One Man in His Time

MAGIC

The next day after luncheon, as Stephen walked from his club to his office, he lived over again his evening with Margaret. "If she cared for me it might be different," he mused; and then, through some perversity of memory, Margaret's pensive smile became suddenly charged with emotion, and he asked himself if he had not misinterpreted her innocent frankness? Even if she cared, he knew that she would die rather than betray her preference by a word or a look. "Whether she cares or not, and it is just possible that she does care in her heart, she will marry me if I ask her," he thought; and decided immediately that there was no necessity to act impulsively in the matter. "If I ask her she will persuade herself that she loves me. She will marry me just as hundreds of women have married men in the past; and we should probably live as long and as happily as all the others." That was the way his father and mother had married; and why were he and Margaret different from the generations before them? What variable strain in their natures impelled them to lead their own separate lives instead of the collective life of the family? "I suppose Mother is right as far as she sees," he admitted. "To marry Margaret and settle down would be the best thing that could happen to me." Yet he had no sooner put the thought into words than the old feeling of suffocation rushed over him as if his hopes were smothered in ashes.

Yes, he would settle down, of course, but not now. Next year perhaps, or the year after, he would sincerely fall in love with Margaret, and then everything would be different.

He was passing through the Square at the moment; and while he played with the idea of his marriage with Margaret, he found himself glancing expectantly at the car which was waiting in front of the Governor's door. "I wonder if she is going out," he thought, while a superficial interest brightened the dull hours before him. "It would be no more than she deserved if I were to go in and ask after her ankle." In obedience to the mocking impulse, he entered the gate and reached the steps just as Patty came out on the porch. She was walking with ease, he noticed at once, and she wore again the red cape and the little hat with red wings.

"Oh," she exclaimed, "it is you!"

"I stopped to ask after your ankle," he retorted with ironic gaiety. "I am glad it doesn't keep you from walking."

"That's the new way of treating a sprain," she replied calmly. "Haven't you heard of it?"

"Yes, I've heard of it." He glanced down at her stocking of thin gray silk. "But I thought even then there were bandages."

She smiled archly—he felt that he wanted to slap her—and glanced up at him with playful concern. The gray-green rays were brighter in the daylight than he had remembered them and her mocking lips were the colour of cherries. He thought of the thin pink curve of Margaret's mouth and wondered if the war had corrupted his taste.

Yes, Margaret was womanly; she was well bred; she possessed every attribute that in theory he admired; yet she had never awakened this sparkling interest, this attraction which was pungently flavoured with surprise that he could be so strangely attracted. He could gaze unmoved by the hour on Margaret's smooth loveliness; but the tantalizing vision of this other girl's face, of her cloudy black hair and her clear skin and her changeable eyes, with their misty gleam like a firefly lost in a spring marsh—all these things were a part not of the tedious actuality, but of that hidden country of romance and adventure. For the first time since his return from France, he was carried far outside of himself on the wave of an impulse; he was interested and excited. Not for an instant did he imagine that he was falling in love. His thoughts did not leave the immediate present when he was with her; and a part of the adventure was the feeling that each vivid moment he spent with her might be the last. It was, he would have said had he undertaken to analyse the situation, merely an incident; but it was an incident that delighted him. He knew nothing of Patty Vetch except that she charmed him against his will; and, for the moment at least, this was sufficient.

"Oh, there are sprains and sprains," she answered, with the quiver of her lip he remembered so disturbingly. "Didn't you learn that in the trenches?" Was she really pretty, or was it only the provocative appeal to his imagination, the dangerous sense that you never knew what she would dare to say next?

"I didn't go there to learn about sprains," he responded gravely.

"Nor about maneuvers apparently?" She hesitated over the word as if it were unfamiliar.

At her charge the light of battle leaped to his eyes. "Then it was a maneuver? I suspected as much."

The audacity of her! The unparalleled audacity! "But I am not so much interested in maneuvers," he added merrily, "as I am in the strategy behind them."

She looked puzzled, though her manner was still mocking. "Is there always strategy," she pronounced the word with care, "behind them?"

"Always in the art of warfare."

"But can't there be a maneuver without warfare?" He could see that she was venturing beyond her depths; but he realized that a confession of ignorance was the last thing he must ever expect from her. Whatever the challenge she would meet it with her natural wit and her bright derision.

"Never," he rejoined emphatically. "A campaign goes either before or afterward."

A thoughtful frown knit her forehead. "Well, one didn't go before, did it?" she inquired with an innocent air. "So I suppose—"

He ended her sentence on a note of merriment. "Then I must be prepared for the one that will follow!"

She threw out her hand with a gesture of mock despair. "Oh, you may have been mistaken, you know!"

"Mistaken? About the campaign?"

"No, about the maneuver. Perhaps there wasn't any such thing, after all."

"Perhaps." Though his voice was stern, his eyes were laughing. "I am not so easily fooled as that."

"I doubt if you could be fooled at all." It was the first bit of flattery she had tossed him, and he found it strangely agreeable.

"I am not sure of that," he answered, "but the thing that perplexes me—the only thing—is why you should have thought it worth while."

Her eyes grew luminous with laughter, and the little red wings quivered as if they were about to take flight over her arching brows. "How do you know that I thought about it at all? Sometimes things just happen."

"But not in this case. You had arranged the whole incident for the stage."

"Do you mean that I fell down on purpose?"

"I mean that you were laughing up your sleeve all the time. You weren't hurt and you knew it."

Her expression was enigmatical. "You think then that I arranged to fall down and risk breaking my bones for the sake of having you pick me up?" she asked demurely.

Put so plainly the fact sounded embarrassing, if not incredible. "I think you fell for the fun of it. I think also that you didn't for a second risk breaking your bones. You are too nimble for that."

"I ought to be," she retorted daringly, "since I was born in a circus."

Surprised into silence, he studied her with a regard in which admiration for her courage was mingled with blank wonder at her recklessness. If she had inherited her father's gift of expression, she appeared to possess also his dauntless humour. For an instant Stephen felt that her gaiety had entered into his spirit; and while his impression of her danced like wine in his head, he answered her in her own tone of mocking defiance.

"Well, everything that is born in a circus isn't a clown."

Her eyes widened. "Is that meant for a compliment?"

"No, merely for a reminder. But if you were born in a circus, I assume that you didn't perform in one."

She shook her head. "No, they took me away when I was a baby—just after Mother died. I never lived with the circus people, and Father didn't either except when he was a child. Not that I should have been ashamed of it," she hastened to explain. "They are very interesting people."

"I am sure of it," he answered gravely, and he was very sure of it now.

"When I was a child," she went on in a matter-of-fact tone, "I used to make Father tell me all he could remember about the 'freaks,' as they called them. The fat woman—her name was really Mrs. Coventry—was very kind to him when he was little, and he never forgot it. He never forgets anybody who has ever been kind to him," she concluded with simple dignity.

