PART TWO
Marianand Marjorie had builded a house of sand on a strip of shaded beach, and by the fraudulent use of sticks and stones they had made it stand in violation of all physical laws. Now that the finishing touches had been given to the tower, Marjorie thrust her doll through a window.
“That will never do!” protested Marian. “In a noble château like this the châtelaine must not stand on her head. When the knightscome riding, she must be waiting, haughty and proud, in the great hall to meet them.”
“Should ums?” asked Marjorie, watching her aunt gouge a new window in the moist wall so that the immured lady might view the lake more comfortably.
“‘Ums should,’ indeed!”
“Should the lady have coffee-cake for ums tea? We never made no pantry nor kitchen in ums house, and lady will be awful hungry. I’ll push ums a cracker. There, you lady, you can eat ums supper!”
“When her knight comes riding, he will bring a deer or maybe a big black boar and there will be feasting in the great hall this night,” said Marian.
“Maybe,” suggested Marjorie, lying flat and peering into the château, “he will kill the grand lady with ums sword; and it will be all over bluggy.”
“Horrible!” cried Marian, closing her eyesand shuddering. “Let us hope he will be a parfait, gentil knight who will be nice to the lady and tell her beautiful stories of the warriors bold he has killed for love of her.”
“My boy doll got all smashed,” said Marjorie; “and ums can’t come a-widing.”
“A truly good knight who got smashed would arrive on his shield just the same; he wouldn’t let anything keep him from coming back to his lady.”
“If ums got all killed dead, would ums come back?”
“He would; he most certainly would!” declared Marian convincingly. “And there would be a beautiful funeral, probably at night, and the other knights would march to the grave bearing torches. And they would repeat a vow to avenge his death and the slug-horn would sound and off they’d go.”
“And ums lady would be lonesome some more,” sighed Marjorie.
“Oh, that’s nothing! Ladies have to get used to being lonesome when knights go riding. They must sit at home and knit or make beautiful tapestries to show the knights when they come home.”
“Marjorie not like to be lonesome. What if Dolly est sit in the shotum—”
“Château is more elegant; though ‘shotum’ is flavorsome and colorful. Come to think of it ‘shotum’ is just as good. Dolly must sit and keep sitting. She couldn’t go out to look for her knight without committing a grave social error.”
These matters having been disposed of, Marjorie thought a stable should be built for the knights’ horses, and they began scooping sand to that end. Marian’s eyes rested dreamily upon distant prospects. The cool airs of early morning were still stirring, and here and there a white sail floated lazily on the blue water. The sandy beach lay only a short distancefrom Mrs. Waring’s house, whose red roof was visible through a cincture of maples on the bluff above.
“If knights comes widing to our shotum and holler for ums shootolain, would you holler to come in?” asked Marjorie, from the stable wall.
“It would be highly improper for a châtelaine to ‘holler’; but if I were there, I should order the drawbridge to be lowered, and I should bid my knight lift the lid of the coal-bucket thing they always wear on their heads,—you know how they look in the picture books,—and then ask him what tidings he brought. You always ask for tidings.”
“Does ums? Me would ask ums for candy, and new hats with long fithery feathers; and ums—”
“Hail, ladies of the Lake! May a lone harper descend and graciously vouchsafe a song?”
From the top of the willow-lined bluff behind them came a voice with startling abruptness. In their discussion of the proprieties of château life they had forgotten the rest of the world, and it was disconcerting thus to be greeted from the unknown.
“Is it ums knight come walking?” whispered Marjorie, glancing round guardedly.
Marian jumped up and surveyed the overhanging willow screen intently. She discerned through the shrubbery a figure in gray, supported by a tightly sheathed umbrella. A narrow-brimmed straw hat and a pair of twinkling eye-glasses attached to the most familiar countenance in the Commonwealth now contributed to a partial portrait of the lone harper. Marian, having heard from her sister and Mrs. Waring of the Poet’s advent, was able to view this apparition without surprise.
“Come down, O harper, and gladden us with song!” she called.
“I have far to go ere the day end; but I bring writings for one whom men call fair.”
He tossed a long envelope toward them; the breeze caught and held it, then dropped it close to the château. Marjorie ran to pick it up.
“Miss Agnew,” said the Poet, lifting his hat, “a young gentleman will pass this way shortly; I believe him to be a person of merit. He will come overseas from a far country, and answer promptly to the name of Frederick. Consider that you have been properly introduced by the contents of yonder packet and bid him welcome in my name.”
“Ums a cwazy man,” Marjorie announced in disgust. “Ums the man what told a funny story at Auntie Waring’s party and then runned off.”
The quivering of the willows already marked the Poet’s passing. He had crossed the lake to the Waring cottage, Marian surmised, and was now returning thither.
Marjorie, uninterested in letters, which, she had observed, frequently made people cry, attacked with renewed zeal the problem of housing the knights’ horses, while Marian opened the long envelope and drew out half a dozen blue onion-skin letter-sheets and settled herself to read. She read first with pleasurable surprise and then with bewilderment. Poetry, she had heard somewhere, should be read out of doors, and clearly these verses were of that order; and quite as unmistakably this, of all the nooks and corners in the world, was the proper spot in which to make the acquaintance of these particular verses. Indeed, it seemed possible, by a lifting of the eyes, to verify the impressions they recorded,—the blue arch, the gnarled boughs of the beeches, the overhanging sycamores, the distant daisy-starred pastures running down to meet the clear water. Such items as these were readily intelligible; but she found dancing throughall the verses a figure that under various endearing names was thedea ex machinaof every scene; and this seemed irreconcilable with the backgrounds afforded by the immediate landscape. Pomona had, it appeared, at some time inspected the apple harvest in this neighborhood:—
The dew flashed from her sandals goldAs down the orchard aisles she sped;—
The dew flashed from her sandals goldAs down the orchard aisles she sped;—
The dew flashed from her sandals gold
As down the orchard aisles she sped;—
or this same delightful divinity became Diana, her arrows cast aside, smashing a tennis ball, or once again paddling a canoe through wind-ruffled water into the flames of a dying September sun. Or, the bright doors of dawn swinging wide, down the steps tripped this same incredible young person taunting the waiting hours for their delay. Was it possible that her own early morning dives from Mrs. Waring’s dock could have suggested this!
