One Man in His Time

A JOURNEY INTO MEAN STREETS

Darrow's little car was waiting before the entrance; and as soon as Stephen had taken his place by the old man's side, they shot forward into the smoky twilight. A policeman, standing in the circle of electric light at the corner, held up a warning hand; and then, as he recognized Darrow, he nodded with a smile, and there stole into his face the look of deference which Stephen had seen in the Governor's eyes. Glancing up at the sombre ruggedness of the profile beside him, the younger man asked himself curiously from what source of character or Circumstance this old man had derived his strange impressiveness and his Authority over men. With his gaunt length, his wide curving nostrils, his thick majestic lips, he looked, as Stephen had first seen him, a rock-hewn Pharaoh of a man. An unusual type to survive in modern America—republican and imperial! Did he represent, this carpenter who was also a politician, the political despotism of the worker—the crook and scourge of the labourer's power?

Suddenly, while he wondered, Darrow turned toward him. "What do you think of the Governor?"

"I hardly know," answered Stephen thoughtfully. "It is too soon to ask; but I think he is honest."

"He is more than honest," rejoined the other quietly. "He is human. He understands. He belongs to us."

"Belongs?" Stephen repeated the word with a note of interrogation.

Very slowly the old man answered. "I mean that he is more than anything that he says or thinks. He is bigger than his message."

"I suppose he stands for a great deal?"

"A man stands only for what he is, not for an inch more, not for an inch less. The trouble with all the leaders we've had in the past was that their thought outstripped their characters. They believed more than they were and they broke down under it. I'm an old man now. I've watched them come and go."

"You think that Vetch is a great leader?"

"I think he is a great leader, but I don't mean that I think he will ever lead us anywhere."

"You feel that he is losing his grip on the crowd?"

Up from Main Street the workers were pouring out of the factories; and while they moved in a dark stream through the light and shadow on the pavement, the faces flowed past Stephen with a pallid intensity which made him think of dead flowers drifting on a river. In all those faces how little life there seemed, how little individuality and animation!

"When I was a small kid I used to live by the seashore," said the old man presently in his dry, emphatic tones. "Many is the time I've stood and watched the tide coming in, and I never once saw it come in that it didn't go out again."

"Then you believe that the tide is turning against Vetch?"

For a minute, while they sped on in the obscurity of a side street, Darrow meditated.

"No, sir, I ain't saying that much—not yet. But the way I calculate is something like this. Vetch came in on a wave of popular emotion, and a wave of popular emotion is just about like the tide of the sea. It may rise a certain distance, but it can't stand still, and it can't go any farther. It's obliged to turn; and when it turns, it's pretty sure to bring back a good deal that it carried with it. A crowd impulse—as they call it in the pulpit and on the platform—is a dangerous thing. It's dangerous because you can't count on it."

"It looks to me as if Vetch counted upon it a little too much."

"That's his nature. He was born on the sunny side of the street. He thinks because he sees the way to help people that they want to be helped. I've been mixed up in politics now for fifty years, and in the labour movement, as they say, ever since it began to move in the South—and I've found out that people don't really want to be helped—they want to be fooled. Vetch offers 'em facts, and all the time it ain't facts they're wanting, but names."

"I see," assented Stephen. "Names that they can repeat over and over until they get at last to believe that they are things. Long reverberating names like Democratic or Republican—"

Darrow laughed grimly. "That's right, sir, that's the way I've worked it out in my mind. The crowd will come a little way after a fact; but in the end it gets tired because the fact won't work magic, like that conjure-stuff of the darkeys, and then it turns and goes back to the old names that mean nothing. Only when a crowd moves all together it's dangerous because it's like the flood-tide and ebb-tide of the sea."

"And the most irritating part of it," said Stephen, with an insight which had sometimes visited him in the trenches, "is that it gets what it deserves because it can always have whatever it wants—even the truth and honest government."

They were passing rows of narrow old-fashioned tenement-houses, standing, like crumbling walls of red brick, behind sagging wooden fences; and suddenly, while Stephen's eyes were on the lights that came and went so fitfully in the basement dining-rooms, Darrow stopped the car in the gutter of cobblestones, and motioned in silence toward the pavement. As Stephen got out, he glanced vaguely round him at the strange neighbourhood.

"Where are we?"

"North of Marshall Street. A quarter which was once very prosperous; but that was before your day. This is one of several rows of old houses, well-built in their time, better built, indeed, than any houses we're putting up now; but their day is over. The cost of repairing them would be so great that the agent is deliberately letting the property run down in the hope that this part of the street will soon be turned over to negroes. The negroes are so crowded in their quarter that they are obliged to expand, and when they do, this investment will yield a still higher interest. Coloured tenants stand crowding better than white ones, and they will pay a better rent for worse housing. As it is the rent of these houses has doubled since the beginning of the war."

"Good God!" said Stephen. "Do we stop here?"

"I want you to see Canning, the man the Governor told you about. He can't pay his rent, which was raised last Saturday, and the family is moving to-morrow."

"He ought to be paid for living here. Where will he go?"

"Oh, people can always find a worse place, if they look long enough. Canning was in the war, by the way. He's got some nervous trouble—not crazy enough to be taken care of—just on edge and unstrung. The war used him up, I reckon, and anxiety and undernourishment used up his wife and children. It all seems to have come out in the baby—queerest little kid you ever saw—born about a year ago. Mighty funny—ain't it?—the way we let children just a few squares away from us grow up pinched, half-starved, undersized, uneducated, and as little moral as the gutters can make 'em, and all the time we're parading and begging and even collecting the pennies out of orphan asylums, for the sake of the children on the other side of the world. But it's a queer thing, charity, however you happen to look at it. My father used to say—and he had as much sense as any man I ever met—that charity is the greatest traveller under the sun; and even if it begins at home it ain't ever content to stop there over night."

Standing there in the dim street, before the silent rows of bleak houses with their tattered window-shades and their fitful lights, Stephen stared wonderingly at the gaunt shape of the man before him. For the first time he was brought face to face with the other half of his world, with the half of the world where poverty and toil are stark realities. This was the way men like Darrow were thinking, men perhaps like Gideon Vetch! These men saw poverty not as a sentimental term, but as a human experience. They knew, while he and his kind only imagined. With a sensation as acute as physical nausea, a sensation that the thought of the Germans used to bring when he was in the trenches, there swept over him a memory of the social hysteria which had followed, like a mental pestilence or famine, in the track of the war. The moral platitudes, the sentimental philanthropy, and the hypocritical command of conscience to put all the world, except our own cellars, in order, where were these impulses now in a time which had gone mad with the hatred of work and the craving for pleasure? Yet he had once thought that he was returning to a world which could be rebuilt on a foundation of justice, and it was this lost belief, he knew, which had made him bitter in spirit and unfair in judgment.

