 Chapter twenty-three of the shuttle, the Slipperovox recording is in the public domain, the shuttle by Francis Hodgson Burnett, Chapter twenty-three, introducing G. Selden. Her bird was perched upon a swaying branch of a slim young sapling near the fence-supported hedge which bounded the park, and Mount Dunstan had stopped to look at it and listen. A soft shower had fallen, and after its passing the sun coming through the light clouds that had broken forth again in the trees, the brief trills and calls and fluting of bird-notes. The sword and ferns glittered fresh green under the raindrops. The young leaves on trees and hedge seemed visibly to uncurl. The uncovered earth looked richly dark and moist, and sent forth the fragrance from its deeps, which, rising to a man's nostril, stirs and thrills him because it is the centre of life's self. The bird upon the sapling was a robin. The tiny round body perched upon his delicate legs plump and bright plumaged for mating. He touched his warm red breast with his beak, fluffed out and shook his feathers, and swelling his throat poured forth his small entranced song. It was a gay, brief, jaunty thing, but pure, joyous, gallant, liquid melody. There was dainty bravado in it, saucy demand and allurement. It was addressed to some invisible hearer of the tender sex, and wheresoever she might be hidden, whether in great branch or low thicket or hedge, there was hinted, no doubt, in her small wooers note that she would hear it and in due time respond. Mount Dunstan listening even laughed at its confident music. The tiny thing was uttering its call of the world, jubilant in the surety of an answer. Having flung it forth he paused a moment and waited. His small head turned sideways, his big round, dew-bright black eye, roguishly attentive. Then, with more swelling of the throat, he trilled and rippled gaily anew, undisturbed and undoubting, but with a trifle of insistence. Then he listened, tried again two or three times with brave chirps and exultant little roulades. Here am I, the bright breasted, the liquid-eyed, the slender-legged, the joyous and conquering. Listen to me, listen to me, listen an answer in the call of God's world. It was the joy and triumphant faith in the tiny note of the tiny thing, life as he himself was, though life whose mystery his man's hand could have crushed, which, while he laughed, set Mount Dunstan thinking. Spring warmth and spring sense and spring notes set a man's being in tune with infinite things. The bright roulade began again, prolonged itself with renewed effort, rose to its height and ended. From the bush in the thicket further up the road a liquid answer came, and Mount Dunstan's laugh at the sound of it was echoed by another which came apparently from the bank rising from the road on the other side of the hedge, and accompanying the laugh was a good-natured nasal voice. She's caught on, there's no mistake about that, I guess it's time for you to hustle, Mr. Robb. Mount Dunstan laughed again. Gem Salter had heard voices like it and cheerful slang phrases of the same order in his ranch days. On the other side of his park fence there was evidently sitting, through some odd chance, an American of the cheery casual order not sufficiently polished by travel to have lost his picturesque national characteristics. Mount Dunstan put a hand on a broken panel of fence and leapt over it into the road. A bicycle was lying upon the roadside grass, and on the bank, looking as though he had been sheltering himself under the hedge from the rain, sat a young man in a cheap bicycling suit. His features were sharply cut and keen, his cap was pushed back from his forehead, and he had a pair of shrewdly careless boyish eyes. Mount Dunstan liked the look of him, and seeing his natural start of the unheralded leap over the gap which was quite close to him he spoke. Good morning, he said. I'm afraid I startled you. Good morning, was the response. It was a bit of a jolt, seeing you jump almost over my shoulder. Where did you come from? You must have been just behind me. I was, explained Mount Dunstan, standing in the park listening to the robin. The young fellow laughed outright. Say, he said that was pretty fine, wasn't it? Wasn't he getting it off his chest? He was an English robin, I guess. American robins are three or four times as big. I liked that little chap. He was a winner. You are an American. Sure, nodding. Put old stars and stripes for mine. First time I've been here. Came part for business and part for pleasure, having the time of my life. Mount Dunstan sat down beside him. He wanted to hear him talk. He had liked to hear the ranchman talk. This was one of the city type, but his genial conversational wanderings would be full of quaint slang and good spirits. He was quite ready to converse, as was made manifest by his next speech. I'm biking through the country because I once had an old grandmother who was English and she was always talking about English country and how green things was and how there was hedges instead of rail fences. She thought there was nothing like little old England. Well, as far as roads and hedges go, I'm with her. They're all right. I wanted a fellow I met crossing to come with me, but he took a cook's trip to Paris. He's a gay sort of boy. Said he didn't want any green lanes in his. He wanted boulevard. He laughed again and pushed his cap further back on his forehead. Said I wasn't much of a sport. I tell you, a chap that's got to earn his fifteen per and live on it can't be too much of a sport. Fifteen per? Mount Dunston repeated doubtfully. His companion chuckled. I forgot I was talking to an Englishman. Fifteen dollars per week, that's what fifteen per means. That's what he told me he gets at Lobenstein's Brewery in New York. Fifteen per, not much is it? How does he manage continental travel on fifteen per, Mount Dunston inquired. He's a typewriter and stenographer, and he dug up some extra jobs to do at night. He's been working and saving two years to do this. We didn't come over on one of the big liners with the four hundred, you can bet, took a cheap one inside Cabin's second class. By George, said Mount Dunston, that was American. The American eagle slightly flapped his wings. The young man pushed his cap at rifle sideways this time and flushed a little. Well, when an American wants anything he generally reaches out for it. Wasn't it rather rash considering the fifteen per, Mount Dunston suggested. He was really beginning to enjoy himself. What's the use of making a dollar and sitting on it? I've not got fifteen per steady, and here I am. Mount Dunston knew his man and looked at him with inquiring interest. He was quite sure he would go on. This was a thing he had seen before, an utter freedom from the insular grudging reserve, a sort of occult perception of the presence of friendly sympathy and an ingenious readiness to meet it half way. The youngster, having missed his fellow traveller, and probably feeling the lack of companionship in his country rides, was in the mood for self- revelation. I'm selling for a big concern, he said, and I've got a first class article to carry. Up to date you know, and all that, it's the top-nuch of type-writing machines. The Delcoff, ever seen it? Here's my card. Taking a card from an inside pocket and handing it to him. It was inscribed, J. Burridge and son, Delcoff typewriter company, Broadway, New York, G. Selden. That's my name, he said, pointing to the inscription in the corner. I am G. Selden, the junior assistant of Mr. Jones. At the sight of the insignia of his trade, his holiday air dropped from him, and he hastily drew from another pocket an illustrated catalogue. If you use a typewriter, he broke forth, I can assure you it would be to your interest to look at this. And as Mount Dunstan took the Prophet pamphlet, and with amiable gravity opened it, he rapidly poured forth his salesman's pata, scarcely pausing to take his breath. It is the most up-to-date machine on the market. It has all the latest improved mechanical appliances. You will see from the cut in the catalogue that the plate and roller is easily removed without a long mechanical operation. All you do is slip two pins back and off comes the roller. There is also another point worth mentioning, the ribbon switch. By using this ribbon switch you can ride in either red or blue ink while you are using only one ribbon. By throwing the switch on this side, you can use 13 yards on the upper edge of the ribbon. By reversing it, you use 13 yards on the lower edge, thus getting practically 26 yards of good serviceable ribbon out of one that is only 13 yards long, making a saving of 50 percent in your ribbon expenditure alone, which you will see as quite an item to any enterprising firm. He was obliged to pause here for a second or so, but as Mount Dunstan exhibited no signs of intending to use violence, and on the contrary continued to inspect the catalogue, he broke forth with renewed cheery volubility. Another advantage is the new basket shift. Also, the carriage on this machine is perfectly stationary and rigid. On all other machines it is fastened by a series of connecting bolts and links, which you will readily understand makes perfect alignment uncertain. Then our tabulator is a part and parcel of the instrument, costing you nothing more than the original price of the machine, which is one hundred dollars, without discount. It seems a good thing, said Mount Dunstan, if I had much business to transact I should buy one. If you bought one you'd have business, responded Selden. That's what's the matter. It's the up-to-date machines that set things humming, a slow old-fashioned type right he uses a firm's time and time's money. I don't find it so, said Mount Dunstan. I have more time than I can possibly use and no money. Gee, Selden looked at him with friendly interest. His experience, which was varied, had taught him to recognize symptoms. This nice, rough-looking chap, who, despite his rather shabby clothes, looked like a gentleman, wore an expression Jones's junior assistant had seen many a time before. He had seen it frequently on the countenances of other junior assistants, who had tramped the streets and met more or less savage rebuffs through a day's length without disposing of a single delcoff and thereby adding five dollars to the ten per. It was the kind of thing which wiped the youth out of a man's face and gave him a hard worn look about the eyes. He had looked like that himself many an unfeeling day before he'd learned to know the ropes and not mind a bit of hot air. His buoyant, slangy soul, was a friendly thing. He was a gregarious creature and liked his fellow man. He felt indeed more at ease with him when he needed jollying along. Patience was not even etiquette in a case as usual as this. Say, he broke out. Maybe I oughtn't have worried you. Are you up against it? Down on your luck, I mean, in hasty translation. Hunt dunced and grinned a little. That's a very good way of putting it, he answered. I never heard up against it before. It's good. Yes, I'm up against it. Out of a job? With genial sympathy. Well, the job I had was too big for me. It needed capital. He grinned slightly again, recalling a phrase of his western past. I'm afraid I'm down and out. No, you're not. With cheerful scorn. You're not dead, are you? As long as a man's not been dead a month, there's always a chance that there's luck around the corner. How did you happen here? Are you piking it? Momentarily, Mount Dunston was baffled. G. Selden, recognizing the fact, enlightened him. That's New York again, he said, with a boyish touch of apology. It means on the tramp, travelling along the turnpike. You don't look as if you'd come to that, though it's queer the sort of fellas you do meet piking sometimes. Theatrical companies that have gone to pieces on the road, you know. Perhaps, with sudden thought, perhaps you're an actor, are you? Mount Dunston admitted to himself that he liked the junior assistant of Jones immensely. A more ingeniously common young man, a more innocent outsider, it had never been his blessed privilege to enter into close converse with, but his very commonness was a healthy normal thing. It made no effort to read itself with chaplets of elegance. It was beautifully unaware that such adornment was necessary. It enjoyed itself youthfully, attacked the earning of its bread with genial pluck, and its good-natured humanness had touched him. He had enjoyed his talk. He wanted to hear more of it. He was not in the mood to let him go his way. To Benzance, who was to lunch with him to-day, he would present a study of absorbing interest. No, he answered, I'm not an actor. My name is Mount Dunston, and this place, with an odour over his shoulder, is mine, but I'm up against it nevertheless. Selden looked a trifle disgusted. He began to pick up his bicycle. He had given a degree of natural sympathy, and this was an English chap's idea of a joke. I'm the Prince of Wales myself, he remarked, and my mother is expecting me to lunch at Windsor so long, my Lord, and he set his foot on the treadle. Mount Dunston rose, feeling rather awkward, the point seemed somewhat difficult to contend. It's not a joke, he said, conscious that he spoke rather stiffly. Little Welly's not quite as easy as he looks, was the cryptic remark of Mr. Selden. Mount Dunston lost his rather easily lost temper, which happened to be the best thing he could have done under the circumstances. Dammit, he burst out, I'm not such a fool as I evidently look, a nice ass I should be to play an idiot joke like that. I'm speaking the truth. Go, if you like, and be hanged." Selden's