Marian read hurriedly; then settled herself for the more deliberate perusal that these pictorialstanzas demanded. It was with a feeling of unreality that she envisaged every point the slight, graceful verses described. Where was there another orchard that stole down to a lake’s edge; or where could Atalanta ever have indulged herself at tennis to the applause of rapping woodpeckers if not in the court by the casino on the other side of the lake? The Poet—that is, the Poet All the People Loved—was not greatly given to the invoking of gods and goddesses; and this was not his stroke—unless he were playing some practical joke, which, to be sure, was quite possible. But she felt herself in contact with someone very different fromthePoet; with quite another poet who sped Pomona down orchard aisles catching at the weighted boughs for the joy of hearing the thump of falling apples, and turning with a laugh to glance at the shower of ruddy fruit. A lively young person, this Pomona; a spirited and agile being, half-real, half-mythical. Aseries of quatrains, under the caption “In September,” described the many-named goddess as the unknown poet had observed her in her canoe at night:—
I watched afar her steady bladeFlash in the path the moon had made,And saw the stars on silvery ripplesShine clear and dance and faint and fade.Then through the windless night I heardHer song float toward me, dim and blurred;’Twas like a call to vanished summersFrom a lost, summer-seeking bird.
I watched afar her steady bladeFlash in the path the moon had made,And saw the stars on silvery ripplesShine clear and dance and faint and fade.Then through the windless night I heardHer song float toward me, dim and blurred;’Twas like a call to vanished summersFrom a lost, summer-seeking bird.
I watched afar her steady bladeFlash in the path the moon had made,And saw the stars on silvery ripplesShine clear and dance and faint and fade.
I watched afar her steady blade
Flash in the path the moon had made,
And saw the stars on silvery ripples
Shine clear and dance and faint and fade.
Then through the windless night I heardHer song float toward me, dim and blurred;’Twas like a call to vanished summersFrom a lost, summer-seeking bird.
Then through the windless night I heard
Her song float toward me, dim and blurred;
’Twas like a call to vanished summers
From a lost, summer-seeking bird.
There were many canoes on Waupegan; without turning her head she counted a dozen flashing paddles. And there were many girls who played capital tennis, or who were quite capable of sprinting gracefully down the aisles of fruitful orchards. She had remained at the lake late the previous year, and had perhaps shaken apple boughs when in flight through orchards; and she had played tennis diligently and had paddled her canoe on many Septembernights through the moon’s path and over quivering submerged stars; and yet it was inconceivable that her performances had attracted the attention of any one capable of transferring them to rhyme. It would be pleasant, though, to be the subject of verses like these! Once, during her college days, she had moved a young gentleman to song, but the amatory verses she had evoked from his lyre had been pitiful stuff that had offended her critical sense. These blue sheets bore a very different message—delicate and fanciful, with a nice restraint under their buoyancy.
While the Poet had said that the author of the verses would arrive shortly, she had taken this as an expression of the make-believe in which he constantly indulged in his writings; but one of the canoes she had been idly observing now bore unmistakably toward the cove.
Marjorie called for assistance and Marianthrust the blue sheets into her belt and busied herself with perplexing architectural problems. Marjorie’s attention was distracted a moment later by the approaching canoe.
“Aunt Marian!” she chirruped, pointing with a sand-encrusted finger, “more foolish mans coming with glad tidings. Ums should come by horses, not by ums canoe.”
“We mustn’t be too particular how ums come, Marjorie,” replied Marian glancing up with feigned carelessness. “It’s the knights’ privilege to come as they will. Many a maiden sits waiting just as we are and no knight ever comes.”
“When ums comes they might knock down our house—maybe?” She tacked on the query with so quaint a turn that Marian laughed.
“We mustn’t grow realistic! We must pretend it’s play, and keep pretending that they will be kind and considerate gentlemen.”
Her own efforts to pretend that they werebuilding a stable for the steeds of Arthur’s knights did not conceal her curiosity as to a young man who had driven his craft very close inshore, and now, after a moment’s scrutiny of the cove, chose a spot for landing and sent the canoe with a whish up the sandy beach half out of the water.
He jumped out and begged their pardon as Marjorie planted herself defensively before the castle.
“Ums can go ’way! Ums didn’t come widing on ums horse like my story book.”
“I apologize! Not being Neptune I couldn’t ride my horse through the water. And besides I’m merely obeying orders. I was told to appear here at ten o’clock, sharp, by a gentleman I paddled over from the village and left on Mrs. Waring’s dock an hour ago. He gave me every assurance that I should be received hospitably, but if I’m intruding I shall proceed farther upon the wine-dark sea.”
THE APPROACHING CANOE
“Is ums name Fwedwick?” asked Marjorie.
Fulton controlled with difficulty an impulse to laugh at the child’s curious twist of his name, but admitted gravely that such, indeed, was the case.
“Then ums can stay,” said Marjorie in a tone of resignation, and returned to her building.
Marian, who, during his colloquy with Marjorie, had risen and was brushing the sand from her skirt, now spoke for the first time.
“It’s hardly possible you’re looking for me—I’m Miss Agnew.”
He bowed profoundly.
“A distinguished man of letters assured me that I should find him here,” the young man explained as he drew on a blue serge coat he had thrown out of the canoe; “but unless he is hiding in the bushes he has played me false. Such being the case I can’t do less than offer to withdraw if my presence is annoying.”
The faint mockery of these sentences was relieved by the mischievous twinkle in his eyes. They were very dark eyes, and his hair was intensely black and brushed back from his forehead smoothly. His face was dark even to swarthiness and his cheek bones were high and a trifle prominent.
He was dressed for the open: white ducks, canvas shoes, and a flannel shirt with soft collar and a scarlet tie.
In spite of his offer to withdraw if his presence proved ungrateful to the established tenants of the cove, it occurred to Marian that he was not, apparently, expecting to be rebuffed. Marjorie, satisfied that the stranger in no way menaced her peace, was addressing herself with new energy to the refashioning of the stable walls along lines recommended by Marian.
“The ways of the Poet are inscrutable,” observed Fulton; “he told me your name andspoke in the highest terms of your kindness of heart and tolerance of stupidity.”
“He was more sparing of facts in warning me of your approach. He said your name would be Frederick, as though the birds would supply the rest of it.”
“Very likely that’s the way of the illustrious—to assume that we are all as famous as themselves; highly flattering, but calculated to deceive. As the birds don’t know me, I will say that my surname is Fulton. A poor and an ill-favored thing, but mine own.”
“It quite suffices,” replied Marian in his own key. “We have built a château,” she explained, “and the châtelaine is even now gazing sadly upon the waters hoping that her true knight will appear. We have mixed metaphor and history most unforgivably—a French château, set here on an American lake in readiness for the Knights of the Round Table.”
“We mustn’t quibble over details in suchmatters; it’s the spirit of the thing that counts. I can see that Marjorie isn’t troubled by anachronisms.”
