Jewel Weed

It was with joy that Lena stood, on Saturday night, with Mrs. Lenox and Miss Elton on the veranda, and hailed the advent of a large red automobile, which disgorged, besides Mr. Lenox, two dress-suit cases and two young men. Mr. Percival had liked her in her natural state and with him she would not need to “put on style”. He was to her the shadow of a great rock in a desperately thirsty land. The only kind of pretense that he demanded was that she should be a dear innocent little girl, and that rôle came easily. She smiled and blushed and saw that there was a difference in his eyes when he greeted her from the look he bent on the other two ladies. It was balm to her spirit to think that this man, who admired her, was himself admired by the people whom she suspected of despising her; and that they did admire him was evident. They were hardly seated at dinner before Mrs. Lenox began:

“Dick, I have just been reading your last night’s speech at the Municipal Club and I’m quite effervescing with it. I want to put you up on a pedestal and call the attention of Mr. Frank Lenox to you. He is one of the innumerable excellent gentlemen, over the length and breadth of the land, who are so busy running everything else that they let city politics go to the place that I’m not allowed to mention. It does my heart good to see you taking it up in earnest.”

“It was a good speech, all right. I’ve read it, too,” said Mr. Lenox. “And I’m all the wretch my wife calls me. I wish I’d heard you in your frenzy, Percival, though I have less faith in speeches and principles than she has. Reform is only a seed, you know, and most seeds never come to maturity or bear fruit. So most people justly doubt the reformer.”

“Do you think we’re thin sound-waves who do nothing but vibrate?” said Dick.

“Not at all; but I mean there are no such things in the world as abstractions. There are only men and women. Thoughts don’t seethe; men and women seethe. Principles don’t reform or corrupt; men and women do the reforming and corrupting. If you want to do things, don’t begin by making the air resound with denunciations of wickedness; but make people believe in you and despise the other fellow. When they like you they’ll begin to think about your ideas.”

“I don’t know any better way to make people believe in me than to stand up for what I think to be right,” said Dick sharply.

“Stand up all you like,” Lenox answered. “But the trouble with most good people is that they are contented to stand up. To arrive anywhere you’ve got to get right down and scrap.”

“Oh, I’m only trying my muscle a bit,” Dick answered laughingly. “I do not intend to do much generalizing except in the way of advertisement. I’m planning to put a spoke in the wheels of a few particular wrongs.”

“That’s what I hope. It’s easier to fulminate than to fight.”

“Then you’ll be glad to know that Dick has already been answerable for galvanizing the Municipal Club into new life,” Ellery put in. “It has been, as you know, a delightfully scholarly affair, any of whose members were quite capable of writing a text-book on civics; but Dick has roped in a lot of new men and stirred up the old ones.”

“To what end?”

“Well, for two things; we have appointed committees to keep close tab on all of the proceedings of the council—to attend every meeting—and others to work up the ward organizations so that we shall be prepared to work intelligently and together by the next election. We want to get some clean business man, who is well known, to stand for mayor. There’s a chance for you, Lenox.”

Lenox laughed. “You’ve caught me there, haven’t you? I am condemned for being still in the stage where I am content to mention things with indignation. However, if you have really gone so far, I’m more than willing to trail after you. I’ll at least back you with a few facts, such as every business man knows, and I’m good for a substantial contribution toward any campaign you may undertake. And what I do there are others who will do, too.”

“I’ll not forget your promise,” said Dick.

As usual, when men talk public affairs, the women had been content to listen, but Madeline’s temperament was too strong for her restraint.

“It’s all very well for you to put your hand in your pocket, Mr. Lenox,” she cried, “but I don’t want to hear you trying to undermine Dick’s idealism. If he does not have the comfort of some purpose higher than the daily fight, how can he endure it? Don’t persuade him to run through life on all fours and never look at the stars.”

Mr. Lenox looked at her warmly.

“Thank the Lord for you women,” he said. “You do not forget that there are stars and sky above the city smoke. If it were not for you and your kind, I’m afraid most of the world would be tied to the ground like serfs.”

“Oh, I fancy nature has liberated a few of you, and I am glad to believe that Dick is among the free,” she said.

She sat beside Dick, but she turned from him and spoke to Mr. Lenox. When Percival, softened by her words and the tone of belief in which they were spoken, looked up, he saw, not her eyes, but, across the table, those of Lena, big and sympathetic. As he gazed into them he saw all of Madeline’s confidence in him, all of Madeline’s ideals, but the more spiritual, the more feminine, because they were unspoken. Lena’s eyes were eloquent even if she was silent; internally she was really resenting Madeline’s tone, which seemed to her to assume that Dick was somehow Miss Elton’s particular property. “Perhaps you needn’t be so sure, missy,” she thought.

After dinner, when the three men found their way to the drawing-room, Mrs. Lenox had started Madeline on a career of song. She was already in the midst of a curious weird Roumanian thing, and Norris made straight for the piano. Lena, ethereal in pale blue, was sympathetically listening to perfection. She had lost her look of incongruity with her surroundings. The dreamy eyes and the transparent skin found their setting in her filmy gown and the rich soft light. Dick drew in his breath. He seemed never to get used to her. Naturally he found a seat near her. She was his protégée.

“Don’t you sing, Miss Quincy?” was his inevitable query.

And she replied with inward anguish, “Not at all.”

