"Hello, Anthony!" he called. "What! is Mr. Paul squandering your midnight oil? You should have sent him to bed long ago."
"It is not my hour for retiring," responded Mr. Paul.
Anthony interrupted pacifically.
"Mr. Paul is exhorting me," he said, "and I have no doubt that, with slight modifications, his sermon may be adapted to your case. He predicts brain-softening and general senility."
"An inspired prophecy," returned Mr. Nevins, crossly, "and savoring of Jeremiah. As for myself, it is but common justice that a man who has conscientiously refused the cultivation of the mind should not be called upon to lose what he doesn't possess." Then he grew suddenly cheerful. "Confound it! What's the use of being a philosopher on paper when you can beone in practice. What's the use of dying when you can eat, drink, and be merry?"
"Eating," remarked Mr. Paul, with depressing effect, "produces dyspepsia, drinking produces gout."
"And thought, paresis," added Anthony, lightly. "They are all merely different forms of dissipation. I have chosen mine; Nevins has chosen his. Only, as a matter of taste, I'd rather die by work than wine. Personally, I prefer consumption to apoplexy."
"There is such a thing as the means justifying the end," responded Mr. Nevins, in reckless ill-humor. "And it is a great principle. If I wasn't a fool, I'd make a bonfire of my brush and palette, and start afresh on a level with my appetite. I would become the apostle of good-living, which means fast living. I tell you, an hour of downright devilment is worth all the art since Adam. Aristippus is greater than Raphael."
"What has gone wrong?" demanded Algarcife, soothingly. "Too much purple in the 'Andromeda'? I always said that purple was the imperial color of his satanic majesty. If you had followed the orthodox art of your college days, and hadn't gone wandering after strange gods, you might have escaped a dash of that purple melancholia."
"You're a proper fellow," returned Mr. Nevins, with disgust. "Who was it that won that last debate in '82 by a glowing defence of Christianity against agnosticism, and, when the Reverend Miles lit out about the new orator in his flock, floored him with: 'Was that good? Then what a magnificent thing I could have made of the other side!'"
Mr. Paul had opened his book, and glanced up with candid lack of interest. Anthony laughed languidly.
"I saw Miles some weeks ago," he said, "and he is still talking about my 'defection,' as he calls it. I couldn't convince him that I was merely the counselfor a weak case, and that I was always an agnostic at heart."
Mr. Nevins lighted a cigar in silence. Then he nodded abruptly towards the wall. "What's that noise?" he demanded, irritably.
"That," replied Algarcife, "is a fiend in woman's form, who makes night hideous. I can't begin to work until she sings herself hoarse, and she doesn't do that until midnight. Verily, she is possessed of seven devils, and singing devils at that."
Mr. Nevins was listening attentively. His irritability had vanished.
"Why, it's Mariana!" he exclaimed. "Bless her pretty throat! An hour of Mariana is worth all the spoken or unspoken thoughts of—of Marcus Aurelius, to say nothing of Solomon."
Mr. Paul closed his book and looked up gravely. "A worthy young woman," he observed, "though a trifle fast. As for Solomon, his wisdom has been greatly exaggerated."
"Fast!" protested Mr. Nevins. "She's as fast as—as Mr. Paul—"
"Your insinuation is absurd," returned Mr. Paul, stiffly. But Mr. Nevins was not to be suppressed.
"Then don't display your ignorance of such matters. As for this St. Anthony, he thinks every woman who walks the New York streets a bleached pattern of virtue. I don't believe he'd know a painted Jezebel unless she wore a scarlet letter."
Anthony turned upon him resentfully. "Confound it, Nevins," he said, "I am not a born fool!"
"Only an innocent," retorted Mr. Nevins, complacently.
A resounding rap upon the panels of the door interrupted them. Mr. Nevins rose.
"That's Ardly," he said. "He and I are doing New York to-night."
Ardly came inside, and stood with his hand upon the door-knob.
"Come on, Nevins," he said. "I've got to do a column on that newdanseuse. She dances like a midge, but, by Jove! she has a figure to swear by—"
"And escape perjury," added Mr. Nevins. "Mariana says it is false."
"Mariana," replied Ardly, "is a sworn enemy to polite illusions. She surveys the stage through a microscope situated upon the end of a lorgnette. It is a mistake. One should never look at a woman through glasses unless they be rose-colored ones. A man preserves this principle, and his faith in plumpness and curves along with it; a woman penetrates to the padding and powder. Come on, Nevins."
Mr. Nevins followed him into the hall, and then turned to look in again. "Algarcife, won't you join us on a jolly little drunk? Won't you, Mr. Paul?"
When they had gone, and Mr. Paul had gone likewise, though upon a different way, Anthony heated the coffee, drank two cups, and resumed his work.
"Taken collectively," he remarked, "the human race is a consummate nuisance. What a deuced opportunity for work the last man will have—only, most likely, he'll be an ass."
The next day he passed Mariana on the stairs without seeing her. He was returning from the college laboratory, and his mind was full of his experiments. Later in the afternoon, when he watered his plants, he turned his can, in absent-minded custom, upon the geranium, and saw that there was a scarlet bloom among the leaves. The sight pleased him. It was as if he had given sustenance to a famished life.
But Mariana, engrossed in lesser things, had seen him upon the stairs and upon the balcony. She still cherished an unreasonable resentment at what she considered his trespass upon her individual rights; andyet, despite herself, the trenchant quality in the dark, massive-browed face had not been without effect upon her. The ascetic self-repression that chastened his lips, and the utter absence of emotion in the mental heat of his glance tantalized her in its very unlikeness to her own nature. She, who thrilled into responsive joy or gloom at reflected light or shade, found her quick senses awake to each passing impression, and had learned to recognize her neighbor's step upon the stair; while he, wrapped in an intellectual trance, created his environment at will, and was as oblivious of the girl at the other end of the fire-escape as he was to the articles of furniture in his room.
It was as if semi-barbarism, in all its exuberance of undisciplined emotion, had converged with the highest type of modern civilization—the civilization in which the flesh is degraded from its pedestal and forced to serve as a jangled vehicle for the progress of the mind.
The next night, as Algarcife stood at his window looking idly down upon the street below, he heard the sound of a woman sobbing in the adjoining room. His first impulse was to hasten in the direction from whence the sound came. He curbed the impulse with a shake.
"Hang it," he said, "it is no business of mine!"
But the suppressed sobbing from the darkness beyond invited him with its enlistment of his quick sympathies.
The electric light, falling upon the fire-escape, cast inky shadows from end to end. They formed themselves into dense outlines, which shivered as if stirred by a phantom breeze.
