 6 On the following morning young Mr. Ware anticipated events by inscribing in his diary for the day immediately after breakfast these remarks, arranged about piano, began work upon book. The date indeed deserved to be distinguished from its fellows. Theron was so conscious of its importance that he not only prophesied in the little Morocco-bound diary which Alice had given him for Christmas, but returned, after he had got out upon the front steps of the parsonage, to have his hat brushed afresh by her. "'Wonders will never cease,' she said jacosely, with you getting particular about your clothes. There isn't anything in this wide world that can't happen now. One doesn't go out to bring home a piano every day,' he made answer. "'Besides, I want to make such an impression upon the man that he will deal gently with that first cash payment down. Do you know?' he added, watching her turn the felt brim under the wisp-broomed strokes. I'm thinking some of getting me a regular silk-stove pie-pat. Why don't you then?' she rejoined, but without any ring of glad acquiescence in her tone. He fancied that her face lengthened a little, and he instantly ascribed it to recollections of the way in which the roses had been bullied out of her own head-gear. "'You are quite sure now, pet?' he made haste to change the subject, that the hired girl can wait just as well as not until fall. "'Oh, my yes,' Alice replied, putting the hat on his head, and smoothing back his hair behind his ears. "'She'd only be in the way now. You see, with hot weather coming on, there won't be much cooking. We'll take all our meals out here, and that saves so much work that really what remains is hardly more than taking care of a bird-cage. And besides, not having her will almost half pay for the piano. "'But when the cold weather comes, you're sure you'll consent,' he urged. "'Like a shot,' she insured him. And after a happy little caress he started out again on his momentous mission. Thurston's was a place concerning which opinions differed in Octavius, that it typified progress and helped more than any other feature of the village to bring it up to date. No one indeed disputed. One might move about a great deal in truth, and hear no other view expressed, but then again one might stumble into conversation with one small storekeeper after another, and learn that they united in resenting the existence of Thurston's, as rival farmers might join to curse a protracted drought. Each had his special flaming grievance. The little dry-goods-dealers asked mournfully how they could be expected to compete with an establishment which could buy bankrupt stocks at a hundred different points and make a profit if only one-third of the articles were sold for more than they would cost from the jobber. The little boot-and-shoe-dealers, clothiers, hatters and furriers, the small merchants and carpets' crockery and furniture, and vendors of hardware and household utensils, of leather and goods and picture frames, of wallpaper, musical instruments and even toys, all had the same pathetically unanswerable question to propound. But mostly they put it to themselves, because the others were at Thurston's. The Reverend Theron Ware had entertained rather strong views on this subject, and that only a week or two ago. One of his first acquaintances in Octavius had been the owner of the principal bookstore in the place, a gentle and bald old man who produced the complete impression of a bibliophile. On what the slightest investigation showed to be only a meager acquaintance with publishers' circulars. But at least he had the air of loving his business, and the young minister had enjoyed a long talk with, or rather at, him. Out of this talk had come the information that the store was losing money. Not even the stationery department now showed a profit worth mentioning. When Octavius had contained only five thousand inhabitants it boasted four bookstores, two of them good ones. Now with a population more than doubled, only these latter two survived, and they must soon go to the wall. The reason it was in a nutshell, the book which sold at retail for one dollar and a half cost the bookseller ninety cents. If it was at all a popular book, Thurston's advertised it at eighty-nine cents, and in any case at a profit of only two or three cents. Of course it was done to widen the establishment's patronage, to bring people into the store. Equally, of course, it was destroying the book business and debauching the reading taste of the community. Without the profits from the light and ephemeral popular literature of the season, the bookstore proper could not keep up its stock of more solid works, and indeed could not keep open at all. On the other hand, Thurston's dealt with nothing, saved the demand of the moment, and offered only the books which were the talk of the week, thus in plain words the book trade was going to the dogs, and it was the same with pretty nearly every other trade. Theron was indignant at this, and on his return home told Alice that he desired her to make no purchases whatever at Thurston's. He even resolved to preach a sermon on the subject of the modern idea of admiring the great for crushing the small, and sketched out some notes for it which he thought solved the problem of flaying the local abuse without mentioning it by name. They had lain on his desk now for ten days or more, and on only the previous Friday he had speculated upon using them that coming Sunday. On this bright and cheerful Tuesday morning he walked with a blithe step, unhesitatingly down the main street to Thurston's, and entered without any show of repugnance the door next to its window, wherein, flanked by dangling banjos and key bugles built in pyramids, was displayed the sign, Pianos, on the installment plan. He was recognized by some responsible persons, and treated with distinguished deference. They were charmed with the intelligence that he desired a Piano, and fascinated by his wish to pay for it only a little at a time. They had special terms for clergymen, and made him feel as if these were being extended to him on a silver charger by kneeling admirers. It was so easy to buy things here that he was a trifle disturbed to find his flowing course interrupted by his own entire ignorance as to what kind of Piano he wanted. He looked at all they had in stock, and heard them played upon. They differed greatly in price, and so he fancied, almost as much in tone. It discouraged him to note, however, that several of those he thought the finest in tone were among the very cheapest in the lot. Pondering this, and staring in hopeless puzzlement from one to another, of the big black shiny monsters, he suddenly thought of something. I would rather not decide for myself, he said. I know so little about it. If you don't mind, I will have a friend of mine, a skilled musician, step in and make a selection. I have so much confidence in her judgment. He added hurriedly. It will only involve a day or two's delay. The next moment he was sorry he had spoken. What would they think when they saw the organist of the Catholic Church come to pick out a piano for the Methodist parsonage? And how could he decorously prefer the request to her to undertake this task? He might not meet her again for ages, and to his provincial notions writing would have seemed out of the question. And would it not be disagreeable to have her know that he was buying a piano by part payments? Poor Alice's dread of the washer-woman's gossip occurred to him at this, and he smiled in spite of himself. Then, all at once the difficulty vanished. Of course it would come all right somehow, everything did. He was on firmer ground buying the materials for the new book over on the stationary side. His original intention had been to bestow this patronage upon the old bookseller, but these swavly smart people at Thurston's had had the effect of putting him on his honour when they asked, would there be anything else? And he had followed them unresistingly. He indulged to the full his whim that everything entering into the construction of Abraham should be spick and span. He watched with his own eyes a whole ream of broad-glazed white paper being sliced down by the cutter into single sheets, and thrilled with a novel ecstasy as he laid his hand upon the spotless bulk so wooingly did it invite him to begin. He tried a score of pins before the right one came to hand. When a box of these had been laid aside with ink and pin holders and a little bronze ink stand, he made a sign that the outfit was complete, or no, there must be some blotting paper. He had always used these blotting-pads given away by insurance companies. His congregation never failed to contain one or more agents who had these to bestow by the armful. But the book deserved a virgin blotter. Theron stood by while all these things were being tied up together in a parcel. The suggestion that they should be sent almost hurt him. Oh, no, he would carry them home himself. So strongly did they appeal to his sanguine imagination that he could not forbear hinting to the man who had shown him the pianos and was now accompanying him to the door that this package under his arm represented potentially the price of the piano he was going to have. He did it in a roundabout way with one of his droll hesitating smiles. The man did not understand at all, and Theron had not the temerity to repeat the remark. He strode home with the precious bundle as fast as he could. I thought it best, after all, not to commit myself to a selection. He explained about the piano at dinner time. In such a matter as this the opinion of an expert is everything. I'm going to have one of the principal musicians of the town go and try them all and tell me which we ought to have. And while he's at it, said Alice, you might ask him to make a little list of some of the new music. I've got way behind the times, being without a piano so long. Tell him not any very difficult pieces, you know. Yes, I know, put in Theron almost hastily, and began talking of other things. His conversation was of the most rambling and desultory sort, because, all the while, the two lobes of his brain, as it were, kept up a dispute as to whether Alice ought to have been told that this principal musician was of her own sex. It would certainly have been better at the outset, he decided, but to mention it now would be to invest the fact with undue importance. Yes, that was quite clear. Only the clearer it became, from one point of view, the shadier it waxed from the other. The problem really disturbed the young minister's mind throughout the meal, and his abstraction became so marked, at last, that his wife commenced upon it. A penny for your thoughts, she said, with cheerful briskness. This ancient formula of the farmland had always rather jarred on Theron. It presented itself now to his mind as a peculiarly aggravating banality. I am going to begin my book this afternoon, he remarked impressively. There is a great deal to think about. It turned out that there was even more to think about than he had imagined, after hours of solitary musing at his desk, or of pacing up and down before his open bookshelves, Theron found the first shadows of a May Day twilight beginning to fall upon that beautiful pile of white paper still unstained by ink. He saw the book he wanted to write before him, in his mental vision, much more distinctly than ever, but the idea of beginning it impetuously, and hurling it off hot and glowing week by week, had faded away like a dream. This long afternoon spent face to face with a project born of his own brain but yesterday, yet already so much bigger than himself, was really a most fruitful time for the young clergyman. The lessons which cut most deeply into our consciousness are those we learn from our children. Theron, in this first day's contact with the offspring of his fancy, found revealed to him an unsuspected and staggering truth. It was that he was an extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man, whose pretensions to intellectual authority, among any educated people, would be laughed at with deserved contempt. Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock, this discovery did not dismay Theron wear. The very completeness of the conviction it carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling, as if the fact had really been known to him all along. And there came, too, after a while, an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation. He had been merely drifting, infatuous and conceited blindness. Now all at once his eyes were open. He knew what he had to do. Ignorance was a thing to be remedied, and he would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating his mind till it should blossom like a garden. In this mood Theron mentally measured himself against the more conspicuous of his colleagues in the conference. They were also ignorant, clownishly ignorant. The difference was that they were doomed by native incapacity to go all their lives without ever finding it out. It was obvious to him that his case was better. There was bright promise in the very fact that he had discovered his shortcomings. He had begun the afternoon by taking down from their places the various works in his meager library which bore more or less relation to the task in hand. The three-score books which constituted his printed possessions were almost wholly from the press of the book Concern. The few exceptions were volumes which, though published elsewhere, had come to him through that giant circulating agency of the General Conference and wore the stamp of its approval. Perhaps it was the sight of these half-filled shelves which started the day's great revolution in Theron's opinions of himself. He had never thought much before about owning books. He had been too poor to buy many, and the conditions of canvassing about one's parishioners which the thrifty book Concern imposes upon those who would have, without buying, had always repelled him. Now suddenly, as he moved along the two shelves, he felt ashamed at their beggarly showing. The land and the book, in three portly volumes, was the most pretentious of the aids which he finally called from his collection. Beside it he laid out Bible lands, rivers and lakes of Scripture, Bible manners and customs, the Genesis and Exodus volume of Whedon's commentary, some old numbers of the Methodist Quarterly Review and a copy of Josephus, which had belonged to his grandfather, and had seen him through many a weary Sunday afternoon in boyhood. He glanced casually through these one by one as he took them down, and began to fear that they were not going to be of so much use as he had thought. Then, seeding himself, he read carefully through the thirteen chapters of Genesis which chronicle the story of the founder of Israel. Of course he had known this story from his earliest years. In almost every chapter he came now upon a phrase or an incident which had served him as the basis for a sermon. He had preached about Hagar and the wilderness, about Lot's wife, about the visit of the angels, about the intended sacrifice of Isaac, about a dozen other things suggested by the ancient narrative. Somehow this time it all seemed different to him. The people he read about were altered to his vision. Here to fore a poetic light had shown about them, where indeed they had not glowed in a halo of sanctification. Now by some chance this light was gone, and he saw them instead as untutored and unwashed barbarians, filled with animal lusts and ferocities, struggling by violence and foul chicanery, to secure a foothold in a country which did not belong to them, all rude tramps and robbers of the uncivilized plain. The apparent fact that Abram was a Chaldean struck him with peculiar force. How was it he wondered that this had never occurred to him before? Examining himself he found that he had supposed vaguely that there had been Jews from the beginning, or at least say, from the flood. But no. Abram was introduced simply as a citizen of the Chaldean town of Ur, and there was no hint of any difference in race between him and his neighbors. It was specially mentioned that his brother, Lot's father, died in Ur, the city of his nativity. Evidently the family belonged there, and were Chaldeans, like the rest. I did not cite this at all as a striking discovery, but it did have a curious effect upon there and where. Up to that very afternoon, his notion of the kind of book he wanted to write had been founded upon a popular book called Ruth the Moabitus, written by a clergyman he knew very well, the Reverend E. Ray Mifflin. This model performance troubled itself not at all with difficult points, but went swimmingly along through scented summer seas of pretty rhetoric, teaching nothing it is true, but pleasing a good deal and selling like hotcakes. Now all at once Theron felt he hated this sort of book. His work should be of a vastly different order. He might fairly assume, he thought, that if the fact that Abram was a Chaldean was new to him, it would fall upon the world in general as a novelty. Very well then there was his chance. He would write a learned book showing who the Chaldeans were, and how their manners and beliefs differed from and influenced. It was at this psychological instant that the wave of self- condemnation suddenly burst upon and submerged the young clergyman. It passed again, leaving him staring fixedly at the pile of books he had taken down from the shelves, and gasping a little as for breath. Then the humorous side of the thing, perversely enough, appealed to him, and he grinned feebly to himself at the joke of his having imagined that he could write learnedly about the Chaldeans or anything else. But no, it shouldn't remain a joke. His long, mobile face grew serious under the new resolve. He would learn what there was to be learned about the Chaldeans. He rose and walked up and down the room, gathering fresh strength of purpose as this inviting field of research spread out its vistas before him. Perhaps, yes, he would incidentally explore the mysteries of the Moabitic past as well, and thus put the Reverend E. Ray Mifflin to confusion on his own subject. That would in itself be a useful thing, because Mifflin wore kid gloves at the conference, and affected an intolerable superiority of dress and demeanor, and there would be general satisfaction among the plainer and worthier brethren at seeing him taken down a peg. Now for the first time there rose distinctly in Theron's mind that casual illusion which Father Forbes had made to the Terranians. He recalled, too, his momentary feeling of mortification of not knowing who the Terranians were at the time. Possibly as he had probed the matter more deeply, now as he walked and pondered in the little living room, he might have traced the whole of the afternoon's mental experiences to that chance remark of the Romish priest. But this speculation did not detain him. He mused instead upon the splendid library Father Forbes must have. Well, how does the book come on? Have you got to my Lady Ketura yet? It was Alice who spoke, opening the door from the kitchen, and putting in her head with a pretense of great and solemn caution, but with a correcting twinkle in her eyes. I haven't got to anybody yet, answered Theron, absently. These big things must be approached slowly. Come out to supper then while the beans are hot, said Alice. The young minister sat through this other meal. Again in deep abstraction, his wife pursued her little pleasantry about Ketura, the second wife, urging him, with mock gravity, to scold her roundly for daring to excerpt Sarah's place. But Theron scarcely heard her, and said next to nothing. He ate sparingly and fidgeted in his seat, waiting with obvious impatience for the finish of the meal. At last he rose abruptly. I've got a call to make, something with reference to the book, he said. I'll run out now, I think, before it gets dark. He put on his hat and strode out of the house as if his errand was of the utmost urgency. Once upon the street, however, his pace slackened. There was still a good deal of daylight outside, and he loitered aimlessly about, walking with bowed head and hands clasped behind him until dusk fell. Then he squared his shoulders and stared straight as the crow flies toward the residence of Father Forbes. CHAPTER VII The New Catholic Church was the largest and most imposing public building in Octavius. Even in its unfinished condition, with a bald roofing of weather-beaten boards marking on the stunted tower the place where a spire was to begin later on, it dwarfed every other edifice. Just as it put them all to shame in the matter of the throngs it drew, rain or shine, to its services. These facts had not here to fore been a source of satisfaction to the reverent therein where. He had even alluded to the subject in terms, which gave his wife the impression that he actively deplored the strength and size of the Catholic denomination in this new home of theirs, and was troubled in his mind about Rome generally. But this evening he walked along the extended side of the big structure, which occupied nearly half the block, and then, turning the corner, passed in review its wide-doored, looming front, without any hostile emotions whatever. In the gathering dusk it seemed more massive than ever before. He found himself only passively considering the odd statement he had heard, that all Catholic church property was deeded absolutely in the name of the bishop of the diocese. Only a narrow passageway separated the church from the pastorate, a fine new brick residence standing flush upon the street. Theron mounted the steps and looked about for a bell-pull. Search revealed instead a little ivory button set in a ring of metalwork. He picked at this for a time with his fingernail, before he made out the injunction printed across it to push. Of course, how stupid of him! This was one of those electric bells he had heard so much of, but which had not as yet made their way to the class of homes he knew. For custodians of a medieval superstition and fanaticism, the Catholic clergy seemed very much up to date. This bell made him feel rather more a countryman than ever. The door was opened by a tall gaunt woman, who stood in black relief against the radiance of the hallway. While Theron, choosing his words with some diffidence, asked if the reverend Mr. Forbes was in, he is, came the hush-voiced answer. He's at dinner, though. It took the minister a second or two to bring into association in his mind this evening hour and this midday meal. Then he began to say that he would call again. It was nothing special, but the woman suddenly cut him short by throwing the door wide open. "'It's Mr. Ware, is it not?' she asked, in a greatly altered tone. Sure, he'd not have you go away. Come inside. Do, sir. I'll tell him.' Theron, with a dumb show of reluctance, crossed the threshold. He noted now that the woman, who had bustled down the hall on her errand, was gray-haired and incredibly ugly, with a dark, sour face, glowering black eyes, and a twisted mouth. Then he saw that he was not alone in the hallway. Three men and two women, all poorly clad and obviously working people, were seated in meek silence on a bench beyond the hat-rack. They glanced up at him for an instant, then resumed their patient study of the linoleum pattern on the floor at their feet. And will you kindly step in, sir? The elderly Gorgon had returned to ask. She led Mr. Ware along the hallway to a door near the end and opened it to him to pass before her. He entered a room in which for the moment he could see nothing but a central glare of dazzling light beating down from a great shaded lamp upon a circular patch of white table linen. Inside this ring of illumination points of fire sparkled from silver and porcelain, and two bars of burning crimson tracked across the cloth in reflection from tall glasses filled with wine. The rest of the room was vague darkness, but the gloom seemed saturated with novel, aromatic odors, the appetizing scent of which bore clear relation to what Theron's blinking eyes rested upon. He was able now to discern two figures at the table outside the glowing circle of the lamp. They had both risen, and one came toward him with cordial celerity, holding out a white plump hand in greeting. He took this proffered hand, rather limply, not wholly sure in the half light that this really was Father Forbes, and began once more that everlasting apology to which he seemed doomed in the presence of the priest. It was broken abruptly off by the other's protesting laughter. My dear Mr. Ware, I beg of you, the priest urged, chuckling with hospitable mirth, don't, don't apologize, I give you my word, nothing in the world could have pleased us better than your joining us here tonight. It was quite dramatic, your coming in as you did. We were speaking of you at that very moment, oh, I forget, let me make you acquainted with my friend, my very particular friend, Dr. Ledzmar. Let me take your hat, pray draw up a chair, Maggie will have a place laid for you in a minute. Oh, I assure you, I couldn't think of it, I've just eaten my dinner, expostulated