The Wheel of Life

IN WHICH FAILURE IS CROWNED BY FAILURE

At one o'clock, when Adams left his office to go home to luncheon—a custom which he had not allowed himself to neglect since Connie's illness—he found Mr. Wilberforce just about to enter the building from the front on Union Square.

"Ah, I've caught you as I meant to," exclaimed the older man, with the cordial enthusiasm which Adams had always found so delightful. "It's been so long a time since I had a talk with you that I hope you'll come out somewhere to lunch?"

"I only wish I could manage it," replied Adams, "but I must look in for a minute on Mrs. Adams—she's been ill, you know."

He saw the surprise reflected in his companion's face as he had seen it a little earlier in Laura's; and at the same instant he felt a sensation of annoyance because of his inability to act upon his impulse of hospitality. He would have liked to take Mr. Wilberforce home with him; but remembering the probable quality of the luncheon which awaited him, he repressed the inclination.

"Is that so? I'm sorry to hear it," remarked the other in the conventional tone in which Adams' friends always spoke of Connie. "Well, I'll walk a block or two with you in your direction," he added as they turned toward Broadway. "Laura told me, by the way, that she was so fortunate as to have a glimpse of you this morning."

Adams nodded and then looked quickly away from the other's searching eyes. "Yes, we met rather early in the street," he responded; "she seems to me to be looking very well, and yet she's altered, somehow—I can't say exactly how or where."

"Then you've noticed it," returned Mr. Wilberforce, with a sigh, and he asked almost immediately: "Does she appear to you to be happier than she was?"

"Happier? Well, perhaps, but I hardly analysed the impression she produced. There was a change in her, that was all I saw."

"Did she speak to you, I wonder, of her book?"

Adams laughed softly. "She spoke of it to say that she was tired of it," he answered, "but that is only the inevitable reaction of youth—it's a part of the universal rhythm of thought, nothing more."

Mr. Wilberforce shook his head a little doubtfully. "I wish I could feel so confident," he returned, while a quick impatience—almost a contempt awoke in Adams' mind. Was it possible that this man beside him, with his white hairs, his blanched skin, his benign old-world sentiments, was, like Trent, a mere worshipper of the literary impulse in its outward accomplishment? Did he love the poet in the woman rather than the woman in the poet? As Adams turned to look at him, he thought, not without a certain grim humour, that he beheld another victim to the vice of sentimentality; and in his mental grouping he placed his companion among those who, like Connie, were in bondage to the images of their imaginations.

"And yet even if she should cease to write poems she will always live one," he added lightly.

"Yes, she will still be herself," agreed Mr. Wilberforce, but his words carried no conviction of comfort; and when he turned at the corner to take his car, it was with the air of a man oppressed by the weight of years.

When Adams reached home he found Connie, dressed in her blue velvet with the little twinkling aigrette, on the point of starting for an afternoon drive with her nurse in the Park. The events of the night had been entirely effaced from her mind by the newer interests of the day; and as he looked at her in amazement, it seemed to him that she bore a greater resemblance to the rosy girl he had first loved than she had done for many weary and heart-sick months. When he left her, presently, to go back to his office, it was with a feeling of hopefulness which entered like an infusion of new blood into his veins. The relapse might have been, after all, less serious than he had at first believed, and Connie's cure might become soon not only a beautiful dream, but an accomplished good. He thought of the sacrifices he had made for it—not begrudgingly, but with a generous thankfulness that he had been permitted to pay the cost—thought of the sleepless nights, the neglected work, the nervous exhaustion which had followed on the broken laws of health. At the moment he regretted none of these things, because the end, which he already saw foreshadowed in his mental vision, seemed to him to be only the crowning of his last few weeks. Even the bodily and moral redemption of Connie appeared no longer difficult in the illumination of his mood; for his compassion, in absorbing all that was vital in his nature, seemed possessed suddenly of the effectiveness of a dynamic force.

"Already she is better," he thought, hopefully; "I see it in her face—in her hands even, and when she is entirely cured the craving for excitement will leave her and we shall be at peace again. Peace will be very like happiness," he said to himself, and then, with the framing of the sentence, he stopped in his walk and smiled. "Peace is happiness," he added after a moment, "for certainly pleasure is not." With the words he remembered the bitter misery of Connie who had lived for joy alone—the utter disenchantment of Arnold Kemper, who had made gratified impulse the fulfilling of his law of life. Back and forth swung the oscillation between fugitive desire and outward possession—between the craving of emptiness and the satiety of fulfilment—and yet where was the happiness of those who lived for happiness alone? Where was even the mere animal contentment? "Is it only when one says to Fate 'take this—and this as well—take everything and leave me nothing. I can do without'—that one really comes into the fulness of one's inheritance of joy? Was this what Christ meant when he said to His disciples 'Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you?' In renunciation was there, after all, not the loss of one's individual self, but the gain of an abundance of life."

The afternoon passed almost before he was aware of it, and when he finished his work and drew on his overcoat, he saw, as he glanced through his office window, that it was already dusk. As he reached the entrance to the elevator, he found Perry Bridewell awaiting him inside, and he kept, with an effort, his too evident surprise from showing in his face.

"Why, this is a treat that doesn't happen often!" he exclaimed with heartiness.

"I was passing and found you were still here, so I dropped in to walk up with you," explained Perry, but there was a note in his voice which caused the other to glance at him quickly with a start.

"Are you ill, old man?" asked Adams, for Perry appeared at his first look to have gone deadly white. "Is there anything that I can do? Would you like to come up and talk things over?"

Perry shook his head with a smile which cast a sickly light over his large, handsome face. "Oh, I'm perfectly well," he responded, "I need to stretch my legs a bit, that's all."

"You do look as if you wanted exercise," commented Adams, as they left the building; "too much terrapin has put your liver wrong, I guess."

At the corner, they passed a news-stand, and as Adams stopped for his evening paper, he noticed again the nervous agony which afflicted Perry during the brief delay.

"Look here, what's up, now?" he enquired, holding his paper in his hand when they started on again, "are you in any trouble and can I help to get you out? I'll do anything you like except play the gallant, and I only draw the line at that because of my temperamental disability. So, something is wrong?" he added gayly, "for you haven't even observed the pretty woman ahead there in the pea-green bonnet."

