For only scoundrels dare to doWhat we consider just and true;And only good men do in fact,What we should think a dirty act.
For only scoundrels dare to doWhat we consider just and true;And only good men do in fact,What we should think a dirty act.
For only scoundrels dare to doWhat we consider just and true;And only good men do in fact,What we should think a dirty act.
For only scoundrels dare to do
What we consider just and true;
And only good men do in fact,
What we should think a dirty act.
But Norma did not enjoy a humorous approach to a subject which she had only recently made her own. She withdrew; frowning slightly, and saying that she would try to get a word with him.
"Oh, don't let's wait," said Evie after a few minutes, during which the crowd on the platform increased.
And so Aunt Georgy was led home by the mayor and her small niece without getting a word with the speaker. But she was a determined woman; and though Lisburn was a busy man, between lecturing at his college in the daytime and conferences with mentally maladjusted in Jefferson in the evening and giving a good many spare hours to Norma, a free afternoon was finally found and Norma brought him to tea. Little Evie, who happened to be spending a week or two with her aunt, immediately announced her intention of being out.
"I don't like that man," she said.
Aunt Georgy, always eager for information, inquired why she didn't.
Evie thought a long time, and then said, "Because he invades one's private life."
"Does Norma feel that way?"
Little Evie laughed. "Norma hasn't got a private life," she answered.
At five o'clock, when Aunt Georgy was settled on her blue sofa, with her cane beside her and her tea set in front, Evie stole quietly out of the back door into the garden as Norma and the seer entered at the front.
"Well, here he is, Aunt Georgy," Norma shouted from the threshold, as if she had done a good deal for an elderly relation.
He came in and shook hands, unruffled by Norma's introduction.
"Where's Evie?" Norma went on in a tone rather like a sheriff's officer.
"She was so sorry—she had an engagement," said Aunt Georgy, quite as if it were true.
Norma gave a short shout.
"Oh, Ken knows she doesn't like him," she said; "and as a matter of fact, he isn't very keen about her."
Lisburn looked at Miss Hadley, not exactly embarrassed, but as if to say that when you told a thing to Norma you told it to the whole world. Aunt Georgy was interested in his not denying the accusation. She had never before happened to meet a man who actually did not like Evie.
"You don't admire my little niece?" she said, in her tone of seeking information merely.
"No," shouted Norma from the hearthrug. "He thinks she's too colorless, too much tied up with inhibitions to be interesting."
"Of course, I see your niece's great charm," he answered; "but, as I said the other night, we all have our own type—the type that particularly appeals—and I am attracted to a more active, aggressive type."
"That's why he likes me," said Norma, with her mouth not empty of chocolate cake—"because I lead a great, free, ramping life. Isn't that true, Ken?"
"I'm sure it's true you lead a great, free, ramping life, Norma," said her aunt.
"Yes, and that's why I'm so healthy," answered Norma, and she danced a little on her flat-heeled shoes. They were large shoes, but then, she was a large woman.
Aunt Georgy was surprised to find herself a partisan. It annoyed her to hear her favorite niece dismissed as attractive to other men but not to this reader of human hearts.
She said almost pettishly, "Evie is healthy, too—one of the healthiest people I ever knew."
"I bet she has dreams," said Norma.
"I doubt it."
"Everybody dreams, Aunt Georgy," said Norma, really astonished at her aunt's ignorance of the facts of life. "If you don't remember your dreams, that only shows that they are so awful that you don't allow them to come up into your conscious at all."
Aunt Georgy was opening her mouth to contradict, but found that Lisburn was speaking.
"That's the theory, Miss Hadley," he said, less positively than Norma; "that everyone dreams, and that our dreams represent our unfulfilled and unacknowledged desires. A type like—like Miss—"
"Like Evie," said Norma, a foe to last names.
"That type," Lisburn went on—"so restrained, so inhibited, so what is called well-bred, is particularly likely to have dreams and almost certain to be unwilling to admit having them."
He stopped as a slight sound at the door that led to the garden made them all turn. Little Evie was standing there—had evidently been standing there for some time. She had on a sky-blue dress, a large childish hat and her arms were full of cherry blossoms. She looked more than usually like a fashion plate of the '40's.
Norma immediately shouted at her, "You do dream, don't you, Evie? Be honest for once in your life."
Aunt Georgy, who was herself an honest person, was aware of an utterly unsuppressed wish that, whatever the facts were, Evie would say that she had never had a dream in her life. Instead the girl, with her blue eyes fixed on Lisburn, was nodding slowly.
"I've begun to dream lately," she said in a low tone.
Norma was delighted.
"I knew it," she said. "I'd have bet on it. It's extraordinary how one gets to know these things. Tell us what your dream is about, Evie."
"Mercy!" exclaimed Aunt Georgy. "Isn't a person allowed more than one dream nowadays?"
Evie sank down on the sofa at her aunt's feet.
"Mine's always the same," she murmured.
"Ah," said Lisburn, "a recurrent dream." He looked at her with interest. "Does it trouble you?"
Evie made a cooing sound like a dove, in doubt. Norma began to tease her to tell. Aunt Georgy thought she was tiresome, nagging and bothering like that. She told her to let Evie alone. Norma shrugged her shoulders.
"It's so characteristic of that introverted type," she said, "not to be willing to be frank enough to be cured."
"Can one be cured?" asked Evie, and she raised her eyes to Lisburn.
He was a busy man, and he had stood up to go.
"I might—if it troubles you—be able to help you."
"Even," said Evie, "though you are not interested in my type?"
"Oh," cried Norma, "isn't that like you, Evie! You overheard the whole thing, and instead of having it out then and there, as I should have, you wait and give him a poisoned dig in the ribs when he's trying to be nice to you."
Evie repeated in exactly the same tone: "Even though you are not interested in my type?"
"I'm always interested in a case," he answered.
They exchanged unfriendly looks. Then he came to the sofa to say good-by to Aunt Georgy. She was rummaging for a pencil among the litter of papers and books beside her. She wanted to write down the name of his book, but he insisted very civilly on sending it to her.
When he and Norma had gone Aunt Georgy turned to Evie.
"I'm glad," she said, "that you did not tell them what your dream was about. They would have been sure to make something horrid out of it."
"I couldn't tell them."
"You mean it is horrid?"
"I hadn't made it up yet," answered Evie. "Dear Aunt Georgy, I never, never dream. I'm always asleep before I get the covers well tucked in at the nape of my neck, and I never wake up until someone comes in and opens the shutters. Norma was so determined that I should have a dream—perhaps she won't be so pleased. Mine is going to be a hard one to interpret. Interested in cases, is he? Well, mine is going to be an interesting one. Wait till we get his book."