Theron. He murmured more in articulate remonstrances a moment later, when the grim old domestic appeared with plates, serviette, and tableware for his use. But she went on spreading them before him, as if she heard nothing. Thus committed against a decent show of resistance, the young minister did eat a little here and there of what was set before him, and was human enough to regret frankly that he could not eat more. It seemed to him very remarkable cookery, transfiguring so simple a thing as steak, for example, quite out of recognition, and investing the humble potato with a charm he had never dreamed of. He wondered from time to time if it would be polite to ask how the potatoes were cooked so that he might tell Alice. The conversation at the table was not continuous or even enlivened. After the lapses into silence became marked, Theron began to suspect that his refusal to drink wine had annoyed them, the more so as he adrenched a large section of tablecloth in his efforts to manipulate a siphon instead. He was greatly relieved, therefore, when Father Forbes explained, in an incidental way, that Dr. Ledzmar and he customarily ate their meals almost without a word. It's a philosophic fad of his, the priest went on smilingly, and I have fallen in with it for the sake of a quiet life, so that when we do have company, that is to say, once in a blue moon, we display no manners to speak of. I had always supposed, that is, I've always heard, that it was more healthful to talk at meals, said Theron. Of course, what I mean is, I took it for granted that all physicians thought so. Dr. Ledzmar laughed. That depended so much upon the quality of the meals, he remarked, holding his glass up to the light. He seemed a man of middle age and equitable disposition. Theron, stealing stray glances at him around the lampshade, saw most distinctly of all a broad impressive dome of skull, which, though obviously the result of baldness, gave the effect of quite belonging to the face. There were gold-rimmed spectacles, through which shone now and again the vivid sparkle of sharp, alert eyes, and there was a nose of some sort not easy to classify, at once long and thick, the rest was thin hair and short round beard, mouse-colored where the light caught them, but losing their outlines in the shadow of the background. Theron had not heard of him among the physicians of Octavius. He wondered if he might not be a doctor of something else than medicine, and decided upon venturing the question. Oh, yes, it is medicine, replied Ledzmar. I am a doctor three or four times over, so far as parchments can make one. In some other respects, though, I should think I am probably less of a doctor than anyone else now living. I haven't practiced, that is, regularly, for many years. I take no interest whatever in keeping abreast of what the profession regards as its progress. I know nothing beyond what was being taught in the 60s. In that I am glad to say, I have mostly forgotten. Dear me, said Theron, I had always supposed that science was the most engrossing of pursuits, that once a man took it up he never left it. But that would imply a connection between science and medicine, commented the doctor. My dear sir, they are not even on speaking terms. Shall we go upstairs, put in the priest, rising from his chair? It will be more comfortable to have our coffee there, unless indeed, Mr. Ware, tobacco is unpleasant to you. Oh, my, no, the young minister exclaimed, eager to free himself from the suggestion of being a killjoy. I don't smoke myself, but I am fond of the odor, I assure you. Father Forbes led the way out. It could be seen now that he wore a long house gown of black silk, skillfully molded to his erect shapely and rounded form. Though he carried this with the natural grace of a proud and beautiful bell, there was no hint of the feminine in his bearing, or in the contour of his pale, firm-set, handsome face. As he moved through the hallway, the five people whom Theron had seen waiting rose from their bench, and two of the women began in humble murmurs, if you please, Father, and good evening to your reverence, but the priest merely nodded and passed up the staircase, followed by his guests. The people sat down on their bench again. A few minutes later, reclining at his ease in a huge low chair, and feeling himself unaccountably at home in the most luxuriously appointed and delightful little room he had ever seen, the reverent Theron Ware sipped his unaccustomed coffee, and embarked on an explanation of his errand. Somehow the very profession of scholarly symbols about him, the great dark rows of encased and crowded bookshelves rising to the ceiling, the classical engravings upon the wall, the revolving bookcase, the reading stand, the mass of littered magazines, reviews, and papers at either end of the costly and elaborate writing desk, seemed to make it easier for him to explain without reproach that he needed information about Abram. He told them quite in detail the story of his book. The two others sat watching him through a faint haze of scented smoke, with polite encouragement on their faces. Father Forbes took the added trouble to nod understandingly at the various points of the narrative, and when it was finished gave one of his little approving chuckles. "'This skirts very closely upon sorcery,' he said smilingly. "'Do you know there is perhaps not another man in the country who knows a seriology so thoroughly as our friend here, Dr. Ledzmar?' "'That's putting it too strong,' remarked the doctor. "'I only follow at a distance, a year or two behind. But I dare say I can help you. You are quite welcome to anything I have. My books cover the ground pretty well up to last year. Delich is very interesting. But Boddison would come closer to what you need. There are several other important Germans, Schrader, Bunsen, Dunker, Hommel, and so on. "'Unluckily, I don't read German readily,' therein explained, with diffidence. "'It's a pity,' said the doctor. "'Because they do the best work, not only in this field, but in most others. And they do so much that the mass defies translation. Well, the best thing outside of German is, of course, Sace. I dare say you know him, though. The reverend Mr. Ware shook his head mournfully. I don't seem to know anyone,' he murmured. The others exchanged glances. "'But if I may ask Mr. Ware,' pursued the doctor, regarding their guest with interest through his spectacles, why do you specially hit upon Abraham? He is full of difficulties, enough just now at any rate to warn off the bravest scholar. Why not take something easier?' Therein had recovered something of his confidence. "'Oh, no,' he said. "'That is just what attracts me to Abraham. I like the complexities and contradictions in his character. Take, for instance, all that strange and picturesque episode of Hagar. See the splendid contrast between the craft and commercial guile of his dealings in Egypt and with Abimelech, and the simple straightforward godliness of his later years. No, all those difficulties only attract me. Do you happen to know, of course you would know, to those German books or the others, give anywhere any additional details of the man himself and his sayings and doings, little things which help, you know, to round out one's conception of the individual?' Again the priest and the doctor stole a furtive glance across the young minister's head. It was Father Forbes who replied, "'I fear you are taking our friend Abraham too literally, Mr. Ware.' He said, in that gentle semblance of paternal tones, which seemed to go so well with his gown. Modern research, you know, quite wipes him out of existence as an individual. The word Abram is merely an eponym. It means exalted father. Practically all the names in the Genesis chronologies are what we call eponymous. Abram is not a person at all. He is a tribe, a sept, a clan. In the same way, Shem is not intended for a man. It is the name of a great division of the human race. Heber is simply throwing back into allegorical substance, so to speak, of the Hebrews, Heth of the Hittites, Asher of Assyria. But this is something very new, this theory, isn't it? queried Theron. The priest smiled and shook his head. Bless you, no. My dear sir, there is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian theory more than two thousand years ago. As to this eponym thing, why St. Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago, he expressly says of these genealogical names, that is, peoples, not persons. It was as obvious to him, as much a common place of knowledge, as it was to Ezekiel eight hundred years before him. It seems passing strange that we should not know it now then, commented Theron. I mean, that everybody shouldn't know it. The forbes gave a little purring chuckle. Ah, there we get upon contentious ground, he remarked. Why should everybody be supposed to know anything at all? What business is it of everybody's to know things? The earth was just as round in the days when people supposed it to be flat, as it is now. So the truth remains always the truth, even though you give a charter to ten thousand separate numbscalls to examine it by the light of their private judgment, and report that it is as many different varieties of something else. But of course that whole question of private judgment versus authority is no man's land for us. We were speaking of eponyms. Yes, said Theron, it is very interesting. There is a curious phase of the subject, which hasn't been worked out much, continued the priest. Probably the Germans will get to it too, sometime. They are doing the best Irish work in their fields as it is. I spoke of Hebrew and Teth in Genesis, as meaning the Hebrews and Hittites. Now my own people, the Irish, have far more ancient legends and traditions than any other nation west of Athens, and you find in their myth of the Milesian invasion and conquest two principal leaders called Heber and Ith, or Heth. That is supposed to be comparatively modern, about the time of Solomon's temple. But these independent Irish myths go back to the fall of the Tower of Babel, and they have there an ancestor, one son of Jaffet, named Phineas Pharsa, and they ascribe to him the invention of the alphabet. They took their ancient name of Phene, the modern Phinean, from him. Oddly enough, that is the name which the Romans knew the Phoenicians by. And to them also as ascribe the invention of the alphabet. The Irish have a holy salmon of knowledge, just like the Chaldean manfish. The druid's tree worship is identical with that of the Chaldeans. As pagan groves you know, which the Jews were always being punished for building. You see, there's nothing new. Everything is built on the ruins of something else. Just as the material earth is made up of countless billions of dead men's bones, so the mental world is all alive with the ghosts of dead men's thoughts and beliefs, the wraiths of dead races, faiths, and imaginings. Father Forbes paused, then added with a twinkle in his eye. That paroration is from an old sermon of mine in the days when I used to preach. I remember rather liking it at the time. But you still preach, asked the Reverend Mr. Ware, with lifted brows. No, no more, I only talk now and again, answered the priest, with what seemed a suggestion of curtness. He made haste to take the conversation back again. The names of these dead and gone things are singularly pertinacious, though. They survive indefinitely. Take the modern name Marmaduke, for example. It strikes one specularly modern, up to date, doesn't it? Well, it is the oldest name on earth, thousands of years older than Adam. It is the ancient Chaldean Meridug, or Meridak. He was the young god who interceded continually between the angry Omnipotent A, his father, and the humble, unhappy Damkana, or earth, who was his mother. This is interesting from another point of view, because Meridak and Marmaduke is, so far as we can see now, the original prototype for our divine intermediary idea. I daresay, though, that if we could go back still other scores of centuries, we should find whole receding series of types of this Christian myth of ours. Theron Ware sat upright in the fall of these words, and flung a swift, startled look about the room. The instinctive glance of a man unexpectedly confronted with peril, and casting desperately about for means of defense and escape. For the instant his mind was aflame with this vivid impression that he was among sinister enemies at the mercy of criminals. He half rose under the impelling stress of this feeling, with the sweat standing on his brow, and