attention was arrested. The fellow was in earnest. The place was his. He must be the old chap he'd heard spoken of at the wayside public-house he'd stopped at for a pot of beer. He dismounted from his bicycle and came back, pushing it before him, good-natured, relenting and awkwardness combining in his look. All right, he said. I apologize if it's cold fact. I'm not calling you a liar. Thank you. Still a little stiffly from Mount Dunston. The unabashed good cheer of G. Selden carried him lightly over a slightly difficult moment. He laughed, pushing his cap back, of course, and looking over the hedge at the sweep of park, with a group of deer cropping softly in the foreground. I guess I should get a bit hot myself, he volunteered handsomely. If I was an earl and owned a place like this, and a full fellow came along and took me for a tramp, that was a pretty bad break, wasn't it? But I did say you didn't look like it. Anyway, you needn't mind me. I shouldn't get on to Pier Point Morgan or W. K. Evanderbilt if I met him in the street. He spoke the two names as an Englishman if his class would have spoken of the Dukes of Westminster or Marlborough. These were his nobles, the heads of the great American houses, and entirely parallel in his mind with the heads of any great house in England. They wielded the power of the world, and could wield it for evil or good as any Prince or Duke might. Mount Dunston saw the parallel. I apologise all right, G. Selden ended genially. I'm not offended, Mount Dunston answered. There was no reason why you should know me from another man. I was taken for a gamekeeper a few weeks since. I was savage a moment because you refused to believe me. And why should you believe me after all? G. Selden hesitated. He liked the fellow anyhow. You said you were up against it, that was it. And I've seen chaps down on their luck often enough. Good Lord, the hard luck stories I hear every day of my life, and they get a sort of look about the eyes and mouth. I hate to see it on any fellow. It makes me sort of sick to come across it even in a chap that's only got his full self to blame. I may be making another break telling you, but you looked sort of that way. Perhaps, dolledly, I did. Then his voice warming. It was jolly good-natured of you to think about it at all. Thank you. That's all right, in polite acknowledgement. Then with another look over the hedge. Say, what ought I to call you, Earl, or my Lord? It's not necessary for you to call me anything in particular as a rule. If you were speaking of me, you might say Lord Mount Dunstan. G. Selden looked relieved. I don't want to be too much off, he said, and I'd like to ask you a favour. I've only three weeks here and I don't want to miss any chances. What chance would you like? One of the things I'm biking around the country for is to get a look at some such a place as this. We haven't got them in America. My old grandmother was always talking about them. Before her mother brought her to New York, she'd lived in a village near some part-kates, and she tuned about it until she died. When I was a little chap, I liked to hear her. She wasn't much of an American, or a black-net cap with purple ribbons in it, and hadn't outlived her respect for aristocracy. Gee, juggling, if she'd heard what I said to you just now, I reckoned she'd have thrown a fit. Anyhow she made me feel I'd like to see the kind of places she talked about, and I shall think myself in luck if you'll let me have a look at yours, just a bike around the park if you don't object, or I'll leave the bike outside if you'd rather. I don't object at all, said Mount Dunstan. The fact is, I happen to be on the point of asking you to come in and have some lunch when you've got on your bicycle. Seldon pushed his cap and cleared his throat. I wasn't expecting that, he said. I'm pretty dusty, with a glance at his clothes. I need a wash and brush up, particularly if there are ladies. There were no ladies, and he could be made comfortable. This being explained to him, he was obviously rejoiced. With unembarrassed frankness, he expressed exultation. Such luck had not at any time presented himself as a possibility in his holiday scheme. By gee, he ejaculated as they walked under the broad oaks of the avenue leading to the house. Speaking of luck, this is the limit. I can't help thinking of what my grandmother would say if she saw me. He was a new order of companion, but before they had reached the house, Mount Dunstan had begun to find him inspiring to the spirits. His jovial, if crude, youth is unaffected acknowledgement of unaccustomedness to grandeur, even when in dilapidation. His delight in the novelty of the particular forms of everything about him, trees and sword, ferns and moss, his open self-congratulation were without doubt cheerful things. His exclamation when they came with insight of the house itself was for a moment disturbing to Mount Dunstan's composure. Holy gee, he said, the old lady was right. Our life thought about him was way off its figure than a museum. His approval was immense. During the absence in which he was supplied with the wash and brush-up, Mount Dunstan found Mr. Penzance in the library. He explained to him what he had encountered and how it had attracted him. You have liked to hear me describe my western neighbours, he said. This youngster is a New York development and of a different type, but there is a likeness. I have invited to lunch with us a young man whom, Tannum, for instance, if he were here, would call him Bounder. He is nothing of the sort. In his junior assistant Salesman way he is rather a fine thing. I never saw anything more decently human than his way of asking me, man to man, making friends by the roadside, if I was up against it. No other fellow I have known has ever exhibited the same healthy sympathy. The Reverend Lewis was entranced. Already he was really quite flushed with interest. As the Syrian character, engraved upon sarcophagi, would have allured and thrilled him, so was he allured by the cryptic nature of the two or three American slang-phases Mount Dunstan had repeated to him. His was the student's simple ardour. Up against it, he echoed, really, dear, dear, and that signifies, you say. Oh, apparently it means that a man has come face to face with an obstacle difficult or impossible to overcome. But upon my word, that's not bad. It's a strong figure of speech. It brings up a picture. A man, hurrying to an end, much desired, comes unexpectedly upon a stone wall. One can almost hear the impact. He is up against it. Most vivid, excellent, excellent. The nature of Seldon's calling was such that he was not accustomed to being received with a hint of enthusiastic welcome. There was something almost akin to this in the vicar's courteously amiable aquiline countenance when he rose to shake hands with the young man on his entrance. Mr. Penzance was indeed slightly disappointed that his greeting was not responded to by some characteristic phrasing. His American was that of Sam Slick and Artemis Ward, punch and various English witticisms in anecdote. Life at the vicarage of Dunstan had not revealed to him that the model had become archaic. The revelation dawned upon him during his intercourse with G. Seldon. The young man in his cheap bicycling suit was a new development. He was markedly unlike an English youth of his class, as he was neither shy nor laboriously at his ease. That he was at his ease to quite an amazing degree might perhaps have been remotely resented by the insular mind, accustomed to another order of bearing in its social inferiors, had it not been so obviously founded on entire unconsciousness of self and so mingled with open appreciation of the unanticipated pleasures of the occasion. Nothing could have been further from G. Seldon than any desire to attempt to convey the impression that he had enjoyed the hospitality of persons of rank on previous occasions. He found indeed a gleeful point in the joke of the incongruousness of his own presence amid such surroundings. What little willy was expecting, he remarked once, to the keen joy of Mr. Penzance, was a hunk of bread and cheese at a village saloon somewhere. I ought to have said pa, Baudendy, you don't call him saloons here. He was encouraged to talk, and in his carefree fluency he opened up many vistas to the interested Mr. Penzance, who found himself, so to speak, world along Broadway, rushed up the steps of the elevated railroad, and struggling to obtain a seat or a strap to hang on to in a sixth avenue train. The man was saturated with the atmosphere of the hot battle he lived in, from his childhood he'd know nothing but the fever heat of his little old New York, as he called it, with affectionate slanginess, and any temperature lower than that he was accustomed to would have struck him as being below normal. Penzance was impressed by his feelings of affection for the amazing city of his birth. He admired, he adored it, he boasted joyously of its preferred charm. Something doing, he said, that's what my sort of fellow likes, something doing. You feel it right there when you walk along the streets, little old New York for mine. It's good enough for little Willie, and it never stops, why, Broadway at night. He forgot his chop and leaned forward on the table to pour forth his description. The man's servant, standing behind Mount Dunstan's chair, forgot himself also, though he was a trained domestic whose duty it was to present dishes to the attention without any apparent mental processes. Certainly it was not his business to listen and gaze fascinated. This he did, however, actually for the time unconscious of his breach of manners. The very crudity of the language used the oddly sounding, sometimes not easily translatable slang phrases used as if they were a necessary part of any conversation. The blunt, uneducated bareness of figure seemed to Penzance to make more roughly vivid the picture dashed off. The broad thoroughfare almost as thronged by night as by day, crowds going to theatres, loaded electric cars, whizzing and clanging bells, the elevated railroad rushing and roaring past within hearing, theatre fronts flaming with electric light, announcements of names of theatrical stars and the plays they appeared in. Electric light advertisements of brands of cigars, whiskeys, breakfast foods, all blazing high in the night air in such number, and with such strength of brilliancy that the whole thoroughfare was as bright with light as a ballroom or a theatre. The vicar felt himself standing in the midst of it all, blinded by the glare. Sit down on the sidewalk and read your newspaper, a book, a magazine, any old thing you like, with an exultant laugh. The names of the dramatic stars blazing over entrances to the theatres were often English names, their plays English plays, their companies made up of English men and women. G. Silden was as familiar with them and commented upon their gifts as easily as if he had drawn his drama from the strand instead of from Broadway. The novels piled up in the stations of what he called the L, which revealed itself as being a New York haste abbreviation of elevated railroad, were in large proportion English novels, and he had his ingenious estimate of English novelists as well as of all else. Ruddy now, he said, I like him, his all right, even though we haven't quite caught into India yet. The dazzle and brilliancy of Broadway so surrounded Penzance that he found it necessary to withdraw himself and return to his immediate surroundings that he might recover from his sense of interest and bewilderment. His eyes fell upon the stern lineaments of Amant Dunstan in a costume of the time of Henry VIII. He was a burly gentleman whose rough, shortened thick neck and haughty fixedness of stare from the background of his portrait were such as seemed to eliminate him from the scheme of things, the clanging of electric cars and the prevailing roar of the L. Confronted by his gaze, electric light advertisements of whiskey, cigars, and corsets seemed impossible. He's all right, continued G. Silden. I'm ready to separate myself from one fifty any time I see a new book of his. He's got the goods with him. The richness of colloquialism moved the vicar of Mount Dunstan to deep enjoyment. Would you mind, I trust you won't, he apologized courteously, telling me exactly the significance of those last two sentences? I think I see their meaning, but G. Silden looked good-naturedly apologetic himself. Well, it's slang, you see, he explained. I guess I can't help it. You, flushing a trifle, but without any touch of resentment in the boyish colour, you know what sort of a chap I am. I'm not passing myself off as anything but an ordinary business hustler, am I? Just under salesmen to a typewriter concern? I shouldn't like to think I'd got in here on any bluff. I guess I sling in slang every half-dozen words. My dear boy, Penzance was absolutely moved, and he spoke with warmth quite paternal. Lord Mount Dunstan and I are genuinely interested, genuinely. He, because he knows New York a little, and I, because I don't. I am an elderly man, and I have spent my life buried in my books in drowsy villages. Pray go on. Your American slang has frequently a delightful meaning, a fantastic hilarity or common sense or philosophy hidden in its origin. In that it generally differs from English slang, which I regret to say is usually founded on some silly catch word. Pray go on. When you see a new book by Mr. Kipling, you are ready to separate yourself from one fifty, because he has the goods with him. G. Seldon suppressed an involuntary young laugh. One dollar and fifty cents is usually the price of a