The book was left at the door after dinner, and Aunt Georgy plunged at once into it. She habitually read as a famished animal eats, tearing the heart out of a book, utterly oblivious of the world until she had finished. At last she looked up.
"Really, Evie," she exclaimed, "I'm afraid you can't get a dream out of this. I'm not old-fashioned, but I must say—" She did not say what it was she must say.
Evie took the book calmly.
"Of course, I shall be perfectly innocent as to what my dream means, Aunt Georgy," she said. "Let's see. X, a young employe in a shoe factory, dreamed— My goodness, what an unpleasant man X must have been! Now this isn't bad— Or, no, that would involvemother. I don't want to drag poor mother into it. Something wonderful might be done with a tune—Old Black Joe, if only his name were Joe, which it isn't.... And I shall begin to do a strange and apparently meaningless thing—to have a compulsion. I mean—like buttering my bread on both sides—"
"Don't you think it's a little dangerous?" said Aunt Georgy. "They interpret everything so oddly."
"Yes, it's dangerous; but everything is. If you do nothing, that's the worst of all." And Evie sank into the book.
A few days later, when Lisburn reached home in the late afternoon, he found a note waiting for him at his house. It was written in Evie's neat, fine hand, and said:
Dear Mr. Lisburn: Do you remember offering to help me in case the dream—of which I think I spoke to you—began to give me trouble? I must say I hesitate to take up your time, as the whole thing seems so trivial [Lisburn gave a little shake of his head, an indication that such experiences were far from trivial] but it would be a relief to me to talk it over with you, and I shall stop at your house for a few minutes this evening on the chance that you may have a spare minute.
Dear Mr. Lisburn: Do you remember offering to help me in case the dream—of which I think I spoke to you—began to give me trouble? I must say I hesitate to take up your time, as the whole thing seems so trivial [Lisburn gave a little shake of his head, an indication that such experiences were far from trivial] but it would be a relief to me to talk it over with you, and I shall stop at your house for a few minutes this evening on the chance that you may have a spare minute.
He laid the letter on the table and eyed it sideways as he lit his pipe. Then he went to the telephone and called up Norma. He said he was sorry, but that he wouldn't be able to come that evening for bridge. Norma, as she herself had observed, did not suffer from inhibitions. Her emotions found easy expression, and her emotion onthis occasion was disappointment mingled with anger. She expressed it freely over the telephone. Lisburn hung up the receiver sharply. Self-expression was all very well, he thought; but there was such a thing as having no self-control. It was necessary for him to have a calm and receptive mind in order to be of any assistance to this child who was coming to consult him. He must make a mental picture of her personality and recall her gestures, her vocabulary.
Soon after eight he heard her step on the piazza and went to the door himself. She entered with that timid, conscious, apologetic manner which had become so familiar to him in his patients. It seemed as if she would have liked to make fun of herself for coming if only she had been less frightened at finding herself there. The hand she gave him shook. He drew forward a deep comfortable chair for her.
"Now tell me everything you can think of," he said; "your own way; I won't interrupt."
She drew an uncertain breath.
"Well, I didn't think anything about it—you know how casually I spoke the other day—but now I find it is beginning to affect my conduct. I find I cannot bring myself to get into an automobile. I have never driven a car myself, but I have always enjoyed driving with other people; but now— This dream of mine is about a car."
She described the dream at great length, though it was strangely lacking in incident. It was merely that she was driving a small car of her own—a very pretty white car with a good deal of blue about it. She wasdriving along a wide street, and suddenly the car began to skid, slowly at first and then faster and faster; and though her agony became extreme and she turned the steering wheel more and more, she could do nothing—the car made straight for the bushes, where some terrific but unseen and unknown object was lurking.
He made her go over the details of it two or three times. The shade of blue was about the same shade as the dress she was wearing, but he elicited very little more. She could not, she said, get any clew as to what was hidden in the bushes, except that it was something she was horribly afraid of.
"And yet," he said, "you go toward it?"
"Yes; but entirely against my will, Mr. Lisburn."
"You're sure you go against your will?"
Her voice was almost hysterical as she protested, "Yes—yes, indeed!"
"And yet you go?"
"No, Mr. Lisburn, the car goes."
"Don't you think you and the car are the same?"
She gave him a long wondering stare, and presently insisted that she must go. She promised, however, that she would do everything in her power to find out what was hidden in those sinister bushes. She was to keep a pencil and paper beside her bed and write down everything she could remember as soon as she waked up in the morning.
She hurried home to tell Aunt Georgy all that had occurred and was disappointed to find her aunt established at the bridge table with Norma and two of Norma's friends. It seemed that Mr. Lisburn had been expectedas a fourth and they had been obliged to come to Aunt Georgy at the last minute to make up the table. Norma was still angry.
"They can't have it both ways—these psychoanalysts," Norma was saying. "It's always a Freudian forgetting—a wish-thought—when you forget an engagement with them, and something quite professional and unavoidable when they break an engagement with you."
"What Norma means, Evie," said Aunt Georgy, without raising her eyes from the interesting hand which had just been dealt her, "is that she suspects Mr. Lisburn of having had something more amusing to do."
Evie shook her head as if you couldn't be sure with men like that.
"Perhaps he had," she said.
Then Aunt Georgy knew the interview had gone well.
Three days later, not having heard anything more from her, he came to the house late in the afternoon. He was in his own car, and he suggested that perhaps he could help her to overcome her repugnance to motoring. At first she refused with every appearance of terror; but soon she admitted that with him she would feel perfectly safe, and so she yielded and got in.
She spoke little, and he could hear that she drew her breath in a tremulous and disturbing manner. At last, in a lonely road, her terror seemed to overmaster her, and she opened the door and would have sprung out while the car was going thirty-five miles an hour if Lisburn had not held her in.
As soon as he had brought the car to a standstill hetook his arm away, while little Evie cowered in the seat beside him.
"You see," she said at last, "how it is with me? If you had not been there I should have jumped out and been killed. It's stronger than I am."
"I see," he answered gently. "Well, if it happens again I won't force you to stay in the car. You shall get out and walk home."
She thanked him warmly for his concession, but it did not happen again.
After this they had conferences every evening, as her stay at Jefferson was coming to an end, and she still did not seem to be able to see what was the emotional center of her dream.