"Oh, I'm not in any mess just now," replied Perry, with a big, affectionate shake like that of a wet Newfoundland dog.

Adams threw a keener glance at him. "No scrape about a woman, then?" he asked, with the tolerant sympathy which had made him so beloved by his own sex.

"Oh, Lord, no," ejaculated Perry, with a fervour too convincing to be assumed.

"And you haven't lost in Wall Street?"

"On the other hand I made a jolly deal."

"Well, I give it up," remarked Adams cheerfully; then as he spoke, the glare from an electric light fell full upon the headlines of the folded paper in his hand, and he came to a halt so sudden that Perry, falling back to keep step with him, felt himself spinning like a wound up top.

"My God!" said Adams, in a voice so low that it barely reached Perry's ears. An instant later a quick animal passion—the passion of the enraged male—entered into his tone and he walked quickly across the pavement to the sheltering dusk of a cross street. "May God damn him for this!" he cried in a hoarse whisper.

Following rapidly in his footsteps, Perry caught up behind him, and made an impulsive, nerveless clutch at the unfolded paper. "I knew you'd see it; so I wanted to be along with you," he said in a voice like that of a tragic schoolboy.

Adams turned to him immediately, with a restraint which had succeeded his first quivering exclamation. "So you knew that Brady's wife meant to sue for a divorce?" he asked.

Perry bowed his head—in the supreme crisis of experience he had always found the simple truth to be invested with the dignity of an elaborate lie. "I had heard it rumoured," was what he said.

"And that my wife—"

"I'll swear I never believed it," broke in Perry, with a violent assurance.

From the emotion in his voice one would have supposed him, rather than Adams, to be the injured husband; and the fact was that he probably suffered more at the instant than he had ever done in the whole course of his comfortable life.

"Well, I suppose I ought to be very much obliged to you," replied Adams, with an agonised irony to the injustice of which Perry was perfectly indifferent, "but I can't see that it matters much so long as the thing is true."

"But it's a lie," protested Perry with energy. "I mean the whole damned business."

"What isn't?" demanded Adams bitterly, as he stuffed the crumpled paper into the pocket of his coat. Then, stopping again as they reached a crossing, he held out his hand and enclosed Perry's in a cordial grip.

"I'm very grateful to you," he said; "but if you don't mind, I think I'll walk about a bit alone. I've got to think things over." He hesitated a moment and then added quietly, "I know you'll stand by me whatever comes?"

"Stand by you!" gasped Perry, and the sincere response of his whole impressionable nature brought two large, round tear drops to his eyes; "by Jove! I'd stand it for you!"

For an instant Adams looked at him in silence, while his familiar smile flickered about his mouth. Then he reached out his hand for another grip, before he turned away and walked rapidly into the dim light of the cross street.

"I must walk about and think things out a bit," he found himself saying presently in his thoughts; "there's a tangle somewhere—I can't pull it out."

Stopping under a light he drew the newspaper from his pocket, but as he unfolded it, one of Connie's wild letters to Brady flashed before his eyes; and crushing the open sheet in his hand, he flung it from him out into the gutter. The darkness afforded what seemed to him a physical shelter for his rage, and as he turned toward it, he felt his first blind instinct for violent action give place to a kind of emotional chaos, in which he could barely hear the thunder of his own thoughts. He knew neither what he believed nor what he suffered; his power to will and his power to think were alike suspended, and he was conscious only of a curious deadness of sensation, amid which his ironic devil, standing apart, asked with surprise why he did not suffer more—why his anger was not the greater, his restraint the less? His philosophy, at the moment, had turned to quicksand beneath his feet; and it was this utter failure of himself which forced upon him the anguish of readjustment, the frenzied striving after a clearer mental vision. As he hurried breathlessly along the narrow, dimly lighted street into which he had turned, he felt instinctively that he was groping blindly for some way back into his former illumination, for some finer knowledge of spirit, which at present he did not appear to possess. Not to act upon brute impulse, but to listen in agony until he heard the voice of reason above the storm of his passion—until he heard the soul speaking beyond the senses—this was the one urgent need he felt himself to be aware of—the one intelligent purpose that remained with him through his flight.

"No—I have failed and it is all over," was the first distinct thought that he framed. "By her own act she has put the last barrier between us. She is my wife no longer, for, through herself, she has brought disgrace upon us both." Again he remembered the sacrifices he had made for her, not with the generous rejoicing of the morning, but with a fierce bitterness which was like a bodily hurt. "She is no longer my wife," he repeated; "nor am I her husband—for by her own sin she has made me free." Yet the word carried no conviction to his conscience, and he knew, in spite of his assurance, that nothing had happened since yesterday to change the relations between Connie and himself—that if he had pitied her then there was only the double reason why he should pity her now. Had this added wrong made her less helpless? had it put moral fibre into her heart? "All this had happened yesterday—had happened even six months ago, yet last night I sat by her bed—I was filled with sympathy—and was it only because I was in ignorance then of something which I know now? Yesterday I sacrificed for her both my rest and my work, but was she worthier of pity at that hour than she is at this. She has not changed since, nor has the thing which I have just discovered; it is only I who am different because it is I alone who have come into knowledge of the evil."

He thought of the hideousness of it all—of the punishment that awaited her, of her convulsed face, of her violent gestures, and even of the pale pink chiffon gown, which made her resemble a crushed blossom as she lay upon the bed. That was only last night, and yet in the reality of experience a thousand years had intervened in his soul since then.

The next instant he remembered again, with a throb of exhilaration that he was free. By her own act she had given him back his freedom—she had returned him to his life and to his work. As for her if she chose to fall back into her old bondage, who was there in heaven or on earth that could hold him to account? Every law that had been made by man since the beginning of law was upon his side; and every law declared to him that he was free. Free! The word went like the intoxication of joy to his head; then, even while the exhilaration lasted, he shivered and came abruptly to a halt.

From the light of the crossing a woman had come close to him and touched him upon the arm, making her immemorial appeal with a sickening coquetry in her terrible eyes. She was, doubtless, but the ordinary creature of her class, yet coming as she did upon the brief rapture of his recovered liberty, she appeared as a visible answer to the question he had asked his soul. He shook his head and walked on a few steps; then coming back again he gave her the money that was in his pocket.

