"Do have some common sense about this, Barnstable," he said. "Do get it out of your head that the man who wrote that book knew anything about your affairs. I've told you that already."
"I told him too," put in Harbinger.
"I suppose you know," Barnstable replied, shaking his head; "but it is strange how near it fits!"
Bradish took Barnstable off to the writing room to pen a suitable apology to the Count, and Jack and Harbinger remained behind.
"Extraordinary beggar," observed Jack, when they had departed.
"Yes," answered the other absently. "Jack, of course you didn't write 'Love in a Cloud'?"
"Of course not. What an idiotic idea!"
"Fairfield said Barnstable had been accusing you of it, but I knew it couldn't be anything but his crazy nonsense. Of course the Count didn't write it either?"
Jack eyed his companion inquiringly.
"Look here, Tom," he said, "What are you driving at? Of course the Count didn't write it. You are about as crazy as Barnstable."
"Oh, I never thought he was the man; but who the deuce is it?"
"Why should you care?"
Harbinger leaned forward to the grate, and began to pound the coal with the poker in a way that bespoke embarrassment. Suddenly he turned, and broke out explosively.
"I should think I ought to care to know what man my wife is writing letters to! You heard her say she wrote that letter to Christopher Calumus."
Jack gave a snort of mingled contempt and amusement.
"You old mutton-head," he said. "Your wife didn't write that letter. I know all about it, and I got it back from the Count."
"You did?" questioned Harbinger with animation. "Then why did Letty say she wrote it?"
"She wanted to shield somebody else. Now that's all I shall tell you. See here, are you coming the Othello dodge?"
Tom gave a vicious whack at a big lump which split into a dozen pieces, all of which guzzled and sputtered after the unpleasant fashion of soft coal.
"There's something here I don't understand," he persisted.
Jack regarded him curiously a moment. Then he lighted a fresh cigarette, and lay back in his chair, stretching out his legs luxuriously.
"It's really too bad that your wife's gone back on you," he observed dispassionately.
"What?" cried Tom, turning violently.
"Such a nice little woman as Letty always was too," went on Jack mercilessly. "I wouldn't have believed it."
"What in the deuce do you mean?" Tom demanded furiously, grasping the poker as if he were about to strike with it. "Do you dare to insinuate—"
Jack sat up suddenly and looked at him, his sunny face full of earnestness.
"What the deuce do you mean?" he echoed. "What can a man mean when he begins to distrust his wife? Heavens! I'm beastly ashamed of you, Tom Harbinger! To think of your coming to the club and talking to a man about that little trump of a woman! You ought to be kicked! There, old man," he went on with a complete change of manner, "I beg your pardon. I only wanted to show you how you might look to an unfriendly eye. You know you can't be seriously jealous of Letty."
The other changed color, and looked shame-facedly into the coals.
"No, of course not, Jack," he answered slowly. "I'm as big an idiot as Barnstable. I do hate to see men dangling about her, though. I can't help my disposition, can I?"
"You've got to help it if it makes a fool of you."
"And that infernal Count with his slimy manners," Tom went on. "If he isn't a rascal there never was one. I'm not really jealous, I'm only—only—"
"Only an idiot," concluded Jack. "If I were Letty I'd really flirt with somebody just to teach you the difference between these fool ideas of yours and the real thing."
"Don't, Jack," Tom said; "the very thought of it knocks me all out."
What might be the result of such a match as that of May Calthorpe and Jack Neligage must inevitably depend largely upon the feelings of one or the other to another love. If either were constant to a former flame, only disaster could come of themariage de convenancewhich Mrs. Neligage had adroitly patched up. If both left behind forgotten the foolish flares of youthful passion, the married pair might arrange their feelings upon a basis of mutual liking comfortable if not inspiring. What happened to Jack in regard to Alice and to May's silly attraction toward the unknown Christopher Calumus was therefore of much importance in influencing the future.
Since Alice Endicott knew of the engagement of May and Jack it was not to be supposed that the malicious fates would fail to bring her face to face with her former lover. The meeting happened a couple of days after. Jack was walking down Beacon street, and Alice came out of May's just in front of him. He quickened his steps and overtook her.
"Good-morning," he said; "you've been in to May's, I see. How is she to-day?"
The tone was careless and full of good-nature, and his face as sunny as the bright sky overhead. Alice did not look up at him, but kept her eyes fixed on the distance. To one given to minute observation it might have occurred that as she did not glance at him when he spoke she must have been aware of his approach, and must have seen him when she came out from the house. That she had not shown her knowledge of his nearness was to be looked upon as an indication of something which was not indifference.
"Good-morning," she answered. "May didn't seem to be in particularly good spirits."
"Didn't she? I must try to find time to run in and cheer her up. I'm not used to being engaged, you see, and I'm not up in my part."
He spoke with a sort of swagger which was obviously intended to tease her, and the heightened color in her cheeks told that it had not missed the mark.
"I have no doubt that you will soon learn it," she returned. "You were always so good in amateur theatricals."
He laughed boisterously, perhaps a little nervously.
"'Praise from Sir Hubert,'" he quoted. "And speaking of engagements, is it proper to offer congratulations on yours?"
She turned to him with a look of indignant severity.
"You know I am not engaged, and that I don't mean to be."
"Oh, that's nothing. I didn't mean to be the other day."
"I am not in the market," she said cuttingly.
"Neither am I any more," Jack retorted coolly. "I've sold myself. That's what they mean, I suppose, by saying a girl has made her market."
Alice had grown more and more stern in her carriage as this talk proceeded. Jack's tone was as flippant as ever, and he carried his handsome head as jauntily as if they were talking of the merriest themes. His brown eyes were full of a saucy light, and he switched his walking-stick as if he were light-heartedly snapping off the heads of daisies in a country lane. The more severe Alice became the more his spirits seemed to rise.
As they halted at a corner to let a carriage pass Alice turned and looked at her companion, the hot blood flushing into her smooth cheek.
"There is nothing in the world more despicable than a fortune-hunter!" she declared with emphasis.
"Oh, quite so," Jack returned, apparently full of inward laughter. "Theoretically I agree with you entirely. Practically of course there are allowances to be made. The Count has been brought up so, and you mustn't be too hard on him."
"You know what I mean," she said, unmoved by the cunning of his speech.
"Yes, of course I can make allowances for you. You mean, I suppose, that as long as you know he's really after you and not your money you can despise public opinion; but naturally it must vex you to have the Count misjudged. Everybody will think Miss Wentstile hired him to marry you."
She parted her lips to speak, then restrained herself, and altered her manner. She turned at bay, but she adopted Jack's own tactics.
