 CHAPTER VII It's evidently a great thing in life to have got hold of a convenient expression and a sign of our inordinate habit of living by words. I have sometimes flattered myself that I live less exclusively by them than the people about me, paying with them, paying with them only, as the phrase is. There I am at it exactly again, rather less than my companions, who, with the exception perhaps, a little sometimes, of poor mother, succeed by their aid in keeping away from every truth in ignoring every reality as comfortably as possible. Poor mother, who is worth all the rest of us put together, and is really worth two or three of poor father, deadly decent as I admit poor father mainly to be, sometimes meets me with a look in some connection, suggesting that deep within she dimly understands, and would really understand a little better if she weren't afraid to. More like all of us, she lives surrounded by the black forest of the facts of life, very much as the people in the heart of Africa live in their dense wilderness of nocturnal terrors, the mysteries and monstrosities that make them seal themselves up in the huts as soon as it gets dark. She, quite exquisite little mother, would often understand, I believe, if she dared, if she knew how to dare, and the vague, dumb interchange then taking place between us, and from the silence of which we have never for an instant deviated, represents perhaps her wonder as to whether I may, and on some great occasion, show her how. The difficulty is that, alas, mere intelligent useless wretches I am, I've never hitherto been sure of knowing how myself, for am I not too as steeped in fears as any of them? My fears mostly are different, and of different dangers. Also I hate having them, whereas they love them and hug them to their hearts. But the fact remains that save in this private precinct of my overflow, which contains under a strong little brass lock several bad words and many good resolutions, I have never either said or done a bold thing in my life. What I seem always to feel, doubtless, cravenly enough, under her almost pathetic appeal, has been that it isn't yet the occasion, the really good and right one, for breaking out. Than which nothing could more resemble, of course, the inveterate argument of the helpless. Any occasion is good enough for the helpful, since there's never any that hasn't weak sides for their own strength to make up. However, if there could conceivably be a good one, I'll be hanged if I don't seem to see it gather now, and if I shan't write myself here, poor Charles Edward, in all truth, by failing to take advantage of it, they have in fact, I should note, one superiority of courage to my own, this habit of their so constantly casting up my poverty at me, poverty of character, of course I mean, for they don't, to do them justice, taunt me with having made so little. They don't, I admit, take their lives in their hands when they perform that act, the proposition itself being that I haven't the spirit of a fished-out fly. My point is, at any rate, that I designate them as poor only in the abysmal confidence of these occult pages, into which I really believe even my poor wife, for its universal, has never succeeded in peeping. It will be a shock to me if I some day find she has so far adventured, and this is not on account of the curiosity felt, or the liberty taken, but on account of her having successfully disguised it. She knows I keep an intermittent diary, I've confessed to her it's the way in which I work things in general, my feelings and impatience is, and difficulties, off. It's the way I work off my nerves, that luxury in which poor Charles Edward's natural narrow means, narrow so far as ever acknowledged, don't permit him to indulge. No one for a moment suspects I have any nerves, and least of all what they themselves do to them. No one, that is, but poor little mother again. Who, however, again in her way, old-timorously and tenderly has never mentioned it, any more than she has ever mentioned her own, which she would think quite indecent. This is precisely one of the things that, while it passes between us as a mute assurance, makes me feel myself more than the others verily her child, more even than poor little pig at the present strained juncture. But what I was going to say above all is that I don't care that poor Lorraine, since that's my wife's inimitable name, which I feel every time I write it I must apologize even to myself for, should quite discover the moments at which, first and last, I worked her off. Yet I've made no secret of my cultivating it as a resource that helps me to hold out. This idea of our holding out, separately and together having become for us, and quite comically as I see, the very basis of life. What does it mean, and how and why and to what end are we holding? I ask myself that, even while I feel how much we achieve, even by just hugging each other over the general intensity of it. This is what I have in mind, as to how we're living to that extent by the vain phrase, as to our really from time to time winding ourselves up by the use of it and winding each other. What should we do if we didn't hold out, and of what romantic, dramatic, or perhaps simply quite prosaic collapse would giving in in counter-distinction consist for us? We haven't at least formulated that, though it perhaps may be but one of the thousand things we are afraid of. At any rate we don't, I think ever so much as ask ourselves, and much less each other. We're so quite sufficiently sustained and inflamed by the sense that we're just doing it, and that in the sublime effort our union is our strength. There must be something in it, for the more intense we make the consciousness, and haven't we brought it to as fine a point as our frequently triumphant partnership at Bridge? The more it positively does support us. Poor Lorraine doesn't really at all need to understand in order to believe. She believes that, failing our exquisite and intimate combined effort of resistance, we should be capable together of something well desperate. It's in fact in this beautiful desperation that we spend our days, that we face the pretty grim prospect of new ones, that we go and come and talk and pretend, that we can sort, so far as in our deep-dyed hypocrisy we do can sort, with the rest of the family, that we have Sunday supper with the parents and emerge, modestly yet virtuously shining from the ordeal, that we put in our daily appearance at the works, for a utility nowadays, so vague that I'm fully aware, Lorraine isn't so much, of the deep amusement I excite there, though I also recognize how wonderfully, how quite charitably, they manage not to break out with it. Bless, for the most part, their dear simple hearts. It is in this privately exalted way that we bear, in short, the burden of our obliquy, our failure, our resignation, our sacrifice of what we should have liked, even if it be a matter we scarce dare to so much as name to each other. And above all, of our insufferable reputation for an abject meekness. We're really not meek a bit, we're secretly quite ferocious, but we're held to be ashamed of ourselves, not only for our proved business and competence, but for our lack of first-rate artistic power as well. It being now definitely on record that we've never yet designed a single type of ice-pitcher, since that the damnable form father's production more and more runs to, his uncanny ideal is to turn out more ice-pitchers than any firm in the world that has taken with their awful public. We've tried again and again to strike off something hideous enough, but it is always in these cases appear to us quite beautiful compared to the object finally turned out on their improved lines for the unspeakable market, so that we've only been able to be publicly rueful and depressed about it, and to plead practically an extenuation of all the extra trouble we saddle them with that such things are, alas, the worst we can do. We so far succeeded in our plea that we're held at least to sit, as I say in contrition, and to understand how little when it comes to a reckoning we really pay our way. This actually passes, I think, for the main basis of our humility, as it's certainly the basis of what I feel to be poor mother's unuttered yearning. It almost broke her heart that we should have to live in such shame. She has only got so far as that yet. But it's a beginning, and I seem to make out that if I don't spoil it by any wrong word, if I don't in fact break the spell by any wrong breath, she'll probably come on further. It will glimmer upon her, some day when she looks at me in her uncomfortable bewilded tenderness, and I almost hypnotize her by just smiling inscrutively back, that she isn't getting all the moral benefit she somehow ought out of my being so pathetically wrong, and then she'll begin to wonder and wonder all to herself if there mayn't be something to be said for me. She has limped along in her more or less dissimulated pain on this apparently firm ground that I'm so wrong that nothing will do for either of us but a sweet, solemn, tactful agreement between us, never to mention it. It falls in so richly with all the other things, all the real things we never mention. Well, it's doubtless an odd fact to be setting down even here, but I shall be sorry for her, on the day when her glimmer, as I have called it, broadens, when it breaks on her that if I'm as wrong as this comes to, why the others must be actively and absolutely right. She has never had to take it quite that way, so women, even mothers, will mysteriously get on, and heaven help her, as I say, when she shall. She'll be immense, tactfully immense, with father about it. She'll manage that for herself and for him all right, but where the iron will enter into her will will be at the thought of her having for so long given raison, as they say in Paris, or as poor Lorraine at least says they say, to a couple like Mariah and Tom Price. It comes over her, then, that she has taken it largely from them, and she has, that we're living in immorality, Lorraine and I. Ah, then, poor dear little mother! Upon my word I believe I'd go on lying low to this positive pitch of groveling, and Lorraine, charming absurd creature, would back me up in it too, in order precisely to save mother such a revulsion. It will be really more trouble than it will be worth to her, since it isn't as if our relation weren't of its kind, just as we are, about as dear as it can be. I'd literally much rather help her not to see than to see. I'd much rather help her to get on with the others. Yes, even including poor father, the fine, damp plaster of whose composition, renewed from week to week, can't be touched anywhere without letting your finger in, without peril of its coming to pieces. In the way easiest for her, if not easiest to her, she couldn't live with the others an hour, no, not with one of them, unless with poor little peg, save by accepting all their premises, save by making in other words all the concessions and having all the imagination. I ask from her nothing of this. I do the whole thing with her, just as she has to do it with them. And of this, au fond, as Lorraine again says, she is ever so subtly aware, just as, for it, she's ever so dumbly grateful. Let these notes stand at any rate for my fond fancy of that, and write it here to my credit in letters as big and black as the tearful alphabet of my childhood. Let them do this even if everything else registers meaner things. I'm perfectly willing to recognize, as grovelingly as anyone likes, that as grown up and as married and as preoccupied and as disillusioned, or at least so battered and seasoned by adversity, as possible, I'm in respect to her as achingly filial and as feelingly dependent all the time as when I used, in the far off years, to wake up a small, blubbering idiot from frightening dreams, and refuse to go to sleep again in the dark till I clutched her hands or her dress and felt her bend over me. She used to protect me, then, from domestic derision, for she somehow kept such passages quiet. But she can't, it's where her ache comes in. Protect me now from a more insidious kind. Well, now I don't care. I feel it in Mariah and Tom constantly, who