The Wheel of Life

USHERS IN THE MODERN SPIRIT

"So you have seen her," Adams had remarked the same afternoon, as he walked with Trent in the direction of Broadway. "Do you walk up, by the way? I always manage to get in a bit of exercise at this hour."

As Trent fell in with his companion's rapid step, he seemed to be moving in a fine golden glow of enthusiasm. A light icy drizzle had turned the snow upon the pavement into sloppy puddles of water, but to the young man, fresh from his inexperience, the hour and the scene alike were of exhilarating promise.

"I feel as if I had been breathing different air!" he exclaimed, without replying directly to the question. "And yet how simple she is—how utterly unlike the resplendent Mrs. Bridewell—"

He stopped breathlessly, overcome by his excitement, and Adams took up the unfinished sentence almost tenderly. "So far, of course, she is merely a beautiful promise, a flower in the bud," he said. "Her genius—if she has genius—has not found itself, and the notes she strikes are all mere groping attempts at a perfect self-expression. Yet, undoubtedly, she has done a few fine things," he admitted with professional caution.

"But if, as you say, her emotional self does not go into her poems, what becomes of it?" enquired Trent, with a curiosity too impersonal to be vulgar. "For she, finely tempered as she is, suggests nothing so much as a beautiful golden flame."

Adams started, and flashed upon the other a glance as incisive as a search-light.

"Then you, too, recognise her beauty?" he asked in a tone which had a kindly jealousy.

"Am I a fool?" protested Trent, laughing.

'You heard Kemper?"

"I heard him proclaim himself an ass. Well, let him, let him. Would you hand out one of your precious first editions to the crowd?"

"You're right, you're right," assented Adams, and followed his remark with a sudden change of subject. "I am interested, Mr. Trent, in what you yourself have come to do."

"I—Oh, I have done nothing," declared Trent.

"In your aims, then, let us say, I understand that you intend to try the drama?"

"Well, I confess to having done a play that I think isn't bad," replied Trent, blushing over all his fresh, smooth-shaven face. "Benson has promised me a hearing."

"Ah, I know him—he's always eager for new blood. Perhaps you wouldn't mind my speaking a word or two to him?

"Mind!" exclaimed the younger man, his voice shaking. "Why, I can't tell you how happy it would make me."

They had reached Eighteenth Street, and Trent paused a moment on the corner before turning off to the big red-brick apartment house where he was temporarily placed. "I'd like to walk up to Thirty-fifth with you," he added, "but my mother is expecting me and it makes her nervous when I stay out after dark. She's just from the country, you know, and she gets confused by the noise." He hesitated an instant and then finished with embarrassment. "I wish so much that she could know you.'

"It is a pleasure I hope for very shortly," responded Adams. "How does she like New York, by the way?"

Under the electric light Trent's eyes seemed to run entirely to sparkles. "Ah, well, it's rather lonely for her. She misses the callers at home who used to come to spend the day."

"We must try to change that," said the other as he moved off, while Trent noted that despite his genial sympathy of manner there had been no mention of Mrs. Adams. Where was she? and what was she? questioned the younger man in perplexity, as he crossed to his apartment house at the corner of Fourth Avenue.

At Twenty-third Street Adams had turned almost unconsciously into Fifth Avenue, for so detached was the intellectual remoteness in which he lived that he might have been, for all his immediate perceptions of his surroundings, strolling at dusk along a deserted Western road. He was so used to dwelling on the cool heights of a dearly bought, a hardly wrung, philosophy that he had become at last almost oblivious of the mere external details of life. To live at all had been for him a matter of fine moral courage, and his slight, delicate emaciated, yet dauntless, figure was in itself the expression of a resolute will to endure as well as to resist. When a man has faced death at close range for fifteen years he is, in a measure, bound to become either indifferent satyr or partial saint, and even in the extremity of his first revolt his personal ideal had stood, like the angel with the flaming sword, between Adams and the quagmire of bodily materialism. He was not, perhaps, as yet even so much as a deficient stoic, but he had wrung from suffering a certain high loyalty to human fellowship and a half humorous, if wholly gallant, determination to keep fast at any cost until the very end. Why he had made the fight he did not ask himself, nor could he have answered. His ambition, his marriage, even the ordinary sensuous enjoyments of life, had crumbled as the mythical Dead Sea apples upon his lips, yet the failure of his own mere individual pursuit of happiness had in no-wise soured the sweet and finely flavored optimism of his nature.

The fragrance from the violets worn by a passing woman struck him presently, and he looked outside of himself almost with a start. Around him many women were walking briskly under raised umbrellas, and some showed pretty faces freshened like flowers by the icy rain. He himself had forgotten the rain, had forgotten even the cold which pierced his chest, and, suddenly remembering the directions of his physician, he fastened his overcoat more closely and hastened across the street, passing rapidly in and out among the moving vehicles until he gained, over the sloppy crossing, the safety of the opposite sidewalk. Here he turned in the direction of Madison Avenue and finally, drawing out his latchkey, entered one of the dingy, flat-faced, utterly conventional brown houses which make up so large a part of the characterless complexion of New York life.

The interior was brilliantly lighted, and he was shrinking noiselessly into his study at the back when he heard his name called from the drawing-room threshold and saw his wife standing there while she put on a long white evening cloak over a filmy effect of cream-coloured lace. She was a small, pretty woman, with a cloud of fluffy, artificially blonde hair and large, innocent, absolutely blank blue eyes. A year ago she had resembled, if one might imagine the existence of such a being, a perfectly worldly wise and cynically minded baby, but twelve months of late suppers and many plays had already blighted her rose-leaf skin and sown three fine, nervous little wrinkles between her delicately arched eyebrows. She was very vivacious, but, as Gerty Bridewell had observed, it was a vivacity that was hardly justified, since possessing neither the means nor the manner exacted by the more exclusive circles, she had been compelled to compromise with a social body which made up in members what it lacked as an organism. Her dash and her prettiness sufficed to place her comfortably here, but beyond a speaking acquaintance with Gerty, who confessed that she was too charitable to be exclusive she had not as yet approached that small shining sphere whose inmates boast the larger freedom no less than the finer discrimination. The larger freedom, it seemed at times, was all of it that she was ever to attain, for, venturing a little too boldly once or twice with a light head, she had at last found herself skating gingerly over a veritable sleet of scandal. She got herself rumoured about so persistently that from being merely improbable, she had become, in Gerty's words again, "one of the very last of the impossibilities." And of late Adams' friends had begun to ask themselves quite seriously, "why in the deuce he didn't keep a hand upon his wife." How much he knew or how much there was, in reality, to know had become in a limited circle almost the question of the hour, until Perry Bridewell had demanded in final exasperation "whether Adams was ridiculously ignorant or outrageously indifferent?"

But if the curious had been permitted to observe the object of their uncertainty as he stood under the full glare before his festive wife they would have found neither ignorance nor indifference in his manner. He regarded her with a frank, fatherly tolerance, in which there was hardly a suggestion of a more passionate concern.

"Wrap up well," he said, as his glance shot over her, "there's a biting wind outside."