He turned and went back to his desk. Upon the table he had spread the supper of which he intended partaking at eleven o'clock. For an unknown reason he had conceived an aversion to the restaurant in the basement, and seldom entered it. He slept late in theday and worked at night, and his meals were apt to be at irregular hours.
He wrote a line, and rose and went back to the window. For an instant he stood and listened, then stepped out upon the fire-escape and walked across the shivering shadows towards the open window beyond.
Upon the little door beneath the window a girl was leaning, her head bowed upon her outstretched arm. The light in the room beyond was low, but he could see distinctly the slight outlines of her figure and the confusion of her heavy hair. She was sobbing softly.
"I beg your pardon," he said, the sympathetic quality in his voice dominating, "but I am sure that I can help you."
His forcible self-confidence exercised a compelling effect. The girl lifted her head and looked at him. Tears stood in her eyes, and as the electric light caught the clear drops they cast out scintillant flashes. Against the dim interior her head, with its nimbus of hair, had the droop and poise of the head of a mediæval saint.
"Oh, but you don't know how unhappy I am!" she said.
He spoke as he would have spoken to Mr. Paul in the same circumstances. "You have no one to whom you can go?"
"No."
"Then tell me about it."
His tone was that in which a physician might inquire the condition of a patient's digestion. It was absolutely devoid of the recognition of sex.
"Oh, I have worked so hard!" said Mariana.
"Yes?"
"And I hoped to sing in opera, and—Morani tells me that—it will be impossible."
"Ah!" In the peculiar power of his voice the exclamation had the warmth of a handshake.
Mariana rested her chin upon her clasped hands and looked at him. "He says it must be a music-hall—or—or nothing," she added.
He was silent for a moment. He felt that it was a case in which his sympathy could be exceeded only by his ignorance. "And this is why you are unhappy?" he asked. "Is there nothing else?"
She gave a little sob. "I am tired," she said. "My allowance hasn't come—and I missed my dinner, and I am—hungry."
Algarcife responded with relieved cheerfulness.
"Why, we are prepared for that," he said. "I was just sitting down to my supper, and you will join me."
In his complete estrangement from the artificial restraints of society, it seemed to him the simplest of possible adjustments of the difficulty. He felt that his intervention had not been wholly without beneficial results.
Mariana glanced swiftly up into his face.
"Come!" he said; and she rose and followed him.
As Mariana crossed the threshold the light dazzled her, and she raised her hand to her eyes. Then she lowered it and looked at him between half-closed lids. It was a trick of mannerism which heightened the subtlety of her smile. In the deep shadows cast by her lashes her eyes were untranslatable.
"You are very hospitable," she said.
"A virtue which covers a multitude of sins," he answered, pleasantly. "If you will make yourself at home, I'll fix things up a bit."
He opened the doors of the cupboard and took out a plate and a cup and saucer, which he placed before her. "I am sorry I can't offer you a napkin," he said, apologetically, "but they allow me only one a day, and I had that at luncheon."
Mariana laughed merrily. The effects of recent tears were visible only in the added lustre of her glance and the pallor of her face. She had grown suddenly mirthful.
"Don't let's be civilized!" she pleaded. "I abhor civilization. It invented so many unnecessary evils. Barbarians didn't want napkins; they wanted only food. I am a barbarian."
Algarcife cut the cold chicken and passed her the bread and butter.
"Why, none of us are really civilized, you know," he returned, dogmatically. "True, we have a thin layer of hypocrisy, which we call civilization. It prompts us to sugar-coat the sins which our forefathers swallowedin the rough; that is all. It is purely artificial. In a hundred thousand years it may get soaked in, and then the artificial refinement will become real and civilization will set in."
Mariana leaned forward with a pretty show of interest. She did not quite understand what he meant, but she adapted herself instinctively to whatever he might mean.
"And then?" she questioned.
"And then we will realize that to be civilized is to shrink as instinctively from inflicting as from enduring pain. Sympathy is merely a quickening of the imagination, in which state we are able to propel ourselves mentally into conditions other than our own." His manner was aggressive in its self-assertiveness. Then he smiled, regarded her with critical keenness, and lifted the coffee-pot.
"I sha'n't give you coffee," he said, "because it is not good for you. You need rest. Why, your hands are trembling! You shall have milk instead."
"I don't like milk," returned Mariana, fretfully. "I'd rather have coffee, please. I want to be stimulated."
"But not artificially," he responded. His gaze softened. "This is my party, you know," he said, "and it isn't polite to ask for what is not offered you. Come here."
He had risen and was standing beside his desk. Mariana went up to him. The power of his will had enthralled her, and she felt strangely submissive. Her coquetry she recognized as an unworthy weapon, and it was discarded. She grew suddenly shy and nervous, and stood before him in the flushed timidity of a young feminine thing.
He had taken a bottle from a shelf and was measuring some dark liquid into a wine-glass. As Mariana reached him he took her hand with frank kindliness.In his cool and composed touch there was not so much as a suggestion of sexual difference. The possibility that, as a woman, she possessed an attraction for him, as a man, was ignored in its entirety.
"You have cried half the evening?"
"Yes."
"Drink this." His tone was peremptory.
He gave her the glass, watching her as she looked into it, with the gleam of a smile in his intent regard. Mariana hesitated an instant. Then she drank it with a slight grimace.
"Your hospitality has taken an unpleasant turn," she remarked. "You might at least give me something to destroy the taste."
He laughed and pointed to a plate of grapes, and they sat down to supper.
The girl glanced about the room critically. Then she looked at her companion.
"I don't quite like your room," she observed. "It is grewsome."
"It is a work-shop," he answered. "But your dislike is pure nonsense. Skulls and cross-bones are as natural in their way as flesh and blood. Nothing in nature is repellent to the mind that follows her."
Mariana repressed a shudder. "I have no doubt that toads are natural enough in their way," she returned, "but I don't like the way of toads."
Anthony met her serious protest lightly.
"You are a beautiful subject for morbid psychology," he said. "Why, toads are eminently respectable creatures, and if we regard them without prejudice, we will discover that, as a point of justice, they have an equal right with ourselves to the possession of this planet. Only, right is not might, you know."
"But I love beautiful things," protested Mariana. She looked at him wistfully, like a child desiring approbation. There was an amber light in her eyes.
He smiled upon her.
"So do I," he made answer; "but to me each one of those nice little specimens is a special revelation of beauty."
