“SPIRITUAL Life and the New Generation” lay meekly upon Mrs. Dodge’s desk for all the rest of that day, and nothing was added to it. Late in the afternoon Lily consented to take a little beef tea and toast in her room; but she was still uttering intermittent gurgles, like sobs too exhausted for a fuller expression, when her mother brought her tray to her—or perhaps Lily merely renewed the utterance of these sounds at sight of her mother—and all in all the latter had what she called “a day indeed of it!”

So she told Mr. Dodge upon his arrival from his office that evening. “Haven’t I, though!” she added, and gave him so vivid an account that, although he was tired, he got up from his easy chair and paced the floor.

“It comes back to the same old, everlasting question,” he said, when she had concluded. “What does she see in him? What on earth makes her act like that over this moron? There’s the question I don’t believe anybody can answer. She’s always been a fanciful, imaginative girl, but until this thing came over her she appeared to be fairly close to normal. Of course, I supposed she’d fall in love some day, but I thought she’d have a few remnants of reason left when she did. I’ve heard of girls that acted like this, but not many; and I never dreamed ours would be one of that sort. I’d like to know what other parents have done who’ve had daughters get into this state over some absolutely worthless cub like Crabbe Osborne.”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Dodge said, helplessly. “I’d ask ’em if I did. I’m sure I’m at my wits’ end about it.”

“We both are. I admit I haven’t the faintest idea how to do anything more intelligent than we’ve been doing—and yet I see where it’s going to end.”

“Where, Roger? Where do you think it’s going to end?”

“They’ve tried twice now,” he said, gloomily. “Last time, if the idiot had taken the precaution to see that there was plenty of gas in his borrowed car before they started, they’d have been married. Some day before long he’ll borrow enough gas, and then she’s going to slip out and meet him again, and they will.”

“No, no!” his wife protested. “I can’t bear to hear you say so.”

“It’ll happen, just the same,” he assured her, grimly. “Nothing on earth that we’ve done has been able to make her see this cub except as an angel—a persecuted angel. She really meant it when she called him that;—on my soul, I believe she did! We’ve told her the truth about him over and over till the repetition makes us sick. What effect does it have on her? We’ve told her what his own father said about him, that he’s ‘absolutely no good on earth and never will be!’ What help was that? Then we tried having other people tell her their opinions of Crabbe. It only made her hate the other people. We’ve tried indulgence; we made the greatest effort to interest her in other things; we’ve tried to get her interested in other young men; we’ve tried giving her anything she wanted; we’ve tried to get her to travel; offered her Europe, Asia, and the whole globe; and then when she wouldn’t go and everything else we tried was no good, we tried taking the whole thing as a joke—making good-natured fun of this cub; trying to make her see him as ridiculous—and the end of that was her first attempt to run away with him! Well, she did it again, and if we keep on as we’re going she’ll do it again! What’s our alternative? I ask you!”

His wife could only moan that she didn’t know;—her mind as well as her emotion was exhausted, she said; and the only thing she could suggest now was that he should try to get Lily to come down to dinner. He assented gloomily, “Well, I’ll see, though it makes me sick to listen to her when she’s like this,” and went upstairs to his daughter’s room.

After he had knocked repeatedly upon the door, obtaining only the significant response of silence, he turned the knob, found himself admitted into darkness, and pressed a button upon the wall just inside the door. The light, magically instantaneous, glowed from the apricot-coloured silk shades of two little lamps on slender tables, one at each side of the daintily painted bed;—and upon the soft green coverlet, with her fair and delicate head upon the lace pillow, lay his daughter. With hands pressed palm to palm upon her breast, her attitude was that of a crusader’s lady in stone upon a tomb; and the closed eyes, the exquisite white profile, thin with suffering, the slender, long outline of her figure, could not fail to touch a father’s heart. For the wasting of long-drawn anguish was truly sculptured there, even though the attitude might have been a little calculated.

“Lily,” he said, gently, as he approached the bed, “your mother wants to know if you wouldn’t like to come down to dinner.”

The dark eyelids remained as they were; but the pale lips just moved. “No, thank you.”

“You won’t?”

“No.”

“Then shall we send your dinner up to you, Lily?”

“No, thank you,” she whispered.

He had come into the room testily, in a gloomy impatience; but she seemed so genuinely in pain and so pathetically fragile a contestant against her solid mother and against his own robust solidity that suddenly he lost every wish to chide her, even every wish to instruct her. He became weak with compassion, and the only wish left in him was the wish to make her happier. He sat down upon a painted little chair beside the bed.