“But I’m sure you do. You look like incarnate song,” he persisted. “You’re playing modest.”

Lena cast down her eyes and said, “I am a very truthful little girl.”

“Have you had a good time here?”

Then she looked up with kindling face. “Oh, so good! You can’t know how I thank you, Mr. Percival. I know I owe it to you. I feel as though I were breathing the air I belong in, at last. It’s so different from—but you know all about my life,” said Lena brokenly. “And Mrs. Lenox is so sweet and kind, I just love her!”

“And Miss Elton?”

Lena stiffened and made no reply for an instant.

“Miss Elton is quite as clever as you men, isn’t she?” Lena asked, in quite another tone of voice.

“Infinitely more so,” said Dick cordially.

“Do you like it?” she asked in a breathless way.

“Why, yes, in Madeline,” he answered. “She isn’t a bit priggish, you know, but just naturally interested in everything good. Why? Don’t you and she get on?”

Lena gave an uneasy little twist as though she did not enjoy the question, and she sighed.

“Why, frankly, I don’t wholly. It’s my own stupid little fault, of course. I’m not clever. She’s very charming; but she gets a little tiresome to me.”

“Does she?” said Dick ponderingly.

“It’s very hateful of me to say such things about your particular friend,” said Lena contritely. “Besides, I don’t mean—what do I mean? I never thought it out. But it’s so easy to tell you everything, Mr. Percival. And I think it’s rather nice for a girl to be more silly and inconsequential part of the time.” She laughed in a gurgling little fashion.

“I believe it is,” said Dick speculatively, as he looked at her. “But Madeline’s awfully jolly, you know. I’ve had more good times with her than with any other girl I know. No nonsense about her.”

“That’s it,—no nonsense,” said Lena, and this time her laugh was not so pleasant; and Dick glanced across at Madeline with a kind of resentment. “It isn’t like Madeline to go back on a fellow that way,” he said to himself. “Of course she’s had all kinds of advantages over this poor little thing; but it’s small of her not to forget them. I trusted her to make things sweet; and for the first time she has disappointed me.” He looked at Madeline with a distinct feeling of irritation as she rose from the piano. Mr. Lenox came and absorbed Lena, whom he was teaching to answer him saucily. Lena enjoyed this process, and it had inspired her to a really clever device, namely, to say vulgar little things in a whimsical way, as though she knew better all the time but wanted to be humorous. A good many other people have had the same brilliant idea, but it was none the less original to Lena, and it saved a lot of trouble and pretense. Norris and Miss Elton were hobnobbing and laughing at the other end of the room, and Dick followed them.

“Have you been out of town, Dick?” Madeline asked as he came up. “I tried to get you over the telephone a day or two ago, and they told me you were away.”

“Yes.” He laughed exultantly as he sat down. “I ran down to the penitentiary at Easton, just to make sure that I wasn’t mistaken in a fact or two.”

“What now?” asked Norris.

“I’ve been told that Barry—the lord of St. Etienne, Madeline—is at last tired of his humble but powerful place, and intends to show himself the master that he really is by running himself for our next mayor. Now even this docile city would hardly exalt a man whom it knew to be a criminal with a record of two years in the pen,—under another name, of course.”

“Is it possible that Barry—”

“I’ve verified my facts. There is only one man in the city besides myself that knows this, and he’s Barry’s closest friend. There’ll be a jolly old sensation in the bunch, when I spring my mine.”

“If nobody knows it, how did you happen to find out?” asked Madeline impulsively.

There was just a moment’s silence, and in that instant Norris had a flash of memory. He seemed to see Dick eying a letter addressed to William Barry, Esquire. Even while he remembered, he hated himself for daring to suspect that Dick would be capable of anything really shabby or dishonorable. Yet he did suspect—nay, more—he was sure; and the pause, the look of innocent inquiry on Madeline’s face grew intolerable. If Dick would say nothing, he, Norris, must.

“We newspaper men,” he rushed in gaily, “get hold of a vast amount of information that people flatter themselves is secret.”

Percival looked at him and grinned. The girl turned slowly from her amused survey of Dick to study Ellery’s face, which showed his discomfort in its flush. If a girl so gentle could feel scorn, Ellery would have thought he detected a touch of it. Certainly there was a hint of grieved surprise as she spoke, with her eyes still fixed on Norris.

“I’m very sorry, Dick,” she said humbly. “I didn’t mean to be prying. I’ve grown so used to asking you about everything. Mr. Norris ought to get a better mask.”

She laughed lightly, but Ellery’s face grew hotter. He wondered if she suspected him of some underhand trickery, and Dick realized it, yet kept amused silence. For an instant he hated Dick, and felt a wild impulse to defend himself; but second thoughts came quickly. She loved Dick and was therefore slow to impute evil to him. Dick loved her, and if he had for once played the petty knave, it was the place of a friend to protect her against that knowledge. That had been the instinctive reason for Norris’ words, and he was not going back on them now. Yet Ellery’s brain whirled to think how swiftly and by what simple means he might have toppled her slowly-ripening friendship into the mire. Ellery’s imagination piled superlatives on every act and expression of his lady. If she looked light disapproval, it was worse than another’s scorn. And Dick—for whom he had thrown away the thing he most valued in the world—Dick exclaimed gaily:

“Don’t be suspicious, Madeline. Are all secrets disgraceful? Can’t you trust your old friends?”