The girl broke her bread daintily. "You misunderstand me," she said, with flattering earnestness and a deprecatory inflection in her voice. Her head drooped sideways on its slender throat. There was a virginal illusiveness about her that tinged with seriousness the lightness of her words. "Surely you love art," she said.
"Oh, I like painting, if that is what you mean," he answered, carelessly, though her image in his eyes was relieved against a sudden warmth. "That is, I like Raphael and Murillo and a few of the modern French fellows. As for music, I don't know one note from another. The only air I ever caught was 'In the Fragrant Summer-time,' and that was an accident. I thought it was 'Maryland.'"
Mariana did not smile. She shrank from him, and he felt as if he had struck her.
"It isn't worth your thinking of," he said, "nor am I."
Mariana protested with her restless hands.
"Oh, but I can't help thinking of it," she answered. "It is dreadful. Why, such things are a part of my religion!"
He returned her startled gaze with one of amusement.
"I might supply you with an alphabetical dictionary of my peculiar vices. An unabridged edition would serve for a criminal catalogue as well. A—Acrimony, Adhesiveness, Atheism, Aggressiveness, Aggravation, Ambition, Artfulness—"
"Oh, stop!" cried Mariana. "You bewilder me."
He leaned back in his chair and fixed his intent gaze upon her. His eyes were so deeply set as to be almostindistinguishable, but in the spell of lamplight she saw that the pupils differed in color, one having a hazel cast, while the other was of a decided gray.
"Why, I thought you displayed an interest in the subject!" he rejoined. "You lack the genius of patience."
"Patience," returned Mariana, with a swift change of manner, "is only lack of vitality. I haven't an atom of it."
A shade of the nervous irritability, which appeared from apparently no provocation, was in his voice as he answered:
"There is nothing fate likes better than to drill it into us. And it is not without its usefulness. If patience is the bugbear of youth, it is the panacea of middle age. We learn to sit and wait as we learn to accept passivity for passion and indifference for belief. The worst of it is that it is a lesson which none of us may skip and most of us are forced to learn by heart." He spoke slowly, his voice softened. Beneath the veneering of philosophic asceticism, the scarlet veins of primeval nature were still palpitant. The chill lines of self-restraint in his face might, in the whirlwind of strong passions, become ingulfed in chaos.
With an effort Mariana threw off the spell of his personality. She straightened herself with an energetic movement. From the childlike her manner passed to the imperious. Her head poised itself proudly, her eyes darkened, her lips lost their pliant curve and grew audacious.
"That is as grewsome as your room," she said. "Let's talk of pleasant things."
The changes in her mystified Algarcife. He regarded her gravely. "Of yourself, or of myself?" he demanded.
"The first would only display your ignorance. Ishould prefer the latter. Begin, please." She had grown vivid.
He spoke jestingly. "Here goes. Name, Algarcife. Christened Anthony. Age, twenty-seven years, three weeks, ten days. Height, five feet eleven inches. Complexion, anæmic. Physique, bad. Disposition, worse. Manners, still worse. Does the exactness of my information satisfy you?"
"No;" she enveloped him in her smile. "You haven't told me anything I want to know. I could have guessed your height, and your manners I have tested. What were you doing before I came in?"
"Cursing my luck."
"And before that?" She leaned forward eagerly.
"Dogging at a theory of heredity which will reconcile Darwin's gemmules, Weismann's germ-plasm, and Galton's stirp."
She wrinkled her brows in perplexity. Her show of interest had not fled. A woman who cannot talk of the things she knows nothing about might as well be a man.
"And you will do it?" she asked. He had a sudden consciousness that no one had ever been quite so in sympathy with him as this elusive little woman with the changeable eyes.
"Well, I hardly think so," he said. "At any rate, I expect to discover what Spencer would call the germ of truth in each one of them, and then I suppose I'll formulate a theory of my own which will contain the best in all of them."
Her manner did not betray her ignorance of his meaning.
"And you will explain it all to me when it is finished?" she asked.
His smile cast a light upon her.
"If you wish it," he answered, "but I had no idea that you cared for such things."
"You did not know me," she responded, reproachfully. "I am very, very ignorant, but I want so much to learn." Then her voice regained its brightness. "And you have read all these books?" she questioned.
He followed with his eyes her swift gestures.
"Those," he answered, pointing to the north shelves, "I have skimmed. Those behind you, I have read; and those," he nodded towards his right, "I know word for word."
"And what do you do?" The delicacy of her manner imbued the question with unconscious flattery.
"I—oh, I eke out an existence with the assistance of the Bodley College."
"What have you to do with it? Oh, I beg your pardon! I had forgotten we were almost strangers."
He answered, naturally.
"It is my unhappy fate to endeavor to instil a few brains and a good deal of information into the heads of sixty-one young females."
"And don't you like them?" queried Mariana, eagerly.
"I do not."
"Why?"
"What an inquisitor you are, to be sure!"
"But tell me," she pleaded.
"Why?" he demanded, in his turn.
She lowered her lashes, looking at her quiet hands.
"Because I want so much to know."
His smiling eyes were probing her. "Tell me why."
She raised her lashes suddenly and returned his gaze. There was a wistful sincerity in her eyes.
"I wish to know," she said, slowly, "so that I may not be like them."
For a moment he regarded her silently. Then he spoke. "My reasons are valid. They giggle; they flirt; and they put candy in my pockets."
"And you don't like women at all?"
"I like nice, sensible women, who wear square-toed shoes, and who don't distort themselves with corsets."
The girl put out her pretty foot in its pointed and high-heeled slipper. Then she shook her head with mock seriousness.
"I don't suppose you think that very sensible?" she remarked.
He looked at it critically.
"Well, hardly. No, it isn't in the least sensible, but it—it is very small, isn't it?"
"Oh yes," responded Mariana, eagerly. She felt a sudden desire to flaunt her graces in his face. He was watching the play of her hands, but she became conscious, with an aggrieved surprise, that he was not thinking of them.
"But you don't like just mere—mere women?" she asked, gravely.
"Are you a mere—mere woman?"
"Yes."
"Then I like them."
The radiance that overflowed her eyes startled him.
"But you aren't just a mere—mere man," she volunteered.
"But I am—a good deal merer, in fact, than many others. I am a shape of clay."
"Then I like shapes of clay," said Mariana.
For an instant they looked at each other in silence. In Mariana's self-conscious eyes there was a soft suffusion of shyness; in his subjective ones there was the quickening of an involuntary interest.
"Then we agree most amicably," he remarked, quietly. As she rose he stood facing her. "It is time for your sleep and my work," he added, and held out his hand.
As Mariana placed her own within it she flashed whitely with a sudden resentment of his cool dismissal.