An emotion which he could not define held Stephen speechless; and before he could command his words, she began again in the same cool and quiet voice. "His mother ran away to marry his father. She came of a very good family in Fredericksburg, and her people never forgave her or spoke to her afterward. But she was happy, and she never regretted it as long as she lived. It was love at first sight. Grandfather was Irish and he was—was—" she hesitated for a word, and at last with evident care selected, "magnificent." "He was magnificent," she repeated emphatically, "and she saw him first on horseback when she was out riding. Her horse became frightened by one of the animals in the circus, and he caught it and stopped it. It began that way, and then one night she stole out of the house after her family had gone to bed, and they ran away and were married. I think she was right," she added thoughtfully, "but then I reckon—I mean I suppose it is in my blood to take risks."

She looked up at him and he responded. "But where did you learn to see things like this, and to put them into words? Not in a circus?"

"I told you I couldn't remember the circus. Mother was in one, and though Father never told me how he fell in love with her—he never talks of her—I think it must have been when he went back to see the people. He always took an interest in them and tried to help them. He does still. Even now, if anybody belonging to a circus asks him for something, he never refuses him. When he was twelve years old somebody took him away and sent him to school, but he always says he never learned anything at school except misinformation about life. No books, he says, ever taught him the truth except the Bible and 'Robinson Crusoe.' He used to read me chapters of those every day—and he does still when he has the time."

What a strange world it was! How full of colour and incident, how drenched with the quality of the unusual!

"And what did you learn?" he asked.

"I?" She was speaking earnestly. "Oh, I learned a great many—no, a multitude of things about life."

At this he broke into a laugh of pure delight. "With a special course of instruction in maneuvers," he rejoined.

Though her smile showed perplexity she tossed back his innuendo with defiance. "And by the time we meet again I shall have learned about—strategy."

How ready she was to fence, and how quick with her attack! It was easy to believe that there was Irish blood in her veins and an Irish sparkle in her wit.

"Oh, then you will out-general me entirely! Isn't it enough to force me to acknowledge your superior tactics?"

She appeared to scrutinize each separate letter. "Tactics? Have I been using superior tactics without knowing it?"

"That I can't answer. Is there anything that has escaped your instinctive understanding?"

She laughed softly. "Well, there's one thing you may be sure of. I'll know a great deal more about some things by the time I see you again." Then, with one of her darting bird-like movements, she ran down the steps and into the car. "I wish Father were here," she said, looking out at him. "He wants to talk to you."

"I should like to talk to him. I shall come again, if I may."

"Oh, of course, and next time we may both be at home." As the car started she called out teasingly. "My next maneuver may be more successful, you know!"

How provoking she was, and how inspiriting! Was she as shrewd, as sophisticated, as she tried to appear, or was he merely, he asked himself, the victim of her irrepressible humour, of a prodigious display of the modern spirit? At least she was a part of her time—not, like Margaret and himself, a discordant note, a divergent atom, in the general march toward recklessness and unrestraint. Young as she was, he felt that she had already solved the problems which he had evaded or pushed aside. She had learned the secret of transition—a perpetual motion that went in circles and was never still. Here, he realized, was where he had lost connection, where he had failed to hold his place in the turmoil. He had tried to stand off and reach a point of view, to become a spectator, while the only way to fit into the century was simply to keep moving in whirls of unintelligent unison; never to meditate, never to reason upon one's course; but to sweep onward, somewhere, anywhere as long as it was in a new direction. Elasticity, variability—were not these the indispensable qualities of the modern mind? The power to make quick decisions and the inability to cling to convictions; the nervous high pitch and the failure to sustain the triumphant note; energy without direction; success without stability; martyrdom without faith. And around, above, beneath, the pervading mediocrity, the apotheosis of the average. Was this the best that democracy had to offer mankind? Was there no depth below the shallows? Was it impossible, even by the most patient search, to discover some justification of the formlessness of the age, of the crazy instinct for ugliness? He could forgive it all, he might eventually bring his mind to believe in it, if there were only some logical design informing the disorder. If he could find that it contained a single redeeming principle that was superior to the old order, he felt that he should be able to surrender his disbelief.

He was leaving the gate when a woman, walking slowly in front of the house, spoke to him abruptly.

"If I wait here shall I see the Governor come out?"

With the feeling that he was passing again through a familiar nightmare, he turned quickly and looked down on the pathetic figure he had seen the evening before. In the daylight she seemed more pitiable and less repellent than she had appeared in the darkness. The hollowness of her features gave a certain dignity to her expression—the look of one who is returning from the shadows of death. Years ago, before illness or dissipation had wrecked her health and her appearance, she may have been attractive, he surmised, in a common and obvious fashion. Her black eyes were still striking, and the sunlight revealed a quantity of coarse black hair on which he detected the claret tinge of fading dye.

"I am sorry," she added as she recognized him. "I did not know it was you." As soon as she had spoken she became confused and tried to pass on; but he made a movement to detain her.

"Have you any particular reason for wishing to see the Governor?"

"Oh, no, I am a stranger here." Her accents were ordinary, yet there was a note of the unusual in her appearance and manner. Whatever she was, she was not commonplace.

"But you were waiting to see him?" he said.

Her gaze left his face and travelled uncertainly over the mansion. "Oh, yes, I thought I might see him. I've never seen a Governor."

"You do not wish to speak to him?"

"No; why should I wish to speak to him? I'm a stranger, that's all. I like to see whatever is going on. Was that his daughter who went out just now?"

"Yes, that was his daughter."

"Then she is pretty—almost as pretty as—Thank you, sir. I will go along now. I'm staying not far from here, and I come out when I get the chance to watch the squirrels in the Square."

The explanation sounded simple enough; yet he suspected, though he could not have defined his reason, that she was not telling the truth. Again he asked himself if she could have known Gideon Vetch in the past? It was possible; it was not even improbable. Once, even ten or fifteen years ago, she may have been handsome in her coarse and showy style; and he had no proof, except Patty, that the Governor had ever possessed a fastidious taste.

The woman had turned with furtive haste in the direction of the outer gate; and when Stephen started on again toward the library, he crossed a man who was rapidly ascending the brick walk from the fountain at the foot of the hill. By his jaunty stride and his air of excessive joviality—the mark of the successful local politician—Stephen recognized Julius Gershom, the campaign-maker, as people called him, who had stood behind Gideon Vetch from the beginning of his career. "What an unconscionable bounder the fellow is," thought Stephen as he passed him. What an abundance of self-assertiveness he had contrived to express in his thin spruce figure, his tightly curling black hair, which grew too low on his forehead, and his short black moustache with pointed ends which curved up like polished metal from his full red lips.

"I suppose he is on his way to the Governor," mused the young man idly. "How on earth does Vetch stand him?"

But to his surprise, when he glanced back again, he saw that Gershom had passed the mansion, and was hurrying down the walk which the strange woman had followed a moment before. Stephen could still see her figure approaching a distant gate; and he observed presently that Gershom was not far behind her, and that he appeared to be speaking her name. She started and turned quickly with a movement of alarm; and then, as Gershom joined her, she went on again in the direction she had first taken. A few minutes later their rapidly moving figures left the Square and passed down the street beyond the high iron fence.

"I wonder what it means?" thought Stephen indifferently. "I wonder what the deuce Gershom has got up his sleeve?"

By the time he reached his office the wonder had vanished; but it returned to him on his way home that afternoon when he dropped into the old print shop for a word with Corinna.

"I passed that fellow Gershom in the Square to-day," he said. "Do you know him by sight?"

She shook her head. "What is he like? Patty tells me that he has become a nuisance."