"Is this the message?" he put to himself as he turned away. "Is this the message, or is it only the ugly hallucination of my nerves?" With an effort he sought to shake the image from him, but in spite of his closed mind it still seemed to him that he saw Connie's future looking back at him from the woman's terrible eyes. "And yet what have I to do with that woman or she with Connie?" he demanded. "I have so far as I am aware never injured either in my life, nor by any act of mine have I helped to make my wife what she is to-day—one with that creature in the street and with her kind. The law acquits me. Religion acquits me. My own conscience acquits me more than all." But the argument was vain and empty so long as he saw Connie's future revealed to him through the eyes of the harlot he had left at the crossing. The helplessness of ignorance, of the will that desired to will the good, came over him at the moment and he could have cried aloud in his terror because his soul had reached the boundaries between its angel and its devil. In his decision he appeared to himself to stand absolutely solitary and detached—put away from all help from humanity or from human creeds. The law courts told him nothing, nor did religion—then, at the instant of his sharpest despair of knowledge, there came back to him, as in a vision of light, the scene two thousand years ago in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper. The people passing about him in the street became suddenly but shadows, even the noise of the cars no longer broke in confusion upon his ears; and in the midst of the silence in which he stood, he heard the Voice as Simon had heard it then: "I have somewhat to say unto thee."

A moment afterward the vision was gone, and he looked round him dazed by the flashing of the lights. "What does it matter about my life which is almost over?" he asked. "I will help Connie, so far as I have strength, to bear her sin against me—and as for the rest it is nothing to me any more." Then, as the resolution took shape in his mind, he was conscious of a feeling of restfulness, of a relief so profound that it pervaded him to the smallest fibre of his being. The whole situation had changed at the instant; his offended honour was no longer offended, nor was his righteous anger still righteous. Though the naked truth must face him in all its brutishness, he knew, from the feeling within him, that by an act of thought, which was not an act, he had drawn the sting of the poisoned arrow from his wound. Not only had the bitterness passed from his shame, but there had come, with the relinquishment of the idea of personal wrong, a swift rush of exaltation, like a strong wind, through his soul. Almost unconsciously he had yielded his will into the hands of God, and immediately, as in the prophecy "all these things had been added" unto the rest.

Turning at once he walked rapidly in the direction of his house, while a clock in a tower across the way pointed to the stroke of nine o'clock. The bodily exertion had begun to wear upon him during the last few minutes. His feet ached and there was a bruised feeling in all his muscles. When he came at last to his own door the sensation of fatigue had blotted out the acuteness of his perceptions.

The lights were blazing in the hall; there was evidently an unusual commotion among the servants; and as he entered, Connie's nurse came to meet him with a white and startled face.

"Have you seen Mrs. Adams?" she asked hastily. "She separated from me in a shop and though I searched for her for hours, I could not find her."

For a breathless pause he stared at her in bewildered horror; then his eyes fell upon a note lying conspicuously on the hall table, and he took it up and tore it open before he answered. The words on the paper were few, and after reading them, he folded the sheet again and replaced it in the envelope. For an instant longer he still hesitated, swallowing down the sensation of dryness in his throat.

"She will not come back to-night," he said quietly at last; "she has gone away for a few days."

Then turning from the vacant curiosity in the assembled faces, he went into his study and shut himself alone in the room in which the memory of his dead child still lived.

"THE SMALL OLD PATH"

"Her letters of course gave her away," observed Gerty thoughtfully, as she smoothed her long glove over her arm and looked at Laura with the brilliant cynicism which belonged to her conspicuous loveliness, "Arnold says it is always the woman's letters, and I'm sure he ought to know."

"Why ought he to know?" asked Laura, turning with an impatient movement from the desk at which she sat. Her gaze hung on the soft white creases of kid that encircled Gerty's arm, but there was an abstraction in her look which put her friend at a chilling distance.

Gerty laughed. "Oh, I mean he's a man of the world and they always know things."

For an instant Laura did not respond, and during the brief silence her eyes were lifted from Gerty's arm to Gerty's face. "I sometimes think his worldliness is only a big bluff," she said at last.

"Well, I wouldn't trust his bluff too much, that's all," retorted Gerty.

A smothered indignation showed for a moment in Laura's glance. "But how do you know so much about him?" she demanded.

"I?—oh, I've had my fancy for him, who hasn't? He's like one of those éclair vanille one gets at Sherry's—they look substantial enough on the surface, but when one sticks in the fork there's nothing there but froth. He's really quite all right, you know, so long as you don't stick in the fork."

"But I thought you liked him!" protested Laura, pushing back her chair and rising angrily to her feet.

"I do—I love him—but that's for myself, darling, not for you."

"Do you mean me to think," persisted Laura in a voice that was tense with horrified amazement, "that you are jealous of me?"

A long pause followed her words, for Gerty, instead of replying to the question had turned to the window and was staring out upon the bared trees in Gramercy Park. The quiet of it for the moment was almost like the quiet of the country, and the two women who loved each other seemed suddenly divided by miles of silent misunderstanding. Then, with a resolute movement, Gerty looked full into Laura's face, while the light flashed upon a mist of tears that hung over her reproachful eyes.

"Oh, Laura, Laura!" she said softly.

With a cry of remorse Laura threw herself upon her knees beside the window, kissing the gloved hands in Gerty's lap.

But Gerty had wiped her tears away and sat smiling her little worldly smile of knowledge. "I am jealous of you, but not in the way you meant," she answered. "I am jealous for myself, for the one little bit of me that is really alive—the part of myself that is in you. I am afraid to go over again with you the old road that I went over with myself—the old wanting, wanting, wanting that ends in nothing."

"But why should I go over it?" asked Laura, from her knees, and the flush in her face coloured all her manner with a fine deception.

Gerty's mocking gayety rang back into her voice. "You might as well ask me why I am still fool enough to be in love with Perry," she returned with her flippant laugh, "it's a part of what Arnold calls 'the damnable contradiction of life.' You might as well ask Connie Adams why she was born bad?"