"You are right," she said. "I understand that the Count is only acting according to the standards he's been brought up to. May hasn't that consolation. I'm sure I don't see, if you don't mind my saying so, on what ground she is going to contrive any sort of an excuse for her husband."
"She'll undoubtedly be so fond of him," Jack retorted with unabashed good-nature, "that it won't occur to her that he needs an excuse. May hasn't your Puritanical notions, you know. Really, I might be afraid of her if she had."
It was a game in which the man is always the superior of the woman. Women will more cleverly and readily dissemble to the world, but to the loved one they are less easily mocking and insincere than men. Alice, however, was plucky, and she made one attempt more.
"Of course May might admire you on the score of filial obedience. It isn't every son who would allow his mother to arrange his marriage for him."
"No," Jack responded with a chuckle, "you're right there. I am a model son."
She stopped suddenly, and turned on the sidewalk in quick vehemence.
"Oh, stop talking to me!" she cried. "I will go into the first house I know if you keep on this way! You've no right to torment me so!"
The angry tears were in her eyes, and her face was drawn with her effort to sustain the self-control which had so nearly broken down. His expression lost its roguishness, and in his turn he became grave.
"No," he said half-bitterly, "perhaps not. Of course I haven't; but it is something of a temptation when you are so determined to believe the worst of me."
She regarded him in bewilderment.
"Determined to believe the worst?" she echoed. "Aren't you engaged to May Calthorpe?"
He took off his hat, and made her a profound and mocking bow.
"I apparently have that honor," he said.
"Then why am I not to believe it?"
He looked at her a moment as if about to explain, then with the air of finding it hopeless he set his lips together.
"If you will tell me what you mean," Alice went on, "I may understand. As it is I have your own word that you are engaged; you certainly do not pretend that you care for May; and you know that your mother made the match. You may be sure, Jack," she added, her voice softening a little only to harden again, "that if there were any way of excusing you I should have found it out. I'm still foolish enough to cling to old friendship."
His glance softened, and he regarded her with a look under which she changed color and drew away from him.
"Dear Alice," he said, "you always were a brick."
She answered only by a startled look. Then before he could be aware of her intention she had run lightly up the steps of a house and rung the bell. He looked after her in amazement, then followed.
"Alice," he said, "what are you darting off in that way for?"
"I have talked with you as long as I care to," she responded, the color in her cheeks, and her head held high. "I am going in here to see Mrs. West. You had better go and cheer up May."
Before he could reply a servant had opened the door. Jack lifted his hat.
"Good-by," said he. "Remember what I said about believing the worst."
Then the door closed behind her, and he went on his way down the street.
That the course of true love never ran smooth has been said on such a multitude of occasions that it is time for some expert in the affections to declare whether all love which runs roughly is necessarily genuine. The supreme prerogative of young folk who are fond is of course to tease and torment each other. Alice and Jack had that morning been a spectacle of much significance to any student in the characteristics of love-making. Youth indulges in the bitter of disagreement as a piquant contrast to the sweets of the springtime of life. True love does not run smooth because love cannot really take deep hold upon youth unless it fixes attention by its disappointments and woes. Smooth and sweet drink quickly cloys; while the cup in which is judiciously mingled an apt proportion of acid stimulates the thirst it gratifies. If Jack was to marry May it was a pity that he and Alice should continue thus to hurt each other.
The friendship between Jack Neligage and Dick Fairfield was close and sincere. For a man to say that the friendships of men are more true and sure than those of women would savor of cynicism, and might be objected to on the ground that no man is in a position to judge on both sides of the matter. It might on the other hand be remarked that even women themselves give the impression of regarding masculine comradeship as a finer product of humanity than feminine, but comparisons of this sort have little value. It is surely enough to keep in mind how gracious a gift of the gods is a genuine affection between two right-hearted men. The man who has one fellow whom he loves, of whose love he is assured; one to whom he may talk as freely as he would think, one who understands not only what is said but the things which are intended; a friend with whom it is possible to be silent without offense or coldness, against whom there need be no safeguards, and to whom one may turn alike in trouble and in joy—the man who has found a friend like this has a gift only to be outweighed by the love of her whose price is far above rubies and whose works praise her in the gates. Such a friendship is all but the most precious gift of the gods.
To evoke and to share such a friendship, moreover, marks the possession of possibilities ethically fine. A man may love a woman in pure selfishness; but really to love his male friend he must possess capabilities of self-sacrifice and of manliness. It is one of the charms of comradeship that it frankly accepts and frankly gives without weighing or accounting. In the garden of such a friendship may walk the soul of man as his body went in Eden before the Fall, "naked and not ashamed." He cannot be willing to show himself as he is if his true self have not its moral beauties. It may be set down to the credit both of Dick and of Jack that between them there existed a friendship so close and so trustful.
Even in the closest friendships, however, there may be times of suspension. Perhaps in a perfect comradeship there would be no room for the faintest cloud; but since men are human and there is nothing perfect in human relations, even friendship may sometimes seem to suffer. For some days after the announcement of Jack's engagement there was a marked shade between the friends. Jack, indeed, was the same as ever, jolly, careless, indolent, and apparently without a trouble in the world. Dick, on the other hand, was at times absent, constrained, or confused. To have his friend walk in and coolly announce an engagement with the girl whose correspondence had fired Dick's heart was naturally trying and astonishing. Dick might have written a bitter chapter about the way in which women spoiled the friendships of men; and certain cynical remarks which appeared in his next novel may be conceived of as having been set down at this time.
More than a week went by without striking developments. The engagement had not been announced, nor had it, after the first evening, been mentioned between the two friends. That there should be a subject upon which both must of necessity reflect much, yet of which they did not speak, was in itself a sufficient reason for a change in the mental atmosphere of their bachelor quarters, which from being the cheeriest possible were fast becoming the most gloomy.
One morning as Dick sat writing at his desk, Jack, who since breakfast had been engaged in his own chamber, came strolling in, in leisurely fashion, smoking the usual cigarette.
"I hope I don't disturb you, old man," he said, "but there's something I'd like to ask you, if you don't mind."
Dick, whose back was toward the other, did not turn. He merely held his pen suspended, and said coldly:—
"Well?"
Jack composed himself in a comfortable position by leaning against the mantel, an attitude he much affected, and regarded his cigarette as if it had some close connection with the thing he wished to say.
"You remember perhaps that letter that I gave you from May?"
Dick laid his pen down suddenly, and sat up, but he did not turn.
"Well?" he said again.
"And the other letters before it?"
"Well?"