The fact that Lisburn was trying to help little Evie soon began to be known, and the knowledge affected different people differently. Norma said that she should think Evie would be ashamed to take up so much of Mr. Lisburn's time, considering how contemptuous she had been about the whole science of psychoanalysis. The Reverend Mr. Gordon said that he had never been in any doubt that the human spirit needed the confessional, but that only a man in holy orders was fit to receive confession. The mayor was a little more violent. He said that it appeared to him that this fellow was practicing medicine without a license, and that if the law could not reach him it ought to be able to. He hoped it wasn't doing little Miss Evie any harm. Aunt Georgy tried to reassure him, and said Evie seemed in the best of health and spirits, at which the mayor, looking gloomier thanever, said he was much relieved. Aunt Georgy had just been telling this to Evie as she was about to start for her last conference. She was going away the next day.
"Have you decided what it is that is hidden in the bushes?" her aunt asked her.
Evie nodded.
"Yes," she said; "it's a black panther—a beautiful, lithe, vigorous, graceful, dangerous wild animal."
"Mercy!" exclaimed Aunt Georgy. "He'll think it's himself."
"Do you think he's a vain man, Aunt Georgy?"
"Everyone's as vain as that."
"Well, that isn't my fault," said Evie, and went on her way.
Aunt Georgy shook her head. Life was often like that, she thought—a woman despised a man for believing something that she had exercised all her ingenuity to make him believe.
Lisburn was on his feet when Evie entered, and as soon as he had seen her settled in the deep chair he began to pace up and down; like a panther, she thought, but did not say so; that would have been crude.
"Well," he said, fixing his black eyes on her, "you've found out what it is, haven't you?"
She nodded.
"You are clever," she answered. "I don't know what you'll make of it—it sounds so silly." She looked up at him, rubbing the back of one hand against the palm of the other. "It's—it's a panther; just a beautiful black panther; a splendid, lithe, graceful, dangerous wildanimal." Even little Evie was susceptible at times to embarrassment, and at this moment she could not endure the piercing stare of those black eyes. She dropped her eyes modestly and murmured, "Oh, Mr. Lisburn, do you think you can help me?"
"I'm sure I can," he answered; "at least, I can if I may be perfectly candid."
Evie said that was all she asked—candor.
"In that case—" said he. He walked to the door and leaned against it as if the revelations he was about to make were such that she might try to escape before she heard him out. "In that case," he repeated, in that smooth, almost honeyed tone in which the psychoanalyst clothes even the most shocking statements, "let me say that you are the most phenomenal little liar, little Evie, that I have ever met—yes, among all the many I have known I gladly hand you the palm."
"Mr. Lisburn!" said Evie, but she was so much surprised and interested that she did not do justice to her protest.
"What makes me angry," he went on in his civil tone, "is that you should imagine you could get away with it. However much of an ass you may consider me, you ought to have known that there was enough in the science of psychoanalysis to show from the very beginning that you were a fraud."
"Not from the beginning!" said Evie.
"From the first evening. You haven't one single symptom of a person with a neurosis—not one. If you knew a little bit more—pooh, if you knew anything at all about the subject—"
"I read your book," she answered, as if this put the blame on him.
"Not very intelligently, then, or you would have done a better fraud."
"You were willing to waste a lot of time on a fraud."
"It hasn't been wasted. And that brings me to my second point. I will now tell you what perhaps you don't know, and that is why you did it."
"I know perfectly well, thank you," replied Evie. "I did it because you were so poisonous about me that afternoon at Aunt Georgy's. I thought I'd like to show you—"
"That is a rationalization," he interrupted, waving it away with one hand. "You did it because you are strongly attracted to me."
"Attracted to you!" said Evie in a most offensive tone.
"I am the panther in the bushes."
Evie laughed contemptuously.
"I knew you'd think you were the panther," she said; "I simply knew it."
"Of course you did," he answered. "That's the very reason you dreamed it."
"But I didn't dream it," she returned triumphantly. "I thought you had grasped that. I didn't dream it. I never dream."
He was not triumphed over.
"Well," he said, "you made it up; that's the same thing—a daydream, a romance."
"I made it up particularly in order to deceive you," Evie explained.
"That's what you think," he answered; "but it isn'ttrue. You made it up in order to let me know you were attracted to me, for I repeat that you are attracted to me."
Little Evie sprang up from the deep chair in which she had sat at ease during so many evening conferences.
"You may repeat it until you are black in the face," she said; "but I'm not, I'm not, I'm not!"
"Don't you see that the emotion with which you repudiate the idea proves that it's the truth?"
An inspiration came to her.
"Then why," she demanded—"the other afternoon when you explained so much why you didn't like me—why doesn't that prove that you are attracted to me?"
"Little Evie," he said, "it does. That's the truth. You are almost everything of which I disapprove in woman. I love you."
He approached and took her in his arms.
"I hate you," said Evie, in a tone too conversational to be impressive.
He behaved as if she had not spoken. She drew away from him, though not wholly out of the circle of his arms.
"I don't think you can have understood me," she remarked coldly. "I said I hated you."
"I feel more sure of you than if you had said you loved me."
"Then I'll say I love you."
"Yes, dear, I know you do."
She sighed.
"You're not a very consistent man, are you?" she said.
She spoke in a tone of remote philosophy, but she leaned her forehead against his chest.
When the story came out, as of course it was bound to do—for both Evie and Lisburn seemed to think they had been rather clever about the whole thing, and they told everybody—Fanny was deeply shocked. In fact, she owned that if she had been Evie's mother she would never have held up her head again.
"To think," she said, "of Evie, who has always seemed so dignified and well-bred and not of this generation at all—to think that she invented the whole thing in order to attract Mr. Lisburn's attention!"
"Fanny," said Aunt Georgy, "do you remember the first day you met your present husband? You twisted your ankle just so that he might have to carry you upstairs to your room. Well, my dear, you recovered entirely as soon as he had gone, and walked all over everywhere. A strange young man carried you in his arms, Fanny. If you ask me, I call the new technique more delicate and modest than the old."
Mr. Brougham stood waiting in the wings. Never before had he made a speech; never had he been upon a stage, except to sit safely with a delegation, in a row, behind the ice-water pitcher. He had a small dry patch in his throat which constant swallowing failed to improve, and the tips of his fingers kept getting cold and very distant. He was about to make a Liberty Loan speech, and he was suffering more than he had expected; but, as he kept murmuring to himself, "Dulce et decorum est."
