The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Wheel of Life, by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Wheel of Life Author: Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow Release Date: January 15, 2005 [eBook #14696] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WHEEL OF LIFE*** E-text prepared by Rick Niles, Charlie Kirschner, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team The Wheel of Life By ELLEN GLASGOW New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1906 BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE DELIVERANCE THE BATTLE-GROUND THE FREEMAN, AND OTHER POEMS THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE PHASES OF AN INFERIOR PLANET THE DESCENDANT CONTENTS PART I. Impulse CHAPTER I. In Which the Romantic Hero is Conspicuous by His Absence II. Treats of an Eccentric Family III. Apologises for an Old-fashioned Atmosphere IV. Ushers in the Modern Spirit V. In Which a Young Man Dreams Dreams VI. Shows That Mr. Worldly-Wise-Man May Belong to Either Sex VII. The Irresistible Force VIII. Proves That a Poor Lover May Make an Excellent Friend IX. Of Masques and Mummeries X. Shows the Hero to Be Lacking in Heroic Qualities XI. In Which a Lie Is the Better Part of Truth PART II. Illusion I. Of Pleasure as the Chief End of Man II. An Advance and a Retreat III. The Moth and the Flame IV. Treats of the Attraction of Opposites V. Shows the Dangers as Well as the Pleasures of the Chase VI. The Finer Vision VII. In Which Failure Is Crowned By Failure VIII. "The Small Old Path" IX. The Triumph of the Ego X. In Which Adams Comes Into His Inheritance XI. On the Wings of Life PART III. Disenchantment I. A Disconsolate Lover and a Pair of Blue Eyes II. The Deification of Clay III. The Greatest of These IV. Adams Watches in the Night and Sees the Dawn V. Treats of the Poverty of Riches VI. The Feet of the God VII. In Which Kemper Is Puzzled VIII. Shows That Love Without Wisdom Is Folly IX. Of the Fear in Love X. The End of the Path PART IV. Reconciliation I. The Secret Chambers II. In Which Laura Enters the Valley of Humiliation III. Proves a Great City to Be a Great Solitude IV. Shows That True Love Is True Service V. Between Laura and Gerty VI. Renewal PART I IMPULSE CHAPTER I IN WHICH THE ROMANTIC HERO IS CONSPICUOUS BY HIS ABSENCE As the light fell on her face Gerty Bridewell awoke, stifled a yawn with her pillow, and remembered that she had been very unhappy when she went to bed. That was only six hours ago, and yet she felt now that her unhappiness and the object of it, which was her husband, were of less disturbing importance to her than the fact that she must get up and stand for three minutes under the shower bath in her dressing-room. With a sigh she pressed the pillow more firmly under her cheek, and lay looking a little wistfully at her maid, who, having drawn back the curtains at the window, stood now regarding her with the discreet and confidential smile which drew from her a protesting frown of irritation. "Well, I can't get up until I've had my coffee," she said in a voice which produced an effect of mournful brightness rather than of anger, "I haven't the strength to put so much as my foot out of bed." Her eyes followed the woman across the room and through the door, and then, turning instinctively to the broad mirror above her dressing table, hung critically upon the brilliant red and white reflection in the glass. It was her comforting assurance that every woman looked her best in bed; and as she lay now, following the lines of her charming figure beneath the satin coverlet, she found herself wondering, not without resentment, why the possession of a beauty so conspicuous should afford her only a slight and temporary satisfaction. Last week a woman whom she knew had had her nose broken in an automobile accident, and as she remembered this it seemed to her that the mere fact of her undisfigured features was sufficient to be the cause of joyful gratitude. But this, she knew, was not so, for her face was perfectly unharmed; and yet she felt that she could hardly have been more miserable, even with a broken nose. Here she paused for an instant in order to establish herself securely in her argument, for, though she could by no stretch of the imagination regard her mind as of a meditative cast, there are hours when even to the most flippant experience wears the borrowed mantle of philosophy. Abstract theories of conduct diverted her but little; what she wanted was some practical explanation of the mental weariness she felt. What she wanted, she repeated, as if to drive in the matter with a final blow, was to be as happy in the actual condition as she had told herself that she might be when as yet the actual was only the ideal. Why, for instance, when she had been wretched with but one man on the box, should the addition of a second livery fail to produce in her the contentment of which she had often dreamed while she disconsolately regarded a single pair of shoulders? That happiness did not masquerade in livery she had learned since she had triumphantly married the richest man she knew, and the admission of this brought her almost with a jump to the bitter conclusion of her unanswerable logic—for the satisfaction which was not to be found in a footman was absent as well from the imposing figure of Perry Bridewell himself. Yet she told herself that she would have married him had he possessed merely the historical penny, and the restless infatuation of those first months was still sufficiently alive to lend the colour of its pleasing torment to her existence. Lying there, in her French embroidered night dress, with her brilliant red hair pushed back from her forehead, she began idly to follow the histories of the people whom she knew, and it seemed to her that each of them was in some particular circumstance more fortunate than she. But she would have changed place with none, not even with her best friend, Laura Wilde, who was perfectly content because she lived buried away in Gramercy Park and wrote vague beautiful verse that nobody ever read. Laura filled as little part in what she called "the world" as Gramercy Park