Connie screwed up her delicate eyebrows and the fine little wrinkles leaped instantly into view. There was a nervous irritation in her look, which recoiled from her husband as from a blank and shining wall.

"I'm dining at Sherry's with the Donaldsons," she explained. "I knew you wouldn't come, so I didn't even trouble you to decline."

"You're right, my dear," he rejoined gayly.

"Mr. Brady has called for me," she went on with the faintest possible hesitation in her voice, "and as we're all going to the theatre afterward I shall probably be late. Don't bother about sitting up for me—I have a key."

"Well, take care of yourself," responded Adams pleasantly, adding to a young man who appeared in the drawing-room doorway, "How are you, Mr. Brady? Please don't let Mrs. Adams be so foolish as to stand outside in the wind. I can't make her take care of her cold."

"Oh, I'll promise to look out for it," replied Brady, standing slightly behind Connie, and arranging by a careless movement the white fur on her cloak. His handsome wooden features possessed hardly more character than was expressed by his immaculately starched shirt front, but he was not without a certain wholly superficial attraction, half as of a sleek, well-groomed animal and half as of a masculine conceit, naked and unashamed.

Connie tinkled out her nervous, high-pitched, vacant little laugh, which she used to fill in gaps in conversation much as a distinguished virtuoso might interlude his own important efforts with selections of light vocal strains.

"Roger is always worrying about my health," she said, "but the truth is that it's so good I'll never begin to value it until it's gone." Her excited, fluttering manner blew about her almost with a commotion of the atmosphere, and reminded Adams at times of a tempestuous March breeze shaking a fragile wind flower. It was unnatural, overdone, unbecoming, but it seemed at last to have got quite beyond her control, and the pretty girlish composure he remembered as one of her freshest charms, was lost in her general violence of animation. Of late he knew that she had fought off her natural exhaustion by the frequent use of stimulants, and it seemed to him that he saw their immediate effects in her flushed cheeks and too brightly shining eyes.

"Don't stay out late," he urged again; "you've been rushing like mad these last weeks and you need rest."

"But I never rest," rejoined Connie, still laughing, "and I honestly hope that I shan't come to a stop until I die."

She fastened her cloak under the fall of lace, and, when Brady had slipped into his overcoat, Adams turned back to open the hall door, which let in a biting draught.

"Ta-ta! don't sit up!" cried Connie breathlessly, as, more than ever like a filmy wind flower in a high wind, she was blown down the steps, across the slushy sidewalk, and into the hired carriage.

When they had gone Adams went into the dining-room and dined alone without dressing, as he had done almost every evening for the last few months. The Irish maid waited upon him with a solicitude in which he read his pose of a deserted husband, and he tried with a forcible, though silent, bravado to dispel her very evident assumption. Connie had certainly not deserted him against his will, and when her absence had begun to show as so incontestable a relief it seemed the basest ingratitude to force upon her reckless shoulders the odium of an entirely satisfying arrangement. After a day of mental and physical exertion the further effort of a conversation with her was something that he felt to be utterly beyond him, and the distant Colorado days when she had played the part of a soft, inviting kitten and he had responded happily to the appeal for constant petting, now lay very far behind them both—buried somewhere in that cloudless country they had left. Neither of them wanted the petting back again, and as he rose from his simple dinner and entered his study at the end of the hall he heaved a sigh of conscious thankfulness that it was empty.

While he lighted his pipe his eyes turned instinctively to his precious first editions of which Trent had spoken, and then straight as an arrow to a photograph of Laura which stood with several others upon his writing table. The eyes of most men would have lingered, perhaps, on one of Connie, which was taken, indeed, at her best period and in a remarkably effective pose, but Adams' glance brushed it with an indifference only unkind in its mute sincerity, while he sought the troubled gaze of Laura, who wore in the picture a shy and startled look, like that of a wild thing suddenly trapped in its reserve. He had never, even in his own mind, analysed his feeling for the woman whom he was content to call his friend—he hesitated to condemn himself almost because he feared to question—but whenever he entered alone his empty room he knew that he turned instinctively to draw strength and courage from her pictured face. It was a face that had followed after the ideal beauty, and in her spiritual isolation, as of one devoted to an inner vision, he had always found the peculiar pathetic quality of her charm. Into her verse, chastened and restrained by the sense for perfection which dwelt in her art, she had put, he knew, this same cloistral vision of an unrealised world—a vision which had expanded and blossomed in the luxuriant if slightly formal garden of her intellect. The world she looked upon was a world, as Adams had once said, "seen through the haze of a golden temperament"—the dream of an imaginative mysticism, of a conventual purity, a dream which is to the reality as the soul of a man is to the body. And it was this inspired divination, this luminous idealism, which had caused Adams to exclaim when he put down her first small gray volume: "Is it possible that we can still see visions?"

A little later, when he came to know her, he found that the vision she looked upon had coloured not only her own soul, but even the outward daily happenings of her life. For him she was from the first compacted of divine mysteries, of exquisite surprises, and he loved to fancy that he could see her genius burning like a clear flame within her and shining at vivid moments with a still soft radiance in her face. He always thought of her soul as of something luminous, and there were instants when it seemed to touch her eyes and her mouth with an edge of light. Beyond this her complexities remained for him as on the day when he first saw her—if she was obscure it was the obscurity of a star seen through a fog—and the desire to understand lost itself presently in the bewilderment of his misapprehension. At last, however, he had put her, as it were, tentatively aside, had relinquished his attempt to reduce her to a formula with the despairing admission that she was, take her as you would, a subtlety that compelled one to a mental effort. The effort which he had up to this time associated with the society of women had been of anything but a mental character. There was the effort of putting one's best physical foot in advance, the effort of keeping one's person conspicuously in evidence and one's intellect as unobtrusively in abeyance—the material effort of appearing always in one's best trousers, the moral effort of presenting always one's worst intelligence. It had seemed to him until he met Laura—and his opinion was the effect of a limited experience upon a large philosophic ignorance—that the female sex played the part in Nature which is performed by the chorus in a Greek tragedy—that it shrilly voiced the horrors of the actual in the face of a divine indifference—and strenuously insisted upon the importance of the eternal detail. From Connie he had gathered that the feminine mind tended naturally toward a material philosophy—toward a deification of the body, a faith in the fugitive allurement of the senses, and because of his earlier initiation he had taken Laura's intellectual radiance as the shining of a virtually disembodied spirit. His own senses had led him, he recognised now, to disastrous issues; his love for Connie had been the prompting of mere physical impulse, and he had emerged from it with a feeling of escaping into freedom. Too much Nature he had learned during those months of mental apathy is in its way quite as destructive as too little—there must be a soul in desire to keep it alive, he understood at last, or the perishing body of it will decay for lack of a vital flame in the very hour of its fulfilment. A colder man might have come to such knowledge along impersonal paths, a coarser one would never have gone beyond it, but in Adams the old fighting spirit—a survival of the uncompromising Puritan conscience—had brought him up again, soul and body, to struggle afresh for a cleaner and a sharper air. Life had meant more to him in the beginning than a mere series of sensations—more even than any bodily conditions, any material attainment; and it was the final triumph of his austere vision that it should mean most of all when it seemed to a casual glance to contain least of actual value.