At twenty-eight he had volunteered among the first in the Spanish War, and it had been no fault of his that he had never got any nearer the front than Chattanooga. At forty-eight he could still speak for his country—at least he hoped he could. How absurd to be nervous! This was no time to be thinking of one's own feelings. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the palms of his hands. "Well, Mr. Brougham," said the loud bold voice of the local chairman, "shall we go on?" What was one victim more or less to him in his insatiable campaign for speakers?
"By all means," answered Brougham in a tone which even in his own ears sounded like that of a total stranger.
His only conscious thought was grateful remembrance that his wife was kept at the canteen that evening, and couldn't be in the audience, which he found himself regarding as a hostile body waiting to devour him. He sattrying to relax the muscles of his face during the chairman's short address; and then the fatal sentence began: " ... the great pleasure ... introduce ... so well known ... Mr. Walter Brougham, who will say a few rousing words to you on this great subject."
What a silly adjective "rousing" was, Brougham thought as he came forward. He had no intention whatever of being rousing. He wondered if he had the intention of being anything except absolutely silent. He lifted the lid and looked into his mind as into an unexplored box. Was there anything in it? Why, yes; rather to his surprise he found there was.
"My friends," he began, "this is no time for oratory." Hearty, and to Brougham totally unexpected, applause greeted this sentiment. "This is a time for cool, steady, clear-eyed vision." That was a mistake; of course vision was clear-eyed. "This is a time to ask ourselves this question: How is it that we hesitate to give our money, and yet stand ready—every one of us—to give our lives and—harder still—our sons' lives?"
"Hear, hear!" cried a voice from the audience, fresh, young and familiar. Brougham looked down; yes, there they were—his own two boys, David, not eighteen, and Lawrence, hardly fifteen. Their blond, well-brushed heads towered above the rest of the row and were easily recognizable. He could see the expressions of their faces—cool, serene, friendly approval. They're too damned philosophical, he said to himself; and as he went on speaking, with all that was mortal in him concentrated on his words, in some entirely different part of his being a veil was suddenly lifted and he saw something that hehad been trying not to see for months—namely, that he was dissatisfied with his elder son's attitude toward the war—it was cool; cool like his approval of the speech. Not that Mr. Brougham wanted his son to volunteer at his age—quite the contrary; he sincerely believed it was every man's duty to wait until he had reached the age designated by his country; but he did want the boy to want to volunteer. He wanted to be able to say at the club as other fathers were saying: "What gets into these young fellows? I've had to forbid my boy—" Perhaps if his self-vision had been perfect he would have admitted that he had sometimes said it.
And then it occurred to him that this was the moment to stir their hearts—to make one of those speeches which might not touch the audience but which would inflame the patriotism of youth. Forgetting his recent pledge he plunged into oratory—the inherited oratory of the Fourth of July, he snatched up any adjectives as long as they came in threes, called patriotism by name, and spoke of the flag as Old Glory. Hurried on by his own warmth he reached his climax too soon, ended his speech before the audience expected and began asking for subscriptions before anyone was ready.
There was an awkward silence. Then a young voice spoke up: "One one-hundred-dollar bond." Yes, it was David. Mr. Brougham's heart leaped with hope; had the boy been moved? Was this the first fruit of repentance? He looked down, hoping to meet the upward glance of a devotee, but David was whispering something to his younger brother which made the latter giggle foolishly.
The ball once set rolling went fast. Subscriptions poured in; it was a successful evening—almost as successful as the evening made famous by a great screen artist. Mr. Brougham was warmly congratulated by the local chairman.
"We shall call on you again, Brougham," he said gayly.
Mr. Brougham nodded, but his thought was: Is nothing enough for these fellows?
His two boys were waiting for him at the stage door. "You're good, sir, you're good!" they cried, patting him on the back.
"I never thought he'd let them have it so mild," said Lawrence.
Mr. Brougham did not mind being laughed at—at least he always said he didn't—but he couldn't bear to have patriotism in any form held up to ridicule. He thought to himself:
"They don't know what it costs a man of my age to go on a stage and make a speech. I don't enjoy making myself conspicuous."
"We'll stop and get your mother at the canteen," he said sternly.
"Oh, yes, this is mother's night for saving the country, isn't it?" said Lawrence.
"Did you know," said David to his brother, across his father's head, for they were both taller than he, "did you know that a gob tipped mother the other evening? So pleased with his coffee that he flicked her a dime for herself."
"Oh, you sailor-boys!" said Lawrence in a high falsetto.
This was really more than Mr. Brougham could bear in his exalted state. "I don't like that, boys," he said.
"No, father," answered David; "but you know we never tipped mother; in fact, it's always been quite the other way."
"I mean I don't like your tone of ridicule, of—of—of—" He couldn't think of the word he wanted, and felt conscious that David had it on the tip of his tongue but was too tactful to interrupt. "You boys don't seem to appreciate the sacrifice, the physical strain for a woman of your mother's age—standing all evening handing out sandwiches—not accustomed to hard work either."
Both boys looked gravely ahead of them, and Mr. Brougham had a sickening conviction they were both trying to think of something to say that would calm him.
The canteen was just closing, and the two boys made themselves useful in putting things away. "Just as if it were a school picnic," their father thought.
As soon as they were on their way home Mrs. Brougham asked about the speech. Had it gone well?
"Oh, father was great, mother," David answered. "He took it from them in wads, and presented Lawrence and me to his country with every bond."
"A lady behind us was awfully affected," said Lawrence. "She kept whispering that she understood the speaker had two lovely boys of his own."
"I could hardly keep Lawrence from telling her that she had not been misinformed."
Mr. Brougham sighed. This was not the tone of youngmen suddenly roused to a new vision of patriotism. He said aloud: "I was glad you felt financially able to take a bond yourself, David."
"Oh, yes," answered his son. "I sold my boat yesterday."
Mr. Brougham was not so Spartan a parent that he did not feel a pang to think of the boy without his favorite pastime on this perhaps his last summer.
"Quite right," he said. "This is no year for pleasure boats."
"You get a good price for boats this year," said David.
There it was again—that note Mr. Brougham didn't like. Even if David's motives had been financial and not patriotic he might have allowed Lawrence to see an example of self-sacrifice. Instead Lawrence was getting just like his brother.
Brougham was not a man who habitually eased his burdens by casting them on his wife, but that night when they went upstairs he took her into his confidence.
"Are you satisfied with David's attitude toward the war?" he began.
She was a silent, deep woman whose actions always astonished those who had no intuitive knowledge of the great general trends of her nature. She and David usually understood each other fairly well.