The gate swung back with a grating noise, and they entered the yard, and walked over scattered papers and empty bottles to the narrow flight of brick steps, which led from the ground to the area in front of the basement dining-room. As Stephen descended by the light from the dust-laden window, a chill dampness rose like a fog from the earth below and filled his nostrils and mouth and throat—a dampness which choked him like the effluvium of poverty. Glancing in from the area a moment later, he saw a scantily furnished room, heated by an open stove and lighted by a single jet of gas, which flickered in a thin greenish flame. In the centre of the room a pine table, without a cloth, was laid for supper, and three small children, in chairs drawn close together, were impatiently drumming with tin spoons on the wood. A haggard woman, in a soiled blue gingham dress, was bringing a pot of coffee from the adjoining room; and in one corner, on a sofa from which the stuffing sagged in bunches, a man sat staring vacantly at a hole in the rag carpet. Tied in a high chair, which stood apart as if it were the pedestal of an idol, a baby, with the smooth unlined face not of an infant, but of a philosopher, was mutely surveying the scene.

More than anything else in the room, more even than the sodden hopelessness of the man's expression, the hopelessness of neurasthenia, this baby, tied with a strip of gingham in his high chair, arrested and held Stephen's attention. Very pallid, with the pallor not of flesh but of an ivory image, with hair as thin and white as the hair of an old man, and eyes that were as opaque as blue marbles, the baby sat there, with its look of stoical philosophy and superhuman experience. And this look said as plainly as if the tiny mute lips had opened and spoken aloud: "I am tired before I begin. I am old before I begin. I am ending before I begin."

Darrow knocked at the door, and the woman opened it with the coffee-pot still in her hand.

"So you've come back," she said in a voice that was without surprise and without gratitude.

"I came back to ask what you've done about a place. This gentleman is with me. You don't mind his stepping inside a minute?"

"Oh, no, I don't mind. I don't mind anything." She drew back as she answered, and the two men entered the room and stood gazing at the stove with the look of embarrassment which the sight of poverty brings to the faces of the well-to-do.

"When are you moving?" asked Darrow, withdrawing his gaze from the glimmer of the embers in the stove, and fixing it on the steam that issued from the coffee-pot.

"In the morning. We've found a cheaper place, though with rent going up every week, it looks as if we'd soon have nowhere worse to move to, unless it's gaol alley." Her tone dripped bitterness, and the lines of her pale lips settled into an expression of scornful resignation.

Without replying to her words, Darrow nodded in the direction of the young man, who had never looked up, but sat in the same rigid attitude, with his vacant eyes staring at the hole in the carpet.

"Any better?"

"How can he be better," returned the woman grimly, "when all he does is to walk the streets until he's fit to drop, and then drag himself home and sit there like that for hours, too worn out even to lift his eyes from the floor. This is the last coffee I've got. I've been saving it since Christmas, but I made it for him because he seems more down than usual to-night." Then a nervous spasm shook her thin figure, and she added in a fierce whisper: "He's sick, that's the matter with him. He ain't sick enough to be in a government hospital, but he'd be better off if he was. Even when he gets work he ain't able to stick to it. The folks that hire him don't have any patience. As long as he was over yonder in France it looked as if every woman in America was knitting for him; and now since he's back here he can't get a job to keep him and the children alive."

"How have you fed the children?"

"On what I could get cheapest. You see how sickly and peaked they look, and it's been awful damp in these rooms sometimes. The doctor says he ain't sick; it ain't his body, it's his mind. He says he's had a kind of horror inside of him ever since he came home. He's turned against everything he used to do, and even everything he used to believe in."

"That's hell!" exclaimed Stephen suddenly; and at her surprised glance, he added, "I've been there and I know. Nerves, they say, but just as real as your skin." He looked away from her to the man on the sofa. "To have that, and be in poverty!" Turning away from the father, his glance met the calm eyes of the baby fixed on him with that gaze which was as old and as pitiless as philosophy.

"Ma, may I help myself?" screamed one of the children, drumming loudly on the table. "I'd rather have bread and molasses!" cried another; and "Oh, Ma, when we move to-morrow will you let me take the kitten I found?"

"Well, I've talked to the Governor," said Darrow, in his level voice which sounded to Stephen so unemotional, "and I think we can find a job for your husband."

Suddenly the man on the sofa looked up. "I voted against him," he whispered angrily.

Darrow laughed shortly. "You don't know the Governor if you think he'd hold that against you," he replied. "But for that little weakness of his he might not be a political problem."

"That's the way he goes on," remarked the woman despairingly. "Always saying things straight out that other people would keep back. He don't care what happens, that's the whole truth of it. He don't care about anything on earth, not even his tobacco."

"Life!" thought Stephen, with a dull pain in his heart. "That's what life is!" And the old familiar feeling of suffocation, of distaste for everything that he had ever felt or thought or believed, smothered him with the dryness of dust. Going quickly over to the sofa, he laid his hand on the man's shoulder, and spoke in a high ringing voice which he tried to make cheerful. "It will pass, old fellow," he said, and could have laughed aloud at the insincerity of his tone. "I know because I've been there." And he added cynically, as a kind of sacrifice on the altar of truth: "Everything will pass if you only wait long enough."

The man started and looked up. With an air of surprise he glanced round the dingy room, at his wife, at the whimpering children, at the dispassionate baby enthroned in his high chair, and at the majestic profile of Darrow. "It's the rottenness of the whole blooming show," he said doggedly. "It ain't just the hole I'm in. I could put up with that if it wasn't for the rottenness of it all."

"I know," replied Stephen quietly. "There are times when the show does look rotten, but we're all in it together."

Then, because he felt that he could stand it no longer, he turned abruptly, and went out into the dusk of the area. In a few minutes Darrow joined him, and in silence the two men felt their way up the brick steps to the bare ground of the front yard.

"I don't know what I ought to do, but I've got to do something," said Stephen, when he had opened the gate and passed through to the pavement where the car waited. Lifting his sensitive young face, he stared up at the row of decaying tenements. "What places for homes!"

For a moment Darrow looked at him without speaking; and then he answered in a voice which sounded as impersonal as the distant rumble of street cars. "I thought you might be interested because these houses, these and the other rows on the next block or two, are part of the Culpeper estate."

"The Culpeper estate?" repeated Stephen in an expressionless tone; and raising his eyes again he looked up at the bleak houses. In that instant, it seemed to him that he was seeing, not the sharp projection of the roofs against the ashen sky, but a long line of pleasant and prosperous generations. Beyond him stood his father, beyond his father stood his grandfather, beyond the tranquil succession of his grandfathers stood—what? Civilization? Humanity?

"Do you mean," he asked quietly, "that we—our family—own these houses?"

"The whole block, and the next, and the next. It is the Culpeper estate. You've never seen 'em before, I reckon. I doubt even if your father has ever seen 'em. The agent attends to all this, and if the agent didn't see that the rents were as high as people would pay, or were paying in the next places, he would be soon out of a job. I'm not blaming him, you know. I've got a son-in-law who is a real estate agent. It's just one of the cases where it's nobody's fault, and everybody's."

