It may be remembered that Truesdale, in making an estimate of the resources of his native town upon the occasion of his return to it, had scheduled the five-o'clock tea as the last resource of all. If we find him present, then, at such a function, we may imagine him to have found the possibilities of local entertainment much slighter than he had figured, and time already hanging somewhat heavily on his hands.
Nor need we make any allowance for the fact that the debutante was his sister, and the scene of her coming-out his own mother's house. The catholic tolerance of his sympathies was such as to make his interest in his relatives, as relatives, no greater than his interest in other people whose general qualities would be likely to receive equal recognition from the world at large; and his outlook was so broad as to make his father's house but one of many houses, and to subject happenings in it to the same criterion as would be used to judge and rate the happenings in any other house throughout Christendom. Truesdale considered himself as admirably and flawlessly a cosmopolite.
Yes, he had done his sister's tea, but not until he had done almost everything else. He went to the few good concerts that offered, he made a fortnightly visit to the art stores, and he patronized (so far as he could endure them) the theatres—the chief and final resource of the town. But the concerts were a factor far from constant; and the theatres offered scarcely once a month a play that a person of taste and intelligence cared to sit through. Abroad he had been a valiant first-nighter; but he learned presently that at home the house for a premiere was composed largely of people whose tickets came from the exposition of theatre "paper" throughout the week in their storefronts—it was on Monday evening that they were paid off; and he found himself little disposed to join in judgment with a raft of small shop-keepers, until he recollected that a premiere was not a premiere, after all—the play's footing having already been secured at some other place, at some other time, before some other audience.
As for the picture-dealers, he complained that a canvas of any importance was likely to be displayed after a fashion frankly mercantile, in the show-window of the shop—a step which met more than halfway the public demand for free art, but which unjustly caused many an original to be taken for a copy. "Perhaps, though," he would say, "the public has got so far along as to judge of a picture independent of its surroundings. Possibly the crimson draperies and the row of gas-jets have really come to be superfluous."
He missed, furthermore, many of his accustomed pleasures and conveniences. He was astonished to find a metropolis without a promenade. True, on Sunday afternoons there was a good deal of strolling up and down along a half-mile of the lake shore; but he never observed that the people whose houses overlooked all this strolling ever took any part in it, and he never learned that they enjoyed this diversion anywhere else. "Singular," he said; "no concerted walking or driving. No understanding as to any time for it; no understanding as to any place for it. Not the slightest social organization for out-door life; how much there must be"—(with a backward thought towards Rosy's debut)—"in-doors—somewhere!"
He deplored the absolute non-existence of the institution known as the café—all the more, in view of the long months of waiting that must intervene before he should be able to gain membership in some club. The café, that crowning gem in the coronet of civilization—the name was everywhere, the thing nowhere. Nothing offered save a few large places of general and promiscuous resort, which, under one ameliorative title or another, dispensed prompt refreshment amid furnishings of the most reverberant vulgarity.
"It's impossible!" he said in one of these places one day to one of his artists, a new-comer from Milan. "Either you stand here in front of this counter facing all that superfluous glassware, and that cheap young man with the dreadful hair, and the reflections of all those hideous daubs behind you, or else you retire to one of those cubby-holes along the side there and make the disposal of a bottle of light beer seem a disreputable orgy or a dark conspiracy, or a combination of both."
"Not one word against the pictures," replied the other. "How else here doI live?"
"No journals," pursued Truesdale; "no demi-tasse, no clientèle, no leisure. No," he added, with the idea of a more general summing up, "nor any excursions; nor any general market; nor any military; nor even any morgue. And five francs for a cab.Quelle ville!"
To Truesdale the café was the great social foothold; it was here that he was accustomed to meet on common ground the whole male section of society. It was to the café that he would like to lead his young water-colorist with the portfolio of views from rural Missouri, or his last new poet with his thin little volume so finely flattened out between the two millstones of journalism and literature—neither of which, alone, could have ground him out his grist in livable quantities. In the absence of the café he led two or three such to the house. It was like thrusting a lighted candle into a jar of nitrogen. The candle went out at once. And never came back. To David Marshall, art in all its forms was an inexplicable thing; but more inexplicable still was the fact that any man could be so feeble as to yield himself to such trivial matters in a town where money and general success still stood ready to meet any live, practical fellow half-way—a fellow, that was to say, who knew an opportunity when he saw it. The desire of beauty was not an inborn essential of the normal human being. Art was not an integral part of the great frame of things; it was a mere surface decoration, and the artist was but for the adornment of the rich man's triumph—in case the rich man were, on his side, so feeble as to need to have his triumph adorned. He himself had taken hold of practical things at an early age; he had made something out of nothing—a good deal out of nothing; and compared with this act of creation the fabrication of verses or of pictures was a paltry affair, indeed.
He was willing enough that his daughters should improve themselves; he was even proud, in a way, of Jane's ability to keep step with the general advance of female culture. But for any such turn in one of his sons he had no sympathy, no patience. He conferred with Truesdale on the possible reorganization of the business, and put before him the appositeness of his coming in at such a time; but Truesdale would lift his brows and suck his lips and study the pattern of the carpet, and mumble something about packing his trunk and "going somewhere."
His days, in fact, were becoming long—inordinately so; it was to his evenings that he was coming to look exclusively for diversion. He made the most of these; he drew them out as long as possible—to counterbalance the days. He seldom came home before midnight, frequently not before two or three in the morning; occasionally not at all. In company with three or four choice spirits, Arthur Paston and his like, he turned night into day, and was seen now and then at such conjunction of place and time as would well have justified an explanation to the sober-minded or even to the comparatively correct. Like his other associates on these occasions, he still retained the enviable faculty of being able to "be nice to nice people"; but he acknowledged his taste and his sensibilities both to be badly lacerated, and he confessed now and then with a sigh that he had never amused himself so indifferently in his life.
His sense of ennui was, in fact, driving him out upon society; and the hopes of his sister, which had drooped somewhat after their first leaving-out, now began to lift themselves again. Jane, on reviewing Rosy's début, had arrived at a juster estimate of her own share in it; she had launched one member of the family very satisfactorily, and she felt herself prompted to the launching of another.
Rosy was now in the full tide of success. The edge of the wedge had been set with singular acumen, and the two or three smart blows that followed had opened up society to her in a twinkling. She had appeared at a few of the best houses, and had at once entered upon a vogue. Her mirror was always full of cards, her cards were always full of names, and her own name was always filling the newspapers. She figured in boxes at theatre-parties, in booths at fancy fairs. She had already poured tea at six receptions, and had acted as bridesmaid at two weddings. An incessant stream had run from the six teapots, and nobody had looked at the two brides. Jane would sit up in the dim library through the small hours waiting for Rosy's ring and planning corresponding triumphs for Truesdale.