“Lily, child,” he said, huskily, “for pity’s sake, what is it you want?”

And again the pathetic lips just moved.

“You know, Papa.”

There was something in the whispered word “Papa” that cried to him of sweetness under torture, and cried of it with so keen a sound that he groaned aloud. “O, baby girl!” he said, succumbing then and there, when he had least expected such a thing to happen to him. “We can’t let you suffer like this! Don’t you know we’ll do anything on earth to make you happy?”

“No. You wouldn’t do the one thing—Papa?”

“I said anything,” he groaned.

WHEN he came downstairs to his wife, five minutes later, he told her desperately to what he had consented.

“There isn’t any alternative,” he said, in his defence against Mrs. Dodge’s outcry. “It was going to happen anyhow, in spite of everything we could do, and she’s grown so thin—I hadn’t realized it, but she’s lost heaven knows how many pounds! You don’t want the child to die, do you? Well, when I saw her there, so worn and stricken, it came over me what that alternative would mean to us! When it comes to risking her life, I give up. I’d give my own life to keep her from marrying this idiot, but not hers! There’s only one thing for us to do, and we’ve got to go through with it.”

“I can’t!”

“Yes, you can,” he told her, angrily. “And since we’ve got to do it we’ll do it right. Not another word to her from either of us in dispraise of her idiot. On the contrary! And he’s to be asked to dinner to-morrow night, and as often as she wants him afterward. Blast him, I’ll put him into my own office and try my darnedest to make it a job that’ll interest him. They can be married as soon as he’s saved enough to pay his own way. I’ll give her enough for hers. We’re beaten, Lydia. There’s nothing else to do.”

She protested despairingly, and in continued despair finally surrendered her “better judgment,” as she called it, to his weakness. Thus, after a painful evening of argument, they went unhappily to their uneasy beds, but woke in the morning determined to be thoroughbreds in the manner of their acceptance of Oswald Crabbe Osborne as their daughter’s betrothed.

Their encounter with him, when he came to dinner that evening in this recognized capacity, was an almost overwhelming trial of their gameness; but they succeeded in presenting the semblance of a somewhat strained beaming upon him, and were rewarded by the sight of a fading daughter blossoming again.

For Lily was radiant: her eyes and cheeks glowed; her feet danced; she was all light and love and gaiety. At the table she laughed at every nothing, caressed her father, patted her mother’s cheek again and again, and from her eyes poured sunshine upon her lover across the centrepiece of roses.

Crabbe received the sunshine with complacency, for he was accustomed to it; and although his position in regard to her father and mother was a novelty, he appeared to accept their change of front as something he had confidently expected all along. That is to say, he took it as a simple and natural matter, of course, and was not surprised to be shown every consideration by his former opponents.

In truth, they showed him more consideration than he was able to perceive. As was already well known to them, he had not the equipment for what is often spoken of as general conversation; his views upon religious, political, scientific, or literary subjects were tactfully not sought, because of his having omitted to acquire the information sometimes held to be a necessary preliminary to the formation of views;—in fact, as Lily’s parents were previously aware, he lacked even those vagrant symptoms of ambition, the views without the information. Therefore, Mr. and Mrs. Dodge kept the talk at first as weatherly, and then as personal, as they could make it, hoping he might shine a little, or at least that some faint spark might come from him to brighten their own impressions of him. They wanted to force themselves to like him; they had genuine yearnings to think better of him than had been their habit; but although they strove within themselves to attain these ends, they cannot be thought to have succeeded. The nearest Crabbe came to giving them a spark was when he spoke of his father; and even that apparent momentary gleam was not a happy one.

“He’s well,” Crabbe said, replying to Mrs. Dodge’s inquiry. “He’s usually well enough. He takes pretty good care of his health and all. I guess he’s a good deal surprised; but probably not enough to make him sick.”

“Isn’t he?” Mr. Dodge said, and he laughed hopefully, for it seemed to him that here was an unexpected hint of humour, something he had never attributed to the young man. “What would surprise him as much as that?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” Crabbe replied. “But he told me once he always got sick if anything surprised him too much. He says it injures his digestion. What he’s surprised about now, it was when I told him about Lily’s telephoning me this morning you were going to find me a position that would interest me. He certainly said he was surprised.”

