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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Fruit of the Tree
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+Illustrator: Alonzo Kimball
+
+Release Date: September 6, 2006 [EBook #19191]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRUIT OF THE TREE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Melissa Er-Raqabi
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FRUIT OF THE TREE
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured
+man.]
+
+
+
+
+THE FRUIT OF THE TREE
+BY
+EDITH WHARTON
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALONZO KIMBALL
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+MDCCCCVII
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+[Illustration: mark]
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+_He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured man_  _Frontispiece_
+_"No--I shall have to ask you to take my word for it"_     _Facing p. 82_
+_Half-way up the slope they met_                            130
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+
+
+THE FRUIT OF THE TREE
+
+I
+
+
+IN the surgical ward of the Hope Hospital at Hanaford, a nurse was
+bending over a young man whose bandaged right hand and arm lay stretched
+along the bed.
+
+His head stirred uneasily, and slipping her arm behind him she effected
+a professional readjustment of the pillows. "Is that better?"
+
+As she leaned over, he lifted his anxious bewildered eyes, deep-sunk
+under ridges of suffering. "I don't s'pose there's any kind of a show
+for me, is there?" he asked, pointing with his free hand--the stained
+seamed hand of the mechanic--to the inert bundle on the quilt.
+
+Her only immediate answer was to wipe the dampness from his forehead;
+then she said: "We'll talk about that to-morrow."
+
+"Why not now?"
+
+"Because Dr. Disbrow can't tell till the inflammation goes down."
+
+"Will it go down by to-morrow?"
+
+"It will begin to, if you don't excite yourself and keep up the fever."
+
+"Excite myself? I--there's four of 'em at home----"
+
+"Well, then there are four reasons for keeping quiet," she rejoined.
+
+She did not use, in speaking, the soothing inflection of her trade: she
+seemed to disdain to cajole or trick the sufferer. Her full young voice
+kept its cool note of authority, her sympathy revealing itself only in
+the expert touch of her hands and the constant vigilance of her dark
+steady eyes. This vigilance softened to pity as the patient turned his
+head away with a groan. His free left hand continued to travel the
+sheet, clasping and unclasping itself in contortions of feverish unrest.
+It was as though all the anguish of his mutilation found expression in
+that lonely hand, left without work in the world now that its mate was
+useless.
+
+The nurse felt a touch on her shoulder, and rose to face the matron, a
+sharp-featured woman with a soft intonation.
+
+"This is Mr. Amherst, Miss Brent. The assistant manager from the mills.
+He wishes to see Dillon."
+
+John Amherst's step was singularly noiseless. The nurse, sensitive by
+nature and training to all physical characteristics, was struck at once
+by the contrast between his alert face and figure and the silent way in
+which he moved. She noticed, too, that the same contrast was repeated in
+the face itself, its spare energetic outline, with the high nose and
+compressed lips of the mover of men, being curiously modified by the
+veiled inward gaze of the grey eyes he turned on her. It was one of the
+interests of Justine Brent's crowded yet lonely life to attempt a rapid
+mental classification of the persons she met; but the contradictions in
+Amherst's face baffled her, and she murmured inwardly "I don't know" as
+she drew aside to let him approach the bed. He stood by her in silence,
+his hands clasped behind him, his eyes on the injured man, who lay
+motionless, as if sunk in a lethargy. The matron, at the call of another
+nurse, had minced away down the ward, committing Amherst with a glance
+to Miss Brent; and the two remained alone by the bed.
+
+After a pause, Amherst moved toward the window beyond the empty cot
+adjoining Dillon's. One of the white screens used to isolate dying
+patients had been placed against this cot, which was the last at that
+end of the ward, and the space beyond formed a secluded corner, where a
+few words could be exchanged out of reach of the eyes in the other beds.
+
+"Is he asleep?" Amherst asked, as Miss Brent joined him.
+
+Miss Brent glanced at him again. His voice betokened not merely
+education, but something different and deeper--the familiar habit of
+gentle speech; and his shabby clothes--carefully brushed, but ill-cut
+and worn along the seams--sat on him easily, and with the same
+difference.
+
+"The morphine has made him drowsy," she answered. "The wounds were
+dressed about an hour ago, and the doctor gave him a hypodermic."
+
+"The wounds--how many are there?"
+
+"Besides the hand, his arm is badly torn up to the elbow."
+
+Amherst listened with bent head and frowning brow.
+
+"What do you think of the case?"
+
+She hesitated. "Dr. Disbrow hasn't said----"
+
+"And it's not your business to?" He smiled slightly. "I know hospital
+etiquette. But I have a particular reason for asking." He broke off and
+looked at her again, his veiled gaze sharpening to a glance of
+concentrated attention. "You're not one of the regular nurses, are you?
+Your dress seems to be of a different colour."
+
+She smiled at the "seems to be," which denoted a tardy and imperfect
+apprehension of the difference between dark-blue linen and white.
+
+"No: I happened to be staying at Hanaford, and hearing that they were in
+want of a surgical nurse, I offered my help."
+
+Amherst nodded. "So much the better. Is there any place where I can say
+two words to you?"
+
+"I could hardly leave the ward now, unless Mrs. Ogan comes back."
+
+"I don't care to have you call Mrs. Ogan," he interposed quickly. "When
+do you go off duty?"
+
+She looked at him in surprise. "If what you want to ask about
+is--anything connected with the management of things here--you know
+we're not supposed to talk of our patients outside of the hospital."
+
+"I know. But I am going to ask you to break through the rule--in that
+poor fellow's behalf."
+
+A protest wavered on her lip, but he held her eyes steadily, with a
+glint of good-humour behind his determination. "When do you go off
+duty?"
+
+"At six."
+
+"I'll wait at the corner of South Street and walk a little way with you.
+Let me put my case, and if you're not convinced you can refuse to
+answer."
+
+"Very well," she said, without farther hesitation; and Amherst, with a
+slight nod of farewell, passed through the door near which they had been
+standing.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+WHEN Justine Brent emerged from the Hope Hospital the October dusk had
+fallen and the wide suburban street was almost dark, except when the
+illuminated bulk of an electric car flashed by under the maples.
+
+She crossed the tracks and approached the narrower thoroughfare where
+Amherst awaited her. He hung back a moment, and she was amused to see
+that he failed to identify the uniformed nurse with the girl in her trim
+dark dress, soberly complete in all its accessories, who advanced to
+him, smiling under her little veil.
+
+"Thank you," he said as he turned and walked beside her. "Is this your
+way?"
+
+"I am staying in Oak Street. But it's just as short to go by Maplewood
+Avenue."
+
+"Yes; and quieter."
+
+For a few yards they walked on in silence, their long steps falling
+naturally into time, though Amherst was somewhat taller than his
+companion.
+
+At length he said: "I suppose you know nothing about the relation
+between Hope Hospital and the Westmore Mills."
+
+"Only that the hospital was endowed by one of the Westmore family."
+
+"Yes; an old Miss Hope, a great-aunt of Westmore's. But there is more
+than that between them--all kinds of subterranean passages." He paused,
+and began again: "For instance, Dr. Disbrow married the sister of our
+manager's wife."
+
+"Your chief at the mills?"
+
+"Yes," he said with a slight grimace. "So you see, if Truscomb--the
+manager--thinks one of the mill-hands is only slightly injured, it's
+natural that his brother-in-law, Dr. Disbrow, should take an optimistic
+view of the case."
+
+"Natural? I don't know----"
+
+"Don't you think it's natural that a man should be influenced by his
+wife?"
+
+"Not where his professional honour is concerned."
+
+Amherst smiled. "That sounds very young--if you'll excuse my saying so.
+Well, I won't go on to insinuate that, Truscomb being high in favour
+with the Westmores, and the Westmores having a lien on the hospital,
+Disbrow's position there is also bound up with his taking--more or
+less--the same view as Truscomb's."
+
+Miss Brent had paused abruptly on the deserted pavement.
+
+"No, don't go on--if you want me to think well of you," she flashed out.
+
+Amherst met the thrust composedly, perceiving, as she turned to face
+him, that what she resented was not so much his insinuation against his
+superiors as his allusion to the youthfulness of her sentiments. She
+was, in fact, as he now noticed, still young enough to dislike being
+excused for her youth. In her severe uniform of blue linen, her dusky
+skin darkened by the nurse's cap, and by the pale background of the
+hospital walls, she had seemed older, more competent and experienced;
+but he now saw how fresh was the pale curve of her cheek, and how
+smooth the brow clasped in close waves of hair.
+
+"I began at the wrong end," he acknowledged. "But let me put Dillon's
+case before you dismiss me."
+
+She softened. "It is only because of my interest in that poor fellow
+that I am here----"
+
+"Because you think he needs help--and that you can help him?"
+
+But she held back once more. "Please tell me about him first," she said,
+walking on.
+
+Amherst met the request with another question. "I wonder how much you
+know about factory life?"
+
+"Oh, next to nothing. Just what I've managed to pick up in these two
+days at the hospital."
+
+He glanced at her small determined profile under its dark roll of hair,
+and said, half to himself: "That might be a good deal."
+
+She took no notice of this, and he went on: "Well, I won't try to put
+the general situation before you, though Dillon's accident is really the
+result of it. He works in the carding room, and on the day of the
+accident his 'card' stopped suddenly, and he put his hand behind him to
+get a tool he needed out of his trouser-pocket. He reached back a little
+too far, and the card behind him caught his hand in its million of
+diamond-pointed wires. Truscomb and the overseer of the room maintain
+that the accident was due to his own carelessness; but the hands say
+that it was caused by the fact of the cards being too near together, and
+that just such an accident was bound to happen sooner or later."
+
+Miss Brent drew an eager breath. "And what do _you_ say?"
+
+"That they're right: the carding-room is shamefully overcrowded. Dillon
+hasn't been in it long--he worked his way up at the mills from being a
+bobbin-boy--and he hadn't yet learned how cautious a man must be in
+there. The cards are so close to each other that even the old hands run
+narrow risks, and it takes the cleverest operative some time to learn
+that he must calculate every movement to a fraction of an inch."
+
+"But why do they crowd the rooms in that way?"
+
+"To get the maximum of profit out of the minimum of floor-space. It
+costs more to increase the floor-space than to maim an operative now and
+then."
+
+"I see. Go on," she murmured.
+
+"That's the first point; here is the second. Dr. Disbrow told Truscomb
+this morning that Dillon's hand would certainly be saved, and that he
+might get back to work in a couple of months if the company would
+present him with an artificial finger or two."
+
+Miss Brent faced him with a flush of indignation. "Mr. Amherst--who gave
+you this version of Dr. Disbrow's report?"
+
+"The manager himself."
+
+"Verbally?"
+
+"No--he showed me Disbrow's letter."
+
+For a moment or two they walked on silently through the quiet street;
+then she said, in a voice still stirred with feeling: "As I told you
+this afternoon, Dr. Disbrow has said nothing in my hearing."
+
+"And Mrs. Ogan?"
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Ogan--" Her voice broke in a ripple of irony. "Mrs. Ogan
+'feels it to be such a beautiful dispensation, my dear, that, owing to a
+death that very morning in the surgical ward, we happened to have a bed
+ready for the poor man within three hours of the accident.'" She had
+exchanged her deep throat-tones for a high reedy note which perfectly
+simulated the matron's lady-like inflections.
+
+Amherst, at the change, turned on her with a boyish burst of laughter:
+she joined in it, and for a moment they were blent in that closest of
+unions, the discovery of a common fund of humour.
+
+She was the first to grow grave. "That three hours' delay didn't help
+matters--how is it there is no emergency hospital at the mills?"
+
+Amherst laughed again, but in a different key. "That's part of the
+larger question, which we haven't time for now." He waited a moment, and
+then added: "You've not yet given me your own impression of Dillon's
+case."
+
+"You shall have it, if you saw that letter. Dillon will certainly lose
+his hand--and probably the whole arm." She spoke with a thrilling of her
+slight frame that transformed the dispassionate professional into a girl
+shaken with indignant pity.
+
+Amherst stood still before her. "Good God! Never anything but useless
+lumber?"
+
+"Never----"
+
+"And he won't die?"
+
+"Alas!"
+
+"He has a consumptive wife and three children. She ruined her health
+swallowing cotton-dust at the factory," Amherst continued.
+
+"So she told me yesterday."
+
+He turned in surprise. "You've had a talk with her?"
+
+"I went out to Westmore last night. I was haunted by her face when she
+came to the hospital. She looks forty, but she told me she was only
+twenty-six." Miss Brent paused to steady her voice. "It's the curse of
+my trade that it's always tempting me to interfere in cases where I can
+do no possible good. The fact is, I'm not fit to be a nurse--I shall
+live and die a wretched sentimentalist!" she ended, with an angry dash
+at the tears on her veil.
+
+Her companion walked on in silence till she had regained her composure.
+Then he said: "What did you think of Westmore?"
+
+"I think it's one of the worst places I ever saw--and I am not unused to
+slums. It looks so dead. The slums of big cities are much more
+cheerful."
+
+He made no answer, and after a moment she asked: "Does the cotton-dust
+always affect the lungs?"
+
+"It's likely to, where there is the least phthisical tendency. But of
+course the harm could be immensely reduced by taking up the old rough
+floors which hold the dust, and by thorough cleanliness and
+ventilation."
+
+"What does the company do in such cases? Where an operative breaks down
+at twenty-five?"
+
+"The company says there was a phthisical tendency."
+
+"And will they give nothing in return for the two lives they have
+taken?"
+
+"They will probably pay for Dillon's care at the hospital, and they have
+taken the wife back as a scrubber."
+
+"To clean those uncleanable floors? She's not fit for it!"
+
+"She must work, fit for it or not; and there is less strain in scrubbing
+than in bending over the looms or cards. The pay is lower, of course,
+but she's very grateful for being taken back at all, now that she's no
+longer a first-class worker."
+
+Miss Brent's face glowed with a fine wrath. "She can't possibly stand
+more than two or three months of it without breaking down!"
+
+"Well, you see they've told her that in less than that time her husband
+will be at work again."
+
+"And what will the company do for them when the wife is a hopeless
+invalid, and the husband a cripple?"
+
+Amherst again uttered the dry laugh with which he had met her suggestion
+of an emergency hospital. "I know what I should do if I could get
+anywhere near Dillon--give him an overdose of morphine, and let the
+widow collect his life-insurance, and make a fresh start."
+
+She looked at him curiously. "Should you, I wonder?"
+
+"If I saw the suffering as you see it, and knew the circumstances as I
+know them, I believe I should feel justified--" He broke off. "In your
+work, don't you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?"
+
+She mused. "One might...but perhaps the professional instinct to save
+would always come first."
+
+"To save--what? When all the good of life is gone?"
+
+"I daresay," she sighed, "poor Dillon would do it himself if he
+could--when he realizes that all the good _is_ gone."
+
+"Yes, but he can't do it himself; and it's the irony of such cases that
+his employers, after ruining his life, will do all they can to patch up
+the ruins."
+
+"But that at least ought to count in their favour."
+
+"Perhaps; if--" He paused, as though reluctant to lay himself open once
+more to the charge of uncharitableness; and suddenly she exclaimed,
+looking about her: "I didn't notice we had walked so far down Maplewood
+Avenue!"
+
+They had turned a few minutes previously into the wide thoroughfare
+crowning the high ground which is covered by the residential quarter of
+Hanaford. Here the spacious houses, withdrawn behind shrubberies and
+lawns, revealed in their silhouettes every form of architectural
+experiment, from the symmetrical pre-Revolutionary structure, with its
+classic portico and clipped box-borders, to the latest outbreak in
+boulders and Moorish tiles.
+
+Amherst followed his companion's glance with surprise. "We _have_ gone a
+block or two out of our way. I always forget where I am when I'm talking
+about anything that interests me."
+
+Miss Brent looked at her watch. "My friends don't dine till seven, and I
+can get home in time by taking a Grove Street car," she said.
+
+"If you don't mind walking a little farther you can take a Liberty
+Street car instead. They run oftener, and you will get home just as
+soon."
+
+She made a gesture of assent, and as they walked on he continued: "I
+haven't yet explained why I am so anxious to get an unbiassed opinion of
+Dillon's case."
+
+She looked at him in surprise. "What you've told me about Dr. Disbrow
+and your manager is surely enough."
+
+"Well, hardly, considering that I am Truscomb's subordinate. I shouldn't
+have committed a breach of professional etiquette, or asked you to do
+so, if I hadn't a hope of bettering things; but I have, and that is why
+I've held on at Westmore for the last few months, instead of getting out
+of it altogether."
+
+"I'm glad of that," she said quickly.
+
+"The owner of the mills--young Richard Westmore--died last winter," he
+went on, "and my hope--it's no more--is that the new broom may sweep a
+little cleaner."
+
+"Who is the new broom?"
+
+"Westmore left everything to his widow, and she is coming here to-morrow
+to look into the management of the mills."
+
+"Coming? She doesn't live here, then?"
+
+"At Hanaford? Heaven forbid! It's an anomaly nowadays for the employer
+to live near the employed. The Westmores have always lived in New
+York--and I believe they have a big place on Long Island."
+
+"Well, at any rate she _is_ coming, and that ought to be a good sign.
+Did she never show any interest in the mills during her husband's life?"
+
+"Not as far as I know. I've been at Westmore three years, and she's not
+been seen there in my time. She is very young, and Westmore himself
+didn't care. It was a case of inherited money. He drew the dividends,
+and Truscomb did the rest."
+
+Miss Brent reflected. "I don't know much about the constitution of
+companies--but I suppose Mrs. Westmore doesn't unite all the offices in
+her own person. Is there no one to stand between Truscomb and the
+operatives?"
+
+"Oh, the company, on paper, shows the usual official hierarchy. Richard
+Westmore, of course, was president, and since his death the former
+treasurer--Halford Gaines--has replaced him, and his son, Westmore
+Gaines, has been appointed treasurer. You can see by the names that it's
+all in the family. Halford Gaines married a Miss Westmore, and
+represents the clan at Hanaford--leads society, and keeps up the social
+credit of the name. As treasurer, Mr. Halford Gaines kept strictly to
+his special business, and always refused to interfere between Truscomb
+and the operatives. As president he will probably follow the same
+policy, the more so as it fits in with his inherited respect for the
+_status quo_, and his blissful ignorance of economics."
+
+"And the new treasurer--young Gaines? Is there no hope of his breaking
+away from the family tradition?"
+
+"Westy Gaines has a better head than his father; but he hates Hanaford
+and the mills, and his chief object in life is to be taken for a New
+Yorker. So far he hasn't been here much, except for the quarterly
+meetings, and his routine work is done by another cousin--you perceive
+that Westmore is a nest of nepotism."
+
+Miss Brent's work among the poor had developed her interest in social
+problems, and she followed these details attentively.
+
+"Well, the outlook is not encouraging, but perhaps Mrs. Westmore's
+coming will make a change. I suppose she has more power than any one."
+
+"She might have, if she chose to exert it, for her husband was really
+the whole company. The official cousins hold only a few shares apiece."
+
+"Perhaps, then, her visit will open her eyes. Who knows but poor
+Dillon's case may help others--prove a beautiful dispensation, as Mrs.
+Ogan would say?"
+
+"It does come terribly pat as an illustration of some of the abuses I
+want to have remedied. The difficulty will be to get the lady's ear.
+That's her house we're coming to, by the way."
+
+An electric street-lamp irradiated the leafless trees and stone
+gate-posts of the building before them. Though gardens extended behind
+it, the house stood so near the pavement that only two short flights of
+steps intervened between the gate-posts and the portico. Light shone
+from every window of the pompous rusticated façade--in the turreted
+"Tuscan villa" style of the 'fifties--and as Miss Brent and Amherst
+approached, their advance was checked by a group of persons who were
+just descending from two carriages at the door.
+
+The lamp-light showed every detail of dress and countenance in the
+party, which consisted of two men, one slightly lame, with a long white
+moustache and a distinguished nose, the other short, lean and
+professional, and of two ladies and their laden attendants.
+
+"Why, that must be her party arriving!" Miss Brent exclaimed; and as she
+spoke the younger of the two ladies, turning back to her maid, exposed
+to the glare of the electric light a fair pale face shadowed by the
+projection of her widow's veil.
+
+"Is that Mrs. Westmore?" Miss Brent whispered; and as Amherst muttered:
+"I suppose so; I've never seen her----" she continued excitedly: "She
+looks so like--do you know what her name was before she married?"
+
+He drew his brows together in a hopeless effort of remembrance. "I don't
+know--I must have heard--but I never can recall people's names."
+
+"That's bad, for a leader of men!" she said mockingly, and he answered,
+as though touched on a sore point: "I mean people who don't count. I
+never forget an operative's name or face."
+
+"One can never tell who may be going to count," she rejoined
+sententiously.
+
+He dwelt on this in silence while they walked on catching as they
+passed a glimpse of the red-carpeted Westmore hall on which the glass
+doors were just being closed. At length he roused himself to ask: "Does
+Mrs. Westmore look like some one you know?"
+
+"I fancied so--a girl who was at the Sacred Heart in Paris with me. But
+isn't this my corner?" she exclaimed, as they turned into another
+street, down which a laden car was descending.
+
+Its approach left them time for no more than a hurried hand-clasp, and
+when Miss Brent had been absorbed into the packed interior her
+companion, as his habit was, stood for a while where she had left him,
+gazing at some indefinite point in space; then, waking to a sudden
+consciousness of his surroundings, he walked off toward the centre of
+the town.
+
+At the junction of two business streets he met an empty car marked
+"Westmore," and springing into it, seated himself in a corner and drew
+out a pocket Shakespeare. He read on, indifferent to his surroundings,
+till the car left the asphalt streets and illuminated shop-fronts for a
+grey intermediate region of mud and macadam. Then he pocketed his volume
+and sat looking out into the gloom.
+
+The houses grew less frequent, with darker gaps of night between; and
+the rare street-lamps shone on cracked pavements, crooked
+telegraph-poles, hoardings tapestried with patent-medicine posters, and
+all the mean desolation of an American industrial suburb. Farther on
+there came a weed-grown field or two, then a row of operatives' houses,
+the showy gables of the "Eldorado" road-house--the only building in
+Westmore on which fresh paint was freely lavished--then the company
+"store," the machine shops and other out-buildings, the vast forbidding
+bulk of the factories looming above the river-bend, and the sudden
+neatness of the manager's turf and privet hedges. The scene was so
+familiar to Amherst that he had lost the habit of comparison, and his
+absorption in the moral and material needs of the workers sometimes made
+him forget the outward setting of their lives. But to-night he recalled
+the nurse's comment--"it looks so dead"--and the phrase roused him to a
+fresh perception of the scene. With sudden disgust he saw the sordidness
+of it all--the poor monotonous houses, the trampled grass-banks, the
+lean dogs prowling in refuse-heaps, the reflection of a crooked gas-lamp
+in a stagnant loop of the river; and he asked himself how it was
+possible to put any sense of moral beauty into lives bounded forever by
+the low horizon of the factory. There is a fortuitous ugliness that has
+life and hope in it: the ugliness of overcrowded city streets, of the
+rush and drive of packed activities; but this out-spread meanness of the
+suburban working colony, uncircumscribed by any pressure of surrounding
+life, and sunk into blank acceptance of its isolation, its banishment
+from beauty and variety and surprise, seemed to Amherst the very
+negation of hope and life.
+
+"She's right," he mused--"it's dead--stone dead: there isn't a drop of
+wholesome blood left in it."
+
+The Moosuc River valley, in the hollow of which, for that river's sake,
+the Westmore mills had been planted, lingered in the memory of
+pre-industrial Hanaford as the pleasantest suburb of the town. Here,
+beyond a region of orchards and farm-houses, several "leading citizens"
+had placed, above the river-bank, their prim wood-cut "residences," with
+porticoes and terraced lawns; and from the chief of these, Hopewood,
+brought into the Westmore family by the Miss Hope who had married an
+earlier Westmore, the grim mill-village had been carved. The pillared
+"residences" had, after this, inevitably fallen to base uses; but the
+old house at Hopewood, in its wooded grounds, remained, neglected but
+intact, beyond the first bend of the river, deserted as a dwelling but
+"held" in anticipation of rising values, when the inevitable growth of
+Westmore should increase the demand for small building lots. Whenever
+Amherst's eyes were refreshed by the hanging foliage above the roofs of
+Westmore, he longed to convert the abandoned country-seat into a park
+and playground for the mill-hands; but he knew that the company counted
+on the gradual sale of Hopewood as a source of profit. No--the mill-town
+would not grow beautiful as it grew larger--rather, in obedience to the
+grim law of industrial prosperity, it would soon lose its one lingering
+grace and spread out in unmitigated ugliness, devouring green fields and
+shaded slopes like some insect-plague consuming the land. The conditions
+were familiar enough to Amherst; and their apparent inevitableness
+mocked the hopes he had based on Mrs. Westmore's arrival.
+
+"Where every stone is piled on another, through the whole stupid
+structure of selfishness and egotism, how can one be pulled out without
+making the whole thing topple? And whatever they're blind to, they
+always see that," he mused, reaching up for the strap of the car.
+
+He walked a few yards beyond the manager's house, and turned down a side
+street lined with scattered cottages. Approaching one of these by a
+gravelled path he pushed open the door, and entered a sitting-room where
+a green-shaded lamp shone pleasantly on bookshelves and a crowded
+writing-table.
+
+A brisk little woman in black, laying down the evening paper as she
+rose, lifted her hands to his tall shoulders.
+
+"Well, mother," he said, stooping to her kiss.
+
+"You're late, John," she smiled back at him, not reproachfully, but with
+affection.
+
+She was a wonderfully compact and active creature, with face so young
+and hair so white that she looked as unreal as a stage mother till a
+close view revealed the fine lines that experience had drawn about her
+mouth and eyes. The eyes themselves, brightly black and glancing, had
+none of the veiled depths of her son's gaze. Their look was outward, on
+a world which had dealt her hard blows and few favours, but in which her
+interest was still fresh, amused and unabated.
+
+Amherst glanced at his watch. "Never mind--Duplain will be later still.
+I had to go into Hanaford, and he is replacing me at the office."
+
+"So much the better, dear: we can have a minute to ourselves. Sit down
+and tell me what kept you."
+
+She picked up her knitting as she spoke, having the kind of hands that
+find repose in ceaseless small activities. Her son could not remember a
+time when he had not seen those small hands in motion--shaping garments,
+darning rents, repairing furniture, exploring the inner economy of
+clocks. "I make a sort of rag-carpet of the odd minutes," she had once
+explained to a friend who wondered at her turning to her needlework in
+the moment's interval between other tasks.
+
+Amherst threw himself wearily into a chair. "I was trying to find out
+something about Dillon's case," he said.
+
+His mother turned a quick glance toward the door, rose to close it, and
+reseated herself.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I managed to have a talk with his nurse when she went off duty this
+evening."
+
+"The nurse? I wonder you could get her to speak."
+
+"Luckily she's not the regular incumbent, but a volunteer who happened
+to be here on a visit. As it was, I had some difficulty in making her
+talk--till I told her of Disbrow's letter."
+
+Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright glance from the needles. "He's very bad,
+then?"
+
+"Hopelessly maimed!"
+
+She shivered and cast down her eyes. "Do you suppose she really knows?"
+
+"She struck me as quite competent to judge."
+
+"A volunteer, you say, here on a visit? What is her name?"
+
+He raised his head with a vague look. "I never thought of asking her."
+
+Mrs. Amherst laughed. "How like you! Did she say with whom she was
+staying?"
+
+"I think she said in Oak Street--but she didn't mention any name."
+
+Mrs. Amherst wrinkled her brows thoughtfully. "I wonder if she's not the
+thin dark girl I saw the other day with Mrs. Harry Dressel. Was she tall
+and rather handsome?"
+
+"I don't know," murmured Amherst indifferently. As a rule he was
+humorously resigned to his mother's habit of deserting the general for
+the particular, and following some irrelevant thread of association in
+utter disregard of the main issue. But to-night, preoccupied with his
+subject, and incapable of conceiving how anyone else could be unaffected
+by it, he resented her indifference as a sign of incurable frivolity.
+
+"How she can live close to such suffering and forget it!" was his
+thought; then, with a movement of self-reproach, he remembered that the
+work flying through her fingers was to take shape as a garment for one
+of the infant Dillons. "She takes her pity out in action, like that
+quiet nurse, who was as cool as a drum-major till she took off her
+uniform--and then!" His face softened at the recollection of the girl's
+outbreak. Much as he admired, in theory, the woman who kept a calm
+exterior in emergencies, he had all a man's desire to know that the
+springs of feeling lay close to the unruffled surface.
+
+Mrs. Amherst had risen and crossed over to his chair. She leaned on it a
+moment, pushing the tossed brown hair from his forehead.
+
+"John, have you considered what you mean to do next?"
+
+He threw back his head to meet her gaze.
+
+"About this Dillon case," she continued. "How are all these
+investigations going to help you?"
+
+Their eyes rested on each other for a moment; then he said coldly: "You
+are afraid I am going to lose my place."
+
+She flushed like a girl and murmured: "It's not the kind of place I ever
+wanted to see you in!"
+
+"I know it," he returned in a gentler tone, clasping one of the hands on
+his chair-back. "I ought to have followed a profession, like my
+grandfather; but my father's blood was too strong in me. I should never
+have been content as anything but a working-man."
+
+"How can you call your father a working-man? He had a genius for
+mechanics, and if he had lived he would have been as great in his way as
+any statesman or lawyer."
+
+Amherst smiled. "Greater, to my thinking; but he gave me his
+hard-working hands without the genius to create with them. I wish I had
+inherited more from him, or less; but I must make the best of what I am,
+rather than try to be somebody else." He laid her hand caressingly
+against his cheek. "It's hard on you, mother--but you must bear with
+me."
+
+"I have never complained, John; but now you've chosen your work, it's
+natural that I should want you to stick to it."
+
+He rose with an impatient gesture. "Never fear; I could easily get
+another job----"
+
+"What? If Truscomb black-listed you? Do you forget that Scotch overseer
+who was here when we came?"
+
+"And whom Truscomb hounded out of the trade? I remember him," said
+Amherst grimly; "but I have an idea I am going to do the hounding this
+time."
+
+His mother sighed, but her reply was cut short by the noisy opening of
+the outer door. Amherst seemed to hear the sound with relief. "There's
+Duplain," he said, going into the passage; but on the threshold he
+encountered, not the young Alsatian overseer who boarded with them, but
+a small boy who said breathlessly: "Mr. Truscomb wants you to come down
+bimeby."
+
+"This evening? To the office?"
+
+"No--he's sick a-bed."
+
+The blood rushed to Amherst's face, and he had to press his lips close
+to check an exclamation. "Say I'll come as soon as I've had supper," he
+said.
+
+The boy vanished, and Amherst turned back to the sitting-room.
+"Truscomb's ill--he has sent for me; and I saw Mrs. Westmore arriving
+tonight! Have supper, mother--we won't wait for Duplain." His face still
+glowed with excitement, and his eyes were dark with the concentration of
+his inward vision.
+
+"Oh, John, John!" Mrs. Amherst sighed, crossing the passage to the
+kitchen.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+AT the manager's door Amherst was met by Mrs. Truscomb, a large flushed
+woman in a soiled wrapper and diamond earrings.
+
+"Mr. Truscomb's very sick. He ought not to see you. The doctor thinks--"
+she began.
+
+Dr. Disbrow, at this point, emerged from the sitting-room. He was a pale
+man, with a beard of mixed grey-and-drab, and a voice of the same
+indeterminate quality.
+
+"Good evening, Mr. Amherst. Truscomb is pretty poorly--on the edge of
+pneumonia, I'm afraid. As he seems anxious to see you I think you'd
+better go up for two minutes--not more, please." He paused, and went on
+with a smile: "You won't excite him, of course--nothing unpleasant----"
+
+"He's worried himself sick over that wretched Dillon," Mrs. Truscomb
+interposed, draping her wrapper majestically about an indignant bosom.
+
+"That's it--puts too much heart into his work. But we'll have Dillon all
+right before long," the physician genially declared.
+
+Mrs. Truscomb, with a reluctant gesture, led Amherst up the handsomely
+carpeted stairs to the room where her husband lay, a prey to the cares
+of office. She ushered the young man in, and withdrew to the next room,
+where he heard her coughing at intervals, as if to remind him that he
+was under observation.
+
+The manager of the Westmore mills was not the type of man that Amherst's
+comments on his superior suggested. As he sat propped against the
+pillows, with a brick-red flush on his cheek-bones, he seemed at first
+glance to belong to the innumerable army of American business men--the
+sallow, undersized, lacklustre drudges who have never lifted their heads
+from the ledger. Even his eye, now bright with fever, was dull and
+non-committal in daily life; and perhaps only the ramifications of his
+wrinkles could have revealed what particular ambitions had seamed his
+soul.
+
+"Good evening, Amherst. I'm down with a confounded cold."
+
+"I'm sorry to hear it," the young man forced himself to say.
+
+"Can't get my breath--that's the trouble." Truscomb paused and gasped.
+"I've just heard that Mrs. Westmore is here--and I want you to go
+round--tomorrow morning--" He had to break off once more.
+
+"Yes, sir," said Amherst, his heart leaping.
+
+"Needn't see her--ask for her father, Mr. Langhope. Tell him what the
+doctor says--I'll be on my legs in a day or two--ask 'em to wait till I
+can take 'em over the mills."
+
+He shot one of his fugitive glances at his assistant, and held up a bony
+hand. "Wait a minute. On your way there, stop and notify Mr. Gaines. He
+was to meet them here. You understand?"
+
+"Yes, sir," said Amherst; and at that moment Mrs. Truscomb appeared on
+the threshold.
+
+"I must ask you to come now, Mr. Amherst," she began haughtily; but a
+glance from her husband reduced her to a heaving pink nonentity.
+
+"Hold on, Amherst. I hear you've been in to Hanaford. Did you go to the
+hospital?"
+
+"Ezra--" his wife murmured: he looked through her.
+
+"Yes," said Amherst.
+
+Truscomb's face seemed to grow smaller and dryer. He transferred his
+look from his wife to his assistant.
+
+"All right. You'll just bear in mind that it's Disbrow's business to
+report Dillon's case to Mrs. Westmore? You're to confine yourself to my
+message. Is that clear?"
+
+"Perfectly clear. Goodnight," Amherst answered, as he turned to follow
+Mrs. Truscomb.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That same evening, four persons were seated under the bronze chandelier
+in the red satin drawing-room of the Westmore mansion. One of the four,
+the young lady in widow's weeds whose face had arrested Miss Brent's
+attention that afternoon, rose from a massively upholstered sofa and
+drifted over to the fireplace near which her father sat.
+
+"Didn't I tell you it was awful, father?" she sighed, leaning
+despondently against the high carved mantelpiece surmounted by a bronze
+clock in the form of an obelisk.
+
+Mr. Langhope, who sat smoking, with one faultlessly-clad leg crossed on
+the other, and his ebony stick reposing against the arm of his chair,
+raised his clear ironical eyes to her face.
+
+"As an archæologist," he said, with a comprehensive wave of his hand, "I
+find it positively interesting. I should really like to come here and
+dig."
+
+There were no lamps in the room, and the numerous gas-jets of the
+chandelier shed their lights impartially on ponderously framed canvases
+of the Bay of Naples and the Hudson in Autumn, on Carrara busts and
+bronze Indians on velvet pedestals.
+
+"All this," murmured Mr. Langhope, "is getting to be as rare as the
+giant sequoias. In another fifty years we shall have collectors fighting
+for that Bay of Naples."
+
+Bessy Westmore turned from him impatiently. When she felt deeply on any
+subject her father's flippancy annoyed her.
+
+"_You_ can see, Maria," she said, seating herself beside the other lady
+of the party, "why I couldn't possibly live here."
+
+Mrs. Eustace Ansell, immediately after dinner, had bent her slender back
+above the velvet-covered writing-table, where an inkstand of Vienna
+ormolu offered its empty cup to her pen. Being habitually charged with a
+voluminous correspondence, she had foreseen this contingency and met it
+by despatching her maid for her own writing-case, which was now
+outspread before her in all its complex neatness; but at Bessy's appeal
+she wiped her pen, and turned a sympathetic gaze on her companion.
+
+Mrs. Ansell's face drew all its charm from its adaptability. It was a
+different face to each speaker: now kindling with irony, now gently
+maternal, now charged with abstract meditation--and few paused to
+reflect that, in each case, it was merely the mirror held up to some one
+else's view of life.
+
+"It needs doing over," she admitted, following the widow's melancholy
+glance about the room. "But you are a spoilt child to complain. Think of
+having a house of your own to come to, instead of having to put up at
+the Hanaford hotel!"
+
+Mrs. Westmore's attention was arrested by the first part of the reply.
+
+"Doing over? Why in the world should I do it over? No one could expect
+me to come here _now_--could they, Mr. Tredegar?" she exclaimed,
+transferring her appeal to the fourth member of the party.
+
+Mr. Tredegar, the family lawyer, who had deemed it his duty to accompany
+the widow on her visit of inspection, was strolling up and down the room
+with short pompous steps, a cigar between his lips, and his arms behind
+him. He cocked his sparrow-like head, scanned the offending apartment,
+and terminated his survey by resting his eyes on Mrs. Westmore's
+charming petulant face.
+
+"It all depends," he replied axiomatically, "how large an income you
+require."
+
+Mr. Tredegar uttered this remark with the air of one who pronounces on
+an important point in law: his lightest observation seemed a decision
+handed down from the bench to which he had never ascended. He restored
+the cigar to his lips, and sought approval in Mrs. Ansell's expressive
+eye.
+
+"Ah, that's it, Bessy. You've that to remember," the older lady
+murmured, as if struck by the profundity of the remark.
+
+Mrs. Westmore made an impatient gesture. "We've always had money
+enough--Dick was perfectly satisfied." Her voice trembled a little on
+her husband's name. "And you don't know what the place is like by
+daylight--and the people who come to call!"
+
+"Of course you needn't see any one now, dear," Mrs. Ansell reminded her,
+"except the Halford Gaineses."
+
+"I am sure they're bad enough. Juliana Gaines will say: 'My dear, is
+that the way widows' veils are worn in New York this autumn?' and
+Halford will insist on our going to one of those awful family dinners,
+all Madeira and terrapin."
+
+"It's too early for terrapin," Mrs. Ansell smiled consolingly; but Bessy
+had reverted to her argument. "Besides, what difference would my coming
+here make? I shall never understand anything about business," she
+declared.
+
+Mr. Tredegar pondered, and once more removed his cigar. "The necessity
+has never arisen. But now that you find yourself in almost sole control
+of a large property----"
+
+Mr. Langhope laughed gently. "Apply yourself, Bessy. Bring your masterly
+intellect to bear on the industrial problem."
+
+Mrs. Ansell restored the innumerable implements to her writing-case, and
+laid her arm with a caressing gesture on Mrs. Westmore's shoulder.
+"Don't tease her. She's tired, and she misses the baby."
+
+"I shall get a telegram tomorrow morning," exclaimed the young mother,
+brightening.
+
+"Of course you will. 'Cicely has just eaten two boiled eggs and a bowl
+of porridge, and is bearing up wonderfully.'"
+
+She drew Mrs. Westmore persuasively to her feet, but the widow refused
+to relinquish her hold on her grievance.
+
+"You all think I'm extravagant and careless about money," she broke out,
+addressing the room in general from the shelter of Mrs. Ansell's
+embrace; "but I know one thing: If I had my way I should begin to
+economize by selling this horrible house, instead of leaving it shut up
+from one year's end to another."
+
+Her father looked up: proposals of retrenchment always struck him as
+business-like when they did not affect his own expenditure. "What do you
+think of that, eh, Tredegar?"
+
+The eminent lawyer drew in his thin lips. "From the point of view of
+policy, I think unfavourably of it," he pronounced.
+
+Bessy's face clouded, and Mrs. Ansell argued gently: "Really, it's too
+late to look so far into the future. Remember, my dear, that we are due
+at the mills tomorrow at ten."
+
+The reminder that she must rise early had the effect of hastening Mrs.
+Westmore's withdrawal, and the two ladies, after an exchange of
+goodnights, left the men to their cigars.
+
+Mr. Langhope was the first to speak.
+
+"Bessy's as hopelessly vague about business as I am, Tredegar. Why the
+deuce Westmore left her everything outright--but he was only a heedless
+boy himself."
+
+"Yes. The way he allowed things to go, it's a wonder there was anything
+to leave. This Truscomb must be an able fellow."
+
+"Devoted to Dick's interests, I've always understood."
+
+"He makes the mills pay well, at any rate, and that's not so easy
+nowadays. But on general principles it's as well he should see that we
+mean to look into everything thoroughly. Of course Halford Gaines will
+never be more than a good figure-head, but Truscomb must be made to
+understand that Mrs. Westmore intends to interest herself personally in
+the business."
+
+"Oh, by all means--of course--" Mr. Langhope assented, his light smile
+stiffening into a yawn at the mere suggestion.
+
+He rose with an effort, supporting himself on his stick. "I think I'll
+turn in myself. There's not a readable book in that God-forsaken
+library, and I believe Maria Ansell has gone off with my volume of
+Loti."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning, when Amherst presented himself at the Westmore door,
+he had decided to follow his chief's instructions to the letter, and ask
+for Mr. Langhope only. The decision had cost him a struggle, for his
+heart was big with its purpose; but though he knew that he must soon
+place himself in open opposition to Truscomb, he recognized the prudence
+of deferring the declaration of war as long as possible.
+
+On his round of the mills, that morning, he had paused in the room where
+Mrs. Dillon knelt beside her mop and pail, and had found her, to his
+surprise, comparatively reassured and cheerful. Dr. Disbrow, she told
+him, had been in the previous evening, and had told her to take heart
+about Jim, and left her enough money to get along for a week--and a
+wonderful new cough-mixture that he'd put up for her special. Amherst
+found it difficult to listen calmly, with the nurse's words still in his
+ears, and the sight before him of Mrs. Dillon's lean shoulder-blades
+travelling painfully up and down with the sweep of the mop.
+
+"I don't suppose that cost Truscomb ten dollars," he said to himself, as
+the lift lowered him to the factory door; but another voice argued that
+he had no right to accuse Disbrow of acting as his brother-in-law's
+agent, when the gift to Mrs. Dillon might have been prompted by his own
+kindness of heart.
+
+"And what prompted the lie about her husband? Well, perhaps he's an
+incurable optimist," he summed up, springing into the Hanaford car.
+
+By the time he reached Mrs. Westmore's door his wrath had subsided, and
+he felt that he had himself well in hand. He had taken unusual pains
+with his appearance that morning--or rather his mother, learning of the
+errand on which Truscomb had sent him, had laid out his
+carefully-brushed Sunday clothes, and adjusted his tie with skilful
+fingers. "You'd really be handsome, Johnny, if you were only a little
+vainer," she said, pushing him away to survey the result; and when he
+stared at her, repeating: "I never heard that vanity made a man
+better-looking," she responded gaily: "Oh, up to a certain point,
+because it teaches him how to use what he's got. So remember," she
+charged him, as he smiled and took up his hat, "that you're going to see
+a pretty young woman, and that you're not a hundred years old yourself."
+
+"I'll try to," he answered, humouring her, "but as I've been forbidden
+to ask for her, I am afraid your efforts will be wasted."
+
+The servant to whom he gave his message showed him into the library,
+with a request that he should wait; and there, to his surprise, he
+found, not the white-moustached gentleman whom he had guessed the night
+before to be Mr. Langhope, but a young lady in deep black, who turned on
+him a look of not unfriendly enquiry.
+
+It was not Bessy's habit to anticipate the clock; but her distaste for
+her surroundings, and the impatience to have done with the tedious
+duties awaiting her, had sent her downstairs before the rest of the
+party. Her life had been so free from tiresome obligations that she had
+but a small stock of patience to meet them with; and already, after a
+night at Hanaford, she was pining to get back to the comforts of her own
+country-house, the soft rut of her daily habits, the funny chatter of
+her little girl, the long stride of her Irish hunter across the
+Hempstead plains--to everything, in short, that made it conceivably
+worth while to get up in the morning.
+
+The servant who ushered in Amherst, thinking the room empty, had not
+mentioned his name; and for a moment he and his hostess examined each
+other in silence, Bessy puzzled at the unannounced appearance of a
+good-looking young man who might have been some one she had met and
+forgotten, while Amherst felt his self-possession slipping away into the
+depths of a pair of eyes so dark-lashed and deeply blue that his only
+thought was one of wonder at his previous indifference to women's eyes.
+
+"Mrs. Westmore?" he asked, restored to self-command by the perception
+that his longed-for opportunity was at hand; and Bessy, his voice
+confirming the inference she had drawn from his appearance, replied with
+a smile: "I am Mrs. Westmore. But if you have come to see me, I ought to
+tell you that in a moment I shall be obliged to go out to our mills. I
+have a business appointment with our manager, but if----"
+
+She broke off, gracefully waiting for him to insert his explanation.
+
+"I have come from the manager; I am John Amherst--your assistant
+manager," he added, as the mention of his name apparently conveyed no
+enlightenment.
+
+Mrs. Westmore's face changed, and she let slip a murmur of surprise
+that would certainly have flattered Amherst's mother if she could have
+heard it; but it had an opposite effect on the young man, who inwardly
+accused himself of having tried to disguise his trade by not putting on
+his everyday clothes.
+
+"How stupid of me! I took you for--I had no idea; I didn't expect Mr.
+Truscomb here," his employer faltered in embarrassment; then their eyes
+met and both smiled.
+
+"Mr. Truscomb sent me to tell you that he is ill, and will not be able
+to show you the mills today. I didn't mean to ask for you--I was told to
+give the message to Mr. Langhope," Amherst scrupulously explained,
+trying to repress the sudden note of joy in his voice.
+
+He was subject to the unobservant man's acute flashes of vision, and
+Mrs. Westmore's beauty was like a blinding light abruptly turned on eyes
+subdued to obscurity. As he spoke, his glance passed from her face to
+her hair, and remained caught in its meshes. He had never seen such
+hair--it did not seem to grow in the usual orderly way, but bubbled up
+all over her head in independent clusters of brightness, breaking, about
+the brow, the temples, the nape, into little irrelevant waves and eddies
+of light, with dusky hollows of softness where the hand might plunge. It
+takes but the throb of a nerve to carry such a complex impression from
+the eye to the mind, but the object of the throb had perhaps felt the
+electric flash of its passage, for her colour rose while Amherst spoke.
+
+"Ah, here is my father now," she said with a vague accent of relief, as
+Mr. Langhope's stick was heard tapping its way across the hall.
+
+When he entered, accompanied by Mrs. Ansell, his sharp glance of
+surprise at her visitor told her that he was as much misled as herself,
+and gave her a sense of being agreeably justified in her blunder. "If
+_father_ thinks you're a gentleman----" her shining eyes seemed to say,
+as she explained: "This is Mr. Amherst, father: Mr. Truscomb has sent
+him."
+
+"Mr. Amherst?" Langhope, with extended hand, echoed affably but vaguely;
+and it became clear that neither Mrs. Westmore nor her father had ever
+before heard the name of their assistant manager.
+
+The discovery stung Amherst to a somewhat unreasoning resentment; and
+while he was trying to subordinate this sentiment to the larger feelings
+with which he had entered the house, Mrs. Ansell, turning her eyes on
+him, said gently: "Your name is unusual. I had a friend named Lucy Warne
+who married a very clever man--a mechanical genius----"
+
+Amherst's face cleared. "My father _was_ a genius; and my mother is Lucy
+Warne," he said, won by the soft look and the persuasive voice.
+
+"What a delightful coincidence! We were girls together at Albany. You
+must remember Judge Warne?" she said, turning to Mr. Langhope, who,
+twirling his white moustache, murmured, a shade less cordially: "Of
+course--of course--delightful--most interesting."
+
+Amherst did not notice the difference. His perceptions were already
+enveloped in the caress that emanated from Mrs. Ansell's voice and
+smile; and he only asked himself vaguely if it were possible that this
+graceful woman, with her sunny autumnal air, could really be his
+mother's contemporary. But the question brought an instant reaction of
+bitterness.
+
+"Poverty is the only thing that makes people old nowadays," he
+reflected, painfully conscious of his own share in the hardships his
+mother had endured; and when Mrs. Ansell went on: "I must go and see
+her--you must let me take her by surprise," he said stiffly: "We live
+out at the mills, a long way from here."
+
+"Oh, we're going there this morning," she rejoined, unrebuffed by what
+she probably took for a mere social awkwardness, while Mrs. Westmore
+interposed: "But, Maria, Mr. Truscomb is ill, and has sent Mr. Amherst
+to say that we are not to come."
+
+"Yes: so Gaines has just telephoned. It's most unfortunate," Mr.
+Langhope grumbled. He too was already beginning to chafe at the
+uncongenial exile of Hanaford, and he shared his daughter's desire to
+despatch the tiresome business before them.
+
+Mr. Tredegar had meanwhile appeared, and when Amherst had been named to
+him, and had received his Olympian nod, Bessy anxiously imparted her
+difficulty.
+
+"But how ill is Mr. Truscomb? Do you think he can take us over the mills
+tomorrow?" she appealed to Amherst.
+
+"I'm afraid not; I am sure he can't. He has a touch of bronchitis."
+
+This announcement was met by a general outcry, in which sympathy for the
+manager was not the predominating note. Mrs. Ansell saved the situation
+by breathing feelingly: "Poor man!" and after a decent echo of the
+phrase, and a doubtful glance at her father, Mrs. Westmore said: "If
+it's bronchitis he may be ill for days, and what in the world are we to
+do?"
+
+"Pack up and come back later," suggested Mr. Langhope briskly; but while
+Bessy sighed "Oh, that dreadful journey!" Mr. Tredegar interposed with
+authority: "One moment, Langhope, please. Mr. Amherst, is Mrs. Westmore
+expected at the mills?"
+
+"Yes, I believe they know she is coming."
+
+"Then I think, my dear, that to go back to New York without showing
+yourself would, under the circumstances, be--er--an error in judgment."
+
+"Good Lord, Tredegar, you don't expect to keep us kicking our heels here
+for days?" her father ejaculated.
+
+"I can certainly not afford to employ mine in that manner for even a
+fraction of a day," rejoined the lawyer, always acutely resentful of the
+suggestion that he had a disengaged moment; "but meanwhile----"
+
+"Father," Bessy interposed, with an eagerly flushing cheek, "don't you
+see that the only thing for us to do is to go over the mills now--at
+once--with Mr. Amherst?"
+
+Mr. Langhope stared: he was always adventurously ready to unmake plans,
+but it flustered him to be called on to remake them. "Eh--what? Now--at
+once? But Gaines was to have gone with us, and how on earth are we to
+get at him? He telephoned me that, as the visit was given up, he should
+ride out to his farm."
+
+"Oh, never mind--or, at least, all the better!" his daughter urged. "We
+can see the mills just as well without him; and we shall get on so much
+more quickly."
+
+"Well--well--what do you say, Tredegar?" murmured Mr. Langhope, allured
+by her last argument; and Bessy, clasping her hands, summed up
+enthusiastically: "And I shall understand so much better without a lot
+of people trying to explain to me at once!"
+
+Her sudden enthusiasm surprised no one, for even Mrs. Ansell, expert as
+she was in the interpreting of tones, set it down to the natural desire
+to have done as quickly as might be with Hanaford.
+
+"Mrs. Westmore has left her little girl at home," she said to Amherst,
+with a smile intended to counteract the possible ill-effect of the
+impression.
+
+But Amherst suspected no slight in his employer's eagerness to visit
+Westmore. His overmastering thought was one of joy as the fulness of his
+opportunity broke on him. To show her the mills himself--to bring her
+face to face with her people, unhampered by Truscomb's jealous
+vigilance, and Truscomb's false explanations; to see the angel of pity
+stir the depths of those unfathomable eyes, when they rested, perhaps
+for the first time, on suffering that it was in their power to smile
+away as easily as they had smiled away his own distrust--all this the
+wonderful moment had brought him, and thoughts and arguments thronged so
+hot on his lips that he kept silence, fearing lest he should say too
+much.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+JOHN AMHERST was no one-sided idealist. He felt keenly the growing
+complexity of the relation between employer and worker, the seeming
+hopelessness of permanently harmonizing their claims, the recurring
+necessity of fresh compromises and adjustments. He hated rant, demagogy,
+the rash formulating of emotional theories; and his contempt for bad
+logic and subjective judgments led him to regard with distrust the
+panaceas offered for the cure of economic evils. But his heart ached
+for the bitter throes with which the human machine moves on. He felt the
+menace of industrial conditions when viewed collectively, their
+poignancy when studied in the individual lives of the toilers among whom
+his lot was cast; and clearly as he saw the need of a philosophic survey
+of the question, he was sure that only through sympathy with its
+personal, human side could a solution be reached. The disappearance of
+the old familiar contact between master and man seemed to him one of the
+great wrongs of the new industrial situation. That the breach must be
+farther widened by the ultimate substitution of the stock-company for
+the individual employer--a fact obvious to any student of economic
+tendencies--presented to Amherst's mind one of the most painful problems
+in the scheme of social readjustment. But it was characteristic of him
+to dwell rather on the removal of immediate difficulties than in the
+contemplation of those to come, and while the individual employer was
+still to be reckoned with, the main thing was to bring him closer to his
+workers. Till he entered personally into their hardships and
+aspirations--till he learned what they wanted and why they wanted
+it--Amherst believed that no mere law-making, however enlightened, could
+create a wholesome relation between the two.
+
+This feeling was uppermost as he sat with Mrs. Westmore in the carriage
+which was carrying them to the mills. He had meant to take the trolley
+back to Westmore, but at a murmured word from Mr. Tredegar Bessy had
+offered him a seat at her side, leaving others to follow. This
+culmination of his hopes--the unlooked-for chance of a half-hour alone
+with her--left Amherst oppressed with the swiftness of the minutes. He
+had so much to say--so much to prepare her for--yet how begin, while he
+was in utter ignorance of her character and her point of view, and while
+her lovely nearness left him so little chance of perceiving anything
+except itself?
+
+But he was not often the victim of his sensations, and presently there
+emerged, out of the very consciousness of her grace and her
+completeness, a clearer sense of the conditions which, in a measure, had
+gone to produce them. Her dress could not have hung in such subtle
+folds, her white chin have nestled in such rich depths of fur, the
+pearls in her ears have given back the light from such pure curves, if
+thin shoulders in shapeless gingham had not bent, day in, day out, above
+the bobbins and carders, and weary ears throbbed even at night with the
+tumult of the looms. Amherst, however, felt no sensational resentment at
+the contrast. He had lived too much with ugliness and want not to
+believe in human nature's abiding need of their opposite. He was glad
+there was room for such beauty in the world, and sure that its purpose
+was an ameliorating one, if only it could be used as a beautiful spirit
+would use it.
+
+The carriage had turned into one of the nondescript thoroughfares, half
+incipient street, half decaying lane, which dismally linked the
+mill-village to Hanaford. Bessy looked out on the ruts, the hoardings,
+the starved trees dangling their palsied leaves in the radiant October
+light; then she sighed: "What a good day for a gallop!"
+
+Amherst felt a momentary chill, but the naturalness of the exclamation
+disarmed him, and the words called up thrilling memories of his own
+college days, when he had ridden his grandfather's horses in the famous
+hunting valley not a hundred miles from Hanaford.
+
+Bessy met his smile with a glow of understanding. "You like riding too,
+I'm sure?"
+
+"I used to; but I haven't been in the saddle for years. Factory managers
+don't keep hunters," he said laughing.
+
+Her murmur of embarrassment showed that she took this as an apologetic
+allusion to his reduced condition, and in his haste to correct this
+impression he added: "If I regretted anything in my other life, it would
+certainly be a gallop on a day like this; but I chose my trade
+deliberately, and I've never been sorry for my choice."
+
+He had hardly spoken when he felt the inappropriateness of this avowal;
+but her prompt response showed him, a moment later, that it was, after
+all, the straightest way to his end.
+
+"You find the work interesting? I'm sure it must be. You'll think me
+very ignorant--my husband and I came here so seldom...I feel as if I
+ought to know so much more about it," she explained.
+
+At last the note for which he waited had been struck. "Won't you try
+to--now you're here? There's so much worth knowing," he broke out
+impetuously.
+
+Mrs. Westmore coloured, but rather with surprise than displeasure. "I'm
+very stupid--I've no head for business--but I will try to," she said.
+
+"It's not business that I mean; it's the personal relation--just the
+thing the business point of view leaves out. Financially, I don't
+suppose your mills could be better run; but there are over seven hundred
+women working in them, and there's so much to be done, just for them and
+their children."
+
+He caught a faint hint of withdrawal in her tone. "I have always
+understood that Mr. Truscomb did everything----"
+
+Amherst flushed; but he was beyond caring for the personal rebuff. "Do
+you leave it to your little girl's nurses to do everything for her?" he
+asked.
+
+Her surprise seemed about to verge on annoyance: he saw the preliminary
+ruffling of the woman who is put to the trouble of defending her
+dignity. "Really, I don't see--" she began with distant politeness; then
+her face changed and melted, and again her blood spoke for her before
+her lips.
+
+"I am glad you told me that, Mr. Amherst. Of course I want to do
+whatever I can. I should like you to point out everything----"
+
+Amherst's resolve had been taken while she spoke. He _would_ point out
+everything, would stretch his opportunity to its limit. All thoughts of
+personal prudence were flung to the winds--her blush and tone had routed
+the waiting policy. He would declare war on Truscomb at once, and take
+the chance of dismissal. At least, before he went he would have brought
+this exquisite creature face to face with the wrongs from which her
+luxuries were drawn, and set in motion the regenerating impulses of
+indignation and pity. He did not stop to weigh the permanent advantage
+of this course. His only feeling was that the chance would never again
+be given him--that if he let her go away, back to her usual life, with
+eyes unopened and heart untouched, there would be no hope of her ever
+returning. It was far better that he should leave for good, and that she
+should come back, as come back she must, more and more often, if once
+she could be made to feel the crying need of her presence.
+
+But where was he to begin? How give her even a glimpse of the packed and
+intricate situation?
+
+"Mrs. Westmore," he said, "there's no time to say much now, but before
+we get to the mills I want to ask you a favour. If, as you go through
+them, you see anything that seems to need explaining, will you let me
+come and tell you about it tonight? I say tonight," he added, meeting
+her look of enquiry, "because later--tomorrow even--I might not have the
+chance. There are some things--a good many--in the management of the
+mills that Mr. Truscomb doesn't see as I do. I don't mean business
+questions: wages and dividends and so on--those are out of my province.
+I speak merely in the line of my own work--my care of the hands, and
+what I believe they need and don't get under the present system.
+Naturally, if Mr. Truscomb were well, I shouldn't have had this chance
+of putting the case to you; but since it's come my way, I must seize it
+and take the consequences."
+
+Even as he spoke, by a swift reaction of thought, those consequences
+rose before him in all their seriousness. It was not only, or chiefly,
+that he feared to lose his place; though he knew his mother had not
+spoken lightly in instancing the case of the foreman whom Truscomb, to
+gratify a personal spite, had for months kept out of a job in his trade.
+And there were special reasons why Amherst should heed her warning. In
+adopting a manual trade, instead of one of the gentlemanly professions
+which the men of her family had always followed, he had not only
+disappointed her hopes, and to a great extent thrown away the benefits
+of the education she had pinched herself to give him, but had disturbed
+all the habits of her life by removing her from her normal surroundings
+to the depressing exile of a factory-settlement. However much he blamed
+himself for exacting this sacrifice, it had been made so cheerfully that
+the consciousness of it never clouded his life with his mother; but her
+self-effacement made him the more alive to his own obligations, and
+having placed her in a difficult situation he had always been careful
+not to increase its difficulties by any imprudence in his conduct toward
+his employers. Yet, grave as these considerations were, they were really
+less potent than his personal desire to remain at Westmore. Lightly as
+he had just resolved to risk the chance of dismissal, all his future was
+bound up in the hope of retaining his place. His heart was in the work
+at Westmore, and the fear of not being able to get other employment was
+a small factor in his intense desire to keep his post. What he really
+wanted was to speak out, and yet escape the consequences: by some
+miraculous reversal of probability to retain his position and yet effect
+Truscomb's removal. The idea was so fantastic that he felt it merely as
+a quickening of all his activities, a tremendous pressure of will along
+undetermined lines. He had no wish to take the manager's place; but his
+dream was to see Truscomb superseded by a man of the new school, in
+sympathy with the awakening social movement--a man sufficiently
+practical to "run" the mills successfully, yet imaginative enough to
+regard that task as the least of his duties. He saw the promise of such
+a man in Louis Duplain, the overseer who boarded with Mrs. Amherst: a
+young fellow of Alsatian extraction, a mill-hand from childhood, who had
+worked at his trade in Europe as well as in America, and who united with
+more manual skill, and a greater nearness to the workman's standpoint,
+all Amherst's enthusiasm for the experiments in social betterment that
+were making in some of the English and continental factories. His
+strongest wish was to see such a man as Duplain in control at Westmore
+before he himself turned to the larger work which he had begun to see
+before him as the sequel to his factory-training.
+
+All these thoughts swept through him in the instant's pause before Mrs.
+Westmore, responding to his last appeal, said with a graceful eagerness:
+"Yes, you must come tonight. I want to hear all you can tell me--and if
+there is anything wrong you must show me how I can make it better."
+
+"I'll show her, and Truscomb shan't turn me out for it," was the vow he
+passionately registered as the carriage drew up at the office-door of
+the main building.
+
+How this impossible result was to be achieved he had no farther time to
+consider, for in another moment the rest of the party had entered the
+factory with them, and speech was followed up in the roar of the
+machinery.
+
+Amherst's zeal for his cause was always quickened by the sight of the
+mills in action. He loved the work itself as much as he hated the
+conditions under which it was done; and he longed to see on the
+operatives' faces something of the ardour that lit up his own when he
+entered the work-rooms. It was this passion for machinery that at school
+had turned him from his books, at college had drawn him to the courses
+least in the line of his destined profession; and it always seized on
+him afresh when he was face to face with the monstrous energies of the
+mills. It was not only the sense of power that thrilled him--he felt a
+beauty in the ordered activity of the whole intricate organism, in the
+rhythm of dancing bobbins and revolving cards, the swift continuous
+outpour of doublers and ribbon-laps, the steady ripple of the long
+ply-frames, the terrible gnashing play of the looms--all these varying
+subordinate motions, gathered up into the throb of the great engines
+which fed the giant's arteries, and were in turn ruled by the invisible
+action of quick thought and obedient hands, always produced in Amherst a
+responsive rush of life.
+
+He knew this sensation was too specialized to affect his companions; but
+he expected Mrs. Westmore to be all the more alive to the other
+side--the dark side of monotonous human toil, of the banquet of flesh
+and blood and brain perpetually served up to the monster whose
+insatiable jaws the looms so grimly typified. Truscomb, as he had told
+her, was a good manager from the profit-taking standpoint. Since it was
+profitable to keep the machinery in order, he maintained throughout the
+factory a high standard of mechanical supervision, except where one or
+two favoured overseers--for Truscomb was given to favoritism--shirked
+the duties of their departments. But it was of the essence of Truscomb's
+policy--and not the least of the qualities which made him a "paying"
+manager--that he saved money scrupulously where its outlay would not
+have resulted in larger earnings. To keep the floors scrubbed, the
+cotton-dust swept up, the rooms freshly whitewashed and well-ventilated,
+far from adding the smallest fraction to the quarterly dividends, would
+have deducted from them the slight cost of this additional labour; and
+Truscomb therefore economized on scrubbers, sweepers and window-washers,
+and on all expenses connected with improved ventilation and other
+hygienic precautions. Though the whole factory was over-crowded, the
+newest buildings were more carefully planned, and had the usual sanitary
+improvements; but the old mills had been left in their original state,
+and even those most recently built were fast lapsing into squalor. It
+was no wonder, therefore, that workers imprisoned within such walls
+should reflect their long hours of deadening toil in dull eyes and
+anæmic skins, and in the dreary lassitude with which they bent to their
+tasks.
+
+Surely, Amherst argued, Mrs. Westmore must feel this; must feel it all
+the more keenly, coming from an atmosphere so different, from a life
+where, as he instinctively divined, all was in harmony with her own
+graceful person. But a deep disappointment awaited him. He was still
+under the spell of their last moments in the carriage, when her face and
+voice had promised so much, when she had seemed so deeply, if vaguely,
+stirred by his appeal. But as they passed from one resounding room to
+the other--from the dull throb of the carding-room, the groan of the
+ply-frames, the long steady pound of the slashers, back to the angry
+shriek of the fierce unappeasable looms--the light faded from her eyes
+and she looked merely bewildered and stunned.
+
+Amherst, hardened to the din of the factory, could not measure its
+effect on nerves accustomed to the subdued sounds and spacious
+stillnesses which are the last refinement of luxury. Habit had made him
+unconscious of that malicious multiplication and subdivision of noise
+that kept every point of consciousness vibrating to a different note, so
+that while one set of nerves was torn as with pincers by the dominant
+scream of the looms, others were thrilled with a separate pain by the
+ceaseless accompaniment of drumming, hissing, grating and crashing that
+shook the great building. Amherst felt this tumult only as part of the
+atmosphere of the mills; and to ears trained like his own he could make
+his voice heard without difficulty. But his attempts at speech were
+unintelligible to Mrs. Westmore and her companions, and after vainly
+trying to communicate with him by signs they hurried on as if to escape
+as quickly as possible from the pursuing whirlwind.
+
+Amherst could not allow for the depressing effect of this enforced
+silence. He did not see that if Bessy could have questioned him the
+currents of sympathy might have remained open between them, whereas,
+compelled to walk in silence through interminable ranks of meaningless
+machines, to which the human workers seemed mere automatic appendages,
+she lost all perception of what the scene meant. He had forgotten, too,
+that the swift apprehension of suffering in others is as much the result
+of training as the immediate perception of beauty. Both perceptions may
+be inborn, but if they are not they can be developed only through the
+discipline of experience.
+
+"That girl in the hospital would have seen it all," he reflected, as the
+vision of Miss Brent's small incisive profile rose before him; but the
+next moment he caught the light on Mrs. Westmore's hair, as she bent
+above a card, and the paler image faded like a late moon in the sunrise.
+
+Meanwhile Mrs. Ansell, seeing that the detailed inspection of the
+buildings was as trying to Mr. Langhope's lameness as to his daughter's
+nerves, had proposed to turn back with him and drive to Mrs. Amherst's,
+where he might leave her to call while the others were completing their
+rounds. It was one of Mrs. Ansell's gifts to detect the first symptoms
+of _ennui_ in her companions, and produce a remedy as patly as old
+ladies whisk out a scent-bottle or a cough-lozenge; and Mr. Langhope's
+look of relief showed the timeliness of her suggestion.
+
+Amherst was too preoccupied to wonder how his mother would take this
+visit; but he welcomed Mr. Langhope's departure, hoping that the
+withdrawal of his ironic smile would leave his daughter open to gentler
+influences. Mr. Tredegar, meanwhile, was projecting his dry glance over
+the scene, trying to converse by signs with the overseers of the
+different rooms, and pausing now and then to contemplate, not so much
+the workers themselves as the special tasks which engaged them.
+
+How these spectators of the party's progress were affected by Mrs.
+Westmore's appearance, even Amherst, for all his sympathy with their
+views, could not detect. They knew that she was the new owner, that a
+disproportionate amount of the result of their toil would in future pass
+through her hands, spread carpets for her steps, and hang a setting of
+beauty about her eyes; but the knowledge seemed to produce no special
+interest in her personality. A change of employer was not likely to make
+any change in their lot: their welfare would probably continue to depend
+on Truscomb's favour. The men hardly raised their heads as Mrs. Westmore
+passed; the women stared, but with curiosity rather than interest; and
+Amherst could not tell whether their sullenness reacted on Mrs.
+Westmore, or whether they were unconsciously chilled by her
+indifference. The result was the same: the distance between them seemed
+to increase instead of diminishing; and he smiled ironically to think of
+the form his appeal had taken--"If you see anything that seems to need
+explaining." Why, she saw nothing--nothing but the greasy floor under
+her feet, the cotton-dust in her eyes, the dizzy incomprehensible
+whirring of innumerable belts and wheels! Once out of it all, she would
+make haste to forget the dreary scene without pausing to ask for any
+explanation of its dreariness.
+
+In the intensity of his disappointment he sought a pretext to cut short
+the tour of the buildings, that he might remove his eyes from the face
+he had so vainly watched for any sign of awakening. And then, as he
+despaired of it, the change came.
+
+They had entered the principal carding-room, and were half-way down its
+long central passage, when Mr. Tredegar, who led the procession, paused
+before one of the cards.
+
+"What's that?" he asked, pointing to a ragged strip of black cloth tied
+conspicuously to the frame of the card.
+
+The overseer of the room, a florid young man with dissipated eyes, who,
+at Amherst's signal, had attached himself to the party, stopped short
+and turned a furious glance on the surrounding operatives.
+
+"What in hell...? It's the first I seen of it," he exclaimed, making an
+ineffectual attempt to snatch the mourning emblem from its place.