IN WHICH A YOUNG MAN DREAMS DREAMS

Since coming to New York Mrs. Trent had taken a small apartment in a big apartment house, where she lived with her son a perfectly provincial as well as a strictly secluded life. She was a large, florid, motherly old lady who still wore mourning for a husband who had been killed while fox hunting twenty-five years ago. Her face resembled a friendly and auspicious full moon, and above it her shining hair rolled like a parting of silvery clouds. Day or night she was always engaged in knitting a purple shawl, which appeared never to have been finished since her son's infancy, for his earliest recollection was of the plump, soft balls of brilliant yarn and the long ivory knitting needles which clicked briskly while she worked with a pleasant, familiar sound. To this day the clicking of those needles brought to his mouth the taste of large slices of bread and jam, and to his ears the soothing murmur of Bible stories told in the twilight.

She was always, too, serene gossip that she was, full of a monotonous, rippling stream of words, and if her days in New York were trying to her body and burdened with homesickness for her heart, no one—not even St. George himself—had ever surprised so much as a passing shadow upon her face. The young man's untiring pursuit of managers and of players had left her continually alone, but she busied herself cheerfully about her housekeeping, and found diversion in yielding to an inordinate curiosity concerning her neighbours. Once or twice she had questioned him about his absence, and this was especially so the morning after his meeting with Laura Wilde.

"You didn't tell me where you were yesterday, St. George," she observed at breakfast; "did you meet any one who is likely to be of use? I remember Beverly Pierce told me that everything had to come through introductions in the North."

He looked at her steadily a moment before replying, taking in all the lovely details of her appearance behind the coffee tray—the morning sunlight on her white hair and on the massive, hand-beaten, old silver service, the solitary rose he had purchased in the street standing between them in a slender Bohemian vase, brought from the rare old china in the press just at her back, the dainty hemstitching on her collar and cuffs of fine thread cambric, and lastly the vivid spot of color made by the knitting she had laid aside.

"I met Laura Wilde," he answered presently, "but as you never read poetry you can't understand just what it means."

As she held the cream jug poised above his coffee cup Mrs. Trent smiled back at him with a placid wonder.

"Who is she, my son? A lady—I mean a real one?"

"Oh, yes, sterling."

"But she writes verse you say! Is it improper?"

His eyes shone with amusement. "Improper! Why, what an idea!"

"I'm sure I don't know how it is," responded his mother, carefully measuring with her eye the correct allowance of cream, "but somehow women always seem to get immodest when they take to verse. It's as if they went into it for the express purpose of airing their improprieties."

"I say!" he exclaimed, with gentle mockery, "have you been reading 'Sappho' at your age?"

She continued to regard him blandly, without so much as a flicker of humour in her serene blue eyes. "Your grandfather used to be very fond of quoting something from 'Sappho,'" she returned thoughtfully, "or was it from Mr. Pope? I can't remember which or what it was except that it was hardly the kind of thing you would recite to a lady."

Trent laughed good-humouredly as he received his coffee cup.

"Well you can't point a moral with Miss Wilde," he rejoined, "you'd be at liberty to recite her to anybody who had the sense to understand her."

"Is she very deep?"

"She's profound—she's wonderful—she's a genius."

Mrs. Trent shook her head a little doubtfully. "I don't see that a woman has any business to be a genius," she remarked. "And I can't help being prejudiced against women writers, your father always was. It's as if they really pretended to know as much as a man. When they publish books I suppose they expect men to read them and that in itself is a kind of conceit."

Trent yielded the point as he helped himself to the cakes brought in by an old negro servant.

"Well, I shan't ask Miss Wilde to call on you," he laughed, "so you won't be apt to run across the learned of your sex."

"Oh, I shouldn't mind myself," responded the old lady, with amiability, "but I do hate to have you thrown with women that you wouldn't meet at home."

"I certainly shouldn't meet Miss Wilde at home if that is what you mean."

"It's bad enough to live in a partitioned cage like this," resumed Mrs. Trent, in her soft, expressionless voice, "and to dry your clothes on your neighbour's roofs, but I can bear anything so long as we are not forced to associate with common people. Of course I don't expect to find the manners of Virginia up here," she added as a last concession, "but I may as well confess that the people I've come across don't seem to me to be exactly civil."

"Just as we don't seem to them to be particularly worldly-wise, I dare say."

She nodded her head, almost without hearing him, while her even tones rippled on over her quaint ideas, which shone to her son's mind like little silver pebbles beneath the shallow stream.

"I'm almost reconciled to the fact that old ladies wear colours and flowers in their bonnets," she pursued, "to say nothing of low-neck dresses, but it does seem to me that they might show a little ordinary politeness. I met the doctor coming out of the apartment downstairs, so in common decency I went immediately to enquire who was sick, and carried along a glass of chicken jelly. The woman who opened the door was rather rude," she finished with a sigh. "I don't believe such a thing had ever happened to her before in the whole course of her life."

Trent gave her a tender glance across the coffee service.

"Probably not," he admitted, "but I wouldn't waste my jelly if I were you."

"I sha'n't" she determined sadly, "and that's the thing I miss most of all—visiting the sick."

"You might devote yourself to the hospitals—there are plenty of them it seems."

Her resignation, however, was complete, and she showed no impulse to reach out actively again. "It wouldn't be the same, my dear—I don't want strange paupers but real friends. Do you know," she added, with a despair that was almost abject, "I was counting up this morning the people I might speak to if I met them in the street, and I got them in easily on the fingers of one hand. That included," she confessed after a hesitation, "the doctor, the butcher's boy and the woman who comes to scrub. It would surprise you to find what a very interesting woman she is."

Trent rose from his chair and, coming round to where she sat, gave her a boyish hug of sympathy. "You're a regular angel of a mother," he said and added playfully, while he still held her, "even then I don't see how you make it five."

She put up her large white hand and smoothed his hair across his forehead. "That's only because I made an acquaintance in the elevator yesterday," she replied.

"In the elevator! How?"

"The thing always makes me nervous, you know—I can't abide it, and I'd much rather any day go up and down the seven flights—but she met me as I started to walk and persuaded me to come inside. Then she held my hand until I got quite to the bottom."

"Indeed," said Trent suspiciously; "who was she?"

"Her name is Christina Coles, and she came from Clarke County. I knew her grandfather."

"Thank Heaven!" breathed Trent, and his voice betrayed his happy reassurance.

"She's really very pretty—all the Coles were handsome—her great-aunt was once a famous beauty. Do you remember my speaking of her—Miss Betty Coles?" He shook his head, and she proceeded with her reminiscence.

"Well, she was said to have received fifty proposals before her twenty-fifth birthday, but she never married. On her last visit to me, when she was a very old lady, I asked her why—and her answer was: 'Pure fastidiousness.'" She had picked up her purple shawl, and the long ivory knitting needles began to click.

"But I'm more interested in the young lady of the elevator—What is she like?"

"Not the beauty that Betty was, but still very pretty, with the same blue eyes and brown hair, which she wears parted exactly as her aunt did fifty years ago. I fear, though," she finished in a whisper, "I really fear—that she writes."