"Good-night!" she said.
He looked down at her as she lingered before him. "I want to be of use to you," he said, frankly, "but things have an unfortunate way of slipping my memory. If at any time I can serve you, just come to the fire-escape and call me."
"No," answered the girl, pettishly, "certainly not."
His brow wrinkled. "That was rude, I know," he rejoined, "but I meant it honestly."
"I have no doubt of it."
As she turned to go he detained her with a compelling touch.
"You aren't angry?"
"No."
"And you forgive me?"
"I have nothing to forgive. Indeed, I am grateful for your charity."
He surveyed her in puzzled scrutiny. "Well, I am sure I sha'n't forget you," he said. "Yes, I am quite sure of it."
"What a marvellous memory!" exclaimed Mariana, crossly, and she stepped out upon the fire-escape.
"Good-night!" he called.
"Good-night!" she responded, and entered her room.
"He is very rude," she whispered as she closed the shutters. In the half-light she undressed and sat in her night-gown, brushing the heavy tangles of her hair. Then she lighted the flame before the little altar and said her prayers; kneeling with bowed head. As she turned off the light she spoke again. "I am not sure that I don't like rudeness," she added.
Meanwhile Algarcife had watched her vanish into the shadows, a smile lightening the gravity of his face. When she had disappeared he turned to his desk. With his singular powers of concentration, he had not taken up his pen before all impressions savethose relating to the subject in hand had been banished from his mind. His expression was buoyant and alert. Turning over his papers, he passed with a sense of reinvigoration to the matter before him.
"Yes; I think, after all, that a strongly modified theory of pangenesis may survive," he said.
At the extreme end of the corridor upon which Mariana's door opened there was a small apartment occupied by three young women from the South, who were bent upon aims of art.
They had moved in a month before, and had celebrated a room-warming by asking Mariana and several of the other lodgers to a feast of beer and pretzels. Since then the girl had seen them occasionally. She knew that they lived in a semi-poverty-stricken Bohemia, and that the pretty one with pink cheeks and a ragged and uncurled fringe of hair, whose name was Freighley, worked in Mr. Nevins's studio and did chrysanthemums in oils. She had once heard Mr. Nevins remark that she was a pupil worth having, and upon asking, "Has she talent?" had met with, "Not a bit, but she's pretty."
"Then it is a pity she isn't a model," said Mariana.
"An example of the eternal contrariness of things," responded Mr. Nevins. "All the good-looking ones want to paint and all the ugly ones want to be painted." Then he rumpled his flaxen head. "In this confounded century everything is in the wrong place, from a woman to her waist-line."
After this Mariana accompanied Miss Freighley on students' day to the Metropolitan Museum, and watched her make a laborious copy of "The Christian Martyr." Upon returning she was introduced to Miss Hill and Miss Oliver, who shared the apartment, and was told to make herself at home.
Then, one rainy Saturday afternoon there was a knock at her door, and, opening it, she found Miss Freighley upon the outside.
"It is our mending afternoon," she said, "and we want you to come and sit with us. If you have any sewing to do, just bring it."
Mariana picked up her work-basket, and, finding that her thimble was missing, began rummaging in a bureau-drawer.
"I never mend anything until I go to put it on," she said. "It saves so much trouble."
Then she found her thimble and followed Miss Freighley into the hall.
Miss Freighley laughed in a pretty, inconsequential way. She had a soft, monotonous voice, and spoke with a marked elimination of vowel sounds.
"We take the last Saturday of the month," she said. "Only Juliet and I do Gerty's things, because she can't sew, and she cleans our palettes and brushes in return."
She swung open the door of the apartment, and they entered a room which served as studio and general lounging-room in one.
A tall girl, sitting upon the hearth-rug beside a heap of freshly laundered garments, stood up and held out a limp, thin hand.
"I told Carrie she would find you," she said, speaking with a slight drawl and an affected listlessness.
She was angular, with a consumptive chest and narrow shoulders. She wore her hair—which was vivid, like flame, with golden ripples in the undulations—coiled confusedly upon the crown of her head. Her name was Juliet Hill. A mistaken but well-known colorist had once traced in her a likeness to Rossetti's "Beata Beatrix." The tracing had resulted in the spoiling of a woman without the making of an artist.
Mariana threw herself upon a divan near the hearth-rug and looked down upon the pile of clothes.
"What a lot of them!" she observed, sympathetically.
Miss Hill drew a stocking from the heap and ran her darning-egg into the heel to locate a hole.
"It is, rather," she responded, "but we never mend until everything we have is in rags. I couldn't find a single pair of stockings this morning, so I knew it was time."
"If you had looked into Gerty's bureau-drawer you might have found them," said Miss Freighley, seating herself upon the end of the divan. "Gerty never marks her things, and somehow she gets all of ours. Regularly once a month I institute a search through her belongings, and discover more of my clothes than I knew I possessed. Here, give me that night-gown, Juliet. The laundress tore every bit of lace off the sleeve. What a shame!"
Mariana removed a guitar from the couch and leaned back among the pillows, glancing about the room. The walls were covered with coarse hangings, decorated in vague outlines of flying cranes and vaguer rushes. Here and there were tacked groups of unframed water-colors and drawings in charcoal—all crude and fanciful and feminine. Upon a small shelf above the door stood a plaster bust, and upon it a dejected and moth-eaten raven—the relic of a past passion for taxidermy. In the centre of the room were several easels, a desk, with Webster's Unabridged for a foot-stool, and a collection of palettes, half-used tubes of paint, and unassorted legs and arms in plaster.
"How do you ever find anything?" asked Mariana, leaning upon her arm.
"We don't," responded a small, dark girl, coming from the tiny kitchen with a dish of cooling caramels in her hand; "we don't find, we just lose." She placed the dish upon the table and drew up a chair. "I would mortgage a share of my life if I could turn my old mammy loose in here for an hour."
"Gerty used to be particular," explained Miss Freighley; "but it is a vicious habit, and we broke her of it. Even now it attacks her at intervals, and she gets out a duster and goes to work."
"I can't write in a mess," interrupted Miss Oliver, a shade ruefully. "I haven't written a line since I came to New York." Then she sighed. "I only wish I hadn't written a word before coming. At home I thought I was a genius; now I know I am a fool."
"I have felt the same way," said Mariana, sympathetically, "but it doesn't last. The first stage-manager I went to I almost fell at his feet; the next almost fell at mine. Neither of them gave me a place, but they taught me the value of men."
"I don't think it's worth learning," returned Miss Oliver, passing her caramels. "Try one, and see if they are hard."