Without replying, Stephen turned away and got into the car. He felt bruised and sick, and he wanted to be alone, to think things out by himself in the darkness. "This is only one instance," he thought, as they started down the dim street toward the white blaze of the business quarter in the distance. "Only one out of millions! In every city. All over the world it is the same. Wherever there is wealth it casts its shadow of poverty."

"I used to bother about it too when I was young," said the old man at his side. "I used to feel, I reckon, pretty near as bad as you are feeling now, but it don't last. When you get on a bit you'll sort of settle down and begin to work it out. That's life. Yes, but it ain't the whole of life. It ain't even the biggest part. Those folks we've been to see have had their good times like the rest of us, only we saw 'em just now when they were in the midst of a bad time. Life ain't confined to a ditch any more than it is to what Gideon calls a lily-pond. Keep your balance, that's the main thing. Whatever else you lose, you must be sure to keep your balance, or you'll be in danger of going overboard."

"Do you mean that there is no remedy for conditions like this?"

The old man pondered his answer so long that Stephen thought he had either given up or forgotten the question.

"The only remedy I have ever been able to see is to work not on conditions, but on human nature," he replied. "Improve human nature, and then you will improve the conditions in which it lives. Improve the rich as well as the poor. Teach 'em to be human beings, not machines, to one another—that's Gideon's idea, you know,—humanize—Christianize, if you like it better—civilize. It's a pretty hopeless problem—the individual case—charity is all rotten from root to branch. If you could see the harm that's been done by mistaken charity! Why, look at my friend, Mrs. Page, now. She tried to work it out that way, and what came of it except more rottenness? And yet until the State looks after the unemployed, there is obliged to be charity."

"Do you mean Mrs. Kent Page?" asked Stephen in surprise, and remembered that his mother had once accused Corinna of trying to "undermine society."

"She is one of my best friends," answered the old man, with mingled pride and affection. "I go to see her in her shop every now and then, and I reckon she values my advice about her affairs as much as anybody's. Well, when she came home from Europe she found that she owned a row of tenements like this one, and her agent was profiteering in rents like most of the others. I wish you could have seen her when she discovered it. Splendid? Well, I reckon she's the most splendid thing this old world has ever had on top of it! She went straight to work and had those houses made into modern apartments—bathrooms, steam heat, and back yards full of trees and grass and flowers, just like Monroe Park, only better. The rent wasn't raised either! She put that back just where it was before the war; and then she let the whole row to the tenants for two years. You never saw anything like the interest she took in that speculation—you'd have thought to hear her that she was setting out to bring what the preachers call the social millennium."

"She never mentioned it to me," said Stephen, with interest. "How did it turn out?"

Darrow threw back his great head with a laugh. "I don't reckon she did mention it, bless her! It don't bear mentioning even now. Why, when she went back last fall to see those houses, she found that the tenants had all moved into dirty little places in the alley, and were letting out the apartments, at five times the rent they paid, to other tenants. They were doing a little special profiteering of their own—and, bless your life, there wasn't so much as a blade of grass left in the yards, even the trees had been cut down and sold for wood. And you say she never mentioned it?"

"How could she? But, after all, I suppose the question goes deeper than that?"

"The question," replied Darrow, with an energy that shook the little car, "goes as deep as hell!"

They were driving rapidly up Grace Street; and as they shot past the club on the corner, Stephen noticed the serene aristocratic profile of Peyton at one of the brilliantly lighted windows. A little farther on, when they turned into Franklin Street, he saw that the old print shop was in darkness, except for the lights in the rooms of the caretaker and the lodgers in the upper storey. Corinna had gone home, he supposed, and he wondered idly if she were with Benham? As they went on they passed the house of the Blairs, where he caught a glimpse of Margaret on the porch, parting from the handsome young clergyman. The sight stirred him strangely, as if the memory of his dead life had been awakened by a scent or a faded flower in a book. How different he was from the boy Margaret had known in that primitive period which people defined as "before the war"! It was as if he had belonged then to some primary emotional stratum of life. All the complex forces, the play and interplay of desire and repulsion, of energy and lassitude, had developed in the last two or three years.

On either side, softly shaded lights were shining from the windows, and women, in rich furs, were getting out of luxurious cars. It was the world that Stephen knew; life moulded in sculptural forms and encrusted with the delicate patina of tradition. Here was all that he had once loved; yet he realized suddenly, with a sensation of loneliness, that here, not in the mean streets, he felt, as Vetch would have said, "stranger than Robinson Crusoe." Something was missing. Something was lost that he could never recover. Was it Vetch, after all, who had shown him the way out, who had knocked a hole in the wall?

When Darrow stopped the car before the Culpeper gate, Stephen turned and held out his hand. "Thank you," he said simply. "I shall see you again."

Crossing the pavement with a rapid step, he entered the gate and ran up the steps to the porch between the white columns. As he passed into the richly tempered glow of the hall, it seemed to him that an invisible force, an aroma of the past, drifted out of the old house and enveloped him like the sweetness of flowers. He was caught again, he was submerged, in the spirit of race.

A little later, when he was passing his mother's door, he glanced in and saw her standing before the mirror in her evening gown of gray silk, with the foam-like ruffles of rose-point on her bosom and at her elbows, which were still round and young looking.

Catching his reflection in the glass, she called out in her crisp tones, "My dear boy, where on earth have you been? You know we promised to dine with Julia, and then to go to those tableaux for the benefit of the children in Vienna. She has worked so hard to make them a success that she would never forgive us if we stayed away."

"Yes, I know. I had forgotten," he replied. Why was he always forgetting? Then he asked impulsively, while pity burned at white heat within him, "Is Father here? I want to speak to him before we go out."

"He came in an hour ago," said Mrs. Culpeper; and as she spoke the mild leonine countenance of Mr. Culpeper, vaguely resembling some playful and domesticated king of beasts, appeared at the door of his dressing-room.

"Do you wish to see me, my boy?" he asked affectionately. "We were just wondering if you had forgotten and stayed at the club."

"No, I wasn't at the club. I've been looking over the Culpeper estate—a part of it." Stephen's voice trembled in spite of the effort he made to keep it impersonal and indifferent. "Father, do you know anything about those old houses beyond Marshall Street?"

It was the peculiar distinction of Mr. Culpeper that, in a community where everybody talked all the time, he had been able to form the habit of silence. While his acquaintances continually vociferated opinions, scandals, experiences, or anecdotes, he remained imperturbably reticent and subdued. All that he responded now to Stephen's outburst was, "Has anybody offered to buy them?"

"Why, what in the world!" exclaimed Mrs. Culpeper, who was neither reticent nor subdued. From the depths of the mirror her bright brown eyes gazed back at her husband, while she fastened a cameo pin, containing the head of Minerva framed in pearls, in the rose-point on her bosom.

"To buy them?" repeated Stephen. "Why, they are horrors, Father, to live in—crumbling, insanitary horrors! And yet the rent has been doubled in the last two or three years."