"Ah, then you have seen Patty?"

A smile turned her eyes to the colour of November leaves. "She was here for an hour this morning. I have great hopes of her. I think she is going to supply me with an interest in life."

"Then she still amuses you?"

"Amuses me? My dear, she enchants me. She stands for the suppressed audacities of my past."

He looked at her thoughtfully. "I wonder how much of her is real?"

"Probably half. She is real, I think, in her courage, but not in her conventions."

"Well, I confess that she puzzles me. I can't see just what she means."

"I doubt if she means anything. She is a vital spirit; she chafes at chains; and she is smarting from a sense of inferiority. There is a thirst for power in her little body that may make her either an actress or a politician."

"Now, it seems to me that if she has any sense it is one of superiority. She treated me like a brick under her feet."

For a minute Corinna was silent. The smile on her lips had grown tenderly humorous; and there was a softness in her eyes which made him sorry that he had not known her when he was a child. "Do you know what she told me to-day?" she said. "She studies a page of the dictionary every morning, and she tries to remember and practise all day the new words that she learns. She is now in the letter M."

A peal of merriment interrupted her. "That explains it!" exclaimed Stephen with unaffected delight, "maneuver—misinformation—multitude—"

"So she has practised on you too?"

"Oh, they all practise on me," he retorted. "It is what I was made for."

"Well, as long as it is only words, you are safe, I suppose."

He denied this with a gesture. "It is everything you can possibly practise with—from puddings to pigeons."

"My poor dear, so you have been eating Margaret's puddings. Weren't they good ones?"

"Oh, perfection! But I wasn't thinking of Margaret."

"I know you weren't. For your mother's sake I wish that you were."

His face looked suddenly tired. "Margaret is perfection, I know; but I feel sometimes that only perfect people can endure perfection."

"Yes, I know." Her smile had faded now. "I admire Margaret tremendously, but I feel closer to Patty."

"Perhaps. I am not sure. Somehow I have been sure of nothing since I came out of the trenches—least of all of myself. I am trying to find out now what I am in reality."

As he rose to go she held out her hand. "I think,—I am not certain, but I think," she responded gaily, "that Patty's dictionary may give you the definition."

CORINNA GOES TO WAR

"Yes, I've had a mean life," thought Corinna, while she stood before her mirror carefully placing a patch on her cheek. In her narrow gown of black velvet, with the silver heels of her slippers shining beneath the transparent draperies, she had more than ever the look of festival, of October splendour. If her beauty had lost in roundness and softness, it had gained immeasurably in authority, in that air of having been a part of great events, of historic moments which clung to her like a legend. Romance and mystery were in her smile; and yet what had life held for her, she mused now, except the frustrated hope, the blighted fruit, the painted lily? Her beauty had brought her nothing that was not tawdry, nothing that was not a gaudy imitation of happiness. She had given herself for what? For the shadow of reality, for the tinted shreds of a damaged illusion. The past, in spite of her many triumphs, had been worse than tragic; it had been comic—since it had left her beggared. Looking back upon it now she saw that it had lacked even the mournful dignity of a broken heart.

"I have had a mean life; but it isn't over yet, and I may make something better of the rest of it," she thought. "At least I have fighting blood in my veins, and I will never give up. After all, even if my life has been mean, I haven't been—and that is what really counts in the end. If I haven't been happy, I have tried to be gallant—and it takes courage to be gallant with an aching heart—"

As she fastened the long string of pearls—one of Kent Page's early gifts—she drew back from the mirror, with the light of philosophy, if not of happiness, overflowing her eyes. With her grace and her radiance she stood for the flower of the Virginian aristocratic tradition; with her sincerity and her fearlessness she embodied the American democratic ideal. Her forefathers had brought representative government to the New World. They had sat in the first General Assembly ever summoned in America; and through the generations they had fought always on the side of liberty tempered by discipline, of democracy exalted by patriotism. They had stood from the beginning for dignity, for manners, for the essence of social culture which places art at the service of life. Always they had sought to preserve the finer lessons of the past; always they had struggled against the tyranny of mediocrity, the increasing cult of the second best. From this source, from the inherited instinct for selection, for elimination, from the inbred tendency toward order and suavity of living, Corinna had derived her clear-eyed acceptance of life, her nobility of mind, her loveliness and grace of body. She had been prepared and nurtured for beauty, only to bloom in an age when beauty had been bartered for usefulness. Would the delicate discriminations in which she had been trained, the lights and shadows of her soul, become submerged in the modern effort to reduce all distinctions to a level, all diversities to an average?

Turning away from the mirror, Corinna glanced over the charming room, with the wood fire, the white bearskin rug, the ivory bed draped in blue silk, the long windows opening on the garden terrace and the starlit darkness. There had been luxury always. Money she had had in abundance; yet there had been no hour in the last twenty years when she would not have exchanged it all—everything that money could bring her—for the dinner of herbs where love was. She had possessed everything except the one thing she had wanted. She had served the tin gods in temples of gold and jade. With the deep instinct for perfection in her blood, she had spent her life in an endless compromise with the inferior.

"Was there something lacking in me?" she asked now of her glowing reflection. "Was there some vital spark left out when I was born? And to-night? Why should I care how it goes? What is Rose Stribling to me or I to her?" Why should she still cherish that dull resentment, that smothered sense of injury in her heart? Was it the burden of her inheritance, the weakness of the older races, that she could not forget? She had loved a man who was unworthy; she had loved him for no better reason, she understood now, than a superficial charm, a romantic appeal. The fault was in the man, she knew, yet she had forgiven the man long ago, while she still hated Rose Stribling. Perversity, inconsistency—but it was her nature, and she could not overcome it. "If she had ever loved him, I might have forgiven her," she thought, "but she cared for him as little as she cares for Gideon Vetch to-day. It was vanity then, and it is vanity now. You cannot hurt her heart—only her pride—"

Her father called from the stairs; and with a last swift glance at her image, she caught up a fan of ostrich plumes and a wrap of peacock-blue velvet. She had never looked more brilliant in her life, not even on that June morning twenty-five years ago, when, coloured like a rose, she had been married to Kent Page beneath a bower of roses. She had lost much since then, freshness, innocence, the trusting heart and the transparent gaze, but she had lost neither charm nor radiance.

"So we are invited to meet Gideon Vetch," remarked the Judge as they went down the steps; and from the whimsical sound of his voice, she knew that there was a smile on his face. The house, with its picturesque English front half hidden by Virginia creeper, stood at the end of a long avenue, in the centre of a broad lawn planted in fine old elms.

"Yes, there must be some reason for the dinner, but Sarah Berkeley did not tell me."

"Well, I'll be glad to see the Governor again," said the Judge, leaning comfortably back as the car rolled down the avenue to the road, "but you will have a dreary evening, I fear, unless John should be there."

Corinna smiled in the darkness. So even her father, who so rarely noticed anything, had observed her growing interest in John Benham. After all, might this be—this sudden revival of an old sentiment in John's heart—"the something different," the ultimate perfection for which she had sought all her life? "He is beginning to mean more to me than any one else," she thought. "If only I had never heard that old gossip about Alice Rokeby."