“Of course I’m not suspicious,” she answered indignantly. “I only mean to beg your pardon, Dick, and I assure you again that I’m not curious, even. I asked this question as I have asked a thousand others, and that would have been the end of it——except for Mr. Norris’ face.”

She smiled as she turned away, and Dick lifted his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, “What difference does it make, anyway? What difference!” Dick didn’t care whether she despised Ellery or not—he didn’t care enough to speak an honorable word of explanation.

Mrs. Lenox came up crying, “Come, my triple alliance, Frank has carried Miss Quincy off to the billiard-room to give her a lesson. Let us go, too, to see that they do not get into mischief.”

Dick hurried away to usurp Mr. Lenox’s place, Madeline tucked her arm through that of Mrs. Lenox, and Norris was left to follow in outer darkness.

When bedtime came, Norris detained Percival.

“Come out for a smoke and a turn,” he said. “The night is frosty, and you’ll sleep all the better for a sniff of fresh air.”

“What are you so glum about?” he asked, as Dick tramped in silence.

He was moody and enraged himself, but too proud to let his anger be seen.

“Not mad, most noble Norris, only thinking.”

“Unfold your thoughts.”

“I was thinking about Madeline,” answered Dick, and Norris’ heart thumped, for he too was thinking about Madeline. “I wonder if the kind of training that she and all girls of her class get is the thing, after all. I’m not talking about knowledge, you understand. I’m not such a cad as to grudge a girl the best there is in the world. But there’s something else. It’s the electric feminine, I suppose, that makes them the powers behind every throne. Fate is always represented in petticoats, you know. It sometimes seems as though the better-trained girls had all that side of them kept out of sight and polished into nothingness. Why are they taught to ignore the biggest power that’s in them? Why, even that untrained little Miss Quincy is vivid with some sex-fascination that the more fortunate girls do not often have.”

“Oh, she is only a colored light. The sunlight has all other colors latent in itself. How do you dare to make any comparison between Miss Quincy and your lovely Miss Elton?”

“Great Scott! Don’t say ‘my Miss Elton’!” Dick exclaimed. “Madeline doesn’t belong to me.” And he added politely, “Worse luck! She and I have always been like brother and sister. That’s all there is to it.”

“Are you sure?” demanded Ellery, with hot thrusts of mingled anguish and exultation stabbing through his bosom.

“Sure!” said Dick equably. “Why, even if I loved her, my dear fellow, I should know, from her unruffled serenity, that there was no hope for me. But Madeline isn’t a very emotional creature, Ellery. She has too much brains for that,—a girl to cheer but not inebriate.”

“I don’t want a girl to make me drunk,” ejaculated Norris.

“Well, I do,” rejoined Dick.

“And though Miss Elton’s emotions do not lie on the surface, I’ll warrant they are there,” Ellery went on as though letting off pent-up steam. “They are like her voice—like all her motions—neither loud nor faint, but exquisitely modulated. She seems to me like the embodiment of innocence,—not the innocence of ignorance, but the untaintedness of a mind that goes through the world selecting the best, as the bee takes honey and leaves the rest. There’s no subject, so far as I can see, on which she is afraid to think; but I can not imagine that any subject would leave a deposit of mire in her mind.”

“Gee whizz!” scoffed Dick. “How fluent your year of journalism has made you! What a great thing it is to be a serious-minded young man with eye-glasses, engaged, while yet in youth, in molding public opinion through the mighty agent of the press! And Madeline is another of the same kind.”

“I wish I were of her kind,” said Ellery stiffly. “You may poke fun at me as much as you like, Dick, but it’s beneath you to jeer at her.”

“You old duffer, aren’t you two the best friends I have in the world? I like the clear and frosty mountain peaks.”

“How did you find out about Barry?” Ellery asked abruptly.

“I do not have to tell you any more than Madeline.” Seeing the grim look on Norris’ face, Dick went on, “Let’s go in and to bed. We seem to rub each other the wrong way to-night. If we don’t separate soon we shall be having a French duel.”

There came a night when a certain great lady gave a dance, and Lena was deputed by the feminine head of the staff of the Star to report these doings of society. At first the chance looked to her delightful. She was to have a peep into the world of charm which was her dream and her ambition. She walked through the wide empty rooms with their soft lights and masses of flowers. She surveyed the dining-room, a wilderness of candles, orchids and maiden-hairs. She felt her feet sink luxuriously into the rugs, oh, so different from the threadbare ingrain carpet at home! She peeped into the ball-room, smilax-draped and glowing as if eager to welcome the guests to come. Through it all she carried a prim air, making businesslike notes on her little pad; but beneath her very demure exterior raged a storm of rebellion that these things should be and not be for her. The world was one huge sour grape; and yet she must smile as though it tasted sweet. There were blurs in her eyes as she stumbled up the back stairs, whither her way was pointed, that she might stand in a corner of the dressing-room where the now fast-arriving ladies were laying off their wraps. She swallowed a lump in her throat and winked hard in the attempt to forget or ignore the careless looks thrown at her by these ladies, as the maids removed the long cloaks made more for splendor than for warmth, or drew up the gloves on bare arms less lovely than her own. Many of the women looked twice at her, and she thought, and resented the fact, that they were surprised to see so much beauty. She could not be impersonal like the other reporters,—sensible girls, taking all this as a part of the day’s work, and whispering names to one another, which Lena, too, must catch and treasure for her reportorial harvest. She must glance with swift inclusiveness at the more striking gowns, that later she may serve them up in the technical slapdash of the social column.