"Poor Gerty!" drawled Miss Hill, watching Mariana bite the caramel. "She faces editors and all kinds of bad characters. Her views of life are depressing."
"They are not views," remonstrated Miss Oliver, "they are facts. Facts are always depressing, except when they are maddening."
"I have begged her to leave off writing and take to water-color or china painting," said Miss Freighley, cheerfully, "but she won't."
"How can she?" asked Mariana.
"Of course I can't," retorted Miss Oliver, shortly. "I never had a paint-brush in my hand in my life, except when I was cleaning it."
Miss Freighley laid her sewing aside and stretched her arms.
"It only requires a little determination," she said, "and I have it. I got tired of Alabama. I couldn't come to New York without an object, so I invented one. It was as good as any other, and I stuck to it."
Miss Hill shook her head, and her glorious hair shone like amber.
"Art is serious," she said, slowly. She was just entering the life-class at the Art League.
"But the artist is not," returned Miss Freighley, "and one can be an artist without having any art. I am. They think at home I am learning to paint pictures to go on the parlor wall in place of the portraits that were burned in the war. But I am not. I am here because I love New York, and—"
"Claude Nevins," concluded Miss Oliver.
Mariana looked up with interest. "How nice!" she said. "He told me you were awfully pretty."
Miss Freighley blushed and laughed.
"Nonsense!" she rejoined; "but Gerty is so faithful to her young fellow down South that it has gone to her brain."
"I am faithful because I have no opportunity for faithlessness," sang Gerty to an accompaniment she was picking upon the guitar. "I have been in love one—two—six times since I came to New York. Once it was with an editor, who accepted my first story. He was short and thick and gray-haired, but I loved him. Once it was with that dark, ill-fed man who rooms next to Mariana. He almost knocked me down upon the stairway and forgot to apologize. I have forgotten the honorable others, as the Japanese say, but I know it is six times, because whenever it happened I made a little cross-mark on my desk, and there are six of them."
"It must have been Mr. Ardly," said Mariana. "I never look at him without thinking what an adorable lover he would make."
"He has such nice hands," said Miss Oliver. "I do like a man with nice hands."
"And he is clean-shaven," added Miss Freighley. "I detest a man with a beard."
Miss Hill crossed her thin ankles upon the hearth.
"Love should be taken seriously," she said, with a wistful look in her dark eyes.
Miss Freighley's pretty, inconsequent laugh broke in.
"That is one of Juliet's platitudes," she said. "But, my dear, it shouldn't be taken seriously. Indeed, it shouldn't be taken at all—except in cases of extremeennui, and then in broken doses. The women who take men seriously—and taking love means taking men, of course—sit down at home and grow shapeless and have babies galore. To grow shapeless is the fate of the woman who takes sentiment seriously. It is a more convincing argument against it than all the statistics of the divorce court—"
"For the Lord's sake, Carrie, beware of woman's rights," protested Miss Oliver. "That is exactly what Mrs. Simpson said in her lecture on 'Our Tyrant, Man.' Why, those dear old aunts of yours in Alabama have inserted an additional clause in their Litany: 'From intemperance, evil desires, and woman's suffrage, good Lord deliver us!' They are grounded in the belief that the new woman is anédition de luxeof the devil."
Mariana rose and shook out her skirts. "I must go," she said, "and you haven't done a bit of work."
"So we haven't," replied Miss Hill, picking up her needle. "But take some caramels—do."
Mariana took a caramel and went out into the hall. Algarcife's door was open, and he was standing upon the threshold talking to Claude Nevins.
As Mariana passed, Nevins smiled and called to her:
"I say, Miss Musin, here is a vandal who complains that you make night hideous."
Algarcife scowled.
"Nevins is a fool," he retorted, "and if he doesn't know it, he ought to be told so."
"Thanks," returned Nevins, amiably, "but I have long since learned not to believe anything I hear."
Anthony's irritation increased. "I should have thought the presumptive evidence sufficient to overcome any personal bias," he replied.
Nevins spread out his hands with an imperturbable shrug.
"My dear fellow, I never found my conclusions upon presumptive evidence. Had I done so, I should hold life to be a hollow mockery—whereas I am convinced that it is a deuced solid one."
"You are so bad-tempered—both of you," said Mariana; "but, Mr. Algarcife, do you really object to my singing? I can't keep silent, you know."
Algarcife smiled.
"I never supposed that you could," he answered. "And as for music, I had as soon listen to you as to—to Patti."
"Not that he values your accomplishments more, but Patti's less," observed Nevins, placidly.
"On the other hand, I should say that Miss Musin would make decidedly the less noise," said Anthony.
"He's a brute, isn't he, Mariana?" asked Nevins—and added, "Now I never said you made anything hideous, did I?"
Mariana laughed, looking a little vexed. "If you wouldn't always repeat everything you hear other people say, it would be wiser," she responded, tartly.
"Such is the reward of virtue," sighed Nevins. "All my life I have been held as responsible for other people's speeches as for my own. And all from a conscientious endeavor to let my neighbors see themselves as others see them—"
Algarcife smiled good-humoredly. "Whatever bad qualities Nevins may possess," he said, "he has at least the courage of his convictions—"
Nevins shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't know about the convictions," he rejoined, "but I've got the courage all right." Then he looked at Mariana. "Is that an implement of housewifery that I see?" he demanded.
"I have been to a darning-party," she answered, "but we didn't darn anything—not even circumstances."
"Lucky circumstances!" ejaculated Nevins. Then he lowered his voice. "I should not have believed it of you," he protested; "to attend a darning-party, and to leave not only me, but my socks, outside."
Mariana flushed angrily.
"You are insufferable," she said, "and you haven't a particle of tact—not a particle. Only yesterday I heard you tell Mr. Morris that his head looked like an advertisement for sapolio, and the day before you told Miss Freighley that I said she didn't know how to dress her hair."
"It was true," said Nevins. "You can't make a liar of me, Mariana."
"I wish you wouldn't call me Mariana," she retorted; and he went upon his way with a lament.
As Mariana laid her hand upon her door-knob she looked at Anthony.
"Mr. Algarcife," she said, "do you really mind my singing so very much?"
From the end of the corridor Nevins's voice was heard chanting:
"I wish that Nevins would attend to his own affairs," Algarcife responded. "As for me, you may dance a break-down every night of your life, and, if it amuses you, I'll grin and bear it."
During Algarcife's first term at college, a fellow fraternity man remarked of him that he resembled the eternal void, in that he might have been anything and was nothing. Algarcife accepted the criticism with a shrug.