From the mirror his mother's face looked back at him, so small and clear and delicately tinted that it seemed to him merely an exaggerated copy of the cameo on her bosom, "I hope that means we shall have a little more to live on next year," she said reflectively, while the expression that Mary Byrd impertinently called her "economic look" appeared in her eyes. "What with the high cost of everything, and the low interest on Liberty Bonds, and the innumerable relief organizations to which one is simply forced to contribute, it has been almost impossible to make two ends meet. Poor Mary Byrd hasn't been able to give a single party this winter."

Before Stephen's gaze there passed a vision of the dingy basement room, the embittered face of the woman, the sickly tow-headed children, the man who could not lift his eyes from the hole in the carpet, and the baby with that look of having been born not young, but old, the look of pre-natal experience and disillusionment. And he heard Darrow's dry voice complaining because the well-to-do classes still gave to starving orphans across the world. After all, what was there to choose between the near-sighted and the far-sighted social vision? How narrow they both appeared and how crooked! Darrow would let all the children of Europe starve as long as their crying did not interfere with the aims of his Federation of Labour; Stephen's sister Julia, with her instinct for imitation and her remote sense of responsibility, would step over the poverty at her door, while she held out her hands, in the latest fashionable gesture of philanthropy, to the orphans in France or Vienna. And beside them both his mother, who because of her constitutional inability to see anything beyond the family, perceived merely the fact that her own child would be disappointed if the tableaux for the benefit of starving children somewhere did not go off well. The question, he realized, was not which one of the three points of view was the most admirable, but simply which one served best the ultimate purpose of the race. Selfishness seemed to have as little as altruism to do with the problem. Was Corinna, who had failed in philanthropy and chosen beauty, the only wise one among them?

"But children are living in these houses," he said, "and not only living—they are forced to move out because the rent has become so high that they must find a worse place. I've just seen it with my own eyes. Three sickly little children and a dreadful baby—a baby that knows everything already."

A quiver of pain crossed Mr. Culpeper's handsome features; but he said only, "I will speak to the agent."

"Won't you look into it yourself?" asked Stephen hopelessly. "The agent is only the agent—but the responsibility is yours—ours. Of course the agent doesn't want to make expensive repairs when he can get as high rent without doing so. He knows that people are obliged to have a roof over them; and if the roofs are too bad for white people, he can always find negroes to pay anything that he asks. Can't you see what it is in reality—that we are preying on the helpless?"

Turning suddenly from the mirror, Mrs. Culpeper crossed the floor hastily and put her arms about her son's shoulders. Her face was very motherly and there was a compassionate light in her eyes, "My dear, dear boy," she murmured in the soothing tone that one uses to the ill or the mentally unbalanced. "My dear boy, you must really go and dress. Julia will never forgive us." In her heart she was sincerely grieved by what he had told her. She would have helped cheerfully if it had been possible to her nature; but stronger than compassion, stronger even than reason, was the instinct of evasive idealism which the generations had bred. He understood, while he looked down on her white hair and unlined face, that even if he took her with him to that basement room, she would see it not as it actually was, but as she wished it to be. Her romanticism was invulnerable because it had no contact, even through imagination, with the edge of reality.

And he knew also, while she held him in her motherly arms, that something had broken down within his soul—some barrier between himself and humanity. The wall of tradition and sentiment no longer divided him from Darrow, or Gideon Vetch, or the man who could not look at anything but the hole in the carpet. Never again could he take his inherited place in the world of which he had once been a part. For an instant a nervous impulse to protest, to startle by some violent gesture that look of gentle self-esteem from the faces before him, jerked over him like a spasm. Then the last habit that he would ever break in his life, the very law of his being, which was the law of order, of manners, of self-control, the inbred horror, older than himself or his parents, of giving himself away, of making a scene of his own emotions, this ancestral custom of good breeding closed over him like the lid of a coffin.

With a smile he looked into the anxious face of his father. "Isn't there some way out of it, Dad?"

The muscles about Mr. Culpeper's mouth contracted as if he were going to cry; but when he spoke his voice was completely under control. "I can't interfere, son, with the way the agent manages the property," he answered, "but, of course, if you have discovered a peculiarly distressing case—if it is an object of charity—"

He paused abruptly in amazement, for Stephen was laughing, laughing in a way, as Mrs. Culpeper remarked afterward, that nobody had ever even thought of laughing before the whole world had become demoralized.

"Damn charity!" he exclaimed hilariously. "I beg your pardon, Mother, but if you only knew how inexpressibly funny it is!" Then the laughter stopped, and a wistful look came into his eyes, for beyond the broken walls he saw Patty Vetch in her red cape, and around her stretched the wind-swept roads of that hidden country.

A minute later, as he left the room, his mother's eyes followed him anxiously. "Poor boy, we must bear with him," she said in melting maternal accents.

CORINNA WONDERS

After a winter of Italian skies spring had come in a night. It was a morning in April, blue and soft as a cloud, with a roving fragrance of lilacs and hyacinths in the air. Already the early bloom of the orchard had dropped, and the freshly ploughed fields, with splashes of henna in the dun-coloured soil, were surrounded by the budding green of the woods.

As Mrs. Culpeper knocked at the door of Corinna's shop, she noticed that the pine bough in the window had been replaced by bowls of growing narcissi. For a moment her stern expression relaxed, and her face, framed in a bonnet of black straw with velvet strings, became soft and anxious. Beneath the veil of white illusion which reached only to the tip of her small sharp nose, her eyes were suddenly touched with spring.

"How delicious the flowers smell," she remarked when Corinna opened the door; and then, as she entered the room and glanced curiously round her, she asked incredulously, "Do people really pay money for these old illustrations, Corinna?"

"Not here, Cousin Harriet. I bought these in London."

"And they cost you something?"

"Some of these, of course, cost more than others. That," Corinna pointed to a mezzotint of the Ladies Waldegrave by Valentine Green, "cost a little less than ten thousand dollars."

"Ten thousand dollars!" Mrs. Culpeper gazed at the print as disapprovingly as if it were an open violation of the Eighteenth Amendment. "We didn't pay anything like that for our largest copy of a Murillo. Well, I may not be artistic, but, for my part, I could never understand why any one should want an old book or an old picture." Sitting rigidly upright in one of the tapestry-covered chairs, she added condescendingly: "Stephen admires this room very much."

"Stephen," remarked Corinna pleasantly, "is a dear boy."

"Just now," returned Stephen's mother, with her accustomed air of duty unflinchingly performed, "he is giving us a great deal of anxiety. Never before, not even when he was in the war, have I spent so many sleepless nights over him."

"I am sorry. Poor Stephen, what has he done?"

"I have always hoped," observed Mrs. Culpeper firmly, "that Stephen would marry Margaret."

"I am aware of that." A flicker of amusement brightened Corinna's eyes. "So, I think, is Stephen."

"I have tried to be honest. It seems to me that a mother's wish should carry a great deal of weight in such matters."

"It ought to," assented Corinna, "but I've never heard of its doing so."

"Everything would have been satisfactory if he had not allowed himself to be carried away by a foolish fancy."

"I cannot imagine," said Corinna primly, "that Stephen could ever be foolish. It gives me hope of him."