Mr. Dodge’s expectations collapsed, though his expression remained indomitably genial. “I see,” he said. “Well, we’ll surprise him more by showing him how well you get on at the work.”

“I know I will,” Crabbe returned, simply. “I mean I’m certain to if it is interesting. It’s just like I’ve been telling Lily: the only reason I ever had any trouble at all in business, it’s because the luck’s been all one way so far;—it kept against my getting anything to do that had any possibilities in it. But it’ll be different from now on, I guess. All anybody needs to do for me, Mr. Dodge, is to find me a position where I’ll feel some use in getting my brain to work.”

Mr. Dodge said he was sure of it, gave his attention to his plate for a few moments, and then, with the gallant assistance of his wife, returned to the weather. Later, when they were alone together in the library, where they could hear from the drawing-room the pretty sound of Lily’s prattling, and, at brief intervals, her happy laughter, the parents faced their misery.

“It’s unbelievable,” Mr. Dodge said, huskily. “You don’t run across these extreme cases of self-satisfied asininity more than a few times in your whole life, even counting all the hundreds and thousands of people you come in contact with. And to think you’ve got to take such a case into your family!”

“It’s your idea!” his wife reminded him.

“It isn’t! It’s not my idea; it’s a monstrous delusion that’s got hold of our girl and that we failed to show her is a delusion. Well, since we couldn’t show her it is, and since opposing her in it was injuring her health, what’s left for us to do but to act as if it were a reality? It isn’t my idea to treat this moron as an angel and take him into our family: it’s the dreadful necessity that her delusion has forced upon us.”

“Thank you for not ending with, ‘Isn’t that logical?’ ” she said. “I’ve been under such a strain, keeping my face cordial at the table, I don’t believe I could have stood it!”

“Under a strain?” he echoed. “I should say so!” He gave her a commiserating and comradelike pat upon her shoulder as he passed behind her to get a book from the shelves. “We’ve both been under a strain, Lydia, and I’m afraid we’ve got to go on being under it.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “That’s the prospect—for the rest of our lives!”

“I’m afraid so.” Then, with grave faces, they settled down to their books, or, at least, tried to settle down to them, but looked into vague and troubled distance more than they read;—ever and anon, as Lily’s merriment was made ripplingly vocal in the drawing-room, the silence of the library would become intensified and then be broken by a mother’s sigh. But at ten o’clock the front door was heard to close with soft reluctance; and Lily left upon the air a trail of dance music in slender soprano as she skipped down the hall and into the library. She threw her arms about her mother, then about her father, kissing them in turn.

“Now you’ve let yourselves begin to know him,” she cried, “isn’t he wonderful? Isn’t he wonderful, Mamma? Isn’t he wonderful, Papa?”

The two thoroughbreds proved of what stuff heroism is made. They said Crabbe was wonderful. . . . Upon an evening two weeks later, Mr. Dodge, again alone with his wife in the library, reverted to this opinion. “I think Crabbe Osborne is more than wonderful,” he said. “I think he’s unique. I hate to be premature, but he’s been in my office for several days now, and, though they don’t say it, I can see that everyone there agrees with me. He couldn’t possibly have a duplicate.”

“Isn’t he ‘interested’ in anything you’ve offered him? Hasn’t he been able to get his ‘brain’ to work?”

“Not yet,” Mr. Dodge replied. “He’s a little discouraged about it, I’m afraid.”

“But you aren’t, are you?” She made this inquiry with a pointedness not wasted upon him, for he had already perceived the indications that thenceforth in their private hours, until death did them part, he was to be the defender of their acceptance of Crabbe Osborne. Mrs. Dodge adopted her husband’s policy, but could not relinquish her attitude of having been forced to it.

“I’m not discouraged about my daughter’s health and spirits,” he retorted, a little sharply. “I’m not discouraged about having done the right thing. The ‘right thing’? How often do I have to tell you it was the only thing? Look what it’s done for Lily. She was literally pining away. How many weeks was it that we never once saw her smile? How many dozens and dozens of miserable, agonizing scenes did we have with her? How long was it that every day was only another of weeping and outcries—and untouched food on trays outside her door—and tears on untouched food on the table when she did come to the dining-room? I tell you, this house was nothing but a nightmare!”

“And how would you define most of our dinners during the last fortnight?”

