 11 Wine sweeter than first wine she gave him drop by drop. Wine stronger than seal could sign she poured and did not stop. H. H. Never was there such a wooing! So, with the simple assurance of that glorified time in which we seem to ourselves to be the originators of each new emotion that overtakes us, Ostrander thought, and indeed many a lover's sweet fallacy has been farther from the truth. Had she not been of a tissue to which Caprice was as impossible as crime, he would scarcely have felt, for a day's space, confident of his new and dazzling claim. Her betrothal fitted upon her impatiently, like the first articles in a treaty of capitulation, only looking as scant as yet towards a dreaded surrender in which a passionately defended lost cause was to go down. He felt his way painfully with her, careful not to startle her, as if she had been a bird poised with tender receding feet and fluttering wing, uncertain whether it would nestle at his heart. The abrupt and cavalierly form of wooing with which she had first, as was inevitable, shocked and temporarily estranged, but thus ultimately strengthened, the leaning of her feeling towards him, had given place to a definite persistence, to be sure, but to one so tender and cautious, that she seemed to be scarcely more conscious of it than of the temperature of the morning. For the first few days she received him with a distance which would have disheartened a less perceptive man. Even her anxiety for his recovery seemed to have retired from the foreground of her thoughts. Neither the future nor the past, apparently, occupied her imagination much more than they do that of the caged creature who has just become recipient of the existence and the nature of bars. She sat by him silently, or they talked of matters of wide interest, or Aunt Chloe came in. She had steadfastly refused so far to acquaint her family with the state of the case between them, saying decidedly, I must get a little used to it first. Secretly Ostrander blessed the sturdy American sentiment which made this possible. It seemed to him just then as much as he could bear, that they too, they only out of all the world, should know that the almost inconceivable future was possible to him, which would give him the right to call her his wife. To share the first blush of this knowledge with any human creature was like bruising the velvet on the petal of an iris. Aren't you sorry yet? She asked one day when this first mood had passed. Don't you think we had better not do this? I can't do any of the things men expect. Oh! he cried. You shall not be what other men expect. I don't want you like other men's wives. You Lorelai, Sphinx, you Cassandra, you rebellious, beautiful—but they thought Cassandra was mad, interrupted Avis. Except—well—the king loved her, said Avis softly. It was perhaps a week since he had received her promise. When one evening, as they were alone together, he went resolutely yet gently over to the window where she stood behind the heavy curtains, restlessly shifting Aunt Chloe's flowers about to know very definite end that he could see, and said—Avis. He had not called her so before. She started with leaping eyes, moved her lips as if she would have spoken, said nothing. Avis—he repeated—do you know that we have been engaged a week—a whole week? When she looked up, he was smiling quietly, and he spoke in that unimpassioned matter-of-course tone which most quickly disarms the dismay of such a woman, as if that which he sought were as natural as the drawing of the breath, and in no sense more suited to create an exciting scene, or as if he dealt indeed with the thought too lofty and too grave to be reduced to the level of an excitement. A whole week, my darling. Ah, hush! Can you not bear so much as that? And you have not yet given me one kiss? Don't you think it is a little hard on a poor wreck of a wounded soldier? I don't mean to be hard, she said, slowly receding from him with unconscious steps that twisted in her long dress. But you are—very hard. It doesn't seem to me worthwhile exactly. Why should you mind so much if you really love me? I love you," she murmured, standing quite still. Ah, how much! Dear, how much! Do you think I can—say what I have not yet—dared to? Her voice sunk. All the same, said Ostrander, shaking his head, obstinate with joy. I'm tired of living on faith. I don't feel sure of you. She began to stir again, still receding, her outline growing fainter in the shadowed corner of the room. He advanced as slowly, but with a reverent attendance on her wish towards her. You don't understand," she cried. No man could. This is all so new, so strange, so terrible to me. You don't remember how it is. I never expected to be in such a position as this. In all my life I've never thought I could be. If I am more foolish than other women, that is why. I don't mean to be foolish. Be patient with me. I love you." If I had not been patient, he began impulsively, but checked himself. I don't know what to do, how to act, how to adjust myself to what has happened. She said, in an intriguing, childlike way, as if she sought his tolerance for some radical fault of hers. He was intoxicated by this peculiarly beautiful lowliness into which her unstooping spirit now and then surged over and spent itself, like the foam upon the crest of a wave. Only let me teach you," he urged, drawing unforbidden nearer her. Only say that you will try to learn. He thought for a moment that she would have fled. Her hands held her very dress away. She seemed to draw even her breath back from him. There was a solemn deprecation, almost of the character of a rebuke upon her face. But she did not deny him. A sense of sacramental awe, such as he would not have believed it possible for him to be so penetrated with at such a moment, penetrated almost to the exclusion of the sense of joy, possessed him, and his own hand with which he touched her seemed to the young man to alter and become transfigured, like the hand of a spirit stretched to meet him across the kneeling room. Then indeed he walked about with resplendent eyes. He trod unbounding air. Then at last he felt that he should win her. He was no longer afraid of any mood or reaction or recoil of hers. She might withdraw herself as she would, or grieve over her sweet lost liberty as she must. She was his. All our pleasure is said to be nothing more than the consciousness of some one or other of our perfections. Ostrander wore the self-gratified smile of successful love. But one's personal share of acidity must be flavoured with gall if one would be untender with this form of complacency. It was the next day after the little scene just related that she went to Aunt Chloe. She had preferred to go, and to go alone. Aunt Chloe heard her in silence and rounded off her stalking, for the little feet of the state orphans this time, before she said, My dear, he's consumptive! However, after a long pause in which she knitted and winked with violent rhythmic harmony, your father will be pleased, and in these days it isn't every talented young man who takes a decided stand. Mr. Ostrander doesn't think he's too smart to believe the Bible, so far. Of course he wouldn't want to marry any but a religious man, and he will go into the professorship as soon as he recovers. I don't see on the whole what could be better. You might take that house of the Perkinses on High Street. But I confess I thought you'd tug away at that painting a while longer. I do not intend this to make any difference with my painting," said Avus quickly. My marriage, if I marry, is not to interfere with my work. Mr. Ostrander does not wish it. Aunt Chloe had laid down the little stalking, and regarded her niece with that superior matronly smile, under which, above all earthly afflictions, a young woman feels herself a helpless rebel. But all Aunt Chloe's reply was a long, low, significant— Hmm. Certainly not, repeated Avus very distinctly. I would not marry if I must give up my profession. That is understood. When a woman becomes a wife, said Aunt Chloe, taking to the little stalking again with her generous dogmatic hands, her husband's interests in life are enough for her. When you are once married you will no longer feel any of this youthful irritation against the things that other women do. Women," added Aunt Chloe solemnly, are not men. God made us! Well, I—said Avus, laughing—am like the boy in the Sunday school whom God didn't make. Will play that somebody else made me, auntie? Aunt Chloe—she suddenly changed her tone to one of grave and searching appeal. Tell me now—tell me the holy truth—for I need all the truth I can get just now, auntie. Did you never, in all your life, want to be anything else but my uncle's wife? Is there nothing in all the world that you—a woman of overflowing energy and individuality and organizing power—able to carry a Christian commission or a national commissary on your shoulders? Is there nothing that you ever wanted to be? The little stalking gently sank to Aunt Chloe's broad knee, and there was a pause in which her soft, brown, benevolent eyes filled with a slow light. In the window sill the September sun fell upon her geraniums. They turned their burning faces to her solemnly, like visions which said, We will never tell. Aunt Chloe arose, went over, and stroked them, then came back. My dear Avus, she said in a subdued voice, I suppose all of us have times of thinking strange thoughts and wishing impossible things. I have thought sometimes, if I could begin life over and choose for my own selfish pleasure, that I would like to give myself to the culture and study of plants. I should be—a florist, perhaps, my dear, or a botanist. Aunt Chloe uttered these words under her breath, as she might have some beautiful heresy, then took to her knitting with a fierce repentance, and that one particular orphan had a pair of stone, china-coloured stockings before tea-time. It would be difficult to follow the precise chain of mental influences which led Aunt Chloe to put in turkey red roses. The interview between Avus and her father was, like all deeply fraught scenes between them, a brief one. She went in, and sliding away his books, knelt before him, and without looking upward said, Father, I have promised to marry Mr. Ostrander. I never meant to marry. The professor pushed back his spectacles, then his lexicon, then his daughter, held her at arm's length for a moment. The conceivable, he murmured, lies always between two inconceivable extremes, such we find in the law of the condition. Then, gently, and so my little girl has come to that. I can hardly understand. It seems such a short time since you were playing about—and your mother. The professor laid his nervous, scholarly hand upon his daughter's head. She felt it suddenly tremble. But he collected himself and said, I have a high regard for Mr. Ostrander. I think your mother would have liked him. But it was not quite easy to prophesy whom your mother would like. She was a woman of rare penetration into human character. I wish she were here just now. But there, my child, is the lecture-bell. I have mislaid the fifth lecture on the Cartesian dictum. Somewhere, Avus. I think your aunt must have been dusting to-day. Look under those three volumes of doogled steward. Try read on Aristotle. No, that is the refutation of Hobbes. Have you shaken the duality of consciousness thoroughly?" He dropped his hand once more upon his daughter's head and passing out, but only said, Et in Acadia ego! How like your mother you are looking in these days, my dear! He strode away to a lecture at a more jagged pace than usual. Across the Cartesian dictum, which he clutched with reverent tenacity under one gaunt elbow, the duality of consciousness, whatever was to be said of the argument, carried everything before it that afternoon. If Hans had touched him, clinging by the sensitive fingertips to his lonely old arm, but the bloodless September air was wan and empty, if a voice had spoken, but there was only a sulky wind to say, Did you want anything, Professor? And clearly only the duality of consciousness could reply with the leaping pulse of eternal youth. Only to see if you look well and happy, my dear. While the boys upon the college steps were shouting within his mild objective ears, here's the old fellow himself. That afternoon, too, Avis sent a little note to Coy. It ran thus. Dear Coy, I have said that, some time or other, I will marry Mr. Ostrender. But Coy, if you talk to me about this, as most women do about such things, I'll break the engagement. Yours, Avis. And Coy answered, Dear Avis, you'll streak his cake with cellaratus, his biscuit will taste of yeast, his wristbands will be wrinkled. But you know, if I were a man, Avis, I'd live on Johnny cake and paper cuffs to get you. You'd better be married Christmas when we are. Yours, Coy. And now the marvellous medicine of joy began at subtle work, and fast with the glamour of the autumn days, the wounded man waxed strong. Avis, looking up sometimes, with timid, astonished eyes, trembled to see the work that love had wrought upon him. She was frightened that she could make him so happy. Perhaps for the first time in her young, untroubled story, she had a glimpse into that mysterious truth which no story is long enough or sad enough to penetrate. That joy is life, as misery is death, as the sun is organic warmth or the night inherent blackness. There may be deeper significance than we always fancy in the sacred figures which familiarize our lips with the everlasting life of heaven and the everlasting death of hell. In brief, Ostrander, being in heaven, proceeded to immediate, and let us never say, amazing recovery. He received, and before November was able to accept, the renewed overtures from the university. He became the junior colleague of the old geological