Impaling her, as if she had been a butterfly, with a glance as sharp as a needle, Mrs. Culpeper demanded sternly, "How much do you know of this affair, my dear?"

In spite of her natural courage Corinna was seized with a shiver of apprehension. "Do you think it is an affair?" she asked.

"I think it is worse. I think it is an infatuation."

"What, Stephen? Not really?" Corinna's voice was mirthfully incredulous.

"I have seen the girl once or twice," resumed Mrs. Culpeper, "and she seems to me objectionable from every point of view."

"Only from the Culpeper one," protested Corinna. "I find her very attractive."

"Well, I do not." Mrs. Culpeper had relapsed into her tone of habitual martyrdom. "If Stephen chooses to kill me," she added, "he may do it."

Corinna leaned toward her ingratiatingly. "Don't you admit, Cousin Harriet, that I have improved Patty tremendously?"

"I see no difference."

"Oh, but there is one—a great difference! If you had come to one of the Governor's receptions last winter, you couldn't have told that she wasn't—well, one of us. She has been so quick to pick up things that it is amazing."

Mrs. Culpeper lifted the transparent mesh from the point of her nose. "Do you know," she demanded, "that the girl was born in a circus tent?"

"So I have heard. It was a romantic beginning."

Foiled but undaunted, the older woman fixed on Corinna the stare with which she would have attempted the conversion of an undraped pagan if she had ever encountered one. Though she was unconscious of the fact as she sat there, suffering yet unbending, in the Florentine chair, she represented the logical result of the conservative principle in nature, of the spirit that forgets nothing and learns nothing, of the instinct of the type to reproduce itself, without variation or development, until the pattern is worn too thin to endure. That Stephen had inherited this passive force, Corinna knew, but she knew also, that it was threatened by his incurable romanticism, by that inarticulate longing for heroic adventures.

Suddenly, as if moved by a steel spring, Mrs. Culpeper rose. "I know you have a great deal of influence over Stephen," she said, "and I hoped that, instead of encouraging him in his folly, you would sympathize with me."

"I do sympathize with you, Cousin Harriet—only I have learned that it is sometimes very difficult to decide what is folly and what is wisdom in a man's life."

"There can scarcely be a doubt, I think, about this. Surely you cannot imagine that there would be happiness for my son in a marriage with the daughter of Gideon Vetch?"

There was a dreamy sweetness in Corinna's eyes. "I can't answer that, Cousin Harriet, because I don't know. But are you sure it has gone as far as that? Has Stephen really thought of marriage?"

"I don't know. He tells me nothing," replied Mrs. Culpeper hopelessly, and she added after a pause: "But I can't help having eyes. It is either that—or he is going into politics." Her tone was as despairing as if she had said, "he is coming down with fever."

For a minute Corinna hesitated; then she responded cheerfully, "If it is any comfort to you, Cousin Harriet, I feel that you are making a mountain out of a mole hill. When it comes to the point, I believe that Stephen will revert to type like the rest of us."

Mrs. Culpeper clutched desperately at the straw that was offered her. "You think he won't ask her to marry him?"

"If he does," said Corinna firmly, "I shall be more surprised than I have ever been in my life."

The look of martyrdom faded slowly from her visitor's features. "You say this because you know Stephen?"

"Because I know Stephen—and men," answered Corinna, while she thought of John Benham. "Frankly, I think it would be a splendid thing for Stephen to do. It would prove, you know, that he cared enough to make a sacrifice. I think it would be splendid; but I think also that we are of the breed that looks too long before it leaps. Our great adventures take place in dreams or in talk. We like to play with forlorn hopes; but the only forlorn hope we have actually embraced is the conservative principle; and we couldn't let that go, even if we tried, because it is bred in our bone. So I believe that the ^hereditary habit will drag Stephen safely back before he rushes into danger. He may play with the thought of Patty, but he will probably marry Margaret."

If Mrs. Culpeper's too refined features could have expressed passion, it would have been the passion of thankfulness. "It was worth coming," she said, "to hear you say that of Stephen."

When at last she had gone, primly grateful for the scrap of comfort, Corinna stood for a minute with her eyes on the sunbeams at the window. Outside there were the roving winds and the restless spirit of April; and feeling suddenly that she could stand the close walls and the familiar objects no longer, she put on her hat and gloves and went out into the street. Scarcely knowing why, with some vague thought that she might go to see Patty, she turned in the direction of the Capitol Square, walking with her buoyant grace which seemed a part of the fugitive beauty of April. The air was so fragrant, the sunshine so softly burning, that it was as if summer were advancing, not gradually, but in a single miracle of florescence. It was one of those days which release all the secret inexpressible dreams of the heart. Every face that she passed was touched with the wistful longing which is the very essence of spring. She saw it in the faces of the women who hurried, warm, flushed, and impatient, from the shops or the markets; she saw it in the faces of the men returning from work and thinking of freedom; and she saw it again in the long sad faces of the dray-horses standing hitched to a city cart at the corner.

In the Square the sunlight lay in splinters over the young grass, which was dotted with buttercups, and overhead the long black boughs of the trees were sprinkled with pale green leaves. Back and forth from the grassy slopes to the winding brick walks, squirrels darted, busy and joyous; and a few old men, never absent from the benches, were smiling vaguely at the passers-by.

When she reached the gate of the Governor's house, her wish to see Patty had vanished, and she decided that she would go on to the library and ask for a book that she had recently heard John Benham discussing. How much of her life now, in spite of its active impersonal interests, was beginning to centre in John Benham! They were planning to be married in June, and beyond that month of roses, which was once so saturated with memories of her early romance, she saw ahead of her long years of tranquil happiness. Well, she could not complain. After all, was not tranquil happiness the best that life had to offer?

She had ascended the steps of the library, and was about to enter the swinging doors, when she turned and glanced back at the dappled boughs of an old sycamore, outlined so softly, with its budding leaves, against the green hill and the changeable blue of the sky. The long walk was almost deserted. A fountain played gently at the end of the slope; a few coloured nurses were dozing on a bench, while their be-ribboned charges scattered peanuts before a fluttering crowd of sparrows, pigeons, and squirrels; and, leaning on a rude crutch, a lame old negro woman was dragging a basket of brushwood to the brow of the hill. The scene was very peaceful, wrapped in that languorous stillness which is the pervading charm of the South; and beyond the high spikes of the iron fence, the noise of passing street cars sounded far off and unreal.

She was still standing there, with her dreamy eyes on the old negress toiling up the hill with her basket of brushwood, when a man passed the fountain hurriedly, and came with a brisk, springy stride up the brick walk below the library. As she watched him, at first without recognition, she thought vaguely that his rugged figure made a picture of embodied activity, of physical energy and enjoyment. The next minute he reached the old negress, glanced at her casually in passing, and turning abruptly round, lifted the basket, and carried it to the top of the hill. Then, as he looked back at the old woman, who limped after him, he laughed with boyish merriment, and Corinna saw in amazement that the man was Gideon Vetch.

"He is obliged to be theatrical," remarked a voice behind her, and glancing over her shoulder she saw that she had been joined by a severe-looking young woman with several books under her arm.