He winced, but continued to defend himself. “At least we’ve reduced the nightmare. If our dinners with the moron are nightmares for us, they aren’t for Lily. Only two of us suffer, where it was nightmare for all three of us before. And it’s been easier for us this second week than it was the first one.”

“Not for me,” his wife said, dismally. “The more I see of him the more terrible it is to think of him as permanent.”

“But can’t you think only of Lily?”

“Indeed, I can! I’m doing just that!”

“Well, then,” he urged, “think of the difference in her these two weeks have made. Now she’s interested in everything, happy in everything. How many times did we try to get her to go to the country club dances and be with the other young people of the kind she liked and enjoyed before this spell came upon her? She said she ‘hated the horrible old place!’ because Crabbe Osborne couldn’t go there.”

“He didn’t mind that,” Mrs. Dodge remarked. “He went anyhow until they sent him a note reminding him he wasn’t a member. That was why Lily said she hated it and we couldn’t get her to go any more. I was surprised she decided to go to-night, since she knows he can’t be there.”

“There’s the very point I’m making,” her husband said. “Two weeks ago we’d both have thought it was the last thing in the world she’d consent to do, and this evening we didn’t even suggest it to her; she went of her own volition, and cheerfully, too! I ask you if that doesn’t show she’s a different creature. And isn’t it better for two to suffer than three?”

“I ask you,” she returned, sharply: “How short sighted are you? We’re giving her a recess from pain, yes; but what are we thrusting her into? When she does see him as he is, and finds herself bound to him for life, isn’t she going to turn to us then, when it’s too late, and say: ‘Why didn’t you save me?’ ”

“Oh, Lord!” the father groaned, and his gesture was that of a man who has tried to make the best of his misery, but abandons the effort. “I don’t know! I can’t see! When you put it like that, I don’t know whether we’re doing right or wrong.” He paced the library floor, walking heavily, his head down. “It’s a miserable thing any way you look at it,” he said. “I did have just one slight alleviation: it seemed to me I bore it a little better, having him at the dinner-table this week, than I did the week before. It seemed to me maybe it might be because I was getting to like him a little, perhaps.”

“No,” Mrs. Dodge said, grimly. “It was because he was here five times the first week and only three the second.”

“Is that so?” He stopped his pacing and stood still. “So she asked him five times the first week and only three the second. Doesn’t that look as if maybe——”

“No, I’m afraid not,” his wife interrupted, unhesitatingly destroying this obscure germ of hope. “When you give a child a toy it’ll play with it more at first than it will later. That doesn’t mean the child won’t cry if you try to take the toy away, does it?”

“No, I suppose not.” He had relapsed into gloom again. “And I suppose my poor little alleviation was——”

“Your ‘alleviation,’ ” Mrs. Dodge informed him, “was in the diminished number of the acute attacks—three instead of five—and not because you began to feel any affection for the disease itself.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” he said. “And I’m afraid you’ve found the correct definition for what afflicts us.” He sank into a chair, unhappily limp and relaxed, his arms hanging flaccidly over the arms of the chair. “Crabbe Osborne is our disease,” he said. “It’s a disease the more awful because when a child gets it the parents get it, too, and when they give the child an opiate they only stop her pain for a little while; and then the child and the parents, all three of ’em, have got to have the disease for the rest of their lives! And the greatest mystery of it all is that an absolutely chance boy, with no malice, no harm in him—a mere drifting bit of flesh and nothing, that we’d never heard of a year ago—that a meaningless thing like Crabbe Osborne should do all this to us!”

“It isn’t,” she said. “He has nothing whatever to do with it. It’s Lily’s imagination. Her imagination was in the state to get the disease, and it just happened this boy was the nearest thing at a crucial moment. It might as well have happened to be someone else.”

“If it had only been any one else!” Mr. Dodge exclaimed. “I’m willing to agree with you, though: Crabbe just happened to be the fatal microbe. Well, he’s done for us, that’s sure!”

Mrs. Dodge glanced sidelong at him—she was making intermittent efforts to read, and a table and a lamp were between them. “ ‘Done for us?’ Well, you said there was no alternative, didn’t you? It’s your policy, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” he groaned. “I suppose so, Lydia.” Then, shaking his head ruefully, and with a grunt of desolate laughter in his throat, he said: “I know, of course, that you’re going to lash me with it—my ‘policy’—for the rest of our lives!”