An hour of it left her faint and sick, not with cynical scorn of the spectacle, but with longing and self-pity. The crowd in the dressing-room was thinning now, but, whether she had finished her duty or not, she must escape. She could endure it no longer. Again she made her way down the narrow non-angelic stairs and out at a little side door. The night air was sweet and cold. She paused for a moment under the light of the porte-cochère to watch the string of carriages and the swirl of silk and laces that passed through the opening door, to listen to gusts of music that came to an abrupt end as the outside door shut on her.

Suddenly a figure loomed beside her, and she look up to see Dick Percival, straight and big, with the electric light gleaming on his white shirt-front, where his overcoat fell back. There was an unpleasant sternness in his deeply-shadowed eyes.

“Miss Quincy!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here!”

“I was sent to report it,” said Lena weakly. “I’m going home now.”

“Going home alone? Nearly midnight?”

“What else can I do? It’s what the other girls—reporters, I mean—have to do.”

“I shall walk home with you,” said Dick sharply, and he drew her aside into the shadow, as though ashamed of being seen, and piloted her in silence to the sidewalk. Lena gave a little sob as he drew her arm through his, and still they walked on until the lights of the great house grew dim in the distance and only the quiet of the city streets by night enveloped them.

“Ought you not to go back now? You’ll lose all the pleasure,” said Lena timidly.

“Are you doing much of this kind of thing?” Dick demanded.

“This is the first time.”

“I hope it will be the last,” he answered glumly.

“So do I—I don’t like it,” whispered Lena.

“I—I can’t endure it—Lena!” Lena started as she heard her name. “Lena, come over here into the park for just a moment. I want to talk to you.”

“I can’t. It’s awfully cold, and—” said Lena, but she followed his lead as she remonstrated.

“And you have on a wretched little thin coat. Why aren’t you decently dressed?”

“I haven’t anything.” Lena spoke under her breath. Dick stamped his foot as a substitute for a curse, whipped off his heavy great-coat, wrapped her in it, and pushed her down on to a bench.

“Lena,” he said, standing squarely in front of her, “I know I’ve no right to hope for anything—no right to speak, even, when you know me so little; but, by Heaven, I can’t endure to see you grinding out your life in this way, when there’s even a chance that you will let me prevent it. You flower of a girl, you! Oh, Lena, I love you—I love you!”

He caught a small white hand that held together the heavy coat, and kissed it in a kind of frenzy, while Lena, rigid with desire to be quite sure what this signified, peered stolidly at him from over the big collar. She was too wise in her generation to leap to conclusions about the ultimate meaning of Dick’s passion. She would not unbottle any emotion until she knew.

“Lena, if you could see how I love you, you’d trust me, I think, even with yourself. If you will be my wife—”

Something in Lena seemed to break, and she gave a gasp of relief and gratitude that was almost prayer and approached love. Then she buried her face in her hands and sobbed aloud, as Dick put both arms around her and drew her head to his shoulder.

“Lena, can you—do you love me a little?” he whispered, as if in awe.

“Oh, Mr. Percival,” said Lena, “I do! How could I help it? But I could not dream of your loving poor little insignificant me.”

“And how could I help it?” he said, mocking her. “Little, you may be, but this part is bigger than the whole world. You belong to me now, and I won’t have you depreciate yourself.”

“Oh, Mr. Percival, is it true?”

“Suppose you say ‘Dick’, and thank God that it is.”

“Dick, Dick, Dick—it is,” said Lena very softly, and she frankly put her arms around his neck, and her soft lips to his cold cheek, so that he lost himself in an ecstasy of delight and wonder.

So they sat in the doubtful shadow of a leafless maple, on a hard park bench, on a chilly November night, and though Dick was half frozen they were both more than happy. And they talked, in lovers’ fashion, over the great fact, and how it all happened.

The mellow chimes of the city hall began to strike twelve—a most persistent hour, and Lena started into consciousness.

“Dick, I must go home,” she said. “None of those girls, the nice girls, Miss Elton or any one like that, would do such an improper thing, would they?”

“I should think not,” said Dick. “I wouldn’t ask them to.”

“And I wouldn’t allow them,” laughed Lena. “Now come, like a dear boy, and walk home with me.”

“There are so many more things that I want to say,” remonstrated Dick. “Stop a moment under this light and let me see your eyes, Lena. You’ll have to look up. I want to talk plain business to you. First, you’ll give up this reporting folly, won’t you?”

“To-morrow,” said Lena joyously.

“What an admirably obedient wife you are going to make! But I’m glad you hate it. If ever you feel a mad desire to take it up again, we’ll go into the library together and write up Godey’s Lady’s Book. I want your life to be sweet and sheltered and filled with good things now.”

“Oh, Dick, to think of that kind of a life coming to me!”

“It ought to have come to you long ago. It was bound to come, because it belongs to you. But things being as they are, you must give yourself into my keeping as soon as possible, sweetheart. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be married at once, or nearly so, is there, dear?”

Here Lena hesitated, a little in doubt whether she ought to show maiden reluctance, and her lover went on with his argument.

“You are so alone, dear. Don’t let any foolish hesitation prolong this bad time of yours.”