+
+At the same instant the midday whistle boomed through the building, and
+at the signal the machinery stopped, and silence fell on the mills. The
+more distant workers at once left their posts to catch up the hats and
+coats heaped untidily in the corners; but those nearer by, attracted by
+the commotion around the card, stood spell-bound, fixing the visitors
+with a dull stare.
+
+Amherst had reddened to the roots of his hair. He knew in a flash what
+the token signified, and the sight stirred his pity; but it also jarred
+on his strong sense of discipline, and he turned sternly to the
+operatives.
+
+"What does this mean?"
+
+There was a short silence; then one of the hands, a thin bent man with
+mystic eyes, raised his head and spoke.
+
+"We done that for Dillon," he said.
+
+Amherst's glance swept the crowded faces. "But Dillon was not killed,"
+he exclaimed, while the overseer, drawing out his pen-knife, ripped off
+the cloth and tossed it contemptuously into a heap of cotton-refuse at
+his feet.
+
+"Might better ha' been," came from another hand; and a deep "That's so"
+of corroboration ran through the knot of workers.
+
+Amherst felt a touch on his arm, and met Mrs. Westmore's eyes. "What has
+happened? What do they mean?" she asked in a startled voice.
+
+"There was an accident here two days ago: a man got caught in the card
+behind him, and his right hand was badly crushed."
+
+Mr. Tredegar intervened with his dry note of command. "How serious is
+the accident? How did it happen?" he enquired.
+
+"Through the man's own carelessness--ask the manager," the overseer
+interposed before Amherst could answer.
+
+A deep murmur of dissent ran through the crowd, but Amherst, without
+noticing the overseer's reply, said to Mr. Tredegar: "He's at the Hope
+Hospital. He will lose his hand, and probably the whole arm."
+
+He had not meant to add this last phrase. However strongly his
+sympathies were aroused, it was against his rule, at such a time, to say
+anything which might inflame the quick passions of the workers: he had
+meant to make light of the accident, and dismiss the operatives with a
+sharp word of reproof. But Mrs. Westmore's face was close to his: he saw
+the pity in her eyes, and feared, if he checked its expression, that he
+might never again have the chance of calling it forth.
+
+"His right arm? How terrible! But then he will never be able to work
+again!" she exclaimed, in all the horror of a first confrontation with
+the inexorable fate of the poor.
+
+Her eyes turned from Amherst and rested on the faces pressing about her.
+There were many women's faces among them--the faces of fagged
+middle-age, and of sallow sedentary girlhood. For the first time Mrs.
+Westmore seemed to feel the bond of blood between herself and these dim
+creatures of the underworld: as Amherst watched her the lovely miracle
+was wrought. Her pallour gave way to a quick rush of colour, her eyes
+widened like a frightened child's, and two tears rose and rolled slowly
+down her face.
+
+"Oh, why wasn't I told? Is he married? Has he children? What does it
+matter whose fault it was?" she cried, her questions pouring out
+disconnectedly on a wave of anger and compassion.
+
+"It warn't his fault.... The cards are too close.... It'll happen
+again.... He's got three kids at home," broke from the operatives; and
+suddenly a voice exclaimed "Here's his wife now," and the crowd divided
+to make way for Mrs. Dillon, who, passing through the farther end of the
+room, had been waylaid and dragged toward the group.
+
+She hung back, shrinking from the murderous machine, which she beheld
+for the first time since her husband's accident; then she saw Amherst,
+guessed the identity of the lady at his side, and flushed up to her
+haggard forehead. Mrs. Dillon had been good-looking in her earlier
+youth, and sufficient prettiness lingered in her hollow-cheeked face to
+show how much more had been sacrificed to sickness and unwholesome toil.
+
+"Oh, ma'am, ma'am, it warn't Jim's fault--there ain't a steadier man
+living. The cards is too crowded," she sobbed out.
+
+Some of the other women began to cry: a wave of sympathy ran through
+the circle, and Mrs. Westmore moved forward with an answering
+exclamation. "You poor creature...you poor creature...." She opened her
+arms to Mrs. Dillon, and the scrubber's sobs were buried on her
+employer's breast.
+
+"I will go to the hospital--I will come and see you--I will see that
+everything is done," Bessy reiterated. "But why are you here? How is it
+that you have had to leave your children?" She freed herself to turn a
+reproachful glance on Amherst. "You don't mean to tell me that, at such
+a time, you keep the poor woman at work?"
+
+"Mrs. Dillon has not been working here lately," Amherst answered. "The
+manager took her back to-day at her own request, that she might earn
+something while her husband was in hospital."
+
+Mrs. Westmore's eyes shone indignantly. "Earn something? But surely----"
+
+She met a silencing look from Mr. Tredegar, who had stepped between Mrs.
+Dillon and herself.
+
+"My dear child, no one doubts--none of these good people doubt--that you
+will look into the case, and do all you can to alleviate it; but let me
+suggest that this is hardly the place----"
+
+She turned from him with an appealing glance at Amherst.
+
+"I think," the latter said, as their eyes met, "that you had better let
+me dismiss the hands: they have only an hour at midday."
+
+She signed her assent, and he turned to the operatives and said quietly:
+"You have heard Mrs. Westmore's promise; now take yourselves off, and
+give her a clear way to the stairs."
+
+They dropped back, and Mr. Tredegar drew Bessy's arm through his; but as
+he began to move away she turned and laid her hand on Mrs. Dillon's
+shoulder.
+
+"You must not stay here--you must go back to the children. I will make
+it right with Mr. Truscomb," she said in a reassuring whisper; then,
+through her tears, she smiled a farewell at the lingering knot of
+operatives, and followed her companions to the door.
+
+In silence they descended the many stairs and crossed the shabby
+unfenced grass-plot between the mills and the manager's office. It was
+not till they reached the carriage that Mrs. Westmore spoke.
+
+"But Maria is waiting for us--we must call for her!" she said, rousing
+herself; and as Amherst opened the carriage-door she added: "You will
+show us the way? You will drive with us?"
+
+During the drive Bessy remained silent, as if re-absorbed in the
+distress of the scene she had just witnessed; and Amherst found himself
+automatically answering Mr. Tredegar's questions, while his own mind
+had no room for anything but the sense of her tremulous lips and of her
+eyes enlarged by tears. He had been too much engrossed in the momentous
+issues of her visit to the mills to remember that she had promised to
+call at his mother's for Mrs. Ansell; but now that they were on their
+way thither he found himself wishing that the visit might have been
+avoided. He was too proud of his mother to feel any doubt of the
+impression she would produce; but what would Mrs. Westmore think of
+their way of living, of the cheap jauntiness of the cottage, and the
+smell of cooking penetrating all its thin partitions? Duplain, too,
+would be coming in for dinner; and Amherst, in spite of his liking for
+the young overseer, became conscious of a rather overbearing freedom in
+his manner, the kind of misplaced ease which the new-made American
+affects as the readiest sign of equality. All these trifles, usually
+non-existent or supremely indifferent to Amherst, now assumed a sudden
+importance, behind which he detected the uneasy desire that Mrs.
+Westmore should not regard him as less of her own class than his
+connections and his bringing-up entitled him to be thought. In a flash
+he saw what he had forfeited by his choice of a calling--equal contact
+with the little circle of people who gave life its crowning grace and
+facility; and the next moment he was blushing at this reversal of his
+standards, and wondering, almost contemptuously, what could be the
+nature of the woman whose mere presence could produce such a change.
+
+But there was no struggling against her influence; and as, the night
+before, he had looked at Westmore with the nurse's eyes, so he now found
+himself seeing his house as it must appear to Mrs. Westmore. He noticed
+the shabby yellow paint of the palings, the neglected garden of their
+neighbour, the week's wash flaunting itself indecently through the
+denuded shrubs about the kitchen porch; and as he admitted his
+companions to the narrow passage he was assailed by the expected whiff
+of "boiled dinner," with which the steam of wash-tubs was intimately
+mingled.
+
+Duplain was in the passage; he had just come out of the kitchen, and the
+fact that he had been washing his hands in the sink was made evident by
+his rolled-back shirt-sleeves, and by the shiny redness of the knuckles
+he was running through his stiff black hair.
+
+"Hallo, John," he said, in his aggressive voice, which rose abruptly at
+sight of Amherst's companions; and at the same moment the frowsy
+maid-of-all-work, crimson from stooping over the kitchen stove, thrust
+her head out to call after him: "See here, Mr. Duplain, don't you leave
+your cravat laying round in my dough."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+MRS. WESTMORE stayed just long enough not to break in too abruptly on
+the flow of her friend's reminiscences, and to impress herself on Mrs.
+Amherst's delighted eyes as an embodiment of tactfulness and
+grace--looking sympathetically about the little room, which, with its
+books, its casts, its photographs of memorable pictures, seemed, after
+all, a not incongruous setting to her charms; so that when she rose to
+go, saying, as her hand met Amherst's, "Tonight, then, you must tell me
+all about those poor Dillons," he had the sense of having penetrated so
+far into her intimacy that a new Westmore must inevitably result from
+their next meeting.
+
+"Say, John--the boss is a looker," Duplain commented across the
+dinner-table, with the slangy grossness he sometimes affected; but
+Amherst left it to his mother to look a quiet rebuke, feeling himself
+too aloof from such contacts to resent them.
+
+He had to rouse himself with an effort to take in the overseer's next
+observation. "There was another lady at the office this morning,"
+Duplain went on, while the two men lit their cigars in the porch.
+"Asking after you--tried to get me to show her over the mills when I
+said you were busy."
+
+"Asking after me? What did she look like?"
+
+"Well, her face was kinder white and small, with an awful lot of black
+hair fitting close to it. Said she came from Hope Hospital."
+
+Amherst looked up. "Did you show her over?" he asked with sudden
+interest.
+
+Duplain laughed slangily. "What? Me? And have Truscomb get on to it and
+turn me down? How'd I know she wasn't a yellow reporter?"
+
+Amherst uttered an impatient exclamation. "I wish to heaven a yellow
+reporter _would_ go through these mills, and show them up in head-lines
+a yard high!"
+
+He regretted not having seen the nurse again: he felt sure she would
+have been interested in the working of the mills, and quick to notice
+the signs of discouragement and ill-health in the workers' faces; but a
+moment later his regret was dispelled by the thought of his visit to
+Mrs. Westmore. The afternoon hours dragged slowly by in the office,
+where he was bound to his desk by Truscomb's continued absence; but at
+length the evening whistle blew, the clerks in the outer room caught
+their hats from the rack, Duplain presented himself with the day's
+report, and the two men were free to walk home.
+
+Two hours later Amherst was mounting Mrs. Westmore's steps; and his hand
+was on the bell when the door opened and Dr. Disbrow came out. The
+physician drew back, as if surprised and slightly disconcerted; but his
+smile promptly effaced all signs of vexation, and he held his hand out
+affably.
+
+"A fine evening, Mr. Amherst. I'm glad to say I have been able to bring
+Mrs. Westmore an excellent report of both patients--Mr. Truscomb, I
+mean, and poor Dillon. This mild weather is all in their favour, and I
+hope my brother-in-law will be about in a day or two." He passed on with
+a nod.
+
+Amherst was once more shown into the library where he had found Mrs.
+Westmore that morning; but on this occasion it was Mr. Tredegar who rose
+to meet him, and curtly waved him to a seat at a respectful distance
+from his own. Amherst at once felt a change of atmosphere, and it was
+easy to guess that the lowering of temperature was due to Dr. Disbrow's
+recent visit. The thought roused the young man's combative instincts,
+and caused him to say, as Mr. Tredegar continued to survey him in
+silence from the depths of a capacious easy-chair: "I understood from
+Mrs. Westmore that she wished to see me this evening."
+
+It was the wrong note, and he knew it; but he had been unable to conceal
+his sense of the vague current of opposition in the air.
+
+"Quite so: I believe she asked you to come," Mr. Tredegar assented,
+laying his hands together vertically, and surveying Amherst above the
+acute angle formed by his parched finger-tips. As he leaned back,
+small, dry, dictatorial, in the careless finish of his evening dress
+and pearl-studded shirt-front, his appearance put the finishing touch to
+Amherst's irritation. He felt the incongruousness of his rough clothes
+in this atmosphere of after-dinner ease, the mud on his walking-boots,
+the clinging cotton-dust which seemed to have entered into the very
+pores of the skin; and again his annoyance escaped in his voice.
+
+"Perhaps I have come too early--" he began; but Mr. Tredegar interposed
+with glacial amenity: "No, I believe you are exactly on time; but Mrs.
+Westmore is unexpectedly detained. The fact is, Mr. and Mrs. Halford
+Gaines are dining with her, and she has delegated to me the duty of
+hearing what you have to say."
+
+Amherst hesitated. His impulse was to exclaim: "There is no duty about
+it!" but a moment's thought showed the folly of thus throwing up the
+game. With the prospect of Truscomb's being about again in a day or two,
+it might well be that this was his last chance of reaching Mrs.
+Westmore's ear; and he was bound to put his case while he could,
+irrespective of personal feeling. But his disappointment was too keen to
+be denied, and after a pause he said: "Could I not speak with Mrs.
+Westmore later?"
+
+Mr. Tredegar's cool survey deepened to a frown. The young man's
+importunity was really out of proportion to what he signified. "Mrs.
+Westmore has asked me to replace her," he said, putting his previous
+statement more concisely.
+
+"Then I am not to see her at all?" Amherst exclaimed; and the lawyer
+replied indifferently: "I am afraid not, as she leaves tomorrow."
+
+Mr. Tredegar was in his element when refusing a favour. Not that he was
+by nature unkind; he was, indeed, capable of a cold beneficence; but to
+deny what it was in his power to accord was the readiest way of
+proclaiming his authority, that power of loosing and binding which made
+him regard himself as almost consecrated to his office.
+
+Having sacrificed to this principle, he felt free to add as a gratuitous
+concession to politeness: "You are perhaps not aware that I am Mrs.
+Westmore's lawyer, and one of the executors under her husband's will."
+
+He dropped this negligently, as though conscious of the absurdity of
+presenting his credentials to a subordinate; but his manner no longer
+incensed Amherst: it merely strengthened his resolve to sink all sense
+of affront in the supreme effort of obtaining a hearing.
+
+"With that stuffed canary to advise her," he reflected, "there's no hope
+for her unless I can assert myself now"; and the unconscious wording of
+his thought expressed his inward sense that Bessy Westmore stood in
+greater need of help than her work-people.
+
+Still he hesitated, hardly knowing how to begin. To Mr. Tredegar he was
+no more than an underling, without authority to speak in his superior's
+absence; and the lack of an official warrant, which he could have
+disregarded in appealing to Mrs. Westmore, made it hard for him to find
+a good opening in addressing her representative. He saw, too, from Mr.
+Tredegar's protracted silence, that the latter counted on the effect of
+this embarrassment, and was resolved not to minimize it by giving him a
+lead; and this had the effect of increasing his caution.
+
+He looked up and met the lawyer's eye. "Mrs. Westmore," he began, "asked
+me to let her know something about the condition of the people at the
+mills----"
+
+Mr. Tredegar raised his hand. "Excuse me," he said. "I understood from
+Mrs. Westmore that it was you who asked her permission to call this
+evening and set forth certain grievances on the part of the operatives."
+
+Amherst reddened. "I did ask her--yes. But I don't in any sense
+represent the operatives. I simply wanted to say a word for them."
+
+Mr. Tredegar folded his hands again, and crossed one lean little leg
+over the other, bringing into his line of vision the glossy tip of a
+patent-leather pump, which he studied for a moment in silence.
+
+"Does Mr. Truscomb know of your intention?" he then enquired.
+
+"No, sir," Amherst answered energetically, glad that he had forced the
+lawyer out of his passive tactics. "I am here on my own
+responsibility--and in direct opposition to my own interests," he
+continued with a slight smile. "I know that my proceeding is quite out
+of order, and that I have, personally, everything to lose by it, and in
+a larger way probably very little to gain; but I thought Mrs. Westmore's
+attention ought to be called to certain conditions at the mills, and no
+one else seemed likely to speak of them."
+
+"May I ask why you assume that Mr. Truscomb will not do so when he has
+the opportunity?"
+
+Amherst could not repress a smile. "Because it is owing to Mr. Truscomb
+that they exist."
+
+"The real object of your visit then," said Mr. Tredegar, speaking with
+deliberation, "is--er--an underhand attack on your manager's methods?"
+
+Amherst's face darkened, but he kept his temper. "I see nothing
+especially underhand in my course----"
+
+"Except," the other interposed ironically, "that you have waited to
+speak till Mr. Truscomb was not in a position to defend himself."
+
+"I never had the chance before. It was at Mrs. Westmore's own suggestion
+that I took her over the mills, and feeling as I do I should have
+thought it cowardly to shirk the chance of pointing out to her the
+conditions there."
+
+Mr. Tredegar mused, his eyes still bent on his gently-oscillating foot.
+Whenever a sufficient pressure from without parted the fog of
+self-complacency in which he moved, he had a shrewd enough outlook on
+men and motives; and it may be that the vigorous ring of Amherst's
+answer had effected this momentary clearing of the air.
+
+At any rate, his next words were spoken in a more accessible tone. "To
+what conditions do you refer?"
+
+"To the conditions under which the mill-hands work and live--to the
+whole management of the mills, in fact, in relation to the people
+employed."
+
+"That is a large question. Pardon my possible ignorance--" Mr. Tredegar
+paused to make sure that his hearer took in the full irony of this--"but
+surely in this state there are liability and inspection laws for the
+protection of the operatives?"
+
+"There are such laws, yes--but most of them are either a dead letter, or
+else so easily evaded that no employer thinks of conforming to them."
+
+"No employer? Then your specific charge against the Westmore mills is
+part of a general arraignment of all employers of labour?"
+
+"By no means, sir. I only meant that, where the hands are well treated,
+it is due rather to the personal good-will of the employer than to any
+fear of the law."
+
+"And in what respect do you think the Westmore hands unfairly treated?"
+
+Amherst paused to measure his words. "The question, as you say, is a
+large one," he rejoined. "It has its roots in the way the business is
+organized--in the traditional attitude of the company toward the
+operatives. I hoped that Mrs. Westmore might return to the mills--might
+visit some of the people in their houses. Seeing their way of living, it
+might have occurred to her to ask a reason for it--and one enquiry would
+have led to another. She spoke this morning of going to the hospital to
+see Dillon."
+
+"She did go to the hospital: I went with her. But as Dillon was
+sleeping, and as the matron told us he was much better--a piece of news
+which, I am happy to say, Dr. Disbrow has just confirmed--she did not go
+up to the ward."
+
+Amherst was silent, and Mr. Tredegar pursued: "I gather, from your
+bringing up Dillon's case, that for some reason you consider it typical
+of the defects you find in Mr. Truscomb's management. Suppose,
+therefore, we drop generalizations, and confine ourselves to the
+particular instance. What wrong, in your view, has been done the
+Dillons?"
+
+He turned, as he spoke, to extract a cigar from the box at his elbow.
+"Let me offer you one, Mr. Amherst: we shall talk more comfortably," he
+suggested with distant affability; but Amherst, with a gesture of
+refusal, plunged into his exposition of the Dillon case. He tried to put
+the facts succinctly, presenting them in their bare ugliness, without
+emotional drapery; setting forth Dillon's good record for sobriety and
+skill, dwelling on the fact that his wife's ill-health was the result of
+perfectly remediable conditions in the work-rooms, and giving his
+reasons for the belief that the accident had been caused, not by
+Dillon's carelessness, but by the over-crowding of the carding-room. Mr.
+Tredegar listened attentively, though the cloud of cigar-smoke between
+himself and Amherst masked from the latter his possible changes of
+expression. When he removed his cigar, his face looked smaller than
+ever, as though desiccated by the fumes of the tobacco.
+
+"Have you ever called Mr. Gaines's attention to these matters?"
+
+"No: that would have been useless. He has always refused to discuss the
+condition of the mills with any one but the manager."
+
+"H'm--that would seem to prove that Mr. Gaines, who lives here, sees as
+much reason for trusting Truscomb's judgment as Mr. Westmore, who
+delegated his authority from a distance."
+
+Amherst did not take this up, and after a pause Mr. Tredegar went on:
+"You know, of course, the answers I might make to such an indictment. As
+a lawyer, I might call your attention to the employé's waiver of risk,
+to the strong chances of contributory negligence, and so on; but happily
+in this case such arguments are superfluous. You are apparently not
+aware that Dillon's injury is much slighter than it ought to be to serve
+your purpose. Dr. Disbrow has just told us that he will probably get off
+with the loss of a finger; and I need hardly say that, whatever may have
+been Dillon's own share in causing the accident--and as to this, as you
+admit, opinions differ--Mrs. Westmore will assume all the expenses of
+his nursing, besides making a liberal gift to his wife." Mr. Tredegar
+laid down his cigar and drew forth a silver-mounted note-case. "Here, in
+fact," he continued, "is a cheque which she asks you to transmit, and
+which, as I think you will agree, ought to silence, on your part as well
+as Mrs. Dillon's, any criticism of Mrs. Westmore's dealings with her
+operatives."
+
+The blood rose to Amherst's forehead, and he just restrained himself
+from pushing back the cheque which Mr. Tredegar had laid on the table
+between them.
+
+"There is no question of criticizing Mrs. Westmore's dealings with her
+operatives--as far as I know, she has had none as yet," he rejoined,
+unable to control his voice as completely as his hand. "And the proof
+of it is the impunity with which her agents deceive her--in this case,
+for instance, of Dillon's injury. Dr. Disbrow, who is Mr. Truscomb's
+brother-in-law, and apt to be influenced by his views, assures you that
+the man will get off with the loss of a finger; but some one equally
+competent to speak told me last night that he would lose not only his
+hand but his arm."
+
+Amherst's voice had swelled to a deep note of anger, and with his tossed
+hair, and eyes darkening under furrowed brows, he presented an image of
+revolutionary violence which deepened the disdain on Mr. Tredegar's lip.
+
+"Some one equally competent to speak? Are you prepared to name this
+anonymous authority?"
+
+Amherst hesitated. "No--I shall have to ask you to take my word for it,"
+he returned with a shade of embarrassment.
+
+"Ah--" Mr. Tredegar murmured, giving to the expressive syllable its
+utmost measure of decent exultation.
+
+Amherst quivered under the thin lash, and broke out: "It is all you have
+required of Dr. Disbrow--" but at this point Mr. Tredegar rose to his
+feet.
+
+"My dear sir, your resorting to such arguments convinces me that nothing
+is to be gained by prolonging our talk. I will not even take up your
+insinuations against two of the most respected men in the
+community--such charges reflect only on those who make them."
+
+Amherst, whose flame of anger had subsided with the sudden sense of its
+futility, received this in silence, and the lawyer, reassured, continued
+with a touch of condescension: "My only specific charge from Mrs.
+Westmore was to hand you this cheque; but, in spite of what has passed,
+I take it upon myself to add, in her behalf, that your conduct of today
+will not be allowed to weigh against your record at the mills, and that
+the extraordinary charges you have seen fit to bring against your
+superiors will--if not repeated--simply be ignored."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When, the next morning at about ten, Mrs. Eustace Ansell joined herself
+to the two gentlemen who still lingered over a desultory breakfast in
+Mrs. Westmore's dining-room, she responded to their greeting with less
+than her usual vivacity.
+
+[Illustration: "No--I shall have to ask you to take my word for it."]
+
+It was one of Mrs. Ansell's arts to bring to the breakfast-table just
+the right shade of sprightliness, a warmth subdued by discretion as the
+early sunlight is tempered by the lingering coolness of night. She was,
+in short, as fresh, as temperate, as the hour, yet without the
+concomitant chill which too often marks its human atmosphere: rather her
+soft effulgence dissipated the morning frosts, opening pinched spirits
+to a promise of midday warmth. But on this occasion a mist of
+uncertainty hung on her smile, and veiled the glance which she turned
+on the contents of the heavy silver dishes successively presented to her
+notice. When, at the conclusion of this ceremony, the servants had
+withdrawn, she continued for a moment to stir her tea in silence, while
+her glance travelled from Mr. Tredegar, sunk in his morning mail, to Mr.
+Langhope, who leaned back resignedly in his chair, trying to solace
+himself with Hanaford Banner, till midday should bring him a sight of
+the metropolitan press.
+
+"I suppose you know," she said suddenly, "that Bessy has telegraphed for
+Cicely, and made her arrangements to stay here another week."
+
+Mr. Langhope's stick slipped to the floor with the sudden displacement
+of his whole lounging person, and Mr. Tredegar, removing his
+tortoise-shell reading-glasses, put them hastily into their case, as
+though to declare for instant departure.
+
+"My dear Maria--" Mr. Langhope gasped, while she rose and restored his
+stick.
+
+"She considers it, then, her duty to wait and see Truscomb?" the lawyer
+asked; and Mrs. Ansell, regaining her seat, murmured discreetly: "She
+puts it so--yes."
+
+"My dear Maria--" Mr. Langhope repeated helplessly, tossing aside his
+paper and drawing his chair up to the table.
+
+"But it would be perfectly easy to return: it is quite unnecessary to
+wait here for his recovery," Mr. Tredegar pursued, as though setting
+forth a fact which had not hitherto presented itself to the more limited
+intelligence of his hearers.
+
+Mr. Langhope emitted a short laugh, and Mrs. Ansell answered gently:
+"She says she detests the long journey."
+
+Mr. Tredegar rose and gathered up his letters with a gesture of
+annoyance. "In that case--if I had been notified earlier of this
+decision, I might have caught the morning train," he interrupted
+himself, glancing resentfully at his watch.
+
+"Oh, don't leave us, Tredegar," Mr. Langhope entreated. "We'll reason
+with her--we'll persuade her to go back by the three-forty."
+
+Mrs. Ansell smiled. "She telegraphed at seven. Cicely and the governess
+are already on their way."
+
+"At seven? But, my dear friend, why on earth didn't you tell us?"
+
+"I didn't know till a few minutes ago. Bessy called me in as I was
+coming down."
+
+"Ah--" Mr. Langhope murmured, meeting her eyes for a fraction of a
+second. In the encounter, she appeared to communicate something more
+than she had spoken, for as he stooped to pick up his paper he said,
+more easily: "My dear Tredegar, if we're in a box there's no reason why
+we should force you into it too. Ring for Ropes, and we'll look up a
+train for you."
+
+Mr. Tredegar appeared slightly ruffled at this prompt acquiescence in
+his threatened departure. "Of course, if I had been notified in advance,
+I might have arranged to postpone my engagements another day; but in any
+case, it is quite out of the question that I should return in a
+week--and quite unnecessary," he added, snapping his lips shut as though
+he were closing his last portmanteau.
+
+"Oh, quite--quite," Mr. Langhope assented. "It isn't, in fact, in the
+least necessary for any of us either to stay on now or to return.
+Truscomb could come to Long Island when he recovers, and answer any
+questions we may have to put; but if Bessy has sent for the child, we
+must of course put off going for today--at least I must," he added
+sighing, "and, though I know it's out of the question to exact such a
+sacrifice from you, I have a faint hope that our delightful friend here,
+with the altruistic spirit of her sex----"
+
+"Oh, I shall enjoy it--my maid is unpacking," Mrs. Ansell gaily
+affirmed; and Mr. Tredegar, shrugging his shoulders, said curtly: "In
+that case I will ring for the time-table."
+
+When he had withdrawn to consult it in the seclusion of the library, and
+Mrs. Ansell, affecting a sudden desire for a second cup of tea, had
+reseated herself to await the replenishment of the kettle, Mr. Langhope
+exchanged his own chair for a place at her side.
+
+"Now what on earth does this mean?" he asked, lighting a cigarette in
+response to her slight nod of consent.
+
+Mrs. Ansell's gaze lost itself in the depths of the empty tea-pot.
+
+"A number of things--or any one of them," she said at length, extending
+her arm toward the tea-caddy.
+
+"For instance--?" he rejoined, following appreciatively the movements of
+her long slim hands.
+
+She raised her head and met his eyes. "For instance: it may mean--don't
+resent the suggestion--that you and Mr. Tredegar were not quite
+well-advised in persuading her not to see Mr. Amherst yesterday
+evening."
+
+Mr. Langhope uttered an exclamation of surprise.
+
+"But, my dear Maria--in the name of reason...why, after the doctor's
+visit--after his coming here last night, at Truscomb's request, to put
+the actual facts before her--should she have gone over the whole
+business again with this interfering young fellow? How, in fact, could
+she have done so," he added, after vainly waiting for her reply,
+"without putting a sort of slight on Truscomb, who is, after all, the
+only person entitled to speak with authority?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell received his outburst in silence, and the butler,
+reappearing with the kettle and fresh toast, gave her the chance to
+prolong her pause for a full minute. When the door had closed on him,
+she said: "Judged by reason, your arguments are unanswerable; but when
+it comes to a question of feeling----"
+
+"Feeling? What kind of feeling? You don't mean to suggest anything so
+preposterous as that Bessy----?"
+
+She made a gesture of smiling protest. "I confess it is to be regretted
+that his mother is a lady, and that he looks--you must have noticed
+it?--so amazingly like the portraits of the young Schiller. But I only
+meant that Bessy forms all her opinions emotionally; and that she must
+have been very strongly affected by the scene Mr. Tredegar described to
+us."
+
+"Ah," Mr. Langhope interjected, replying first to her parenthesis, "how
+a woman of your good sense stumbled on that idea of hunting up the
+mother--!" but Mrs. Ansell answered, with a slight grimace: "My dear
+Henry, if you could see the house they live in you'd think I had been
+providentially guided there!" and, reverting to the main issue, he went
+on fretfully: "But why, after hearing the true version of the facts,
+should Bessy still be influenced by that sensational scene? Even if it
+was not, as Tredegar suspects, cooked up expressly to take her in, she
+must see that the hospital doctor is, after all, as likely as any one to
+know how the accident really happened, and how seriously the fellow is
+hurt."
+
+"There's the point. Why should Bessy believe Dr. Disbrow rather than Mr.
+Amherst?"
+
+"For the best of reasons--because Disbrow has nothing to gain by
+distorting the facts, whereas this young Amherst, as Tredegar pointed
+out, has the very obvious desire to give Truscomb a bad name and shove
+himself into his place."
+
+Mrs. Ansell contemplatively turned the rings upon her fingers. "From
+what I saw of Amherst I'm inclined to think that, if that is his object,
+he is too clever to have shown his hand so soon. But if you are right,
+was there not all the more reason for letting Bessy see him and find out
+as soon as possible what he was aiming at?"
+
+"If one could have trusted her to find out--but you credit my poor child
+with more penetration than I've ever seen in her."
+
+"Perhaps you've looked for it at the wrong time--and about the wrong
+things. Bessy has the penetration of the heart."
+
+"The heart! You make mine jump when you use such expressions."
+
+"Oh, I use this one in a general sense. But I want to help you to keep
+it from acquiring a more restricted significance."
+
+"Restricted--to the young man himself?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell's expressive hands seemed to commit the question to fate.
+"All I ask you to consider for the present is that Bessy is quite
+unoccupied and excessively bored."
+
+"Bored? Why, she has everything on earth she can want!"
+
+"The ideal state for producing boredom--the only atmosphere in which it
+really thrives. And besides--to be humanly inconsistent--there's just
+one thing she hasn't got."
+
+"Well?" Mr. Langhope groaned, fortifying himself with a second
+cigarette.
+
+"An occupation for that rudimentary little organ, the mention of which
+makes you jump."
+
+"There you go again! Good heavens, Maria, do you want to encourage her
+to fall in love?"
+
+"Not with a man, just at present, but with a hobby, an interest, by all
+means. If she doesn't, the man will take the place of the
+interest--there's a vacuum to be filled, and human nature abhors a
+vacuum."
+
+Mr. Langhope shrugged his shoulders. "I don't follow you. She adored her
+husband."
+
+His friend's fine smile was like a magnifying glass silently applied to
+the gross stupidity of his remark. "Oh, I don't say it was a great
+passion--but they got on perfectly," he corrected himself.
+
+"So perfectly that you must expect her to want a little storm and stress
+for a change. The mere fact that you and Mr. Tredegar objected to her
+seeing Mr. Amherst last night has roused the spirit of opposition in
+her. A year ago she hadn't any spirit of opposition."
+
+"There was nothing for her to oppose--poor Dick made her life so
+preposterously easy."
+
+"My ingenuous friend! Do you still think that's any reason? The fact is,
+Bessy wasn't awake, she wasn't even born, then.... She is now, and you
+know the infant's first conscious joy is to smash things."
+
+"It will be rather an expensive joy if the mills are the first thing she
+smashes."
+
+"Oh I imagine the mills are pretty substantial. I should, I own," Mrs.
+Ansell smiled, "not object to seeing her try her teeth on them."
+
+"Which, in terms of practical conduct, means----?"
+
+"That I advise you not to disapprove of her staying on, or of her
+investigating the young man's charges. You must remember that another
+peculiarity of the infant mind is to tire soonest of the toy that no one
+tries to take away from it."
+
+"_Que diable!_ But suppose Truscomb turns rusty at this very unusual
+form of procedure? Perhaps you don't quite know how completely he
+represents the prosperity of the mills."
+
+"All the more reason," Mrs. Ansell persisted, rising at the sound of Mr.
+Tredegar's approach. "For don't you perceive, my poor distracted friend,
+that if Truscomb turns rusty, as he undoubtedly will, the inevitable
+result will be his manager's dismissal--and that thereafter there will
+presumably be peace in Warsaw?"
+
+"Ah, you divinely wicked woman!" cried Mr. Langhope, snatching at an
+appreciative pressure of her hand as the lawyer reappeared in the
+doorway.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+BEFORE daylight that same morning Amherst, dressing by the gas-flame
+above his cheap wash-stand, strove to bring some order into his angry
+thoughts. It humbled him to feel his purpose tossing rudderless on
+unruly waves of emotion, yet strive as he would he could not regain a
+hold on it. The events of the last twenty-four hours had been too rapid
+and unexpected for him to preserve his usual clear feeling of mastery;
+and he had, besides, to reckon with the first complete surprise of his
+senses. His way of life had excluded him from all contact with the
+subtler feminine influences, and the primitive side of the relation left
+his imagination untouched. He was therefore the more assailable by those
+refined forms of the ancient spell that lurk in delicacy of feeling
+interpreted by loveliness of face. By his own choice he had cut himself
+off from all possibility of such communion; had accepted complete
+abstinence for that part of his nature which might have offered a
+refuge from the stern prose of his daily task. But his personal
+indifference to his surroundings--deliberately encouraged as a defiance
+to the attractions of the life he had renounced--proved no defence
+against this appeal; rather, the meanness of his surroundings combined
+with his inherited refinement of taste to deepen the effect of Bessy's
+charm.
+
+As he reviewed the incidents of the past hours, a reaction of
+self-derision came to his aid. What was this exquisite opportunity from
+which he had cut himself off? What, to reduce the question to a personal
+issue, had Mrs. Westmore said or done that, on the part of a plain
+woman, would have quickened his pulses by the least fraction of a
+second? Why, it was only the old story of the length of Cleopatra's
+nose! Because her eyes were a heavenly vehicle for sympathy, because her
+voice was pitched to thrill the tender chords, he had been deluded into
+thinking that she understood and responded to his appeal. And her own
+emotions had been wrought upon by means as cheap: it was only the
+obvious, theatrical side of the incident that had affected her. If
+Dillon's wife had been old and ugly, would she have been clasped to her
+employer's bosom? A more expert knowledge of the sex would have told
+Amherst that such ready sympathy is likely to be followed by as prompt a
+reaction of indifference. Luckily Mrs. Westmore's course had served as a
+corrective for his lack of experience; she had even, as it appeared,
+been at some pains to hasten the process of disillusionment. This timely
+discipline left him blushing at his own insincerity; for he now saw that
+he had risked his future not because of his zeal for the welfare of the
+mill-hands, but because Mrs. Westmore's look was like sunshine on his
+frozen senses, and because he was resolved, at any cost, to arrest her
+attention, to associate himself with her by the only means in his power.
+
+Well, he deserved to fail with such an end in view; and the futility of
+his scheme was matched by the vanity of his purpose. In the cold light
+of disenchantment it seemed as though he had tried to build an
+impregnable fortress out of nursery blocks. How could he have foreseen
+anything but failure for so preposterous an attempt? His breach of
+discipline would of course be reported at once to Mr. Gaines and
+Truscomb; and the manager, already jealous of his assistant's popularity
+with the hands, which was a tacit criticism of his own methods, would
+promptly seize the pretext to be rid of him. Amherst was aware that only
+his technical efficiency, and his knack of getting the maximum of work
+out of the operatives, had secured him from Truscomb's animosity. From
+the outset there had been small sympathy between the two; but the
+scarcity of competent and hard-working assistants had made Truscomb
+endure him for what he was worth to the mills. Now, however, his own
+folly had put the match to the manager's smouldering dislike, and he saw
+himself, in consequence, discharged and black-listed, and perhaps
+roaming for months in quest of a job. He knew the efficiency of that
+far-reaching system of defamation whereby the employers of labour pursue
+and punish the subordinate who incurs their displeasure. In the case of
+a mere operative this secret persecution often worked complete ruin; and
+even to a man of Amherst's worth it opened the dispiriting prospect of a
+long struggle for rehabilitation.
+
+Deep down, he suffered most at the thought that his blow for the
+operatives had failed; but on the surface it was the manner of his
+failure that exasperated him. For it seemed to prove him unfit for the
+very work to which he was drawn: that yearning to help the world forward
+that, in some natures, sets the measure to which the personal adventure
+must keep step. Amherst had hitherto felt himself secured by his insight
+and self-control from the emotional errors besetting the way of the
+enthusiast; and behold, he had stumbled into the first sentimental trap
+in his path, and tricked his eyes with a Christmas-chromo vision of
+lovely woman dispensing coals and blankets! Luckily, though such wounds
+to his self-confidence cut deep, he could apply to them the antiseptic
+of an unfailing humour; and before he had finished dressing, the
+picture of his wide schemes of social reform contracting to a blue-eyed
+philanthropy of cheques and groceries, had provoked a reaction of
+laughter. Perhaps the laughter came too soon, and rang too loud, to be
+true to the core; but at any rate it healed the edges of his hurt, and
+gave him a sound surface of composure.
+
+But he could not laugh away the thought of the trials to which his
+intemperance had probably exposed his mother; and when, at the
+breakfast-table, from which Duplain had already departed, she broke into
+praise of their visitor, it was like a burning irritant on his wound.
+
+"What a face, John! Of course I don't often see people of that kind
+now--" the words, falling from her too simply to be reproachful, wrung
+him, for that, all the more--"but I'm sure that kind of soft loveliness
+is rare everywhere; like a sweet summer morning with the mist on it. The
+Gaines girls, now, are my idea of the modern type; very handsome, of
+course, but you see just _how_ handsome the first minute. I like a story
+that keeps one wondering till the end. It was very kind of Maria
+Ansell," Mrs. Amherst wandered happily on, "to come and hunt me out
+yesterday, and I enjoyed our quiet talk about old times. But what I
+liked best was seeing Mrs. Westmore--and, oh, John, if she came to live
+here, what a benediction to the mills!"
+
+Amherst was silent, moved most of all by the unimpaired simplicity of
+heart with which his mother could take up past relations, and open her
+meagre life to the high visitations of grace and fashion, without a
+tinge of self-consciousness or apology. "I shall never be as genuine as
+that," he thought, remembering how he had wished to have Mrs. Westmore
+know that he was of her own class. How mixed our passions are, and how
+elastic must be the word that would cover any one of them! Amherst's, at
+that moment, were all stained with the deep wound to his self-love.
+
+The discolouration he carried in his eye made the mill-village seem more
+than commonly cheerless and ugly as he walked over to the office after
+breakfast. Beyond the grim roof-line of the factories a dazzle of rays
+sent upward from banked white clouds the promise of another brilliant
+day; and he reflected that Mrs. Westmore would soon be speeding home to
+the joy of a gallop over the plains.
+
+Far different was the task that awaited him--yet it gave him a pang to
+think that he might be performing it for the last time. In spite of Mr.
+Tredegar's assurances, he was certain that the report of his conduct
+must by this time have reached the President, and been transmitted to
+Truscomb; the latter was better that morning, and the next day he would
+doubtless call his rebellious assistant to account. Amherst, meanwhile,
+took up his routine with a dull heart. Even should his offense be
+condoned, his occupation presented, in itself, little future to a man
+without money or powerful connections. Money! He had spurned the thought
+of it in choosing his work, yet he now saw that, without its aid, he was
+powerless to accomplish the object to which his personal desires had
+been sacrificed. His love of his craft had gradually been merged in the
+larger love for his fellow-workers, and in the resulting desire to lift
+and widen their lot. He had once fancied that this end might be attained
+by an internal revolution in the management of the Westmore mills; that
+he might succeed in creating an industrial object-lesson conspicuous
+enough to point the way to wiser law-making and juster relations between
+the classes. But the last hours' experiences had shown him how vain it
+was to assault single-handed the strong barrier between money and
+labour, and how his own dash at the breach had only thrust him farther
+back into the obscure ranks of the stragglers. It was, after all, only
+through politics that he could return successfully to the attack; and
+financial independence was the needful preliminary to a political
+career. If he had stuck to the law he might, by this time, have been
+nearer his goal; but then the gold might not have mattered, since it was
+only by living among the workers that he had learned to care for their
+fate. And rather than have forfeited that poignant yet mighty vision of
+the onward groping of the mass, rather than have missed the widening of
+his own nature that had come through sharing their hopes and pains, he
+would still have turned from the easier way, have chosen the deeper
+initiation rather than the readier attainment.
+
+But this philosophic view of the situation was a mere thread of light on
+the farthest verge of his sky: much nearer were the clouds of immediate
+care, amid which his own folly, and his mother's possible suffering from
+it, loomed darkest; and these considerations made him resolve that, if
+his insubordination were overlooked, he would swallow the affront of a
+pardon, and continue for the present in the mechanical performance of
+his duties. He had just brought himself to this leaden state of
+acquiescence when one of the clerks in the outer office thrust his head
+in to say: "A lady asking for you--" and looking up, Amherst beheld
+Bessy Westmore.
+
+She came in alone, with an air of high self-possession in marked
+contrast to her timidity and indecision of the previous day. Amherst
+thought she looked taller, more majestic; so readily may the upward
+slant of a soft chin, the firmer line of yielding brows, add a cubit to
+the outward woman. Her aspect was so commanding that he fancied she had
+come to express her disapproval of his conduct, to rebuke him for lack
+of respect to Mr. Tredegar; but a moment later it became clear, even to
+his inexperienced perceptions, that it was not to himself that her
+challenge was directed.
+
+She advanced toward the seat he had moved forward, but in her absorption
+forgot to seat herself, and stood with her clasped hands resting on the
+back of the chair.
+
+"I have come back to talk to you," she began, in her sweet voice with
+its occasional quick lift of appeal. "I knew that, in Mr. Truscomb's
+absence, it would be hard for you to leave the mills, and there are one
+or two things I want you to explain before I go away--some of the
+things, for instance, that you spoke to Mr. Tredegar about last night."
+
+Amherst's feeling of constraint returned. "I'm afraid I expressed myself
+badly; I may have annoyed him--" he began.
+
+She smiled this away, as though irrelevant to the main issue. "Perhaps
+you don't quite understand each other--but I am sure you can make it
+clear to me." She sank into the chair, resting one arm on the edge of
+the desk behind which he had resumed his place. "That is the reason why
+I came alone," she continued. "I never can understand when a lot of
+people are trying to tell me a thing all at once. And I don't suppose I
+care as much as a man would--a lawyer especially--about the forms that
+ought to be observed. All I want is to find out what is wrong and how to
+remedy it."
+
+Her blue eyes met Amherst's in a look that flowed like warmth about his
+heart. How should he have doubted that her feelings were as exquisite as
+her means of expressing them? The iron bands of distrust were loosened
+from his spirit, and he blushed for his cheap scepticism of the morning.
+In a woman so evidently nurtured in dependence, whose views had been
+formed, and her actions directed, by the most conventional influences,
+the mere fact of coming alone to Westmore, in open defiance of her
+advisers, bespoke a persistence of purpose that put his doubts to shame.
+
+"It will make a great difference to the people here if you interest
+yourself in them," he rejoined. "I tried to explain to Mr. Tredegar that
+I had no wish to criticise the business management of the mills--even if
+there had been any excuse for my doing so--but that I was sure the
+condition of the operatives could be very much improved, without
+permanent harm to the business, by any one who felt a personal sympathy
+for them; and in the end I believe such sympathy produces better work,
+and so benefits the employer materially."
+
+She listened with her gentle look of trust, as though committing to him,
+with the good faith of a child, her ignorance, her credulity, her little
+rudimentary convictions and her little tentative aspirations, relying on
+him not to abuse or misdirect them in the boundless supremacy of his
+masculine understanding.
+
+"That is just what I want you to explain to me," she said. "But first I
+should like to know more about the poor man who was hurt. I meant to see
+his wife yesterday, but Mr. Gaines told me she would be at work till
+six, and it would have been difficult to go after that. I _did_ go to
+the hospital; but the man was sleeping--is Dillon his name?--and the
+matron told us he was much better. Dr. Disbrow came in the evening and
+said the same thing--told us it was all a false report about his having
+been so badly hurt, and that Mr. Truscomb was very much annoyed when he
+heard of your having said, before the operatives, that Dillon would lose
+his arm."
+
+Amherst smiled. "Ah--Mr. Truscomb heard that? Well, he's right to be
+annoyed: I ought not to have said it when I did. But unfortunately I am
+not the only one to be punished. The operative who tied on the black
+cloth was dismissed this morning."
+
+Mrs. Westmore flamed up. "Dismissed for that? Oh, how unjust--how
+cruel!"
+
+"You must look at both sides of the case," said Amherst, finding it much
+easier to remain temperate in the glow he had kindled than if he had had
+to force his own heat into frozen veins. "Of course any act of
+insubordination must be reprimanded--but I think a reprimand would have
+been enough."
+
+It gave him an undeniable throb of pleasure to find that she was not to
+be checked by such arguments. "But he shall be put back--I won't have
+any one discharged for such a reason! You must find him for me at
+once--you must tell him----"
+
+Once more Amherst gently restrained her. "If you'll forgive my saying
+so, I think it is better to let him go, and take his chance of getting
+work elsewhere. If he were taken back he might be made to suffer. As
+things are organized here, the hands are very much at the mercy of the
+overseers, and the overseer in that room would be likely to make it
+uncomfortable for a hand who had so openly defied him."
+
+With a heavy sigh she bent her puzzled brows on him. "How complicated it
+is! I wonder if I shall ever understand it all. _You_ don't think
+Dillon's accident was his own fault, then?"
+
+"Certainly not; there are too many cards in that room. I pointed out the
+fact to Mr. Truscomb when the new machines were set up three years ago.
+An operative may be ever so expert with his fingers, and yet not learn
+to measure his ordinary movements quite as accurately as if he were an
+automaton; and that is what a man must do to be safe in the
+carding-room."
+
+She sighed again. "The more you tell me, the more difficult it all
+seems. Why is the carding-room so over-crowded?"
+
+"To make it pay better," Amherst returned bluntly; and the colour
+flushed her sensitive skin.
+
+He thought she was about to punish him for his plain-speaking; but she
+went on after a pause: "What you say is dreadful. Each thing seems to
+lead back to another--and I feel so ignorant of it all." She hesitated
+again, and then said, turning her bluest glance on him: "I am going to
+be quite frank with you, Mr. Amherst. Mr. Tredegar repeated to me what
+you said to him last night, and I think he was annoyed that you were
+unwilling to give any proof of the charges you made."
+
+"Charges? Ah," Amherst exclaimed, with a start of recollection, "he
+means my refusing to say who told me that Dr. Disbrow was not telling
+the truth about Dillon?"
+
+"Yes. He said that was a very grave accusation to make, and that no one
+should have made it without being able to give proof."
+
+"That is quite true, theoretically. But in this case it would be easy
+for you or Mr. Tredegar to find out whether I was right."
+
+"But Mr. Tredegar said you refused to say who told you."
+
+"I was bound to, as it happened. But I am not bound to prevent your
+trying to get the same information."
+
+"Ah--" she murmured understandingly; and, a sudden thought striking him,
+he went on, with a glance at the clock: "If you really wish to judge for
+yourself, why not go to the hospital now? I shall be free in five
+minutes, and could go with you if you wish it."
+
+Amherst had remembered the nurse's cry of recognition when she saw Mrs.
+Westmore's face under the street-lamp; and it immediately occurred to
+him that, if the two women had really known each other, Mrs. Westmore
+would have no difficulty in obtaining the information she wanted; while,
+even if they met as strangers, the dark-eyed girl's perspicacity might
+still be trusted to come to their aid. It remained only to be seen how
+Mrs. Westmore would take his suggestion; but some instinct was already
+telling him that the highhanded method was the one she really preferred.
+
+"To the hospital--now? I should like it of all things," she exclaimed,
+rising with what seemed an almost childish zest in the adventure. "Of
+course that is the best way of finding out. I ought to have insisted on
+seeing Dillon yesterday--but I begin to think the matron didn't want me
+to."
+
+Amherst left this inference to work itself out in her mind, contenting
+himself, as they drove back to Hanaford, with answering her questions
+about Dillon's family, the ages of his children, and his wife's health.
+Her enquiries, he noticed, did not extend from the particular to the
+general: her curiosity, as yet, was too purely personal and emotional to
+lead to any larger consideration of the question. But this larger view
+might grow out of the investigation of Dillon's case; and meanwhile
+Amherst's own purposes were momentarily lost in the sweet confusion of
+feeling her near him--of seeing the exquisite grain of her skin, the way
+her lashes grew out of a dusky line on the edge of the white lids, the
+way her hair, stealing in spirals of light from brow to ear, wavered off
+into a fruity down on the edge of the cheek.
+
+At the hospital they were protestingly admitted by Mrs. Ogan, though the
+official "visitors' hour" was not till the afternoon; and beside the
+sufferer's bed, Amherst saw again that sudden flowering of compassion
+which seemed the key to his companion's beauty: as though her lips had
+been formed for consolation and her hands for tender offices. It was
+clear enough that Dillon, still sunk in a torpor broken by feverish
+tossings, was making no perceptible progress toward recovery; and Mrs.
+Ogan was reduced to murmuring some technical explanation about the state
+of the wound while Bessy hung above him with reassuring murmurs as to
+his wife's fate, and promises that the children should be cared for.
+
+Amherst had noticed, on entering, that a new nurse--a gaping young woman
+instantly lost in the study of Mrs. Westmore's toilet--had replaced the
+dark-eyed attendant of the day before; and supposing that the latter was
+temporarily off duty, he asked Mrs. Ogan if she might be seen.
+
+The matron's face was a picture of genteel perplexity. "The other nurse?
+Our regular surgical nurse, Miss Golden, is ill--Miss Hibbs, here, is
+replacing her for the present." She indicated the gaping damsel; then,
+as Amherst persisted: "Ah," she wondered negligently, "do you mean the
+young lady you saw here yesterday? Certainly--I had forgotten: Miss
+Brent was merely a--er--temporary substitute. I believe she was
+recommended to Dr. Disbrow by one of his patients; but we found her
+quite unsuitable--in fact, unfitted--and the doctor discharged her this
+morning."
+
+Mrs. Westmore had drawn near, and while the matron delivered her
+explanation, with an uneasy sorting and shifting of words, a quick
+signal of intelligence passed between her hearers. "You see?" Amherst's
+eyes exclaimed; "I see--they have sent her away because she told you,"
+Bessy's flashed back in wrath, and his answering look did not deny her
+inference.
+
+"Do you know where she has gone?" Amherst enquired; but Mrs. Ogan,
+permitting her brows a faint lift of surprise, replied that she had no
+idea of Miss Brent's movements, beyond having heard that she was to
+leave Hanaford immediately
+
+In the carriage Bessy exclaimed: "It was the nurse, of course--if we
+could only find her! Brent--did Mrs. Ogan say her name was Brent?"
+
+"Do you know the name?"
+
+"Yes--at least--but it couldn't, of course, be the girl I knew----"
+
+"Miss Brent saw you the night you arrived, and thought she recognized
+you. She said you and she had been at some school or convent together."
+
+"The Sacred Heart? Then it _is_ Justine Brent! I heard they had lost
+their money--I haven't seen her for years. But how strange that she
+should be a hospital nurse! And why is she at Hanaford, I wonder?"
+
+"She was here only on a visit; she didn't tell me where she lived. She
+said she heard that a surgical nurse was wanted at the hospital, and
+volunteered her services; I'm afraid she got small thanks for them."
+
+"Do you really think they sent her away for talking to you? How do you
+suppose they found out?"
+
+"I waited for her last night when she left the hospital, and I suppose
+Mrs. Ogan or one of the doctors saw us. It was thoughtless of me,"
+Amherst exclaimed with compunction.
+
+"I wish I had seen her--poor Justine! We were the greatest friends at
+the convent. She was the ringleader in all our mischief--I never saw any
+one so quick and clever. I suppose her fun is all gone now."
+
+For a moment Mrs. Westmore's mind continued to linger among her
+memories; then she reverted to the question of the Dillons, and of what
+might best be done for them if Miss Brent's fears should be realized.
+
+As the carriage neared her door she turned to her companion with
+extended hand. "Thank you so much, Mr. Amherst. I am glad you suggested
+that Mr. Truscomb should find some work for Dillon about the office. But
+I must talk to you about this again--can you come in this evening?"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+AMHERST could never afterward regain a detailed impression of the weeks
+that followed. They lived in his memory chiefly as exponents of the
+unforeseen, nothing he had looked for having come to pass in the way or
+at the time expected; while the whole movement of life was like the
+noon-day flow of a river, in which the separate ripples of brightness
+are all merged in one blinding glitter. His recurring conferences with
+Mrs. Westmore formed, as it were, the small surprising kernel of fact
+about which sensations gathered and grew with the swift ripening of a
+magician's fruit. That she should remain on at Hanaford to look into the
+condition of the mills did not, in itself, seem surprising to Amherst;
+for his short phase of doubt had been succeeded by an abundant inflow of
+faith in her intentions. It satisfied his inner craving for harmony that
+her face and spirit should, after all, so corroborate and complete each
+other; that it needed no moral sophistry to adjust her acts to her
+appearance, her words to the promise of her smile. But her immediate
+confidence in him, her resolve to support him in his avowed
+insubordination, to ignore, with the royal license of her sex, all that
+was irregular and inexpedient in asking his guidance while the whole
+official strength of the company darkened the background with a
+gathering storm of disapproval--this sense of being the glove flung by
+her hand in the face of convention, quickened astonishingly the flow of
+Amherst's sensations. It was as though a mountain-climber, braced to the
+strain of a hard ascent, should suddenly see the way break into roses,
+and level itself in a path for his feet.
+
+On his second visit he found the two ladies together, and Mrs. Ansell's
+smile of approval seemed to cast a social sanction on the episode, to
+classify it as comfortably usual and unimportant. He could see that her
+friend's manner put Bessy at ease, helping her to ask her own questions,
+and to reflect on his suggestions, with less bewilderment and more
+self-confidence. Mrs. Ansell had the faculty of restoring to her the
+belief in her reasoning powers that her father could dissolve in a
+monosyllable.
+
+The talk, on this occasion, had turned mainly on the future of the
+Dillon family, on the best means of compensating for the accident, and,
+incidentally, on the care of the young children of the mill-colony.
+Though Amherst did not believe in the extremer forms of industrial
+paternalism, he was yet of opinion that, where married women were
+employed, the employer should care for their children. He had been
+gradually, and somewhat reluctantly, brought to this conviction by the
+many instances of unavoidable neglect and suffering among the children
+of the women-workers at Westmore; and Mrs. Westmore took up the scheme
+with all the ardour of her young motherliness, quivering at the thought
+of hungry or ailing children while her Cicely, leaning a silken head
+against her, lifted puzzled eyes to her face.
+
+On the larger problems of the case it was less easy to fix Bessy's
+attention; but Amherst was far from being one of the extreme theorists
+who reject temporary remedies lest they defer the day of general
+renewal, and since he looked on every gain in the material condition of
+the mill-hands as a step in their moral growth, he was quite willing to
+hold back his fundamental plans while he discussed the establishment of
+a nursery, and of a night-school for the boys in the mills.
+
+The third time he called, he found Mr. Langhope and Mr. Halford Gaines
+of the company. The President of the Westmore mills was a trim
+middle-sized man, whose high pink varnish of good living would have
+turned to purple could he have known Mr. Langhope's opinion of his
+jewelled shirt-front and the padded shoulders of his evening-coat.
+Happily he had no inkling of these views, and was fortified in his
+command of the situation by an unimpaired confidence in his own
+appearance; while Mr. Langhope, discreetly withdrawn behind a veil of
+cigar-smoke, let his silence play like a fine criticism over the various
+phases of the discussion.
+
+It was a surprise to Amherst to find himself in Mr. Gaines's presence.
+The President, secluded in his high office, seldom visited the mills,
+and when there showed no consciousness of any presence lower than
+Truscomb's; and Amherst's first thought was that, in the manager's
+enforced absence, he was to be called to account by the head of the
+firm. But he was affably welcomed by Mr. Gaines, who made it clear that
+his ostensible purpose in coming was to hear Amherst's views as to the
+proposed night-schools and nursery. These were pointedly alluded to as
+Mrs. Westmore's projects, and the young man was made to feel that he was
+merely called in as a temporary adviser in Truscomb's absence. This was,
+in fact, the position Amherst preferred to take, and he scrupulously
+restricted himself to the answering of questions, letting Mrs. Westmore
+unfold his plans as though they had been her own. "It is much better,"
+he reflected, "that they should all think so, and she too, for Truscomb
+will be on his legs again in a day or two, and then my hours will be
+numbered."
+
+Meanwhile he was surprised to find Mr. Gaines oddly amenable to the
+proposed innovations, which he appeared to regard as new fashions in
+mill-management, to be adopted for the same cogent reasons as a new cut
+in coat-tails.
+
+"Of course we want to be up-to-date--there's no reason why the Westmore
+mills shouldn't do as well by their people as any mills in the country,"
+he affirmed, in the tone of the entertainer accustomed to say: "I want
+the thing done handsomely." But he seemed even less conscious than Mrs.
+Westmore that each particular wrong could be traced back to a radical
+vice in the system. He appeared to think that every murmur of assent to
+her proposals passed the sponge, once for all, over the difficulty
+propounded: as though a problem in algebra should be solved by wiping it
+off the blackboard.
+
+"My dear Bessy, we all owe you a debt of gratitude for coming here, and
+bringing, so to speak, a fresh eye to bear on the subject. If I've been,
+perhaps, a little too exclusively absorbed in making the mills
+profitable, my friend Langhope will, I believe, not be the first
+to--er--cast a stone at me." Mr. Gaines, who was the soul of delicacy,
+stumbled a little over the awkward associations connected with this
+figure, but, picking himself up, hastened on to affirm: "And in that
+respect, I think we can challenge comparison with any industry in the
+state; but I am the first to admit that there may be another side, a
+side that it takes a woman--a mother--to see. For instance," he threw in
+jocosely, "I flatter myself that I know how to order a good dinner; but
+I always leave the flowers to my wife. And if you'll permit me to say
+so," he went on, encouraged by the felicity of his image, "I believe it
+will produce a most pleasing effect--not only on the operatives
+themselves, but on the whole of Hanaford--on our own set of people
+especially--to have you come here and interest yourself in
+the--er--philanthropic side of the work."
+
+Bessy coloured a little. She blushed easily, and was perhaps not
+over-discriminating as to the quality of praise received; but under her
+ripple of pleasure a stronger feeling stirred, and she said hastily: "I
+am afraid I never should have thought of these things if Mr. Amherst had
+not pointed them out to me."
+
+Mr. Gaines met this blandly. "Very gratifying to Mr. Amherst to have you
+put it in that way; and I am sure we all appreciate his valuable hints.
+Truscomb himself could not have been more helpful, though his larger
+experience will no doubt be useful later on, in developing
+and--er--modifying your plans."
+
+It was difficult to reconcile this large view of the moral issue with
+the existence of abuses which made the management of the Westmore mills
+as unpleasantly notorious in one section of the community as it was
+agreeably notable in another. But Amherst was impartial enough to see
+that Mr. Gaines was unconscious of the incongruities of the situation.
+He left the reconciling of incompatibles to Truscomb with the simple
+faith of the believer committing a like task to his maker: it was in the
+manager's mind that the dark processes of adjustment took place. Mr.
+Gaines cultivated the convenient and popular idea that by ignoring
+wrongs one is not so much condoning as actually denying their existence;
+and in pursuance of this belief he devoutly abstained from studying the
+conditions at Westmore.
+
+A farther surprise awaited Amherst when Truscomb reappeared in the
+office. The manager was always a man of few words; and for the first
+days his intercourse with his assistant was restricted to asking
+questions and issuing orders. Soon afterward, it became known that
+Dillon's arm was to be amputated, and that afternoon Truscomb was
+summoned to see Mrs. Westmore. When he returned he sent for Amherst; and
+the young man felt sure that his hour had come.
+
+He was at dinner when the message reached him, and he knew from the
+tightening of his mother's lips that she too interpreted it in the same
+way. He was glad that Duplain's presence kept her from speaking her
+fears; and he thanked her inwardly for the smile with which she watched
+him go.
+
+That evening, when he returned, the smile was still at its post; but it
+dropped away wearily as he said, with his hands on her shoulders: "Don't
+worry, mother; I don't know exactly what's happening, but we're not
+blacklisted yet."
+
+Mrs. Amherst had immediately taken up her work, letting her nervous
+tension find its usual escape through her finger-tips. Her needles
+flagged as she lifted her eyes to his.
+
+"Something _is_ happening, then?" she murmured.
+
+"Oh, a number of things, evidently--but though I'm in the heart of them,
+I can't yet make out how they are going to affect me."
+
+His mother's glance twinkled in time with the flash of her needles.
+"There's always a safe place in the heart of a storm," she said
+shrewdly; and Amherst rejoined with a laugh: "Well, if it's Truscomb's
+heart, I don't know that it's particularly safe for me."
+
+"Tell me just what he said, John," she begged, making no attempt to
+carry the pleasantry farther, though its possibilities still seemed to
+flicker about her lip; and Amherst proceeded to recount his talk with
+the manager.
+
+Truscomb, it appeared, had made no allusion to Dillon; his avowed
+purpose in summoning his assistant had been to discuss with the latter
+the question of the proposed nursery and schools. Mrs. Westmore, at
+Amherst's suggestion, had presented these projects as her own; but the
+question of a site having come up, she had mentioned to Truscomb his
+assistant's proposal that the company should buy for the purpose the
+notorious Eldorado. The road-house in question had always been one of
+the most destructive influences in the mill-colony, and Amherst had made
+one or two indirect attempts to have the building converted to other
+uses; but the persistent opposition he encountered gave colour to the
+popular report that the manager took a high toll from the landlord.
+
+It therefore at once occurred to Amherst to suggest the purchase of the
+property to Mrs. Westmore; and he was not surprised to find that
+Truscomb's opposition to the scheme centred in the choice of the
+building. But even at this point the manager betrayed no open
+resistance; he seemed tacitly to admit Amherst's right to discuss the
+proposed plans, and even to be consulted concerning the choice of a
+site. He was ready with a dozen good reasons against the purchase of the
+road-house; but here also he proceeded with a discretion unexampled in
+his dealings with his subordinates. He acknowledged the harm done by the
+dance-hall, but objected that he could not conscientiously advise the
+company to pay the extortionate price at which it was held, and reminded
+Amherst that, if that particular source of offense were removed, others
+would inevitably spring up to replace it; marshalling the usual
+temporizing arguments of tolerance and expediency, with no marked change
+from his usual tone, till, just as the interview was ending, he asked,
+with a sudden drop to conciliation, if the assistant manager had
+anything to complain of in the treatment he received.
+
+This came as such a surprise to Amherst that before he had collected
+himself he found Truscomb ambiguously but unmistakably offering
+him--with the practised indirection of the man accustomed to cover his
+share in such transactions--a substantial "consideration" for dropping
+the matter of the road-house. It was incredible, yet it had really
+happened: the all-powerful Truscomb, who held Westmore in the hollow of
+his hand, had stooped to bribing his assistant because he was afraid to
+deal with him in a more summary manner. Amherst's leap of anger at the
+offer was curbed by the instant perception of its cause. He had no time
+to search for a reason; he could only rally himself to meet the
+unintelligible with a composure as abysmal as Truscomb's; and his voice
+still rang with the wonder of the incident as he retailed it to his
+mother.
+
+"Think of what it means, mother, for a young woman like Mrs. Westmore,
+without any experience or any habit of authority, to come here, and at
+the first glimpse of injustice, to be so revolted that she finds the
+courage and cleverness to put her little hand to the machine and
+reverse the engines--for it's nothing less that she's done! Oh, I know
+there'll be a reaction--the pendulum's sure to swing back: but you'll
+see it won't swing _as far_. Of course I shall go in the end--but
+Truscomb may go too: Jove, if I could pull him down on me, like
+what's-his-name and the pillars of the temple!"
+
+He had risen and was measuring the little sitting-room with his long
+strides, his head flung back and his eyes dark with the inward look his
+mother had not always cared to see there. But now her own glance seemed
+to have caught a ray from his, and the knitting flowed from her hands
+like the thread of fate, as she sat silent, letting him exhale his hopes
+and his wonder, and murmuring only, when he dropped again to the chair
+at her side: "You won't go, Johnny--you won't go."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Westmore lingered on for over two weeks, and during that time
+Amherst was able, in various directions, to develop her interest in the
+mill-workers. His own schemes involved a complete readjustment of the
+relation between the company and the hands: the suppression of the
+obsolete company "store" and tenements, which had so long sapped the
+thrift and ambition of the workers; the transformation of the Hopewood
+grounds into a park and athletic field, and the division of its
+remaining acres into building lots for the mill-hands; the establishing
+of a library, a dispensary and emergency hospital, and various other
+centres of humanizing influence; but he refrained from letting her see
+that his present suggestion was only a part of this larger plan, lest
+her growing sympathy should be checked. He had in his mother an example
+of the mind accessible only to concrete impressions: the mind which
+could die for the particular instance, yet remain serenely indifferent
+to its causes. To Mrs. Amherst, her son's work had been interesting
+simply because it _was_ his work: remove his presence from Westmore, and
+the whole industrial problem became to her as non-existent as star-dust
+to the naked eye. And in Bessy Westmore he divined a nature of the same
+quality--divined, but no longer criticized it. Was not that
+concentration on the personal issue just the compensating grace of her
+sex? Did it not offer a warm tint of human inconsistency to eyes chilled
+by contemplating life in the mass? It pleased Amherst for the moment to
+class himself with the impersonal student of social problems, though in
+truth his interest in them had its source in an imagination as open as
+Bessy's to the pathos of the personal appeal. But if he had the same
+sensitiveness, how inferior were his means of expressing it! Again and
+again, during their talks, he had the feeling which had come to him when
+she bent over Dillon's bed--that her exquisite lines were, in some
+mystical sense, the visible flowering of her nature, that they had taken
+shape in response to the inward motions of the heart.
+
+To a young man ruled by high enthusiasms there can be no more dazzling
+adventure than to work this miracle in the tender creature who yields
+her mind to his--to see, as it were, the blossoming of the spiritual
+seed in forms of heightened loveliness, the bluer beam of the eye, the
+richer curve of the lip, all the physical currents of life quickening
+under the breath of a kindled thought. It did not occur to him that any
+other emotion had effected the change he perceived. Bessy Westmore had
+in full measure that gift of unconscious hypocrisy which enables a woman
+to make the man in whom she is interested believe that she enters into
+all his thoughts. She had--more than this--the gift of self-deception,
+supreme happiness of the unreflecting nature, whereby she was able to
+believe herself solely engrossed in the subjects they discussed, to
+regard him as the mere spokesman of important ideas, thus saving their
+intercourse from present constraint, and from the awkward contemplation
+of future contingencies. So, in obedience to the ancient sorcery of
+life, these two groped for and found each other in regions seemingly so
+remote from the accredited domain of romance that it would have been as
+a great surprise to them to learn whither they had strayed as to see
+the arid streets of Westmore suddenly bursting into leaf.
+
+With Mrs. Westmore's departure Amherst, for the first time, became aware
+of a certain flatness in his life. His daily task seemed dull and
+purposeless, and he was galled by Truscomb's studied forbearance, under
+which he suspected a quickly accumulating store of animosity. He almost
+longed for some collision which would release the manager's pent-up
+resentment; yet he dreaded increasingly any accident that might make his
+stay at Westmore impossible.
+
+It was on Sundays, when he was freed from his weekly task, that he was
+most at the mercy of these opposing feelings. They drove him forth on
+long solitary walks beyond the town, walks ending most often in the
+deserted grounds of Hopewood, beautiful now in the ruined gold of
+October. As he sat under the beech-limbs above the river, watching its
+brown current sweep the willow-roots of the banks, he thought how this
+same current, within its next short reach, passed from wooded seclusion
+to the noise and pollution of the mills. So his own life seemed to have
+passed once more from the tranced flow of the last weeks into its old
+channel of unillumined labour. But other thoughts came to him too: the
+vision of converting that melancholy pleasure-ground into an outlet for
+the cramped lives of the mill-workers; and he pictured the weed-grown
+lawns and paths thronged with holiday-makers, and the slopes nearer the
+factories dotted with houses and gardens.