book, he said. You separate yourself from it when you take it out of your clothes, I mean out of your pocket, and pay it over the counter. There's a careless humour in it, said Mount Dunstan grimly. The suggestion of parting is not half bad. On the whole it's subtle. A great deal of it is subtle, said Penzance, though it all professes to be obvious. The other sentence has a commercial sound. When a man goes about selling for a concern, said the junior assistant of Jones, he can prove what he says if he has the goods with him. I guess it came from that. I don't know. I only know that when a man is a straight sort of fellow and can show up, we say he's got the goods with him. They sat after lunch in the library before an open window, looking into a lovely sunken garden. Plossoms were breaking out on every side, and robins, thrushes and blackbirds chirped and trilled and whistled as Mount Dunstan and Penzance led G. Seldon on to paint further pictures for them. Some of them were rather painful Penzance thought. As connected with youth they held a touch of pathos Seldon was all unconscious of. He had had a hard life, made up since his tenth year of struggles to earn his living. He had sold newspapers, he had run errands, he had swept out a candy store. He had had a few years at the public school and a few months at a business college to which he went at night after work hours. He had been up against it good and plenty, he told them. He seemed, however, to have had a knack of making friends and of giving them a boost along when such a chance was possible. Both of his listeners realized that a good many people had liked him, and the reason was apparent enough to them. When a chap gets sorry for himself, he remarked once, he's down and out, that's a stone-cold fact. There's lots of hard luck stories that you've got to hear anyhow. The fellow that can keep his to himself is the fellow that's likely to get there. Get there, the vicar murmured reflectively, and Seldon chuckled again. Get where he started out to go to, the White House, if you like. The fellows that have got there kept their hard luck stories quiet, I bet. Guess most of them had penned he during election if they were the kind to lie awake sobbing on their pillows because their feelings were hurt. He had never been sorry for himself, it was evident, though it must be admitted that there were moments when the elderly English clergyman, whose most serious encounters had been annoying interviews with cottages of disrespectful manner, rather shuddered as he heard his simple recital of days when he had tramped street after street carrying his catalogue with him and trying to tell his story of the Delcoff de frantically busy men who were driven mad by the importionate sight of him, to worry dull-tempered ones who broke into fury when they heard his voice, and to savage brutes who were only restrained by law from kicking him into the street. You've got to take it if you don't want to lose your job. Some of them's as tired as you are. Sometimes if you can give them a jolly and make them laugh they'll listen and you may unload a machine. But it's no merry jest just at first, particularly in bad weather. The first five weeks I was with the Delcoff I never made a sale, had to live on my ten per, and that's pretty hard in New York. Three-and-a-half few whole bedroom and the rest of your hash and shoes. But I held on and gradually luck began to turn, and I began not to care so much when a man gave it to me hut. The vicar of Mount Dunstan had never heard of the whole bedroom as an institution. A dozen unconscious sentences placed it before his mental vision. He thought it horribly touching. A narrow room at the back of a cheap lodging-house, a bed, a strip of carpet, a wash stand. This, the sole refuge of a male human creature in the flug tide of youth. No more than this to come back to nightly, foot sore and resentful of soul, after days tramps spent enforcing himself and his wares on people who did not want him or them, and who found infinite variety in the forcefulness of their method of saying so. What you know when you go into a place is that nobody wants to see you, and no one will let you talk if they can help it. The only thing is to get in and rattle off your stump before you can be fired out. Sometimes at first he had gone back to the night to the whole bedroom and sat on the edge of the narrow bed swinging his feet and asking himself how long he could hold out. But he had held out and evidently developed into a good salesman, being bold and of imperturbable good spirits and temper, and not troubled by hypersensitiveness. Hearing of the whole bedroom, the coldness of it in winter and the breathless heat in summer, the utter loneliness of it at all times and seasons, one could not have felt surprised if the grown-up lad doomed to its narrowness's home, had been drawn into the electric-lighted gaiety of Broadway, and being caught in its maelstrom had been sucked under to its lowest depths. But it was to be observed that G. Selden had a clear eye and a healthy skin and a healthy young laugh yet, which were all wonderfully to his credit and added enormously to one's liking for him. Do you use a typewriter, he said at last, to Mr. Benzance? It would cut out half your work with your sermons. If you do use one, I'd just like to call your attention to the Delcoff. It's the most up-to-date machine on the market today, drawing out the catalogue. I do not use one, and I'm extremely sorry to say that I could not afford to buy one, said Mr. Benzance, with considerate courtesy. But do tell me about it, I'm afraid I never saw a typewriter. It was the most hospitable thing he could have done and was of the tact of courts. He arranged his falseness in taking the catalogue applied himself to it. G. Selden's soul warmed within him, to be listened to like this, to be treated as a gentleman by a gentleman, by a final swell like this. Harley G! This isn't what I'm used to, he said, with genuine enjoyment. It doesn't matter you're not being ready to buy now. You may be some time, or you may run up against someone who is. Little Willie's are always ready to say his piece. He poured it forthwith glee, the improved mechanical appliances, the cuts in the catalogue, the plate and roller, the ribbon switch, the twenty-six yards of red or blue typing, the fifty percent saving and ribbon expenditure alone, the new basket-shift, the stationery carriage, the tabulator, the superiority to all other typewriting machines, the price one hundred dollars without discount. And both Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance listened entranced, examined cuts in the catalogue, asked questions, and in fact ended by finding that they must repress an actual desire to possess the luxury. The joy their attitude bestowed upon Selden was the thing he would feel gave the finishing touch to the hours which he would recall to the end of his days as the time of his life. Yes, by G, he was having the time of his life. Later he found himself feeling, as Miss Vanderpool had felt, rather as if the whole thing was a dream. This came upon him when, with Mount Dunstan and Penzance, he walked through the park on the curiously beautiful old gardens. The lovely, soundless quiet broken into only by bird-notes or his companion's voices had an extraordinary effect on him. It's so still you can hear it, he said, once stopping on a velvet moss-covered path. Seems like you've got quiet shut up here, and you've turned it on until the air's thick with it. Good Lord, think of little old Broadway keeping it up, and the owl whizzing and thundering along every three minutes just the same while we're standing here. You can't believe it. It would have gone hard with him to describe to them the value of his enjoyment. Again and again there came back to him the memory of his grandmother, who wore the black-net cap trimmed with purple ribbons. Apparently she had remained to the last almost contumaciously British. She had kept photographs of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort on her bedroom mantelpiece and had made caustic international comparisons. But she had seen places like this, and her stories became realities to him now. But she had never thought of the possibility of any chance of his being shown about by the Lord of the Manor himself, lunching by G. and talking to them about typewriters. He vaguely knew that if the grandmother had not emigrated, and he had been born in Dunstan village, he would naturally have touched his forehead to Mount Dunstan and the Vicar when they passed him in the road, and conversation between them would have been an unlikely thing. Somehow things had been changed by destiny, perhaps for the whole of them as years had passed. What he felt when he stood in the picture-gallery neither of his companions could at first guess. He ceased to talk and wandered silently about. Secretly he found himself a trifle awed by being looked down upon by the unchanging eyes of men in strange rich garments, in coarselut, rough and doublet, velvet, powder, curled love-locks, brocade and lace. The face of long-dead loveliness smiled out from its canvas, or withheld itself haughtily from his salesman's gaze. Wonderful bare white shoulders and bosoms clasped with gems or flowers and lace defied him to recall any treasures of broadway to compare with them. Elderly dames, garbed in stiff splendor, held stiff unsympathetic inquiry in their eyes as they looked back upon him. What exactly was a thirty-shilling bicycle suit doing there? In the Delcoff, plainly none were interested. A pretty masquerading shepherdess with a lamb and a crook seemed to laugh at him from under her broad-baribbon straw hat. After looking at her for a minute or so he gave a half-laugh himself, but it was an awkward one. She's a looker, he remarked. There's a lot of them lookers, not all, but a fair show. A looker, translated Mount Dunstan in a low voice to Penzance, means, I believe, a young woman with good looks, a beauty. Here she is a looker by G, said G. Selden, but the awkward half-laugh, taking on a depressed touch of sheepishness. She makes me feel way off, they all do. That was it. Surrounded by them he was fascinated but not cheered. They were all so smilingly or disdainfully or indifferently unconscious of the existence of the human thing of his class. His aspect, his life, and his desires were as remote as those of prehistoric man. His broadway, his L-rail road, his Delcoff. What were they? Where did they come into the scheme of the universe? They silently gazed and likely smiled or frowned through him as he stood. He was probably not in the least aware that he rather loudly sighed. Yes, he said, they make me feel way off. I'm not in it, but she is a looker. Get under the dimple in her cheek. Mount Dunstan and Penzance spent the afternoon in doing their best for him. He was well worth it. Mr. Penzance was filled with delight and saturated with the atmosphere of New York. I feel, he said, softly polishing his eyeglasses and almost affectionately smiling. I really feel as if I had been walking down Broadway or Fifth Avenue. I believe that I might find my way to, well, suppose we say, Webber and Fields. And G. Selden shouted with glee. Never before, in fact, had he felt his heart so warmed by spontaneous affection, as it was by this elderly, somewhat bald and thin-faced clergyman of the Church of England. This he had never seen before. Without the trained subtlety to have explained to himself the finely sweet and simply gracious deeps of it, he was moved and uplifted. He was glad he had come across it. He felt a vague regret at passing on his way and leaving it behind. He would have liked to feel that perhaps he might come back. He would have liked to present him with a Delcoff and teach him how to run it. He had delighted in Mount Dunstan and rejoiced in him, but he had rather fallen in love with Penzance. Certain American doubts he had had of the solidity and permanency of England's position and power were somewhat modified. When fellows like these two stood at the first rank, Little Old England was a pretty safe proposition. After they had given him tea among the scents and songs of the sunken garden outside the library window, they sent him on his way. The shadows were lengthening and the sunlight falling in deepening gold when they walked up the avenue and shook hands with him at the big entrance gates. Well, gentlemen, he said, you've treated me grand as fine as silk and it won't be like Little Willie to forget it. When I go back to New York it'll be all I can do to keep from getting the swell ahead and bragging about it. I've enjoyed myself down to the ground every minute. I'm not the kind of fellow to be likely to be able to pay you back your kindness. But, Harley, gee, if I could I'd do it to beat the band. Goodbye, gentlemen, and thank you, thank you." Across which one of their minds passed a thought that the sound of the hollow impact of a trotting horse's hooves on the road, which each that moment became conscious of hearing, was the sound of the advancing foot of fate. It crossed no mind among the three. There was no reason why it should, and yet at that moment the meaning of the regular stirring sound was a fateful thing. Someone on horseback, said Pen's aunts. He had scarcely spoken before round the curve of the road she came. A finely slender and spiritedly erect girl's figure upon a satin-skinned bright chestnut with a thoroughbred gate, a smart groom riding behind her. She came towards them, was abreast them, looked at Mount Dunstan, a smiling dimple near her lip as she returned his quick salute. Miss Vanderpool, he