his jaw dropped in a scared and bewildered stare. Then, quite a suddenly, the sense of shock was gone, and it was as if nothing at all had happened. He drew a long breath, took another sip of his coffee, and found himself all at once reflecting almost pleasurably upon the charm of contact with really educated people. He leaned back in the big chair again, and smiled to show these men of the world how much at his ease he was. It required an effort, he discovered, but he made it bravely, and hoped he was succeeding. It hasn't been in my power at all to lay hold of what the world keeps on learning nowadays about its babyhood, he said. All I have done is try to preserve an open mind, and to maintain my faith the more we know, the nearer we shall approach the throne. Dr. Ledzmar abruptly scuffled his feet on the floor, and took out his watch. I'm afraid, he began. No, no, there's plenty of time, remarked the priest, with his soft half-smile and purring tones. You finish your cigar here with Mr. Ware, and excuse me while I run down and get rid of the people in the hall. Father Forbes tossed his cigar end into the fender. Then he took from the mantle a strange three-cornered black velvet cap, with a dangling silk tassel at its side, put it on his head, and went out. Theron, being left alone with the doctor, hardly knew what to say or do. He took up a paper from the floor beside him, but realized that it would be impolite to go farther, and laid it down on his knee. Some trace of that earlier momentary feeling that he was in hostile hands came back and worried him. He lifted himself upright in the chair, and then became conscious that what really disturbed him was the fact that Dr. Ledzmar had turned in his seat, crossed his legs, and was contemplating him with a gravely concentrated scrutiny through his spectacles. This uncomfortable gaze kept itself up a long way beyond the point of good manners, but the doctor seemed not to mind at all. CHAPTER VIII. When Dr. Ledzmar finally spoke, it was in a kindlier tone than the young minister had looked for. I had half a notion of going to hear you preach the other evening, he said, but at the last minute I backed out. I daresay I shall pluck up the courage sooner or later and really go. It must be full twenty years since I last heard a sermon, and I had supposed that would suffice me for the rest of my life. But they tell me that you are worthwhile, and for some reason or other I find myself curious on the subject. Dr. Ledzmar seemed endubious, though the compliment might be. Theron felt himself flushing with satisfaction. He nodded his acknowledgment and changed the topic. I was surprised to hear Father Forbes say that he did not preach, he remarked. Why should he, asked the doctor, indifferently? I suppose he hasn't more than fifteen parishioners and a thousand who would understand him if he did, and of these probably twelve would join in a complaint to his bishop about the heterodox tone of his sermon. There is no point in his going to all that pains merely to incur that risk. Nobody wants him to preach, and he has reached an age where personal vanity no longer tempts him to do so. What is wanted of him is that he should be the paternal, ceremonial, authoritative head and center of his flock, advisor, monitor, overseer, elder brother, friend, patron, whatever you like, everything except a bore. They draw the line at that. You see how diametrically opposed this Catholic point of view is to the Protestant. The difference does seem extremely curious to me, said Theron. Now, those people in the hall, go on, put in the doctor, as the other faltered, hesitatingly. I know what you were going to say. It struck you as odd that he should let them wait on the bench there while he came up here to smoke. Theron smiled faintly. I was thinking that my parishioners probably wouldn't have taken it so quietly, but of course it is all so different. As chalk from cheese, said Dr. Letzmar, lighting a fresh cigar, I dare say everyone you saw there came either to take the pledge or to see that one of the others took it. That is the chief industry in the hall so far as I have observed. Now discipline is an important element in the machinery here. Coming to take the pledge implies that you have been drunk and are now ashamed. Both states have their values, but they are opposed. Sitting on that bench tends to develop penitence to the prejudice of alcoholism. But at no stage would it ever occur to the occupant of the bench that he was the best judge of how long he was to sit there. Or that his priest should interrupt his dinner or general personal routine in order to administer the pledge. Now I dare say you have no people at all coming to swear off. The reverend Mr. Ware shook his head. No, if a man with us got as bad as all that he wouldn't come near the church at all. He'd simply drop out and there would be an into it. Quite so, interjected the doctor. That is the voluntary system, but these fellows can't drop out. There's no bottom to the Catholic Church. Everything that's in stays in. If you don't mind my saying so, of course I view you all impartially from the outside, but it seems logical to me that a church should exist for those who need its help and not for those who by their own profession are so good already that it is they who help the church. Now turn a man out of your church who behaves badly. That must be on the theory that his remaining in would injure the church. And that in turn involves the idea that it is the excellent character of the parishioners which imparts virtue to the church. The Catholic's conception you see is quite the converse. Such virtue as they keep is stock on the tap, so to speak, here in the church itself, and the parishioners come and get some for themselves according to their need of it. Some come every day, some only once a year, some perhaps never between their baptism and their funeral. But they all have a right here, the professional burglar every wit as much as the speckless saint. The only stipulation is that they oughtn't to come under false pretenses. The burglar is in honor bound not to pass himself off to his priest as the saint, but that is merely a moral obligation established in the burglar's own interest. It does him no good to come unless he feels that he is playing the rules of the game, and one of these is confession. If he cheats there, he knows that he is cheating nobody but himself, and might much better have stopped away altogether. Theron nodded his head comprehendingly. He had a great many views about the Romish right of confession, which did not at all square with the statement of the case, but this did not seem especially fit time for bringing them forth. There was indeed a sense of languid repletion in his mind, as if it had been overfed and wanted to lie down for a while. He contented himself with nodding again, and murmuring reflectively, yes, it is all strangely different. His tone was an invitation to silence, and the doctor turned his attention to the cigar, studying its ash for a minute with an air of deep meditation and then solemnly blowing out a slow series of smoke rings. Theron watched him with an indolent placid eye, wondering lazily if it was, after all, so very pleasant to smoke. There fell upon this silence, with a softness so delicate, that it came almost like a progression in the hush, the sound of sweet music. For a little strain and source were alike indefinite, an impalpable setting to harmony of the mellowed light, the perfumed opalescence of the air, the luxury and charm of the room, then it rose as by a sweeping curve of beauty into a firm, calm, severe melody, delicious to the ear, but as cold in the mind's vision as moonlit sculpture. It went on upward with stately collectedness of power, till the atmosphere seemed all alive with the trembling consciousness of the presence of lofty souls, sternly pure and pitilessly great. Theron found himself moved, as he had never been before. He almost resented the discovery when it was presented to him by the prosaic mechanical side of his brain, that he was listening to organ music and that it came through the open window from the church close by. He would feign have reclined in his chair and closed his eyes and saturated himself with the uttermost fullness of the sensation, yet in absurd despite of himself, he rose and moved over to the window. Only a narrow alley separated the pastorate from the church. Mr. Ware could have touched with a walking stick the opposite wall. Directly facing him was the arched and mullion top of a great window, a dim light from within shown through the more translucent portions of the glass below, throwing out faint little bars of party-colored radiance upon the blackness of the deep passage way. He could vaguely trace by these the outline of some sort of picture on the window. There were human figures in it, and yes, up here in the center nearest him was a woman's head. There was a halo about it, and girdling rich, flowing waves of reddish hair, the lights in which glowed like flame. The face itself was barely distinguishable, but its half-suggested form raised a curious sense of resemblance to some other face. He looked at it closely, blankly, the noble music throbbing through his brain meanwhile. It's that madden girl. He suddenly heard a voice say by his side. Dr. Ledzmar had followed him to the window and was close at his shoulder. Theron's thoughts were now upon the puzzling shadowed lineaments on the stained glass. He saw now in a flash the resemblance which had baffled him. It is like her, of course, he said. Yes, unfortunately, it is just like her, replied the doctor, with a hostile note in his voice. Whenever I am dining here she always goes in and kicks up that racket. She knows I hate it. Oh, you mean that it is she who was playing, remarked Theron. I thought you referred to, at least, I was thinking of. His sentence died off in inconsequence. He had a feeling that he did not want to talk with the doctor about the stained glass likeness. The music had sunk away now into fragmentary and unconnected passages, broken here and there by abrupt stops. Dr. Ledzmar stretched an arm out past him and shut the window. Let's hear as little of that row as we can, he said, and the two went back to their chairs. Upon me for the question, the Reverend Mr. Ware said, after a pause which began to affect him as constrained, but something you said about dining, you don't live here then, in the house, I mean. The doctor laughed, a characteristically abrupt, dry little laugh, which struck Theron at once as bearing a sort of black sheep relationship to the priest's habitual chuckle. That must have been puzzling you no end, he said. That notion that the pastorate kept a devil's advocate on the premises. No, Mr. Ware, I don't live here. I inhabit a house of my own, you may have seen it. An old-fashioned place up beyond the race course, with a sort of tower at the back and a big garden. I dine here three or four times a week. It is an old arrangement of ours. Vincent and I have been friends for many years now. We are quite alone in the world, we too, much to our mutual satisfaction. You must come up and see me some time. Come up and have a look over the books we were speaking of. I am much obliged, said Theron, without enthusiasm. The thought of the doctor by himself did not attract him greatly. The reservation in his tone seemed to interest the doctor. I suppose you were the first man I have asked in a dozen years, he remarked, frankly willing that the young minister should appreciate the favour extended him. It must be fully that since anybody but Vincent Forbes has been under my roof. That is, of my own species, I mean. You live there quite alone, commented Theron, quite, with my dogs and cats and lizards and my Chinaman, I must not forget him. The doctor noted the inquiry in the others lifted brows and smilingly explained, He is my solitary servant. Perhaps he might not appeal to you much, but I can assure you he used to interest Octavius a great deal when I first brought him here, ten years ago or so. He afforded occupation for all the idle boys in the village for a twelve-month at least. They used to lie and wait for him all day long, with stones or horse chestnuts or snowballs, according to the season. The Irishman from the wagon works nearly killed him once or twice, but he patiently lived it all down. The Chinaman has the patience to live everything down. The Caucasian races included. He will see us all to bed, will that gentleman with the pigtail. The music over in the church had lifted