"It has occurred to me that perhaps I ought to ask for them,—demand them, don't you know, the way they do on the stage."
Dick said nothing. By keeping his back to his chum he missed sight of a face full of fun and mischief.
"Of course I don't want to seem too bumptious, but now I'm engaged to Miss Calthorpe—"
He paused as if to give Fairfield an opportunity of speaking; but still Dick remained silent.
"Well," observed Jack after a moment, "why the dickens don't you say something? I can't be expected to carry on this conversation all alone."
"What do you want me to say?" Fairfield asked, in a tone so solemn that it was no wonder his friend grinned more than ever.
"Oh, nothing, if that's the way you take it."
"You knew about those letters when I got them," Fairfield went on. "I read them to you before I knew where they came from."
"Oh, my dear fellow, hold on. You never read me any but the first one."
"At any rate," rejoined Dick, obviously disturbed by this thrust, "I told you about them."
"Oh, you did? You told me very little about the second, and nothing about the third. I didn't even know how many you had."
Fairfield rose from his seat, thrust his hands into his pockets, and began to pace up and down the room. Jack smoked and watched.
"Look here, Jack," Dick said, "we've been fencing round this thing for a week, and it's got to be talked out."
"All right; heave ahead, old man."
Fairfield stopped in his walk and confronted his friend.
"Are you really fond of Miss Calthorpe, Jack?"
"Oh, I don't object to her; but of course the marriage is for purely business reasons."
"You're not in love with her?"
"Not the least in the world, old man," Jack responded cheerfully, blowing a ring of smoke and watching it intently as it sailed toward the ceiling. "But then she doesn't love me, so there's no bother of pretending on either side."
The color mounted in Dick's cheeks.
"Do you think it's the square thing to marry a young girl like that, and tie her up for life when she doesn't know what she's doing?"
"Oh, girls never know what they are doing. How should they know about marriage in any case? The man has to think for both, of course."
"But suppose she shouldn't be happy."
"Oh, I'll be good to any girl I marry. I'm awfully easy to live with. You ought to know that."
"But suppose," Dick urged again, "suppose she—"
"Suppose she what?"
"Why, suppose she—suppose she—she liked somebody else?"
Jack looked shrewdly at Dick's confused face, and burst into a laugh.
"I guessed those letters were pretty fair," he burst out, "but they must have been much worse than I even suspected!"
"What do you mean?" stammered Dick.
"Mean? Oh, nothing,—nothing in the world. By the way, as the matter relates to myfiancée, I hope you won't mind my asking if she's written to you since our engagement."
"Why—"
"Then she has written," pronounced Jack, smiling more than ever at the confusion of his friend. "You haven't the cheek to bluff a baby, Dick. I should hate to see you try to run a kelter through."
"She only wrote to say that she was glad the Count didn't write 'Love in a Cloud,' and a few things, you know, that she wanted to say."
Jack flung the end of his cigarette away and stepped swiftly forward to catch his chum by the shoulders behind. He whirled Dick about like a teetotum.
"Oh, Dick, you old fool," he cried, "what an ass you are! Do you suppose I'm such a cad as really to propose to marry May when she's fond of you and you're fond of her? It doesn't speak very well of your opinion of me."
Dick stared at him in half-stupefied amazement for an instant; then the blood came rushing into his cheeks.
"You don't mean to marry her?" he cried amazedly.
"Never did for a minute," responded Jack cheerfully. "Don't you know, old man, that I've sold my polo ponies, and taken a place in the bank?"
"Taken a place in the bank!" exclaimed Dick, evidently more and more bewildered. "Then what did you pretend to be engaged to her for?"
"Confound your impudence!" laughed Jack, "I was engaged to her, you beast! I am engaged to her now, and if you're n't civil I'll keep on being. You can't be engaged to her till I break my engagement!"
"But, Jack, I don't understand what in the deuce you mean."
"Mean? I don't know that I meant anything. I was engaged to her without asking to be, and when a lady says she is engaged to you you really can't say you're not. Besides, I thought it might help you."
"Help me?"
"Of course, my boy. There is nothing to set a girl in the way of wishing to be engaged to the right man like getting engaged to the wrong one."
Dick wrung his friend's hand.
"Jack," he said, "I beg your pardon. You're a trump!"
"Oh, I knew that all the time," responded Jack. "It may comfort you a little to know that it hasn't been much of an engagement. I've been shamefully neglectful of my position. Now of course an engaged man is supposed to show his ardor, to take little liberties, and be generally loving, you know."
Dick grew fiery red, and shrank back. Jack laughed explosively.
"Jealous, old man?" he demanded provokingly. "Well, I won't tease you any more. I haven't so much as kissed her hand."
Dick's rather combative look changed instantly into shamefacedness, and he shook hands again. He turned away quickly, but as quickly turned back again once more to grasp the hand of his chum.
"Jack Neligage," he declared, "you're worth more than a dozen of my best heroes, and a novelist can't say more than that!"
"Gad! You'd better put me in a novel then," was Jack's response. "They won't believe I'm real though; I'm too infernally virtuous."
A knock at the door interrupted them, and proved to be the summons of the janitor, who announced that a lady wished to see Mr. Fairfield.
"Don't let her stay long," Jack said, retreating to his room. "I can't get out till she is gone, and I want to go down town. I've got to order the horses to take myfiancéeout for a last ride. It's to break my engagement, so you ought to want it to come off."
The lady proved to be Alice Endicott. She came in without shyness or embarrassment, with her usual air of quiet refinement, and although she must have seen the surprise in Dick's face, she took no notice of it. Alice was one of those women so free from self-consciousness, so entirely without affectations, yet so rare in her simple dignity, that it was hard to conceive her as ever seeming to be out of place. She was so superior to surroundings that her environment did not matter.
"Good-morning, Mr. Fairfield," she said. "I should apologize for intruding. I hope I am not disturbing your work."
"Good-morning," he responded. "I am not at work just now. Sit down, please."
She took the chair he offered, and came at once to her errand.
"I came from Miss Calthorpe," she said.
"Miss Calthorpe?" he repeated.
"Yes. She thought she ought not to write to you again; and she asked me to come for her letters; those she wrote before she knew who you were."
"But why shouldn't she write to me for them?"
"You forget that she is engaged, Mr. Fairfield."
"I—Of course, I did forget for the minute; but even if she is, I don't see why so simple a thing as a note asking for her letters—"
Alice rose.
"I don't think that there is any need of my explaining," she said. "If I tell you that she didn't find it easy to write, will that be sufficient? Of course you will give me the letters."
"I must give them if she wishes it; but may I ask one question first? Doesn't she send for them because she's engaged?"