occupied in modern progress, yet it was not without a faint impulse of envy that Gerty recalled now the grave old house mantled in brown creepers and the cheerful firelit room in which Laura lived. The peace which she had missed in the thought of her husband came back to her with the first recollection of her friend, and her hard bright eyes softened a little while she dwelt on the vivid face of the woman to whom she clung because of her very unlikeness to herself. Gradually out of the mist of her unhappiness the figure of Laura rose in the mirror before her, and she saw clearly her large white forehead under the dark wing-like waves of hair, the singular intentness of her eyes, and the rapt expectancy of look in which her features were lost as in a general vagueness of light. Though it was twenty years since she had first seen Laura Wilde as a child of ten, the meeting came to her suddenly with all the bright clearness of an incident of yesterday. She remembered herself as a weak, bedraggled little girl, in wet slippers, who was led by a careless nurse to a strange German school; and she felt again the agony of curiosity with which, after the first blank wonder was over, she had stared at the children who hung whispering together in the centre of the room. As she looked a panic terror seized her like a wild beast, and she threw up her hands and turned to rush away to the reassuring presence of grown up creatures, when from the midst of the whispering group a little dark girl, in an ugly brown frock, ran up to her and folded her in her arms. "I shall love you best of all because you are so beautiful," said the little dark girl, "and I will do all your sums and even eat your sausage for you." Then she had kissed her and brought her to the stove and knelt down on the floor to take off her wet slippers. To this day Gerty had always thought of her friend as the little girl who had shut her eyes and gulped down those terrible sausages for her behind her teacher's back. The maid brought the coffee, and while she sat up to drink it the door of her husband's dressing-room opened and he came in and stood, large, florid and impressive, beside her bed. "I'm afraid I shan't get back to luncheon," he remarked, as he settled his ample, carefully groomed body in his clothes with a comfortable shake, "there's a chap from the country Pierce has sent to me with a letter and I'll be obliged to feed him at the club, but—to tell the truth—there's so little one can get really fit at this season." To a man for whom the pleasures of the table represented the larger share of his daily enjoyment, this was a question not without a serious importance of its own; and while he paused to settle it he stood, squaring his chest, with an expression of decided annoyance on his handsome, good-humored face. Then, having made a satisfactory choice of dishes, his features recovered their usual look of genial contentment, and he felt carelessly in his pocket for the letter which he presently produced and laid on Gerty's pillow. His life had corresponded so evenly with his bodily impulses that the perfection of the adjustment had produced in him the amiable exterior of an animal that is never crossed. It was a case in which supreme selfishness exerted the effect of personality. Leaving the letter where he had placed it, Gerty sat sipping her coffee while she looked up at him with the candid cynicism which lent a piquant charm to the almost doll-like regularity of her features. "You did not get three hours sleep and yet you're so fresh you smell of soap," she observed as an indignant protest, "while I've had six and I'm still too tired to move." "Oh, I'm all right—I never let myself get seedy," returned Perry, with his loud though pleasant laugh. "That's the mistake all you women make." Half closing her eyes Gerty leaned back and surveyed him with a curious detachment—almost as if he were an important piece of architecture which she had been recommended to admire and to which she was patiently trying in vain to adjust her baffled vision. The smaller she screwed her gaze the more remotely magnificent loomed his proportions. "How you manage it is more than I can understand," she said. Perry stared for a moment in an amiable vacancy at the coffee pot. Then she watched the animation move feebly in his face, while he pulled at his short fair moustache with a characteristic masculine gesture. Physically, she admitted, he had never appeared to a better advantage in her eyes. "By the way, I had a game of billiards with Kemper and we talked pretty late," he said, as if evolving the explanation for which she had not asked. "He got back from Europe yesterday you know." "He did?" Her indifferent gaiety played like harmless lightning around his massive bulk. "Then we may presume, I suppose, on Madame Alta for the opera season?" He met the question with an admiring chuckle. "Do you really mean you think he's been abroad with her all this time?" "Well, what else did he get his divorce for?" she demanded, with the utter disillusion of knowledge which she had found to be her most effective pose. Perry's chuckle swelled suddenly into a roar. "Good Lord, how women talk!" he burst out. "Why, Arnold has been divorced ten years and he never laid eyes on Jennie Alta till she sang over here three years ago. There was nothing in it except that he liked to be seen with a celebrity—most men do. But, my dear girl," he concluded in a kind of awful reverence, "what a tongue you've got. It's a jolly good thing for me that I'm your husband or you wouldn't leave me a blessed patch of reputation to my back." His humor held him convulsed for several minutes, during which interval Gerty continued to regard him with her piquant cynicism. "Well, if it wasn't Madame Alta it was somebody who is voiceless," she retorted coolly. "I merely meant that there must have been a reason." "Oh, your 'reasons'!" ejaculated Perry. Then he stooped and gave the letter lying on Gerty's pillow a filip from his large pink forefinger. "You haven't told me what you think of this?" he said. Picking up the letter Gerty unfolded it and read it slowly through from start to finish, the little