The blue sheets containing, presumably, this young man’s verses, were still in her belt, and their presence there did not add to her comfort. Of course he might not be the real author of those tributes to the lake’s divinities. His appearance did not strongly support the suspicion. The young man who had sent her flowers accompanied by verses on various occasions was an anæmic young person who would never have entrusted himself to so tricksy a bark as a canoe. Frederick Fulton was of a more heroic mould; she thought it quite likely that he could shoulder his canoe and march off with it if it pleased him to do so. He looked capable of doing many things besides scribbling verses. His manner, as she analyzed it, left nothing to be desired. While he was enjoying this encounter to the full, as his ready smileassured her, he did not presume upon her tolerance, but seemed satisfied to let her prescribe the terms of their acquaintance. This was a lark of some kind, and whether he had connived at the meeting, or whether he was as much in the dark as she as to the Poet’s purpose in bringing them together, remained a mystery.
She found a seat on a log near the engrossed Marjorie, and Fulton settled himself comfortably on the sand.
“This has been a day of strange meetings,” he began. “I really had no intention of coming to Waupegan; and I was astonished to find our friend the Poet on the hotel veranda this morning. He had told me to come;—it was rather odd—”
“Oh, he told you to come!”
“In town, two days ago he suggested it. I wonder if he’s in the habit of doing that sort of thing.”
“It would hardly be polite for me to criticize him now that he has introduced us. I fear we shall have to make the best of it!”
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of it in that way!”
They regarded each other with searching inquiry and then laughed. Her possession of the verses had already advertised itself to him; she saw his eyes rest upon them carelessly for an instant and then he disregarded them; and this pleased her. If he were their author—if, possibly, he had written them of her—she approved of his good breeding in ignoring them.
“I know this part of the world better than almost any other,” he went on, clasping his hands over his knees. “I was born only ten miles from here on a farm; and I fished here a lot when I was a boy.”
“But, of course, you’ve escaped from the farm into the larger world or the Poet wouldn’t know you.”
“Well, you see, I’m a newspaper reporterdown at the capital and reporters know everybody.”
“Oh, the Poet doesn’t know everybody; though everybody knows him. Perhaps we’d better pass that. Tell me some more about your early adventures on the lake.”
“You have heard all that’s worth telling. We farm boys used to come over and fish before the city men filched all the bass and left only sunfish and suckers. Then I grew up and went to the State Agricultural School—to fit me for a literary career!—and I didn’t get here again until last fall when my paper gave me a vacation and I spent a fortnight at the farm and used to ride over here on my bicycle every morning to watch the summer resorters and read books.”
“It’s strange I never saw you,” said Marian, “for I was here last fall. My own memories of the pioneers go back almost to the Indians. My father used to own that red-roofed cottageyou see across the lake; and I’ve tumbled into the water from every point in sight.”
“September and June are the best months here, I think. It was all much nicer, though, before the place became so popular.”
“Hardly a gracious remark, seeing that Marjorie and I are here, and all these cottagers are friends of ours!”
“I haven’t the slightest objection to you and Marjorie. You fit into the landscape delightfully—give it tone and color; but I was thinking of the noisy people at the inns down by the village. They seem rather unnecessary. The Poet and I agreed about that this morning while we were looking for a quiet place for an after-breakfast smoke.”
“It must be quite fine to know him—really know him,” she said musingly.
“Yes; but before you grow too envious of my acquaintance I’ll have to confess that I’ve known him less than a week.”
“A great deal can happen in a week,” she remarked absently.
“A great deal has!” he returned quickly.
This seemed to be rather leading; but a cry for help from Marjorie provided a diversion.
Fulton jumped up and ran to the perplexed builder’s aid, neatly repaired a broken wall, and when he had received the child’s grave thanks reseated himself at Marian’s feet. The blue onion-skin paper had disappeared from her belt; he caught her in the act of crumpling the sheets into her sleeve.
With their disappearance she felt her courage returning. His confessions as to the farm, the university, the newspaper—created an outline which she meant to encourage him to fill in. Journalism, like war and the labors of those who go down to the sea in ships, suggests romance; and Marian had never known a reporter before.
“I should think it would be great fun workingon a newspaper, and knowing things before they happen.”
“And things that never happen!”
She was quick to seize upon this.
“The imagination must enter into all writing—even facts, history. Bryant was a newspaper man, and he wrote poetry, but I heard in school that he was a very good editor, too.”
“I’m not an editor and nobody has called me a poet; but the suggestion pleases me,” he said.
“If our own Poet offered you a leaf of his laurel, that would help establish your claims,—set you up in business, so to speak.”
“I should hasten to return it before it withered! My little experiments in rhyme are not of the wreath-winning kind.”
“Then you do write verses!”
“Yards!” he confessed shamelessly.
She was taken aback by this bold admission. His tone and manner implied that he set nogreat store by his performances, and this piqued her. It seemed like a commentary on her critical judgment which had found them good. Fulton now became impersonal and philosophical.
“It’s a great thing to have done what our Poet has done—give to the purely local a touch that makes it universal. That’s what art does when it has heart behind it, and there’s the value of provincial literature. Hundreds of men had seen just what he saw,—the same variety of types and individuals against this Western landscape,—but it was left for him to set them forth with just the right stroke. And he has done other things, too, besides thegenrestudies that make him our own particular Burns; he has sung of days like this when hope rises high, and sung of them beautifully; and he has preached countless little sermons of cheer and contentment and aspiration. And he’s the first poet who ever really understoodchildren—wrote not merely of them but to them. He’s the poet of a thousand scrapbooks! I came up on a late train last night and got to talking to a stranger who told me he was on his way to visit his old home; pulled one of the Poet’s songs of June out of his pocket and asked me to read it; said he’d cut it out of a newspaper that had come to him wrapped round a pair of shoes in some forsaken village in Texas, and that it had made him homesick for a sight of the farm where he was born. The old fellow grew tearful about it, and almost wrung a sob out of me. He was carrying that clipping pinned to his railway ticket—in a way it was his ticket home.”
“Of course our Poet has the power to move people like that,” murmured Marian. “It’s genius, a gift of the gods.”
“He’s been able to do it without ever cheapening himself; there’s never any suggestion of that mawkishness we hear in vaudeville songsthat implore us to write home to mother to-night! He takes the simplest theme and makes literature of it.”