"Isn't that reason enough?"
"It is reason enough," Dick answered, smiling; "but it isn't a reason here. She isn't engaged any more. That is, she won't be by night."
Alice stared at him in astonishment.
"What do you mean?" she demanded.
"I mean that Jack never meant to marry her, and that he is going to release her from her engagement."
"How do you know that?"
"He told me himself."
They stood in silence a brief interval looking each other in the face. Fairfield was radiant, but Miss Endicott was very pale.
"I beg your pardon," she said presently. "Is Mr. Neligage in the house?"
"Yes; he's in his room."
"Will you call him, please?"
Fairfield hesitated a little, but went to call his chum.
"Miss Endicott wants to speak to you," he said abruptly.
"What does she want?"
"I haven't any idea."
"What have you been telling her?"
The necessity of answering this question Dick escaped by returning to the other room; and his friend followed.
"Jack," Alice cried, as soon as he appeared, "tell me this moment if it's true that you're not to marry May!"
He faced her stiff and formal in his politeness.
"Pardon me if I do not see that you have any right to ask me such a question."
"Why, I came to ask Mr. Fairfield for May's letters because she is engaged to you, and he told me—"
She broke off, her habitual self-control being evidently tried almost beyond its limit.
"I took the liberty, Jack," spoke up Fairfield, "of saying—"
"Don't apologize," Neligage said. "It is true, Miss Endicott, that circumstances have arisen which make it best for May to break the engagement. I shall be obliged to you, however, if you don't mention the matter to her until she brings it up."
Alice looked at him appealingly.
"But I thought—"
"We are none of us accountable for our thoughts, Miss Endicott, nor perhaps for a want of faith in our friends."
She moved toward him with a look of so much appeal that Dick discreetly turned his back under pretense of looking for something on his writing-table.
"At least," she said, her voice lower than usual, "you will let me apologize for the way in which I spoke to you the other morning."
"Oh, don't mention it," he returned carelessly. "You were quite justified."
He turned away with easy nonchalance, as if the matter were one in which he had no possible interest.
"At least," she begged, "you'll pardon me, and shake hands."
"Oh, certainly, if you like," answered he; "but it doesn't seem necessary."
Her manner changed in the twinkling of an eye. Indignation shone in her face and her head was carried more proudly.
"Then it isn't," she said. "Good-morning, Mr. Fairfield."
She went from the room as quickly as a shadow flits before sunlight. The two young men were so taken by surprise that by the time Dick reached the door to open it for his departing caller, it had already closed behind her. The friends stared a moment. Then Jack made a swift stride to the door; but when he flung it open the hall without was empty.
"Damn it, Dick," he ejaculated, coming back with a face of anger, "what did you let her go off like that for?"
"How in the world could I help it?" was all that his friend could answer.
Jack regarded Dick blackly for the fraction of a second; then he burst into a laugh, and clapped him on the shoulder.
"I beg your pardon, old man," he said, as cheerily as ever. "I'm going off my nerve with all these carryings on. If you hadn't written that rotten old novel of yours, we shouldn't have had these continual circuses."
He went for his hat as he spoke, and without farther adieu took his way down town. Men in this peculiar world are to be envied or pitied not so much for their fortunes as for their dispositions; and if outward indications were to be trusted, Jack Neligage was one of those enviable creatures who will be cheerful despite the blackest frowns of fate. From indifference or from pluck, from caring little for the favors of fortune or from despising her spite, Jack took his way through life merrily, smiling and sunny; up hill or down dale as it chanced he followed the path, with a laugh on his lip and always a kindly greeting for his fellow travelers. This morning, as he walked out into the sunlight, handsome, well-groomed, debonaire, and jocund, certainly no one who saw him was likely to suspect that the world did not go smoothly with him. Least of all could one suppose that his heart or his thought was troubled concerning the favor or disfavor of any woman whatsoever.
Jack in the afternoon took May for a drive. The engagement had thus far been a somewhat singular one. Jack had been to see May nearly every day, it is true, but either by the whimsical contrivance of fate or by his own cunning he had seldom seen her alone. She either had callers or was out herself; and as no one but Mrs. Neligage and Alice knew of the engagement there was no chance for that sentiment which makes callers upon a lady feel it necessary to retreat as speedily as possible upon the appearance of her acknowledged lover. So well settled in the public mind was the conviction that Jack was in love with Alice Endicott, that nobody took the trouble to notice that he was calling on May Calthorpe or to get out of his way that he might be alone with her. This afternoon, in the face of all the world, in a stylish trap, on the open highway, they were at last together without other company.
Had not the mind of May been provided with an object of regret and longing in the person of Fairfield, there might have been danger that Jack would engage her fancy by sheer indifference. Any girl must be puzzled, interested, piqued, and either exasperated or hurt according to her nature, when the man to whom she is newly betrothed treats her as the most casual of acquaintances. If nothing else moved her there would be the bite of unsatisfied curiosity. To be engaged without even being able to learn by experience what being engaged consists in may well wear on the least inquisitive feminine disposition. Thefiancéwho does not even make pretense of playing the lover is an object so curious that he cannot fail to attract attention, to awake interest, and the chances are largely in favor of his developing in the breast of his fair the determination to see him really aroused and enslaved. Many a woman has succumbed to indifference who would have been proof against the most ardent wooing.
"Well, May," Jack said, smiling upon her as they drove over the Mill Dam, "how do you like being engaged?"
She looked at him with a sparkle in her eyes which made her bewitching.
"I don't see that it's very different from not being engaged," she said.
"It will be if you keep on looking so pretty," he declared. "I shall kiss you right here in the street, and that would make folks talk."
The color came into her cheeks in a way that made her more charming still.
"Now you color," Jack went on, regarding her with a teasing coolness, "you are prettier yet. Gad! I shall have to kiss you!"
His horses shied at something at that instant, and he was forced to attend to them, so that May had a moment's respite in which to gather up her wits. When he looked back, she took the aggressive.
"It is horrid in you to talk that way," she remarked. "Besides, you said that I needn't kiss you until I wanted to."
"Well, I didn't promise not to kiss you, did I?"
"How silly you are to-day!" she exclaimed. "Isn't there anything better to talk about than kissing?"
Jack regarded her with a grin; a grin in which, it must be confessed, there was something of the look with which a boy watches a kitten he is teasing.
"Anything better?" repeated he. "When you've had more experience, May, perhaps you won't think there is anything better."
May began to look sober, and even to have the appearance of feeling that the conversation was becoming positively improper.
"I think you are just horrid!" she declared. "I do wish you'd behave."