Her first and chiefest task was to get him to take society seriously. He had professed himself as unable to put his finger on it; he asked her where it was to be found—what was the general platform on which it met. At the Charity Ball, she had answered him—rightly, perhaps; wrongly, perhaps. Let us waive the point.
"Then to the Charity Ball I shall go," he had answered, promptly.
"Will you?" shrilled Jane. "Oh, goody! And you won't be disappointed, either. It's the one great, magnificent thing of the year. Everybody goes. And they have 'C-h-a-r-i-t-y' in electric lights, and palm-trees, and champagne, and two different places to eat supper in." Jane had never attended one of these entertainments; her wealth of picturesque detail was gathered from the newspapers.
"Ouf!" said Truesdale, indifferently, discounting the magnificence. He had been to one ball at the British embassy in Rome, and to another at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, and did not expect to be impressed. He rather looked to find this coming occasion like the latter—a heterogeneous assemblage of elements whose value was doubtful separately and not much greater collectively.
Jane ran to her fairy godmother; through Mrs. Bates everything appeared possible. "You must put him on the committee," said Jane; "or you must make him a floor-manager or something." Jane's head swam with a social vertigo; she could call spirits from the vasty deep and feel perfectly sure of their coming.
"Very well," responded Mrs. Bates; "a floor-manager he shall be."
"He'll do it splendidly, too," declared Jane; "he's so alert, and so self-possessed, and so awfully graceful and good-looking. Just the right height, and a very handsome figure—don't you think?"
"Too slender."
"Well, of course he's no slugger," retorted Jane, whose thought turned suddenly towards the youthful footballist at Yale. "Yes," she went on, "he's got plenty of assurance and readiness, and he'll do beautifully—if he'll just be disposed to take the trouble. Only—only he doesn't know anybody, hardly," was her dubious conclusion.
"Never mind," returned Mrs. Bates, genially; "lots of 'em he couldn't know—there's too many; and lots of 'em he wouldn't want to know. He can jump about, I imagine, and see that other people are kept jumping about too. The fewer he knows the better he'll do his work."
She looked at Jane steadily for a moment or two. "One thing more; I want you to come and sit in my box."
"Me!" squealed Jane. "Oh-h-h!" It was a complicated cry; it indicated surprise, gratitude, self-depreciation, and (before all) a sense of divided duty.
Mrs. Bates, all unsuspected by her subject, had taken Jane in hand a month ago, and had made her at length fairly presentable. Incidentally she had made herself a martyr. "But never mind," she would say; "the poor child doesn't know how to do herself justice, so somebody else has got to do it for her."
After a pretty thorough canvass of Jane—her hands, her hair, her dress, her carriage, her complexion—she began operations. She went, for example, to a widely celebrated beautifier, as well as to other dealers in those lotions and cosmetics which have secured the recommendation of various singers and professional beauties, and she took Jane with her. The good woman pretended alarm at the state of her complexion—as if her robust health, her careful table, her good allowance of sleep, her active circulation, and her hundred varied forms of daily exercise all went for naught. So she sat in "parlors" with cloths tied round her neck, and let people smear her with creams and prod her with electric needles and work their will on her for the removal of all the "facial blemishes" that flesh is heir to.
"My dear girl," she would call over her shoulder to Jane, "I know this is awfully tiresome to you, and it must be very painful to see your old friend suffering so; but if you will just wait patiently for ten or fifteen minutes more—"
"Oh, don't mind me," Jane would respond, outwardly bored, but inwardly interested. "I'm getting along all right. Go on enjoying your sufferings as long as you please." And after a few of these forenoons Jane had realized her own imperfections, and had learned the means of getting round them.
Then Mrs. Bates would convey her unconscious pupil to the hair-dresser's. She would abandon her gray tresses to the manipulations of operatives skilled to show the possibilities of the natural material and the magical supplementary powers of the unnatural; every frown occasioned by a tug, every tear produced by a tangle, was borne cheerfully for the sake of an ultimate good, and Jane acquired indirectly a complete knowledge of all those preparations and processes which her preceptress felt her needs required.
"Yes, my hairisthinning on the forehead," Mrs. Bates would admit. "If you should happen to have the precise match…."
The match was always difficult, but Jane did not fail to observe how easy the same would be for herself.
Then Mrs. Bates would have her manicure at the house twice as often as before, to increase the chance of her being on hand some morning when Jane should drop in. "Try it yourself—just to see what it's like," she would suggest; and her own plump and shapely hands would yield their place on the small red velvet cushion to the long and graceless fingers of her protégée. And presently the other processes—the soakings, the washings, the rubbings—would follow.
She also recommended exercise—dumb-bells, for example.
"What's the matter with fencing?" asked Jane. "Truesdale, you know; he's awfully good to me." She might have found it difficult to cite any definite example of Truesdale's goodness; perhaps she meant merely that he never snubbed her, never hectored her.
"Better yet. Fencing by all means."
Jane, moreover, always accompanied Mrs. Bates to the milliner's and to the dress-maker's. They priced things, debated things, and tried on things—on themselves, on each other, on the attendants. Mrs. Bates purchased lavishly for herself, and suggested lavishly in regard to purchases by Jane.
"You'd better have this," she would say. "It becomes you first-rate—you won't find anything nicer."
"But the price!" Jane would demur. For Mrs. Bates frequented the most expensive places, and spent money with a prodigal recklessness. "I can't; it isn't right; I couldn't think of costing poor pa so much—especially with Rosy and everything making such an expense for him."
"Nonsense. You're entitled to some of the good things of life, too. Your father can stand it, I should hope. If he hasn't learned how to spend money, it's high time he did. Have you any idea, you poor, simple soul, what's he worth?"
"I suppose he is pretty well off," Jane would acknowledge, reluctantly, indefinitely.
"Well off? I should say so! You ought to have twenty times what you do.Let them send this home for you—I'll take the risk."
Thus in the course of a month or two Jane, to the bewilderment and surprise of her mother and sisters and everybody else, became more presentable than ever before in the whole course of her life. She fully merited, in fact, the sincere encomium finally bestowed by Mrs. Bates herself:
"There, now! You're not the worst-looking girl in this town—not by a jugful!"
Jane was seriously affected by this unstinted praise, and she was almost overwhelmed when her monitress showed the courage of her convictions by offering a place in her box.
"Oh-h-h!" she mimicked, after Jane. "What does that mean? Will you or won't you?"