"Is it that?" asked Corinna doubtfully, and she added to herself after a moment, "I wonder?"

A little later, as she was leaving the Square, Stephen overtook her, and she told him of the incident. "The Governor is always breaking out like an epidemic where you least expect him," she concluded with a smile.

"I know. I've caught him." Though the young man's eyes reflected her smile, his tone was serious. "I can't rid myself of the fellow."

"Have you been to see him this morning?"

He laughed. "I should say not! But I've been in a worse fix. I've just walked up the street with—well, imagine it!—that bounder Gershom."

"So you both haunt the Square?"

At the question Stephen turned and faced her frankly. "How, in Heaven's name, does she stand him?"

"That's a riddle. To me he is impossible."

"He is more than that. He is unspeakable." As he looked into her eyes a deep anxiety or disturbance appeared beneath the superficial gaiety of his smile. "The fellow had evidently had a quarrel, perhaps a permanent break, with Vetch. He was in a kind of cold rage; and do you know what he said to me? He told me,—not openly, but in pretended secrecy,—that Vetch had never married Patty's mother—"

For an instant Corinna gazed at him in silence. Then her words came in a gasp of indignation. "Of course there isn't a word of truth in it!"

"So I said to him. He insists that he has the proofs. You know what it means?"

"Oh, I know—poor Patty! You understand why he told you?"

"I couldn't at first see the reason; but afterward it came to me."

"The reason is as clear as daylight. He is infatuated, and he imagines that you stand in his way."

"Not only that. I think he has some idea of using whatever proofs he has to bend Vetch to his will. He was sharp enough not to say so, for he knew that would be pure blackmail. The ground he took was one of nauseating morality, but I inferred that he is trying to force Vetch to agree to this general strike, and that he is prepared to threaten him with some kind of exposure if he doesn't. This, however, was mere surmise on my part. The fellow is as shrewd as he is unprincipled."

When Corinna believed it was in full measure and overflowing. "It's not true. I know it's not true."

"Has Patty told you anything?"

"Nobody has told me anything. One doesn't have to have a reason for knowing things—at least one doesn't unless one is a man. I know it because I know it." Then, without waiting for his reply, she continued with cheerful firmness: "The best way to treat scandal is to forget it. Don't you think that Patty improves every day?"

He reddened and looked away from her. "Yes, she grows more attractive, I—" While she still waited for him to complete his sentence, he shot out in an embarrassed tone: "Corinna, do you believe in Gideon Vetch?"

For an instant Corinna hesitated. "I believe that he is—well, just Gideon Vetch," she answered enigmatically.

"Just a professional politician?"

"Not at all. He is a great deal more than that, but what that great deal is I cannot pretend to say."

"Do you ever see him away from Patty?"

"Now and then. He has been to the shop."

"And you like him?"

Again she hesitated. "Yes, I like him." Turning her head, she looked straight at him with a glow in her eyes. "That is," she corrected softly, "I should like him if it were not for John."

"You compare him with John?"

"Don't you?"

"Naturally. Of course the Governor loses by that."

"Who wouldn't?"

Her face flushed at the thought, and as Stephen watched her, he asked in a gentler voice, "Are you really to be married in June?"

She smiled an assent, with her dreaming gaze on the young leaves and the blue sky.

"Are you happy?" he persisted.

Her smile answered him again. "One dreads the lonely fireside as one grows older." Then suddenly, as if the shadow of a cloud had drifted over the bright sky, he saw the smile fade from her lips and the glow from her upraised eyes. Somewhere within her brain a voice as hollow as an echo was repeating, "Isn't that life—sparrows for larks always?"

"Well, you know what I feel about you, and what I think about Benham," replied Stephen. "You two together stand for all that I admire." As if ashamed of the tone of sentiment, he continued carelessly after a moment: "Vetch is very far from being a Benham, and yet there is something about the man that holds one's attention. People are for ever discussing him. A little while ago we were talking about his personal peculiarities and his political offences. Now we are wondering how he will handle this strike if it comes off; and what effect it will have on his career? Benham, of course, thinks that he is an instrument in the hands of a political group; that his office was the price they paid him not to interfere in the strike. As for me I have no opinion. I am waiting to see what will happen."

They had reached the old print shop; and, as they paused beneath the cedars in the front yard, Stephen glanced up at the window under the quaint shingled roof. The upper storey, he knew, was rented to a couple of tenants, and he was not surprised when he saw the curtains of dotted swiss pushed aside and a woman's face look down on him over the red geranium on the window-sill. The face was familiar; but, while he stared back at it, searching his memory for a resemblance, the white curtains dropped together again, veiling the features. Where had he seen that woman before? What association of ideas did the sight of her recall? In a flash, while he still groped through mental obscurity, light broke on him.

"Who is that woman, Corinna?" he asked. "What do you know of her?"

"That woman?" Corinna repeated; then, as he lifted his eyes to the window, she added, "Oh, that's Mrs. Green. A pathetic face, isn't it? I know nothing about her except that she came in a few weeks ago, and the caretaker tells me that she is leaving to-morrow."

"Do you know where she came from?"

"My dear Stephen! Why, what in the world?" A laugh broke from Corinna's lips. "Did you ever see her before?"

"Twice, and both times in the Capitol Square. I thought her dreadful to look at."

"I've only glanced at her, but she appeared to me more pathetic than dreadful. She has been ill, I imagine, and she looks terribly poor. I'm afraid the rent is too high, but I can't do anything, for she rented her room from the tenants. I suppose, poor thing, that she is merely a sad adventuress, and it is not the sad adventuresses, but the glad ones, who usually enlist a young man's sympathy. By the way, I am lunching with the Governor to-morrow."

"Is it a party?"

"No, just the family. That shows how intimate I have become with the Vetches. Don't tell Cousin Harriet, or she would think I was beginning to corrupt your politics. But I may use my influence to find out what the Governor intends to do about the strike, and a cousin with a political secret is worth having."

With a laugh Stephen went on his way, wondering vaguely what there was about the woman at the window, Mrs. Green Corinna had called her, that made it impossible for him to rid his mind of her? Glancing back from the end of the block, he saw that Corinna had entered the shop and that the curtains at the upper window had been pushed back again while the dim face of Mrs. Green looked down into the street. Was she watching for some one? Or was she merely relieving the monotony of life indoors by gazing down into Franklin Street at an hour when it was almost deserted?

A LITTLE LIGHT ON HUMAN NATURE

Corinna had not expected to see the Governor until luncheon next day; but, to her surprise, he came to the shop just as she was about to lock the door and go home for the afternoon. At first she thought that the visit was merely a casual one—it was not unusual for him to drop in as he was going by—but he had no sooner glanced about the room to see if they were alone than he broke out with his characteristic directness.

"There is something I want to ask you. Will you answer me frankly?"

"That depends. Tell me what it is and then I will answer your question."

"It is about Patty. You've seen a great deal of her, haven't you?"

"A great deal. I am very fond of her."

"Then perhaps you can tell me if she is interested in this young Culpeper?"