Marian was thinking of her talk with the Poet at Mrs. Waring’s garden-party. Strange to say, it seemed more difficult to express her disdain of romance and poetry to this young man than it had been to the Poet. And yet he evidently accepted unquestioningly the Poet’s philosophy of life, which she had dismissed contemptuously, and in which, she assured herself, she did not believe to-day any more than she did a week ago. The incident of a pilgrim from Texas with a poem attached to his railway ticket had its touch of sentiment and pathos, but it did not weigh heavily against the testimony of experience which had proved in her own observation that life is perplexing and difficult, and that poetry and romance are only a lure and mesh to delude and betray the trustful.
“Poets have a good deal to fight against these days,” she said, wishing to state her dissent as kindly as possible. “The Bible is full of poetry, but it has lost its hold on the people; it’s like an outworn sun that no longer lights and warms the world. I wish it weren’t so; but unfortunately we’re all pretty helpless when it comes to the iron hoofs of the Time-Spirit.”
“Oh!” he exclaimed, sitting erect, “we mustn’t make the mistake of thinking the Time-Spirit a new invention. We’re lucky to live in the twentieth century when it goes on rubber heels;—when people are living poetry more and talking about it less. Why, the spirit of the Bible has just gone to work! I was writing an account of a new summer camp for children the day before I came up—one of those Sunday supplement pieces around a lot of pictures; and it occurred to me as I watched youngsters, who had never seen green grassbefore, having the time of their lives, that such philanthropies didn’t exist in the good old days when people dusted their Bibles oftener than they do now. There’s a difference between the Bible as a fetish and as a working plan for daily use. Preaching isn’t left to the men who stand up in pulpits in black coats on Sundays; there’s preaching in all the magazines and newspapers all the time. For example, my paper raises money every summer to send children into the country; and then starts another fund to buy them Christmas presents. The apostles themselves didn’t do much better than that!”
“Of course there are many agencies and a great deal of generosity,” replied Marian colorlessly. The young men she knew were not in the habit of speaking of the Bible or of religion in this fashion. Religion had never made any strong appeal to her and she had dabbled in philanthropy fitfully without enthusiasm.Fulton’s direct speech made some response necessary and she tried to reply with an equally frank confidence.
“I suppose I’m a sort of heathen; I don’t know what a pantheist is, but I think I must be one.”
“Oh, you can be a pantheist without being a heathen! There’s a natural religion that we all subscribe to, whether we’re conscious of it or not. There’s no use bothering about definitions or quarreling with anybody’s church or creed. We’re getting beyond that; it’s the thing we make of ourselves that counts; and when it comes to the matter of worship, I suppose every one who looks up at a blue sky like that, and knows it to be good, is performing a sort of ritual and saying a prayer.”
There was nothing in the breezy, exultant verses she had thrust into her sleeve to prepare her for such statements as these. While he spoke simply and half-smilingly, as thoughto minimize the seriousness of his statements, his utterances had an undeniable ring of sincerity. He was provokingly at ease—this dark young gentleman who had been cast by the waters upon this tranquil beach. He was not at all like young men who called upon her and made themselves agreeable by talking of the theater or country club dances or the best places to spend vacations. She could not recall that any one had ever spoken to her before of man’s aspirations in the terms employed by this newspaper reporter.
Marjorie, having prepared for the stabling of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, announced her intention of contributing a wing to the château. This called for a conference in which they all participated. Then, when the addition had been planned in all soberness and the child had resumed her labors, Marian and Fred stared at the lake until the silence became oppressive. Marian spoke first,tossing the ball of conversation into a new direction.
“You have confessed to yards of verses,” she began, gathering up a handful of sand which she let slip through her fingers lingeringly, catching the grains in her palm. “I’ve seen—about a yard of them.”
Clearly flirtation was not one of his accomplishments. His “Oh, I’ve scattered them round rather freely,” ignored a chance to declare gracefully that she had been the inspiration of those lyrics, written in a perfectly legible hand on onion-skin letter-sheets, that were concealed in her sleeve. His indifference to the opening she had made for him piqued her. She was quite dashed by the calm tone in which he added, with no hint of sidling or simpering:—
“I’ve written reams of poems about you.” (He might as well have said that he had scraped the ice off her sidewalk or carried coal into her cellar, for all the thrill she derived from hisadmission.) “I hope you won’t be displeased; but when I was ranging the lake last September we seemed to find the same haunts and to be interested in the same sort of thing, and it kept me busy dodging you, I can tell you! I exhausted the Classical Dictionary finding names for you; and it wasn’t any trouble at all to make verses about you. I was really astonished to find how necessary you were to the completion of my pen-and-ink sketches of all this,”—a wave of the arm placed the lake shores in evidence,—“I liked you best in action; when the spirit moved you to run or drive your canoe over the water. You do all the outdoor things as though you had never done anything else; it’s a joy to watch you! I was sitting on a fence one day over there in Mrs. Waring’s orchard and you ran by,—so near that I could hear the swish of your skirts,—and you made a high jump for a bough and shook down the apples and ran off laughinglike a boy afraid of being caught. I pulled out my notebook and scribbled seven stanzas on that little incident.”
Any admiration that was conveyed by these frankly uttered sentences was of the most impersonal sort conceivable. She was not used to being treated in this fashion. Even his manner of asking her pardon for his temerariousness in apostrophizing her in his verses had lacked, in her critical appraisement of it, the humility a self-respecting young woman had a right to demand of a young poet who observes her without warrant, is pleased to admire her athletic prowess, her ways and her manners, and puts her into his verses as coolly as he might pick a flower from the wayside and wear it in his coat.
“Then you used me merely to give human interest to your poems; any girl running through Mrs. Waring’s orchard and snatching at the apples would have done just as well?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t say that,” he replied, unabashed; “but even the poorest worm of a scribbler has to have an ideal and you supplied mine. You were like a model who strolls along just when it occurs to the painter that his landscape needs a figure to set it off. You don’t mind, I hope?”
This made it necessary for her to assure him in as few words as possible that she didn’t in the least object to his view of the matter; and she added, not without a trace of irony, that she was always glad to be of use; that if she could further the cause of art in any way she was ready to do it.
“Please don’t; that hurt a little! By the way, the Poet told me I ought to know you. He recommended you in the noblest terms. I see now what was in his mind; he thought I needed your gentle chastening.”
“It’s more likely he thought it well for you to see your ideal shattered! It’s too bad, forthe sake of your ambitions, that I didn’t remain just an unknown girl in an orchard—who suggested Pomona inspecting her crops and then vanished forever.”
“Oh, I had to know you; it was inevitable,” he replied with irritating resignation. “You see I’ve written about you in prose, too; you’ve been immensely provocative and stimulating. My best prose, as well as my only decent jingles, has had you for a subject. I laid myself out to describe you at the tennis tournament last fall. Next to watching you run through an orchard trippingly, like one of Swinburne’s long lines, I like you best when you show your snappy stroke with the racket and make a champion look well to her knitting.”