"If I only could," said Jane; "it's the first thing of any account I've had a chance at since I don't know when. But I've got another engagement for that evening. I'm going to the university extension lecture with—I'm going to the university extension lecture; it's my regular night." She ended with a heavy downward inflection which she hoped was pronounced enough to conceal the tell-tale dislocation that had preceded it.
"Indeed? Where does your lecture carry you?"
"Over on the West side—to that Settlement."
"Um. Bad neighborhood to be going into alone, at night."
"I'm not going alone," returned Jane, with a kind of fluttering joyfulness.
"Oh! with some girl friends, then? Not much better—that way."
"I'm not going with any girl friends"—this accompanied by a perceptible palpitation of delight. She looked at Mrs. Bates with eyes that seemed to say, "Please go on; don't stop right there."
"Oh, then, that kind, good brother, perhaps," suggested Mrs. Bates—going on.
"No, not that kind, good brother." Jane's face was fairly beaming.
"Some other kind, good young man, then."
"Yes," responded Jane, with a challenging light on her countenance; "some other kind, good young man."
"Ah! And when does your lecture end?"
"At nine."
"Before the other thing begins. Of course the lecture is much too instructive to lose, and then there's the fascination of a mile or two in a dirty street-car; but couldn't you look in on us between ten and half-past? The box is small, but I have a great fondness for those kind, good young men. Couldn't you induce one of them—any one at all, of course—to bring you, if he knew there was a place waiting for you both?"
"The gentleman who is going to escort me," began Jane, rising suddenly to a very formal tone, "is—well, in fact, he—he doesn't go out very much," she proceeded, lapsing back into her former manner. "He's kind of quiet and retiring. I don't believe he'd ever go to anything like this."
"Not when he's got a good place offered him—and a nice girl to take, with a brand-new dress of just the right sort to go in? I should want a beau of mine to have a little more spunk than that."
"How can you talk that way?" whimpered Jane, quite quivering with pleasure. "I can't sit here and listen to anything like that. What right"—with a feint of maiden indignation—"what right have you to say that Mr. Br—that anybody is—is my—"
"Beau," supplied Mrs. Bates, serenely. "Beau—that's what I said.Old-fashioned word, I know; but I can't think of a better one."
"You're just dreadful; you are," stammered Jane, trying to withdraw as best she might from too pronounced an attitude of protest. She fingered the length of ravelled bordering that drooped from the hair-cloth cushion of her chair and ran an eye, pretendedly speculative, up and down the pink and green stripes of Mrs. Bates's wall-paper.
"I'm pretty sure he wouldn't go—the gentleman who is to escort me to the lecture," she said, with another return to her vain paraphrase. "He's earnest. He's serious. Besides, he hasn't got a dress-coat."
"Hasn't got a dress-coat?"
"He doesn't approve of them. He thinks they're ugly and foolish and—and not right. He believes that society is—well, not exactly wrong, but—"
"All the same," declared Mrs. Bates, "he will receive a ticket, and I shall contrive to let him know that there's a place waiting for him."
"Oh, no! No, you mustn't! What would he ever think of me?"
"I shall, too."
"No! Don't—please don't. He wouldn't know what to think. He might think that I—"
"I shall, too!" repeated Mrs. Bates, more loudly and stubbornly. "I shall, too!" She knew that anything less marked than this would be a chilling disappointment to the girl before her. "And if he hasn't got a dress-coat, why, he can just get one. I'm sure if a young man cared anything for me—"
"Oh, don't talk that way—please don't!" implored Jane, half hiding her face with a kind of despairing joy. "Don't say such things, I beg of you!"
"—I should expect him to make some little sacrifice for me," Mrs. Bates completed. "Let him come and look at us; we may not be half so bad as he imagines."
"Sacrifice." What a delightful and comforting sound the word had to Jane.It vitalized in a moment all her story-reading of the past ten years.That anybody should ever be moved to make a sacrifice forher!
"But he used to live in the Settlement," persisted Jane; "he used to work there. He doesn't approve of Charity Balls; he thinks that isn't at all the way to do things."
"Well," said Mrs. Bates, thoughtfully, "it'saway; but there are better ones, no doubt. Come, cut that lecture altogether. He could pick up more in half an hour with me there at his elbow than he could learn in half a dozen courses of lectures, however extended they were."
"And have you act as you acted at Rosy's afternoon? You'd paralyze us both." Jane blushed at her "both."
"Oh, that's only my little way," returned Mrs. Bates, laughing. "You'dbothunderstand." Jane blushed again. "A way," she repeated; "but there are better ones, no doubt." And she laughed once more.
Bingham half folded the newspaper, and laid it again on Marshall's desk. Then he settled his large, long figure back in Marshall's other chair, and placed a broad finger or two upon each of its curved and varnished arms.
"Yes," he observed, slowly, with a smile in the direction of the old man, "the younger generation are holding up their end."
"So it seems," said Marshall, in return, while he scanned the other's face closely to see what his precise meaning might be. Bingham's remark had been uttered with an even intonation; it was difficult to determine whether, after all, he had emphasized "younger" more than "generation," or "their" more than "end," or, indeed, whether he had given an undue stress to either.
"Yes," the old man repeated. He made another reference to the newspaper."Yes; that is my child."
He fixed an eye, half fascinated, half protesting, upon a large cut which was set to fill the width of two columns. It was a portrait of Rosy—of "Miss Rosamund Marshall," as it read—with a line or two more, vaguely biographical in character, in italics, beneath. It was engraved with more than the usual care, and printed with more than the usual success.
This was the first time that any woman of his family had ever been exposed in the public prints. "And here are five or six lines telling how she was dressed. Is that right, Bingham?"
"Well, I'm no hand at describing. I suppose it reads correctly enough. At any rate, Rosamund was the handsomest girl there, and the best dressed—so several said—and the one who drew the most attention."
"Is that right, Bingham?" the old man repeated. He was accustomed enough to the public presentation of other men's daughters, but this was the first time that such a thing had befallen one of his own.
"Oh," replied Bingham; "you meanthatway. Well, times change. Ten years ago this would have brought a protest, and twenty a flogging. And we change with them. However, if this is the Miss Rosamund Marshall who has begun lately to figure at teas and receptions and cotillons, and always contrives to be the bright particular—Is it?"
Marshall smiled slowly. All this was true enough, and he could not profess himself completely displeased. He nodded.
"Well, then, you'll have to stand it; you can't avoid it; it can't be helped. And there's one more thing, too."
"What?"