ripple of sceptical amusement crossing and recrossing her parted lips, RAVENS NEST, Fauquier County, Virginia, December 26, 19—. My Dear Perry: Nobody, of course, ever accused you of being literary, nor, thank Heaven, have I fallen under that aspersion—but since the shortest road to success seems to be by circumvention, it has occurred to me that you might give a social shove or two to the chap who will hand you this letter sometime after the New Year. His name is St. George Trent, he was born a little way up the turnpike from me, has an enchanting mother, and shows symptoms of being already inoculated with the literary plague. I never read books, so I have no sense of comparative values in literature, and consequently can't tell whether he is an inglorious Shakespeare or a subject for the daily press. His mother assures me that he has already written a play worthy to stand beside Hamlet—but, though she is a charming lady, I'm hardly convinced by her opinion. The fact remains, however, that he is going to New York to become a playwright, and that he has two idols in the market place which, I fancy, you may be predestined to see demolished. He is simply off his head to meet Roger Adams, the editor of The—something or other I never heard of—and—remember your budding days and be charitable—a lady who writes poems and signs herself Laura Wilde. I prepared him for the inevitable catastrophe by assuring him that the harmless Mr. Adams eats with his knife, and that the lady, as she writes books, isn't worth much at love-making—the purpose for which woman was created by God and cultivated by man. Alas, though, the young are a people of great faith! Commend me to Mrs. Bridewell, whom I haven't seen since I had the honour of assisting at the wedding. Yours ever, BEVERLY PIERCE. As she finished her reading, Gerty broke into a laugh and carelessly threw the letter aside on the blue satin quilt. "I'm glad to hear that somebody has read Laura's poems," she observed. "But what in thunder am I to do with the chap?" enquired Perry. "God knows I don't go in for literature, and that's all he's good for I dare say." "Oh, well, he can eat, I guess," commented Gerty, with consoling irony. "I've asked Roger Adams to luncheon," pursued Perry, too concerned to resent her lack of sympathy, "but there are nine chances to one that he will stay away." "Experience has taught me," rejoined Gerty sweetly, "that your friend Adams can be absolutely counted on to stay away. Do you know," she resumed after a moment's thought, "that, though he's probably the brainiest man of our acquaintance, I sometimes seriously wonder what you see in him." A flush of anger darkened Perry's clear skin, and this sudden change gave him an almost brutal look. "I'd like to know if I'm a blamed fool?" he demanded. Her merriment struck pleasantly on his ears. "Do you want to destroy the illusion in which I married you?" she asked. "It was, after all, simply the belief that size is virtue." The flush passed, and he took in a full breath which expanded his broad chest. "Well, I'm big enough," he answered, "but it isn't Adam's fault that he hasn't got my muscle." With a leisurely glance in the mirror, he settled his necktie in place, twisted the short ends of his moustache, and then stooped to kiss his wife before going out. "Don't you let yourself get seedy and lose your looks," he said as he left the room. When he had gone she made a sudden ineffectual effort to rise from bed; then as if oppressed by a fatigue that was moral rather than physical, she fell back again and turned her face wearily from the mirror. So the morning slipped away, the luncheon hour came and went, and it was not until the afternoon that she gathered energy to dress herself and begin anew the inevitable and agonising pursuit of pleasure. The temptation of the morning had been to let go—to relax in despair from the fruitlessness of her endeavor—and the result of this brief withdrawal was apparent in the order which she gave the footman before the open door of her carriage. "To Miss Wilde's first"—the words ended abruptly and she turned eagerly, with outstretched hand, to a man who had hurried toward her from the corner of Fifth Avenue. "So you haven't forgotten me in six months, Arnold," she said, with a sweetness in which there was an almost imperceptible tone of bitterness. He took her hand in both of his, pressing it for an instant in a quick muscular grasp which had in it something of the nervous vigor that lent a peculiar vibrant quality to his voice. "And I couldn't have done it in six years," he replied, as a singularly charming smile illumined his forcible rather than regular features, and brought out the genial irony in his expressive light gray eyes. "If I'd gone to Europe to forget you it would have been time thrown away, but I had something better on my hands than that—I've been buying French racing automobiles—" As he finished he gave an impatient jerk to the carriage door, a movement which, like all his gestures, sprang from the nervous energy that found its outlet in the magnetism of his personality. People sometimes said that he resembled Perry Bridewell, who was, in fact, his distant cousin, but the likeness consisted solely in a certain evident possession of virile power—a quality which women are accustomed to describe as masculine. He was not tall, and yet he gave an impression of bigness; away from him one invariably thought of him as of unusual proportions, but, standing by his side, he was found to be hardly above the ordinary height. The development of his closely knit figure, the splendid breadth of his chest and shoulders, the slight projection of his heavy brows and the almost brutal strength of his jaw and chin, all combined to emphasise that appearance of ardent vitality which has appealed so strongly to the imagination of women. Seen in repose there was a faint suggestion of cruelty in the lines of his mouth under his short brown moustache, but this instead of detracting from the charm he exercised only threw into greater relief the genial brightness of his smile. Now Gerty, glancing up at him, remembered a little curiously, the whispered