“What about my mother?” demanded Lena, with a sudden descent to the region of hard facts.

“Do you want her to live with us?” Dick asked with a gulp.

“No, I don’t!” Lena answered so sharply that Dick started in surprise, and she gathered herself together.

“It would take a long time for me to explain things to you,” she went on in gentler accents. “But, Dick, mother and I are not very happy together. I’ll tell you all about it some time. Perhaps she would be just as contented to live somewhere else.”

“Very well,” said Dick with a sense of relief. “We must make her comfortable, of course.” In reality nobody else’s comfort made a rap’s difference just then. “I dare say we can find some jolly little apartment and somebody to take care of her.”

“Hire somebody for her to find fault with,” said Lena, with a return of acid. “What about your mother?”

“Oh, I couldn’t let mother live anywhere but in the dear old home. It’s too big and lonely for her by herself, so we must share it with her. And no other place would ever have the flavor of home, either to her or to me.”

Lena stopped short in her progress.

“Does the house belong to you or to her?”

“Technically to me, I believe—not that it makes the slightest difference, dear.”

“Then I should be mistress of it, not she?”

“I’m sure she’d be only too glad to turn the housekeeping cares over to your pretty little hands,” said Dick, smiling, but a little uneasily. “She’s a good deal of an invalid, you know. But there’s plenty of time to think of all these details. I suppose you’ve had to worry about the little things until it’s become a habit,” he added in a kind of apology to himself.

“I’ve been a bond-slave so long,” said Lena, “that I’d like to feel perfectly free and mistress of everything around me.” She straightened her back and squared her soft shoulders.

“So you shall be!” answered Dick happily. “Even of your husband.”

“Oh, that, of course,” said Lena with an enchanting pout. “Now here we are, and it’s very late. You must go. Good night.”

“Good night,” said Dick. “I suppose I must not keep you. To think I have the unbelievable good fortune to kiss you good night, sweetheart.”

Mrs. Quincy turned over in the lumpy bed which she and her daughter shared and said, with a querulousness undiminished by her sleepiness, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Lena Quincy, gallivanting around at this hour of night. It ain’t decent. But there!”

“I guess I know my business,” Lena snapped.

She turned out the gas to undress in the dark rather than encourage her mother’s conversation. She needed to think. An awful problem had just presented itself. How was she to get a trousseau?

It was in another mood that Dick Percival walked home. Whenever anything very great and wonderful happens to us, we are apt to bow our heads and cry, “What am I, that this should be given to me?” Doubtless he is the noblest man who most often feels this exultant humility. This was Dick’s hour on the mountain. The depth of his own tenderness, the deliciousness of his passion swept over him like a revelation, as he asked himself in wonder how it could be that this love had sprung up at once, like Aphrodite from the waves, where no one could have suspected such a marvel. He himself had been without realization of how his passing interest had deepened its roots until now they fed on every part of him. Love had startled him like a stroke of lightning out of a clear sky, but it was evident that it was no light that flashed out and then disappeared. It had come to stay.

Then came self-reproach. He remembered with hot cheeks that he had actually joked with Ellery about her in early days, and let himself be bantered in return—cad that he was, incapable of appreciating at first sight the woman he was to love. He had thought her an exquisite trifle, almost too illusive to be taken seriously. Now that very illusiveness was the thing that gripped him closest, like poetry and music and all the finer elements of life, the most impossible to explain, the most supreme in their dominion. Beauty meant all this. He found himself repeating, “Beauty is truth. Truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” And Lena was beautiful. How beautiful! He trembled in flesh and spirit at the vision of her face turned up to him out of the black November darkness, at the memory of the fine texture of her cheeks and lips.

He did not stop to ask himself whether he and Keats were agreed in their definition of beauty. Moreover, poor Keats never had the delight of anything so pink and golden and blue-eyed as Lena Quincy.

“You are ill, dear mother Percival,” cried the girl, dropping to her knees and slipping an arm behind her friend’s back in an unconscious attitude of protection.

Mrs. Percival’s fingers followed the soft curve that the girl’s hair made around her forehead.

“No, dear,” she said slowly, “but I had something to tell you. I wanted to speak to you myself, before any one else had the chance.”

“Please tell me quickly.”

“So many of my dearest hopes have come to nothing!” Mrs. Percival went on, with a little bitterness that Madeline thought unlike her. “Each blow, as it falls, seems the hardest to bear. I’ve tried to accept whatever happens, graciously. It isn’t always easy, Madeline, dear.”

“Yes?” said Madeline.

“Dick—”

“Is anything the matter with Dick?” Madeline rose with a little cry.

“Dick does not think so,” his mother answered. “My child, you have seen something of this little Miss Quincy?”

Madeline’s eyes dropped for the tenth of a second and a heaviness took possession of her body; then she lifted her head bravely.

“Yes,” she answered, “I know Miss Quincy—quite the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.”

“Very beautiful,” echoed Mrs. Percival. “So I too thought, the only time I ever saw her. Well, Madeline, what I have to tell you is that Dick is to marry her.”

The girl saw that the older woman’s hands were trembling, and she laid her own warm young palms over the cold old ones.

“I hope Dick will be very happy,” she said softly. “I—I’m not a bit surprised. We ought to have seen that it was coming. And Dick loves her!”

And she laid her cheek against Mrs. Percival’s, but the other pushed her away and stared into the eyes so near her own.