But this was a prediction unfulfilled, for they had missed a clew that was in their hands; or, more accurately, it had been in their mouths, and they had actually spoken it. A toy withheld becomes the universe to a child, and a lover withheld is life and death; but toys and lovers freely given are another matter. What Mr. and Mrs. Dodge failed to see was the significant relation of five to three.

. . . The gloomy parents, despondently communing, were still in the library at midnight when Lily came home. They heard her laughter outside before the latchkey turned in the lock of the front door; and then, with the opening of the door, her voice sounded in a gay chattering like a run of staccato notes in an aria of spring. Accompanying it, interrupting it, there was heard a ’cello obbligato, a masculine voice, young and lively, and this short duet closed with Lily’s “See you day-after-to-morrow!”

She came dancing into the library, all white fur and flying silk.

“Oh, you mustn’t!” she cried. “You dear things, you mustn’t sit up for me!”

“We didn’t,” her mother said. “We were just reading. Who was it that brought you home? I asked your Aunt Sarah——”

“Oh, no! Aunt Sarah was there, but I didn’t want to trouble her to come out of her way.” Lily seated herself lightly on the arm of her mother’s chair, letting one cheerful foot swing and resting an affectionate hand upon Mrs. Dodge’s shoulder. “Freddie Haines brought me home. He’s a nice boy.”

“Is he?”

“I like him awf’ly,” said Lily. “I danced with lots of others, though, too. I didn’t want ’em to think I was only going to dance with nobody but Fred.”

“Didn’t you?”

“Freddie Haines is considerate,” said Lily. “He doesn’t mind my being an old engaged girl at all.” Upon this she looked across to meet her father’s frowning glance, and laughed. “Oh, Fred won’t tell; he’s never going to mention it. I didn’t forget I promised you to keep it under cover until we’re ready to have it announced. I haven’t told any one but Fred, and I’m not going to.” Here she jumped down from her mother’s chair, took an apple daintily from a bowl on the table, and skipped to the door, laughing reminiscently. “He didn’t take it seriously, anyhow!” she said as she went out. Then, humming a dance tune, she ran upstairs to her bed.

In the library the astounded parents gazed long upon each other, and the longer they gazed the wider were their eyes.

“Well, at least there’s this much to be said for me,” Lily’s father said, finally;—“when we decided to adopt my policy——”

“Your what?” cried Mrs. Dodge. “Your policy!”

He perceived that his policy was about to be claimed by another—not instantly, nor brazenly, but nevertheless with a slowly growing assurance that in time would browbeat him.

To-night his wife said, “Your policy!” The day would come when she would say, “Your policy?”

CORNELIA CROMWELL, having passed her sixteenth birthday anniversary, had begun to think seriously about life and books, and was causing her parents some anxiety. She declined a birthday party, although in former years such festivals had obviously meant to her the topmost of her heart’s desire; and she expressed her reasons for this refusal in a baffling manner. “I simply don’t care to have one,” she said, coldly. “Isn’t that enough?” Then, being further pressed, and informed that this repeated explanation of hers was one of those not uncommon explanations that do not explain, she said with visibly increasing annoyance: “Frankly, it would be a useless expense, because I don’t care to have a party.”

“She’s so queer lately,” her mother complained to Cornelia’s married sister Mildred. “She won’t go to other girls’ parties either. Of course, it isn’t desirable often, while she’s still in school, but there are a few she really ought to go to, especially now, during the holidays. She simply refuses—says she ‘doesn’t care to.’ It isn’t natural, and I don’t know what to make of it, she’s grown so moody.”

“Don’t you think young girls nearly all get like that sometimes?” Mildred suggested. “Perhaps somebody hurt her feelings at the last party she did go to.” She laughed reminiscently. “I remember when I was about her age I was terribly anxious to please that funny little Paul Thompson, who used to live next door. He danced with me twice at somebody’s birthday party, and I felt perfectly uplifted about it. Then I overheard him talking to another boy, not thinking I was near him. He said his mother had told him he must be polite to me or he wouldn’t have done it, and he certainly never would again, no matter what his mother said, because I’d walked all over his new pumps. It just crushed me, and I know I moped around the house for days afterward; but I wouldn’t tell you what was the matter. It’s the most terribly sensitive age we go through, Mamma, and I just couldn’t have told you. Perhaps there’s been a Paul Thompson for Cornelia.”