He gave her a respite for some moments, and they drove along through the sunlight of the April afternoon. The trees as they came into the country were beautiful with the buds and promise of nearing summer; the air soft with that cool smoothness which is a reminder that afar the breeze has swept fragments of old snowdrifts yet unmelted; the sky moist with the mists of snow-fields that have wasted away. All the landscape was exquisite with delicate hues.
The supreme color-season of New England begins about the middle of March, and lasts—at the very latest—until the middle of May. Its climax comes in late April, when pearly mists hover among the branches that are soon to be hidden by foliage. Glowing tints of amethyst, luminous gray, tender green, coral, and yellow white, make the woods a dream of poetic loveliness beside which the gorgeous and less varied hues of autumn are crude. Something dreamlike, veiled, mysterious, is felt in these tints, this iridesence of the woods in spring; as if one were looking at the luminous, rosy mists within which, as Venus amid the rainbow-dyed foam of the sea, is being shaped to immortal youth and divine comeliness the very goddess of spring. The red of the maple-buds shows from afar; the russet leaflets of the ash, the vivid green, the amber, the pearl, and the tawny of the clustering hardwood trees, set against the heavy masses of the evergreens, are far more lovely than all the broad coloring of summer or the hot tints of autumn.
Under the afternoon sun the woods that day were at their best, and presently May spoke of the colors which spread down the gentle slopes of the low hills not far away.
"Isn't it just too lovely for anything!" she said. "Just look at that hill over there. It is perfectly lovely."
Jack glanced at the hill, and then looked at her teasingly.
"That's right," he remarked. "Of course spoony people ought to talk about spring, and how perfectly lovely everything is."
"I didn't say that because we're engaged," returned May, rather explosively. "I really meant it."
"Of course you did. That shows that you are in the proper frame of mind. Now I'm not. I don't care a rap to talk about the whole holy show. It's pretty, of course; but I'm not going in for doing the sentimental that way."
She looked up with mingled indignation and entreaty.
"Now you are going to be horrid again," she protested. "Why can't you stop talking about our being engaged?"
"Stop talking about it? Why, good heavens, we're expected to talk about it. I never was engaged before, but I hope I know my business."
"But I don't want to talk about it!"
"Oh, you really do, only you are shy about owning it."
"But I won't talk about it!"
"Oh, yes, you will, my dear; for if I say things you can't help answering 'em."
"I won't say another word!"
"I'll bet you a pair of gloves that the next thing I say about our being engaged you'll not only answer, but you'll answer in a hurry."
"I'll take your bet!" cried May with animation. "I won't answer a word."
Jack gave a wicked chuckle, and flicked his horses into a brisk run. In a moment or two he drew them down to an easy trot, and turned to May with a matter-of-fact air.
"Of course now we have been engaged a week," he said, "I am at liberty to read that letter you wrote to Christopher Calumus?"
"Read it!" she cried. "Oh, I had forgotten that you kept it! Oh, you mustn't read it! I wouldn't have you read it for the world."
"Would you have me read it for a pair of gloves?" inquired Jack wickedly. "You've lost your bet."
"I don't care anything about my bet," she retorted, with an earnestness so great as to suggest that tears were not so far behind. "I want that letter."
"I'm sorry you can't have it," was his reply; "but the truth is, I haven't got it."
"Haven't got it? What have you done with it?"
"Delivered it to the one it was addressed to,—Christopher Calumus."
"Delivered it? Do you mean you gave it to Mr. Fairfield?"
"Just that. You wrote it to him, didn't you?"
Poor May was now so pale and miserable that a woman would have taken her in her arms to be kissed and comforted, but Jack, the unfeeling wretch, continued his teasing.
"I didn't want you to think I was a tyrant," he went on. "Of course I'm willing you should write to anybody that you think best."
"But—but I wrote that letter to Mr. Fairfield before I knew who he was!" gasped May.
"Well, what of it? Anything that you could say to a stranger, of course you could say to a man you knew."
For reply May put up one hand to her eyes, and with the other began a distressing and complicated search for a handkerchief. Jack bent forward to peer into her face and instantly assumed a look of deep contrition.
"Oh, I say," he remonstrated, "it's no fair to cry. Besides, you'll spoil your gloves, and now you've got to pay me a pair you can't afford to be so extravagant."
The effect of this appeal was to draw from May a sort of hysterical gurgle, a sound indescribably funny, and which might pass for either a cry of joy or of woe.
"I think you are too bad," she protested chokingly. "You know I didn't want Mr. Fairfield to have that letter when I was engaged to you!"
"Oh, is that all?" he returned lightly. "Then that's easily fixed. Let's not be engaged any more, and then there'll be no harm in his having it."
Apparently astonishment dried her tears. She looked at him in a sort of petrified wonder.
"I really mean it, my dear," he went on with a paternal air which was exceedingly droll in Jack Neligage. "I'll say more. I never meant for a minute to marry you. I knew you didn't want to have me, and I'd no notion of being tied to a dragooned wife."
"A dragooned wife?" May repeated.
She was evidently so stupefied by the turn things had taken that she could not follow him.
"A woman dragooned into marrying me," Jack explained, with a jovial grin; "one that was thinking all the time how much happier she would be with somebody else."
"And you never meant to marry me? Then what did you get engaged to me for?"
"I didn't. You wrote me that you were engaged to me, and of course as a gentleman I couldn't contradict a lady, especially on a point so delicate as that."
May flushed as red as the fingers of dawn.
"Your mother—" she began; but he interrupted her.
"Isn't it best that we don't go into that?" he said in a graver voice. "I confess that I amused myself a little, and I thought that you needed a lesson. There were other things, but no matter. I never was the whelp you and Alice thought me."
"Oh, Alice!" cried May, with an air of sudden enlightenment.
"Well, what about her?" Jack demanded.
"Nothing," replied May, smiling demurely to herself, "only she will be glad that the engagement is broken. She said awfully hard things about you."
"I am obliged to her," he answered grimly.
"Oh, not really awful," May corrected herself quickly, "and anyway it was only because she was so fond of you."
To this he made no reply, and for some time they drove on in silence. Then Jack shook off his brief depression, and apparently set himself to be as amusing as he could. He aroused May to a condition of mirth almost wildly joyous. They laughed and jested, told each other stories, and the girl's eyes shone, her dimples danced in and out like sun-flecks flashing on the water, the color in her cheeks was warm and delightful. Not a word more was said on personal matters until Jack deposited her at her own door once more.
"I never had such a perfectly lovely ride in my life!" she exclaimed, looking at him with eyes full of animation and gratitude.