offer themselves as the pattern of success in comparison with which poor Lorraine and I are nowhere. I don't say they do it with malice pre-pence, or that they plot against us to our ruin. The thing operates rather as an extraordinary effect of their mere successful blatancy, their blatant truly, in the superlative degree, and I call them successfully so, for just this reason, that poor mother is to all appearance perfectly unaware of it. Mariah is the one member of all her circle that has got her really, not only just ostensibly, into training, and it's part of the general irony of fate that neither she nor my terrible sister herself recognizes the truth of this. The others, even to poor father, think they manage and manipulate her, and she can afford to let them think it, ridiculously, since they don't come anywhere near it. She knows they don't, and is easy with them, playing over father in a special, with fingertips so lightly resting and yet so effectively tickling that he is never known at a given moment either where they were or, in the least, what they were doing to him. That's enough for mother, who keeps by it the freedom of her soul, yet whose fundamental humility comes out, and it's being so hidden from her that her eldest daughter, to whom she allows the benefit of every doubt, does damnably boss her. This is the one case in which she's not lucid. And to make it perfect, Mariah, whose humility is neither fundamental nor superficial, but whose avidity is both, comfortably cherishes as a ground of complaint, nurses, in fact, be atypically as a wrong, the belief that she's the one person without influence. Influence? Why, she has so much on me, that she absolutely coerces me into making here these dark and dreadful remarks about her. Let my record establish, in this fashion, that if I'm a clinging son, I'm, in that quarter, to make up for it, a detached brother. Deadly virtuous, and deadly hard, and deadly charmless, also more than anything, deadly sure I. How does Mariah fit on, by consanguinity, to such amiable characters, such real social values as mother and me at all? If that question ceases to matter, sometimes during the week, it flares up, on the other hand, at Sunday supper, down the street where Tom and his wife, overwhelmingly cheerful and facetious, contrasts so favorably with poor, gentle, sickly, as we doubtless appear, Lorraine and me. We can't meet them, that is, I can't meet Tom, on that ground, the furious football field to which he reduces conversation, making it echo, as with the roar of the arena, one little bit. Of course, with such deep diversity of feeling, we simply loathe each other, he and I. But the sad thing is that we get no good of it, none of the true joy of life, the joy of our passions and perceptions and desires, by reason of our awful, predetermined geniality, and the strange abysmal necessity of our having so eternally to put up with one another. If we could intermit that vain superstition, somehow, for about three minutes, I often think the air might clear, as by the scramble of the game of general post, or whatever they call it. And we should all get out of our wrong corners and find ourselves in our right, glaring from these positions, a happy and natural defiance. When I shouldn't be thus nominally and pretendedly, it's just too ignoble, on the same side or in the same air as my brother-in-law, whose value is that he has thirty business ideas a day, while I shall never have had the thirtieth fraction of one in my whole life. He just hums Tom Price with business ideas, whereas I just gape with the impossibility of them. He moves in the densest. We carry our heads there on August evenings, each with its own thick nimbus of mosquitoes. I'm but too conscious of how, on the other hand, I'm desolately outlined to all eyes, in an air as pure and empty as that of a fine Polish sunset. It was Lorraine, dear quaint thing, who some time ago made the remark on our leaving one of those weekly banquets, at which we figure positively as a pair of social skeletons, that Tom's faciche multiply evidently in direct proportion to his wealth of business ideas, so that whenever he's enormously funny we may take it that he's on something tremendous. He's sprightly in proportion as he's in earnest, and innocent in proportion as he's going to be dangerous. Dangerous I mean to the competitor and the victim. Indeed when I reflect that his jokes are probably each going to cost certain people, wretched helpless people like myself, hundreds and thousands of dollars. Their abundant flow affects me as one of the most lurid of exhibitions. I've sometimes rather wondered that Father can stand so much of him. Father who has, after all, a sharp nerve or two in him, like a razor gone astray in a valise of thick Jaeger under-clothing, though of course Mariah, pulling with Tom shoulder to shoulder, would like to see any one not stand her husband. The explanation has struck me as, mostly, that business-genial and cheerful and even obstreperous, without detriment to its being business, has been poor Father's ideal for his own terrible kind. This ideal is, further, that his home life shall attest that prosperity. I think it has even been his conception that our family tone shall, by its sweet innocence, fairly register the pace at which the works keep ahead, so that he has the pleasure of feeling us as funny and slangy here as people can only be who have had the best of the bargains other people are having occasion to rue. We of course don't know, that his mother and grandma don't, in any definite way, any more than I do thanks to my careful stupidity, how exceeding small some of the material is consciously ground in the great grim, thrifty mill of industrial success, and indeed we grow about as many cheap illusions and easy comforts in the faintly fenced garden of our little life as could very well be crammed into the space. Poor Grandma Ma, since I've mentioned her, appears to be always the aged wan flora of our paradise, the presiding divinity seated in the center, under whose pious traditions really quite dim and outlived, our fond sacrifices are offered. Queer enough the superstition that Granny is a very solid and strenuous and rather grim person, with a capacity for facing the world, that we, a relaxed generation, have weakly lost. She knows as much about the world as the tin jelly mold knows about the dinner, and is the oddest mixture of brooding anxieties over things that don't in the least matter, and of bland failure to suspect things that intensely do. She lives in short in a weird little waste of words, over the moral earnestness we none of us cultivate, yet hasn't a notion of any effective earnestness herself, except on the subject of empty bottles which have, it would appear, noble neglected uses. At this time of day it doesn't matter, but if there could have been dropped into her empty bottles at an earlier stage, something to strengthen a little any wine of life they were likely to contain, she wouldn't have figured so as the head and front of all our sentimentality. I judge it, for that matter, a proof of our flat modernity in this order, that the scant starch holding her together is felt to give her among us this antique and austere consistency. I don't talk things over with Lorraine for nothing, and she does keep for me the flashes of perception we neither of us waste on the others. It's the antiquity of the age of crinoline, she said the other day, apropos of a little carte-de-visite photograph of my ancestors as a young woman of the time of the war, looking as if she had been violently inflated from below, but had succeeded in resisting at any cost, and with a strange intensity of expression from her waste up. Mother, however, I must say, is as wonderful about her as about everything else, and arranges herself exactly to appear a mere contemporary illustration, being all the while three times the true picture, in order that her parent shall have the importance of the family portrait. I don't mean, of course, that she has told me so, but she cannot see that if she hasn't that importance, Granny has none other, but it's therefore as if she pretended she had a rough, a stomacher, a farthing-gale, and all the rest, grand old angles and eccentricities and fine absurdities, the hard white face, if necessary, of one who has seen witches burned. She hasn't any more than any one else among us a gleam of fine absurdity. That's a product that seems unable for the life of it, and though so indispensable, say, for literary material, to grow here. But exquisitely determined, she shall have character lest she perish, while it's assumed we still need her. Mother makes it up for her, with the turn of the hand, out of bits left over from her own, far from economically as her own was originally planned. Scraps of spiritual silk and velvet that no one takes notice of missing, and Granny, as in the dignity of her legend, imposes ridiculous old woman on every one. Granny passes for one of the finest old figures in the place, while Mother is never discovered. So is history always written, and so is truth mostly worshiped. There's indeed one thing I'll do with the justice to say, as to which she has a glimmer of vision, as to which she had it a couple of years ago. I was thoroughly with her in her deprecation of the idea that Peggy should be sent to crown her culture to that horrid co-educative college, from which the poor child returned the other day, so preposterously engaged to be married. And if she had only been a little more actively with me, we might perhaps between us have done something about it. But she has a way of deprecating with her long, knobby, mitten hand over her mouth, and of looking at the same time in a mysterious manner down into one of the angles of the room, it reduces her protest to a feebleness. She's incapable of seeing in it herself more than a fraction of what it has for her, and really thinks it would be wicked and abandoned, would savor of criticism, which is the cardinal sin with her, to see all or to follow any premise to it in the right direction. Still there was the happy chance at the time the question came up that she had retained on the subject of promiscuous colleges, the mistrust of the age of crinoline, as to which fact that little old photograph with its balloon petticoat and its astonishingly flat, stiff torso might have imaged some failure of the attempt to blow the heresy into her. The true inwardness of the history, at the crisis, was that our fell Mariah had made up her mind that Peg should go, and that, as I have noted, the thing our fell Mariah makes up her mind to, among us, is, in nine cases out of ten, the thing that has done. Mariah still takes, in spite of her partial removal to a wider sphere, the most insidious interest in us, and the beauty of her affectionate concern for the welfare of her younger sisters, is the theme of every tongue. She observed till Lorraine, in a moment of rare expansion more than a year ago, that she had got their two futures perfectly fixed, and that as Peggy appeared to have some mind, though how much she wasn't yet sure, it should be developed what there was of it, on the highest modern lines. Peggy would never be thought generally, that is physically attractive anyway. She would see about Alice, the brat, later on, though at mean time she had her idea, the idea that Alice was really going to have the looks and would, at a given moment, break out into beauty, in which event she should be run for that, and for all it might be worth, when she, Mariah, would be ready to take the contract. This is the kind of patronage of us that passes, I believe, among her more particular intubates, for so sweet of her. It being, of course, Mariah all over, to think herself subtle for just reversing with a, there, see how original I am? Any benighted conviction usually entertained. I don't know that anyone has ever thought Alice, the brat, intellectual, but certainly no one has ever judged her even potentially handsome, in the light of no matter which of those staggering girl processes that suddenly produce features in flat faces and figure in the void of space, as a conjurer pulls rabbits out of a sheet of paper and yards of ribbon out of