"Was she—and how do you know it?" demanded Laura.

"I don't know." Gerty's shrug was exquisitely indifferent. "But it's more charitable, I fancy, to suppose so. Have you seen Roger, by the bye?"

Laura shook her head. "I would rather not. There is nothing one could say."

"Oh, I don't know—one might congratulate him on his liberation, and that's something. I dare say he'll have to get a divorce now, though Perry says he hates them."

"Then I don't believe he'll do it, he doesn't live by the ordinary ethics of the rest of us, you know. Will she marry Brady, do you think?"

"Marry Brady? My blessed innocent, Brady wouldn't marry her. He has about as much moral responsibility as a fig tree that puts forth thistles—and besides who could blame him? She's half crazy already from cocaine, and no man on earth could stand her for a month."

No man on earth! Laura leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes, for she remembered the figure of Roger Adams as he moved away from her through the sunlight in the crowded street. She saw his worn clothes, his resolute walk, and the patience which belonged to the infinite stillness in his face; and, for one breathless moment, she seemed to feel the approach of the spirit which worked silently amid the humming material things that made up life.

Gerty had risen and was fastening her white furs at her throat. "I must go to Camille's," she said, "for she has just got in some new French gowns and she has promised to give me the first look. Of course, one can't really trust her," she added suspiciously, "and I shouldn't be in the least surprised to find that she'd let Ada Lawley get ahead of me. It is simply marvellous how that woman always manages to produce a striking effect. She was at the opera last night in peacock blue when every other woman was wearing that dead, lustreless white. Do you know I sometimes wonder if I follow the fashion almost too closely."

"You could never look like any one else so it doesn't matter."

"And yet I spend two-thirds of my time trying to extinguish the little individuality I possess," laughed Gerty, as she turned upon the threshold. "I wear the same wave in my hair, the same colour in my gown, the same length to my gloves. Oh, you fortunate dear, thank heaven you have never kept a fashion!"

She went out with her softened merriment, while Laura, throwing herself into the chair beside the window, looked down upon the carriage which was waiting before the door. After a moment she saw Gerty come out and cross the sidewalk, lifting her velvet skirt until she showed a beautifully shod foot and a glimpse of black embroidered stocking. She gave a few careless directions to the footman who arranged her rugs, and then as the carriage door closed, she leaned out with her brilliant smile and waved her hand to Laura at the window above. The winter sunlight seemed to pass away with her when at last she turned the corner.

With a sigh Laura's thoughts followed the carriage, envying the beauty and the fashion of her friend for the first time in her life. A strange fascination enveloped the world in which Gerty lived, and the old familiar atmosphere through which she herself had moved so tranquilly was troubled suddenly as if by an approaching storm. The things which she had once loved now showed stale and profitless to her eyes, while those external objects of fortune, to which she had always believed herself to be indifferent, were endowed at the moment with an extraordinary and unreal value. It was as if her whole nature had undergone some powerful physical convulsion, which had altered not only her outward sensibilities but the obscure temperamental forces which controlled in her the laws of attraction and repulsion. What she had liked yesterday she was frankly wearied of to-day. What she had formerly hated she now found to be full of a mysterious charm. Books bored her, and her mind, in spite of her effort at restraint, dwelt longingly upon the trivial details which made up Gerty's life—upon those bodily adornments on which her friend had staked her chance of married happiness. The endless round of dressmakers, shops, and feverish emulation appeared strangely full of interest; and her own quiet life showed to her as utterly destitute of that illusory colour of romance which she found in her vision of Gerty's and of every other existence except her own. She beheld her friend moving in a whirl of colour, through perpetual laughter, and the picture fascinated her, though she knew that in the naked reality of things Gerty was far more unhappy than she herself. Yet Gerty's unhappiness appeared to her to be distinguished by the element of poetry in which her own was lacking.

A terrible ennui possessed her, the restless desire for a change that would obliterate not only the circumstances in which she was placed, but even the personal fact of her own identity. She wanted an experience so fresh that it would be like a new birth—a resurrection—and yet she could tell neither what this experience would be nor why she wanted it. All that she was clearly aware of was that her surroundings, her family, her friends, the small daily events of her life and her own dissatisfaction, had become stale and repugnant to her mood, and she thought of the day before her as of a gray waste of utterly intolerable hours.

"Nothing will happen in it that has not happened every twenty-four hours since I was born," she said; "it is always the same—everything is the same, and it is this monotony that seems to me insupportable. As I sit here at this window I feel it to be impossible that I should ever drag myself through the remainder of this afternoon, and through the evening which will be like every other evening that I have spent. Aunt Rosa will repeat her exhaustless jokes, Aunt Angela will make her old complaints, Uncle Percival will begin to play upon his flute." And these things when she thought of them—the stories of Mrs. Payne, the despair of Angela, the piping of Uncle Percival's flute—appeared to her to exact a power of moral endurance which she felt herself no longer to possess. A disgust more terrible than grief seized upon her—a revolt from the commonplace which she knew to be worse than tragedy.

Then in the midst of her depression she remembered that on the following afternoon she would see Arnold Kemper, and the hours appeared instantly to open into the light. The end of everything was there just twenty-four hours ahead, and she felt, like a physical agony, the necessity to stifle the consciousness of time, to kill the minutes, one by one, as they crept slowly into sight. She thought of the meeting in this very room, of the gown that she would wear, of the words that she would speak, of the curious exquisite mixture of attraction and repulsion, of the ardent tenderness she would find in his look. This tenderness, she felt, was the solitary expression of the real man—of the man whom Gerty had never known, whom Madame Alta had not so much as glimpsed; and the assurance produced in her a secret rapture which was all the sweeter for being exclusively her own. She wondered where he was at the instant—how he would pass the hours which dragged so heavily for her—and the interest which had vanished so strangely from her own existence attached itself immediately to his. The people he knew, the club he went to, even the motor cars he drove, were surrounded in her thoughts with a fresh and vivid charm. Apart from this there was no longer any charm—hardly any animation about the life she led. A single idea had enlarged itself at the cost of all the others, and she had a sense of standing amid a desert waste, in the drab miles of which a solitary palm-tree flourished.