said low to the vicar, Lady Amstrow the sister. Mr. Pen's aunts, replacing his own hat, looked after her with surprised pleasure. Really, he exclaimed, Miss Vanderpool, what a fine girl, how unusually handsome! Selden turned with a gasp of delighted amazed recognition. Miss Vanderpool, he burst forth, Ruben Vanderpool's daughter, the one that's over here visiting her sister. Is it that one, sure? Yes, from Mount Dunstan without fervour. Lady Amstrow, this lives at Stornham about six miles from here. Gee, with feverish regret, if her father were there then I could get next to him, my fortune would be made. Should you, ventured Pen's aunts politely, endeavour to sell him a typewriter? A typewriter, holy smoke, I'd try to sell him ten thousand. A fella like that syndicates the world, if I could get next to him. And he mounted his bicycle with a laugh. Get next, murmured Pen's aunts. Get on the good side of him, Mount Dunstan murmured in reply. So long, gentlemen, good-bye and thank you again, called Gee Selden as he wheeled off, and was carried soundlessly down the golden road. End of Chapter 23 Chapter 24 of the Shuttle The Slipperyvox recording is in the public domain. The Shuttle by Francis Hodgson Burnett Chapter 24 The Political Economy of Stornham The certain-skinned chestnut was one of the new horses now standing in the Stornham stables. There were several of them, a pair for the land or, saddle horses, smart young cobs for the fair to know, dog-cart, a pony for Utrid, the animals necessary at such a place as Stornham. The stables themselves had been quickly put in order, grooms and stable boys kept them as they had not been kept for years. The men learned in a week's time that their work could not be done too well. There were new carriages as well as horses. They had come from London after Lady Unstruthers and her sister returned from town. The horses had been brought down by their grooms, immensely looked after, blanketed, hooded, and altogether cared for as if they were visiting dukes and duchesses. They were all fine, handsome, carefully chosen creatures. When they danced and cycled through the village on their way to the court, they created a sensation. Whosoever had chosen them had known his business. The older vehicles had been repaired in the village by tread and did him credit. Fox had also done his work well. Plenty more of it had come into their workshops. Tools to be used on the estate, garden implements, wheel-barrows, lawn rollers—things needed about the house, stables, and cottages were to be attended to. The church roof was being repaired. Taking all these things and the doing up of the court itself, there was more work than the village could manage, and carpenters, bricklayers, and decorators were necessarily brought from other places. Still Joe Butler and Simsomes were allowed to lead in all such things as lay within their capabilities. It was they who made such a splendid job of the entrance gates and the lodges. It was astonishing how much was done and how the sense of life in the air, the work of resulting prosperity, made men begin to tread with less listless steps as they went to and from their labour. In the cottages things were being done which made downcast women bestow themselves and look less slattenly. Leaks mended here, windows there, the hopeless copper in the tiny wash-house replaced by a new one. Chimneys cured of the habit of smoking. A clean, flowered paper put on a wall, a coat of white wash. They were small matters, but produced great effect. Betty had begun to drop into the cottages and make the acquaintance of their owners. Her first visits, she observed, created great consternation. Women looked frightened or sullen. Children stared and refused to speak, clinging to skirts and aprons. She found the atmosphere clear after her second visit. The women began to talk, and the children collected in groups and listened with cheerful grins. She could pick up little Jane's kitten or give a pat to small Thomas' mongrel dog in a manner which threw down barriers. Don't put out your pipe, she said to old grandfather Dobie, rising totteringly respectful from his chimney-side chair. You have only just lighted it. You mustn't waste a whole pipe full of tobacco, because I've come in. The old man, grown childish, with age, tittered and shuffled and giggled. Such a joke as the grand-young lady was having with him. She saw he had only just lighted his pipe. The gentry joked a bit sometimes, but he was afraid of his grandson's wife, who was frowning and shaking her head. Betty went to him and put her hand on his arm. "'Sit down,' she said, and I will sit by you.' And she sat down and showed him that she had brought a package of tobacco with her, and actually a wonder of a red and yellow jar to hold it. At the sight of which unheard of Joyce, his rapture was so great that his trembling hands could scarcely clasp his treasures. "'He he he, dearie me, thank ye, thank ye, my lady,' he titted, and he gazed and blinked at her beauty through heavenly tears. Nearly a hundred years old, and he has lived on sixteen shillings a week all his life, and earned it by working every hour between sunrise and sunset,' Betty said to her sister when she went home. A man has one life, and his has passed like that. It is done now, and all the years and work have left nothing in his old hands but his pipe. That's all. I should not like to put it out for him. Who am I that I can buy him a new one, and keep it filled for him until the end? How did it happen? No, suddenly I must not lose time in asking myself that. I must get the new pipe." She did it. A pipe of great magnificence, such as drew to the Dobie cottage as many callers as the village could provide, each coming with fevered interest to look at it, to be allowed to hold and examine it for a few moments, guessing at its probable enormous cost, and returning it reverently, to gaze at Dobie with respect, the increase of which can be imagined when it was known that he was not only possessor of the pipe, but of an assurance that he would be supplied with as much tobacco as he could use to the end of his days. From the time of the advent of the pipe, Grandfather Dobie became a man of mock, and his life in the chimney-corner a changed thing. A man who owns splendors and unlimited excellent shag may like friends to drop in and crack jokes, and even smoke a pipe with him—a common pipe, which, however, is not a miss when excellent shag comes free. He lives in a wild world of gaiety as social vortex said Betty to Lady Anstruthers after one of her visits. He is actually rejuvenated. I must order some new white smocks for him to receive his visitors in. Someone brought him an old copy of the illustrated London News last night. We will send him illustrated papers every week. In the dull old brain God knows what spark of life had been relighted. Young Mrs. Dobie related with chuckles that Grandad had begged that his chair might be dragged to the window, that he might sit and watch the village street. Sitting there, day after day, he smoked and looked at his pictures, and dozed and dreamed, his pipe and tobacco jar beside him on the window-ledge. At any sound of wheels or footsteps his face lighted, and if by chance he caught a glimpse of Betty he tottered to his feet, and stood hurriedly touching his bald forehead with a reverent, palsyed hand. "'Tis er,' he would say, and rapped, I seen her, I did. And young Mrs. Dobie knew that this was his joy, and what he waited for as one waits for the coming of the sun. "'Tis er, tis er.'" The vicar's wife, Mrs. Brent, who since the affair of John Wilson's fire had dropped into the background and felt it indiscreet to present tales of distress at the court, began to recover her courage. Her perfunctory visits assumed a new character. The vicarage had, of course, called promptly upon Miss Vanderpool after her arrival. Mrs. Brent admired Miss Vanderpool hugely. "'You seem so unlike an American,' she said once in her most tactful ingratiating manner, which was very ingratiating indeed. "'Do I? What is one like when one is like an American? I am one, you know. I can scarcely believe it, with sweet order. Pray try,' said Betty, with simple brevity, and Mrs. Brent felt that perhaps Miss Vanderpool was not really very easy to get on with. She meant to imply that I did not speak through my nose and talk too much and too vivaciously in a shrill voice, Betty said afterwards, in talking the interview over with Rosie. I like to convince myself that is not one sole national characteristic. Also it was not exactly Mrs. Brent's place to kindly encourage me with the information that I do not seem to belong to my own country.' Lady Unstruthers laughed, and Betty looked at her inquiringly. "'You said that just like—just like an English woman.' "'Did I?' said Betty. Mrs. Brent had come to talk to her because she did not wish to trouble dear Lady Unstruthers. Lady Unstruthers already looked much stronger, but she had been delicate so long that one hesitated to distress her with village matters. She did not add that she realised that she was coming to headquarters. The vicar and herself were much disturbed about a rather tiresome old woman, old Mrs. Weldon, who lived in a tiny cottage in the village. She was eighty-three years old and a respectable old person, a widow who had reared ten children. The children had all grown up and scattered, and old Mrs. Weldon had nothing whatever to live on. No one knew how she lived, and really she would be better off in the work-house. She could be sent to Brexley Union and comfortably taken care of, but she had that singular obstinate dislike of going which it was so difficult to manage. She had asked for shilling a week from the parish, but that could not be allowed her, as it would merely uphold her in the obstinate intention of remaining in her cottage and taking care of herself, which she could not do. Betty gathered that the shilling a week would be a drain on the parish funds and would so raise the old creature to affluence that she would feel she could defy fate, and the conchumacity of old men and women should not be strengthened by the reckless bestowal of shillings. Knowing that Miss Vanderpool had already gained influence among the village people, Mrs. Brents said, she had come to ask her if she would see old Mrs. Weldon and argue with her in such a manner as would convince her that the work-house was the best place for her. It was, of course, so much pleasanter if these old people could be induced to go to Brexley willingly. Shall I be undermining the whole political economy of Stornham if I take care of her myself? suggested Betty. You will lead others to expect the same thing will be done for them. When one has resources to draw on, Miss Vanderpool commented, in the case of a woman who has lived eighty-three years and brought up ten children until they were old enough and strong enough to leave her to take care of herself, it is difficult for the weak of mind to apply the laws of political economics. I will go and see old Mrs. Weldon. If the Vanderpools would provide for all the obstinate old women and men in the parish, the political economics of Stornham would proffer no marked objections. A good many Americans, Mrs. Brent reflected, seemed to have these odd, lavish ways, as witness Lady Anstra does herself on her first introduction to village life. Miss Vanderpool was evidently a much stronger character and extremely clever, and somehow the stream of the American fortune was at last being directed towards Stornham, which of course should have happened long ago. A good deal was being done, and the whole situation looked more promising. So was the matter discussed and summed up the same evening after dinner at the vicarage. Betty found old Mrs. Weldon's cottage, it was in a green lane turning from the village street which was almost a green lane itself. A tiny hedged-in front garden was before the cottage door. A crazy-looking wicket gate was in the hedge, and a fuchsia bush and a few old roses were in the few yards of garden. There were actually two or three geraniums in the window showing cheerful scarlet between the short white dimity curtains. A house this size and of this poverty in an American village, was Betty's thought, would be a bear and straggling hideousness with old tomato cans in the front yard. Here is one of the things we have to learn from them. When she knocked at the door, an old woman opened it. She was a well-preserved and markedly respectable old person, in a decent print frock and a cap. At the sight of her visitor, she beamed and made a suggestion of curtsy. How do you do, Mrs. Weldon? said Betty. I am Lady Anne Struthers' sister, Miss Vanderpool. I thought I would like to come and see you. Thank you, Miss. I am obliged for the kindness, Miss. Won't you come in and have a chair? There were no signs of decrepitude about her, and she had a cheery old eye. The tiny front room was neat, though there was scarcely space enough in it to contain the table covered with its blue-checked cotton cloth, the narrow sofa, and two or three chairs. There were a few small coloured prints and a famed photograph or so on the walls, and on the table was a Bible and a brown earthenware teapot and a plate. Tom Wood's wife—that's neighbour next door to me, she said—gave me a pinch of tea, and I've just been having it. Tom Wood's miss has just been took on by mustack-edges as one of the new under-gardeners at the court. Betty found her delightful. She made no complaints, and was evidently pleased with the excitement of receiving a visitor. The truth was that, in common with every other old woman, she