itself again into form and sequence and defied the closed window. If anything it was louder than before, and the sonorous roar of the bass-pedals seemed to be shaking the very walls. It was something with a big lunged, exultant, triumphant swing in it, something which ought to have been sung on the battlefield at the close of day by the whole jubilant army of victors. It was impossible to pretend not to be listening to it, but the doctor submitted with an obvious scowl and bit off the tip of his third cigar with an annoyed air. You don't seem to care much for music, suggested Mr. Ware, when a lull came. Doctor Ledzmar looked up, lighted match in hand. Say, musicians, he growled, as it ever occurred to you, he went on, between puffs at the flame, that the only animals who make the noises we call music are of the bird family, a debased offshoot of the reptilian creation, the very lowest type of vertebrata now in existence. I insist upon the parallel among humans. I have in my time, sir, had considerable opportunities for studying close at hand the various orders of memelia who devote themselves to what they describe as the arts. It may sound a harsh judgment, but I am convinced that musicians stand at the very bottom rung of the ladder in the sub-seller of human intelligence, even lower than painters and actors. This seemed such unqualified nonsense to the revered Mr. Ware, that he offered no comment whatever upon it. He tried instead to divert his thoughts to the stormy strains which rolled in through the vibrating brickwork, and to picture to himself the large capable figure of Miss Madden, seated in the half-light at the organ board, swaying to and fro in a splendid ecstasy of power, as she evoked at will the superb ordered uproar. But the doctor broke insistently in upon his musings. All art, so-called, is decay, he said, raising his voice. When a race begins to brood on the beautiful, so-called, it is a sign of rot, and getting ready to fall from the tree, take the Jews, those marvelous old fellows, who were never more than a handful, yet have imposed the rule of their ideas and the gods upon us for fifteen hundred years, why? They were forbidden by their most fundamental law to make sculptures or pictures. That was at a time when the Egyptians, when the Assyrians, the other Semites, were running to artistic riot. Every great museum in the world now has whole floors devoted to statues from the Nile, and marvelous carvings from the palaces of Sargon. You can get the artistic remains of the Jews during the whole period into a child's wheelbarrow. They had the sense and strength to penalize art. They alone survived. They saw the Egyptians go, the Assyrians go, the Greeks go, the late Romans go, the Moors and Spain go, all the artistic peoples perish. They remained triumphing over all. Now at last their long-belated apogee is here, their decline is at hand. I am told that in this present generation in Europe the Jews are producing a great lot of young painters and sculptors and actors. Just as for a century they have been producing famous composers and musicians. That means the end of the Jews. What? You have only got so far as that. Came the welcome interruption of a cheery voice. Father Forbes had entered the room and stood looking down with a whimsical twinkle in his eye from one to the other of his guests. You must have been taken over the ground at a very slow pace, Mr. Ware, he continued, chuckling softly, to have arrived merely at the collapse of the New Jerusalem. I fancied I had given him enough time to bring you straight to the end of us all, with that Chinaman of his gently slapping our graves with his pigtail. That's where the doctor always winds up, if he's allowed to run his course. It has all been very interesting, extremely so, I assure you, faltered Theron. It had become suddenly apparent to him that he desired nothing so much as to make his escape, that he had indeed only been waiting for the host's return to do so. He rose at this and explained that he must be going. No special effort being put forth to restrain him. He presently made his way out. Father Forbes hospitably following him down to the door, and putting a very gracious cordiality into his adieu. The night was warm and black. Theron stood still in it the moment the pastor at door had closed. The sudden darkness was so thick that it was as if he had closed his eyes. His dominant sensation was of a deep relief and rest after some undue fatigue. It crossed his mind that drunken men probably felt like this as they leaned against things on their way home. He was affected himself, he saw, by the weariness and half nausea following a mental intoxication. The conceit pleased him, and he smiled to himself as he turned and took the first homeward steps. It must be growing late, he thought. Alice would be wondering as she waited. There was a street lamp at the corner, and as he walked toward it he noted all at once that his feet were keeping step to the movement of the music proceeding from the organ within the church. A vaguely processional air, marked enough in measure, but still with a dreamy effect. It became a pleasure to identify his progress with the quaint rhythm of sound as he sauntered along. He discovered, as he neared the light, that he was instinctively stepping over the seams in the flagstone sidewalk as he had done as a boy. He smiled again at this. There was something exceptionally juvenile and buoyant about his mood, now that he examined it. He set it down as a reaction from the doctor's extravagant and incendiary talk. One thing was certain. He would never be caught up at that house beyond the race course, with its reptiles and its Chinaman. Should he ever even go to the pastorate again? He decided not to quite definitely answer that in the negative, but as he felt now the chances were all against it. Turning the corner and walking off into the shadows along the side of the huge church building, therein noted, almost at the end of the edifice, a small door, the entrance to a porch coming out to the sidewalk, which stood wide open. A thin, pale, vertical line of light showed that the inner door, too, was ajar. Through this wee aperture, the organ music, reduced and mellowed by distance, came to him again with that same curious, intimate, personal relation which had so moved him at the start, before the doctor closed the window. It was as if it was being played for him alone. He paused for a doubting minute or two, with bowed head, listening to the exquisite harmony which floated out to caress and soothe and enfold him. There was no spiritual, or at least pious effect in it now. He fancied that it must be secular music, or, if not, then something adapted to marriage ceremonies, rich, vivid, passionate, a celebration of beauty and the glory of possession, with its ruling note of joy only heightened by soft, wooing interludes, and here and there the tremor of a fond, timid little sob. Therein turned away irresolutely, half frightened at the undrimped of impression this music was making upon him. Then all at once he wheeled and stepped boldly into the porch, pushing the inner door and hearing it rustle against its leatherened frame as it swung, too, behind him. He had never been inside a Catholic church before. End of Chapter 8 CHAPTER IX. Jeremiah Madden was supposed to be probably the richest man in Octavius. There was no doubt at all about his being its least pretentious citizen. The huge and ornate modern mansion, which he had built, putting to shame every other house in the place, gave an effect of ostentation to the Maddens as a family. It seemed only to accentuate the air of humility which enveloped Jeremiah as with a garment. Everybody knew some version of the many tales of float, which, in a kindly spirit, illustrated the incongruity between him and his splendid habitation. Some had it that he slept in the shed. Others told whimsical stories of his sitting alone in the kitchen evenings, smoking his old clay pipe, and sorrowing because the second Mrs. Madden would not suffer the pigs and chickens to come in and bear him company. But no matter how comic the exaggeration, these legends were invariably amiable. It lay in no man's mouth to speak harshly of Jeremiah Madden. He had been born a Connemara peasant, and he would die one. When he was ten years old he had seen some of his own family and most of his neighbors starve to death. He could remember looking at the stiffened figure of a woman stretched on the stones by the roadside with the green stain of nettles on her white lips. A girl five years or so older than himself, also a Madden, and distantly related, had started in despair off across the mountains to the town where it was said the poor law officers were dealing out food. He could recall her coming back next day while died with hunger and the fever. The officers had refused her relief because her bare legs were not wholly shrunken to the bone. While there's a calf on the shank there's no starvation. They had explained to her. The girl died without profiting by this official apathem. The boy found it burned inefficibly upon his brain. Now, after a lapse of more than forty years, it seemed the thing he remembered best about Ireland. He had drifted westward as an unconsidered, unresisting item in that vast flight of the famine years, others whom he rubbed against in that melancholy exodus, and deemed of much greater promise than himself, had done badly. Somehow he did well. He learned the wheelwright's trade, and really that seemed all there was to tell. The rest had been calm and sequent progression, steady employment as a journeyman first, then marriage and a house and lot, the modest start as a master, the move to Octavius in cheap lumber, the growth of his business always marked, of late years stupendous, all following naturally easily one thing out of another. Jeremiah encountered the idea among his fellows, now and again, that he was entitled to feel proud of all this. He smiled to himself at the thought, and then sent a sigh after the smile. But was it all but empty and transient vanity, the score of other Connemara boys he had known, none very fortunate, several broken tragically in prison or the gutter, nearly all now gone the way of flesh, were as good as he. He could not have it in his heart to take credit for his success. It would have been like sneering over their poor graves. Jeremiah Madden was now fifty-three, a little man of a reddened weather-worn skin, and a meditative, almost saddened aspect. He had blue eyes, but his scanty iron-gray hair showed raven black in its shadows. The width and prominence of his cheekbones dominated all one's recollections of his face. The long vertical upper lip and irregular teeth made in repose and unshapely mouth. Its smile, though, sweetened the whole countenance. He wore a fringe of stiff, steel-colored beard, passing from ear to ear under his chin. His weekday clothes were as simple as his workaday manners, fitting his short black pipe and his steadfast devotion to his business. On Sundays he dressed with a certain rigor of respectability, all in black, and laid aside tobacco, at least to the public view. He never missed going to the early low mass quite alone. His family always came later, at the ten o'clock high mass. There had been, at one time or another, a good many members of his family. Two wives had borne Jeremiah Madden a total of over a dozen children. Of these there survived now only two of the first Mrs. Madden's offspring, Michael and Celia, and a son of the present wife, who had been baptized Terence, but called himself Theodore. This minority of the family inhabited the great new house on Main Street. Jeremiah went every Sunday afternoon by himself to kneel in the presence of the majority, there where they lay in St. Agnes's consecrated ground. If the weather was good, he generally extended his walk through the fields to an old deserted Catholic burial field, which had been used only in the first years after the famine invasion, and now was clean forgotten. The old wagon-maker liked to look over the primitive neglected stones which marked the graves of these earlier exiles. Fully half of the inscriptions mentioned his county Galway. There were two naming the very parish adjoining his. The latest date on any stone was of the Remotor fifties. They had all been stricken down here in this strange land with its bitter winters, while the memory of their own soft, humid, gentle West Coast air was fresh within them. Looking upon the clumsy sculpture with its R.I.P., or pray for the soul of, have to be