"Is that so? Did she tell you?"

"Not in words, but she carried a parcel exactly like your manuscripts, and she spoke—oh, so seriously—of her work. She spoke of it quite as if it were a baby."

"By Jove!" he gasped, and after a moment, "I hope at any rate that she will be a comfort."

With her knitting still in her hands, she rose and went to the window, where she stood placidly staring at the sunlight upon the blackened chimney-pots. "At least I can talk to her about her aunt," she returned. Then her gaze grew more intense, and she almost flattened her nose against the pane. "I declare I wonder what that woman is doing out there on that fire-escape," she observed.

After he had got into his overcoat Trent came back to give her a parting kiss. "Find out by luncheon time," he returned gaily.

When presently he entered the elevator he found it already occupied by a young lady whom he recognised from his mother's description as Christina Coles. She was very pretty, but, even more than by her prettiness, he was struck by her peculiar steadfastness of look, as of one devoted to a single absorbing purpose. He noticed, too, that the little tan coat she wore was rather shabby, and that there was a small round hole in one of the fingers of her glove. When she spoke, as she did when leaving the key with the man in charge of the elevator, her voice sounded remarkably fresh and pleasant. They left the house together, but while she walked rapidly toward Broadway he contented himself with strolling leisurely along Fourth Avenue, where he bent a vacant gaze on the objects assembled in the windows of dealers in "antiques."

But his thoughts did not so much as brush the treasures at which he stared, and neither the hurrying crowd—which had a restless, workaday look at the morning hour—nor the noisily clanging cars broke into the exquisitely reared castle of his dreams. Since the evening before his imagination had been thrilling to the tune of some spirited music, flowing presumably from these airy towers, and as he went on over the wet sunlight on the sidewalk, he was still keeping step to the exalted if unreal measures. Never in his life; not even in his wildest literary ecstasies, had he felt so assured of the beauty, of the bountifulness, of his coming years—so filled with a swelling thankfulness for the mere physical fact of birth. He was twenty-five, he believed passionately in his own powers, and he was, he told himself with emphasis, in love for the first and only time. In the confused tangle of his fancy he saw Laura like some great white flower, growing out of reach, yet not entirely beyond endeavour, and the ladder that went up to her was made by his own immediate successes. Then the footlights before his play swam in his picture and he heard already the applause of crowded houses and felt in his head the intoxication of his triumph. Act by act, scene by scene, he rehearsed in fancy his great drama, seeing the players throng before the footlights and seeing, too, Laura applauding softly from a stage box at the side. He had had moments of despondency over his idea, had grovelled in abject despair during trying periods of execution, but now all uncertainty—all misgivings evaporated like an obscuring fog before a burst of light. The light, indeed, had at the moment the full radiance of a great red glow such as he had seen used for effective purposes upon the stage—and just as every object of scenery had taken, for the time, a portion of the transfiguring suffusion—so now the external ugly details among which he moved were bathed in the high coloured light of his imagination.

But if the end is sometimes long in coming, it comes at last even to the visions of youth, and when his tired limbs finally dragged his soaring spirit to earth, he took a passing car and came home to luncheon. The glamour had faded suddenly from his dreams, as if a bat's wing had fluttered overhead, and in his new mood, he felt a resurgence of his old self-consciousness. He was provoked by the suspicion that he had shown less as a coming dramatist than as a present fool, and he contrasted his own awkwardness with Adams' whimsical ease of manner. Did a woman ever forget how a man appeared when she first met him? Would any amount of fame to-morrow obliterate from Laura's memory his embarrassment of yesterday? He had heard that the surface impression was what counted in the feminine mind, and this made him think enviously, for a minute, of Perry Bridewell—of his handsome florid face and his pleasant animal magnetism. Perry was stupid and an egoist, and yet he had heard that Mrs. Bridewell, for all her beauty and her wit, adored him, while he openly neglected her. Was the secret of success, after all, simply an indifference to everyone's needs except one's own? or was it rather the courage to impress the world that one's own were the only needs that counted?

He was late for luncheon but his mother had waited for him, and he found when he entered the drawing room that Christina Coles was with her. The girl still wore her hat, but she had removed her jacket, and it lay with a little brown package on the sofa. As she spoke to him he was struck afresh by the singular concentration of her expression.

"Your mother tells me that you've written a play," she began, a little shyly; "she says, too, that it is wonderful."

"'She says' is well put," he retorted gaily, "but I hear that you, also, are among the prophets."

"I am nothing else," she answered earnestly. "It is everything to me—it is my life."

Her frankness startled him unpleasantly, and but for her girlish prettiness, he might have felt himself almost repelled. As it was he merely glanced appealingly at his mother, who intervened with a gesture of her knitting needle. "She writes stories," explained the old lady, appearing to transfix her subject on the ivory point; "it is just as I imagined."

The girl herself met his eyes almost fiercely, reminding him vaguely of the look with which a lioness might defend her threatened young.

"I've done nothing yet," she declared, "but I mean to—I mean to if it takes every single hour I have to live." Then her manner changed suddenly, and she impressed him as melting from her hard reserve. "Oh, she tells me that you've met Laura Wilde!" she said.

The sacred name struck him, after his impassioned dreaming, like a sharp blow between the eyes, and he met the girl's animated gesture with a look of blank aversion.

"I've met her—yes," he answered coldly.

But her enthusiasm was at white heat, and he saw what he had thought mere prettiness in her warm to positive beauty. "And you adore her work as I do?" she exclaimed.

After a moment's hesitation his ardour flashed out to meet her own. "Oh, yes, I adore her work and her!" he said.

SHOWS THAT MR. WORLDLY-WISE-MAN MAY BELONG TO EITHER SEX

Several afternoons later Trent was to have further light thrown on the character of Christina Coles by a chance remark of Roger Adams, into whose office he had dropped for a moment as he was on his way to make his first call upon Mrs. Bridewell.

After a few friendly enquiries about the young man's own work, and the report of a promising word from the great Benson, Adams took up a letter lying loose among the papers on his big littered desk.

"Half the tragedy in New York is contained in a letter like this," he observed. "Do you know, by the way, that the mass of outside literary workers drawn in at last by the whirlpool constitutes almost a population? Take this girl, now, she is so consumed by her ambition, for heaven knows what, that she comes here and starves in an attic rather than keep away in comfort. That reminds me," he added, with a sudden recollection, "she's from your part of the country."

"Indeed!" An intuition shot like a conviction into Trent's mind. "Could her name, I wonder, by any chance be Coles?"

"You know her then?"

"I've met her, but do you mean to say that ability is what she hasn't got?"

"For some things I've no doubt she has an amazing amount, only she's mistaken its probable natural bent. She strikes me as a woman who was born for the domestic hearth, or failing that she'd do admirably, I dare say, in a hospital."

"It's the literary instinct, then, that's missing in her?"

"Not the instinct so much as the literary stuff, and in that she's not different from a million others. She is evidently on fire with the impulse to create, but the power—the creative matter—isn't in her. Let her keep up, and she'll probably go on doing 'hack' work until her death."