nothing. Moreover, if anyone should know, Lorraine and I, with our trained sense for form and for values, certainly would. However, it doesn't matter, the whole thing being but a bit of Mariah's system of bluffing in order to boss. Peggy hasn't more than the brain, in proportion to the rest of her, of a small, swelling dove on a window-sill, but she's extremely pretty and absolutely nice, a little rounded, pink-billed presence that pecks up gratefully any grain of appreciation. I said to Mother, I remember at the time, I took that plunge. I hoped to goodness you're not going to pitch that defenseless child into any such bear-garden. And she replied that to make a bear-garden you first had to have bears, and she didn't suppose the co-educative young men could so be described. Well, then, said I, would you rather I should call them donkeys or even monkeys? What I mean is that the poor girl, a perfect little decorative person who ought to have iridescent gray plumage and pink shod feet to match the rest of her, shouldn't be thrust into any general menagerie cage, but be kept for the dove-coat and the garden, kept where we may still hear her coo. That's what at college they'll make her unlearn, she'll learn to roar and snarl with the other animals. Think of the vocal sounds with which she may come back to us. Mother appeared to think, but asked me after a moment, as a result of it, in which of the cages of the New York Art League menagerie, and among what sort of sounds I had found Lorraine, who was a product of co-education, if there ever had been one, just as our marriage itself had been such a product. I replied to this, well, what I could easily reply, but I asked, I recollect, in the very forefront, if she was sending Peg to college to get married. She declared it was the last thing she was in a hurry about, and that she believed there was no danger, but her great argument let the cat out of the bag. Moriah feels the want of it, of a college education. She feels that it would have given her more confidence. And I shall in fact never forget the little look of strange supplication that she gave me with these words. What it meant was, now, don't ask me to go into the question for the moment any further. It's in the acute stage, and you know how soon Moriah can bring a question to a head. She has settled it with your father, in other words, has settled it for him, settled it in the sense that we didn't give her, at the right time, the advantage she ought to have had. It would have given her confidence. From the want of which, acquired of that age, she feels she so suffers, and your father thinks it is fine of her to urge that her little sister shall profit by her warning. Nothing works on him, you know, so much as to hear it hinted that we failed of our duty to any of you, and you can see how it must work when he can be persuaded that Moriah hasn't colossal cheek, I took the words out of her mouth, with such colossal cheek what need have you of confidence which is such an inferior form. The long and the short of it was, of course, that Peggy went, moving on her side, poor dear, that it might for future relations give her the pull of Moriah. This represents, really, I think, the one spark of guile in Peggy's breast, the smart of a small grievance suffered at her sister's hands in the dim long ago. Moriah slapped her face, or ate up her chocolates, or smeared her coffee-book, or something of that sort, and the sound of the slap still reverberates in Peggy's consciousness. The mist-sweetness still haunts her palate, the smudge of the fair page. Pegg writes an immaculate little hand, and Moriah a wretched one, the only thing she can't swagger about, still affronts her sight. Moriah also, to do her justice, has a vague hankering, under which he has always been restive, to make up for the outrage, and the form the compunction now takes is to get her away. Which one of the facts of our situation all around, I may thus add, that every one wants to get someone else away, and that there are indeed one or two of us upon whom, to that end, could the conspiracy only be occult enough, which it can never, all the rest would effectively concentrate. Father would like to shunt Granny. It is monstrous his having his mother-in-law a fixture under his roof, though, after all, I'm not sure this patience doesn't rank for him as one of those domestic genialities that allow his conscience a boulder and tighter business hand. A curious service, this sort of thing, I note, rendered to the business conscious throughout our community. Mother at any rate, and small blame to her, would like to shoe off Eliza, as Lorraine and I, in our deepest privacy, call Aunt Elizabeth. The Tom prices would like to extirpate us, of course. We would give our most immediate jewel to clear the sky of the Tom prices, und so weiter. And I think we should really all band together for once in our lives in an unnatural alliance to get rid of Eliza. The beauty is to this, is moreover, that I make out the rich, if dim, dawn of that last-named possibility, which I've been secretly invoking all this year, for poor mother's sake, and is the act of my own right hand, moreover without other human help. But of that anon, the immediately striking thing be in meanwhile again the strange stultification of the passions in us, which prevents anything ever from coming to an admitted and avowed head. Mariah can be trusted, as I have said, to bring on the small crisis every time. But she's as afraid as any one else of the great one. And she's moreover, I write it with rapture, afraid of Eliza. Eliza is the one person in our whole community she does fear, and for reasons I perfectly grasp, to which moreover this extraordinary oddity attaches, that I positively feel I don't fear Eliza in the least, and in fact promise myself before long to show it. And yet don't at all avail by that show of my indifference to danger to inspire my sister with the least terror in respect to myself. Very funny, the degree of her dread of Eliza, who affects her evidently as a person of lurid worldly possibilities. The one innocent light in which poor Mariah wears for me, what Lorraine calls a weird pathos. And perhaps after all, on the day I shall have justified my futile passage across this agitated scene and my questionable utility here below every way, by converting our aunt's lively presence into a lively absence it may come over her that I am to be recognized. I, in fact, dream at times with high intensity that I see the prices some day quite turn pale as they look at each other and find themselves taking me in. I've made up my mind, at any rate, that poor mother shall within the year be relieved in one way or another of her constant liability to her sister-in-law's visitations. It isn't to be endured that her house should be so little her own house, as I've known Granny and Eliza between them, though after a different fashion succeed in making it appear. And yet the action to take will, I perfectly see, never by any possibility come from poor father. He accepts his sister's perpetual re-arrivals under the law of her own convenience with a broad-backed serenity which I find distinctly irritating, if I may use the impious expression, and which makes me ask myself how he sees poor mother's position at all. The truth is poor father never does see anything of that sort, in the sense of conceiving it in its relations. He doesn't know, I guess, but what the prowling Eliza has a position, since this is the superstition that I observe even my acute little arraign can't quite shake off. He takes refuge about it as about everything, truly, in the cheerful vagueness of that general consciousness on which I have already touched. He likes to come home from the works every day to see how good he really is, after all, and it's what poor mother thus has to demonstrate for him by translating his benevolence, translating it to himself and to others into housekeeping. If he were only good to her, he mightn't be good enough, but the more we pig together around him, the more blandly patriarchal we make him feel. Eliza, meanwhile, at any rate, is spoiling for a dose, if ever a woman required one, and I seem all ready to feel in the air the gathering elements of the occasion that awaits me for administering it, all of which it is a comfort somehow to mourn or away on here. As I read over what I have written, the aspects of our situation multiply so, in fact, that I note again how one has only to look at any human thing very straight, that is, with the minimum of intelligence, to see it shine out in as many aspects as the hues of the prism, or place itself, in other words, in relations that positively stop nowhere. I've often thought I should like some day to write a novel, but what would become of me in that case, delivered over, I mean, for my subject to my extravagant sense that everything is part of something else. When you paint a picture with a brush and pigments, that is all on a single plane, it can stop at your guilt frame, but when you paint one with a pen and words, that is, in all the dimensions, how are you to stop? Of course, as Lorraine says, stopping, that's art. And what are we artists like, my dear, but those drivers of trolley cars in New York, who by some divine instinct recognize in the forest of pillars and posts the white-striped columns at which they may pull up? Yes, we're drivers of trolley cars charged with electric force and prepare to go any distance from which the consideration of a probable smash ahead doesn't deter us. That consideration deters me doubtless, even a little here, in spite of my seeing the track to the next bend so temptingly clear. I should like to note, for instance, for my own satisfaction, though no fellow, thank God, was ever less afraid of the ignoble fear of inconsistency, that poor mother's impunement of my acquisition of Lorraine didn't in the least disconcert me. I did pick Lorraine, then, a little bleeding stray lamb collared with a blue ribbon and a tinkling silver bell, out of our New York Bear Garden, but it interests me awfully to recognize that, whereas the kind of association is one I hate for my small Philistine sister, who probably has the makings of a nice, dull, dressed, amiable, insignificant woman, I recognize it perfectly as Lorraine's native element and my own, or at least don't at all mind her having been dipped in it. It has tempered and plated us for the rest of life, and to an effect different enough from the awful metallic wash of our company's admired ice-pitchers. We artists are at the best, children of despair, a certain divine despair, as Lorraine naturally says, and what jollier place for laying it in abundantly than the art-league. As for Peg, however, I won't hear of her having anything to do with this. She shall despair of nothing worse than the hang of her skirt or the moderation of her hat, and not often, if I can help it, even of those. That small vow I'm glad to register here. It helps, somehow, at the juncture I seem to feel rapidly approaching, to do the indispensable thing Lorraine is always talking about, to define my position. She's always insisting that we've never sufficiently defined it, as if I've ever for a moment pretended we have. We've re-fined it to the last intensity, and, of course, now shall have to do so still more, which will leave them all even more bewildered than the boldest definition would have done. But that's quite a different thing. The furthest we have gone in the way of definition—unless indeed this too belongs but to our invincible tendency to refine—is by the happy rule we've made that Lorraine shall walk with me every morning to the works, and I shall find her there when I come out to walk home with me. I see, unreading over, that this is what I meant by our, in speaking above of our daily little heroism in that direction. The heroism is easier and becomes quite sweet, I find, when she comes so far on the way with me and when we linger outside for a little war last talk before I go in. It's the drullest thing in the world and really the most precious note of the mystic influence known in the place as the force of public opinion, which is, in other words, but the incubus of small domestic conformity. I really