Leaning over, she patted the Judge's hand. "Don't have me on your mind, Father darling. Go ahead and enjoy the Governor as much as you can. I am easy to amuse, you know, and besides, I have my own particular iron in the fire to-night."

"You are never without expedients, my child, but I hope this one has no bearing on Vetch."

"Oh, but it has. Like Esther, the queen, I have put on royal apparel for an ulterior object. Did you notice that I had made myself as terrible as an army with banners?"

"I thought you were looking unusually lovely," replied the Judge gracefully. "But you are always so handsome that I suspected no guile."

Corinna laughed merrily. "But I am full of guile, dear innocent! I go forth to conquer."

"Not the Governor, I hope?"

"Oh, no, the Governor is nothing—a prize, nothing more. My antagonist is Mrs. Stribling."

"Rose Stribling?" The Judge was mildly astonished. "Why, I remember her as a little girl in white dresses."

Corinna's smile became scornful. "Well, she isn't a little girl any longer, and she oughtn't to be in white dresses."

"Dear me, dear me," rejoined the old gentleman. "I am aware that you have a dramatic temperament, but it is scarcely possible that you are jealous of little Rose. She is a good deal younger than you, if I am not mistaken—but my memory is not all that it once was."

"She is twelve years younger and at least twenty years more malicious," retorted Corinna lightly. "But those twelve years aren't as long as they were in your youth, my dear. A generation ago they would have spelt an end of my conquests; to-day they mean only new worlds to conquer."

The Judge looked perplexed. "Am I to infer from this that you have designs on the Governor? And may I inquire what use you intend to make of him after you have captured him from the enemy?"

Corinna shrugged her shoulders. "I hadn't thought of that. Release him, probably. But, whatever happens, I shall have saved him from a worse fate. For that he ought to thank me, and he will if he is reasonable."

"Few men are reasonable in captivity. Do you think, by the way, that Mrs. Stribling would like another husband, and such a husband as our friend the demagogue?"

"I think she would like a political career, and of course her only way of obtaining a career of any kind is to marry one. Though she isn't discerning, she has sense enough to perceive that. They tell me that the Governor is starting straight for the Senate, and the wife of a senator—of any senator—might have a very good time in Washington. Besides, there is always the chance of course that the winds of public folly may blow him into the White House."

"If what you say is true it would be a hard fate for an honest rogue," admitted the Judge. "In your hands he would at least go unharmed."

"Oh, unharmed certainly. Perhaps helped."

"Then it is better so. But the thing that interests me in Vetch, is not his value as a matrimonial or romantic prize; I am concerned solely and simply with his opinions."

"Well, you will have the advantage of Mrs. Stribling and me, for we shall probably find the cigars an impediment to our attack. At any rate, we ought to have a less tedious evening than you expect."

A little later, when she entered the long drawing-room where the other guests were already assembled, Corinna threw an inquiring glance in the direction of Mrs. Stribling. Could the shallow pink and white loveliness of that other woman, the historic type of the World's Desire, bear comparison with her own starry beauty? It was a petty rivalry. She had entered into it half in jest, half in irritation, yet some sportsmanlike instinct prompted her to play the game to the end. She would prove to Rose Stribling that those twelve years of knowledge and suffering had taught her not to surrender, but to conquer.

The Berkeleys were what was still known in their small social world as "quiet people." They entertained little, and always with a definite object which they were not afraid to disclose. Their house, an incongruous example of Mid-Victorian architecture, was still suffused for them with the sentimental glamour of their wedding day. The walls, untouched for years, were covered with embossed paper and panelled in yellow oak. The furniture, protected for five months of the year by covers of striped linen, was stiffly upholstered in pea-green brocade; and the pictures, hanging very high, were large but inferior oil paintings in heavily gilded frames that represented preposterous sheaves of wheat or garlands of roses. Forty years ago the house reproduced within and without "the best taste" of the period, and was as bad as the Berkeleys could afford to make it. Since then fashions had come and gone; yet the hospitable home remained as unchanged as the politics of the host or the figure of the hostess. The Berkeleys were still content to be "old-fashioned people," with the fine feeling and the indiscriminate taste of an era which had flowered not in architecture but in character, when the standard of living was high and the style in furniture correspondingly low. To-night the ten guests (the Berkeleys never gave large dinners) had been carefully chosen, and the evening would probably be distinguished by good talk and good wine. Though they were law-abiding persons to the core, the bitterness of the Eighteenth Amendment had not penetrated to the subterranean darkness where Mr. Berkeley's treasures were stored.

Mrs. Berkeley, a brisk, compact little woman, with a pretty florid face and the prominent bosom and tapering waist of forty years ago, turned from the Governor as Corinna and the Judge entered, and hurried forward in her animated way, which reminded one of the manner of a child that is trying to make a success of a dolls' party. Beyond Mr. Berkeley, a short, neutral-tinted man without emphasis of personality, Corinna saw Mrs. Stribling's tall, full figure draped in a gown of jade-coloured velvet, with a daringly short skirt from which a narrow, sharply pointed train wound like a serpent. Her heavy hair, of an unusual shade of pale gold, had the smooth, polished look of metal which had been moulded in waves close to her head. In spite of her active life and her disastrous affairs, she presented an unblemished complexion, as if her hard rosy surface were protected by some indestructible glaze. Beside her opulent attractions the frail prettiness of Alice Rokeby, who was dining out for the first time this winter, looked wistful and pathetic. Every one, except Corinna, who had been abroad at the time, knew of the old affair between Alice Rokeby and John Benham; and every one who knew of it had thought that they would be married as soon as she got her divorce. But time had dragged on; Corinna had come home again; and Alice Rokeby's violet eyes had grown deeper and more wistful, with a haunted look in them as if they were denying a hungry heart. She had never dressed well; she had never, as Mrs. Stribling remarked, known how to bring out her best points; and to-night she had been even less successful than usual. Both Corinna and Mrs. Stribling could have told her that she should have avoided violent shades; and yet she was wearing now a dress of vivid purple which made her pale rose-leaf complexion look almost sallow. Though she could exercise when she chose a strangely passive attraction, her charm usually failed in the end for lack of intelligent guidance.

A little beyond Alice Rokeby, where her eyes could follow his gestures, John Benham was talking in his pleasant subdued voice to Patty Vetch, who looked, in her frock of scarlet tulle, as if she had just alighted from the chorus of a musical comedy. Her boyish dark head was bent over a fan of scarlet feathers, a toy which appeared ridiculously large beside her small figure. It was evident that the girl was trying to cover an uncomfortable shyness with an air of mocking effrontery; and a moment later, when Corinna joined them, Benham glanced up with a flash of satirical amusement in his eyes. He was a tall thin man of middle age, with a striking appearance and the straight composed features of an early American portrait. His dark hair, brushed back from his forehead, had the shining gloss that comes of good living and careful grooming, and this gloss was reflected in his smiling gray eyes and in the healthy red of his well-cut though not quite generous mouth. He was a charming guest, an impressive speaker, a sympathetic listener; yet there had always seemed to Corinna to be a subtle deficiency in his character. It was only of late, since their friendship had turned into a warmer feeling, that she had been able to overcome that sense of something wanting which had troubled her when she was with him. She could define no quality that was absent; but the impression he still gave her at times was one of a man tremendously gifted and yet curiously inadequate. A mental thinness perhaps? An emotional dryness? Or was it merely that here also she felt, rather than perceived, the intrinsic weakness of the old order?