professor, whose death or resignation, and the Board of Trustees generously allowed him his choice of these alternatives, undoubtedly to take place in a few years' time, which slipped the young man into a shored and commanding future. I can hardly understand," said Avis. A month ago you were a failing man. We thought, I thought, Philip, you would die." She had but just learned, slowly and hardly, to make music of his name for him upon her bewildered lips. The little language in which lovers are unusually profuse he heard but scantily. An exquisite reticence hung over her, which he would not, if he could, have shaken. Her expressions of endearment, like her caresses, were rare, rapturous, and rich. His hungry mood waited on them. They surprised his imagination like the discovery of a new art which all time would not be long enough for him to make his own. The man who has won you, he would answer, with that unconsciousness of possible exaggeration which makes the very folly of young love sublime, such a man could not die. Then indeed she turned her strong head towards him, in that way of hers which a kind of lofty wonder at the new conditions in which she found herself, making it possible for her to sit and hear a radically feeble assertion without any intellectual revolt. Upon this grave wonder a gradual tolerance grew. Then perhaps, if she were in her gentler temper, she melted into some sign of tenderness which overtook him like a beautiful stratagem of her nature, yet which expanded itself as unconsciously as the smile of a child or the nodding of an anemone. Or perhaps she sat wrapped in some maiden reverie of silence, or fear, or retreat, which he founded impossible to understand or to share with her. He sat shut out, as if he had tried to lift the veil of Isis, or to woo the sphinx of the desert to open her stone lips. One day he asked her to play to him, for he had never heard her. She told him, what was true enough, that her execution, which was always poor, had not been improved by six years of exclusive art study. But she went to her mother's old piano, and played for half an hour. Fragments from the Andante of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, a serenade of Schubert's, the Adelaide, some scotch melodies, and one or two improvisations, unscientific, powerful, and magnetic. Ostrander threw himself upon the sofa, and listened, with his hand above his eyes, as if he were shutting out a light. Oh! he said under his breath when she had finished. What a touch! Avis heard this gratefully. Ostrander's taste for music was highly cultivated. She would have felt it to be an unkind insincerity if he had said she played well. She was moved by the delicate and honest fervour of his tribute. As if he, he first and only in the world, had recognised some dumb sigh to her nature. She cherished the memory of this recognition with a peculiarly coy happiness, which she had afterwards occasioned to remember. She long remembered too, and he, what lovers would soon forget, their first shared experience of the raptures of the dying year. It seemed to her that the heart of spring could never beat to stir her own like this October pulse. What was the vigor of a violet, the fire of a snow-drop? What did the young grass know of hardly yielded and sternly encroaching love? One red leaf understood her better than they all. They walked one day far out of the town, into a forest of young oaks, and stood clinging together, awed by the sea of subdued colour that broke against their feet, and down the knoll to the crown of which they had climbed. In the violet distance the maples splashed into shadow-tints, bold vermilion and transparent yellow, like emotions quickly stung and healed. But the infant oaks, mere shrubs yet, gathered themselves in deep shades, blood to the heart's core. All the gales of winter could not stir their leaves. They would cling like the unclasped fingers that death had overtaken. They appealed to the imagination like some superb constancy towering above all lesser story, as strength must perforce, tower over weakness, and unity above disintegration. Avis, standing with her straw hat thrust hanging down her shoulders, and her head bent as if she listened, turned suddenly with an appealing gesture towards Ostrander and said, I never loved another man. What should I do if you had loved another woman? Instantly, for her only answer, she was swept to his heart, with an impulse more daring and authoritative than she had ever witnessed in him, as if some impalpable power had been arrayed to snatch her from him, or as if her mad supposition were beneath the respect of articulate reply. The young oaks throbbed about them dizzily for a moment. Before, moved by his continued silence, she drew back her face, that she might look up into his. She was a little surprised to find, for the second time, that look which she had marked upon the June morning by the shore. He seemed to have become, for the moment, perfectly blind, and to regard her with the blank, narrow gaze of a person whose brain was stealthily diseased. Then swiftly it darted as before, and his deep eyes burnt it out before he said, Avis, never say that again. It frightened the man, who has won the right to hold you here, to remember that it might or could, but for God's mercy, have been some other woman. And you! You would have still been in the world, in the same world with him!" Avis said nothing. A man, after all, was so different. She, for instance, had never thought that it might or could have been some other who should have so much touched her hand. One does not waste the fancy upon the incredible. It had not occurred to her, as a special interposition of Providence, that she should love Philip Ostrander. What man cometh after the king? Her great love was simply the condition of existence, like the action of her heart. She had never felt called upon to thank God for that. Just before his assumption of his new duties in the college, Ostrander left for a few days' visit in New Hampshire. He expressed much regret, in which Avis, with the tenderness which she shrank from expressing, fully shared, that he had been obliged to defer seeing his mother for so long. She felt sorry that this had been, and must have been so. Her heart yearned towards that solitary old mother, Philip's mother. She did not care how rustic or old or ignorant she might be. My poor mother is not exactly a cultivated woman, Ostrander had said once in his tender way. Her own motherlessness youth reached with a particular longing after this unknown woman, who had borne the man she loved. She wondered sometimes if the old lady would not find it less lonely to live in harmeth. But, of course, her son would be the best to know, and should be the first to speak of that. She contended herself with sending a timid but tender little message when Ostrander went, in response to the cramped, old-fashioned postscript, her only welcome from his only living kin, in which Mrs. Ostrander had once sent her kind respects to the young lady of whom her son had written her. When he was gone, for the first time since the injury to her hand, she resumed with stiff, strange fingers her work in the studio. It was not easy to estimate, perhaps, the precise effect which that disabled hand had borne upon her lot. Avis found herself wondering, with a kind of terror, if she should ever have promised to be Philip Ostrander's wife, if she had been through those idle and thralling days, doggedly, at work. A stiffness and strangeness deeper than a bruised muscle could strike, came upon her when she closed the door of the long, deserted place, and, striking a fire in her little grate, sat down to warm her hands. The autumn sun stepped in, and stood cool and calm against the wall, like the friend who never forgets, or suffers us to forget, the resolve or the aspiration which we once expressed. The dust had collected upon her sketches, the boughs of the apple-tree were bare, upon the easel the sphinx hung, covered, and dumb. Avis looked about her with a singularly self-defensive feeling, as if she were summoned by some invisible tribunal to answer for an impalpable offense. A radical confusion, such as her young life had never known before, obscured her thoughts. She had something of the self-recoil which a man has in turning to his books, or his business, after a night's dissipation. She went up and uncovered her sketch. The critical, cool sunlight fell upon it. The woman and the sphinx looked at one another. Avis glanced at the ring that fettered her finger. Her whole figure straightened and heightened. She lifted her head, and out of her deepening eye there sprang that magnificent light which so allured and commanded Philip Ostrander. What have I done? she cried. Oh! what have I done? With an impulse which only a woman will quite respect, standing alone there in the silent witness of the little room, she tore off her betrothal ring. Then, with one of her rare sobs, sudden and sharp as an articulate cry, she flung her arms about the insensate canvas, and laid her cheek, as if it had been the touch of one woman upon another, against the cold cheek of the sphinx, and solemnly, as if she sought to atone to a goddess for some broken fealty, she whispered, I will be true. When Ostrander returned, he found her nervously at work. A marked unrest enveloped her. But she stood quite still. When pushing open the studio door eagerly, he met her with the accumulated fervours of a lover after a first separation. A chill crept over him even while he touched her—beautiful, reluctant, mysterious, this strong, sweet woman, wooed, but not yet one. Are you not glad, he pleaded, to see me back? I did not think I should be so glad. And you missed me? A little? I had no idea, complainingly, that I should miss you so much. I can't understand it. I ought not to have minded. I've been at work. She spoke with protesting significance, glancing at her hand, which he held, pallet, brushes, and all, fast prisoner. He followed her glance, and changed colour swiftly before he said, Avis, where is your ring? I took it off, it made me uncomfortable. Made you uncomfortable? My ring? Our engagement ring? Ostrander released her hands and stood looking at her with a perplexity, which struck, as indeed it seemed to, to the very core of his imagination. I do not understand this at all, he said with some displeasure. Where is the ring? On the shelf, behind the lake of Como, at the left of father's portrait, on the right of the charcoal news-boy, replied Avis, laughing. Ostrander brought the ring, and stood with it, balanced between his thumb and forefinger, looking from her to it, thoroughly uncertain what to do or say. Turning with one of her sudden supple motions, she saw how deeply she had pained him. She put down her brushes and held out her firm finger at once. Shall I put it on again? he hesitated. If you think I deserve it? she gently said. He put it on, and they talked no more about it. Ostrander was thoroughly uneasy. He ventured for the first time that morning to speak quite distinctly of their future, said that he was going with her father when his inauguration was well over, to see the available houses in Harmouth, spoke of his improving health, and of his desire to be quietly settled, but more especially of his wish to see her at work more to the purpose than she could be, as things were at present, than she could indeed, he feared, well be until after their marriage. Avis, while he spoke, painted busily, still painting and without looking round, she said, below her breath, Philip, don't want me to marry you yet. But when he left her, she crept up to him, timid as a hare, and besought him to be patient with her, for she was sorely tried in ways she said that she knew she could not expect him to understand. He would have waited half a lifetime for the tone and the touch with which she said those words. After this, she painted with great steadiness. Ostrander spent most of his spare hours in the studio. Aunt Chloe had an easy chair wheeled out for him and set beside the little grate. Why not leave that picture? he asked one day, as he stood silently watching it, until by and by. Why do you want me to do that? I think you would make a greater picture of it after we are married. He answered, disregarding her disturbed expression. You will have more leisure, more calm. It is going to be a great work, Avis. I wish to be as proud of it as possible. I wish it to be grand and full, without deficiency. I want the world to know you by it, in some sense, in its sense, for what you are." She was touched by his generous interest in her work and fame. She thought how true was that wise man's word who said that a friend is he who makes us do what we can. She pitied with the calm compassion of joy that woman, wherever she might be on the earth, who would not find in this beautiful sense a friend in the man whose wife she was to be. Down through the years she suddenly saw herself transfigured by happiness. She saw her whole nature deepening, its lightest grace or deepest gift illuminated herself idealized by love. This man, so tender and so noble above his fellows, so true that he could be proud of the woman he loved, so great that he could make himself small beside her, so anxious rather for her success in doing the thing God had made her to do than for his own, so simply and superbly recognizant of the truth that this thing was not done when she had become his wife and ordered his house. This man brought her, she thought, that transcendent experience which is so often given to a man but alas so unknown to women, in which the sternest aspiration is strengthened by the sweetest joy in which love shall be found more a stimulus to than a sacrifice of the higher elements of the nature. Hand in hand with this man whose generous humility had