believe there's nothing we do or don't do that excites in the bosom of our circle a subtler sense that we're au fond, uncanny. And it's amusing to think that this is our sole tiny touch of independence, that she should come forth with me at those hours, that she should hang about with me, that we should have it last, and when she sees me again first, small sweet things to say to each other, as if we were figures in a chromo or a tableau vivant keeping our Trista the style. No, this, quite inexplicably, transcends their scheme and baffles their imagination. They can't conceive how or why Lorraine gets out or should wish to at such hours. There's a feeling that she must violate every domestic duty to do it. Yes, at bottom, really, the act wears for them, I discern, an insidious immorality, and it wouldn't take much to bring public opinion down on us in some scandalized way. The funniest thing of all more over is that that effect resides largely in our being husband and wife. It would be absent holy if we were engaged or lovers, a publicly parading gentleman friend and lady friend. What is it we can have to say to each other in that exclusive manner, so particularly, so frequently, so flagrantly, and as if we hadn't chances enough at home? I see it's a thing mother might accidentally do with father, or Mariah with Tom Price, but I can imagine the shouts of hilarity, the resounding public comedy with which Tom and Mariah would separate, and also how scantily poor little mother would permit herself with poor big father, any appearance of a grave leave-taking. I've quite expected her, yes, literally poor little mother herself, to ask me, a bit anxiously, any time, these six months, what it is that at such extraordinary moments passes between us. So much at any rate for the truth of this cluster of documentary impressions, to which there may some day attach the value as of a direct contemporary record of strange and remote things, so much I hear super-ad and verily with regret as well, on behalf of my picture for two or three other touches from which I must forbear. There has lately turned up on our scene one person with whom, doors and windows closed, curtains drawn, secrecy sworn, the whole town asleep in something amber-colored and brewing. There has recently joined us one person, I say, with whom we might really pass the time of day, to whom we might, after due deliberation, tip the wink. I allude to the parent's new neighbor, the odd fellow-temple, who for reasons mysterious and which is ostensible undertaking of the native newspaper, don't at all make plausible, has elected, as they say, fondly to sojourn among us. A journalist, a rolling stone, a man who has seen other life, spoken one not suspect him of some deeper game than he avows, some such studious, surreptitious, sociological intent as alone it would seem could sustain him through the practice of leaning on his fence that even tied to converse for long periods with poor father. Poor father indeed, if a real remorseless sociologist were once to get well hold of him, Lorraine freely maintains that there's more in the temples that meets the eye, that they're up to something, at least that he is, that he kind of feels this in the air, just as we feel him, and that he would sort of reach out to us by the same token if we would in any way give the first sign. This, however, Lorraine contends, his wife won't let him do. His wife, according to mine, is quite a different proposition, much more really hatted and gloved, she notes, than any one here, even than the belted and trinketed Eliza, and with a conviction of her own as to what their stay is going to amount to. On the basis of Lorraine's similar conviction about ours, it would seem that then we ought to meet for an esoteric revel, if somehow it doesn't come off. Sometimes I think I'm quite wrong and that he can't really be a child of light. We should in this case either have seen him collapse, or have discovered what inwardly sustains him. We are ourselves inwardly collapsing. There's no doubt of that. In spite of the central fires, as Lorraine says somebody in Boston used to say, somebody said, from which we're fed, from what central fires is temple-nourished, I give it up, for on the point again and again of desperately stopping him in the street to ask him, I recoil as often in terror. He may be only plotting to make me do it, so that he may give me away in his paper. Remember he's a mere little frisking prize-ass. Stick to that, cling to it, make it your answer to everything. It's all you now know and all you need to know and you'll be as firm on it as a rock. This is what I said to poor Peg, on the subject of Harry Goward, before I started in the glorious impulse of the moment five nights ago for New York, and with no moment now to spare, but wishing not to lose my small silver clue, I just put it here for one of the white pebbles, or whatever they were, that hop of my thumb carried off to the forest, dropped as he went to know his way back. I was carried off the other evening in a whirlwind, which is not even yet quite gone down, though I am now at home and recovering my breath, and it will interest me vividly when I have more freedom of mind to live over again these strange, these wild successions. But a few rude notes, and only of the first few hours of my adventure, must for the present suffice. The moe of the whole thing, as Lorraine calls it, was that at last, in a flash, we recognized what we had so long been wondering about, what supreme advantage we've been all this latter time in particular holding out for. Lorraine had put it once again in her happy way only a few weeks previous. We were saving up, she said, and not meaning at all our poor scant dollars and cents, though we've also kept hold of some of them, for an exercise of strength and a show of character that would make us of a sudden some unmistakable sign. We should just meet it rounding a corner, as with the rush of an automobile, a chariot of fire that would stop but long enough to take us in when we should know it immediately for the vehicle of our fate. That conviction had somehow been with us, and I had really heard our hour begin to strike, on pegs coming back to us from her coeducative adventure so preposterously engaged. I didn't believe in it, in such a matter of becoming so one little bit, and I took on myself to hate the same, though that indeed seemed the last thing to trouble any one else. Her turning up in such a fashion, with the whole thing settled before father or mother or Mariah or any of us, had so much as heard of the young man, much less seen the tip of his nose, had too much in common for my taste, with the rude betrothals of the people, with some maid-servance announcement to her employer that she has exchanged vows with the butcher-boy. I was indignant, quite artlessly indignant, I fear, with the college authorities, barbarously irresponsible as it struck me. For when I broke out about them to poor mother she surprised me, though I confess she had sometimes surprised me before, by her deep fatalism. Oh, I suppose they don't pretend not to take their students at the young people's own risk. They can scarcely pretend to control their affections, she wonderfully said. She seemed almost shocked, moreover, that I could impute either to father or to herself any disposition to control Peggy's. It was one of the few occasions of my life on which I've suffered irritation from poor mother, and yet I'm now not sure, after all, that she wasn't again but at her old game, even then, for she has certainly been so since, of protecting poor father by feigning a life-lossity from the full appearance, not to say the full disclosure of his failure ever to meet a domestic responsibility. It came over me that there would be absolutely nobody to meet this one, and my own peculiar chance glimmered upon me therefore on the spot. I can't retrace steps and stages. Suffice it that my opportunity developed and broadened to my watching eyes with each precipitated consequence of the wretched youth's arrival. We proved without delay an infant in arms, an infant either, according to circumstances, crowing and kicking and clamoring for sustenance, or wailing and choking and refusing even the bottle, to the point even, as I've just seen in New York, of imminent convulsions. The arms most appropriate to his case suddenly announced themselves, in fine, to our general consternation as Eliza's, but it was at this unnatural vision that my heart indeed leapt up. I was beforehand even with Lorraine. She was still gaping, while in three bold strokes I sketched where our campaign. I take command, the others are flat on their backs. I save little pathetic peg, even in spite of herself, though her just resentment is really much greater than she dares poor might recognize amazing scruple. By which I mean I guard her against a possible relapse. I save poor mother, that is, I rid her of the deadly Eliza, for ever and a day. Despised, rejected, misunderstood, I nevertheless intervene in its hour of dire need as the good genius of the family, and you, dear little quaint thing, I take advantage of the precious psychological moment to whisk you off to Europe. We'll take Peg Willis for a year's true culture. She wants a year's true culture pretty badly, but she doesn't, as it turns out, want Mr. Goward a speck, and I'll do it all in my own way before they can recover breath. They'll recover it, if we but give them time, to bless our name, but by that moment we shall have struck for freedom. Well then, my own way, it was given me, as Lorraine says, was taking the night express, without a word to any one but Peg, whom it was charming at the supreme hour to feel glimmeringly, all-wonderingly with us. My own way, I say, was to go the next morning, as soon as I had breakfasted, to the address Lorraine had been able, by an immense piece of luck, to suggest to me as a possible clue to Eliza's whereabouts. She'll either be with her friends the Chateaways in East 73rd Street, she's always swaggering about the Chateaways, who by her account a tremendous smarts, as she has told Lorraine the right term is in London, leading a life that is a burden to them without her, or else they'll know where she is. That's at least what I hope, said my wife, with infinite feminine subtlety. The Chateaways, as the subject of swagger, presented themselves, even to my rustic vision, oddly, I may be mistaken about New York values, but the grandeur of this connection was brought home to me neither by the high lopsided stoop of its very, very east-side setting, nor by the appearance of a terrible, massive lady who came to the door while I was in quite unproductive parley with an unmistakably, a hopelessly mystified menial, an outlandish young woman with a face of dark despair and an intelligence close to any mere indigenous appeal. I was to learn later in the day that she's a Macedonian Christian whom the Chateaways harbour against the cruel Turk in return for domestic service, a romantic item that allies a name to me in rueful connection of the absence of several indeed that are apparently prosaic enough. The powder on the massive lady's face indeed transcended, I rather thought. The bounds of prose did much to refer her to the realm of fantasy, some fairy land for Lorne, an effect the more marked as the wrapper she appeared hastily to have caught up, and which was somehow both voluminous and tense, flowing like a cataract in some places yet in others exposing, or at least denning, the ample bed of the stream, reminded me of the big cloth spread in a room when any mess is to be made. She apologised when I said I had come to inquire for Miss Talbert, commissioned, with play of a wonderfully fine fat hand, that she herself was just being manicured in the parlor, but was evidently surprised by asking about Eliza, which plunged her into the question, its effused her extravagant bluntness with a troubled light, struggling there like sunrise over snow, of whether she had better, confessing to ignorance, relieve her curiosity, or, pretending to knowledge, baffle mine. But mine, of course, carried the day, for mine showed it could wait while hers couldn't, the final superiority of women to men being, in