Now she shook her head. "No," she said.
"Good Lord!" said poor Mr. Brougham. "I don't want the boy shot in a trench. I think it's his duty to wait a year or two; but I can't see that he has any enthusiasm, any eagerness, hardly any interest. He seized the paper last evening, and I supposed that hewanted to read about the offensive. Not at all! After a glance at the headlines he turned to the baseball news. Do you understand him?"
"No," said his mother.
"At his age I should have been in this war, with or without my parents' consent. Mind you, I don't want him in it—not for a year or two. But why doesn't he want to get in? He's not a coward."
"No," said his mother, and then she added: "I've thought a great deal about it, and I think it's because he's so young—so immature."
"Immature!" cried Mr. Brougham. "Why, he's always using words I don't know the meaning of!"
"Perhaps he doesn't either," said his wife. "That's immature, isn't it? But I meant the immaturity of not seeing responsibilities—not taking them up, at least. You see, my dear, he's very young—only a year out of school. It's natural enough."
"It's not natural at all," answered Mr. Brougham. "Just out of school—school is the very place to learn patriotism—drilling and all that—and I'm sure Granby is one of the most patriotic men I ever knew. He inspires most of his boys. No, I don't understand. I shall speak to David about his attitude."
"Oh, don't! You'll have him enlisting to-morrow."
"No; for I shall explain to him that he must wait."
She smiled. "You're going to stir him up to want to do something which you won't allow him to do. Is that sensible, dear?"
It wasn't sensible, but—more important—it was inevitable. Mr. Brougham, feeling as he did, could not besilent. He had always been proud of his boys, had always assumed they were stuff to be proud of. They had done decently in their lessons, well in their athletics. What could a father ask more? Now for the first time he found himself questioning his right to be proud, and the doubt was like poison in his system. He must speak to his son.
The difficulty of "speaking to" people is that we either take too portentous a tone, and thus ruffle the minds we mean to impress, or else that we speak so casually as to make no impression at all. Mr. Brougham's leanings were all to the former manner, and recognizing this weakness he made one more effort at the indirect attack. Hearing that his nephew, a lieutenant of infantry, was about to sail, he sent for him to come and dine. In his greeting of the young man he tried to express his respect for the uniform, even when decorated by nothing more than a gold bar.
"I envy you, my boy," he said. "I remember how I felt when I first put on those clothes in 1898—not that we can compare that war with this, but the emotion is the same—the emotion is always the same. We all envy you in this house."
David looked rather impish. "Envy him!" he said. "And him such a bad sailor!"
At this Brougham's brows contracted, but the lieutenant smiled.
"Yes," he said; "won't I wish I had stayed at home!"
This sentiment would have shocked Mr. Brougham except that he believed he recognized in it the decent Anglo-Saxoncloak of a profound feeling—very different from David's cold inaction.
As soon as dinner was over he left the boys alone and took a chair on the piazza, from which he could watch the expressions of their faces. They fell at once into a conversation of the deepest interest; so interesting that they began to move their hands about in unaccustomed gestures. Once David lifted his and brought it down with a sidewise swoop.
"That's it!" a voice rang out. "It's great!"
Mr. Brougham felt justified in moving a little nearer. He then found that the subject of discussion was jazz-band records for the phonograph.
The next morning, looking out of his window early, he saw David in his bathing suit trying, with a seriousness that might have drilled a company, to teach a new handspring to Lawrence. And this made it impossible for Mr. Brougham to be silent any longer.
When David came back to the house, dressed, but with his hair still dark and wet from his swim, his father stopped him.
"Sit down a minute," he said. "I want to speak to you. I want you to explain your attitude toward this war."
This opening sentence, which he had thought of while the handsprings were going on, would have been excellent if he could have given his son time to answer it, but he couldn't; his emotions swept him on, and at the end of five minutes he was still talking:
"The Civil War was fought by boys your age oryounger. I don't say it was best, but it's the fact. And here you are—you've had every advantage—of education, of luxury, of protection. Don't you care for the traditions of your country? You're not a child any more. You're old enough to understand that a hideous catastrophe has come upon the world, and before long you must take your part in remedying it. What's your attitude to the war?"
"I think we're going to win it, sir, in the end."
"Other people are going to win it?"
"Would you approve of my enlisting at once? I understood—"
"No, I would not approve of it, as I've told you," answered his father, feeling that somehow he was being unjustly cornered. "But because a man's too young to make a soldier, that doesn't mean he shouldn't have any patriotism in his make-up—should be absolutely indifferent, with his head full of handsprings and jazz bands."
"I'm not indifferent," said David; "and as for jazz bands, even the men at the Front like them."
"But you're not at the Front—if you get my point."
"I don't believe I do," said David.
Civil as David's tone was there was of course a trace of hostility in the words themselves, and in his distress Mr. Brougham decided to go and consult Granby, the head of the school where David had been for five years and where Lawrence still was.
Brougham only went to Granby in desperate straits, for he was a little afraid of his son's schoolmaster. Granby was a tall bald man of fifty, with an expression at once stern and humble—stern with the habit ofinnumerable decisions, humble with the consciousness that half of them had been wrong. Brougham admired him, but could not be his friend, owing to the fact that he always became in Granby's presence an essential parent and nothing else. Mrs. Brougham, with the protection of her long silences, managed better to retain her individuality in his presence.
"I've come to consult you about David," he began.
Granby visibly shrank. "Don't tell me he's gone too!"
"No—he hasn't; that's it."
Brougham managed to tell his story very satisfactorily, for Granby had the power, rarer than is supposed, of extracting an idea from spoken words.
"He has no enthusiasm—no emotion. I can't understand him. At his age, I venture to say, I would— Well, I've come to you. You've had thirty years' experience of boys."
"Yes," said Granby with his reserved, pedagogic manner. "I've been at it thirty years." He stared at the floor and then, looking up, added: "But I've only had four years of boys as they are now."
This was a new idea to Brougham.
"You mean boys are different?"
"Of course, they're different!" said Granby. "Even we are different, and they— Boys I was giving demerits to and scolding about Latin prose last winter are fighting the war for us to-day. Roberts—I used to make Roberts' life a burden to him about the dative of reference—he was killed last month rescuing his machine gun; and here I am doing the same safe task— Well, I never felt like that about my work before. Different? Of coursethey're different! They are not boys any more. They are men; and we are old men."