exalted him, as what else could, to the kingship of her, she should climb to see how life looked behind the mountains. She longed to make herself worthy of so royal a love. She began to be glad with the proud pleasure that it was in the nature of things that she should sacrifice more for Philip than he for her. It seemed that, by slow and kind degrees, a reposeful spirit crept upon her. The inevitable conflict between her art and her love which had diseased her happiest hours, shriveled from an organic to a functional thing. She began to consider it now without alarm. She began to understand how natural is joy. Her sequestered tenderness peered out more frequently. She became a radiant creature. Ostrander watched her in a kind of ethereal trance, which for a long time he guarded from the disturbance of his own more impatient moods as jealously as he guarded herself from them. He felt it a barbarism now to mar the unforecasting nature of her sweet impulse, as it would be to hasten mechanically the budding of a flower. He felt that he was living that which few men ever live at all, and no man ever lives but once. He held the cup of happiness to a delicate and slowly tasting lip. But the autumn met its blazing death, and the calmer colors of the winter set in. The tenser nerve and the clearer brain kept time to the strong step that crushed the flakes of first fallen snow. Now on nights when one solitary feat rang upon the walks of the little town, shadows splitted on drawn curtains, and lights beamed out from the hearts of deeply colored rooms. All the sacraments and sacrifices that go to make up human homes began to gather upon them the vigorous solemnity of the winter. On Christmas Coy was married, and the two young people began, with the touching confidence of the young and the very happy, the sacred work which we are won't to call saving souls. The phrase is well-rasped, not to say warn, but indestructible as an atom, and poetic as a fossil. It was not long after this that Aunt Chloe began in a vague and abstract manner to drop a variety of remarks upon the family ear, which Avis failed to find interesting, but did think singularly inconsequent. What is it, she said to Coy one day, sitting in the cheerful parsonage parlor, that has happened lately in the cotton market? Aunt Chloe keeps telling me how cheap, unbleached cotton is. I think it is twenty-five cents, or really perhaps it was five. Is that a fact so vital to the interest of the country that I ought to care about it? My dear child, said Mrs. Rose, with her most matronly smile, it is the servant's sheets. Servant's sheets? Why, yes! Oh, Avis! Avis, doble! Who but you would be so divinely dull! I suppose you expect your servants to have sheets when you go to housekeeping? I never thought, said Avis faintly. And is that what she meant to about towels? She's been exhausting the subject of towels, Coy. There is something very remarkable about them. I think you cut the fringe or else you fell—let me see. No, I think you overcast it. I think it was very ill-mannered at Aunt Chloe. A rollercloth would do, dear, suggested Coy soothingly, and no new England servant would mind camping out. I wouldn't trouble myself if I were you. But Avis sat looking at her with wide eyes, like an injured goddess, women upon whom domestic details sit with a natural or even an acquired grace, will need to cultivate their sympathies with this young recoiling creature. Across her picture or her poem, looking up a little blindly, she had listened to the household chatter of women with a kind of gentle indifference, such as one feels about the habits of the Fegeans. Unbleached cotton, like X and the Algebra, represented an unknown quantity of oppressive but extremely distant facts. How had she brought herself into a world where the fringe upon a towel must become a subject requiring fixed opinions? She bade Coy good-bye abruptly, fled to her studio, and worked till dark. But when she went into the house, she found Aunt Chloe advancing a new theory about comforters. In Vermont they were quilted at home, but there were advantages in purchasing them outright, not to be underestimated, unless—as in the case of Miss Snipper, a worthy young woman who had put two brothers through college, and one into the Hawaiian field—he died in six months, poor fellow—you really felt at a duty to employ a seamstress. And the professor made so much less trouble about having her at the table, which was the more to his credit, as her teeth were set by so inefficient a dentist, and make that peculiar noise, especially with biscuit. But Aunt Chloe thought milk-toast would remedy the difficulty. CHAPTER XII. It should be remembered that the pa'ing is a calling or exclaiming tone, the shang is a questioning tone, the ku is a despairing tone, and the hyaping, an assenting tone. The jaxiang is an abrupt stop. CHINESE GRAMMOR. It was in the heart of the happy winter that Ostrander, sitting one day by the study fire with Avis, after a long walk over the frozen beach, said quietly as if resuming a broken conversation. But Avis, is this to last forever? This—she turned to catch his meaning, dull with happiness. It is pleasant enough to last forever, I think, she said, throwing herself back in her deep chair. She sat drowned in her furs and partially loosened cape. Her cheek had the vivid flush that a winter night paints upon young faces, and the fine excitement which accompanies it, hovered in her eyes. But our own home would be like this always, persisted he, with the vague and blessed fatuity of a lover's imagination, which, while it may perceive the trail of the serpent over Adam's Eden, or Tom Smith's, or yours, or mine, hears in its own only the rustle of the leaf upon the tree of life. Avis, who had now lost her brilliant colour, and sat quite dull and still, said, I wish a man and woman could be always engaged. What are you laughing at, Philip? Should you really like it to be so, for you and me? asked Ostrander, with a smile that was grave enough. Certainly! said Avis promptly. Of course I should. I am perfectly happy as we are. I think most women would be. And I, suggested Ostrander, am not happy. I am tired of a homeless life. I have lived one so long. He had never so distinctly urged his own need upon her before. Avis listened attentively. Her precious freedom, wild rebel that it was, petted perhaps and overindulged, took on to her mind for the first time faintly the aspect of a selfish delight. To be sure, Philip had no home like herself, no consonants of household repose and love led into his life. She had not thought sufficiently of that. I do not wish to press any claim or want of mine unduly. He went on gently. But there is my work. I have my future to make. I don't want it to be one that my wife shall be ashamed of. Situated as I am, I cannot command my best conditions. With his home and his wife a man must develop himself if he ever can. With you, Avis! With you!" he paused, much agitated. There are no bounds but those of my own nature that will prevent my life from becoming at least a worthy, if not a noble deed. Long years after, these words came back to Avis Dobel's memory, like the carving stone into which time his wrought meanings that the sculptor's mind or hand was impotent to grasp. Come now! he continued more lightly. An honest word for an honest word, Avis. Do you suppose if I let you go on just as you like you would ever make a definite step towards our wedding-day? No," said the woman, after a long pause. Never! She threw back her wrappings with a suffocated look, and paced for a few minutes back and forth before the brilliant fire, a silhouette in her falling feather and dark winter dress. Ostrander watched her with compressed lip and guarded eye. He was prepared for a long and serious contest, in which he fully made up his mind not to be worsted. By gradations as fine as the shades in a woman's fancy, too fine for any man but a determined lover to be patient with, he expected her to taunt, torment, allure, baffle, but yield to him now. He had not understood, what man ever understood a complex woman, the immortal element of surprise in her nature. He sat dumb with delight under the look and the motion with which she presently turned to him. As beautiful is the pliability of a torrent meeting its first unconquerable resistance, it surrenders as mightily as it defied. You are perfectly right," she said, with a grave, sweet dignity, and I have been very foolish. If you leave me to myself I shall never make any change in anything. If I am ever to become your wife, let it be all over with as soon as possible." They were married in three weeks. If ever the Christian character deepened under discipline, Aunt Chloe should have been that character at the end of this memorable time. We are all of us a little incredulous of our neighbor's affliction. But among the radical trials of life, who could fail to rank the rearing of a motherless child to a marriage in which neither the true so nor the upholstery commanded the proper respect of the bride? Unless, as someone has told us, deficiency of charity be deficiency of imagination, we must feel sorry for Aunt Chloe. Avis positively refused at the outset to investigate the deeps beyond the lowest deeps that underlay the nature of unbleached cotton. Asked why, if a woman had money enough to buy blankets, she must sit an hour discussing the wadding of a comforter, and failed utterly to see why the marriage certificate would not be valid without the intervention of Miss Snipper and the Milk Toast. There was a compromise upon these fatal questions. Aunt Chloe retained the privilege of seeing to it that Avis entered upon the holiest state of matrimony as a lady ought, with a dozen of everything, upon sole condition that Avis herself should not be consulted. Instead, therefore, of a heavy-eyed, exhausted woman whose every nerve was stitched into her clothes, Avis came to her wedding-day brilliant with health and calm as the sky. This little fact was the more memorable because it left her to her instincts, and no one knew quite how those led her to dispose of these three weeks. She was much in the open air, pacing the shore and the snowy fields, or she worked intently in the studio, or she sat alone with unshared, inscrutable moods. Ostrander would have said that he scarcely saw her in all that time. She received him quietly, but with a withdrawal which he dared not disturb. It was evident that she preferred her solitude to himself. He left her to her fancy—not altogether, perhaps, without some comprehension of it. A man does not live a celibate till thirty-one without becoming fully as conscious of the perils as of the pleasures of a wedded future. Ostrander would not have thought it possible, however, that he could put his broad shoulders beneath this sweet yoke with so slight a protest. His feeling that he accepted a sacrifice radically so much deeper than any he could ever make overswept the superficial shrinking from change, which perhaps all but the youngest lovers feel in more or less degree upon the immediate eve of marriage. He felt impressed by his dim conception of the strong individual struggle in the nature of this woman whom he loved. His whole soul consented itself, with a unity not habitual to him in all things, upon the effort to adjudge himself worthy of the acquiescence of her life with his. He tried to tell her so the day before their marriage, but she gave him one look which stopped the breath of his soul for joy, and he tried no more just then. It was the simplest of weddings. Mr. and Mrs. John Rose were there, and Barbara, but her brother was out of town on business. Barbara looked at Ostrander, and remembered the tea-rose. Ostrander looked at Barbara, and forgot it. Poor Chattie Hogarth was got over with her wheeled chair, and Frederick Maynard came to see what he was known to have pronounced the burial of the most promising artist in New England, and at Avis's request the family servant came in, and her father, who as is so usual with the collegiate instructors of America, had become life in the pulpit, married them. Wallant Chloe, with a mind at peace with God and man upon the subject of the wedding-cake, which no New York caterer had been allowed to handle for her niece, protected her silver-gray silk from her honest sparse tears, and made it clearly understood among the guests that Mrs. Ostrander's health had not permitted her attending her son's marriage, and that the young people would visit her in New Hampshire upon their brief little wedding tour. They had a relenting February day, in which the prophecy of the near spring was audible, as the whisper of one deer to us across a darkened room. The windows were flung open in the house, and the well-worn path to the studio was without frost, yielding timidly to the touch of the foot that loved it. Avis slipped away somehow, and was missing after the wedding. Her husband went in search of her. He found her, as he expected, in the studio. The disarray of packing put a chill desolation into the room. The pictures were boxed or gone. The easels folded against the wall. Only the sphinx was left. There had been no fire in the building that week. Avis, in the middle of the cold little neglected place, stood shivering in her wedding-dress. He held his arms out, smiling, but with an emotion which he found it difficult not to call sad even at that moment. He was so sorry to startle, to grieve, or to stress her by the inevitable presence of his feeling. There seemed to him just then something inexorable, like a pagan fate in the nature of a mighty love. They, too, standing there in the yielding winter sunshine, seemed like children swept and lost within it. Tell me," he said, seeking to dissipate the almost oppressive solemnity which the moment had assumed for him, and