She turned crimson at this, remembering very well the “Chronicle’s” report of the tennis match, which she had cut out and still treasured in her portfolio. Clearly, her obligations to this impudent young man were increasing rapidly.
Marjorie, seized with an ambition to add a new tower to the château, opportunely demanded their assistance. The architectural integrity of the château was in jeopardy and the proposed changes called for much debate by the elders. This consumed considerable time, and after the new tower was finished by their joint labors they set Marjorie to work constructing a moat which Fulton declared to be essential.
He got on famously with Marjorie; and this scored heavily in his favor with Marian. His way with the child was informed with the nicest tact and understanding; he entered into the spirit of the château-building with just the earnestness that her young imagination demanded. He promised to take her canoeing to a place where he thought there might be fairies, though he would not go the length of saying that he had seen them, to be sure, for when people saw fairies they must never tell any one;it wouldn’t be kind to the fairies, who got into the most dreadful predicaments when human folk talked about them. Marjorie listened big-eyed, while he held her sandy little fingers. Yes; there was something pleasing in this young man, who described tennis matches for the sporting page of a newspaper or wrote verses or spoke of religion or fairies all as part of the day’s work.
“The Poet will think I’ve fallen into the lake,” he remarked presently. “The ride to Mrs. Waring’s dock was a great concession on his part and he expressed misgivings as to allowing me to paddle him back to the inn. He’s waiting at this moment on Mrs. Waring’s veranda, hoping that I won’t show up with the canoe so he can take passage on the steamer and reduce the hazards of the journey. The height of the sun proclaims the luncheon hour, and Marjorie must be hungry. Won’t you honor my humble argosy!”
Marian could think of no good reason for declining this invitation, particularly after Marjorie had chirruped an immediate and grateful acceptance. Moreover, Mr. Fulton had made himself so agreeable and had contributed so many elements to the morning’s pleasure, that it was not in her heart to be rude to him.
They embarked after a promise had been exacted by Marjorie that “ums” should all meet again on the morrow, to perfect the moat and build a drawbridge.
“I’m glad to have an excuse for staying,” Fulton declared, “and I hope I’m not the man to go off and leave a noble shotum without the finishing touches. We shall meet frequently, maid Marjorie. In fact”—he lifted the paddle and let it drip with a pleasant tinkle into the calm water, while he half-turned toward Marian—“I don’t believe I’ll ever go back to ‘the heat and dust and noise of trades.’ Asold Walt says, in effect, the earth, that is sufficient; so why not stay close to it?”
“Ums splashed water on me!” protested Marjorie.
“A thousand pardons, my young realist!”
“The Poet and Elizabeth are waving to us from the landing,” remarked Marian. “Perhaps you’d better save the rest of the peroration until to-morrow.”
“No unkinder word was ever spoken!” cried Fulton cheerfully, and swept the light craft forward with long, splashless strokes.
“It’sbeautifully kind of you to want to help; but you see how impossible it is!”
“I don’t like that word,” replied the Poet patiently. “Most things are possible that we really want to do.”
For two hours that morning Mrs. Redfield and he had talked of her troubles, first with areluctance, a wariness on both sides that yielded gradually to the warmth of his kindness. However, on the whole, the Poet found her easier to talk to than her husband had been. She understood, as Redfield had not, that his appearance in the matter was not merely the assertion of a right inhering in an old friendship, but that it was dictated by something larger,—a resentment of an apostasy touching intimately his own good faith as a public teacher. This attitude had not only its poignancy for her, but it broadened the horizon against which she had been contemplating the broken and distorted structure that had been her life.
“I suppose,” she said bravely, “that we oughtn’t to ask so much! We ought to be prepared for calamity; then we shouldn’t break under it when the blow falls. When I saw other people in just such troubles I used to think, ‘There’s something that will never come tome’: I suppose Miles is right in saying that I have no ambition, that I had become merely a drag on him. And I can see his side of it; there wasn’t much ahead of him but standing behind a bank counter to the end of his days. The novels are full of the conflicts between the man who wants to rise and the woman without wings. It’s my misfortune to be one of the wingless ones.”
She was less bitter than he expected; and he took courage from this fact. He had hoped to avoid any minute dissection of the situation; but she had given him a pretty full account of the whole affair, and he was both dismayed and relieved to find how trivial the details of the dissension proved. She had wept—beyond doubt there had been tears—and Miles on his side had exhausted persuasion before her obstinacy kindled his wrath. The crux had come with his demand that she should do her part toward cultivating acquaintances that he believedto be essential to the success of his new undertaking. She had never known such people, she assured the Poet, feeling that he knew she never had and would sympathize with her position. Miles had no right to ask her to countenance them, and all that.
The Poet preferred to be amused by this. The obnoxious persons were strangers to him; he had merely heard of them; he admitted that he would never deliberately have chosen them for intimate companionship. And yet it was not so egregious a thing to sit at the same table for an hour with a man and woman one wouldn’t care to meet daily.
“If there weren’t such people as the Farnams in the world we’d never know how to appreciate our own kind of folks,” remarked the Poet. “And that fellow can’t be so bad. I heard only recently of an instance of his generosity—he made a very handsome subscription to the new children’s hospital. Men of thatstamp frequently grow emotional when they’re touched on the right chord.”
“But you wouldn’t have Miles—the Miles you used to know—become like that, or get down on his knees to such people in the hope of getting some of their money!”
The Poet chuckled.
“If Miles can pry that particular man loose from any of his money I’d say it proved that Miles was right and you were wrong! Farnam doesn’t carry his philanthropy into his business affairs. He’s quite capable of eating your lobster to-night and to-morrow morning exacting the last ounce of flesh from the man who paid for it. It’s possible that Miles will pay dearly for his daring; I understand that this new business is beset with pitfalls.”
“Oh, I want him to succeed! He’s free now to do as he likes and I hope he will prosper. At any rate, Marjorie and I are not dragging him down!”
Angry tears came with this; the Poet looked away to the green-fringed shores. When she was calm again he thought it wise to drop the matter for the present. At least it was best to withdraw to safe ground, from which it might, however, be possible to approach the citadel obliquely.
“Marian,” he remarked, “is a charming girl.”
She seconded his praise of her sister ardently, saying that Marian had been splendid throughout her troubles.
“She sees everything so clearly; I don’t know what I should have done without her.”
“She sees things your way, then,” he ventured quietly. “I’m a little afraid we always prefer counselors who tell us we’re doing the right thing.”