“No,” Mrs. Cromwell returned. “I’m sure there isn’t, and that nobody’s hurt her feelings. She came home from the last party she went to, a couple of months ago, in a perfect gale of high spirits; she’d had a glorious time. Then, a week or two later, when I spoke of arranging for her birthday, she got very moody—wouldn’t hear of any such thing; and she’s been so ever since. Your father’s getting cross about it and thinks we ought to do something.”

“You don’t suppose—you don’t suppose she’s fallen in love? It does happen, you know, Mamma—even at fifteen and sixteen.”

“No,” Mrs. Cromwell returned decidedly. “I’m certain it isn’t that. She’s sensible about the boys she knows, and she’s never shown the slightest sentimentality. I’ve thought over all those things, and it isn’t any of them. Nothing’s the matter with her health either; so there just isn’t any reason at all for a change in her. Yet she has changed—completely. In the space of a few weeks—you might almost say a few days—instead of being the bright, romping, responsive girl she’s always been, she’s become so silent and remote you’d think the rest of her family were mere distant and rather inferior acquaintances. It’s mysterious and extremely uncomfortable. Your father thinks we ought to send her away to school where she’d have a complete change, and I’ve had some correspondence about it with Miss Remy of your old school. I think perhaps——”

Mrs. Cromwell stopped speaking, her attention arrested by the sound of a door opening and closing. She listened for a moment, then whispered: “There! She’s just come in. See for yourself.”

The two ladies were sitting in a room that opened upon the broad central hallway of the house, and their view of that part of the black-and-white marble-floored hall just beyond the open double doors was unimpeded. Here appeared in profile the subject of their discussion, a plump brunette demoiselle, rosy-cheeked and far from uncomely, but weightily preoccupied with her own thoughts.

She did not even glance into the room where sat her mother and sister, though the doorway was so wide that she must have been conscious of them;—she was going toward the stairway at the other end of the hall, and would have passed without offering any greeting, if her mother’s voice, a little strained, had not checked her.

“Cornelia!”

The girl paused unwillingly. “Yes?”

“Don’t you see who’s here?”

“Yes.” Cornelia nodded vaguely in the direction of her sister. “How do you do,” she said, not smiling. “I’m glad to see you.”

“Is that all you have to say?” Mrs. Cromwell inquired.

“Yes, Mamma, if you please. May I go now? There’s something important I want to attend to.”

“What is it?”

“Something important.”

“You told us that,” her mother returned. “What is it?”

Cornelia’s voice expressed the strained tolerance of a person who has already reported, over and over, all the known facts in a case. “Mamma, I explained that it’s something important. Would you mind letting me go?”

“No! Do!” her mother replied crisply, and, when Cornelia had disappeared, turned again to her oldest daughter, and with widespread hands made the gesture of one displaying strange stuff for inspection.

“You see? That’s what she’s like all the time.”

“What do you suppose it is she says is so important?”

Mrs. Cromwell laughed ruefully. “That’s all you’d ever find out about it from her. If I ask her again at lunch what it was, she’ll do just what she did then. Her expression will show that she finds me a very trying person, and she’ll either say, ‘Nothing,’ or else, ‘It was something I wanted to attend to.’ And if we should follow her up to her room now, we shouldn’t learn any more about it. She’d probably be just pottering at her dressing-table or looking out of the window. That’s all we’d find her doing.”

In this surmise Mrs. Cromwell was correct;—if she and Mildred had ascended to Cornelia’s room, they would have found her either rearranging the silver and porcelain trifles on her dressing-table, or else standing at the window near her desk and looking down pensively upon the suburban boulevard below. That is to say, by the time they opened the door she would have been doing one of those two things: Cornelia was quick of hearing.

What they would have found her doing, if they could have entered her room without any forewarning sound of footsteps, however, was another matter. While her mother and sister continued to wonder about her downstairs, Cornelia went to her small desk of dull mahogany and seated herself before it, but, having done that, did nothing else for a minute or two;—instead, she sat listening, a precaution due to the possibility that her mother might indeed prove so curious as to follow up recent inquiries in person.

Then she opened the desk, and after a final glance at her closed door, took from about her neck, beneath the collar of her brown silk blouse, a tiny key upon a fragile gold chain of links as slim as thin wire. With the key she unlocked a drawer inside the desk, and as she did this her expression altered;—the guarded look vanished, and there came in its place a tenderness, wistful and yet so keen that the colour in her cheeks heightened and her softened eyes grew lustrous.