There was, naturally enough, a pause, for this was by no means a conception of life which Mr. Brougham could accept offhand; and in the silence the door opened and David himself strode in—and stopped with every appearance of disappointment on seeing his father.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "I'm afraid I'm interrupting you. I'll come back."
"What did you want?" said Mr. Granby.
David paused, looking less like a man and more like a boy in his indecision. Then his jaw set as he took his determination.
"I wanted you to tell my father something, but as long as he's here I'd better tell him myself. I took the examinations last month for an aviation camp, and I've just heard that I'm accepted."
Relief and horror struggling in Mr. Brougham like opposing waves resulted in calm.
"But, my son," he said, "why have you concealed it? You did not think I'd oppose you?"
David moved restlessly.
"Oh, no," he answered. "It wasn't that." He looked at Mr. Granby and smiled. "Father's awfully tyrannical about this war," he said. "He wants everyone to feel just as he does."
"But don't you feel as I do?" asked his father. "Why, you've just proved that you do!"
"Not a bit!" said David, and he spoke with a force neither of the men had ever heard from him before. "I don't feel a bit as you do, sir, and what's more, I don'twant to!" He stopped. "But we needn't go into that," he added, and seemed about to leave the room.
Granby looked at Brougham. "It must be right here if we could get at it," he said. "Tell us, David, what is it in your father's attitude that you don't sympathize with?"
"And my mother's too."
"And mine?" asked Granby.
David hesitated an instant.
"You don't seem to care so much about having us all feel the way you do if what we do is right. But my father and mother don't care what I do unless I get excited about it."
"A healthy emotion is not excitement," said Mr. Brougham. "But you have been cold, absolutely cold to the horror of the world's bleeding to death, to all this unnatural disaster that has come upon us."
"It doesn't seem exactly unnatural to me," answered the boy slowly. "At least I've got used to it. You see, sir, ever since I knew anything—ever since I was Lawrence's age—war has been about the most natural thing going. I suppose it's very different for all of you. Coming at the end of a perfectly peaceful life, it must seem like a sort of dirty accident; but even so, it's awfully queer to me the way you and mother have to lash yourselves up to doing anything—"
"Lash ourselves up?" exclaimed Mr. Brougham.
"Yes, with the idea of patriotism and self-sacrifice, when it's so perfectly clear what we all have to do. Why, father, I feel just as if I were a policeman, or, no, a fireman—I feel as if I were a fireman and you expected meto get off something about patriotism and self-sacrifice every time I went to put out a fire. A fireman goes, all right—it's his job; but I dare say he often wishes he could stay in bed. No one says his heart is cold, and no more it is, to my mind. It must be fun to go off in a burst of patriotic enthusiasm. I know, for I've often felt like that about football. But this is different. This isn't a sport—it's a long disagreeable job. And I must say, father, it makes me pretty tired to have you think me a slacker because I don't get, and don't want to get, excited about it."
"You misunderstand me," said his father. "I don't think any man a slacker who waits to think it over before he makes the supreme sacrifice and offers"—Mr. Brougham's voice took a deeper note—"his life."
David turned sharply to Granby.
"There," he said, "that's what I hate! I hate that attitude toward death—as if it were something you couldn't speak of in the drawing-room. Death isn't so bad," he added, as if saying what he could for an absent friend.
With this Mr. Brougham couldn't even pretend to agree; death seemed to him very bad indeed—about the worst possible, though not to be evaded by brave men on that account.
"Ah," he said to Granby, "that's the beauty of youth—it doesn't think about death at all."
"Nonsense," said David. "I beg your pardon, sir, but isn't it nonsense? Of course, we think of it—a lot more than you do. The chances are about one in twenty that I'll be killed. When you were my age you wereplanning your career, and college, and you thought you'd be married sometime, and you were getting your name put up at clubs you couldn't get into for years. But fellows of my age aren't making any plans—it would be pretty foolish if we did. We haven't got any future, as you had it. I don't know if you call that thinking about death. I do—thinking about it as a fact, not a horror. We've been up against it for the last four years, and we've got used to it. That's what none of you older people seem to be able to get into your heads. We don't particularly mind the idea of dying. And now I think I'll run home and tell my mother."
Neither of the men spoke for a few minutes after he had gone. Mr. Brougham was shocked. He had just caught himself back from telling David that he ought to be afraid of dying—which of course was not at all what he meant. He himself had always feared death—most of the men he knew feared it—only hadn't allowed that fear to influence their actions. He had always regarded this fear as a great universal limitation. He felt as if a great gulf had suddenly opened between him and his son. More than that, he felt that to live free from the terror was too great an emancipation for one so young.
"If they're not afraid of death, what are they afraid of?" he found himself thinking.
He himself in his youth had never thought about dying—except sometimes in church in connection with music and crowns and glassy seas. Then once, when he was only a little younger than David, he had been very ill in the school infirmary; another boy had died, and then, he remembered, he did for the first time consider thepossibility of his, Walter Brougham's, coming to an end, stopping, going out perhaps like a candle. It had been an uncomfortable experience, and when his mother had come to take care of him he had distinctly clung to her—as if she could have done any good. Had these boys gone through that and come out on the other side? He found it alarmed him to think that David wasn't afraid.
Good heavens, what would they do—this new generation, young and healthy and unafraid of death, not because they had never thought about it but because they had been familiar with it since they went into long trousers?
Mr. Granby broke the silence. He said: "To order ourselves lowly and reverently to all our betters?"
Brougham was puzzled by these words, and he felt that it was no time for puzzling him.
"Did you think David was impertinent to me, Mr. Granby?" he asked. "Is that what you meant?"
"No, that isn't what I meant, Mr. Brougham."
Brougham didn't inquire any further. He shook his head and went home. He found his wife and David sitting hand in hand on the piazza looking out to sea, with the same blank grave look on both their faces. Yet they were thinking very different thoughts.
Mrs. Brougham was thinking that she had been strangely stupid not to know that this was just exactly the way David would do it; but she added to herself she had allowed her vision to be clouded by her husband.
David was carefully reviewing the small stock of his technical knowledge of aëroplanes.
Miss Wilbur sat up and wrung the water out of her hair. Most of us have looked about a dinner-table and wondered which of the party would make the pleasantest companion on a desert island; Juliana had done it often enough, but now the comic touch was lacking. Far out, hung on some unknown reef, the prow of the vessel stuck up black and tall, almost as if she were still pursuing a triumphant course landward, though a list to starboard betrayed her desperate condition, and a second glance showed that the waves were breaking over her stern. The heavy swell was all that was left of the storm. The sun had just risen in a cloudless sky, above a dark-blue sea. It was perhaps that bright horizontal ray which had waked Miss Wilbur. It had not disturbed her rescuer, who, more provident, had hidden his face in his arm.
