 Chapter 1 And all I saw was on the sunny ground, the flying shadow of an unseen bird. What was it about her? Coy Bishop at the poetry club that night, while a theological student with a cold in his head was declaiming from the second canto, sat perversely wondering. It was becoming to Coy to wonder—she did not, very often, being a blonde, with a small mouth and happy eyes. She changed the accent of her thoughts as they pursued her, out of irresistible sympathy perhaps with the reader, who experienced some elocutionary difficulty in changing his. Though indeed she found her own reverie so much more to the purpose just then than her desire for literary culture, that she conceived a distaste for the young gentleman as a tiresome interruption, and hoped that some of the girls would refuse him before the winter was over. What was it then about her? There was more sense than syntax in Coy's question—at least a sense perfectly clear to herself—who, as the only person concerned in this mute discussion, had obvious rhetorical rights therein. This was in the days when young ladies had not begun to have opinions upon the doctrine of evolution, and before feminine friendship and estrangements were founded on the distinctions between protoplasm and bioplasm. Yet even fifteen years ago, the resemblance of the human face to different types of animals was no novelty to any thoughtful fancy. So too the likenesses in the human body to forms of life incident to the vegetable world were surprising only to people ignorant of the anatomy of the nervous and arterial systems. Coy was not ignorant. Harmoth girls never were. Her mind was stocked with fact sufficient to bring these correspondences before it. But there she stumbled upon a dense idea across which neither the diploma of the harmoth female seminary, nor the course of study in which all harmoth girls engaged, could strike a light. Had anybody ever said that people resembled metals? Was it Galileo, or Socrates, Newton, perhaps? Or—or could it have been John Rose? The theological reader at the other end of the room just then, suddenly observing Miss Bishop's averted face, floundered into an acute embarrassment upon seeing that she blushed swiftly, and wondered if he had read from the love passages too long. His mind gathered an immediate accretion to the conviction that light literary work was unsuitable to the preparation for the gospel ministry. Coy was not blushing about John Rose. Young men are too common in harmoth to be easily blushed about. She was aware of a certain incongruousness in that fancy about the metals. What was the use of reading clubs, and suffering such anxiety about the coffee, when one took one's turn, if one could not tell whether one owed an idea to an old Greek, or to an evening caller? That she could have originated it, Coy never for an instant conceived. She left ideas to Avis. What she meant about the metals was this. All people in their physical natures are akin to some form of inorganic existence. Some, for instance, are clay, sheer clay, mud. Certain metals enter into the composition of certain temperaments, brass or iron, gold, silver or steel, stratifies in the nature, and gives character to body and soul. Who knows, Coy would have said if she could. Who knows but a skillful soul geologist may learn to detect these metallic traces in men and women, and can act upon the character of a soul's topography accordingly, can map it with some accuracy, can fathom its wealth or measure its barrenness, indicate the presence of its minds, discover its fossils, account for its deluges, prophesy its earthquakes, its volcanoes. It was surely in the old creed of alchemists that metals were endowed with scents and feeling, and possessed of either masculine or feminine qualities. Then why not the man or the woman with the scents or the trait of the metal? Now Avis was a magnet. His metallic theory had by this time rather run away with her, but of so much, she was sure, when Avis was a baby mother earth yielded pure perfect magnet up into her composition. Shrewd nature, never to be cheated out of her control over her children, had held back her gold, her gems, her silver, and her fine dumb pearl, and wrought into Avis just the one thing more precious than them all. People, to be sure, were artificially magnetized to a certain extent. Barbara Allen, for instance, turning the exact intellectual pose of her head, there was but one intellectual pose to Barbara's head, towards Philip Ostrander, while he read his paper on Spenssyrian meters, was a species of electromagnet. But Avis was, without alloy, lodestone. In Avis there existed that attribute, no, that quality, which was it? Coy remembered hearing one of the professors say at a supper that there was a difference between these two things, but she did not remember which was which. She seldom did. At all events Avis had that one particular coloring about her, Coy decided to call it coloring, which is in a woman powerful above all beauty, wit, or genius, that subtle thing which we name Charm. Now it was true and tender in Coy to sit thinking this about Avis. That was a wise word which said that, when we have ceased to enjoy the superiority of another, we have ceased to love him. Hence it may be the self-defensive strategy of affection that we feel our friend's advantage long before we allow ourselves to perceive it. Nay, in proportion to the depth of our feeling under it, are we not apt to have a frostbite of the intellect, which makes its distinct acknowledgement a matter of hard thawing. And Coy was not, by any means, a girl of liquid moods. She sometimes felt it proper to judge Avis very severely, else what was the use in having grown up with her. For instance, she had reproved her for staying so much by herself since she had come home. Barbara now thought that affectation it was plain to see, and affectation it would have been in Barbara, though of course she was too well bred to say so. Coy knew better than that. It was only morbidness. Coy had the glibness of most unaccentuated natures in the use of this convenient word, which is without a rival in its adaptability to cover all forms of character differing from one's own. There had been a ripple of surprise when Avis came into the club that night. The club met at Chattie Hogarth's. Chattie was the president's daughter and an invalid. Avis did not like to refuse poor Chattie. It was the first time that Miss Doble had appeared in Harmouth Society since her return from Florence. At this rate it was plain that Miss Cora Bishop's Ben-Syrian culture would be very deficient. Coy, with a pretty change of mental attitude, which had a pretty bodily expression down to the very tips of her fingers, tightening like growing shells about the covers of her book, brought her intellect to bear severely upon the business of the evening. But fly, ah, fly, far hence away, for fear lest to you hap that happened to me here. A low and singularly musical voice was pronouncing these words as Coy looked up. Not the cataral theologue, surely. He had finished his contribution to the evening's entertainment, thanked the muses, and Mr. Ostrander was reading. Philip Ostrander, the new tutor. There was always a new tutor to be considered in Harmouth University. He had not always, however, a musical voice. And to this wretched lady, my dear love, oh, too, dear love, love bought with death too dear. Clearly Mr. Ostrander was an effective reader, a cultivated reader, Coy said. Miss Dobel from her corner opposite the gentleman, sitting a little in the shadow, and giving equable and earnest attention to the performance of each member of the poetry club in turn, said only, an effective reader, but hesitated at the word, and listened thoughtfully. With sudden fear her picture down she threw and fled away, sang on the reader. All fast she fled, knee ever looked behind, as if her life upon the wager lay. Musical was the word, assuredly. Mr. Ostrander's voice held rather melody than harmony, but music beyond a question. There was a modesty and simplicity about its accent not common to young men in those stages of growth in which Harmouth knew them, perhaps a little uncommon in any young man. It suffused a penetrative sense of pleasure, of unexplained organic joy, like that of nature in her simpler moods. It had an effect not unlike that of an unseen brook, or a flying bird. Though the brook chanted, it ran, though the bird sang, it flew. Its sweetness was measured by its evanescence. People often noted Mr. Ostrander's voice. Young ladies had been heard to declare that it was, like Mozart. Davis Dobel, sitting in the shadowed corner of the president's parlor that night, had happened to place herself against some very heavy drapery, which clasped two warm arms of intense colour across the chill of a bay window. The colour was that called variously and lawlessly by upholsterers Cranberry, Garnet, or Ponzo, known to artists as Carmine. The material held a satin thread, which lent the curtains the luster of jewels in a dark setting, or of water under a flaming sky. In the gaslight and firelight of the room, the insensate piece of cloth took on a strange and vivid life, and seemed to throb as if it held some inarticulate passion, like that of a subject soul. Coy or Barbara would have known better than to have ventured their complexions against this trying background. Davis went to it as straight as a bird to a lighthouse on a dark night. She would have beaten herself against that colour, like those very birds against the glowing glass, and been happy, even if she had beaten her soul out with it as they did. She had a fierce kinship in her for that colour, of which she seldom spoke. She did not expect it to be understood. She did not care that it should be. Perhaps she imperfectly understood it herself. She only knew that it made her happy to be near it. At night, for instance, though she had felt this poetry club rather abhor, a positive wave of pleasure flowed to her from the sight and contact of that curtain, which she felt in every sense of soul and body. Davis was affected by colour as the more sensitive musical temperament is by sound. Colour divorced from form, crude and clear, was to her what the musical notation is to the composer, who, without striking a note, reads the score by the hour as other men read printed text. Besides, she knew perfectly well that the curtain became her. Against this background of the passion of Carmine, Davis, sitting silently the evening through, had a solitary look. There was a certain aloofness in her very beauty, if one chose to call by the name of beauty the kindling of her face, it was somehow unlike that of other handsome women. It cannot be said that she was quite without consciousness of it, no woman could have been. It