She took first from the drawer a little notebook bound in black leather, and opened it. All the pages were blank except the first one, upon which she had lately written the opening sentence of a novel that she intended to offer the world when the work had been secretly completed. She read the sentence over fondly and yet with some perplexity. It was this:

That was the original form of the sentence, but Cornelia had made an alteration. She had scratched out “7000” and replaced it with “5000.” To-day she looked at the latter figure thoughtfully for some time, and, having drawn a line through it, wrote “1000” above it. Then, for a few moments, she had an encouraged look and seemed about to begin a second sentence, but did not do so. Instead, she rested her elbow upon the desk and her chin upon her hand; and as she continued her study of the opening of her novel, her air of being encouraged gave way to a renewed bafflement. It was not that the opening sentence displeased her;—on the contrary. Yet whenever she wished to add another and get on with the story, she came to one of those inexplicable blank gaps in the creative mind, one of those flat stops that so often set even the most willing novelists to walking the floor or the links.

She was sure that if she could once surmount the difficulty of the second sentence, the rest would flow easily from her. Gregory Harlford was to be the hero of her story, and she had in her mind’s eye a remarkably definite portrait of him, which she wished to include in the novel; but she felt that under the circumstances a description of his person and attributes would be out of place in the second sentence. There was a vague but persistent impediment somewhere;—inspiration failed to make an appearance, and, after waiting almost fifteen minutes for it, she sighed, pushed the little book away and turned to the other contents of the drawer.

There were several queer items: the stub of an almost entirely consumed lead pencil; an odd bit of broken amber, not quite cylindrical, and half of an old shoe-lace. There were also a dozen dried violets, a flattened rosebud, and a packet of small sheets of note paper whereon appeared cryptic designs—line drawings most curious. These enigmas were what now occupied Cornelia.

They were her own handiwork; nobody had even seen any of them, and they were of different ages. The oldest of the designs had been drawn long, long ago;—that is to say, long, long ago, according to Cornelia’s sense of the passage of time. For she was sixteen now, and she had made the first of the queer drawings four eternal years earlier, when she was only a child.

It appeared to be the representation in profile of a steep stairway, or perhaps a series of superimposed cliffs, each with a small shelf at its base. Beginning at the bottom of the sheet of paper, this stairway, or series of cliffs, rose to a small plateau or summit near the top; and upon each step, or shelf of cliff, there was drawn one of those little figures children call “men”;—the body is emaciated to the extent that it becomes a single straight line, the arms and legs being similar lines, and the head a round black dot.

In Cornelia’s drawing, each of these little figures was labelled, a name having been written beside it; and in some cases a descriptive word or two had been added beneath the name. Thus, under the name “Georgie P.”, which evidently belonged to the figure occupying the lowest step or shelf, there appeared in faded purple ink a phrase of qualified admiration, “Half Handsome.” Another expression of an enthusiasm limited by a defect in its subject seemed to refer to “Harold,” midway in the ascent—“Terribly Good Looking But Stingy.” However, the figure upon the summit, named in full, “William Peterson McAvoy,” was obviously the symbol of a being without flaw, for here Cornelia had carefully printed, all in capital letters: “ABSOLUTELY PERFECT.”

Yet, in the next drawing, which, like all the others, was of the same stairway, or series of cliffs, with little “men” upon the steps or ledges, a sharp disaster had befallen this figure adorning with its perfection the summit of the first design. Cornelia had drawn a straight line from the summit down to the bottom of the page; and evidently this straight line indicated a precipice of catastrophical dimension. At the foot of it lay the dot and five lines representing the head, body, and members of William Peterson McAvoy, again thus denominated, and near by was written the simple explanation, “Too Snooty.” The summit was bare.

In a subsequent design, done when Cornelia was thirteen, the half handsome Georgie P., who had sometimes occupied one step and sometimes another, finally made his appearance upon the summit, though without any other explanatory tribute than a date: “Sept. 16th.” But Georgie P. did not long remain in his high position. A drawing made only a week later depicted him miserably upon his back at the foot of the precipice, and beside him Cornelia had written: “Perfectly Odious. Well only another dream shattered.”

All of the drawings were dated and thus proved that they were made at irregular intervals;—sometimes two or three months had elapsed between them; sometimes three or four would be produced within a week; and the figures upon the steps or ledges varied in name and relative position as greatly, though one or two of the names appeared upon all of the designs except the last and most recent one. This had been drawn only a month ago, and was interestingly different from its predecessors.