"Wait and see," he responded, shortly, and the fraternity man had waited and had seen.
In that first year Anthony succeeded in sowing a supply of wild oats sufficient for the domestication of the species. He was improvident from principle and reckless from an inborn distrust of accepted dogmas. "I shall live as I please," he replied, in answer to the warnings of a classmate, "and I shall think as I damn please."
For a year he went about his dissipations in a kind of inquiring ardor. He called it "seeing life," and he pursued his observations with entire obliviousness to public regard, but with philosophic concern as to the accuracy of the information obtained. He was known to have got drunk upon whiskey and light wine in order to test the differences in effect, and it was rumored that he made love to the homeliest and most virtuous daughter of the saloon-keeper that he might convince himself whether her virtue was the logical resultant of her homeliness. Into all experiments he carried an entire absence of prejudice, and a half-defiant acceptance of consequences.
"It is a sheer waste of time," said John Driscoll, of the Senior class. "You haven't learned the first principleof scientific dissipation. Instead of plunging into excesses, you stroll into them. By Jove! if you broke every command in the Decalogue, you would appear to sin in moderation."
Algarcife laughed. "I am going to reform," he said. "I am not enough of an artist to see the æsthetic values of vice. Let's become decent. It is more economical."
It was at this time that he reduced his living expenses one-half, and appropriated the surplus funds to the support of a young mechanic, whose health had collapsed in the struggle to work his way to a university degree. "He not only gave it," declared the young mechanic, in a burst of gratitude, "but he gave it without knowing that he did a generous thing."
When Algarcife left college that summer he followed Driscoll to his cabin in the Adirondacks and spent several months botanizing. The chance application to science decided the tenor of his mind, and, upon his return to study, he refused to bow beneath the weight of authority hurled upon him. He denounced the classics and a classical training. Several courses he declared superficial, and he mastered various systems of moral philosophy that he might refute the fallacies of the professor. The brilliancy which he had frittered during the preceding year was turned into newer channels, and the closeness of his reliance upon inductive reasoning caused him to become at once a source of amusement to his classmates and of annoyance to his instructor. To see him rise in class, his face charged with the nervous vigor which seized him in moments of excitement, his keen glance riveted upon the professor as he mercilessly dissected his utterances, was an event which, to his fellow-students, rendered even old Monckton's lectures of interest.
Then he took a prominent part in a debating society. With a readiness which his friends declared to springfrom love of logic, his enemies from lack of principle, he accepted either side of a given argument, and had been known to undertake at once the negative and the affirmative, detecting his own weaknesses as ruthlessly as he had detected those of old Monckton.
Before leaving college, and at the urgency of his guardian, he had carried through with dogged distaste a course in dogmatic theology. It was then that he fell into the way of writing theses from opposite sides of a subject, and when handing in a treatise upon "Historical Evidences of Christianity," or "The Pelagian Heresy," it was invariably accompanied by the remark: "I wish you'd look over that 'Lack of Historical Evidences,' or 'Defence of Pelagianism,' at the same time. You know, I always do the other side."
And it was "the other side" which finally drove him out of theology and his guardian into despair. Whether it was an argument in moral philosophy, a mooted question in Egyptology, or a stand in current politics, Algarcife was ready with what his classmates called "the damned eternal opposition." It was even said that a facetious professor, in remarking to his class that it was "a fine day," had turned in absent-minded custom and called upon Mr. Algarcife for "the other side," an appeal which drew a howl of approbation from hilarious students.
Anthony was not popular at college, though his friends were steadfast. It was not until later years, when life had tempered the incisive irony of his speech and endowed him with the diplomacy of indifference, that men fell beneath the attraction of his personality. At that time he was looked upon in an ominous light, and the scintillant scepticism which he carried fearlessly into every department of knowledge caused him to be regarded as one who might prove himself to be an enemy to society. Even his voice, which long afterwards exerted so potent an influence, hadnot then gained its varied range and richness of expression.
So, when, years later, the public lauded the qualities they had formerly condemned, there was no inconsistence—since life is more colored by points of view than by principles. At the end of his theological course he had delivered an address, at the request of his class, upon the "Christian Revelation." When it was over he went into his guardian's room, the flame of a long determination in his eyes. The paper which he had read was still in his hands, and he laid it upon the table as he spoke.
"It can't be," he said. "I give it up."
The man whom he addressed rose slowly and faced him, standing, a tall, gaunt figure in his clerical coat. His hair was white, and at a first glance he presented the impression of a statue modelled in plaster, so much did the value of form outweigh that of color in his appearance. In meeting his eyes an observer would, perhaps, have gained a conception of expression rather than shade. One would have said that the eyes were benevolent, not that they were gray or blue. His forehead was high and somewhat narrow, three heavy furrows running diagonally between the eyebrows—ruts left by the constant passage of perplexities. He was called Father Speares, and was an impassioned leader of the High Church movement.
"Do you mean it?" he asked, slowly—"that you give up your faith?"
Algarcife's brow wrinkled in sudden irritation. "That I have given up long ago," he answered. "If I ever had any, it was an ingrafted product. What I do mean is that I give up the Church—that I give up theology—that I give up religion."
The other flinched suddenly. He put out one frail, white hand as if in protest.
"I—I cannot believe it," he said.
"And yet I have been honest."
"Honest! Yes, I suppose so. Honest—" he lifted the paper from the table and unfolded it mechanically. "And yet you could write this?"
Anthony shook his head impatiently. "I was but a special pleader with the side assigned, and you knew it."
"But I did not know your power—nor do you. It convinced me—convinced me, though I came with the knowledge that your words were empty—empty and rotten—"
"They were words. The case was given me, and I defended it as a lawyer defends a client. What else could I do?"
Father Speares sighed and passed his hand across his brow.
"It is not the first disappointment of my life," he said, "but it is the greatest."
Algarcife was looking through the open window to the sunlight falling upon the waving grass. A large butterfly, with black and yellow wings, was dancing above a clump of dandelions.
"I am sorry," he said, more gently—"sorry for that—but it can't be helped. I am not a theologian, but a scientist; I am not a believer, but an agnostic; I am not a priest, but a man."
"But you are young. The pendulum may swing back—"
"Never," said Algarcife—"never." He lifted his head, looking into the other's eyes. "Don't you see that when a man has once conceived the magnitude of the universe he can never bow his head to a creed? Don't you see that when he has grasped the essential verity in all religions he no longer allies himself to a single one? Don't you see that when he has realized the dominance of law in religions—the law of their growth and decay, of their evolution and dissolution,when he has once grasped the fact that man creates, and is not created by, his god—don't you see that he can never bind himself to the old beliefs?"