had secretly aspired to being visited some day by the amazing young lady from Merricka. Betty had yet to learn of the heart-burnings which may be occasioned by an unconscious favouritism. She was not aware that when she dropped into talk to old Doby, his neighbour, Old Megworth, peered from behind his curtains with the dew of envy in his roomy eyes. Seems, he mumbled, as if there wasn't nobody now in Stornham Village, but charged Doby, seems not. There were very fierce in their jealousy of attention, and one must beware of arousing evil passions in the octogenarian breast. The young lady from Merricka had not so far had time to make a call at any cottage in old Mrs. Weldon's Lane, and she had knocked just at old Mrs. Weldon's door. This was enough to put in good spirits even a less cheery old person. At first Betty wondered how she could with delicacy ask personal questions. A few minutes' conversation, however, showed her that the personal affairs of Sennigal's tenants were also the affairs of not only himself, but of such of his relatives as attended to their natural duty. Her presence in the cottage and her interest in Mrs. Weldon's ready-flow of simple talk were desirable and proper compliments to the old woman herself. She was a decent and self-respecting old person, but in her mind there was no faintest glimmer of resentment of questions concerning rent and food and the needs of her simple, hard-driven existence. She had answered such questions on many occasions when they had not been asked in the manner in which her ladyship's sister asked them. Mrs. Brent had scolded her and poked about her cottage going into the tiny wash-house and up into her infinitesimal bedroom under the slanting roof to see that they were kept clean. Miss Vanderpool showed no disposition to poke. She sat and listened and made an inquiry here and there in a nice voice and with a smile on her eyes. There was some pleasure in relating the whole history of your eighty-three years to a young lady who listened as if she wanted to hear it. So old Mrs. Weldon prattled on about her good days when she was young and was kitchen-made at the parsonage in a village twenty miles away, about her marriage with a young farm-labourer, about his steady habits and the comfort they had together in spite of the yearly arrival of a new baby and the crowding of the bit of a cottage his master allowed them. Ten of them, and it had been up before sunrise and a good bit of hard work to keep them all fed and clean. But she had not minded that until Jack died quite sudden after sunstroke. It was odd how much colour her rustic phrasology held. She made Betty see it all. The apparent natural inevitableness of their being turned out of the cottage because another man must have it. The years during which she worked her way while the ten were growing up, having measles and chicken pox and scarlet fever, one dying here and there, dropping out quite in the natural order of things and being buried by the parish in corners of the ancient churchyard. Three of them was took by scarlet fever, one of them of a decline, and then one or two by other illnesses. Only four reached man and womanhood. One had gone to Australia, but he never was one to write, and after a year or two Betty gathered he had seemed to melt away into the great distance. Two girls had married, and Mrs. Weldon could not say they had been comfortable. They could barely feed themselves and their swarms of children. The other son had never been steady like his father. He had at last gone to London, and London had swallowed him up. Betty was struck by the fact that she did not seem to feel that the mother of ten might have expected some return for her labours at eighty-three. Her unresentful acceptance of things was at once significant and moving. Betty found her amazing. What she lived on it was not easy to understand. She seemed rather like a cheerful old bird getting up each unprovided for morning and picking up her sustenance where she found it. There's more in the sign the Lord provides than a good many things, she said, with a small chuckle, marked more by a genial and comfortable sense of humour than by an air of meritoriously quoting the vicar. He do! She paid one and threepence a week in rent for her cottage, and this was the most serious strain upon her resources. She apparently could live without food or fire, but the rent must be paid. An odd do get a bit blind sometimes, she confessed apologetically, and then it's a trouble to get straight. Her cottage was one of a short row, and she did odd jobs for the women who were her neighbours. There were always babies to be looked after, and bits of elk needed. Sometimes there were movings from one cottage to another, and confinements were plainly at once exhilarating and enriching. Her temperamental good cheer, combined with her experience, made her a desirable companion and assistant. She was engagingly frank. When they're new to it and a bit frightened, I just give them a cup of tea and joke with them and cheer them up, she said. Our sister Charles Jenkins' wife as lives next door, come now, me girl, it's been going on since Adam and Eve, and there's a good many of us left, isn't there? And a fine boy it was to miss and her up and about before a month. She was paid in sixpences and spare shillings and in cups of tea or a fresh baked loaf or screws of sugar, or even in a garment not yet worn beyond repair, and she was free to run in and out and grow a flower or so in her garden and talk with a neighbour over the low dividing hedge. They want me to go into the arse, reaching the dangerous subject at last. They say I'll be took care of and looked after, but I don't want to do it, miss. I want to keep me bit of a gnome if I can and be free to come and go. I'm eighty-three and it won't be long. I had a shill in a week from the parish, but they stopped it because they said I ought to go into the arse. She looked at Betty with a momentarily anxious smile. Perhaps you don't quite understand, miss, she said. It'll seem like nothing to you, a place like this. It doesn't, Betty answered, smiling bravely back into the old eyes, though she felt a slight fullness of the throat. I understand all about it. It is possible that old Mrs. Weldon was a little taken aback by an attitude which, satisfactory to her own prejudices, though it might be, was taken in connection with fixed customs, a trifle unnatural. You don't mind me not wanting to go, she said. No was the answer, not at all. Betty began to ask questions. How much tea, sugar, soap, candle, bread, butter, bacon could Mrs. Weldon use in a week? It was not very easy to find out the exact quantities as Mrs. Weldon's estimates of such things had been based during her entire existence upon calculation as to how little, not how much, she could use. When Betty suggested a pound of tea, a half-pound, the old woman smiled at the innocent ignorance, the suggestion of such reckless profusion implied. Oh, no, bless your miss, no! I could never do away with it. A quarter-miss, that'd be plenty, a quarter. Mrs. Weldon's idea of the best was that at two shillings a pound. Quarter of a pound would cost six pence, twelve cents, thought Betty. A pound of sugar would be tuppence. Mrs. Weldon would use half a pound, the riotous extravagance of two cents. Half a pound of butter, good tub-butter, miss, would be ten pence, three farthings a pound. Soap, candles, bacon, bread, coal, wood, in the quantities required by Mrs. Weldon, might with the addition of rent amount to the dizzying height of eight or ten shillings. With careful extravagance, Betty mentally summed up, I might spend almost two dollars a week in surrounding her with a riot of luxury. She made a list of the things and added some extras as an idea of her own. Life had not afforded her this kind of thing before she realized. She felt for the first time the joy of reckless extravagance and thrilled with the excitement of it. You need not think of Brexley Union any more, she said, when she having risen to go stood at the cottage door with old Mrs. Weldon. The things I have written down here shall be sent to you every Saturday night. I will pay your rent. Miss, miss, Miss Weldon looked affrighted. It's too much, miss, and coals eighteen pence and a hundred. Never mind, said her ladyship's sister, and the old woman looking up into her eyes found there the color Mount Dunstan had thought of as being that of Bluebell's underwater. I think we can manage it, Mrs. Weldon. Keep yourself as warm as you like, and some time I will come and have a cup of tea with you and see if the tea is good. Oh, dearie me, said Mrs. Weldon, I can't think what to say, miss. It lifts everything, it's not to be believed it's like being left to fortune. When the wicked gate swung to and the young lady went up the lane, the old woman stood staring after her, and here was a piece of news to run into Charlie Jenkins' cottage and tell, and what woman or man in the row would quite believe it. End of Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five of The Shuttle This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, The Shuttle by Francis Hodgson Burnett, Chapter Twenty-Five. We began to marry them, my good fellow. Lord Dunham and his eldest son Lord Westholth sauntered together, smoking there after dinner cigars, on the broad turf terrace overlooking park and gardens, which seemed to sweep without boundary line into the purplish land beyond. The gray mass of the castle stood clear cut against the blue of a sky whose twilight was still almost daylight, though in the purity of its evening stillness a star already hung here and there, and a young moon swung low. The great spaces about them held a silence whose exquisite entirety was marked at intervals by the distant bark of a shepherd dog driving his master's sheep to their fold. Their soft intermittent planks, the mother use mellow answering to the tender fretful lambs, floated on the air, a lovely part of the ending day's repose. Where, too, who are friends strolled together at such hours, the great beauty makes for silence or for thoughtful talk. These two men, father and son, were friends and intimates, and had been so from Westholth's first memory of the time when his childish individuality began to detach itself from the background of misty and interesting things. They had liked each other, and their liking and intimacy had increased with the onward moving and change of years. After sixty sane and decently spent active years of life, Lord Denham, in either country tweed or evening-dress, was a well-built and handsome man. At thirty-three his son was still like him. Have you seen her, he was saying? Only at a distance she was driving Lady Ernst, others across the marshes in a cart. She drove well, and he laughed as he flicked the ash from his cigar. The back of her head and shoulders looked handsome. The American young woman is at present a factor which is without doubt to be counted with. Lord Denham put the matter without likeness. Any young woman is a factor, but the American young woman just now, just now. He paused a moment as though considering. It did not seem at all necessary to count with them at first when they began to appear among us. They were generally curiously exotic, funny little creatures with odd manners and voices. They were often most amusing, and one liked to hear them chatter and see the airy likeness with which they took superfluous, and sometimes unsuperfluous conventions, as a hunter takes a five-barred gate. But it never occurred to us to marry them. We didn't take them seriously enough. But we began to marry them. We began to marry them, my good fellow. The final words broke forth with such a suggestion of sudden anxiety, that in spite of himself Westhold laughed involuntarily, and his father turning to look at him laughed also. But he recovered his seriousness. It was all rather a muddle at first, he went on. Things were not fairly done, and certain bad lots looked on it as a paying scheme on the one side, while it was a matter of silly little ambitions on the other. But that it is an extraordinary country, there is no sane denying, huge, fabulously resourceful in every way, area, variety of climate, wealth of minerals, products of all sorts, soil to grow anything, and sun and rain enough to give each thing what it needs. Last, or rather first, a people who considered as a nation are in the riot of youth, and who began by being English, which we Englishmen have an innocent belief is the one method of owning the earth. That figure of speech is an Americanism I carefully committed to memory. Well, after all, look at the map, look at the map, there we are. They had frequently discussed together the question of the development of international relations. Lord Dunham, a man of far-reaching and clear logic, had realized that the oddly unaccentuated growth of intercourse between the two countries might be a subject to be reflected on without likeness. The habit we have of regarding America and Americans is rather a joke, he had once said, as a sort of parallel in the condescendingly amiable amusement of a parent at the precocity or whimsicalness of a child. But the child is shooting up amazingly, amazingly, in a way which suggests diverse possibilities. The exchange of visits between Dunham and Stornham had been rare and formal. From the call made upon the younger Lady Anstruthers on her marriage the Dunham's had returned with a sense of puzzle pity for the little American bride, with her wonderful frock and her uneasy childish eyes. For some years Lady Anstruthers had been too delicate to make or return calls, one heard painful