+
+An unexpected event revived these hopes. A few days before Christmas it
+became known to Hanaford that Mrs. Westmore would return for the
+holidays. Cicely was drooping in town air, and Bessy had persuaded Mr.
+Langhope that the bracing cold of Hanaford would be better for the child
+than the milder atmosphere of Long Island. They reappeared, and brought
+with them a breath of holiday cheerfulness such as Westmore had never
+known. It had always been the rule at the mills to let the operatives
+take their pleasure as they saw fit, and the Eldorado and the Hanaford
+saloons throve on this policy. But Mrs. Westmore arrived full of festal
+projects. There was to be a giant Christmas tree for the mill-children,
+a supper on the same scale for the operatives, and a bout of skating and
+coasting at Hopewood for the older lads--the "band" and "bobbin" boys in
+whom Amherst had always felt a special interest. The Gaines ladies,
+resolved to show themselves at home in the latest philanthropic
+fashions, actively seconded Bessy's endeavours, and for a week Westmore
+basked under a sudden heat-wave of beneficence.
+
+The time had passed when Amherst might have made light of such efforts.
+With Bessy Westmore smiling up, holly-laden, from the foot of the ladder
+on which she kept him perched, how could he question the efficacy of
+hanging the opening-room with Christmas wreaths, or the ultimate benefit
+of gorging the operatives with turkey and sheathing their offspring in
+red mittens? It was just like the end of a story-book with a pretty
+moral, and Amherst was in the mood to be as much taken by the tinsel as
+the youngest mill-baby held up to gape at the tree.
+
+At the New Year, when Mrs. Westmore left, the negotiations for the
+purchase of the Eldorado were well advanced, and it was understood that
+on their completion she was to return for the opening of the
+night-school and nursery. Suddenly, however, it became known that the
+proprietor of the road-house had decided not to sell. Amherst heard of
+the decision from Duplain, and at once foresaw the inevitable
+result--that Mrs. Westmore's plan would be given up owing to the
+difficulty of finding another site. Mr. Gaines and Truscomb had both
+discountenanced the erection of a special building for what was, after
+all, only a tentative enterprise. Among the purchasable houses in
+Westmore no other was suited to the purpose, and they had, therefore, a
+good excuse for advising Bessy to defer her experiment.
+
+Almost at the same time, however, another piece of news changed the
+aspect of affairs. A scandalous occurrence at the Eldorado, witnesses to
+which were unexpectedly forthcoming, put it in Amherst's power to
+threaten the landlord with exposure unless he should at once accept the
+company's offer and withdraw from Westmore. Amherst had no long time to
+consider the best means of putting this threat into effect. He knew it
+was not only idle to appeal to Truscomb, but essential to keep the facts
+from him till the deed was done; yet how obtain the authority to act
+without him? The seemingly insuperable difficulties of the situation
+whetted Amherst's craving for a struggle. He thought first of writing to
+Mrs. Westmore;, but now that the spell of her presence was withdrawn he
+felt how hard it would be to make her understand the need of prompt and
+secret action; and besides, was it likely that, at such short notice,
+she could command the needful funds? Prudence opposed the attempt, and
+on reflection he decided to appeal to Mr. Gaines, hoping that the
+flagrancy of the case would rouse the President from his usual attitude
+of indifference.
+
+Mr. Gaines was roused to the extent of showing a profound resentment
+against the cause of his disturbance. He relieved his sense of
+responsibility by some didactic remarks on the vicious tendencies of the
+working-classes, and concluded with the reflection that the more you did
+for them the less thanks you got. But when Amherst showed an
+unwillingness to let the matter rest on this time-honoured aphorism, the
+President retrenched himself behind ambiguities, suggestions that they
+should await Mrs. Westmore's return, and general considerations of a
+pessimistic nature, tapering off into a gloomy view of the weather.
+
+"By God, I'll write to her!" Amherst exclaimed, as the Gaines portals
+closed on him; and all the way back to Westmore he was busy marshalling
+his arguments and entreaties.
+
+He wrote the letter that night, but did not post it. Some unavowed
+distrust of her restrained him--a distrust not of her heart but of her
+intelligence. He felt that the whole future of Westmore was at stake,
+and decided to await the development of the next twenty-four hours. The
+letter was still in his pocket when, after dinner, he was summoned to
+the office by Truscomb.
+
+That evening, when he returned home, he entered the little sitting-room
+without speaking. His mother sat there alone, in her usual place--how
+many nights he had seen the lamplight slant at that particular angle
+across her fresh cheek and the fine wrinkles about her eyes! He was
+going to add another wrinkle to the number now--soon they would creep
+down and encroach upon the smoothness of the cheek.
+
+She looked up and saw that his glance was turned to the crowded
+bookshelves behind her.
+
+"There must be nearly a thousand of them," he said as their eyes met.
+
+"Books? Yes--with your father's. Why--were you thinking...?" She started
+up suddenly and crossed over to him.
+
+"Too many for wanderers," he continued, drawing her hands to his breast;
+then, as she clung to him, weeping and trembling a little: "It had to
+be, mother," he said, kissing her penitently where the fine wrinkles
+died into the cheek.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+AMHERST'S dismissal was not to take effect for a month; and in the
+interval he addressed himself steadily to his task.
+
+He went through the routine of the work numbly; but his intercourse with
+the hands tugged at deep fibres of feelings. He had always shared, as
+far as his duties allowed, in the cares and interests of their few free
+hours: the hours when the automatic appendages of the giant machine
+became men and women again, with desires and passions of their own.
+Under Amherst's influence the mixed elements of the mill-community had
+begun to crystallize into social groups: his books had served as an
+improvised lending-library, he had organized a club, a rudimentary
+orchestra, and various other means of binding together the better
+spirits of the community. With the older men, the attractions of the
+Eldorado, and kindred inducements, often worked against him; but among
+the younger hands, and especially the boys, he had gained a personal
+ascendency that it was bitter to relinquish.
+
+It was the severing of this tie that cost him most pain in the final
+days at Westmore; and after he had done what he could to console his
+mother, and to put himself in the way of getting work elsewhere, he
+tried to see what might be saved out of the ruins of the little polity
+he had built up. He hoped his influence might at least persist in the
+form of an awakened instinct of fellowship; and he gave every spare hour
+to strengthening the links he had tried to form. The boys, at any rate,
+would be honestly sorry to have him go: not, indeed, from the profounder
+reasons that affected him, but because he had not only stood
+persistently between the overseers and themselves, but had recognized
+their right to fun after work-hours as well as their right to protection
+while they worked.
+
+In the glow of Mrs. Westmore's Christmas visitation an athletic club had
+been formed, and leave obtained to use the Hopewood grounds for Saturday
+afternoon sports; and thither Amherst continued to conduct the boys
+after the mills closed at the week-end. His last Saturday had now come:
+a shining afternoon of late February, with a red sunset bending above
+frozen river and slopes of unruffled snow. For an hour or more he had
+led the usual sports, coasting down the steep descent from the house to
+the edge of the woods, and skating and playing hockey on the rough
+river-ice which eager hands kept clear after every snow-storm. He always
+felt the contagion of these sports: the glow of movement, the tumult of
+young voices, the sting of the winter air, roused all the boyhood in his
+blood. But today he had to force himself through his part in the
+performance. To the very last, as he now saw, he had hoped for a sign in
+the heavens: not the reversal of his own sentence--for, merely on
+disciplinary grounds, he perceived that to be impossible--but something
+pointing to a change in the management of the mills, some proof that
+Mrs. Westmore's intervention had betokened more than a passing impulse
+of compassion. Surely she would not accept without question the
+abandonment of her favourite scheme; and if she came back to put the
+question, the answer would lay bare the whole situation.... So Amherst's
+hopes had persuaded him; but the day before he had heard that she was to
+sail for Europe. The report, first announced in the papers, had been
+confirmed by his mother, who brought back from a visit to Hanaford the
+news that Mrs. Westmore was leaving at once for an indefinite period,
+and that the Hanaford house was to be closed. Irony would have been the
+readiest caustic for the wound inflicted; but Amherst, for that very
+reason, disdained it. He would not taint his disappointment with
+mockery, but would leave it among the unspoiled sadnesses of life....
+
+He flung himself into the boys' sports with his usual energy, meaning
+that their last Saturday with him should be their merriest; but he went
+through his part mechanically, and was glad when the sun began to dip
+toward the rim of the woods.
+
+He was standing on the ice, where the river widened just below the
+house, when a jingle of bells broke on the still air, and he saw a
+sleigh driven rapidly up the avenue. Amherst watched it in surprise.
+Who, at that hour, could be invading the winter solitude of Hopewood?
+The sleigh halted near the closed house, and a muffled figure, alighting
+alone, began to move down the snowy slope toward the skaters.
+
+In an instant he had torn off his skates and was bounding up the bank.
+He would have known the figure anywhere--known that lovely poise of the
+head, the mixture of hesitancy and quickness in the light tread which
+even the snow could not impede. Half-way up the slope to the house they
+met, and Mrs. Westmore held out her hand. Face and lips, as she stood
+above him, glowed with her swift passage through the evening air, and in
+the blaze of the sunset she seemed saturated with heavenly fires.
+
+"I drove out to find you--they told me you were here--I arrived this
+morning, quite suddenly...."
+
+She broke off, as though the encounter had checked her ardour instead of
+kindling it; but he drew no discouragement from her tone.
+
+"I hoped you would come before I left--I knew you would!" he exclaimed;
+and at his last words her face clouded anxiously.
+
+"I didn't know you were leaving Westmore till yesterday--the day
+before--I got a letter...." Again she wavered, perceptibly trusting her
+difficulty to him, in the sweet way he had been trying to forget; and he
+answered with recovered energy: "The great thing is that you should be
+here."
+
+She shook her head at his optimism. "What can I do if you go?"
+
+"You can give me a chance, before I go, to tell you a little about some
+of the loose ends I am leaving."
+
+"But why are you leaving them? I don't understand. Is it inevitable?"
+
+"Inevitable," he returned, with an odd glow of satisfaction in the word;
+and as her eyes besought him, he added, smiling: "I've been dismissed,
+you see; and from the manager's standpoint I think I deserved it. But
+the best part of my work needn't go with me--and that is what I should
+like to speak to you about. As assistant manager I can easily be
+replaced--have been, I understand, already; but among these boys here I
+should like to think that a little of me stayed--and it will, if
+you'll let me tell you what I've been doing."
+
+[Illustration: Half-way up the slope to the house they met.]
+
+She glanced away from him at the busy throng on the ice and at the other
+black cluster above the coasting-slide.
+
+"How they're enjoying it!" she murmured. "What a pity it was never done
+before! And who will keep it up when you're gone?"
+
+"You," he answered, meeting her eyes again; and as she coloured a little
+under his look he went on quickly: "Will you come over and look at the
+coasting? The time is almost up. One more slide and they'll be packing
+off to supper."
+
+She nodded "yes," and they walked in silence over the white lawn,
+criss-crossed with tramplings of happy feet, to the ridge from which the
+coasters started on their run. Amherst's object in turning the talk had
+been to gain a moment's respite. He could not bear to waste his perfect
+hour in futile explanations: he wanted to keep it undisturbed by any
+thought of the future. And the same feeling seemed to possess his
+companion, for she did not speak again till they reached the knoll where
+the boys were gathered.
+
+A sled packed with them hung on the brink: with a last shout it was off,
+dipping down the incline with the long curved flight of a swallow,
+flashing across the wide meadow at the base of the hill, and tossed
+upward again by its own impetus, till it vanished in the dark rim of
+wood on the opposite height. The lads waiting on the knoll sang out for
+joy, and Bessy clapped her hands and joined with them.
+
+"What fun! I wish I'd brought Cicely! I've not coasted for years," she
+laughed out, as the second detachment of boys heaped themselves on
+another sled and shot down. Amherst looked at her with a smile. He saw
+that every other feeling had vanished in the exhilaration of watching
+the flight of the sleds. She had forgotten why she had come--forgotten
+her distress at his dismissal--forgotten everything but the spell of the
+long white slope, and the tingle of cold in her veins.
+
+"Shall we go down? Should you like it?" he asked, feeling no resentment
+under the heightened glow of his pulses.
+
+"Oh, do take me--I shall love it!" Her eyes shone like a child's--she
+might have been a lovelier embodiment of the shouting boyhood about
+them.
+
+The first band of coasters, sled at heels, had by this time already
+covered a third of the homeward stretch; but Amherst was too impatient
+to wait. Plunging down to the meadow he caught up the sled-rope, and
+raced back with the pack of rejoicing youth in his wake. The sharp climb
+up the hill seemed to fill his lungs with flame: his whole body burned
+with a strange intensity of life. As he reached the top, a distant bell
+rang across the fields from Westmore, and the boys began to snatch up
+their coats and mufflers.
+
+"Be off with you--I'll look after the sleds," Amherst called to them as
+they dispersed; then he turned for a moment to see that the skaters
+below were also heeding the summons.
+
+A cold pallor lay on the river-banks and on the low meadow beneath the
+knoll; but the woodland opposite stood black against scarlet vapours
+that ravelled off in sheer light toward a sky hung with an icy moon.
+
+Amherst drew up the sled and held it steady while Bessy, seating
+herself, tucked her furs close with little breaks of laughter; then he
+placed himself in front.
+
+"Ready?" he cried over his shoulder, and "Ready!" she called back.
+
+Their craft quivered under them, hanging an instant over the long
+stretch of whiteness below; the level sun dazzled their eyes, and the
+first plunge seemed to dash them down into darkness. Amherst heard a cry
+of glee behind him; then all sounds were lost in the whistle of air
+humming by like the flight of a million arrows. They had dropped below
+the sunset and were tearing through the clear nether twilight of the
+descent; then, with a bound, the sled met the level, and shot away
+across the meadow toward the opposite height. It seemed to Amherst as
+though his body had been left behind, and only the spirit in him rode
+the wild blue currents of galloping air; but as the sled's rush began to
+slacken with the strain of the last ascent he was recalled to himself by
+the touch of the breathing warmth at his back. Bessy had put out a hand
+to steady herself, and as she leaned forward, gripping his arm, a flying
+end of her furs swept his face. There was a delicious pang in being thus
+caught back to life; and as the sled stopped, and he sprang to his feet,
+he still glowed with the sensation. Bessy too was under the spell. In
+the dusk of the beech-grove where they had landed, he could barely
+distinguish her features; but her eyes shone on him, and he heard her
+quick breathing as he stooped to help her to her feet.
+
+"Oh, how beautiful--it's the only thing better than a good gallop!"
+
+She leaned against a tree-bole, panting a little, and loosening her
+furs.
+
+"What a pity it's too dark to begin again!" she sighed, looking about
+her through the dim weaving of leafless boughs.
+
+"It's not so dark in the open--we might have one more," he proposed; but
+she shook her head, seized by a new whim.
+
+"It's so still and delicious in here--did you hear the snow fall when
+that squirrel jumped across to the pine?" She tilted her head, narrowing
+her lids as she peered upward. "There he is! One gets used to the
+light.... Look! See his little eyes shining down at us!"
+
+As Amherst looked where she pointed, the squirrel leapt to another tree,
+and they stole on after him through the hushed wood, guided by his grey
+flashes in the dimness. Here and there, in a break of the snow, they
+trod on a bed of wet leaves that gave out a breath of hidden life, or a
+hemlock twig dashed its spicy scent into their faces. As they grew used
+to the twilight their eyes began to distinguish countless delicate
+gradations of tint: cold mottlings of grey-black boles against the snow,
+wet russets of drifted beech-leaves, a distant network of mauve twigs
+melting into the woodland haze. And in the silence just such fine
+gradations of sound became audible: the soft drop of loosened
+snow-lumps, a stir of startled wings, the creak of a dead branch,
+somewhere far off in darkness.
+
+They walked on, still in silence, as though they had entered the glade
+of an enchanted forest and were powerless to turn back or to break the
+hush with a word. They made no pretense of following the squirrel any
+longer; he had flashed away to a high tree-top, from which his ironical
+chatter pattered down on their unheeding ears. Amherst's sensations were
+not of that highest order of happiness where mind and heart mingle their
+elements in the strong draught of life: it was a languid fume that stole
+through him from the cup at his lips. But after the sense of defeat and
+failure which the last weeks had brought, the reaction was too exquisite
+to be analyzed. All he asked of the moment was its immediate
+sweetness....
+
+They had reached the brink of a rocky glen where a little brook still
+sent its thread of sound through mufflings of ice and huddled branches.
+Bessy stood still a moment, bending her head to the sweet cold tinkle;
+then she moved away and said slowly: "We must go back."
+
+As they turned to retrace their steps a yellow line of light through the
+tree-trunks showed them that they had not, after all, gone very deep
+into the wood. A few minutes' walk would restore them to the lingering
+daylight, and on the farther side of the meadow stood the sleigh which
+was to carry Bessy back to Hanaford. A sudden sense of the evanescence
+of the moment roused Amherst from his absorption. Before the next change
+in the fading light he would be back again among the ugly realities of
+life. Did she, too, hate to return to them? Or why else did she walk so
+slowly--why did she seem as much afraid as himself to break the silence
+that held them in its magic circle?
+
+A dead pine-branch caught in the edge of her skirt, and she stood still
+while Amherst bent down to release her. As she turned to help him he
+looked up with a smile.
+
+"The wood doesn't want to let you go," he said.
+
+She made no reply, and he added, rising: "But you'll come back to
+it--you'll come back often, I hope."
+
+He could not see her face in the dimness, but her voice trembled a
+little as she answered: "I will do what you tell me--but I shall be
+alone--against all the others: they don't understand."
+
+The simplicity, the helplessness, of the avowal, appealed to him not as
+a weakness but as a grace. He understood what she was really saying:
+"How can you desert me? How can you put this great responsibility on me,
+and then leave me to bear it alone?" and in the light of her unuttered
+appeal his action seemed almost like cruelty. Why had he opened her eyes
+to wrongs she had no strength to redress without his aid?
+
+He could only answer, as he walked beside her toward the edge of the
+wood: "You will not be alone--in time you will make the others
+understand; in time they will be with you."
+
+"Ah, you don't believe that!" she exclaimed, pausing suddenly, and
+speaking with an intensity of reproach that amazed him.
+
+"I hope it, at any rate," he rejoined, pausing also. "And I'm sure that
+if you will come here oftener--if you'll really live among your
+people----"
+
+"How can you say that, when you're deserting them?" she broke in, with a
+feminine excess of inconsequence that fairly dashed the words from his
+lips.
+
+"Deserting them? Don't you understand----?"
+
+"I understand that you've made Mr. Gaines and Truscomb angry--yes; but
+if I should insist on your staying----"
+
+Amherst felt the blood rush to his forehead. "No--no, it's not
+possible!" he exclaimed, with a vehemence addressed more to himself than
+to her.
+
+"Then what will happen at the mills?"
+
+"Oh, some one else will be found--the new ideas are stirring everywhere.
+And if you'll only come back here, and help my successor----"
+
+"Do you think they are likely to choose any one else with your ideas?"
+she interposed with unexpected acuteness; and after a short silence he
+answered: "Not immediately, perhaps; but in time--in time there will be
+improvements."
+
+"As if the poor people could wait! Oh, it's cruel, cruel of you to go!"
+
+Her voice broke in a throb of entreaty that went to his inmost fibres.
+
+"You don't understand. It's impossible in the present state of things
+that I should do any good by staying."
+
+"Then you refuse? Even if I were to insist on their asking you to stay,
+you would still refuse?" she persisted.
+
+"Yes--I should still refuse."
+
+She made no answer, but moved a few steps nearer to the edge of the
+wood. The meadow was just below them now, and the sleigh in plain sight
+on the height beyond. Their steps made no sound on the sodden drifts
+underfoot, and in the silence he thought he heard a catch in her
+breathing. It was enough to make the brimming moment overflow. He stood
+still before her and bent his head to hers.
+
+"Bessy!" he said, with sudden vehemence.
+
+She did not speak or move, but in the quickened state of his perceptions
+he became aware that she was silently weeping. The gathering darkness
+under the trees enveloped them. It absorbed her outline into the shadowy
+background of the wood, from which her face emerged in a faint spot of
+pallor; and the same obscurity seemed to envelop his faculties, merging
+the hard facts of life in a blur of feeling in which the distinctest
+impression was the sweet sense of her tears.
+
+"Bessy!" he exclaimed again; and as he drew a step nearer he felt her
+yield to him, and bury her sobs against his arm.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+"BUT, Justine----"
+
+Mrs. Harry Dressel, seated in the June freshness of her Oak Street
+drawing-room, and harmonizing by her high lights and hard edges with the
+white-and-gold angularities of the best furniture, cast a rebuking eye
+on her friend Miss Brent, who stood arranging in a glass bowl the
+handful of roses she had just brought in from the garden.
+
+Mrs. Dressel's intonation made it clear that the entrance of Miss Brent
+had been the signal for renewing an argument which the latter had
+perhaps left the room to escape.
+
+"When you were here three years ago, Justine, I could understand your
+not wanting to go out, because you were in mourning for your mother--and
+besides, you'd volunteered for that bad surgical case in the Hope
+Hospital. But now that you've come back for a rest and a change I can't
+imagine why you persist in shutting yourself up--unless, of course," she
+concluded, in a higher key of reproach, "it's because you think so
+little of Hanaford society----"
+
+Justine Brent, putting the last rose in place, turned from her task with
+a protesting gesture.
+
+"My dear Effie, who am I to think little of any society, when I belong
+to none?" She passed a last light touch over the flowers, and crossing
+the room, brushed her friend's hand with the same caressing gesture.
+
+Mrs. Dressel met it with an unrelenting turn of her plump shoulder,
+murmuring: "Oh, if you take _that_ tone!" And on Miss Brent's gaily
+rejoining: "Isn't it better than to have other people take it for me?"
+she replied, with an air of affront that expressed itself in a ruffling
+of her whole pretty person: "If you'll excuse my saying so, Justine, the
+fact that you are staying with _me_ would be enough to make you welcome
+anywhere in Hanaford!"
+
+"I'm sure of it, dear; so sure that my horrid pride rather resents being
+floated in on the high tide of such overwhelming credentials."
+
+Mrs. Dressel glanced up doubtfully at the dark face laughing down on
+her. Though she was president of the Maplewood Avenue Book-club, and
+habitually figured in the society column of the "Banner" as one of the
+intellectual leaders of Hanaford, there were moments when her
+self-confidence trembled before Justine's light sallies. It was absurd,
+of course, given the relative situations of the two; and Mrs. Dressel,
+behind her friend's back, was quickly reassured by the thought that
+Justine was only a hospital nurse, who had to work for her living, and
+had really never "been anywhere"; but when Miss Brent's verbal arrows
+were flying, it seemed somehow of more immediate consequence that she
+was fairly well-connected, and lived in New York. No one placed a higher
+value on the abstract qualities of wit and irony than Mrs. Dressel; the
+difficulty was that she never quite knew when Justine's retorts were
+loaded, or when her own susceptibilities were the target aimed at; and
+between her desire to appear to take the joke, and the fear of being
+ridiculed without knowing it, her pretty face often presented an
+interesting study in perplexity. As usual, she now took refuge in
+bringing the talk back to a personal issue.
+
+"I can't imagine," she said, "why you won't go to the Gaines's
+garden-party. It's always the most brilliant affair of the season; and
+this year, with the John Amhersts here, and all their party--that
+fascinating Mrs. Eustace Ansell, and Mrs. Amherst's father, old Mr.
+Langhope, who is quite as quick and clever as _you_ are--you certainly
+can't accuse us of being dull and provincial!"
+
+Miss Brent smiled. "As far as I can remember, Effie, it is always you
+who accuse others of bringing that charge against Hanaford. For my part,
+I know too little of it to have formed any opinion; but whatever it may
+have to offer me, I am painfully conscious of having, at present,
+nothing but your kind commendation to give in return."
+
+Mrs. Dressel rose impatiently. "How absurdly you talk! You're a little
+thinner than usual, and I don't like those dark lines under your eyes;
+but Westy Gaines told me yesterday that he thought you handsomer than
+ever, and that it was intensely becoming to some women to look
+over-tired."
+
+"It's lucky I'm one of that kind," Miss Brent rejoined, between a sigh
+and a laugh, "and there's every promise of my getting handsomer every
+day if somebody doesn't soon arrest the geometrical progression of my
+good looks by giving me the chance to take a year's rest!"
+
+As she spoke, she stretched her arms above her head, with a gesture
+revealing the suppleness of her slim young frame, but also its tenuity
+of structure--the frailness of throat and shoulders, and the play of
+bones in the delicate neck. Justine Brent had one of those imponderable
+bodies that seem a mere pinch of matter shot through with light and
+colour. Though she did not flush easily, auroral lights ran under her
+clear skin, were lost in the shadows of her hair, and broke again in her
+eyes; and her voice seemed to shoot light too, as though her smile
+flashed back from her words as they fell--all her features being so
+fluid and changeful that the one solid thing about her was the massing
+of dense black hair which clasped her face like the noble metal of some
+antique bust.
+
+Mrs. Dressel's face softened at the note of weariness in the girl's
+voice. "Are you very tired, dear?" she asked drawing her down to a seat
+on the sofa.
+
+"Yes, and no--not so much bodily, perhaps, as in spirit." Justine Brent
+drew her brows together, and stared moodily at the thin brown hands
+interwoven between Mrs. Dressel's plump fingers. Seated thus, with
+hollowed shoulders and brooding head, she might have figured a young
+sibyl bowed above some mystery of fate; but the next moment her face,
+inclining toward her friend's, cast off its shadows and resumed the look
+of a plaintive child.
+
+"The worst of it is that I don't look forward with any interest to
+taking up the old drudgery again. Of course that loss of interest may be
+merely physical--I should call it so in a nervous patient, no doubt. But
+in myself it seems different--it seems to go to the roots of the world.
+You know it was always the imaginative side of my work that helped me
+over the ugly details--the pity and beauty that disinfected the physical
+horror; but now that feeling is lost, and only the mortal disgust
+remains. Oh, Effie, I don't want to be a ministering angel any more--I
+want to be uncertain, coy and hard to please. I want something dazzling
+and unaccountable to happen to me--something new and unlived and
+indescribable!"
+
+She snatched herself with a laugh from the bewildered Effie, and
+flinging up her arms again, spun on a light heel across the polished
+floor.
+
+"Well, then," murmured Mrs. Dressel with gentle obstinacy, "I can't see
+why in the world you won't go to the Gaines's garden-party!" And caught
+in the whirlwind of her friend's incomprehensible mirth, she still
+persisted, as she ducked her blonde head to it: "If you'll only let me
+lend you my dress with the Irish lace, you'll look smarter than anybody
+there...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before her toilet mirror, an hour later, Justine Brent seemed in a way
+to fulfill Mrs. Dressel's prediction. So mirror-like herself, she could
+no more help reflecting the happy effect of a bow or a feather than the
+subtler influence of word and look; and her face and figure were so new
+to the advantages of dress that, at four-and-twenty, she still produced
+the effect of a young girl in her first "good" frock. In Mrs. Dressel's
+festal raiment, which her dark tints subdued to a quiet elegance, she
+was like the golden core of a pale rose illuminating and scenting its
+petals.
+
+Three years of solitary life, following on a youth of confidential
+intimacy with the mother she had lost, had produced in her the quaint
+habit of half-loud soliloquy. "Fine feathers, Justine!" she laughed back
+at her laughing image. "You look like a phoenix risen from your ashes.
+But slip back into your own plumage, and you'll be no more than a little
+brown bird without a song!"
+
+The luxurious suggestions of her dress, and the way her warm youth
+became it, drew her back to memories of a childhood nestled in beauty
+and gentle ways, before her handsome prodigal father had died, and her
+mother's face had grown pinched in the long struggle with poverty. But
+those memories were after all less dear to Justine than the grey years
+following, when, growing up, she had helped to clear a space in the
+wilderness for their tiny hearth-fire, when her own efforts had fed the
+flame and roofed it in from the weather. A great heat, kindled at that
+hearth, had burned in her veins, making her devour her work, lighting
+and warming the long cold days, and reddening the horizon through dark
+passages of revolt and failure; and she felt all the more deeply the
+chill of reaction that set in with her mother's death.
+
+She thought she had chosen her work as a nurse in a spirit of high
+disinterestedness; but in the first hours of her bereavement it seemed
+as though only the personal aim had sustained her. For a while, after
+this, her sick people became to her mere bundles of disintegrating
+matter, and she shrank from physical pain with a distaste the deeper
+because, mechanically, she could not help working on to relieve it.
+Gradually her sound nature passed out of this morbid phase, and she took
+up her task with deeper pity if less exalted ardour; glad to do her part
+in the vast impersonal labour of easing the world's misery, but longing
+with all the warm instincts of youth for a special load to lift, a
+single hand to clasp.
+
+Ah, it was cruel to be alive, to be young, to bubble with springs of
+mirth and tenderness and folly, and to live in perpetual contact with
+decay and pain--to look persistently into the grey face of death without
+having lifted even a corner of life's veil! Now and then, when she felt
+her youth flame through the sheath of dullness which was gradually
+enclosing it, she rebelled at the conditions that tied a spirit like
+hers to its monotonous task, while others, without a quiver of wings on
+their dull shoulders, or a note of music in their hearts, had the whole
+wide world to range through, and saw in it no more than a frightful
+emptiness to be shut out with tight walls of habit....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A tap on the door announced Mrs. Dressel, garbed for conquest, and
+bestowing on her brilliant person the last anxious touches of the artist
+reluctant to part from a masterpiece.
+
+"My dear, how well you look! I _knew_ that dress would be becoming!" she
+exclaimed, generously transferring her self-approval to Justine; and
+adding, as the latter moved toward her: "I wish Westy Gaines could see
+you now!"
+
+"Well, he will presently," Miss Brent rejoined, ignoring the slight
+stress on the name.
+
+Mrs. Dressel continued to brood on her maternally. "Justine--I wish
+you'd tell me! You say you hate the life you're leading now--but isn't
+there somebody who might----?"
+
+"Give me another, with lace dresses in it?" Justine's slight shrug might
+have seemed theatrical, had it not been a part of the ceaseless dramatic
+play of her flexible person. "There might be, perhaps...only I'm not
+sure--" She broke off whimsically.
+
+"Not sure of what?"
+
+"That this kind of dress might not always be a little tight on the
+shoulders."
+
+"Tight on the shoulders? What do you mean, Justine? My clothes simply
+_hang_ on you!"
+
+"Oh, Effie dear, don't you remember the fable of the wings under the
+skin, that sprout when one meets a pair of kindred shoulders?" And, as
+Mrs. Dressel bent on her a brow of unenlightenment--"Well, it doesn't
+matter: I only meant that I've always been afraid good clothes might
+keep my wings from sprouting!" She turned back to the glass, giving
+herself a last light touch such as she had bestowed on the roses.
+
+"And that reminds me," she continued--"how about Mr. Amherst's wings?"
+
+"John Amherst?" Mrs. Dressel brightened into immediate attention. "Why,
+do you know him?"
+
+"Not as the owner of the Westmore Mills; but I came across him as their
+assistant manager three years ago, at the Hope Hospital, and he was
+starting a very promising pair then. I wonder if they're doing as well
+under his new coat."
+
+"I'm not sure that I understand you when you talk poetry," said Mrs.
+Dressel with less interest; "but personally I can't say I like John
+Amherst--and he is certainly not worthy of such a lovely woman as Mrs.
+Westmore. Of course she would never let any one see that she's not
+perfectly happy; but I'm told he has given them all a great deal of
+trouble by interfering in the management of the mills, and his manner is
+so cold and sarcastic--the truth is, I suppose he's never quite at ease
+in society. _Her_ family have never been really reconciled to the
+marriage; and Westy Gaines says----"
+
+"Ah, Westy Gaines _would_," Justine interposed lightly. "But if Mrs.
+Amherst is really the Bessy Langhope I used to know it must be rather a
+struggle for the wings!"
+
+Mrs. Dressel's flagging interest settled on the one glimpse of fact in
+this statement. "It's such a coincidence that you should have known her
+too! Was she always so perfectly fascinating? I wish I knew how she
+gives that look to her hair!"
+
+Justine gathered up the lace sunshade and long gloves which her friend
+had lent her. "There was not much more that was genuine about her
+character--that was her very own, I mean--than there is about my
+appearance at this moment. She was always the dearest little chameleon
+in the world, taking everybody's colour in the most flattering way, and
+giving back, I must say, a most charming reflection--if you'll excuse
+the mixed metaphor; but when one got her by herself, with no reflections
+to catch, one found she hadn't any particular colour of her own. One of
+the girls used to say she ought to wear a tag, because she was so easily
+mislaid---- Now then, I'm ready!"
+
+Justine advanced to the door, and Mrs. Dressel followed her downstairs,
+reflecting with pardonable complacency that one of the disadvantages of
+being clever was that it tempted one to say sarcastic things of other
+women--than which she could imagine no more crying social error.
+
+During the drive to the garden-party, Justine's thoughts, drawn to the
+past by the mention of Bessy Langhope's name, reverted to the comic
+inconsequences of her own lot--to that persistent irrelevance of
+incident that had once made her compare herself to an actor always
+playing his part before the wrong stage-setting. Was there not, for
+instance, a mocking incongruity in the fact that a creature so leaping
+with life should have, for chief outlet, the narrow mental channel of
+the excellent couple between whom she was now being borne to the Gaines
+garden-party? All her friendships were the result of propinquity or of
+early association, and fate had held her imprisoned in a circle of
+well-to-do mediocrity, peopled by just such figures as those of the
+kindly and prosperous Dressels. Effie Dressel, the daughter of a cousin
+of Mrs. Brent's, had obscurely but safely allied herself with the heavy
+blond young man who was to succeed his father as President of the Union
+Bank, and who was already regarded by the "solid business interests" of
+Hanaford as possessing talents likely to carry him far in the
+development of the paternal fortunes. Harry Dressel's honest countenance
+gave no evidence of peculiar astuteness, and he was in fact rather the
+product of special conditions than of an irresistible bent. He had the
+sound Saxon love of games, and the most interesting game he had ever
+been taught was "business." He was a simple domestic being, and
+according to Hanaford standards the most obvious obligation of the
+husband and father was to make his family richer. If Harry Dressel had
+ever formulated his aims, he might have said that he wanted to be the
+man whom Hanaford most respected, and that was only another way of
+saying, the richest man in Hanaford. Effie embraced his creed with a
+zeal facilitated by such evidence of its soundness as a growing income
+and the early prospects of a carriage. Her mother-in-law, a kind old
+lady with a simple unquestioning love of money, had told her on her
+wedding day that Harry's one object would always be to make his family
+proud of him; and the recent purchase of the victoria in which Justine
+and the Dressels were now seated was regarded by the family as a
+striking fulfillment of this prophecy.
+
+In the course of her hospital work Justine had of necessity run across
+far different types; but from the connections thus offered she was often
+held back by the subtler shades of taste that civilize human
+intercourse. Her world, in short, had been chiefly peopled by the dull
+or the crude, and, hemmed in between the two, she had created for
+herself an inner kingdom where the fastidiousness she had to set aside
+in her outward relations recovered its full sway. There must be actual
+beings worthy of admission to this secret precinct, but hitherto they
+had not come her way; and the sense that they were somewhere just out of
+reach still gave an edge of youthful curiosity to each encounter with a
+new group of people.
+
+Certainly, Mrs. Gaines's garden-party seemed an unlikely field for the
+exercise of such curiosity: Justine's few glimpses of Hanaford society
+had revealed it as rather a dull thick body, with a surface stimulated
+only by ill-advised references to the life of larger capitals; and the
+concentrated essence of social Hanaford was of course to be found at the
+Gaines entertainments. It presented itself, however, in the rich June
+afternoon, on the long shadows of the well-kept lawn, and among the
+paths of the rose-garden, in its most amiable aspect; and to Justine,
+wearied by habitual contact with ugliness and suffering, there was pure
+delight in the verdant setting of the picture, and in the light
+harmonious tints of the figures peopling it. If the company was dull, it
+was at least decorative; and poverty, misery and dirt were shut out by
+the placid unconsciousness of the guests as securely as by the leafy
+barriers of the garden.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+"AH, Mrs. Dressel, we were on the lookout for you--waiting for the
+curtain to rise. Your friend Miss Brent? Juliana, Mrs. Dressel's friend
+Miss Brent----"
+
+Near the brilliantly-striped marquee that formed the axis of the Gaines
+garden-parties, Mr. Halford Gaines, a few paces from his wife and
+daughters, stood radiating a royal welcome on the stream of visitors
+pouring across the lawn. It was only to eyes perverted by a different
+social perspective that there could be any doubt as to the importance
+of the Gaines entertainments. To Hanaford itself they were epoch-making;
+and if any rebellious spirit had cherished a doubt of the fact, it would
+have been quelled by the official majesty of Mr. Gaines's frock-coat and
+the comprehensive cordiality of his manner.
+
+There were moments when New York hung like a disquieting cloud on the
+social horizon of Mrs. Gaines and her daughters; but to Halford Gaines
+Hanaford was all in all. As an exponent of the popular and patriotic
+"good-enough-for-me" theory he stood in high favour at the Hanaford
+Club, where a too-keen consciousness of the metropolis was alternately
+combated by easy allusion and studied omission, and where the unsettled
+fancies of youth were chastened and steadied by the reflection that, if
+Hanaford was good enough for Halford Gaines, it must offer opportunities
+commensurate with the largest ideas of life.
+
+Never did Mr. Gaines's manner bear richer witness to what could be
+extracted from Hanaford than when he was in the act of applying to it
+the powerful pressure of his hospitality. The resultant essence was so
+bubbling with social exhilaration that, to its producer at any rate, its
+somewhat mixed ingredients were lost in one highly flavoured draught.
+Under ordinary circumstances no one discriminated more keenly than Mr.
+Gaines between different shades of social importance; but any one who
+was entertained by him was momentarily ennobled by the fact, and not all
+the anxious telegraphy of his wife and daughters could, for instance,
+recall to him that the striking young woman in Mrs. Dressel's wake was
+only some obscure protégée, whom it was odd of Effie to have brought,
+and whose presence was quite unnecessary to emphasize.
+
+"Juliana, Miss Brent tells me she has never seen our roses. Oh, there
+are other roses in Hanaford, Miss Brent; I don't mean to imply that no
+one else attempts them; but unless you can afford to give _carte
+blanche_ to your man--and mine happens to be something of a
+specialist...well, if you'll come with me, I'll let them speak for
+themselves. I always say that if people want to know what we can do they
+must come and see--they'll never find out from _me_!"
+
+A more emphatic signal from his wife arrested Mr. Gaines as he was in
+the act of leading Miss Brent away.
+
+"Eh?--What? The Amhersts and Mrs. Ansell? You must excuse me then, I'm
+afraid--but Westy shall take you. Westy, my boy, it's an ill-wind.... I
+want you to show this young lady our roses." And Mr. Gaines, with
+mingled reluctance and satisfaction, turned away to receive the most
+important guests of the day.
+
+It had not needed his father's summons to draw the expert Westy to Miss
+Brent: he was already gravitating toward her, with the nonchalance bred
+of cosmopolitan successes, but with a directness of aim due also to his
+larger opportunities of comparison.
+
+"The roses will do," he explained, as he guided her through the
+increasing circle of guests about his mother; and in answer to Justine's
+glance of enquiry: "To get you away, I mean. They're not much in
+themselves, you know; but everything of the governor's always begins
+with a capital letter."
+
+"Oh, but these roses deserve to," Justine exclaimed, as they paused
+under the evergreen archway at the farther end of the lawn.
+
+"I don't know--not if you've been in England," Westy murmured, watching
+furtively for the impression produced, on one who had presumably not, by
+the great blush of colour massed against its dusky background of clipped
+evergreens.
+
+Justine smiled. "I _have_ been--but I've been in the slums since; in
+horrible places that the least of those flowers would have lighted up
+like a lamp."
+
+Westy's guarded glance imprudently softened. "It's the beastliest kind
+of a shame, your ever having had to do such work----"
+
+"Oh, _had_ to?" she flashed back at him disconcertingly. "It was my
+choice, you know: there was a time when I couldn't live without it.
+Philanthropy is one of the subtlest forms of self-indulgence."
+
+Westy met this with a vague laugh. If a chap who was as knowing as the
+devil _did_, once in a way, indulge himself in the luxury of talking
+recklessly to a girl with exceptional eyes, it was rather upsetting to
+discover in those eyes no consciousness of the risk he had taken!
+
+"But I _am_ rather tired of it now," she continued, and his look grew
+guarded again. After all, they were all the same--except in that
+particular matter of the eyes. At the thought, he risked another look,
+hung on the sharp edge of betrayal, and was snatched back, not by the
+manly instinct of self-preservation, but by some imp of mockery lurking
+in the depths that lured him.
+
+He recovered his balance and took refuge in a tone of worldly ease. "I
+saw a chap the other day who said he knew you when you were at Saint
+Elizabeth's--wasn't that the name of your hospital?"
+
+Justine assented. "One of the doctors, I suppose. Where did you meet
+him?"
+
+Ah, _now_ she should see! He summoned his utmost carelessness of tone.
+"Down on Long Island last week--I was spending Sunday with the
+Amhersts." He held up the glittering fact to her, and watched for the
+least little blink of awe; but her lids never trembled. It was a
+confession of social blindness which painfully negatived Mrs. Dressel's
+hint that she knew the Amhersts; if she had even known _of_ them, she
+could not so fatally have missed his point.
+
+"Long Island?" She drew her brows together in puzzled retrospection. "I
+wonder if it could have been Stephen Wyant? I heard he had taken over
+his uncle's practice somewhere near New York."
+
+"Wyant--that's the name. He's the doctor at Clifton, the nearest town to
+the Amhersts' place. Little Cicely had a cold--Cicely Westmore, you
+know--a small cousin of mine, by the way--" he switched a rose-branch
+loftily out of her path, explaining, as she moved on, that Cicely was
+the daughter of Mrs. Amherst's first marriage to Richard Westmore.
+"That's the way I happened to see this Dr. Wyant. Bessy--Mrs.
+Amherst--asked him to stop to luncheon, after he'd seen the kid. He
+seems rather a discontented sort of a chap--grumbling at not having a
+New York practice. I should have thought he had rather a snug berth,
+down there at Lynbrook, with all those swells to dose."
+
+Justine smiled. "Dr. Wyant is ambitious, and swells don't have as
+interesting diseases as poor people. One gets tired of giving them bread
+pills for imaginary ailments. But Dr. Wyant is not strong himself and I
+fancy a country practice is better for him than hard work in town."
+
+"You think him clever though, do you?" Westy enquired absently. He was
+already bored with the subject of the Long Island doctor, and vexed at
+the lack of perception that led his companion to show more concern in
+the fortunes of a country practitioner than in the fact of his own visit
+to the Amhersts; but the topic was a safe one, and it was agreeable to
+see how her face kindled when she was interested.
+
+Justine mused on his question. "I think he has very great promise--which
+he is almost certain not to fulfill," she answered with a sigh which
+seemed to Westy's anxious ear to betray a more than professional
+interest in the person referred to.
+
+"Oh, come now--why not? With the Amhersts to give him a start--I heard
+my cousin recommending him to a lot of people the other day----"
+
+"Oh, he may become a fashionable doctor," Justine assented
+indifferently; to which her companion rejoined, with a puzzled stare:
+"That's just what I mean--with Bessy backing him!"
+
+"Has Mrs. Amherst become such a power, then?" Justine asked, taking up
+the coveted theme just as he despaired of attracting her to it.
+
+"My cousin?" he stretched the two syllables to the cracking-point.
+"Well, she's awfully rich, you know; and there's nobody smarter. Don't
+you think so?"
+
+"I don't know; it's so long since I've seen her."
+
+He brightened. "You _did_ know her, then?" But the discovery made her
+obtuseness the more inexplicable!
+
+"Oh, centuries ago: in another world."
+
+"_Centuries_--I like that!" Westy gallantly protested, his ardour
+kindling as she swam once more within his social ken. "And Amherst? You
+know him too, I suppose? By Jove, here he is now----"
+
+He signalled a tall figure strolling slowly toward them with bent head
+and brooding gaze. Justine's eye had retained a vivid image of the man
+with whom, scarcely three years earlier, she had lived through a moment
+of such poignant intimacy, and she recognized at once his lean outline,
+and the keen spring of his features, still veiled by the same look of
+inward absorption. She noticed, as he raised his hat in response to
+Westy Gaines's greeting, that the vertical lines between his brows had
+deepened; and a moment later she was aware that this change was the
+visible token of others which went deeper than the fact of his good
+clothes and his general air of leisure and well-being--changes
+perceptible to her only in the startled sense of how prosperity had aged
+him.
+
+"Hallo, Amherst--trying to get under cover?" Westy jovially accosted
+him, with a significant gesture toward the crowded lawn from which the
+new-comer had evidently fled. "I was just telling Miss Brent that this
+is the safest place on these painful occasions--Oh, confound it, it's
+not as safe as I thought! Here's one of my sisters making for me!"
+
+There ensued a short conflict of words, before his feeble flutter of
+resistance was borne down by a resolute Miss Gaines who, as she swept
+him back to the marquee, cried out to Amherst that her mother was asking
+for him too; and then Justine had time to observe that her remaining
+companion had no intention of responding to his hostess's appeal.
+
+Westy, in naming her, had laid just enough stress on the name to let it
+serve as a reminder or an introduction, as circumstances might decide,
+and she saw that Amherst, roused from his abstraction by the proffered
+clue, was holding his hand out doubtfully.
+
+"I think we haven't met for some years," he said.
+
+Justine smiled. "I have a better reason than you for remembering the
+exact date;" and in response to his look of surprise she added: "You
+made me commit a professional breach of faith, and I've never known
+since whether to be glad or sorry."
+
+Amherst still bent on her the gaze which seemed to find in external
+details an obstacle rather than a help to recognition; but suddenly his
+face cleared. "It was you who told me the truth about poor Dillon! I
+couldn't imagine why I seemed to see you in such a different
+setting...."
+
+"Oh, I'm disguised as a lady this afternoon," she said smiling. "But I'm
+glad you saw through the disguise."
+
+He smiled back at her. "Are you? Why?"
+
+"It seems to make it--if it's so transparent--less of a sham, less of a
+dishonesty," she began impulsively, and then paused again, a little
+annoyed at the overemphasis of her words. Why was she explaining and
+excusing herself to this stranger? Did she propose to tell him next that
+she had borrowed her dress from Effie Dressel? To cover her confusion
+she went on with a slight laugh: "But you haven't told me."
+
+"What was I to tell you?"
+
+"Whether to be glad or sorry that I broke my vow and told the truth
+about Dillon."
+
+They were standing face to face in the solitude of the garden-walk,
+forgetful of everything but the sudden surprised sense of intimacy that
+had marked their former brief communion. Justine had raised her eyes
+half-laughingly to Amherst, but they dropped before the unexpected
+seriousness of his.
+
+"Why do you want to know?" he asked.
+
+She made an effort to sustain the note of pleasantry.
+
+"Well--it might, for instance, determine my future conduct. You see I'm
+still a nurse, and such problems are always likely to present
+themselves."
+
+"Ah, then don't!"
+
+"Don't?"
+
+"I mean--" He hesitated a moment, reaching up to break a rose from the
+branch that tapped his shoulder. "I was only thinking what risks we run
+when we scramble into the chariot of the gods and try to do the driving.
+Be passive--be passive, and you'll be happier!"
+
+"Oh, as to that--!" She swept it aside with one of her airy motions.
+"But Dillon, for instance--would _he_ have been happier if I'd been
+passive?"
+
+Amherst seemed to ponder. "There again--how can one tell?"
+
+"And the risk's not worth taking?"
+
+"No!"
+
+She paused, and they looked at each other again. "Do you mean that
+seriously, I wonder? Do you----"
+
+"Act on it myself? God forbid! The gods drive so badly. There's poor
+Dillon...he happened to be in their way...as we all are at times." He
+pulled himself up, and went on in a matter-of-fact tone: "In Dillon's
+case, however, my axioms don't apply. When my wife heard the truth she
+was, of course, immensely kind to him; and if it hadn't been for you she
+might never have known."
+
+Justine smiled. "I think you would have found out--I was only the humble
+instrument. But now--" she hesitated--"now you must be able to do so
+much--"
+
+Amherst lifted his head, and she saw the colour rise under his fair
+skin. "Out at Westmore? You've never been there since? Yes--my wife has
+made some changes; but it's all so problematic--and one would have to
+live here...."
+
+"You don't, then?"
+
+He answered by an imperceptible shrug. "Of course I'm here often; and
+she comes now and then. But the journey's tiresome, and it is not always
+easy for her to get away." He checked himself, and Justine saw that he,
+in turn, was suddenly conscious of the incongruity of explaining and
+extenuating his personal situation to a stranger. "But then we're _not_
+strangers!" a voice in her exulted, just as he added, with an
+embarrassed attempt to efface and yet justify his moment of expansion:
+"That reminds me--I think you know my wife. I heard her asking Mrs.
+Dressel about you. She wants so much to see you."
+
+The transition had been effected, at the expense of dramatic interest,
+but to the obvious triumph of social observances; and to Justine, after
+all, regaining at his side the group about the marquee, the interest was
+not so much diminished as shifted to the no less suggestive problem of
+studying the friend of her youth in the unexpected character of John
+Amherst's wife.
+
+Meanwhile, however, during the brief transit across the Gaines
+greensward, her thoughts were still busy with Amherst. She had seen at
+once that the peculiar sense of intimacy reawakened by their meeting had
+been chilled and deflected by her first allusion to the topic which had
+previously brought them together: Amherst had drawn back as soon as she
+named the mills. What could be the cause of his reluctance? When they
+had last met, the subject burned within him: her being in actual fact a
+stranger had not, then, been an obstacle to his confidences. Now that he
+was master at Westmore it was plain that another tone became him--that
+his situation necessitated a greater reserve; but her enquiry did not
+imply the least wish to overstep this restriction: it merely showed her
+remembrance of his frankly-avowed interest in the operatives. Justine
+was struck by the fact that so natural an allusion should put him on the
+defensive. She did not for a moment believe that he had lost his
+interest in the mills; and that his point of view should have shifted
+with the fact of ownership she rejected as an equally superficial
+reading of his character. The man with whom she had talked at Dillon's
+bedside was one in whom the ruling purposes had already shaped
+themselves, and to whom life, in whatever form it came, must henceforth
+take their mould. As she reached this point in her analysis, it occurred
+to her that his shrinking from the subject might well imply not
+indifference, but a deeper preoccupation: a preoccupation for some
+reason suppressed and almost disavowed, yet sustaining the more
+intensely its painful hidden life. From this inference it was but a leap
+of thought to the next--that the cause of the change must be sought
+outside of himself, in some external influence strong enough to modify
+the innate lines of his character. And where could such an influence be
+more obviously sought than in the marriage which had transformed the
+assistant manager of the Westmore Mills not, indeed, into their
+owner--that would rather have tended to simplify the problem--but into
+the husband of Mrs. Westmore? After all, the mills were Bessy's--and for
+a farther understanding of the case it remained to find out what manner
+of person Bessy had become.
+
+Justine's first impression, as her friend's charming arms received
+her--with an eagerness of welcome not lost on the suspended judgment of
+feminine Hanaford--the immediate impression was of a gain of emphasis,
+of individuality, as though the fluid creature she remembered had belied
+her prediction, and run at last into a definite mould. Yes--Bessy had
+acquired an outline: a graceful one, as became her early promise, though
+with, perhaps, a little more sharpness of edge than her youthful texture
+had promised. But the side she turned to her friend was still all
+softness--had in it a hint of the old pliancy, the impulse to lean and
+enlace, that at once woke in Justine the corresponding instinct of
+guidance and protection, so that their first kiss, before a word was
+spoken, carried the two back to the precise relation in which their
+school-days had left them. So easy a reversion to the past left no room
+for the sense of subsequent changes by which such reunions are sometimes
+embarrassed. Justine's sympathies had, instinctively, and almost at
+once, transferred themselves to Bessy's side--passing over at a leap
+the pained recognition that there _were_ sides already--and Bessy had
+gathered up Justine into the circle of gentle self-absorption which left
+her very dimly aware of any distinctive characteristic in her friends
+except that of their affection for herself--since she asked only, as she
+appealingly put it, that they should all be "dreadfully fond" of her.
+
+"And I've wanted you so often, Justine: you're the only clever person
+I'm not afraid of, because your cleverness always used to make things
+clear instead of confusing them. I've asked so many people about
+you--but I never heard a word till just the other day--wasn't it
+odd?--when our new doctor at Rushton happened to say that he knew you.
+I've been rather unwell lately--nervous and tired, and sleeping
+badly--and he told me I ought to keep perfectly quiet, and be under the
+care of a nurse who could make me do as she chose: just such a nurse as
+a wonderful Miss Brent he had known at St. Elizabeth's, whose patients
+obeyed her as if she'd been the colonel of a regiment. His description
+made me laugh, it reminded me so much of the way you used to make me do
+what you wanted at the convent--and then it suddenly occurred to me that
+I had heard of you having gone in for nursing, and we compared notes,
+and I found it was really you! Wasn't it odd that we should discover
+each other in that way? I daresay we might have passed in the street
+and never known it--I'm sure I must be horribly changed...."
+
+Thus Bessy discoursed, in the semi-isolation to which, under an
+overarching beech-tree, the discretion of their hostess had allowed the
+two friends to withdraw for the freer exchange of confidences. There
+was, at first sight, nothing in her aspect to bear out Mrs. Amherst's
+plaintive allusion to her health, but Justine, who knew that she had
+lost a baby a few months previously, assumed that the effect of this
+shock still lingered, though evidently mitigated by a reviving interest
+in pretty clothes and the other ornamental accessories of life.
+Certainly Bessy Amherst had grown into the full loveliness which her
+childhood promised. She had the kind of finished prettiness that
+declares itself early, holds its own through the awkward transitions of
+girlhood, and resists the strain of all later vicissitudes, as though
+miraculously preserved in some clear medium impenetrable to the wear and
+tear of living.
+
+"You absurd child! You've not changed a bit except to grow more so!"
+Justine laughed, paying amused tribute to the childish craving for "a
+compliment" that still betrayed itself in Bessy's eyes.
+
+"Well, _you_ have, then, Justine--you've grown extraordinarily
+handsome!"
+
+"That _is_ extraordinary of me, certainly," the other acknowledged
+gaily. "But then think what room for improvement there was--and how
+much time I've had to improve in!"
+
+"It is a long time, isn't it?" Bessy assented. "I feel so intimate,
+still, with the old Justine of the convent, and I don't know the new one
+a bit. Just think--I've a great girl of my own, almost as old as we were
+when we went to the Sacred Heart: But perhaps you don't know anything
+about me either. You see, I married again two years ago, and my poor
+baby died last March...so I have only Cicely. It was such a
+disappointment--I wanted a boy dreadfully, and I understand little
+babies so much better than a big girl like Cicely.... Oh, dear, here is
+Juliana Gaines bringing up some more tiresome people! It's such a bore,
+but John says I must know them all. Well, thank goodness we've only one
+more day in this dreadful place--and of course I shall see you, dear,
+before we go...."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+AFTER conducting Miss Brent to his wife, John Amherst, by the exercise
+of considerable strategic skill, had once more contrived to detach
+himself from the throng on the lawn, and, regaining a path in the
+shrubbery, had taken refuge on the verandah of the house.
+
+Here, under the shade of the awning, two ladies were seated in a
+seclusion agreeably tempered by the distant strains of the Hanaford
+band, and by the shifting prospect of the groups below them.
+
+"Ah, here he is now!" the younger of the two exclaimed, turning on
+Amherst the smile of intelligence that Mrs. Eustace Ansell was in the
+habit of substituting for the idle preliminaries of conversation. "We
+were not talking of you, though," she added as Amherst took the seat to
+which his mother beckoned him, "but of Bessy--which, I suppose, is
+almost as indiscreet."
+
+She added the last phrase after an imperceptible pause, and as if in
+deprecation of the hardly more perceptible frown which, at the mention
+of his wife's name, had deepened the lines between Amherst's brows.
+
+"Indiscreet of his own mother and his wife's friend?" Mrs. Amherst
+protested, laying her trimly-gloved hand on her son's arm; while the
+latter, with his eyes on her companion, said slowly: "Mrs. Ansell knows
+that indiscretion is the last fault of which her friends are likely to
+accuse her."
+
+"_Raison de plus_, you mean?" she laughed, meeting squarely the
+challenge that passed between them under Mrs. Amherst's puzzled gaze.
+"Well, if I take advantage of my reputation for discretion to meddle a
+little now and then, at least I do so in a good cause. I was just saying
+how much I wish that you would take Bessy to Europe; and I am so sure
+of my cause, in this case, that I am going to leave it to your mother to
+give you my reasons."
+
+She rose as she spoke, not with any sign of haste or embarrassment, but
+as if gracefully recognizing the desire of mother and son to be alone
+together; but Amherst, rising also, made a motion to detain her.
+
+"No one else will be able to put your reasons half so convincingly," he
+said with a slight smile, "and I am sure my mother would much rather be
+spared the attempt."
+
+Mrs. Ansell met the smile as freely as she had met the challenge. "My
+dear Lucy," she rejoined, laying, as she reseated herself, a light
+caress on Mrs. Amherst's hand, "I'm sorry to be flattered at your
+expense, but it's not in human nature to resist such an appeal. You
+see," she added, raising her eyes to Amherst, "how sure I am of
+myself--and of _you_, when you've heard me."
+
+"Oh, John is always ready to hear one," his mother murmured innocently.
+
+"Well, I don't know that I shall even ask him to do as much as that--I'm
+so sure, after all, that my suggestion carries its explanation with it."
+
+There was a moment's pause, during which Amherst let his eyes wander
+absently over the dissolving groups on the lawn.
+
+"The suggestion that I should take Bessy to Europe?" He paused again.
+"When--next autumn?"
+
+"No: now--at once. On a long honeymoon."
+
+He frowned slightly at the last word, passing it by to revert to the
+direct answer to his question.
+
+"At once? No--I can't see that the suggestion carries its explanation
+with it."
+
+Mrs. Ansell looked at him hesitatingly. She was conscious of the
+ill-chosen word that still reverberated between them, and the unwonted
+sense of having blundered made her, for the moment, less completely
+mistress of herself.
+
+"Ah, you'll see farther presently--" She rose again, unfurling her lace
+sunshade, as if to give a touch of definiteness to her action. "It's
+not, after all," she added, with a sweet frankness, "a case for
+argument, and still less for persuasion. My reasons are excellent--I
+should insist on putting them to you myself if they were not! But
+they're so good that I can leave you to find them out--and to back them
+up with your own, which will probably be a great deal better."
+
+She summed up with a light nod, which included both Amherst and his
+mother, and turning to descend the verandah steps, waved a signal to Mr.
+Langhope, who was limping disconsolately toward the house.
+
+"What has she been saying to you, mother?" Amherst asked, returning to
+his seat beside his mother.
+
+Mrs. Amherst replied by a shake of her head and a raised forefinger of
+reproval. "Now, Johnny, I won't answer a single question till you smooth
+out those lines between your eyes."
+
+Her son relaxed his frown to smile back at her. "Well, dear, there have
+to be some wrinkles in every family, and as you absolutely refuse to
+take your share--" His eyes rested affectionately on the frosty sparkle
+of her charming old face, which had, in its setting of recovered
+prosperity, the freshness of a sunny winter morning, when the very snow
+gives out a suggestion of warmth.
+
+He remembered how, on the evening of his dismissal from the mills, he
+had paused on the threshold of their sitting-room to watch her a moment
+in the lamplight, and had thought with bitter compunction of the fresh
+wrinkle he was about to add to the lines about her eyes. The three years
+which followed had effaced that wrinkle and veiled the others in a tardy
+bloom of well-being. From the moment of turning her back on Westmore,
+and establishing herself in the pretty little house at Hanaford which
+her son's wife had placed at her disposal, Mrs. Amherst had shed all
+traces of the difficult years; and the fact that his marriage had
+enabled him to set free, before it was too late, the pent-up springs of
+her youthfulness, sometimes seemed to Amherst the clearest gain in his
+life's confused total of profit and loss. It was, at any rate, the sense
+of Bessy's share in the change that softened his voice when he spoke of
+her to his mother.
+
+"Now, then, if I present a sufficiently unruffled surface, let us go
+back to Mrs. Ansell--for I confess that her mysterious reasons are not
+yet apparent to me."
+
+Mrs. Amherst looked deprecatingly at her son. "Maria Ansell is devoted
+to you too, John----"
+
+"Of course she is! It's her _rôle_ to be devoted to
+everybody--especially to her enemies."
+
+"Her enemies?"
+
+"Oh, I didn't intend any personal application. But why does she want me
+to take Bessy abroad?"
+
+"She and Mr. Langhope think that Bessy is not looking well."
+
+Amherst paused, and the frown showed itself for a moment. "What do _you_
+think, mother?"
+
+"I hadn't noticed it myself: Bessy seems to me prettier than ever. But
+perhaps she has less colour--and she complains of not sleeping. Maria
+thinks she still frets over the baby."
+
+Amherst made an impatient gesture. "Is Europe the only panacea?"
+
+"You should consider, John, that Bessy is used to change and amusement.
+I think you sometimes forget that other people haven't your faculty of
+absorbing themselves in a single interest. And Maria says that the new
+doctor at Clifton, whom they seem to think so clever, is very anxious
+that Bessy should go to Europe this summer."
+
+"No doubt; and so is every one else: I mean her father and old
+Tredegar--and your friend Mrs. Ansell not least."
+
+Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright black eyes to his. "Well, then--if they
+all think she needs it----"
+
+"Good heavens, if travel were what she needed!--Why, we've never stopped
+travelling since we married. We've been everywhere on the globe except
+at Hanaford--this is her second visit here in three years!" He rose and
+took a rapid turn across the deserted verandah. "It's not because her
+health requires it--it's to get me away from Westmore, to prevent things
+being done there that ought to be done!" he broke out vehemently,
+halting again before his mother.
+
+The aged pink faded from Mrs. Amherst's face, but her eyes retained
+their lively glitter. "To prevent things being done? What a strange
+thing to say!"
+
+"I shouldn't have said it if I hadn't seen you falling under Mrs.
+Ansell's spell."
+
+His mother had a gesture which showed from whom he had inherited his
+impulsive movements. "Really, my son--!" She folded her hands, and added
+after a pause of self-recovery: "If you mean that I have ever attempted
+to interfere----"
+
+"No, no: but when they pervert things so damnably----"
+
+"John!"
+
+He dropped into his chair again, and pushed the hair from his forehead
+with a groan.
+
+"Well, then--put it that they have as much right to their view as I
+have: I only want you to see what it is. Whenever I try to do anything
+at Westmore--to give a real start to the work that Bessy and I planned
+together--some pretext is found to stop it: to pack us off to the ends
+of the earth, to cry out against reducing her income, to encourage her
+in some new extravagance to which the work at the mills must be
+sacrificed!"
+
+Mrs. Amherst, growing pale under this outbreak, assured herself by a
+nervous backward glance that their privacy was still uninvaded; then her
+eyes returned to her son's face.
+
+"John--are you sure you're not sacrificing your wife to the mills?"
+
+He grew pale in turn, and they looked at each other for a moment without
+speaking.
+
+"You see it as they do, then?" he rejoined with a discouraged sigh.
+
+"I see it as any old woman would, who had my experiences to look back
+to."
+
+"Mother!" he exclaimed.
+
+She smiled composedly. "Do you think I mean that as a reproach? That's
+because men will never understand women--least of all, sons their
+mothers. No real mother wants to come first; she puts her son's career
+ahead of everything. But it's different with a wife--and a wife as much
+in love as Bessy."
+
+Amherst looked away. "I should have thought that was a reason----"
+
+"That would reconcile her to being set aside, to counting only second in
+your plans?"
+
+"They were _her_ plans when we married!"
+
+"Ah, my dear--!" She paused on that, letting her shrewd old glance, and
+all the delicate lines of experience in her face, supply what farther
+comment the ineptitude of his argument invited.
+
+He took the full measure of her meaning, receiving it in a baffled
+silence that continued as she rose and gathered her lace mantle about
+her, as if to signify that their confidences could not, on such an
+occasion, be farther prolonged without singularity. Then he stood up
+also and joined her, resting his hand on hers while she leaned on the
+verandah rail.
+
+"Poor mother! And I've kept you to myself all this time, and spoiled
+your good afternoon."
+
+"No, dear; I was a little tired, and had slipped away to be quiet." She
+paused, and then went on, persuasively giving back his pressure: "I know
+how you feel about doing your duty, John; but now that things are so
+comfortably settled, isn't it a pity to unsettle them?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst had intended, on leaving his mother, to rejoin Bessy, whom he
+could still discern, on the lawn, in absorbed communion with Miss Brent;
+but after what had passed it seemed impossible, for the moment, to
+recover the garden-party tone, and he made his escape through the house
+while a trio of Cuban singers, who formed the crowning number of the
+entertainment, gathered the company in a denser circle about their
+guitars.
+
+As he walked on aimlessly under the deep June shadows of Maplewood
+Avenue his mother's last words formed an ironical accompaniment to his
+thoughts. "Now that things are comfortably settled--" he knew so well
+what that elastic epithet covered! Himself, for instance, ensconced in
+the impenetrable prosperity of his wonderful marriage; herself too
+(unconsciously, dear soul!), so happily tucked away in a cranny of that
+new and spacious life, and no more able to conceive why existing
+conditions should be disturbed than the bird in the eaves understands
+why the house should be torn down. Well--he had learned at last what his
+experience with his poor, valiant, puzzled mother might have taught him:
+that one must never ask from women any view but the personal one, any
+measure of conduct but that of their own pains and pleasures. She,
+indeed, had borne undauntedly enough the brunt of their earlier trials;
+but that was merely because, as she said, the mother's instinct bade her
+heap all her private hopes on the great devouring altar of her son's
+ambition; it was not because she had ever, in the very least, understood
+or sympathized with his aims.
+
+And Bessy--? Perhaps if their little son had lived she might in turn
+have obeyed the world-old instinct of self-effacement--but now! He
+remembered with an intenser self-derision that, not even in the first
+surprise of his passion, had he deluded himself with the idea that Bessy
+Westmore was an exception to her sex. He had argued rather that, being
+only a lovelier product of the common mould, she would abound in the
+adaptabilities and pliancies which the lords of the earth have seen fit
+to cultivate in their companions. She would care for his aims because
+they were his. During their precipitate wooing, and through the first
+brief months of marriage, this profound and original theory had been
+gratifyingly confirmed; then its perfect surface had begun to show a
+flaw. Amherst had always conveniently supposed that the poet's line
+summed up the good woman's rule of ethics: _He for God only, she for God
+in him._ It was for the god in him, surely, that she had loved him: for
+that first glimpse of an "ampler ether, a diviner air" that he had
+brought into her cramped and curtained life. He could never, now, evoke
+that earlier delusion without feeling on its still-tender surface the
+keen edge of Mrs. Ansell's smile. She, no doubt, could have told him at
+any time why Bessy had married him: it was for his _beaux yeux_, as Mrs.
+Ansell would have put it--because he was young, handsome, persecuted, an
+ardent lover if not a subtle one--because Bessy had met him at the fatal
+moment, because her family had opposed the marriage--because, in brief,
+the gods, that day, may have been a little short of amusement. Well,
+they were having their laugh out now--there were moments when high
+heaven seemed to ring with it....
+
+With these thoughts at his heels Amherst strode on, overtaken now and
+again by the wheels of departing guests from the garden-party, and
+knowing, as they passed him, what was in their minds--envy of his
+success, admiration of his cleverness in achieving it, and a little
+half-contemptuous pity for his wife, who, with her wealth and looks,
+might have done so much better. Certainly, if the case could have been
+put to Hanaford--the Hanaford of the Gaines garden-party--it would have
+sided with Bessy to a voice. And how much justice was there in what he
+felt would have been the unanimous verdict of her class? Was his mother
+right in hinting that he was sacrificing Bessy to the mills? But the
+mills _were_ Bessy--at least he had thought so when he married her!