coming up behind her where she stood before the still incomplete, but now strongly indicated an impressive picture. What would you do if you had to choose now between us, the sphinx, and me? A man cannot understand, perhaps, said Avis, after a long silence, or he would never ask a woman such a bitter question. Oh! We will have no bitter questions to-day," he murmured, taking a step back to look at her. There seemed to him something strangely select and severe in her unornimented dress. Only an artist could make such a bride. Her silk drapery hung about her like the marble folds upon a statue. Can you understand, continued Avis, ignoring or unconscious of his look, that I might, perhaps, choose to stay with the sphinx to-day, and not mind it much? I think I can," he said, hesitating. No, I will not mind. I can't be jealous even of the sphinx just now. And then, she added, turning sharply so that she stood with her face averted from him. Another day. Oh! and watch the other day. Avis did not answer. Impetuous words bounded to her lips, but they were checked by an instinct that she herself did not comprehend. Her nature recoiled on itself in the discovery that she had begun to tell him that she could think of no price too costly by which to purchase her way back to him. She stood in her white dress with burning cheeks. She wondered if, when a woman had been for half a lifetime a happy wife, she could let her husband understand how much she loved him. Her love seemed to her an eternal secret. Her soul spoke to his in whispers. It were unwomently, unwifely, to lavish herself. After a silent moment, she glided to him like a goddess, and for the first time of her own unguided, or it might be unguarded, will, his wife lifted her lips to his. They passed out together into the pliant air, and Aunt Chloe came calling about the carriage and the people, and the sky, when they looked up to it through the garden trees, lifted itself and widened like a joy whose nature knows no end. They passed on through the golden weather, in the solemn separateness from all our little common cares and pleasures, which to have known is to have lived, and to have missed is to hope for life beyond. In the opinion of the world, marriage ends all, as it does in a comedy. The truth is precisely the reverse. It begins all. Who hath most, he yearneth most, sure as seldom here to fore, somewhere of the gracious more, deepest joy the least shall boast, asking with new opened eyes the remainder. The reluctance with which we turn from any intense feeling, whether of pain or pleasure, to a lower level of emotion, is a psychological study for which the curriculum of Harmouth University unquestionably finds a proper place in the lecture room, where all well classified feelings go, but strictly in view of which it does not regulate the academic year. Granting that the corporation agreed to honour him by the offer of a chair, Harmouth would have summoned Adam out of Eden, had the Lord chosen to create him in term time. It lacked still some weeks to the spring vacation, and Ostrander's bridal tour was necessarily compressed almost between two Sabbath sunsets. They did not get up into New Hampshire after all. He found himself suffering somewhat from the capricious weather, and it would be really worth more to his mother, he said, to see them in July. The two young people came dreamily to their own home. The afternoon that they were to come, Coy and Aunt Chloe held confidential council in the expectant house, a passable place, which had been selected in the perplexed patients with which we adjust ourselves to all depressed ideals. Avis, in the town, was like a bird that has flown through a window by mistake. The sea could be heard, but not seen, from her chamber window. The noise from the street interrupted the library. It was not quite clear where the studio was to be, unless in the attic. But there were elms in the yard, and crocuses in the garden, and the house stood at three minutes' walk from the college green. This, in view of the New England winters, and the delicate health of the young professor, was decisive. I can arrange about the studio somehow," Avis had said. Certainly," said Ostrander, that must be managed. He meant to manage it, of course. There should be no trouble about the studio, and Aunt Chloe said approvingly, You do quite right, Avis, my dear, to consult Mr. Ostrander's interest first." Avis vaguely resented this. She could not have told why. She had no principles but the instinctive code of daily love about deifying her husband's interests, and had found women singularly weak upon this point. But it was quite reasonable that Philip should be near the college. She thought she had done no more than good manners required. Poor Avis, said Aunt Chloe plaintively, as she and Coy put the last touches to the small dining-room, where tea was spread for the travellers. Would have pink doilies. Of course the first cooked huckleberry will ruin them. And I told her they never could be used with English breakfast tea, and they fade in washing beyond all belief. Yes, they fade like a sunrise," said Mrs. Rose demurely. But Avis is precisely one of those women of whom you can say that she never will be married again, and salt sets them. Is the china she painted? How like Avis? At first you don't understand it, then it bewitches you. See, every piece has a feather on it, a different feather. She has wrought some fancy about her own name into this tea-table all venture. Oh, I see. No, I don't. I don't see. I suppose we're not expected to see. That rose curlew on the creamer is like a singing-leaf, I think. Perhaps so, moaned Aunt Chloe. But have you seen the vegetable dishes? Not a handle that a servant could get hold of if her thumbs were all fingers. And that rep in the parlor poor child may last her through the summer. And when I told her how easy it was to slip down newspapers—and I'm sure you can get them up again while the doorbell rings, and a housekeeper can't begin by counting a little trouble like that—but if I'd proposed, plated spoons couldn't have been worse. Not that I've said much about it to her father, for he is so overworked, and it never does to worry a literary man. They weaken down under it like a baby under the whooping cough. But when I come into this house, and think of those two, I am—I am very much troubled," said Aunt Chloe, stiffening suddenly at the discovery that one slow tear had rolled into the Japanese teapot. Now, while she was painting all this china, she might have learned to set white bread at least with milk, and the yeast I could have looked after. Mr. Ostrender may dine off painted feathers awhile, but he's too literary to like it long. No men are so fussy about what they eat as those who think their brains the biggest part of them, though my brother is very patient and easy to pacify. And poor Avis knows no more what is before her than if she were keeping house with little stones and broken crockery in a huckleberry pasture on a Saturday afternoon. There's a baker, said Koi soothingly, had Mr. Ostrender is very much in love with her. But in her heart she shared Aunt Chloe's anxieties more acutely than she found it worth while to allow. Koi had a delicate loyalty about expressing them. She did not talk much about Avis, even with John himself. She wished to spare Avis the sting which pricks the brightest hours fate yields to some of us—the knowledge that, behind the shield we hold before our dazzling happiness, a prudential committee of our friends sits endorsing, whether in our temper, health, income, complexion, or the nature of things, a grudge against our delirium. Koi referenced the severe old canon which bids us rejoice in the joy of the soul we love. Mr. and Mrs. Ostrender came with the laggard March sunset. Avis moved about the house radiant and unwirried as a heebie. Even the dust of travel seemed to glitter on her. Koi and her husband, the Professor and Aunt Chloe, remained at her wish to dedicate the pleasant tea table. Certainly there was never a pleasanter. And the bread was Aunt Chloe's. Avis presided dreamily. The room was alive with color. She felt rather than perceived the rose tint of the linen, the bronze prism on the peacock's plume which encircled the cup that she lifted to her lips, the Pompeian red upon the walls, the mellowed meaning of the Japanese coloring upon the lamp-screen, the flutter of the bright ribbon at her own throat, the luminous presence of her husband's face. She lifted her eyes to him timidly for the first time across their own table. Life put a finger on its lips like a child with a secret to tell. Love was a mystery that went deepening before her. She stood with one foot on an untrodd path that broadened to the sun. She shrank from the advance, nay even from the existence of unexplored joy. She was afraid to be so happy. He found her when, at an early hour, their friends had left them to themselves in the silent house, in a daydream in the middle of the parlour, just where she had bitten her father a good night. He came and stood beside her. But he too found it difficult to speak. He was silenced with joy. To find words for it was a task sacred and slow, like selecting an earthly lily for an angel to carry into heaven. He did not try, it seemed, and for that she liked him better. For he said only presently, Are you too tired to go over the house to-night, Avus? Will it not be pleasant to see how it all looks at first? And in the morning I must get to the college early. She felt grateful to him for the easy commonplace words as they wandered up and down, hand in hand, through that new world which is the old. She wondered how women ever became used to their husbands, and spoke of them indifferently, as Mr. Smith, or Mr. Jones. This home, their home, lifted its walls gravely about her like a temple, and this man, whose wife she was, ministered therein a high priest, before whom her soul trod softly. She had never perceived before how solemn a thing it is to found a human home. Most of those experiences which make the whole world kin must become personal to become interesting. The truism was now the discovery. Avus had contrived it was impossible to say how, for never did a bride take possession of a house, knowing so little what was in it, to stamp her individuality with a delicate but distinct definition upon her home. It is like going from flower to flower, said Ostrander, as they strolled from room to room. On certain points Avus had been stringent. Whatever the vague necessities in the matter of tinware, Aunt Chloe should not put a scarlet cricket or a purple tidy in the same room as a maroon curtain. His library was a harmony in green and gray. The little room upon whose windows the buds of the elm tree tapped was a melody in blue. In her own room Avus had gathered the shades of the rose. The little house was a study in color. To the young man coming out of the cold spaces of so many homeless years, it seemed that night like a new and glowing science, which it would take him as long to command as to possess the mysterious nature of his wife. Both awed him. He watched her with held breath as she moved, gentle with the new domestic touch and stir that sat so strangely on her. She breathed color, he thought, as other women breathed pale air. Avus left him presently to look over some matters for his morning class, and herself strolled about the house alone. It was one of the small surprises of life to her to find herself stroking the curtains and patting the pillows, like other women whom she had seen in other new houses, to see that her hand lingered upon her own doorknobs even with a caress. The thrill of possession, the passion of home, had awakened itself in a sleeping side of her nature. In her own room there was a very fine East India hammock, woven of a life pearl-white cord, much favored for this purpose by people of ease in tropical countries. Avus put it there because, against the color of the walls and drapery, it had a peculiarly delicate and negligent effect, grateful to her in the confined house. Above it, against a deeply stained panel, stood her own Mellian Venus. She flung herself into the hammock and yielded to its light motion idly. As idly she thought of her future, of her work, of the Sphinx in the cold, closed studio. Not tomorrow, perhaps, but some day, she should convert her delight into deeds. It seemed to her a necessity simple as the rhythm of a poem, or the syntax of a sentence, that the world should be somehow made nobler or purer by her happiness. By and by she should know how to spell it out. Her husband called her presently from the foot of the stairs, and she stole down to meet him with a beautiful timidity. She did not tell him what she had been thinking. She felt as if he understood. This is what it is to be happy, to believe that our thought is shared before it can be spared. She had exchanged her travelling dress while she was upstairs, for a loose wrapper, over which she had thrown a shawl, a crepe-shawl, that he had never seen. He put his hand upon it and said, You do not often wear this color, Avis. What do you call it? It is Carmine. It looks like a live thing. It is one of the colors made from the cocaniel, said Avis. I have always fancied that they throb with the life that has been yielded to make them. Do you like it, Philip? Like it? How should I know? You are in it. She blushed gently. She was glad he thought the Carmine suited her. She loved it too well to wear it at haphazard. One of those subtle fancies, which the happiest woman does not expect to share with the man she loves, came to her just then. She would not wear this color, except for him. Her soul seemed filled with fine reserves, winding corridors of fancy, closed rooms of thought, deep recesses of feeling, which she curtained from him by a lofty