"And yet why should I hunger for his presence and what is there in it when it comes that is worth this wanting?" she asked in dismay of her own longing. "When I am away from him I think of nothing except of the hour when I shall see him again, and yet when the meeting comes I am not happy and he is always a little different from what I hoped that he would be. I have no particular satisfaction when I see him, but when he goes the longing and the dream begin again and I build up other ideals of him which he will destroy the first time that we come together. Is it because I have never really got to the thing that he is eternally—to the soul of him—that he creates in me this agony of expectancy and of disappointment? When I meet him to-morrow may it not happen that for the first time he will fulfill all the ideals of him that I have made?"

And it seemed to her almost impossible that she should wait the twenty-four intervening hours before making her final discovery—that she should exist a day and a night in utter vacancy while the ultimate moment still beckoned her from to-morrow. Would time never pass? Was there no way of strangling it before it came to birth? She picked up her favourite books from her desk—Spinoza, Shelley, "The Imitation of Christ"—but the throbbing vitality in her own breast caused the printed pages to turn chill and lifeless.

A mirror was placed over the mantel and she looked closely into it, meeting her profound gaze and the poetic charm which hung like an atmosphere about her delicate figure. She felt at the instant that she would have given her life—her soul even and its infinite possibilities—for an exterior of Gerty's brilliant beauty. The blackness of her hair, the prominence of her brow, the faint amber pallor of her skin, provoked her into a sensation of anger; and she turned away with an emotion that was almost one of bitterness. A minute later it seemed to her that the afternoon would pass more quickly if she spent it out of doors, and as she slipped into her walking clothes she thought with relief of the crowded streets and of the noises that would drown the consciousness of her own thoughts. When Angela called to her as she passed along the hall it was with a movement of irritation that she turned the handle of the door and entered the invalid's room, where the pale winter sunshine fell over the tall white candles and uncarpeted floor.

Mrs. Payne, in her black velvet and old rose point, sat by the window reading aloud in her shrill voice extracts from a society paper which she had brought for the purpose of entertaining her sister. In the conventual atmosphere in which Angela lived the biting scandals and malicious gossip of the worldly old woman always produced upon Laura an impression of mere vulgar insincerity. To have lived over seventy years and still to find one's chief interest in the social indiscretions of one's neighbours was a fact which would have been pathetic had it been less ridiculous. Tottering reluctantly to her grave, in the centre of a universe filled with a million mysteries of dead and living suns, she was absorbed to the exclusion of all larger matters in the question as to whether or not "Tom Marbury had compromised Mrs. Billy Pearce?"

"As if it mattered," sighed Angela from her couch. "As if it really mattered to me in the least."

Mrs. Payne fixed upon her a painted pair of eyes set in lustreless vacancy between two flashing diamond earrings. "That's because you live so out of the world, my dear," she observed, "that you have ceased to feel any longer a rational interest in life."

"But is life all somebody's impropriety?" enquired Angela, with the meekness of a child.

"It is that—or charities," returned Mrs. Payne. "You may take your choice between the two. It was only after I failed to interest you in our day nursery that I turned to the social news."

"But you haven't tried the sports," suggested Laura, with a laugh, while she felt the presence of her aunts to have become an intolerable burden.

Mrs. Payne raised her blackened eyebrows, and sat smoothing out the crumpled paper with her claw-like jewelled fingers. It seemed to Laura that she wore her body to-day as if it were a tattered, yet industriously mended garment for which her indomitable spirit would soon have no further use. Everything about her was youthful except the flesh which wrapped her, and that was hideously, was grotesquely ancient. Yet she had once been both a beauty and a belle, famed for her quick affairs and her careful indiscretions; and as Laura watched her she saw in this living decay but the inevitable end and weariness of pleasure. Of her many lovers, which remained to her to-day? With the multiplied sensations of her youth what had her loveless age to do? She had hardly laid up even a sweetness of memories, or why did she feast upon uncovered scandals as a vulture upon carrion?

"What poor dear Angela needs is an object in life—a passion," remarked Mrs. Payne, picking up her gold-rimmed eye glasses which hung on a little jewelled chain from her bosom. "I used to say that when I got too old for an emotion I wanted to be chloroformed, but I found, thank heaven, that with care one's emotions may last one pretty well to one's eightieth year. When men fail one cards are left, and after cards, I daresay, there would come gossip. It is for this reason," she pursued with conviction, "that I am trying to persuade Angela to take up a little bridge."

"A little bridge!" gasped Laura, and from sheer amazement she sat down on the foot of Angela's couch.

"I was considering the moral support of it, of course," resumed Mrs. Payne. "First of all I would advise some inspiring religious conviction, but as religion does not appeal to her, I suggested bridge."

"It might as well be white rabbits, I don't see the difference," protested Angela, rolling over upon her side with a despairing movement of fatigue.

"The difference, my dear, is that white rabbits are dirty little beasts," observed the elder woman.

Angela lay back upon her sofa and regarded her sister with a smile sharp and cold as the edge of a knife. "I wonder why you were more fortunate than I, Rosa," she said, after a pause, "for in my heart I was always a better woman."

Mrs. Payne laughed her hard little mirthless laugh, and stretched out her withered hand with a melodramatic gesture. "But I was never a fool, my dear," was her retort, "and there are few women of whom it can be said with truth that they were never at any time, from the beginning to the end of their career, a fool. Nobody is a fool always, but there are very few people who escape it throughout their lives."

"Oh, I was," sighed Angela submissively, "I know it, but I was punished."

"It is the one thing for which we can count quite certainly upon being punished in this life," remarked Mrs. Payne, with a kind of moral satisfaction, as of one who was ranged upon the side of worldliness if not of righteousness. "Other sins are for eternity, I suppose, but I have never yet seen a fool escape the deserts of his folly. It is the one reason which has always made me believe so firmly in an overruling Providence. Are you going out, my child?" she asked, as Laura rose.

"I am stifling for want of air," replied the girl, shrinking away from the unnatural flash of her aunt's eyes. "I'll read to aunt Angela when I come in, but just now I must get out." Then as Mrs. Payne still sought to detain her, she broke away and ran rapidly down into the street.