"There was a young man present on this same occasion," Bingham proceeded; "a decorative, diffusive young man—with a badge. Richard Truesdale Marshall—was that his name? Any son of yours?"
Marshall nodded again, but his smile was distinctly less complacent.
"I am beginning to meet his name in print quite frequently," pursuedBingham, serenely. "Is he the same Truesdale Marshall who has acollection of water-colors in the current exhibition at the ArtInstitute?"
"I believe so," responded the old man, with some lack of warmth.
"Is it the same Truesdale Marshall who sang last Friday at the residence of Mrs. Granger S. Bates, for the benefit of—of—"
David Marshall smiled broadly. "Our Jennie—what a girl she is coming to be! That Lunch Club is one of her pet notions; she pushes it at all times—in season and out."
"She seems to be pushing it to good purpose just now," commented Bingham. "By-the-way, I suppose she is the same Miss Marshall I danced with last night. She sat in one of the upper places, so to speak, but she was induced to go down on the floor for a few minutes."
"Well, Bingham," said Marshall, "I knew you went to that sort of thing once in a while, and I thought that that in itself was a good deal for a man like you; but for you to dance there—I shouldn't have imagined your doing it; well, no."
"I didn't but once," responded the other, apologetically. "Still, if you're going to get along in this world, you've got to be of it. Besides, I thought"—argumentum ad hominem—"that she was entitled to show that dress; hers was described, too."
"Um!" said her father, soberly, with a sidelong glance towards his pigeon-holes. "But no picture."
"Well, let that pass," responded Bingham, with a slight touch of pique."Is this the Miss Marshall who read lately at the Fortnightly?"
"Yes."
"Is it the same one who is announced to lecture at Hull House on theRussian novelists?"
"See here, Bingham!" The old man wheeled about sharply in his chair, and fastened a keen scrutiny upon the other's face. Bingham had never talked to him like this before; he had never seemed so light-minded, so slanted towards the jocular. "See here, Bingham, what are you driving at?"
Bingham fitted himself solidly into the curved back of the chair, and laid his hands out ponderously upon its arms. He had something to say, and he wondered how best he might say it. "Marshall is twenty years older than I am," he thought, as his eye traversed the shelves of nutmegs and orris-root and lit upon the discolored awnings over the way, "and I must be careful. I'm young to him, of course; but I can't ask the indulgence due to a boy. How shall I work it?"
He felt that he had earned the right to speak. He had done well by Marshall, and he knew that Marshall was pleased. It was more as a personal favor than anything else that he had undertaken the work upon the warehouse; he had put it through more promptly than anybody else could have done, and with less interruption to the course of trade than either of the firm would have imagined possible. For the past month the business had been comfortably accommodated in its enlarged quarters, and the two new floors were already habituated to the occult processes which competition and a minutely graded scale of prices impose upon even the most righteous of the trade. It is but fair to say, however, that Marshall & Belden always saw that their sugar was as saccharine as a specified price would permit, and that their coffee-roasters met the lowered standard of cheap purchasers as well as the apparatus of any rival did.
Yes, everything was running smoothly, and Bingham felt that he might venture a slight trespass upon the friendliness and tolerance of his last client.
He looked at Marshall for a moment with a slow and cautious smile. "Yes, the young people are holding up their end; but how about the 'old man' himself?"
"Oh, that's it!" thought Marshall. He made an instant and intuitive application of this remark. Hewasdeclining towards the horizon; hewasshining but dimly compared with the twinkling of his attendant satellites.
"Well, the 'old man' isn't altogether useless by a long shot. The young people dance—and the old people furnish the platform. See here, Bingham. I don't have to go to the papers to learn what my daughters wear to parties; I've got my own papers here right within easy reach." He contracted his brows as his eyes turned towards the pigeon-holes. "A better account, too, than the newspaper one—fuller, exacter, more detailed, backed up by figures—down three long sheets and half-way down a fourth. And I don't need to go to art-galleries to understand what opportunities my son has had to learn to paint; the foreign exchange man at our bank could tell me all about that. And I don't have to go to concerts, either, when I want to make my contribution to a benevolent object: I can sit right in this room and draw checks, and be told just how much to draw them for, too. Yes, Bingham, there are a great many ways for an old fellow like me to make himself useful, and I am not allowed to overlook any of them."
Marshall's tone and expression during this exposition had wavered back and forth between jest and protest. But his eyes wandered towards those pigeon-holes again, and his mien and accents drew on a shade of distinct melancholy.
These receptacles contained other bills than those of the dress-makers. There was one, for example, from a carriage-maker, and another from a horse-dealer. For Rosamund, at the very outset of her career, had set her face against old Mabel and the carry-all. She declined to appear in any such fashion among the landaus and broughams of her newly-chosen associates. She represented, furthermore, that it was extremely awkward to depend upon the equipages of friends; and she protested that it was far beneath their dignity to hire a conveyance from a livery-stable. Her father had succumbed. Along with the bills for the new carriage and pair were bills for a coachman's hat and cape-coat. Besides these, there was the first month's statement of board for Mabel and storage for the carry-all—both having been crowded out of the cramped stable to another across the alley.
"Yes," resumed Bingham, availing himself of Marshall's own figure, "the young people are dancing—though no more briskly than they should; but why may not the old people dance, too? When the young ones are making their youth and their beauty and their cleverness tell as they do, may they notexpectthe old ones to come forward as well? Aren't there times when they should do it in mere justice to themselves? After your children have led so many more germans and adorned so many more receptions and founded so many more clubs and really worked their way into the life of the town, they may look to their father to put himself in evidence also. One of them, I can swear, is already a little jealous on your account."
"Jane? Oh yes; she is always trying to make her poor old father toe the mark."
"She has plans for you—ambitions for you. If you meet the expectations that the future is likely to develop, you will be carrying through a pretty big contract. I was surprised, myself, to learn how many diverse opportunities this town offers—enough to extend through three dances. People may preside at banquets, I learned, and address political meetings, and head subscription papers, and found public baths, and build and endow colleges. And there are others who donate telescopes, or erect model lodging-houses, or set up statues and fountains, or give—Marshall," he said, suddenly, "do something for yourself and for the town; nothing that you are doing here"—he waved his hand towards the larger office outside—"is enough for a man of your means and standing."
Bingham was now speaking with increased confidence and with greater seriousness. He felt himself entitled to say these things by reason of their personal relations and by virtue of his own standing before the public. He was twenty years younger than Marshall, but he was twenty times as great a figure in the public eye. He had had no mean share in those two fast and crowded years through which the city had striven towards readiness for the coming of the world. Like the Christians at Ephesus, he, too, had "fought with the wild beasts"—with time, with the elements, with Labor, with National niggardliness, with a hundred-headed management; and he had expanded and ripened in the struggle. He saw the world with a wider vision; he inhaled the vast and palpitating present with a deeper breath. He beheld, too, a triumphant and wide-spreading future, and he felt with the utmost keenness the opportunities that the town offered even to the older and departing generation—crabbed and reluctant though it be.