might be rather that she made no effort to appear unconscious of it. She had nothing of that wide-eyed infantile look of distraction, which, in a grown woman, indicates the very quintessence of egoism. She carried about her an indefinable air of having been used to the love, or admiration probably, of men as well as women, which the most exquisitely modest women will sometimes wear, and which is as unmistakable as it is alluring to the eye. Her dress, made in the fashion of the time, fitting closely and without trimming, was of a negative tint, something toning upon black, else she should not, and so would not, have sat by the Carmine curtain. She wore, as all well-dressed women wore at that time, a very full white undersleeve, which completely concealed the outline of the arm. Over her shoulders a shawl of pale lace, white and very delicate, hung like a thistle down. She had a fresh but fine and restless colour, and brown, abundant hair. She had a generous mouth and a delicate ear. Her profile, when the Carmine curtain took it, had the harmony of a strong antique. "'Avis,' said Mrs. Hogarth, when Mr. Ostrander had finished his canto, and the little party of young people had fallen into that general discussion of the topic of the evening study which was usual in Harmouth clubs, "'Avis, my dear, are we to hear nothing from you to-night?' "'Oh, yes, Avis,' urged Chattie. "'You must excuse me,' pleaded Avis, in a voice more timid than one would have looked to hear from a young lady of so much presence. She spoke faintly, like a shrinking child. Indeed, it made her feel like one, coming from the strange changes of her life, suddenly back here among her old play-fellows, being called out by Mrs. Hogarth so, as if she were to recite a lesson. Mrs. Hogarth was one of those people who always made her feel as if she were a little girl, always would. It would not matter to Mrs. Hogarth if she had painted the Sistine Mary. There were others, however, in the Spencer Club, strangers across whom stirred a visible wave of interest, when Avis, speaking for the first time, drew all the eyes in the room towards the Carmine curtain. Coy remarked it, and felt proud of her, for Avis had got into the newspapers. It was seldom that a Harmouth woman got into the papers. It was only men—men at Harmouth—indeed, the university existed, she supposed, for the glorification of men. This was all right and proper. Coy had never been conscious of any depressing aspirations toward the college diploma, but she took an aromatic enjoyment, after all, in the fact that one of the professor's daughters had adopted a career. She was glad it was precisely Avis, and not Barbara, or some of the other girls, who had painted a good picture, and sold it in London. She enjoyed having it thoroughly understood in Harmouth that people who knew about such things—Coy was not quite sure who, but that did not matter—had predicted a brilliant future for the modest young lady who made that picture. "'May I not be pardoned,' repeated Avis. "'If I do not bring my share of the work to-night—I have been busy in other ways so long—it is not possible that I could find anything to say worth your hearing, on a subject which the rest of you have been studying all winter.' "'Avis,' said Coy suddenly from across the room, "'if I had done a real mean thing, should you want to know it?' "'No,' said Avis, "'if anybody I cared for could be mean, I should rather never know it.' She spoke in the graceful surface tone through which the serious instinct of an earnest nature can no more help penetrating than the sun can help shining through ornamented glass. "'You have turned over two leaves, Mr. Ostrander,' said Barbara Allen, who was looking up footnotes with him. "'And do you incline to Upton's conjecture? It seems to me, if we grant the Henry VIII theory, then Oona. "'It's about Oona that I've been mean,' said Coy rather loudly. "'Avis, I brought your sketch of Oona that you gave me. I know you'll let me show it. You never were a bit of a shirk now, Avis, and this is just your fair contribution to a Spencer evening. Please, Avis.' Avis did not please, that was plain, but she consented without any fuss, and the young people gathered about Miss Bishop to see the sketch. It was a sketch in charcoal, strongly but not roughly laid in, and preserved by a shellac which lent a soft colour, like that of a very old print, to the paper. It bore marks of the artist's peculiar style, for it was already recognised in art-circles that Miss Dobel had a style. The sketch was expressive of the lines. Ere long he came where Oona travelled slow, and that champion waiting her beside. By his like-seeming shield her knight by name she waned it was, and towards him gan ride. Approaching nigh she whisked it was the same, and with fair fearful humbleness towards him she came. Miss Dobel's Oona was a spirited figure. Did not ride the lion like a donkey, neither did she pat him like a dog in the approved manner. Followed her in a shadow almost as heavy as that which hides the Jupiter and Corregio's Io, dark, vague, and inscrutable as fate. She had been walking swiftly, the lethargy of collapse from motion had settled on every limb. Arrested in the full light, the woman curved one fine hand inward, like a shell, as if to warn the creature back. It was impossible to look upon this woman, and not say, she sees the man she loves. Her eyes leapt to him, her lips leaned to him, her whole being gravitated to him. "'Pretty girl,' said John Rose, who dared say anything to anybody, and besides he used to know Avis in college, very pretty girl, but how she holds her head! Put her into a harmless senior party now, she'd freeze a fellow into a sherbet. "'Was Oona so easily one, my dear?' asked Mrs. Hogarth, with a little matronly smile. "'Easily one.' A voice behind the young artist repeated these words in a protesting whisper, then gathering distinctness said, "'My dear Mrs. Hogarth, do you not see? Every nerve and muscle is tense for flight. She will turn and run before that clumsy night gets up to her, if she can.' Avis, turning with a grateful look to see who had interpreted her picture, felt Coy's hand laid upon her arm. "'Avis, may I present Mr. Ostrander?' Avis very ceremoniously bowed. As she did so, there flitted across her eyes, like the shadow of an unseen object, an expression which Coy found it so difficult to understand that she even made up her mind to ask her afterwards if she had objected to the introduction. But probably Avis had met far more interesting men in Florence, where it was understood that she had been much sought. "'May I?' urged Ostrander with hesitancy, putting out his hand for the sketch. On the back of it was written, with a brush dipped in a crimson water-colour, these words. She speaks no more of past. True is that true love hath no power to look in back, his eye be fixed before. "'I am glad not to have blundered,' he said simply, in handing the picture back. The weight of talk had by this time slipped from the picture, and he and the two young ladies stood slightly apart. "'But after all you see,' said the young man musingly, "'your truth is subject to love, omnipotently subject.' "'I am not responsible for Spencer's theology,' said Avis, laughing evasively, and an artist has such gloriously lawless moods. Why should I trouble myself to think about Oona every day? I had a pretty girl to draw, so I drew her. But I put the lion in, so people shouldn't make a mistake. It is better to be dumb than to be misunderstood.'" "'Who said that?' asked Ostrander with a fine smile. But he was conscious of feeling some curiosity over this superficial little speech of Miss Dobles. There was not a superficial stroke in the picture, nor in the speaker, to his mind. "'How do you know that I did not say it?' returned the young lady. "'Mr. Ostrander,' said Coy, "'Miss Hogarth wants you to bring Miss Doble the oysters. Do it gracefully. She'll sketch you while you are gone.' When Ostrander returned, Coy had been called away, and Avis was alone. As he handed her plate, their eyes met in a long, full grave. Look! Avis's eyes were neither brown nor black, yet they were very dark. One sometimes sees in the lining of waves on which the full sun shines, and in which the bright weeds are thick, a colour that resembles them. Philip Ostrander said, "'I have seen you before.'" Avis hesitated. She hesitated perceptibly before she answered. "'Yes.' "'Had you forgotten it?' Now Ostrander spoke with hesitation. He felt a little alarmed at his own interpidity. This young lady in the Fael's shawl, with the slightly disturbed carriage to her head, had suddenly acquired throughout her face and figure a beautiful protest which he felt it would be the easiest thing in the world to mistake. Should he go on, or stop exactly where he was? After a moment's silence, he said, with an accent of renewed decision, "'Had you forgotten it?' Avis lifted her eyelids very slowly, and in her honest, even voice said, "'No.'" End of chapter 1. Chapter 2 of The Story of Avis. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Elizabeth Klett. The Story of Avis by Elizabeth Stewart Phelps. Chapter 2 We rejoice in hunting truth in company as in hunting game. Themistias. For merveille of this night him to behold, full besley they waiten, young and old. Chaucer. Koi and John Rose walked home together in the dear old foolish country fashion, which Harmouth was too full of young people to outgrow. It was a night of many stars. The two, as they stepped out into the April weather, in deference to the Constitution of the Spencer Club, at the stroke of half-past ten, had involuntarily stood for a moment with uplifted faces in the thin, half-frozen snow. Great pulses of light beat before the eyes, where stars that are northern atmospheres know only in their happiest moods, were aflame that night. And arteries of fire ran along wastes of space, quivering as they ran. The very aether in which they hung seemed to be crossed with fine lines, shadow drawn on shadow, like the nerves of a mute and infinite organism, whose heart only, beating somewhere, impassioned, imprisoned, was hidden from the sight. But Koi and John Rose did not talk about the stars, it was not their way. The young man, if he had said anything, would have wrenched a pun out of them, perhaps, or propounded a conundrum, for no better reason than that the sight of them had moved him. And the first thing that Koi said was, Avis wishes us all in Guinea. But why? She hasn't seen so much astronomy since she was in Italy. She wants to be by herself, and reduce it to Prussian blue and Naples yellow. I think it must be very uncomfortable to be an artist. You're always looking at nature with a professional squint. You can't put yourself on any sort of terms