reason for his long absence. There was always a woman in the wind when it blew rumours of Kemper, though he was generally considered to regard the sex with the blithe indifference of a man to whom feminine favour has come easily. How easily Gerty had sometimes wondered, though she had hardly ventured so much as a dim surmise. Ten years, she would have said, was a considerable period from which to date a passion, and she remembered now that ten years ago Kemper had secured a divorce from his wife in some Western court. There had been no particular scandal, no damning charges on either side; and a club wit had remarked at the time that the only possible ground for a separation was the fact that Mrs. Kemper had grown jealous of her husband's after-dinner cigar. Since then other and varied rumours had reached Gerty's ears, until finally there had blown a veritable gale concerning a certain Madame Alta, who sang melting soprano parts in Italian opera. Then this, too, had passed, and, with the short memory of city livers, Gerty had forgotten alike the gossip and the heroines of the gossip, until she noted now the lines of deeper harassment in Kemper's face. These coming so suddenly after six months of Europe caused her to wonder if the affair with the prima donna had been really an entanglement of the heart. "Well, I may not be as fast as an automobile," she presently admitted. "But you're twice as dangerous," he retorted gaily. For an instant the pleasant humour in his eyes held her speechless. "Ah, well, you aren't a coward," she answered coolly enough at last. Then her tone changed, and as she settled herself under her fur rugs she made a cordial inviting gesture. "Come in with me and I'll take you to Laura Wilde's," she said; "she's a genius, and you ought to know her before the world finds her out." With a protesting laugh Kemper held up his gloved finger. "God forbid!" he exclaimed with a shrug which struck her as a slightly foreign affectation. "The lady may be a female Milton, but Perry tells me that she isn't pretty." He touched her hand again, met her indignant defence of Laura with a nod of smiling irony, and then, as her carriage started, he turned rapidly down Sixty-ninth Street in the direction of the Park. In Gerty the chance meeting had awakened a slumbering interest which she had half forgotten, and as she drove down Fifth Avenue toward Laura's distant home she found herself wondering idly if he would let many days go by before he came again. The thought was still in her mind when the carriage turned into Gramercy Park and stopped before the old brown house hidden in creepers in which Laura lived. So changed by this time, however, was Gerty's mood that, after leaving her carriage, she stood hesitating from indecision upon the sidewalk. The few bared trees in the snow, the solemn, almost ghostly, quiet of the quaint old houses and the deserted streets, in which a flock of sparrows quarrelled under the faint sunshine, produced in her an odd and almost mysterious sense of unreality—as if the place, herself, the waiting carriage, and Laura buried away in the dull brown house, were all creations of some gossamer and dream-like quality of mind. She felt suddenly that the sorrows which had oppressed her in the morning belonged no more to any existence in which she herself had a part. Then, looking up, she saw her husband crossing the street between the two men with whom he had lunched, and even the impressive solidity of Perry Bridewell appeared to her strangely altered and out of place. He came up, a little breathless from his rapid walk, and it was a minute before he could summon voice to introduce the cheerful, fresh-coloured youth on his right hand. "I've already told Mrs. Bridewell about you, Mr. Trent," he said at last, "but I'm willing to confess that I haven't told her half the truth." Gerty met Trent's embarrassed glance with the protecting smile with which she favoured the young who combined his sex with his attractions. Then, when he was quite at ease again, she turned to speak to Roger Adams, for whom, in spite, as she laughingly said, of the distinction between a bookworm and a butterfly, she was accustomed to admit a more than ordinary liking. He was a gaunt, scholarly looking man of forty years, with broad, singularly bony shoulders, an expression of kindly humour, and a plain, strong face upon which suffering had left its indelible suggestion of defeated physical purpose. Nothing about him was impressive, nothing even arresting to a casual glance, and not even the shooting light from the keen gray eyes, grown a little wistful from the emotional repression of the man's life, could account for the cordial appeal that spoke through so unimposing a figure. As much of his personal history as Gerty knew seemed to her peculiarly devoid of the interest or the excitement of adventure; and the only facts of his life which she would have found deserving the trouble of repeating were that he had married an impossible woman somewhere in Colorado, and that for ten years he had lived in New York where he edited The International Review. "Perry tells me that Mr. Trent has really read Laura's poems," she said now to Adams with an almost unconscious abandonment of her cynical manner. "Have you examined him and is it really true?" "I didn't test him because I hoped the report was false," was Adams' answer. "He's welcome to the literary hash, but I want to keep the caviar for myself." "Read them!" exclaimed Trent eagerly, while his blue eyes ran entirely to sparkles. "Why, I've learned them every one by heart." "Then she'll let you in," responded Gerty reassuringly, "there's no doubt whatever of your welcome." "But there is of mine," said Perry gravely, "so I guess I'd better quit." He made a movement to turn away, but Gerty placing her gloved hand on his arm, detained him by a reproachful look. "That reminds me of the mischief you have done to-day," she said. "I met Arnold Kemper as I left the house, and when I asked him to come with me what do you suppose was the excuse he gave?" "The dentist or a twinge of rheumatism?" suggested Adams gravely. "Neither." Her voice rose indignantly, and