fact, I think, that we are more patiently curious. Why, is she in the city? If she isn't, dear madam, I replied, she ought to be. She left Eastridge last evening for parts unknown and should have got here by midnight. Oh, how glad I was to let them both in as far as I possibly could. And clearly now I had let Mrs. Chataway, if such she was, in very far indeed. She stared, but then airily considered. Oh, well, I guess she's somewheres. I guess she is, I replied. She hasn't got here yet. She has so many friends in the city. But she always wants us, and when she does come, with which my friend, now so far relieved and agreeably smiling, rubbed together conspicuously the pair of plump subjects of her cure. You feel, then, I inquired, that she will come? Oh, I guess she'll be round this afternoon. We wouldn't forgive her. Ah, I'm afraid we must forgive her. I was careful to declare. But I'll come back on the chance. Any message, then? Yes, please say, her nephew from Eastridge—oh, her nephew? Her nephew, she'll understand. I'll come back, I repeated, but I've got to find her. And, as in the fever of my need, I turned and sped away. I roamed, I quite careered about, in those uptown streets, but instinctively and confidently westward. I felt, I don't know why, miraculously sure of some favouring chance, and as if I were floating in the current of success. I was on the way to our reward. I was positively on the way to Paris. A New York itself, vast and glittering and roaring, much noisier even than the works at their noisiest, but with its old, rich thrill of the art league days again in the air, was already almost Paris for me, so that when at last I fidgeted into the park, where you get so beautifully away from the town, it was surely the next thing to Europe and, in fact, had to be, since it's the very antithesis of Eastridge. I regularly reveled in the sense that Eliza couldn't have done a better thing for us than just not be, that morning, where it was supremely advisable she should have been. If she had had two grains of sense, she would have put in an appearance at the Chateaways with the lark, or at least with the manicure, who seems there almost as early stirring. Or rather, really, she would have reported herself as soon as their train, that of the guilty couple, got in. No matter how late in the evening, it was at any rate actually uplifting to realize that I had got thus, in three minutes, the pull of her in regard to her great New York friends. My eye, as Lorraine says, how she has, on all this ground of those people, been piling it on. If Mariah, who is so bowed her head, gets any such glimpse of what her aunt has been making her bow it to, well, I think I shall then entertain something of the human pity for Eliza that I found myself while I walked about fairly entertaining for my sister. What were they? What are they, the Chateaways, anyhow? I don't even yet know, I confess. But now I don't want to, I don't care a hang, having no further use for them whatever. But on one of those park benches in the golden morning the wonderment added, I remember to my joy, for we hadn't, Lorraine and I, been the least bit overwhelmed about them, Lorraine only pretending a little with her charming, elfish art that she occasionally was in order to see how far Eliza would go. Well, that brilliant woman had gone pretty far for us, truly, if after all, they were only in the manicure line. She was adoring of it, as Lorraine says, my massive lady was, in the parlor where I don't suppose it's usually done, and art there such places precisely as manicure parlors where they do nothing else, or at least are supposed to? Oh, I do hope, for the perfection of it, that this may be what Eliza has kept from us. Otherwise, by all the gods, it's just a boarding-house that was exactly the smell in the hall, the boarding-house smell that pervaded my old greasy haunt of the league days, that boiled atmosphere that seems to belong at once confusedly to a domestic wash and to inferior food, as if the former were perhaps being prepared in the saucepan and the latter in the tubs. There also came back to me, I recollect, that note of Mrs. Chatterway's queer look at me, on my saying I was Eliza's nephew, the droll effect of her making on her side a discovery about me. Yes, she made it, and as against me, of course, against all of us, at sight of me, so that if Eliza has bragged at Eastridge about New York, she has at least bragged in New York about Eastridge. I didn't clearly, for Mrs. Chatterway came up to the brag, or perhaps rather didn't come down to it, since I daresay the poor lady's consternation meant simply that my aunt has confessed to me, but as an unconsidered trifle, a gifted child at the most, or as young and handsome and dashing at the most, and not as—well, as what I am. However I am, in any case, and however awkward a document as nephew to a girlish aunt, I believe I really tasted of the joy of life in its highest intensity when, at the end of twenty minutes of the park, I suddenly saw my absurd presentiment of a miracle justified. I could, of course, scarce believe my eyes when, at the turn of a quiet alley, pulling up the gape, I recognized in the young man brooding on a bench ten yards off the precious personality of Harry Goward. There he languished alone, our feebler fugitive, handed over to me by a mysterious fate and a well-nigh incredible hazard. There is certainly but one place in all New York where the stricken deer may weep, or even, for that matter, the heart-ungalled play. The wonder of my coincidence shrank a little, that is, before the fact that when young ardor or young despair wishes to commune with immensity it can only do so either in a hall-bedroom or in just this corner, practically, where I pounced on my prey. To sit down, in short, you've got to sit there. There isn't another square inch of the whole place over which you haven't got, as everything shrieks at you to step lively. Poor Goward, I could see at a glance, wanted very much to sit down, looked indeed very much as if he wanted never, never again to get up. I hovered there, I couldn't help it, a bit gloatingly, before I pounced, and yet even when he became aware of me, as he did in a minute, he didn't shift his position by an inch but only took me and my dreadful meaning with his wand stare as a part of the strange burden of his fate. He didn't seem even surprised to speak of. He had waked up, premising his brief bewildered delirium to the sense that something natural must happen, and even to the fond hope that something natural would, and I was simply the form in which it was happening. I came nearer, I stood before him, and he kept up at me the oddest stare, which was plainly but the dumb yearning that I would explain, explain. He wanted everything told him, but every single thing, as if after a tremendous fall, or some wild parabola through the air, the effect of a violent explosion under his feet, he had landed at a vast distance from his starting point and required to know where he was. Well, the charming thing was that this affected me as giving the very sharpest point to the idea that, in asking myself how I should deal with him, I had already so vividly entertained. CHAPTER VIII. THE MARRIED Daughter We start in life with the most preposterous of all human claims, that one should be understood. We get bravely over that after a while, but not until the idea has been knocked out of us by the hardest. I used to worry a good deal myself, because nobody, distinctly not one person, in our family understood me. That is, me in my relation to themselves. Nothing else, of course, mattered so much. But that was before I was married. I think it was because Tom understood me from the very first eye-beam that I loved him enough to marry him and learn to understand him. I always knew in my heart that he had the advantage of me in that beautiful art. I suppose one might call it the soul-art. At all events, it has been of the least possible consequence to me since I had Tom, whether anyone else in the world understood me or not. I suppose—in fact, I know—that it is this unfortunate affair of Peggy's, which has brought up all that old soreness to the surface of me. Nobody knows better than I that I have not been a popular member of the family. But nobody knows as well as I how hard I have tried to do my conscientious best by the whole of them collectively and individually considered. An older sister, if she have any consciousness of responsibility at all, is, to my mind, not in an easy position. Her extra years give her an extra sense. One might call it a sixth sense of family anxiety which the younger children cannot share. She has, in a way, the intelligence and forethought of a mother without a mother's authority or privilege. When father had that typhoid and could not sleep, dear father, in his normal condition he sleeps like a bag of cornmeal. Who was there in all the house to keep those boys quiet? Nobody but me. When they organized a military company in our backyard directly under father's windows, two drums, a fishhorn, a juice harp, a five and three tin pans, was there anybody but me to put a stop to it? It was on this occasion that the pet name Mooli Maria, afterward corrupted into Messy Maria, and finally evolved into Medley Maria, became attached to me. To this day I do not like to think how many cries I had over it. Then when Charles Edward got into debt and nobody dared to tell father, and when Billy had the measles and there wasn't a throat in the house to read to him four hours a day except my unpopular throat, and when Charles Edward had that quarrel over a girl with a squash-coloured dress and Saris hair-rivens, or when Alice fell in love with an automobile, the chauffeur being incidentally thrown in, and took to riding around the country with him, who put a stop to it? Who was the only person in the family that could put a stop to it? Again and again. But what's the use? My very temperament I can see now—I didn't see it when I lived at home—is in itself an unpopular one in a family like ours. I forecast, I foresee, I provide, I plan—it is my nature too. I can't go sprawling through life. I must know where I am to set my foot. Dear mother has no more sense of anxiety than a rice pudding, and father is as cool as one of his own ice-pitchers. We all know what Charles Edward is, and I didn't count Grandmother and Aunt Elizabeth. There has been my blunder. I ought to have counted Aunt Elizabeth. I ought to have fathomed her. It never occurred to me that she was deep enough to drop a plummet in. I, the burden-bearer, the caretaker, the warrior—I, who am appropriately called the manager in this family—I have failed them at this critical point in their household history. I did not foresee. I did not forecast. I did not worry. I did not manage. It did not occur to me to manage after we had got Peggy safely graduated and engaged. And now this dreadful thing has gaped beneath us like the fishers at San Francisco or Kingston, and poor little Peggy has tumbled into it. A tea-cupful of management might have prevented it. An ounce of worry would have saved it all. I lacked that tea-cupful. I missed that ounce. The various popular optimists could have done no worse. I am smothered with my own stupidity. I have borne this humiliating condition of things as long as I can. I propose to go over to that house and take the helm in this emergency. I don't care whether I am unpopular or popular for it, but something has got to be done for Peggy, and I am going to do it. I have been over, and I have done it. I have taken the management of the whole thing, not even discouraged by that unfortunate word. I own, I am rather raw to it. But the time has come when, though I bled beneath it, I must act as if I didn't. At all events I must act. I have acted. I am going to New York by the early morning express, the seven-twenty. I would go to-night. In fact, I really ought to go to-night. But Tom has a supper on with some visitors to the works. He won't be home till late, and I can't go without seeing Tom. It would hurt his feelings. And that is a thing no wife ought to do, and my kind of wife can't do. I found the house in its usual gelatinous condition. There wasn't a backbone in