"But she's so pretty," urged Trent with a chivalric qualm—and he remembered her smooth brown hair parted over her rosy ears, her blue eyes, fresh as flowers, and the peculiar steadfastness that possessed her face.

"The more's the pity," said Adams, while the muscles about his mouth twitched slightly, as they always did when he was deeply moved, "it's a bigger waste. I wrote to her as a father might have done and begged her to give it up," he went on, "and in return," he tapped the open sheet, "she sends me this fierce, pathetic little letter and informs me grandly that her life is dedicated. Dedicated, good Lord!" he exclaimed compassionately, "dedicated to syndicated stories in the Sunday press and an occasional verse in the cheaper magazines."

"And there's absolutely nothing to be done?" asked Trent.

Adams met the question with a frown.

"Oh, if it would make it all come right in the end, I'd go on publishing her empty, trite little articles until Gabriel blows his trumpet."

"It wouldn't help, though, after all."

"Well, hardly—the quick way is sure to be the most merciful," he laughed softly with the quality of kindly humour which never failed him, "we'll starve her out as soon as possible," he declared.

As if to dismiss the subject, he refolded the letter, slipped it in its envelope, and placed it in one of his crammed pigeon-holes. "Thank God, your own case isn't of the hopeless kind!" he exclaimed fervently.

"Somehow success looks like selfishness," returned Trent, showing by his tone the momentary depression which settled so easily upon his variable moods.

At the speech Adams turned upon him the full sympathy of his smile, while he enclosed in a warm grasp the hand which the young man held out.

"It's what we're made for," he responded cheerily, "success in one way or another."

His words, and even more his look, remained with Trent long afterwards, blowing, like a fresh strong wind, through the hours of despondency which followed for him upon any temporary exaltation. The young man had a trick of remembering faces, not as wearing their accustomed daily look, but as he had seen them animated and transfigured by any vivid moment of experience, and he found later that when he thought of Adams it was to recall the instant's kindly lighting of the eyes, the flicker of courageous humour about the mouth and the dauntless ring in the usually quiet voice. He realised now, as he walked through the humming streets, that success or failure is not an abstract quantity but a relative value—that a man may be a shining success in the world's eyes and a comparative failure in his own. To Trent, Adams had for years represented the cultured and scholarly critic—the writer who, in his limited individual field, had incontestably "arrived." Now, for the first time, he saw that the editor looked upon himself as a man of small achievements, and that, inasmuch as his idea had been vastly more than his execution, he felt himself to belong to the unfulfilled ones of the earth.

When, a little later, he reached Mrs. Bridewell's house in Sixty-ninth Street the servant invited him, after a moment's wait below, into her sitting-room upstairs, and, following the man's lead, he was finally ushered into a charming apartment upon the second floor. A light cloud of cigarette smoke trailed toward him as he entered, and when he paused, confused by broken little peals of laughter, he made out a group of ladies gathered about a tiny Oriental table upon which stood a tray of Turkish coffee. Gerty rose from the circle as he advanced, and moved a single step forward, while the pale green flounces of her train rippled prettily about her feet. Her hair was loosely arranged, and she gave him an odd impression of wearing what in his provincial mind he called a "wrapper"—his homely name for the exquisite garment which flowed, straight and unconfined, from her slender shoulders. His mother, he remembered, not without a saving humour, had always insisted that a lady should appear before the opposite sex only in the entire armour of her "stays" and close-fitting bodice.

Gerty, as she mentioned the names of her callers, subsided with her ebbing green waves into the chair from which she had risen, and held her cigarette toward Trent with a pretty inviting gesture. Her delicate grace gave the pose a piquant attraction, and he found himself watching with delight the tiny rings of smoke which curled presently from her parted lips. As she smoked she held her chin slightly lifted, and regarded him from beneath lowered lids with an arch and careless humour.

"If you'd been the Pope himself," she remarked, as an indifferent apology, "I'd hardly have done more than fling the table-cover over my head. Even you, after you'd spent a morning trying on a velvet gown, would require a lounge and a good smoke."

He admitted that he thought it probable, and then turned to one of the callers who had spoken—a handsome woman with gray hair, which produced an odd effect of being artificial.

"I wish I'd done nothing worse than try on clothes," she observed, "but I've been to lunch with an old lover."

"Poor dear," murmured Gerty, compassionately, as she passed Trent a cup of coffee, "was he so cruel as to tell you you'd retained your youth?"

"He did worse," sighed the handsome woman, "he assured me I hadn't."

"Well, he couldn't have done more if he'd married you," declared Gerty, with her gleeful cynicism.

"He was too brutally frank for a husband," remarked a second caller as she sipped her coffee. "You showed more discretion, Susie, than I gave you credit for."

"Oh, you needn't compliment me," protested Susie; "in those days he hadn't a penny."

"Indeed! and now?"

"Now he has a great many, but he has attached to himself a wife, and I a husband. Well, I can't say honestly that I regret him," she laughed, "for if he has lived down his poverty he hasn't his passion for red—he wore a red necktie. Why is it," she lamented generally to the group, "that the male mind leans inevitably toward violent colours?"

"Perhaps they appeal to the barbaric part of us," suggested Trent, becoming suddenly at ease amid the battle of inanities.

"Have you a weakness for red, too, Mr. Trent?" enquired Gerty.

The sparkle in his eyes leaped out at her challenge.

"Only in the matter of hair," he retorted boldly.

She regarded him intently for a moment, while he felt again as he had felt at Laura Wilde's, not only her fascination—her personal radiance—but the conviction that she carried at heart a deep disgust, a heavy disenchantment, which her ostentatious gayety could not conceal. Even her beauty gave back to him a suggestion of insincerity, and he wondered if the brightness of her hair and of her mouth was as artificial as her brilliant manner. It was magnificent, but, after all, it was not nature.

"Because I warn you now," she pursued, after the brief pause, "that if you bind your first play in red I shall refuse to read it."

"You can't escape on that ground," rejoined Trent, "I'll make it green."

"Well, you're more civilised than Perry," declared Gerty, with one of her relapses into defiant ridicule, which caused Trent to wonder if she were not acting upon an intuition which taught her that a slight shock is pleasantly stimulating to the fancy, "and I suppose it's my association with him that convinces me if we'd leave your sex alone it would finally revert to the savage state and to skin girdles."

"Now don't you think Perry would look rather nice in skins?" enquired the handsome woman. "I can quite see him with his club like the man in—which one of Wagner's?"

"It isn't the club of the savage I object to," coolly protested Gerty, "it's the taste. Perry has been married to me five years," she continued, reflectively, "a long enough period you would think to teach even a Red Indian that my hair positively shrieks at anything remotely resembling pink. Yet when I went to the Hot Springs last autumn he actually had this room hung for me in terra-cotta."

Trent cast a blank stare about the tapestried walls.

"But where is it?" he demanded.