“And you can take it so quietly?” she asked. “Forgive me, dear, if for once I break down the barriers of reserve. I love you so much, let me be frank. Surely you know what I hoped, what I thought.”

“You thought Dick and I loved each other,” Madeline said bravely.

“I hoped so. Heaven knows I hoped so.”

“We are too good friends for that, dear Mrs. Percival. One needs a little something unexplored and unexpected in a lover; don’t you think so? Dick and I knew each other in kilts and pig-tails.”

“Well, it seems I am as much of an old fool as Dick is a young one,” Mrs. Percival said bitterly. “I’m good for nothing but to lie here and comfort myself with dreams.”

“You’re an old dear, and Dick is a young one,” Madeline tried to laugh. “And Miss Quincy is exquisite—charming.”

“An old fool,” repeated Mrs. Percival. “Now listen, sweetheart! If Dick marries this girl, I have no intention of forgetting that he is my son, and that she is his wife. I shall do all I can to help her to be worthy of him; but before that happens, I am going to have the satisfaction of speaking to just one person in the world—you—exactly what I think about it. From what Mrs. Lenox told me, after her visit in the country, and from what I saw myself, I think she is a vulgar little image overlaid with tinsel.”

“Oh, don’t!” Madeline cried. “You and I do not really know her, but we can trust Dick. He’s too fine himself to be attracted by anything but fineness. She must have character to have made the fight she has with fate.”

“Attracted by character! Pins and figs! My son is just like all the others, I am finding. He’s attracted by pink flesh. And as for heart and soul—all the women that Dick has known well have been women of refinement. He takes their purity and nobility for granted, as a part of womanhood. He thinks he’s marrying you and me. His reason has nothing to do with it.”

For the moment Madeline had no answer, and Mrs. Percival went on:

“It’s foolish to care what people say about your tragedies. Oh, you needn’t shake your head. This is a tragedy, Madeline. And I do care about the world. I hate to think of the whispering and gossiping because my son—my son—has fallen a victim to a cheap adventuress.”

“Nonsense,” Madeline broke out. “Miss Quincy isn’t an outcast, just because she has had the world’s cold shoulder. And people aren’t so silly as to let such external things prejudice them.”

“Don’t mistake me, dearie. I’m not taking exception to the girl because she works. We’re all—those of us that are good for much—the mothers and wives and daughters of men who work, and we share in their labor. I could admire and love a real worker, but this butterfly creature affects me like a parasite—a woman who wants to get and not to give. It’s just because I feel that she isn’t a real worker that I am afraid of her.”

“And that, even if it is true, may be only the result of sordid surroundings.” Madeline’s heart misgave her, for she had learned to respect Mrs. Percival’s judgments. “She’ll blossom out and add womanliness to beauty in such an atmosphere as you and Dick will give her.”

“Spontaneous generation will not do everything. You must have the germ of a heart before you can develop the whole thing. Do you think you can really change a girl who has lived for twenty years in the wrong attitude?”

“You are judging cruelly,” Madeline cried. “Of course every one has the germs of good.”

“And did it ever occur to you that the kind of love that Dick will give his wife may be too good—so far above a coarse-grained woman that it will not touch her comprehension? A lower grade of man might bring her out better.”

“It’s impossible to think of so exquisite a creature being coarse-grained,” Madeline exclaimed. “I, for one, am going to believe in her, and in a year, with you and Dick and mother and Mrs. Lenox and myself all backing her, you’ll be proud of her loveliness and tact. I shall be only Cinderella’s ugly sister. But you must not ever quite forget me, Mrs. Percival.” And Madeline laughed most cheerfully.

Mrs. Percival smiled in return. “Well, I have had my explosion. It’s extraordinary what a relief it is, once in a while. I’m not often so guilty, am I, Madeline? After all, I’ve told you my fears rather than my convictions. The situation does not seem so bad, now that I have said even more than I think. Hereafter I shall find it easy to hold my tongue.”

“And you will try to like her?” Madeline asked anxiously.

“Of course, my dear. I shall try harder than any one else. I am going in state to pay her a motherly call this very afternoon, feeling all the time like a plated volcano.” Mrs. Percival leaned back with a small moue, then sat up again. “There’s my boy’s latch-key in the lock now,” she said.

Dick halted at the door when he saw the two and knew that they must have been talking of him. He had something of an air of defiance thickly overlaid with innocence; but Madeline went to meet him with hands outstretched.

“Dick,” she exclaimed, “I congratulate you with all my heart. She’s the prettiest creature in the world.”

Dick, manlike, regarded this as the highest possible tribute to his beloved and glowed in return. His defiance dropped like a shell and he shook Madeline’s hands with enthusiasm.

“You’re a trump,” he said. “I shall not forget how good you have been to her; and I hope you two will always be friends.”

“I should think so! I should like to see your trying to prevent us, Dick,” said Madeline saucily. “And your mother is going to love her, too, when—”

“When we are married,” Dick answered with silly masculine self-consciousness.

“And that is to be soon!”

“As soon as I can manage it. I can’t bear to have Lena living as she does now; and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t cut it short.”

“No reason at all. I don’t wonder you feel so. Good-by, both of you.”

Dick saw her to the door and Madeline walked out with her usual deliberate serenity.