it, scarcely an ankle joint to stand upon—plenty of crying, but no thinking, a mush of talk, but no decision. To cap the situation, Charles Edward has gone on to New York with a preposterous conviction that he can clear it up. Charles Edward! If there is a living member of the household—but never mind that. This circumstance was enough for me, that's all. It brought out all the determination in me, all the manager, if you choose to put it so. I shall go to New York myself, and take the whole thing in hand. If I needed anything to padlock my purpose, those dozen words with Peggy would have turned the key upon it. When I found that she wasn't crying, when I got face to face with that soft, fine excitement in the eyes which a girl wears when she has a love affair, not stagnant, but in action, I concluded at once that Peggy had her reservations, and was keeping something from me. One pretence of wanting a doughnut, I got her into the pantry, and shut both doors. Peggy, I said, what has Charles Edward gone to New York for? Do you know? Peggy wound a big doughnut spinning around her engagement finger, and made no reply. If it has anything to do with you and Harry Goward, you must tell me, Peggy! You must tell me instantly! Peggy put a doughnut on her wedding-finger, and observed with pain, perplexity, that it would not spin, but stock. What is Charles Edward up to? I persisted. The opening rosebud of Peggy's face took on a furtive expression, like that of certain pansies or some orchids I have seen. He is going to take me to Europe, she admitted, removing both of her doughnut rings. You! To Europe! He and Lorraine, when this is blown by, they want to get me away. Away from what? Away from Harry Goward? No, I suppose so, blubbered Peggy. She now began, in a perfectly normal manner, to mop her eyes with her handkerchief. Do you want to be got away from Harry Goward? I demanded. I never said I did, sobbed Peggy. I never said so, not one little bit. But, oh Maria, mooly Maria! You can't think how dreadful it is to be a girl, an engaged girl, and not know what to do! One and there, an active idea, one with bones in it, raced and overtook me, and I shot out. Where is that letter? Mother has it, replied Peggy. Have you opened it? No. Has Aunt Elizabeth opened it? Oh no! Did Charles Edward take it with him? I don't think he did. I'll go ask Mother. Go ask Mother for that letter, I commanded, and bring it to me. He gave me one mutinous look, but the instinct of a younger sister was in her and she obeyed me. She brought the letter. I have this precious document in my pocket. I asked her if she would trust me to find out to whom that letter was addressed. After some hesitation she replied that she would. I reminded her that she was the only person in the world who could give me this authority, which pleased her. I told her that I should accept it as a solemn trust and do my highest and best with it for her sake. Peggy, I said, this is not altogether a pleasant job for me, but you are my little sister and I will take care of you. Kiss your old medley Maria, Peggy. She took down her sopping handkerchief and lifted her warm wet face. So I kissed Peggy, and I am going on the seven-twenty morning train. It is now ten o'clock. My suitcase is packed, my ticket is bought, but Tom has not come back. And the worst of it is, he can't get back to-night. He telephoned between courses at his dinner that he had accepted an invitation to go home for the night with one of the men they are dining. It seems he is a person of importance. There is a big order behind the junket, and Tom has gone home with him to talk it over. The ridiculous thing about it is that I forget where he was going. Of course I could telephone to the hotel and find out, but men don't like telephoning wives. At least my man doesn't. It makes it rather hard going on this trip without kissing Tom goodbye. I had half made up my mind to throw the whole thing over. But Peggy is pretty young. She has a long life before her. There is a good deal at stake. So Tom and I kissed by electricity, and he said that it was all right and to go ahead. And the other absurd thing about that is that Tom didn't ask me for my New York address, and I forgot to tell him. We are like two asteroids spinning through space, neither knowing the other's route or destination. In point of fact I shall register at the Sphinx, that nice lady's hotel where mere man is never admitted. I have always supposed that the Mrs. Chataway Aunt Elizabeth talks about kept a boarding house. I think Aunt Elizabeth rolls in upon her like a spent wave between visits. I have no doubt that I shall be able to trace Aunt Elizabeth by her weeds upon this beach. After that the rest is easy. I must leave my address for Tom pinned up somewhere. Matilda's mind wouldn't hold it if I stuck it through her brain with a hat pin. I think I will glue it to his library table, and I'll do it this minute to make sure. I have directed Matilda to give him chicken croquette for his luncheon, and I have written out the menu for every meal to like at home. Poor Tom. He isn't used to eating alone. I wish I thought he would mind it as much as I do. Eleven o'clock. I am obsessed with an idea, and I have yielded to it. Whether for good or ill, for wisdom or folly remains to be proved. I have telephoned Dr. Denby, and suggested to him that he should go to New York, too. Considered in any light but that of Peggy's welfare. But I am not considering anything in any light but that of Peggy's welfare. Dr. Denby used to have a little torn dress for Peggy. It was never anything more, I am convinced. She's too young for him. A doctor sees so many women. He grows critical, if not captious. Character goes for more with him than with most men. Looks go for less. And poor little Peggy, who can deny, up to this point in her development, is chiefly looks. I intimated to the doctor that my errand to New York was of an important nature, that it concerned my younger sister, that my husband was, unfortunately, out of town, and that I needed masculine advice. I am not in the habit of flattering the doctor, and he swallowed this delicate bait, as I thought he would. When I asked him if he didn't think he needed a little vacation, if he didn't think he could get the old doctor from Southwest Eastridge to take his practice for two days, he said he didn't know, but he could. The grip epidemic had gone down, and nothing more strenuous than a few cases of measles stood in the way. In fact, Eastridge, at the present time, he averred, was lamentably healthy. When he had committed himself so far as this, he hesitated, and very seriously said, Mrs. Price, you have never asked me to do a foolish thing, and I have known you for a good many years. It is too late to come over and talk it out with you. If you assure me that you consider your object in making this request important, I will go. We won't waste words about it. What train do you take? I am not a person of divination or intuition. I think I have rather a common place, careful, painstaking mind. But if ever I had an inspiration in my life, I think I have one now. Perhaps it is the novelty of it that makes me confide in it with so little reflection. My inspiration, in a word, is this. Aunt Elizabeth has reached the point where she is ready for a new man. I know I don't understand her kind of woman by experience. I don't suppose I do by sympathy. I have to reason her out. I have reasoned Aunt Elizabeth out to this conclusion. She always has had. She always must have. She always will have—the admiration of some man or man to engross her attention. She is an attractive woman. She knows it. Women admit it, and men feel it. I don't think Aunt Elizabeth is a heartless person, not an irresponsible one, only an idle and unhappy one. She lives on this intoxicant as other women might live on tea or gossip, as a man would take his dram or his tobacco. She drinks this wine because she is thirsty, and the plain, cool spring water of life has grown stale to her. It is corked up in bottles like the water sold in towns where the drinking supply is low. It has ceased to be palatable to her. My interpretation is that there is no man on her horizon just now except Harry Goward, and I won't do her the injustice to believe that she would be thankful to be rid of him just for her own sake, to say nothing of Peggy's. Aunt Elizabeth, I repeat, needs a new man. If Dr. Denby is willing to fill this role for a few days—of course, I must be perfectly frank with him about it—the effect upon Harry Goward would be instantaneous. His disillusion will be complete. His return to Peggy in a state of abject humiliation will be assured. I mean, assuming that the fellow is capable of manly feeling, and that Peggy has aroused it. That, of course, remains for me to find out. How I am to fish Harry Goward out of the ocean of New York City doesn't trouble me in the least. Given Aunt Elizabeth, he will complete the equation. If Mrs. Chataway should fail me—but I won't suppose that Mrs. Chataway will fail—I must be sure and explain to Tom about Dr. Denby. The Sphinx, New York, ten p.m. I arrived, that is to say, we arrived in this town at ten minutes past one o'clock, almost ten hours ago. Dr. Denby has gone somewhere, and that reminds me that I forgot to ask him where. I never thought of it until this minute, but it has just occurred to me that it may be quite as well from an ignorant point of view that the Sphinx excludes mere man from its portals. He was good to me on the train, very good. I can't deny that he flashed a little when I told him frankly what I wanted of him. At first I thought that he was going to be angry. Then I saw the corners of his mustache twitch. Then our sense of humour got the better of us, and then I laughed, and then he laughed, and I felt that the crisis was past. I explained to him why we were in the Pullman car as well as I could without being overheard by a fat lady with three chins, and a girl with a permit for a pet poodle, what it was that I wanted of him. I related the story of Peggy's misfortune, in confidence, of course, and explained the part he was expected to play—confidentially, of course. In fact, I laid my plot before him from beginning to end. "'If the boy doesn't love her, you see,' I suggested, the sooner we know it, the better. She must break it off if her heart is broken in the process. If he does love her, my private opinion is he thinks he does. I won't have Peggy's whole future wrecked by one of Aunt Elizabeth's flirtations. The reef is too small for the catastrophe. I shall find Aunt Elizabeth. Oh, yes, I shall find Aunt Elizabeth. I have no more doubt of that than I have that Matilda is putting too much onion in the croquette for Tom this blessed minute. If I find her, I shall find the boy. But what good is that going to do me, if I find either of them or both of them, if we can't disillusionize the boy?" "'In a word,' interrupted the doctor, rather tartly, all you want of me is to walk across the troubled stage. For Peggy's sake,' I observed, "'Of course, yes, for Peggy's sake. I am to walk across this fantastic stage in the inglorious capacity of a Philanderer.' "'That is precisely it,' I admitted. I want you to Philander with Aunt Elizabeth for two days—one day, two hours, one hour, just long enough, only long enough to bring that fool boy to his senses. If I had suspected the nature of the purpose I am to serve in this complication,' began the doctor without a smile, "'I trusted your judgment, Mrs. Price, and good sense. I have never known either to fail before.' "'However,' he added, manfully, "'I am in for it now, and I would do more disagreeable things than this, for Peggy's sake. But perhaps,' he suggested, grimly, "'we shan't find either of them.' He retired from the subject, obviously, if gracefully, and began to play with the poodle that had the Pullman permit. I happen to know that if there is any species of dog the doctor does not love it is a poodle, with or without a permit. The lady with three chins asked me if my husband were fond of dogs. I think she said, so fond as that. She glanced at the girl whom the poodle owned. I don't know why it should be a surprise to me, but it was, that the chin lady and the