"I see that he can awake to the knowledge of the spiritual life as well as to the physical—that he can grasp the existence of a vital ethical principle in nature. I shall pray for you, and I shall hope—"
Algarcife frowned. "I am sick of it," he said—"sick to death. To please you, I plodded away at theology for three solid years. To please you, I weighed assumptions as light as air. To please you, I read all the rot of all the Fathers—and I am sick of it. I shall live my own life in my own way."
"And may God help you!" said the elder man; and then, "Where will you go?"
"To Egypt—to India—to the old civilizations."
"And then?"
"I do not know. I shall work and I shall succeed—with or without the help of God."
And he had gone. During the next few years he travelled in Africa and Asia, when the sudden loss of his income recalled him to America. Finding it fruitless to rebel, he resigned himself philosophically, secured a position as instructor in a woman's college, made up an annual deficit by writing for the scientific reviews, and continued his studies. His physical nature he believed he had rendered quiescent.
Some days after his encounter with Mariana he came upon her again. He had just entered the park at the Seventy-second Street entrance, on his way from his lecture at the Bodley College. The battered bonnet of a beggar-woman had blown beneath the horses' hoofs in the drive, and he had stopped to rescue it, when he heard his name called, and saw Mariana beside him.
She spoke impulsively.
"I have been watching you," she said.
He looked at her in perplexity.
"Indeed! And what have you discovered?"
"I discovered that you are a gentleman."
He laughed outright.
"Your powers of intuition are positively miraculous," he replied.
She upbraided him with a glance.
"You are unkind," she said.
"Am I?"
"You are unkind to me." Her manner had grown subtly personal. He felt suddenly as if he had known her from the beginning of time and through various transmigrations.
"You laugh at me," she added. "You were kinder to that woman—"
He broke in upon her, perplexity giving place to amusement.
"Oh!" he said; "so that is what you mean! Why, if you were to lose your hat, I shouldn't laugh, I assure you."
Mariana walked on silently. Her eyes were bent upon the gray sidewalk, there was a faint flush in her face. A line of men seated upon the benches beside the way surveyed her with interest.
"Miss Musin!"
Her face quickened.
"I have a confession to make."
She looked up inquiringly. A finger of sunlight pierced the branches of an elm and pointed to her upraised face.
"I have rather bad manners," he went on. "It is a failing which you must accept as you accept the color of my hair—"
Mariana smiled.
"I say just what I think," he added.
Mariana frowned.
"That is what I complain of," she responded. Then she laughed so brightly that a tiny child, toddling with a toy upon the walk, looked up and clapped its hands.
His eyes warmed.
"But you will take me for better or for worse?" he demanded.
"Could it be better?" she asked, demurely.
"That is a matter of opinion."
They left the park and turned into a cross-town street. The distant blocks sloped down into the blue blur of the river, from which several gaunt, gray masts rose like phantom wrecks evolved from the mist. Beyond them the filmy outline of the opposite shore was revealed.
Suddenly Mariana stopped.
"This is Morani's, and I must go in." She held out her hand.
"How is the voice?" he asked.
"I am nursing it. Some day you shall hear it."
"I have heard it," he responded.
She smiled.
"Oh, I forgot. You are next door. Well, some day you shall hear it in opera."
"Shall I?"
"And I shall sing Elsa with Alvary. My God! I would give ten years of my life for that—to sing with Alvary."
He smiled at the warmth in her words and, as he smiled he became conscious that her artistic passion ignited the fire of a more material passion in himself. A fugitive desire seized him to possess the woman before him, body and brain. From the quivering of his pulses he knew that the physical nature he had drugged had stirred in response to a passing appeal.
"Good-bye," said Mariana. She tripped lightly up the brown-stone steps. As she opened the outer door she turned with a smile and a nod. Then the door closed and he went on his way. But the leaping of his pulses was not appeased.
One morning, several days later, Mariana, looking from her window, saw Anthony standing upon the fire-escape. He had thrown a handful of crumbs to a swarm of noisy sparrows quarrelling about his feet.
As he stood there with the morning sunlight flashing upon his face and gilding the dark abundance of his hair, the singularly mystic beauty of his appearance was brought into bold relief. It was a beauty which contained no suggestion of physical supremacy. He seemed the survival of a lost type—of those purified prophets of old who walked with God and trampled upon the flesh which was His handiwork. It was the striking contrast between the intellectual tenor of his mind and its physical expression which emphasized his personality. To the boldest advance in scientific progress he had the effect of uniting a suggestion of that poetized mysticism which constitutes the charm of a remote past. With the addition of the yellow robe and a beggar's bowl, he might have been transformed into one of the Enlightened of nigh on three thousand years ago, and have followed the Blessed One upon his pilgrimage towards Nirvana. The modernity of his mind was almost tantalizing in its inconsistency with his external aspect.
Mariana, looking through the open window, smiled unconsciously. Anthony glanced up, saw her, and nodded.
"Good-morning," he called. "Won't you come out and help quiet these rogues?"
Mariana opened the little door beneath the window and stepped outside. She looked shy and girlish, and the flutter with which she greeted him had a quaint suggestion of flattery.
He came towards her, and they stood together beside the railing. Beneath them the noise of trade and traffic went on tumultuously. Overhead the sky was of a still, intense blueness, the horizon flecked by several church-spires, which rose sharply against the burning remoteness. Across the tenement roofs lines of drying garments fluttered like banners.
Mariana, in her cotton gown of dull blue, cast a slender shadow across the fire-escape. In the morning light her eyes showed gray and limpid. The sallow tones of her skin were exaggerated, and the peculiar harmony of hair and brows and complexion was strongly marked. She was looking her plainest, and she knew it.
But Anthony did not. He had seen her, perhaps, half a dozen times, and upon each occasion he had discovered his previous conceptions of her to be erroneous. Her extreme mobility of mood and manner at once perplexed and attracted him. Yesterday he had resolved her character into a compound of surface emotions. Now he told himself that she was cool and calm and sweetly reasonable.
"I am glad you like sparrows," she said, "because nobody else does, and, somehow, it doesn't seem fair. You do like them, don't you?"
"I believe," he answered, "that I have two passions beyond the usual number with which man is supplied—a passion for books and a passion for animals. I can't say I have a special regard for sparrows, but I like them. They are hardy little fellows, though a trifle pugnacious, and they have learned the value of co-operation."
"I had a canary," remarked Mariana, with pathos,"but it died. Everything that belongs to me always dies, sooner or later."