instinct. The nature of the wife withdrew itself with a deeper than maidenly reticence. She feared lest her great love should put into his hands the key to a fair palace in which she would that he should be forever an expectant guest. What are you thinking, Avis? He asked her suddenly. A certain contraction of her forehead which he did not know, and the familiar throbbing of the temple, arrested him. I was thinking, she began, and hesitated. Are not your thoughts to be mine, love? He drew her to him slowly. In the rich color of her loose drapery she had the poised, reluctant look of the fine Jacques Rose. I was only wondering, she said. I was thinking that there are women in the world whose husbands have ceased to love them. I can think of nothing else like that. You could never, under any conditions, be one of those women, murmured the young husband rapturously. I, said Avis, looking for the moment perplexed. I was not thinking of myself. I was sorry for the poor women. But I would rather be such a woman than such a man. I began to be sorry and glad about many things, and many strange ways, new ways of which I never thought. Philip, two people who love one another, might almost make the world over, it seems to me. Joy is so strong. We are so strong. God will ask a great deal of us. If he asks, he shall receive, said the young man solemnly. He was impressed with her reverent mood. He assimilated it so perfectly, that he could not have thought it was an impulse of his own which she rather had perceived and reflected. He asked her for a Bible, and himself suggested that they have a prayer. With an agitated voice he sought God's blessing upon their home, and upon their love. They talked no more of lesser things after this. Avis moved about, hushed and happy. She stirred, putting his books and papers and order upon the table. He watched her with eyes, beaten faint, by love. You must not tire yourself to work, dear love," she said. She had never called him so before. Shivering like a Cremona upon which a discord had been struck, Avis started when at the newly painted door of the new little gleaming room there fell a sudden knock. It was the new girl. Ostrander had forgotten that there was anybody in the house but themselves. Avis looked at her in gentle perplexity. It seemed to her a remarkable breach of good manners that the woman should have come at all. And when she said, And what is it ye as would leave me to get for your breakfast? Mrs. Ostrander could have dismissed her on the spot. Philip Ostrander now plunged into his life's work with the supreme vigor of joy. His ambition took on the colours of his emotion, and fired feverishly. He assumed the drudgeries of his position with the fervour of a far more conscientious temperament, and his excitements took on the character of a thrill. His really brilliant but phosphoric nature strengthened into honest flame. He was at that time in his life a marked and splendid illustration of the cohesive power of a great love. His own wife failed sometimes to fathom the almost pathetic movement, with which in those days he would turn to her, when he came home from the lecture room overwearyed, holding out his still thin hands, and asked her to strike a few chords for him upon the piano, saying as he did so, Harmony, Harmony! Avis, I am spent for a touch of Harmony. And when her eyes only asked him what he meant, when she had satisfied him as she could, with her repressed, rich touch, he would answer that the boys had tried him, that something had jarred, that there was a discord in him. And you, he said, you quellet all. And then he spoke no more, but to himself, he said, bowing his forehead on her yielding hair, who am I that I should win her? He was then, at least, as that man should be who has gained the allegiance of a strong wife, an odd and humble man. Then his professional work began to partake of the gravity of his happiness. Professor Doble brought to his daughter from the green room of the university a report of her husband's present popularity and prospective power in the college, which excited her like fine wine. For a little while that seemed to her, added to all the other elements of deep emotion in her new life, as much excitement as she could sanely bear. Her own work she deferred resuming from day to day, but neither from that syncope of the will, nor fervor of feeling, which threatens the integral purpose of a woman first intoxicated by the deification of herself, that grows from ministry to the man she loves. She reasoned herself through her honeymoon in succeeding weeks with a steady eye. The studio was not an order, and she chose not to put into her picture—this one picture, at least—any element less permanent than repose. She decorated the dadoes in her hall contentedly. The Sphinx could wait. A tender sense of justice possibly mingled itself with this course. She had not treated Philip so well before their marriage, that she need accentuate her haste to pursue her personal aims and wishes now. Each lingering sign of physical weakness in him smote her with a rich revenge. She watched the lessening pallor of his temples with a hidden remorse, of which she dared not trust herself to speak. Sometimes she stole up and kissed the still prominent and beating vein across his forehead, darting like a vanished thought then from his outstretched arms, and silent afterwards for a long time. One day, sitting beside him in the full light, she lifted his hand—which was whiter than her own—in both her sensitive, healthful palms, and brought her lips to it with her slow and delicate, deepening touch. Then, when he restrained her, she sat crimson. She could not have said whether she was more afraid of or more savage with herself. She had never thought before that she could care to kiss her husband's hand. But in these days she felt herself wasted with unsatisfied sorrow for all that she had cost him. For him, he sat blessed and blind with love. He remembered when his daring fancy had first asked itself, What will her tenderness be? Her lightest endearment, he thought, meant more than the abnegation of other women's souls. A little thing chanced at this time which gave Avis a deep pleasure, and which threw a certain glamour, even in her husband's own eyes, over his brightening popularity in the college. During the two years of travel and study which had preceded Ostrander's connection with Harmouth, it had befallen him, one life-sick vacation, to find himself so exhausted with the term's work that his German physician ordered an immediate sea voyage. Ostrander never loathed to yield himself to a new sensation, readily through beside the laboratory life marked out for that summer, and joined a fellow student on one of those aimless expeditions so alluring to a young unanchored fancy, shipping on a trader, which, for ought they cared, might have been booked for the Chinese seas or the river Styx. It chanced that they were driven by gales out of their expected course, which skirted the south seas, and found themselves in the Pomotu archipelago, somewhere in the track taken first by the Wilkes expedition, and thereby opened since to navigators and missionaries. They anchored for some cause one day off an island in the northeast of Tahiti, a small coral island uninhabited by man. Ostrander and his friend rode out, overcome by an emotion which they were still young enough to try and express to one another, and beached their boat upon this maiden shore. But Ostrander, after the first thrill had spent itself, wandered away into the heart of the place, finding himself as unable to share the impression it produced upon him as he would have been to share the heart of a woman with another man. He plunged on from beckoning thicket to beckoning thicket, reeling like an intoxicated creature. When he came to himself, he was in a wild place, alone. It was on the bank of a small stream, fair, but fearful to him. The virgin repose of the trees, the startled look of the strange flowers, the retreat of unseen and unknown creatures rustling through the undergrowth at his approach, solemnized the nature of his delight. Suddenly, as he sat reverent there, a bird—the island was peopled with rare birds—settled slowly over his head and alighted on a cactus near him. It was a large creature, snow-white, and dropped like an angel from the burning sky. A tide of feeling, half terror, half joy, overswept the young man, sitting there with upturned face, gone white to the lip's edge. Perhaps there was not a young scientist in the world but would have risked years of his life to be in Ostrander's place at that moment. The name and nature of that bird were unknown to science, and the young man knew it. It seemed to him as if nature laughed in his face. She held out this one sequestered shining thought of hers, this white fancy that she had hidden from the world, and nodded, crying, Catch it if you can. Classify my unone mood in your bald human lore. Marry my choice's tenderness to your dull future, if you will. See, I have waited for you. I have kept my treasure back from the eye and hand of other men. Yours it shall be. Yours only. Yours. Yours. As for the bird, it stirred circling on the scarlet cactus. Ostrander grasped his gun dropping to his hands and knees. The bounding of his heart delayed his shaking aim. He sought to calm himself. His future lay balanced upon that long, shining, shuttering barrel. To capture that bird was fame. So at least the situation presented itself to the young man. When we are young, nothing seems quite so likely to happen as glory. He grew pale, with faint finger on the trigger. The bird stood perfectly still. One day in the classroom it occurred to Ostrander to tell this story. When he had reached this point he paused, shaken by the retrospect of one of the most muscular emotions that his life had known. Gentlemen, he said, the bird stood still. It turned its head and looked at me. Its eyes, shown with a singularly soft, pleased light. I lowered the gun. How could I fire? I crept towards it. It was a beautiful creature. It did not move. I thought it was gratified at the sight of me. It acted as if it had never seen a man before. I do not suppose it ever had. I crawled along. I stretched out my hand, and yet it did not fly. I touched it. I stroked it. With this hand I stroked that magnificent unknown creature. It did not shrink. I took out my knife, opened it, and laid it down. The bird looked at me confidingly. I put the blade to its throat, but it would not stir. It trusted me. Gentlemen, I came away. I could not kill the bird. For a moment after the young professor told this story, his repressed feeling extended itself, like the shade of a powerful cloud upon the class, and then the boys broke into a passion of cheers that out rang till the old college walls trembled like a being surprised by something in its own nature that it had never perceived before. Ostrander had become the demigod of the term. He came home to his wife that afternoon much moved by this little experience. He called her several times, and receiving no answer sought and found her in their own room. She was in the hammock under the Venus. The weather was warm, and she was lightly covered with a white muslin negligee. The instinct of the English tongue has done no better yet than to level the artistic possibilities of this garment to the word wrapper. As she lifted her head at his knock in her poised way, and slipping from the hammock stood to receive him, holding the long white folds of her dress, he looked at the Venus behind her and said, How like you are to one another, and I have known you so long and never thought of it till this moment. Turn your head, so. There. Yes. What were you doing love when I came in? I was at work. At work? Thinking where I had better put, What I shall do about the studio, said Avis. Oh, the studio! Yes, we must attend to that tomorrow, immediately, said Ostrander lightly. He was thinking about the bird and the boys. He began at once to tell her about it. Her face flushed with a divine light. Nothing could have happened to her which would have so kindled her tender eyes. If the Sphinx standing with her patient face to the wall in the closed studio had herself put on the wings of immortality that summer afternoon, would the woman have turned her proud head to see her fly? They sat down side by side like children in the hammock. Avis touched the floor with the tip of her slender long foot. She lifted her arms timidly and wound his hair about her finger. They looked in one another's eyes through a sweet distance, like Cupid and Psyche through the dark. Philip Ostrander that day saw his future as the people saw the face of Moses. Shining so as it must be veiled. They had been four months married, and his wife was as sacred a marvel to him as on the day when he first touched her reluctant hand. Not one charm of the bud was missing from the glory of the flower. Deeps beyond the lowest deeps in her nature were yet unwon. His manhood gathered itself to be worthy of their mastery. He felt himself to have taken a supreme lean upon an exhaustless joy. CHAPTER XIV It's the drain, ma'am, as is playin' the fool on me. Bad luck to it! Mrs. Ostrander's third girl, the third that is, in point of continuity, not in cotemporaneity, met her at the front door with these portentous words. Mrs. Ostrander, radiant from an hour in her old studio in her father's orchard, came in, shutting out the august morning, and repeated with a perplexity which would have had a touch of the superb in it, if it had not been something at once too pitiful and too ludicrous. The drain? The kitchen drain, ma'am, as has refused entirely to take the clain tea-leaves from the sink, but cast them back upon me hands, the vagabond. I did not know there had to be drains in sinks, Mrs. Ostrander said, with