Beyond Benham, Gideon Vetch, rugged, sanguine, and wearing the wrong tie with his evening clothes as valiantly as he had worn the rumpled brown suit in which Stephen had last seen him, was talking in a loud voice to Miss Maria Berkeley—one of those serene single women arrayed in dove-colour who belong as appropriately as crewel work or antimacassars to another century. If Patty was shy and self-conscious, it was evident that her state of mind was not shared by her father. He was interested because he was expressing a cherished opinion, and he was talking in an emphatic tone because he hoped that he might be overheard. When Mrs. Berkeley drew him away in order to introduce him to Corinna, he resumed his theme immediately, as if he were addressing a public meeting and had scarcely noticed that there had been a change in his audience. "Miss Berkeley was asking me what I thought of the effects of prohibition," he explained presently with his smile of unguarded friendliness. How was it possible to arrest the attention of a man who insisted on talking of prohibition?

At the table a little later Corinna asked herself the question again, while she made light conversation for the retired general who had taken her in—an anecdotal, bewhiskered presence, with the husky voice and the glazed eyes of successful pomposity. Glancing occasionally at Vetch who sat on her left, she found that he was describing to Mrs. Berkeley the best protection against forest fires. As far as Corinna was concerned, she felt that she might as well have been a view from the window, or the portrait of Mr. Berkeley's great aunt that hung over the mantelpiece. He had probably, she reflected, classified her lightly as "another gray-haired woman," and passed on to Rose Stribling, who bloomed triumphantly between John Benham and Stephen Culpeper. Vetch was so different from what Corinna had expected to find him that, in some vague way, she felt disappointed and absurdly resentful. Had her imagination, she wondered, prepared her to meet one of the picturesque radicals of fiction? Had she looked for a middle-aged Felix Holt; and was this why the Governor's prosaic figure, his fresh-coloured, undistinguished face and his vehement, spectacular gestures, dispelled immediately the interest she had felt in the meeting? There were no salient points in his appearance, nothing that she could detach from the rest in her mental image of him. There was no single characteristic of which she could say: "He may be common; he may be vulgar; but he strikes the note of greatness here—and here—and here." With such a man, she felt, the direct and obvious appeal of Rose Stribling would be victorious. He could discern pink and white and blue and gold; but the indeterminate shades, the subtleties and mysteries of charm were enigmatical to him. His emotions would be as literal as his convictions or his oratory. Yet there must be some faculty in him which did not appear on the surface, some primitive grasp of realities in his understanding of men. Why should the influence of this sanguine, loud-talking demagogue, she asked herself the next minute, be greater than the influence of John Benham, who possessed every admirable trait except the ability to make people follow him? What was this fundamental difference in material or structure which divided them so completely? When she had traced it to its source would she discover the secret of Vetch's conquering personality?

Looking away from the General, her eyes rested for a moment on Stephen Culpeper, who was listening with his reserved impersonal attention to the amusing prattle of Patty Vetch. Obeying an imperative rule, Mrs. Berkeley had placed her youngest guests together; and yet, if Stephen had been seventy-five instead of twenty-six, he could sparcely have had less in common with the Governor's daughter. With her small glossy head, and her scarlet cheeks and lips above the fan of ostrich feathers, the girl reminded Corinna of a spray of Christmas holly, all dark and bright and shining. Ever since Patty's first visit to the print shop Corinna had felt a genuine liking for her. The girl had something deeper than charm, reflected the older woman; she had determination and endurance, the essentials of character. Of course she was crude, she was ignorant; but these are never insurmountable obstacles except to the dull. With intelligence and resourcefulness all things are possible—even the metamorphosis of a circus rider's daughter into a woman of the world.

Becoming suddenly aware that Vetch was silent, and that Mrs. Berkeley had turned to Judge Page on her left, Corinna looked for the first time into the frank blue eyes of the Governor. Strange eyes they were, she thought, the one striking feature in a face that was ordinary. It was like looking down into the very fountain of life—no, of humanity.

"I have been watching your daughter," she began casually. "She is very pretty."

"Yes, she is pretty enough"—his tone was playful—"but I don't like this craze for short hair."

She looked him over calmly. Indirect methods would be wasted on such an opponent. "You must admire Mrs. Stribling's."

"I do. Don't you?" His glance roved to the ample beauty beside John Benham. "It looks exactly like a rope of flax."

"A rope suggests a hanging to me," she rejoined grimly.

He laughed, and she noticed that his eyes were brimming over with humour. Yes, they were extraordinary eyes, and they made one feel sympathetic and friendly. The man had a quality, she couldn't deny it.

"We don't hang any longer," he replied.

"Oh, yes, we do sometimes—without the law."

The blue sparkles in his eyes contracted to points of light. She had at last, by arresting his wandering attention, succeeded in making him look at her.

"I wonder what you mean," he mused aloud, and added frankly, "I've never seen you before, have I?"

"Have I?" she mimicked gaily. "Wouldn't you remember me? Or are all gray-haired women alike to you?"

His gaze travelled to her hair. "I didn't mean it that way. Of course I should have remembered." He spoiled this by adding: "I never forget a face," and continued before she could answer, "I don't know whether your hair is gray or only powdered a little; but you are as young as—as summer."

"Or as your political party."

"That's good. I like a nimble wit." He was plainly amused. "But my party isn't young, you know. It is as old as Esau and Jacob. Oh, yes, I've read my Bible. I was brought up on it."

"That is why your speech is so direct," she said when he paused, concluding slowly after a minute, "and so sincere."

"You feel that I am sincere?"

She met his eyes gravely. "Doesn't every one?"

He laughed shortly. "Ah, you know better than that!"

"Well, my father does. He says that it is your sincerity that makes you resemble me."

To her surprise he did not laugh at this. "Do I resemble you?" he asked simply.

"Father thinks so. He says that people won't take us seriously because we tell them the truth."

An impression drifted like smoke across the blue of his eyes. Who was it, she wondered, who had said that his eyes were gray? "Don't they take you seriously?" he asked.

"As a woman, yes. As a human being, no."

He smiled. "You are too deep. I can't follow. I understand only the plain bright ideas of the half educated, you know."

Her brilliant glance shone on him steadily. "I shan't try to explain. What one doesn't understand without an explanation isn't worth knowing. But somebody must take you seriously, or you wouldn't be where you are."

"Do you know where I am?" he demanded impulsively.

"I know that you are Governor of Virginia."

"Oh, that! I thought you meant something more than that," he returned with a note of disappointment in his voice.

"What could I mean more than that? Isn't it the first step upward in a political career?"

"Perhaps. But I was thinking of something else. The chief thing seems to me to be to work a way out of the muddle. Anybody may be Governor or even President if he tries hard enough—but it is a different matter to bring some kind of order out of this confusion. I've got an idea that I've been hammering at for the last twenty years. Not a great one, perhaps, though I think it is; and I'd like to get a chance to put it into practice before I die. I want to wake up people and tell them the truth."

Was he, for all his matter-of-fact appearance, simply another political dreamer, another visionary without a definite vision?