with her, I should say, more than a photographer can with a complexion, or a dentist with front teeth. It was true enough that Avis, coming out of the close room into the freshening April night, had thrilled beneath the sudden throbbing of the stars, with an impulse which those only know whose life in its more poetic stages has been passed under the ardours of a southern sky. Some slight disturbing element which had entered into the evening for her, served only to make the coolness and calm and vastness more marked and reposeful. She had drawn a deep breath, as one does in readjusting oneself to a momentarily suspended action. She would have liked Mr. Ostrander better if he had not exclaimed, almost Florence, as he turned to take Barbara home. She was glad it was nobody but Barbara's brother, poor fellow, who was to walk with her, and that he did not expect her to talk about the stars, and that Coy and John Rose seemed so very comfortable to gather just in front of them. Her mind was preoccupied in ways to which the little inner life of a Harmouth Reading Club was as foreign as—ah, well—as foreign as the Carmine Curtain to the cold North Star. She felt no less annoyed than perplexed by the slight pressure of circumstances which seemed to have drawn her to-night into the exact atmosphere of that half-expressed life. She longed for the poise which solitude only can give, and half wished that she had not invited Coy to spend the night with her, and see the Venetian views to-morrow. Her fancy about the Curtain and the Lighthouse came before her with a strange pictorial vividness, as she walked on, talking commonplace to Barbara's brother. Out beyond the little sheltered town the great sea swept. She could hear the far beating of the tide upon the receptive April air. While the currents of these delicate human lives swept softly on in their elected channels, long waves thundered against the harbour-light. Miles away through the night some homeless bird took wing for the burning bosom of the reflector, and straight, straight, led as unerringly as instinct leads, as tenderly as love constrains, as brutally as nature cheats, with a glad fluttering at the delicate throat, with a trustful quiver of the flashing wings, like the bending of a hair-bell, like the breath of an arrow, came swaying, was tossed, was torn, and fell. She had been out when she was a child, after many a storm, and seen them dead there by hundreds on the rock. The light-keeper gathered them up into a bushel-basket once, for the scientific professor. They had strewn the shores of her young thought with untold and un-gathered suffering, those birds. No one thing had been more responsible for the attack of universal scepticism which she had successfully weathered at eighteen, in common with the existing senior class of college boys in her father's lecture room. Sometimes, in Florence, on a radiant night, when across the roofs, against the setting sun, the sparrows stood twittering in Italian—no New England sparrow could have rehearsed in that accent of his engagement for the season had depended on it—and the voices of children, whose parents' eyes had never questioned fate, poured their plyant chirrup into the Arnos monotone beyond the studio window. Then suddenly, like a drop of sleet upon a flower, would fall a vision of the harbour light at home, and towards it, through the freezing night, a bird fly to its death. She had not thought about the light before, since she had come home. But Coy and John Rose were walking together beneath the April stars. They did not talk of the Spenssyrian meters, nor the Uptonian theory. They discussed the oysters and the last engagement, the coming concert and the impending battle, the hazing scrape and the mission Sunday school. Then they talked a little about Barbara, and a little of the new tutor, and then about Miss Dobel, and then a little about art and life and earnestness, and about a man's understanding himself, and about the beauty of high purposes, and the preciousness of sympathy, and the uncertainty of the future, and many other original and impressive themes. And the young man made no conundrums now, and grew so grave that Coy took fright and asked him, was he going on a mission? But he answered gravely still, did she think him fit? To which he told him promptly, no, that he would set the cannibals to making bad puns before a week was out, and then he said he was afraid he should, and that he must be content with some obscure position among educated Americans who read the charades in the religious weekly Sunday mornings. And by that time they were at the gate of Professor Dobel's old-fashioned silent house, and stopped to wait for Avis. "'Poor Mr. Allen,' said Coy, turning the curve of her cheek in the starlight. "'I don't know about that,' said the young minister perversely. "'But Avis will never, never. I wouldn't grant that any woman I cared for would never, never, as long as she allowed me upon terms of friendship at all,' persisted the young man. "'But,' said Coy hurriedly, "'Avis is not like other women. She never was.' "'Then you admit,' began John Rose. "'I admit that I'm cold, and here she is,' shivered Coy. Coy was half frightened. If Mr. Rose had said any more about sympathy and friendship just then, she would have gone into the house without waiting for Avis. The colour had heightened in her young face. Her foot tapped the snow sharply in her impatience for Avis to come up. It seemed to her as if she and John Rose, standing there in the Professor's snowy, shaded yard, had been left alone, the only two people on the breathing earth. "'I never saw a woman have a latch-key before,' said Coy, as the two girls, having dismissed their escorts, lest so many voices should disturb the Professor, stood together upon the doorstep. "'Father is in the study,' said Avis, and I begged Aunt Chloe to go to bed. And the girls are tired, poor things. Why shouldn't a woman have a latch-key?' This was one of those propositions of which the burden of proof certainly lies with the negative, and Coy replied only by an amused smile as they passed into the large and silent house. It was lighted only in the halls, for Aunt Chloe was of an economical, old-fashioned temper, and thought it rather snobbish to waste good kerosene, when there was not brandy enough for the soldiers in the hospitals. Aunt Chloe had attacks of benevolent parsimony very peculiar to herself. When these overtook her, she resolutely denied herself her cup of Oolong tea at night for months at a time, and relinquished butter on her buckwheats of a morning. It was never quite clear to the rest of the family exactly how the United States Army was the better for that tea or butter. But Aunt Chloe has that sense of superior personal sacrifice, which is the most useful element in our charities beyond doubt, laughed Avis, as she and Coy went directly to her own room, treading softly past the study-door. It was abundantly light and warm in Avis's room. The fire was in the grate, the curtains were drawn, Avis's easy chair and slippers were before the hearth. It was a plain, rather a grave-place, that little bedroom—would have been prim with Avis out of it. Such a room one would look for in a house of which Professor Doble's sister had been the mistress for eighteen years. Aunt Chloe believed in good blankets and towels, and plenty of them, and when you bought a piece of furniture, buy the real always. But as long as there were home missionary boxes to be made up spring and fall, she could not see that the New Testament recommended a fashion in carpets, or that St. Paul could possibly have been sensitive to any lack of harmony and upholstery, or mantle ornaments. There was one fine bit of marble, the Mellian Venus. This with the few foreign trinkets and engravings which Avis had scattered about the room, seemed to be there only by tolerance, till she herself came into it. Then a fair congruence settled upon the air. Every thread of colour left in the old rug, and antiquated chints, and faint wallpaper, seemed to shake itself, and begin to shine. The firelight leapt to her feet like a lover. All the room budded and opened like a flower about her, as the two girls threw themselves in lithe attitudes upon the old rug, to toast their feet, like children at the fire. I find that I am talking rather lawlessly about these girls. Avis Doble was a woman of twenty-six, and Coy not many years the younger. But they were girls still to each other by that pretty trick of speech, and fancy, common in the comradeship of all women before marriage. Sometimes we find it in our way to smile at this illusion. But like all illusions, its pathetic side is its deepest and its truest one. Within the soul of every unwon woman abides eternal youth. Though the snow beyond her hair before the king may claim her, yet shall he not find violets and the birds of spring, when at last, at last, his coming feet shine beautiful upon the mountains of her ungarnered heart. It was quite the proper thing in Harmouth, as I have intimated, for young ladies to be somewhat seriously intelligent. And so, when Avis had got her long hair down over her white marino wrapper, and Coy, with a gay silk shoulder-robe thrown across her night-dress, was crimping her short front locks before the deepening fire, she began, What do you think about the club, Avis? I thought you called it a Chaucer club, said Avis. Oh, so it is, said Coy. We've been the whole mortal winter poking over Chaucer. We only got into Spencer last week. For my part, I hate him. Which? Why, Chaucer! I never did like old-fashioned poetry, and I never shall. I'm a terrible modern, Avis. I like Tennyson, and Whittier, and Longfellow, and the Brownings, and so on. And that scotch woman, Jean Ingello, cultivates me more than two Spencers. I've just had to set two on the old fellow like a Latin prose lesson all winter. We've really worked very hard," said Coy, with a sense of high literary virtue. I never worked so hard in a club in my life. That is Mr. Ostrander's doing. They say he's very talented. But then talented tutors are so common in harm-earth. I wonder we don't hear more of them afterwards, don't you? Coy wound her small fingers in and out of her crimping pins with a sinuous motion. Her two lifted bare arms and closing a face as innocent of sarcasm as a mocking-birds. Coy was one of the immortal few who can look pretty in their crimping pins. I suppose you've gone on having clubs, mused Avis, leaning her head back against the seat of the easy chair and clasping both arms above it. Every winter, just as we did when we were girls— Just the same, said Coy, as we did when you were at home six years ago. You know how it is with people. Some take physiology, and some take to religion. That's the way it is