For a minute Corinna struggled against a burst of hysterical laughter. Oh, if Cousin Harriet had only met him here, she thought, what a comedy they would have made!

"Surely if any one has an opinion about that, it must be you," she rejoined as gravely as she could.

"I haven't; not the shadow of one." He was plainly puzzled. "I thought you might help me. You have a way of seeing things."

"Have I?" The spontaneous tribute touched her. "I wish I could see this, but I can't. Frankly, since you ask me, I may say that I have been troubled about it. There are things that Patty hides, even from me, and I think I have her confidence."

"I dare say you wonder why I have come to you to-day," he said. "I can handle most situations; but I have never had to handle the love affairs of a girl, and I'm perfectly capable of making a mess of them. Things like that are outside of my job."

He seemed to her a pathetic figure as he stood there, in his boyish embarrassment and his redundant vitality, confessing an inability to surmount the obstacle in his way. She had never known any one, man or woman, who was so obviously lacking in subtlety of perception, in all those delicate intuitions on which she relied more completely than on judgment for an accurate impression of life. Was he, with his bigness, his earnestness, his luminous candour, only an overgrown child? Even his physical magnetism, and she felt this in the very moment when she was trying to analyse it, even his physical magnetism might be nothing more than the spell exercised by primitive impulse over the too complex problems of civilization. She had heard that he was unscrupulous—vague charges that he had never been able to repel—yet she was conscious now of a secret wish to protect him from the consequences of his duplicity, as she might have wished to protect an irresponsible child. Some mysterious sense perception made her aware that beneath what appeared to be discreditable public actions there was the simple bed-rock of honesty. For the quality she felt in Vetch was a profound moral integrity, an integrity which was bred by nature in the innermost fibre of the man.

"If you will tell me—" she began, and checked herself with a sensation of helplessness. After all, what could he tell her that she did not know?

"I want to do what is right for her," he said abruptly. "I should hate for her to be hurt."

While he talked it seemed to Corinna that she was living in some absurd comedy, which mimicked life but was only acting, not reality. In her world of reserves and implications no man would have dared to make himself ridiculous by a visit like this.

"Do you believe that she cares for Stephen?" she asked bluntly.

"It didn't start with me. Miss Spencer, that's the lady who lives with us you know, is afraid that Patty sees too much of him. He is at the house every day—"

"Well?" Corinna waited patiently. She was not in the least afraid of what Stephen might do. She knew that she could trust him to be a gentleman; but being a gentleman, she reflected, did not necessarily keep one from breaking a woman's heart. And Patty had a wild, free heart that might be broken.

"I don't know what to do about it," Vetch was saying while she pondered the problem. "As I told you a minute ago this is all outside my job."

"Have you spoken to Patty?"

"I started to, but she made fun of the idea—you know the way she has. She asked me if I had ever heard of any one falling in love with a plaster saint?"

Corinna smiled. "So she called Stephen a plaster saint?"

"She was chaffing, of course."

"Well, I don't see that there is anything you can do unless you send Patty away."

"She wouldn't go," he responded simply; then after a moment of embarrassed hesitation, he blurted out nervously, "Is this young Culpeper what you would call a marrying man?"

This time it was impossible for Corinna to suppress her amusement, and it broke out in a laugh that was like the chiming of silver bells. Oh, if only Cousin Harriet could hear him! Then observing the gravity of Vetch's expression, she checked her untimely mirth with an effort.

"That depends, I suppose. At his age how can any one tell?" In her heart she did not believe that Stephen would marry Patty; she was not sure even that she, Corinna, should wish him to do so. There was too much at stake, and though her philosophy was fearless, her conduct had never been anything but conventional. While in theory she despised discretion, she realized that the virtue she despised, not the theory she admired, had dominated her life. The great trouble with acts of reckless nobility was that the recklessness was only for a moment, but the nobility was obliged to last a lifetime. It was not difficult, she knew, for persons like Stephen or herself to be heroic in appropriate circumstances; the difficulty began when one was compelled to sustain the heroic rôle long after the appropriate circumstances had passed away. Yet, in spite of the cynical lucidity of her judgment, the romantic in her heart longed to have Stephen, by one generous act of devotion, prove her theory fallacious. Her strongest impulse, the impulse to create happiness, to repair, as her father had once described it, crippled destinies; this impulse urged her now to help Patty's pathetic romance in every way in her power. It would be very fine if Stephen cared enough to forget what he was losing. It would be magnificent, she felt, but it would not be masculine. For she had had great experience; and though men might vary in a multitude of particulars, she had found that the solidarity of sex was preserved in some general code of emotional expediency.

"Do you think," Vetch was making another attempt to explain his meaning, "that he is seriously interested?"

"I am perfectly sure," she replied, "that he is more than half in love with her."

"Is he the kind, then, to let himself go the rest of the way?"

She shook her head. "That I cannot answer. From my knowledge of the restraining force of the Culpeper fibre, I should say that he is not."

"You mean he wouldn't think it a suitable marriage?"

She blushed for his crudeness. "I mean his mother wouldn't think it a suitable marriage. Patty is very attractive, but they know nothing about her except that. You see they have had the disadvantage of knowing everything about every one who has married, or who has even wished to marry, into the family for the last two hundred years. It is a disadvantage, as I've said, for the strain is so highly bred that each generation becomes mentally more and more like the fish in caves that have lost their eyes because they stopped trying to see. Stephen is different in a way—and yet not different enough. It would be his salvation if he could care enough for Patty to take a risk for her sake; but his mother, of course, would fight against it with every particle of her influence, and her influence is enormous." Then she met his eyes boldly: "Wouldn't you fight against it in her place?" she asked.

"I? Oh, I shouldn't care a hang what anybody thought if I liked the girl," he retorted. His smile shone out warmly. "Would you?" he demanded in his turn.

For an instant his blunt question disconcerted her, and while she hesitated she felt his blue eyes on her downcast face. "You can't judge by me," she answered presently. "Only those who have been in chains know the meaning of freedom."

"Are you free now?"

"Not entirely. Who is?"

He was looking at her more closely; and when at last she raised her eyelashes and met his gaze, the lovely glow which gave her beauty its look of October splendour suffused her features. Anger seized her in the very moment that the colour rushed to her cheeks. Why should she blush like a schoolgirl because of the way this man—or any man—looked at her?

"Are you going to marry Benham?" he asked; and there was a note in his voice which disturbed her in spite of herself. Though she denied passionately his right to question her, she answered simply enough: "Yes, I am going to marry him."

"Do you care for him?"

With an effort she turned her eyes away and looked beyond the green stems and the white flowers of the narcissi in the window to the street outside, where the shadows of the young leaves lay like gauze over the brick pavement.

"If I didn't care do you think that I would marry him?" she asked in a low voice. Through the open window a breeze came, honey-sweet with the scent of narcissi, and she realized, with a start, that this early spring was poignantly lovely and sad.

"Well, I wish I'd known you twenty years ago," said Vetch presently. "If I'd had a woman like you to help me, I might have been almost anything. Nobody knows better than I how much help a woman can be when she's the right sort."