But she was no sooner out of doors than it seemed to her that she ought to have stayed in her room—that the minutes would have passed more swiftly in unbroken quiet. Her senses were absorbed in the single desire to have the day over—to begin to-morrow; and it seemed to her that when once the night was gone, she would be able to collect her thoughts with clearness, that the morning would bring some lucid explanation of the disturbance that she felt to-day. Then it occurred to her that she would follow Gerty's example and seek a distraction in the shops, and she took a cab and drove to her milliner's, where she tried on a number of absurdly impossible hats. She bought one at last, to realise immediately as she left the shop that she would never persuade herself to wear it because she felt that it gave her an air of Gerty's "smartness" which sat like an impertinence upon her own individual charm. Glancing at her watch she found that only two hours had gone since she left the house, and turning up the street she walked on with a step which seemed striving to match in energy her rapid thoughts.

"You have effaced every other impression of my life," he had said to her yesterday; and as she repeated the words she remembered the quiver of his mouth under his short brown moustache, the playful irony of the smile that had met her own. Had he meant more or less than the spoken phrase? Was the strength of his handclasp sincere? Or was the caressing sound of his voice a lie, as Gerty believed? Was he, in truth, fighting under all the shams of life for the liberation of his soul? or was there only the emptiness of sense within him, after all? She felt his burning look again, and flinched at the memory. "Every glance, every gesture, every word speaks to me of things which he cannot utter, which are unutterable," and yet even with the assurance she felt as if she were living in an obscure and painful dream—as if the element of unreality were a part of his smile, of his voice, of the feverish longing from which she told herself that she would presently awake. It was as if she moved an illusion among illusions, and yet felt the unreal quality of herself and of the things outside.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGO

He came punctually at three o'clock on the following afternoon, and even as he entered the room, she was conscious of a slight disappointment because, in some perfectly indefinable way, he was different from what she had hoped that he would be.

"This is the first peaceful moment I have had for twenty-four hours," he remarked, as he flung himself into a chair before the small wood fire; "a man I knew was inconsiderate enough to die and make me the guardian of his son, and I've had to overhaul the chap's property almost before the funeral was over."

A frown of nervous irritation wrinkled his forehead, but as he turned to her it faded quickly before the kindling animation in his look. "By Jove, I've thought of you every single minute since I was here," he pursued. "What a persistent way you have of interfering with a fellow's peace of mind. I've known nothing like it in my life."

"I hope at least I didn't damage the property," she observed, and almost with the words she wondered why she had longed so passionately yesterday for his presence. Now that he had come she felt neither the delight of realised expectation nor the final peace of renouncement.

"Well, it wasn't your fault if you didn't," he replied, leaning his head against the chair-back and looking at her with his intimate and charming smile. "I had to fight hard enough to keep you out even of the stocks. Was I as much in your way, I wonder?"

She shook her head. "In my way? I wouldn't allow it. Why should I?"

"Why, indeed?" his genial irony was in his glance and he held her gaze until she felt the warm blood mount swiftly to her forehead. "Why, indeed unless you wanted to?" he laughed.

His eyes moved to the window, and she followed the large, slightly coarsened features of his profile and the fullness of his jaw which lent a suggestion of brutality to his averted face. Was it possible that she found an attraction in mere animal vitality? She wondered; then his caressing glance was turned upon her, and she forgot to ask herself the useless question.

"So I must presume, then, that I haven't disturbed you?" he enquired gayly.

Her eyes lingered upon him for a moment before she answered. "Oh, no, it wasn't you, it was Gerty," she replied.

He drew nearer until the arm of his chair touched her own. "I thought at least that my character was safe with Gerty," he exclaimed, not without the annoyance of an easily aroused vanity.

"I don't know what you'd think about the danger," she returned with seriousness, "but I simply hate the kind of things she told me."

His frown returned with gathered energy. "Is that so? What were they?"

"Oh, I don't know—nothing definite—but about women generally."

"Women! Pshaw! You're the only woman. There isn't any other on the earth."

Her hand lay on the arm of her chair, and he reached out and grasped her wrist, not gently, but with a violent pressure. "I'll swear there isn't another woman in existence," he exclaimed.

An electric current started from his fingers through the length of her arm; she felt it burning into her flesh as it travelled quickly from her wrist to her heart. For one breathless moment she was conscious of his presence as of a powerful physical force, and the sensation came to her that she was being lifted from her feet and swept blindly out into space. Then, drawing slightly away, she released herself from his grasp.

"I give you fair warning that if you repeat that for the third time, I shall believe it," she retorted coolly.

"I'm trying to make you," he returned in a strained voice. "Why are you such a sceptic, I wonder," he added as he fell back into his chair. "Can't you tell the real thing when you come across it?"

"The real thing?" Her words were almost a whisper.

"Are you so used to shams that you don't recognise a man's love when you see it?"

She leaned toward him, her black brows drawn together with the sombre questioning look which had always fascinated him by its strangeness. Beyond the look, what was there? he asked with an intense and eager curiosity. What passionate surprises existed in her? What secret suggestions of a still undiscovered charm? The wonder of her temperament rose before him, exquisite, remote, alluring, and he felt the appeal she made thrill like the spirit of adventure through his blood. Again he stretched out his hand, but with a frown he drew it back before it touched her.

"Can't you see that I love you?" he said with an angry hoarseness.

His face, his voice, the gesture of his outstretched hand startled her into a quick feeling of terror, and she shrank back with a childlike movement of alarm. Where was her dream, she demanded with an instinctive repulsion, if this was the only living reality of love? Then his face changed abruptly beneath her look, and as the strong tenderness of his smile enveloped her, she was conscious of a sudden ecstasy of peace.

"Did I frighten you?" he asked, smiling.

She shook her head, resting her fingers for an instant upon his hand. "I don't believe you could frighten me if you tried," she answered.

He raised his eyebrows with his characteristic blithe interrogation, "Well, I shouldn't like to try, that's all."

"I give you leave—my courage is my shield."

"But I don't want to frighten you." His voice was softer than she had ever heard it. "We aren't afraid of those we love, you know."

"Why should I love you?" she enquired gayly.

His pleasant irony was in his laugh. "Because you can't help yourself—you're obliged to—it's your fate."