poodle girl have both registered at the Sphinx. Directly after luncheon—before I could not afford to lose a minute—I went to Mrs. Chataway's, the agreement being that the doctor should follow me in an absent-minded way a little later. But there was a blockade on the way, and I wasn't on time. What I took to be Mrs. Chataway herself admitted me with undisguised hesitation. Miss Talbert, she said, was not at home—that is, no, she was not home. She explained that a great many people had been asking for Miss Talbert. There were two in the parlor now. When I demanded, to what, she replied in a breathless tone, to gentlemen, and ushered me into that old-fashioned architectural effort known to early New York as a front and back parlor. One of the gentlemen, as I expected, proved to be Dr. Denby. The other was flatly and unmistakably Charles Edward. The doctor offered to excuse himself, but I took Charles Edward into the back parlor, and I made so bold as to draw the folding doors. I felt that the occasion justified worse than this. The colloquy between myself and Charles Edward was brief and pointed. He began by saying, You here, what a mess! My conviction is that he saved himself just in time from messy Maria. Have you found him? I propounded. No. Haven't seen him. I didn't say I hadn't seen him. What did he say? I insisted. Not very much. It was in the park. In the park? Not very much. How could you let him go? I didn't let him go! Drawed Charles Edward. He invited me to dinner. A man can't ask a fellow what his intentions are to a man's sister in a park. I hadn't said very much up to that point. He did most of the talking. I thought I would put it off till we got round to the cigars. Then I cried impatiently. And then— You see, reluctantly admitted Charles Edward, there wasn't any then. I didn't dine with him after all. I couldn't find it. Couldn't find what? Couldn't find the hotel, said Charles Edward defiantly. I lost the address. Couldn't even say that it was a hotel. I believe it was a club. He seems to be a sort of a swell, for a co-educational professor. Anyhow, I lost the address. And that is the long and the short of it. If it had been a studio, or a Bohemian café, I began. I should undoubtedly have remembered it," admitted Charles Edward in his languid way. You have lost him, I replied frostily. You have lost Harry Goward, and you come here. On the same errand, I presume, my distressed and distressing sister, that has brought you. Have you seen her? He demanded, with sudden, uncharacteristic shrewdness. At this moment a portier opened at the side of my back parlor, and Mrs. Chataway, voluminously appearing, mysteriously beckoned me. I followed her into the dreariest hall I think I ever saw, even in New York boarding-house. There the landlady frankly told me that Miss Talbert wasn't out. She was in her room, packing to make one of her visits. Miss Talbert had given orders that she was to be denied to gentlemen friends. No, she never said anything about ladies. This, I thought, highly probable. But if I were anything to her and chose to take the responsibility, I chose, and I did. In five minutes I was in Aunt Elizabeth's room, and had turned the key upon an interview which was briefer but more startling than any I could possibly have anticipated. Elizabeth Talbert is one of those women whose attraction increases with the negligee or the desabe. She was so pretty in her pink kimono that she half disarmed me. She had been crying, and had a gentle look. When I said, where is he? And when she said, if you mean Harry Goward, I don't know. I was prepared to believe her without evidence. She looked too pretty to doubt. Besides, I cannot say that I have ever caught Aunt Elizabeth in a real fib. She may be a Charmian, but I don't think she is a liar. Yet I pushed my case severely. If you and he hadn't taken that 540 train to New York— We didn't take the 540 train, retorted Elizabeth Talbert hotly. It took us. You don't suppose—but I suppose you do, and I suppose I know what the whole family supposes, as if I would do such a dastardly, as if I didn't clear out on purpose to get away from him, to get out of the whole mix, as if I knew that young one would be aboard that train. But he was aboard. You admit that. Oh, yes, he got aboard. Made a pleasant travelling companion, auntie. I don't know, said Aunt Elizabeth shortly. I didn't have ten words with him. I told him he had put me in a position I should never forgive. Then he told me I had put him in a worse. We quarreled, and he went into the smoker. At the grand central he checked my suitcase and lifted his hat. He did ask if I were going to miss his chateau ways. I've never seen him since. Aunt Elizabeth, I said, sadly, I am younger than you. Not so very much, retorted Aunt Elizabeth. And I must speak to you with the respect due my father's sister when I say that the nobility of your conduct on this occasion—an nobility which you will pardon me for suggesting that I didn't altogether count on—is likely to prove the catastrophe of the situation. Aunt Elizabeth stared at me with her wet, coquettish eyes. You are pretty hard on me, Maria. She said, you always were. Hurry and dress, I suggested soothingly. There are two gentlemen to see you downstairs. Aunt Elizabeth shook her head. She asserted with evidence sincerity that she didn't wish to see any gentleman. She didn't care to see any gentleman under any circumstances. She never meant to have anything to do with any gentleman again. She said something about becoming a deaconess in the Episcopal Church. She spoke of the attractions in the life of a trained nurse, mentioned settlement work, and asked me what I thought of Elizabeth Fry, Dorothy Addix, and Clara Barton. There is one advantage that Catholics have over us, she observed dreamily. One could go into a nunnery. Then one would be quite sure there would be no men to let loose the consequences of their natures and conduct upon a woman's whole existence. These two downstairs have waited a good while. I returned carelessly. One of them is a married man and is used to it, but the other is not. Very well," said Aunt Elizabeth, with what, it occurred to me, was a smile of forced dejection. To please you, Maria, I will go down. If Aunt Elizabeth's dejection were assumed, mine was not. I have been in the lowest possible spirit since my unlucky discovery. Anything and everything had occurred to me except that she and that boy could quarrel. I had fancied him shadowing Mrs. Chatterway for the slightest sign of his charmer. I don't know that I should have been surprised to see him curled up like a dog asleep on the doorsteps. At the present moment I have no more means of finding the wretched lad than I had in Eastridge. Not so much, for doubtless Peggy has his prehistoric addresses. I am very unhappy. I have not had the heart left in me to admire Dr. Denby, who has filled his role brilliantly all the afternoon. In half an hour he and Aunt Elizabeth had flandered as deep as a six-months flirtation, and I must say that they have kept added with an art amounting almost to sincerity. Aunt Elizabeth did not once mention settlement work, and put no inquiries to Dr. Denby about Elizabeth Fry, Dorothea Dix, or Clara Barton. I think he took her to the Metropolitan Museum. I know he invited her to the theatre, and there is some sort of an appointment for tomorrow morning, I forget what, but my marked success at this end of the stage only adds poignancy to my sense of defeat at the other. I am very homesick. I wish I could see Tom. I do hope Tom found my message about Dr. Denby. Twenty-four hours later, the breeze of yesterday has spun into a whirlwind to-day. I am half stunned by the possibilities of human existence. One lives the simple life at Eastridge, and New York strikes me on the head like some heavy thing blown down. If these are the results of the very little love affair of one very little girl, what must the great emotion, the real experience, the vigorous crisis bring? That the sphinx, as is well known, no male being is admitted on any pretense. I believe the porter, for heavy trunks, is the only exception. The bell-boys are bell-girls. The clerk is a matron, and the proprietress a widow in half-morning. At nine o'clock this morning I was peremptorily summoned out of the breakfast-room and ordered to the desk. Two frowning faces received me. With cold politeness I was reminded of the leading clause in the constitution of that house. Positively, observed the clerk, no gentlemen-callers are permitted at this hotel, and madam, there are two on the door-steps who insist upon an interview with you. They have been there half an hour. One of them refuses to recognize the rule of the house. He insists upon an immediate suspension of it. I regret to tell you that he went so far as to mention that he would have a conversation with you if it took a search warrant to get it. He says, interrupted the proprietress in half-morning, that he is your husband. She spoke quite distinctly, and as these dreadful words re-echoed through the lobby, I saw that two ladies had come out from the reception-room and were drinking the scene down. One of these was the fat lady with the three chins, the other was the poodle-girl. She held him at that unpleasant moment by a lavender ribbon leash. It seems she gets a permit for him everywhere. And he is the wrong sex, I am sure, to obtain any privileges at the sphinx. The mosaic of that beautiful lobby did not open and swallow me down as I tottered across it to the vestibule. A strapping door-girl guarded the entrance. Grounded upon the long flight of marble steps, two men impatiently awaited me. The one with the twitching mustache was Dr. Denby. But he—oh, he with the lightning in his eyes—he was my husband, Thomas Price. Maria! he began with ominous composure. If you have any explanations to offer of these extraordinary circumstances. Then the torrent burst forth. Very expletive familiar to the wives of good North American husbands broke from Tom's unleashed lips. I didn't hear of it till afternoon. I took the midnight express. Billy told Matilda he saw you get aboard the 720 train. It's all over Eastridge. We have been married thirteen years, Maria, and I have always had occasion to trust your judgment and good sense till now. That is precisely what I told her, ventured Dr. Denby. As for you, sir—Tom Price turned towering—it is fortunate for you that I find my wife in this darn shebang—any female policeman behind that door-girl? Doctor? Why doctor? Say doctor! Dr. Denby, what in thunder are you laughing at? The doctor's sense of humour—a quality for which I must admit that my dear husband is not so distinguished as he is for some more important traits—had got the better of him. He put his hands in his pockets, threw back his handsome head, and then and there in that sacred feminine vestibule he laughed as no woman could laugh if she tried. In the teeth of the door-girl, the clerk and the proprietress, in the face of the chin-lady and the poodle-girl, I ran straight to Tom and put my arms around his neck. At first I was afraid he was going to push me off, but he thought better of it. Then I cried out upon him as a woman will when she has had a good scare. Oh, Tom! Tom! Tom! You dear old precious Tom! I told you all about it! I wrote you a note about Dr. Denby and—and everything! You don't mean to say you never found it? Where the deuce did you leave it? demanded Thomas Price. Why, I stuck it on your pin-cushion. I pinned it there. I pinned it down with two safety pins. I was very particular to— Pin-cushion! exploded Tom. A message—an important message to a man on a pin-cushion! Then, with that admirable self-possession which has been the secret of Tom Price's success in life, he immediately recovered himself. Next time, Maria, he observed, with pitying gentleness, pin it on the hen-coop, or paste it on the haymow with the mucilage brush, or fasten it to the watering trough off in the square, anywhere I might run across it. Ah, Doctor, I beg your pardon, old fellow. Now, madam, if you are allowed by law to get out of this blasted house I can't get into, I will pay your bill, Maria, and take you to a respectable hotel. What's that one we're used to go to