Marshall listened to his remarks and indicated an unremitted attention by bowing now and then with a subdued gravity. The strain seemed familiar; where had he heard it before? Why, from Susan Bates, to be sure—and in this very place: strophe and antistrophe. Could it be possible that he was so remiss towards himself and towards the community? Could it be true that he was doing himself such scant and graceless justice? What answer had he to make to this new advocate? The old one—with additions.
"I have been thinking about these matters. I have been considering the public that so much is asked for. It is not the old public I used to know twenty years ago—it has changed a good deal. It is better organized against us—a banding together of petty officials with their whole contemptible following: steerage-rats that have left their noisome holds to swarm into our houses, over them, through them, everywhere—between the floors, behind the wainscoting—everywhere. Do you know anything about cheap law?"
"Justice courts? Don't let's go into that," said Bingham, quickly.
"Iamin that," retorted Marshall, angrily. His blue eyes took on an unwonted gleam. "And I shall stay in until I have satisfied myself."
"Drop it," said Bingham. "It's a terrible thing—rotten, deplorable, an out-and-out curse."
"I will not," returned Marshall. He struck his thin old hand on the edge of his desk. "I'll see it through. They live within two blocks of my house. Her son is an alderman; her nephew is a bailiff; two or three others of them keep saloons. They are Poles, or Bohemians, or Jews—Heaven knows what. They do business on the premises—they stick to their burrow. Yet we couldn't get a summons served by a constable. And when we finally got the matter before a court—it was continued. No defendants there—only a filthy little creature who called himself their attorney. We were never so blackguarded in our lives. Then another continuance; and a third. Roger, poor boy, makes no headway at all. He knows the law; he has a good practice; he leases and collects for me—and buys and sells. But he is getting to be almost ashamed to come here to see me about it."
"I know," assented Bingham; "a kind ofcamorra. Get a shyster; fight the devil with fire. What can a gentleman do in a justice's court? If the rats are behind the wainscot, don't stick your own hand into the hole. Hire somebody else."
"I won't!" cried the old man, stubbornly. "I want to see for myself how things actually are. I want to learn what conditions we are living under. I want to understand the things that are really going on about us. I want to see what a good citizen and a tax-payer can count upon by way of redress." He picked at his petty grievance as a child torments a sore. Yet a sore, in justice, may mean little, or it may mean much. Any physician will tell you that.
"Drop it," counselled Bingham again. "It will irritate you and exasperate you out of all proportion to its importance. And if you have been wronged in a lower court, remember that many poorer men have been wronged in higher ones. Come; keep your head clear and your temper calm, and save them for important things."
The door of the little office opened softly, and one of the important things began. The door had opened none too widely, yet sufficiently for the entrance of the thin edge of a wedge—a wedge that was to gain a tyrannizing force with each inch of advance, as is the wont.
To Bingham it seemed like another of those rats—one that had left the wainscoting and taken to the floor, regardless (in a boldness at once insolent and sly) of the presence of humankind. To Marshall it was only an office-hand from the outer room who now entered with a handful of mail matter, which he placed, with an air not wholly guiltless of servility and stealth, upon his employer's desk.
He was a dark man of forty-five, with a black beard and a pair of narrow eyes. He looked neither of the two occupants of the room full in the face. His glance was searching and sidelong rather, not so much from the presence of anything to spy upon as from habit and instinct. One fancied a man too accustomed to the heavy foot of superiors to decline willingly any minor advantage that came his way—or any major one.
Bingham's eyes followed him out. "Whom have you there?"
"Somebody of Belden's—a new hand; some of the sediment left from theFair."
"That's where I've seen him. He was in the Service building—draughtsman, clerk, or something. Swiss? Alsacian?"
"I don't know," replied Marshall. "He speaks German and some French." Half unconsciously he began upon his mail. "It would be more to the purpose if he spoke English—better."
Bingham reached for his hat. "Well, time's money to both of us. English is an easy thing to pick up—as witness Midway. I dare say he'll be able to express himself fluently enough inside of another six months. Good-morning."
"There!" Jane had said to herself, as he stood before her small looking-glass to give a final touch to her hair and to pull out her puffed sleeves to their widest for the tenth and last time; "if I can keep in mind that I am thirty-three years old, and not a day less, I imagine I shall get through all right. Of course I sha'n't go on the floor and dance—at least, not very much. Perhaps nobody will ask me, anyway; of course I can expect nothing from Theodore Brower, who couldn't waltz any more than he could fly. No; I'll just sit in the box, and then nobody can say that I am giddy, or flighty, or trying to be too young."
She cast a last glance towards her looking-glass, which seemed smaller than ever. "I do wish I could see both of them at once. I hope Theodore will like 'em; the chances are, though, he'll never notice 'em at all."
Such had been Jane's modest and cautious programme, and she carried it out pretty closely. She sat in the box with Mrs. Bates a good part of the evening, and bowed a great many times to a great many gentlemen, young and old, whom she had never seen before and never expected to see again, and whose names, therefore, she made no effort to secure. She talked with two or three with whom it seemed possible and profitable to talk, and learned their names afterwards.
Mr. Bates himself spent very little time in his wife's box. He lounged on one of the springy sofas in the narrow lobby behind, or leaned over the burnished barriers of other boxes to talk murmurously with other magnates about the Stock Exchange or the volume of traffic. He was a grave and somewhat inexpressive person, with reticent eyes and snow-white bunches of side-whiskers, and a rather cold and impassive manner. His wife followed his peregrinations with an indulgent eye.
"Poor Granger," she said to Jane; "this thing tires him more and more every year. So I give him plenty of leeway. See him now." She looked over her shoulder, where, twenty feet away, her husband was talking across the bronze bar with another elderly man in the adjoining box.
"It's a conference," she went on—"it's a deal; it's on my account—he told me so himself. If it goes through it means another string to this necklace."
She suddenly became quite smileless and rigid. "Why, what's the matter?" asked Jane.