with places. It may be the Lancers, and it may be prayer meetings. Once I went to see my grandmother in the country, and everybody had a candy-pull, there were twenty-five candy-pulls and taffy-bakes in that town that winter. John Rose says, in the Connecticut Valley where he came from, it was missionary barrels, and I heard of a place where it was cold coffee. In harmath it's improving your mind. It comes hard on me," said Coy plaintively. It comes rather hard on me. Generally, I have an intellectual conviction that I ought to improve my mind, but nothing comes of it, you know, till there's a club. Then I groan, but I go in for it hardest of them all. Improving your mind is as bad as old poetry. I don't take to it," said Coy mournfully. I ought never to have been born in harmath. If I'd been just a downright society girl now, I could have been a dunce, and nobody ever have known the difference. I know I could. But the amount I've read this last four years, it positively makes my head swim to think of the titles of the books. And strictly speaking I'm not in the faculty either, you know, Avis. Her father resigned when I was—why it was the year I was going on with Jim Snow. I couldn't have been fourteen. I wish when he took to patenting his discoveries he had taken me with him. I think I could have patented a crimper that would make a simpler system of punctuation in your finger than this. And so," added Coy, turning one bare foot slowly around from side to side before the deep-bread fire, as if she were baking an exquisite bit of porcelain. And so we run to reading-clubs, and we all go fierce winter after winter to see who will get to the severest. There's a set outside of the faculty that descend to charades and music and inconceivably low intellectual depths, and some of our girls sneak off and get in there once in a while, like the little girl that wanted to go from heaven to hell to play Saturday afternoons, just as you and I used to do, Avis, when we dared. But I find I've got too old for that," said Coy sadly, when you're fairly past the college boys, and as far along as the law students. Or the theologues," interposed Avis. Yes, or the theologues, or even the medical department, that there positively is nothing for it but to improve your mind. Coy pathetically turned the other foot to the fire, and watched it with an attentive air, as if there were danger of its being overdone. And so we have the clubs. Sometimes its old poet served hot, and sometimes its plain history cut cold, and it may be a hash of the fine arts, or even a ragout of well-spiced science. One winter it was political economy. Oh! I had my first gray hairs that winter. But the season we took the positive philosophy they thought I was going into a decline. And we all fight to begin with in the politest possible way, every year as to who shall be in, and who shan't, and what we shall be allowed to have for supper. And the wrong people are always let in, and the right ones are always left out. And we have the usual number of flirtations, and the usual set of jokes. And we get off the old one about Barbara Allen's name regularly for each new club. And there are about so many engagements, and the usual number of offers, and so it goes. I think I must be growing old. I only had two last winter. Boy drew both feet back from the ardour of the fire, and folded them in the plaid silk robe. There was a silence which she broke by saying, Mr. Ostrander is tutor in Latin. Is John Rose going to settle over the central church? asked Avus. Probably. Father says he will have the call. It seems unspeakably funny to me to see John turn into a minister, said Avus. He was such a little scape-grace in college. I remember his telling me he should like to preach, but it would never do he was too fond of slang. Should say, what locks my brethren, before the sermon was over? Oh, yes, he's got past that, said Coy. He's very good, I think. He's a great deal better than I am. I'm not good at all. But I think myself will make a peculiar minister. He's so much like other men. Did you know there was talk of making a professor of Mr. Ostrander? Professor of geology? But I thought he was teaching Latin, said Avus. So he is, but there's no vacancy in Latin, and he's said to have a very versatile mind. He was once educated in medicine besides. Father says he has a very broad grasp. I should think so, said Avus, with an inscrutable look. How old prey is this Mr. Ostrander? Oh, he's very old, said Coy. He's almost thirty. He teaches German, too. He added persuasively after a silence. He has a class of young ladies. Barbara is in it, and I'm going to join when I get round to it. I should think you would like to go. What pretty arms you have, Avus! Avus had risen from the old rug, untwining her arms from the locked position above her head, which they had steadily retained while Coy was talking. The sleeves of the white wrapper fell away in the abrupt motion. They're not fat, like mine, said Coy, with a critical air. Did anybody ever tell you they were like the arms of Madame Rekamye in David's picture? Yes, said Avus. I have been told so. Let us go to sleep now, Coy. Avus was a light sleeper, and she lay long awake that night, watching the glow within the grate, and listening to the beat of the surf upon the shore, almost a mile beyond her father's house. She lay, rather she sat perfectly still, bolstered against Aunt Chloe's generous pillows, with one hand thrust through her long hair, and her strong young eyes fixed undazzled upon the white heat of the coals, till it had died to a delicate blush of colour, until the blue ashes had crept like the hue of death upon a human cheek across it. The window towards the sea was open, and the rhythm of the tide beat a strange duet with Coy's gentle happy breathing on the pillow at her side. It seemed to her a great song without words, full of uncaptured meanings, deep with unuttered impulse. She would have liked to fit expression to it. But Avus never wrote poetry, never had, even when she was in her teens. That was not the baptism with which she was baptized. Certain words, as sleep overtook her, adjusted themselves in a disjointed fashion to her thoughts. But when, starting, she roused and wakened, staring about the darkening room from which even the starlight was now gone, she found that they were only these. So fast she fled, knee ever looked behind, as if her life upon the wager lay. Young and a woman, tis thus she was mine. Gertas Pandora When Hegel Jobel, professor of ethics and intellectual philosophy, thirty-five years old and a bachelor, brought home one day to the old-fashioned house set apart for the incumbents in his department, a bride of nineteen New York summers, all harmoth shook its highly intellectual head. In the nature of things, it was argued, a man of years and reputation, a man preeminently a scholar as well as a student, a man capable of writing the celebrated brochure, was pitched a mystic. To say nothing of the correspondence with the Berlin Professor, whose name harmoth never could remember, on the subject harmoth always found it difficult to recall. Even throwing out of the question the pamphlet on the identity of identity and non-identity, which that other celebrated German, name also gone for the moment, was understood to have discussed at one of his Sunday dinners, before his mind gave way, such a man, it was urged, must find a slender stock of conjugal promise in the choice of a society-girl known to have been gay and understood to be peculiar. Any man, in fact, filling the metaphysical chair in harmoth university, must discover that he had mistaken the premises of his syllogism in marrying a spoiled child, whose parents had experienced difficulty even in restraining her within polite circles at all. This pretty young thing, who peeped shyly as an anemone out of her stylish hat at the congregation in the college chapel, looked dimwere enough and delicate as if a waft of wind or sun would wilt her. Yet it was distinctly understood, below the baited breath of harmoth, that the great professor had won this little lady but just in time to prevent her from running away to go upon the stage. Perhaps indeed it was a trifle gossipy to call it running away, and harmoth never gossiped. Miss Mercy had suggested as much as this, and the phrase was decorously amended. Miss Mercy was a mild and matronly power in harmoth always, even before her marriage. In fact, harmoth had privately selected her as the proper Mrs. Doble long before the New York girl was met or thought of. Was she not a lady of unexceptionable antecedence, whose family had been professional for as many generations as a good American could conscientiously count at all? Could it be denied that she was healthy, handsome, and thirty-one? Could one fail to recall her marked and lucrative success as principal of the harmoth female seminary? And if you chose to consider her known interest in the university's scientific endowments? And where else was there a woman who had read the professor's lectures on Spinoza through? It was not for a long while indeed, not until Miss Mercy had become the second Mrs. Hogarth, and the president's wife had avenged the spinster, that harmoth was comforted for this highly educated lady. But perhaps she was right, the little bride had not exactly run away, yet there was certainly a freak for the stage intercepted somewhere. And clearly she was a restless, glittering, inefficient thing, like a hummingbird turned radical. Would the great professor bend his well-salaried powers happily now to investigating the varieties of honey which his quiet garden roses might have and hold for a petulant beak? At all events it was as clear as the law of excluded middle that the great professor, like any small man who delays marriage till he has reached the age when his neighbors should choose for him, had made a serious blunder. The professor, however, like every other genius, had a touch of obstinacy about him, and persistently delayed as time ran metaphysically on to discover that he had blundered at all, was an inexcusably tedious while in beginning to be disappointed in his marriage venture, and ended by flatly refusing altogether to be miserable. This was an unscientific evolution from precedent which tried harmeth to the soul's depths. We can forgive our friend much. All true allegiance deepened in geometrical proportion to his deserved misfortune, and a crime can only test the temper of sound loyalty. But who can pardon him for not being unhappy when we have foretold him that he would be? If the professor's little wife were a hummingbird, she was a very tender and true one. She loved the great hand that had lured her from the fields on which the wild dew lay, and sipped his grave domestic honey