“Oh, she reasons things out wonderfully. I hope she will profit by my troubles! Fortunately we’re unlike; she’s much more practicalthan I am. She has a wider outlook; I think her college training shows there.”
“We must see to it that she doesn’t make mistakes,” said the Poet, his thoughts reverting to his efforts to place some new ideals where Marian might contemplate them without suspecting that he was responsible for putting them in her way. The humorous aspects of his intervention—and particularly his employment of the unconscious Fulton as a missionary—caused him to smile—a smile which Mrs. Redfield detected but failed to understand.
“I can never look on marriage again as I used to,” she ventured. “Most of the good things of life have been spoiled for me.”
“I can’t agree to that: you are less than thirty, which isn’t the age at which we can afford to haul down the flag. If I’d subsided at thirty,—had concluded that the world would never listen to my little tin horn,—I should have missed most of the joy of life.And Marian at twenty-two mustn’t be allowed to say that the world at best is a dreary place. She mustn’t be allowed to form foolish opinions of life and destiny and call to the stage-hands to drop the curtain the first time some actor misses his cue. And do you know,” he continued with the humor glinting through his glasses, “that girl had the bad manners to tell me to my face only a few days ago that there was no substance to all our poetizing—that the romance had been trampled out of life! To think of that—at twenty-twoorthirty!”
“Well,” said Mrs. Redfield, a little defiantly, “you must remember thatI’vetried poetry and romance.”
It was clear from her tone that she thought this scored heavily on her side, and offset any blame that might attach to her in his mind. She was surprised by the quickness with which he retorted.
“Ah, but have you!”
This was rather discouraging when she had been at such pains to tell him the truth; when she had bared her soul to him. She felt that it was unchivalrous for him to question her fairness when she had been so frank.
“You can hardly say,” he went on, “that you made much of a trial of romance when you dropped it at the first sign of trouble. Please don’t misunderstand me. That letter you wrote me during your honeymoon from this very house was in a sense the declaration of a faith. You meant to live by it always; and if no troubles had ever come it would have been perfectly satisfactory—no doubts, no questions! You were like a mariner who doesn’t question his charts when the sea is calm; but who begins to doubt them when he hears the breakers roaring on hidden reefs. Ideals are no good if we haven’t a tolerably strong faith in them. I’m going to tell you something that may surpriseyou. You and Miles have been an ideal of mine. Not only was your house with its pretty garden and the hollyhocks a refuge, but it was one of my chief inspirations. A good many of the best things I’ve written came out of that little establishment. I was astonished the other day, in looking over my work of the past half-dozen years, to find how much of you and Miles there is in it. And now I feel that I ought to modify those things—stick in footnotes to say that the ideal home—the ideal of happiness I had derived from you—was all a fraud. Just think how that would look: an asterisk tacked to the end of every stanza, leading the eye down to an admission that my statements were not true, only poetry, romance, a flimsy invention which no one need be deceived by!”
“I hope,” she said despairingly, “that I haven’t lost everything! I’ve got to hold on to something for Marjorie’s sake!”
“But Miles,” he persisted, “what about him!”
“That isn’t kind or fair,” she replied, at the point of tears again. “If I’ve lost my ideals he’s responsible! He’s thrown away all of his own!”
“No, not quite! If he had he wouldn’t have been angry at me when I went to him to discuss these matters!”
“So you’ve talked to him! Then, of course, you came to me prejudiced in his favor! I don’t call that being fair. And if he asked you to talk to me—”
Her eyes flashed indignantly.
“It’s rather funny that both of you should be so afraid of that. Nothing is further from the truth!”
“I know you mean to be kind, and I know it wasn’t easy for you to come to me. But you can see that matters have gone too far—after the heartache and the gossip—”
“The heartache is deplorable, and the gossipisn’t agreeable,” he assented readily. “We mustn’t let the chatter of the neighbors worry us. Think how a reconciliation would dull the knives of the expectant cynics and hearten the good people—and they are the majority, after all—who want to see the gospel of happiness and love rule this good old world. As for things having gone too far, nothing’s been done, no irrevocable step taken—”
“You don’t understand, then,—” and there was a note of triumph in this,—“I’ve brought a suit; it will be determined in October.”
“October,” replied the Poet, with his provoking irrelevance, “is a month of delight, ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.’ The warmth of summer still hovering; the last flowers challenging the frost to do its worst; plans for the indoor life of winter—the fire, cozy talks that aren’t possible anywhere but at the hearthside; the friendly lamp and the neglected book calling us back. I don’t thinkyou and Miles are going to have a very happy winter of it under different roofs. I’m sure I’ll miss the thought of you, running upstairs on tiptoe when you thought you heard Marjorie. Miles was always reading Kipling aloud and we’d forget ourselves and laugh till you’d hush us and run away in a panic. You know,” he continued, “your cottage wasn’t only a place for you to live in; it was my house of dreams—a house of realities that were dreams come true. I’ve sat by the table many a time when you didn’t know I was there—an intruder stealing in, a cheerful sort of ghost, sensible of an unspoken welcome. Odd, isn’t it, about the spirit of place? Not a great many places really take hold of most of us; but they have a way of haunting us; or maybe it’s the other way round and we hauntthem, and without knowing how we get into them. We explore strange frontiers into undiscovered countries; we cross from our own existences into otherpeople’s lives,—lose identity, feel, see as other people do,—and then lift our heads, rub our eyes, and become our old selves again—but not quite. We are likely to be wiser and more just and tolerant. And it’s discouraging,” he went on, “to go to your house of dreams and find it plastered with ‘for rent’ and ‘for sale’ signs—or worse yet, to let yourself in with your old key to find only ghosts there! That’s what I’ve been doing. Your bungalow is empty—doubly empty—for the last tenant didn’t stay long; the ghosts were probably too much for him! But I’m there—in spirit, you might say. If the owner knew how much I loaf there, in a disembodied sort of fashion, he’d begin to charge me rent! But it’s mighty lonesome—nobody around to dig out old songs and play the airs for me, as you used to, while I limped along with Miles’s old banjo.”
He spoke with a certain air of injury, as though after all he were the chief sufferer fromthe passing of the old familiar faces from his house of dreams. He complained as a guest might who suddenly finds that his hosts have taken their departure without warning, leaving him sitting at their fireside all unconscious of their flight.