+They were her particular form of contact with life, the expression of
+her relation to her fellow-men, her pretext, her opportunity--unless
+they were merely a vast purse in which to plunge for her pin-money! He
+had fancied it would rest with him to determine from which of these
+stand-points she should view Westmore; and at the outset she had
+enthusiastically viewed it from his. In her eager adoption of his ideas
+she had made a pet of the mills, organizing the Mothers' Club, laying
+out a recreation-ground on the Hopewood property, and playing with
+pretty plans in water-colour for the Emergency Hospital and the building
+which was to contain the night-schools, library and gymnasium; but even
+these minor projects--which he had urged her to take up as a means of
+learning their essential dependence on his larger scheme--were soon to
+be set aside by obstacles of a material order. Bessy always wanted
+money--not a great deal, but, as she reasonably put it, "enough"--and
+who was to blame if her father and Mr. Tredegar, each in his different
+capacity, felt obliged to point out that every philanthropic outlay at
+Westmore must entail a corresponding reduction in her income? Perhaps if
+she could have been oftener at Hanaford these arguments would have been
+counteracted, for she was tender-hearted, and prompt to relieve such
+suffering as she saw about her; but her imagination was not active, and
+it was easy for her to forget painful sights when they were not under
+her eye. This was perhaps--half-consciously--one of the reasons why she
+avoided Hanaford; why, as Amherst exclaimed, they had been everywhere
+since their marriage but to the place where their obligations called
+them. There had, at any rate, always been some good excuse for not
+returning there, and consequently for postponing the work of improvement
+which, it was generally felt, her husband could not fitly begin till she
+_had_ returned and gone over the ground with him. After their marriage,
+and especially in view of the comment excited by that romantic incident,
+it was impossible not to yield to her wish that they should go abroad
+for a few months; then, before her confinement, the doctors had exacted
+that she should be spared all fatigue and worry; and after the baby's
+death Amherst had felt with her too tenderly to venture an immediate
+return to unwelcome questions.
+
+For by this time it had become clear to him that such questions were,
+and always would be, unwelcome to her. As the easiest means of escaping
+them, she had once more dismissed the whole problem to the vague and
+tiresome sphere of "business," whence he had succeeded in detaching it
+for a moment in the early days of their union. Her first husband--poor
+unappreciated Westmore!--had always spared her the boredom of
+"business," and Halford Gaines and Mr. Tredegar were ready to show her
+the same consideration; it was part of the modern code of chivalry that
+lovely woman should not be bothered about ways and means. But Bessy was
+too much the wife--and the wife in love--to consent that her husband's
+views on the management of the mills should be totally disregarded.
+Precisely because her advisers looked unfavourably on his intervention,
+she felt bound--if only in defense of her illusions--to maintain and
+emphasize it. The mills were, in fact, the official "platform" on which
+she had married: Amherst's devoted _rôle_ at Westmore had justified the
+unconventionality of the step. And so she was committed--the more
+helplessly for her dense misintelligence of both sides of the
+question--to the policy of conciliating the opposing influences which
+had so uncomfortably chosen to fight out their case on the field of her
+poor little existence: theoretically siding with her husband, but
+surreptitiously, as he well knew, giving aid and comfort to the enemy,
+who were really defending her own cause.
+
+All this Amherst saw with that cruel insight which had replaced his
+former blindness. He was, in truth, more ashamed of the insight than of
+the blindness: it seemed to him horribly cold-blooded to be thus
+analyzing, after two years of marriage, the source of his wife's
+inconsistencies. And, partly for this reason, he had put off from month
+to month the final question of the future management of the mills, and
+of the radical changes to be made there if his system were to prevail.
+But the time had come when, if Bessy had to turn to Westmore for the
+justification of her marriage, he had even more need of calling upon it
+for the same service. He had not, assuredly, married her because of
+Westmore; but he would scarcely have contemplated marriage with a rich
+woman unless the source of her wealth had offered him some such
+opportunity as Westmore presented. His special training, and the natural
+bent of his mind, qualified him, in what had once seemed a predestined
+manner, to help Bessy to use her power nobly, for her own uplifting as
+well as for that of Westmore; and so the mills became, incongruously
+enough, the plank of safety to which both clung in their sense of
+impending disaster.
+
+It was not that Amherst feared the temptation to idleness if this outlet
+for his activity were cut off. He had long since found that the luxury
+with which his wife surrounded him merely quickened his natural bent for
+hard work and hard fare. He recalled with a touch of bitterness how he
+had once regretted having separated himself from his mother's class, and
+how seductive for a moment, to both mind and senses, that other life had
+appeared. Well--he knew it now, and it had neither charm nor peril for
+him. Capua must have been a dull place to one who had once drunk the joy
+of battle. What he dreaded was not that he should learn to love the
+life of ease, but that he should grow to loathe it uncontrollably, as
+the symbol of his mental and spiritual bondage. And Westmore was his
+safety-valve, his refuge--if he were cut off from Westmore what remained
+to him? It was not only the work he had found to his hand, but the one
+work for which his hand was fitted. It was his life that he was fighting
+for in insisting that now at last, before the close of this
+long-deferred visit to Hanaford, the question of the mills should be
+faced and settled. He had made that clear to Bessy, in a scene he still
+shrank from recalling; for it was of the essence of his somewhat
+unbending integrity that he would not trick her into a confused
+surrender to the personal influence he still possessed over her, but
+must seek to convince her by the tedious process of argument and
+exposition, against which she knew no defense but tears and petulance.
+But he had, at any rate, gained her consent to his setting forth his
+views at the meeting of directors the next morning; and meanwhile he had
+meant to be extraordinarily patient and reasonable with her, till the
+hint of Mrs. Ansell's stratagem produced in him a fresh reaction of
+distrust.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+THAT evening when dinner ended, Mrs. Ansell, with a glance through the
+tall dining-room windows, had suggested to Bessy that it would be
+pleasanter to take coffee on the verandah; but Amherst detained his wife
+with a glance.
+
+"I should like Bessy to stay," he said.
+
+The dining-room being on the cool side the house, with a refreshing
+outlook on the garden, the men preferred to smoke there rather than in
+the stuffily-draped Oriental apartment destined to such rites; and Bessy
+Amherst, with a faint sigh, sank back into her seat, while Mrs. Ansell
+drifted out through one of the open windows.
+
+The men surrounding Richard Westmore's table were the same who nearly
+three years earlier had gathered in his house for the same purpose: the
+discussion of conditions at the mills. The only perceptible change in
+the relation to each other of the persons composing this group was that
+John Amherst was now the host of the other two, instead of being a
+subordinate called in for cross-examination; but he was so indifferent,
+or at least so heedless, a host--so forgetful, for instance, of Mr.
+Tredegar's preference for a "light" cigar, and of Mr. Langhope's
+feelings on the duty of making the Westmore madeira circulate with the
+sun--that the change was manifest only in his evening-dress, and in the
+fact of his sitting at the foot of the table.
+
+If Amherst was conscious of the contrast thus implied, it was only as a
+restriction on his freedom. As far as the welfare of Westmore was
+concerned he would rather have stood before his companions as the
+assistant manager of the mills than as the husband of their owner; and
+it seemed to him, as he looked back, that he had done very little with
+the opportunity which looked so great in the light of his present
+restrictions. What he _had_ done with it--the use to which, as
+unfriendly critics might insinuate, he had so adroitly put it--had
+landed him, ironically enough, in the ugly _impasse_ of a situation from
+which no issue seemed possible without some wasteful sacrifice of
+feeling.
+
+His wife's feelings, for example, were already revealing themselves in
+an impatient play of her fan that made her father presently lean forward
+to suggest: "If we men are to talk shop, is it necessary to keep Bessy
+in this hot room?"
+
+Amherst rose and opened the window behind his wife's chair.
+
+"There's a breeze from the west--the room will be cooler now," he said,
+returning to his seat.
+
+"Oh, I don't mind--" Bessy murmured, in a tone intended to give her
+companions the full measure of what she was being called on to endure.
+
+Mr. Tredegar coughed slightly. "May I trouble you for that other box of
+cigars, Amherst? No, _not_ the Cabañas." Bessy rose and handed him the
+box on which his glance significantly rested. "Ah, thank you, my dear. I
+was about to ask," he continued, looking about for the cigar-lighter,
+which flamed unheeded at Amherst's elbow, "what special purpose will be
+served by a preliminary review of the questions to be discussed
+tomorrow."
+
+"Ah--exactly," murmured Mr. Langhope. "The madeira, my dear John?
+No--ah--_please_--to the left!"
+
+Amherst impatiently reversed the direction in which he had set the
+precious vessel moving, and turned to Mr. Tredegar, who was
+conspicuously lighting his cigar with a match extracted from his
+waist-coat pocket.
+
+"The purpose is to define my position in the matter; and I prefer that
+Bessy should do this with your help rather than with mine."
+
+Mr. Tredegar surveyed his cigar through drooping lids, as though the
+question propounded by Amherst were perched on its tip.
+
+"Is not your position naturally involved in and defined by hers? You
+will excuse my saying that--technically speaking, of course--I cannot
+distinctly conceive of it as having any separate existence."
+
+Mr. Tredegar spoke with the deliberate mildness that was regarded as his
+most effective weapon at the bar, since it was likely to abash those
+who were too intelligent to be propitiated by it.
+
+"Certainly it is involved in hers," Amherst agreed; "but how far that
+defines it is just what I have waited till now to find out."
+
+Bessy at this point recalled her presence by a restless turn of her
+graceful person, and her father, with an affectionate glance at her,
+interposed amicably: "But surely--according to old-fashioned ideas--it
+implies identity of interests?"
+
+"Yes; but whose interests?" Amherst asked.
+
+"Why--your wife's, man! She owns the mills."
+
+Amherst hesitated. "I would rather talk of my wife's interest in the
+mills than of her interests there; but we'll keep to the plural if you
+prefer it. Personally, I believe the terms should be interchangeable in
+the conduct of such a business."
+
+"Ah--I'm glad to hear that," said Mr. Tredegar quickly, "since it's
+precisely the view we all take."
+
+Amherst's colour rose. "Definitions are ambiguous," he said. "Before you
+adopt mine, perhaps I had better develop it a little farther. What I
+mean is, that Bessy's interests in Westmore should be regulated by her
+interest in it--in its welfare as a social body, aside from its success
+as a commercial enterprise. If we agree on this definition, we are at
+one as to the other: namely that my relation to the matter is defined by
+hers."
+
+He paused a moment, as if to give his wife time to contribute some sign
+of assent and encouragement; but she maintained a puzzled silence and he
+went on: "There is nothing new in this. I have tried to make Bessy
+understand from the beginning what obligations I thought the ownership
+of Westmore entailed, and how I hoped to help her fulfill them; but ever
+since our marriage all definite discussion of the subject has been put
+off for one cause or another, and that is my reason for urging that it
+should be brought up at the directors' meeting tomorrow."
+
+There was another pause, during which Bessy glanced tentatively at Mr.
+Tredegar, and then said, with a lovely rise of colour: "But, John, I
+sometimes think you forget how much has been done at Westmore--the
+Mothers' Club, and the play-ground, and all--in the way of carrying out
+your ideas."
+
+Mr. Tredegar discreetly dropped his glance to his cigar, and Mr.
+Langhope sounded an irrepressible note of approval and encouragement.
+
+Amherst smiled. "No, I have not forgotten; and I am grateful to you for
+giving my ideas a trial. But what has been done hitherto is purely
+superficial." Bessy's eyes clouded, and he added hastily: "Don't think I
+undervalue it for that reason--heaven knows the surface of life needs
+improving! But it's like picking flowers and sticking them in the ground
+to make a garden--unless you transplant the flower with its roots, and
+prepare the soil to receive it, your garden will be faded tomorrow. No
+radical changes have yet been made at Westmore; and it is of radical
+changes that I want to speak."
+
+Bessy's look grew more pained, and Mr. Langhope exclaimed with unwonted
+irascibility: "Upon my soul, Amherst, the tone you take about what your
+wife has done doesn't strike me as the likeliest way of encouraging her
+to do more!"
+
+"I don't want to encourage her to do more on such a basis--the sooner
+she sees the futility of it the better for Westmore!"
+
+"The futility--?" Bessy broke out, with a flutter of tears in her voice;
+but before her father could intervene Mr. Tredegar had raised his hand
+with the gesture of one accustomed to wield the gavel.
+
+"My dear child, I see Amherst's point, and it is best, as he says, that
+you should see it too. What he desires, as I understand it, is the
+complete reconstruction of the present state of things at Westmore; and
+he is right in saying that all your good works there--night-schools, and
+nursery, and so forth--leave that issue untouched."
+
+A smile quivered under Mr. Langhope's moustache. He and Amherst both
+knew that Mr. Tredegar's feint of recognizing the justice of his
+adversary's claim was merely the first step to annihilating it; but
+Bessy could never be made to understand this, and always felt herself
+deserted and betrayed when any side but her own was given a hearing.
+
+"I'm sorry if all I have tried to do at Westmore is useless--but I
+suppose I shall never understand business," she murmured, vainly seeking
+consolation in her father's eye.
+
+"This is not business," Amherst broke in. "It's the question of your
+personal relation to the people there--the last thing that business
+considers."
+
+Mr. Langhope uttered an impatient exclamation. "I wish to heaven the
+owner of the mills had made it clear just what that relation was to be!"
+
+"I think he did, sir," Amherst answered steadily, "in leaving his wife
+the unrestricted control of the property."
+
+He had reddened under Mr. Langhope's thrust, but his voice betrayed no
+irritation, and Bessy rewarded him with an unexpected beam of sympathy:
+she was always up in arms at the least sign of his being treated as an
+intruder.
+
+"I am sure, papa," she said, a little tremulously, "that poor Richard,
+though he knew I was not clever, felt he could trust me to take the best
+advice----"
+
+"Ah, that's all we ask of you, my child!" her father sighed, while Mr.
+Tredegar drily interposed: "We are merely losing time by this
+digression. Let me suggest that Amherst should give us an idea of the
+changes he wishes to make at Westmore."
+
+Amherst, as he turned to answer, remembered with what ardent faith in
+his powers of persuasion he had responded to the same appeal three years
+earlier. He had thought then that all his cause needed was a hearing;
+now he knew that the practical man's readiness to let the idealist talk
+corresponds with the busy parent's permission to destructive infancy to
+"run out and play." They would let him state his case to the four
+corners of the earth--if only he did not expect them to act on it! It
+was their policy to let him exhaust himself in argument and exhortation,
+to listen to him so politely and patiently that if he failed to enforce
+his ideas it should not be for lack of opportunity to expound them....
+And the alternative struck him as hardly less to be feared. Supposing
+that the incredible happened, that his reasons prevailed with his wife,
+and, through her, with the others--at what cost would the victory be
+won? Would Bessy ever forgive him for winning it? And what would his
+situation be, if it left him in control of Westmore but estranged from
+his wife?
+
+He recalled suddenly a phrase he had used that afternoon to the
+dark-eyed girl at the garden-party: "What risks we run when we scramble
+into the chariot of the gods!" And at the same instant he heard her
+retort, and saw her fine gesture of defiance. How could he ever have
+doubted that the thing was worth doing at whatever cost? Something in
+him--some secret lurking element of weakness and evasion--shrank out of
+sight in the light of her question: "Do _you_ act on that?" and the "God
+forbid!" he had instantly flashed back to her. He turned to Mr. Tredegar
+with his answer.
+
+Amherst knew that any large theoretical exposition of the case would be
+as much wasted on the two men as on his wife. To gain his point he must
+take only one step at a time, and it seemed to him that the first thing
+needed at Westmore was that the hands should work and live under
+healthier conditions. To attain this, two important changes were
+necessary: the floor-space of the mills must be enlarged, and the
+company must cease to rent out tenements, and give the operatives the
+opportunity to buy land for themselves. Both these changes involved the
+upheaval of the existing order. Whenever the Westmore mills had been
+enlarged, it had been for the sole purpose of increasing the revenues of
+the company; and now Amherst asked that these revenues should be
+materially and permanently reduced. As to the suppression of the company
+tenement, such a measure struck at the roots of the baneful paternalism
+which was choking out every germ of initiative in the workman. Once the
+operatives had room to work in, and the hope of homes of their own to
+go to when work was over, Amherst was willing to trust to time for the
+satisfaction of their other needs. He believed that a sounder
+understanding of these needs would develop on both sides the moment the
+employers proved their good faith by the deliberate and permanent
+sacrifice of excessive gain to the well-being of the employed; and once
+the two had learned to regard each other not as antagonists but as
+collaborators, a long step would have been taken toward a readjustment
+of the whole industrial relation. In regard to general and distant
+results, Amherst tried not to be too sanguine, even in his own thoughts.
+His aim was to remedy the abuse nearest at hand, in the hope of thus
+getting gradually closer to the central evil; and, had his action been
+unhampered, he would still have preferred the longer and more circuitous
+path of practical experiment to the sweeping adoption of a new
+industrial system.
+
+But his demands, moderate as they were, assumed in his hearers the
+consciousness of a moral claim superior to the obligation of making
+one's business "pay"; and it was the futility of this assumption that
+chilled the arguments on his lips, since in the orthodox creed of the
+business world it was a weakness and not a strength to be content with
+five per cent where ten was obtainable. Business was one thing,
+philanthropy another; and the enthusiasts who tried combining them were
+usually reduced, after a brief flight, to paying fifty cents on the
+dollar, and handing over their stock to a promoter presumably unhampered
+by humanitarian ideals.
+
+Amherst knew that this was the answer with which his plea would be met;
+knew, moreover, that the plea was given a hearing simply because his
+judges deemed it so pitiably easy to refute. But the knowledge, once he
+had begun to speak, fanned his argument to a white heat of pleading,
+since, with failure so plainly ahead, small concessions and compromises
+were not worth making. Reason would be wasted on all; but eloquence
+might at least prevail with Bessy....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When, late that night, he went upstairs after long pacings of the
+garden, he was surprised to see a light in her room. She was not given
+to midnight study, and fearing that she might be ill he knocked at her
+door. There was no answer, and after a short pause he turned the handle
+and entered.
+
+In the great canopied Westmore couch, her arms flung upward and her
+hands clasped beneath her head, she lay staring fretfully at the globe
+of electric light which hung from the centre of the embossed and gilded
+ceiling. Seen thus, with the soft curves of throat and arms revealed,
+and her face childishly set in a cloud of loosened hair, she looked no
+older than Cicely--and, like Cicely, inaccessible to grown-up arguments
+and the stronger logic of experience.
+
+It was a trick of hers, in such moods, to ignore any attempt to attract
+her notice; and Amherst was prepared for her remaining motionless as he
+paused on the threshold and then advanced toward the middle of the room.
+There had been a time when he would have been exasperated by her
+pretense of not seeing him, but a deep weariness of spirit now dulled
+him to these surface pricks.
+
+"I was afraid you were not well when I saw the light burning," he began.
+
+"Thank you--I am quite well," she answered in a colourless voice,
+without turning her head.
+
+"Shall I put it out, then? You can't sleep with such a glare in your
+eyes."
+
+"I should not sleep at any rate; and I hate to lie awake in the dark."
+
+"Why shouldn't you sleep?" He moved nearer, looking down compassionately
+on her perturbed face and struggling lips.
+
+She lay silent a moment; then she faltered out: "B--because I'm so
+unhappy!"
+
+The pretense of indifference was swept away by a gush of childish sobs
+as she flung over on her side and buried her face in the embroidered
+pillows.
+
+Amherst, bending down, laid a quieting hand on her shoulder. "Bessy----"
+
+She sobbed on.
+
+He seated himself silently in the arm-chair beside the bed, and kept his
+soothing hold on her shoulder. The time had come when he went through
+all these accustomed acts of pacification as mechanically as a nurse
+soothing a fretful child. And once he had thought her weeping eloquent!
+He looked about him at the spacious room, with its heavy hangings of
+damask and the thick velvet carpet which stifled his steps. Everywhere
+were the graceful tokens of her presence--the vast lace-draped
+toilet-table strewn with silver and crystal, the embroidered muslin
+cushions heaped on the lounge, the little rose-lined slippers she had
+just put off, the lace wrapper, with a scent of violets in its folds,
+which he had pushed aside when he sat down beside her; and he remembered
+how full of a mysterious and intimate charm these things had once
+appeared to him. It was characteristic that the remembrance made him
+more patient with her now. Perhaps, after all, it was his failure that
+she was crying over....
+
+"Don't be unhappy. You decided as seemed best to you," he said.
+
+She pressed her handkerchief against her lips, still keeping her head
+averted. "But I hate all these arguments and disputes. Why should you
+unsettle everything?" she murmured.
+
+His mother's words! Involuntarily he removed his hand from her
+shoulder, though he still remained seated by the bed.
+
+"You are right. I see the uselessness of it," he assented, with an
+uncontrollable note of irony.
+
+She turned her head at the tone, and fixed her plaintive brimming eyes
+on him. "You _are_ angry with me!"
+
+"Was that troubling you?" He leaned forward again, with compassion in
+his face. _Sancta simplicitas!_ was the thought within him.
+
+"I am not angry," he went on; "be reasonable and try to sleep."
+
+She started upright, the light masses of her hair floating about her
+like silken sea-weed lifted on an invisible tide. "Don't talk like that!
+I can't endure to be humoured like a baby. I am unhappy because I can't
+see why all these wretched questions should be dragged into our life. I
+hate to have you always disagreeing with Mr. Tredegar, who is so clever
+and has so much experience; and yet I hate to see you give way to him,
+because that makes it appear as if...as if...."
+
+"He didn't care a straw for my ideas?" Amherst smiled. "Well, he
+doesn't--and I never dreamed of making him. So don't worry about that
+either."
+
+"You never dreamed of making him care for your ideas? But then why do
+you----"
+
+"Why do I go on setting them forth at such great length?" Amherst smiled
+again. "To convince you--that's my only ambition."
+
+She stared at him, shaking her head back to toss a loose lock from her
+puzzled eyes. A tear still shone on her lashes, but with the motion it
+fell and trembled down her cheek.
+
+"To convince _me_? But you know I am so ignorant of such things."
+
+"Most women are."
+
+"I never pretended to understand anything about--economics, or whatever
+you call it."
+
+"No."
+
+"Then how----"
+
+He turned and looked at her gently. "I thought you might have begun to
+understand something about _me_."
+
+"About you?" The colour flowered softly under her clear skin.
+
+"About what my ideas on such subjects were likely to be worth--judging
+from what you know of me in other respects." He paused and glanced away
+from her. "Well," he concluded deliberately, "I suppose I've had my
+answer tonight."
+
+"Oh, John----!"
+
+He rose and wandered across the room, pausing a moment to finger
+absently the trinkets on the dressing-table. The act recalled with a
+curious vividness certain dulled sensations of their first days
+together, when to handle and examine these frail little accessories of
+her toilet had been part of the wonder and amusement of his new
+existence. He could still hear her laugh as she leaned over him,
+watching his mystified look in the glass, till their reflected eyes met
+there and drew down her lips to his. He laid down the fragrant
+powder-puff he had been turning slowly between his fingers, and moved
+back toward the bed. In the interval he had reached a decision.
+
+"Well--isn't it natural that I should think so?" he began again, as he
+stood beside her. "When we married I never expected you to care or know
+much about economics. It isn't a quality a man usually chooses his wife
+for. But I had a fancy--perhaps it shows my conceit--that when we had
+lived together a year or two, and you'd found out what kind of a fellow
+I was in other ways--ways any woman can judge of--I had a fancy that you
+might take my opinions on faith when it came to my own special
+business--the thing I'm generally supposed to know about."
+
+He knew that he was touching a sensitive chord, for Bessy had to the
+full her sex's pride of possessorship. He was human and faulty till
+others criticized him--then he became a god. But in this case a
+conflicting influence restrained her from complete response to his
+appeal.
+
+"I _do_ feel sure you know--about the treatment of the hands and all
+that; but you said yourself once--the first time we ever talked about
+Westmore--that the business part was different----"
+
+Here it was again, the ancient ineradicable belief in the separable body
+and soul! Even an industrial organization was supposed to be subject to
+the old theological distinction, and Bessy was ready to co-operate with
+her husband in the emancipation of Westmore's spiritual part if only its
+body remained under the law.
+
+Amherst controlled his impatience, as it was always easy for him to do
+when he had fixed on a definite line of conduct.
+
+"It was my situation that was different; not what you call the business
+part. That is inextricably bound up with the treatment of the hands. If
+I am to have anything to do with the mills now I can deal with them only
+as your representative; and as such I am bound to take in the whole
+question."
+
+Bessy's face clouded: was he going into it all again? But he read her
+look and went on reassuringly: "That was what I meant by saying that I
+hoped you would take me on faith. If I want the welfare of Westmore it's
+above all, I believe, because I want Westmore to see you as _I_ do--as
+the dispenser of happiness, who could not endure to benefit by any wrong
+or injustice to others."
+
+"Of course, of course I don't want to do them injustice!"
+
+"Well, then----"
+
+He had seated himself beside her again, clasping in his the hand with
+which she was fretting the lace-edged sheet. He felt her restless
+fingers surrender slowly, and her eyes turned to him in appeal.
+
+"But I care for what people say of you too! And you know--it's horrid,
+but one must consider it--if they say you're spending my money
+imprudently...." The blood rose to her neck and face. "I don't mind for
+myself...even if I have to give up as many things as papa and Mr.
+Tredegar think...but there is Cicely...and if people said...."
+
+"If people said I was spending Cicely's money on improving the condition
+of the people to whose work she will some day owe all her wealth--"
+Amherst paused: "Well, I would rather hear that said of me than any
+other thing I can think of, except one."
+
+"Except what?"
+
+"That I was doing it with her mother's help and approval."
+
+She drew a long tremulous sigh: he knew it was always a relief to her to
+have him assert himself strongly. But a residue of resistance still
+clouded her mind.
+
+"I should always want to help you, of course; but if Mr. Tredegar and
+Halford Gaines think your plan unbusinesslike----"
+
+"Mr. Tredegar and Halford Gaines are certain to think it so. And that is
+why I said, just now, that it comes, in the end, to your choosing
+between us; taking them on experience or taking me on faith."
+
+She looked at him wistfully. "Of course I should expect to give up
+things.... You wouldn't want me to live here?"
+
+"I should not ask you to," he said, half-smiling.
+
+"I suppose there would be a good many things we couldn't do----"
+
+"You would certainly have less money for a number of years; after that,
+I believe you would have more rather than less; but I should not want
+you to think that, beyond a reasonable point, the prosperity of the
+mills was ever to be measured by your dividends."
+
+"No." She leaned back wearily among the pillows. "I suppose, for
+instance, we should have to give up Europe this summer----?"
+
+Here at last was the bottom of her thought! It was always on the
+immediate pleasure that her soul hung: she had not enough imagination to
+look beyond, even in the projecting of her own desires. And it was on
+his knowledge of this limitation that Amherst had deliberately built.
+
+"I don't see how you could go to Europe," he said.
+
+"The doctor thinks I need it," she faltered.
+
+"In that case, of course--" He stood up, not abruptly, or with any show
+of irritation, but as if accepting this as her final answer. "What you
+need most, in the meantime, is a little sleep," he said. "I will tell
+your maid not to disturb you in the morning." He had returned to his
+soothing way of speech, as though definitely resigned to the inutility
+of farther argument. "And I will say goodbye now," he continued,
+"because I shall probably take an early train, before you wake----"
+
+She sat up with a start. "An early train? Why, where are you going?"
+
+"I must go to Chicago some time this month, and as I shall not be wanted
+here tomorrow I might as well run out there at once, and join you next
+week at Lynbrook."
+
+Bessy had grown pale. "But I don't understand----"
+
+Their eyes met. "Can't you understand that I am human enough to prefer,
+under the circumstances, not being present at tomorrow's meeting?" he
+said with a dry laugh.
+
+She sank back with a moan of discouragement, turning her face away as he
+began to move toward his room.
+
+"Shall I put the light out?" he asked, pausing with his hand on the
+electric button.
+
+"Yes, please."
+
+He pushed in the button and walked on, guided through the obscurity by
+the line of light under his door. As he reached the threshold he heard a
+little choking cry.
+
+"John--oh, John!"
+
+He paused.
+
+"I can't _bear_ it!" The sobs increased.
+
+"Bear what?"
+
+"That you should hate me----"
+
+"Don't be foolish," he said, groping for his door-handle.
+
+"But you do hate me--and I deserve it!"
+
+"Nonsense, dear. Try to sleep."
+
+"I can't sleep till you've forgiven me. Say you don't hate me! I'll do
+anything...only say you don't hate me!"
+
+He stood still a moment, thinking; then he turned back, and made his way
+across the room to her side. As he sat down beside her, he felt her arms
+reach for his neck and her wet face press itself against his cheek.
+
+"I'll do anything..." she sobbed; and in the darkness he held her to him
+and hated his victory.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+MRS. ANSELL was engaged in what she called picking up threads. She had
+been abroad for the summer--had, in, fact, transferred herself but a few
+hours earlier from her returning steamer to the little station at
+Lynbrook--and was now, in the bright September afternoon, which left her
+in sole possession of the terrace of Lynbrook House, using that pleasant
+eminence as a point of observation from which to gather up some of the
+loose ends of history dropped at her departure.
+
+It might have been thought that the actual scene out-spread below
+her--the descending gardens, the tennis-courts, the farm-lands sloping
+away to the blue sea-like shimmer of the Hempstead plains--offered, at
+the moment, little material for her purpose; but that was to view them
+with a superficial eye. Mrs. Ansell's trained gaze was, for example,
+greatly enlightened by the fact that the tennis-courts were fringed by a
+group of people indolently watchful of the figures agitating themselves
+about the nets; and that, as she turned her head toward the entrance
+avenue, the receding view of a station omnibus, followed by a
+luggage-cart, announced that more guests were to be added to those who
+had almost taxed to its limits the expansibility of the luncheon-table.
+
+All this, to the initiated eye, was full of suggestion; but its
+significance was as nothing to that presented by the approach of two
+figures which, as Mrs. Ansell watched, detached themselves from the
+cluster about the tennis-ground and struck, obliquely and at a desultory
+pace, across the lawn toward the terrace. The figures--those of a slight
+young man with stooping shoulders, and of a lady equally youthful but
+slenderly erect--moved forward in absorbed communion, as if unconscious
+of their surroundings and indefinite as to their direction, till, on the
+brink of the wide grass terrace just below their observer's parapet,
+they paused a moment and faced each other in closer speech. This
+interchange of words, though brief in measure of time, lasted long
+enough to add a vivid strand to Mrs. Ansell's thickening skein; then, on
+a gesture of the lady's, and without signs of formal leave-taking, the
+young man struck into a path which regained the entrance avenue, while
+his companion, quickening her pace, crossed the grass terrace and
+mounted the wide stone steps sweeping up to the house.
+
+These brought her out on the upper terrace a few yards from Mrs.
+Ansell's post, and exposed her, unprepared, to the full beam of welcome
+which that lady's rapid advance threw like a searchlight across her
+path.
+
+"Dear Miss Brent! I was just wondering how it was that I hadn't seen you
+before." Mrs. Ansell, as she spoke, drew the girl's hand into a long
+soft clasp which served to keep them confronted while she delicately
+groped for whatever thread the encounter seemed to proffer.
+
+Justine made no attempt to evade the scrutiny to which she found herself
+exposed; she merely released her hand by a movement instinctively
+evasive of the mechanical endearment, explaining, with a smile that
+softened the gesture: "I was out with Cicely when you arrived. We've
+just come in."
+
+"The dear child! I haven't seen her either." Mrs. Ansell continued to
+bestow upon the speaker's clear dark face an intensity of attention in
+which, for the moment, Cicely had no perceptible share. "I hear you are
+teaching her botany, and all kinds of wonderful things."
+
+Justine smiled again. "I am trying to teach her to wonder: that is the
+hardest faculty to cultivate in the modern child."
+
+"Yes--I suppose so; in myself," Mrs. Ansell admitted with a responsive
+brightness, "I find it develops with age. The world is a remarkable
+place." She threw this off absently, as though leaving Miss Brent to
+apply it either to the inorganic phenomena with which Cicely was
+supposed to be occupied, or to those subtler manifestations that engaged
+her own attention.
+
+"It's a great thing," she continued, "for Bessy to have had your
+help--for Cicely, and for herself too. There is so much that I want you
+to tell me about her. As an old friend I want the benefit of your
+fresher eye."
+
+"About Bessy?" Justine hesitated, letting her glance drift to the
+distant group still anchored about the tennis-nets. "Don't you find her
+looking better?"
+
+"Than when I left? So much so that I was unduly disturbed, just now, by
+seeing that clever little doctor--it _was_ he, wasn't it, who came up
+the lawn with you?"
+
+"Dr. Wyant? Yes." Miss Brent hesitated again. "But he merely
+called--with a message."
+
+"Not professionally? _Tant mieux!_ The truth is, I was anxious about
+Bessy when I left--I thought she ought to have gone abroad for a change.
+But, as it turns out, her little excursion with you did as well."
+
+"I think she only needed rest. Perhaps her six weeks in the Adirondacks
+were better than Europe."
+
+"Ah, under _your_ care--that made them better!" Mrs. Ansell in turn
+hesitated, the lines of her face melting and changing as if a rapid
+stage-hand had shifted them. When she spoke again they were as open as a
+public square, but also as destitute of personal significance, as flat
+and smooth as the painted drop before the real scene it hides.
+
+"I have always thought that Bessy, for all her health and activity,
+needs as much care as Cicely--the kind of care a clever friend can give.
+She is so wasteful of her strength and her nerves, and so unwilling to
+listen to reason. Poor Dick Westmore watched over her as if she were a
+baby; but perhaps Mr. Amherst, who must have been used to such a
+different type of woman, doesn't realize...and then he's so little
+here...." The drop was lit up by a smile that seemed to make it more
+impenetrable. "As an old friend I can't help telling you how much I hope
+she is to have you with her for a long time--a long, long time."
+
+Miss Brent bent her head in slight acknowledgment of the tribute. "Oh,
+soon she will not need any care----"
+
+"My dear Miss Brent, she will always need it!" Mrs. Ansell made a
+movement inviting the young girl to share the bench from which, at the
+latter's approach, she had risen. "But perhaps there is not enough in
+such a life to satisfy your professional energies."
+
+She seated herself, and after an imperceptible pause Justine sank into
+the seat beside her. "I am very glad, just now, to give my energies a
+holiday," she said, leaning back with a little sigh of retrospective
+weariness.
+
+"You are tired too? Bessy wrote me you had been quite used up by a
+trying case after we saw you at Hanaford."
+
+Miss Brent smiled. "When a nurse is fit for work she calls a trying case
+a 'beautiful' one."
+
+"But meanwhile--?" Mrs. Ansell shone on her with elder-sisterly
+solicitude. "Meanwhile, why not stay on with Cicely--above all, with
+Bessy? Surely she's a 'beautiful' case too."
+
+"Isn't she?" Justine laughingly agreed.
+
+"And if you want to be tried--" Mrs. Ansell swept the scene with a
+slight lift of her philosophic shoulders--"you'll find there are trials
+enough everywhere."
+
+Her companion started up with a glance at the small watch on her breast.
+"One of them is that it's already after four, and that I must see that
+tea is sent down to the tennis-ground, and the new arrivals looked
+after."
+
+"I saw the omnibus on its way to the station. Are many more people
+coming?"
+
+"Five or six, I believe. The house is usually full for Sunday."
+
+Mrs. Ansell made a slight motion to detain her. "And when is Mr. Amherst
+expected?"
+
+Miss Brent's pale cheek seemed to take on a darker tone of ivory, and
+her glance dropped from her companion's face to the vivid stretch of
+gardens at their feet. "Bessy has not told me," she said.
+
+"Ah--" the older woman rejoined, looking also toward the gardens, as if
+to intercept Miss Brent's glance in its flight. The latter stood still a
+moment, with the appearance of not wishing to evade whatever else her
+companion might have to say; then she moved away, entering the house by
+one window just as Mr. Langhope emerged from it by another.
+
+The sound of his stick tapping across the bricks roused Mrs. Ansell from
+her musings, but she showed her sense of his presence simply by
+returning to the bench she had just left; and accepting this mute
+invitation, Mr. Langhope crossed the terrace and seated himself at her
+side.
+
+When he had done so they continued to look at each other without
+speaking, after the manner of old friends possessed of occult means of
+communication; and as the result of this inward colloquy Mr. Langhope at
+length said: "Well, what do you make of it?"
+
+"What do _you_?" she rejoined, turning full upon him a face so released
+from its usual defences and disguises that it looked at once older and
+more simple than the countenance she presented to the world.
+
+Mr. Langhope waved a deprecating hand. "I want your fresher
+impressions."
+
+"That's what I just now said to Miss Brent."
+
+"You've been talking to Miss Brent?"
+
+"Only a flying word--she had to go and look after the new arrivals."
+
+Mr. Langhope's attention deepened. "Well, what did you say to her?"
+
+"Wouldn't you rather hear what she said to _me_?"
+
+He smiled. "A good cross-examiner always gets the answers he wants. Let
+me hear your side, and I shall know hers."
+
+"I should say that applied only to stupid cross-examiners; or to those
+who have stupid subjects to deal with. And Miss Brent is not stupid, you
+know."
+
+"Far from it! What else do you make out?"
+
+"I make out that she's in possession."
+
+"Here?"
+
+"Don't look startled. Do you dislike her?"
+
+"Heaven forbid--with those eyes! She has a wit of her own, too--and she
+certainly makes things easier for Bessy."
+
+"She guards her carefully, at any rate. I could find out nothing."
+
+"About Bessy?"
+
+"About the general situation."
+
+"Including Miss Brent?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell smiled faintly. "I made one little discovery about her."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"She's intimate with the new doctor."
+
+"Wyant?" Mr. Langhope's interest dropped. "What of that? I believe she
+knew him before."
+
+"I daresay. It's of no special importance, except as giving us a
+possible clue to her character. She strikes me as interesting and
+mysterious."
+
+Mr. Langhope smiled. "The things your imagination does for you!"
+
+"It helps me to see that we may find Miss Brent useful as a friend."
+
+"A friend?"
+
+"An ally." She paused, as if searching for a word. "She may restore the
+equilibrium."
+
+Mr. Langhope's handsome face darkened. "Open Bessy's eyes to Amherst?
+Damn him!" he said quietly.
+
+Mrs. Ansell let the imprecation pass. "When was he last here?" she
+asked.
+
+"Five or six weeks ago--for one night. His only visit since she came
+back from the Adirondacks."
+
+"What do you think his motive is? He must know what he risks in losing
+his hold on Bessy."
+
+"His motive? With your eye for them, can you ask? A devouring ambition,
+that's all! Haven't you noticed that, in all except the biggest minds,
+ambition takes the form of wanting to command where one has had to obey?
+Amherst has been made to toe the line at Westmore, and now he wants
+Truscomb--yes, and Halford Gaines, too!--to do the same. That's the
+secret of his servant-of-the-people pose--gad, I believe it's the whole
+secret of his marriage! He's devouring my daughter's substance to pay
+off an old score against the mills. He'll never rest till he has
+Truscomb out, and some creature of his own in command--and then, _vogue
+la galère_! If it were women, now," Mr. Langhope summed up impatiently,
+"one could understand it, at his age, and with that damned romantic
+head--but to be put aside for a lot of low mongrelly socialist
+mill-hands--ah, my poor girl--my poor girl!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell mused. "You didn't write me that things were so bad. There's
+been no actual quarrel?" she asked.
+
+"How can there be, when the poor child does all he wants? He's simply
+too busy to come and thank her!"
+
+"Too busy at Hanaford?"
+
+"So he says. Introducing the golden age at Westmore--it's likely to be
+the age of copper at Lynbrook."
+
+Mrs. Ansell drew a meditative breath. "I was thinking of that. I
+understood that Bessy would have to retrench while the changes at
+Westmore were going on."
+
+"Well--didn't she give up Europe, and cable over to countermand her new
+motor?"
+
+"But the life here! This mob of people! Miss Brent tells me the house is
+full for every week-end."
+
+"Would you have my daughter cut off from all her friends?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell met this promptly. "From some of the new ones, at any rate!
+Have you heard who has just arrived?"
+
+Mr. Langhope's hesitation showed a tinge of embarrassment. "I'm not
+sure--some one has always just arrived."
+
+"Well, the Fenton Carburys, then!" Mrs. Ansell left it to her tone to
+annotate the announcement.
+
+Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "Are they likely to be an
+exceptionally costly pleasure?"
+
+"If you're trying to prove that I haven't kept to the point--I can
+assure you that I'm well within it!"
+
+"But since the good Blanche has got her divorce and married Carbury,
+wherein do they differ from other week-end automata?"
+
+"Because most divorced women marry again to be respectable."
+
+Mr. Langhope smiled faintly. "Yes--that's their punishment. But it would
+be too dull for Blanche."
+
+"Precisely. _She_ married again to see Ned Bowfort!"
+
+"Ah--that may yet be hers!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell sighed at his perversity. "Meanwhile, she's brought him
+here, and it is unnatural to see Bessy lending herself to such
+combinations."
+
+"You're corrupted by a glimpse of the old societies. Here Bowfort and
+Carbury are simply hands at bridge."
+
+"Old hands at it--yes! And the bridge is another point: Bessy never used
+to play for money."
+
+"Well, she may make something, and offset her husband's prodigalities."
+
+"There again--with this _train de vie_, how on earth are both ends to
+meet?"
+
+Mr. Langhope grown suddenly grave, struck his cane resoundingly on the
+terrace. "Westmore and Lynbrook? I don't want them to--I want them to
+get farther and farther apart!"
+
+She cast on him a look of startled divination. "You want Bessy to go on
+spending too much money?"
+
+"How can I help it if it costs?"
+
+"If what costs--?" She stopped, her eyes still wide; then their glances
+crossed, and she exclaimed: "If your scheme costs? It _is_ your scheme,
+then?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders again. "It's a passive attitude----"
+
+"Ah, the deepest plans are that!" Mr. Langhope uttered no protest, and
+she continued to piece her conjectures together. "But you expect it to
+lead up to something active. Do you want a rupture?"
+
+"I want him brought back to his senses."
+
+"Do you think that will bring him back to _her_?"
+
+"Where the devil else will he have to go?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell's eyes dropped toward the gardens, across which desultory
+knots of people were straggling back from the ended tennis-match. "Ah,
+here they all come," she said, rising with a half-sigh; and as she stood
+watching the advance of the brightly-tinted groups she added slowly:
+"It's ingenious--but you don't understand him."
+
+Mr. Langhope stroked his moustache. "Perhaps not," he assented
+thoughtfully. "But suppose we go in before they join us? I want to show
+you a set of Ming I picked up the other day for Bessy. I flatter myself
+I _do_ understand Ming."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+JUSTINE BRENT, her household duties discharged, had gone upstairs to her
+room, a little turret chamber projecting above the wide terrace below,
+from which the sounds of lively intercourse now rose increasingly to her
+window.
+
+Bessy, she knew, would have preferred to have her remain with the party
+from whom these evidences of gaiety proceeded. Mrs. Amherst had grown to
+depend on her friend's nearness. She liked to feel that Justine's quick
+hand and eye were always in waiting on her impulses, prompt to interpret
+and execute them without any exertion of her own. Bessy combined great
+zeal in the pursuit of sport--a tireless passion for the saddle, the
+golf-course, the tennis-court--with an almost oriental inertia within
+doors, an indolence of body and brain that made her shrink from the
+active obligations of hospitality, though she had grown to depend more
+and more on the distractions of a crowded house.
+
+But Justine, though grateful, and anxious to show her gratitude, was
+unwilling to add to her other duties that of joining in the amusements
+of the house-party. She made no pretense of effacing herself when she
+thought her presence might be useful--but, even if she had cared for the
+diversions in favour at Lynbrook, a certain unavowed pride would have
+kept her from participating in them on the same footing with Bessy's
+guests. She was not in the least ashamed of her position in the
+household, but she chose that every one else should be aware of it, that
+she should not for an instant be taken for one of the nomadic damsels
+who form the camp-followers of the great army of pleasure. Yet even on
+this point her sensitiveness was not exaggerated. Adversity has a deft
+hand at gathering loose strands of impulse into character, and Justine's
+early contact with different phases of experience had given her a fairly
+clear view of life in the round, what might be called a sound working
+topography of its relative heights and depths. She was not seriously
+afraid of being taken for anything but what she really was, and still
+less did she fear to become, by force of propinquity and suggestion, the
+kind of being for whom she might be temporarily taken.
+
+When, at Bessy's summons, she had joined the latter at her camp in the
+Adirondacks, the transition from a fatiguing "case" at Hanaford to a
+life in which sylvan freedom was artfully blent with the most studied
+personal luxury, had come as a delicious refreshment to body and brain.
+She was weary, for the moment, of ugliness, pain and hard work, and life
+seemed to recover its meaning under the aspect of a graceful leisure.
+Lynbrook also, whither she had been persuaded to go with Bessy at the
+end of their woodland cure, had at first amused and interested her. The
+big house on its spreading terraces, with windows looking over bright
+gardens to the hazy distances of the plains, seemed a haven of harmless
+ease and gaiety. Justine was sensitive to the finer graces of luxurious
+living, to the warm lights on old pictures and bronzes, the soft
+mingling of tints in faded rugs and panellings of time-warmed oak. And
+the existence to which this background formed a setting seemed at first
+to have the same decorative qualities. It was pleasant, for once, to be
+among people whose chief business was to look well and take life
+lightly, and Justine's own buoyancy of nature won her immediate access
+among the amiable persons who peopled Bessy's week-end parties. If they
+had only abounded a little more in their own line she might have
+succumbed to their spell. But it seemed to her that they missed the
+poetry of their situation, transacting their pleasures with the dreary
+method and shortness of view of a race tethered to the ledger. Even the
+verbal flexibility which had made her feel that she was in a world of
+freer ideas, soon revealed itself as a form of flight from them, in
+which the race was distinctly to the swift; and Justine's phase of
+passive enjoyment passed with the return of her physical and mental
+activity. She was a creature tingling with energy, a little fleeting
+particle of the power that moves the sun and the other stars, and the
+deadening influences of the life at Lynbrook roused these tendencies to
+greater intensity, as a suffocated person will suddenly develop abnormal
+strength in the struggle for air.
+
+She did not, indeed, regret having come. She was glad to be with Bessy,
+partly because of the childish friendship which had left such deep
+traces in her lonely heart, and partly because what she had seen of her
+friend's situation stirred in her all the impulses of sympathy and
+service; but the idea of continuing in such a life, of sinking into any
+of the positions of semi-dependence that an adroit and handsome girl may
+create for herself in a fashionable woman's train--this possibility
+never presented itself to Justine till Mrs. Ansell, that afternoon, had
+put it into words. And to hear it was to revolt from it with all the
+strength of her inmost nature. The thought of the future troubled her,
+not so much materially--for she had a light bird-like trust in the
+morrow's fare--but because her own tendencies seemed to have grown less
+clear, because she could not rest in them for guidance as she had once
+done. The renewal of bodily activity had not brought back her faith in
+her calling: her work had lost the light of consecration. She no longer
+felt herself predestined to nurse the sick for the rest of her life, and
+in her inexperience she reproached herself with this instability. Youth
+and womanhood were in fact crying out in her for their individual
+satisfaction; but instincts as deep-seated protected her from even a
+momentary illusion as to the nature of this demand. She wanted
+happiness, and a life of her own, as passionately as young
+flesh-and-blood had ever wanted them; but they must come bathed in the
+light of imagination and penetrated by the sense of larger affinities.
+She could not conceive of shutting herself into a little citadel of
+personal well-being while the great tides of existence rolled on
+unheeded outside. Whether they swept treasure to her feet, or strewed
+her life with wreckage, she felt, even now; that her place was there, on
+the banks, in sound and sight of the great current; and just in
+proportion as the scheme of life at Lynbrook succeeded in shutting out
+all sense of that vaster human consciousness, so did its voice speak
+more thrillingly within her.
+
+Somewhere, she felt--but, alas! still out of reach--was the life she
+longed for, a life in which high chances of doing should be mated with
+the finer forms of enjoying. But what title had she to a share in such
+an existence? Why, none but her sense of what it was worth--and what did
+that count for, in a world which used all its resources to barricade
+itself against all its opportunities? She knew there were girls who
+sought, by what is called a "good" marriage, an escape into the outer
+world, of doing and thinking--utilizing an empty brain and full pocket
+as the key to these envied fields. Some such chance the life at Lynbrook
+seemed likely enough to offer--one is not, at Justine's age and with her
+penetration, any more blind to the poise of one's head than to the turn
+of one's ideas; but here the subtler obstacles of taste and pride
+intervened. Not even Bessy's transparent manœuvrings, her tender
+solicitude for her friend's happiness, could for a moment weaken
+Justine's resistance. If she must marry without love--and this was
+growing conceivable to her--she must at least merge her craving for
+personal happiness in some view of life in harmony with hers.
+
+A tap on her door interrupted these musings, to one aspect of which
+Bessy Amherst's entrance seemed suddenly to give visible expression.
+
+"Why did you run off, Justine? You promised to be down-stairs when I
+came back from tennis."
+
+"_Till_ you came back--wasn't it, dear?" Justine corrected with a smile,
+pushing her arm-chair forward as Bessy continued to linger irresolutely
+in the doorway. "I saw that there was a fresh supply of tea in the
+drawing-room, and I knew you would be there before the omnibus came from
+the station."
+
+"Oh, I was there--but everybody was asking for you----"
+
+"Everybody?" Justine gave a mocking lift to her dark eyebrows.
+
+"Well--Westy Gaines, at any rate; the moment he set foot in the house!"
+Bessy declared with a laugh as she dropped into the arm-chair.
+
+Justine echoed the laugh, but offered no comment on the statement which
+accompanied it, and for a moment both women were silent, Bessy tilting
+her pretty discontented head against the back of the chair, so that her
+eyes were on a level with those of her friend, who leaned near her in
+the embrasure of the window.
+
+"I can't understand you, Justine. You know well enough what he's come
+back for."
+
+"In order to dazzle Hanaford with the fact that he has been staying at
+Lynbrook!"
+
+"Nonsense--the novelty of that has worn off. He's been here three times
+since we came back."
+
+"You are admirably hospitable to your family----"
+
+Bessy let her pretty ringed hands fall with a discouraged gesture. "Why
+do you find him so much worse than--than other people?"
+
+Justine's eye-brows rose again. "In the same capacity? You speak as if I
+had boundless opportunities of comparison."
+
+"Well, you've Dr. Wyant!" Mrs. Amherst suddenly flung back at her.
+
+Justine coloured under the unexpected thrust, but met her friend's eyes
+steadily. "As an alternative to Westy? Well, if I were on a desert
+island--but I'm not!" she concluded with a careless laugh.
+
+Bessy frowned and sighed. "You can't mean that, of the two--?" She
+paused and then went on doubtfully: "It's because he's cleverer?"
+
+"Dr. Wyant?" Justine smiled. "It's not making an enormous claim for
+him!"
+
+"Oh, I know Westy's not brilliant; but stupid men are not always the
+hardest to live with." She sighed again, and turned on Justine a glance
+charged with conjugal experience.
+
+Justine had sunk into the window-seat, her thin hands clasping her knee,
+in the attitude habitual to her meditative moments. "Perhaps not," she
+assented; "but I don't know that I should care for a man who made life
+easy; I should want some one who made it interesting."
+
+Bessy met this with a pitying exclamation. "Don't imagine you invented
+that! Every girl thinks it. Afterwards she finds out that it's much
+pleasanter to be thought interesting herself."
+
+She spoke with a bitterness that issued strangely from her lips. It was
+this bitterness which gave her soft personality the sharp edge that
+Justine had felt in it on the day of their meeting at Hanaford.
+
+The girl, at first, had tried to defend herself from these
+scarcely-veiled confidences, distasteful enough in themselves, and
+placing her, if she listened, in an attitude of implied disloyalty to
+the man under whose roof they were spoken. But a precocious experience
+of life had taught her that emotions too strong for the nature
+containing them turn, by some law of spiritual chemistry, into a
+rankling poison; and she had therefore resigned herself to serving as a
+kind of outlet for Bessy's pent-up discontent. It was not that her
+friend's grievance appealed to her personal sympathies; she had learned
+enough of the situation to give her moral assent unreservedly to the
+other side. But it was characteristic of Justine that where she
+sympathized least she sometimes pitied most. Like all quick spirits she
+was often intolerant of dulness; yet when the intolerance passed it left
+a residue of compassion for the very incapacity at which she chafed. It
+seemed to her that the tragic crises in wedded life usually turned on
+the stupidity of one of the two concerned; and of the two victims of
+such a catastrophe she felt most for the one whose limitations had
+probably brought it about. After all, there could be no imprisonment as
+cruel as that of being bounded by a hard small nature. Not to be
+penetrable at all points to the shifting lights, the wandering music of
+the world--she could imagine no physical disability as cramping as that.
+How the little parched soul, in solitary confinement for life, must pine
+and dwindle in its blind cranny of self-love!
+
+To be one's self wide open to the currents of life does not always
+contribute to an understanding of narrower natures; but in Justine the
+personal emotions were enriched and deepened by a sense of participation
+in all that the world about her was doing, suffering and enjoying; and
+this sense found expression in the instinct of ministry and solace. She
+was by nature a redresser, a restorer; and in her work, as she had once
+told Amherst, the longing to help and direct, to hasten on by personal
+intervention time's slow and clumsy processes, had often been in
+conflict with the restrictions imposed by her profession. But she had no
+idle desire to probe the depths of other lives; and where there seemed
+no hope of serving she shrank from fruitless confidences. She was
+beginning to feel this to be the case with Bessy Amherst. To touch the
+rock was not enough, if there were but a few drops within it; yet in
+this barrenness lay the pathos of the situation--and after all, may not
+the scanty spring be fed from a fuller current?
+
+"I'm not sure about that," she said, answering her friend's last words
+after a deep pause of deliberation. "I mean about its being so pleasant
+to be found interesting. I'm sure the passive part is always the dull
+one: life has been a great deal more thrilling since we found out that
+we revolved about the sun, instead of sitting still and fancying that
+all the planets were dancing attendance on us. After all, they were
+_not_; and it's rather humiliating to think how the morning stars must
+have laughed together about it!"
+
+There was no self-complacency in Justine's eagerness to help. It was far
+easier for her to express it in action than in counsel, to grope for the
+path with her friend than to point the way to it; and when she had to
+speak she took refuge in figures to escape the pedantry of appearing to
+advise. But it was not only to Mrs. Dressel that her parables were dark,
+and the blank look in Bessy's eyes soon snatched her down from the
+height of metaphor.
+
+"I mean," she continued with a smile, "that, as human nature is
+constituted, it has got to find its real self--the self to be interested
+in--outside of what we conventionally call 'self': the particular
+Justine or Bessy who is clamouring for her particular morsel of life.
+You see, self isn't a thing one can keep in a box--bits of it keep
+escaping, and flying off to lodge in all sorts of unexpected crannies;
+we come across scraps of ourselves in the most unlikely places--as I
+believe you would in Westmore, if you'd only go back there and look for
+them!"
+
+Bessy's lip trembled and the colour sprang to her face; but she answered
+with a flash of irritation: "Why doesn't _he_ look for me there,
+then--if he still wants to find me?"
+
+"Ah--it's for him to look here--to find himself _here_," Justine
+murmured.
+
+"Well, he never comes here! That's his answer."
+
+"He will--he will! Only, when he does, let him find you."
+
+"Find me? I don't understand. How can he, when he never sees me? I'm no
+more to him than the carpet on the floor!"
+
+Justine smiled again. "Well--be that then! The thing is to _be_."
+
+"Under his feet? Thank you! Is that what you mean to marry for? It's not
+what husbands admire in one, you know!"
+
+"No." Justine stood up with a sense of stealing discouragement. "But I
+don't think I want to be admired----"
+
+"Ah, that's because you know you are!" broke from the depths of the
+other's bitterness.
+
+The tone smote Justine, and she dropped into the seat at her friend's
+side, silently laying a hand on Bessy's feverishly-clasped fingers.
+
+"Oh, don't let us talk about me," complained the latter, from whose lips
+the subject was never long absent. "And you mustn't think I _want_ you
+to marry, Justine; not for myself, I mean--I'd so much rather keep you
+here. I feel much less lonely when you're with me. But you say you won't
+stay--and it's too dreadful to think of your going back to that dreary
+hospital."
+
+"But you know the hospital's not dreary to me," Justine interposed;
+"it's the most interesting place I've ever known."
+
+Mrs. Amherst smiled indulgently on this extravagance. "A great many
+people go through the craze for philanthropy--" she began in the tone of
+mature experience; but Justine interrupted her with a laugh.
+
+"Philanthropy? I'm not philanthropic. I don't think I ever felt inclined
+to do good in the abstract--any more than to do ill! I can't remember
+that I ever planned out a course of conduct in my life. It's only," she
+went on, with a puzzled frown, as if honestly trying to analyze her
+motives, "it's only that I'm so fatally interested in people that before
+I know it I've slipped into their skins; and then, of course, if
+anything goes wrong with them, it's just as if it had gone wrong with
+me; and I can't help trying to rescue myself from _their_ troubles! I
+suppose it's what you'd call meddling--and so should I, if I could only
+remember that the other people were not myself!"
+
+Bessy received this with the mild tolerance of superior wisdom. Once
+safe on the tried ground of traditional authority, she always felt
+herself Justine's superior. "That's all very well now--you see the
+romantic side of it," she said, as if humouring her friend's vagaries.
+"But in time you'll want something else; you'll want a husband and
+children--a life of your own. And then you'll have to be more practical.
+It's ridiculous to pretend that comfort and money don't make a
+difference. And if you married a rich man, just think what a lot of good
+you could do! Westy will be very well off--and I'm sure he'd let you
+endow hospitals and things. Think how interesting it would be to build a
+ward in the very hospital where you'd been a nurse! I read something
+like that in a novel the other day--it was beautifully described. All
+the nurses and doctors that the heroine had worked with were there to
+receive her...and her little boy went about and gave toys to the
+crippled children...."
+
+If the speaker's concluding instance hardly produced the effect she had
+intended, it was perhaps only because Justine's attention had been
+arrested by the earlier part of the argument. It was strange to have
+marriage urged on her by a woman who had twice failed to find happiness
+in it--strange, and yet how vivid a sign that, even to a nature absorbed
+in its personal demands, not happiness but completeness is the inmost
+craving! "A life of your own"--that was what even Bessy, in her obscure
+way, felt to be best worth suffering for. And how was a spirit like
+Justine's, thrilling with youth and sympathy, to conceive of an isolated
+existence as the final answer to that craving? A life circumscribed by
+one's own poor personal consciousness would not be life at all--far
+better the "adventure of the diver" than the shivering alone on the
+bank! Bessy, reading encouragement in her silence, returned her
+hand-clasp with an affectionate pressure.
+
+"You _would_ like that, Justine?" she said, secretly proud of having hit
+on the convincing argument.
+
+"To endow hospitals with your cousin's money? No; I should want
+something much more exciting!"
+
+Bessy's face kindled. "You mean travelling abroad--and I suppose New
+York in winter?"
+
+Justine broke into a laugh. "I was thinking of your cousin himself when
+I spoke." And to Bessy's disappointed cry--"Then it _is_ Dr. Wyant,
+after all?" she answered lightly, and without resenting the challenge:
+"I don't know. Suppose we leave it to the oracle."
+
+"The oracle?"
+
+"Time. His question-and-answer department is generally the most reliable
+in the long run." She started up, gently drawing Bessy to her feet. "And
+just at present he reminds me that it's nearly six, and that you
+promised Cicely to go and see her before you dress for dinner."
+
+Bessy rose obediently. "Does he remind you of _your_ promises too? You
+said you'd come down to dinner tonight."
+
+"Did I?" Justine hesitated. "Well, I'm coming," she said, smiling and
+kissing her friend.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+WHEN the door closed on Mrs. Amherst a resolve which had taken shape in
+Justine's mind during their talk together made her seat herself at her
+writing-table, where, after a moment's musing over her suspended pen,
+she wrote and addressed a hurried note. This business despatched, she
+put on her hat and jacket, and letter in hand passed down the corridor
+from her room, and descended to the entrance-hall below. She might have
+consigned her missive to the post-box which conspicuously tendered its
+services from a table near the door; but to do so would delay the
+letter's despatch till morning, and she felt a sudden impatience to see
+it start.
+
+The tumult on the terrace had transferred itself within doors, and as
+Justine went down the stairs she heard the click of cues from the
+billiard-room, the talk and laughter of belated bridge-players, the
+movement of servants gathering up tea-cups and mending fires. She had
+hoped to find the hall empty, but the sight of Westy Gaines's figure
+looming watchfully on the threshold of the smoking-room gave her, at the
+last bend of the stairs, a little start of annoyance. He would want to
+know where she was going, he would offer to go with her, and it would
+take some time and not a little emphasis to make him understand that his
+society was not desired.
+
+This was the thought that flashed through Justine's mind as she reached
+the landing; but the next moment it gave way to a contradictory feeling.
+Westy Gaines was not alone in the hall. From under the stairway rose the
+voices of a group ensconced in that popular retreat about a chess-board;
+and as Justine reached the last turn of the stairs she perceived that
+Mason Winch, an earnest youth with advanced views on political economy,
+was engaged, to the diversion of a circle of spectators, in teaching the
+Telfer girls chess. The futility of trying to fix the spasmodic
+attention of this effervescent couple, and their instructor's grave
+unconsciousness of the fact, constituted, for the lookers-on, the
+peculiar diversion of the scene. It was of course inevitable that young
+Winch, on his arrival at Lynbrook, should have succumbed at once to the
+tumultuous charms of the Telfer manner, which was equally attractive to
+inarticulate youth and to tired and talked-out middle-age; but that he
+should have perceived no resistance in their minds to the deliberative
+processes of the game of chess, was, even to the Telfers themselves, a
+source of unmitigated gaiety. Nothing seemed to them funnier than that
+any one should credit them with any mental capacity; and they had
+inexhaustibly amusing ways of drawing out and showing off each other's
+ignorance.
+
+It was on this scene that Westy's appreciative eyes had been fixed till
+Justine's appearance drew them to herself. He pronounced her name
+joyfully, and moved forward to greet her; but as their hands met she
+understood that he did not mean to press his company upon her. Under the
+eye of the Lynbrook circle he was chary of marked demonstrations, and
+even Mrs. Amherst's approval could not, at such moments, bridge over the
+gap between himself and the object of his attentions. A Gaines was a
+Gaines in the last analysis, and apart from any pleasing accident of
+personality; but what was Miss Brent but the transient vehicle of those
+graces which Providence has provided for the delectation of the
+privileged sex?
+
+These influences were visible in the temperate warmth of Westy's manner,
+and in his way of keeping a backward eye on the mute interchange of
+comment about the chess-board. At another time his embarrassment would
+have amused Justine; but the feelings stirred by her talk with Bessy had
+not subsided, and she recognized with a sting of mortification the
+resemblance between her view of the Lynbrook set and its estimate of
+herself. If Bessy's friends were negligible to her she was almost
+non-existent to them; and, as against herself, they were overwhelmingly
+provided with tangible means of proving their case.
+
+Such considerations, at a given moment, may prevail decisively even with
+a nature armed against them by insight and irony; and the mere fact that
+Westy Gaines did not mean to join her, and that he was withheld from
+doing so by the invisible pressure of the Lynbrook standards, had the
+effect of precipitating Justine's floating intentions.
+
+If anything farther had been needed to hasten this result, it would have
+been accomplished by the sound of footsteps which, over-taking her a
+dozen yards from the house, announced her admirer's impetuous if tardy
+pursuit. The act of dismissing him, though it took but a word and was
+effected with a laugh, left her pride quivering with a hurt the more
+painful because she would not acknowledge it. That she should waste a
+moment's resentment on the conduct of a person so unimportant as poor
+Westy, showed her in a flash the intrinsic falseness of her position at
+Lynbrook. She saw that to disdain the life about her had not kept her
+intact from it; and the knowledge made her feel anew the need of some
+strong decentralizing influence, some purifying influx of emotion and
+activity.
+
+She had walked on quickly through the clear October twilight, which was
+still saturated with the after-glow of a vivid sunset; and a few minutes
+brought her to the village stretching along the turnpike beyond the
+Lynbrook gates. The new post-office dominated the row of shabby houses
+and "stores" set disjointedly under reddening maples, and its arched
+doorway formed the centre of Lynbrook's evening intercourse.
+
+Justine, hastening toward the knot of loungers on the threshold, had no
+consciousness of anything outside of her own thoughts; and as she
+mounted the steps she was surprised to see Dr. Wyant detach himself from
+the group and advance to meet her.
+
+"May I post your letter?" he asked, lifting his hat.
+
+His gesture uncovered the close-curling hair of a small
+delicately-finished head just saved from effeminacy by the vigorous jut
+of heavy eye-brows meeting above full grey eyes. The eyes again, at
+first sight, might have struck one as too expressive, or as expressing
+things too purely decorative for the purposes of a young country doctor
+with a growing practice; but this estimate was corrected by an
+unexpected abruptness in their owner's voice and manner. Perhaps the
+final impression produced on a close observer by Dr. Stephen Wyant would
+have been that the contradictory qualities of which he was compounded
+had not yet been brought into equilibrium by the hand of time.
+
+Justine, in reply to his question, had drawn back a step, slipping her
+letter into the breast of her jacket.
+
+"That is hardly worth while, since it was addressed to you," she
+answered with a slight smile as she turned to descend the post-office
+steps.
+
+Wyant, still carrying his hat, and walking with quick uneven steps,
+followed her in silence till they had passed beyond earshot of the
+loiterers on the threshold; then, in the shade of the maple boughs, he
+pulled up and faced her.
+
+"You've written to say that I may come tomorrow?"
+
+Justine hesitated. "Yes," she said at length.
+
+"Good God! You give royally!" he broke out, pushing his hand with a
+nervous gesture through the thin dark curls on his forehead.
+
+Justine laughed, with a trace of nervousness in her own tone. "And you
+talk--well, imperially! Aren't you afraid to bankrupt the language?"
+
+"What do you mean?" he said, staring.
+
+"What do _you_ mean? I have merely said that I would see you
+tomorrow----"
+
+"Well," he retorted, "that's enough for my happiness!"
+
+She sounded her light laugh again. "I'm glad to know you're so easily
+pleased."
+
+"I'm not! But you couldn't have done a cruel thing without a struggle;
+and since you're ready to give me my answer tomorrow, I know it can't
+be a cruel one."
+
+They had begun to walk onward as they talked, but at this she halted.
+"Please don't take that tone. I dislike sentimentality!" she exclaimed,
+with a tinge of imperiousness that was a surprise to her own ears.
+
+It was not the first time in the course of her friendship with Stephen
+Wyant that she had been startled by this intervention of something
+within her that resisted and almost resented his homage. When they were
+apart, she was conscious only of the community of interests and
+sympathies that had first drawn them together. Why was it then--since
+his looks were of the kind generally thought to stand a suitor in good
+stead--that whenever they had met of late she had been subject to these
+rushes of obscure hostility, the half-physical, half-moral shrinking
+from some indefinable element in his nature against which she was
+constrained to defend herself by perpetual pleasantry and evasion?
+
+To Wyant, at any rate, the answer was not far to seek. His pale face
+reflected the disdain in hers as he returned ironically: "A thousand
+pardons; I know I'm not always in the key."
+
+"The key?"
+
+"I haven't yet acquired the Lynbrook tone. You must make allowances for
+my lack of opportunity."
+
+The retort on Justine's lips dropped to silence, as though his words
+had in fact brought an answer to her inward questioning. Could it be
+that he was right--that her shrinking from him was the result of an
+increased sensitiveness to faults of taste that she would once have
+despised herself for noticing? When she had first known him, in her work
+at St. Elizabeth's some three years earlier, his excesses of manner had
+seemed to her merely the boyish tokens of a richness of nature not yet
+controlled by experience. Though Wyant was somewhat older than herself
+there had always been an element of protection in her feeling for him,
+and it was perhaps this element which formed the real ground of her
+liking. It was, at any rate, uppermost as she returned, with a softened
+gleam of mockery: "Since you are so sure of my answer I hardly know why
+I should see you tomorrow."
+
+"You mean me to take it now?" he exclaimed.
+
+"I don't mean you to take it at all till it's given--above all not to
+take it for granted!"
+
+His jutting brows drew together again. "Ah, I can't split hairs with
+you. Won't you put me out of my misery?"
+
+She smiled, but not unkindly. "Do you want an anæsthetic?"
+
+"No--a clean cut with the knife!"
+
+"You forget that we're not allowed to despatch hopeless cases--more's
+the pity!"
+
+He flushed to the roots of his thin hair. "Hopeless cases? That's it,
+then--that's my answer?"
+
+They had reached the point where, at the farther edge of the straggling
+settlement, the tiled roof of the railway-station fronted the
+post-office cupola; and the shriek of a whistle now reminded Justine
+that the spot was not propitious to private talk. She halted a moment
+before speaking.
+
+"I have no answer to give you now but the one in my note--that I'll see
+you tomorrow."
+
+"But if you're sure of knowing tomorrow you must know now!"
+
+Their eyes met, his eloquently pleading, hers kind but still
+impenetrable. "If I knew now, you should know too. Please be content
+with that," she rejoined.
+
+"How can I be, when a day may make such a difference? When I know that
+every influence about you is fighting against me?"
+
+The words flashed a refracted light far down into the causes of her own
+uncertainty.
+
+"Ah," she said, drawing a little away from him, "I'm not so sure that I
+don't like a fight!"