an expression of recoil. I never examined one. Could not ours be fixed to work without? What must we do about it, Julia? Yes, must have a man to it, ma'am," said she of Aaron, with a sweet, superior smile. Very well! said Mrs. Ostrander, with a sigh of relief, we shall send for a carpenter at once. Mr. Ostrander shall attend to it. You can go now, Julia. Is there anything more you wished to say? It's the cramy tartar I'm lacking for me cake, ma'am, and the butter is out against dinner. But that's all, ma'am. Bear in the lemon for the pies, and the jelly strainer, as they slipped me mind when the grocer come, being up to do the beds, ma'am, at the time, and the hole in the pantry-windy that lets the rain upon the floor-barrel, as yourself complained of the mould and the biscuit. That's all I think of at the minute. Save it, Mr. Ostrander's company. Mr. Ostrander's company? Blankly, from Mrs. Ostrander. It's me self as well, and I forgot it till this blessed minute. On account of iron and day and the breakfast so late, you'll own yourself, ma'am," penitently, from Julia. But it's himself as left word with me, while he's was gone, as there would be far gentlemen to dinner. Have we—I suppose we have dinner enough in the house for four gentlemen? asked Avis a little nervously. She liked Philip to feel that his friends were welcome, and she had thought, with a certain scorn, of families that were injured by the appearance of a guest on ironing-day. She was sure that a narrow hospitality must indicate either a narrow heart or a dull head. Any family in a university faculty must, of course, be expected to receive largely and irregularly. Avis was quite used to this. But she had never been able to understand why Aunt Chloe founded a necessary condition of this state of things to make the puddings herself. The political economy of any intelligent home implied a strict division of labour, upon which she was perfectly resolved not to infringe. A harmonious home, like a star in its orbit, should move of itself. The service of such a home should be a kind of blind intelligence, like a natural law, set in motion to be sure by a designer, but competent to its own final cause. Besides, as Philip had said, she had not married him to be his housekeeper. It's the pound-and-a-half a steak for the two of you we have—observed Julia peacefully—and the butcher is gone before Mr. Ostrander let on a word about the gentleman—and college gentleman, ma'am, it's mostly awful. It was not much, perhaps, to set herself now to conquer this little occasion. Not much to descend from the sphinx to the drain-pipe at Oneville Swoop. Not much to watch the potatoes while Julia went to market, to answer the doorbell while the jelly was straining, to dress for dinner after her guests were in the parlor, to resolve to engage a table-girl to-morrow, because Julia tripped with the gravy, to sit wondering how the ironing was to get done while her husband talked of Greek sculpture, to bring creation out of chaos, law out of disorder, and a clear head out of wasted nerves. Life is composed of such little strains, and the artistic temperament is only more sensitive to, but can never hope to escape them. It was not much, but let us not forget that it is under the friction of such atoms that women far simpler, and so, for that yoke, far stronger, than Avis, have yielded their lives as a burden too heavy to be borne. That one day wore itself to an end, at last, of course, like others of its kin. It was what Avis had already learned to call a day well wasted. She was so exhausted, what with the heat of the weather and the jar of the household machinery, that she scarcely noticed her husband, when after their guests had gone, he came in to the cool darkness of the parlor, and threw himself in the chair beside her to say easily, Tired, Avis? Everybody knows moments when, to be asked if one is tired, seems in itself a kind of insult, and to be asked in that tone an unendurable thing. But it was not in Avis's poised and tender temper to drizzle out her little irritations as if they were matters of consequence, and her husband's greater physical delicacy had already taught the six months' wife the silence of her own. She replied, after a moment's pause, that she should soon rest. I am sorry to have you concerned so much in this domestic flurry," began Ostrander. Avis turned her head with a slight contraction of the brow. To have left the colours without the drying oil upon her easel, and surrendered her whole summer's day to the task of making one harmonious fact of the week's ironing, and four round, red, hungry alumni, and then to have her moderate, but at least gracious and orderly success, called a flurry, was one of those little dullnesses of the masculine fancy which she was loath to admit in Philip. Philip, whose fine perception, and what might be called almost a tact of the imagination, had always from the first been so winning to her. It must not be, proceeded her husband with some deepening sincerity in his affectionate tones. We must have better trained service for you. We must, I think. I've been thinking it over to-day. Have more service," replied Avis. It seemed as if Julia ought to take care of two people. And there are your college debts to be got off whatever happens, but I cannot think it right to get along so any longer. Certainly not! said Ostrander promptly. You must have what relief you need, my dear. Do not burden yourself to worry over those debts. At most, as I have told you, three thousand would cover the whole, and a part of that is already cleared. Avis did not answer. The point of the debts was rather a sensitive one between them. Philip thought he had explained it all to her before their marriage. Avis thought he had not made it quite clear. Of course, she dimly understood that he had incurred pecuniary liabilities for his education, like other young men in America, whose belongings and beginnings were unendowed. But her way would have been to have straightened all that before incurring the risks and obligations of a home. Still, with Philip's good salary, and her own little income that fell to her from her mother, and surely when she herself was well at work, there need be no trouble about it. And of course, if Philip thought he explained it to her, he must have done so. It was she who had been dull. She argued this slight point with herself sometimes with an earnestness which she could not justify to herself, without a glance at some far crouching motive set deep like a sunken danger in her thought, at which it did not seem worthwhile to look scrutinizingly. Any thought of her husband which was not open as the midday to her heart and his, was beneath the respect of attention. Her most distinct annoyance in this, and other little points which might occur to her, was perhaps the first baffling consciousness of a woman, that there may be laws of perspective in her husband's nature with which courtship had not made her clearly acquainted. It will come all right," said Ostrander in a comfortable tone, turning to go, and now I must get to the college, or I shall be late. He looked back across the long parlor. The closed blinds and dark drapery cast a moveless green shadow upon Avis's face, that made her look pale and ill. Ostrander came back. He had not reached the point of conjugal culture at which a man can go happily away, leaving a shade on his wife's face. He came back, and said, more tenderly than a husband who has been six months married may be expected to speak upon an especially busy day. What is it, love? Nothing worth getting late to recitation for, Philip. You tire yourself going so far and so often to your father's. We must build you a studio at home, I think. I do not get to father so often as to tire myself," said Avis with a slight emphasis, but with a brightening brow. But indeed, Philip, I begin to be a little impatient for my regular and sustained work. We have changed girls so much, and with all the commencement company, something has continually happened to embarrass my plan so far. But do not look troubled, my darling. It is not all worth one such look as that. She leaned to him lovingly. She was comforted by his tenderness. She blamed herself for adding one least anxiety of her own to his crowded cares. When he said that all this must be changed and that she at least should not be exhausted below the level of her work, if they had to close the house, and board, her heart lightened at his thoughtfulness. Her little difficulties fused like raindrops into a golden mist. She was sure that she saw her way through them, and beyond them, to that energy of days which nature had made imperative to her. When her husband called after lecture and asked if he might go to the studio with her and see what she was doing, her heart lifted as it did when they too stood there beneath the apple-bows, learning love and surrender of the falling blossoms, now so long ago. She looked her future in the face with aspiration larger, because deeper than her maiden days had known, with love as with God all things are possible. Avis had that day retouched the sphinx. She turned the easel, and she and her husband stood before it silently. Against a deep sky, palpitant with the purple soul of Egypt, the riddle of the ages rose with a certain majesty which Ostrander may be excused for thinking few hands could have wrought upon it. Avis had commanded with consummate skill the tint and the trouble of heat in the tropical air. It was mid-morning with the sphinx. The lessening shadow fell westward from her brow. The desert was unmarked by foot of man or beast. The sky uncut by wing of bird. The child of their union looked across them to the east. Staring straight on with calm eternal eyes. The sand had drifted to her solemn breast. The lion's feet of her no eye can see. The eagle's wings of her are bound by the hands of unrelenting years. Only her mighty face remains to answer what the ages have demanded, and shall forever ask of her. Upon this face Avis had spent something of her best strength. The crude Nubian features she had rechiseled. The mutilated outline she had restored. The soul of it she had created. She did not need the authority of Herodotus to tell her that the face of the sphinx, in ages gone, was full of beauty. The artist would have said, who dared to doubt it. Yet she was glad to have wise men convinced that this giant ideal was once young and beautiful, like any other woman. If there were a touch of purely feminine feeling in this, it was a sort too lofty to excite the kind of smile which we bestow upon most of the consciousness of sex which expresses itself in women. A poet of our own time has articulated the speech of one face of womanhood to one type of manhood, thus, I turn from you my cheeks and eyes, my hair which you shall see no more, alas for love that never dies, alas for joy that went before. Only my lips still turn to you, only my lips that cry, repent. With something of the undertow of these words Avis was at this time struggling in the making of her picture. Grave as the desert, tender as the sky, strong as the silence, the parted lips of the mysterious creature seemed to speak a perfect word. Yet in its deep eyes flitted an expectant look that did not satisfy her. Meanings were in them which she had not mastered. Questionings troubled them to which her imagination had found no controlling reply. It is a great picture, said her husband heartily, after long and silent study. She flushed joyously. Just then she would rather hear these words from him than from the whole round world besides. I am not satisfied yet, she said. The eyes baffle me, Philip. They ought to baffle you. They ought to forever. Else you would have failed, he answered. Let that picture go now. It isn't right to waste it on one blessed, unworthy sort of fellow like me. Let as much of the world as has been created fit to understand you have the sphinx at once. I cannot be understood till I have understood myself, said his wife in a low voice. The picture must wait—now—a while. You should know best, but I hope you'll not mistake about it. He replied, yielding himself to the influence of the picture, with only a superficial attention to her words. That, I have noticed, is the peril of thoroughly trained women. Once really fit to do a great thing, their native conscientiousness and timidity become, I sometimes think, a heavier break upon their success than the more ignorant, and therefore more abandoned enthusiasm. Why, in reason, should the sphinx wait any longer? Not in reason, perhaps—only in feeling. And an artist can never be brusque with a feeling. The picture must wait, Philip—a little longer. The depth of her tone arrested his scrutiny, and the eyes which she lifted, turning from the solemn sphinx to him, held themselves like enunciation lilies in a breaking mist. It was not long after this that Professor Ostrander received imperative telegraphic summons to his old home in New Hampshire. His mother lay very ill. A succession of those little distractions incident to young people who have just yielded themselves to the monopolizing claim of their own house, together with a brief trip to the scientific convention which Ostrander had taken at the outset of the vacation, had delayed their longer and more laborious journey up to this time. Avis, upon the reception of the message, said at once that she should go with him. They set out that night, oppressed by a differing weight of feeling, of which neither cared to speak. They found themselves in the face of a calm, inevitable death, which seemed rather an awe to the son, and an anguish to the daughter. Avis trod the dreary oil-cloth of the narrow stairs to the sick-room with an acute sense, such as she had never known before, of what it meant to live and die in these dumb country