"It's gone," was Gerty's brief rejoinder, and she added, after a moment devoted to her cigarette, "now that's where it pays to have the wisdom of the serpent. I really flatter myself," she admitted complacently, "that I've a genius, I did it so beautifully. Your young innocent would have mangled matters to the point of butchery and have gloried like a martyr in her domestic squabbles, but I've learned a lesson or two from misfortune, and one of them is that a man invariably prides himself upon possessing the quality he hasn't got. That's a perfectly safe rule," she annotated along the margin of her story. "I used to compliment an artist upon his art and an Apollo upon his beauty—but it never worked. They always looked as if I had under-valued them, so now I industriously praise the folly of the wise and the wisdom of the fool."

"And the decorative talent of Perry," laughed one of the callers.

"You needn't smile," commented Gerty, while Trent watched the little greenish flame dance in her eyes, "it isn't funny—it's philosophy. I made it out of life."

"But what about the terra-cotta?" enquired Susie.

"Oh, as I've said, I did nothing reckless," resumed Gerty, relaxing among her cushions, "I neither slapped his face nor went into hysterics—these tactics, I've found, never work unless one happens to be a prima donna—so I complimented him upon his consideration and sat down and waited. That night he went to a club dinner—after the beautiful surprise he'd given me he felt that he deserved a little freedom—and the door had no sooner closed upon him than I paid the butler to come in and smoke the walls. He didn't want to do it at all, so I really had to pay him very high—I gave him a suit of Perry's evening clothes. It's the ambition of his life, you know, to look like Perry."

"How under heaven did he manage it?" persisted Susie. "The smoke, I mean, not the resemblance."

"There are a good many lamps about the house and we brought them all in, every one. The butler warned me it was dangerous, but I assured him I was desperate. That settled it—that and the evening clothes—and by the time Perry returned the room was like an extinct volcano."

"And he never found out?" asked Susie, as the callers rose to go.

"Found out! My dear, do you really give him credit for feminine penetration? Well, if you will go—good-bye—and—oh—don't look at my gown to-morrow night or you'll turn blue with envy," then, as Trent started to follow the retreating visitors, she detained him by a gesture. "Stay awhile, unless you're bored," she urged, "but if you're really bored I shan't say a word. I assure you I sometimes bore myself."

As he fell back into his chair Trent was conscious of a feeling of intimacy, and strange as it was, it dispelled instantly his engrossing shyness.

"I'm not bored," he said, "I'm merely puzzled."

"Oh, I know," Gerty nodded, "but you'll get over it. I puzzle everybody at first, but it doesn't last because I'm really as clear as running water. My gayety and my good spirits are but the joys of flippancy, you see."

"I don't see," protested Trent, his eyes warming.

She laughed softly, as if rather pleased than otherwise by the frankness of his admiration. "You haven't lost as yet the divine faith of youth," she said, carelessly flicking the ashes of her cigarette upon the little table at her elbow. Then, tossing the burned end into a silver tray, she pushed it from her with a decisive movement. "I've had six," she observed, "and that's my limit."

"What I'm trying to understand," confessed Trent, leaning forward in his earnestness, "is why you should care so greatly for Miss Wilde?"

Gerty flashed up suddenly from her cushions. "And pray why shouldn't I?" she demanded.

"Because," he hesitated an instant and then advanced with the audacity born of ignorance, "you're as much alike as a thrush and a paroquet."

She laughed again.

"So you consider me a paroquet?"

"In comparison with Laura Wilde."

"Well, I'd have said a canary," she remarked indulgently, "but we'll let it pass. I don't see though," she serenely continued, "why a paroquet shouldn't have a feeling for a thrush?"

He shook his head, smiling. "It seems a bit odd, that's all."

"Then, if it's any interest to you to know it," pursued Gerty, with a burst of confidence, "I'd walk across Brooklyn Bridge, every step of the way, on my knees for Laura. That's because I believe in her," she wound up emphatically, "and because, too, I don't happen to believe much in anybody else."

"So you know her well?"

"I went to school with her and I adored her then, but I adore her even more to-day. Somehow she always seems to be knocking for the good in one, and it has to come out at last because she stands so patiently and waits. She makes me over every time she meets me, shapes me after some ideal image of me she has in her brain, and then I'm filled with desperate shame if I don't seem at least a little bit to correspond with it."

"I understand," said Trent slowly; "one feels her as one feels a strong wind on a high mountain. There's a wonderful bigness about her."

"It's because she's different," explained Gerty, "she's kept so apart from life that she knows it only in its elemental freshness—she has a kind of instinct for truth just as she has for poetry or for beauty, and our little quibbles, our incessant inanities have never troubled her at all."

The servant entered with a card as she finished, and after reading the name she made a quick movement of interest.

"Ask him to come up," she said to the man, adding immediately as Trent rose to go, "it's Arnold Kemper. Will you stay and see him?"

Trent shook his head, while he held out his hand with a laugh. "I won't stay," he answered; "I don't like him."

She looked up puzzled, her brows bent in an enquiring frown. "Not like him! Why, you've never met."

"What has that to do with it?" he persisted lightly. "One doesn't have to meet a man to hate him."

"One does unless one's a person of stupid prejudices."

"Well, maybe I am," he admitted, "but I have my side."

As the portières were drawn back, he turned hastily away, to come face to face with Gerty's caller the next instant upon the threshold. Keen as his curiosity was he took in, at his brief glance, only that Kemper presented a bright and brave appearance and walked with a peculiarly energetic step.

THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE

Gerty was leaning forward among her cushions and as her visitor approached she held out her hand, still faintly scented with cigarettes. "Will you have coffee," she asked, "or shall I ring for tea?"

He sat down in the chair from which Trent had risen and replied with a gesture of happy physical exhaustion. "Let me have some coffee," he answered, "I've been out golfing all the morning, and if you don't prove mentally stimulating I shall fall asleep before you. How many holes do you think I played to-day?"

Gerty shrugged her shoulders over the little coffee pot. "I don't know and it doesn't interest me," she retorted. "After six months of Europe do you still make a god of physical exertion?"

The genial irony of his smile flashed back at her, and his eyes, half quizzical, half searching, but wholly kind, wandered leisurely down her slender figure. Even as he lazily sipped his coffee, with his closely clipped, rather large brown head lying against the chair-back, she was made to feel, not unpleasantly, the compelling animal magnetism—the "personal quantity," as she had called it—that lay behind the masculine bluntness of manner he affected. "Aren't you rather tumbled?" he enquired, with an animated glance, and, though he was fond of boasting that he was the only man he knew who never flattered women, Gerty was conscious of a sudden flush and the pleased conviction that she must be looking her very best. It was a trick of his, she knew, to flatter, as it were, by paradox, to deal with delicate inuendos and to compliment by pleasant contradiction. She had not been a woman of the world without reaping the reward of knowledge, and now, as she leaned back and smiled brilliantly into his face, she knew that, despite the apparent abruptness of his beginning, they would descend inevitably to the play of personal suggestion. His measure had been taken long ago, she told herself, and lay tucked away in the receptacle which contained the varied neatly labelled patterns of her masculine world; but at the same time she was perfectly aware that within five minutes he would pique afresh both her interest and her liking. "You can't warm yourself by fireworks," she had once said to him, and a moment later had paused to wonder at the intrinsic meaning of a daring phrase which he had spoken.