Mrs. Bates presently relaxed. "That woman who just passed," she explained; "she was wondering if these diamonds weren't imitations, and the real ones in the safety vaults down-town. Notice that other one over there; yes, the one in nile-green, with the garnet velvet sleeves. She's looking for me, and can't find me. There! she sees Granger—everybody knowshim. And now she's quieter; she's satisfied; she has taken old Mrs. McIntosh for me, just because Granger happens to be in their box for a moment. See, the man alongside of her is smiling and looking the same way. I know what she's saying to him: 'IsthatMrs. Bates—that plain old woman in that dowdy gown? Well, I never!—after all I've heard and read.' And she's so happy over it. Tell me, child;amI plain,amI dowdy?"
"You are magnificent," said Jane, squeezing her hand. "Carolus-Duran is only a dauber—and a half-blind one at that!" Jane, after the first half-hour, had become quite habituated to her new and unaccustomed environment. Her attitude was neither too self-conscious nor too relaxed; and she never lost sight of the fact that she was thirty-three. Her dress was a fabric in a soft shade of blue-gray run through by fine black lines. Her ample sleeves took full advantage of the prevailing mode, and several falls of wide lace passed between them, both before and behind. Her hair was done up high, in a fashion devised by her fairy godmother—a piece of discreet but fetching phantasy. Jane leaned back graciously in her chair, after the manner of her favorite heroines, losing in height and gaining in breadth; never before had she felt so amplitudinous, so imperial.
"Whoever would suspect," she asked, turning over her shoulder to SusanBates, "that I was a natural-born rail?"
"Nobody," the other responded. "You never looked so well in your life."
Jane blushed with pleasure. At that moment two of the Fortnightly ladies passed—clever creatures, who could drive culture and society abreast. Jane, with the flush still on her face and a happy glitter in those wide eyes, leaned forward and bowed in the most marked style at her command. "I am here myself," she seemed to announce.
"Well," said one of the Fortnightly ladies, "where is the 'Decadence' now?"
"Ah!" smiled the other, "that's past, and the 'Renaissance' is here again!"
However, Jane was not so taken up with her literary affinities as to lose sight of her own kith and kin. She saw Rosy swim past once or twice, and was gratified by constant glimpses of an active and radiant Truesdale. Once Statira Belden drove by in saffron satin and a mother-of-pearl tiara. "And that's her daughter with her," commented Jane. "And there's that girl from New York. And there goes her son—that smooth-faced little snip. Huh!—compare him with our Truesdale!"
She leaned forward eagerly as her brother came once more into view. "Yes," she said, "his flower is all right, and the soles of his shoes. I wonder if—" and she leaned still farther forward and drew in a long breath through her nose. "No, I can't smell it; I don't believe it's bothered him any!"
Jane, in the earlier part of the evening, had sent Truesdale to the ball as a lady sends a knight to battle. She had stopped him on the moment of his departure at the foot of the stairs, close to the grotesque old newel-post, to look him over with a severely critical eye.
"Has it got its posy in its button-hole?" she inquired, throwing open his ulster. There was a gardenia there. "Yes,that'sall right." Then:
"Has it got its little soles blacked?" Truesdale laughed, and turned up one of his long, slender, shining shoes, while he supported himself by his other leg and the newel-post. "Yes, that's first-rate," she assented. "What else is there, now?" she pondered.
"Oh! wait one second." She ravaged his inner pocket with a sudden hand. "Has it got its 'foom'ry on its little hanky?" She drew out the handkerchief and clapped it to her nose. "Not a drop—just wait one second."
She tore up-stairs in great haste, and in a moment more she came tumbling down with her own cologne bottle in her hand. "You'll kill yourself, Jane," her mother called.
"Here!" She seized her brother's handkerchief again and drenched it with a plentiful and vigorous douse. "There!" she said, with great satisfaction, as she restored it to him.
"Goodness, Jane!" Truesdale cried, in laughing protest, "they'll all smell this for fifty feet around."
Jane gave her brother a commendatory pat, and said no word. She felt that he was now ready for conquest. Speech was superfluous.
"No, I can't smell it," said Jane, again; "I think he must have exaggerated. He's going off in the other direction, anyway."
Mrs. Bates touched her elbow. "Who's that dark girl in pink? No; not to the left—straight ahead."
"Why, I declare, it's Rosy!" exclaimed Jane. "And doesn't she look lovely! She's the prettiest girl here, isn't she?"
"Yes."
"And how well that little curly-cue curl on her forehead keeps its shape!But do you think she should have worn Maréchal Niels?"
"I dare say she's had red until she is tired of them. Who is the young man with her?"
"Don't know," said Jane. "These new young men are getting to be too many forme."
"Well, then, I'll tell you. It's Arthur Paston."
"Arthur Scodd-Paston?" asked Jane, contributing a conscientious hyphen to the name and a laborious accent to the forepart of it. "Why, he doesn't look so very hateful and supercilious."
"Oh, he's never that. He's a nice enough fellow. You mustn't take all my exaggerations seriously. He's jolly and pleasant, as you see for yourself."
"He'd better be—with Rosamund. She won't stand any great 'I' and little 'u' from anybody. But he does look real nice and stout and healthy and rosy, and everything, doesn't he?"
"Especially rosy," said Mrs. Bates, wickedly.
"I'm ashamed of you," remonstrated Jane; and the two young people swept on, while the music swirled and crashed, and the vast illumined ceiling bent above them like a rainbow of promise.
During one of the promenades Truesdale passed by with Bertie Patterson on his arm. The decorum of the walk could not exclude all of Truesdale's lithe and swaying ease; he held his head high, and sent his eyes abroad to right or left with an assurance that some might have felt to be an impertinence and others an insolence. To Jane he seemed just descended from some heaven-kissing hill. She sniffed once or twice as he went past. "IhopeI didn't put too much on—I'm sure I didn't. I just sha'n't worry about it any more."
Bertie Patterson kept step beside him bravely, though she knew that Jane was looking at her from one side of the house and her aunt Lydia from the other. She was striving faithfully to be worthy of her environment. To take the arm of this brilliant young personage on any occasion at all would have been a test of spirit; how much more so on an occasion so brilliant and entrancing as this—particularly when the badge upon the young man's breast connected him so closely with it, and made the connection patent to all? She fused everything, and filled him with it and it with him: the mounting tones of violins and trumpets, the sparkling quincunxes of the girdling balcony-front, the wide band of fresco which ran in unison with the arches of glittering bulbs above their heads, the circling and swaying throng—all the sheen and splendor of a vast and successful city.
"Nice little girl with your brother," said Mrs. Bates.
"A real dear," responded Jane. "She poured tea for Rosy."
"Did she, indeed?" And Mrs. Bates looked at her harder to avoid seeing the passage of Gilbert Belden and his wife.