She frowned slightly. "I have no fate except the one I make for myself."

He bent toward her and this time his hand closed with determination upon hers. "Well, you may make me what you please," he said.

Her hand fluttered like an imprisoned bird in his grasp, but he held it with a pressure which sent the blood tingling sharply to the ends of her fingers. His strength hurt her and yet she found a curious pleasure in the very acuteness of her sensations.

"There's no use fighting," he said with a short laugh, "we can't help ourselves. You'll have to marry me, so you may as well give in."

His tone was mocking, but she felt his tenderness as she had felt it a moment before, resistless and enveloping. As she smiled up at him, he bent quickly forward and kissed her brow and eyes and mouth, then lifting her chin he kissed, also, the soft fulness of her throat. When she put up her hands in protest, he crushed them back upon her bosom by the strength of his lips.

She closed her eyes, yielding for one breathless instant to the passion of his embrace. Her dream and her longing melted swiftly into realisation, and she told herself that the agony of joy was sharper than that of grief. This was like nothing that she had imagined, and she felt an impulse to fly back into the uncertainty that she had left—to gain time in which to prepare for the happiness which she told herself was hers. Yet was it happiness? Her soul trembled as if from some almost imperceptible shock of disillusionment, and she knew again the sense of unreality which had come to her in the street on the day before. Again she felt that she was in the midst of a singularly vivid dream from which she would presently awake to life—and this dream seemed the result of her dual nature, as if even her emotions belonged less to her real existence than to an unconscious projection of thought.

The impulse to escape re-awoke in her, and yet she was clearly aware that she would no sooner fly from him than her insatiable longing would drive her back anew. His attraction appeared strangely the greater as she withdrew the further from his actual presence, and she knew that if he were absent from her for a day the uncertainty that he aroused would become intolerable. "Does the soul that I see in him—the soul of which mine is but the reflection—really exist, or have I created an image out of mere emptiness?" she asked; and even with the thought it seemed to her that she saw a new seriousness—a profounder meaning in his face. Gerty had never touched the hidden springs, nor had any other woman except herself, and the knowledge of this gave her an ecstatic consciousness of power.

When she raised her eyes she saw that he had fallen back into his chair and was watching her intently with a puzzled and ardent look.

"You won't keep me hanging on for an eternity," he said, with the nervous contraction of his forehead she knew so well. "If we must go to the scaffold, let's go at once."

"To the scaffold?" She smiled at him for the purpose of prolonging the thrill of the uncertainty.

"Oh, I hate marriage, you know," he returned impatiently, "there's not another woman on earth who could get me into it."

She nodded. "Well, that is to be hoped if not believed."

He made an impulsive movement toward her. "Believe it or not, so long as you marry me," he exclaimed.

His flippancy grated upon her, and she turned from his words to the elusive earnestness which mocked at her from his face. If she might only arrest and hold this earnestness, then surely she might reach the depths of his nature and be at peace.

"It never seemed possible to me that I should marry a man who has had another wife," she said, with an emotion which was almost a regret for the old ideal of conduct from which she had slipped away.

"A wife! Nonsense!" She saw the indignant flash of his eyes and the nervous quiver of the hand with which he pulled at his short moustache. Though he did not touch her she felt instinctively that his personality had been put forth to overmaster her. "She was nothing but a schoolboy's folly, and I've forgotten that I ever knew her. She's safely married again now, so for heaven's sake, don't be foolish!"

"And how do you know that in ten years you will not have forgotten me?" she asked.

For a brief pause he did not reply; then he bent toward her and she hung for a rapturous instant upon the passionate denial in his face. The look that she loved and dreaded was in his eyes, and she struggled blindly in her own helplessness before it. He was so close to her that it seemed as if the breath were leaving her body in the intensity of the atmosphere she breathed.

"Forget you, my own sweetheart!" he exclaimed, and the trivial words were almost an offence against the emotional dignity of the moment.

She rose to her feet, stretching out her hand until she stood as if keeping him at a distance by the mere fragile tips of her fingers.

"If I love you, I shall love you very, very much," she said.

With a laugh he bent his lips against her hand. "You'll never love me half so much as I love you, you bit of thistledown," he answered.

"It will be either a great happiness or a greater misery," she went on, hesitating, retreating, as she withdrew her hands and pressed them upon her bosom.

"There's no misery any more—it is the beginning of life," he rejoined.

She laughed softly, a little tender, yielding laugh; then at the very instant when he would have caught her in his arms, she slipped quickly back until her desk came between them.

"You must give me time—I must think before I let myself care too much," she said.

In the end she gave him her promise and he went from her with a rare and vivid feeling of exhilaration. For the time he told himself that he wanted her more than he remembered ever to have wanted anything in his whole life; and his sated emotion of a man of pleasure, responded with all the lost intensity of youth. Was it credible that he was already middle-aged—was already growing a little bald? he demanded, with a genuine delight in the discovery that his senses were still alive.

On his way up to his rooms, he dropped, by habit, into his club, and after a word or two with several men whom he seldom met, he crossed over to join Perry Bridewell, who sat in an exhausted attitude in a leather chair beside the window. Outside a stream of carriages, containing richly dressed women moved up Fifth Avenue, dividing as it approached the mounted police at the corner, and Perry, as Kemper went up to him, was following with a dulled fish-like glance the pronounced figure of a lady who held the reins over a handsome pair of bays.

"That's a fine figure of a woman—look at her hips," he observed, with relish, as Kemper stopped beside him.

"I saw her yesterday. Gerty says she's terrific form," commented Kemper, gazing to where the object of their admiration vanished in a crush of vehicles.

"Oh, they always say that of a woman with any figure to speak of," remarked Perry. "Unless she's as flat as an ironing board, somebody is sure to say she's vulgar. For my part I like shape," he concluded with emphasis.