when we ran down to see Irving? I can't think. Oh, yes, the Holy Family. Don't be blasphemous Price, whatever else you are—had monished the Doctor. He was choking with laughter. Perhaps it was the whole family, Tom? I suggested meekly. Come to think of it, admitted Tom, it must have been the happy family. Get your things on my scene, we'll get out of this inhuman place. I held my head as high as I could when I came back through the lobby, with a stout chambermaid carrying my suitcase. The clerk sniffed audibly. The proprietress spent me with a granite eye. The lady with the three chins muttered something which I am convinced it would not have added to my personal happiness to hear. But I thought the girl with the lavender poodle watched me a little wistfully as I whirled away upon my husband's big, forgiving arm. The Doctor, who had really laughed until he cried, followed, wiping his merry eyes. These glistened when on the sidewalk directly opposite the hotel entrance we met Elizabeth Talbert, who had arranged—but in the agitation of the morning I had entirely forgotten it—to come to see me at that very hour. So we fell into line. The Doctor and Aunt Elizabeth, my husband and I, on our way to take the cars for the happy family. When suddenly Tom clapped his hands to his pockets, and announced that he had forgotten, he must send a telegram. Coming away in such a hurry, he must telegraph to the works. Tom is an incurable telegrapher—I have long cherished the conviction that he is the main support of the Western Union Telegraph Company—and we all followed him to the nearest office where he could get a wire. Someone was before him at the window, a person holding a hesitant pencil above a yellow blank. I believe I am not without self-possession myself—partly natural, and partly acquired by living so long with Tom. But it took all I ever had not to utter a womanish cry when the young man turned his face, and I saw that it was Harry Goward. The boys' glance swept us all in. When it reached Aunt Elizabeth and Dr. Denby, he paled, whether with relief or regret I had my doubts at that moment, and I have them still. An emotion of some species possessed him so that he could not for the moment speak. Aunt Elizabeth was the first to recover herself. Ah! she cooed, what a happy accident! Mr. Goward, allow me to present you to my friend, Dr. Denby. The doctor bowed with a portentous gravity. It was almost the equal of Harry's own. After this satisfactory incident everybody fell back instinctively and gave the command of the expedition to me. The boy anxiously yielded his place at the telegraph window to Tom. In fact, I took the pains to notice that Harry's telegram was not sent, or was deferred to a more convenient season. I invited him to run over to the happy family with us, and we all fell into rank again on the sidewalk—the boy nod without embarrassment. Of this I made it my first duty to relieve him. We chatted of the weather and the theatre and the hotels. When we walked a short distance, we met Charles Edward dawdling along over to the Sphinx, however reluctantly, to call upon his precious elder sister. So we pared off naturally. Aunt Elizabeth and the doctor in front, Goward and I behind them, and Tom and Charles Edward bringing up the rear. My heart dropped when I saw what a family party air we had. I felt it to my fingertips, and I could see that the lad writhed under it. His expression changed from misery to mutiny. I should not have been surprised if he had made one plunge into the roaring current of Broadway, and sunk from sight forever. The thing that troubled me most was the poor taste of it, as if the whole family had congregated in the metropolis to capture that unhappy boy. For the first time I began to feel some sympathy for him. "'Mr. Goward,' I said abruptly, in a voice too low even for Aunt Elizabeth to hear, "'nobody wishes to make you uncomfortable. We are not here for any such purpose. I have something in my pocket to show you, that is all. It will interest you, I am sure. As soon as we get to the hotel, if you don't mind, I will tell you about it. Or, in fact, we'll give it to you. Count the rest out. They are not in the secret.' "'I feel like a convict arrested by plain clothesmen,' complained Harry, glancing before and behind. "'You won't,' I said, when you have talked to me five minutes.' "'Shant I?' he asked, dully. He said nothing more, and we pursued our way to the hotel in silence. Elizabeth Talbert and Dr. Denby talked enough to make up for us. Aunt Elizabeth made herself so charming, so acutely charming, that I heard the boy draw one quick sharp breath. But his eyes followed her more sullenly than tenderly, and when she clung to the doctor's arm upon a muddy crossing, the young man turned to me with a sad, whimsical smile. It doesn't seem to make much difference, does it, Mrs. Price? She treats us all alike. There is the prettiest little writing-room in the happy family, all blue and mahogany and quiet. This place was deserted, and thither I betook myself with Harry Goward, and there he began as soon as we were alone. Well, what is it, Mrs. Price? "'Nothing but this,' I said gently enough. I have taken upon myself to solve a mystery that has caused a good deal of confusion in our family. Without warning, I took the muddy letter from my pocket, and slid it under his eyes upon the big blue blotter. "'I don't wish to be intrusive or strenuous,' I pleaded. None of us wishes to be that. Nobody is here to call you to account, Mr. Goward. But you see this letter. It was received at our house in the condition in which you find it. Would you be so kind as to supply the missing address? That is all I want of you.' The boy's complexion ran through the pallet, and subsided from a dull Indian red to a sickly Nile green. "'Hasn't she ever read it?' he demanded. "'Nobody has ever read it,' I said. Naturally, since it is not addressed, this letter went fishing with Billy.' The young man took the letter and examined it in trembling silence. Perhaps if fate ever broke him on her wheel, it was at that moment. His destiny was still in his own hands, and so was the letter. Unaddressed, it was his personal property. He could retain it if he chose, and the family mystery would darken into deeper gloom than ever. I felt my comfortable, commonplace heart beat rapidly. Our silence had passed the point of discomfort, and was fast reaching that of anguish, when the boy lifted his head manfully, dipped one of the happy family's new pens into a stately ink-bottle, and rapidly filled in the missing address upon the unfortunate letter. He handed it to me without a word. My eyes blurred when I read, personal, Miss Peggy Talbert, Eastridge, Kindness of Miss Alice Talbert. "'What shall I do with it?' I asked, controlling my agitation. Deliver it to her if you please as quickly as possible. I thought of everything else. I never thought of this. Never thought of? That she might not have got it?' Now then, Mr. Goward, I ventured, still speaking very gently. Do you mind telling me what you took that five-forty train for?" "'Why, because I didn't get an answer from the letter,' exclaimed Harry, raising his voice for the first time. A man doesn't write a letter such as that more than once in a lifetime. It was a very important letter. I told her everything. I explained everything. I felt I ought to have a hearing. If she wanted to throw me over—I don't deny she had the right to—I would rather she had taken some other way than—than to ignore such a letter. I waited for an answer to that letter till quarter-past five. I just caught the five-forty train and went to my aunt's house, the one—you know, my uncle died the other day—and I've been there ever since. By the way, Mrs. Price, if anything else comes up, and if you have any messages for me, I shall be greatly obliged if you will take my address.' He handed me his card with an uptown street and number, and I snapped it into the inner pocket of my wallet. "'Do you think,' demanded Harry gowered outright, that she will ever forgive me—really forgive me.' "'That is for you to find out,' I answered, smiling comfortably, for I could not possibly have Harry think that any of us, even an unpopular elder sister, could be there to fling Peggy at the young man's head. "'That is between you and Peggy.' "'When shall you get home with that letter?' demanded Harry. "'Ask my husband. Had a guess, I should say, to-morrow.' "'Perhaps I had better wait till she has read the letter,' mused the boy. "'Don't you think so, Mrs. Price?' "'I don't think anything about it. I will not take any responsibility about it. I have got the letter officially addressed, and there my errand ends.' "'You see, I want to do the best thing,' urged Harry gowered. "'And so much has happened since I wrote that letter, and when you come to think that she has never read it.' "'I will mail it to her,' I said suddenly. "'I will enclose it with a line and get it off by special delivery this noon.' "'I might not reach her,' suggested Harry pessimistically. "'Everything seems to go wrong in this affair.' "'Would you prefer to send it yourself?' I asked. Harry Gower took his head. "'I would rather wait till she has read it. I feel under the circumstances that I owe that to her. Now, at that critical moment, a wide figure darkened the entrance of the writing-room, and plumping down solidly at another table, spread out a fat, ring-laden hand, and began to write a laborious letter. It was the lady with the three chins. But the girl with the poodle did not put it in appearance. I learned afterward that the dog-rule of the happy family admitted of no permits. Harry Gowered and I parted abruptly but pleasantly, and he earnestly requested the privilege of being permitted to call upon me tomorrow morning. I mailed the letter to Peggy by special delivery, and just now I asked Tom if he didn't think it was wise. "'I can tell you better, my dear, day after tomorrow,' he replied, and that was all I could get out of him.' The happy family. It is day after tomorrow, and Tom and I are going to take the noon train home. Our purpose, or at least my purpose, to this effect has been confirmed, if not created, by the following circumstances. Yesterday, a few hours after I had parted from Harry Gowered in the blue writing-room of the happy family, Tom received from father a telegram which ran like this. "'Off for Washington! That gooch business. Shall take Peggy. Child needs change. Will stop over from Colonial Express and lunch happy family. Explicitly request no outsider present. Can't have appearance of false position. Shall take her directly out of New York after luncheon.' Cyrus Talbert. Torn between filial duty and sisterly affection, I sat twirling this telegram between my troubled fingers. Tom had dashed it there and blown off somewhere, leaving me, as he usually does, to make my own decisions. Should I tell Harry? Should I not tell Harry? Was it my right? Was it not his due? I vibrated between these inexorable questions, but like the pendulum I was, I struck no answer anywhere. I had half made up my mind to let matters take their own course. If Goward should happen to call on me when Peggy, flying through New York between her father's stalwart wing, alighted for the instant at the happy family, was I to blame? Could I be held responsible? It struck me that I could not. On the other hand, father could not be more determined than I, that Peggy should not be put into the apparent position of pursuing in a resolute, however repentant, lover. I was still debating the question as conscientiously and philosophically as I knew how, when the bell-boy brought me a note dispatched by a district messenger, and therefore constitutionally delayed upon the way. The letter was from my little sister's fiancee, and briefly said, My dear Mrs. Price, I cannot tell you how I thank you for your sisterly sympathy and womanly good sense. You have cleared away a lot of fog out of my mind. I don't feel that I can wait an unnecessary hour before I see Peggy. I should like to be with her as soon as the letter is. If you will allow me to postpone my appointment with yourself, I shall start for Eastridge by the first train I can catch to-day. Gratefully yours, Henry T. Gowered.