"There's another real dear," she said, presently, "if I can only catch his eye." She held up her finger to a young man who had just conducted Rosamund back to her aunt Lydia's box. Rosy had quite scorned the antiquated usage of the balls of an earlier and less sophisticated day. "OfcourseI shall not go with any young man; I shall go with a chaperon, and if the young men wish to see me they may see me there. It's all right if Jane wants to go with Theodore Brower; they might do anything after the way they bang around together in the street-cars. And I sha'n't go even with a chaperon unless she is in a box, where I can be taken afterwards"—a declaration which led to financial negotiations between David Marshall and his sister-in-law, and which brought him to a still higher appreciation of the general preciousness of his youngest daughter.
"There! he's coming—my boy Billy. Isn't he about right?"
A tall, broad-shouldered young man of twenty-five was making his way across the floor, and presently passed through the exit in the midst of the lower boxes to gain the level of the upper ones.
"College all over, isn't he?" commented Jane; "his shoulders, and the way he parts his hair."
"The best boy in the world," said Mrs. Bates, plumply, "He has been with his father for the last four years, and he's come to be a real help to him. Gets to the office at eight o'clock, rain or shine, and loves nothing better than to sit and grub there all day long. Steady as a rock. Splendid future. Holds his own nose to the grindstone like a real little lamb. I hope he asked Rosamund for supper."
The young man presently reappeared, making his way behind the long tier of upper boxes.
"Well, my boy, were you forgetting all about your mother and her elderly friends? I'd never figured on your meeting the younger daughter first. My son William, Miss Marshall. William, here's an awfully good girl; her father thinks as much of her as I do of you."
The young man bowed, but blushed and halted before this singular presentation.
"Well, I don't know," said Jane, filling up the breach in the first fashion that presented itself. "If pa had the same gift of language that you have, I should feel surer." She picked out her puffs, and then leaned back negligently with her hands crossed. She was too thoroughly grounded by this time to be discomposed by any youth seven or eight years her junior.
The youth shifted his feet.
"I saw you with my sister a minute ago," continued Jane. She knew, without looking round to see, that Mrs. Bates was smiling in the anxious, would-be-helpful way of parents who have put their offspring at a disadvantage.
"Yes—oh yes," the young man responded, with precipitation. "We had a very nice polka, indeed."
"Well," said Jane to herself, "I can talk about polkas and lots of other things." And she did. She held and entertained the young man for a full ten minutes. She found, after all, that he was in no degree constrained or backward, and she made him do himself justice.
"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Bates, as he withdrew, "you made my Billy quite brilliant. I don't know when I have heard so much real conversation!"
"That's all right," responded Jane; "I was young myself once. I haven't forgotten that."
"Only you mustn't fascinate him," protested the elder woman, with a burlesque of maternal anxiety. "I want somebody else to dothat." She gave Jane a smile full of meaning.
"Aha!" thought Jane, and wondered if she were to see a certain little romance resumed after the lapse of so many lumbering years.
"But she didn't seem to mind Paston any. Well, why should she?" concludedJane.
Presently Truesdale came along and asked his sister to waltz. "All right," she said; "just for a minute; but not out in the middle—yet." She wished to test herself first.
"You're awfully good to me, Dicky," she whispered, as he led her back.
"Cut it," said Truesdale; "I'm proud of you."
Jane got back to her lofty perch. "I'll do it once more—if anybody asks me; yes, I will."
In another ten minutes she was on the floor again. "Quite happy, I'm sure," she had said to Bingham.
"Only I'm no great dancer," this big and bearded bachelor had warned her.
"Neither am I," declared Jane. "I can just totter around and that's about all." She arose quickly, shook out her plumage, took his arm, and in less than a minute was waltzing again. "Lucky itisa waltz," she thought; "I don't want to be trying too many novelties."
Mrs. Bates moved to let them pass out. "Really," she said, "I don't want to sit here all alone. Oh, Mr. Brower, I rely upon you. Let me have your arm. I suppose"—with a resigned submission to the inevitable—"that I am expected to walk around once, at least."
Brower had returned to the box, after diverting himself for some time rather shyly in the foyer. He had given Jane a promenade earlier in the evening, and had hoped to pass the rest of the time as inconspicuously as might be. Jane had been much pleased by his efforts to do the right thing—to be correctly dressed, for example. She knew from her own experience how one thing led to another, and she was appreciative of the pains he had taken on her account. It was easy for her to fancy how dress-suits must lead to dress-shirts, and shirts to studs and collars and ties and shoes and boutonnières—but Brower wore no boutonnière; there he drew the line. "Never mind," said Jane; "that isn't necessary, anyway. He has done quite enough as it is, and he's a good fellow to have done it." She knew how he regarded all this: as a sacrifice to Mammon, if not indeed to Moloch. "On my account, too," thought Jane—"every bit of it. Isn't it splendid of him!"
Brower was vastly disconcerted on receiving this command from Mrs. Bates—it was nothing less than a command, of course, and he must obey it. He had found it something of an ordeal to lead even Jane round the floor once; how much greater a one, then, to perform the like service for Mrs. Granger Bates, whose escort could not but expect to draw scrutiny and to provoke inquiry. He was a modest man with no pronounced social ambitions; he would immensely have preferred to pass the same length of time staring into a locomotive head-light.
Mrs. Bates presently effected a clearance, and with Brower as a convoy steered straight for the open sea. She carried a bunch of plumes aloft, showed a flashing brilliant on both the port and the starboard side, and left a long trail of rustling silk and lace behind her. And as she pursued her course, other craft, great and small, dipped their colors right and left.
"I want you to see both ends of the scale," she presently said to Brower."You are trying to bring them closer together, they tell me."
"That is a part of our object," replied Brower.
"Well, you have one end in your Nineteenth Ward, and the other here. I want you to get the good side of this."
"I should be glad to; thereisone, I'm sure."
"To begin with, don't encourage your associates to talk about the 'butterflies of fashion,' and that sort of thing. There are no butterflies in this town, except young girls under twenty, and you surely won't quarrel withthem. Yes, we are all workers; what could Idleness herself do with her time in such a place as this? You've got to work in self-defence. Do you see that woman up aloft there?"
"Well?"
"She's the president and responsible manager of an orphan asylum. That one over across on the other side is an officer of the Civil Federation. Do you believe in that?"
"Devoutly."
"The woman just ahead of us—the purple velvet one—is a member of theBoard of Education; she helps to place teachers and to audit coal bills.Why, even I myself have got a good many more things to look after thanyou could easily shake a stick at!"
"And the one you this instant bowed to?"