She found her way home with bottled-up emotions, as a hurt child holds in the cry until he gets to the spot where mother’s breast waits for the inarticulate sobs. Everything she had done and said seemed to have been the act of some far-away self, that had hardly any connection with the real Madeline. The earth danced around her and she was incapable of real thought. And yet the well-trained, automatic body that was her outer shell conducted itself with reason. It even stopped in the living-room to kiss her mother; it apparently skimmed a new copy of Life; it convoyed her slowly up stairs to her own room, where it shut and locked her door. But here her real self resumed control, as she threw herself into an easy chair by the window and stared out at the desolation of December where dead leaves went whirling in elfin eddying clouds.

For a few moments she let the solar system rock and reel around her, and watched everything she had thought stable go up in smoke. Then upon the world, swirling and pounding meaninglessly, there came an intense quiet. She knew that the outer world was as serene as ever; but a great throbbing pain within showed her that it was only her own little atom of self that was revolutionized. Nature was not upset. There was still order for her to hold fast to. For the first time she began to analyze herself and her emotions.

She could not say that she had planned her future, but it had seemed so natural and inevitable that she had accepted it without planning, almost without thought. Dick and she had belonged to each other ever since they could remember. At ten they had been outspoken lovers, and ever since there had been that intimate comradeship that seemed to her to imply the unspoken relation, behind, above, below. All this she had taken for granted, like mother-love and her own dawning womanhood. And now Dick, the chief corner-stone of her edifice, was torn away, and the whole airy structure toppled and dissolved.

“I’ve been assuming all this,” she said to herself, “and marriage isn’t a thing to take for granted. Shouldn’t I have resented it if Dick had appropriated me as though I belonged to him and had lost my freedom of choice? I’ve been unfair to him. And now—if I should never marry—there are surely plenty of good things left in the world. But are there?”

Madeline had always been characterized by those who knew her as lovely and placid. And why not? What else should life draw out of a girl of normal nature, surrounded by protecting love, given the good things of life as by right, shielded from the knowledge of evil, never facing a problem more exciting than those of Euclid. But now something began to stir in the unknown depths of her nature. For the first time in her life she had had a blow. There rose before her a vision of endless maidenhood. She saw herself as she had seen other women—uninteresting women, she had thought them. Now they seemed to her like tragedies—women whose lives did not count, either to themselves or to the world, middle-aged, somber, unrelated. To be childless, to eat and dress and wear the semblance of womanhood, even to play a little part in society, and yet to be but half a woman! To be no link in the generations! This was unendurable. The first demand of every soul is for life, and yet life is life only when it is part of the future. To live oneself one must live in others. All the mother hidden in the depths of her rose and cried out against any destiny that shut her out from the great stream of humanity.

“I shall be a side-eddy in the current. I shall grow stagnant and slimy and lead nowhere. And the rushing waters will go leaping and laughing past.”

She got up and moved restlessly up and down the room. She looked again out of the window at the sober end of the winter day. In the tree branches that clattered outside, her eyes fell on an empty nest.

“And am I to be such a thing?” she said. “Surely all the world must bow down in pity for the solitary woman.” Some half-forgotten lines came back to her:

“Mine ear is full of the rocking of cradles.
For a single cradle, saith Nature, I would give every one of my graves.”

By her little practice piano her eyes fell on the pages of Schubert’s unfinished symphony.

“Unfinished!” she said. “And yet even there is the phrase that comes and comes again, sweeter and more full of meaning in every renewed variety. So I must have love to play through my life, or else it will be nothing but a medley. It must be my music’s theme; even if the symphony is unfinished. Are there women who can do without it, who can take a life alone and make it sweet and satisfying? Not I, oh God, not I! I’m no exceptional creature. I’m just a plain woman. And if life doesn’t give me wifehood and motherhood, it gives me nothing. I wonder if all women feel this way. This pretty little Lena,—is she bursting with primal need of giving and taking? At any rate she has put something in Dick’s face that was never there before—that I’d give my soul to see in a man’s face when he looks at me.”

Hitherto the world had ambled along in an amiable way; and now it suddenly turned and delivered a blow in the face. Every one is destined to receive such blows, some get little else. But the test comes in the way they are received. You may use belladonna as a poison, or you may use it to help the blind to see. So when pain comes, you may take it to your bosom and suckle it till it becomes a fine healthy child, too heavy for you to carry; or cast out the changeling and leave it on the doorstep to die. It matters little how much anguish skulks about the outside of life, so long as it finds no lodgment in the sacred shrines of the heart. Madeline met her first grief and fought it off; and, even while she thought it had given her a mortal wound, came the revelation of the powerlessness of the poor thing. She put her arms down on the window-sill to cry deliberately, but something dried her tears.

“I couldn’t put that look in Dick’s face, but could he put it in mine? Was this taking of things for granted the best love of which I am capable? I’ve found out to-day that there are all kinds of things in me that I have never dreamed of before, and passion is one of them, and rebellion. Great heavens! I might have married him and been serene and never found things out.”

She seemed to be looking at a new Madeline; and while she stared, startled, this self grew greater and stronger.

“This is not the end of life; it is the beginning,” she whispered. “I’ve been looking down the wrong road. Dick has no such power over me as to consign me to misery everlasting. I am mistress of my own fate. I have not handed it over to him. Happiness is not a thing to get. It is a state of mind to live in. It is my own affair, not that of others.” She rested her chin in her hands and fell into a girl’s day-dream, in which the nightmare was forgotten.