she enforced her reprimand by a light stroke on Perry's sleeve. "He actually said that Perry had told him Laura wasn't pretty." "Well, I take back my words and eat 'em, too," cried Perry. He broke away in affected terror before Trent's angry eyes, while Gerty gave a joyful little exclamation and waved her hand toward one of the lower windows in the house before which they stood. The head of a woman, framed in brown creepers, appeared there for an instant, and then, almost before Trent had caught a glimpse of the small dark eager figure, melted again into the warm firelight of the interior. A moment later the outer door opened quickly, and Laura stood there with impulsive outstretched hands and the cordial smile which was her priceless inheritance from a Southern mother. "I knew that you were there even before I looked out of the window," she exclaimed to Gerty, in what Adams had once called her "Creole voice." Then she paused, laughing happily, as she looked, with her animated glance, from Gerty to Trent and from Trent to Adams. To the younger man, full of his enthusiasm and his ignorance, the physical details of her appearance seemed suddenly of no larger significance than the pale bronze gown she wore or the old coffee-coloured lace knotted upon her bosom in some personal caprice of dress. What she gave to him as she stood there, looking from Adams to himself with her ardent friendly glance, was an impression of radiant energy, of abundant life. She turned back after the first greeting, leading the way into the pleasant firelit room, where a white haired old gentleman with an interesting blanched face rose to receive them. "I have just proved to Mr. Wilberforce that I could 'feel' you coming," said Laura with a smile as she unfastened Gerty's furs. "And I have argued that she could quite as well surmise it," returned Mr. Wilberforce, as he fell back into his chair before the wood fire. "Well, you may know in either way that my coming may be counted on," said Gerty, "for I have sacrificed for you the society of the most interesting man I know." "What! Is it possible that Perry has been forsaken?" enquired Adams in his voice of quiet humor. In the midst of her flippant laughter, Gerty turned on him the open cynicism of her smile. "Now is it possible that Perry has that effect on you?" she asked with curiosity. "For I find him decidedly depressing." "Then if it isn't Perry I demand the name," persisted Adams gayly, "though I'm perfectly ready to wager that it's Arnold Kemper." "Kemper," repeated Laura curiously, as if the name arrested her almost against her will. "Wasn't there a little novel once by an Arnold Kemper—a slight but striking thing with very little grammar and a great deal of audacity?" "Oh, that was done in his early days," replied Adams, "as a kind of outlet to the energy he now expends in racing motors. I asked Funsten, who does our literary notices, if there was any chance for him again in fiction, and he answered that the only favourable thing he could say of him was to say nothing." "But he's gone in for automobiles now," said Gerty, "they're so much bigger, after all, he thinks, than books." "I haven't seen him for fifteen years," remarked Adams, "but I recognise his speech." "One always recognises his speeches," admitted Gerty, "there's a stamp on them, I suppose, for somehow he himself is great even if his career isn't—and, after all," she concluded seriously, "it is—what shall I call it—the personal quantity that he insists on." "The personal quantity," repeated Laura laughing, and, as if the description of Kemper had failed to interest her, she turned the conversation upon the subject of Trent's play. CHAPTER II TREATS OF AN ECCENTRIC FAMILY When the last caller had gone Laura slid back the folding doors which opened into the library and spoke to a little old gentleman, with a very bald head, who sat in a big armchair holding a flute in his wrinkled and trembling hand. He had a simple, moonlike face, to which his baldness lent a deceptive appearance of intellect, and his expression was of such bland and smiling goodness that it was impossible to resent the tedious garrulity of his conversation. In the midst of his shrivelled countenance his eyes looked like little round blue buttons which had been set there in order to keep his features from entirely slipping away. He was the oldest member of the Wilde family, and he had lived in the house in Gramercy Park since it was built by his father some sixty years or more ago. "Tired waiting, Uncle Percival?" asked Laura, raising her voice a little that it might penetrate his deafened hearing. As he turned upon her his smile of perfect patience the old gentleman nodded his head quickly several times in succession. "I waited to play until after the people went," he responded in a voice that sounded like a cracked silver bell. "Your Aunt Angela has a headache, so she couldn't stand the noise. I went out to get her some flowers and offered to sit with her, but this is one of her bad days, poor girl." He fell silent for a minute and then added, wistfully, "I'm wondering if you would like to hear 'Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon'? It used to be your mother's favourite air." Though he was an inoffensively amiable and eagerly obliging old man, by some ironic contradiction of his intentions his life had become a series of blunders through which he endeavoured to add his share to the general happiness. His soul was overflowing with humanity, and he spent sleepless nights evolving innocent pleasures for those about him, but his excess of goodness invariably resulted in producing petty annoyances if not serious inconveniences. So his virtues had come to be regarded with timidity, and there was an ever present anxiety in the air as to what Uncle Percival was "doing" in his mind. The fear of inopportune benefits was in its way as oppressive as the dread of unmerited misfortune. Laura shook her head impatiently as she threw herself into a chair on the other side of the tall bronze lamp upon the writing table. On the stem of an eccentric family tree she was felt to be the perfect flower of artistic impulses, and