guessed under the stain and moss of a generation, there would seem to him but a step from this present to that heart-rending awful past. What had happened between was a meaningless vision, as impersonal as the passing of the planets overhead. He rarely had an impulse to tears in the new cemetery, where his ten children were. He never left this weed-grown, forsaken old God's acre, dry-eyed. One must not construct from all this the image of a melancholy man, as his fellows met and knew him. Mr. Madden kept his griefs, racial and individual, for his own use. To the men about him in the offices and the shops, he presented day after day, year after year, an imperturbable cheeriness of demeanor. He had always been fortunate in the selection of lieutenants and chief helpers. Two of these had grown now into partners, and were almost as much a part of the big enterprise as Jeremiah himself. They spoke often of their inability to remember any unjust or petulant word of his, much less any unworthy deed. Once they had seen him in a great rage, all the more impressive because he said next to nothing. A thoughtless fellow told a dirty story in the presence of some apprentices, and Madden, listening to this, drove the offender implacably from his employ. It was years now since anyone who knew him had ventured upon lewd pleasantries in his hearing. Jokes of that sort which women might hear he was very fond of, though he had not much humor of his own. Of books he knew nothing whatever, and he made only the most perfunctory pretense now and again of reading the newspapers. The elder son Michael was very like his father, diligent, unassuming, kindly and simple, a plain tall, thin red man of nearly thirty, who toiled in paper cap and rolled up shirt sleeves as the superintendent in the sawmill, and put on no heirs whatever as the son of the master. If there was surprise felt at his not being taken into the firm as a partner he gave no hint of sharing it. He attended to his religious duties with great zeal, and was president of the sodality as a matter of course. This was regarded as his blind side, and young employees who cultivated it and made broad their phylacteries under his notice certainly had an added chance of getting on well in the works. To some few whom he knew specially well Michael would confess that if he had had the brains for it he should have wished to be a priest. He displayed no inclination to marry. The other son Terrence was some eight years younger and seemed the product of a wholly different race. The contrast between Michael's sandy skin and long garnt visage, and this dark boy's handsome rounded face with its prettily curling black hair, large heavily fringed brown eyes, and delicately modeled features was not more obvious than their temperamental separation. The second lad had been away for years at school, indeed at the good mini-schools, for no one seemed to manage to keep him long. He had been with the Jesuits at Georgetown, with the Christian brothers at Manhattan, the sectarian Mount St. Mary's, and the severely secular Annapolis had both been tried and proved misfits. The young man was home again now, and save that his name had become Theodore, he appeared in no wise changed from the beautiful, willful, bold and showy boy who had gone away in his teens. He was still rather small for his years, but so gracefully molded in form and so perfectly tailored that the fact seemed rather in advantage than otherwise. He never dreamed of going near the wagon works, but he did go a good deal, in fact, most of the time, to the Nadama Club. His mother spoke often to her friends about her fears for his health. He never spoke to his friends about his mother at all. The second Mrs. Madden did not, indeed, appeal strongly to the family pride. She had been a Miss Foley, a dressmaker, and an old maid. Jeremiah had married her after a brief widowerhood, principally because she was the sister of his parish priest and had a considerable reputation for piety. It was at a time when the expansion of his business was promising certain wealth and suggesting the removal to Octavius. He was conscious of a notion that his obligations to social respectability were increasing. It was certain that the embarrassments of a motherless family were. Miss Foley had shown a good deal of attention to his little children. She was not ill-looking. She bore herself with modesty. She was the priest's sister, the niece once removed of a vicar general, and so it came about. Although those most concerned did not say so, everybody could see from the outset the pity of its ever having come about at all, the pious and stiffly respectable priest's sister had been harmless enough as a spinster. It made the heart ache to contemplate her as a wife. Incredibly narrow-minded, ignorant, suspicious, vain, and sour-tempered, she must have driven a less equable and well-rooted man than Jeremiah Madden to drink or flight. He may have had his temptations, but they made no mark on the even record of his life. He only worked the harder, concentrating upon his business those extra hours which another sort of home life would have claimed instead. The end of twenty years found him a rich man, but still toiling pertinaciously day by day as if he had his wage to earn. In the great house which he had built to please, or rather placate, his wife, he kept to himself as much as possible. The popular story of his smoking alone in the kitchen was more or less true. Only Michael as a rule sat with him, too weak-lunged for tobacco himself, but reading stray scraps from the papers to the lonely old man, and talking with him about the works, the while Jeremiah meditatively sucked his clay pipe. One or two evenings in the week the twain spent up in Celia's part of the house, listening with the awe of simple honest mechanics to the music she played for them. Celia was, to them, something indefinably less, indescribably more than a daughter and sister. They could not think there had ever been anything like her before in the world. The notion of criticizing any deed or word of hers would have appeared to them monstrous and unnatural. She seemed to have come up to this radiant and wise and marvelously talented womanhood of hers, to their minds, quite spontaneously. There had been a little Celia, a red-headed, sulky, mutinous slip of a girl, always at war with her stepmother, and affording no special comfort or hope to the rest of the family. Then there was a long gap, during which the father, four times a year, handed Michael a letter he had received from the superioress of a distant convent, referring with cold formality to the studies and discipline by which Miss Madden might profit more if she had been better brought up, and in closing a large bill. Then, all at once they beheld a big Celia, whom they spoke of as being home again, but who really seemed never to have been there before, a tall, handsome, confident young woman, swift of tongue and apprehension, appearing to know everything that there was to be known by the most learned, able to paint pictures, carve wood, speak in diverse languages, and make music for the gods, yet with at all a very proud lady, one might say, a queen. The miracle of such a Celia as this impressed itself even upon the stepmother. Mrs. Madden had looked forward with a certain grim tightening of her combative jaws to the homecoming of the red-head. She felt herself much more the fine lady now than she had ever been when the girl went away. She had her carriage now, and the magnificent new house was nearly finished, and she had a great number of ailments and spent far more money on doctor's bills than any other lady in the whole section. The flush of pride in her greatest achievement up to date, having the most celebrated of New York physicians brought up to Octavius by special train, still prickled in her blood. It was in all the papers, and the admiration of the flatterers and soft-sotterers, wives of Irish merchants and smaller professional men who formed her social circle, was raising visions in her poor head of going next year with Theodore to Saratoga and fastening the attention of the whole fashionable republic upon the variety and resources of her invalidism. Mrs. Madden's fancy did not run to the length of seeing her stepdaughter also at Saratoga. It pictured her still as the sullen and hated redhead, moping defiantly in corners or courting by her insolence the punishments which leaped against their leash in the stepmother's mind to get at her. The real Celia, when she came, fairly took Mrs. Madden's breath away. The peevish little plans for annoyance and tyranny, the resolutions born of ignorant and jealous egotism, found themselves swept out of sight by the very first swirl of Celia's dress-train. When she came down from her room, robed in peacock blue, the stepmother could only stare. Now, after two years of it, Mrs. Madden still viewed her stepdaughter with round-eyed uncertainty, not unmixed with wrathful fear. She still drove about behind two magnificent horses. The new house had become almost tiresome by familiarity. Her preeminence in the interested minds of the Dearborn County Medical Society was as towering as ever, but somehow it was all different. There was a note of unreality nowadays in Mrs. Donnelly's professions of wonder at her bearing up under her multiplied maladies. There was almost a leer of mockery in the sympathetic smirk with which the Mrs. Mangon listened to her symptoms. Even the doctors, though they kept their faces turned toward her, obviously did not pay much attention. The people in the street seemed no longer to look at her and her equipage at all. Worst of all, something of the meaning of this managed to penetrate her own mind. She caught, now and again, a dim glimpse of herself as others must have seen her for years. As a stupid, ugly, boastful, and bad-tempered old nuisance, it was always as if she saw this in the mirror held up by Celia. Of open discord there had been next to none Celia would not permit it, and showed this so clearly from the start that there was scarcely need for her saying it. It seemed hardly necessary for her to put into words any of her desires for that matter. All existing arrangements in the maddened household seemed to shrink automatically and to make room for her whichever way she walked. A whole quarter of the unfinished house set itself apart for her. Partitions altered themselves, doorways moved across to opposite sides, a recess opened itself tall and deep, for it knew now what statue simply because it seemed the Lady Celia willed it so. When the family moved into this mansion it was with a consciousness that the only one who really belonged there was Celia. She alone could behave like one perfectly at home. It seemed entirely natural to the others that she should do just what she liked, shut them off from her portion of the house, take her meals there as she felt disposed, and keep such hours as pleased her instant whim. If she awakened them at midnight by her piano or deferred her breakfast to the late afternoon they felt that it must be all right since Celia did it. She had one room furnished with only the vans and huge soft cushions, its walls covered with large copies of statuary, not too strictly clothed, which she would suffer no one, not even the servants, to enter. Michael fancied sometimes when he passed the draped entrance to this sacred chamber that the portiere smelt of tobacco, and he would not have spoken of it, even had he been sure. Old Jeremiah, whose established habit it was to audit minutely the expenses of his household, covered over round sums to Celia's separate banking account upon the mere playful hint of her holding her checkbook up without a dream of questioning her. That the stepmother had joy, or indeed anything but gall and wormwood, out of all this is not to be pretended. There lingered along the recollection of the family some vague memories of her having tried to assert an authority over Celia's comings and goings at the outset, but they grouped themselves as only parts of the general disorder of moving and settling, which a fortnight or so quite righted. Mrs. Madden still permitted herself a certain license of hostile comment when her stepdaughter was not present, and listened with gratification to what the women of her acquaintance ventured upon saying in the same spirit. But actual interference or remonstrance she never offered nowadays, the two rarely met for that matter and exchanged only the baldest and curtest forms of speech. Celia Madden interested all Octavius deeply. This she must have