Still sipping his coffee, he regarded her with the blithe humour which lent so great a charm to his expression.

"I don't see why you object to exercise when it saves my life," he observed as he took up a cigarette and then bent forward to hold it to the flame of the alcohol lamp.

"I don't object except when it bores me out of mine," responded Gerty lightly.

He was still smiling when he raised his head.

"You used to like it yourself," he persisted.

"I used to like a great many things which bore me now."

"Yes, you used to like me," he retorted gaily.

She had so confidently expected the remark, had left so frank an opening for it, that while she watched him from beneath languid eyelids a little cynical quiver disturbed her lips. The game was as old as the Garden of Eden, she had played it well or ill from her cradle, and at last she had begun to grow a trifle weary. She had found the wisdom which is hidden at the core of all Dead Sea fruit, and the bitter taste of it was still in her mouth. The world for her was a world of make-believe—of lies so futile that their pretty embroidered shams barely covered the ugly truths beneath, and, though she had pinned her faith upon falsehood and had made her sacrifice to the little gods, there were moments still when the undelivered soul within her awoke and stirred as a child stirs in the womb. Even as she went back to the game anew, she was conscious that it would be a battle of meaningless words, of shallow insincerities—yet she went back, nevertheless, before the disgust the thought awoke had passed entirely from among her sensations.

"I believe I did," she confessed with a charming shrug.

"But you turned against me in the end—women always do," he lamented merrily, as he flicked away the ashes of his cigarette. Then, with a perceptible start of recollection, he paused a moment and leaned forward to look at her more closely. "By the way, I had a shot at your friend to-day," he said, "the lady who looks like an old picture and does verse. Why on earth did she take to poetry?" he demanded impatiently. "I hate it—it's all sheer insanity."

"Well, some few madmen have thought otherwise," remarked Gerty, adding immediately, "and so you met Laura. Oh, you two! It was the irresistible force meeting the immovable body. What happened?"

He regarded her quite gravely while his cigarette burned like a little red eye between his fingers.

"Nothing," he responded at last. "I didn't meet her—I merely glimpsed her. She has a pair of eyes—you didn't tell me."

Gerty nodded.

"And I forgot to mention as well that she has a nose and a mouth and a chin. What an oversight."

"Oh, I didn't bother about the rest," he said, and she wondered if he could be half in earnest or if he were wholly jesting, "but, by Jove, I went overboard in her eyes and never touched bottom."

For a moment Gerty stared at him in blank amazement, in the midst of which she promptly told herself that henceforth she would be prepared for any eccentricities of which the male mind might be capable. A hot flush mantled her cheek, and she spoke in a voice which had a new and womanly ring of decision.

"You would not like her," she said, "and she would hate you."

With an amused exclamation he replaced his coffee cup upon the table. "Then she'd be a very foolish woman," he observed.

"She believes in all the things that you scoff at—she believes in the soul, in people, and in love—"

He made a protest of mock dismay. "My dear girl, I've been too hard hit by love not to believe in it. On the contrary, I believe in it so firmly that I think the only sure cure for it is marriage."

At her swift movement of aversion his laughing glance made a jest of the words, and she smiled back at him with the fantastic humour which had become almost her natural manner. It was a habit of his to treat sportively even the subjects which he reverenced, and in reality she had sometimes felt him to be less of a sober cynic than herself. He took his pleasures where he found them, and there was a touch of pathos in the generous eagerness with which he was ready to provide as well for the pleasures of others. If he lacked imagination she had learned by now that he did not fail in its sister virtue, sympathy, and his keen gray eyes, which expressed so perfectly a gay derision, were not slow, she knew, to warm into a smiling tenderness.

"Laura is the most earnest creature alive," she said after a moment.

"Is that so? Then I presume she lacks a sense of humour."

"She has a sense of honour at any rate."

With a laugh he settled his figure more comfortably in his chair, and while she watched the movement, a little fascinated by its easy freedom, she felt a sudden impulse to reach out and touch his broad, strong shoulders as she might have touched the shoulders of a statue. Were they really as hard as bronze, she wondered, or was that suggestion of latent power, of slumbering energy, as deceptive as the caressing glance he bent upon her? The glance meant nothing she was aware—he would have regarded her in much the same way had Perry been at her side, would have shone quite as affectionately, perhaps, upon her mother. Yet, in spite of her worldly knowledge, she felt herself yielding to it as to a delicate flattery. Her eyes were still on him, and presently he caught her gaze and held it by a look which, for all its fervour, had an edge of biting irony. There was a meaning, a mystery in his regard, but his words when at last they came sounded almost empty.

"Oh, that's well enough in its way," he said, "but as a safeguard there's no virtue alive that can stand against a sense of humour. An instinct for the ridiculous will keep any man from going to the devil."

She shot her defiant merriment into his face. "Has it kept you?"

"I?—Oh, I wasn't bound that way, you know—but why do you ask?"

For a breath she hesitated, then, remembering her mystification of an instant ago, she felt a swift desire to punish him for something which even to herself she could not express—for too sharp a prick of unsatisfied curiosity, or was it for too intense a moment of uncertainty?

"Oh, one hears, you know," she replied indifferently.

"One hears! And what is it that one hears?"

His voice was hard, almost angry, and she despised herself because the fierce sound of it made her suddenly afraid.

"Do you know what a man said to me the other day," she went on with a cool insolence before which he became suddenly quiet. "Whom the gods destroy they first infatuate—with an opera singer."

She delivered the words straight from the shoulder, and as she finished he rose from his chair and stood looking angrily down upon her.

"Did you let me come here for this?" he demanded.

"O Arnold, Arnold!" the gayety rang back to her voice, and she made a charming little face of affected terror. "If you're going to be a bear I'll run away."

She stretched out her hand, and he held it for an instant in his own, while he fell back impatiently into his chair.

"The truth is that I was clean mad about her," he said, "about Madame Alta—but it's over now, and I abominate everything that has ever set foot on the stage."

"Was she really beautiful?" she enquired curiously.

He laughed sharply. "Beautiful! She was flesh—if you mean that."

An angry sigh escaped him, and Gerty lighted a fresh cigarette and gave it to him with a soothing gesture. The nervous movements which were characteristic of him became more frequent, and she found herself wondering that they should increase rather than diminish the impression of virile force. For a while he smoked in silence; then, with his eyes still turned away from her, he asked in a changed voice.

"Tell me about your friend—she interests me."

"She interests you! Laura?"

"There's something in her that I like," he pursued, smiling at her exclamation. "She looks human, natural, real. By Jove, she looks as if she were capable of big emotions—as if, too, you could like her without making love. She's something new."

Gerty's amazement was so sincere that she only stared at him, while her red lips parted slightly in a breathless and perfectly unaffected surprise. Something new! Her wonder faded slowly, and she told herself that now at last she understood. So he was still what he had always been—an impatient seeker after fresh sensations.

"I thought you were too much like Perry to care about her," she said.

His amused glance made the remark appear suddenly ridiculous. "I'm different from Perry in one thing at least," he retorted. "You didn't marry me."