her enclosed life in the sombre old house had not succeeded in cultivating in her the slightest resemblance to an artificial variety. She was obviously, inevitably, impulsively the original product, and Uncle Percival never realised this more hopelessly than in that unresponsive headshake of dismissal. Laura could be kind, he knew, but she was kind, as she was a poet, when the mood prompted. "Presently—not now," she said, "I want to talk to you awhile. Do you know, Aunt Rosa was here again to-day and she still tries to persuade us to sell the house and move uptown. It is so far for her to come from Seventieth Street, she says, but as for me I'd positively hate the change and Aunt Angela can't even stand the mention of it." She leaned forward and stroked his arm with one of her earnest gestures. "What would you do uptown, dear Uncle Percival?" she inquired gently. The old man laid the flute on his knees, where his shrunken little hands still caressed it. "Do? why I'd die if you dragged me away from my roots," he answered. Laura smiled, still smoothing him down as if he were an amiable dog. "Well, the Park is very pleasant, you know," she returned, "and it is full of walks, too. You wouldn't lack space for exercise." "The Park? Pooh!" piped Uncle Percival, raising his voice; "I wouldn't give these streets for the whole of Central Park together. Why, I've seen these pavements laid and relaid for seventy years and I remember all the men who walked over them. Did I ever tell you of the time I strolled through Irving Place with Thackeray? As for Central Park, it hasn't an ounce—not an ounce of atmosphere." "Oh, well, that settles it," laughed Laura. "We'll keep to our own roots. We are all of one mind, you and Aunt Angela and I." "I'm sure Angela would never hear of it," pursued Uncle Percival, "and in her affliction how could one expect it?" For a moment Laura looked at him in a compassionate pause before she made her spring. "There's nothing in the world the matter with Aunt Angela," she said; "she's perfectly well." Blank wonder crept into the old gentleman's little blue eyes and he shook his head several times in solemn if voiceless protest. Forty years ago Angela Wilde, as a girl of twenty, had in the accustomed family phrase "brought lasting disgrace upon them," and she had dwelt, as it were, in the shadow of the pillory ever since. Unmarried she had yielded herself to a lover, and afterward when the full scandal had burst upon her head, though she had not then reached the fulfilment of a singularly charming beauty, she had condemned herself to the life of a solitary prisoner within four walls. She had never since the day of her awakening mentioned the name of her faithless or unfortunate lover, but her silent magnanimity had become the expression of a reproach too deep for words, and her bitter scorn of men had so grown upon her in her cloistral existence that there were hours together when she could not endure even the inoffensive Percival. Cold, white, and spectral as one of the long slim candles on an altar, still beautiful with an indignant and wounded loveliness, she had become in the end at once the shame and the romance of her family. "There is no reason under the sun why Aunt Angela shouldn't come down to dinner with us to-night," persisted Laura. "Don't you see that by encouraging her as you did in her foolish attitude, you have given her past power over her for life and death. It is wrong—it is ignoble to bow down and worship anything—man, woman, child, or event, as she bows down and worships her trouble." The flute shook on Uncle Percival's knees. "Ah, Laura, would you have her face the world again?" he asked. "The world? Nonsense! The world doesn't know there's such a person in it. She was forgotten forty years ago, only she has grown so selfish in her grief that she can never believe it." The old man sighed and shook his head. "The women of this generation have had the dew brushed off them," he lamented, "but your mother understood. She felt for Angela." "And yet it was an old story when my mother came here." "Some things never grow old, my dear, and shame is one of them." Laura dismissed the assertion with a shrug of scornful protest, and turned the conversation at once into another channel. "Am I anything like my mother, Uncle Percival?" she asked abruptly. For a moment the old man pondered the question in silence, his little red hands fingering the mouth of his flute. "You have the Creole hair and the Creole voice," he replied; "but for the rest you are your father's child, every inch of you." "My mother was beautiful, I suppose?" "Your father thought so, but as for me she was too little and passionate. I can see her now when she would fly into one of her spasms because somebody had crossed her or been impolite without knowing it." "They got on badly then—I mean afterward." "What could you expect, my dear? It was just after the War, and, though she loved your father, she never in her heart of hearts forgave him his blue uniform. There was no reason in her—she was all one fluttering impulse, and to live peaceably in this world one must have at least a grain of leaven in the lump of one's emotion." He chuckled as he ended and fixed his mild gaze upon the lamp. Being very old, he had come to realise that of the two masks possible to the world's stage, the comic, even if the less spectacular, is also the less commonplace. "So she died of an overdose of medicine," said Laura; "I have never been told and yet I have always known that she died by her own hand. Something in my blood has taught me." Uncle Percival shook his head. "No—no, she only made a change," he corrected. "She was a little white moth who drifted to another sphere—because she had wanted so much, my child, that this earth would have been bankrupt had it attempted to satisfy her." "She wanted what?" demanded Laura, her eyes glowing. The old man turned upon her a glance in which she saw the wistful curiosity which belongs to age. "At the moment you remind me of her," he returned, "and yet you seem so strong where she was only weak." "What did she want? What did she want?" persisted Laura. "Well, first of all she