"Then you see what you are losing in throwing me over," he returned. "Oh, you've had your chance and lost it!"
She laughed brightly, and held out her hand.
"But you see," she said mischievously, "the trouble is that the best thing about the ride was just that loss!"
"I like your impudence!" he chuckled. "Well, you're welcome. Good-by. I'll send Fairfield round to talk with you about the letter."
And before she could reply he was away.
There is nothing like the possibility of loss to bring a man to his bearings in regard to a woman. Dick Fairfield had told Jack that of course he was not a marrying man, that he could not afford to marry a poor woman, and that nothing would induce him to marry a rich one; he had even set down in his diary on the announcement of Jack's engagement that he could never have offered his hand to a girl with so much money; what his secret thought may have been no sage may say, but he had all the outward signs of a man who has convinced himself that he has no idea of trying to secure the girl he loves. Now that the affair had shaped itself so that May was again free, he hurried to her with a precipitation which had in it a choice flavor of comedy.
May always told him afterward that he did not even do her the honor to ask her for her hand, but that he coolly walked in and took up the engagement of Jack Neligage where it had been dropped. It was at least true that by nine o'clock that very evening they were sitting side by side as cosy and as idiotically blissful as a young couple newly betrothed should be. However informally the preliminaries had been conducted, the conclusion seemed to be eminently satisfactory.
"To think that this is the result of that little letter that I found on my table one rainy night last February," Dick observed rapturously. "I remember just how it looked."
"It was horrid of me to write it," May returned, with a demure look which almost as plainly as words added: "Contradict me!"
"It was heavenly of you," Dick declared, rising to the occasion most nobly. "It was the nicest valentine that ever was."
Some moments of endearments interesting to the participants but not edifying in narration followed upon this assertion, and then the little stream of lover-talk purled on again.
"Oh, Mr. Fairfield," May began with utter irrelevancy, "I—"
"You promised not to call me that," he interrupted.
"But it's so strange to say Dick. Well, Dick, then—"
The slight interruption of a caress having been got over, she went on with her shattered observation.
"What was I going to say? You put me all out, with your 'Dick'—I do think it's the dearest name!—Stop! I know what I was going to say. I was frightened almost to death when Mrs. Neligage said the Count wrote 'Love in a Cloud.' Oh, I wanted to get under the tea-table!"
"But you didn't really think he wrote my letters?"
"I couldn't believe it; but I didn't know what to think. Then when he wore a red carnation the next day, I thought I should die. I thought anyway he'd read the letter; and that's what made me so meek when Mrs. Neligage took hold of me."
"But you never suspected that I wrote the book?" Fairfield asked.
"Oh, I don't know. Sometimes it seems to me as if I really did know all the time. Don't you remember how we talked about the book at Mrs. Harbinger's tea?"
"That's just your intuition," Dick returned. "I know I didn't suspect you, for it troubled me tremendously that I cared so much for you when I thought I was in love with my unknown correspondent. It didn't seem loyal."
"But of course it was, you know, because there was only one of us."
Dick laughed, and bestowed upon her an ecstatic little hug.
"You dear little Paddy! That's a perfect bull!"
She drew herself away, and pretended to frown with great dignity.
"I don't care if it is a bull!" protested she. "I won't be called a Paddy!"
Dick's face expressed a consternation and a penitence so marked that she burst into a trill of laughter and flung herself back into his arms.
"I was just teasing," she said. "The truth is that Jack Neligage has teased me so awfully that I've caught it like the measles."
The tender follies which make up the talk of lovers are not very edifying reading when set down in the unsympathetic blackness of print. They are to be interpreted, moreover, with the help of many signs, trifling in themselves but essential to a correct understanding. Looks, caresses, sighs, chuckles, giggles, pressures and claspings, intonations which alter or deny the word spoken, a thousand silly becks, and nods, and wreathèd smiles, all go to make up the conversation between the pair, so that what may be put into print is but a small portion of the ecstatic whole. May Calthorpe and Dick Fairfield were not behind in all the enchanting idiocy which belongs to a wooing, where each lover, secure in being regarded as perfection, ventures for once in a lifetime to be frankly childish, to show self without any mask of convention.
"Oh, I knew you were a man of genius the very first time I saw you," May cried, in an entirely honest defiance of all facts and all evidence.
"I wish I were for your sake," Dick replied, with an adoring glance, and a kiss on the hand which he held. "And to think that this absurdly small hand wrote those beautiful letters."
"You didn't suppose I had an amanuensis, did you?" laughed May.
Then Dick laughed, and together they both laughed, overpowered by the exquisite wit of this fine jest.
"Really, though," Dick said, "they came to me like a revelation. I never had such letters before!"
May drew away her hand, and sat upright with an air of offended surprise.
"Well, I should hope you never did!" she cried. "The idea of any other woman's daring to write to you!"
"But you were writing to a stranger; some other woman—"
"Now, Richard," declared May resolutely, "this has got to be settled right here. If you are going to twit me all my life with having written to you—"
He effectually stopped her speech.
"I'll never speak of it again," he said; "or at least only just often enough so that it shan't be entirely forgotten."
"You are horrid!" declared she with a pout. "You mean to tease me with—"
"Tease you, May? Heavens, how you mistake! I only want all my life to be kept your slave by remembering—"
The reader is at liberty from experience to supply as many hours of this sort of talk as his taste calls for. There were, however, some points of real interest touched upon in the course of the evening. Dick confided to May the fact that Jack Neligage had sold his ponies, was paying his debts, and had accepted a place in a bank. Mr. Frostwinch, a college friend of Jack's father, had offered the situation, and although the salary was of course not large it gave Neligage something to live on.
"Oh, I'll tell that to Alice to-morrow," May said. "She will be delighted to know that Jack is going to do something. Alice is awfully fond of him."
The conversation had to be interrupted by speculations upon the relative force of the attachment between Alice and Jack and the love which May and Dick were at that moment confirming; and from this the talk drifted away to considerations of the proper manner of disclosing the engagement. May's guardian, Mr. Frostwinch, Dick knew well, and there was no reason to expect opposition from him unless on the possible ground of a difference of fortune. It was decided that Dick should see him on the morrow, and that there should be no delay in announcing the important news.
"It will take us two or three days to write our notes, of course," May said, with a pretty air of being very practical in the midst of her sentiment. "We'll say next Wednesday."
Dick professed great ignorance of the social demands of the situation, and of course the explanation had to be given with many ornamental flourishes in the way of oscular demonstrations. May insisted that everything should be done duly and in order; told him upon whom of her relatives he would have to call, to whom write, and so many other details that Dick accused her of having been engaged before.