"And will they listen when you tell them?" she asked.

He laughed. "Who knows what may happen? When I was a kid in the circus—you have heard, of course, that I spent my childhood in a travelling circus"—how simply he brought this out!—"the fat woman, we called her 'the fat lady' in those days, had a favourite proverb: 'When the skies fall we shall catch larks'. I reckon when the skies fall the people will learn wisdom."

"But you have caught your larks, haven't you?"

"No, I used to set snares by the hundred, but I never caught anything better than a sparrow."

A wistful look crossed her face, and for an instant the youth seemed to droop and fade in her eyes. "Isn't that life?—sparrows for larks always?"

His sanguine spirit rejected this as she had known that it would. "Life is all right," he replied, "as long as there's a fighting chance left to you. That is the only thing that makes it worth while, fighting to win."

She gazed meditatively at the points of flame on the white candles. "I suppose it would be so with you; for you fit into the age. You are a part of this variable uncertain quantity called democracy, which some of us old-fashioned folk look upon as a boomerang."

"Yes, I am a part of it," he answered slowly. "I see it as it is, I think. It is pure buncombe, of course, to say that it hasn't its ugly side; but I believe, if I have a chance, that I can make something of it." He paused a moment while he hesitated over the silver beside his plate; but there was no uncertainty in his voice when he went on again, after deliberately picking up the fork he preferred. It was a little thing to remember a man by—the merest trifle—but she never forgot it. Only a big man could be as natural as that, she reflected. "I reasoned it all out before I went into politics," he was saying. "I didn't get it out of books either—unless you count the Bible and 'Robinson Crusoe,' which are the only two I ever read as a boy. But the way I worked it out at last was that democracy, like life, isn't anything that's already finished. It is raw stuff. We are making it every minute of the time; and it depends on us whether we put it through as a straight job or a failure. Democracy, as I see it, isn't a word or a phrase out of a book, or a formula, or anything that has frozen into a fixed shape or pattern. It is warm and fluid, and it is teeming with living forms. It is as much alive as the earth or air or water, and it can be used to develop as many varying energies. That is why it is all so amazingly interesting. As long as you don't fall away from that thought you have your feet planted on solid ground—you can face things squarely—"

"You preach a kind of political pragmatism," she said as he paused.

"Pragmatism? That's a muscular word, but I don't know it. I wonder if Robinson Crusoe discovered it."

"If Robinson Crusoe didn't discover it, he lived it," she rejoined gaily; and then, as the voice of Mrs. Berkeley was heard purring softly on Vetch's other side, Corinna turned to the bewhiskered General, whose only sense, she had already ascertained, was the historic sense.

While she leaned back, with her head bent in the direction of his husky voice, she was visited by a piercing realization of the emptiness, the artificiality of her life. Futility—weariness—disenchantment—a gray lane without a turning that stretched on into nothingness! Many thoughts were blown through her mind like leaves in a high wind. She saw herself from the beginning—striving without rest—searching—searching—for what? For happiness—for perfection—for the starry flower that she had never found. All was tawdry, all was tarnished, all was unreal. In looking back she saw that the festival of her life was an affair of tinselled splendour and glittering dust. Was this only the impression of Vetch on her mood? Did he possess some magic gift of personality which caused the artificial, the counterfeit, to wither in his presence?

Conversation was not animated; and while she listened with a smile to dreary anecdotes of the War Between the States, she allowed her gaze to wander slowly down the table to where Alice Rokeby sat, with her large soft eyes, so vague and wistful, asking of life, "Why have you passed me by?" Now and then these eyes, which reminded Corinna of the eyes in a dream, would turn timidly to John Benham, and then there would steal into them that strange look of hunger, of desperation. What did it mean? Corinna wondered. Surely there was no truth in the old gossip that she had heard long ago and forgotten?

John Benham had put a question to the Governor across the table; and he sat now, leaning a little forward, while he waited for an answer. The light from the tall white candles, in branched candelabra of the Queen Anne pattern, fell directly on his handsome austere face, so full of delicate reserves and fine intentions; and all the disturbing questions fled from Corinna's mind while she looked at him. Surely, she repeated to herself, with a triumphant emphasis, surely there was no truth in that old ugly gossip! The backward sweep of his iron-gray hair accentuated the height of his forehead, and produced at first sight an impression of intellectual superiority. His nose was long and slightly aquiline; his mouth firm and clear-cut, with thin lips that closed tightly; his chin jutted a little forward, giving a hatchet-like severity to his profile. It was the face of a fair fighter, of a man who could be trusted absolutely beyond personal limitations, of a man who would always keep the vision of the end through any enterprise, who would always put the curb of expediency on emotional impulses, who would invariably judge a theory not by its underlying principle, but by its practical application. A charming face, too, complex and imaginative, a face which made the rugged and open countenance of the Governor appear primitive and undeveloped. Corinna admired Benham; she respected him; she liked—was it even possible, she asked herself, that she loved him? Yet here again she was conscious of that baffled feeling of inadequacy, of something wanting, as if an essential faculty of soul had been either left out by Nature, or refined away by the subtle impersonal processes of his mind.

Clearly there had been an error of judgment in placing him beside Mrs. Stribling. His taste was too fastidious to respond to her palpable allurements. She would have had a better chance with Vetch, for the flippant pleasantry with which Benham responded to the beaming enchantress was clothed in the very tone and look he had used with Patty Vetch in the drawing-room. Yes, it was futile to stray too far from one's type. Rose Stribling had failed to interest Benham, mused Corinna, for the same reason that she herself had been unable to arouse the admiration of Gideon Vetch. The lesson it taught, she repeated cynically, was simply that it was futile to stray too far from one's type. Vetch had talked to her as he might have talked to her father or to the husky warrior on her right; but he had never once looked at her. His attention would be arrested by large, sudden, bright things like the rosy curve of Mrs. Stribling's shoulders or the shining ropes of her hair.

"How absurd it was to imagine that I could compare with that!" thought Corinna with amusement. Her sense of defeat was humorous rather than resentful; yet she realized that it contained a disagreeable sting. Was her long day over at last? Had the sun set on her conquests? Had her adventurous return to power been merely a prelude to the ultimate Waterloo? Lifting her eyes suddenly from her plate she met the deep meditative gaze of John Benham across the marigolds on the table; and the faint flush that kindled her face made her eyes glow like embers. Had he read the thought in her mind? Was the tenderness in his glance only an ironical comment on the ignominious end of her Hundred Days?

She glanced away quickly, and as she did so she looked straight into the eyes of Alice Rokeby—those eyes that asked perpetually of life, "Why have you passed me by?"

THE WORLD AND PATTY

On the way home, leaning against her father who had not spoken since the car started, Patty shut her eyes and went over, one by one, the incidents of the dinner. What had she done that was right? What had she done that was wrong? Was her dress just what it ought to have been? Had she talked to Stephen Culpeper about the things people are supposed to discuss at a dinner? Had he seen how embarrassed she was beneath her pretence of gaiety? Would she be better looking if she were to let her hair grow long again? What had Mrs. Page, who looked as if she had stepped down from one of those old prints, thought of her?

Beneath the hard brightness of her manner there was a passionate groping toward some dimly seen but intensely felt ideal. She longed to learn if she could only learn without confessing her ignorance. Her pride was the obstinate, unreasonable pride of a child.