A vision of Gerty's slender, almost boyish figure, with its daring carriage, rose before Kemper, and he bit back the cynical laugh upon his lips. Did one require, after all, a certain restraint in life, a cultured abstinence before one could really appreciate the finer flavour of the aesthetic taste? His old aversion to marriage returned to him as he looked at Perry, sunk in his domestic satiety, and his exhilaration of a moment ago gave place to a corresponding degree of depression. He had done the irrevocable thing, and, as usual, it was no sooner irrevocable than the joyous seduction of it fled from his fancy. Marriage was utterly repugnant to him, and yet he knew not only that there was no withdrawing from his position, but that he would not wish to withdraw himself if he had the power. The instant that the possibility of losing Laura occurred to him, he felt again the full, resurgent wave of his desire. He wanted her, and if to marry her was the one way to possess her, then—the devil take it—marry her he would!

A tinted note was brought to Perry Bridewell, who, after reading it, sat twirling it between his fingers with a bored and discontented look on his handsome florid face.

"Take my advice, and when you get clear of an affair, keep out," he remarked, in a disgusted voice. "By Jove, I'm sometimes tempted to wish that I were as cold blooded as old Adams."

"Old Adams?" Kemper repeated the name, with a quickened interest. "Well, I'd hardly envy him his experience with the sex," he exclaimed.

"You would if you saw him—he simply never thinks about a woman so far as I know, and at least he's well enough rid of his wife, at last. She's on Brady's hands, thank heaven!"

Kemper shrugged his shoulders. "It serves her right, I suppose, but I shouldn't care to be on Brady's hands, that's all."

"Oh, he'll chuck her presently, you'll see."

"And afterward—" Kemper was leaning over Perry while he critically examined a pretty woman who was passing under the window.

"There's no afterward," laughed Perry; "you know how such women end."

As he glanced at the note again, the bored and discontented look came back upon his face, and he tore the envelope carelessly across and flung it with a jerk into the waste basket.

"Pshaw! it's all a confounded nuisance—the whole business of sex," he remarked as he rose to his feet. Then while the disgust still lingered in his expression, a servant entered and handed him a second note written upon the same faintly tinted paper. Immediately as if by magic his face was transfigured by the animated satisfaction of the conqueror, and instinctively his hand wandered to the ends of his fair moustache, to which he added an eloquent upward twirl. From the condition of a mere sullen and dejected animal—he sprang instantly into the victorious swagger of the complacent male.

"Sorry, but I'm in an awful hurry," he remarked in his usual hearty voice. "Look me up later in the evening and we'll have a game of billiards."

He went out, still twirling the fine ends of his moustache, and Kemper followed, after a short delay, to where his newest French motor car was waiting before the door.

A little later as he moved slowly amid the crush of vehicles in Fifth Avenue, it occurred to him that since Perry was so agreeably engaged, he might himself come in for a share of Gerty's society, and stopping before her door, he sent up a request that she would come with him for a short quick run up Riverside. Next to Laura herself he felt that he preferred Gerty because he knew that she would enter into a lively banter upon the subject that filled his thoughts, and his emotion was so fresh that there was a piquant charm in her sprightly allusion to the mere fact of its existence. When she came down at the end of a few minutes, wearing her long tan motoring coat and a fluttering white chiffon veil, he felt a quick impatience of the first casual phrases with which she leaned back in the car and settled her hanging draperies about her.

"Go as fast as you like," he said to the chauffeur, and then reaching into his pocket, he drew out his glasses and offered her a pair.

She shook her head, with an indignant gesture of refusal. "If I perish I perish, but I won't perish hideously!" she exclaimed.

With a laugh he slipped the elastic over his cap. "What a bore it must be always to keep beautiful," he remarked. "You can't imagine the positive delight there is in the freedom of ugliness."

"I dare say." She had turned her head to look at a passing carriage, and he saw the lovely delicacy of her profile through the blown transparent folds of her veil. "I shall know it some day," she added presently, "for after I've safely passed my fiftieth birthday, I mean never to look into a glass again. Then I'll break my mirrors and be really happy."

"No, you won't, my dear cousin," he rejoined, "for you'll continue to see yourself in Perry's eyes."

He watched with a sensation of pleasure the graceful shrug of her shoulders under her shapeless coat.

"Oh, there's no chance of that," she assured him; "he is always in them himself?"

The vague curiosity in his thoughts took form suddenly in words. "Where's he now, by the way, do you know?"

Her musical, empty laugh was as perfect as the indifferent glance she gave him. "Enjoying himself, I hope," she answered. "He hung around me until I sent him out in the sheer desperation of weariness."

Though her lashes did not quiver, he knew not only that she lied, but that she was perfectly aware of the assurance and extent of his knowledge. The hopeless gallantry of her deception appealed to the fighting spirit in his blood, and he found himself wondering foolishly if Laura could have played with so high an air the part of a neglected wife. To a man of his peculiarly eager temperament there existed a curious fascination in the idea of pushing to its limit of endurance an unalterable constancy. Would Laura have uttered her futile lies with so exquisite an insolence? or would she have acted in tears the patient Griselda in her closet? The virtue of truthfulness was the one he had most nearly associated with her, and it seemed to him impossible that she should stoop to shield herself behind a falsehood. Yet he could not dispel his curiosity as to how she would act in circumstances which he felt to be impossible and purely imaginary.

He wanted to speak of her to Gerty, but a restraint that was almost embarrassment kept him silent, and Gerty herself could not be induced to abandon her flippant satirical tone. So Laura was not mentioned between them; and he felt when at last he brought Gerty to her door again that, on the whole, the drive had been a disappointment. He had meant to seek her sympathy with his love for her friend, and instead he had been met by a fine, exquisite edge of cutting humour. For once he had felt the need to be wholly in earnest, and Gerty had taken nothing seriously, least of all the hint which he had dropped concerning the ultimate stability of his emotion. If she had got her heartache from his sex, he saw clearly that she meant to have her laugh on it as well; and the only remark from which she had let fall even momentarily her gay derision was in answer to some phrase of his in which had occurred the name of Roger Adams.

"Roger Adams!" she had echoed with a fleeting earnestness, "do you know I've always had a fancy that he is meant for Laura in another life."

"In another life?" he questioned merrily.

"Oh, things went crosswise here, you see," she answered, "but somewhere else, who knows? They may all be straightened out."

The question of Laura's possible fate in "another life" failed somehow to disturb him seriously; but as he drove presently down the darkening street, under the high electric lights, he found himself wondering vaguely why Gerty had so persistently associated her friend with Roger Adams.