"You horrid thing!" she pouted. "I've a great mind to break the engagement now. I have been engaged, though," she added, bursting into a laugh of pure glee. "You forget that I woke up this morning engaged to one man and shall go to sleep engaged to another."
"Dear old Jack!" Fairfield said fervently. "Well, I must go home and find him. I want to tell him the news. Heavens! I had no idea it was so late!"
"It isn't late," May protested, after the fashion of all girls in her situation, both before and since; but when Dick would go, she laughingly said: "You tell Jack if he were here I'd kiss him. He said I'd want to some time."
And after half an hour of adieus and a brisk walk home, Dick delivered the message.
The decadence of literature began insensibly with the invention of printing, and has been proceeding ever since. How far it has proceeded and whether literature yet exists at all are questions difficult if not impossible to answer at the present time, because of the multitude of books. No living man can have more than a most superficial knowledge of what is being done in what was formerly the royalty and is now the communism of letters. A symphony played in the midst of a battle would stand much the same chance of being properly appreciated as would to-day a work of fine literary worth sent forth in the midst of the innumerous publications of the age.
Men write, however, more than ever. There is perhaps a difference, in that where men of the elder day deluded themselves or hoped to delude others with impressive talk about art and fame and other now obsolete antiquities, the modern author sets before him definite and desirable prizes in the shape of money and of notoriety which has money's worth. The muse of these days is confronted on the door of the author with a stern "No admittance except on business," and she is not allowed to enter unless she bring her check-book with her. The ideal of art is to-day set down in figures and posted by bankers' clerks. Men once foolishly tried to live to write; now they write to live. If men seek for Pegasus it is with a view to getting a patent on him as a flying-machine; and the really progressive modern author has much the same view of life as the rag-picker, that of collecting any sort of scraps that may be sold in the market.
Dick Fairfield had much the attitude of other writers of his day and generation. He had set out to make a living by writing, because he liked it, and because, in provincial Boston at least, there is still a certain sense of distinction attached to the profession of letters, a legacy from the time when the public still respected art. Fairfield had been for years struggling to get a foothold of reputation sufficiently secure to enable him to stretch more vigorously after the prizes of modern literary life, where notoriety commands a price higher than genius could hope for. He had done a good deal of hack work, of which that which he liked least, yet which had perhaps as a matter of training been best for him, had been the rewriting of manuscripts for ambitious authors. A bureau which undertakes for a compensation to mend crude work, to infuse into the products of undisciplined imagination or incompetency that popular element which shall make a work sell, had employed Fairfield to reconstruct novels which dealt with society. In this capacity he had made over a couple of flimsy stories of which Mrs. Croydon claimed the credit, on the strength of having set down the first draught from events which had happened within her own knowledge. So little of the original remained in the published version, it may be noted in passing, that she might have been puzzled to recognize her own bantlings. The success of these books had given Dick courage to attempt a society novel for himself; and by one of those lucky and inexplicable flukes of fortune, "Love in a Cloud" had gained at least the success of immediate popularity.
Fairfield had published the novel anonymously partly from modesty, partly from a business sense that it was better to have his name clear than associated with a failure. He had been deterred from acknowledging the book after its success by the eagerness with which the public had set upon his characters and identified each with some well known person. If the scene of a novel be laid in a provincial city its characters must all be identified. That is the first intellectual duty of the readers of fiction. To look at a novel from a critical point of view is no longer in the least a thing about which any reader need concern himself; but it would be an omission unpardonably stupid were he to remain unacquainted with some original under the disguise of every character. A single detail is sufficient for identification. If a man in a tale have a wart on his nose, the intelligent reader should not rest until he think of a dweller in the town whose countenance is thus adorned. That single particular must thenceforth be held to decide the matter. If the man in the novel and the man in the flesh differ in every other particular, physical and mental, that is to be held as the cunning effort of the writer to disguise his real model. The wart decides it, and the more widely the copy departs in other characteristics from the chosen person the more evident is it that the novelist did not wish his original to be known. The more striking therefore is the shrewdness which has penetrated the mystery. The reader soddens in the consciousness of his own penetration as the sardine, equally headless, soaks in oil. Fairfield was now waiting for this folly of identification to pass before he gave his name to the novel, and in the mean time he was tasting the delight of a first literary success where the pecuniary returns allowed his vanity to glow without rebuke from his conscience.
Fairfield was surprised, one morning not long after the polo game, by receiving a call from Mrs. Croydon. He knew her slightly, having met her now and then in society, and his belief that she was entirely ignorant of his share in her books might naturally invest her with a peculiar interest. She was a Western woman who had lived in the East but a few years, and her blunders in regard to Eastern society as they appeared in her original manuscripts had given him a good deal of quiet amusement. Why she should now have taken it upon herself to come to his chambers could only become evident by her own explanation.
"You are probably surprised to see me here, Mr. Fairfield," she began, settling herself in a chair with the usual ruffling of rag-tag-and-bobbery without which she never seemed able to move.
"I naturally should not have been vain enough to foresee that I should have such an honor," he responded, with his most elaborate society manner.
She smirked, and nodded.
"That is very pretty," she said. "Well, I'll tell you at once, not to keep you in suspense. I came on business."
"Business?" repeated he.
"Yes, business. You see, I have just come from the Cosmopolitan Literary Bureau."
Fairfield did not look pleased. He had kept his connection with that factory of hack-work a secret, and no man likes to be reminded of unpleasant necessities.
"They have told me," she went on, "that you revised the manuscript of my novels. I must say that you have done it very satisfactorily. We women of society are so occupied that it is impossible for us to attend to all that mere detail work, and it is a great relief to have it so well done."
Fairfield bowed stiffly.
"I am glad that you were satisfied," he replied; "but it is a violation of confidence on the part of the bureau."
"Oh, you are one of us now," Mrs. Croydon observed with gracious condescension. "It isn't as if they had told anybody else. They told me, you see, that you wrote 'Love in a Cloud.'"
"That is a greater violation of confidence still," Fairfield responded. "Indeed, it was a most un-gentlemanly thing of Mr. Cutliff. He only knew it because a stupid errand boy carried him the manuscript by mistake. He had no right to tell that. I shall give him my opinion of his conduct."
Mrs. Croydon accomplished a small whirlwind of ribbon ends, and waved her plump hand in remonstrance.
"Oh, I beg you won't," she protested. "It will get me into trouble if you do. He especially told me not to let you know."
Fairfield smiled rather sardonically.
"The man who betrays a confidence is always foolish enough to suppose his confidence will be sacred. I think this is an outrageous breach of good faith on Mr. Cutliff's part."