Elizabeth was surprised to find that his interposition in this fashion impressed her more than the counsels of other friends who, supporting her cause loyally, urged her to maintain her “stand” and recommended sharp reprisals. She had not recovered from her amazement that this shyest and most unobtrusive of men should have come to her in any guise; and when he spoke of his house of dreams—herhouse with its old-fashioned garden that contained the flowers he scattered oftenest through his poems—she was half-persuaded that he was really a sad, wistful visitor of this house of dreams—herhouse—that symbolized for him contentment and peace.
His way of stating the case touched her deeply, and seeing this he rose and walked to the veranda rail and scanned the limpid water.
“That looks like the boy I sent to do my fishing for me,” he remarked. “He’s bringing Marian and Marjorie home. A pretty capable boy, that! What do you think of a youngster who pops up out of nowhere and chucks bunches of verses into mail-boxes on crowded corners where any one with any sort of ear, passing along, would hear them singing inside! Let’s go down and meet them.”
On their way to the dock the Poet continued to talk of the young man in the canoe as though he were a great personage. His extravagant praise of Frederick Fulton justified any one in believing that either Shelley or Keats had stolen away from Paradise and was engaged just now in paddling a canoe upon Lake Waupegan. The Poet had risen from the long interviewwith apparent satisfaction and was now his more familiar amusing self.
“How on earth did Marian get acquainted with this young man?” asked Mrs. Redfield in perplexity, as Fulton skillfully maneuvered the canoe inshore.
“Why assume that I know anything about it? Marian doubtless knows scores of people that I never heard of; she’s not an old friend like you. I dare say he saw her wandering alone on the shore and at once landed and handed her a poem as though it were the advertisement of a ventriloquist billed for one night at Waupegan Town Hall! Very likely, being a girl of discriminating literary taste, she liked his verses and bade him welcome. And what could be more natural than that he should offer to bring her home! The longer I live the more I wonder that people meet who were always destined to meet. We think we’re yielding to chance when we’re really doing thingswe’ve been rehearsing in our subconsciousness for a thousand years!”
When the party landed he parleyed with Marjorie to make it necessary for Marian to introduce Fulton to Elizabeth. He avoided Marian’s eyes, and warily eluded the combined efforts of the sisters to detain him. The obvious result of his artfulness, so far as Marian and Fulton were concerned, was eminently satisfactory. The most delightful comradeship seemed to have been established between the young people. The Poet was highly pleased with his morning’s work, but having dared so much he was anxious to retire while the spell of mystification was still upon them. Luncheon was offered; Mrs. Waring would soon be home and would be inconsolable if she found they had come in her absence.
“We are very busy—fishing,” said the Poet as he entrusted himself with exaggerated apprehensions to the canoe. “When you have a boyfishing for you you have to watch him. He’ll hide half the fish if you’re not careful.”
“You absurd man!” cried Marian, with an accession of boldness, as Fulton swung the canoe round with sophisticated strokes.
“Ims a cwazy man,” piped Marjorie; “but ims nice!”
ThePoet was amusing himself the next afternoon with a book of Scotch ballads when Fulton found him, with his back against a big beech, apparently established for all time. The young man didn’t know that the Poet was rather expecting him—not anxiously or nervously, in the way of people unconsoled by a sound philosophy; but the Poet had nevertheless found in the ballads some hint that possibly Frederick Fulton would appear.
Fulton carried a tennis racket and an old geography with the leaves torn out which served him as a portfolio. These encumbrancesseemed in nowise related to each other, a fact which called for a gibe.
“I telephoned down to the office last night and arranged to take my vacation now,” Fulton explained. “In two weeks I can do some new poems to relieve the prose of my story and round it out. The lake’s my scene, you know; I planned it all last September—and a lot of things will occur to me here that I’d never get hold of in town.”
“There’s something in that,” the Poet agreed; “and by putting aside the pen for the racket occasionally you can observe Marian in her golden sandals at short range. And then,” he deliberated, “if she doesn’t prove to be quite up to the mark; if you find that she isn’t as enchanting as you imagined when you admired her at a distance, you can substitute another girl. There are always plenty of girls.”
Fulton met the Poet’s eyes squarely and grinned.
“So far my only trouble is my own general incompetence. The scenery and the girl are all right. By the way, you got me into a nice box showing her my verses! I suffered, I can tell you, when I followed your advice and paddled up in my little canoe and found her with those things!”
The Poet discounted his indignation heavily, as Fulton clearly meant that he should.
“Formal introductions bore me, and in your case I thought we’d do something a little different. From the fact that you’re going off now with your scribble-book and racket to find her I judge that my way of bringing you to each other’s attention has been highly successful. Pray don’t let me detain you!” he ended with faint irony.
“I wanted to tell you,” said Fulton, “that I’ve decided not to accept Redfield’s offer; I’ve just written to him.”
The Poet expressed no surprise. He merelynodded and began searching for a knot in the cord attached to his eye-glasses.
“We can usually trust June with our confidences and rely on her judgments,” he remarked pensively. “January is first-rate, too; February and March are tricky and unreliable. April, on the other hand, is much safer than she gets credit for being. But it was lucky that we thought of June as an arbiter in your case. If we would all get out under a June sky like this with our troubles we’d be a good deal happier. It was a bad day for the human race when it moved indoors.”
The Poet, absorbed in the passage of a launch across the lake, had not applauded Fulton’s determination not to ally himself with Redfield, as the young man had expected. Fulton felt that the subject required something more.
“I mean to stick to the newspaper and use every minute I have outside for study and writing,” he persisted earnestly. “I’ve decidedto keep trying for five years, whether I ever make a killing or not.”
“That’s good,” said the Poet heartily. “I’m glad you’ve concluded to do that. Your determination carries you halfway to the goal; and I’m glad you see it that way. I didn’t want to influence you about Redfield; but I wanted you to take time to think.”
“Well, I’m sure I should always have regretted it, if I’d gone with him. And now that I’ve met Mrs. Redfield, I’m fully convinced that I’m making no mistake. It doesn’t seem possible—”
He checked himself, and waited for a sign from the Poet before concluding. The Poet drew out and replaced in the ballads the slim ivory paper-cutter he used as a bookmark.