"Well, I dare say it's a good thing you never gave me the chance," she tossed back lightly. "I don't let Perry rave, you know, even over Laura. Not that I'm unduly jealous, but that I'm easily bored."

"I can't imagine you jealous," he commented, keeping as usual close to the intimate intention.

"And of Perry! I should hope not!" Her gesture was one of amused indifference. "Jealousy is the darling virtue of the savage, and I may not be a saint, but at least I'm civilized. Give me food and a warm fire and clothes to my back, and I'm quite content to let the passions go."

"Even love?" he asked, still smiling.

She shrugged her shoulders—gracefully as few women can. "Love among the rest—I don't care—why should I? Make me comfortable."

An impulse which was hardly more than a consuming interest in humanity—in the varied phenomena of life—caused him to draw quickly nearer.

"You say that because you've 'arrived,'" he declared. "You've 'arrived' in love as your friend has in literature. The probationary stage after all is the only one worth while, and you've gone too far beyond it."

"I've gone too far beyond everything," she protested, laughing. "I'm a graduate of the world. Now Laura—"

The name recalled his thoughts and he repeated it while she paused. "Laura—it has a jolly sound—and upon my word I haven't seen a woman in years who has had so much to say to me before I've met her. Do you know, I already like her—I like her smooth black hair, without any of your fussy undulations; I like her strong earnest look and the strength in her brow and chin; I even like the way she dresses—"

Gerty's laugh pealed out, and he broke off with a movement of irritation. "Is it possible that Laura is an enchantress," she demanded, "and have I followed the wrong principle all my life? Has my honest intention to please men led me astray?"

"Oh, you may be funny at my expense if you choose," he retorted, "but I've had enough of fluff and feathers, and I like the natural way she wears her clothes—" Again he smoked in an abstracted silence, and then asked abruptly: "Will you take me some day to see her?"

She shook her head.

"Take you? No, you've missed your opportunity."

"But I'll make another. Why not?"

"Because I tell you frankly she would hate you."

"My dear girl, she wouldn't have a shadow of an excuse. No woman has ever hated me in my life."

"Then there's no use seeking the experience. You'd just as well accept the fact at once that Laura couldn't bear you—"

A laugh followed from the door while the words were still in the air, and turning quickly they saw Laura pausing upon the threshold.

"And pray what is it about Laura?" she asked in her cordial contralto voice. "A person who has borne living in the house with a flute may be said to have unlimited powers of endurance."

She moved forward and Kemper, while he sprang to his feet and stood waiting for the introduction, became swiftly aware that with her entrance the whole atmosphere had taken a fresher and a finer quality. The sophistication of the world, the flippant irony of Gerty's voice gave place immediately before her earnest dignity and before the look of large humanity which distinguished her so vitally from the women whom he knew. He felt her sincerity of purpose at the same instant that he felt Gerty's shallowness and the artificial glamour of the hot-house air in which he had hardly drawn breath. There was an appeal in Laura's face which he had never seen before—an expression which seemed to him to draw directly from the elemental pulse; and he felt suddenly that there were depths of consciousness which he had never sounded, vivid experiences which he had never even glimpsed. "She is different—but how is she different?" he asked himself, perplexed. "Is she simply a bigger personality, or is she really more of a woman than any woman I have ever known? What is it in her that speaks to me and what is it in myself that responds?" And it seemed to him both strange and wonderful that he should be drawn by an impulse which was not the impulse of love—that a woman should attract him through qualities which were independent of the allurement of sex. A clean and perfectly sane satisfaction was the immediate result; he felt that he had grown larger in his own eyes—that the old Adam who had ruled over him so long had become suddenly dwarfed and insignificant. "To like a woman and yet not to make love to her," he repeated in his thoughts. "By Jove, it will be something decent, something really worth while." Then he remembered that he had never known intimately a woman of commanding intellect, and the novelty inspired him with the spirit of fresh adventure.

She had bowed to him over the large muff she carried, and he spoke lightly though his awakened interest showed in his face and voice. "I was the unfortunate subject of Gerty's decision," he said. "Is there no appeal from it?"

Her answering smile was one of indifferent kindliness; and he liked, even while he resented her sincerity of manner. "Appeal! and to whom?" she enquired.

"To you—to your mercy," he laughed.

She glanced at Gerty with a look which hardly simulated a curiosity she apparently did not feel.

"But why should you need my mercy?" she demanded, as she sat down on a little sofa heaped with cushions.

His gaze, after resting a moment on the smooth black hair beneath her velvet hat, turned to the exquisite shining waves which encircled Gerty's head.

"Ask my cousin," he advised with merriment.

Whatever Gerty's reason for not caring to bring them together may have been, she concealed it now beneath a ready acceptance of the situation.

"Oh, he tried to make me promise to take him to see you," she explained, "but I've told him you'd show him no quarter because he hasn't read your poems."

Laura raised her eyes to his face, and he had again the sensation of looking into an unutterable personality.

"I'm glad you haven't read them," she rejoined, "for now you won't be able to talk to me about them."

"So you don't like to have one talk about them?"

She met his question with direct simplicity. "About my verse? I shouldn't like to have you do it."

"And why not I?" he demanded, laughing.

"Oh, I don't know," she returned, her eyes lighting with the humour of her frankness, "can one explain? But I'm perfectly sure that it's not the kind of thing you'd like. There's no action in it."

"So Gerty has told you that I'm a strenuous creature?"

"Perhaps. I don't remember." She turned to Gerty, looking down upon her with a tenderness that suffused her face with colour. "What was it that you told me, dearest?"

"What did I tell you?" repeated Gerty, still clasping Laura's hand. "Oh, it must have been that he agrees with some dreadful person who said that poetry was the insanity of prose."

Laura laughed as she glanced back at him, and he contrasted her deep contralto notes with Gerty's flute-like soprano.

"Well, he may not be right, but he is with the majority," she said.

Her indifference piqued him into the spirit of opposition, and he felt an immediate impulse to compel her reluctant interest—to arouse her admiration of the very qualities she now disdained.

"Well, I take my poetry where I find it," he rejoined, "and that's mostly in life and not in books."

From the quick turn of her head, the instant's lifting of her emotional reserve, he saw that the words had arrested her imagination—that for the first time since her entrance she had really taken in the fact of his existence as an individual.

"Then you are not with the majority, but you are right!" she exclaimed.

"Is it not possible to be both?" he asked, pleased almost more than he would admit by the quickening of her attention.

"I think not," she answered seriously, "don't you?"

"I never think," he laughed with his eyes upon hers, "I live."

The animation, which was like the glow from an inner illumination, shone in her face, and he thought, as Trent had thought before him, that her soul must burn like a golden flame within her—a flame that reached toward life, knowledge and the veiled wonders of experience.

"And so would I if I were a man," she said.

She rose, clasping the furs at her throat, then folding Gerty in her arms she kissed her cheek.

"I stopped for a moment to look at you, nothing more," she confessed. "It was a choice between looking at you and at the Rembrandt in the Metropolitan, and I chose you." As she held Gerty from her for an instant and then drew her into her embrace again, Kemper saw that her delight in her friend's beauty was almost a rapture, that her friendship possessed something of a religious fervour.