It seems hardly possible for a young lady to be dragged from her berth in the dead of night, hauled to the deck, and literally dumped into a small boat, to be tossed out of the boat and dragged to shore—all by a man whose face and name were equally unknown. But the more she looked at the back of that damp head, and the line of those shoulders, the less familiar did they appear. This was hardly surprising, for since she and her maid had taken the steamer at Trinidad, she had made so little effort atrapprochementwith her fellow passengers that she could hardly call any of them to mind—a greatGerman from a banking house in Caracas; a sunburnt native botanist bound for the Smithsonian; a little Englishman from the Argentine; these were the only three figures she could remember. Who was this man? A sailor? A commercial traveler? Of what standing and what nationality?
She coughed presently: "I wish you'd wake up," she said, "and let me thank you for saving my life."
The first result of this remark was that the man grunted and buried his nose deeper in the sand. Then he rolled over, stood up, and comprehensively hitching up what remained of his trousers, he looked carefully round the horizon, then at the wall of palm-trees behind them, and last of all at Miss Wilbur, without the smallest change of expression.
"Did I save you?" he asked.
"Yes, don't you remember? You caught me up in the dark—"
"I had a notion it was Mrs. Morale's son." Again his eyes sought the horizon, and he turned to move away, but she arrested him with a question.
"Do you think we shall be rescued?" she said.
He stopped, eyed her, and again turned away. His silence annoyed her. "Why don't you answer my question?"
"Because I thought it just about worthy of someone who wakes up a tired man to thank him for saving her life. Do I think we'll be rescued? That depends on whether we are in the track of vessels; and I know neither the track of vessels nor where we are. It depends on whether any of the other boats lived through thenight. But I'll tell you one thing. It looks to me as if they needn't trouble to come at all, if they don't come soon. I'm going to hunt up breakfast."
He disappeared into the forest of palms, leaving her alone. She would have liked to call him back and ask him what he thought of the probabilities of snakes on the island. Tact, however, that civilized substitute for terror, restrained her. She thought him very peculiar. "I wonder if he's a little crazy," she thought. "I wonder if something hit him on the head."
He was gone a long time, and when he returned carried a bunch of bananas and three cocoanuts. He stopped short on seeing her. "Do you mean to say," he cried, "that you haven't been drying your clothes? What do you suppose I stayed away so long for? But no matter. Have your breakfast first."
She refrained from expressing, at once, a profound distaste for cocoanuts, but when he cut one and handed it to her, the smell overcame her resolutions. "Oh!" she said, drawing back, "I can't bear them."
"You will order something else on the menu?"
The tone was not agreeable, and Miss Wilbur eyed the speaker. No wonder she was at a loss, for hitherto her measure of men had been the people they knew, the clothes they wore, and, more especially, their friendliness to herself. In the present case, none of these were much help, and she decided to resort to the simpler means of the direct question. Besides, it had always been Juliana's custom to converse during her meals and, peculiar though this one appeared, she saw no reason for making it an exception.
"Doesn't it seem strange," she began, "that I don't even know your name?"
"Nathaniel or Spens?"
"Oh! Spens, of course," she answered, quite as if they had met in a ballroom. "And don't you think," she went on, "that it would be nice if we knew a little more about each other than just our names?"
"A little more?" he exclaimed. "My idea was we were getting near the too much point."
"But I meant our past selves, our everyday selves—ourrealselves."
"So did I. I hope we sha'n't get any realler. This is real enough to suit me." He continued under his breath to ring the changes on this idea to his own intense satisfaction.
Miss Wilbur gave up and began again. "I think it would be interesting to tell each other a little of our lives—who we are, and where we came from. For instance I'm willing to begin—I'm a New Yorker. My mother died when I was sixteen, and I have been at the head of my father's house ever since—he has retired from business. We are quite free, and we travel a great deal. I came down here on a yacht. You may ask why I left it—well, a little difficulty arose—a situation. The owner, one of my best and oldest friends—" She paused. As she talked, questions had floated through her mind. Does he take in the sort of person I am at home? Does he realize how his toil is lightened by the contrast of my presence in the benighted spot? Does he know what a privilege it is to be cast away with me? He was sayingto himself: "If only I can get home before the first, I'll increase that quarterly dividend."
She took up her narrative. "The owner, as I say, was one of my best and oldest friends; and yet, you know—"
"And yet you quarreled like one o'clock."
"Oh, no," said Miss Wilbur. "We did not quarrel. It would have been better if we had."
"Just sulked, you mean?"
This was more than she could bear. "He wanted to marry me," she said firmly.
"Not really!" he exclaimed, and then, studying her more carefully, he added: "But of course—very naturally. I am sure to some types of men you would be excessively desirable."
This was the nearest approach to a compliment that she had had since the ship struck, and she gulped at it eagerly.
"Desirable is not quite the word," she answered. "But perhaps I should rather have you think of me as desirable than not at all," and she smiled fascinatingly.
"Great Cæsar's ghost!" he exclaimed. "Did I say I was thinking of you? But there, I mean—I mean—" But it was unnecessary to complete the sentence, for Miss Wilbur rose, with what dignity a tattered dressing gown allowed, and moved away. He followed her and explained with the utmost civility where there was another beach, how she should spread out her clothes to the sun, and added gravely, holding up one finger: "And remember to keep in the shade yourself."
"Oh, the sun never affects me," said Juliana.
This answer plainly tried him, but with some self-control he merely repeated his injunction in exactly the same words.
Miss Wilbur's costume was not elaborate. It comprised, all told, a night-gown, a pink quilted dressing-gown, a pair of men's sneakers, and a bit of Cartier jewelry about her throat. She wished that dressing-gown had been more becoming. Just before she sailed she had sent her maid out to buy something warm, and the pink atrocity had been the result. She had thought it did not matter then, but, now that she might have to spend the rest of her life in it, she wished she had taken the trouble to choose it herself.
Even if she had been completely alone on this Caribbean island, she was too much a child of civilization to remove all her clothes at once. The process took time. As she sat under the trees and waited, she considered her position.