"You mean the one who bowed to me." For Mrs. Rhodes had leaned completely out of her box, and had then looked both right and left to observe whether her neighbors had done full justice to the episode. "Oh, she's a good little woman who is—climbing.
"The fact is," Mrs. Bates proceeded, "that there are not a dozen real grown-up butterflies in town. We're coming to one now." They were skirting one range of the lower boxes. "It's Mrs. Ingles; you must meet her."
"Some other time, please," implored Brower, as Mrs. Bates nodded to a sumptuous young creature not ten feet away.
"Very well." Mrs. Bates shrugged her shoulders "Yes," she proceeded, presently, "Cecilia Ingles and her immediate set are about the only real butterflies we have. However, I'm going to take her in hand pretty soon and make a good, earnest woman of her."
"There is work for them all," said Brower.
"But don't let's be too serious just now," rejoined Mrs. Bates in friendly caution.
"Who was that young man you had with you last night?" somebody demanded of her next day.
"Mr. Brower."
"Who is Mr. Brower, may I ask?"
"A friend of Jane Marshall's." This (save that he had a trusty face) was all that she knew of Theodore Brower; but she thought it enough.
"And who is Jane Marshall?"
Mrs. Bates gave her questioner one look. "Really, you surprise me," she observed, and said no word more. Within a week Jane was known throughout the inquirer's whole set.
Truesdale presently passed Mrs. Bates with a girl on his arm. "I wonder if that's another one of the tea-pourers?" she asked herself.
It was. Truesdale was escorting Gladys—Gladys McKenna, as her complete name had finally come to him. He had laughed on first hearing it. "There's achaud-froidfor you, sure enough!"
Gladys wore a flame-colored gown, and her eyes, curiously fringed with black above and beneath, had anoutréand dishevelled appearance that lingered in the memory as wax-works do. She kept a strong clutch on his arm, and galloped alongside him with a persistentcamaraderiewhich conveyed no hint of cessation.
"Why insist so strongly on aquadrille d'honneur?" he was asking her."Wasn't a march good enough?"
"We always look for a quadrille at one of the best functions—at home."
"But why draw lines? You don't object if people meet for pleasure on terms free and equal?"
"Oh, of course if you have no celebrities here—no great figures—"
"Not one—not till you came. We are all plain people here. If any of us forget our plainness there are plenty who are glad enough to remind us of it."
"Are you plain, too?"
"The plainest of the lot."
"You don't seem so; you look awfully ornamental, with that ribbon and all." The "all" meant the wave in his hair, the lustre of his eyes, the upward flaunt of his mustache which hid in no degree the white, firm evenness of his teeth, the freshness of a second gardenia—even the sheen of his shapely shoes.
"The ribbon—you like it? Sorry I'm wearing only one. How would you have liked a second running the opposite way? Or a third pinned on behind?"
"Oh, you!—How about all these other young men; are they anybody?"
"What other young men?"
"The ones with these criss-cross red ribbons."
"Oh! Well, some few of them have what you might call position, and some are working for it, and some are not thinking anything about it; and some, after having served their purpose, will be dropped soon enough, I promise you."
"And you yourself—are you in, or out, or not thinking about it, or-"
"I?" returned Truesdale, carelessly. "I'm just a passer-by; I'm on my way to Japan."
"Oh no; not Japan!" said the girl, quickly.
"Japan, I assure you," he smiled.
She caught herself. "To escape my uncle, then?"
"Why that, in Heaven's name?"
"You have offended him."
"Dear me! How?"
"By what you said at the house the other night. About the costumes, you know."
"Nonsense. How could that have reached him?"
"Those things do get around. Do you know what he's going to do? He's going to cut your comb. My aunt—she cried like anything."
To Truesdale the girl's tone seemed preposterously confidential. "You were in the wrong," she seemed to imply; "but I am on your side for all that."
"Ouf!" said Truesdale; "this comes of trenching on Biblical ground. I'll never quote scripture again."
Truesdale had gone to the Belden house in pursuance of the invitation extended at his mother's own tea-table. Eliza Marshall had made a faint effort to dissuade him; despite Mrs. Belden's presence at her own function, his going seemed, in one way or another, too much like an excursion into the enemy's country. But the occasion was a fancy-dress ball, and Truesdale declared himself much too curious to remain away. "I must go," he said, and at once took steps to equip himself for this voyage of discovery.
He wore the dress of a Spanish grandee of the early seventeenth century—he recalled the Spaniards as famous explorers. He was in black throughout, save for the white lace of his wide collar and cuffs, and for the dark purple lining of his mantle. If the Beldens, for their part, had costumed themselves half so discreetly, he would never have fallen from their good graces. But Statira Belden (keeping her own given name in view) had based her costume upon one of the old French tapestries—the Family of Darius at the Feet of Alexander; you may see the original, a Veronese, in the National Gallery. She had counterfeited the distressed queen by flowing robes and pearls strung through her yellow hair. She had revivified and heightened the faded ideal of the oldtime artist, and incidentally she had extinguished every other woman in the room.
But the difficulty would still have been avoided had not Belden himself so far lapsed from discretion as to put himself forward in the guise of Shylock. It mended matters little that he had abandoned the costume within half an hour after donning it. Thus it was that Truesdale saw him for the first time in four or five years; the young man had completely disdained, thus far, to visit the store. With eyes freshened by long absence, and wits sharpened by contact with the world, he saw his father's partner in a dress which seemed to throw into greater prominence every lineament of his face and every trait of his character. The young man instantly doubted, mistrusted him. His Hebraic garments suggested another character held in still lower esteem. Truesdale, at a certain stage of the entertainment, observed his host and hostess in momentary conjunction on the threshold of the drawing-room; it was then that he uttered his little jest, whimsically careless of accuracy and loftily indifferent to outlying ears.
"Ananias and Statira," he said, and his words travelled through the house like escaping gas.
"They're awfully offended," said Gladys, continuing her confidential tone. "You can't come there any more—I don't believe. I'm so glad to have seen you here—who knows where I shall ever see you again? Why wouldn't you talk to me any, that first time? Why were you so long in asking me to dance to-night?"
She seemed to be pushing the claim of proprietorship first advanced at the Belden ball.
"Well, I hope I've talked enough since."
"But where shall we talk together next time? I don't believe you can come to the house," she repeated.
She seemed to be drawing attention romantically to obstacles in the way—in their way—and to be calling on him to remove them.
"Perhaps they won't let me see you again. Perhaps they're offended by my having danced with you here." She was adding to the barricade, but he was bold and resourceful enough to level it.
"Ouf!" thought Truesdale. "Girls—they're alike, every one of 'em, after all!"