One thing that made it different was the fact that it contained a Mister. In the others there were Georgies and Harolds and Williams and Toms and Johnnies; but now, for the first time, with unique dignity, appeared “Mr. Bromley,” neither a Mister nor a Bromley having been seen upon any previous step or ledge. Moreover, this début of his was unprecedented. Instead of occupying one ledge and then another, sometimes ascending, sometimes descending, before reaching the final elevation, Mr. Bromley made his first appearance strikingly upon the summit. More than this, the ledges below him were unoccupied;—the lofty plateau alone was inhabited. The Harolds and Johnnies and Georgies were gone utterly from the picture, as if unworthy to be seen at all upon a mountain crowned with this supreme Mister.

For the cliffs, or stairway, meant a mountain to Cornelia;—she thought of the drawings as a mountain; and she called the little packet, kept in the locked drawer, “My Mountain.” Her mountain was her own picture of her heart and of the impressions made upon it;—no wonder she kept it locked away! And now it was a deeper secret than ever, for in its present state it glorified the one name alone, and would have told her world everything. Mr. Bromley was the “English Professor,” aged forty-three, at the boarding-school where she was a day scholar; and not long ago he had told her she ought to think “less about candy and more about books and life.” That was what was the matter with Cornelia;—she had begun her novel immediately, and spent a great deal of time in her room, thinking about life and Mr. Bromley.

Mr. Bromley was the hero of the novel and Cornelia thought of him as Gregory Harlford. The general public would never have supposed Mr. Bromley to be an aviator, and he had no claim, in fact, to be thought anything so dashing, though he was fond of chess and still played tennis sometimes. Nevertheless, he seemed to be a quietly resourceful man, one who would find a way out of almost any difficulty, and it was strange that he remained so long suspended in mid-air, in Cornelia’s story, even after the vacancy beneath him had been reduced to a thousand feet. For, after looking over her mountain, Cornelia again took up the little leather-bound notebook and renewed the struggle for a second sentence.

Nothing resulted, and, sighing, she gave over the effort and performed a little daily ceremonial of hers, placing side by side in a row her mementoes of Mr. Bromley—the stub of the pencil he had used, the worn shoe-lace he had broken and carelessly tossed aside, the rosebud she had once asked him to smell, the violets that had dropped from his coat lapel, and the fragment of the amber mouthpiece of his pipe, broken when it fell from his pocket upon the stone steps of the school building. Dreamily, she put them all in a row, touching them gently, one after the other; then she leaned her elbows upon the desk and, with her chin in her hands, thought about life and books in a general way for several minutes.

After that, as the air was warm in the room, she went to the window and opened it. Looking down moodily, she saw her sister Mildred departing. “Going home to mess around with the baby,” Cornelia thought. “That’s her life. How strange she can be contented with it!”

A large red open car went by, sending forth upon the wintry air some cheerful cadences of song as it passed;—young gentlemen collegians merrymaking not indecorously in this holiday time. Cornelia looked down upon the manly young faces, rosy with the wind. “How terrible!” she murmured, dreamily. For they were no part of her mountain; her sister’s baby had nothing to do with Mr. Bromley; neither had the song from the big red car; both were dross.

A negro rattled by upon an ash cart drawn by a lively mule. The negro whistled piercingly to a friend in the distance, and the mule’s splendid ears stood high and eager; he was noble in action, worthy of all attention. Cornelia could not bear him. “Oh, dear!” she said, probably thinking of his master, who was proud of him. “What lives these people lead!”

She was in the act of turning away from this barren window when something far down the street caught her attention. It was the figure of a thin, somewhat middle-aged gentleman in gray clothes, approaching slowly upon the sidewalk. For a moment Cornelia was uncertain; then there appeared for an instant, beneath the rim of his soft hat, twin sparklings of reflected light. They vanished, but Cornelia needed no further proof that the gentleman in gray wore the eyeglasses that completed her identification of him.

She said, “Oh!” in a loud voice, and clapped her joined hands over her mouth to stifle this too-eloquent revelation. Then the bright eyes above the joined hands semicircled impulsively to the bed, where lay her hat and coat as she had tossed them when she came into the room. The impulse that made her look at them increased overwhelmingly; she seized them, put them on hurriedly; opened her door with elaborate caution, tiptoed to a back stairway, descended it noiselessly, and a moment later left the house by a rear door. No one had seen her except the cook’s cat.