with happy, upturned look. Once in a while, when the professor, strolling about the house in the play-hour which rigorously followed meals, saw through the window Mrs. Hogarth walking intelligently and plumply by upon the president's arm, a fine, scintillant gleam of fun twinkled in his deep-set eyes. He said nothing. He never said anything of any matter which kindled that rare spark under the cavern of his brows, but he strode across the room to where his wife was sitting, pulled his nervous hand out of his pocket, and, bending his gaunt, awkward shoulders, gently laid a finger under her chin, and turned her young face up to his. And then she said, "'Do you want anything, professor?' And then he said, "'Only to see if you look happy and well, my dear.'" Perhaps after that they looked into one another's eyes a moment with something of the gravity which is inseparable from all deep happiness, before she stirred, and put up both lithe arms to be caught, to be clasped, to be devoured against his heart. For it was the old, imperious story that we know so well, this story of the scholar and the woman, who can explain the witchery by which it pulls at the heartstrings of us all, as alive, as foused, as old as Abelard, as tender as Petrarch, as eternal as Dante, it keeps pace with our calmer passions and our serener time. In the sweep of preeminently well-regulated affections that eddied through the real life of that decorous university town, there was probably none more constraining, there certainly was none more controlling, than the love which had settled upon the quiet home where the rebellious little society girl had passed her honeymoon, had begun to extract from joy the elements of rest. It was the same old, intense, delirious story, the overwrought mind captured by the unused heart, the monarch will bent to the subject emotion, the great purpose gone suppliant to the great passion, a wise man become as a fool for a pair of velvet arms, and the author of the identity of identity and non-identity was the elected priest or victim of the ancient and honourable experience. That was as one chose to look at it. Harmouth might call him a victim, but in the glamour of his own vision, he was the odd priest chosen for an imposing and sacred service. No college boy in his classroom, struggling with his first fancy, struck wilder current than this grave man in his late, impetuous love. There was no girl, dreaming with shy eyes in the twilight before folded and glorified ideal, who had a simpler or more romantic faith in it, than the metaphysician held in his. In his pure and studious life, Hegel Dobel had been blessed above his own deeming or dreaming in this, that he had never spent his nature upon unworthy, or even mixed or insufficient feeling. The great passion of his life was one with its great love. The forces of both overtook him with the swiftness of a freshet. He yielded to the taunt with the childlike and ecstatic surprise that he would have felt at the discovery of a new axiom. It was Eden in the old-fashioned house, and the tremulous amazement of the first man and the first woman filled it. To them was given dominion over a world as unreal to souls incapable of sublimation by a great love as the paradise of Milton, or the palace of Kubla Khan. They were not of dull fancy, after all, who nicknamed the professor's wife. There was something birdlike in her, in her buoyant attitudes, in a way she had of turning her head sidewise to look at her husband as she perched upon the arm of his chair, in the cooing tones of her clear but uninsistent voice, and especially in a certain reserve that was very marked in her. We are apt to think of a bird as rather an open-hearted, impetuous creature, telling all she knows, pouring out her private affairs to the whole world's hearing by simple force of her nature. In fact, perhaps no creature is more capable of concealment. Naturalists load us with stories of her little stratagems. We have but to look intently in her eye to be made conscious that she has her mental reservations about many matters. In particular, opinions about ourselves, which it is not worthwhile to explain. The robin at your door on a June morning seems to be expressing himself with lavish confidence, but to a patient listener, his song has something of the exuberant frankness which is the most impenetrable disguise in the world. The sparrow on her nest under your terrace broods meekly, but the centuries have not rung from one such pretty prisoner a breath of longing for the freedom of the summer day. Do her delicate, cramped muscles ache for flight? Her fleet unused wings tremble against the long roots of the overhanging grass. She turns her soft eye upon you with a fine, far sarcasm. You may find out, if you can. It was in memory, perhaps, of some of the sweet nonsense of her honeymoon that Mrs. Dobel had selected for her little daughter the name of Avis. "'Mama,' said the child one day, not coming to her mother's knee, but sitting in the sunlight at some distance from her on the floor. What shall I be? What shall you be, Avis? Drayton Allen is going to keep a dog-store, and Ben Hogarth is going to be president of some college. What shall I be? What will Koi be, my dear, and Barbara? Koi is going to be a lady, she says, Mama. Very well, said Mama. And Barbara is going to get married." Mama made no reply. "'I think I'd rather keep dogs,' said Avis gravely after a silence. After some moments, receiving still no answer, the child rose to her feet, pushing back her thick hair from her eyes, standing in the full sun. "'Mama, did you run away?' "'Did I what?' "'Barbara says you ran away. She says you ran away in a stage.' "'Barbara told you a very wrong story, my child. Come here.' Avis threw down her playthings, and went slowly to her mother's knee. The mother put her arm expressively about the child, but still she did not speak. "'Mama,' began the little girl again, "'I have never seen anybody in a theatre. Some day you shall, when it is right and best.' "'Mama,' slowly after a pause, "'did you ever want to keep dogs?' "'Not exactly, Avis. I thought not. You know you didn't like that dog I had who drowned himself. Now what I'd like to know is this. If you wanted to keep theatres, why didn't you?' Mrs. Dobel, with some signs of agitation, laid aside her sewing, and drew her little daughter upon her lap. She looked into Avis's eyes for a long moment, with that instinctive assurance of sympathy and impulse of confidence, which from the hour when the baby's face is first upturned to hers, a mother feels at times in the presence of a woman child. "'Avis,' she said gravely, "'I married your papa. That is why I never acted in a theatre.' "'Oh, yes! Well, I didn't know. Did you never want to run away after you had married papa? Did you never care about the theatre again?' "'Mama, what is the matter? Are you cold? I don't want to go away and play. I haven't talked enough. I have a great many questions to ask you. I like you better than I do Barbara's mother. You're so much prettier, mama.' But long after that, after her pretty mother had become a thin, sweet vision, like a fading sketch to the young girl's heart, she recalled with incisive distinctness the way in which she had been put down from her mother's knee that morning, then impulsively recalled, snatched, kissed, and cried over with a gush of incoherent words and scalding tears. She never saw her mother cry before or after that. But all that she could understand of what she said was, "'Oh, my little woman! Mother's little woman! Little woman!' This glimpse into her mother's heart, the child, held by some blind and delicate sense of honour, never shared with any other human eyes. When she herself was a woman grown, and not till then, she asked her father once if he supposed her mother to have possessed genuine dramatic talent. Unquestionably, said the Professor, lifting his head, "'My wife was not like most women, given to magnifying every little aesthetic taste into an unappreciated genius. She had, beyond doubt, the histrionic gift. Under proper conditions, she might have become famous.' "'Why, then, should she never have cultivated such a gift?' ventured Avis. "'Because,' said the man simply. She married me.' "'But do you not suppose,' persisted Avis, that in all those years, shut up in this quiet house, she ever knew a restless longing in that—in those—in such directions?' Avis faltered beneath the old man's sharp and sudden look, bent upon her in a kind of deep indignant pity. "'Your mother was my wife,' he said superbly, "'and my wife loved me.' One other morning spent in the sunlight with her mother became pictorial in Avis's memory, one other only, and whether the first threw the more powerful focus upon the last, or the last against the first, it were difficult to say. Avis was nine years old that morning. It was winter, and her father waked her in the freezing dawn, while as yet only a single feather of gold fled to the east, where snow-clouds were piling high. Her mother had been ailing, ill, none knew exactly why. It was quite certain that she had no disease, only the waxing and waning and wasting of a fine feverish excitement, for which there seemed to be neither cause nor remedy. Last night they told her she was better. They had called her now in hot haste, swift feet passed to and fro across the halls, and voices broke and whispered at the doors. The child and her little night-gown pattered across the entry, shivering with cold. But when her mother asked her why she cried, she said Papa had hurt her hand when he took hold to lead her in. The light had broadened when she climbed upon the high old-fashioned bed, and pulled aside the clothes to get in under her mother's arm. Someone objected to this, but someone else said, Let the child alone. The colour in the east unfolded, and hung against the windows like a wing, she thought, as she lay down, and curled against her mother's heart. Mama, began the child, I am sorry you were sick, shan't I bring you a little picture that I drew last night? But her mother only answered, There, my daughter, mother loves her, there. It is a picture of a bird, mama, with trees, I thought you'd like to see it. And oh, mama, the wing, see the wing the sun has made upon the sky! It looks as if it was meant to wrap us, wrap us, wrap us in! As Avis, leaning on one little arm, uttered these words in the dreamy monotone of an imaginative child, the sun burst broke full against her face. It was then that there rang throughout the room a tense and awestruck cry. It was not in any sense a cry of pain, rather surcharge for the burden of wondering joy. Then there followed words resonant and vibrant. Under the shadow of his wing shalt thou abide. But when Avis, dazzled by the sunrise, turned