accounts of her apparent retched ill health and of the condition of her husband's estate. As the relations between the two families have evidently been strained for years, Lord Dunham said, it is interesting to hear of the sudden advent of the sister, it seems to point to reconciliation, and you say the girl is an unusual person. From what one hears she would be unusual if she were an English girl who had spent her life on an English estate, that an American who is making her first visit to England should seem to see at once the practical needs of a neglected place is a thing to wonder at. What can she know about it, one thinks, but she apparently does know. They say she has made no mistakes even with the village people. She is managing in one way or another to give work to every man who wants it. Result, of course, unbounded rustic enthusiasm. Lord Dunham laughed between the soothing whiffs of his cigar. How clever of her, and what sensible good-feeling. Yes, yes, she evidently has learned things somewhere. Perhaps New York has founded wise to begin to give young women professional training in the management of English estates. Who knows, not a bad idea. It was the rustic enthusiasm, Westfield explained, which had in a manner spread her fame. One heard enlightening and illustrative anecdotes of her. He related several well worth hearing. She had evidently a sense of humour and unexpected perceptions. One detail of the story of Old Dobie's Mirsham, Westolt said, pleased me enormously. She managed to convey to him, without hurting his aged feelings or overwhelming him with embarrassment, that if he preferred a clean church warden or his old briar would, he need not feel obliged to smoke the new pipe. He could regard it as a trophy. Now, how did she do that without filling him with fright and confusion, lest you might think him not sufficiently grateful for her present? But they tell me she did it, and that Old Dobie is rapturously happy and takes the Mirsham to bed with him, but only smokes it on Sundays, sitting at his window, blowing great clouds when his neighbours are coming from church. It was a clever girl who knew that an old fellow might secretly like his old pipe best. It was a deliciously clever girl, said Lord Dunham. One wants to know and make friends with her. We must drive over and call. I confess I rather congratulate myself that Ann Stothers is not at home. Oh, so do I, Westolt answered. One wonders a little how far he and his sister-in-law will foregather when he returns. He's an unpleasant beggar. A few days later Mrs. Brent, returning from a call on Mrs. Charlie Jenkins, was passed by a carriage whose liveries she recognised halfway up the village street. It was the carriage from Dunham Castle. Lord and Lady Dunham and Lord Westolt sat in it. They were, of course, going to call at the court. Miss Vanderpool was beginning to draw people. She naturally would. She would be likely to make quite a difference in the neighbourhood now that it had heard of her, and Lady Ann Stothers had been seen driving with her, evidently no longer an unvisitable invalid but actually decently closed than in her right mind. Mrs. Brent slackened her steps that she might have the pleasure of receiving and responding gracefully to salutations from the important personages in the landlord. She felt that the Dunham's were important. There were earldoms and earldoms, and that of Dunham was dignified and of distinction. A common-looking young man on a bicycle who had wheeled into the village with the carriage, riding alongside it for a hundred yards or so, stopped before the clock in and dismounted just as Mrs. Brent neared him. He saw her looking after the equipage and lifting his cap spoke to her civilly. This is Stornham Village, ain't it, ma'am? he inquired. Yes, my man. His costume and general aspect seemed to indicate that he was of the class one addressed as my man, though there was something a little odd about him. Thank you. That wasn't Miss Vanderpool's elder sister in that carriage, was it? Miss Vanderpool's? Mrs. Brent hesitated. Do you mean Lady Anne Struthers? I'd forgotten her name. I know Miss Vanderpool's elder sister lives at Stornham, Ruben S. Vanderpool's daughter. Lady Anne Struthers' younger sister is a Miss Vanderpool, and she is visiting at Stornham Court now. Mrs. Brent could not help adding curiously. Why do you ask? I'm going to see her. I'm an American. Mrs. Brent coughed to cover a slight gasp. She had heard remarkable things of the democratic customs of America. It was painful not to be able to ask questions. The lady in the carriage was the countess of Dunham, she said rather grandly. They are going to the court to call on Miss Vanderpool. Then Miss Vanderpool's there yet. That's all right. Thank you, ma'am. And lifting his cap again, he turned into the little public house. The Dunham party had been accustomed on their rare visits to Stornham to be received by the kind of man-servant in the kind of livery, which is a manifest, though unwilling, confession. The men who threw open the doors were of regulation height, well-dressed, and of a trained bearing. The entrance hall had lost its hopeless shabbiness. It was a complete and picturesquely luxurious thing. The change suggested magic. The magic which had been used, Lord Dunham reflected, was the simplest and most powerful on earth. Given surroundings, combined with the gift of knowing values of form and color, if you have the power to spend thousands of guineas on tiger-skins, oriental rugs, and other beauties, barrenness is easily transformed. The drawing-room wore a changed aspect, and at a first glance it was to be seen that in poor little Lady Anstrowhers, as she had generally been called, there was to be noted alteration also. In her case the change, being in its first stages, could not perhaps be yet called transformation, but aided by softly pretty arrangement of dress and hair, a light in her eyes, and a suggestion of pink under her skin, one recalled that she had once been a pretty little woman, and that after all she was only about thirty-two years old. That her sister, Miss Vanderpool, had beauty it was not necessary to hesitate in deciding. Neither Lord Dunham, nor his wife, nor their son, did hesitate. A girl with long limbs in a luring profile and extraordinary black lashes set around lovely Irish blue eyes possesses physical capital not to be argued about. She was not one of the curious, exotic little creatures, whose thin though sometimes rather sweet and always gay, high-pitched young voices Lord Dunham had been so especially struck by in the early days of the American invasion. Her voice had a tone one would be likely to remember with pleasure. How well she moved! How well her black head was set on her neck! Yes, she was of the new type, the later generation. These amazing, oddly practical people had evolved it, planned it, perhaps, bought figuratively speaking the architects and material to design and build it, bought them in whatever country they found them—England, France, Italy, Germany—pocketing them coolly and carrying them back home to develop, complete, and send forth into the world when their invention was a perfected thing. Struck by the humour of his fancy Lord Dunham found himself smiling into the Irish blue eyes. They smiled back at him in a way which warmed his heart. There were no pauses in the conversation which followed. In time's past calls at Stornham had generally held painfully black moments. Lady Dunham was as pleased as her husband. A really charming girl was an enormous acquisition to the neighbourhood. Westholt, his father, saw, had found even more than the story of old Dobie's pipe had prepared him to expect. Country calls were not usually interesting or stimulating, and this one was. Lord Dunham made subtly brilliant plans to lead Miss Vanderpool to talk of her native land and her views of it. He knew that she would say things worth hearing. Incidentally, one gathered picturesque detail—to have vibrated between the two continents since her thirteenth year—to have spent a few years at school in one country, a few years in another, and yet a few years more in still another as part of an arranged educational plan. To have crossed the Atlantic for the holidays, and to have journeyed thousands of miles with her father in his private car, to make the visits of a man of great schemes to his possessions of mines, railroads, and lands which were almost principalities. These things had been merely details of her life, adding interest and variety it was true, but seeming the merely normal outcome of existence. They were normal to Vanderpools and others of their class who were abnormalities in themselves when compared with the rest of the world. Her own very lack of any abnormality reached in Lord Dunham's mind, the highest point of illustration of the phase of life she beautifully represented, for beautiful he felt its rare charms were. When they strolled out to look at the gardens, he found talk with her no less stimulating thing. She told her story of Kedgers and showed the chosen spot where thickets of lilies were to bloom, with the giants lifting white-arc angel trumpets above them in the centre. He can be trusted, she said. I feel sure he can be trusted. He loves them. He could not love them so much and not be able to take care of them. And as she looked at him in frank appeal for sympathy, Lord Dunham felt that for the moment she looked like a tall, queenly child. But pleased as he was, he presently gave up his place at her side to West Holt. He must not be a selfish old fellow and monopolise her. He hoped they would see each other often, he said, charmingly. He thought she would be sure to like Dunham, which was really a thoroughly English old place marked by all the features she seemed so much attracted by. There were some beautiful relics of the past here and some rather shocking ones. Certain dungeons, for instance, in a gallows-mount on which, in good old times, the family gallows had stood. This had apparently been a working adjunct to the domestic arrangements of every respectable family, and that irritating person should dangle from it had been a simple domestic necessity if one was to believe old stories. It was then that nobles were regarded with respect, he said, with his fine smile, in the days when a man appeared with clang of arms and with javelins and spears before, and Don John keeps in the background the attitude of bent knees and awful reverence with the inevitable results. When one could hang a servant on one's own private gallows or chop off his hand for a reverence or disobedience, obedience and reverence were a rule. Now a month's notice is the extremity of punishment and the old pomp of armed servitors suggests comic opera, but we can show you relics of it at Dunham. He joined his wife and began at once to make himself so delightful to Rosie that she ceased to be afraid of him and ended by talking almost gaily of her London visit. Betty and Westholt walked together. The afternoon being lovely, they had all sauntered into the park to look at certain views, and the sun was shining between the trees. Betty thought the young man almost as charming as his father which was saying much. She had fallen wholly in love with Lord Dunham, with his handsome elderly face, his voice, his erect bearing, his fine smile, his attraction of manner, his courteous ease and wit. He was one of the men who stood for the best of all they had been born to represent. Her own father she felt stood for the best of all such an American as himself should be. Lord Westholt would in time be what his father was. He had inherited from him good looks, good feeling, and a sense of humour. Yes, he had been given from the outset all that the other man had been denied. She was thinking of Mount Dunstan as the other man and spoke of him. You know Lord Mount Dunstan, she said. Westholt hesitated slightly. Yes, and no, he answered after the hesitation. No one knows him very well. You have not met him, with a touch of surprise in his tone. He was a passenger on the Meridiana when I last crossed the Atlantic. There was a slight accident and we were thrown together for a few moments. Afterwards I met him by chance again. I did not know who he was. Lord Westholt showed signs of hesitation anew. In fact, he was rather disturbed. She evidently did not know anything whatever of the Mount Dunstan's. She would not be likely to hear the details of the scandal which it obliterated them as it were from the decent world. The present man, though he had not openly been mixed up with the hideous thing, had born the brand because he had not proved himself to possess any qualities likely to recommend him. It was generally understood that he was a bad lot also. To such a man, near Lourman, such a young woman as Miss Vanderpool would present would be extraordinary. It was unfortunate that she should have been thrown in his way. At the same time it was not possible to state the place clearly during one's first call on a beautiful stranger. His going to America was rather spirited, said the mellow voice beside him. I thought only Americans took their fates in their hands in that way. For a man of his class to face a rancher's life means determination. It means the spirit—with a low little laugh at the leap of her imagination—of the men who were Mount Dunstan's in early days and went forth to fight for what they meant to have. He went to fight. He ought to have won. He will win some day. I do not know about fighting, Lord Westholt answered. Had the fellow been telling her romantic stories, the general impression was that he went to America to amuse himself. No, he