+
+"Is that why you won't give in?" He moved toward her with a despairing
+gesture. "If I let you go now, you're lost to me!"
+
+She stood her ground, facing him with a quick lift of the head. "If you
+don't let me go I certainly am," she said; and he drew back, as if
+conscious of the uselessness of the struggle. His submission, as usual,
+had a disarming effect on her irritation, and she held out her hand.
+"Come tomorrow at three," she said, her voice and manner suddenly
+seeming to give back the hope she had withheld from him.
+
+He seized on her hand with an inarticulate murmur; but at the same
+moment a louder whistle and the thunder of an approaching train reminded
+her of the impossibility of prolonging the scene. She was ordinarily
+careless of appearances, but while she was Mrs. Amherst's guest she did
+not care to be seen romantically loitering through the twilight with
+Stephen Wyant; and she freed herself with a quick goodbye.
+
+He gave her a last look, hesitating and imploring; then, in obedience to
+her gesture, he turned away and strode off in the opposite direction.
+
+As soon as he had left her she began to retrace her steps toward
+Lynbrook House; but instead of traversing the whole length of the
+village she passed through a turnstile in the park fencing, taking a
+more circuitous but quieter way home.
+
+She walked on slowly through the dusk, wishing to give herself time to
+think over her conversation with Wyant. Now that she was alone again, it
+seemed to her that the part she had played had been both inconsistent
+and undignified. When she had written to Wyant that she would see him on
+the morrow she had done so with the clear understanding that she was to
+give, at that meeting, a definite answer to his offer of marriage; and
+during her talk with Bessy she had suddenly, and, as it seemed to her,
+irrevocably, decided that the answer should be favourable. From the
+first days of her acquaintance with Wyant she had appreciated his
+intelligence and had been stimulated by his zeal for his work. He had
+remained only six months at Saint Elizabeth's, and though his feeling
+for her had even then been manifest, it had been kept from expression by
+the restraint of their professional relation, and by her absorption in
+her duties. It was only when they had met again at Lynbrook that she had
+begun to feel a personal interest in him. His youthful promise seemed
+nearer fulfillment than she had once thought possible, and the contrast
+he presented to the young men in Bessy's train was really all in his
+favour. He had gained in strength and steadiness without losing his high
+flashes of enthusiasm; and though, even now, she was not in love with
+him, she began to feel that the union of their common interests might
+create a life full and useful enough to preclude the possibility of
+vague repinings. It would, at any rate, take her out of the stagnant
+circle of her present existence, and restore her to contact with the
+fruitful energies of life.
+
+All this had seemed quite clear when she wrote her letter; why, then,
+had she not made use of their chance encounter to give her answer,
+instead of capriciously postponing it? The act might have been that of a
+self-conscious girl in her teens; but neither inexperience nor coquetry
+had prompted it. She had merely yielded to the spirit of resistance that
+Wyant's presence had of late aroused in her; and the possibility that
+this resistance might be due to some sense of his social defects, his
+lack of measure and facility, was so humiliating that for a moment she
+stood still in the path, half-meaning to turn back and overtake him----
+
+As she paused she was surprised to hear a man's step behind her; and the
+thought that it might be Wyant's brought about another revulsion of
+feeling. What right had he to pursue her in this way, to dog her steps
+even into the Lynbrook grounds? She was sure that his persistent
+attentions had already attracted the notice of Bessy's visitors; and
+that he should thus force himself on her after her dismissal seemed
+suddenly to make their whole relation ridiculous.
+
+She turned about to rebuke him, and found herself face to face with John
+Amherst.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+AMHERST, on leaving the train at Lynbrook, had paused in doubt on the
+empty platform. His return was unexpected, and no carriage awaited him;
+but he caught the signal of the village cab-driver's ready whip.
+Amherst, however, felt a sudden desire to postpone the moment of
+arrival, and consigning his luggage to the cab he walked away toward the
+turnstile through which Justine had passed. In thus taking the longest
+way home he was yielding another point to his reluctance. He knew that
+at that hour his wife's visitors might still be assembled in the
+drawing-room, and he wished to avoid making his unannounced entrance
+among them.
+
+It was not till now that he felt the embarrassment of such an arrival.
+For some time past he had known that he ought to go back to Lynbrook,
+but he had not known how to tell Bessy that he was coming. Lack of habit
+made him inexpert in the art of easy transitions, and his inability to
+bridge over awkward gaps had often put him at a disadvantage with his
+wife and her friends. He had not yet learned the importance of observing
+the forms which made up the daily ceremonial of their lives, and at
+present there was just enough soreness between himself and Bessy to make
+such observances more difficult than usual.
+
+There had been no open estrangement, but peace had been preserved at the
+cost of a slowly accumulated tale of grievances on both sides. Since
+Amherst had won his point about the mills, the danger he had foreseen
+had been realized: his victory at Westmore had been a defeat at
+Lynbrook. It would be too crude to say that his wife had made him pay
+for her public concession by the private disregard of his wishes; and if
+something of this sort had actually resulted, his sense of fairness told
+him that it was merely the natural reaction of a soft nature against the
+momentary strain of self-denial. At first he had been hardly aware of
+this consequence of his triumph. The joy of being able to work his will
+at Westmore obscured all lesser emotions; and his sentiment for Bessy
+had long since shrunk into one of those shallow pools of feeling which a
+sudden tide might fill, but which could never again be the deep
+perennial spring from which his life was fed.
+
+The need of remaining continuously at Hanaford while the first changes
+were making had increased the strain of the situation. He had never
+expected that Bessy would stay there with him--had perhaps, at heart,
+hardly wished it--and her plan of going to the Adirondacks with Miss
+Brent seemed to him a satisfactory alternative to the European trip she
+had renounced. He felt as relieved as though some one had taken off his
+hands the task of amusing a restless child, and he let his wife go
+without suspecting that the moment might be a decisive one between them.
+But it had not occurred to Bessy that any one could regard six weeks in
+the Adirondacks as an adequate substitute for a summer abroad. She felt
+that her sacrifice deserved recognition, and personal devotion was the
+only form of recognition which could satisfy her. She had expected
+Amherst to join her at the camp, but he did not come; and when she went
+back to Long Island she did not stop to see him, though Hanaford lay in
+her way. At the moment of her return the work at the mills made it
+impossible for him to go to Lynbrook; and thus the weeks drifted on
+without their meeting.
+
+At last, urged by his mother, he had gone down to Long Island for a
+night; but though, on that occasion, he had announced his coming, he
+found the house full, and the whole party except Mr. Langhope in the act
+of starting off to a dinner in the neighbourhood. He was of course
+expected to go too, and Bessy appeared hurt when he declared that he was
+too tired and preferred to remain with Mr. Langhope; but she did not
+suggest staying at home herself, and drove off in a mood of exuberant
+gaiety. Amherst had been too busy all his life to know what intricacies
+of perversion a sentimental grievance may develop in an unoccupied mind,
+and he saw in Bessy's act only a sign of indifference. The next day she
+complained to him of money difficulties, as though surprised that her
+income had been suddenly cut down; and when he reminded her that she had
+consented of her own will to this temporary reduction, she burst into
+tears and accused him of caring only for Westmore.
+
+He went away exasperated by her inconsequence, and bills from Lynbrook
+continued to pour in on him. In the first days of their marriage, Bessy
+had put him in charge of her exchequer, and she was too indolent--and at
+heart perhaps too sensitive--to ask him to renounce the charge. It was
+clear to him, therefore, how little she was observing the spirit of
+their compact, and his mind was tormented by the anticipation of
+financial embarrassments. He wrote her a letter of gentle expostulation,
+but in her answer she ignored his remonstrance; and after that silence
+fell between them.
+
+The only way to break this silence was to return to Lynbrook; but now
+that he had come back, he did not know what step to take next. Something
+in the atmosphere of his wife's existence seemed to paralyze his
+will-power. When all about her spoke a language so different from his
+own, how could he hope to make himself heard? He knew that her family
+and her immediate friends--Mr. Langhope, the Gaineses, Mrs. Ansell and
+Mr. Tredegar--far from being means of communication, were so many
+sentinels ready to raise the drawbridge and drop the portcullis at his
+approach. They were all in league to stifle the incipient feelings he
+had roused in Bessy, to push her back into the deadening routine of her
+former life, and the only voice that might conceivably speak for him was
+Miss Brent's.
+
+The "case" which, unexpectedly presented to her by one of the Hope
+Hospital physicians, had detained Justine at Hanaford during the month
+of June, was the means of establishing a friendship between herself and
+Amherst. They did not meet often, or get to know each other very well;
+but he saw her occasionally at his mother's and at Mrs. Dressel's, and
+once he took her out to Westmore, to consult her about the emergency
+hospital which was to be included among the first improvements there.
+The expedition had been memorable to both; and when, some two weeks
+later, Bessy wrote suggesting that she should take Miss Brent to the
+Adirondacks, it seemed to Amherst that there was no one whom he would
+rather have his wife choose as her companion.
+
+He was much too busy at the time to cultivate or analyze his feeling for
+Miss Brent; he rested vaguely in the thought of her, as of the "nicest"
+girl he had ever met, and was frankly pleased when accident brought them
+together; but the seeds left in both their minds by these chance
+encounters had not yet begun to germinate.
+
+So unperceived had been their gradual growth in intimacy that it was a
+surprise to Amherst to find himself suddenly thinking of her as a means
+of communication with his wife; but the thought gave him such
+encouragement that, when he saw Justine in the path before him he went
+toward her with unusual eagerness.
+
+Justine, on her part, felt an equal pleasure. She knew that Bessy did
+not expect her husband, and that his prolonged absence had already been
+the cause of malicious comment at Lynbrook; and she caught at the hope
+that this sudden return might betoken a more favourable turn of affairs.
+
+"Oh, I am so glad to see you!" she exclaimed; and her tone had the
+effect of completing his reassurance, his happy sense that she would
+understand and help him.
+
+"I wanted to see you too," he began confusedly; then, conscious of the
+intimacy of the phrase, he added with a slight laugh: "The fact is, I'm
+a culprit looking for a peace-maker."
+
+"A culprit?"
+
+"I've been so tied down at the mills that I didn't know, till yesterday,
+just when I could break away; and in the hurry of leaving--" He paused
+again, checked by the impossibility of uttering, to the girl before him,
+the little conventional falsehoods which formed the small currency of
+Bessy's circle. Not that any scruple of probity restrained him: in
+trifling matters he recognized the usefulness of such counters in the
+social game; but when he was with Justine he always felt the obscure
+need of letting his real self be seen.
+
+"I was stupid enough not to telegraph," he said, "and I am afraid my
+wife will think me negligent: she often has to reproach me for my sins
+of omission, and this time I know they are many."
+
+The girl received this in silence, less from embarrassment than from
+surprise; for she had already guessed that it was as difficult for
+Amherst to touch, even lightly, on his private affairs, as it was
+instinctive with his wife to pour her grievances into any willing ear.
+Justine's first thought was one of gratification that he should have
+spoken, and of eagerness to facilitate the saying of whatever he wished
+to say; but before she could answer he went on hastily: "The fact is,
+Bessy does not know how complicated the work at Westmore is; and when I
+caught sight of you just now I was thinking that you are the only one of
+her friends who has any technical understanding of what I am trying to
+do, and who might consequently help her to see how hard it is for me to
+take my hand from the plough."
+
+Justine listened gravely, longing to cry out her comprehension and
+sympathy, but restrained by the sense that the moment was a critical
+one, where impulse must not be trusted too far. It was quite possible
+that a reaction of pride might cause Amherst to repent even so guarded
+an avowal; and if that happened, he might never forgive her for having
+encouraged him to speak. She looked up at him with a smile.
+
+"Why not tell Bessy yourself? Your understanding of the case is a good
+deal clearer than mine or any one else's."
+
+"Oh, Bessy is tired of hearing about it from me; and besides--" She
+detected a shade of disappointment in his tone, and was sorry she had
+said anything which might seem meant to discourage his confidence. It
+occurred to her also that she had been insincere in not telling him at
+once that she had already been let into the secret of his domestic
+differences: she felt the same craving as Amherst for absolute openness
+between them.
+
+"I know," she said, almost timidly, "that Bessy has not been quite
+content of late to have you give so much time to Westmore, and perhaps
+she herself thinks it is because the work there does not interest her;
+but I believe it is for a different reason."
+
+"What reason?" he asked with a look of surprise.
+
+"Because Westmore takes you from her; because she thinks you are happier
+there than at Lynbrook."
+
+The day had faded so rapidly that it was no longer possible for the
+speakers to see each other's faces, and it was easier for both to
+communicate through the veil of deepening obscurity.
+
+"But, good heavens, she might be there with me--she's as much needed
+there as I am!" Amherst exclaimed.
+
+"Yes; but you must remember that it's against all her habits--and
+against the point of view of every one about her--that she should lead
+that kind of life; and meanwhile----"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Meanwhile, isn't it expedient that you should, a little more, lead
+hers?"
+
+Always the same answer to his restless questioning! His mother's answer,
+the answer of Bessy and her friends. He had somehow hoped that the girl
+at his side would find a different solution to the problem, and his
+disappointment escaped in a bitter exclamation.
+
+"But Westmore is my life--hers too, if she knew it! I can't desert it
+now without being as false to her as to myself!"
+
+As he spoke, he was overcome once more by the hopelessness of trying to
+put his case clearly. How could Justine, for all her quickness and
+sympathy, understand a situation of which the deeper elements were
+necessarily unknown to her? The advice she gave him was natural enough,
+and on her lips it seemed not the counsel of a shallow expediency, but
+the plea of compassion and understanding. But she knew nothing of the
+long struggle for mutual adjustment which had culminated in this crisis
+between himself and his wife, and she could therefore not see that, if
+he yielded his point, and gave up his work at Westmore, the concession
+would mean not renewal but destruction. He felt that he should hate
+Bessy if he won her back at that price; and the violence of his feeling
+frightened him. It was, in truth, as he had said, his own life that he
+was fighting for. If he gave up Westmore he could not fall back on the
+futile activities of Lynbrook, and fate might yet have some lower
+alternative to offer. He could trust to his own strength and
+self-command while his energies had a normal outlet; but idleness and
+self-indulgence might work in him like a dangerous drug.
+
+Justine kept steadily to her point. "Westmore must be foremost to both
+of you in time; I don't see how either of you can escape that. But the
+realization of it must come to Bessy through _you_, and for that reason
+I think that you ought to be more patient--that you ought even to put
+the question aside for a time and enter a little more into her life
+while she is learning to understand yours." As she ended, it seemed to
+her that what she had said was trite and ineffectual, and yet that it
+might have passed the measure of discretion; and, torn between two
+doubts, she added hastily: "But you have done just that in coming back
+now--that is the real solution of the problem."
+
+While she spoke they passed out of the wood-path they had been
+following, and rounding a mass of shrubbery emerged on the lawn below
+the terraces. The long bulk of the house lay above them, dark against
+the lingering gleam of the west, with brightly-lit windows marking its
+irregular outline; and the sight produced in Amherst and Justine a vague
+sense of helplessness and constraint. It was impossible to speak with
+the same freedom, confronted by that substantial symbol of the accepted
+order, which seemed to glare down on them in massive disdain of their
+puny efforts to deflect the course of events: and Amherst, without
+reverting to her last words, asked after a moment if his wife had many
+guests.
+
+He listened in silence while Justine ran over the list of names--the
+Telfer girls and their brother, Mason Winch and Westy Gaines, a cluster
+of young bridge-playing couples, and, among the last arrivals, the
+Fenton Carburys and Ned Bowfort. The names were all familiar to
+Amherst--he knew they represented the flower of week-end fashion; but he
+did not remember having seen the Carburys among his wife's guests, and
+his mind paused on the name, seeking to regain some lost impression
+connected with it. But it evoked, like the others, merely the confused
+sense of stridency and unrest which he had brought away from his last
+Lynbrook visit; and this reminiscence made him ask Miss Brent, when her
+list was ended, if she did not think that so continuous a succession of
+visitors was too tiring for Bessy.
+
+"I sometimes think it tires her more than she knows; but I hope she can
+be persuaded to take better care of herself now that Mrs. Ansell has
+come back."
+
+Amherst halted abruptly. "Is Mrs. Ansell here?"
+
+"She arrived from Europe today."
+
+"And Mr. Langhope too, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes. He came from Newport about ten days ago."
+
+Amherst checked himself, conscious that his questions betrayed the fact
+that he and his wife no longer wrote to each other. The same thought
+appeared to strike Justine, and they walked across the lawn in silence,
+hastening their steps involuntarily, as though to escape the oppressive
+weight of the words which had passed between them. But Justine was
+unwilling that this fruitless sense of oppression should be the final
+outcome of their talk; and when they reached the upper terrace she
+paused and turned impulsively to Amherst. As she did so, the light from
+an uncurtained window fell on her face, which glowed with the inner
+brightness kindled in it by moments of strong feeling.
+
+"I am sure of one thing--Bessy will be very, very glad that you have
+come," she exclaimed.
+
+"Thank you," he answered.
+
+Their hands met mechanically, and she turned away and entered the house.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+BESSY had not seen her little girl that day, and filled with compunction
+by Justine's reminder, she hastened directly to the school-room.
+
+Of late, in certain moods, her maternal tenderness had been clouded by a
+sense of uneasiness in the child's presence, for Cicely was the argument
+most effectually used by Mr. Langhope and Mr. Tredegar in their efforts
+to check the triumph of Amherst's ideas. Bessy, still unable to form an
+independent opinion on the harassing question of the mills, continued to
+oscillate between the views of the contending parties, now regarding
+Cicely as an innocent victim and herself as an unnatural mother,
+sacrificing her child's prospects to further Amherst's enterprise, and
+now conscious of a vague animosity against the little girl, as the chief
+cause of the dissensions which had so soon clouded the skies of her
+second marriage. Then again, there were moments when Cicely's rosy bloom
+reminded her bitterly of the child she had lost--the son on whom her
+ambitions had been fixed. It seemed to her now that if their boy had
+lived she might have kept Amherst's love and have played a more
+important part in his life; and brooding on the tragedy of the child's
+sickly existence she resented the contrast of Cicely's brightness and
+vigour. The result was that in her treatment of her daughter she
+alternated between moments of exaggerated devotion and days of neglect,
+never long happy away from the little girl, yet restless and
+self-tormenting in her presence.
+
+After her talk with Justine she felt more than usually disturbed, as she
+always did when her unprofitable impulses of self-exposure had subsided.
+Bessy's mind was not made for introspection, and chance had burdened it
+with unintelligible problems. She felt herself the victim of
+circumstances to which her imagination attributed the deliberate malice
+that children ascribe to the furniture they run against in playing. This
+helped her to cultivate a sense of helpless injury and to disdain in
+advance the advice she was perpetually seeking. How absurd it was, for
+instance, to suppose that a girl could understand the feelings of a
+married woman! Justine's suggestion that she should humble herself still
+farther to Amherst merely left in Bessy's mind a rankling sense of being
+misunderstood and undervalued by those to whom she turned in her
+extremity, and she said to herself, in a phrase that sounded well in her
+own ears, that sooner or later every woman must learn to fight her
+battles alone.
+
+In this mood she entered the room where Cicely was at supper with her
+governess, and enveloped the child in a whirl of passionate caresses.
+But Cicely had inherited the soberer Westmore temper, and her mother's
+spasmodic endearments always had a repressive effect on her. She
+dutifully returned a small fraction of Bessy's kisses, and then, with an
+air of relief, addressed herself once more to her bread and marmalade.
+
+"You don't seem a bit glad to see me!" Bessy exclaimed, while the little
+governess made a nervous pretence of being greatly amused at this
+prodigious paradox, and Cicely, setting down her silver mug, asked
+judicially: "Why should I be gladder than other days? It isn't a
+birthday."
+
+This Cordelia-like answer cut Bessy to the quick. "You horrid child to
+say such a cruel thing when you know I love you better and better every
+minute! But you don't care for me any longer because Justine has taken
+you away from me!"
+
+This last charge had sprung into her mind in the act of uttering it, but
+now that it was spoken it instantly assumed the proportions of a fact,
+and seemed to furnish another justification for her wretchedness. Bessy
+was not naturally jealous, but her imagination was thrall to the spoken
+word, and it gave her a sudden incomprehensible relief to associate
+Justine with the obscure causes of her suffering.
+
+"I know she's cleverer than I am, and more amusing, and can tell you
+about plants and animals and things...and I daresay she tells you how
+tiresome and stupid I am...."
+
+She sprang up suddenly, abashed by Cicely's astonished gaze, and by the
+governess's tremulous attempt to continue to treat the scene as one of
+"Mamma's" most successful pleasantries.
+
+"Don't mind me--my head aches horribly. I think I'll rush off for a
+gallop on Impulse before dinner. Miss Dill, Cicely's nails are a
+sight--I suppose that comes of grubbing up wild-flowers."
+
+And with this parting shot at Justine's pursuits she swept out of the
+school-room, leaving pupil and teacher plunged in a stricken silence
+from which Cicely at length emerged to say, with the candour that Miss
+Dill dreaded more than any punishable offense: "Mother's prettiest--but
+I do like Justine the best."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was nearly dark when Bessy mounted the horse which had been hastily
+saddled in response to her order; but it was her habit to ride out alone
+at all hours, and of late nothing but a hard gallop had availed to quiet
+her nerves. Her craving for occupation had increased as her life became
+more dispersed and agitated, and the need to fill every hour drove her
+to excesses of bodily exertion, since other forms of activity were
+unknown to her.
+
+As she cantered along under the twilight sky, with a strong sea-breeze
+in her face, the rush of air and the effort of steadying her nervous
+thoroughbred filled her with a glow of bodily energy from which her
+thoughts emerged somewhat cleansed of their bitterness.
+
+She had been odious to poor little Cicely, for whom she now felt a
+sudden remorseful yearning which almost made her turn her horse's head
+homeward, that she might dash upstairs and do penance beside the child's
+bed. And that she should have accused Justine of taking Cicely from her!
+It frightened her to find herself thinking evil of Justine. Bessy, whose
+perceptions were keen enough in certain directions, knew that her second
+marriage had changed her relation to all her former circle of friends.
+Though they still rallied about her, keeping up the convenient habit of
+familiar intercourse, she had begun to be aware that their view of her
+had in it an element of criticism and compassion. She had once fancied
+that Amherst's good looks, and the other qualities she had seen in him,
+would immediately make him free of the charmed circle in which she
+moved; but she was discouraged by his disregard of his opportunities,
+and above all by the fundamental differences in his view of life. He was
+never common or ridiculous, but she saw that he would never acquire the
+small social facilities. He was fond of exercise, but it bored him to
+talk of it. The men's smoking-room anecdotes did not amuse him, he was
+unmoved by the fluctuations of the stock-market, he could not tell one
+card from another, and his perfunctory attempts at billiards had once
+caused Mr. Langhope to murmur, in his daughter's hearing: "Ah, that's
+the test--I always said so!"
+
+Thus debarred from what seemed to Bessy the chief points of contact with
+life, how could Amherst hope to impose himself on minds versed in these
+larger relations? As the sense of his social insufficiency grew on her,
+Bessy became more sensitive to that latent criticism of her marriage
+which--intolerable thought!--involved a judgment on herself. She was
+increasingly eager for the approval and applause of her little audience,
+yet increasingly distrustful of their sincerity, and more miserably
+persuaded that she and her husband were the butt of some of their most
+effective stories. She knew also that rumours of the disagreement about
+Westmore were abroad, and the suspicion that Amherst's conduct was the
+subject of unfriendly comment provoked in her a reaction of loyalty to
+his ideas....
+
+From this turmoil of conflicting influences only her friendship with
+Justine Brent remained secure. Though Justine's adaptability made it
+easy for her to fit into the Lynbrook life, Bessy knew that she stood as
+much outside of it as Amherst. She could never, for instance, be
+influenced by what Maria Ansell and the Gaineses and the Telfers
+thought. She had her own criteria of conduct, unintelligible to Bessy,
+but giving her an independence of mind on which her friend leaned in a
+kind of blind security. And that even her faith in Justine should
+suddenly be poisoned by a jealous thought seemed to prove that the
+consequences of her marriage were gradually infecting her whole life.
+Bessy could conceive of masculine devotion only as subservient to its
+divinity's least wish, and she argued that if Amherst had really loved
+her he could not so lightly have disturbed the foundations of her world.
+And so her tormented thoughts, perpetually circling on themselves,
+reverted once more to their central grievance--the failure of her
+marriage. If her own love had died out it would have been much
+simpler--she was surrounded by examples of the mutual evasion of a
+troublesome tie. There was Blanche Carbury, for instance, with whom she
+had lately struck up an absorbing friendship...it was perfectly clear
+that Blanche Carbury wondered how much more she was going to stand! But
+it was the torment of Bessy's situation that it involved a radical
+contradiction, that she still loved Amherst though she could not forgive
+him for having married her.
+
+Perhaps what she most suffered from was his too-prompt acceptance of the
+semi-estrangement between them. After nearly three years of marriage she
+had still to learn that it was Amherst's way to wrestle with the angel
+till dawn, and then to go about his other business. Her own mind could
+revolve in the same grievance as interminably as a squirrel in its
+wheel, and her husband's habit of casting off the accepted fact seemed
+to betoken poverty of feeling. If only he had striven a little harder to
+keep her--if, even now, he would come back to her, and make her feel
+that she was more to him than those wretched mills!
+
+When she turned her mare toward Lynbrook, the longing to see Amherst was
+again uppermost. He had not written for weeks--she had been obliged to
+tell Maria Ansell that she knew nothing of his plans, and it mortified
+her to think that every one was aware of his neglect. Yet, even now, if
+on reaching the house she should find a telegram to say that he was
+coming, the weight of loneliness would be lifted, and everything in life
+would seem different....
+
+Her high-strung mare, scenting the homeward road, and excited by the
+fantastic play of wayside lights and shadows, swept her along at a wild
+gallop with which the fevered rush of her thoughts kept pace, and when
+she reached the house she dropped from the saddle with aching wrists and
+brain benumbed.
+
+She entered by a side door, to avoid meeting any one, and ran upstairs
+at once, knowing that she had barely time to dress for dinner. As she
+opened the door of her sitting-room some one rose from the chair by the
+fire, and she stood still, facing her husband....
+
+It was the moment both had desired, yet when it came it found them
+tongue-tied and helpless.
+
+Bessy was the first to speak. "When did you get here? You never wrote me
+you were coming!"
+
+Amherst advanced toward her, holding out his hand. "No; you must forgive
+me. I have been very busy," he said.
+
+Always the same excuse! The same thrusting at her of the hateful fact
+that Westmore came first, and that she must put up with whatever was
+left of his time and thoughts!
+
+"You are always too busy to let me hear from you," she said coldly, and
+the hand which had sprung toward his fell back to her side.
+
+Even then, if he had only said frankly: "It was too difficult--I didn't
+know how," the note of truth would have reached and moved her; but he
+had striven for the tone of ease and self-restraint that was habitual
+among her friends, and as usual his attempt had been a failure.
+
+"I am sorry--I'm a bad hand at writing," he rejoined; and his evil
+genius prompted him to add: "I hope my coming is not inconvenient?"
+
+The colour rose to Bessy's face. "Of course not. But it must seem rather
+odd to our visitors that I should know so little of your plans."
+
+At this he humbled himself still farther. "I know I don't think enough
+about appearances--I'll try to do better the next time."
+
+Appearances! He spoke as if she had been reproaching him for a breach of
+etiquette...it never occurred to him that the cry came from her
+humiliated heart! The tide of warmth that always enveloped her in his
+presence was receding, and in its place a chill fluid seemed to creep up
+slowly to her throat and lips.
+
+In Amherst, meanwhile, the opposite process was taking place. His wife
+was still to him the most beautiful woman in the world, or rather,
+perhaps, the only woman to whose beauty his eyes had been opened. That
+beauty could never again penetrate to his heart, but it still touched
+his senses, not with passion but with a caressing kindliness, such as
+one might feel for the bright movements of a bird or a kitten. It seemed
+to plead with him not to ask of her more than she could give--to be
+content with the outward grace and not seek in it an inner meaning. He
+moved toward her again, and took her passive hands in his.
+
+"You look tired. Why do you ride so late?"
+
+"Oh, I just wanted to give Impulse a gallop. I hadn't time to take her
+out earlier, and if I let the grooms exercise her they'll spoil her
+mouth."
+
+Amherst frowned. "You ought not to ride that mare alone at night. She
+shies at everything after dark."
+
+"She's the only horse I care for--the others are all cows," she
+murmured, releasing her hands impatiently.
+
+"Well, you must take me with you the next time you ride her."
+
+She softened a little, in spite of herself. Riding was the only
+amusement he cared to share with her, and the thought of a long gallop
+across the plains at his side brought back the warmth to her veins.
+
+"Yes, we'll go tomorrow. How long do you mean to stay?" she asked,
+looking up at him eagerly.
+
+He was pleased that she should wish to know, yet the question
+embarrassed him, for it was necessary that he should be back at Westmore
+within three days, and he could not put her off with an evasion.
+
+Bessy saw his hesitation, and her colour rose again. "I only asked," she
+explained, "because there is to be a fancy ball at the Hunt Club on the
+twentieth, and I thought of giving a big dinner here first."
+
+Amherst did not understand that she too had her inarticulate moments,
+and that the allusion to the fancy ball was improvised to hide an
+eagerness to which he had been too slow in responding. He thought she
+had enquired about his plans only that he might not again interfere with
+the arrangements of her dinner-table. If that was all she cared about,
+it became suddenly easy to tell her that he could not stay, and he
+answered lightly: "Fancy balls are a little out of my line; but at any
+rate I shall have to be back at the mills the day after tomorrow."
+
+The disappointment brought a rush of bitterness to her lips. "The day
+after tomorrow? It seems hardly worth while to have come so far for two
+days!"
+
+"Oh, I don't mind the journey--and there are one or two matters I must
+consult you about."
+
+There could hardly have been a more ill-advised answer, but Amherst was
+reckless now. If she cared for his coming only that he might fill a
+place at a fancy-dress dinner, he would let her see that he had come
+only because he had to go through the form of submitting to her certain
+measures to be taken at Westmore.
+
+Bessy was beginning to feel the physical reaction of her struggle with
+the mare. The fatigue which at first had deadened her nerves now woke
+them to acuter sensibility, and an appealing word from her husband would
+have drawn her to his arms. But his answer seemed to drive all the blood
+back to her heart.
+
+"I don't see why you still go through the form of consulting me about
+Westmore, when you have always done just as you pleased there, without
+regard to me or Cicely."
+
+Amherst made no answer, silenced by the discouragement of hearing the
+same old grievance on her lips; and she too seemed struck, after she had
+spoken, by the unprofitableness of such retorts.
+
+"It doesn't matter--of course I'll do whatever you wish," she went on
+listlessly. "But I could have sent my signature, if that is all you came
+for----"
+
+"Thanks," said Amherst coldly. "I shall remember that the next time."
+
+They stood silent for a moment, he with his eyes fixed on her, she with
+averted head, twisting her riding-whip between her fingers; then she
+said suddenly: "We shall be late for dinner," and passing into her
+dressing-room she closed the door.
+
+Amherst roused himself as she disappeared.
+
+"Bessy!" he exclaimed, moving toward her; but as he approached the door
+he heard her maid's voice within, and turning away he went to his own
+room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bessy came down late to dinner, with vivid cheeks and an air of
+improvised ease; and the manner of her entrance, combined with her
+husband's unannounced arrival, produced in their observant guests the
+sense of latent complications. Mr. Langhope, though evidently unaware of
+his son-in-law's return till they greeted each other in the
+drawing-room, was too good a card-player to betray surprise, and Mrs.
+Ansell outdid herself in the delicate art of taking everything for
+granted; but these very dissimulations sharpened the perception of the
+other guests, whom long practice had rendered expert in interpreting
+such signs.
+
+Of all this Justine Brent was aware; and conscious also that, by every
+one but herself, the suspected estrangement between the Amhersts was
+regarded as turning merely on the question of money. To the greater
+number of persons present there was, in fact, no other conceivable
+source of conjugal discord, since every known complication could be
+adjusted by means of the universal lubricant. It was this unanimity of
+view which bound together in the compactness of a new feudalism the
+members of Bessy Amherst's world; which supplied them with their
+pass-words and social tests, and defended them securely against the
+insidious attack of ideas.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Genius of History, capriciously directing the antics of its
+marionettes, sometimes lets the drama languish through a series of
+unrelated episodes, and then, suddenly quickening the pace, packs into
+one scene the stuff of a dozen. The chance meeting of Amherst and
+Justine, seemingly of no significance to either, contained the germ of
+developments of which both had begun to be aware before the evening was
+over. Their short talk--the first really intimate exchange of words
+between them--had the effect of creating a sense of solidarity that grew
+apace in the atmosphere of the Lynbrook dinner-table.
+
+Justine was always reluctant to take part in Bessy's week-end dinners,
+but as she descended the stairs that evening she did not regret having
+promised to be present. She frankly wanted to see Amherst again--his
+tone, his view of life, reinforced her own convictions, restored her
+faith in the reality and importance of all that Lynbrook ignored and
+excluded. Her extreme sensitiveness to surrounding vibrations of thought
+and feeling told her, as she glanced at him between the flowers and
+candles of the long dinner-table, that he too was obscurely aware of the
+same effect; and it flashed across her that they were unconsciously
+drawn together by the fact that they were the only two strangers in the
+room. Every one else had the same standpoint, spoke the same language,
+drew on the same stock of allusions, used the same weights and measures
+in estimating persons and actions. Between Mr. Langhope's indolent
+acuteness of mind and the rudimentary processes of the rosy Telfers
+there was a difference of degree but not of kind. If Mr. Langhope viewed
+the spectacle more objectively, it was not because he had outlived the
+sense of its importance, but because years of experience had
+familiarized him with its minutest details; and this familiarity with
+the world he lived in had bred a profound contempt for any other.
+
+In no way could the points of contact between Amherst and Justine Brent
+have been more vividly brought out than by their tacit exclusion from
+the currents of opinion about them. Amherst, seated in unsmiling
+endurance at the foot of the table, between Mrs. Ansell, with her
+carefully-distributed affabilities, and Blanche Carbury, with her
+reckless hurling of conversational pebbles, seemed to Justine as much of
+a stranger as herself among the people to whom his marriage had
+introduced him. So strongly did she feel the sense of their common
+isolation that it was no surprise to her, when the men reappeared in the
+drawing-room after dinner, to have her host thread his way, between the
+unfolding bridge-tables, straight to the corner where she sat. Amherst's
+methods in the drawing-room were still as direct as in the cotton-mill.
+He always went up at once to the person he sought, without preliminary
+waste of tactics; and on this occasion Justine, without knowing what had
+passed between himself and Bessy, suspected from the appearance of both
+that their talk had resulted in increasing Amherst's desire to be with
+some one to whom he could speak freely and naturally on the subject
+nearest his heart.
+
+She began at once to question him about Westmore, and the change in his
+face showed that his work was still a refuge from all that made life
+disheartening and unintelligible. Whatever convictions had been thwarted
+or impaired in him, his faith in the importance of his task remained
+unshaken; and the firmness with which he held to it filled Justine with
+a sense of his strength. The feeling kindled her own desire to escape
+again into the world of deeds, yet by a sudden reaction it checked the
+growing inclination for Stephen Wyant that had resulted from her revolt
+against Lynbrook. Here was a man as careless as Wyant of the minor
+forms, yet her appreciation of him was not affected by the lack of
+adaptability that she accused herself of criticizing in her suitor. She
+began to see that it was not the sense of Wyant's social deficiencies
+that had held her back; and the discovery at once set free her judgment
+of him, enabling her to penetrate to the real causes of her reluctance.
+She understood now that the flaw she felt was far deeper than any defect
+of manner. It was the sense in him of something unstable and
+incalculable, something at once weak and violent, that was brought to
+light by the contrast of Amherst's quiet resolution. Here was a man whom
+no gusts of chance could deflect from his purpose; while she felt that
+the career to which Wyant had so ardently given himself would always be
+at the mercy of his passing emotions.
+
+As the distinction grew clearer, Justine trembled to think that she had
+so nearly pledged herself, without the excuse of love, to a man whose
+failings she could judge so lucidly.... But had she ever really thought
+of marrying Wyant? While she continued to talk with Amherst such a
+possibility became more and more remote, till she began to feel it was
+no more than a haunting dream. But her promise to see Wyant the next
+day reminded her of the nearness of her peril. How could she have played
+with her fate so lightly--she, who held her life so dear because she
+felt in it such untried powers of action and emotion? She continued to
+listen to Amherst's account of his work, with enough outward
+self-possession to place the right comment and put the right question,
+yet conscious only of the quiet strength she was absorbing from his
+presence, of the way in which his words, his voice, his mere nearness
+were slowly steadying and clarifying her will.
+
+In the smoking-room, after the ladies had gone upstairs, Amherst
+continued to acquit himself mechanically of his duties, against the
+incongruous back-ground of his predecessor's remarkable
+sporting-prints--for it was characteristic of his relation to Lynbrook
+that his life there was carried on in the setting of foils and
+boxing-gloves, firearms and racing-trophies, which had expressed Dick
+Westmore's ideals. Never very keenly alive to his material surroundings,
+and quite unconscious of the irony of this proximity, Amherst had come
+to accept his wife's guests as unquestioningly as their background, and
+with the same sense of their being an inevitable part of his new life.
+Their talk was no more intelligible to him than the red and yellow
+hieroglyphics of the racing-prints, and he smoked in silence while Mr.
+Langhope discoursed to Westy Gaines on the recent sale of Chinese
+porcelains at which he had been lucky enough to pick up the set of Ming
+for his daughter, and Mason Winch expounded to a group of languid
+listeners the essential dependence of the labouring-man on the
+prosperity of Wall Street. In a retired corner, Ned Bowfort was
+imparting facts of a more personal nature to a chosen following who
+hailed with suppressed enjoyment the murmured mention of proper names;
+and now and then Amherst found himself obliged to say to Fenton Carbury,
+who with one accord had been left on his hands, "Yes, I understand the
+flat-tread tire is best," or, "There's a good deal to be said for the
+low tension magneto----"
+
+But all the while his conscious thoughts were absorbed in the
+remembrance of his talk with Justine Brent. He had left his wife's
+presence in that state of moral lassitude when the strongest hopes droop
+under the infection of indifference and hostility, and the effort of
+attainment seems out of all proportion to the end in view; but as he
+listened to Justine all his energies sprang to life again. Here at last
+was some one who felt the urgency of his task: her every word and look
+confirmed her comment of the afternoon: "Westmore must be foremost to
+you both in time--I don't see how either of you can escape it."
+
+She saw it, as he did, to be the special outlet offered for the
+expression of what he was worth to the world; and with the knowledge
+that one other person recognized his call, it sounded again loudly in
+his heart. Yes, he would go on, patiently and persistently, conquering
+obstacles, suffering delay, enduring criticism--hardest of all, bearing
+with his wife's deepening indifference and distrust. Justine had said
+"Westmore must be foremost to you both," and he would prove that she was
+right--spite of the powers leagued against him he would win over Bessy
+in the end!
+
+Those observers who had been struck by the length and animation of Miss
+Brent's talk with her host--and among whom Mrs. Ansell and Westy Gaines
+were foremost--would hardly have believed how small a part her personal
+charms had played in attracting him. Amherst was still under the power
+of the other kind of beauty--the soft graces personifying the first
+triumph of sex in his heart--and Justine's dark slenderness could not at
+once dispel the milder image. He watched her with pleasure while she
+talked, but her face interested him only as the vehicle of her
+ideas--she looked as a girl must look who felt and thought as she did.
+He was aware that everything about her was quick and fine and supple,
+and that the muscles of character lay close to the surface of feeling;
+but the interpenetration of spirit and flesh that made her body seem
+like the bright projection of her mind left him unconscious of anything
+but the oneness of their thoughts.
+
+So these two, in their hour of doubt, poured strength into each other's
+hearts, each unconscious of what they gave, and of its hidden power of
+renewing their own purposes.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+IF Mr. Langhope had ever stooped to such facile triumphs as that summed
+up in the convenient "I told you so," he would have loosed the phrase on
+Mrs. Ansell in the course of a colloquy which these two, the next
+afternoon, were at some pains to defend from the incursions of the
+Lynbrook house-party.
+
+Mrs. Ansell was the kind of woman who could encircle herself with
+privacy on an excursion-boat and create a nook in an hotel drawing-room,
+but it taxed even her ingenuity to segregate herself from the Telfers.
+When the feat was accomplished, and it became evident that Mr. Langhope
+could yield himself securely to the joys of confidential discourse, he
+paused on the brink of disclosure to say: "It's as well I saved that
+Ming from the ruins."
+
+"What ruins?" she exclaimed, her startled look giving him the full
+benefit of the effect he was seeking to produce.
+
+He addressed himself deliberately to the selecting and lighting of a
+cigarette. "Truscomb is down and out--resigned, 'the wise it call.' And
+the alterations at Westmore are going to cost a great deal more than my
+experienced son-in-law expected. This is Westy's morning budget--he and
+Amherst had it out last night. I tell my poor girl that at least she'll
+lose nothing when the _bibelots_ I've bought for her go up the spout."
+
+Mrs. Ansell received this with a troubled countenance. "What has become
+of Bessy? I've not seen her since luncheon."
+
+"No. She and Blanche Carbury have motored over to dine with the Nick
+Ledgers at Islip."
+
+"Did you see her before she left?"
+
+"For a moment, but she said very little. Westy tells me that Amherst
+hints at leasing the New York house. One can understand that she's left
+speechless."
+
+Mrs. Ansell, at this, sat bolt upright. "The New York house?" But she
+broke off to add, with seeming irrelevance: "If you knew how I detest
+Blanche Carbury!"
+
+Mr. Langhope made a gesture of semi-acquiescence. "She is not the friend
+I should have chosen for Bessy--but we know that Providence makes use of
+strange instruments."
+
+"Providence and Blanche Carbury?" She stared at him. "Ah, you are
+profoundly corrupt!"
+
+"I have the coarse masculine habit of looking facts in the face.
+Woman-like, you prefer to make use of them privately, and cut them when
+you meet in public."
+
+"Blanche is not the kind of fact I should care to make use of under any
+circumstances whatever!"
+
+"No one asks you to. Simply regard her as a force of nature--let her
+alone, and don't put up too many lightning-rods."
+
+She raised her eyes to his face. "Do you really mean that you want Bessy
+to get a divorce?"
+
+"Your style is elliptical, dear Maria; but divorce does not frighten me
+very much. It has grown almost as painless as modern dentistry."
+
+"It's our odious insensibility that makes it so!"
+
+Mr. Langhope received this with the mildness of suspended judgment. "How
+else, then, do you propose that Bessy shall save what is left of her
+money?"
+
+"I would rather see her save what is left of her happiness. Bessy will
+never be happy in the new way."
+
+"What do you call the new way?"
+
+"Launching one's boat over a human body--or several, as the case may
+be!"
+
+"But don't you see that, as an expedient to bring this madman to
+reason----"
+
+"I've told you that you don't understand him!"
+
+Mr. Langhope turned on her with what would have been a show of temper in
+any one less provided with shades of manner. "Well, then, explain him,
+for God's sake!"
+
+"I might explain him by saying that she's still in love with him."
+
+"Ah, if you're still imprisoned in the old formulas!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell confronted him with a grave face. "Isn't that precisely what
+Bessy is? Isn't she one of the most harrowing victims of the plan of
+bringing up our girls in the double bondage of expediency and unreality,
+corrupting their bodies with luxury and their brains with sentiment, and
+leaving them to reconcile the two as best they can, or lose their souls
+in the attempt?"
+
+Mr. Langhope smiled. "I may observe that, with my poor child so early
+left alone to me, I supposed I was doing my best in committing her
+guidance to some of the most admirable women I know."
+
+"Of whom I was one--and not the least lamentable example of the system!
+Of course the only thing that saves us from their vengeance," Mrs.
+Ansell added, "is that so few of them ever stop to think...."
+
+"And yet, as I make out, it's precisely what you would have Bessy do!"
+
+"It's what neither you nor I can help her doing. You've given her just
+acuteness enough to question, without consecutiveness enough to explain.
+But if she must perish in the struggle--and I see no hope for her--"
+cried Mrs. Ansell, starting suddenly and dramatically to her feet, "at
+least let her perish defending her ideals and not denying them--even if
+she has to sell the New York house and all your china pots into the
+bargain!"
+
+Mr. Langhope, rising also, deprecatingly lifted his hands, "If that's
+what you call saving me from her vengeance--sending the crockery
+crashing round my ears!" And, as she turned away without any pretense of
+capping his pleasantry, he added, with a gleam of friendly malice: "I
+suppose you're going to the Hunt ball as Cassandra?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst, that morning, had sought out his wife with the definite resolve
+to efface the unhappy impression of their previous talk. He blamed
+himself for having been too easily repelled by her impatience. As the
+stronger of the two, with the power of a fixed purpose to sustain him,
+he should have allowed for the instability of her impulses, and above
+all for the automatic influences of habit.
+
+Knowing that she did not keep early hours he delayed till ten o'clock to
+present himself at her sitting-room door, but the maid who answered his
+knock informed him that Mrs. Amherst was not yet up.
+
+His reply that he would wait did not appear to hasten the leisurely
+process of her toilet, and he had the room to himself for a full
+half-hour. Many months had passed since he had spent so long a time in
+it, and though habitually unobservant of external details, he now found
+an outlet for his restlessness in mechanically noting the intimate
+appurtenances of Bessy's life. He was at first merely conscious of a
+soothing harmony of line and colour, extending from the blurred tints of
+the rug to the subdued gleam of light on old picture-frames and on the
+slender flanks of porcelain vases; but gradually he began to notice how
+every chair and screen and cushion, and even every trifling utensil on
+the inlaid writing-desk, had been chosen with reference to the whole
+composition, and to the minutest requirements of a fastidious leisure. A
+few months ago this studied setting, if he had thought of it at all,
+would have justified itself as expressing the pretty woman's natural
+affinity with pretty toys; but now it was the cost of it that struck
+him. He was beginning to learn from Bessy's bills that no commodity is
+taxed as high as beauty, and the beauty about him filled him with sudden
+repugnance, as the disguise of the evil influences that were separating
+his wife's life from his.
+
+But with her entrance he dismissed the thought, and tried to meet her as
+if nothing stood in the way of their full communion. Her hair, still wet
+from the bath, broke from its dryad-like knot in dusky rings and spirals
+threaded with gold, and from her loose flexible draperies, and her whole
+person as she moved, there came a scent of youth and morning freshness.
+Her beauty touched him, and made it easier for him to humble himself.
+
+"I was stupid and disagreeable last night. I can never say what I want
+when I have to count the minutes, and I've come back now for a quiet
+talk," he began.
+
+A shade of distrust passed over Bessy's face. "About business?" she
+asked, pausing a few feet away from him.
+
+"Don't let us give it that name!" He went up to her and drew her two
+hands into his. "You used to call it our work--won't you go back to that
+way of looking at it?"
+
+Her hands resisted his pressure. "I didn't know, then, that it was going
+to be the only thing you cared for----"
+
+But for her own sake he would not let her go on. "Some day I shall make
+you see how much my caring for it means my caring for you. But
+meanwhile," he urged, "won't you overcome your aversion to the subject,
+and bear with it as my work, if you no longer care to think of it as
+yours?"
+
+Bessy, freeing herself, sat down on the edge of the straight-backed
+chair near the desk, as though to mark the parenthetical nature of the
+interview.
+
+"I know you think me stupid--but wives are not usually expected to go
+into all the details of their husband's business. I have told you to do
+whatever you wish at Westmore, and I can't see why that is not enough."
+
+Amherst looked at her in surprise. Something in her quick mechanical
+utterance suggested that not only the thought but the actual words she
+spoke had been inspired, and he fancied he heard in them an echo of
+Blanche Carbury's tones. Though Bessy's intimacy with Mrs. Carbury was
+of such recent date, fragments of unheeded smoking-room gossip now
+recurred to confirm the vague antipathy which Amherst had felt for her
+the previous evening.
+
+"I know that, among your friends, wives are not expected to interest
+themselves in their husbands' work, and if the mills were mine I should
+try to conform to the custom, though I should always think it a pity
+that the questions that fill a man's thoughts should be ruled out of his
+talk with his wife; but as it is, I am only your representative at
+Westmore, and I don't see how we can help having the subject come up
+between us."
+
+Bessy remained silent, not as if acquiescing in his plea, but as though
+her own small stock of arguments had temporarily failed her; and he went
+on, enlarging on his theme with a careful avoidance of technical terms,
+and with the constant effort to keep the human and personal side of the
+question before her.
+
+She listened without comment, her eyes fixed on a little jewelled
+letter-opener which she had picked up from the writing-table, and which
+she continued to turn in her fingers while he spoke.
+
+The full development of Amherst's plans at Westmore, besides resulting,
+as he had foreseen, in Truscomb's resignation, and in Halford Gaines's
+outspoken resistance to the new policy, had necessitated a larger
+immediate outlay of capital than the first estimates demanded, and
+Amherst, in putting his case to Bessy, was prepared to have her meet it
+on the old ground of the disapproval of all her advisers. But when he
+had ended she merely said, without looking up from the toy in her hand:
+"I always expected that you would need a great deal more money than you
+thought."
+
+The comment touched him at his most vulnerable point. "But you see why?
+You understand how the work has gone on growing--?"
+
+His wife lifted her head to glance at him for a moment. "I am not sure
+that I understand," she said indifferently; "but if another loan is
+necessary, of course I will sign the note for it."
+
+The words checked his reply by bringing up, before he was prepared to
+deal with it, the other and more embarrassing aspect of the question. He
+had hoped to reawaken in Bessy some feeling for the urgency of his task
+before having to take up the subject of its cost; but her cold
+anticipation of his demands as part of a disagreeable business to be
+despatched and put out of mind, doubled the difficulty of what he had
+left to say; and it occurred to him that she had perhaps foreseen and
+reckoned on this result.
+
+He met her eyes gravely. "Another loan _is_ necessary; but if any proper
+provision is to be made for paying it back, your expenses will have to
+be cut down a good deal for the next few months."
+
+The blood leapt to Bessy's face. "My expenses? You seem to forget how
+much I've had to cut them down already."
+
+"The household bills certainly don't show it. They are increasing
+steadily, and there have been some very heavy incidental payments
+lately."
+
+"What do you mean by incidental payments?"
+
+"Well, there was the pair of cobs you bought last month----"
+
+She returned to a resigned contemplation of the letter-opener. "With
+only one motor, one must have more horses, of course."
+
+"The stables seemed to me fairly full before. But if you required more
+horses, I don't see why, at this particular moment, it was also
+necessary to buy a set of Chinese vases for twenty-five hundred
+dollars."
+
+Bessy, at this, lifted her head with an air of decision that surprised
+him. Her blush had faded as quickly as it came, and he noticed that she
+was pale to the lips.
+
+"I know you don't care about such things; but I had an exceptional
+chance of securing the vases at a low price--they are really worth
+twice as much--and Dick always wanted a set of Ming for the drawing-room
+mantelpiece."
+
+Richard Westmore's name was always tacitly avoided between them, for in
+Amherst's case the disagreeable sense of dependence on a dead man's
+bounty increased that feeling of obscure constraint and repugnance which
+any reminder of the first husband's existence is wont to produce in his
+successor.
+
+He reddened at the reply, and Bessy, profiting by an embarrassment which
+she had perhaps consciously provoked, went on hastily, and as if by
+rote: "I have left you perfectly free to do as you think best at the
+mills, but this perpetual discussion of my personal expenses is very
+unpleasant to me, as I am sure it must be to you, and in future I think
+it would be much better for us to have separate accounts."
+
+"Separate accounts?" Amherst echoed in genuine astonishment.
+
+"I should like my personal expenses to be under my own control again--I
+have never been used to accounting for every penny I spend."
+
+The vertical lines deepened between Amherst's brows. "You are of course
+free to spend your money as you like--and I thought you were doing so
+when you authorized me, last spring, to begin the changes at Westmore."
+
+Her lip trembled. "Do you reproach me for that? I didn't
+understand...you took advantage...."
+
+"Oh!" he exclaimed.
+
+At his tone the blood rushed back to her face. "It was my fault, of
+course--I only wanted to please you----"
+
+Amherst was silent, confronted by the sudden sense of his own
+responsibility. What she said was true--he had known, when he exacted
+the sacrifice, that she made it only to please him, on an impulse of
+reawakened feeling, and not from any real recognition of a larger duty.
+The perception of this made him answer gently: "I am willing to take any
+blame you think I deserve; but it won't help us now to go back to the
+past. It is more important that we should come to an understanding about
+the future. If by keeping your personal account separate, you mean that
+you wish to resume control of your whole income, then you ought to
+understand that the improvements at the mills will have to be dropped at
+once, and things there go back to their old state."
+
+She started up with an impatient gesture. "Oh, I should like never to
+hear of the mills again!"
+
+He looked at her a moment in silence. "Am I to take that as your
+answer?"
+
+She walked toward her door without returning his look. "Of course," she
+murmured, "you will end by doing as you please."
+
+The retort moved him, for he heard in it the cry of her wounded pride.
+He longed to be able to cry out in return that Westmore was nothing to
+him, that all he asked was to see her happy.... But it was not true, and
+his manhood revolted from the deception. Besides, its effect would be
+only temporary--would wear no better than her vain efforts to simulate
+an interest in his work. Between them, forever, were the insurmountable
+barriers of character, of education, of habit--and yet it was not in him
+to believe that any barrier was insurmountable.
+
+"Bessy," he exclaimed, following her, "don't let us part in this
+way----"
+
+She paused with her hand on her dressing-room door. "It is time to dress
+for church," she objected, turning to glance at the little gilt clock on
+the chimney-piece.
+
+"For church?" Amherst stared, wondering that at such a crisis she should
+have remained detached enough to take note of the hour.
+
+"You forget," she replied, with an air of gentle reproof, "that before
+we married I was in the habit of going to church every Sunday."
+
+"Yes--to be sure. Would you not like me to go with you?" he rejoined
+gently, as if roused to the consciousness of another omission in the
+long list of his social shortcomings; for church-going, at Lynbrook, had
+always struck him as a purely social observance.
+
+But Bessy had opened the door of her dressing-room. "I much prefer that
+you should do what you like," she said as she passed from the room.
+
+Amherst made no farther attempt to detain her, and the door closed on
+her as though it were closing on a chapter in their lives.
+
+"That's the end of it!" he murmured, picking up the letter-opener she
+had been playing with, and twirling it absently in his fingers. But
+nothing in life ever ends, and the next moment a new question confronted
+him--how was the next chapter to open?
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+IT was late in October when Amherst returned to Lynbrook.
+
+He had begun to learn, in the interval, the lesson most difficult to his
+direct and trenchant nature: that compromise is the law of married life.
+On the afternoon of his talk with his wife he had sought her out,
+determined to make a final effort to clear up the situation between
+them; but he learned that, immediately after luncheon, she had gone off
+in the motor with Mrs. Carbury and two men of the party, leaving word
+that they would probably not be back till evening. It cost Amherst a
+struggle, when he had humbled himself to receive this information from
+the butler, not to pack his portmanteau and take the first train for
+Hanaford; but he was still under the influence of Justine Brent's words,
+and also of his own feeling that, at this juncture, a break between
+himself and Bessy would be final.
+
+He stayed on accordingly, enduring as best he might the mute observation
+of the household, and the gentle irony of Mr. Langhope's attentions; and
+before he left Lynbrook, two days later, a provisional understanding had
+been reached.
+
+His wife proved more firm than he had foreseen in her resolve to regain
+control of her income, and the talk between them ended in reciprocal
+concessions, Bessy consenting to let the town house for the winter and
+remain at Lynbrook, while Amherst agreed to restrict his improvements at
+Westmore to such alterations as had already been begun, and to reduce
+the expenditure on these as much as possible. It was virtually the
+defeat of his policy, and he had to suffer the decent triumph of the
+Gaineses, as well as the bitterer pang of his foiled aspirations. In
+spite of the opposition of the directors, he had taken advantage of
+Truscomb's resignation to put Duplain at the head of the mills; but the
+new manager's outspoken disgust at the company's change of plan made it
+clear that he would not remain long at Westmore, and it was one of the
+miseries of Amherst's situation that he could not give the reasons for
+his defection, but must bear to figure in Duplain's terse vocabulary as
+a "quitter." The difficulty of finding a new manager expert enough to
+satisfy the directors, yet in sympathy with his own social theories,
+made Amherst fear that Duplain's withdrawal would open the way for
+Truscomb's reinstatement, an outcome on which he suspected Halford
+Gaines had always counted; and this possibility loomed before him as the
+final defeat of his hopes.
+
+Meanwhile the issues ahead had at least the merit of keeping him busy.
+The task of modifying and retrenching his plans contrasted drearily with
+the hopeful activity of the past months, but he had an iron capacity for
+hard work under adverse conditions, and the fact of being too busy for
+thought helped him to wear through the days. This pressure of work
+relieved him, at first, from too close consideration of his relation to
+Bessy. He had yielded up his dearest hopes at her wish, and for the
+moment his renunciation had set a chasm between them; but gradually he
+saw that, as he was patching together the ruins of his Westmore plans,
+so he must presently apply himself to the reconstruction of his married
+life.
+
+Before leaving Lynbrook he had had a last word with Miss Brent; not a
+word of confidence--for the same sense of reserve kept both from any
+explicit renewal of their moment's intimacy--but one of those exchanges
+of commonplace phrase that circumstances may be left to charge with
+special meaning. Justine had merely asked if he were really leaving and,
+on his assenting, had exclaimed quickly: "But you will come back soon?"
+
+"I shall certainly come back," he answered; and after a pause he added:
+"I shall find you here? You will remain at Lynbrook?"
+
+On her part also there was a shade of hesitation; then she said with a
+smile: "Yes, I shall stay."
+
+His look brightened. "And you'll write me if anything--if Bessy should
+not be well?"
+
+"I will write you," she promised; and a few weeks after his return to
+Hanaford he had, in fact, received a short note from her. Its ostensible
+purpose was to reassure him as to Bessy's health, which had certainly
+grown stronger since Dr. Wyant had persuaded her, at the close of the
+last house-party, to accord herself a period of quiet; but (the writer
+added) now that Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell had also left, the quiet
+was perhaps too complete, and Bessy's nerves were beginning to suffer
+from the reaction.
+
+Amherst had no difficulty in interpreting this brief communication. "I
+have succeeded in dispersing the people who are always keeping you and
+your wife apart; now is your chance: come and take it." That was what
+Miss Brent's letter meant; and his answer was a telegram to Bessy,
+announcing his return to Long Island.
+
+The step was not an easy one; but decisive action, however hard, was
+always easier to Amherst than the ensuing interval of readjustment. To
+come to Lynbrook had required a strong effort of will; but the effort of
+remaining there called into play less disciplined faculties.
+
+Amherst had always been used to doing things; now he had to resign
+himself to enduring a state of things. The material facilities of the
+life about him, the way in which the machinery of the great empty house
+ran on like some complex apparatus working in the void, increased the
+exasperation of his nerves. Dr. Wyant's suggestion--which Amherst
+suspected Justine of having prompted--that Mrs. Amherst should cancel
+her autumn engagements, and give herself up to a quiet outdoor life with
+her husband, seemed to present the very opportunity these two distracted
+spirits needed to find and repossess each other. But, though Amherst was
+grateful to Bessy for having dismissed her visitors--partly to please
+him, as he guessed--yet he found the routine of the establishment more
+oppressive than when the house was full. If he could have been alone
+with her in a quiet corner--the despised cottage at Westmore, even!--he
+fancied they might still have been brought together by restricted space
+and the familiar exigencies of life. All the primitive necessities which
+bind together, through their recurring daily wants, natures fated to
+find no higher point of union, had been carefully eliminated from the
+life at Lynbrook, where material needs were not only provided for but
+anticipated by a hidden mechanism that filled the house with the
+perpetual sense of invisible attendance. Though Amherst knew that he and
+Bessy could never meet in the region of great issues, he thought he
+might have regained the way to her heart, and found relief from his own
+inaction, in the small ministrations of daily life; but the next moment
+he smiled to picture Bessy in surroundings where the clocks were not
+wound of themselves and the doors did not fly open at her approach.
+Those thick-crowding cares and drudgeries which serve as merciful
+screens between so many discordant natures would have been as
+intolerable to her as was to Amherst the great glare of leisure in which
+he and she were now confronted.
+
+He saw that Bessy was in the state of propitiatory eagerness which
+always followed on her gaining a point in their long duel; and he could
+guess that she was tremulously anxious not only to make up to him, by
+all the arts she knew, for the sacrifice she had exacted, but also to
+conceal from every one the fact that, as Mr. Langhope bluntly put it, he
+had been "brought to terms." Amherst was touched by her efforts, and
+half-ashamed of his own inability to respond to them. But his mind,
+released from its normal preoccupations, had become a dangerous
+instrument of analysis and disintegration, and conditions which, a few
+months before, he might have accepted with the wholesome tolerance of
+the busy man, now pressed on him unendurably. He saw that he and his
+wife were really face to face for the first time since their marriage.
+Hitherto something had always intervened between them--first the spell
+of her grace and beauty, and the brief joy of her participation in his
+work; then the sorrow of their child's death, and after that the
+temporary exhilaration of carrying out his ideas at Westmore--but now
+that the last of these veils had been torn away they faced each other as
+strangers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The habit of keeping factory hours always drove Amherst forth long
+before his wife's day began, and in the course of one of his early
+tramps he met Miss Brent and Cicely setting out for a distant swamp
+where rumour had it that a rare native orchid might be found. Justine's
+sylvan tastes had developed in the little girl a passion for such
+pillaging expeditions, and Cicely, who had discovered that her
+step-father knew almost as much about birds and squirrels as Miss Brent
+did about flowers, was not to be appeased till Amherst had scrambled
+into the pony-cart, wedging his long legs between a fern-box and a
+lunch-basket, and balancing a Scotch terrier's telescopic body across
+his knees.
+
+The season was so mild that only one or two light windless frosts had
+singed the foliage of oaks and beeches, and gilded the roadsides with a
+smooth carpeting of maple leaves. The morning haze rose like smoke from
+burnt-out pyres of sumach and sugar-maple; a silver bloom lay on the
+furrows of the ploughed fields; and now and then, as they drove on, the
+wooded road showed at its end a tarnished disk of light, where sea and
+sky were merged.
+
+At length they left the road for a winding track through scrub-oaks and
+glossy thickets of mountain-laurel; the track died out at the foot of a
+wooded knoll, and clambering along its base they came upon the swamp.
+There it lay in charmed solitude, shut in by a tawny growth of larch and
+swamp-maple, its edges burnt out to smouldering shades of russet,
+ember-red and ashen-grey, while the quaking centre still preserved a
+jewel-like green, where hidden lanes of moisture wound between islets
+tufted with swamp-cranberry and with the charred browns of fern and wild
+rose and bay. Sodden earth and decaying branches gave forth a strange
+sweet odour, as of the aromatic essences embalming a dead summer; and
+the air charged with this scent was so still that the snapping of
+witch-hazel pods, the drop of a nut, the leap of a startled frog,
+pricked the silence with separate points of sound.
+
+The pony made fast, the terrier released, and fern-box and lunch-basket
+slung over Amherst's shoulder, the three explorers set forth on their
+journey. Amherst, as became his sex, went first; but after a few
+absent-minded plunges into the sedgy depths between the islets, he was
+ordered to relinquish his command and fall to the rear, where he might
+perform the humbler service of occasionally lifting Cicely over
+unspannable gulfs of moisture.
+
+Justine, leading the way, guided them across the treacherous surface as
+fearlessly as a king-fisher, lighting instinctively on every
+grass-tussock and submerged tree-stump of the uncertain path. Now and
+then she paused, her feet drawn close on their narrow perch, and her
+slender body swaying over as she reached down for some rare growth
+detected among the withered reeds and grasses; then she would right
+herself again by a backward movement as natural as the upward spring of
+a branch--so free and flexible in all her motions that she seemed akin
+to the swaying reeds and curving brambles which caught at her as she
+passed.
+
+At length the explorers reached the mossy corner where the orchids grew,
+and Cicely, securely balanced on a fallen tree-trunk, was allowed to dig
+the coveted roots. When they had been packed away, it was felt that this
+culminating moment must be celebrated with immediate libations of jam
+and milk; and having climbed to a dry slope among the pepper-bushes, the
+party fell on the contents of the lunch-basket. It was just the hour
+when Bessy's maid was carrying her breakfast-tray, with its delicate
+service of old silver and porcelain, into the darkened bed-room at
+Lynbrook; but early rising and hard scrambling had whetted the appetites
+of the naturalists, and the nursery fare which Cicely spread before
+them seemed a sumptuous reward for their toil.
+
+"I do like this kind of picnic much better than the ones where mother
+takes all the footmen, and the mayonnaise has to be scraped off things
+before I can eat them," Cicely declared, lifting her foaming mouth from
+a beaker of milk.
+
+Amherst, lighting his pipe, stretched himself contentedly among the
+pepper-bushes, steeped in that unreflecting peace which is shed into
+some hearts by communion with trees and sky. He too was glad to get away
+from the footmen and the mayonnaise, and he imagined that his
+stepdaughter's exclamation summed up all the reasons for his happiness.
+The boyish wood-craft which he had cultivated in order to encourage the
+same taste in his factory lads came to life in this sudden return to
+nature, and he redeemed his clumsiness in crossing the swamp by spying a
+marsh-wren's nest that had escaped Justine, and detecting in a
+swiftly-flitting olive-brown bird a belated tanager in autumn incognito.
+
+Cicely sat rapt while he pictured the bird's winter pilgrimage, with
+glimpses of the seas and islands that fled beneath him till his long
+southern flight ended in the dim glades of the equatorial forests.
+
+"Oh, what a good life--how I should like to be a wander-bird, and look
+down people's chimneys twice a year!" Justine laughed, tilting her head
+back to catch a last glimpse of the tanager.
+
+The sun beamed full on their ledge from a sky of misty blue, and she had
+thrown aside her hat, uncovering her thick waves of hair, blue-black in
+the hollows, with warm rusty edges where they took the light. Cicely
+dragged down a plumy spray of traveller's joy and wound it above her
+friend's forehead; and thus wreathed, with her bright pallour relieved
+against the dusky autumn tints, Justine looked like a wood-spirit who
+had absorbed into herself the last golden juices of the year.
+
+She leaned back laughing against a tree-trunk, pelting Cicely with
+witch-hazel pods, making the terrier waltz for scraps of ginger-bread,
+and breaking off now and then to imitate, with her clear full notes, the
+call of some hidden marsh-bird, or the scolding chatter of a squirrel in
+the scrub-oaks.
+
+"Is that what you'd like most about the journey--looking down the
+chimneys?" Amherst asked with a smile.
+
+"Oh, I don't know--I should love it all! Think of the joy of skimming
+over half the earth--seeing it born again out of darkness every morning!
+Sometimes, when I've been up all night with a patient, and have seen the
+world _come back to me_ like that, I've been almost mad with its beauty;
+and then the thought that I've never seen more than a little corner of
+it makes me feel as if I were chained. But I think if I had wings I
+should choose to be a house-swallow; and then, after I'd had my fill of
+wonders, I should come back to my familiar corner, and my house full of
+busy humdrum people, and fly low to warn them of rain, and wheel up high
+to show them it was good haying weather, and know what was going on in
+every room in the house, and every house in the village; and all the
+while I should be hugging my wonderful big secret--the secret of
+snow-plains and burning deserts, and coral islands and buried
+cities--and should put it all into my chatter under the eaves, that the
+people in the house were always too busy to stop and listen to--and when
+winter came I'm sure I should hate to leave them, even to go back to my
+great Brazilian forests full of orchids and monkeys!"
+
+"But, Justine, in winter you could take care of the monkeys," the
+practical Cicely suggested.
+
+"Yes--and that would remind me of home!" Justine cried, swinging about
+to pinch the little girl's chin.
+
+She was in one of the buoyant moods when the spirit of life caught her
+in its grip, and shook and tossed her on its mighty waves as a sea-bird
+is tossed through the spray of flying rollers. At such moments all the
+light and music of the world seemed distilled into her veins, and forced
+up in bubbles of laughter to her lips and eyes. Amherst had never seen
+her thus, and he watched her with the sense of relaxation which the
+contact of limpid gaiety brings to a mind obscured by failure and
+self-distrust. The world was not so dark a place after all, if such
+springs of merriment could well up in a heart as sensitive as hers to
+the burden and toil of existence.
+
+"Isn't it strange," she went on with a sudden drop to gravity, "that the
+bird whose wings carry him farthest and show him the most wonderful
+things, is the one who always comes back to the eaves, and is happiest
+in the thick of everyday life?"
+
+Her eyes met Amherst's. "It seems to me," he said, "that you're like
+that yourself--loving long flights, yet happiest in the thick of life."
+
+She raised her dark brows laughingly. "So I imagine--but then you see
+I've never had the long flight!"