her head, someone came from behind, and swiftly laid a gentle hand across her eyes. And though she begged them, till the day was dark again to let her go back, just for once and hear mama say, Mother loves her, none would give her leave. The professor's sister was a homeless widow of excellent Vermont intentions and high ideals and cupcake. In the course of a severe and simple life, she had known one passion and one only—the refined passion for flowers, which makes the soul poetry of many a plain prosaic story. She accepted her calling and election conscientiously when she was summoned to that most difficult of human tasks, the training of another woman's child. When Hagel's letter came, beseeching her to bring the presence of the ever-womanly into the desolate house of a heartbroken man, she prayed over it for a week. And then she spent another in wondering what it would be her clear duty to do by that child in regard to pickles and hot biscuit. Her poor mother had never attended to her diet. She held it to be the first business of any woman who undertook the management of a literary family, like her brothers, to attend properly to its digestion. And then she wrote her brother simply, saying nothing of either prayers or pickles, that she would come and do the best she could. Her soul's stipulation was that she might be allowed to bring her geraniums. Her best, to her glory, be it said, from the day when she first unpacked in the professor's house the rather rural-looking trunks, to which Avis's town-bread sensibility immediately objected, Aunt Chloe faithfully, evenly, and nobly did, and what could angels or mothers more? Yet when she had been in her brother's family a year, she came to him one day with a sunken look about the temples—a family look, indicating sternly repressed feeling, in which she bore at times a marvellous likeness to the professor. "'Hagel,' said the childless woman with a quivering lip, "'I should like to have your little daughter love me, but I'm afraid she never will.' "'What's the matter now?' the professor brought his black brows together, looking up from the copy of Hamilton's logic in which he was trying, with the patience of genius, to keep six places open with five fingers. "'Nothing very new,' sighed Aunt Chloe, "'the same old story. She had to rip her seam out of the—the undergarments, and she would not stir the jelly. And when I went to ask her why she had not made her bed, I found her putting tinfoil over the medallions that she brought from Mantua, making impressions of them with her fingernail. And the noses, Hagel, it'll displease you very much to see the noses. The lacquer one is as black as the register and the Apollo.' The professor strode across the room and into the parlor where Avis sat, deep in the broad, cushioned windowsill, with the medallions on her lap. A vein on the child's temple began to throb as she looked up. "'Papa, I never meant to hurt their noses. I didn't know they were so tender—just like sugar. I wanted to make a statue out of the tinfoil. Poor Apollo, Papa! He's just a snub!' Avis brought the medallions to him with a swift, sweet gesture of appeal, which too frequently converted her clearest faults into her most irresistible claims upon one's sympathy, or, as Aunt Chloe put it, turned her from a sinner into a sufferer at once. "'Never mind the noses,' said the professor, irritably tossing the medallions to one side. Avis, don't you love your Aunt Chloe?' "'Why, yes,' said Avis, with wide eyes. "'I like Aunt Chloe. It isn't Aunt Chloe that I hate.' "'What do you hate?' Her father looked at her across the great black logic, as a depressed garrison might look at the progress of an enemy whose movements it was utterly unable to forecast. "'Aunt Chloe says it's un-ladylike to hate,' said Avis. "'If it is, then I'd rather not be a lady. There are other people in the world than ladies. And I hate to make my bed. And I hate, hate to sew chemises. And I hate, hate, hate to go cooking round the kitchen. It makes a crawling down my back to sew. But the crawling comes from hating. The more I hate, the more I crawl. And Mama never cooked about the kitchen. I think that is a servant's work. I am very ugly to want to Chloe sometimes, Papa. And then I'm sorry. But I don't tell her unless I think of it.' "'On the whole, Papa,' added the child gravely, "'I have so many sorrows in this world that I don't care to live.' "'But,' said her father, with rather a gymnastic sternness, "'it is shirking not to attend to your work. There is nothing meaner than a shirk.' "'I'm not a shirk, Papa,' said Avis, with hot, indignant eyes. "'It isn't the work that I hate. I raked up the leaves for you last fall, and you said I did it most as well as Jacobs. And I go to the post-office every day. It's not the working, but the hating and the crawling that I mind.' "'It is proper that little girls should learn to sew and cook,' said the Professor of Intellectual Philosophy faithfully. He turned the leaves of the logic. He groped blindly among the marginal annotations. His two hundred unruly boys in the college classroom he could manage. But all the wisdom of Sir William was as the folly of a fool to teach a great man what to say to a little girl who did not like to sew. There was a vein of broad tolerance in Hageldobel's sturdy nature. He knew that it would give him a crawling to sit for fifteen minutes at that slow, nervous, precise drawing in and out of the needle, at which his little daughter, with flushed cheeks and twitching fingers, sat by the hour at a time. A crawling! call it a brain-fever. Yet it was unquestionably proper for all women—certainly for women belonging to himself—to be versed in those domestic accomplishments to which the feminine nature was created to adjust itself happily at some cost. So he only said, "'Well, well, my dear, do as Aunt Chloe bids you, and hate as few things as possible. And now, if you want to make statues, spare my medallions and put the tin foil on your doll's faces in the playroom.' "'My dolls!' said Avis. Her colour came swiftly. She lifted her little head with the helpless look of one, who receives a perfectly unvengeable insult. "'My Papa! I haven't had a doll since long before Mama died. You know I buried my last one under the tool-house, and Coy came to the funeral. But Papa and Sir William the Wise were gone.' "'It is an admitted principle in all systems of education,' said the Professor plaintively to his sister. That some concession shall be made to the moulds of individuality. In point of fact all theories cool off in such moulds at last. There certainly is this element of justice in the electoral system which is in danger of becoming so threatening to our universities.' "'Do you want Avis to give up learning to cook?' said Aunt Chloe with a puzzled face. "'Certainly not,' said her father, retreating promptly and safely behind the cover of the logic. Aunt Chloe sighed. In her heart she thought that if Avis failed in the end to grow up like other girls and be a credit to her, it would be owing chiefly to her poor mother's city bread, unthrifty system, of allowing servants to manage their work with so little personal supervision. It has been said that every human opinion is strong enough to have had its martyrs. Aunt Chloe would have gone to the stake cheerfully for this conviction." End of Chapter 3 CHAPTER IV Yet thoroughly to believe in one's own self, so one's self, or thorough, were to do great things. Tennison The illuminated hours of life are few, but those of our first youth have a piercing splendor which neither earlier nor later experience can by any chance absorb. Avis was, perhaps, sixteen, when one of these phosphorescent hours flashed upon her. To the day of her death she will recall the last detail that expressed it to her. As most of us revive the sunrise of love, or the first assault of grief, it is given to a few to individualize the moment when aspiration lays a coal of fire upon our young, dumb lips. She was down at her father's apple orchard, where the low, outskirting branches yield the outlook to the sea. Between her and the shore slept placently the expanse of the farm, for whose sake the Professor clung with syllogistic precision to the old-fashioned house so far from the centre of the town. The ripening grain had a sinuous, feminine motion under the light wind. The stalks of the young corn turned their edges in profile towards the sun, and the short silk hung like the hair of babies, tangled and falling. It seemed to Avis that she could see a stir now and then, and tiny green hands put up to push it out of winking eyes. In the meadow the long grass rioted, and black and brown and yellow bees made love to crimson clovers. How they blushed! She should think they would. They were too lavish of their honey, those buxom clovers, like an untaught country lassie with a kiss. But the daisies that skirted the old grey stone walls, the slim white daisies with the golden hearts, looked to the young girl's fancy like the virgins in the Bible-story, carrying each a burning lamp. She had climbed into the highest ariest branch of the highest tree in all the orchard, principally because Aunt Chloe said it was un-ladylike to climb. Anything, everything that Aunt Chloe did not want her to be, she would like to become that morning. It was purely because all things had gone narrowly wrong indoors that day that she had taken her little blue and gold girl's copy of Aurora Lee, and rushed out fiercely with it into the wide June weather. Because Aunt Chloe had made her late to the drawing-lesson to get that parlour swept, because she had been rude and wrong about it, and Aunt Chloe had been polite and right, because Aunt Chloe had said she would never grow gentle and womanly like other girls, and she had retorted that she hoped she never, never, never should. Because, too, she had told Aunt Chloe hotly to that good lady's extreme perplexity, that carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade, was not the imperative labour after all, and so had run up to get the poem, and see in secret if she had her quotation right. Because of all this, here they were, she and Aurora together, tossing like feathers in the apple-bow, high, still, safe from all the whole round, rasping world. Besides, Aunt Chloe never could find her, and would have to make the pudding by herself. So near are pettiest motives to our largest inspirations lie. She had easily thrown off the annoyance of the morning, with the blessed elastic temper of her young years, flinging herself upon one elbow, in that way of hers, pressing her fingers against her temple, and under the girlish fillet of her closely braided hair, balancing herself dexterously by her feet upon the tremulous bow, and so plunged into that idol of