Feelings of dislike for, and dependence upon, her rescuer grew together in her mind. She did not say, even to herself, that she was afraid of him, very much in the same way in which she had once been afraid of her schoolmistress—afraid of his criticism and his contempt, but she expressed the same idea by saying "he was not very nice to her." That he "was rather rude"! She thought how differently any of the men she had left on the yacht at Trinidad would have behaved. Alfred, for instance. It would have been rather fun to have been cast away with Alfred. He would have been tender and solicitous. Poor Alfred! She began to think it had beenan absurd scruple that had made her leave the party. It had seemed as if she could not cruise another day on the yacht of a man she had refused so decidedly to marry. After such a scene, too! Miss Wilbur frowned and shook her head at the recollection. As a matter of fact, she liked scenes.
She had so far used the freedom of her life in eliminating from her consciousness those who did not contribute to her self-esteem. Sometimes she created admiration where it had not existed. Sometimes, when this seemed impossible, she simply withdrew. The latter method was obviously out of the question on this little dot of an island.
But the other? One of the unquestioned facts in Miss Wilbur's life was her own extreme charm; and this thought brought another to her mind. The picture of the traditional male—the beast of prey! In spite of the American girl's strange mixture of inexperience and sophistication, she is not entirely without the instinct of self-preservation. She remembered his long Yankee jaw with relief.
When she returned she found he had erected four poles with cross beams and was attempting to thatch it with banana-leaves, to the accompaniment of a low sibilant whistle.
"What's that?" she asked. He completed the phrase diminuendo before answering.
"This," he said, "is where you are going to sleep, and, if it doesn't fall in on you in the night, I'll build another for myself to-morrow. Look out where you step.I'm drying two vestas on that rock. If they light, we'll have a fire, and perhaps some day something to eat. Suppose you go and find some wood?"
She hesitated. "Do you think there are snakes on this island?" she hazarded; and oh, with what enthusiasm such a suggestion of femininity would have been received on the yacht!
"Think not," said her companion; "but I'd look out for scorpions and centipedes and things like that, you know."
The suggestion did not increase her enthusiasm for her task. She hung about a few minutes longer and then collected a few twigs along the beach, raising them carefully between her thumb and forefinger. They did not make an imposing pile, as she felt when her rescuer came to inspect it, looking first at it and then at her, with his hands in his pockets.
"I hope you won't overdo?" he said.
Juliana colored. "Did you expect me to carry great logs?" she asked. "Women can't do that sort of thing."
He moved away without answering, and presently had collected enough wood for many fires.
"I'd like to see you lay a fire," he said.
She threw some of the small sticks together, then the larger ones, as she had seen the housemaid do at home. Then, embarrassed at his silent observation, she drew back.
"Of course I can't do it, if you watch me," she exclaimed.
"You can't do it anyhow, because you don't know the principle. The first thing a fire needs is air. It's donelike this." He tore down and re-erected her structure.
If Miss Wilbur had followed her impulse, she would have kicked it down as he finished, but she managed a fine aloofness instead. He did not appear to notice her chin in the air.
"Yes," he observed as he rose from his knees, "it's a handy thing to know—how to lay a fire, and as you say, one is naturally grateful to the fellow who teaches one. I'm going to look for food. Keep a lookout for ships."
He had hardly gone when he came bounding back again, waving two small fish by the tails. "Got 'em," he shouted. "Dug out some ponds this morning, but never thought it would work, but here they are. Now we'll light the fire."
His excitement was contagious. She sprang up, held the skirt of her dressing-gown to shield the match, blew the flame, almost blew it out. Finally, with the help of both matches the fire was lit.
"I'm so hungry," she said. "Do you think they'll taste good?"
He did not answer. She could not but be impressed by the deftness with which he split and boned the fish, and the invention he displayed in evolving cooking utensils out of shells and sticks.
"You know," he said suddenly, "this fire must never go out. This will be your job. Sort of vestal-virgin idea."
The charge made her nervous. The responsibility was serious. During one of his absences she began to think the flame was dying down. She put in a stick. It blazed too quickly. A crash followed and one of the fish disappeared into the fire.
After a time she managed to drag it out, black and sandy. She dreaded his return. How could she make clear to him that it had not been her fault? She decided on a comic manner. Holding it up by the tail, she smiled at him. "Doesn't that look delicious?" she asked gayly.
His brow darkened. "All right, if you like them that way," he returned.
"Don't you think the other is large enough for two?"
His answer was to remove the other from the fire and to eat it himself.
Miss Wilbur watched him to the end, and then she could contain herself no longer. She had been extremely hungry.
"Upon my word," she said, "I've known a good many selfish men, but I never before saw one who would not have taken the bread out of his mouth to give to a hungry woman."
Her rescuer looked at her unshaken. "You don't think that was just?" he inquired.
"I am not talking of justice, but of chivalry," replied Miss Wilbur passionately. "Of consideration for the weak. You are physically stronger than I—"
"And I intend to remain so."
"At my expense?"
"If you fell ill, I should be sorry. If I fell ill, you would die." He turned away sharply, but half-way up to the beach thought better of it and returned.
"See here," he said, "I'm an irritable man, and a tired man. This whole thing isn't going to be easy for either of us. And what do we find, the first crack out ofthe box? That you are not only incompetent, but that you want to be social and pleasant over it. Great Scott! what folly! Well, if it's any satisfaction to you, I know I'm not behaving well either. But you don't seem aware of even that much, or of anything, indeed"—he smiled faintly—"except your own good looks."
He left her to meditate.
Battle, murder, and sudden death are not as great a shock to some people as their own failure to please. Miss Wilbur, being incapable of looking within for the cause of this phenomenon, looked at her companion. Evidently hewasa peculiar, nervous sort of a creature, and, after all, had he been so successful? He hardly came up to the desert-island standard set by the father of the Swiss Family Robinson. She reviewed him with a critical eye. He was a nice-looking young man of the clean-shaven type. He lacked the great air, she told herself, which was not surprising, since eighteen months before there had been nothing whatever to distinguish him from any of the other shrewd young men produced in such numbers by the State of Connecticut. But chance had waved her wand, and it had fallen to his lot to head a congenial band of patriots who, controlling a group of trolleys, had parted with them at a barefaced price to the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railway. Since thiscouphe had rather rested on his laurels, spending most of his time with a classmate in New York, where he had acquired a tailor and had succeeded in getting himself elected to the directorate of The General Fruit Company—an organization which, as every Italian vender knows, deals in such miscellaneous commoditiesas bananas, hides, coffee, rubber, sugar, copper-mines, and narrow-gauge railroads along the Caribbean shores, with an argosy for transportation to Spokane, New Orleans, Baltimore, Boston, Bristol, or Bordeaux.