+
+Amherst smiled. "Ah, there it is--one never knows--one never says, _This
+is the moment_! because, however good it is, it always seems the door to
+a better one beyond. Faust never said it till the end, when he'd nothing
+left of all he began by thinking worth while; and then, with what a
+difference it was said!"
+
+She pondered. "Yes--but it _was_ the best, after all--the moment in
+which he had nothing left...."
+
+"Oh," Cicely broke in suddenly, "do look at the squirrel up there! See,
+father--he's off! Let's follow him!"
+
+As she crouched there, with head thrown back, and sparkling lips and
+eyes, her fair hair--of her mother's very hue--making a shining haze
+about her face, Amherst recalled the winter evening at Hopewood, when he
+and Bessy had tracked the grey squirrel under the snowy beeches.
+Scarcely three years ago--and how bitter memory had turned! A chilly
+cloud spread over his spirit, reducing everything once more to the
+leaden hue of reality....
+
+"It's too late for any more adventures--we must be going," he said.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+AMHERST'S morning excursions with his step-daughter and Miss Brent
+renewed themselves more than once. He welcomed any pretext for escaping
+from the unprofitable round of his thoughts, and these woodland
+explorations, with their gay rivalry of search for some rare plant or
+elusive bird, and the contact with the child's happy wonder, and with
+the morning brightness of Justine's mood, gave him his only moments of
+self-forgetfulness.
+
+But the first time that Cicely's chatter carried home an echo of their
+adventures, Amherst saw a cloud on his wife's face. Her resentment of
+Justine's influence over the child had long since subsided, and in the
+temporary absence of the governess she was glad to have Cicely amused;
+but she was never quite satisfied that those about her should have
+pursuits and diversions in which she did not share. Her jealousy did not
+concentrate itself on her husband and Miss Brent: Amherst had never
+shown any inclination for the society of other women, and if the
+possibility had been suggested to her, she would probably have said that
+Justine was not "in his style"--so unconscious is a pretty woman apt to
+be of the versatility of masculine tastes. But Amherst saw that she felt
+herself excluded from amusements in which she had no desire to join, and
+of which she consequently failed to see the purpose; and he gave up
+accompanying his stepdaughter.
+
+Bessy, as if in acknowledgment of his renunciation, rose earlier in
+order to prolong their rides together. Dr. Wyant had counselled her
+against the fatigue of following the hounds, and she instinctively
+turned their horses away from the course the hunt was likely to take;
+but now and then the cry of the pack, or the flash of red on a distant
+slope, sent the blood to her face and made her press her mare to a
+gallop. When they escaped such encounters she showed no great zest in
+the exercise, and their rides resolved themselves into a spiritless
+middle-aged jog along the autumn lanes. In the early days of their
+marriage the joy of a canter side by side had merged them in a community
+of sensation beyond need of speech; but now that the physical spell had
+passed they felt the burden of a silence that neither knew how to break.
+
+Once only, a moment's friction galvanized these lifeless rides. It was
+one morning when Bessy's wild mare Impulse, under-exercised and
+over-fed, suddenly broke from her control, and would have unseated her
+but for Amherst's grasp on the bridle.
+
+"The horse is not fit for you to ride," he exclaimed, as the hot
+creature, with shudders of defiance rippling her flanks, lapsed into
+sullen subjection.
+
+"It's only because I don't ride her enough," Bessy panted. "That new
+groom is ruining her mouth."
+
+"You must not ride her alone, then."
+
+"I shall not let that man ride her."
+
+"I say you must not ride her alone."
+
+"It's ridiculous to have a groom at one's heels!"
+
+"Nevertheless you must, if you ride Impulse."
+
+Their eyes met, and she quivered and yielded like the horse. "Oh, if you
+say so--" She always hugged his brief flashes of authority.
+
+"I do say so. You promise me?"
+
+"If you like----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst had made an attempt to occupy himself with the condition of
+Lynbrook, one of those slovenly villages, without individual character
+or the tradition of self-respect, which spring up in America on the
+skirts of the rich summer colonies. But Bessy had never given Lynbrook a
+thought, and he realized the futility of hoping to interest her in its
+mongrel population of day-labourers and publicans so soon after his
+glaring failure at Westmore. The sight of the village irritated him
+whenever he passed through the Lynbrook gates, but having perforce
+accepted the situation of prince consort, without voice in the
+government, he tried to put himself out of relation with all the
+questions which had hitherto engrossed him, and to see life simply as a
+spectator. He could even conceive that, under certain conditions, there
+might be compensations in the passive attitude; but unfortunately these
+conditions were not such as the life at Lynbrook presented.
+
+The temporary cessation of Bessy's week-end parties had naturally not
+closed her doors to occasional visitors, and glimpses of the autumnal
+animation of Long Island passed now and then across the Amhersts'
+horizon. Blanche Carbury had installed herself at Mapleside, a
+fashionable colony half-way between Lynbrook and Clifton, and even
+Amherst, unused as he was to noting the seemingly inconsecutive
+movements of idle people, could not but remark that her visits to his
+wife almost invariably coincided with Ned Bowfort's cantering over
+unannounced from the Hunt Club, where he had taken up his autumn
+quarters.
+
+There was something very likeable about Bowfort, to whom Amherst was
+attracted by the fact that he was one of the few men of Bessy's circle
+who knew what was going on in the outer world. Throughout an existence
+which one divined to have been both dependent and desultory, he had
+preserved a sense of wider relations and acquired a smattering of
+information to which he applied his only independent faculty, that of
+clear thought. He could talk intelligently and not too inaccurately of
+the larger questions which Lynbrook ignored, and a gay indifference to
+the importance of money seemed the crowning grace of his nature, till
+Amherst suddenly learned that this attitude of detachment was generally
+ascribed to the liberality of Mrs. Fenton Carbury. "Everybody knows she
+married Fenton to provide for Ned," some one let fall in the course of
+one of the smoking-room dissertations on which the host of Lynbrook had
+such difficulty in fixing his attention; and the speaker's
+matter-of-course tone, and the careless acquiescence of his hearers,
+were more offensive to Amherst than the fact itself. In the first flush
+of his disgust he classed the story as one of the lies bred in the
+malarious air of after-dinner gossip; but gradually he saw that, whether
+true or not, it had sufficient circulation to cast a shade of ambiguity
+on the persons concerned. Bessy alone seemed deaf to the rumours about
+her friend. There was something captivating to her in Mrs. Carbury's
+slang and noise, in her defiance of decorum and contempt of criticism.
+"I like Blanche because she doesn't pretend," was Bessy's vague
+justification of the lady; but in reality she was under the mysterious
+spell which such natures cast over the less venturesome imaginations of
+their own sex.
+
+Amherst at first tried to deaden himself to the situation, as part of
+the larger coil of miseries in which he found himself; but all his
+traditions were against such tolerance, and they were roused to revolt
+by the receipt of a newspaper clipping, sent by an anonymous hand,
+enlarging on the fact that the clandestine meetings of a fashionable
+couple were being facilitated by the connivance of a Long Island
+_châtelaine_. Amherst, hot from the perusal of this paragraph, sprang
+into the first train, and laid the clipping before his father-in-law,
+who chanced to be passing through town on his way from the Hudson to the
+Hot Springs.
+
+Mr. Langhope, ensconced in the cushioned privacy of the reading-room at
+the Amsterdam Club, where he had invited his son-in-law to meet him,
+perused the article with the cool eye of the collector to whom a new
+curiosity is offered.
+
+"I suppose," he mused, "that in the time of the Pharaohs the Morning
+Papyrus used to serve up this kind of thing"--and then, as the nervous
+tension of his hearer expressed itself in an abrupt movement, he added,
+handing back the clipping with a smile: "What do you propose to do? Kill
+the editor, and forbid Blanche and Bowfort the house?"
+
+"I mean to do something," Amherst began, suddenly chilled by the
+realization that his wrath had not yet shaped itself into a definite
+plan of action.
+
+"Well, it must be that or nothing," said Mr. Langhope, drawing his stick
+meditatively across his knee. "And, of course, if it's _that_, you'll
+land Bessy in a devil of a mess."
+
+Without giving his son-in-law time to protest, he touched rapidly but
+vividly on the inutility and embarrassment of libel suits, and on the
+devices whereby the legal means of vindication from such attacks may be
+turned against those who have recourse to them; and Amherst listened
+with a sickened sense of the incompatibility between abstract standards
+of honour and their practical application.
+
+"What should you do, then?" he murmured, as Mr. Langhope ended with his
+light shrug and a "See Tredegar, if you don't believe me"--; and his
+father-in-law replied with an evasive gesture: "Why, leave the
+responsibility where it belongs!"
+
+"Where it belongs?"
+
+"To Fenton Carbury, of course. Luckily it's nobody's business but his,
+and if he doesn't mind what is said about his wife I don't see how you
+can take up the cudgels for her without casting another shade on her
+somewhat chequered reputation."
+
+Amherst stared. "His wife? What do I care what's said of her? I'm
+thinking of mine!"
+
+"Well, if Carbury has no objection to his wife's meeting Bowfort, I
+don't see how you can object to her meeting him at your house. In such
+matters, as you know, it has mercifully been decided that the husband's
+attitude shall determine other people's; otherwise we should be deprived
+of the legitimate pleasure of slandering our neighbours." Mr. Langhope
+was always careful to temper his explanations with an "as you know": he
+would have thought it ill-bred to omit this parenthesis in elucidating
+the social code to his son-in-law.
+
+"Then you mean that I can do nothing?" Amherst exclaimed.
+
+Mr. Langhope smiled. "What applies to Carbury applies to you--by doing
+nothing you establish the fact that there's nothing to do; just as you
+create the difficulty by recognizing it." And he added, as Amherst sat
+silent: "Take Bessy away, and they'll have to see each other elsewhere."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst returned to Lynbrook with the echoes of this casuistry in his
+brain. It seemed to him but a part of the ingenious system of evasion
+whereby a society bent on the undisturbed pursuit of amusement had
+contrived to protect itself from the intrusion of the disagreeable: a
+policy summed up in Mr. Langhope's concluding advice that Amherst should
+take his wife away. Yes--that was wealth's contemptuous answer to every
+challenge of responsibility: duty, sorrow and disgrace were equally to
+be evaded by a change of residence, and nothing in life need be faced
+and fought out while one could pay for a passage to Europe!
+
+In a calmer mood Amherst's sense of humour would have preserved him from
+such a view of his father-in-law's advice; but just then it fell like a
+spark on his smouldering prejudices. He was clear-sighted enough to
+recognize the obstacles to legal retaliation; but this only made him the
+more resolved to assert his will in his own house. He no longer paused
+to consider the possible effect of such a course on his already strained
+relations with his wife: the man's will rose in him and spoke.
+
+The scene between Bessy and himself was short and sharp; and it ended in
+a way that left him more than ever perplexed at the ways of her sex.
+Impatient of preamble, he had opened the attack with his ultimatum: the
+suspected couple were to be denied the house. Bessy flamed into
+immediate defence of her friend; but to Amherst's surprise she no
+longer sounded the note of her own rights. Husband and wife were
+animated by emotions deeper-seated and more instinctive than had ever
+before confronted them; yet while Amherst's resistance was gathering
+strength from the conflict, Bessy unexpectedly collapsed in tears and
+submission. She would do as he wished, of course--give up seeing
+Blanche, dismiss Bowfort, wash her hands, in short, of the imprudent
+pair--in such matters a woman needed a man's guidance, a wife must of
+necessity see with her husband's eyes; and she looked up into his
+through a mist of penitence and admiration....
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+IN the first reaction from her brief delusion about Stephen Wyant,
+Justine accepted with a good grace the necessity of staying on at
+Lynbrook. Though she was now well enough to return to her regular work,
+her talk with Amherst had made her feel that, for the present, she could
+be of more use by remaining with Bessy; and she was not sorry to have a
+farther period of delay and reflection before taking the next step in
+her life. These at least were the reasons she gave herself for deciding
+not to leave; and if any less ostensible lurked beneath, they were not
+as yet visible even to her searching self-scrutiny.
+
+At first she was embarrassed by the obligation of meeting Dr. Wyant, on
+whom her definite refusal had produced an effect for which she could not
+hold herself blameless. She had not kept her promise of seeing him on
+the day after their encounter at the post-office, but had written,
+instead, in terms which obviously made such a meeting unnecessary. But
+all her efforts to soften the abruptness of her answer could not
+conceal, from either herself or her suitor, that it was not the one she
+had led him to expect; and she foresaw that if she remained at Lynbrook
+she could not escape a scene of recrimination.
+
+When the scene took place, Wyant's part in it went far toward justifying
+her decision; yet his vehement reproaches contained a sufficient core of
+truth to humble her pride. It was lucky for her somewhat exaggerated
+sense of fairness that he overshot the mark by charging her with a
+coquetry of which she knew herself innocent, and laying on her the
+responsibility for any follies to which her rejection might drive him.
+Such threats, as a rule, no longer move the feminine imagination; yet
+Justine's pity for all forms of weakness made her recognize, in the very
+heat of her contempt for Wyant, that his reproaches were not the mere
+cry of wounded vanity but the appeal of a nature conscious of its lack
+of recuperative power. It seemed to her as though she had done him
+irreparable harm, and the feeling might have betrayed her into too
+great a show of compassion had she not been restrained by a salutary
+fear of the result.
+
+The state of Bessy's nerves necessitated frequent visits from her
+physician, but Justine, on these occasions, could usually shelter
+herself behind the professional reserve which kept even Wyant from any
+open expression of feeling. One day, however, they chanced to find
+themselves alone before Bessy's return from her ride. The servant had
+ushered Wyant into the library where Justine was writing, and when she
+had replied to his enquiries about his patient they found themselves
+face to face with an awkward period of waiting. Justine was too proud to
+cut it short by leaving the room; but Wyant answered her commonplaces at
+random, stirring uneasily to and fro between window and fireside, and at
+length halting behind the table at which she sat.
+
+"May I ask how much longer you mean to stay here?" he said in a low
+voice, his eyes darkening under the sullen jut of the brows.
+
+As she glanced up in surprise she noticed for the first time an odd
+contraction of his pupils, and the discovery, familiar enough in her
+professional experience, made her disregard the abruptness of his
+question and softened the tone in which she answered. "I hardly know--I
+suppose as long as I am needed."
+
+Wyant laughed. "Needed by whom? By John Amherst?"
+
+A moment passed before Justine took in the full significance of the
+retort; then the blood rushed to her face. "Yes--I believe both Mr. and
+Mrs. Amherst need me," she answered, keeping her eyes on his; and Wyant
+laughed again.
+
+"You didn't think so till Amherst came back from Hanaford. His return
+seems to have changed your plans in several respects."
+
+She looked away from him, for even now his eyes moved her to pity and
+self-reproach. "Dr. Wyant, you are not well; why do you wait to see Mrs.
+Amherst?" she said.
+
+He stared at her and then his glance fell. "I'm much obliged--I'm as
+well as usual," he muttered, pushing the hair from his forehead with a
+shaking hand; and at that moment the sound of Bessy's voice gave Justine
+a pretext for escape.
+
+In her own room she sank for a moment under a rush of self-disgust; but
+it soon receded before the saner forces of her nature, leaving only a
+residue of pity for the poor creature whose secret she had surprised.
+She had never before suspected Wyant of taking a drug, nor did she now
+suppose that he did so habitually; but to see him even momentarily under
+such an influence explained her instinctive sense of his weakness. She
+felt now that what would have been an insult on other lips was only a
+cry of distress from his; and once more she blamed herself and forgave
+him.
+
+But if she had been inclined to any morbidness of self-reproach she
+would have been saved from it by other cares. For the moment she was
+more concerned with Bessy's fate than with her own--her poor friend
+seemed to have so much more at stake, and so much less strength to bring
+to the defence of her happiness. Justine was always saved from any
+excess of self-compassion by the sense, within herself, of abounding
+forces of growth and self-renewal, as though from every lopped
+aspiration a fresh shoot of energy must spring; but she felt that Bessy
+had no such sources of renovation, and that every disappointment left an
+arid spot in her soul.
+
+Even without her friend's confidences, Justine would have had no
+difficulty in following the successive stages of the Amhersts' inner
+history. She knew that Amherst had virtually resigned his rule at
+Westmore, and that his wife, in return for the sacrifice, was trying to
+conform to the way of life she thought he preferred; and the futility of
+both attempts was more visible to Justine than to either of the two
+concerned. She saw that the failure of the Amhersts' marriage lay not in
+any accident of outward circumstances but in the lack of all natural
+points of contact. As she put it to herself, they met neither underfoot
+nor overhead: practical necessities united them no more than imaginative
+joys.
+
+There were moments when Justine thought Amherst hard to Bessy, as she
+suspected that he had once been hard to his mother--as the leader of men
+must perhaps always be hard to the hampering sex. Yet she did justice to
+his efforts to accept the irretrievable, and to waken in his wife some
+capacity for sharing in his minor interests, since she had none of her
+own with which to fill their days.
+
+Amherst had always been a reader; not, like Justine herself, a
+flame-like devourer of the page, but a slow absorber of its essence; and
+in the early days of his marriage he had fancied it would be easy to
+make Bessy share this taste. Though his mother was not a bookish woman,
+he had breathed at her side an air rich in allusion and filled with the
+bright presences of romance; and he had always regarded this commerce of
+the imagination as one of the normal conditions of life. The discovery
+that there were no books at Lynbrook save a few morocco "sets"
+imprisoned behind the brass trellisings of the library had been one of
+the many surprises of his new state. But in his first months with Bessy
+there was no room for books, and if he thought of the matter it was only
+in a glancing vision of future evenings, when he and she, in the calm
+afterglow of happiness, should lean together over some cherished page.
+Her lack of response to any reference outside the small circle of daily
+facts had long since dispelled that vision; but now that his own mind
+felt the need of inner sustenance he began to ask himself whether he
+might not have done more to rouse her imagination. During the long
+evenings over the library fire he tried to lead the talk to books, with
+a parenthesis, now and again, from the page beneath his eye; and Bessy
+met the experiment with conciliatory eagerness. She showed, in especial,
+a hopeful but misleading preference for poetry, leaning back with
+dreaming lids and lovely parted lips while he rolled out the immortal
+measures; but her outward signs of attention never ripened into any
+expression of opinion, or any after-allusion to what she heard, and
+before long he discovered that Justine Brent was his only listener. It
+was to her that the words he read began to be unconsciously addressed;
+her comments directed him in his choice of subjects, and the ensuing
+discussions restored him to some semblance of mental activity.
+
+Bessy, true to her new rôle of acquiescence, shone silently on this
+interchange of ideas; Amherst even detected in her a vague admiration
+for his power of conversing on subjects which she regarded as abstruse;
+and this childlike approval, combined with her submission to his will,
+deluded him with a sense of recovered power over her. He could not but
+note that the new phase in their relations had coincided with his first
+assertion of mastery; and he rashly concluded that, with the removal of
+the influences tending to separate them, his wife might gradually be won
+back to her earlier sympathy with his views.
+
+To accept this theory was to apply it; for nothing could long divert
+Amherst from his main purpose, and all the thwarted strength of his will
+was only gathering to itself fresh stores of energy. He had never been a
+skilful lover, for no woman had as yet stirred in him those feelings
+which call the finer perceptions into play; and there was no instinct to
+tell him that Bessy's sudden conformity to his wishes was as unreasoning
+as her surrender to his first kiss. He fancied that he and she were at
+length reaching some semblance of that moral harmony which should grow
+out of the physical accord, and that, poor and incomplete as the
+understanding was, it must lift and strengthen their relation.
+
+He waited till early winter had brought solitude to Lynbrook, dispersing
+the hunting colony to various points of the compass, and sending Mr.
+Langhope to Egypt and the Riviera, while Mrs. Ansell, as usual, took up
+her annual tour of a social circuit whose extreme points were marked by
+Boston and Baltimore--and then he made his final appeal to his wife.
+
+His pretext for speaking was a letter from Duplain, definitely
+announcing his resolve not to remain at Westmore. A year earlier
+Amherst, deeply moved by the letter, would have given it to his wife in
+the hope of its producing the same effect on her. He knew better now--he
+had learned her instinct for detecting "business" under every serious
+call on her attention. His only hope, as always, was to reach her
+through the personal appeal; and he put before her the fact of Duplain's
+withdrawal as the open victory of his antagonists. But he saw at once
+that even this could not infuse new life into the question.
+
+"If I go back he'll stay--I can hold him, can gain time till things take
+a turn," he urged.
+
+"Another? I thought they were definitely settled," she objected
+languidly.
+
+"No--they're not; they can't be, on such a basis," Amherst broke out
+with sudden emphasis. He walked across the room, and came back to her
+side with a determined face. "It's a delusion, a deception," he
+exclaimed, "to think I can stand by any longer and see things going to
+ruin at Westmore! If I've made you think so, I've unconsciously deceived
+us both. As long as you're my wife we've only one honour between us, and
+that honour is mine to take care of."
+
+"Honour? What an odd expression!" she said with a forced laugh, and a
+little tinge of pink in her cheek. "You speak as if I had--had made
+myself talked about --when you know I've never even looked at another
+man!"
+
+"Another man?" Amherst looked at her in wonder. "Good God! Can't you
+conceive of any vow to be kept between husband and wife but the
+primitive one of bodily fidelity? Heaven knows I've never looked at
+another woman--but, by my reading of our compact, I shouldn't be keeping
+faith with you if I didn't help you to keep faith with better things.
+And you owe me the same help--the same chance to rise through you, and
+not sink by you--else we've betrayed each other more deeply than any
+adultery could make us!"
+
+She had drawn back, turning pale again, and shrinking a little at the
+sound of words which, except when heard in church, she vaguely
+associated with oaths, slammed doors, and other evidences of
+ill-breeding; but Amherst had been swept too far on the flood of his
+indignation to be checked by such small signs of disapproval.
+
+"You'll say that what I'm asking you is to give me back the free use of
+your money. Well! Why not? Is it so much for a wife to give? I know you
+all think that a man who marries a rich woman forfeits his self-respect
+if he spends a penny without her approval. But that's because money is
+so sacred to you all! It seems to me the least important thing that a
+woman entrusts to her husband. What of her dreams and her hopes, her
+belief in justice and goodness and decency? If he takes those and
+destroys them, he'd better have had a mill-stone about his neck. But
+nobody has a word to say till he touches her dividends--then he's a
+calculating brute who has married her for her fortune!"
+
+He had come close again, facing her with outstretched hands,
+half-commanding, half in appeal. "Don't you see that I can't go on in
+this way--that I've _no right_ to let you keep me from Westmore?"
+
+Bessy was looking at him coldly, under the half-dropped lids of
+indifference. "I hardly know what you mean--you use such peculiar words;
+but I don't see why you should expect me to give up all the ideas I was
+brought up in. Our standards _are_ different--but why should yours
+always be right?"
+
+"You believed they were right when you married me--have they changed
+since then?"
+
+"No; but----" Her face seemed to harden and contract into a small
+expressionless mask, in which he could no longer read anything but blank
+opposition to his will.
+
+"You trusted my judgment not long ago," he went on, "when I asked you to
+give up seeing Mrs. Carbury----"
+
+She flushed, but with anger, not compunction. "It seems to me that
+should be a reason for your not asking me to make other sacrifices! When
+I gave up Blanche I thought you would see that I wanted to please
+you--and that you would do something for me in return...."
+
+Amherst interrupted her with a laugh. "Thank you for telling me your
+real reasons. I was fool enough to think you acted from conviction--not
+that you were simply striking a bargain----"
+
+He broke off, and they looked at each other with a kind of fear, each
+hearing between them the echo of irreparable words. Amherst's only clear
+feeling was that he must not speak again till he had beaten down the
+horrible sensation in his breast--the rage of hate which had him in its
+grip, and which made him almost afraid, while it lasted, to let his eyes
+rest on the fair weak creature before him. Bessy, too, was in the clutch
+of a mute anger which slowly poured its benumbing current around her
+heart. Strong waves of passion did not quicken her vitality: she grew
+inert and cold under their shock. Only one little pulse of self-pity
+continued to beat in her, trembling out at last on the cry: "Ah, I know
+it's not because you care so much for Westmore--it's only because you
+want to get away from me!"
+
+Amherst stared as if her words had flashed a light into the darkest
+windings of his misery. "Yes--I want to get away..." he said; and he
+turned and walked out of the room.
+
+He went down to the smoking-room, and ringing for a servant, ordered
+his horse to be saddled. The foot-man who answered his summons brought
+the afternoon's mail, and Amherst, throwing himself down on the sofa,
+began to tear open his letters while he waited.
+
+He ran through the first few without knowing what he read; but presently
+his attention was arrested by the hand-writing of a man he had known well
+in college, and who had lately come into possession of a large cotton-mill
+in the South. He wrote now to ask if Amherst could recommend a good
+manager--"not one of your old routine men, but a young fellow with the new
+ideas. Things have been in pretty bad shape down here," the writer added,
+"and now that I'm in possession I want to see what can be done to civilize
+the place"; and he went on to urge that Amherst should come down himself
+to inspect the mills, and propose such improvements as his experience
+suggested. "We've all heard of the great things you're doing at Westmore,"
+the letter ended; and Amherst cast it from him with a groan....
+
+It was Duplain's chance, of course...that was his first thought. He took
+up the letter and read it over. He knew the man who wrote--no
+sentimentalist seeking emotional variety from vague philanthropic
+experiments, but a serious student of social conditions, now
+unexpectedly provided with the opportunity to apply his ideas. Yes, it
+was Duplain's chance--if indeed it might not be his own!... Amherst sat
+upright, dazzled by the thought. Why Duplain--why not himself? Bessy had
+spoken the illuminating word--what he wanted was to get away--to get
+away at any cost! Escape had become his one thought: escape from the
+bondage of Lynbrook, from the bitter memory of his failure at Westmore;
+and here was the chance to escape back into life--into independence,
+activity and usefulness! Every atrophied faculty in him suddenly started
+from its torpor, and his brain throbbed with the pain of the
+awakening.... The servant came to tell him that his horse waited, and he
+sprang up, took his riding-whip from the rack, stared a moment,
+absently, after the man's retreating back, and then dropped down again
+on the sofa....
+
+What was there to keep him from accepting? His wife's affection was
+dead--if her sentimental fancy for him had ever deserved the name! And
+his passing mastery over her was gone too--he smiled to remember that,
+hardly two hours earlier, he had been fatuous enough to think he could
+still regain it! Now he said to himself that she would sooner desert a
+friend to please him than sacrifice a fraction of her income; and the
+discovery cast a stain of sordidness on their whole relation. He could
+still imagine struggling to win her back from another man, or even to
+save her from some folly into which mistaken judgment or perverted
+enthusiasm might have hurried her; but to go on battling against the
+dull unimaginative subservience to personal luxury--the slavery to
+houses and servants and clothes--ah, no, while he had any fight left in
+him it was worth spending in a better cause than that!
+
+Through the open window he could hear, in the mild December stillness,
+his horse's feet coming and going on the gravel. _Her_ horse, led up and
+down by _her_ servant, at the door of _her_ house!... The sound
+symbolized his whole future...the situation his marriage had made for
+him, and to which he must henceforth bend, unless he broke with it then
+and there.... He tried to look ahead, to follow up, one by one, the
+consequences of such a break. That it would be final he had no doubt.
+There are natures which seem to be drawn closer by dissension, to
+depend, for the renewal of understanding, on the spark of generosity and
+compunction that anger strikes out of both; but Amherst knew that
+between himself and his wife no such clearing of the moral atmosphere
+was possible. The indignation which left him with tingling nerves and a
+burning need of some immediate escape into action, crystallized in Bessy
+into a hard kernel of obstinacy, into which, after each fresh collision,
+he felt that a little more of herself had been absorbed.... No, the
+break between them would be final--if he went now he would not come
+back. And it flashed across him that this solution might have been
+foreseen by his wife--might even have been deliberately planned and led
+up to by those about her. His father-in-law had never liked him--the
+disturbing waves of his activity had rippled even the sheltered surface
+of Mr. Langhope's existence. He must have been horribly in their way!
+Well--it was not too late to take himself out of it. In Bessy's circle
+the severing of such ties was regarded as an expensive but unhazardous
+piece of surgery--nobody bled to death of the wound.... The footman came
+back to remind him that his horse was waiting, and Amherst rose to his
+feet.
+
+"Send him back to the stable," he said with a glance at his watch, "and
+order a trap to take me to the next train."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+WHEN Amherst woke, the next morning, in the hotel to which he had gone
+up from Lynbrook, he was oppressed by the sense that the hardest step he
+had to take still lay before him. It had been almost easy to decide that
+the moment of separation had come, for circumstances seemed to have
+closed every other issue from his unhappy situation; but how tell his
+wife of his decision? Amherst, to whom action was the first necessity of
+being, became a weak procrastinator when he was confronted by the need
+of writing instead of speaking.
+
+To account for his abrupt departure from Lynbrook he had left word that
+he was called to town on business; but, since he did not mean to return,
+some farther explanation was now necessary, and he was paralyzed by the
+difficulty of writing. He had already telegraphed to his friend that he
+would be at the mills the next day; but the southern express did not
+leave till the afternoon, and he still had several hours in which to
+consider what he should say to his wife. To postpone the dreaded task,
+he invented the pretext of some business to be despatched, and taking
+the Subway to Wall Street consumed the morning in futile activities. But
+since the renunciation of his work at Westmore he had no active concern
+with the financial world, and by twelve o'clock he had exhausted his
+imaginary affairs and was journeying up town again. He left the train at
+Union Square, and walked along Fourth Avenue, now definitely resolved to
+go back to the hotel and write his letter before lunching.
+
+At Twenty-sixth Street he had struck into Madison Avenue, and was
+striding onward with the fixed eye and aimless haste of the man who has
+empty hours to fill, when a hansom drew up ahead of him and Justine
+Brent sprang out. She was trimly dressed, as if for travel, with a small
+bag in her hand; but at sight of him she paused with a cry of pleasure.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Amherst, I'm so glad! I was afraid I might not see you for
+goodbye."
+
+"For goodbye?" Amherst paused, embarrassed. How had she guessed that he
+did not mean to return to Lynbrook?
+
+"You know," she reminded him, "I'm going to some friends near
+Philadelphia for ten days"--and he remembered confusedly that a long
+time ago--probably yesterday morning--he had heard her speak of her
+projected visit.
+
+"I had no idea," she continued, "that you were coming up to town
+yesterday, or I should have tried to see you before you left. I wanted
+to ask you to send me a line if Bessy needs me--I'll come back at once
+if she does." Amherst continued to listen blankly, as if making a
+painful effort to regain some consciousness of what was being said to
+him, and she went on: "She seemed so nervous and poorly yesterday
+evening that I was sorry I had decided to go----"
+
+Her intent gaze reminded him that the emotions of the last twenty-four
+hours must still be visible in his face; and the thought of what she
+might detect helped to restore his self-possession. "You must not think
+of giving up your visit," he began hurriedly--he had meant to add "on
+account of Bessy," but he found himself unable to utter his wife's name.
+
+Justine was still looking at him. "Oh, I'm sure everything will be all
+right," she rejoined. "You go back this afternoon, I suppose? I've left
+you a little note, with my address, and I want you to promise----"
+
+She paused, for Amherst had made a motion as though to interrupt her.
+The old confused sense that there must always be truth between them was
+struggling in him with the strong restraints of habit and character; and
+suddenly, before he was conscious of having decided to speak, he heard
+himself say: "I ought to tell you that I am not going back."
+
+"Not going back?" A flash of apprehension crossed Justine's face. "Not
+till tomorrow, you mean?" she added, recovering herself.
+
+Amherst hesitated, glancing vaguely up and down the street. At that
+noonday hour it was nearly deserted, and Justine's driver dozed on his
+perch above the hansom. They could speak almost as openly as if they had
+been in one of the wood-paths at Lynbrook.
+
+"Nor tomorrow," Amherst said in a low voice. There was another pause
+before he added: "It may be some time before--" He broke off, and then
+continued with an effort: "The fact is, I am thinking of going back to
+my old work."
+
+She caught him up with an exclamation of surprise and sympathy. "Your
+old work? You mean at----"
+
+She was checked by the quick contraction of pain in his face. "Not that!
+I mean that I'm thinking of taking a new job--as manager of a Georgia
+mill.... It's the only thing I know how to do, and I've got to do
+something--" He forced a laugh. "The habit of work is incurable!"
+
+Justine's face had grown as grave as his. She hesitated a moment,
+looking down the street toward the angle of Madison Square, which was
+visible from the corner where they stood.
+
+"Will you walk back to the square with me? Then we can sit down a
+moment."
+
+She began to move as she spoke, and he walked beside her in silence till
+they had gained the seat she pointed out. Her hansom trailed after them,
+drawing up at the corner.
+
+As Amherst sat down beside her, Justine turned to him with an air of
+quiet resolution. "Mr. Amherst--will you let me ask you something? Is
+this a sudden decision?"
+
+"Yes. I decided yesterday."
+
+"And Bessy----?"
+
+His glance dropped for the first time, but Justine pressed her point.
+"Bessy approves?"
+
+"She--she will, I think--when she knows----"
+
+"When she knows?" Her emotion sprang into her face. "When she knows?
+Then she does not--yet?"
+
+"No. The offer came suddenly. I must go at once."
+
+"Without seeing her?" She cut him short with a quick commanding gesture.
+"Mr. Amherst, you can't do this--you won't do it! You will not go away
+without seeing Bessy!" she said.
+
+Her eyes sought his and drew them upward, constraining them to meet the
+full beam of her rebuking gaze.
+
+"I must do what seems best under the circumstances," he answered
+hesitatingly. "She will hear from me, of course; I shall write
+today--and later----"
+
+"Not later! _Now_--you will go back now to Lynbrook! Such things can't
+be told in writing--if they must be said at all, they must be spoken.
+Don't tell me that I don't understand--or that I'm meddling in what
+doesn't concern me. I don't care a fig for that! I've always meddled in
+what didn't concern me--I always shall, I suppose, till I die! And I
+understand enough to know that Bessy is very unhappy--and that you're
+the wiser and stronger of the two. I know what it's been to you to give
+up your work--to feel yourself useless," she interrupted herself, with
+softening eyes, "and I know how you've tried...I've watched you...but
+Bessy has tried too; and even if you've both failed--if you've come to
+the end of your resources--it's for you to face the fact, and help her
+face it--not to run away from it like this!"
+
+Amherst sat silent under the assault of her eloquence. He was conscious
+of no instinctive resentment, no sense that she was, as she confessed,
+meddling in matters which did not concern her. His ebbing spirit was
+revived by the shock of an ardour like his own. She had not shrunk from
+calling him a coward--and it did him good to hear her call him so! Her
+words put life back into its true perspective, restored their meaning to
+obsolete terms: to truth and manliness and courage. He had lived so long
+among equivocations that he had forgotten how to look a fact in the
+face; but here was a woman who judged life by his own standards--and by
+those standards she had found him wanting!
+
+Still, he could not forget the last bitter hours, or change his opinion
+as to the futility of attempting to remain at Lynbrook. He felt as
+strongly as ever the need of moral and mental liberation--the right to
+begin life again on his own terms. But Justine Brent had made him see
+that his first step toward self-assertion had been the inconsistent one
+of trying to evade its results.
+
+"You are right--I will go back," he said.
+
+She thanked him with her eyes, as she had thanked him on the terrace at
+Lynbrook, on the autumn evening which had witnessed their first broken
+exchange of confidences; and he was struck once more with the change
+that feeling produced in her. Emotions flashed across her face like the
+sweep of sun-rent clouds over a quiet landscape, bringing out the gleam
+of hidden waters, the fervour of smouldering colours, all the subtle
+delicacies of modelling that are lost under the light of an open sky.
+And it was extraordinary how she could infuse into a principle the
+warmth and colour of a passion! If conduct, to most people, seemed a
+cold matter of social prudence or inherited habit, to her it was always
+the newly-discovered question of her own relation to life--as most women
+see the great issues only through their own wants and prejudices, so she
+seemed always to see her personal desires in the light of the larger
+claims.
+
+"But I don't think," Amherst went on, "that anything can be said to
+convince me that I ought to alter my decision. These months of idleness
+have shown me that I'm one of the members of society who are a danger to
+the community if their noses are not kept to the grindstone----"
+
+Justine lowered her eyes musingly, and he saw she was undergoing the
+reaction of constraint which always followed on her bursts of
+unpremeditated frankness.
+
+"That is not for me to judge," she answered after a moment. "But if you
+decide to go away for a time--surely it ought to be in such a way that
+your going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy, or subject her
+to any unkind criticism."
+
+Amherst, reddening slightly, glanced at her in surprise. "I don't think
+you need fear that--I shall be the only one criticized," he said drily.
+
+"Are you sure--if you take such a position as you spoke of? So few
+people understand the love of hard work for its own sake. They will say
+that your quarrel with your wife has driven you to support yourself--and
+that will be cruel to Bessy."
+
+Amherst shrugged his shoulders. "They'll be more likely to say I tried
+to play the gentleman and failed, and wasn't happy till I got back to my
+own place in life--which is true enough," he added with a touch of
+irony.
+
+"They may say that too; but they will make Bessy suffer first--and it
+will be your fault if she is humiliated in that way. If you decide to
+take up your factory work for a time, can't you do so without--without
+accepting a salary? Oh, you see I stick at nothing," she broke in upon
+herself with a laugh, "and Bessy has said things which make me see that
+she would suffer horribly if--if you put such a slight on her." He
+remained silent, and she went on urgently: "From Bessy's standpoint it
+would mean a decisive break--the repudiating of your whole past. And it
+is a question on which you can afford to be generous, because I know...I
+think...it's less important in your eyes than hers...."
+
+Amherst glanced at her quickly. "That particular form of indebtedness,
+you mean?"
+
+She smiled. "The easiest to cancel, and therefore the least galling;
+isn't that the way you regard it?"
+
+"I used to--yes; but--" He was about to add: "No one at Lynbrook does,"
+but the flash of intelligence in her eyes restrained him, while at the
+same time it seemed to answer: "There's my point! To see their
+limitation is to allow for it, since every enlightenment brings a
+corresponding obligation."
+
+She made no attempt to put into words the argument her look conveyed,
+but rose from her seat with a rapid glance at her watch.
+
+"And now I must go, or I shall miss my train." She held out her hand,
+and as Amherst's met it, he said in a low tone, as if in reply to her
+unspoken appeal: "I shall remember all you have said."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a new experience for Amherst to be acting under the pressure of
+another will; but during his return journey to Lynbrook that afternoon
+it was pure relief to surrender himself to this pressure, and the
+surrender brought not a sense of weakness but of recovered energy. It
+was not in his nature to analyze his motives, or spend his strength in
+weighing closely balanced alternatives of conduct; and though, during
+the last purposeless months, he had grown to brood over every spring of
+action in himself and others, this tendency disappeared at once in
+contact with the deed to be done. It was as though a tributary stream,
+gathering its crystal speed among the hills, had been suddenly poured
+into the stagnant waters of his will; and he saw now how thick and
+turbid those waters had become--how full of the slime-bred life that
+chokes the springs of courage.
+
+His whole desire now was to be generous to his wife: to bear the full
+brunt of whatever pain their parting brought. Justine had said that
+Bessy seemed nervous and unhappy: it was clear, therefore, that she also
+had suffered from the wounds they had dealt each other, though she kept
+her unmoved front to the last. Poor child! Perhaps that insensible
+exterior was the only way she knew of expressing courage! It seemed to
+Amherst that all means of manifesting the finer impulses must slowly
+wither in the Lynbrook air. As he approached his destination, his
+thoughts of her were all pitiful: nothing remained of the personal
+resentment which had debased their parting. He had telephoned from town
+to announce the hour of his return, and when he emerged from the station
+he half-expected to find her seated in the brougham whose lamps
+signalled him through the early dusk. It would be like her to undergo
+such a reaction of feeling, and to express it, not in words, but by
+taking up their relation as if there had been no break in it. He had
+once condemned this facility of renewal as a sign of lightness, a
+result of that continual evasion of serious issues which made the life
+of Bessy's world a thin crust of custom above a void of thought. But he
+now saw that, if she was the product of her environment, that
+constituted but another claim on his charity, and made the more precious
+any impulses of natural feeling that had survived the unifying pressure
+of her life. As he approached the brougham, he murmured mentally: "What
+if I were to try once more?"
+
+Bessy had not come to meet him; but he said to himself that he should
+find her alone at the house, and that he would make his confession at
+once. As the carriage passed between the lights on the tall stone
+gate-posts, and rolled through the bare shrubberies of the avenue, he
+felt a momentary tightening of the heart--a sense of stepping back into
+the trap from which he had just wrenched himself free--a premonition of
+the way in which the smooth systematized routine of his wife's existence
+might draw him back into its revolutions as he had once seen a careless
+factory hand seized and dragged into a flying belt....
+
+But it was only for a moment; then his thoughts reverted to Bessy. It
+was she who was to be considered--this time he must be strong enough for
+both.
+
+The butler met him on the threshold, flanked by the usual array of
+footmen; and as he saw his portmanteau ceremoniously passed from hand
+to hand, Amherst once more felt the steel of the springe on his neck.
+
+"Is Mrs. Amherst in the drawing-room, Knowles?" he asked.
+
+"No, sir," said Knowles, who had too high a sense of fitness to
+volunteer any information beyond the immediate fact required of him.
+
+"She has gone up to her sitting-room, then?" Amherst continued, turning
+toward the broad sweep of the stairway.
+
+"No, sir," said the butler slowly; "Mrs. Amherst has gone away."
+
+"Gone away?" Amherst stopped short, staring blankly at the man's smooth
+official mask.
+
+"This afternoon, sir; to Mapleside."
+
+"To Mapleside?"
+
+"Yes, sir, by motor--to stay with Mrs. Carbury."
+
+There was a moment's silence. It had all happened so quickly that
+Amherst, with the dual vision which comes at such moments, noticed that
+the third footman--or was it the fourth?--was just passing his
+portmanteau on to a shirt-sleeved arm behind the door which led to the
+servant's wing....
+
+He roused himself to look at the tall clock. It was just six. He had
+telephoned from town at two.
+
+"At what time did Mrs. Amherst leave?"
+
+The butler meditated. "Sharp at four, sir. The maid took the three-forty
+with the luggage."
+
+With the luggage! So it was not a mere one-night visit. The blood rose
+slowly to Amherst's face. The footmen had disappeared, but presently the
+door at the back of the hall reopened, and one of them came out,
+carrying an elaborately-appointed tea-tray toward the smoking-room. The
+routine of the house was going on as if nothing had happened.... The
+butler looked at Amherst with respectful--too respectful--interrogation,
+and he was suddenly conscious that he was standing motionless in the
+middle of the hall, with one last intolerable question on his lips.
+
+Well--it had to be spoken! "Did Mrs. Amherst receive my telephone
+message?"
+
+"Yes, sir. I gave it to her myself."
+
+It occurred confusedly to Amherst that a well-bred man--as Lynbrook
+understood the phrase--would, at this point, have made some tardy feint
+of being in his wife's confidence, of having, on second thoughts, no
+reason to be surprised at her departure. It was humiliating, he
+supposed, to be thus laying bare his discomfiture to his dependents--he
+could see that even Knowles was affected by the manifest impropriety of
+the situation--but no pretext presented itself to his mind, and after
+another interval of silence he turned slowly toward the door of the
+smoking-room.
+
+"My letters are here, I suppose?" he paused on the threshold to enquire;
+and on the butler's answering in the affirmative, he said to himself,
+with a last effort to suspend his judgment: "She has left a line--there
+will be some explanation----"
+
+But there was nothing--neither word nor message; nothing but the
+reverberating retort of her departure in the face of his return--her
+flight to Blanche Carbury as the final answer to his final appeal.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+JUSTINE was coming back to Lynbrook. She had been, after all, unable to
+stay out the ten days of her visit: the undefinable sense of being
+needed, so often the determining motive of her actions, drew her back to
+Long Island at the end of the week. She had received no word from
+Amherst or Bessy; only Cicely had told her, in a big round hand, that
+mother had been away three days, and that it had been very lonely, and
+that the housekeeper's cat had kittens, and she was to have one; and
+were kittens christened, or how did they get their names?--because she
+wanted to call hers Justine; and she had found in her book a bird like
+the one father had shown them in the swamp; and they were not alone now,
+because the Telfers were there, and they had all been out sleighing;
+but it would be much nicer when Justine came back....
+
+It was as difficult to extract any sequence of facts from Cicely's
+letter as from an early chronicle. She made no reference to Amherst's
+return, which was odd, since she was fond of her step-father, yet not
+significant, since the fact of his arrival might have been crowded out
+by the birth of the kittens, or some incident equally prominent in her
+perspectiveless grouping of events; nor did she name the date of her
+mother's departure, so that Justine could not guess whether it had been
+contingent on Amherst's return, or wholly unconnected with it. What
+puzzled her most was Bessy's own silence--yet that too, in a sense, was
+reassuring, for Bessy thought of others chiefly when it was painful to
+think of herself, and her not writing implied that she had felt no
+present need of her friend's sympathy.
+
+Justine did not expect to find Amherst at Lynbrook. She had felt
+convinced, when they parted, that he would persist in his plan of going
+south; and the fact that the Telfer girls were again in possession made
+it seem probable that he had already left. Under the circumstances,
+Justine thought the separation advisable; but she was eager to be
+assured that it had been effected amicably, and without open affront to
+Bessy's pride.
+
+She arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and when she entered the house the
+sound of voices from the drawing-room, and the prevailing sense of
+bustle and movement amid which her own coming was evidently an
+unconsidered detail, showed that the normal life of Lynbrook had resumed
+its course. The Telfers, as usual, had brought a lively throng in their
+train; and amid the bursts of merriment about the drawing-room tea-table
+she caught Westy Gaines's impressive accents, and the screaming laughter
+of Blanche Carbury....
+
+So Blanche Carbury was back at Lynbrook! The discovery gave Justine
+fresh cause for conjecture. Whatever reciprocal concessions might have
+resulted from Amherst's return to his wife, it seemed hardly probable
+that they included a renewal of relations with Mrs. Carbury. Had his
+mission failed then--had he and Bessy parted in anger, and was Mrs.
+Carbury's presence at Lynbrook Bessy's retort to his assertion of
+independence?
+
+In the school-room, where Justine was received with the eager outpouring
+of Cicely's minutest experiences, she dared not put the question that
+would have solved these doubts; and she left to dress for dinner without
+knowing whether Amherst had returned to Lynbrook. Yet in her heart she
+never questioned that he had done so; all her fears revolved about what
+had since taken place.
+
+She saw Bessy first in the drawing-room, surrounded by her guests; and
+their brief embrace told her nothing, except that she had never beheld
+her friend more brilliant, more triumphantly in possession of recovered
+spirits and health.
+
+That Amherst was absent was now made evident by Bessy's requesting Westy
+Gaines to lead the way to the dining-room with Mrs. Ansell, who was one
+of the reassembled visitors; and the only one, as Justine presently
+observed, not in key with the prevailing gaiety. Mrs. Ansell, usually so
+tinged with the colours of her environment, preserved on this occasion a
+grey neutrality of tone which was the only break in the general
+brightness. It was not in her graceful person to express anything as
+gross as disapproval, yet that sentiment was manifest, to the nice
+observer, in a delicate aloofness which made the waves of laughter fall
+back from her, and spread a circle of cloudy calm about her end of the
+table. Justine had never been greatly drawn to Mrs. Ansell. Her own
+adaptability was not in the least akin to the older woman's studied
+self-effacement; and the independence of judgment which Justine
+preserved in spite of her perception of divergent standpoints made her a
+little contemptuous of an excess of charity that seemed to have been
+acquired at the cost of all individual convictions. To-night for the
+first time she felt in Mrs. Ansell a secret sympathy with her own
+fears; and a sense of this tacit understanding made her examine with
+sudden interest the face of her unexpected ally.... After all, what did
+she know of Mrs. Ansell's history--of the hidden processes which had
+gradually subdued her own passions and desires, making of her, as it
+were, a mere decorative background, a connecting link between other
+personalities? Perhaps, for a woman alone in the world, without the
+power and opportunity that money gives, there was no alternative between
+letting one's individuality harden into a small dry nucleus of egoism,
+or diffuse itself thus in the interstices of other lives--and there fell
+upon Justine the chill thought that just such a future might await her
+if she missed the liberating gift of personal happiness....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Neither that night nor the next day had she a private word with
+Bessy--and it became evident, as the hours passed, that Mrs. Amherst was
+deliberately postponing the moment when they should find themselves
+alone. But the Lynbrook party was to disperse on the Monday; and Bessy,
+who hated early rising, and all the details of housekeeping, tapped at
+Justine's door late on Sunday night to ask her to speed the departing
+visitors.
+
+She pleaded this necessity as an excuse for her intrusion, and the
+playful haste of her manner showed a nervous shrinking from any renewal
+of confidence; but as she leaned in the doorway, fingering the diamond
+chain about her neck, while one satin-tipped foot emerged restlessly
+from the edge of her lace gown, her face lost the bloom of animation
+which talk and laughter always produced in it, and she looked so pale
+and weary that Justine needed no better pretext for drawing her into the
+room.
+
+It was not in Bessy to resist a soothing touch in her moments of nervous
+reaction. She sank into the chair by the fire and let her head rest
+wearily against the cushion which Justine slipped behind it.
+
+Justine dropped into the low seat beside her, and laid a hand on hers.
+"You don't look as well as when I went away, Bessy. Are you sure you've
+done wisely in beginning your house-parties so soon?"
+
+It always alarmed Bessy to be told that she was not looking her best,
+and she sat upright, a wave of pink rising under her sensitive skin.
+
+"I am quite well, on the contrary; but I was dying of inanition in this
+big empty house, and I suppose I haven't got the boredom out of my
+system yet!"
+
+Justine recognized the echo of Mrs. Carbury's manner.
+
+"Even if you _were_ bored," she rejoined, "the inanition was probably
+good for you. What does Dr. Wyant say to your breaking away from his
+régime?" She named Wyant purposely, knowing that Bessy had that respect
+for the medical verdict which is the last trace of reverence for
+authority in the mind of the modern woman. But Mrs. Amherst laughed with
+gentle malice.
+
+"Oh, I haven't seen Dr. Wyant lately. His interest in me died out the
+day you left."
+
+Justine forced a laugh to hide her annoyance. She had not yet recovered
+from the shrinking disgust of her last scene with Wyant.
+
+"Don't be a goose, Bessy. If he hasn't come, it must be because you've
+told him not to--because you're afraid of letting him see that you're
+disobeying him."
+
+Bessy laughed again. "My dear, I'm afraid of nothing--nothing! Not even
+of your big eyes when they glare at me like coals. I suppose you must
+have looked at poor Wyant like that to frighten him away! And yet the
+last time we talked of him you seemed to like him--you even hinted that
+it was because of him that Westy had no chance."
+
+Justine uttered an impatient exclamation. "If neither of them existed it
+wouldn't affect the other's chances in the least. Their only merit is
+that they both enhance the charms of celibacy!"
+
+Bessy's smile dropped, and she turned a grave glance on her friend. "Ah,
+most men do that--you're so clever to have found it out!"
+
+It was Justine's turn to smile. "Oh, but I haven't--as a
+generalization. I mean to marry as soon as I get the chance!"
+
+"The chance----?"
+
+"To meet the right man. I'm gambler enough to believe in my luck yet!"
+
+Mrs. Amherst sighed compassionately. "There _is_ no right man! As
+Blanche says, matrimony's as uncomfortable as a ready-made shoe. How can
+one and the same institution fit every individual case? And why should
+we all have to go lame because marriage was once invented to suit an
+imaginary case?"
+
+Justine gave a slight shrug. "You talk of walking lame--how else do we
+all walk? It seems to me that life's the tight boot, and marriage the
+crutch that may help one to hobble along!" She drew Bessy's hand into
+hers with a caressing pressure. "When you philosophize I always know
+you're tired. No one who feels well stops to generalize about symptoms.
+If you won't let your doctor prescribe for you, your nurse is going to
+carry out his orders. What you want is quiet. Be reasonable and send
+away everybody before Mr. Amherst comes back!"
+
+She dropped the last phrase carelessly, glancing away as she spoke; but
+the stiffening of the fingers in her clasp sent a little tremor through
+her hand.
+
+"Thanks for your advice. It would be excellent but for one thing--my
+husband is not coming back!"
+
+The mockery in Bessy's voice seemed to pass into her features, hardening
+and contracting them as frost shrivels a flower. Justine's face, on the
+contrary, was suddenly illuminated by compassion, as though a light had
+struck up into it from the cold glitter of her friend's unhappiness.
+
+"Bessy! What do you mean by not coming back?"
+
+"I mean he's had the tact to see that we shall be more comfortable
+apart--without putting me to the unpleasant necessity of telling him
+so."
+
+Again the piteous echo of Blanche Carbury's phrases! The laboured
+mimicry of her ideas!
+
+Justine looked anxiously at her friend. It seemed horribly false not to
+mention her own talk with Amherst, yet she felt it wiser to feign
+ignorance, since Bessy could never be trusted to interpret rightly any
+departure from the conventional.
+
+"Please tell me what has happened," she said at length.
+
+Bessy, with a smile, released her hand. "John has gone back to the life
+he prefers--which I take to be a hint to me to do the same."
+
+Justine hesitated again; then the pressure of truth overcame every
+barrier of expediency. "Bessy--I ought to tell you that I saw Mr.
+Amherst in town the day I went to Philadelphia. He spoke of going away
+for a time...he seemed unhappy...but he told me he was coming back to
+see you first--" She broke off, her clear eyes on her friend's; and she
+saw at once that Bessy was too self-engrossed to feel any surprise at
+her avowal. "Surely he came back?" she went on.
+
+"Oh, yes--he came back!" Bessy sank into the cushions, watching the
+firelight play on her diamond chain as she repeated the restless gesture
+of lifting it up and letting it slip through her fingers.
+
+"Well--and then?"
+
+"Then--nothing! I was not here when he came."
+
+"You were not here? What had happened?"
+
+"I had gone over to Blanche Carbury's for a day or two. I was just
+leaving when I heard he was coming back, and I couldn't throw her over
+at the last moment."
+
+Justine tried to catch the glance that fluttered evasively under Bessy's
+lashes. "You knew he was coming--and you chose that time to go to Mrs.
+Carbury's?"
+
+"I didn't choose, my dear--it just happened! And it really happened for
+the best. I suppose he was annoyed at my going--you know he has a
+ridiculous prejudice against Blanche--and so the next morning he rushed
+off to his cotton mill."
+
+There was a pause, while the diamonds continued to flow in threads of
+fire through Mrs. Amherst's fingers.
+
+At length Justine said: "Did Mr. Amherst know that you knew he was
+coming back before you left for Mrs. Carbury's?"
+
+Bessy feigned to meditate the question. "Did he know that I knew that he
+knew?" she mocked. "Yes--I suppose so--he must have known." She stifled
+a slight yawn as she drew herself languidly to her feet.
+
+"Then he took that as your answer?"
+
+"My answer----?"
+
+"To his coming back----"
+
+"So it appears. I told you he had shown unusual tact." Bessy stretched
+her softly tapering arms above her head and then dropped them along her
+sides with another yawn. "But it's almost morning--it's wicked of me to
+have kept you so late, when you must be up to look after all those
+people!"
+
+She flung her arms with a light gesture about Justine's shoulders, and
+laid a dry kiss on her cheek.
+
+"Don't look at me with those big eyes--they've eaten up the whole of
+your face! And you needn't think I'm sorry for what I've done," she
+declared. "I'm _not_--the--least--little--atom--of a bit!"
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+JUSTINE was pacing the long library at Lynbrook, between the caged sets
+of standard authors.
+
+She felt as much caged as they: as much a part of a conventional
+stage-setting totally unrelated to the action going on before it. Two
+weeks had passed since her return from Philadelphia; and during that
+time she had learned that her usefulness at Lynbrook was over. Though
+not unwelcome, she might almost call herself unwanted; life swept by,
+leaving her tethered to the stake of inaction; a bitter lot for one who
+chose to measure existence by deeds instead of days. She had found Bessy
+ostensibly busy with a succession of guests; no one in the house needed
+her but Cicely, and even Cicely, at times, was caught up into the whirl
+of her mother's life, swept off on sleighing parties and motor-trips, or
+carried to town for a dancing-class or an opera matinée.
+
+Mrs. Fenton Carbury was not among the visitors who left Lynbrook on the
+Monday after Justine's return.
+
+Mr. Carbury, with the other bread-winners of the party, had hastened
+back to his treadmill in Wall Street after a Sunday spent in silently
+studying the files of the Financial Record; but his wife stayed on,
+somewhat aggressively in possession, criticizing and rearranging the
+furniture, ringing for the servants, making sudden demands on the
+stable, telegraphing, telephoning, ordering fires lighted or windows
+opened, and leaving everywhere in her wake a trail of cigarette ashes
+and cocktail glasses.
+
+Ned Bowfort had not been included in the house-party; but on the day of
+its dispersal he rode over unannounced for luncheon, put up his horse in
+the stable, threaded his way familiarly among the dozing dogs in the
+hall, greeted Mrs. Ansell and Justine with just the right shade of quiet
+deference, produced from his pocket a new puzzle-game for Cicely, and
+sat down beside her mother with the quiet urbanity of the family friend
+who knows his privileges but is too discreet to abuse them.
+
+After that he came every day, sometimes riding home late to the Hunt
+Club, sometimes accompanying Bessy and Mrs. Carbury to town for dinner
+and the theatre; but always with his deprecating air of having dropped
+in by accident, and modestly hoping that his intrusion was not
+unwelcome.
+
+The following Sunday brought another influx of visitors, and Bessy
+seemed to fling herself with renewed enthusiasm into the cares of
+hospitality. She had avoided Justine since their midnight talk,
+contriving to see her in Cicely's presence, or pleading haste when they
+found themselves alone. The winter was unusually open, and she spent
+long hours in the saddle when her time was not taken up with her
+visitors. For a while she took Cicely on her daily rides; but she soon
+wearied of adapting her hunter's stride to the pace of the little girl's
+pony, and Cicely was once more given over to the coachman's care.
+
+Then came snow and a long frost, and Bessy grew restless at her
+imprisonment, and grumbled that there was no way of keeping well in a
+winter climate which made regular exercise impossible.
+
+"Why not build a squash-court?" Blanche Carbury proposed; and the two
+fell instantly to making plans under the guidance of Ned Bowfort and
+Westy Gaines. As the scheme developed, various advisers suggested that
+it was a pity not to add a bowling-alley, a swimming-tank and a
+gymnasium; a fashionable architect was summoned from town, measurements
+were taken, sites discussed, sketches compared, and engineers consulted
+as to the cost of artesian wells and the best system for heating the
+tank.
+
+Bessy seemed filled with a feverish desire to carry out the plan as
+quickly as possible, and on as large a scale as even the architect's
+invention soared to; but it was finally decided that, before signing the
+contracts, she should run over to New Jersey to see a building of the
+same kind on which a sporting friend of Mrs. Carbury's had recently
+lavished a fortune.
+
+It was on this errand that the two ladies, in company with Westy Gaines
+and Bowfort, had departed on the day which found Justine restlessly
+measuring the length of the library. She and Mrs. Ansell had the house
+to themselves; and it was hardly a surprise to her when, in the course
+of the afternoon, Mrs. Ansell, after a discreet pause on the threshold,
+advanced toward her down the long room.
+
+Since the night of her return Justine had felt sure that Mrs. Ansell
+would speak; but the elder lady was given to hawk-like circlings about
+her subject, to hanging over it and contemplating it before her wings
+dropped for the descent.
+
+Now, however, it was plain that she had resolved to strike; and Justine
+had a sense of relief at the thought. She had been too long isolated in
+her anxiety, her powerlessness to help; and she had a vague hope that
+Mrs. Ansell's worldly wisdom might accomplish what her inexperience had
+failed to achieve.
+
+"Shall we sit by the fire? I am glad to find you alone," Mrs. Ansell
+began, with the pleasant abruptness that was one of the subtlest
+instruments of her indirection; and as Justine acquiesced, she added,
+yielding her slight lines to the luxurious depths of an arm-chair: "I
+have been rather suddenly asked by an invalid cousin to go to Europe
+with her next week, and I can't go contentedly without being at peace
+about our friends."
+
+She paused, but Justine made no answer. In spite of her growing sympathy
+for Mrs. Ansell she could not overcome an inherent distrust, not of her
+methods, but of her ultimate object. What, for instance, was her
+conception of being at peace about the Amhersts? Justine's own
+conviction was that, as far as their final welfare was concerned, any
+terms were better between them than the external harmony which had
+prevailed during Amherst's stay at Lynbrook.
+
+The subtle emanation of her distrust may have been felt by Mrs. Ansell;
+for the latter presently continued, with a certain nobleness: "I am the
+more concerned because I believe I must hold myself, in a small degree,
+responsible for Bessy's marriage--" and, as Justine looked at her in
+surprise, she added: "I thought she could never be happy unless her
+affections were satisfied--and even now I believe so."
+
+"I believe so too," Justine said, surprised into assent by the
+simplicity of Mrs. Ansell's declaration.
+
+"Well, then--since we are agreed in our diagnosis," the older woman went
+on, smiling, "what remedy do you suggest? Or rather, how can we
+administer it?"
+
+"What remedy?" Justine hesitated.
+
+"Oh, I believe we are agreed on that too. Mr. Amherst must be brought
+back--but how to bring him?" She paused, and then added, with a singular
+effect of appealing frankness: "I ask you, because I believe you to be
+the only one of Bessy's friends who is in the least in her husband's
+confidence."
+
+Justine's embarrassment increased. Would it not be disloyal both to
+Bessy and Amherst to acknowledge to a third person a fact of which Bessy
+herself was unaware? Yet to betray embarrassment under Mrs. Ansell's
+eyes was to risk giving it a dangerous significance.
+
+"Bessy has spoken to me once or twice--but I know very little of Mr.
+Amherst's point of view; except," Justine added, after another moment's
+weighing of alternatives, "that I believe he suffers most from being cut
+off from his work at Westmore."
+
+"Yes--so I think; but that is a difficulty that time and expediency must
+adjust. All _we_ can do--their friends, I mean--is to get them together
+again before the breach is too wide."
+
+Justine pondered. She was perhaps more ignorant of the situation than
+Mrs. Ansell imagined, for since her talk with Bessy the latter had not
+again alluded to Amherst's absence, and Justine could merely conjecture
+that he had carried out his plan of taking the management of the mill he
+had spoken of. What she most wished to know was whether he had listened
+to her entreaty, and taken the position temporarily, without binding
+himself by the acceptance of a salary; or whether, wounded by the
+outrage of Bessy's flight, he had freed himself from financial
+dependence by engaging himself definitely as manager.
+
+"I really know very little of the present situation," Justine said,
+looking at Mrs. Ansell. "Bessy merely told me that Mr. Amherst had taken
+up his old work in a cotton mill in the south."
+
+As her eyes met Mrs. Ansell's it flashed across her that the latter did
+not believe what she said, and the perception made her instantly shrink
+back into herself. But there was nothing in Mrs. Ansell's tone to
+confirm the doubt which her look betrayed.
+
+"Ah--I hoped you knew more," she said simply; "for, like you, I have
+only heard from Bessy that her husband went away suddenly to help a
+friend who is reorganizing some mills in Georgia. Of course, under the
+circumstances, such a temporary break is natural enough--perhaps
+inevitable--only he must not stay away too long."
+
+Justine was silent. Mrs. Ansell's momentary self-betrayal had checked
+all farther possibility of frank communion, and the discerning lady had
+seen her error too late to remedy it.
+
+But her hearer's heart gave a leap of joy. It was clear from what Mrs.
+Ansell said that Amherst had not bound himself definitely, since he
+would not have done so without informing his wife. And with a secret
+thrill of happiness Justine recalled his last word to her: "I will
+remember all you have said."
+
+He had kept that word and acted on it; in spite of Bessy's last assault
+on his pride he had borne with her, and deferred the day of final
+rupture; and the sense that she had had a part in his decision filled
+Justine with a glow of hope. The consciousness of Mrs. Ansell's
+suspicions faded to insignificance--Mrs. Ansell and her kind might think
+what they chose, since all that mattered now was that she herself
+should act bravely and circumspectly in her last attempt to save her
+friends.
+
+"I am not sure," Mrs. Ansell continued, gently scrutinizing her
+companion, "that I think it unwise of him to have gone; but if he stays
+too long Bessy may listen to bad advice--advice disastrous to her
+happiness." She paused, and turned her eyes meditatively toward the
+fire. "As far as I know," she said, with the same air of serious
+candour, "you are the only person who can tell him this."
+
+"I?" exclaimed Justine, with a leap of colour to her pale cheeks.
+
+Mrs. Ansell's eyes continued to avoid her. "My dear Miss Brent, Bessy
+has told me something of the wise counsels you have given her. Mr.
+Amherst is also your friend. As I said just now, you are the only person
+who might act as a link between them--surely you will not renounce the
+rôle."
+
+Justine controlled herself. "My only rôle, as you call it, has been to
+urge Bessy to--to try to allow for her husband's views----"
+
+"And have you not given the same advice to Mr. Amherst?"
+
+The eyes of the two women met. "Yes," said Justine, after a moment.
+
+"Then why refuse your help now? The moment is crucial."
+
+Justine's thoughts had flown beyond the stage of resenting Mrs. Ansell's
+gentle pertinacity. All her faculties were absorbed in the question as
+to how she could most effectually use whatever influence she possessed.
+
+"I put it to you as one old friend to another--will you write to Mr.
+Amherst to come back?" Mrs. Ansell urged her.
+
+Justine was past considering even the strangeness of this request, and
+its oblique reflection on the kind of power ascribed to her. Through the
+confused beatings of her heart she merely struggled for a clearer sense
+of guidance.
+
+"No," she said slowly. "I cannot."
+
+"You cannot? With a friend's happiness in extremity?" Mrs. Ansell paused
+a moment before she added. "Unless you believe that Bessy would be
+happier divorced?"
+
+"Divorced--? Oh, no," Justine shuddered.
+
+"That is what it will come to."
+
+"No, no! In time----"
+
+"Time is what I am most afraid of, when Blanche Carbury disposes of it."
+
+Justine breathed a deep sigh.
+
+"You'll write?" Mrs. Ansell murmured, laying a soft touch on her hand.
+
+"I have not the influence you think----"
+
+"Can you do any harm by trying?"
+
+"I might--" Justine faltered, losing her exact sense of the words she
+used.
+
+"Ah," the other flashed back, "then you _have_ influence! Why will you
+not use it?"
+
+Justine waited a moment; then her resolve gathered itself into words.
+"If I have any influence, I am not sure it would be well to use it as
+you suggest."
+
+"Not to urge Mr. Amherst's return?"
+
+"No--not now."
+
+She caught the same veiled gleam of incredulity under Mrs. Ansell's
+lids--caught and disregarded it.
+
+"It must be now or never," Mrs. Ansell insisted.
+
+"I can't think so," Justine held out.
+
+"Nevertheless--will you try?"
+
+"No--no! It might be fatal."
+
+"To whom?"
+
+"To both." She considered. "If he came back now I know he would not
+stay."
+
+Mrs. Ansell was upon her abruptly. "You _know_? Then you speak with
+authority?"
+
+"No--what authority? I speak as I feel," Justine faltered.
+
+The older woman drew herself to her feet. "Ah--then you shoulder a great
+responsibility!" She moved nearer to Justine, and once more laid a
+fugitive touch upon her. "You won't write to him?"
+
+"No--no," the girl flung back; and the voices of the returning party in
+the hall made Mrs. Ansell, with an almost imperceptible gesture of
+warning, turn musingly away toward the fire.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bessy came back brimming with the wonders she had seen. A glazed
+"sun-room," mosaic pavements, a marble fountain to feed the marble
+tank--and outside a water-garden, descending in successive terraces, to
+take up and utilize--one could see how practically!--the overflow from
+the tank. If one did the thing at all, why not do it decently? She had
+given up her new motor, had let her town house, had pinched and stinted
+herself in a hundred ways--if ever woman was entitled to a little
+compensating pleasure, surely she was that woman!
+
+The days were crowded with consultations. Architect, contractors,
+engineers, a landscape gardener, and a dozen minor craftsmen, came and
+went, unrolled plans, moistened pencils, sketched, figured, argued,
+persuaded, and filled Bessy with the dread of appearing, under Blanche
+Carbury's eyes, subject to any restraining influences of economy. What!
+She was a young woman, with an independent fortune, and she was always
+wavering, considering, secretly referring back to the mute criticism of
+an invisible judge--of the husband who had been first to shake himself
+free of any mutual subjection? The accomplished Blanche did not have to
+say this--she conveyed it by the raising of painted brows, by a smile of
+mocking interrogation, a judiciously placed silence or a resigned glance
+at the architect. So the estimates poured in, were studied,
+resisted--then yielded to and signed; then the hour of advance payments
+struck, and an imperious appeal was despatched to Mr. Tredegar, to whom
+the management of Bessy's affairs had been transferred.
+
+Mr. Tredegar, to his client's surprise, answered the appeal in person.