homes. Poor, narrow, solitary home. Poor, plain, old mother, watching so long for the son who had not come. She forced herself to remember with some distinctness how imperative her husband's reasons had been for not coming before. She dismissed the neighbors and old friends who were in attendance, and herself, having sent Philip to rest within sound of her voice, watched out the night, for the first time in her life, alone with a dying face. She found it a reticent, fine face, on whose gray solemnity set a strange likeness to the youth and beauty of the son. Towards morning, when Mrs. Ostrander, stirring, spoke, she bent and kissed her passionately. "'Thank you, dear,' said the old lady, with a painless, pleasant smile. "'I have lived without a mother,' cried Avis, headlong with regret and grief. "'I am so glad I am not too late. Now you kiss me, I know what it is like.' "'Thank you, dear,' came the answer once again quietly. "'Is Philip here?' "'Oh, yes. Shall I speak to him?' "'No. No. Do not disturb him,' said his mother, in the pathetic, uncomplaining tone which solitude gives to gracious age. I would not break the poor boy's nap, and I like to see you. You are my daughter, my son Philip's wife. You made the portrait for me of my son. It was kind in Philip to send me his portrait, because I do not often see him. You have a gentle hand, my dear. You are a good daughter.' "'I am a heartbroken daughter,' cried Avis. "'Why did you not send for us? We did not think. We did not know. Philip did not understand how feeble a summer you have had. I can see how it has been. You did not tell us. I have had, rather, a feeble summer, yes,' said the sinking woman with some effort of speech. But I have needed nothing. My son has been always a good son. I knew he would come when he could. I did not want to trouble him. I have never lacked for anything. Did you have a pretty wedding, my dear?' Her mind seemed to slip and wander a little with this, for she spoke of Philip's father, had now these twenty years. And then she called to him, bidding him find the wedding slippers in the bureau drawer, that she had saved for her son's wife. Then reiterating that Philip had been a good son, and she had wanted nothing, turned to Avis once again, to say so apologetically. They had got so yellow, my dear, and I had not seen your foot. Philip thought they would not fit when he was here, and I showed them to him. I am glad you had a pretty wedding. Philip thought it was too cold for me to go. He was always careful to think when I would take cold. He was quite right. But I am glad to know it was a pretty wedding. Raise me up, my dear, and let me look at you again." Avis lifted her with her strong young arms easily against the pillows, and the two turned to one another. In the chill before the dawning, some things seemed to stir from eye to eye between them, and to crawl cold about the heart of the wife, like a thought created to be of the creeping things for ever, to which rectitude of gait and outrightness of speech were forbidden. Had Philip—Philip, whose tenderness was like the creation of a new passion in the world—somehow, somewhere in some indefinite sense, neglected his mother, his old mother, sick and alone—it was not a question for a wife to ask, it was not one for a mother to answer. Like spirits the two women met each other's eyes, and neither spoke. Wait still, Ostrander—such was her poetic, puritan name—died that night. Her son was with her, tender and sorrowful to the last. But a little before the stroke of midnight she turned her face and said, He was a good boy. He was always a good son to me. I never lacked for anything. Your father would be pleased, Philip, that you had a pretty wedding. Now I want my daughter, Avis. And in Avis's arms and on Avis's heart she drew her last, uncomplaining breath. Philip and Avis were together after the funeral, drearily busied with all the little matters about the house which required the women's and the daughter's touch before they left. Avis was standing reverently before an open bureau in their mother's room. She had just lifted from their old-fashioned swathings and scents of linen and lavender those sacred yellow satin shoes which had never ventured to the pretty wedding. Their first smooth, suave touch upon her palm gave her something almost like an electric shock. To conceal the intensity of her momentary feeling, of which she could not just then speak to her husband, she laid them down and began to talk of other things. Philip, she said, there was a woman, a young woman in grey, I think, who cried so bitterly at the funeral that she attracted my attention. Do you remember? She went up and kissed poor mother on the forehead. She had dark grey eyes. I am sure the shawl was grey. Do you know who it was? It might possibly have been Jane Grey or Susan Wanamaker. I hardly know. Both have dark eyes and both were neighbours of my mother's, said Ostrander thoughtfully. Jane Wanamaker was always very fond of her. He added with an increasing interest. I think you must have heard me speak of Susan. No, I do not remember that you have. I did not have a suitable chance to speak to her, preceded Ostrander. I ought to have done so. It was an old friend. All the neighbours seemed to have been very kind to mother. Thus he chatted on to divert her of indifferent things. Avis said nothing just then, but presently she asked, Of course you added your own urgent invitation, Philip, to mine that mother should have come to our wedding. Why, of course, said Ostrander, but certainly she could not have come. The weather was far too cold, and I really don't know what we could have done with her exactly. But I was so absorbed then, my darling, that I am afraid I don't remember about it all as clearly as I ought. In truth he did not, and it was this very fact, perhaps, that Avis brooded over with the most definite discontent. She had half feared, standing there with the poor little old wedding-shoe in her hand, that he would turn to her, flashing across it, and ask her if she thought him capable of a slight to his mother, that he had not even perceived that the circumstances were suggestive of neglect was in itself peculiarly painful to her. His nature had slipped so lightly away from an experience under which her own was writhing that she felt at a loss to understand him. She folded the white slipper with tender fingers to take it home. Perhaps Philip could not be expected to know what a sacredness it would have added to her marriage-day to have worn it. Perhaps no man could. Perhaps this was one of the differences, one of the things that it meant to be a man, not to understand such matters. Gently she tried to think so. But she stood looking across the slope of the near churchyard to the locked, oppressive hills, with a dull pain for which she wished she could have found the tears. When her husband came up and laid his hand upon her shoulder, stooping to see what she saw, she pointed to the mountains and said, How lean they look! How parched! And she lived, shut in here! Seventy years! Don't grieve so, said Ostrander tenderly. Poor mother would never have been happy away from them. She always told me so when I asked her. He kissed her, and went downstairs to see about boxing the portrait for the morning's express. CHAPTER XV Only the eye of God can see the universe geometrically. Man, in his infirmity, sees only four shortenings. Perspective is, so to say, the ideal of visible things. As man advances towards his horizon, his horizon retreats from him, and the lines that seem to unite in the remote distance remain eternally separate in their eternal conveyance. The point at which love ceases to be, per se, an occupation, is seldom more distinctly defined than the line which divides the fire of the sunset from the calm of the upper sky. Avis's love for her work was as imperious as her love for her husband, and as loyally stubborn to distraction. Said one of the greatest women of this age, success is impossible unless the passion for art overcomes all desultery passions. Avis found herself by dimly shaded gradations approaching a condition of serious unrest. She was like a creature in whom two gods ward. Her nature bent, but could not break, under the divine conflict. Yet at this time she looked across it with firm, clear eyes. All would come right. These little household obstacles experience would disperse. They loved each other. What could she fear? The winter passed dreamily. When her husband came home on the bitter nights, her eyes turned to him full of a trust as unreflective and as much in the nature of things, it then seemed, as the trust of the lily in the summer wind. He liked best to find her in the dark opaque reds of their little parlor, and in the mood of the open fire. She sat with her books or her sketching, or in the shadow at the soft piano. The usual little feminine bustle of sewing he missed without regret. Women fretted him with their eternal, nervous stitch, stitching, and fathomless researches into the nature of tatting and crochet. He rather admired his wife for sharing so fully his objection to them. Avis was that rare woman who had never embroidered a tidy in her life. It is as much of an exhaustion of the nervous centers to my wife to sew as it would be to me, he used to say at this time, and as much, if not more, of a nervous waist, she shall not do it. It did not occur to him, how should it, that Avis's exemption from this burden was a matter requiring any forethought or management, and he expressed surprise on learning, by accident one day, that the price of two portraits which she had painted, her only finished work, that winter, had gone to cover the seamstresses' bills. Avis did not chatter about such things. She had a fine power of selection in her conversation, had not someone well said that conversation is always but a selection, which she admired. Certain moods befell her that winter from which he stood far off. Sometimes when the wild weather deterred her from the brisk walks which her sturdy out-of-door habits had made a necessity to her, he found her pacing the house, up and down, from attic to cellar, in a fitful, and what, in a woman of less self-control, would have been a fretful way. He spoke to her and received courteous but uncommunicative answers. Her eyes had become two beating rebels, for whom his tenderest thought could find no amnesty. Usually at such time she retreated to the studio, which was now established in a manner in the attic, and worked fiercely till the early winter dark dropped down. Then he would come up and call her, unless he were too busy. If he came he found her calm and gentle. She leaned upon his arm as they went downstairs. Avis left the unfinished sketch or painting patiently. She said, By and by, after a while, I must wait a little. She was still able to allure herself with the melody of this refrain, to which so many hundreds of women's lips have shaped themselves trembling, while the ears of a departed hope or a struggling purpose were bent to hear. Life had become a succession of expectancies. In each experience she waited for her foothold upon another, before finding her poise. There is more than a fanciful symbolism in the law which regulates the drawing of the human form. We must be able to take a straight line from the head to the feet, or our picture topples over. Women understand, only women altogether, what a dreary will-of-the-wisp is this old, common, I had almost said, common place, experience. When the fall sewing is done, when the baby can walk, when house-cleaning is over, when the company has gone, when we have got through the whooping-coff, when I am a little stronger, then I will write the poem, or learn the language, or study the great charity, or master the symphony, then I will act, dare, dream, become. Merciful is the fate that hides from any soul the prophecy of its stillborn aspirations. The winter was over. In the elm-tree outside of Avis's chamber window a robin was building a nest, with an eye that withdrew itself like a happy secret. Avis watched the bird with a blind sympathy. She held out her hand, and the little creature ate from it after a decorous hesitation. She felt a lowly kinship with the brooding, patient thing. In May her baby was born, a son. Avis was a little sorry for this, but she did not like to say so. It seemed a rude disloyalty to the poor little fellow. But when his father asked her if she were not content, she said, If I had a daughter, I should fall down and worship her. It was a delicate, ailing baby, and seemed at first a mere little ganglion of quivering nerves. It cried a great deal. I don't see what the child has to cry for, said Avis, looking a little offended. The baby's grandfather was there the day that she said this. He put on his spectacles at the precise angle, and with the peculiar rub which he reserved for a pet philosophical problem, and with a lordly reverence took the child's fingers, poor little sprawling antennae, upon his own. What Aristotle and Leibniz and Kant, he said loftily, would have yielded their lives to know, you ask, Avis, over lightly. Philosophy will be no longer a fragment, but a system, when it has commanded the psychological process by which one infant is led to weep. Aristotle might have had a chance to find out, Avis thought, if he could have had the pleasure of studying her child for the first three weeks of its life. But the professor watched the child gravely. He had a deep respect for a being who could baffle Aristotle. That baby has cried ever since it was born! Avis wailed one night, exhausted with sleeplessness. I wish somebody would take it out of my sight and hearing for a while. Why, Avis, said her husband, don't you care? Don't you feel any maternal affection for the little thing? No! cried every quivering nerve in the honest