"If I could only find out things without asking!" The image of Stephen rose in her mind, which worked by flashes of insight rather than orderly processes. She saw his earnest young face, with the sleek dark hair, which swept in a point back from his forehead, his sombre smoke-coloured eyes, and the firm, slightly priggish line of his mouth. He seemed miles away from her, separated by some imponderable yet impassable barrier. The first time her gaze had rested on him at the charity ball she had thought impetuously, "Any girl could fall in love with a man like that!" and she had carelessly asked his name of the assiduous Gershom, who appeared to her to exist in innumerable reflections of himself. The next day when she had seen Stephen approaching her in the Square, she had obeyed the same erratic impulse, half in jest and half from the gambler's instinct to grasp at reluctant opportunity. After all, had not experience taught her that one must venture in order to win, that nothing came to those who dared not stake the whole of life on the next turn of fortune? She had been startled out of her composure by the sight of Stephen at the dinner; and yet she had not been conscious of any particular wish to see him again, or to sit at his side through two hours of embarrassment and uncertainty. Now, on the way home, she was suffering acutely from the burden of failure, from the smarting realization of her own ignorance and awkwardness. Her one bitter-sweet consolation was the knowledge that she had been "a good loser," that she had carried off her humiliation with a scornful pride which must have blighted like frost any tenderly budding shoots of compassion. "I'll show them that they mustn't pity me!" she thought, while her eyes blazed in the darkness. "I'll prove to them that I think myself every bit as good as they are!" She knew that her manner had been ungracious; but she knew also that something stronger than her will, some instinct which was rooted deep in the secret places of her nature, had made it impossible for her to appear otherwise. Impassioned, undisciplined, and capable of fierce imaginative loyalties and aversions, the strongest force in her character was this bitter ineradicable pride. To accept no benefits that she could not return; to fall under no obligation that would involve a feeling of gratitude; to pay the piper to the utmost penny whenever she called the tune—these were the only laws that she acknowledged. Though she longed ardently for the admiration of Stephen Culpeper, she would have died rather than relinquish the elfin mockery of her challenge.

"Well, did you enjoy it, Patty?" Her father turned to her with sudden tenderness, though the frown produced by some engrossing train of thought still gathered his heavy brows.

She caught his hand while her small face relaxed from its expression of rigid disdain. "I had simply the time of my life," she responded with convincing animation. "That Mrs. Page is the most beautiful woman I ever saw—but she can't be very young. I wonder what she was like when she was my age?"

Vetch laughed. "Not like a short-haired imp with green eyes anyway," he replied. "Mrs. Stribling looked very handsome, too, I thought."

"Oh, she's handsome enough," admitted Patty. "But she hasn't any sense. I listened to what she was saying, and she just asked questions all the time. Mrs. Page is different. You can tell that she has been all over the world. She knows things."

"Yes, I suppose she does," said Vetch. "What did you think of Benham?"

"He is good looking," answered the girl deliberately, "but I don't like him. He is making fun of you."

"Is he?" returned Vetch curiously. "Now, I wonder if you're right about that. At any rate he asked me a question to-night that I should like a chance to answer on the platform."

"He was in the army," said Patty, "and every one says he was a hero. The women were talking about him while you were smoking. They all admire him so. It seems that he went into an officer's training camp as soon as war was declared though he was over age; and then just recently he has done something that every one thinks splendid. He refused a tremendous fee from some corporation—what did they mean by a corporation?—because he thought the money was made dishonestly. Mrs. Page says he has as many public virtues as a civic forum. What is a forum, Father?"

Vetch laughed without replying directly to her question. "Did she say that?" he responded. "And what did she mean by it, I wonder?"

"It sounded clever," said Patty, "but I didn't understand. What is a forum, Father?"

Vetch thought a moment. "Mrs. Page would probably tell you," he replied, "that it is the temple of the improbable."

Patty stirred impatiently. "Now you are trying to talk like Mrs. Page," she rejoined. "I wish I knew what things meant."

"When you find out what they mean, Patty, they will cease to interest you."

"Well, I'd rather be less interested and more comfortable," said Patty, with a trace of exasperation in her voice. "To-night, for instance, I hadn't the faintest idea how to behave. Look at all those books I've read, too, when I might just as well have been enjoying myself. I've found out to-night, Father, that books can't tell you everything—not even books on etiquette."

Vetch broke into a laugh of boisterous amusement. "So that is how you have been spending your time!" he exclaimed. "You'd better trust to your common sense, my dear; it will carry you straighter."

"Oh, no, it doesn't. It doesn't carry me anywhere except into trouble. When I think of all the pains I've taken to learn how to talk like the dictionary! Why, nobody talks like the dictionary any longer! They all talk slang, every one of them—only they don't talk the kind that Julius Gershom and all these politicians do. If you could have seen Mrs. Berkeley's face when I told her I'd had a 'grand' time to-night—she looked exactly like a frozen fish—though just the moment before Mr. Culpeper had called somebody a 'rotter'. I heard him."

The Governor dismissed it all with a wave of his hand. "Trifles, trifles," was his only comment.

The car had entered the Square, and in a moment it was passing the Washington statue and the Capitol building. Until it stopped before the steps of the mansion, Patty did not reply; then springing up with a flutter of her scarlet skirt, she exclaimed airily, "But I am a trifle, too, Father!"

As he held out his hand from the ground, Vetch looked at her with an expression in which pride and pity were strangely mingled. "Then you are one of the trifles that make life worth living," he replied.

He had taken out his latch-key and was about to insert it in the lock, when the door opened and Gershom stood before them.

"I waited for you," he said to Vetch. "There's a matter I must see you about to-night." His ruddy face was tinged with purple, and he had the look of a man who has just been aroused from a nap.

"Well, I'm sleepy, and I'm going to bed," retorted Patty in reply to his glance rather than his words, and her tone was bitterly hostile.

"Then I'll see you to-morrow." He had followed her into the wide hall while the Governor closed the door and stopped to take off his overcoat. "Did you have a good time?"

She responded with a disdainful movement of her shoulders which might have been a shrug if she had had French instead of Irish blood in her veins. In her evening cloak of green velvet trimmed with gray fox she had the look of a small wild creature of the forest. Beneath her thick eyelashes her eyes shone through a greenish mist; and at the moment there was something frightened and furtive in their brightness.

"Of course," she replied defiantly, moving away from him in the direction of the staircase. "I had a wonderful time—perfectly wonderful. The people were all so interesting." Her pronunciation was as deliberately correct as if she were reading from a dictionary. It was the air of superiority that she always assumed with Gershom, for in no other way, she had learned from experience, could she irritate him so intensely.

His jovial manner gave place to a crestfallen look. "Who was there? I reckon I know the names anyway."

He affected a true republican scorn of appearances; and standing there, in his dishevelled business clothes beside Patty's ethereal youth, he looked as hopelessly battered by reality as a political theory, or as old General Powhatan Plummer of aristocratic descent.