+He had not been lately to Lynbrook, dreading the cold and damp of the
+country in winter; and his sudden arrival had therefore an ominous
+significance.
+
+He came for an evening in mid-week, when even Blanche Carbury was
+absent, and Bessy and Justine had the house to themselves. Mrs. Ansell
+had sailed the week before with her invalid cousin. No farther words had
+passed between herself and Justine--but the latter was conscious that
+their talk had increased instead of lessened the distance between them.
+Justine herself meant to leave soon. Her hope of regaining Bessy's
+confidence had been deceived, and seeing herself definitely superseded,
+she chafed anew at her purposeless inactivity. She had already written
+to one or two doctors in New York, and to the matron of Saint
+Elizabeth's. She had made herself a name in surgical cases, and it could
+not be long before a summons came....
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Tredegar arrived, and the three dined together, the two
+women bending meekly to his discourse, which was never more oracular and
+authoritative than when delivered to the gentler sex alone. Amherst's
+absence, in particular, seemed to loose the thin current of Mr.
+Tredegar's eloquence. He was never quite at ease in the presence of an
+independent mind, and Justine often reflected that, even had the two men
+known nothing of each other's views, there would have been between them
+an instinctive and irreducible hostility--they would have disliked each
+other if they had merely jostled elbows in the street.
+
+Yet even freed from Amherst's presence Mr. Tredegar showed a darkling
+brow, and as Justine slipped away after dinner she felt that she left
+Bessy to something more serious than the usual business conference.
+
+How serious, she was to learn that very night, when, in the small hours,
+her friend burst in on her tearfully. Bessy was ruined--ruined--that was
+what Mr. Tredegar had come to tell her! She might have known he would
+not have travelled to Lynbrook for a trifle.... She had expected to find
+herself cramped, restricted--to be warned that she must "manage,"
+hateful word!... But this! This was incredible! Unendurable! There was
+no money to build the gymnasium--none at all! And all because it had
+been swallowed up at Westmore--because the ridiculous changes there,
+the changes that nobody wanted, nobody approved of--that Truscomb and
+all the other experts had opposed and derided from the first--these
+changes, even modified and arrested, had already involved so much of her
+income, that it might be years--yes, he said _years_!--before she would
+feel herself free again--free of her own fortune, of Cicely's
+fortune...of the money poor Dick Westmore had meant his wife and child
+to enjoy!
+
+Justine listened anxiously to this confused outpouring of resentments.
+Bessy's born incapacity for figures made it indeed possible that the
+facts came on her as a surprise--that she had quite forgotten the
+temporary reduction of her income, and had begun to imagine that what
+she had saved in one direction was hers to spend in another. All this
+was conceivable. But why had Mr. Tredegar drawn so dark a picture of the
+future? Or was it only that, thwarted of her immediate desire, Bessy's
+disappointment blackened the farthest verge of her horizon? Justine,
+though aware of her friend's lack of perspective, suspected that a
+conniving hand had helped to throw the prospect out of drawing....
+
+Could it be possible, then, that Mr. Tredegar was among those who
+desired a divorce? That the influences at which Mrs. Ansell had hinted
+proceeded not only from Blanche Carbury and her group? Helpless amid
+this rush of forebodings, Justine could do no more than soothe and
+restrain--to reason would have been idle. She had never till now
+realized how completely she had lost ground with Bessy.
+
+"The humiliation--before my friends! Oh, I was warned...my father, every
+one...for Cicely's sake I was warned...but I wouldn't listen--and _now_!
+From the first it was all he cared for--in Europe, even, he was always
+dragging me to factories. _Me?_--I was only the owner of Westmore! He
+wanted power--power, that's all--when he lost it he left me...oh, I'm
+glad now my baby is dead! Glad there's nothing between us--nothing,
+nothing in the world to tie us together any longer!"
+
+The disproportion between this violent grief and its trivial cause would
+have struck Justine as simply grotesque, had she not understood that the
+incident of the gymnasium, which followed with cumulative pressure on a
+series of similar episodes, seemed to Bessy like the reaching out of a
+retaliatory hand--a mocking reminder that she was still imprisoned in
+the consequences of her unhappy marriage.
+
+Such folly seemed past weeping for--it froze Justine's compassion into
+disdain, till she remembered that the sources of our sorrow are
+sometimes nobler than their means of expression, and that a baffled
+unappeased love was perhaps the real cause of Bessy's anger against her
+husband.
+
+At any rate, the moment was a critical one, and Justine remembered with
+a pang that Mrs. Ansell had foreseen such a contingency, and implored
+her to take measures against it. She had refused, from a sincere dread
+of precipitating a definite estrangement--but had she been right in
+judging the situation so logically? With a creature of Bessy's emotional
+uncertainties the result of contending influences was really
+incalculable--it might still be that, at this juncture, Amherst's return
+would bring about a reaction of better feelings....
+
+Justine sat and mused on these things after leaving her friend exhausted
+upon a tearful pillow. She felt that she had perhaps taken too large a
+survey of the situation--that the question whether there could ever be
+happiness between this tormented pair was not one to concern those who
+struggled for their welfare. Most marriages are a patch-work of jarring
+tastes and ill-assorted ambitions--if here and there, for a moment, two
+colours blend, two textures are the same, so much the better for the
+pattern! Justine, certainly, could foresee in reunion no positive
+happiness for either of her friends; but she saw positive disaster for
+Bessy in separation from her husband....
+
+Suddenly she rose from her chair by the falling fire, and crossed over
+to the writing-table. She would write to Amherst herself--she would tell
+him to come. The decision once reached, hope flowed back to her
+heart--the joy of action so often deceived her into immediate faith in
+its results!
+
+"Dear Mr. Amherst," she wrote, "the last time I saw you, you told me you
+would remember what I said. I ask you to do so now--to remember that I
+urged you not to be away too long. I believe you ought to come back now,
+though I know Bessy will not ask you to. I am writing without her
+knowledge, but with the conviction that she needs you, though perhaps
+without knowing it herself...."
+
+She paused, and laid down her pen. Why did it make her so happy to write
+to him? Was it merely the sense of recovered helpfulness, or something
+warmer, more personal, that made it a joy to trace his name, and to
+remind him of their last intimate exchange of words? Well--perhaps it
+was that too. There were moments when she was so mortally lonely that
+any sympathetic contact with another life sent a glow into her
+veins--that she was thankful to warm herself at any fire.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+BESSY, languidly glancing through her midday mail some five days later,
+uttered a slight exclamation as she withdrew her finger-tip from the
+flap of the envelope she had begun to open.
+
+It was a black sleety day, with an east wind bowing the trees beyond the
+drenched window-panes, and the two friends, after luncheon, had
+withdrawn to the library, where Justine sat writing notes for Bessy,
+while the latter lay back in her arm-chair, in the state of dreamy
+listlessness into which she always sank when not under the stimulus of
+amusement or exercise.
+
+She sat suddenly upright as her eyes fell on the letter.
+
+"I beg your pardon! I thought it was for me," she said, holding it out
+to Justine.
+
+The latter reddened as she glanced at the superscription. It had not
+occurred to her that Amherst would reply to her appeal: she had pictured
+him springing on the first north-bound train, perhaps not even pausing
+to announce his return to his wife.... And to receive his letter under
+Bessy's eye was undeniably embarrassing, since Justine felt the
+necessity of keeping her intervention secret.
+
+But under Bessy's eye she certainly was--it continued to rest on her
+curiously, speculatively, with an under-gleam of malicious significance.
+
+"So stupid of me--I can't imagine why I should have expected my husband
+to write to me!" Bessy went on, leaning back in lazy contemplation of
+her other letters, but still obliquely including Justine in her angle of
+vision.
+
+The latter, after a moment's pause, broke the seal and read.
+
+
+     "Millfield, Georgia.
+     "My dear Miss Brent,
+
+     "Your letter reached me yesterday and I have thought it over
+     carefully. I appreciate the feeling that prompted it--but I don't
+     know that any friend, however kind and discerning, can give the
+     final advice in such matters. You tell me you are sure my wife will
+     not ask me to return--well, under present conditions that seems to
+     me a sufficient reason for staying away.
+
+     "Meanwhile, I assure you that I have remembered all you said to me
+     that day. I have made no binding arrangement here--nothing to
+     involve my future action--and I have done this solely because you
+     asked it. This will tell you better than words how much I value
+     your advice, and what strong reasons I must have for not following
+     it now.
+
+     "I suppose there are no more exploring parties in this weather. I
+     wish I could show Cicely some of the birds down here.
+
+     "Yours faithfully,
+     "John Amherst.
+
+     "Please don't let my wife ride Impulse."
+
+
+Latent under Justine's acute consciousness of what this letter meant,
+was the sense of Bessy's inferences and conjectures. She could feel them
+actually piercing the page in her hand like some hypersensitive visual
+organ to which matter offers no obstruction. Or rather, baffled in their
+endeavour, they were evoking out of the unseen, heaven knew what
+fantastic structure of intrigue--scrawling over the innocent page with
+burning evidences of perfidy and collusion....
+
+One thing became instantly clear to her: she must show the letter to
+Bessy. She ran her eyes over it again, trying to disentangle the
+consequences. There was the allusion to their talk in town--well, she
+had told Bessy of that! But the careless reference to their woodland
+excursions--what might not Bessy, in her present mood, make of it?
+Justine's uppermost thought was of distress at the failure of her plan.
+Perhaps she might still have induced Amherst to come back, had it not
+been for this accident; but now that hope was destroyed.
+
+She raised her eyes and met Bessy's. "Will you read it?" she said,
+holding out the letter.
+
+Bessy received it with lifted brows, and a protesting murmur--but as she
+read, Justine saw the blood mount under her clear skin, invade the
+temples, the nape, even the little flower-like ears; then it receded as
+suddenly, ebbing at last from the very lips, so that the smile with
+which she looked up from her reading was as white as if she had been
+under the stress of physical pain.
+
+"So you have written my husband to come back?"
+
+"As you see."
+
+Bessy looked her straight in the eyes. "I am very much obliged to
+you--extremely obliged!"
+
+Justine met the look quietly. "Which means that you resent my
+interference----"
+
+"Oh, I leave you to call it that!" Bessy mocked, tossing the letter down
+on the table at her side.
+
+"Bessy! Don't take it in that way. If I made a mistake I did so with the
+hope of helping you. How can I stand by, after all these months
+together, and see you deliberately destroying your life without trying
+to stop you?"
+
+The smile withered on Bessy's lips. "It is very dear and good of you--I
+know you're never happy unless you're helping people--but in this case I
+can only repeat what my husband says. He and I don't often look at
+things in the same light--but I quite agree with him that the management
+of such matters is best left to--to the persons concerned."
+
+Justine hesitated. "I might answer that, if you take that view, it was
+inconsistent of you to talk with me so openly. You've certainly made me
+feel that you wanted help--you've turned to me for it. But perhaps that
+does not justify my writing to Mr. Amherst without your knowing it."
+
+Bessy laughed. "Ah, my dear, you knew that if you asked me the letter
+would never be sent!"
+
+"Perhaps I did," said Justine simply. "I was trying to help you against
+your will."
+
+"Well, you see the result." Bessy laid a derisive touch on the letter.
+"Do you understand now whose fault it is if I am alone?"
+
+Justine faced her steadily. "There is nothing in Mr. Amherst's letter to
+make me change my opinion. I still think it lies with you to bring him
+back."
+
+Bessy raised a glittering face to her--all hardness and laughter. "Such
+modesty, my dear! As if I had a chance of succeeding where you failed!"
+
+She sprang up, brushing the curls from her temples with a petulant
+gesture. "Don't mind me if I'm cross--but I've had a dose of preaching
+from Maria Ansell, and I don't know why my friends should treat me like
+a puppet without any preferences of my own, and press me upon a man who
+has done his best to show that he doesn't want me. As a matter of fact,
+he and I are luckily agreed on that point too--and I'm afraid all the
+good advice in the world won't persuade us to change our opinion!"
+
+Justine held her ground. "If I believed that of either of you, I
+shouldn't have written--I should not be pleading with you now--And Mr.
+Amherst doesn't believe it either," she added, after a pause, conscious
+of the risk she was taking, but thinking the words might act like a blow
+in the face of a person sinking under a deadly narcotic.
+
+Bessy's smile deepened to a sneer. "I see you've talked me over
+thoroughly--and on _his_ views I ought perhaps not to have risked an
+opinion----"
+
+"We have not talked you over," Justine exclaimed. "Mr. Amherst could
+never talk of you...in the way you think...." And under the light
+staccato of Bessy's laugh she found resolution to add: "It is not in
+that way that I know what he feels."
+
+"Ah? I should be curious to hear, then----"
+
+Justine turned to the letter, which still lay between them. "Will you
+read the last sentence again? The postscript, I mean."
+
+Bessy, after a surprised glance at her, took the letter up with the
+deprecating murmur of one who acts under compulsion rather than dispute
+about a trifle.
+
+"The postscript? Let me see...'Don't let my wife ride Impulse.'--_Et
+puis?_" she murmured, dropping the page again.
+
+"Well, does it tell you nothing? It's a cold letter--at first I thought
+so--the letter of a man who believes himself deeply hurt--so deeply that
+he will make no advance, no sign of relenting. That's what I thought
+when I first read it...but the postscript undoes it all."
+
+Justine, as she spoke, had drawn near Bessy, laying a hand on her arm,
+and shedding on her the radiance of a face all charity and sweet
+compassion. It was her rare gift, at such moments, to forget her own
+relation to the person for whose fate she was concerned, to cast aside
+all consciousness of criticism and distrust in the heart she strove to
+reach, as pitiful people forget their physical timidity in the attempt
+to help a wounded animal.
+
+For a moment Bessy seemed to waver. The colour flickered faintly up her
+cheek, her long lashes drooped--she had the tenderest lids!--and all her
+face seemed melting under the beams of Justine's ardour. But the letter
+was still in her hand--her eyes, in sinking, fell upon it, and she
+sounded beneath her breath the fatal phrase: "'I have done this solely
+because you asked it.'
+
+"After such a tribute to your influence I don't wonder you feel
+competent to set everybody's affairs in order! But take my advice, my
+dear--_don't_ ask me not to ride Impulse!"
+
+The pity froze on Justine's lip: she shrank back cut to the quick. For a
+moment the silence between the two women rang with the flight of arrowy,
+wounding thoughts; then Bessy's anger flagged, she gave one of her
+embarrassed half-laughs, and turning back, laid a deprecating touch on
+her friend's arm.
+
+"I didn't mean that, Justine...but let us not talk now--I can't!"
+
+Justine did not move: the reaction could not come as quickly in her
+case. But she turned on Bessy two eyes full of pardon, full of
+speechless pity...and Bessy received the look silently before she moved
+to the door and went out.
+
+"Oh, poor thing--poor thing!" Justine gasped as the door closed.
+
+She had already forgotten her own hurt--she was alone again with Bessy's
+sterile pain. She stood staring before her for a moment--then her eyes
+fell on Amherst's letter, which had fluttered to the floor between them.
+The fatal letter! If it had not come at that unlucky moment perhaps she
+might still have gained her end.... She picked it up and re-read it.
+Yes--there were phrases in it that a wounded suspicious heart might
+misconstrue.... Yet Bessy's last words had absolved her.... Why had she
+not answered them? Why had she stood there dumb? The blow to her pride
+had been too deep, had been dealt too unexpectedly--for one miserable
+moment she had thought first of herself! Ah, that importunate,
+irrepressible self--the _moi haïssable_ of the Christian--if only one
+could tear it from one's breast! She had missed an opportunity--her last
+opportunity perhaps! By this time, even, a hundred hostile influences,
+cold whispers of vanity, of selfishness, of worldly pride, might have
+drawn their freezing ring about Bessy's heart....
+
+Justine started up to follow her...then paused, recalling her last
+words. "Let us not talk now--I can't!" She had no right to intrude on
+that bleeding privacy--if the chance had been hers she had lost it. She
+dropped back into her seat at the desk, hiding her face in her hands.
+
+Presently she heard the clock strike, and true to her tireless instinct
+of activity, she lifted her head, took up her pen, and went on with the
+correspondence she had dropped.... It was hard at first to collect her
+thoughts, or even to summon to her pen the conventional phrases that
+sufficed for most of the notes. Groping for a word, she pushed aside her
+writing and stared out at the sallow frozen landscape framed by the
+window at which she sat. The sleet had ceased, and hollows of sunless
+blue showed through the driving wind-clouds. A hard sky and a hard
+ground--frost-bound ringing earth under rigid ice-mailed trees.
+
+As Justine looked out, shivering a little, she saw a woman's figure
+riding down the avenue toward the gate. The figure disappeared behind a
+clump of evergreens--showed again farther down, through the boughs of a
+skeleton beech--and revealed itself in the next open space as
+Bessy--Bessy in the saddle on a day of glaring frost, when no horse
+could keep his footing out of a walk!
+
+Justine went to the window and strained her eyes for a confirming
+glimpse. Yes--it was Bessy! There was no mistaking that light flexible
+figure, every line swaying true to the beat of the horse's stride. But
+Justine remembered that Bessy had not meant to ride--had countermanded
+her horse because of the bad going.... Well, she was a perfect
+horsewoman and had no doubt chosen her surest-footed mount...probably
+the brown cob, Tony Lumpkin.
+
+But when did Tony's sides shine so bright through the leafless branches?
+And when did he sweep his rider on with such long free play of the
+hind-quarters? Horse and rider shot into sight again, rounding the curve
+of the avenue near the gates, and in a break of sunlight Justine saw the
+glitter of chestnut flanks--and remembered that Impulse was the only
+chestnut in the stables....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She went back to her seat and continued writing. Bessy had left a
+formidable heap of bills and letters; and when this was demolished,
+Justine had her own correspondence to despatch. She had heard that
+morning from the matron of Saint Elizabeth's: an interesting "case" was
+offered her, but she must come within two days. For the first few hours
+she had wavered, loath to leave Lynbrook without some definite light on
+her friend's future; but now Amherst's letter had shed that light--or
+rather, had deepened the obscurity--and she had no pretext for lingering
+on where her uselessness had been so amply demonstrated.
+
+She wrote to the matron accepting the engagement; and the acceptance
+involved the writing of other letters, the general reorganizing of that
+minute polity, the life of Justine Brent. She smiled a little to think
+how easily she could be displaced and transplanted--how slender were her
+material impedimenta, how few her invisible bonds! She was as light and
+detachable as a dead leaf on the autumn breeze--yet she was in the
+season of sap and flower, when there is life and song in the trees!
+
+But she did not think long of herself, for an undefinable anxiety ran
+through her thoughts like a black thread. It found expression, now and
+then, in the long glances she threw through the window--in her rising to
+consult the clock and compare her watch with it--in a nervous snatch of
+humming as she paced the room once or twice before going back to her
+desk....
+
+Why was Bessy so late? Dusk was falling already--the early end of the
+cold slate-hued day. But Bessy always rode late--there was always a
+rational answer to Justine's irrational conjectures.... It was the sight
+of those chestnut flanks that tormented her--she knew of Bessy's
+previous struggles with the mare. But the indulging of idle
+apprehensions was not in her nature, and when the tea-tray came, and
+with it Cicely, sparkling from a gusty walk, and coral-pink in her cloud
+of crinkled hair, Justine sprang up and cast off her cares.
+
+It cost her a pang, again, to see the lamps lit and the curtains
+drawn--shutting in the warmth and brightness of the house from that
+wind-swept frozen twilight through which Bessy rode alone. But the icy
+touch of the thought slipped from Justine's mind as she bent above the
+tea-tray, gravely measuring Cicely's milk into a "grown-up" teacup,
+hearing the confidential details of the child's day, and capping them
+with banter and fantastic narrative.
+
+She was not sorry to go--ah, no! The house had become a prison to her,
+with ghosts walking its dreary floors. But to lose Cicely would be
+bitter--she had not felt how bitter till the child pressed against her
+in the firelight, insisting raptly, with little sharp elbows stabbing
+her knee: "And _then_ what happened, Justine?"
+
+The door opened, and some one came in to look at the fire. Justine,
+through the mazes of her fairy-tale, was dimly conscious that it was
+Knowles, and not one of the footmen...the proud Knowles, who never
+mended the fires himself.... As he passed out again, hovering slowly
+down the long room, she rose, leaving Cicely on the hearth-rug, and
+followed him to the door.
+
+"Has Mrs. Amherst not come in?" she asked, not knowing why she wished to
+ask it out of the child's hearing.
+
+"No, miss. I looked in myself to see--thinking she might have come by
+the side-door."
+
+"She may have gone to her sitting-room."
+
+"She's not upstairs."
+
+They both paused. Then Justine said: "What horse was she riding?"
+
+"Impulse, Miss." The butler looked at his large responsible watch. "It's
+not late--" he said, more to himself than to her.
+
+"No. Has she been riding Impulse lately?"
+
+"No, Miss. Not since that day the mare nearly had her off. I understood
+Mr. Amherst did not wish it."
+
+Justine went back to Cicely and the fairy-tale.--As she took up the
+thread of the Princess's adventures, she asked herself why she had ever
+had any hope of helping Bessy. The seeds of disaster were in the poor
+creature's soul.... Even when she appeared to be moved, lifted out of
+herself, her escaping impulses were always dragged back to the magnetic
+centre of hard distrust and resistance that sometimes forms the core of
+soft-fibred natures. As she had answered her husband's previous appeal
+by her flight to the woman he disliked, so she answered this one by
+riding the horse he feared.... Justine's last illusions crumbled. The
+distance between two such natures was unspannable. Amherst had done well
+to remain away...and with a tidal rush her sympathies swept back to his
+side....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The governess came to claim Cicely. One of the footmen came to put
+another log on the fire. Then the rite of removing the tea-table was
+majestically performed--the ceremonial that had so often jarred on
+Amherst's nerves. As she watched it, Justine had a vague sense of the
+immutability of the household routine--a queer awed feeling that,
+whatever happened, a machine so perfectly adjusted would work on
+inexorably, like a natural law....
+
+She rose to look out of the window, staring vainly into blackness
+between the parted curtains. As she turned back, passing the
+writing-table, she noticed that Cicely's irruption had made her forget
+to post her letters--an unusual oversight. A glance at the clock told
+her that she was not too late for the mail--reminding her, at the same
+time, that it was scarcely three hours since Bessy had started on her
+ride.... She saw the foolishness of her fears. Even in winter, Bessy
+often rode for more than three hours; and now that the days were growing
+longer----
+
+Suddenly reassured, Justine went out into the hall, intending to carry
+her batch of letters to the red pillar-box by the door. As she did so, a
+cold blast struck her. Could it be that for once the faultless routine
+of the house had been relaxed, that one of the servants had left the
+outer door ajar? She walked over to the vestibule--yes, both doors were
+wide. The night rushed in on a vicious wind. As she pushed the vestibule
+door shut, she heard the dogs sniffing and whining on the threshold. She
+crossed the vestibule, and heard voices and the tramping of feet in the
+darkness--then saw a lantern gleam. Suddenly Knowles shot out of the
+night--the lantern struck on his bleached face.
+
+Justine, stepping back, pressed the electric button in the wall, and the
+wide door-step was abruptly illuminated, with its huddled, pushing,
+heavily-breathing group...black figures writhing out of darkness,
+strange faces distorted in the glare.
+
+"Bessy!" she cried, and sprang forward; but suddenly Wyant was before
+her, his hand on her arm; and as the dreadful group struggled by into
+the hall, he froze her to him with a whisper: "The spine----"
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+WITHIN Justine there was a moment's darkness; then, like terror-struck
+workers rallying to their tasks, every faculty was again at its post,
+receiving and transmitting signals, taking observations, anticipating
+orders, making her brain ring with the hum of a controlled activity.
+
+She had known the sensation before--the transmuting of terror and pity
+into this miraculous lucidity of thought and action; but never had it
+snatched her from such depths. Oh, thank heaven for her knowledge
+now--for the trained mind that could take command of her senses and bend
+them firmly to its service!
+
+Wyant seconded her well, after a moment's ague-fit of fear. She pitied
+and pardoned the moment, aware of its cause, and respecting him for the
+way in which he rose above it into the clear air of professional
+self-command. Through the first hours they worked shoulder to shoulder,
+conscious of each other only as of kindred will-powers, stretched to the
+utmost tension of discernment and activity, and hardly needing speech or
+look to further their swift co-operation. It was thus that she had known
+him in the hospital, in the heat of his youthful zeal: the doctor she
+liked best to work with, because no other so tempered ardour with
+judgment.
+
+The great surgeon, arriving from town at midnight, confirmed his
+diagnosis: there was undoubted injury to the spine. Other consultants
+were summoned in haste, and in the winter dawn the verdict was
+pronounced--a fractured vertebra, and possibly lesion of the cord....
+
+Justine got a moment alone when the surgeons returned to the sick-room.
+Other nurses were there now, capped, aproned, quickly and silently
+unpacking their appliances.... She must call a halt, clear her brain
+again, decide rapidly what was to be done next.... Oh, if only the
+crawling hours could bring Amherst! It was strange that there was no
+telegram yet--no, not strange, after all, since it was barely six in the
+morning, and her message had not been despatched till seven the night
+before. It was not unlikely that, in that little southern settlement,
+the telegraph office closed at six.
+
+She stood in Bessy's sitting-room, her forehead pressed to the
+window-pane, her eyes straining out into the thin February darkness,
+through which the morning star swam white. As soon as she had yielded
+her place to the other nurses her nervous tension relaxed, and she hung
+again above the deeps of anguish, terrified and weak. In a moment the
+necessity for action would snatch her back to a firm footing--her
+thoughts would clear, her will affirm itself, all the wheels of the
+complex machine resume their functions. But now she felt only the
+horror....
+
+She knew so well what was going on in the next room. Dr. Garford, the
+great surgeon, who had known her at Saint Elizabeth's, had evidently
+expected her to take command of the nurses he had brought from town;
+but there were enough without her, and there were other cares which, for
+the moment, she only could assume--the despatching of messages to the
+scattered family, the incessant telephoning and telegraphing to town,
+the general guidance of the household swinging rudderless in the tide of
+disaster. Cicely, above all, must be watched over and guarded from
+alarm. The little governess, reduced to a twittering heap of fears, had
+been quarantined in a distant room till reason returned to her; and the
+child, meanwhile, slept quietly in the old nurse's care.
+
+Cicely would wake presently, and Justine must go up to her with a bright
+face; other duties would press thick on the heels of this; their feet
+were already on the threshold. But meanwhile she could only follow in
+imagination what was going on in the other room....
+
+She had often thought with dread of such a contingency. She always
+sympathized too much with her patients--she knew it was the joint in her
+armour. Her quick-gushing pity lay too near that professional exterior
+which she had managed to endue with such a bright glaze of insensibility
+that some sentimental patients--without much the matter--had been known
+to call her "a little hard." How, then, should she steel herself if it
+fell to her lot to witness a cruel accident to some one she loved, and
+to have to perform a nurse's duties, steadily, expertly, unflinchingly,
+while every fibre was torn with inward anguish?
+
+She knew the horror of it now--and she knew also that her self-enforced
+exile from the sick-room was a hundred times worse. To stand there,
+knowing, with each tick of the clock, what was being said and done
+within--how the great luxurious room, with its pale draperies and
+scented cushions, and the hundred pretty trifles strewing the lace
+toilet-table and the delicate old furniture, was being swept bare,
+cleared for action like a ship's deck, drearily garnished with rows of
+instruments, rolls of medicated cotton, oiled silk, bottles, bandages,
+water-pillows--all the grim paraphernalia of the awful rites of pain: to
+know this, and to be able to call up with torturing vividness that poor
+pale face on the pillows, vague-eyed, expressionless, perhaps, as she
+had last seen it, or--worse yet--stirred already with the first creeping
+pangs of consciousness: to have these images slowly, deliberately burn
+themselves into her brain, and to be aware, at the same time, of that
+underlying moral disaster, of which the accident seemed the monstrous
+outward symbol--ah, this was worse than anything she had ever dreamed!
+
+She knew that the final verdict could not be pronounced till the
+operation which was about to take place should reveal the extent of
+injury to the spine. Bessy, in falling, must have struck on the back of
+her head and shoulders, and it was but too probable that the fractured
+vertebra had caused a bruise if not a lesion of the spinal cord. In that
+case paralysis was certain--and a slow crawling death the almost
+inevitable outcome. There had been cases, of course--Justine's
+professional memory evoked them--cases of so-called "recovery," where
+actual death was kept at bay, a semblance of life preserved for years in
+the poor petrified body.... But the mind shrank from such a fate for
+Bessy. And it might still be that the injury to the spine was not
+grave--though, here again, the fracturing of the fourth vertebra was
+ominous.
+
+The door opened and some one came from the inner room--Wyant, in search
+of an instrument-case. Justine turned and they looked at each other.
+
+"It will be now?"
+
+"Yes. Dr. Garford asked if there was no one you could send for."
+
+"No one but Mr. Tredegar and the Halford Gaineses. They'll be here this
+evening, I suppose."
+
+They exchanged a discouraged glance, knowing how little difference the
+presence of the Halford Gaineses would make.
+
+"He wanted to know if there was no telegram from Amherst."
+
+"No."
+
+"Then they mean to begin."
+
+A nursemaid appeared in the doorway. "Miss Cicely--" she said; and
+Justine bounded upstairs.
+
+The day's work had begun. From Cicely to the governess--from the
+governess to the housekeeper--from the telephone to the
+writing-table--Justine vibrated back and forth, quick, noiseless,
+self-possessed--sobering, guiding, controlling her confused and
+panic-stricken world. It seemed to her that half the day had elapsed
+before the telegraph office at Lynbrook opened--she was at the telephone
+at the stroke of the hour. No telegram? Only one--a message from Halford
+Gaines--"Arrive at eight tonight." Amherst was still silent! Was there a
+difference of time to be allowed for? She tried to remember, to
+calculate, but her brain was too crowded with other thoughts.... She
+turned away from the instrument discouraged.
+
+Whenever she had time to think, she was overwhelmed by the weight of her
+solitude. Mr. Langhope was in Egypt, accessible only through a London
+banker--Mrs. Ansell presumably wandering on the continent. Her cables
+might not reach them for days. And among the throng of Lynbrook
+habitués, she knew not to whom to turn. To loose the Telfer tribe and
+Mrs. Carbury upon that stricken house--her thought revolted from it, and
+she was thankful to know that February had dispersed their migratory
+flock to southern shores. But if only Amherst would come!
+
+Cicely and the tranquillized governess had been despatched on a walk
+with the dogs, and Justine was returning upstairs when she met one of
+the servants with a telegram. She tore it open with a great throb of
+relief. It was her own message to Amherst--_address unknown_....
+
+Had she misdirected it, then? In that first blinding moment her mind
+might so easily have failed her. But no--there was the name of the town
+before her...Millfield, Georgia...the same name as in his letter.... She
+had made no mistake, but he was gone! Gone--and without leaving an
+address.... For a moment her tired mind refused to work; then she roused
+herself, ran down the stairs again, and rang up the telegraph-office.
+The thing to do, of course, was to telegraph to the owner of the
+mills--of whose very name she was ignorant!--enquiring where Amherst
+was, and asking him to forward the message. Precious hours must be lost
+meanwhile--but, after all, they were waiting for no one upstairs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The verdict had been pronounced: dislocation and fracture of the fourth
+vertebra, with consequent injury to the spinal cord. Dr. Garford and
+Wyant came out alone to tell her. The surgeon ran over the technical
+details, her brain instantly at attention as he developed his diagnosis
+and issued his orders. She asked no questions as to the future--she
+knew it was impossible to tell. But there were no immediate signs of a
+fatal ending: the patient had rallied well, and the general conditions
+were not unfavourable.
+
+"You have heard from Mr. Amherst?" Dr. Garford concluded.
+
+"Not yet...he may be travelling," Justine faltered, unwilling to say
+that her telegram had been returned. As she spoke there was a tap on the
+door, and a folded paper was handed in--a telegram telephoned from the
+village.
+
+"Amherst gone South America to study possibilities cotton growing have
+cabled our correspondent Buenos Ayres."
+
+Concealment was no longer possible. Justine handed the message to the
+surgeon.
+
+"Ah--and there would be no chance of finding his address among Mrs.
+Amherst's papers?"
+
+"I think not--no."
+
+"Well--we must keep her alive, Wyant."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At dusk, Justine sat in the library, waiting for Cicely to be brought to
+her. A lull had descended on the house--a new order developed out of the
+morning's chaos. With soundless steps, with lowered voices, the
+machinery of life was carried on. And Justine, caught in one of the
+pauses of inaction which she had fought off since morning, was reliving,
+for the hundredth time, her few moments at Bessy's bedside....
+
+She had been summoned in the course of the afternoon, and stealing into
+the darkened room, had bent over the bed while the nurses noiselessly
+withdrew. There lay the white face which had been burnt into her inward
+vision--the motionless body, and the head stirring ceaselessly, as
+though to release the agitation of the imprisoned limbs. Bessy's eyes
+turned to her, drawing her down.
+
+"Am I going to die, Justine?"
+
+"No."
+
+"The pain is...so awful...."
+
+"It will pass...you will sleep...."
+
+"Cicely----"
+
+"She has gone for a walk. You'll see her presently."
+
+The eyes faded, releasing Justine. She stole away, and the nurses came
+back.
+
+Bessy had spoken of Cicely--but not a word of her husband! Perhaps her
+poor dazed mind groped for him, or perhaps it shrank from his name....
+Justine was thankful for her silence. For the moment her heart was
+bitter against Amherst. Why, so soon after her appeal and his answer,
+had he been false to the spirit of their agreement? This unannounced,
+unexplained departure was nothing less than a breach of his tacit
+pledge--the pledge not to break definitely with Lynbrook. And why had he
+gone to South America? She drew her aching brows together, trying to
+retrace a vague memory of some allusion to the cotton-growing
+capabilities of the region.... Yes, he had spoken of it once in talking
+of the world's area of cotton production. But what impulse had sent him
+off on such an exploration? Mere unrest, perhaps--the intolerable burden
+of his useless life? The questions spun round and round in her head,
+weary, profitless, yet persistent....
+
+It was a relief when Cicely came--a relief to measure out the cambric
+tea, to make the terrier beg for ginger-bread, even to take up the
+thread of the interrupted fairy-tale--though through it all she was
+wrung by the thought that, just twenty-four hours earlier, she and the
+child had sat in the same place, listening for the trot of Bessy's
+horse....
+
+The day passed: the hands of the clocks moved, food was cooked and
+served, blinds were drawn up or down, lamps lit and fires renewed...all
+these tokens of the passage of time took place before her, while her
+real consciousness seemed to hang in some dim central void, where
+nothing happened, nothing would ever happen....
+
+And now Cicely was in bed, the last "long-distance" call was answered,
+the last orders to kitchen and stable had been despatched, Wyant had
+stolen down to her with his hourly report--"no change"--and she was
+waiting in the library for the Gaineses.
+
+Carriage-wheels on the gravel: they were there at last. Justine started up
+and went into the hall. As she passed out of the library the outer door
+opened, and the gusty night swooped in--as, at the same hour the day
+before, it had swooped in ahead of the dreadful procession--preceding now
+the carriageful of Hanaford relations: Mr. Gaines, red-glazed, brief and
+interrogatory; Westy, small, nervous, ill at ease with his grief; and Mrs.
+Gaines, supreme in the possession of a consolatory yet funereal manner,
+and sinking on Justine's breast with the solemn whisper: "Have you sent
+for the clergyman?"
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+THE house was empty again.
+
+A week had passed since Bessy's accident, and friends and relations had
+dispersed. The household had fallen into its routine, the routine of
+sickness and silence, and once more the perfectly-adjusted machine was
+working on steadily, inexorably, like a natural law....
+
+So at least it seemed to Justine's nerves, intolerably stretched, at
+times, on the rack of solitude, of suspense, of forebodings. She had
+been thankful when the Gaineses left--doubly thankful when a telegram
+from Bermuda declared Mrs. Carbury to be "in despair" at her inability
+to fly to Bessy's side--thankful even that Mr. Tredegar's professional
+engagements made it impossible for him to do more than come down, every
+second or third day, for a few hours; yet, though in some ways it was a
+relief to be again in sole command, there were moments when the weight
+of responsibility, and the inability to cry out her fears and her
+uncertainties, seemed almost unendurable.
+
+Wyant was her chief reliance. He had risen so gallantly above his
+weakness, become again so completely the indefatigable worker of former
+days, that she accused herself of injustice in ascribing to physical
+causes the vague eye and tremulous hand which might merely have
+betokened a passing access of nervous sensibility. Now, at any rate, he
+had his nerves so well under control, and had shown such a grasp of the
+case, and such marked executive capacity, that on the third day after
+the accident Dr. Garford, withdrawing his own assistant, had left him in
+control at Lynbrook.
+
+At the same time Justine had taken up her attendance in the sick-room,
+replacing one of the subordinate nurses who had been suddenly called
+away. She had done this the more willingly because Bessy, who was now
+conscious for the greater part of the time, had asked for her once or
+twice, and had seemed easier when she was in the room. But she still
+gave only occasional aid, relieving the other nurses when they dined or
+rested, but keeping herself partly free in order to have an eye on the
+household, and give a few hours daily to Cicely.
+
+All this had become part of a system that already seemed as old as
+memory. She could hardly recall what life had been before the
+accident--the seven dreadful days seemed as long as the days of
+creation. Every morning she rose to the same report--"no change"--and
+every day passed without a word from Amherst. Minor news, of course, had
+come: poor Mr. Langhope, at length overtaken at Wady Halfa, was
+hastening back as fast as ship and rail could carry him; Mrs. Ansell,
+anchored at Algiers with her invalid, cabled anxious enquiries; but
+still no word from Amherst. The correspondent at Buenos Ayres had simply
+cabled "Not here. Will enquire"--and since then, silence.
+
+Justine had taken to sitting in a small room beyond Amherst's bedroom,
+near enough to Bessy to be within call, yet accessible to the rest of
+the household. The walls were hung with old prints, and with two or
+three photographs of early Italian pictures; and in a low bookcase
+Amherst had put the books he had brought from Hanaford--the English
+poets, the Greek dramatists, some text-books of biology and kindred
+subjects, and a few stray well-worn volumes: Lecky's European Morals,
+Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm Meister, Seneca, Epictetus, a German
+grammar, a pocket Bacon.
+
+It was unlike any other room at Lynbrook--even through her benumbing
+misery, Justine felt the relief of escaping there from the rest of the
+great soulless house. Sometimes she took up one of the books and read a
+page or two, letting the beat of the verse lull her throbbing brain, or
+the strong words of stoic wisdom sink into her heart. And even when
+there was no time for these brief flights from reality, it soothed her
+to feel herself in the presence of great thoughts--to know that in this
+room, among these books, another restless baffled mind had sought escape
+from the "dusty answer" of life. Her hours there made her think less
+bitterly of Amherst--but also, alas, made her see more clearly the
+irreconcilable difference between the two natures she had striven to
+reunite. That which was the essence of life to one was a meaningless
+shadow to the other; and the gulf between them was too wide for the
+imagination of either to bridge.
+
+As she sat there on the seventh afternoon there was a knock on the door
+and Wyant entered. She had only time to notice that he was very
+pale--she had been struck once or twice with his look of sudden
+exhaustion, which passed as quickly as it came--then she saw that he
+carried a telegram, and her mind flew back to its central anxiety. She
+grew pale herself as she read the message.
+
+"He has been found--at Corrientes. It will take him at least a month to
+get here."
+
+"A month--good God!"
+
+"And it may take Mr. Langhope longer." Their eyes met. "It's too
+long----?" she asked.
+
+"I don't know--I don't know." He shivered slightly, turning away into
+the window.
+
+Justine sat down to dash off messages to Mr. Tredegar and the Gaineses:
+Amherst's return must be made known at once. When she glanced up, Wyant
+was standing near her. His air of intense weariness had passed, and he
+looked calm and ready for action.
+
+"Shall I take these down?"
+
+"No. Ring, please. I want to ask you a few questions."
+
+The servant who answered the bell brought in a tea-tray, and Justine,
+having despatched the telegrams, seated herself and began to pour out
+her tea. Food had been repugnant to her during the first anguished
+unsettled days, but with the resumption of the nurse's systematic habits
+the nurse's punctual appetite returned. Every drop of energy must be
+husbanded now, and only sleep and nourishment could fill the empty
+cisterns.
+
+She held out a cup to Wyant, but he drew back with a gesture of
+aversion.
+
+"Thanks; I'm not hungry."
+
+"You ought to eat more."
+
+"No, no. I'm very well."
+
+She lifted her head, revived by the warm draught. The mechanical act of
+nourishment performed, her mind leapt back to the prospect of Amherst's
+return. A whole month before he reached Lynbrook! He had instructed her
+where news might find him on the way ... but a whole month to wait!
+
+She looked at Wyant, and they read each other's thoughts.
+
+"It's a long time," he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But Garford can do wonders--and she's very strong."
+
+Justine shuddered. Just so a skilled agent of the Inquisition might have
+spoken, calculating how much longer the power of suffering might be
+artificially preserved in a body broken on the wheel....
+
+"How does she seem to you today?"
+
+"The general conditions are about the same. The heart keeps up
+wonderfully, but there is a little more oppression of the diaphragm."
+
+"Yes--her breathing is harder. Last night she suffered horribly at
+times."
+
+"Oh--she'll suffer," Wyant murmured. "Of course the hypodermics can be
+increased."
+
+"Just what did Dr. Garford say this morning?"
+
+"He is astonished at her strength."
+
+"But there's no hope?--I don't know why I ask!"
+
+"Hope?" Wyant looked at her. "You mean of what's called recovery--of
+deferring death indefinitely?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"How can Garford tell--or any one? We all know there have been cases
+where such injury to the cord has not caused death. This may be one of
+those cases; but the biggest man couldn't say now."
+
+Justine hid her eyes. "What a fate!"
+
+"Recovery? Yes. Keeping people alive in such cases is one of the
+refinements of cruelty that it was left for Christianity to invent."
+
+"And yet--?"
+
+"And yet--it's got to be! Science herself says so--not for the patient,
+of course; but for herself--for unborn generations, rather. Queer, isn't
+it? The two creeds are at one."
+
+Justine murmured through her clasped hands: "I wish she were not so
+strong----"
+
+"Yes; it's wonderful what those frail petted bodies can stand. The fight
+is going to be a hard one."
+
+She rose with a shiver. "I must go to Cicely----" The rector of Saint
+Anne's had called again. Justine, in obedience to Mrs. Gaines's
+suggestion, had summoned him from Clifton the day after the accident;
+but, supported by the surgeons and Wyant, she had resisted his admission
+to the sick-room. Bessy's religious practices had been purely
+mechanical: her faith had never been associated with the graver moments
+of her life, and the apparition of a clerical figure at her bedside
+would portend not consolation but calamity. Since it was all-important
+that her nervous strength should be sustained, and the gravity of the
+situation kept from her, Mrs. Gaines yielded to the medical commands,
+consoled by the ready acquiescence of the rector. But before she left
+she extracted a promise that he would call frequently at Lynbrook, and
+wait his opportunity to say an uplifting word to Mrs. Amherst.
+
+The Reverend Ernest Lynde, who was a young man, with more zeal than
+experience, deemed it his duty to obey this injunction to the letter;
+but hitherto he had had to content himself with a talk with the
+housekeeper, or a brief word on the doorstep from Wyant. Today, however,
+he had asked somewhat insistently for Miss Brent; and Justine, who was
+free at the moment, felt that she could not refuse to go down. She had
+seen him only in the pulpit, when once or twice, in Bessy's absence, she
+had taken Cicely to church: he struck her as a grave young man, with a
+fine voice but halting speech. His sermons were earnest but ineffective.
+
+As he rose to meet her, she felt that she should like him better out of
+church. His glance was clear and honest, and there was sweetness in his
+hesitating smile.
+
+"I am sorry to seem persistent--but I heard you had news of Mr.
+Langhope, and I was anxious to know the particulars," he explained.
+
+Justine replied that her message had overtaken Mr. Langhope at Wady
+Haifa, and that he hoped to reach Alexandria in time to catch a steamer
+to Brindisi at the end of the week.
+
+"Not till then? So it will be almost three weeks--?"
+
+"As nearly as I can calculate, a month."
+
+The rector hesitated. "And Mr. Amherst?"
+
+"He is coming back too."
+
+"Ah, you have heard? I'm glad of that. He will be here soon?"
+
+"No. He is in South America--at Buenos Ayres. There will be no steamer
+for some days, and he may not get here till after Mr. Langhope."
+
+Mr. Lynde looked at her kindly, with grave eyes that proffered help.
+"This is terrible for you, Miss Brent."
+
+"Yes," Justine answered simply.
+
+"And Mrs. Amherst's condition----?"
+
+"It is about the same."
+
+"The doctors are hopeful?"
+
+"They have not lost hope."
+
+"She seems to keep her strength wonderfully."
+
+"Yes, wonderfully."
+
+Mr. Lynde paused, looking downward, and awkwardly turning his soft
+clerical hat in his large kind-looking hands. "One might almost see in
+it a dispensation--_we_ should see one, Miss Brent."
+
+"_We?_" She glanced up apologetically, not quite sure that her tired
+mind had followed his meaning.
+
+"We, I mean, who believe...that not one sparrow falls to the ground...."
+He flushed, and went on in a more mundane tone: "I am glad you have the
+hope of Mr. Langhope's arrival to keep you up. Modern science--thank
+heaven!--can do such wonders in sustaining and prolonging life that,
+even if there is little chance of recovery, the faint spark may be
+nursed until...."
+
+He paused again, conscious that the dusky-browed young woman, slenderly
+erect in her dark blue linen and nurse's cap, was examining him with an
+intentness which contrasted curiously with the absent-minded glance she
+had dropped on him in entering.
+
+"In such cases," she said in a low tone, "there is practically no chance
+of recovery."
+
+"So I understand."
+
+"Even if there were, it would probably be death-in-life: complete
+paralysis of the lower body."
+
+He shuddered. "A dreadful fate! She was so gay and active----"
+
+"Yes--and the struggle with death, for the next few weeks, must involve
+incessant suffering...frightful suffering...perhaps vainly...."
+
+"I feared so," he murmured, his kind face paling.
+
+"Then why do you thank heaven that modern science has found such
+wonderful ways of prolonging life?"
+
+He raised his head with a start and their eyes met. He saw that the
+nurse's face was pale and calm--almost judicial in its composure--and
+his self-possession returned to him.
+
+"As a Christian," he answered, with his slow smile, "I can hardly do
+otherwise."
+
+Justine continued to consider him thoughtfully. "The men of the older
+generation--clergymen, I mean," she went on in a low controlled voice,
+"would of course take that view--must take it. But the conditions are so
+changed--so many undreamed-of means of prolonging life--prolonging
+suffering--have been discovered and applied in the last few years, that
+I wondered...in my profession one often wonders...."
+
+"I understand," he rejoined sympathetically, forgetting his youth and
+his inexperience in the simple desire to bring solace to a troubled
+mind. "I understand your feeling--but you need have no doubt. Human
+life is sacred, and the fact that, even in this materialistic age,
+science is continually struggling to preserve and prolong it,
+shows--very beautifully, I think--how all things work together to
+fulfill the divine will."
+
+"Then you believe that the divine will delights in mere pain--mere
+meaningless animal suffering--for its own sake?"
+
+"Surely not; but for the sake of the spiritual life that may be
+mysteriously wrung out of it."
+
+Justine bent her puzzled brows on him. "I could understand that view of
+moral suffering--or even of physical pain moderate enough to leave the
+mind clear, and to call forth qualities of endurance and renunciation.
+But where the body has been crushed to a pulp, and the mind is no more
+than a machine for the registering of sense-impressions of physical
+anguish, of what use can such suffering be to its owner--or to the
+divine will?"
+
+The young rector looked at her sadly, almost severely. "There, Miss
+Brent, we touch on inscrutable things, and human reason must leave the
+answer to faith."
+
+Justine pondered. "So that--one may say--Christianity recognizes no
+exceptions--?"
+
+"None--none," its authorized exponent pronounced emphatically.
+
+"Then Christianity and science are agreed." She rose, and the young
+rector, with visible reluctance, stood up also.
+
+"That, again, is one of the most striking evidences--" he began; and
+then, as the necessity of taking leave was forced upon him, he added
+appealingly: "I understand your uncertainties, your questionings, and I
+wish I could have made my point clearer----"
+
+"Thank you; it is quite clear. The reasons, of course, are different;
+but the result is exactly the same."
+
+She held out her hand, smiling sadly on him, and with a sudden return of
+youth and self-consciousness, he murmured shyly: "I feel for you"--the
+man in him yearning over her loneliness, though the pastor dared not
+press his help....
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+THAT evening, when Justine took her place at the bedside, and the other
+two nurses had gone down to supper, Bessy turned her head slightly,
+resting her eyes on her friend.
+
+The rose-shaded lamp cast a tint of life on her face, and the dark
+circles of pain made her eyes look deeper and brighter. Justine was
+almost deceived by the delusive semblance of vitality, and a hope that
+was half anguish stirred in her. She sat down by the bed, clasping the
+hand on the sheet.
+
+"You feel better tonight?"
+
+"I breathe...better...." The words came brokenly, between long pauses,
+but without the hard agonized gasps of the previous night.
+
+"That's a good sign." Justine paused, and then, letting her fingers
+glide once or twice over the back of Bessy's hand--"You know, dear, Mr.
+Amherst is coming," she leaned down to say.
+
+Bessy's eyes moved again, slowly, inscrutably. She had never asked for
+her husband.
+
+"Soon?" she whispered.
+
+"He had started on a long journey--to out-of-the-way places--to study
+something about cotton growing--my message has just overtaken him,"
+Justine explained.
+
+Bessy lay still, her breast straining for breath. She remained so long
+without speaking that Justine began to think she was falling back into
+the somnolent state that intervened between her moments of complete
+consciousness. But at length she lifted her lids again, and her lips
+stirred.
+
+"He will be...long...coming?"
+
+"Some days."
+
+"How...many?"
+
+"We can't tell yet."
+
+Silence again. Bessy's features seemed to shrink into a kind of waxen
+quietude--as though her face were seen under clear water, a long way
+down. And then, as she lay thus, without sound or movement, two tears
+forced themselves through her lashes and rolled down her cheeks.
+
+Justine, bending close, wiped them away. "Bessy--"
+
+The wet lashes were raised--an anguished look met her gaze.
+
+"I--I can't bear it...."
+
+"What, dear?"
+
+"The pain.... Shan't I die...before?"
+
+"You may get well, Bessy."
+
+Justine felt her hand quiver. "Walk again...?"
+
+"Perhaps...not that."
+
+"_This?_ I can't bear it...." Her head drooped sideways, turning away
+toward the wall.
+
+Justine, that night, kept her vigil with an aching heart. The news of
+Amherst's return had produced no sign of happiness in his wife--- the
+tears had been forced from her merely by the dread of being kept alive
+during the long days of pain before he came. The medical explanation
+might have been that repeated crises of intense physical anguish, and
+the deep lassitude succeeding them, had so overlaid all other feelings,
+or at least so benumbed their expression, that it was impossible to
+conjecture how Bessy's little half-smothered spark of soul had really
+been affected by the news. But Justine did not believe in this argument.
+Her experience among the sick had convinced her, on the contrary, that
+the shafts of grief or joy will find a crack in the heaviest armour of
+physical pain, that the tiniest gleam of hope will light up depths of
+mental inanition, and somehow send a ray to the surface.... It was true
+that Bessy had never known how to bear pain, and that her own sensations
+had always formed the centre of her universe--yet, for that very reason,
+if the thought of seeing Amherst had made her happier it would have
+lifted, at least momentarily, the weight of death from her body.
+
+Justine, at first, had almost feared the contrary effect--feared that
+the moral depression might show itself in a lowering of physical
+resistance. But the body kept up its obstinate struggle against death,
+drawing strength from sources of vitality unsuspected in that frail
+envelope. The surgeon's report the next day was more favourable, and
+every day won from death pointed now to a faint chance of recovery.
+
+Such at least was Wyant's view. Dr. Garford and the consulting surgeons
+had not yet declared themselves; but the young doctor, strung to the
+highest point of watchfulness, and constantly in attendance on the
+patient, was tending toward a hopeful prognosis. The growing conviction
+spurred him to fresh efforts; at Dr. Garford's request, he had
+temporarily handed over his Clifton practice to a young New York doctor
+in need of change, and having installed himself at Lynbrook he gave up
+his days and nights to Mrs. Amherst's case.
+
+"If any one can save her, Wyant will," Dr. Garford had declared to
+Justine, when, on the tenth day after the accident, the surgeons held
+their third consultation. Dr. Garford reserved his own judgment. He had
+seen cases--they had all seen cases...but just at present the signs
+might point either way.... Meanwhile Wyant's confidence was an
+invaluable asset toward the patient's chances of recovery. Hopefulness
+in the physician was almost as necessary as in the patient--contact with
+such faith had been known to work miracles.
+
+Justine listened in silence, wishing that she too could hope. But
+whichever way the prognosis pointed, she felt only a dull despair. She
+believed no more than Dr. Garford in the chance of recovery--that
+conviction seemed to her a mirage of Wyant's imagination, of his boyish
+ambition to achieve the impossible--and every hopeful symptom pointed,
+in her mind, only to a longer period of useless suffering.
+
+Her hours at Bessy's side deepened her revolt against the energy spent
+in the fight with death. Since Bessy had learned that her husband was
+returning she had never, by sign or word, reverted to the fact. Except
+for a gleam of tenderness, now and then, when Cicely was brought to
+her, she seemed to have sunk back into herself, as though her poor
+little flicker of consciousness were wholly centred in the contemplation
+of its pain. It was not that her mind was clouded--only that it was
+immersed, absorbed, in that dread mystery of disproportionate anguish
+which a capricious fate had laid on it.... And what if she recovered, as
+they called it? If the flood-tide of pain should ebb, leaving her
+stranded, a helpless wreck on the desert shores of inactivity? What
+would life be to Bessy without movement? Thought would never set her
+blood flowing--motion, in her, could only take the form of the physical
+processes. Her love for Amherst was dead--even if it flickered into life
+again, it could but put the spark to smouldering discords and
+resentments; and would her one uncontaminated sentiment--her affection
+for Cicely--suffice to reconcile her to the desolate half-life which was
+the utmost that science could hold out?
+
+Here again, Justine's experience answered no. She did not believe in
+Bessy's powers of moral recuperation--her body seemed less near death
+than her spirit. Life had been poured out to her in generous measure,
+and she had spilled the precious draught--the few drops remaining in the
+cup could no longer renew her strength.
+
+Pity, not condemnation--profound illimitable pity--flowed from this
+conclusion of Justine's. To a compassionate heart there could be no
+sadder instance of the wastefulness of life than this struggle of the
+small half-formed soul with a destiny too heavy for its strength. If
+Bessy had had any moral hope to fight for, every pang of suffering would
+have been worth enduring; but it was intolerable to witness the
+spectacle of her useless pain.
+
+Incessant commerce with such thoughts made Justine, as the days passed,
+crave any escape from solitude, any contact with other ideas. Even the
+reappearance of Westy Gaines, bringing a breath of common-place
+conventional grief into the haunted silence of the house, was a respite
+from her questionings. If it was hard to talk to him, to answer his
+enquiries, to assent to his platitudes, it was harder, a thousand times,
+to go on talking to herself....
+
+Mr. Tredegar's coming was a distinct relief. His dryness was like
+cautery to her wound. Mr. Tredegar undoubtedly grieved for Bessy; but
+his grief struck inward, exuding only now and then, through the fissures
+of his hard manner, in a touch of extra solemnity, the more laboured
+rounding of a period. Yet, on the whole, it was to his feeling that
+Justine felt her own to be most akin. If his stoic acceptance of the
+inevitable proceeded from the resolve to spare himself pain, that at
+least was a form of strength, an indication of character. She had never
+cared for the fluencies of invertebrate sentiment.
+
+Now, on the evening of the day after her talk with Bessy, it was more
+than ever a solace to escape from the torment of her thoughts into the
+rarefied air of Mr. Tredegar's presence. The day had been a bad one for
+the patient, and Justine's distress had been increased by the receipt of
+a cable from Mr. Langhope, announcing that, owing to delay in reaching
+Brindisi, he had missed the fast steamer from Cherbourg, and would not
+arrive till four or five days later than he had expected. Mr. Tredegar,
+in response to her report, had announced his intention of coming down by
+a late train, and now he and Justine and Dr. Wyant, after dining
+together, were seated before the fire in the smoking-room.
+
+"I take it, then," Mr. Tredegar said, turning to Wyant, "that the
+chances of her living to see her father are very slight."
+
+The young doctor raised his head eagerly. "Not in my opinion, sir.
+Unless unforeseen complications arise, I can almost promise to keep her
+alive for another month--I'm not afraid to call it six weeks!"
+
+"H'm--Garford doesn't say so."
+
+"No; Dr. Garford argues from precedent."
+
+"And you?" Mr. Tredegar's thin lips were visited by the ghost of a
+smile.
+
+"Oh, I don't argue--I just feel my way," said Wyant imperturbably.
+
+"And yet you don't hesitate to predict----"
+
+"No, I don't, sir; because the case, as I see it, presents certain
+definite indications." He began to enumerate them, cleverly avoiding the
+use of technicalities and trying to make his point clear by the use of
+simple illustration and analogy. It sickened Justine to listen to his
+passionate exposition--she had heard it so often, she believed in it so
+little.
+
+Mr. Tredegar turned a probing glance on him as he ended. "Then, today
+even, you believe not only in the possibility of prolonging life, but of
+ultimate recovery?"
+
+Wyant hesitated. "I won't call it recovery--today. Say--life
+indefinitely prolonged."
+
+"And the paralysis?"
+
+"It might disappear--after a few months--or a few years."
+
+"Such an outcome would be unusual?"
+
+"Exceptional. But then there _are_ exceptions. And I'm straining every
+nerve to make this one!"
+
+"And the suffering--such as today's, for instance--is unavoidable?"
+
+"Unhappily."
+
+"And bound to increase?"
+
+"Well--as the anæsthetics lose their effect...."
+
+There was a tap on the door, and one of the nurses entered to report to
+Wyant. He went out with her, and Justine was left with Mr. Tredegar.
+
+He turned to her thoughtfully. "That young fellow seems sure of himself.
+You believe in him?"
+
+Justine hesitated. "Not in his expectation of recovery--no one does."
+
+"But you think they can keep the poor child alive till Langhope and her
+husband get back?"
+
+There was a moment's pause; then Justine murmured: "It can be done...I
+think...."
+
+"Yes--it's horrible," said Mr. Tredegar suddenly, as if in answer to her
+thought.
+
+She looked up in surprise, and saw his eye resting on her with what
+seemed like a mist of sympathy on its vitreous surface. Her lips
+trembled, parting as if for speech--but she looked away without
+answering.
+
+"These new devices for keeping people alive," Mr. Tredegar continued;
+"they increase the suffering besides prolonging it?"
+
+"Yes--in some cases."
+
+"In this case?"
+
+"I am afraid so."
+
+The lawyer drew out his fine cambric handkerchief, and furtively wiped a
+slight dampness from his forehead. "I wish to God she had been killed!"
+he said.
+
+Justine lifted her head again, with an answering exclamation. "Oh, yes!"
+
+"It's infernal--the time they can make it last."
+
+"It's useless!" Justine broke out.
+
+"Useless?" He turned his critical glance on her. "Well, that's beside
+the point--since it's inevitable."
+
+She wavered a moment--but his words had loosened the bonds about her
+heart, and she could not check herself so suddenly. "Why inevitable?"
+
+Mr. Tredegar looked at her in surprise, as though wondering at so
+unprofessional an utterance from one who, under ordinary circumstances,
+showed the absolute self-control and submission of the well-disciplined
+nurse.
+
+"Human life is sacred," he said sententiously.
+
+"Ah, that must have been decreed by some one who had never suffered!"
+Justine exclaimed.
+
+Mr. Tredegar smiled compassionately: he evidently knew how to make
+allowances for the fact that she was overwrought by the sight of her
+friend's suffering: "Society decreed it--not one person," he corrected.
+
+"Society--science--religion!" she murmured, as if to herself.
+
+"Precisely. It's the universal consensus--the result of the world's
+accumulated experience. Cruel in individual instances--necessary for the
+general welfare. Of course your training has taught you all this; but I
+can understand that at such a time...."
+
+"Yes," she said, rising wearily as Wyant came in.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her worst misery, now, was to have to discuss Bessy's condition with
+Wyant. To the young physician Bessy was no longer a suffering,
+agonizing creature: she was a case--a beautiful case. As the problem
+developed new intricacies, becoming more and more of a challenge to his
+faculties of observation and inference, Justine saw the abstract
+scientific passion supersede his personal feeling of pity. Though his
+professional skill made him exquisitely tender to the patient under his
+hands, he seemed hardly conscious that she was a woman who had
+befriended him, and whom he had so lately seen in the brightness of
+health and enjoyment. This view was normal enough--it was, as Justine
+knew, the ideal state of mind for the successful physician, in whom
+sympathy for the patient as an individual must often impede swift choice
+and unfaltering action. But what she shrank from was his resolve to save
+Bessy's life--a resolve fortified to the point of exasperation by the
+scepticism of the consulting surgeons, who saw in it only the
+youngster's natural desire to distinguish himself by performing a feat
+which his elders deemed impossible.
+
+As the days dragged on, and Bessy's sufferings increased, Justine longed
+for a protesting word from Dr. Garford or one of his colleagues. In her
+hospital experience she had encountered cases where the useless agonies
+of death were mercifully shortened by the physician; why was not this a
+case for such treatment? The answer was simple enough--in the first
+place, it was the duty of the surgeons to keep their patient alive till
+her husband and her father could reach her; and secondly, there was that
+faint illusive hope of so-called recovery, in which none of them
+believed, yet which they could not ignore in their treatment. The
+evening after Mr. Tredegar's departure Wyant was setting this forth at
+great length to Justine. Bessy had had a bad morning: the bronchial
+symptoms which had developed a day or two before had greatly increased
+her distress, and there had been, at dawn, a moment of weakness when it
+seemed that some pitiful power was about to defeat the relentless
+efforts of science. But Wyant had fought off the peril. By the prompt
+and audacious use of stimulants--by a rapid marshalling of resources, a
+display of self-reliance and authority, which Justine could not but
+admire as she mechanically seconded his efforts--the spark of life had
+been revived, and Bessy won back for fresh suffering.
+
+"Yes--I say it can be done: tonight I say it more than ever," Wyant
+exclaimed, pushing the disordered hair from his forehead, and leaning
+toward Justine across the table on which their brief evening meal had
+been served. "I say the way the heart has rallied proves that we've got
+more strength to draw on than any of them have been willing to admit.
+The breathing's better too. If we can fight off the degenerative
+processes--and, by George, I believe we can!" He looked up suddenly at
+Justine. "With you to work with, I believe I could do anything. How you
+do back a man up! You think with your hands--with every individual
+finger!"
+
+Justine turned her eyes away: she felt a shudder of repulsion steal over
+her tired body. It was not that she detected any note of personal
+admiration in his praise--he had commended her as the surgeon might
+commend a fine instrument fashioned for his use. But that she should be
+the instrument to serve such a purpose--that her skill, her promptness,
+her gift of divining and interpreting the will she worked with, should
+be at the service of this implacable scientific passion! Ah, no--she
+could be silent no longer....
+
+She looked up at Wyant, and their eyes met.
+
+"Why do you do it?" she asked.
+
+He stared, as if thinking that she referred to some special point in his
+treatment. "Do what?"
+
+"It's so useless...you all know she must die."
+
+"I know nothing of the kind...and even the others are not so sure
+today." He began to go over it all again--repeating his arguments,
+developing new theories, trying to force into her reluctant mind his own
+faith in the possibility of success.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Justine sat resting her chin on her clasped hands, her eyes gazing
+straight before her under dark tormented brows. When he paused she
+remained silent.
+
+"Well--don't you believe me?" he broke out with sudden asperity.
+
+"I don't know...I can't tell...."
+
+"But as long as there's a doubt, even--a doubt my way--and I'll show you
+there is, if you'll give me time----"
+
+"How much time?" she murmured, without shifting her gaze.
+
+"Ah--that depends on ourselves: on you and me chiefly. That's what
+Garford admits. _They_ can't do much now--they've got to leave the game
+to us. It's a question of incessant vigilance...of utilizing every hour,
+every moment.... Time's all I ask, and _you_ can give it to me, if any
+one can!"
+
+Under the challenge of his tone Justine rose to her feet with a low
+murmur of fear. "Ah, don't ask me!"
+
+"Don't ask you----?"
+
+"I can't--I can't."
+
+Wyant stood up also, turning on her an astonished glance.
+
+"You can't what--?"
+
+Their eyes met, and she thought she read in his a sudden divination of
+her inmost thoughts. The discovery electrified her flagging strength,
+restoring her to immediate clearness of brain. She saw the gulf of
+self-betrayal over which she had hung, and the nearness of the peril
+nerved her to a last effort of dissimulation.
+
+"I can't...talk of it...any longer," she faltered, letting her tears
+flow, and turning on him a face of pure womanly weakness.
+
+Wyant looked at her without answering. Did he distrust even these plain
+physical evidences of exhaustion, or was he merely disappointed in her,
+as in one whom he had believed to be above the emotional failings of her
+sex?
+
+"You're over-tired," he said coldly. "Take tonight to rest. Miss Mace
+can replace you for the next few hours--and I may need you more
+tomorrow."
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+FOUR more days had passed. Bessy seldom spoke when Justine was with her.
+She was wrapped in a thickening cloud of opiates--morphia by day,
+bromides, sulphonal, chloral hydrate at night. When the cloud broke and
+consciousness emerged, it was centred in the one acute point of bodily
+anguish. Darting throes of neuralgia, agonized oppression of the breath,
+the diffused misery of the whole helpless body--these were reducing
+their victim to a mere instrument on which pain played its incessant
+deadly variations. Once or twice she turned her dull eyes on Justine,
+breathing out: "I want to die," as some inevitable lifting or
+readjusting thrilled her body with fresh pangs; but there were no signs
+of contact with the outer world--she had ceased even to ask for
+Cicely....
+
+And yet, according to the doctors, the patient held her own. Certain
+alarming symptoms had diminished, and while others persisted, the
+strength to fight them persisted too. With such strength to call on,
+what fresh agonies were reserved for the poor body when the narcotics
+had lost their power?
+
+That was the question always before Justine. She never again betrayed
+her fears to Wyant--she carried out his orders with morbid precision,
+trembling lest any failure in efficiency should revive his suspicions.
+She hardly knew what she feared his suspecting--she only had a confused
+sense that they were enemies, and that she was the weaker of the two.
+
+And then the anæsthetics began to fail. It was the sixteenth day since
+the accident, and the resources of alleviation were almost exhausted. It
+was not sure, even now, that Bessy was going to die--and she was
+certainly going to suffer a long time. Wyant seemed hardly conscious of
+the increase of pain--his whole mind was fixed on the prognosis. What
+matter if the patient suffered, as long as he proved his case? That, of
+course, was not his way of putting it. In reality, he did all he could
+to allay the pain, surpassed himself in new devices and experiments. But
+death confronted him implacably, claiming his due: so many hours robbed
+from him, so much tribute to pay; and Wyant, setting his teeth, fought
+on--and Bessy paid.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Justine had begun to notice that it was hard for her to get a word alone
+with Dr. Garford. The other nurses were not in the way--it was Wyant who
+always contrived to be there. Perhaps she was unreasonable in seeing a
+special intention in his presence: it was natural enough that the two
+persons in charge of the case should confer together with their chief.
+But his persistence annoyed her, and she was glad when, one afternoon,
+the surgeon asked him to telephone an important message to town.
+
+As soon as the door had closed, Justine said to Dr. Garford: "She is
+beginning to suffer terribly."
+
+He answered with the large impersonal gesture of the man to whom
+physical suffering has become a painful general fact of life, no longer
+divisible into individual cases. "We are doing all we can."
+
+"Yes." She paused, and then raised her eyes to his dry kind face. "Is
+there any hope?"
+
+Another gesture--the fatalistic sweep of the lifted palms. "The next ten
+days will tell--the fight is on, as Wyant says. And if any one can do
+it, that young fellow can. There's stuff in him--and infernal
+ambition."
+
+"Yes: but do _you_ believe she can live--?"
+
+Dr. Garford smiled indulgently on such unprofessional insistence; but
+she was past wondering what they must all think of her.
+
+"My dear Miss Brent," he said, "I have reached the age when one always
+leaves a door open to the unexpected."
+
+As he spoke, a slight sound at her back made her turn. Wyant was behind
+her--he must have entered as she put her question. And he certainly
+could not have had time to descend the stairs, walk the length of the
+house, ring up New York, and deliver Dr Garford's message.... The same
+thought seemed to strike the surgeon. "Hello, Wyant?" he said.
+
+"Line busy," said Wyant curtly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About this time, Justine gave up her night vigils. She could no longer
+face the struggle of the dawn hour, when life ebbs lowest; and since her
+duties extended beyond the sick-room she could fairly plead that she was
+more needed about the house by day. But Wyant protested: he wanted her
+most at the difficult hour.