“No, it doesn’t seem possible,” he replied quietly. “It was just as well for you to see her before making up your mind about going in with Redfield.” (His own part in making it possiblefor Fulton to meet Mrs. Redfield at this juncture was not, he satisfied his conscience, a matter for confession!) “Of course their affairs will straighten out—not because you or I may want them to, but because they really need each other; or if they don’t know it now they will. I’m inclined to think Marian will help a little. Even you and I may be inconspicuous figures in the drama—just walking on and off, saying a word here and there! None of us lives all to himself. All of us who write must keep that in mind;—our responsibility. When I was a schoolboy I found a misspelled word in a book I was reading and I kept misspelling that word for twenty years. We must be careful what we put into print; we never can tell who’s going to be influenced by what we write. Don’t let anybody fool you into thinking that the virile book has to be a nasty one. There’s too much of that sort of thing. They talk about warning the innocent; but there’s not muchsense in handing a child the hot end of a poker just to make it dread the fire. There are writers who seem to find a great joy in making mankind out as bad as possible, and that doesn’t help particularly, does it? It doesn’t help you or me any to find that some man we have known and admired has landed with a bump at the bottom of the toboggan. But,” he ended, “when we hear the bump it’s our job to get the arnica bottle and see what we can do for him. By the way, I’m leaving this afternoon.”
“Not going—not to-day!” cried Fulton with unfeigned surprise and disappointment.
“As I never had the slightest intention of coming, it’s time I was moving along. And besides, I’ve accomplished all the objects of my visit. If I remained any longer I might make a muddle of them. I’m a believer in the inevitable hour and the inevitable word. ‘Skip’ was the first word that popped into myhead when I woke up this morning. At first I thought Providence was kindly indicating the passing of a prancing buccaneer who began pounding carpets under my window at 5A.M.; but that was too good to be true. I decided that it was in the stars that I should be the skipper. Unless the innkeeper is an exalted liar my train leaves at four, and I shall be occupied with balladry until the hour arrives. We must cultivate repose and guard against fretfulness. There’s no use in trying to hasten the inevitable hour by moving the dial closer to the sun. If you’re not too busy you might bring Marjorie and Marian over to see me off. It would be a pleasant attention; and besides, I should be much less likely to miss the train.”
Mrs. Redfield,Marian, and Marjorie were back in town by the first of July. The sisters had taken a small house on a convenient sidestreet and were facing their to-morrows confidently. Mrs. Redfield was to open a kindergarten in October and Marian was to teach Latin in a private school. Fulton still clung to the manuscript of his romance for the revision it constantly invited. Since returning to town he had seen the Poet frequently, and had kept that gentleman informed of the movements and plans of Mrs. Redfield and Marian.
The Poet wandered into the “Chronicle” office one humid afternoon and found the reporter writing an interview with a visiting statesman. On days when every one else complained bitterly of the heat, the Poet was apparently the coolest person in town.
“I hope you have enough raisins in your pudding to spare a few,” he remarked. And then, as Fulton groped for his meaning, he drew an envelope from his pocket. “I took the liberty of purloining a few of those things you gave me a month ago before I passed them on toMarian and here’s the ‘Manhattan Magazine’ kindly inclosing a check for fifty dollars for four of them. I suggested to the editor that they ought to be kept together and printed on one page. If you don’t like the arrangement, you can send back the check. I’d suggest, though, that you exchange it for gold and carry the coins in your pocket for a day or two. The thrill of the first real money you get for poetry comes only once. Of course, if you’re not satisfied and want to send it back—”
He feigned to ignore the surprise and delight with which the young man stared at the slip of paper in his hand while he tried to grasp this astonishing news.
“Send it back!” he blurted, breaking in upon the Poet’s further comments on the joy of a first acceptance. “Send it back! Why, they’ve sent me back dozens of better pieces! And if it hadn’t been for you—Why,” he cried, with mounting elation, “this is the grandest thingthat ever happened to me! If I wasn’t afraid of getting arrested I’d yell!”
“Of course,” continued the Poet calmly, “I had to tell the magazine people that you made your sketches from life—and that they might get into a libel suit by printing them. I suppose you’re hardly in a position to ask Miss Agnew’s leave to print! You haven’t been seeing much of her, of course!”
An imaginary speck of mud on his umbrella engaged the Poet’s attention at the moment so that he missed the color that deepened in Fulton’s face.
“Oh, I’ve seen a good deal of Miss Agnew,” he confessed, “both at the lake and since I’ve come home. We do some tennis together every afternoon I can get off. I suppose there might be some question as to using the poems without asking her about it. Very likely no one would ever guess that she inspired them—and yet I have a guilty feeling—”
“You know, of course; and she, being, we will say, a person of average intelligence, knows, too, perfectly well. There you have it—a very delicate question! And the fact that she doesn’t care for such foolishness as poetry and romance makes a difference. You’ve got to consider that.”
His insinuations had been of the mildest, but his keen scrutiny marked the flash of resentment in Fulton’s eyes.
“Well, she was very nice about my putting her into the story. It did rather stagger her at first—to know that I had been worshiping from afar, and grinding rhymes about her for a year without ever knowing her.”
“The enchantment wasn’t all a matter of distance, I hope,” the Poet persisted. “I wasn’t quite sure about her. She struck me as being a little bitter; seemed to think life a string of wrong numbers and the girl at the exchange stupid and cross. I should be sorry if you gotany such notions from her; it couldn’t fail to make your ideal totter on its pedestal. It would be rough to find that your Pomona, in shaking the boughs in the orchard, was looking for an apple with a worm-mark in its damask cheek. It would argue for an unhappy nature. We must insist that our goddesses have a cheerful outlook; no grumbling when it rains on the picnic!”
“Well,” Fulton admitted, “she did seem a little disdainful and rather generally skeptical about things at first; but I met that by rather overemphasizing the general good that’s lying around everywhere, most of which I got from your books. Her father had lost his money, and her sister’s troubles couldn’t fail to spoil some of her illusions; but she’s going into her school-teaching with the right spirit. She’s been reading the manuscript of my story and has made some bully suggestions. I’ve rewritten one of the chapters and improved it vastlybecause she pointed out a place where I’d changed the key a little—I must have been tired when I wrote it. I’d rather got off the romantic note I started with and there were a dozen dead, pallid pages right in the middle of the thing.”
“She was afraid the romantic element flagged there?” asked the Poet carelessly.
“Well, I suppose that’s about what it came to. My heroine and the hero had a tiff; and I was giving the girl the best of it and makinghimout unreasonable; and she said she thought that wasn’t fair; that the trouble was all the girl’s fault. She thought the girl shouldn’t have been so peevish over a small matter when the young orchardist had shown himself chivalrous and generous. It seemed to be Miss Agnew’s idea that when you go in for romance you ought to carry through with it.”
The Poet’s attention seemed to wander, and he suppressed a smile with difficulty. He thenbegan searching his pockets for something, and not finding it, remarked:—
“People who never change their minds aren’t interesting; they really are not.”
“Well, I’m glad enough to change mine,” replied Fulton, not knowing what was in the Poet’s mind; “and I hope I’ll never get to a place where I can’t take criticism in the right spirit.”