young mother. Not a bit! Perhaps indeed she was lacking in what is called the maternal passion, as distinct from the maternal devotion. She was perfectly conscious of being obliged to learn to love her baby like anybody else, and rarely she did not find the qualities which that unfortunate young gentleman developed during the early part of his existence, those which she was won't to consider lovable in more mature characters. She felt half ashamed of herself for being the mother of so cross a baby. She had supposed that children were gifted by their creator with some measure of respect for the feelings of others. This child seemed to be as deficient in it as a young Batrakean. It mortified her, like an evidence of ill-breeding. Avis had never lived in the house with a baby, neither had Ostrander. Their vague ideas of the main characteristics of infancy were drawn as, I think I may safely say, those of most young men and women are at the time of marriage, chiefly from novels and romances, in which parentages represented as a blindly deifying privilege, witted were in a reverence to associate with teething, the midnight colic, or an insufficient income. Avis herself had not escaped the influence of these golden, if a little hazy, pictures. While she knew, or supposed that she felt, many things not expected of her, and failed to feel others which it was proper to feel under the conditions of maternity, yet she cherished in her own way her own ideals. But of these she did not talk, even to her husband. These it was only for her child and herself to understand. Over these, as over her wedded fancy, nature drew a veil like those casement screens which, to the beholder, are dense and opaque, but to the eye behind them glitter with a fair transparency through which all the world is seen divinely new. And then motherhood was a fact which had never entered, as in the case of most women, upon her plans or visions of life. It was to be learned, like any other unexpected lesson. But the spring was budding, and in the robin's nest at the window the fledglings chirped, and the tender air stole in on tiptoe, and her strength waxed with the leaping weather, and God made people to love their children. So it must all be well. The kind of dumb terror with which she had lain listening to the child's cry gave place to a calm exultance. Now, in a fortnight, in a week, in days, to-morrow, she could be at work. To be sure the baby was a fact, but he was matched by another, the nurse. From so fair an equation it was not too much to expect a clear solution. She came out into the sunshine with bounding heart. The soul of the spring was in her. Her most overpowering consciousness was one of deep religious fervor. She thanked God that her life's purpose, for which she believed he had created her, would be more opulently fulfilled by this experience. The baby would teach her new words to tell the world, his sad, wrong world that the birth of a little child had saved. She felt a deepening respect for the baby. She kissed him fervently. It seemed singularly obtuse in him to double up his seriously inartistic fist, and put her eye out with blind and smarting tears. "'I hope you like him, Avis,' said Coy, a little doubtfully, one day in June. He was so preeminently uninteresting compared with her baby that she really felt some uncertainty on the nature of Avis's feelings, and then Avis said so little. "'Certainly,' said Avis, looking up rather weirdly from the week's wash, which she was sorting, a snow-drift fatally deepened by all these little garments whose name and nature were still a mystery to her, and if the truth best be told, produced more sense of irritation than of poetry on her fancy, since she did not see that her love for her son required that she should know whether the scallop on his flannel petticoat was ironed the wrong way. "'Certainly I like him, but I don't understand why, when he is put on the bed, he doesn't go to sleep. It is very inconvenient, crying so, when it is proper for him to take a nap. "'Why?' said Avis, lifting her grey-b eyes. I find him a great deal of trouble.' Coy, who thought it quite in the order of things that her baby should be three months the older, since naturally Avis couldn't get on, she never had, in any real thing that had got to be done without her advisory council, Coy gasped and felt it useless to remonstrate that morning, even about the little shirts which poor Avis was understood to have trusted the nurse to sew. We hear and think much of the marked days of life, the signal stations of gloom or gladness, the wedding, the birth, the burial, the day that lent its ear like a priest to love's first confession. One may dare assert that amongst these, days which quiver to their roots, when ere you stir the dust of such a day, there strikes in the lives of most of us, one deeper than they all, that day when we heard the first bitter word from lips which would once have breathed their last to win our kisses. Do you not remember how the sun struck out the figure in the carpet? The refrain of the bird that flew singing past the window? What the pattern of the sofa-cushion was on which you sat gazing? How the Parian Venus tumbled from the bracket, when going out he slammed the door, how she swept away to the piano, and the little polka that she played with bent head to hide the tears. You turned that carpet, you covered the cushion long ago, for economy's sake, you thought. Ah, me! it must have been for economy, too, that the broken Venus was never mended, but lies hidden in your bureau drawer, and let me hear you play that little polka, if you dare." Avis's baby selected one July night, when the thermometer stood at ninety degrees in the heart of the little town, to cry, with a perseverance worthy of so noble a cause, from nine o'clock in the stifling night till three in the exhausted dawn, doubtless for reasons which were metaphysically satisfactory to himself. Philip Ostrander, not finding in them any distinct bearings upon the natural sciences, was, as might be expected, less of an enthusiast in the matter. He took his pillow and vacated the scene of action. He had sometimes since reached the stage at which a man first perceives the full value and final cause of the spare room, an institution not created, as we have crudely supposed, for a chance guest, but for the relief of the father, whose morning duties clearly require a full night's rest. It certainly was plain enough that Mr. Ostrander could not conduct the morning recitation, if he had been kept awake all night, and his week long forbade his carrying the baby, Avis said. The poor girl wore that terrible July out as best she might, in the deepening reserve which motherhood only of all forms of human solitude knows. On this particular morning she came down late, and won. The fierce free fire of her superb eyes had given way to the burnt-in look of anxious patience which marks a young mother out from all other young creatures in the world. Her husband sat with a disturbed face at a disorderly table. Avis, he began, without looking up to see how she was, the cracked wheat is soggy again. Avis for a moment made no reply. She could not, for sheer surprise. The husband's tone breaking in upon her exhaustion of mind and body gave her something of the little shock that we feel on finding our paper give-out in the middle of an absorbing sentence. When she spoke, she said gently but with some dignity, I am sorry, Philip, I will speak about it. And the cream, proceeded Philip, is sour. The steak was cold, and the coffee will give me a billious headache before night. I really don't see why we can't have things more comfortable. We certainly must, if they are so very uncomfortable," replied his wife with rather a pale smile, striving she could hardly have told why, to turn the discussion into a jest. But you remember you didn't marry me to be your housekeeper, Philip? Philip Ostrander pushed his chair back without a smile, folded his napkin with the peculiar masculine emphasis which says, I can hold my tongue, for I am a gentleman, but it is doggedly hard work. Then turning, with averted face, murmured through his closed teeth, Yes, I remember. I don't know what we were either of us thinking of. With this he took his hat and strode away to college, in the sacred summer light, to conduct the morning prayers of a thousand perceptive and receptive boys. Avis sat for a little while at the uninviting breakfast-table. She tasted the cold coffee, and sent Julia away with her sympathetic, if a little bitter, tea. She felt too weak to eat. She looked out into the elm-branch, and saw the empty nest which the May robin had left, and dimly thought what an unpleasant look it had, and dimly thought she would get Julia to pull it down. It seemed quite necessary not to think of anything except the nest. Her eyes burned feverishly. She threw herself upon the lounge, and lay with both hands pressed upon them, still as the coins that pressed the lids of the dead. Presently she rang the bell sharply, and in a strong, strained voice, bad that the nurse be ordered to bring the child. He came, poor little fellow, looking as wawn as his mother, but as innocent of having made himself an unpleasant fact in the family life, as a tuberose is of yielding too strong a sweetness. Avis caught in with something not unlike the passionate love which Arya may have felt for the dagger, and hid her broken face upon the baby's neck, as if she would have hidden it there forever from all the world. When Ostrander came home, he sought his wife all over the house. She was not to be found. The cook said she took her hat and went out an hour since, and the nurse explained that in throwing back the nursery blinds to give the important message which the cook had forgotten to deliver to the grocer's boy, she had thought it likely it was Mrs. Ostrander, as she saw, just beyond the top of the cart, turning Elm Street to the beach. Ostrander pursued her impatiently in the blazing sun. He perceived the flutter of her dress far down against the lighthouse, and when he had overtaken her, he found her creeping along in the shadow formed by that great gorge so memorable to them both. She did not see him or hear him, and so crawled along in an aimless dreary fashion which had gave him a nameless terror to see. Her figure looked so broken, so beaten and weak, that it for the first time occurred to him that the effect of a little conjugal quarrel upon a nature like that of his wife's was not altogether a calculable one. His own words once spoken in that spot came back to him as he made his penitent way along the purple gorge, looking from torn side to torn side. It was a perfect primeval marriage. The heart of the rock was simply broken. Had Avis wrought herself into that frenzy of wounded feeling in which weaker women have courted death as a man with lacerated spinal nerves courted the moxa, he overtook her without her hearing his light step, and manlike, trusting to the sensation to interpret the emotion, barricaded her with both arms, and folded her to his shamed and sorry heart. But Avis glided from his touch like a spirit. Her bent figure heightened grandly, and her unwon maiden eye seemed to look again from a great height, down upon him where she had swept and stood upon the jutting cliff. Ostrander at that moment felt that to have been permitted to gain the allegiance of the heart we love is but the most tentative and introductory step towards the durability of a happiness whose existence depends upon our being found worthy to retain what we have won. And in feeling this, he felt deeper than he could reason into the joy and pain and peril which wailed two individual human souls into the awful fusion which we call marriage. But he said only, Avis, I was a brute. No, she said bitterly, you were only a man. Then, repenting, with swift nobility, she came to him. Now it is I who am wrong. Forgive me, Philip. You! he gathered her tenderly. She did not repel him. She was worn out with the strain of the night and the glare of the long walk. She did not cry, but she lay in his arms with a dry, sobbing sigh which alarmed him. He caressed her passionately. He sought her pardon in the soul of every sweet sign love had taught him in its first dizzy hours. She submitted quietly, but with an unresponsiveness which afterwards he remembered with disquiet perplexity. The scar which an unkind word leaves upon a large love may be invisible, like that of a great sin upon the tissues of the repentant soul, but for one, as for the other, this life has no healing. Avis did not choose to talk about cracked wheat. There were other things in the world to say, and it was impossible to express, without giving them both useless pain, her inherent, ineradicable and sickening recoil from the details of household care. And Philip, distraught with his deepening responsibilities at the college, naturally ceased to inquire so often how matters went in the studio. Avis faced her circumstances with such patience as she could command. A weaker woman lets conditions override her, be the lash a divine frenzy or a chronic neuralgia. Avis sadly turned the tense muscle of her strong nature now to secure a gracious home. The thong which has stung the aspirations of all women, since Eve, for love of knowledge, ate and sinned, goaded her on. She said to herself, It will be a matter at most of a few months when I have mastered this one little house, life waits, and art is long. She made haste to be wise and wisdom that her soul loathed to clear the space about her for the leisure that her patient purpose craved. But sometimes, sitting burdened with the child upon her arms, she looked out and off upon the summer sky with a strangling desolation, like that of the forgotten diver who sees the clouds flit from the bottom of the sea.