wanted your father—every minute of him, every thought, every heart-beat. He couldn't give it to her, my dear. No man could. I tell you I have lived to a great age, and I have known great people, and I have never seen the man yet who could give a woman all the love she wanted. Women seem to be born with a kind of divination— a second sight where love is concerned—they aren't content with the mere husk, and yet that is all that the most of them ever get—" "But my father?" protested Laura; "he broke his heart for her." A smile at the fine ironic humour of existence crossed the old man's sunken lips. "He gave to her dead what she had never had from him living," he returned. "When she was gone everything—even the man's life for which he had sacrificed her—turned worthless. He always had the seeds of consumption, I suppose, and his gnawing remorse caused them to develop." A short silence followed his words, while Laura stared at him with eyes which seemed to weigh gravely the meaning of his words. Then, rising hurriedly, she made a gesture as if throwing the subject from her and walked rapidly to the door. "Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy are coming to dine," she said, "so I must glance at the table. I can't remember now whether I ordered the oysters or not." The old man glanced after her with timid disappointment. "So you haven't time to hear me play?" he asked wistfully. "Not now—there's Aunt Angela's dinner to be seen to. If Mr. Bleeker comes with Aunt Sophy you can play to him. He likes it." "But he always goes to sleep, Laura. He doesn't listen—and besides he snores so that I can't enjoy my own music." "That's because he'd rather snore than do anything else. I wouldn't let that worry me an instant. He goes to sleep at the opera." She went out, and after giving a few careful instructions to a servant in the dining-room, ascended the staircase to the large square room in the left wing where Angela remained a wilful prisoner. As she opened the door she entered into a mist of dim candle light, by which her aunt was pacing restlessly up and down the length of the apartment. To pass from the breathless energy of modern New York into this quiet conventual atmosphere was like crossing by a single step the division between two opposing civilisations. Even the gas light, which Angela could not endure, was banished from her eyes, and she lived always in a faint, softened twilight not unlike that of some meditative Old-World cloisters. The small iron bed, the colourless religious prints, the pale drab walls and the floor covered only by a chill white matting, all emphasised the singular impression of an expiation that had become as pitiless as an obsession of insanity. On a small table by a couch, which was drawn up before a window overlooking the park, there was a row of little devotional books, all bound neatly in black leather, but beyond this the room was empty of any consolation for mind or body. Only the woman herself, with her accusing face and her carelessly arranged snow-white hair, held and quickened the imagination in spite of her suggestion of bitter brooding and unbalanced reason. Her eyes looking wildly out of her pallid face were still the beautiful, fawn-like eyes of the girl of twenty, and one felt in watching her that the old tragic shock had paralysed in them the terrible expression of that one moment until they wore forever the indignant and wounded look with which she had met the blow that destroyed her youth. "Dear," said Laura, entering softly as she might have entered a death chamber. "You will see Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy, will you not?" Angela did not stop in her nervous walk, but when she reached the end of the long room she made a quick, feverish gesture, raising her hands to push back her beautiful loosened hair. "I will do anything you wish, Laura, except see their husbands." "I've ceased to urge that, Aunt Angela, but your own sisters—" "Oh, I will see them," returned Angela, as if the words—as if any speech, in fact—were wrung from the cold reserve which had frozen her from head to foot. Laura went up to her and, with the impassioned manner which she had inherited from her Southern mother, enclosed her in a warm and earnest embrace. "My dear, my dear," she said, "Uncle Percival tells me that this is one of your bad days. He says, poor man, that he went out and got you flowers." Angela yielded slowly, still without melting from her icy remoteness. "They were tuberoses," she responded, in a voice which was in itself effectual comment. "Tuberoses!" exclaimed Laura aghast, "when you can't even stand the scent of lilies. No wonder, poor dear, that your head aches." "Mary put them outside on the window sill," said Angela, in a kind of resigned despair, "but their awful perfume seemed to penetrate the glass, so she took them down into the coal cellar." "And a very good place for them, too," was Laura's feeling rejoinder; "but you mustn't blame him," she charitably concluded, "for he couldn't have chosen any other flower if he had had the whole Garden of Eden to select from. It isn't really his fault after all—it's a part of fatality like his flute." "He played for me until my head almost split," remarked Angela wearily, "and then he apologised for stopping because his breath was short." A startled tremor shook through her as a step was heard on the staircase. "Who is it, Laura?" Laura went quickly to the door and, after pausing a moment outside, returned with a short, flushed, and richly gowned little woman who was known to the world as Mrs. Robert Bleeker. More than twenty years ago, as the youngest of the pretty Wilde sisters, she had, in the romantic fervour of her youth and in spite of the opposition of her parents, made a love match with a handsome, impecunious young dabbler in "stocks." "Sophy is a creature of sentiment," her friends had urged in extenuation of a marriage which was not then considered in a brilliant light, but to the surprise of everybody, after the single venture by which she had proved the mettle of her dreams, she had sunk back into a prosperous and comfortable mediocrity. She had made her flight—like