Patty had often wondered what it was about the man that aroused in her so unconquerable an aversion. He was not ugly compared to many of the men her father had brought to the house; and ten years ago, when she first met him in the little country town where they were living, his curling black hair and sharp black eyes had seemed to her rather attractive than otherwise. If he had been merely untidy and unashamed in dress, she might have tolerated the failing as the outward sign of a distinguished social philosophy; but, even in those early days, his Jeffersonian simplicity had yielded to an outbreak of vanity. Though his clothes were unbrushed and his boots were unpolished, he wore a sparkling pin in his tie and several sparkling rings on his fingers. There was something else, too, some easy tone of patronage, some familiar inflexion, which as a child she had hated. Now, after the evening with Stephen Culpeper, she shrank from him with a disgust which was made all the keener by contrast. A pitiless light had fallen over Gershom while he stood there beside her, as if his bad taste and his pathetic ambition to appear something that he was not, had become exaggerated into positive vices. She was too young to perceive the essential pathos of all wasted effort, of all misdirected attempts to overcome the disadvantages of ignorance; and while she looked at him now, she saw only the vulgarity. Like all those who have suffered from insufficient opportunities and wounded pride, Patty Vetch was without mercy for the very weaknesses that she had risen above. After the evening at the Berkeleys' she felt that she should be less ashamed of a drunkard than of a man who wore diamonds because he thought that it was the correct thing to do. She remembered suddenly that on her fourteenth birthday she had bought a pair of paste earrings with ten dollars her father had given her; and for the sting of this reminder she knew that she should never forgive Gershom. Oh, she had no patience with a man who couldn't find out things and learn without asking questions! Hadn't she tried and tried, and made mistakes and tried again, and still gone on trying by hook or by crook; as her father would say, to find out the thousand and one things she oughtn't to do? If she, even as a child, had struggled so hard to improve herself and change in the right way, not the wrong way—then why shouldn't he? Her father, of course, wasn't polished, but he was as unlike Gershom as if they had been born as far apart as the poles. Even to her untrained eyes it was evident that Vetch possessed the authority of personality—a sanction that was not social but moral. Some inherent dislike for anything that was not solid, that was not genuine, had served Vetch as a kind of aesthetic discrimination.

"I know Benham," Gershom was saying eagerly. "I've worked with him. Smart chap, don't you think? Ever heard him speak?"

"No, I hate speeches."

"Did he and the Governor have any words?"

"Of course they didn't—not at dinner," she replied with a crushing manner. "Father is waiting for you."

"Then you'll see me to-morrow? I've got a lot I want to say to you. And I'll tell you this right now, Patty, my dear, you may run round with these high-faluting chaps like Culpeper as much as you please; but how many dinner parties do you think you'd be invited to if I hadn't put the old man where he is?"

At this she turned on him furiously, her eyes blazing through their greenish mist. "I don't owe you anything, and you know it!" she retorted defiantly. Then before he could detain her she broke away from him and ran up the stairs. How dared he pretend that he had placed her under an obligation! As if it made any difference to her whether her father were Governor or not!

As she fled upward she heard Gershom follow Vetch into the library, and she knew that they would sit talking there until long after midnight. These discussions had become frequent of late; and she surmised vaguely, though Vetch never mentioned Gershom's name to her, that the two men were no longer upon the friendly terms of the old days. Ever since Vetch's election, it had seemed to her that the pack of hungry politicians had closed in about him; and only the day before, when she had gone over to the Governor's office in the Capitol building, she had run away from what she merrily described as "the famished wolves" waiting outside his door. It was clear even to her that the political leaders who had supported Vetch were beginning already to distrust him. They had sought, she realized, to use his popularity, his eloquence, his earnestness, for their own ends; and they were making the historic discovery that the man who possesses these affirmative qualities is seldom without the will to preserve them. In their superficial ploughing of the soil, Vetch's adherents had at last struck against the rock of resistance. A man of ambition, or a man of prejudice, they might have controlled; but, as Patty had learned long ago, Vetch was that most difficult of political problems—the man of an idea.

Sitting before her dressing-table she glanced over the room, which was hung with the gaily decorated chintz she had bought after months of secret longing for roses and hollyhocks in her bedroom. Now she felt that it looked cheap and flimsy because she had sacrificed material to colour. She wanted something different to-night; she wanted something better. Turning to the mirror she gazed back at her vivid face, with the large deep eyes, so full of poignant expectancy, and the soft dimpled chin. From her expression she might have been dreaming of happiness; but the thought in her mind was simply, "The powder I use is too white. Those women to-night used powder that did not show. I must get some to-morrow." She was pretty,—even Stephen thought she was pretty. She could see it in his eyes when he looked at her; but her prettiness was merely the bloom of youth, nothing more. It was not that changeless beauty of structure—that beauty, as she recognized, of the very bone, which made Mrs. Page perennially lovely. "In ten, fifteen, at the most in twenty years, I shall have lost it all," she thought. "Then I shall get fat and common looking; and everything will be over for me because a little youthful colour and sparkle was all that I had. I have nothing to hold on to—nothing that will last. I don't know anything—and yet how could I be expected to know anything after the dull life I've had? In my whole life I've never known a woman that could help me. I've had to find out everything for myself—"

With her gaze still on the mirror, she laid the brush on its back of pink celluloid—how much she had admired it when she bought it!—and leaned forward with her hands clasped on the cover of the dressing-table. Her hair still flying out from the strokes of the brush surrounded her small eager face like a cloud. From the open neck of her kimono, embroidered in a pattern of cranes and wistaria, the thin girlish lines of her throat rose with an appealing fragility, like the stem of some delicate flower.

"I wonder if Mother could have helped me if she had lived?" she asked presently of her reflection. "I wonder if she was different from all the other women I've known?" Through her mind there passed swiftly a hundred memories of her childhood. First there came the one vivid recollection of her mother, a flashing, graceful figure, as light as thistle-down, in a skirt of spangled tulle that stood out from her knees. The face Patty could not remember, but the spangles were indelibly impressed on her mind, the spangles and a short silver wand, with a star on the end of it, which that fairy-like figure had held over her cradle. Of her mother this was all she had left, just this one unforgettable picture, and then a long terrible night when she had not seen her, but had heard her sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, somewhere in the darkness. The next day, when she cried for her, they had said that she was gone, and the child had never seen her again. In the place of her pretty mother there had been a big, rugged man, whom she had never seen before, and when she cried this man had taken her in his arms, and tried to quiet her. Afterward, when she grew bigger and asked questions, one of the neighbours had told her that her mother had lost her mind from a fall in the circus, that they had taken her away to an asylum, and that now she was dead.

"And wherever she is, she ought to go down on her knees and thank Gideon Vetch for the way he's looked after you," said the woman.

"But didn't he look after her too?" asked the child.

At this the woman laughed shrilly, lifting the soaking clothes with her capable red hands, and then plunging them down into the soapsuds." Well, I reckon that's more than the Lord Almighty would expect of him!" she replied emphatically but ambiguously.

"I wonder why Father never took me to see her. I'm sure I'd have remembered it."

The woman looked at her darkly. "There are some places that children don't go to."

"How long ago did she die?"

Patty waited patiently for an answer; but when at last the neighbour raised her head again from the tub, it appeared that her reticence had extended from her speech to her expression which looked as if it had closed over something. "You'll have to ask your father that," she returned in a phrase as cryptic as the preceding one. "I ain't here to tell you things."