the June, that girl's gospel, which will be great as long as there are girls in the world to think it so. As few poems are ever read, as only an imaginative girl can read those few, Avis in the apple-bow read on and on. She had always meant to take just some such June morning, and find out to her satisfaction what the woman really meant to say who wrote that book, but had only nibbled at it hitherto indiscriminately after the manner of girls. Full of the vague restlessness which possesses all healthy young creatures, and the more definite hungers natural to a girl of her temperament, Avis was ready to be fed with any full-rich nutriment which seemed to promise fibrine to a growing soul. Poison or nectar, brimstone or mana, our lips slake at the nearest, be it what it may, in the crisis of that fine fever which comes but once in life. Avis was not without capability of relishing a certain quality of poison, not too fully flavored, of prismatic tints, and in a lilies' shape, like hyacinths. But it was silent as a convent in the apple-bows, the growing day drew on a solemn veil of light. Upon the sea the steps of unseen sacred feet were stirring, and so the mana fell. I like to think of this young thing, coiled there, like an oaryad in the apple-tree, with the shadow of a leaf set like a seal upon her parted lips, and her eyes leaping now and then, dumb prisoners, from her book to the horizon of the summer sea, her heart arising with the sweet imperiousness of girlhood, to solve the problem of her whole long life before that robin yonder should cease singing, or the next wave break upon the shore, or the lamp of one of the virgin daisies go out under the shadow of the over-flying cloud that swept across the meadow. The June was in her, with its nightingales. And are there not those of us who would yield our lives to know their Junes once more? Avis, long years after, used to remember with a positive thrill how she said aloud that morning, throwing back her head and turning her eye through the close leaves to the vivid sky, I am alive. What did God mean by that? And then was frightened lest the very oriol should understand her. It seemed to her to be the first time that she had ever really thought she was alive. But no one could understand. No one should understand. She sat up and looked at the birds with her finger on her lips. Despite our most conscientious endeavour to go on cutting bread and butter, it is on ideals that the world's starvation feeds. And to most of us who must perforce live prose, there is a charm beyond all definition in the development of a poetic nature. In the budding of all young gifts, in the recognition of all high graces, in the kindling of all divine fires, we feel a generous glow upon our own colder and serener fates, like the presence of the late evening light upon a drift of snow. When the passion of our lives has long since wasted into pathos, and hope has shriveled to fit the cell of care, we lean with increasing ardour on the hearts of those in whom purpose and poetry were permitted to be won. On Monday when the fire smokes, on Tuesday when the bills come in, on Wednesday when the children cry, it is not more smoke, more debt, more tears we want. Tell us rather how a statue grew, or how a poem sprang, or how a song was wrought, or how a prayer conceived. Avus climbed down from the apple-tree by and by, with eyes in which a proud young purpose hid. It had come to her now. It had all come to her very plainly. Why she was alive? What God meant by making her? What he meant by her being Avus Dobel, and reading just that thing that morning in the apple-bows, with the breath of June upon her? Avus Dobel, who had rather take her painting-lesson than go to the senior party? Just Avus, not Coy, nor Barbara. She climbed down and went straight into the house to her father. The Orioles looked kindly after her, and the maiden Daisy's held their lamps aloft to light the going of her impetuous feet. And perhaps either birds or flowers came nearer to the young girl's heart just then, than our tenderest imagination can ever take us. Aunt Chloe had made her pudding alone, and the Professor had eaten it. Avus thought of it as she went to the study. Very well, other women might make puddings. She went straight to her father's knee, and standing with her straw hat hanging by the strings between her crossed hands, said as simply as if she'd been asking for a kiss. Papa, I should like to be an artist, if you please. The Professor looked up from the critique of pure reason with a faint, appealing perplexity, like a child waked from a nap in a strange room. Oh, Avus, you have come. Your aunt missed you at dinner. I am sorry that you have made her more trouble about your domestic duties. Avus stood perfectly still. She seldom entirely lost the delicate, fluctuating color which lighted her face. At that moment she became, for one of the very few times in her life, absolutely pale. But Papa—she stretched out both her hands a little towards him—Papa, you do not understand me. I have decided this morning that I want to be an artist. I want to be educated as an artist, and paint pictures all my life. Papa, said the Professor, nonsense. Ah, well, we must forgive him. What should he know of the apple-trees and the orioles, the daisies and the blue and gold poem, and the way of a June morning with a young girl's heart? Nonsense, nonsense! repeated Professor Dobel. I can't have you filling your head with any of these womanish apings of a man's affairs, like a monkey playing tunes on a hand organ. He spoke of the rude irritability not common with him in his treatment of his little daughter, and under that cavern of his brows glittered the rare spark which his wife had known so well. Avus, by some subtle law of association, thought at that moment of her mother, and wondered if Papa were thinking of her also. But she said nothing, only turned miserably away. But my child—called her father more gently—come here, come here. What is all this about? I don't understand. If you want to go on with your drawing lessons, nothing is to prevent. That I know. Make yourself happy with your paint-box, if you like. That was a very pretty little copy which you made me of Sir William. The likeness was really preserved. Still, still, and forever Achilles will have his one little vulnerability. When he was a young man, Hagel Doble had been told that he resembled Sir William Hamilton. Perhaps he did, at all events, it was the pride and delight of his gentle life to think so. A portrait engraving of the great philosopher always hung above the study-table. To be invited into that study was to be expected to observe with more or less promptness that remarkable likeness. His college boys understood this so well, that he used frequently to remark, after a visit from some more than commonly promising young man, how much that resemblance seemed to be thought to increase with years. It was a very pretty little copy, repeated the Professor. I do not want to make pretty little copies, cried Avus with quivering lip. I, who love my art, would never wish it lower to suit my stature. The Professor of Intellectual Philosophy, not being well read and roarly, stared at this alarming quotation. But Avus went headlong on. I want to be educated. I want to be thoroughly educated in art. Mr. Maynard told me when I drew the Venus that I should go to Florence. Certainly, said her father, you shall go to Florence on due time like other educated young ladies, and when you have had enough of Mr. Maynard I will send you to the art school if that will make you happy. But fret no more about being this or that. Your business at present is to be a studious and womanly girl. Now kiss me and run beg on Chloe's pardon for being late to dinner. So lightly do we dispose of the instincts of the young thing lifting the first startled, self-concentrated eyes to ours. We pat the sleeping lion at our feet as if it were a spaniel, offering milk and sugar to the creature that would feed on flesh and blood, and settle after the trifling disturbance to our after-dinner nap. There was little enough of the lion in poor Avus's composition. She had all the self-consciousness of the artistic temperament with but a small share of its self-confidence. After this little scene with her father, she shrank and shriveled unto herself for a long time. She must be spurred, applauded to her possibility, or it was possible no longer. It seemed to her an arrogance not to measure her belief in herself by the belief of others in her. Above all, she craved at this time the daily stir and stimulus of an idealizing love. She wondered sometimes if in the feeling that other girls had about their mothers lay hidden the wine which she found missing from her youth. For a soul which loved her so that it could not help believing in her, Avus could have dared the world. But only mothers, she supposed, ever cared for a perplexed and solitary girl like that. Still, because her hour had come, and because the June was in her, she bent blindly to her young purpose in her young and groping way. But she quoted no more Mrs. Browning to her father, and if he praised her crayons, she sat politely silent. It is possible that this poised reserve excited in the professor more respect than a man may naturally be supposed to feel for the mental processes of his daughter at any age. When Avus, being nineteen, and having finished, as one was careful to say in Harmouth, her school education, thus delicately expressing the true Harmouth compassion for those types of society in which postgraduate courses of reading were not added to a young lady's accomplishments, when Avus was sent to Europe with the Hogarths and Coy to stay a year, she kissed her father good-bye as innocently and quite as charmingly as any young lady who was travelling to improve her accent and French. But when the year was out, he received from her a serious proposition, that her friends be allowed to return without her, and that she be permitted to remain for an indefinite time and study art. She hasn't underclothed enough, said Aunt Chloe decidedly. I only fitted her out for a year. When the professor, with a slow smile, suggested that possibly this was a difficulty which time and talent could overcome, Aunt Chloe looked very much depressed. If Hegel were going to give in to Avus at last, after all the good sense that he had shown in managing her, the poor girl would never be a credit to her, never, and her life's work would simply be thrown away. Aunt Chloe was of quite as unselfish a temper as the most of us, but she found it hard sometimes to trace the exact distinction between Avus's good and her own glory. Besides—erged Aunt Chloe—what is to become of her when she is married? Aunt Chloe held it to be impossible that