the queen bee she had soared once into the farthest, bluest reaches of her heaven, and henceforth she was quite content to relapse into the utter commonplaces of the hive. Her yellow hair grew sparse and flat and streaked with gray, her pink-rose face became over plump and mottled across the nose, and her mind turned soon as flat and unelastic as her body; but she was perfectly satisfied with the portion she had had from life, for, having weighed all things, she had come to regard the conventions as of most enduring worth. Now she rustled in with an emphatic announcement of stiff brocade, and enveloped the spectral Angela in an embrace of comfortable arms and bosom. Her unwieldy figure reminded Laura of a broad, low wall that has been freshly papered in a large flowered pattern. On her hands and bosom a number of fine emeralds flashed, for events had shown in the end that the impecunious young lover was not fated to dabble in stocks in vain. "Oh Angela, my poor dear, how are you?" she enquired. Angela released herself with a shrinking gesture and, turning away, sat down at the foot of the long couch. "I am the same—always the same," she answered in her cold, reserved voice. "You took your fresh air to-day, I hope?" "I went down in the yard as usual. Laura," she looked desperately around, "is that Rosa who has just come in?" As she paused a knock came at the door, and Laura opened it to admit Mrs. Payne—the eldest, the richest and the most eccentric of the sisters. From a long and varied association with men and manners Mrs. Payne had gathered a certain halo of experience, as of one who had ripened from mere acquaintance into a degree of positive intimacy with the world. She had seen it up and down from all sides, had turned it critically about for her half-humorous, half-sentimental inspection, and the frank cynicism which now flavoured her candid criticism of life only added the spice of personality to her original distinction of adventure. As the wife of an Ambassador to France in the time of the gay Eugénie, and again as one of the diplomatic circle in Cairo and in Constantinople, she had stored her mind with precious anecdotes much as a squirrel stores a hollow in his tree with nuts. Life had taught her that the one infallible method for impressing your generation is to impress it by a difference, and, beginning as a variation from type, she had ended by commanding attention as a preserved specimen of an extinct species. Long, wiry, animated, and habitually perturbed, she moved in a continual flutter of speech—a creature to be reckoned with from the little, flat, round curls upon her temples, which looked as if each separate hair was held in place by a particular wire, to the sweep of her black velvet train, which surged at an exaggerated length behind her feet. Her face was like an old and tattered comic mask which, though it has been flung aside as no longer provocative of pleasant mirth, still carries upon its cheeks and eyebrows the smears of the rouge pot and the pencil. "My dear Angela," she now asked in her excited tones, "have you really been walking about again? I lay awake all night fearing that you had over-taxed your strength yesterday. Mrs. Francis Barnes—you never knew her of course, but she was a distant cousin of Horace's—died quite suddenly, without an instant's warning, after having walked rapidly twice up and down the room. Since then I have always looked upon movement as a very dangerous thing." "Well, I could hardly die suddenly under any circumstances," returned Angela, indifferently. "You've been watching by my death-bed for forty years." "Oh, dear sister," pleaded Mrs. Bleeker, whose heart, was as soft as her bosom. "It does sound as if you thought we really wanted your things," commented Mrs. Payne, opening and shutting her painted fan. "Of course—if you were to die we should be too heart-broken to care what you left—but, since we are on the subject, I've always meant to ask you to leave me the shawl of old rose-point which belonged to mother." "Rosa, how can you?" remonstrated Mrs. Bleeker, "I am sure I hope Angela will outlive me many years, but if she doesn't I want everything she has to go to Laura." "Well, I'm sure I don't see how Laura could very well wear a rose-point shawl," persisted Mrs. Payne. "I wouldn't have started the subject for anything on earth, Angela, but, since you've spoken of it, I only mention what is in my mind. And now don't say a word, Sophy, for we'll go back to other matters. In poor Angela's mental state any little excitement may bring on a relapse." "A relapse of what?" bluntly enquired honest Mrs. Bleeker. Mrs. Payne turned upon her a glance of indignant calm. "Why a relapse of—of her trouble," she responded. "You show a strange lack of consideration for her condition, but for my part I am perfectly assured that it needs only some violent shock, such as may result from a severe fall or the unexpected sight of a man, to produce a serious crisis." Mrs. Bleeker shook her head with the stubborn common sense which was the reactionary result of her romantic escapade. "A fall might hurt anybody," she rejoined, "but I'm sure I don't see why the mere sight of a man should. I've looked at one every day for thirty years and fattened on it, too." "That," replied Mrs. Payne, who still delighted to prick at the old scandal with a delicate dissecting knife, "is because you have only encountered the sex in domestic shackles. As for me, I haven't the least doubt in the world that the sudden shock of beholding a man after forty years would be her death blow." "But she has seen Percival," insisted Mrs. Bleeker; and feeling that her illustration did not wholly prove her point added, weakly, "at least he wears breeches." "I would not see him if I could help myself," broke in Angela, with sudden energy. "I never—never—never wish to see a man again in this world or the next." Mrs. Payne glanced sternly at Mrs. Bleeker and followed it with an emphatic head shake, which said as plainly as words, "So there's your argument." "All the same, I don't believe Robert would shock her," remarked Mrs. Bleeker. "Never—never—never," repeated Angela in a froze...