did not do that, said Betty, with simple finality. As she ran, she is not amusing. She stopped short and stood still for a moment. They had been walking down the avenue, and she stopped because her eyes had been caught by a figure half sitting, half lying in the middle of the road, a prostrate bicycle near it. It was the figure of a cheaply dressed young man who, as she looked, seemed to make an ineffectual effort to rise. Is that man ill? she exclaimed. I think he must be. They went towards him at once, and when they reached him he lifted a dazed white face, down which a stream of blood was trickling from a cut on his forehead. He was, in fact, very white indeed, and did not seem to know what he was doing. I am afraid you are hurt, Betty said, and as she spoke the rest of the party joined them. The young man vacantly smiled, and, making an unconscious looking pass across his face with his hand, smeared the blood over his features painfully. Betty kneeled down, and, drawing out her handkerchief, lightly wiped the gruesome smears away. Lord Westholt saw what had happened, having given a look at the bicycle. His chain broke as he was coming down the incline, and as he fell he got a nasty knock on this stone, touching with his foot a rather large one which had evidently fallen from some cartload of building material. The young man, still vacantly smiling, was fumbling at his breast pocket. He began to talk incoherently in good nasal New York, at the mere sound of which Lady Amstrad has made a little yearning step forward. Superior any other, he muttered, tabulator, spacer, marginal release key, call your attention, instantly justable Delcoff, no equal on market. And, having found what he had fumbled for, he handed a card to Miss Vanderpool and sank unconscious on her breast. Let me support him, Miss Vanderpool, said Westholt, starting forward. Never mind, thank you, said Betty, if he has fainted, I suppose he must be laid flat on the ground. Will you please to read the card? It was the card Mount Dunstan had read the day before. Jay Burridge and son Delcoff typewriter company, Broadway, New York, G. Selden. His probably G. Selden, said Westholt, travelling in the interests of his firm poor chap. The clue is not of much immediate use, however. They were fortunately not far from the house, and Westholt went back quickly to summon servants and send for the village doctor. The Dunnams were kindly sympathetic, and each of the party lent a handkerchief to staunch the bleeding. Lord Dunnham helped Miss Vanderpool to lay the young man down carefully. I am afraid, he said, I am really afraid his leg is broken. It was twisted under him. What can be done with him? Miss Vanderpool looked at her sister. Will you allow him to be carried to the house temporarily, Rosie? She asked. There is apparently nothing else to be done. Yes, yes, said Lady Amstraddus. How could one send him away, poor fellow? Let him be carried to the house. Miss Vanderpool smiled into Lord Dunnham as much approving, elderly eyes. G. Selden is a compatriot, she said. Perhaps he heard a whizz here and came to sell me a typewriter. Lord Westholt, returning with two footmen and a light mattress, G. Selden was carried with cautious care to the house. The afternoon sun, breaking through the branches of the ancestral oaks, kindly touched his keen-featured, white-young face. Lord Dunnham and Lord Westholt each lend a friendly hand, and Miss Vanderpool, keeping near, once or twice wiped away an insistent trickle of blood, which showed itself from beneath the handkerchiefs. Lady Dunnham followed with Lady Amstraddus. Afterwards, during his convalescence, G. Selden frequently felt with regret that by his unconsciousness of the dignity of his courtage at the moment he had missed feeling himself to be for once in a position he would have designated as out of sight in the novelty of its importance. To have beheld him, borne by nobles and liveryed menials, accompanied by ladies of title up the avenue of an English park, on his way to be cared for in baronial halls, would he knew have added a joy to the final moments of his grandmother, which the consolations of religion could scarcely have met equally in competition. His own point of view, however, would not, it is true, have been that of the old woman in the black net cap and purple ribbons, but of a less reverent nature. His enjoyment, in fact, would have been based upon that transatlantic sense of humor whose soul is glee at the incompatible, which would have been full-fed by the incongruity of little Willie being yanked along by a bunch of earls and Ruben S. Vanderpool's daughters following the funeral, that he himself should have been unconscious of the situation seemed to him like throwing away money. The doctor arriving after he had been put to bed found slight concussion of the brain in a broken leg. With Lady Anstra this kind permission it would certainly be best that he should remain for the present where he was. So in a bedroom whose windows looked out upon spreading lawns and broad branched trees he was as comfortably established as was possible. G. Selden through the capricious intervention of fate, if he had not got next to Ruben S. Vanderpool himself, had most undisputably got next to his favourite daughter. As the Dunham carriage rolled down the avenue there reigned for a few minutes reflective silence. It was Lady Dunham who broke it. That, she said in her softly decided voice, that is a nice girl. Lord Dunham's agreeable humorous smile flickered into evidence. That is it, he said. Thank you, Eleanor, for supplying me with a quite delightful early Victorian word. I believe I wanted it. She is a beauty and she is clever. She is a number of other things, but she is also a nice girl. If you will allow me to say so, I have fallen in love with her. If you will allow me to say so, put in West Holt, so have I quite fatally. That, said his father, with speculation in his eye, is more serious. Gee, Seldon, awakening to consciousness two days later, lay instead at the chintz covering of the top of his four-post bed through a few minutes of vacant amazement. It was a four-post bed he was lying in, wasn't it, and his leg was bandaged and felt immovable. The last thing he remembered was going down an incline in a tree-bordered avenue. There was nothing more. He had been all right then. Was this a four-post bed or was it not? Yes, it was. Was it part of the furnishings of a swell bedroom, the kind of bedroom he had never been in before? Tip top, in fact. He stared and tried to recall things, but could not, and in his bewilderment exclaimed aloud, Well, he said, if this ain't the limit, you can search me. A respectable person in a white apron came to him from the other side of the room. It was Buttle's wife who had been hastily called in. Sh! she said, soothingly. Don't you worry. Nobody ain't gonna search you. Nobody ain't. There. Sh! Rather as if he were a baby. Beginning to be conscious of a curious sense of weakness, Selden lay instead at her in helplessness, which might have been considered pathetic. Perhaps it got bats in his belfry, and there was no use in talking. At that moment, however, the door opened and a young lady entered. She was a looker. G. Selden's weakness did not interfere with his perceiving. A looker by G. She was dressed as if for going out in softly-tinted, exquisite things, and a large, strange hydrangea-blue flower under the brim of her hat rested on soft and full black hair. The black hair gave him a clue. It was hair like that he had seen as Ruben S. Vanderpool's daughter rode by when he stood at the park gates at Mount Dunstan. Bats in his belfry, of course. How is he, she said to the nurse. He's been seeming comfortable all day, miss, the woman answered, but he's light-headed yet. He opened his eyes quite sensible-looking a bit ago, but he spoke queer. He said something was the limit, and that we might search him. Bet he approached the bedside to look at him and meeting the disturbed inquiry in his uplifted eyes laughed, because seeing that he was not delirious, she thought she understood. She had not lived in New York without hearing its argot, and she realized that the exclamation which had appeared delirium to Mrs. Butler had probably indicated that the unexplainableness of the situation in which G. Selden found himself struck him as reaching the limit of probability, and that the most extended search of his person would fail to reveal any clue to satisfactory explanation. She bent over him with her laugh still shining in her eyes. I hope you feel better, can you tell me, she said. His voice was not strong, but his answer was that of a young man who knew what he was saying. If I'm not off my head, ma'am, I'm quite comfortable, thank you, he replied. I'm glad to hear that, said Bet he. Don't be disturbed, your mind is quite clear. All I want, said G. Selden impartially, is just to know where I'm at and how I blew in here. It would help me to rest better. You met with an accident, the looker explained, still smiling with both lips and eyes. Your bicycle chain broke, and you were thrown and hurt yourself. It happened in the avenue in the park. We found you and brought you in. You're at Stornham Court, which belongs to Sir Nigel Anstrothers. Lady Anstrothers is my sister. I am Miss Vanderpool. Holly G. ejaculated G. Selden inevitably. Holly G. The splendour of the moment was such that his brain whirled, as it was not yet in the physical condition to whirl with any comfort he found himself closing his eyes weakly. That's right, Miss Vanderpool said. Keep them closed. I must not talk to you until you're stronger. Lie still and try not to think. The doctor says you're getting on very well. I'll come and see you again. As the soft sweep of her dress reached the door, he managed to open his eyes. Thank you, Miss Vanderpool. He said, thank you, ma'am. And as his eyelids closed again, he murmured in luxurious peace. Well, if that's her, she can have me and welcome. She came to see him again each day, sometimes in a linen frock and garden hat, sometimes in her soft tints and lace and flowers before or after her drive in the afternoon, and two or three times in the evening, with lovely shoulders and wonderfully trailing draperies, looking like the women he had caught far off glimpses of on the rare occasion of his having indulged himself in the highest and most remotely placed seat in the gallery at the opera, which in convenience he had borne not through any ardent desire to hear the music, but because he wanted to see the show and get a look in at the four hundred. He believed very implicitly in his four hundred, and privately, though perhaps almost unconsciously, cherished the distinction his share of them conferred upon him, as fondly as the English young man of his rudimentary type cherishes his dukes and duchesses. The English young man may revel in his coronated beauties in photograph shops. The young American dwells fondly on flattering or very unflattering reproductions of his multimillionaires' wives and daughters in the voluminous illustrated sheets of his Sunday paper, without which life would be a wretched and savourless thing. Selden had never seen Miss Vanderpool in his Sunday paper, and here he was lying in a room in the same house with her, and she, coming in to see him and talk to him as if he was one of the four hundred himself. The comfort and luxury with which he found himself surrounded sank into insignificance when compared with such unearthly luck as this. Lady Anstruthers came in to see him also, and she several times brought with her a queer little lame fellow who was spoken of as Master Utrid. Master was supposed by G. Selden to be a sort of title conferred upon the small sons of baronettes and the like. The children he knew in New York and elsewhere answered to the names of Bob or Jimmy or Bill. No parallel to Master had been in vogue among them. Lady Anstruthers was not like her sister. She was a little thing, and both she and Master Utrid seemed fond of talking of New York. She had not been home for years, and the youngster had never seen it at all. He had some queer ideas about America, and seemed never to have seen anything but Stornham in the village. G. Selden liked him, and was vaguely sorry for a little chap to whom a description of the festivities attendant upon the Fourth of July and a presidential election seemed like stories from the Arabian Nights. Tell me about the Tammany Tiger, if you please, he said once. I want to know what kind of an animal it is. From a point of view somewhat different from that of Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance, Betty Vanderpool found talk with him interesting. To her he did not wear the aspect of a foreign product. She had not met and conversed with young men like him, but she knew of them. Stringent precautions were taken to protect her father from their ingenious enterprises. They were not permitted to enter his offices. They were even discouraged from hovering about their neighbourhood when seen and suspected. The atmosphere it was understood was to be, if possible, disinfected of agents. This one, lying softly in the four-post bed, cheerfully grateful for the kindness shown him, and plainly filled with delight in his adventure, despite the physical discomforts attending it, gave her, as he began to recover, new views of the life he lived in common with his kind. It was like reading scenes from a realistic novel of New York Life to listen to his frank, slangy conversation. To her, as well as to Mr. Penzance, sidelights were thrown upon existence in the hall bedroom and upon previously unknown phases of business