Mrs. Croydon gave a hitch forward as if she were trying to bring her chair closer to that of Fairfield.
"As I was saying," she remarked, "we society women have really so little time to give to literature, and literature needs just our touch so much, that it has been especially gratifying to find one that could carry out my ideas so well."
The young man began to regard her with a new expression in his face. As a literary woman she should have recognized the look, the expression which tells of the author on the scent of material. Whether Fairfield ever tried his hand at painting Mrs. Croydon or not, that look would have made it plain to any well-trained fellow worker that her peculiarities tempted his literary sense. Any professional writer who listens with that gleam in his eyes is inevitably examining what is said, the manner of its saying, the person who is speaking, in the hope that here he has a subject for his pen; he is asking himself if the reality is too absurd to be credible; how much short of the extravagance of the original he must come to keep within the bounds of seeming probability. Fairfield was confronted with a subject which could not be handled frankly and truthfully. Nobody would believe the tone of the woman or her remarks to be anything but a foolish exaggeration; if she had had the genuine creative instinct, the power of analysis, the recognition of human peculiarities, Mrs. Croydon must have seen in his evident preoccupation the indication that he was deliberating how far toward the truth it would in fiction be possible to go.
"It is very kind of you," he murmured vaguely.
"Oh, don't mention it," responded she, more graciously than ever. "You are really one of us now, as I said; and I always feel strongly the ties of the literary guild."
"The guild owes you a great deal," Fairfield observed blandly.
Mrs. Croydon waved her hand engagingly in return for this compliment, incidentally with a waving of various adornments of her raiment which gave her the appearance in little of an army with banners.
"I didn't come just for compliments," she observed with much sweetness. "I am a business woman, and I know how to come to the point. My father left me to manage my own property, and so I've had a good deal of experience. When I see how women wander round a thing without being able to get at it, it makes me ashamed of them all. I don't wonder that men make fun of them."
"You are hard on your sex."
"Oh, no harder than they deserve. Why, in Chicago there are a lot of women that do business in one way or another, and I never could abide 'em. I never could get on with them, it was so hard to pin them down."
"I readily understand how annoying it must have been," Fairfield observed with entire gravity. "Did you say that you had business with me?"
"Yes," she answered. "I suppose that I might have written, but there are some things that are so much better arranged by word of mouth. Don't you think so?"
"Oh, there's no doubt of it."
"Besides," she went on, "I wanted to tell you how much I like your work, and it isn't easy to express those things on paper."
It would be interesting to know whether to Fairfield at that moment occurred the almost inevitable reflection that for Mrs. Croydon it was hard, if her manuscripts were the test, to express anything on paper.
"You are entirely right," he said politely. "It is easy enough to put facts into words, but when it comes to feelings such as you express, it is different, of course."
He confided to Jack Neligage later that he wondered if this were not too bold a flout, but Mrs. Croydon received it as graciously as possible.
"There is so complete a difference," she observed with an irrelevance rather startling, "between the mental atmosphere in Boston and that I was accustomed to in Chicago. Here there is a sort of—I don't know that I can express it exactly; it's part of an older civilization, I suppose; but I don't think it pays so well as what we have in Chicago."
"Pays so well?" he repeated. "I don't think I understand."
"It doesn't sell so well in a book," she explained. "I thought that it would be better business to write stories of the East for the West to buy; but I've about made up my mind that it'll be money in my pocket to write of the West for the eastern market."
Fairfield smiled under his big mustache, playing with a paper-knife.
"Pardon my mentioning it," he said, "but I thought you wrote for fame, and not for money."
"Oh, I don't write for money, I assure you; but I was brought up to be a business woman, and if I'm going to write books somebody ought to pay for them. Now I wanted to ask you what you will sell me your part in 'Love in a Cloud' for."
Whether this sudden introduction of her business or the nature of it when introduced were the more startling it might have been hard to determine. Certain it is that Fairfield started, and stared at his visitor as if he doubted his ears.
"My part of it?" he exclaimed. "Why, I wrote it."
"Yes," she returned easily, "but so many persons have supposed it to be mine, that it is extremely awkward to deny it; and you have become my collaborateur, of course, by writing on the other novels."
"I hadn't realized that," Dick returned with a smile.
"You've put so much of your style into my other books," she pursued, "that it's made people attribute 'Love in a Cloud' to me, and I think you are bound now not to go back on me. I don't know as you see it as I do, but it seems to me that since you took the liberty of changing so much in my other stories you ought to be willing to bear the consequences of it, especially as I'm willing to pay you well."
"But as long as you didn't write the book," Dick observed, "I should think you'd feel rather queer to have it said you did."
"I've thought of that," Mrs. Croydon said, nodding, with a flutter of silken tags, "but I reason that the ideas are so much my own, and the book is so exactly what I would have written if social duties hadn't prevented, that that ought not to count. The fact that so many folks think I wrote it shows that I might have written it."
"But after all you didn't write it," Fairfield objected. "That seems to make it awkward."
"Why, of course it would have been better if I had given you a sketch of it," Mrs. Croydon returned, apparently entirely unmoved; "but then of course you got so much of the spirit of 'Love in a Cloud' out of my other books—"
This was perhaps more than any author could be expected to endure, and least of all a young author in the discussion of his first novel.
"Why, how can you say that?" he demanded indignantly.
"Do you suppose," she questioned with a benign and patronizing smile, "that so many persons would have taken your book for mine in the first place if you hadn't imitated me or taken ideas from my other books?"
Dick sprang to his feet, and then sat down, controlling himself.
"Well," he said coldly, "it makes no difference. It is too late to do anything about it now. An edition of 'Love in a Cloud' with my name on the title-page comes out next Wednesday. If folks say too much about the resemblance to your books, I can confess, I suppose, my part in the others."
She turned upon him with a burst of surprise and indignation which set all her ribbon-ends waving in protest.
"That," she said, "is a professional secret. No man of honor would tell it."
She rose as she spoke, her face full of indignation.
"You have not treated me fairly," she said bitterly. "You must have seen that the book was attributed to me, and you knew the connection between 'Love in a Cloud' and my other books—"
"Other books!" exclaimed Dick.
Mrs. Croydon waved him into silence with a magnificent gesture, but beyond that took no notice of his words.
"You saw how everybody looked at me that day at Mrs. Harbinger's," she went on. "If you were going to give your name to the book why didn't you do it then?"
"I didn't think of you at all," was his answer. "I was too much amused in seeing that absurd Barnstable make a fool of himself with Count Shimbowski. Did you know that the Count actually challenged him?"