She tore her gaze from the sunshine beyond, from the beauty and the wistfulness of April. What was there in this man that convinced her in spite of everything that Benham had told her?

"Your wife has been dead a long time?" She spoke gently, for his tone more than his words had touched her sympathy.

As soon as she asked the question, she realized that it was a mistake. An expressionless mask closed over his face, and she received the impression that he had withdrawn to a distance.

"A long time," was all he answered. His voice had become so impersonal that it was toneless.

"Well, it hasn't kept you back—not having help," she hastened to reply as naturally as she could. "You are almost everything you wished to be in the world, aren't you?" It was a foolish speech, she felt, but the change in his manner had surprised and bewildered her.

He laughed shortly without merriment. "I?" he replied, and she noticed for the first time that he looked tired and worried beneath his exuberant optimism. "I am the loneliest man on earth. The loneliest man on earth is the one who stands between two extremes." As she made no reply, he continued after a moment, "You think, of course, that I stand with one extreme, not in the centre, but you are mistaken. I am in the middle. When I try to bring the two millstones together they will grind me to powder."

She had never heard him speak despondently before; and while she listened to the sound of his expressive voice, so full, for the hour at least, of discouragement, she felt drawn to him in a new and personal way. It was as if, by showing her a side of his nature the public had never seen, he had taken her into his confidence.

"But surely your influence is as great as ever," she said presently. A trite remark, but the only one that occurred to her.

"I brought the crowd with me as far as I thought safe," he answered, "and now it is beginning to turn against me because I won't lead it over the precipice into the sea. That's the way it always is, I reckon. That's the way it's been, anyhow, ever since Moses tried to lead the Children of Israel out of bondage. Take these strikers, for instance. I believe in the right to strike. I believe that they ought to have every possible protection. I believe that their families ought to be provided for in order to take the weapon of starvation out of the hands of the capitalists. I'd give them as fair a field as it is in my power to provide, and anybody would think that they would be satisfied with simple fairness. But, no, what they are trying to do is not to strike for themselves, but to strike at somebody else. They are not satisfied with protection from starvation unless that protection involves the right to starve somebody else. They want to tie up the markets and stop the dairy trains, and they won't wink an eyelash if all the babies that don't belong to them are without milk. That's war, they tell me; and I answer that I'd treat war just as I'd treat a strike, if I had the power. As soon as an army began to prey on the helpless, I'd raise a bigger army if I could and throw the first one out into the jungle where it belonged. But people don't see things like that now, though they may in the next five hundred years. The trouble is that all human nature, including capitalist and labourer, is tarred with the same brush and tarred with selfishness. What the oppressed want is not freedom from oppression, but the opportunity to become oppressors."

Was this only a mood, she wondered, or was it the expression of a profound disappointment? Sympathy such as John Benham had never awakened overflowed from her heart, and she was conscious suddenly of some deep intuitive understanding of Vetch's nature. All that had been alien or ambiguous became as close and true and simple as the thoughts in her own mind. What she saw in Vetch, she perceived now, was that resemblance to herself which the Judge had once turned into a jest. She discerned his point of view not by looking outside of herself, but by looking within.

"I know," she responded in her rich voice. "I think I know."

He gazed at her with a smile which had grown as tired as the rest of him. "Then if you know why don't you help—you others?" he asked. "Don't you see that by standing aside, by keeping apart, you are doing all the harm that you can? If democracy doesn't seem good enough for you, then get down into the midst of it and make it better. That's the only way—the only way on earth to make a better democracy—by putting the best we've got into it. You can't make bread rise from the outside. You've got to mix the yeast with the dough, if you want it to leaven the whole lump."

She had been standing with her hands clasped before her and her eyes on the sky beyond the window; and when he paused, with a husky tone in his voice, she spoke almost as if she were in a dream. "I believe in you," she said, and then again, as he did not speak she repeated very slowly: "I believe in you."

"That helps," he answered gravely. "I don't suppose you will ever realize how much that will help me." As he finished he turned toward the door; and a minute afterward, without another word or look, he went out into the street, and she saw his figure cross the flowers and the sunlight in the window.

When he had gone Corinna opened the door and stood watching the long black shadows of the cedars creep over the walk of broken flagstones. Always when she was alone her thoughts would return like homing birds to John Benham; but this afternoon, though she spoke his name in her reflections, she was conscious of an inner detachment from the vital interests of her personal life. For a little while, so strong was the mental impression Vetch had made on her, she saw his image even while she thought the name of John Benham. Then, with an effort of will, she put the Governor and all that he had said out of her mind. After all, how little would she ever see of him now—how seldom would their paths cross in the future! A strange and interesting man, a man who had, in one instant of mental sympathy, stirred something within her heart that no one, not even Kent Page, had ever awakened before. For that one instant a ripple, nothing more, had moved on the face of the deep—of the deep which was so ancient that it was older even than the blood of her race. Then the ripple passed and the sunny stillness settled again on her spirit.

She thought of John Benham easily now; and while she stood there a quiet happiness shone in her eyes. After the storm and stress of twenty years, life in this Indian summer of the emotions was like an enclosed garden of sweetness and bloom. She had had enough of hunger and rapture and disappointment. Never again would she take up the old search for perfection, for the starry flower of the heights. Something that she could worship! So often in the past it had seemed to her that she missed it by the turn of a corner, the stop on the roadside, by the choice of a path that led down into the valley instead of up into the hills. So often her god had revealed the feet of clay just as she was preparing to scatter marigolds on his altar. It appeared to her as she looked back on the past, that life had been merely a succession of great opportunities that one did not grasp, of high adventures that one never followed.

The sound of a motor horn interrupted her reverie, and she saw that a big open car, with a green body, had turned the corner and was about to stop at her door. An instant later anger burned in her heart, for she saw that the car was driven by Rose Stribling. Even a glimpse of that flaunting pink hollyhock of a woman was sufficient to ruffle the placid current of Corinna's thoughts. Could she never forget? Must she, who had long ago ceased to love the man, still be enslaved to resentment against the woman?

With an ample grace, Mrs. Stribling descended from the car, and crossed the pavement to the flagged walk which led to the white door of the old print shop. In her trimly fitting dress of blue serge, with her small straw hat ornamented by stiff black quills, she looked fresher, harder, more durably glazed than ever. A slight excess, too deep a carmine in her smooth cheeks, too high a polish on her pale gold hair, too thick a dusk on her lashes; this was the only flaw that one could detect in her appearance. If men liked that sort of thing, and they apparently did, Corinna reflected, then they could scarcely complain of an emphasis on perfection.

"I've just got back," began Rose Stribling in a tone as soft as her metallic voice could produce. "It's been an age since I've seen you—not since the night of that stupid dinner at the Berkeleys', and I'm so much interested in the news I have heard."

For a minute Corinna stared at her. "Yes, my shop has been very successful," she answered, after a pause in which she tried and failed to think of a reply that would sound more disdainful. "If you are looking for prints, I can show you some very good ones."