done in any case if only because she was the only daughter of its richest citizen, but the bold, luxuriant quality of her beauty, the original and peccant freedom of her manners. The stories told in gossip about her lawlessness at home, her intellectual attainments and artistic vagaries. These were even more exciting. The unlikelihood of her marrying anyone, at least any Octavian, was felt to add a certain romantic zest to the image she made on the local perceptions. There was no visible young Irishman at all approaching the social and financial standard of the Maddens. It was taken for granted that a mixed marriage was quite out of the question in this case. She seemed to have more business about the church than even the priest. She was always playing the organ, or drilling the choir, or decorating the altars with flowers, or looking over the robes of the acolytes for rints and stains, or going in or out of the pastorate. Clearly this was not the sort of girl to take a Protestant husband. The gossip of the town concerning her was, however, exclusively Protestant. The Irish spoke of her, even among themselves, but seldom. There was no occasion for them to pretend to like her. They did not know her except in the most distant and formal fashion. Even the members of the choir, of both sexes, had the sense of being held away from her at haughty arms' length. No single parishioner dreamed of calling her friend. But when they referred to her, it was always with a cautious and respectful reticence. For one thing she was the daughter of their chief man, the man they most esteemed and loved. For another, reservations they may have had in their souls about her touched close upon a delicately sore spot. It could not escape their notice that Protestant neighbors were watching her with vigilant curiosity, and with a certain tendency to wink when her name came into conversation, along with that of Father Forbes. It had never yet got beyond a tendency, the barest fluttering suggestion of attempted eyelid, but the whole Irish population of the place felt themselves to be waiting with clenched fists but sinking hearts for the wink itself. The Reverend Theron Ware had not caught even the faintest hint of these overtures to suspicion. When he had entered the huge, dark, cool vault of the church, he could see nothing at first but a faint light up over the gallery, far at the other end. Then little by little, his surrounding shaped themselves out of the gloom. To his right was a rail with some broad steps, rising toward a softly confused little mass of gray vertical bars, and the pale twinkle of tiny spots of gilded reflection, which he made out in the dusk to be the candles and trappings of the altar. Overhead the great arches faded away from foundations of dimly discernible capitals into utter blackness. There was a strange medicinal odor as of Kubeb's cigarettes in the air. After a little pause, he tiptoed noiselessly up the side aisle toward the end of the church, toward the light above the gallery. This radiance from the single gas jet expanded as he advanced, and spread itself upward over a burnished row of monster-metal pipes which went towering into the darkness like giants. They were roaring at him now, a sonorous deafening angry bellow which made everything about him vibrate. The gallery balustrade hid the keyboard and the organist from view. There were only these jostling brazen tubes, as big round as trees and as tall, trembling with their own furious thunder. It was for all the world as if he had wandered into some vast, tragical, enchanted cave, and was being drawn against his will, like fascinated bird in python, toward fate, at the savage hands of the swollen and enraged genie. He stumbled in the obscure light over a kneeling stool, making a considerable racket. On the instant the noise from the organ ceased, and he saw the black figure of a woman rise above the gallery rail and look down. Who is it? The indubitable voice of Miss Madden demanded sharply. Theron had a sudden sheepish notion of turning and running. With the best grace he could summon he called out an explanation instead. Wait a minute, I'm through now, I'm coming down. She returned. He thought there was a note of amusement in her tone. She came to him a moment later, accompanied by a thin, tall man whom Theron could barely see in the dark, now that the organ light, too, was gone. This man lighted a match or two to enable them to make their way out. When they were on the sidewalk, Celia spoke. Walk on ahead, Michael, she said. I have some matters to speak of with Mr. Ware. End of Chapter 9 Well, what did you think of Dr. Ledzmar? The girl's abrupt question came as a relief to Theron. They were walking along in a darkness so nearly complete that he could see next to nothing of his companion. For some reason this seemed to suggest a sort of impropriety. He had listened to the footsteps of the man ahead, whom he guessed to be a servant, and pictured him as intent upon getting up early next morning to tell everybody that the Methodist minister had stolen into the Catholic Church at night to walk home with Miss Madden. That was going to be very awkward. Yes, worse than awkward. It might mean ruin itself. She had mentioned aloud that she had matters to talk over with him. That of course implied confidences. And the man might put heaven only knew what construction on that. It was notorious that the servants did ascribe the very worst motives to those they worked for. The bare thought of the delight an Irish servant would have in also dragging a Protestant clergyman into the thing was sickening. And what could she want to talk to him about anyway? The minute of silence stretched itself out upon his nerves into an interminable period of anxious unhappiness. Her mention of the doctor at last somehow seemed to lighten the situation. Oh, I thought he was very smart. He made haste to answer. Wouldn't it be better to keep close to your man? He may think we've gone some other way. It wouldn't matter if he did, remarked Celia. She appeared to comprehend his nervousness and take pity on it, for she added, It is my brother Michael as good a soul as ever lived. He is quite used to my ways. The Reverend Mr. Ware drew a long comforting breath. Oh, I see! He went with you to bring you home. To blow the organ, said the girl in the dark, correctingly. But about that doctor, did you like him? Well, Theron began. Like is rather a strong word for so short an acquaintance. He talked very well, that is, fluently. But he is so different from any other man I have come into contact with that. What I wanted you to say was that you hated him, put in Celia firmly. I don't make a practice of saying that of anybody, returned Theron. So much at his ease again, that he put an effect of gentle smiling reproof into the words. And why specially should I make an exception of him? Because he's a beast! Theron fancied that he understood. I noticed that he seemed not to have much of an ear for music. He commented with a little laugh. He shut down the window when you began to play. He's doing so annoyed me because I wanted very much to hear it all. I never heard such music before. I came into the church to hear more of it, but then you stopped. I will play for you some other time, Celia said, answering the reproach in his tone. But tonight I wanted to talk to you instead. She kept silent in spite of this, so long now, that Theron was on the point of gestingly asking when the talk was to begin. Then she put a question abruptly. It is a conventional way of putting it, but are you fond of poetry, Mr. Ware? Well, yes, I suppose I am, replied Theron, much mystified. I can't say that I am any great judge, but I like the things that I like, and— Meredith, interposed Celia, makes one of his women, Emilia, in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe, like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again. Does it impress you that way? I don't know that it does, said he, dubiously. It seemed, however, to be her whim to talk literature, and he went on. I've hardly read Meredith at all. I once borrowed his Lucille, but somehow I never got interested in it. I heard a recitation of his once, though, a piece about a dead wife, and the husband and another man quarreling as to whose portrait was in the locket on her neck, and of which they're going up to settle the dispute, and finding that it was the likeness of a third man, a young priest. And though it was very striking, it didn't give me a thirst to know his other poems. I fancied I shouldn't like them, but I daresay I was wrong. As I get older, I find that I take less narrow views of literature—that is, of course, of light literature, and that, that—Celia mercifully stopped him. The reason I asked you was, she began, and then herself paused, or no, never mind that. Tell me something else. Are you fond of pictures, statuary, the beautiful things of the world, the great works of art, the big achievements of the big artists appealed to you, stir you up? Alas, that is something I can only guess at myself, answered Theron, humbly. I have always lived in little places, I suppose, from your point of view. I have never seen a good painting in my life. I can only say this, though, that it has always weighed on my mind as a great and sore deprivation, this being shut out from knowing what others mean when they talk and write about art. Perhaps that may help to get at what you are after. If I ever went to New York, I feel that one of the first things I should do would be to go to all the picture galleries. Is that what you meant? And would you mind telling me why you—why I asked you? Celia supplied his halting question. No, I don't mind. I have a reason for wanting to know. To satisfy myself whether I had guessed rightly or not about the kind of man you are, I mean in the matter of temperament and bent of mind and tastes. The girl seemed to be speaking seriously and without intent to offend. Madden did not find any comment ready, but walked along by her side, wondering much what it was all about. I daresay you think me too familiar on short acquaintance, she continued, after a little. My dear Miss Madden! He protested, perfunctorily. No, it is a matter of a good deal of importance, she went on. I can see that you are going to be thrown into friendship, close contact with Father Forbes. He likes you, and you can't help liking him. There is nobody else in this raw, overgrown, empty-headed place for you and him to like. Nobody except that man, that Dr. Ledzmar, and if you like him I shall hate you. He has done mischief enough already. I am counting on you to help undo it, and to choke him off from doing more. It would be different if you were an ordinary Orthodox minister, all encased like a Terrapin in prejudices and nonsense. Of course, if you had been that kind, we should never have got to know you at all. But when I saw you in McEvoy's cottage there, it was plain that you were one of us, I mean a man, and not a marionette or a mummy. I am talking very frankly to you, you see. I want you on my side, against that doctor and his heartless, bloodless science. I feel myself very heartily on your side, replied Theron. He had set their progress at a slower pace, now that the lights of the main street were drawing near, as if to prolong their talk. All his earlier reservations had fled. It was almost as if she were a parishioner of his own. I need hardly tell you that the doctor's whole attitude toward revelation was deeply repugnant to me. It doesn't make it any the less hateful to call it science. I am afraid, though. He went on, hesitatingly, that there are difficulties in the way of my helping, as you call it. You see the very fact of my being a Methodist minister and his being a Catholic priest rather puts my interference out of the question. No, that doesn't matter a button, said Celia, lightly. None of us think of that at all. There is the other embarrassment, then, pursued Theron, diffidently, that Father Forbes is a vastly broader and deeper scholar in all these matters than I am. How could I possibly hope to influence him by my poor arguments? I don't know even the alphabet of the language he thinks in on these subjects, I mean. Of course you don't, interposed the girl, with a confidence which the other, for all his meekness, rather winced under. That wasn't what I meant at all. We don't want arguments from our friends. We want sympathies, sensibilities, emotional bonds. The right person's silence is worth more for companionship than the wisest talk in the world from anybody else. It isn't your