life in Broadway and roaring downtown streets. His determination, his sharp readiness, his control of temper under rebuff and superfluous harshness, his odd impersonal summing up of men and things, and good-natured patience with the world in general, were, she knew, business assets. She was even moved, no less, by the remote connection of such a life with that of the First Ruben Vanderpool, who had laid the huge solid foundations of their modern fortune. The First Ruben Vanderpool must have seen and known the faces of men as G. Selden saw and knew them, fighting his way step by step, knocking pertinaciously at every gateway which might give ingress to some passage, leading to even the smallest gain, meeting with rebuff and indifference, only to be overcome by steady and continued assault. If G. Selden was a nuisance, the First Vanderpool had without doubt worn that aspect upon innumerable occasions. No one desires the presence of the man who, while having nothing to give, must persist in keeping himself in evidence, even if by strategy or force. From stories she was familiar with, she had gathered that the First Ruben Vanderpool had certainly lacked a certain youth of soul she felt in this modern struggle of her life. He had been the cleverer man of the two. G. Selden, she secretly liked the better. The curiosity of Mrs. Buttle, who was the nurse, had been awakened by a singular feature of her patient's feverish wanderings. He keeps muddering Miss Things I Can't Make Out about Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Ben Zance, and some child he calls Little Willie. He talks to them the same as if he knew them, same as if he was with them, and they were talking to him quite friendly. One morning, Betty, coming to make her visit of inquiry, found the patient looking thoughtful, and when she commented upon his air of pondering, his reply classed light upon the mystery. While Miss Vanderpool, he explained, I was lying here thinking of Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Ben Zance, and how well they'd treated me. I haven't told you about that, have I?" That explains what Mrs. Buttle said, she answered. When you were delirious, you talked frequently to Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Ben Zance. We both wondered why. Then he told her the whole story. Beginning with his sitting on the grassy bank outside the park, listening to the song of the robin, he ended with the adieu at the entrance gates, when the sound of her horse's trotting hooves had been heard by each of them. What I've been lying here thinking of, he said, is how queer it was, it happened just that way. If I hadn't stopped just that minute, and if you hadn't gone by, and if Lord Mount Dunstan hadn't known you and said who you were, Little Willie would have been in London by this time, hustling to get a cheap bunk back to New York in. Because, inquired Miss Vanderpool, she seldom laughed and hesitated a moment, then he made a clean breast of it. Same as Vanderpool, he said, I hope it won't make you mad if I own up. Ladies like you don't know anything about chaps like me. On the square and straight out, when I seen you and heard your name, I couldn't help remembering whose daughter you was. Ruben S. Vanderpool spells a big thing. Why, when I was in New York, we fellows used to get together and talk about what it had mean to the chap who could get next to Ruben S. Vanderpool. We used to count up all the business he does and all the clerks he's got under him pounding away on typewriters, and how they'd be bound to get worn out and need new ones. And we'd make calculations how many a man could unload if he could get next. It was a kind of typewriting junior assistant fairy story, and we knew it couldn't happen really. But we used to chin about it just for the fun of the thing. One of the boys made up a thing about one of us saving Ruben S.'s life, dragging him from under a runaway auto, and when he says, What can I do to show my gratitude, young man? Him handing out his catalogue and saying, I should like to call your attention to the Delcoff, sir, and getting him to promise he'd never use any other so long as he lived. Ruben S. Vanderpool's daughter laughed as spontaneously as any girl might have done. G. Selden laughed with her. At any rate, she hadn't got mad so far. That was what did it, he went on. When I rode away on my bike, I got thinking about it and couldn't get it out of my head. The next day I just stopped on the road and got off my wheel, and I says to myself, Look here, business is business. If you are travelling in Europe and lunching at Buckingham Palace with a main squeeze, get busy. What'll the boys say if they hear you've missed a chance like this? You hit the bike for Stornham Castle or whatever it's called, and take your nerve with you. She can't do more than have you fired out, and you've been fired before and got your breath after it. So I turned round and made time, and that was how I happened on your avenue. And perhaps it was because I was feeling a bit rattled, I lost my hold when the chain broke and pitched over on my head. There, I've got it off my chest. I was thinking I should have to explain somehow. Something akin to her feeling of affection for the nice long leg at Westerner she had seen rambling in Bond Street touched Betty again. The Delcoff was the centre of G. Selden's world, as the flowers were of Kedges, and the little home was of Mrs. Welden's. Were you going to try and sell me a typewriter? She asked. Well, G. Selden admitted, I don't know but what there might be used for one, writing business letters on a big place like this. Straight, I won't say I wasn't going to try pretty hard. It may look like goll, but you see a fella has to rush things or he'll never get there. A chap like me has to get there somehow. She was silent a few moments and looked as if she was thinking something over. Her silence and this look on her face actually caused to dawn in the breast of Selden a gleam of daring hope. He looked around at her with a faint rising of colour. Same as Fanderpool, say he began and then broke off. Yes, said Betty, still thinking. Could you use one anywhere, he said. I don't want to rush things too much, but could you? Is it easy to learn to use it? Easy, his head lifted from his pillow. It's as easy as falling off a log. A baby in a perambulator could learn to tick off orders for its bottle, and on the square there isn't a sequel on the market, Ms. Fanderpool, there isn't. He fumbled beneath his pillow and actually brought forth his catalogue. I asked the nurse to put it there. I wanted to study it now and then and think up arguments. See, adjustable to hold with perfect ease an envelope, an index card, or a strip of paper no wider than a postage stamp. Unsurpassed paper feed, practical ribbon mechanism, perfect and permanent alignment. As Mount Dunstan had taken the book, Betty Vanderpool took it. Never had she seldom beheld such smiling in eyes about to bend upon his catalogue. You will raise your temperature, she said, if you excite yourself. You mustn't do that. I believe there are two or three people on the estate who might be taught to use a typewriter. I will buy three. Yes, we will say three. She would buy three. He soared to heights. He didn't know how to thank her, though he did his best. Dizzying visions of what he would have to tell the boys when he returned to New York flashed across his mind. The daughter of Ruben S. Vanderpool had bought three Delcoffs, and he was the junior assistant who had sold them to her. You don't know what it means to me, Ms. Vanderpool, he said, but if you were a junior salesman you'd know. It's not only the sale, though that's a rake-off of fifteen dollars to me, but it's because it's you that bought them. Gee! gazing at her with frank awe, whose obvious sincerity held a queer touch of pathos. What it must be to be you, just you! She did not laugh. She felt as if her hand had lightly touched her on her naked heart. She had thought of it so often, had been bewildered restlessly by it as a mere child, this difference in human lot, this chance. Was it chance which had placed her entity in the centre of Bettina Vanderpool's world, instead of in that of some little cash-girl with hair raked back from a shallow face, who stared at her as she passed in a shop, or in that of the young French woman whose life was spent in serving her in caring for delicate dresses and keeping guard over ornaments whose price would have given to her own humbleness ease for the rest of existence? What did it mean, and what law was laid upon her? What law which could only work through her and such as she, who had been born with almost unearthly power laid in their hands, the reins of monstrous wealth which guided or drove the world? Sometimes fear touched her, as with this light touch at her heart, because she did not know the law, and could only pray that her guessing at it might be right. And even as she thought these things Gee! Selden went on. You never can know, he said, because you've always been in it, and the rest of the world can't know because they've never been anywhere near it. He stopped and evidently fell to thinking. Tell me about the rest of the world, said Betty quietly. He laughed again. Why, I was just thinking to myself you didn't know a thing about it, and it's queer, it's the rest of us that mounts up when you come to numbers. I guess it had run into millions. I'm not thinking of beggars and starving people. I've been rushing the Delcoff too steady to get on to any swell charity organisation, so I don't know about them. I'm just thinking of the millions of fellows and women too, for the matter of that, that waken up every morning and know they've got a hustle for their ten per or their fifteen per, if they can stir it up as thick as that. If it's as much as fifty per of cost seems to me they're on easy street, but sometimes those that's got to fifty per, or even more, have got more things to do with it, kids you know, and more rent and clothes. They've got to get at it just as hard as we have. Why, Miss Vanderpool, how many people do you suppose there are in a million that don't have to worry over their next month's grocery bills and the rent of their flat? I bet there's not ten, and I don't know the ten. He did not state his case un-cheerfully. The rest of the world represented to him the normal condition of things. Most married men's a bit afraid to look an honest grocery bill in the face, and they will come in as regular as spring hats, and I tell you, when a man's got to live on seventy-five a month, a thing that'll take all the strength and energy out of a twenty dollar bill sort of gets him down on the mat. Like old Mrs Weldon's, his roughly sketched picture was a graphic one. Take the working that bothers most of us. We were born to that, and most of us would feel like deadbeats if we were doing nothing. It's the earning less than you can live on, and getting a sort of tired feeling over it. It's the having to make a dollar bill look like two, and watching every other fellow trying to do the same thing, and not often make the trip. There's millions of us, just millions, every one of us with his delcoff to sell. His figure of speech pleased him, and he chuckled at his own cleverness, and thinking of it, and talking about it, and under his vest half afraid that he can't make it. And what you say in the morning when you open your eyes and stretch yourself is, Holly, gee, I've got to sell a delcoff to-day, and suppose I shouldn't and couldn't hold down my job. I began it over my feeding-bottle, so did all the people I know. It's what gave me a sort of jolt just now when I looked at you and I thought about you being you, and what it meant. When their conversation ended she had a much more intimate knowledge of New York than she had ever had before, and she felt it a rich possession. She had heard of the whole bedroom previously, and she had seen from the outside the quick lunch counter, but she seldom unconsciously escorted her inside and threw upon faces and lives the glare of a flashlight. There was a thing I'd been thinking I'd ask you, Miss Vanderpool, he said, just before she left him. I'd like you to tell me, if you please. It's like this. You see, those two fellows treated me as fine as silk. I mean Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance. I never expected it. I never saw a lord before, much less spoke to one, but I can tell you that one's just about all right, Mount Dunstan, and the other one, the old vicar, I've never taken to any one since I was born like I took to him. The way he puts on his eyeglasses and looks at you sort of kind and curious about you at the same time, and his voice and his way of saying his words, well, it just got me sure. And they both of them did say they'd like to see me again. Now, do you think, Miss Vanderpool, it would look too fresh if I was to write a polite note and ask if either of them could make it convenient to come and take a look at me, if it wouldn't be too much trouble. I don't want to be too fresh, and perhaps they wouldn't come anyhow. And if it is, please, won't you tell me, Miss Vanderpool?" Betty thought of Mount Dunstan as he had stood and talked to her in the deepening afternoon sun. She didn't know much of him, but she thought, having heard G. Seldon's story of the lunch, that he would come. She had never seen Mr. Penzance, but she knew she should like to see him. I think you might write the note, she said. I believe they would come to see you. Do you, with eager pleasure, then I'll do it. I'd give a good deal to see them again. I tell you they are just it, both of them.