any woman could make home happy without being able to make good gram bread, and Avus's last remarkable experiment in this direction was yet vividly in mind. How a course of instruction in oil-colours was to help the matter, it really was not immediately easy to see. But the professor strode about his study a little while, and then sat down and wrote, It is the custom, and the training of carrier doves, to let them loose from their places of confinement into the upper air. But those which do not return readily without interference are cast aside as too dull to be worth the trouble of further education. I let you go, my dear daughter, not without misgivings. But omnipotent nature is wiser than I. I should be duller than the dullest bird among them all, if I could not trust you at her hands." Avus had now plunged into a life which extremely few women in America, twenty years ago, found it either possible or desirable to lead. Those who know anything of art circles in Italy at that time will recall the impression made upon them by her superb perseverance in mastering the difficulties of her position long before her gift had been distinguished from a grace. The shy American girl of the unquestionable breeding and the yet half-blossomed beauty trod the mazes of Florentine life with an innocent rapture which protected her like a shining veil. The prospect of commanding proper surroundings to her venture had seemed at first a hopeless one. But one day her friends looked about to find that the little Yankee girl had brought her circumstances, like spaniels, to her feet. She had even provided herself with a chaperone of Mrs. Hogarth's own selection. She had then armed herself with a new palette, Coy's last kiss, and a single introductory letter, and with a sublime assurance of twenty, gone headlong to work. With a dumb joy such as some world-sick soul of us may feel in the actual long-delayed presence of death, this young thing now began in soul and sense to live. Now indeed she knew that she had never lived before. She read her life backwards, like the Chaldeans, translating all its suppressed text by the light of her aspiration, as happy lovers view their past by the illumination of their love, grudging to time every hour they have spent apart. We find that most of the traits of a great, affectionate passion exist in the young genius which is making the first use of its antennae. Her letter over the signature of Frederick Maynard was addressed to Alta Moura, once, as the harm with drawing-teacher was used to say with lifted head, once his master. "'Go over to Naples,' said the scrutinizing artist to whom the young lady had been advised to carry it, go and ask Alta Moura what he wants done with you." Avis went to Naples, and Alta Moura sent her back again. "'Are you ready, young lady?' he had said, to spend two days copying a carrot that hangs twenty feet away from you against the wall.' "'Two hundred, if I must,' said Avis. "'Then throw away everything in your very pretty portfolio. Maynard has taken to copying from the flat. Go back to Florence to a man whose name I'll give you in a street that I will tell you. Do exactly as he bids you for two years. Then come back to me.' "'She will get tired of it in six months,' said Aunt Chloe, but I'll knit her some woolen stockings, for I'm told the Italian winters are quite dramatic.' Aunt Chloe was still so old-fashioned that she would not say, neuralgic, even of a young lady's bones. And the professor paced the silent study, beneath the portrait of Sir William, wondering sometimes, when the sun got low, where it was he found that rather touching anecdote about the carrier doves. Avis, in the little bear studio, high, high, so high that it seemed by putting her hand out of the window in the roof, she could touch the purple wideness of the Florentine sky, had her own thoughts about those doves, perhaps. But she stooped to her task with a stern, un-girlish doggedness. In the little attic studio Pegasus kicked at the plough now and then, but on the whole behaved himself somewhat remarkably. She was young to have been so docile, but she thought nothing about that. She did not know that she was in any sense unusual in coining the fervors of twenty to secure that most elusive of human gifts, a disciplined imagination. The self-distrust which had shrunk at the first rebuff of Arder was her preservation now. She abandoned herself to the grating drudgeries involved in mastering the technique of art, with the passion of which it were not discerning not to say that it added to the fire of the artist something of feminine self-abnegation. In short, Avus shared the fate of most American art students in Italy at that time. She simply spent two years unlearning that she might begin to learn. When these two years were over, she went back to Altamura. He said, Now I will see if you can be taught. And took her with her chaperone into the atelier under his protection. She went to her place on the front settee before the students entered and left it after they had gone. When two years were gone again Altamura sent her to Paris and Paris sent her to Couture. When she was in Paris her father came out to see her. I think I would let the dove fly, he said, a little longer. One day Couture came into the studio and said, Manmousel, I will give you two years to make a reputation. Avus, standing with her slender thumb piercing her palette and her brushes gathered with it, thrust out her empty hand with a gesture which the great artist admired more thoroughly than he understood. Her magnificent rare pallor swept over her face and the quality of her features heightened. Her face and head looked larger when she was pale. She reminded him at that moment of Sedoma's Roxana in the Alexander's marriage at Rome. Copies from the fresco sometimes had that colossal look, and her face had taken on the tints of a deep engraving. If the archangel Gabriel had said, Manmousel, I will let you into heaven, but be so good as to wait an hour. Avus might have looked at him with just that widening of the eyes and parting of the lips. She went back to her apartments that morning with a dazzled face, but she walked weakly, and for the first time for nearly six years of hard work and hard homesickness, burst into a passion of hysterical tears. She had worked so gently and so humbly, with such patient service of her possibility, that success overtook her with more the grip of a paralysis than the thrill of a delight. For two days she lay actually ill upon her bed. For a week she did not enter the studio, but wandered about Paris like a spirit and a vision. The monarch of her young future had turned lover, and kneeled at her feet. His resplendent promise humbled her. Like the beggar maiden in the story, she stretched no hand out towards her crown, and stood with downcast eyes before the king Cephetua. It was under the glamour of these blinding days that she found herself one afternoon, wandering into the Madlène. The blessed Christian habit by which an overfull heart relieves itself in prayer to an unseen god, was on her. But just then the tropical Catholic atmosphere came more kindly to the New England girl than any other could. In the college chapel at home, perhaps, she would have found an audible public prayer at an arctic remove from the seething necessities of her mood. She kneeled at respers in the Madlène in that temper when a religion of emotions assumes a sacerdotal authority over the intellect, and even a superstition takes on the sacredness of faith. Avis, often found in such hours, a certain positive physical repose which only the reverent can understand, or even, perhaps, respect. It seemed to her that these prayers, which bore the burden of centuries of half-inarticulate human longing, surrounded her like everlasting arms, and upon the chant which held the cry of ages, she leaned her head, as John did upon the bosom of his lord. It would be impossible, of course, to explain to any other than a believer that this was something as much deeper than a physiological effect, as the soul is finer than the body. It was when Avis rose from her knees with the halo that John himself might have worn upon her face, and was about turning, with the few stray Parisians who surrounded her, to leave the Madlène that afternoon, that she found herself arrested by a pair of eyes fastened upon her in the twilight across the nave. They were the eyes of a fellow countryman, as it took but the flash of an instinct to see. Avis, in that flash, said, There is a remarkable face. Perhaps any one would have called it a remarkable face. Certainly, in the impressive background of the dim-lit church, it blazed like an amber intaglio. We see occasionally in women, but very rarely in a man, that union of the Saxon and the Southern which weds the fair hair to the dark eye. This face was set in a nimbus of bright hair, which, in a boyhood not too long departed, must have been of a deep, unusual gold. A beard which had never known a razor quite concealed the outline of what seemed to be a sensitive mouth, but of that it was impossible to tell. The young man wore his hair a little long, perhaps with either the carelessness or the affectation of a student. Avis liked the shape of his head, which her artist's glance had caught simultaneously with the colour and character of his eyes. These were black, with a large iridescent pupil, which she felt concentrated upon her—upon her lifted face, her arrested motion, her responsive attitude, like a burning glass. The telegraphic signal system of the human soul runs now and then in a cipher, blank to the most imaginative of us all. It is not easy to explain, but most of us will admit, the effect which people may produce upon one another by the outleaping eye in the prison of a chanced crowd. I do not think that I am overstating the case, in saying that these two—man and woman grown—going out from the Madeline that afternoon to the world's wide ends—would have thought of one another, as we think of an unread poem, or an undiscovered country, as long as either lived. In Avis this was very natural. The artist's world is peopled with the vanishing of such mute and unknown friends, and the artist's eye is privileged to take their passports as they come and go. But when, standing with her gloved hand upon a column, her face, draped in the dark veil of her little Parisian hat, bent slightly forwards and upwards, and her eyes gone rebel to all but the instinct of the moment, starting—she stirred and turned away. She felt a great tidal wave of colour surge across her face. If the eye of that amber god across the Madeline had caught an artist, it had held a woman. Avis became aware of this with a scorching, maidenly self-scorn. She dropped her veil, and hurried from the church.