He laughed, looking at her with quizzical humor. "Do you expect them to escape the common fate?" he demanded; and then: "If there is anything that could give me an attack of horrors sooner than a dancing dog—and there isn't—it would be a bird in a cage. I left my last lodgings because my neighbor kept a mocking-bird outside of her window. If it had been a canary I might have endured it, but I knew that if I stayed there a week longer I should break in and set that bird free. I used to hear it at night beating itself against the cage."
"Oh, hush!" said Mariana, putting her hands to her ears. She wondered vaguely at his peculiar sensitiveness of sympathy. It was a type of manhood that she had not before encountered—one as unlike the jovial, fox-hunting heroes of her childish days as mind is unlike matter. She remembered that among them such expressions would have been regarded as a mark of effeminacy and ruthlessly laughed to scorn. She even remembered that her own father had denounced a prohibition of prize-fighting as "mawkish rot." This eccentric type of nervous vigor, in which all remnants of semi-barbarism were apparently extinguished, possessed a fascination for her in its very strangeness. In his character all those active virtues around which her youthful romances were woven held no place. Patriotism was modified into a sense of general humanity; chivalry was tempered into commonplace politeness. She did not know that the force which attracted her was but a dominant mentality; that where the mind holds sway the character is modified accordingly. With a great expenditure of nerve force those attributes which result from physical hardihood occupy a less prominent part. In Anthony she beheld, without knowing it, a forced and abnormal result of existingconditions. Nature often foreshadows a coming civilization by an advance-guard of individuals. As a supreme test she places a century before his time the victim of her experiments in vivisection. And a character that might have fitted with uncut edges into the circle of existence, had he but been permitted to insert himself at the proper moment, has often been trampled into nothingness by the incessant trend of the inopportune. The priest of the coming generation is the pariah of the present, and the dogma of to-morrow the heresy of to-day.
To Mariana's ignorant eyes Anthony seemed one in whom passion had been annihilated. In reality it was only smothered beneath the weight of a strenuous will. Let the pressure be removed, and it would burst forth the fiercer for its long confinement, ingulfing perhaps the whole organism in its destructive flame.
"Oh, hush!" Mariana had said, and turned from him. "You seem to delight in unpleasant things. I make it a point to believe that suffering and death do not exist. Iknowthey do, but Ibelievethey do not."
He drew nearer. Across his face she saw a sudden flash—so vivid that it seemed the awakening of a dormant element in his nature. "You are wonderfully vital," he said. "There is as much life in you as there is in a dozen of us poor effete mortals. What is your secret?"
The girl leaned her arm upon the railing and rested her chin in her hand. She looked up at him and her eyes grew darker. "It is the pure animal love of existence," she answered. "I love the world. I love living and breathing, and feeling the blood quicken in my veins. I love dancing and singing and eating and sleeping. The simple sensuousness of life is delicious to me. If I could not be a queen, I had rather be a beggar upon the road-side than to be nothing. If I could not be a human being, I had rather be a butterflyin the sunshine than not to be at all. So long as I had the blue sky and the air and the world about me I could not be miserable. It is life—life in its physical fulfilment—that I love. So long as they leave me the open world I can be happy. Only, if I were taken and shut up in an ugly dungeon I should want to die. And even then there would be hope."
She had spoken passionately, the words coming quickly from between her parted lips. She seemed so light and etherealized as to be almost bodiless. The materialistic philosophy to which she gave utterance was spiritualized by her own illusiveness.
For an instant she hesitated, looking across the tenement roofs to the horizon beyond. Then she went on: "I am different from you—oh, so different! Where you think, I feel. You are all mind, I am all senses. I am only fulfilling my place in nature when I am hearing or seeing or feeling beautiful things. My sense of beauty is my soul."
Anthony watched her with steadfast intentness. He had never before seen her in this mood, and it was a new surprise to him. His former generalizations were displaced.
But if he had known it, the present aspect was a result of his own influence upon Mariana. In a moment of contrition for small deceptions, she had been precipitated into an extravagant self-abasement.
"You are disappointed," she added, presently, meeting his gaze. "You expected something different, but I am shallow, and I can't help it." It was like her that in the tendency to self-depreciation she was as sincere as she had been in the former tendency to self-esteem.
And perhaps Anthony was the juster judge of the two. He was certainly the more dispassionate.
"I have told you," concluded Mariana, with an eager catch at the redeeming grace, "because I want to be truthful."
"My dear girl," responded Anthony, a warm friendliness in his voice, "you might have spared yourself this little piece of analysis. It is as useless as most morbid rot of the kind. It doesn't in the least affect what I think of you, and what I do think of you is of little consequence."
"But what do you think?" demanded Mariana.
"I think that you know yourself just a little less well than you know that old lady wheeling her cart of vegetables in the street below. Had she, by the way, known herself a little better she would not have flown into such a rage because she spilled a few. If we knew ourselves we would see that things are not very much our fault, after all, and that a few slips the more or less on our uphill road are very little matter."
Mariana glowed suddenly. She looked up at him, a woman's regard for power warming her eyes. To her impressionable temperament there seemed an element of sublimity in his ethical composure.
"Teach me," she said, simply. Anthony smiled. If he seemed a Stoic to Mariana, it was not because he was one, and perhaps he was conscious of it. But our conceptions of others are colored solely by their attitudes towards ourselves, and not in the least by their attitudes towards the universe, which, when all is said, is of far less consequence.
"I should have first to learn the lesson myself," he answered.
"Would you, if you could?" asked Mariana.
For an instant he looked at her thoughtfully. "Teach you what?" he questioned. "Teach you to endure instead of to enjoy? To know instead of to believe? To play with skulls and cross-bones instead of with flowers and sunshine? No, I think not."
Mariana grew radiant. She felt a desire to force from him a reluctant confession of liking. "Why wouldn't you?" she demanded.
"Well, on the whole, I think your present point of view better suited to you. And everything, after all, is in the point of view." He leaned against the railing, looking down into the street. "Look over and tell me what you see. Is it not the color of those purple egg-plants in the grocer's stall? the pretty girl in that big hat, standing upon the corner? the roguish faces of those ragamuffins at play? Well, I see these, but I see also the drooping figure of the woman beside the stall; the consumptive girl with the heavy bundle, going from her work; the panting horses that draw the surface cars."
They both gazed silently from the balcony. Then Mariana turned away. "It is the hour for my music," she said. "I must go."
The sunlight caught the nimbus around her head and brightened it with veins of gold.
"All joy goes with you," he answered, lightly. "And I shall return to work."
"All frivolity, you mean," laughed Mariana, and she left him with a nod.