mind that is needed here, or what you know, it is your heart and what you feel. You are full of poetry, of ideals, of generous, unselfish impulses. You see the human, the warm-blooded side of things. That is what is really valuable. That is how you can help. You overestimate me, sadly, protested Theron, though with considerable tolerance for her error in his tone. But you ought to tell me something of this Dr. Ledzmar. He spoke of being an old friend of Father Forbes. Oh yes, they've always known each other, that is, for many years. They were professors together in a college once, heaven only knows how long ago, when they separated, I fancy they quarreled, too, before they parted. The doctor came here, where some relative had left him the place he lives in. Then in time the bishop chanced to send Father Forbes here, that was about three years ago, and the two men, after a while, renewed their old relations. They dined together, that is the doctor's stronghold. He knows more about eating than any other man alive, I believe. He studies it as you would study a language. He has taught old Maggie, at the pastorate there, to cook like the mother of all the Delmonicoes. And while they sit and stuff themselves, or lull about afterwards, like gourd snakes, they think it is smart to laugh at all the sweet and beautiful things in life, and to sneer at people who believe in ideals, and to talk about mankind being merely a fortuitous product of fermentation and twaddle of that sort, it makes me sick. I can readily see, said Theron, with sympathy, how such a cold material and infidel influence is that much shock and revolt, an essentially religious temperament like yours. Miss Madden looked up at him. They had turned into the main street, and there was enough light for him to detect something startlingly like a grin on her beautiful face. But I'm not religious at all, you know, he heard her say. I'm as pagan as anything. Of course there are forms to be observed, and so on. I rather like them than otherwise. I can make them serve very well for my own system, for I am, myself, you know, an out-and-out Greek. Why, I had supposed that you were full-blooded Irish, the Reverend Mr. Ware found himself remarking, and then on the instant was overwhelmed by the consciousness that he had said a foolish thing. Maybe where the folly lay he did not know, but it was impossible to mistake the gesture of annoyance which his companion had instinctively made at his words. She had widened the distance between them now and quickened her step. They went on in silence, till they were within a block of her house. Several people had passed them, who Theron felt sure must have recognized them both. What I mean was, the girl all at once began, drawing nearer again and speaking, with patient slowness, that I find myself much more in sympathy with the Greek thought, the Greek theology of the beautiful and the strong, the Greek philosophy of life and all that, than what is taught nowadays. Personally I take much more stock in Plato than I do in Peter, but of course it is wholly a personal affair. I had no business to bother you with it, and for that matter I oughtn't to have troubled you with any of our— I assure you, Miss Madden, the young minister began, with fervor. No, she broke in, and resigned in even downcast tone. Let it all be as if I hadn't spoken. Don't mind anything I have said. If it is to be, it will be. You can't say more than that, can you? She looked into his face again, and her large eyes produced an impression of deep melancholy, which Theron found himself somehow impelled to share. Things seemed all at once to have become very sad indeed. It is one of my unhappy nights, she explained, in gloomy confidence. I get them every once in a while, as if some vicious planet or other was crossing in front of my good star, and then I'm a caution to the snakes. I shut myself up—that's the only thing to do—and have it out with myself. I didn't know but the organ music should call me down, but it hasn't. I shan't sleep a wink tonight, but just rage around from one room to another, piling all the cushions from the devans to the floor, and then kicking them away again. Do you ever have fits like that? Theron was able to reply, with a good conscience, in the negative. It occurred to him to add, with Jaco's intent, I am curious to know, could these fits, as you call them, occupy a prominent part in Grecian philosophy as a general rule? Celia gave a little snort, which might have signified amusement, but did not speak until they were upon her own sidewalk. There is my brother, waiting at the gate, she said then, briefly. Well, then, I will bid you good night here, I think. Theron remarked, coming to a halt and offering his hand. It must be getting very late, and my, that is, I have to be up particularly early tomorrow. So good night, I hope you will be feeling ever so much better in spirits in the morning. Oh, that doesn't matter, replied the girl, listlessly. It's a very paltry little affair, this life of ours, at the best of it. Luckily, it's soon done with, like a bad dream. Tut, tut, I won't have you talk like that. But Theron, with a swift and smart assumption of authority, such talk isn't sensible, and it isn't good, I have no patience with it. Well, try and have a little patience with me, anyway, just for to-night. Said Celia, taking the reproof with gentlest humility, rather to her sensors surprise. I really am unhappy to-night, Mr. Ware, very unhappy. It seems as if all at once the world had swelled out in size a thousandfold, and that poor me had dwindled down to the merest-weave little red-headed atom, the most helpless and forlorn and lonesome of atoms at that. She seemed to force a sorrowful smile on her face as she added, but all the same it has done me good to talk with you, I am sure it has, and I daresay that by tomorrow I shall be quite out of the blues. Good-night, Mr. Ware, forgive my making such an exhibition of myself. I was going to be such a fine early Greek, you know, and I have turned out only a late Milesian, quite of the decadence. I shall do better next time, and good-night again, and ever so many thanks. She was walking briskly away now toward the gate, where the shadowy Michael still patiently stood. Therein strode off in the opposite direction, taking long deliberate steps, and bowing his head in thought. He had his hands behind his back, as was his want, and the sense of their recent contact with her firm, ungloved hands was, curiously enough, the thing which pushed itself uppermost in his mind. There had been a frank, almost manly vigor in her grasp. He said to himself that, of course, that came from her playing so much on the keyboard. The exercise naturally would give her large, robust hands. Finally he remembered about the piano. He had quite forgotten to solicit her aid in selecting it. He turned upon the impulse to go back. She had not entered the gate as yet, but stood, shiningly visible under the street lamp, on the sidewalk, and she was looking in his direction. He turned again, like a shot, and started homeward. The front door of the parsonage was unlocked, and he made his way on tiptoe through the unlit hall to the living room. The stuffy air there was almost suffocating, with the evil smell of a kerosene lamp turned down too low. Alice sat asleep in her old farmhouse rocking chair, with an inelegant darning basket on the table by her side. The whole effect of the room was as bare and squalid to Theron's newly informed eye, as the atmosphere was offensive to his nostrils. He coughed sharply, and his wife sat up and looked at the clock. It was after eleven. Where on earth have you been? She asked, with a yawn, turning up the wick of her sewing lamp again. You ought never to turn down a light like that, said Theron, with a complaining note in his voice. It smells up the whole place. I never dreamed of your sitting up for me like this. You ought to have gone to bed. But how could I guess that you were going to be so late? She retorted. And you haven't even told me where you were. Is this book of yours going to keep you up like this right along? The episode of the book was buried in the young minister's mind, beneath such a mass of subsequent experiences, that it required an effort for him to grasp what she was talking about. It seemed as if months had elapsed since he was in earnest about that book, and yet he had left the house full of it only a few hours before. He shook his wits together and made answer, Oh, bless you, no. Only there arose a very curious question. You have no idea, literally no conception, of the interesting and important problems which are raised by the mere fact of Abraham leaving the city of Ur. It's amazing, I assure you. I hadn't realized it myself. Well, replied Alice, rising, and with good humor and petulance struggling sleepily in her tone, all I've got to say is that if Abraham hadn't anything better to do than to keep young ministers of the Gospel out, goodness knows where, to all hours of the night, I wish to gracious he'd stayed in the city of Ur right straight along. You have no idea what a scholarly man Dr. Ledzmar is. Theron suddenly found himself inspired to volunteer. He has the most marvelous collection of books, a whole library devoted to this very subject, and he has put them all quite freely at my disposal, extremely kind of him, isn't it? Ledzmar, Ledzmar, queried Alice, I don't seem to remember the name. He isn't the little man with the birthmark who sits in the pew behind the love joys, is he? I think someone said he was a doctor. Yes, a horse doctor, said Theron, with a sniff. No, you haven't seen this Dr. Ledzmar at all. I—I don't know that he attends any church regularly. I scraped his acquaintance quite by accident. He is really a character. He lives in the big house, just beyond the race course, you know, the one with the tower in the back. No, I don't know. How could I? I've hardly poked my nose outside of the yard since I've been here. Well, you shall go, said the husband consolingly. You have been cooped up here too much, poor girl. I must take you out more, really. I don't know that I could take you to the doctor's place, without an invitation, I mean. He is very queer about some things. He lives there all alone, for instance, with only a Chinaman for a servant. He told me I was the only man he had asked under his roof for years. He isn't a practicing physician at all, you know. He is a scientist. He makes experiments with lizards and things. Theron, the wife said, pausing lamp in hand on her way to the bedroom. Do you be careful now? For all you know this doctor may be a loose man, or pretty near an infidel. You've got to be mighty particular in such matters, you know, or you'll have the trustees down on you like a thousand of bricks. I will thank the trustees to mind their own business, said Theron, stiffly, and the subject dropped. The bedroom window upstairs was open, and upon the fresh night air was born in the shrill jangling sound of a piano, being played off somewhere in the distance, but so vehemently that the noise imposed itself upon the silence far and wide. Theron listened to this as he undressed. It proceeded from the direction of the main street, and he knew, as by instinct, that it was the maddened girl who was playing. The incongruity of the hour escaped his notice. He mused instead upon the wild and tropical tangle of moods, emotions, passions, which had grown up in that strange temperament. He found something very pathetic in that picture she had drawn of herself in forecast, roaming disconsolate through her rooms the live-long night unable to sleep. The woeful moan of insomnia seemed to make itself heard in every strain from her piano. She was asserted also, but being unallumined, she missed the romantic pathos. I call it disgraceful, she muttered from her pillow, for folks to be banging away on a piano at this time of night there ought to be a law to prevent it. It may be some distressed soul, said Theron gently, seeking relief from the curse of sleeplessness. The wife laughed, almost contemptuously, distressed fiddle-sticks, was her only other comment. The music went on for a long time, rising now to strident heights, now sinking off to the nearest tinkling murmur, and broken ever and again by intervals of utter hush. It did not prevent Alice from at once falling sound asleep, but Theron lay awake it seemed to him for hours, listening tranquilly, and letting his mind wander at will through the pleasant antechambers of sleep. Where are more unreal fantasies than dreamland itself affords?