Twilight fell at last, and faint sounds came up to her to remind her that down stairs there were well-beloved people who did not know and should never know of her little vigil. Her father must be coming home. It was time for her to put on her armor and go down. Armor is one of the necessities of life. If we can’t wear it in steel plates on the outside, we must mask the face with impenetrability and the manner with pretense. Never let the heart be vulnerable. Yet, try as we may, something of our weakness is laid bare. Hereafter Miss Elton might be serene, but would never again be placid.

But now she was quite herself.

Down stairs her father read the paper and her mother sat near the big table, hem-stitching. For them everything was settled, and settled satisfactorily. They knew whom they were going to marry, and whether love was to be a success, and where they were going to live, and what they were going to do. Henceforth, for them the game meant only pleasantly plodding onward along paths already marked out. Just a wholesome common marriage, planted with the seed of love and watered with small self-sacrifices. How could they possibly remember the restlessness of youth, to whom all these things are hidden in the mists of the future, and who is longing for everything and sure of nothing?

Madeline sat down at the piano and her hands fell inevitably into phrasing the “unfinished symphony.” She became aware that her mother laid down the stitching and Mr. Elton’s evening paper ceased to crackle. As she stopped her father stood behind her. He bent and kissed the little parting in her hair.

“Your music grows sweeter and richer day by day, little girl,” he said. “I suppose as more comes into your life you have more to give. I’m glad that you give it out to us old folks at home.”

Madeline wheeled about and sprang to her feet.

“Ah,” she exclaimed, “if you have finished with your stupid old paper, I’ll give you a real piece of news. It’s a ‘scoop’ too, for no reporter has got hold of it yet. Dick Percival is engaged to little Miss Quincy.”

Both father and mother stared at her in silence. She stood a little behind the chandelier, where the light shone full on her face, and in neither mouth nor eyes could they see the trace of shadow. On the contrary, there was a radiant loveliness about her that astonished those that loved her best.

Then Mr. Norris was announced.

Now when Miss Elton had her first peep into her soul, and so stirred up the possibilities in her nature, she also awoke to new insight into what was going on behind other people’s eyes. The day when she could look a young man squarely in the face and say to him whatever she thought had passed. The period of unconscious girlhood, much prolonged in her case, came to an end. Since, in this world, shadow goes with sunshine, so demons tag after angels; and with the dawn of her sweeter womanhood, Madeline developed a new spirit of contrariety and coquetry that astonished no one so much as herself.

When Mr. Norris came in, his apologetic glance told her at once that she had hardly spoken to him since she had turned up her straight little high-bred nose and informed him and Dick that she despised their underhand ways; told her, also, what had not dawned on her before, that here was an abject creature, and that it was the province of womanhood to batter and buffet him who is down, perhaps in secret fear of that day when outraged manhood will rise and claim a tyranny of its own.

So she put out her hand with that stiffness that holds at arm’s length and said:

“Oh, how dy’ do, Mr. Norris,” just as though they had never sailed together in dual solitude, and she allowed her lip to curl in evidence of her disapproval of the much warmer greeting of her elders.

She sat down and eyed and tapped a small bronze slipper, while she ignored the reproachful glances of her mother at her rank desertion of conversational duties. Her father hardly noticed it. He himself so liked young men that he frequently forgot that his daughter and not himself might be the object of their quest. So he plunged cheerfully into an animated discussion of the new tide in civic politics, while Norris dully and conscientiously tried to bear up his end.

Ellery’s eyes, however, as well as the thoughts behind those superficial thoughts that guided his words, were absorbed in the other side of the room, where Miss Elton canvassed with her mother the merits of various embroidery silks. She was lovelier than ever. He had thought her perfect before, but to-night she had added a sheen to perfection and made herself entrancing, both reposeful and vivid. He wondered if she had heard of Dick’s engagement and if her color covered a pale heart.

Suddenly she flung up her head impatiently, and came behind her father’s chair to clap a small hand over his mouth in the middle of a sentence of which Norris had entirely lost track.

“Father, father,” she cried, “do you think Mr. Norris wants to come here and maunder over stupid politics all the evening, after he has been writing stupid editorials about them all day? They are stupid—I’ve read some of them.” She smiled at the young man. “Wouldn’t you both infinitely rather hear me sing?”

Mr. Elton kissed the offending hand before he put it gently down.

“I know I should.”

Norris sprang up.

“May I turn your music?” he asked eagerly, but she shook her head as she moved away.

“There isn’t going to be any music to turn.”

She began to sing the same little Roumanian song that he remembered on their last evening in the Lenox house, and his spirits, lifted for a moment by her smile, went down again.

“Into the mist I gazed and fear came on me,
Then said the mist, ‘I weep for the lost sun.’”

She sang passionately and he could have cried aloud. It was true then that she was grieving for Dick.

“The music is uncanny, isn’t it?” she said, as she ended and found him near her. “How does it make you feel?”

“If I should find an image for my feelings just at present, you would scorn me for my base material thoughts.”

“Find it,” she commanded.

“I think I feel like a mince-pie—a maddening jumble of things delicious and indigestible.”

She laughed and grew friendly. This, he thought, is, after all, her permanent mood; but before he could take advantage of it another caller, Mr. Early, appeared; and again she basely deserted Norris to the mercies of her father and mother, and devoted herself to the evident beatification of the apostle of the new in art.