+
+"You know you're taking a chance from her," he said, almost sternly.
+
+"Oh, no----"
+
+He looked at her searchingly. "You don't feel up to it?"
+
+"No."
+
+He turned away with a slight shrug; but she knew he resented her
+defection.
+
+The day watches were miserable enough. It was the nineteenth day now;
+and Justine lay on the sofa in Amherst's sitting-room, trying to nerve
+herself for the nurse's summons. A page torn out of the calendar lay
+before her--she had been calculating again how many days must elapse
+before Mr. Langhope could arrive. Ten days--ten days and ten nights! And
+the length of the nights was double.... As for Amherst, it was
+impossible to set a date for his coming, for his steamer from Buenos
+Ayres called at various ports on the way northward, and the length of
+her stay at each was dependent on the delivery of freight, and on the
+dilatoriness of the South American official.
+
+She threw down the calendar and leaned back, pressing her hands to her
+temples. Oh, for a word with Amherst--he alone would have understood
+what she was undergoing! Mr. Langhope's coming would make no
+difference--or rather, it would only increase the difficulty of the
+situation. Instinctively Justine felt that, though his heart would be
+wrung by the sight of Bessy's pain, his cry would be the familiar one,
+the traditional one: _Keep her alive!_ Under his surface originality,
+his verbal audacities and ironies, Mr. Langhope was the creature of
+accepted forms, inherited opinions: he had never really thought for
+himself on any of the pressing problems of life.
+
+But Amherst was different. Close contact with many forms of wretchedness
+had freed him from the bondage of accepted opinion. He looked at life
+through no eyes but his own; and what he saw, he confessed to seeing. He
+never tried to evade the consequences of his discoveries.
+
+Justine's remembrance flew back to their first meeting at Hanaford, when
+his confidence in his own powers was still unshaken, his trust in others
+unimpaired. And, gradually, she began to relive each detail of their
+talk at Dillon's bedside--her first impression of him, as he walked down
+the ward; the first sound of his voice; her surprised sense of his
+authority; her almost involuntary submission to his will.... Then her
+thoughts passed on to their walk home from the hospital--she recalled
+his sober yet unsparing summary of the situation at Westmore, and the
+note of insight with which he touched on the hardships of the
+workers.... Then, word by word, their talk about Dillon came
+back...Amherst's indignation and pity...his shudder of revolt at the
+man's doom.
+
+"_In your work, don't you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?_"
+And then, after her conventional murmur of protest: "_To save what,
+when all the good of life is gone?_"
+
+To distract her thoughts she stretched her hand toward the book-case,
+taking out the first volume in reach--the little copy of Bacon. She
+leaned back, fluttering its pages aimlessly--so wrapped in her own
+misery that the meaning of the words could not reach her. It was useless
+to try to read: every perception of the outer world was lost in the hum
+of inner activity that made her mind like a forge throbbing with heat
+and noise. But suddenly her glance fell on some pencilled sentences on
+the fly-leaf. They were in Amherst's hand, and the sight arrested her as
+though she had heard him speak.
+
+_La vraie morale se moque de la morale...._
+
+_We perish because we follow other men's examples...._
+
+_Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of
+Lamiæ--bugbears to frighten children...._
+
+A rush of air seemed to have been let into her stifled mind. Were they
+his own thoughts? No--her memory recalled some confused association with
+great names. But at least they must represent his beliefs--must embody
+deeply-felt convictions--or he would scarcely have taken the trouble to
+record them.
+
+She murmured over the last sentence once or twice: _The opinions of the
+many--bugbears to frighten children...._ Yes, she had often heard him
+speak of current judgments in that way...she had never known a mind so
+free from the spell of the Lamiæ.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some one knocked, and she put aside the book and rose to her feet. It
+was a maid bringing a note from Wyant.
+
+"There has been a motor accident beyond Clifton, and I have been sent
+for. I think I can safely be away for two or three hours, but ring me up
+at Clifton if you want me. Miss Mace has instructions, and Garford's
+assistant will be down at seven."
+
+She looked at the clock: it was just three, the hour at which she was to
+relieve Miss Mace. She smoothed the hair from her forehead, straightened
+her cap, tied on the apron she had laid aside....
+
+As she entered Bessy's sitting-room the nurse came out, memoranda in
+hand. The two moved to the window for a moment's conference, and as the
+wintry light fell on Miss Mace's face, Justine saw that it was white
+with fatigue.
+
+"You're ill!" she exclaimed.
+
+The nurse shook her head. "No--but it's awful...this afternoon...." Her
+glance turned to the sick-room.
+
+"Go and rest--I'll stay till bedtime," Justine said.
+
+"Miss Safford's down with another headache."
+
+"I know: it doesn't matter. I'm quite fresh."
+
+"You _do_ look rested!" the other exclaimed, her eyes lingering
+enviously on Justine's face.
+
+She stole away, and Justine entered the room. It was true that she felt
+fresh--a new spring of hope had welled up in her. She had her nerves in
+hand again, she had regained her steady vision of life....
+
+But in the room, as the nurse had said, it was awful. The time had come
+when the effect of the anæsthetics must be carefully husbanded, when
+long intervals of pain must purchase the diminishing moments of relief.
+Yet from Wyant's standpoint it was a good day--things were looking well,
+as he would have phrased it. And each day now was a fresh victory.
+
+Justine went through her task mechanically. The glow of strength and
+courage remained, steeling her to bear what had broken down Miss Mace's
+professional fortitude. But when she sat down by the bed Bessy's moaning
+began to wear on her. It was no longer the utterance of human pain, but
+the monotonous whimper of an animal--the kind of sound that a
+compassionate hand would instinctively crush into silence. But her hand
+had other duties; she must keep watch on pulse and heart, must reinforce
+their action with the tremendous stimulants which Wyant was now using,
+and, having revived fresh sensibility to pain, must presently try to
+allay it by the cautious use of narcotics.
+
+It was all simple enough--but suppose she should not do it? Suppose she
+left the stimulants untouched? Wyant was absent, one nurse exhausted
+with fatigue, the other laid low by headache. Justine had the field to
+herself. For three hours at least no one was likely to cross the
+threshold of the sick-room.... Ah, if no more time were needed! But
+there was too much life in Bessy--her youth was fighting too hard for
+her! She would not sink out of life in three hours...and Justine could
+not count on more than that.
+
+She looked at the little travelling-clock on the dressing-table, and saw
+that its hands marked four. An hour had passed already.... She rose and
+administered the prescribed restorative; then she took the pulse, and
+listened to the beat of the heart. Strong still--too strong!
+
+As she lifted her head, the vague animal wailing ceased, and she heard
+her name: "Justine----"
+
+She bent down eagerly. "Yes?"
+
+No answer: the wailing had begun again. But the one word showed her that
+the mind still lived in its torture-house, that the poor powerless body
+before her was not yet a mere bundle of senseless reflexes, but her
+friend Bessy Amherst, dying, and feeling herself die....
+
+Justine reseated herself, and the vigil began again. The second hour
+ebbed slowly--ah, no, it was flying now! Her eyes were on the hands of
+the clock and they seemed leagued against her to devour the precious
+minutes. And now she could see by certain spasmodic symptoms that
+another crisis of pain was approaching--one of the struggles that Wyant,
+at times, had almost seemed to court and exult in.
+
+Bessy's eyes turned on her again. "_Justine_----"
+
+She knew what that meant: it was an appeal for the hypodermic needle.
+The little instrument lay at hand, beside a newly-filled bottle of
+morphia. But she must wait--must let the pain grow more severe. Yet she
+could not turn her gaze from Bessy, and Bessy's eyes entreated her
+again--_Justine_! There was really no word now--the whimperings were
+uninterrupted. But Justine heard an inner voice, and its pleading shook
+her heart. She rose and filled the syringe--and returning with it, bent
+above the bed....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She lifted her head and looked at the clock. The second hour had passed.
+As she looked, she heard a step in the sitting-room. Who could it be?
+Not Dr. Garford's assistant--he was not due till seven. She listened
+again.... One of the nurses? No, not a woman's step----
+
+The door opened, and Wyant came in. Justine stood by the bed without
+moving toward him. He paused also, as if surprised to see her there
+motionless. In the intense silence she fancied for a moment that she
+heard Bessy's violent agonized breathing. She tried to speak, to drown
+the sound of the breathing; but her lips trembled too much, and she
+remained silent.
+
+Wyant seemed to hear nothing. He stood so still that she felt she must
+move forward. As she did so, she picked up from the table by the bed the
+memoranda that it was her duty to submit to him.
+
+"Well?" he said, in the familiar sick-room whisper.
+
+"She is dead."
+
+He fell back a step, glaring at her, white and incredulous.
+
+"_Dead?_--When----?"
+
+"A few minutes ago...."
+
+"_Dead--?_ It's not possible!"
+
+He swept past her, shouldering her aside, pushing in an electric button
+as he sprang to the bed. She perceived then that the room had been
+almost in darkness. She recovered command of herself, and followed him.
+He was going through the usual rapid examination--pulse, heart,
+breath--hanging over the bed like some angry animal balked of its prey.
+Then he lifted the lids and bent close above the eyes.
+
+"Take the shade off that lamp!" he commanded.
+
+Justine obeyed him.
+
+He stooped down again to examine the eyes...he remained stooping a long
+time. Suddenly he stood up and faced her.
+
+"Had she been in great pain?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Worse than usual?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What had you done?"
+
+"Nothing--there was no time."
+
+"No time?" He broke off to sweep the room again with his excited
+incredulous glance. "Where are the others? Why were you here alone?" he
+demanded.
+
+"It came suddenly. I was going to call----"
+
+Their eyes met for a moment. Her face was perfectly calm--she could feel
+that her lips no longer trembled. She was not in the least afraid of
+Wyant's scrutiny.
+
+As he continued to look at her, his expression slowly passed from
+incredulous wrath to something softer--more human--she could not tell
+what....
+
+"This has been too much for you--go and send one of the others.... It's
+all over," he said.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+ON a September day, somewhat more than a year and a half after Bessy
+Amherst's death, her husband and his mother sat at luncheon in the
+dining-room of the Westmore house at Hanaford.
+
+The house was John Amherst's now, and shortly after the loss of his wife
+he had established himself there with his mother. By a will made some
+six months before her death, Bessy had divided her estate between her
+husband and daughter, placing Cicely's share in trust, and appointing
+Mr. Langhope and Amherst as her guardians. As the latter was also her
+trustee, the whole management of the estate devolved on him, while his
+control of the Westmore mills was ensured by his receiving a slightly
+larger proportion of the stock than his step-daughter.
+
+The will had come as a surprise, not only to Amherst himself, but to his
+wife's family, and more especially to her legal adviser. Mr. Tredegar
+had in fact had nothing to do with the drawing of the instrument; but as
+it had been drawn in due form, and by a firm of excellent standing, he
+was obliged, in spite of his private views, and Mr. Langhope's open
+adjurations that he should "do something," to declare that there was no
+pretext for questioning the validity of the document.
+
+To Amherst the will was something more than a proof of his wife's
+confidence: it came as a reconciling word from her grave. For the date
+showed that it had been made at a moment when he supposed himself to
+have lost all influence over her--on the morrow of the day when she had
+stipulated that he should give up the management of the Westmore mills,
+and yield the care of her property to Mr. Tredegar.
+
+While she smote him with one hand, she sued for pardon with the other;
+and the contradiction was so characteristic, it explained and excused in
+so touching a way the inconsistencies of her impulsive heart and
+hesitating mind, that he was filled with that tender compunction, that
+searching sense of his own shortcomings, which generous natures feel
+when they find they have underrated the generosity of others. But
+Amherst's was not an introspective mind, and his sound moral sense told
+him, when the first pang of self-reproach had subsided, that he had done
+his best by his wife, and was in no way to blame if her recognition of
+the fact had come too late. The self-reproach subsided; and, instead of
+the bitterness of the past, it left a softened memory which made him
+take up his task with the sense that he was now working with Bessy and
+not against her.
+
+Yet perhaps, after all, it was chiefly the work itself which had healed
+old wounds, and quelled the tendency to vain regrets. Amherst was only
+thirty-four; and in the prime of his energies the task he was made for
+had been given back to him. To a sound nature, which finds its outlet in
+fruitful action, nothing so simplifies the complexities of life, so
+tends to a large acceptance of its vicissitudes and mysteries, as the
+sense of doing something each day toward clearing one's own bit of the
+wilderness. And this was the joy at last conceded to Amherst. The mills
+were virtually his; and the fact that he ruled them not only in his own
+right but as Cicely's representative, made him doubly eager to justify
+his wife's trust in him.
+
+Mrs. Amherst, looking up from a telegram which the parlour-maid had
+handed her, smiled across the table at her son.
+
+"From Maria Ansell--they are all coming tomorrow."
+
+"Ah--that's good," Amherst rejoined. "I should have been sorry if Cicely
+had not been here."
+
+"Mr. Langhope is coming too," his mother continued. "I'm glad of that,
+John."
+
+"Yes," Amherst again assented.
+
+The morrow was to be a great day at Westmore. The Emergency Hospital,
+planned in the first months of his marriage, and abandoned in the
+general reduction of expenditure at the mills, had now been completed on
+a larger and more elaborate scale, as a memorial to Bessy. The strict
+retrenchment of all personal expenses, and the leasing of Lynbrook and
+the town house, had enabled Amherst, in eighteen months, to lay by
+enough income to carry out this plan, which he was impatient to see
+executed as a visible commemoration of his wife's generosity to
+Westmore. For Amherst persisted in regarding the gift of her fortune as
+a gift not to himself but to the mills: he looked on himself merely as
+the agent of her beneficent intentions. He was anxious that Westmore and
+Hanaford should take the same view; and the opening of the Westmore
+Memorial Hospital was therefore to be performed with an unwonted degree
+of ceremony.
+
+"I am glad Mr. Langhope is coming," Mrs. Amherst repeated, as they rose
+from the table. "It shows, dear--doesn't it?--that he's really
+gratified--that he appreciates your motive...."
+
+She raised a proud glance to her tall son, whose head seemed to tower
+higher than ever above her small proportions. Renewed self-confidence,
+and the habit of command, had in fact restored the erectness to
+Amherst's shoulders and the clearness to his eyes. The cleft between the
+brows was gone, and his veiled inward gaze had given place to a glance
+almost as outward-looking and unspeculative as his mother's.
+
+"It shows--well, yes--what you say!" he rejoined with a slight laugh,
+and a tap on her shoulder as she passed.
+
+He was under no illusions as to his father-in-law's attitude: he knew
+that Mr. Langhope would willingly have broken the will which deprived
+his grand-daughter of half her inheritance, and that his subsequent show
+of friendliness was merely a concession to expediency. But in his
+present mood Amherst almost believed that time and closer relations
+might turn such sentiments into honest liking. He was very fond of his
+little step-daughter, and deeply sensible of his obligations toward her;
+and he hoped that, as Mr. Langhope came to recognize this, it might
+bring about a better understanding between them.
+
+His mother detained him. "You're going back to the mills at once? I
+wanted to consult you about the rooms. Miss Brent had better be next to
+Cicely?"
+
+"I suppose so--yes. I'll see you before I go." He nodded affectionately
+and passed on, his hands full of papers, into the Oriental smoking-room,
+now dedicated to the unexpected uses of an office and study.
+
+Mrs. Amherst, as she turned away, found the parlour-maid in the act of
+opening the front door to the highly-tinted and well-dressed figure of
+Mrs. Harry Dressel.
+
+"I'm so delighted to hear that you're expecting Justine," began Mrs.
+Dressel as the two ladies passed into the drawing-room.
+
+"Ah, you've heard too?" Mrs. Amherst rejoined, enthroning her visitor in
+one of the monumental plush armchairs beneath the threatening weight of
+the Bay of Naples.
+
+"I hadn't till this moment; in fact I flew in to ask for news, and on
+the door-step there was such a striking-looking young man enquiring for
+her, and I heard the parlour-maid say she was arriving tomorrow."
+
+"A young man? Some one you didn't know?" Striking apparitions of the
+male sex were of infrequent occurrence at Hanaford, and Mrs. Amherst's
+unabated interest in the movement of life caused her to dwell on this
+statement.
+
+"Oh, no--I'm sure he was a stranger. Extremely slight and pale, with
+remarkable eyes. He was so disappointed--he seemed sure of finding her."
+
+"Well, no doubt he'll come back tomorrow.--You know we're expecting the
+whole party," added Mrs. Amherst, to whom the imparting of good news was
+always an irresistible temptation.
+
+Mrs. Dressel's interest deepened at once. "Really? Mr. Langhope too?"
+
+"Yes. It's a great pleasure to my son."
+
+"It must be! I'm so glad. I suppose in a way it will be rather sad for
+Mr. Langhope--seeing everything here so unchanged----"
+
+Mrs. Amherst straightened herself a little. "I think he will prefer to
+find it so," she said, with a barely perceptible change of tone.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. They were never very fond of this house."
+
+There was an added note of authority in Mrs. Dressel's accent. In the
+last few months she had been to Europe and had had nervous prostration,
+and these incontestable evidences of growing prosperity could not always
+be kept out of her voice and bearing. At any rate, they justified her in
+thinking that her opinion on almost any subject within the range of
+human experience was a valuable addition to the sum-total of wisdom; and
+unabashed by the silence with which her comment was received, she
+continued her critical survey of the drawing-room.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Amherst--you know I can't help saying what I think--and I've
+so often wondered why you don't do this room over. With these high
+ceilings you could do something lovely in Louis Seize."
+
+A faint pink rose to Mrs. Amherst's cheeks. "I don't think my son would
+ever care to make any changes here," she said.
+
+"Oh, I understand his feeling; but when he begins to entertain--and you
+know poor Bessy always _hated_ this furniture."
+
+Mrs. Amherst smiled slightly. "Perhaps if he marries again--" she said,
+seizing at random on a pretext for changing the subject.
+
+Mrs. Dressel dropped the hands with which she was absent-mindedly
+assuring herself of the continuance of unbroken relations between her
+hat and her hair.
+
+"_Marries again?_ Why--you don't mean--? He doesn't think of it?"
+
+"Not in the least--I spoke figuratively," her hostess rejoined with a
+laugh.
+
+"Oh, of course--I see. He really _couldn't_ marry, could he? I mean, it
+would be so wrong to Cicely--under the circumstances."
+
+Mrs. Amherst's black eye-brows gathered in a slight frown. She had
+already noticed, on the part of the Hanaford clan, a disposition to
+regard Amherst as imprisoned in the conditions of his trust, and
+committed to the obligation of handing on unimpaired to Cicely the
+fortune his wife's caprice had bestowed on him; and this open expression
+of the family view was singularly displeasing to her.
+
+"I had not thought of it in that light--but it's really of no
+consequence how one looks at a thing that is not going to happen," she
+said carelessly.
+
+"No--naturally; I see you were only joking. He's so devoted to Cicely,
+isn't he?" Mrs. Dressel rejoined, with her bright obtuseness.
+
+A step on the threshold announced Amherst's approach.
+
+"I'm afraid I must be off, mother--" he began, halting in the doorway
+with the instinctive masculine recoil from the afternoon caller.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Amherst, how d'you do? I suppose you're very busy about
+tomorrow? I just flew in to find out if Justine was really coming," Mrs.
+Dressel explained, a little fluttered by the effort of recalling what
+she had been saying when he entered.
+
+"I believe my mother expects the whole party," Amherst replied, shaking
+hands with the false _bonhomie_ of the man entrapped.
+
+"How delightful! And it's so nice to think that Mr. Langhope's
+arrangement with Justine still works so well," Mrs. Dressel hastened on,
+nervously hoping that her volubility would smother any recollection of
+what he had chanced to overhear.
+
+"Mr. Langhope is lucky in having persuaded Miss Brent to take charge of
+Cicely," Mrs. Amherst quietly interposed.
+
+"Yes--and it was so lucky for Justine too! When she came back from
+Europe with us last autumn, I could see she simply hated the idea of
+taking up her nursing again."
+
+Amherst's face darkened at the allusion, and his mother said hurriedly:
+"Ah, she was tired, poor child; but I'm only afraid that, after the
+summer's rest, she may want some more active occupation than looking
+after a little girl."
+
+"Oh, I think not--she's so fond of Cicely. And of course it's everything
+to her to have a comfortable home."
+
+Mrs. Amherst smiled. "At her age, it's not always everything."
+
+Mrs. Dressel stared slightly. "Oh, Justine's twenty-seven, you know;
+she's not likely to marry now," she said, with the mild finality of the
+early-wedded.
+
+She rose as she spoke, extending cordial hands of farewell. "You must be
+so busy preparing for the great day...if only it doesn't rain!... No,
+_please_, Mr. Amherst!... It's a mere step--I'm walking...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That afternoon, as Amherst walked out toward Westmore for a survey of
+the final preparations, he found that, among the pleasant thoughts
+accompanying him, one of the pleasantest was the anticipation of seeing
+Justine Brent.
+
+Among the little group who were to surround him on the morrow, she was
+the only one discerning enough to understand what the day meant to him,
+or with sufficient knowledge to judge of the use he had made of his
+great opportunity. Even now that the opportunity had come, and all
+obstacles were levelled, sympathy with his work was as much lacking as
+ever; and only Duplain, at length reinstated as manager, really
+understood and shared in his aims. But Justine Brent's sympathy was of a
+different kind from the manager's. If less logical, it was warmer, more
+penetrating--like some fine imponderable fluid, so subtle that it could
+always find a way through the clumsy processes of human intercourse.
+Amherst had thought very often of this quality in her during the weeks
+which followed his abrupt departure for Georgia; and in trying to define
+it he had said to himself that she felt with her brain.
+
+And now, aside from the instinctive understanding between them, she was
+set apart in his thoughts by her association with his wife's last days.
+On his arrival from the south he had gathered on all sides evidences of
+her tender devotion to Bessy: even Mr. Tredegar's chary praise swelled
+the general commendation. From the surgeons he heard how her unwearied
+skill had helped them in their fruitless efforts; poor Cicely, awed by
+her loss, clung to her mother's friend with childish tenacity; and the
+young rector of Saint Anne's, shyly acquitting himself of his visit of
+condolence, dwelt chiefly on the consolatory thought of Miss Brent's
+presence at the death-bed.
+
+The knowledge that Justine had been with his wife till the end had, in
+fact, done more than anything else to soften Amherst's regrets; and he
+had tried to express something of this in the course of his first talk
+with her. Justine had given him a clear and self-possessed report of the
+dreadful weeks at Lynbrook; but at his first allusion to her own part in
+them, she shrank into a state of distress which seemed to plead with him
+to refrain from even the tenderest touch on her feelings. It was a
+peculiarity of their friendship that silence and absence had always
+mysteriously fostered its growth; and he now felt that her reticence
+deepened the understanding between them as the freest confidences might
+not have done.
+
+Soon afterward, an opportune attack of nervous prostration had sent Mrs.
+Harry Dressel abroad; and Justine was selected as her companion. They
+remained in Europe for six months; and on their return Amherst learned
+with pleasure that Mr. Langhope had asked Miss Brent to take charge of
+Cicely.
+
+Mr. Langhope's sorrow for his daughter had been aggravated by futile
+wrath at her unaccountable will; and the mixed sentiment thus engendered
+had found expression in a jealous outpouring of affection toward Cicely.
+He took immediate possession of the child, and in the first stages of
+his affliction her companionship had been really consoling. But as time
+passed, and the pleasant habits of years reasserted themselves, her
+presence became, in small unacknowledged ways, a source of domestic
+irritation. Nursery hours disturbed the easy routine of his household;
+the elderly parlour-maid who had long ruled it resented the intervention
+of Cicely's nurse; the little governess, involved in the dispute, broke
+down and had to be shipped home to Germany; a successor was hard to
+find, and in the interval Mr. Langhope's privacy was invaded by a stream
+of visiting teachers, who were always wanting to consult him about
+Cicely's lessons, and lay before him their tiresome complaints and
+perplexities. Poor Mr. Langhope found himself in the position of the
+mourner who, in the first fervour of bereavement, has undertaken the
+construction of an imposing monument without having counted the cost. He
+had meant that his devotion to Cicely should be a monument to his
+paternal grief; but the foundations were scarcely laid when he found
+that the funds of time and patience were almost exhausted.
+
+Pride forbade his consigning Cicely to her step-father, though Mrs.
+Amherst would gladly have undertaken her care; Mrs. Ansell's migratory
+habits made it impossible for her to do more than intermittently hover
+and advise; and a new hope rose before Mr. Langhope when it occurred to
+him to appeal to Miss Brent.
+
+The experiment had proved a success, and when Amherst met Justine again
+she had been for some months in charge of the little girl, and change
+and congenial occupation had restored her to a normal view of life.
+There was no trace in her now of the dumb misery which had haunted him
+at their parting; she was again the vivid creature who seemed more
+charged with life than any one he had ever known. The crisis through
+which she had passed showed itself only in a smoothing of the brow and
+deepening of the eyes, as though a bloom of experience had veiled
+without deadening the first brilliancy of youth.
+
+As he lingered on the image thus evoked, he recalled Mrs. Dressel's
+words: "Justine is twenty-seven--she's not likely to marry now."
+
+Oddly enough, he had never thought of her marrying--but now that he
+heard the possibility questioned, he felt a disagreeable conviction of
+its inevitableness. Mrs. Dressel's view was of course absurd. In spite
+of Justine's feminine graces, he had formerly felt in her a kind of
+elfin immaturity, as of a flitting Ariel with untouched heart and
+senses: it was only of late that she had developed the subtle quality
+which calls up thoughts of love. Not marry? Why, the vagrant fire had
+just lighted on her--and the fact that she was poor and unattached, with
+her own way to make, and no setting of pleasure and elegance to
+embellish her--these disadvantages seemed as nothing to Amherst against
+the warmth of personality in which she moved. And besides, she would
+never be drawn to the kind of man who needed fine clothes and luxury to
+point him to the charm of sex. She was always finished and graceful in
+appearance, with the pretty woman's art of wearing her few plain dresses
+as if they were many and varied; yet no one could think of her as
+attaching much importance to the upholstery of life.... No, the man who
+won her would be of a different type, have other inducements to
+offer...and Amherst found himself wondering just what those inducements
+would be.
+
+Suddenly he remembered something his mother had said as he left the
+house--something about a distinguished-looking young man who had called
+to ask for Miss Brent. Mrs. Amherst, innocently inquisitive in small
+matters, had followed her son into the hall to ask the parlour-maid if
+the gentleman had left his name; and the parlour-maid had answered in
+the negative. The young man was evidently not indigenous: all the social
+units of Hanaford were intimately known to each other. He was a
+stranger, therefore, presumably drawn there by the hope of seeing Miss
+Brent. But if he knew that she was coming he must be intimately
+acquainted with her movements.... The thought came to Amherst as an
+unpleasant surprise. It showed him for the first time how little he knew
+of Justine's personal life, of the ties she might have formed outside
+the Lynbrook circle. After all, he had seen her chiefly not among her
+own friends but among his wife's. Was it reasonable to suppose that a
+creature of her keen individuality would be content to subsist on the
+fringe of other existences? Somewhere, of course, she must have a centre
+of her own, must be subject to influences of which he was wholly
+ignorant. And since her departure from Lynbrook he had known even less
+of her life. She had spent the previous winter with Mr. Langhope in New
+York, where Amherst had seen her only on his rare visits to Cicely; and
+Mr. Langhope, on going abroad for the summer, had established his
+grand-daughter in a Bar Harbour cottage, where, save for two flying
+visits from Mrs. Ansell, Miss Brent had reigned alone till his return in
+September.
+
+Very likely, Amherst reflected, the mysterious visitor was a Bar Harbour
+acquaintance--no, more than an acquaintance: a friend. And as Mr.
+Langhope's party had left Mount Desert but three days previously, the
+arrival of the unknown at Hanaford showed a singular impatience to
+rejoin Miss Brent.
+
+As he reached this point in his meditations, Amherst found himself at
+the street-corner where it was his habit to pick up the Westmore
+trolley. Just as it bore down on him, and he sprang to the platform,
+another car, coming in from the mills, stopped to discharge its
+passengers. Among them Amherst noticed a slender undersized man in
+shabby clothes, about whose retreating back, as he crossed the street to
+signal a Station Avenue car, there was something dimly familiar, and
+suggestive of troubled memories. Amherst leaned out and looked again:
+yes, the back was certainly like Dr. Wyant's--but what could Wyant be
+doing at Hanaford, and in a Westmore car?
+
+Amherst's first impulse was to spring out and overtake him. He knew how
+admirably the young physician had borne himself at Lynbrook; he even
+recalled Dr. Garford's saying, with his kindly sceptical smile: "Poor
+Wyant believed to the end that we could save her"--and felt again his
+own inward movement of thankfulness that the cruel miracle had not been
+worked.
+
+He owed a great deal to Wyant, and had tried to express his sense of the
+fact by warm words and a liberal fee; but since Bessy's death he had
+never returned to Lynbrook, and had consequently lost sight of the young
+doctor.
+
+Now he felt that he ought to try to rejoin him, to find out why he was
+at Hanaford, and make some proffer of hospitality; but if the stranger
+were really Wyant, his choice of the Station Avenue car made it appear
+that he was on his way to catch the New York express; and in any case
+Amherst's engagements at Westmore made immediate pursuit impossible.
+
+He consoled himself with the thought that if the physician was not
+leaving Hanaford he would be certain to call at the house; and then his
+mind flew back to Justine Brent. But the pleasure of looking forward to
+her arrival was disturbed by new feelings. A sense of reserve and
+embarrassment had sprung up in his mind, checking that free mental
+communion which, as he now perceived, had been one of the unconscious
+promoters of their friendship. It was as though his thoughts faced a
+stranger instead of the familiar presence which had so long dwelt in
+them; and he began to see that the feeling of intelligence existing
+between Justine and himself was not the result of actual intimacy, but
+merely of the charm she knew how to throw over casual intercourse.
+
+When he had left his house, his mind was like a summer sky, all open
+blue and sunlit rolling clouds; but gradually the clouds had darkened
+and massed themselves, till they drew an impenetrable veil over the
+upper light and stretched threateningly across his whole horizon.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+THE celebrations at Westmore were over. Hanaford society, mustering for
+the event, had streamed through the hospital, inspected the clinic,
+complimented Amherst, recalled itself to Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell,
+and streamed out again to regain its carriages and motors.
+
+The chief actors in the ceremony were also taking leave. Mr. Langhope,
+somewhat pale and nervous after the ordeal, had been helped into the
+Gaines landau with Mrs. Ansell and Cicely; Mrs. Amherst had accepted a
+seat in the Dressel victoria; and Westy Gaines, with an _empressement_
+slightly tinged by condescension, was in the act of placing his electric
+phaeton at Miss Brent's disposal.
+
+She stood in the pretty white porch of the hospital, looking out across
+its squares of flower-edged turf at the long street of Westmore. In the
+warm gold-powdered light of September the factory town still seemed a
+blot on the face of nature; yet here and there, on all sides, Justine's
+eye saw signs of humanizing change. The rough banks along the street had
+been levelled and sodded; young maples, set in rows, already made a long
+festoon of gold against the dingy house-fronts; and the houses
+themselves--once so irreclaimably outlawed and degraded--showed, in
+their white-curtained windows, their flowery white-railed yards, a
+growing approach to civilized human dwellings.
+
+Glancing the other way, one still met the grim pile of factories cutting
+the sky with their harsh roof-lines and blackened chimneys; but here
+also were signs of improvement. One of the mills had already been
+enlarged, another was scaffolded for the same purpose, and young trees
+and neatly-fenced turf replaced the surrounding desert of trampled
+earth.
+
+As Amherst came out of the hospital, he heard Miss Brent declining a
+seat in Westy's phaeton.
+
+"Thank you so much; but there's some one here I want to see first--one
+of the operatives--and I can easily take a Hanaford car." She held out
+her hand with the smile that ran like colour over her whole face; and
+Westy, nettled by this unaccountable disregard of her privileges,
+mounted his chariot alone.
+
+As he glided mournfully away, Amherst turned to Justine. "You wanted to
+see the Dillons?" he asked.
+
+Their eyes met, and she smiled again. He had never seen her so
+sunned-over, so luminous, since the distant November day when they had
+picnicked with Cicely beside the swamp. He wondered vaguely if she were
+more elaborately dressed than usual, or if the festal impression she
+produced were simply a reflection of her mood.
+
+"I do want to see the Dillons--how did you guess?" she rejoined; and
+Amherst felt a sudden impulse to reply: "For the same reason that made
+you think of them."
+
+The fact of her remembering the Dillons made him absurdly happy; it
+re-established between them the mental communion that had been checked
+by his thoughts of the previous day.
+
+"I suppose I'm rather self-conscious about the Dillons, because they're
+one of my object lessons--they illustrate the text," he said laughing,
+as they went down the steps.
+
+Westmore had been given a half-holiday for the opening of the hospital,
+and as Amherst and Justine turned into the street, parties of workers
+were dispersing toward their houses. They were still a dull-eyed stunted
+throng, to whom air and movement seemed to have been too long denied;
+but there was more animation in the groups, more light in individual
+faces; many of the younger men returned Amherst's good-day with a look
+of friendliness, and the women to whom he spoke met him with a
+volubility that showed the habit of frequent intercourse.
+
+"How much you have done!" Justine exclaimed, as he rejoined her after
+one of these asides; but the next moment he saw a shade of embarrassment
+cross her face, as though she feared to have suggested comparisons she
+had meant to avoid.
+
+He answered quite naturally: "Yes--I'm beginning to see my way now; and
+it's wonderful how they respond--" and they walked on without a shadow
+of constraint between them, while he described to her what was already
+done, and what direction his projected experiments were taking.
+
+The Dillons had been placed in charge of one of the old factory
+tenements, now transformed into a lodging-house for unmarried
+operatives. Even its harsh brick exterior, hung with creepers and
+brightened by flower-borders, had taken on a friendly air; and indoors
+it had a clean sunny kitchen, a big dining-room with cheerful-coloured
+walls, and a room where the men could lounge and smoke about a table
+covered with papers.
+
+The creation of these model lodging-houses had always been a favourite
+scheme of Amherst's, and the Dillons, incapacitated for factory work,
+had shown themselves admirably adapted to their new duties. In Mrs.
+Dillon's small hot sitting-room, among the starched sofa-tidies and pink
+shells that testified to the family prosperity, Justine shone with
+enjoyment and sympathy. She had always taken an interest in the lives
+and thoughts of working-people: not so much the constructive interest of
+the sociological mind as the vivid imaginative concern of a heart open
+to every human appeal. She liked to hear about their hard struggles and
+small pathetic successes: the children's sicknesses, the father's lucky
+job, the little sum they had been able to put by, the plans they had
+formed for Tommy's advancement, and how Sue's good marks at school were
+still ahead of Mrs. Hagan's Mary's.
+
+"What I really like is to gossip with them, and give them advice about
+the baby's cough, and the cheapest way to do their marketing," she said
+laughing, as she and Amherst emerged once more into the street. "It's
+the same kind of interest I used to feel in my dolls and guinea pigs--a
+managing, interfering old maid's interest. I don't believe I should care
+a straw for them if I couldn't dose them and order them about."
+
+Amherst laughed too: he recalled the time when he had dreamed that just
+such warm personal sympathy was her sex's destined contribution to the
+broad work of human beneficence. Well, it had not been a dream: here was
+a woman whose deeds spoke for her. And suddenly the thought came to him:
+what might they not do at Westmore together! The brightness of it was
+blinding--like the dazzle of sunlight which faced them as they walked
+toward the mills. But it left him speechless, confused--glad to have a
+pretext for routing Duplain out of the office, introducing him to Miss
+Brent, and asking him for the keys of the buildings....
+
+It was wonderful, again, how she grasped what he was doing in the mills,
+and saw how his whole scheme hung together, harmonizing the work and
+leisure of the operatives, instead of treating them as half machine,
+half man, and neglecting the man for the machine. Nor was she content
+with Utopian generalities: she wanted to know the how and why of each
+case, to hear what conclusions he drew from his results, to what
+solutions his experiments pointed.
+
+In explaining the mill work he forgot his constraint and returned to the
+free comradery of mind that had always marked their relation. He turned
+the key reluctantly in the last door, and paused a moment on the
+threshold.
+
+"Anything more?" he said, with a laugh meant to hide his desire to
+prolong their tour.
+
+She glanced up at the sun, which still swung free of the tall factory
+roofs.
+
+"As much as you've time for. Cicely doesn't need me this afternoon, and
+I can't tell when I shall see Westmore again."
+
+Her words fell on him with a chill. His smile faded, and he looked away
+for a moment.
+
+"But I hope Cicely will be here often," he said.
+
+"Oh, I hope so too," she rejoined, with seeming unconsciousness of any
+connection between the wish and her previous words.
+
+Amherst hesitated. He had meant to propose a visit to the old Eldorado
+building, which now at last housed the long-desired night-schools and
+nursery; but since she had spoken he felt a sudden indifference to
+showing her anything more. What was the use, if she meant to leave
+Cicely, and drift out of his reach? He could get on well enough without
+sympathy and comprehension, but his momentary indulgence in them made
+the ordinary taste of life a little flat.
+
+"There must be more to see?" she continued, as they turned back toward
+the village; and he answered absently: "Oh, yes--if you like."
+
+He heard the change in his own voice, and knew by her quick side-glance
+that she had heard it too.
+
+"Please let me see everything that is compatible with my getting a car
+to Hanaford by six."
+
+"Well, then--the night-school next," he said with an effort at
+lightness; and to shake off the importunity of his own thoughts he added
+carelessly, as they walked on: "By the way--it seems improbable--but I
+think I saw Dr. Wyant yesterday in a Westmore car."
+
+She echoed the name in surprise. "Dr. Wyant? Really! Are you sure?"
+
+"Not quite; but if it wasn't he it was his ghost. You haven't heard of
+his being at Hanaford?"
+
+"No. I've heard nothing of him for ages."
+
+Something in her tone made him return her side-glance; but her voice, on
+closer analysis, denoted only indifference, and her profile seemed to
+express the same negative sentiment. He remembered a vague Lynbrook
+rumour to the effect that the young doctor had been attracted to Miss
+Brent. Such floating seeds of gossip seldom rooted themselves in his
+mind, but now the fact acquired a new significance, and he wondered how
+he could have thought so little of it at the time. Probably her somewhat
+exaggerated air of indifference simply meant that she had been bored by
+Wyant's attentions, and that the reminder of them still roused a slight
+self-consciousness.
+
+Amherst was relieved by this conclusion, and murmuring: "Oh, I suppose
+it can't have been he," led her rapidly on to the Eldorado. But the old
+sense of free communion was again obstructed, and her interest in the
+details of the schools and nursery now seemed to him only a part of her
+wonderful art of absorbing herself in other people's affairs. He was a
+fool to have been duped by it--to have fancied it was anything more
+personal than a grace of manner.
+
+As she turned away from inspecting the blackboards in one of the empty
+school-rooms he paused before her and said suddenly: "You spoke of not
+seeing Westmore again. Are you thinking of leaving Cicely?"
+
+The words were almost the opposite of those he had intended to speak; it
+was as if some irrepressible inner conviction flung defiance at his
+surface distrust of her.
+
+She stood still also, and he saw a thought move across her face. "Not
+immediately--but perhaps when Mr. Langhope can make some other
+arrangement----"
+
+Owing to the half-holiday they had the school-building to themselves,
+and the fact of being alone with her, without fear of interruption, woke
+in Amherst an uncontrollable longing to taste for once the joy of
+unguarded utterance.
+
+"Why do you go?" he asked, moving close to the platform on which she
+stood.
+
+She hesitated, resting her hand on the teacher's desk. Her eyes were
+kind, but he thought her tone was cold.
+
+"This easy life is rather out of my line," she said at length, with a
+smile that draped her words in vagueness.
+
+Amherst looked at her again--she seemed to be growing remote and
+inaccessible. "You mean that you don't want to stay?"
+
+His tone was so abrupt that it called forth one of her rare blushes.
+"No--not that. I have been very happy with Cicely--but soon I shall have
+to be doing something else."
+
+Why was she blushing? And what did her last phrase mean? "Something
+else--?" The blood hummed in his ears--he began to hope she would not
+answer too quickly.
+
+She had sunk into the seat behind the desk, propping her elbows on its
+lid, and letting her interlaced hands support her chin. A little bunch
+of violets which had been thrust into the folds of her dress detached
+itself and fell to the floor.
+
+"What I mean is," she said in a low voice, raising her eyes to
+Amherst's, "that I've had a great desire lately to get back to real
+work--my special work.... I've been too idle for the last year--I want
+to do some hard nursing; I want to help people who are miserable."
+
+She spoke earnestly, almost passionately, and as he listened his
+undefined fear was lifted. He had never before seen her in this mood,
+with brooding brows, and the darkness of the world's pain in her eyes.
+All her glow had faded--she was a dun thrush-like creature, clothed in
+semi-tints; yet she seemed much nearer than when her smile shot light on
+him.
+
+He stood motionless, his eyes absently fixed on the bunch of violets at
+her feet. Suddenly he raised his head, and broke out with a boyish
+blush: "Could it have been Wyant who was trying to see you?"
+
+"Dr. Wyant--trying to see me?" She lowered her hands to the desk, and
+sat looking at him with open wonder.
+
+He saw the irrelevance of his question, and burst, in spite of himself,
+into youthful laughter.
+
+"I mean--It's only that an unknown visitor called at the house
+yesterday, and insisted that you must have arrived. He seemed so annoyed
+at not finding you, that I thought...I imagined...it must be some one
+who knew you very well...and who had followed you here...for some
+special reason...."
+
+Her colour rose again, as if caught from his; but her eyes still
+declared her ignorance. "Some special reason----?"
+
+"And just now," he blurted out, "when you said you might not stay much
+longer with Cicely--I thought of the visit--and wondered if there was
+some one you meant to marry...."
+
+A silence fell between them. Justine rose slowly, her eyes screened
+under the veil she had lowered. "No--I don't mean to marry," she said,
+half-smiling, as she came down from the platform.
+
+Restored to his level, her small shadowy head just in a line with his
+eyes, she seemed closer, more approachable and feminine--yet Amherst did
+not dare to speak.
+
+She took a few steps toward the window, looking out into the deserted
+street. "It's growing dark--I must go home," she said.
+
+"Yes," he assented absently as he followed her. He had no idea what she
+was saying. The inner voices in which they habitually spoke were growing
+louder than outward words. Or was it only the voice of his own desires
+that he heard--the cry of new hopes and unguessed capacities of living?
+All within him was flood-tide: this was the top of life, surely--to feel
+her alike in his brain and his pulses, to steep sight and hearing in the
+joy of her nearness, while all the while thought spoke clear: "This is
+the mate of my mind."
+
+He began again abruptly. "Wouldn't you marry, if it gave you the chance
+to do what you say--if it offered you hard work, and the opportunity to
+make things better...for a great many people...as no one but yourself
+could do it?"
+
+It was a strange way of putting his case: he was aware of it before he
+ended. But it had not occurred to him to tell her that she was lovely
+and desirable--in his humility he thought that what he had to give would
+plead for him better than what he was.
+
+The effect produced on her by his question, though undecipherable, was
+extraordinary. She stiffened a little, remaining quite motionless, her
+eyes on the street.
+
+"_You!_" she just breathed; and he saw that she was beginning to
+tremble.
+
+His wooing had been harsh and clumsy--he was afraid it had offended her,
+and his hand trembled too as it sought hers.
+
+"I only thought--it would be a dull business to most women--and I'm tied
+to it for life...but I thought...I've seen so often how you pity
+suffering...how you long to relieve it...."
+
+She turned away from him with a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I _hate_
+suffering!" she broke out, raising her hands to her face.
+
+Amherst was frightened. How senseless of him to go on reiterating the
+old plea! He ought to have pleaded for himself--to have let the man in
+him seek her and take his defeat, instead of beating about the flimsy
+bush of philanthropy.
+
+"I only meant--I was trying to make my work recommend me..." he said
+with a half-laugh, as she remained silent, her eyes still turned away.
+
+The silence continued for a long time--it stretched between them like a
+narrowing interminable road, down which, with a leaden heart, he seemed
+to watch her gradually disappearing. And then, unexpectedly, as she
+shrank to a tiny speck at the dip of the road, the perspective was
+mysteriously reversed, and he felt her growing nearer again, felt her
+close to him--felt her hand in his.
+
+"I'm really just like other women, you know--I shall like it because
+it's your work," she said.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+EVERY one agreed that, on the whole, Mr. Langhope had behaved extremely
+well.
+
+He was just beginning to regain his equanimity in the matter of the
+will--to perceive that, in the eyes of the public, something important
+and distinguished was being done at Westmore, and that the venture,
+while reducing Cicely's income during her minority, might, in some
+incredible way, actually make for its ultimate increase. So much Mr.
+Langhope, always eager to take the easiest view of the inevitable, had
+begun to let fall in his confidential comments on Amherst; when his
+newly-regained balance was rudely shaken by the news of his son-in-law's
+marriage.
+
+The free expression of his anger was baffled by the fact that, even by
+the farthest stretch of self-extenuating logic, he could find no one to
+blame for the event but himself.
+
+"Why on earth don't you say so--don't you call me a triple-dyed fool for
+bringing them together?" he challenged Mrs. Ansell, as they had the
+matter out together in the small intimate drawing-room of her New York
+apartment.
+
+Mrs. Ansell, stirring her tea with a pensive hand, met the challenge
+composedly.
+
+"At present you're doing it for me," she reminded him; "and after all,
+I'm not so disposed to agree with you."
+
+"Not agree with me? But you told me not to engage Miss Brent! Didn't you
+tell me not to engage her?"
+
+She made a hesitating motion of assent.
+
+"But, good Lord, how was I to help myself? No man was ever in such a
+quandary!" he broke off, leaping back to the other side of the argument.
+
+"No," she said, looking up at him suddenly. "I believe that, for the
+only time in your life, you were sorry then that you hadn't married me."
+
+She held his eyes for a moment with a look of gentle malice; then he
+laughed, and drew forth his cigarette-case.
+
+"Oh, come--you've inverted the formula," he said, reaching out for the
+enamelled match-box at his elbow. She let the pleasantry pass with a
+slight smile, and he went on reverting to his grievance: "Why _didn't_
+you want me to engage Miss Brent?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know...some instinct."
+
+"You won't tell me?"
+
+"I couldn't if I tried; and now, after all----"
+
+"After all--what?"
+
+She reflected. "You'll have Cicely off your mind, I mean."
+
+"Cicely off my mind?" Mr. Langhope was beginning to find his charming
+friend less consolatory than usual. After all, the most magnanimous
+woman has her circuitous way of saying _I told you so_. "As if any good
+governess couldn't have done that for me!" he grumbled.
+
+"Ah--the present care for her. But I was looking ahead," she rejoined.
+
+"To what--if I may ask?"
+
+"The next few years--when Mrs. Amherst may have children of her own."
+
+"Children of her own?" He bounded up, furious at the suggestion.
+
+"Had it never occurred to you?"
+
+"Hardly as a source of consolation!"
+
+"I think a philosophic mind might find it so."
+
+"I should really be interested to know how!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell put down her cup, and again turned her gentle tolerant eyes
+upon him.
+
+"Mr. Amherst, as a father, will take a more conservative view of his
+duties. Every one agrees that, in spite of his theories, he has a good
+head for business; and whatever he does at Westmore for the advantage of
+his children will naturally be for Cicely's advantage too."
+
+Mr. Langhope returned her gaze thoughtfully. "There's something in what
+you say," he admitted after a pause. "But it doesn't alter the fact
+that, with Amherst unmarried, the whole of the Westmore fortune would
+have gone back to Cicely--where it belongs."
+
+"Possibly. But it was so unlikely that he would remain unmarried."
+
+"I don't see why! A man of honour would have felt bound to keep the
+money for Cicely."
+
+"But you must remember that, from Mr. Amherst's standpoint, the money
+belongs rather to Westmore than to Cicely."
+
+"He's no better than a socialist, then!"
+
+"Well--supposing he isn't: the birth of a son and heir will cure that."
+
+Mr. Langhope winced, but she persisted gently: "It's really safer for
+Cicely as it is--" and before the end of the conference he found himself
+confessing, half against his will: "Well, since he hadn't the decency
+to remain single, I'm thankful he hasn't inflicted a stranger on us; and
+I shall never forget what Miss Brent did for my poor Bessy...."
+
+It was the view she had wished to bring him to, and the view which, in
+due course, with all his accustomed grace and adaptability, he presented
+to the searching gaze of a society profoundly moved by the incident of
+Amherst's marriage. "Of course, if Mr. Langhope approves--" society
+reluctantly murmured; and that Mr. Langhope did approve was presently
+made manifest by every outward show of consideration toward the
+newly-wedded couple.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst and Justine had been married in September; and after a holiday
+in Canada and the Adirondacks they returned to Hanaford for the winter.
+Amherst had proposed a short flight to Europe; but his wife preferred to
+settle down at once to her new duties.
+
+The announcement of her marriage had been met by Mrs. Dressel with a
+comment which often afterward returned to her memory. "It's splendid for
+you, of course, dear, _in one way_," her friend had murmured, between
+disparagement and envy--"that is, if you can stand talking about the
+Westmore mill-hands all the rest of your life."
+
+"Oh, but I couldn't--I should hate it!" Justine had energetically
+rejoined; meeting Mrs. Dressel's admonitory "Well, then?" with the
+laughing assurance that _she_ meant to lead the conversation.
+
+She knew well enough what the admonition meant. To Amherst, so long
+thwarted in his chosen work, the subject of Westmore was becoming an
+_idée fixe_; and it was natural that Hanaford should class him as a man
+of one topic. But Justine had guessed at his other side; a side as long
+thwarted, and far less articulate, which she intended to wake into life.
+She had felt it in him from the first, though their talks had so
+uniformly turned on the subject which palled on Hanaford; and it had
+been revealed to her during the silent hours among his books, when she
+had grown into such close intimacy with his mind.
+
+She did not, assuredly, mean to spend the rest of her days talking about
+the Westmore mill-hands; but in the arrogance of her joy she wished to
+begin her married life in the setting of its habitual duties, and to
+achieve the victory of evoking the secret unsuspected Amherst out of the
+preoccupied business man chained to his task. Dull lovers might have to
+call on romantic scenes to wake romantic feelings; but Justine's
+glancing imagination leapt to the challenge of extracting poetry from
+the prose of routine.
+
+And this was precisely the triumph that the first months brought her. To
+mortal eye, Amherst and Justine seemed to be living at Hanaford: in
+reality they were voyaging on unmapped seas of adventure. The seas were
+limitless, and studded with happy islands: every fresh discovery they
+made about each other, every new agreement of ideas and feelings,
+offered itself to these intrepid explorers as a friendly coast where
+they might beach their keel and take their bearings. Thus, in the
+thronging hum of metaphor, Justine sometimes pictured their relation;
+seeing it, again, as a journey through crowded populous cities, where
+every face she met was Amherst's; or, contrarily, as a multiplication of
+points of perception, so that one became, for the world's contact, a
+surface so multitudinously alive that the old myth of hearing the grass
+grow and walking the rainbow explained itself as the heightening of
+personality to the utmost pitch of sympathy.
+
+In reality, the work at Westmore became an almost necessary sedative
+after these flights into the blue. She felt sometimes that they would
+have been bankrupted of sensations if daily hours of drudgery had not
+provided a reservoir in which fresh powers of enjoyment could slowly
+gather. And their duties had the rarer quality of constituting,
+precisely, the deepest, finest bond between them, the clarifying element
+which saved their happiness from stagnation, and kept it in the strong
+mid-current of human feeling.
+
+It was this element in their affection which, in the last days of
+November, was unexpectedly put on trial. Mr. Langhope, since his return
+from his annual visit to Europe, showed signs of diminishing strength
+and elasticity. He had had to give up his nightly dinner parties, to
+desert his stall at the Opera: to take, in short, as he plaintively put
+it, his social pleasures homœopathically. Certain of his friends
+explained the change by saying that he had never been "quite the same"
+since his daughter's death; while others found its determining cause in
+the shock of Amherst's second marriage. But this insinuation Mr.
+Langhope in due time discredited by writing to ask the Amhersts if they
+would not pity his loneliness and spend the winter in town with him. The
+proposal came in a letter to Justine, which she handed to her husband
+one afternoon on his return from the mills.
+
+She sat behind the tea-table in the Westmore drawing-room, now at last
+transformed, not into Mrs. Dressel's vision of "something lovely in
+Louis Seize," but into a warm yet sober setting for books, for scattered
+flowers, for deep chairs and shaded lamps in pleasant nearness to each
+other.
+
+Amherst raised his eyes from the letter, thinking as he did so how well
+her bright head, with its flame-like play of meanings, fitted into the
+background she had made for it. Still unobservant of external details,
+he was beginning to feel a vague well-being of the eye wherever her
+touch had passed.
+
+"Well, we must do it," he said simply.
+
+"Oh, must we?" she murmured, holding out his cup.
+
+He smiled at her note of dejection. "Unnatural woman! New York _versus_
+Hanaford--do you really dislike it so much?"
+
+She tried to bring a tone of consent into her voice. "I shall be very
+glad to be with Cicely again--and that, of course," she reflected, "is
+the reason why Mr. Langhope wants us."
+
+"Well--if it is, it's a good reason."
+
+"Yes. But how much shall you be with us?"
+
+"If you say so, I'll arrange to get away for a month or two."
+
+"Oh, no: I don't want that!" she said, with a smile that triumphed a
+little. "But why should not Cicely come here?"
+
+"If Mr. Langhope is cut off from his usual amusements, I'm afraid that
+would only make him more lonely."
+
+"Yes, I suppose so." She put aside her untasted cup, resting her elbows
+on her knees, and her chin on her clasped hands, in the attitude
+habitual to her in moments of inward debate.
+
+Amherst rose and seated himself on the sofa beside her. "Dear! What is
+it?" he said, drawing her hands down, so that she had to turn her face
+to his.
+
+"Nothing...I don't know...a superstition. I've been so happy here!"
+
+"Is our happiness too perishable to be transplanted?"
+
+She smiled and answered by another question. "You don't mind doing it,
+then?"
+
+Amherst hesitated. "Shall I tell you? I feel that it's a sort of ring of
+Polycrates. It may buy off the jealous gods."
+
+A faint shrinking from some importunate suggestion seemed to press her
+closer to him. "Then you feel they _are_ jealous?" she breathed, in a
+half-laugh.
+
+"I pity them if they're not!"
+
+"Yes," she agreed, rallying to his tone. "I only had a fancy that they
+might overlook such a dull place as Hanaford."
+
+Amherst drew her to him. "Isn't it, on the contrary, in the ash-heaps
+that the rag-pickers prowl?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no disguising it: she was growing afraid of her happiness. Her
+husband's analogy of the ring expressed her fear. She seemed to herself
+to carry a blazing jewel on her breast--something that singled her out
+for human envy and divine pursuit. She had a preposterous longing to
+dress plainly and shabbily, to subdue her voice and gestures, to try to
+slip through life unnoticed; yet all the while she knew that her jewel
+would shoot its rays through every disguise. And from the depths of
+ancient atavistic instincts came the hope that Amherst was right--that
+by sacrificing their precious solitude to Mr. Langhope's convenience
+they might still deceive the gods.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once pledged to her new task, Justine, as usual, espoused it with
+ardour. It was pleasant, even among greater joys, to see her husband
+again frankly welcomed by Mr. Langhope; to see Cicely bloom into
+happiness at their coming; and to overhear Mr. Langhope exclaim, in a
+confidential aside to his son-in-law: "It's wonderful, the _bien-être_
+that wife of yours diffuses about her!"
+
+The element of _bien-être_ was the only one in which Mr. Langhope could
+draw breath; and to those who kept him immersed in it he was prodigal of
+delicate attentions. The experiment, in short, was a complete success;
+and even Amherst's necessary weeks at Hanaford had the merit of giving a
+finer flavour to his brief appearances.
+
+Of all this Justine was thinking as she drove down Fifth Avenue one
+January afternoon to meet her husband at the Grand Central station. She
+had tamed her happiness at last: the quality of fear had left it, and it
+nestled in her heart like some wild creature subdued to human ways.
+And, as her inward bliss became more and more a quiet habit of the mind,
+the longing to help and minister returned, absorbing her more deeply in
+her husband's work.
+
+She dismissed the carriage at the station, and when his train had
+arrived they emerged together into the cold winter twilight and turned
+up Madison Avenue. These walks home from the station gave them a little
+more time to themselves than if they had driven; and there was always so
+much to tell on both sides. This time the news was all good: the work at
+Westmore was prospering, and on Justine's side there was a more cheerful
+report of Mr. Langhope's health, and--best of all--his promise to give
+them Cicely for the summer. Amherst and Justine were both anxious that
+the child should spend more time at Hanaford, that her young
+associations should begin to gather about Westmore; and Justine exulted
+in the fact that the suggestion had come from Mr. Langhope himself,
+while she and Amherst were still planning how to lead him up to it.
+
+They reached the house while this triumph was still engaging them; and
+in the doorway Amherst turned to her with a smile.
+
+"And of course--dear man!--he believes the idea is all his. There's
+nothing you can't make people believe, you little Jesuit!"
+
+"I don't think there is!" she boasted, falling gaily into his tone; and
+then, as the door opened, and she entered the hall, her eyes fell on a
+blotted envelope which lay among the letters on the table.
+
+The parlour-maid proffered it with a word of explanation. "A gentleman
+left it for you, madam; he asked to see you, and said he'd call for the
+answer in a day or two."
+
+"Another begging letter, I suppose," said Amherst, turning into the
+drawing-room, where Mr. Langhope and Cicely awaited them; and Justine,
+carelessly pushing the envelope into her muff, murmured "I suppose so"
+as she followed him.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+OVER the tea-table Justine forgot the note in her muff; but when she
+went upstairs to dress it fell to the floor, and she picked it up and
+laid it on her dressing-table.
+
+She had already recognized the hand as Wyant's, for it was not the first
+letter she had received from him.
+
+Three times since her marriage he had appealed to her for help, excusing
+himself on the plea of difficulties and ill-health. The first time he
+wrote, he alluded vaguely to having married, and to being compelled,
+through illness, to give up his practice at Clifton. On receiving this
+letter she made enquiries, and learned that, a month or two after her
+departure from Lynbrook, Wyant had married a Clifton girl--a pretty
+piece of flaunting innocence, whom she remembered about the lanes,
+generally with a young man in a buggy. There had evidently been
+something obscure and precipitate about the marriage, which was a
+strange one for the ambitious young doctor. Justine conjectured that it
+might have been the cause of his leaving Clifton--or or perhaps he had
+already succumbed to the fatal habit she had suspected in him. At any
+rate he seemed, in some mysterious way, to have dropped in two years
+from promise to failure; yet she could not believe that, with his
+talents, and the name he had begun to make, such a lapse could be more
+than temporary. She had often heard Dr. Garford prophesy great things
+for him; but Dr. Garford had died suddenly during the previous summer,
+and the loss of this powerful friend was mentioned by Wyant among his
+misfortunes.
+
+Justine was anxious to help him, but her marriage to a rich man had not
+given her the command of much money. She and Amherst, choosing to regard
+themselves as pensioners on the Westmore fortune, were scrupulous in
+restricting their personal expenditure; and her work among the
+mill-hands brought many demands on the modest allowance which her
+husband had insisted on her accepting. In reply to Wyant's first appeal,
+which reached her soon after her marriage, she had sent him a hundred
+dollars; but when the second came, some two months later--with a fresh
+tale of ill-luck and ill-health--she had not been able to muster more
+than half the amount. Finally a third letter had arrived, a short time
+before their leaving for New York. It told the same story of persistent
+misfortune, but on this occasion Wyant, instead of making a direct
+appeal for money, suggested that, through her hospital connections, she
+should help him to establish a New York practice. His tone was
+half-whining, half-peremptory, his once precise writing smeared and
+illegible; and these indications, combined with her former suspicions,
+convinced her that, for the moment, he was unfit for medical work. At
+any rate, she could not assume the responsibility of recommending him;
+and in answering she advised him to apply to some of the physicians he
+had worked with at Lynbrook, softening her refusal by the enclosure of a
+small sum of money. To this letter she received no answer. Wyant
+doubtless found the money insufficient, and resented her unwillingness
+to help him by the use of her influence; and she felt sure that the note
+before her contained a renewal of his former request.
+
+An obscure reluctance made her begin to undress before opening it. She
+felt slightly tired and indolently happy, and she did not wish any
+jarring impression to break in on the sense of completeness which her
+husband's coming always put into her life. Her happiness was making her
+timid and luxurious: she was beginning to shrink from even trivial
+annoyances.
+
+But when at length, in her dressing-gown, her loosened hair about her
+shoulders, she seated herself before the toilet-mirror, Wyant's note
+once more confronted her. It was absurd to put off reading it--if he
+asked for money again, she would simply confide the whole business to
+Amherst.
+
+She had never spoken to her husband of her correspondence with Wyant.
+The mere fact that the latter had appealed to her, instead of addressing
+himself to Amherst, made her suspect that he had a weakness to hide, and
+counted on her professional discretion. But his continued importunities
+would certainly release her from any such supposed obligation; and she
+thought with relief of casting the weight of her difficulty on her
+husband's shoulders.
+
+She opened the note and read.
+
+"I did not acknowledge your last letter because I was ashamed to tell
+you that the money was not enough to be of any use. But I am past shame
+now. My wife was confined three weeks ago, and has been desperately ill
+ever since. She is in no state to move, but we shall be put out of these
+rooms unless I can get money or work at once. A word from you would have
+given me a start in New York--and I'd be willing to begin again as an
+interne or a doctor's assistant.
+
+"I have never reminded you of what you owe me, and I should not do so
+now if I hadn't been to hell and back since I saw you. But I suppose you
+would rather have me remind you than apply to Mr. Amherst. You can tell
+me when to call for my answer."
+
+Justine laid down the letter and looked up. Her eyes rested on her own
+reflection in the glass, and it frightened her. She sat motionless, with
+a thickly-beating heart, one hand clenched on the letter.
+
+_"I suppose you would rather have me remind you than apply to Mr.
+Amherst."_
+
+That was what his importunity meant, then! She had been paying blackmail
+all this time.... Somewhere, from the first, in an obscure fold of
+consciousness, she had felt the stir of an unnamed, unacknowledged fear;
+and now the fear raised its head and looked at her. Well! She would look
+back at it, then: look it straight in the malignant eye. What was it,
+after all, but a "bugbear to scare children"--the ghost of the opinion
+of the many? She had suspected from the first that Wyant knew of her
+having shortened the term of Bessy Amherst's sufferings--returning to
+the room when he did, it was almost impossible that he should not have
+guessed what had happened; and his silence had made her believe that he
+understood her motive and approved it. But, supposing she had been
+mistaken, she still had nothing to fear, since she had done nothing that
+her own conscience condemned. If the act were to do again she would do
+it--she had never known a moment's regret!
+
+Suddenly she heard Amherst's step in the passage--heard him laughing and
+talking as he chased Cicely up the stairs to the nursery.
+
+_If she was not afraid, why had she never told Amherst?_
+
+Why, the answer to that was simple enough! She had not told him _because
+she was not afraid_. From the first she had retained sufficient
+detachment to view her act impartially, to find it completely justified
+by circumstances, and to decide that, since those circumstances could be
+but partly and indirectly known to her husband, she not only had the
+right to keep her own counsel, but was actually under a kind of
+obligation not to force on him the knowledge of a fact that he could not
+alter and could not completely judge.... Was there any flaw in this line
+of reasoning? Did it not show a deliberate weighing of conditions, a
+perfect rectitude of intention? And, after all, she had had Amherst's
+virtual consent to her act! She knew his feelings on such matters--his
+independence of traditional judgments, his horror of inflicting needless
+pain--she was as sure of his intellectual assent as of her own. She was
+even sure that, when she told him, he would appreciate her reasons for
+not telling him before....
+
+For now of course he must know everything--this horrible letter made it
+inevitable. She regretted that she had decided, though for the best of
+reasons, not to speak to him of her own accord; for it was intolerable
+that he should think of any external pressure as having brought her to
+avowal. But no! he would not think that. The understanding between them
+was so complete that no deceptive array of circumstances could ever make
+her motives obscure to him. She let herself rest a moment in the
+thought....
+
+Presently she heard him moving in the next room--he had come back to
+dress for dinner. She would go to him now, at once--she could not bear
+this weight on her mind the whole evening. She pushed back her chair,
+crumpling the letter in her hand; but as she did so, her eyes again fell
+on her reflection. She could not go to her husband with such a face! If
+she was not afraid, why did she look like that?
+
+Well--she was afraid! It would be easier and simpler to admit it. She
+was afraid--afraid for the first time--afraid for her own happiness! She
+had had just eight months of happiness--it was horrible to think of
+losing it so soon.... Losing it? But why should she lose it? The letter
+must have affected her brain...all her thoughts were in a blur of
+fear.... Fear of what? Of the man who understood her as no one else
+understood her? The man to whose wisdom and mercy she trusted as the
+believer trusts in God? This was a kind of abominable nightmare--even
+Amherst's image had been distorted in her mind! The only way to clear
+her brain, to recover the normal sense of things, was to go to him now,
+at once, to feel his arms about her, to let his kiss dispel her
+fears.... She rose with a long breath of relief.
+
+She had to cross the length of the room to reach his door, and when she
+had gone half-way she heard him knock.
+
+"May I come in?"
+
+She was close to the fire-place, and a bright fire burned on the hearth.
+
+"Come in!" she answered; and as she did so, she turned and dropped
+Wyant's letter into the fire. Her hand had crushed it into a little
+ball, and she saw the flames spring up and swallow it before her husband
+entered.
+
+It was not that she had changed her mind--she still meant to tell him
+everything. But to hold the letter was like holding a venomous
+snake--she wanted to exterminate it, to forget that she had ever seen
+the blotted repulsive characters. And she could not bear to have
+Amherst's eyes rest on it, to have him know that any man had dared to
+write to her in that tone. What vile meanings might not be read between
+Wyant's phrases? She had a right to tell the story in her own way--the
+true way....
+
+As Amherst approached, in his evening clothes, the heavy locks smoothed
+from his forehead, a flower of Cicely's giving in his button-hole, she
+thought she had never seen him look so kind and handsome.
+
+"Not dressed? Do you know that it's ten minutes to eight?" he said,
+coming up to her with a smile.
+
+She roused herself, putting her hands to her hair. "Yes, I know--I
+forgot," she murmured, longing to feel his arms about her, but standing
+rooted to the ground, unable to move an inch nearer.
+
+It was he who came close, drawing her lifted hands into his. "You look
+worried--I hope it was nothing troublesome that made you forget?"
+
+The divine kindness in his voice, his eyes! Yes--it would be easy, quite
+easy, to tell him....
+
+"No--yes--I was a little troubled...." she said, feeling the warmth of
+his touch flow through her hands reassuringly.
+
+"Dear! What about?"
+
+She drew a deep breath. "The letter----"
+
+He looked puzzled. "What letter?"
+
+"Downstairs...when we came in...it was not an ordinary begging-letter."
+
+"No? What then?" he asked, his face clouding.
+
+She noticed the change, and it frightened her. Was he angry? Was he
+going to be angry? But how absurd! He was only distressed at her
+distress.
+
+"What then?" he repeated, more gently.
+
+She looked up into his eyes for an instant. "It was a horrible
+letter----" she whispered, as she pressed her clasped hands against him.
+
+His grasp tightened on her wrists, and again the stern look crossed his
+face. "Horrible? What do you mean?"
+
+She had never seen him angry--but she felt suddenly that, to the guilty
+creature, his anger would be terrible. He would crush Wyant--she must be
+careful how she spoke.
+
+"I didn't mean that--only painful...."
+
+"Where is the letter? Let me see it."
+
+"Oh, no" she exclaimed, shrinking away.
+
+"Justine, what has happened? What ails you?"
+
+On a blind impulse she had backed toward the hearth, propping her arms
+against the mantel-piece while she stole a secret glance at the embers.
+Nothing remained of it--no, nothing.
+
+But suppose it was against herself that his anger turned? The idea was
+preposterous, yet she trembled at it. It was clear that she must say
+_something_ at once--must somehow account for her agitation. But the
+sense that she was unnerved--no longer in control of her face, her
+voice--made her feel that she would tell her story badly if she told it
+now.... Had she not the right to gain a respite, to choose her own hour?
+Weakness--weakness again! Every delay would only increase the phantom
+terror. Now, _now_--with her head on his breast!
+
+She turned toward him and began to speak impulsively.
+
+"I can't show you the letter, because it's not--not my secret----"
+
+"Ah?" he murmured, perceptibly relieved.
+
+"It's from some one--unlucky--whom I've known about...."
+
+"And whose troubles have been troubling you? But can't we help?"
+
+She shone on him through gleaming lashes. "Some one poor and ill--who
+needs money, I mean----" She tried to laugh away her tears. "And I
+haven't any! That's _my_ trouble!"
+
+"Foolish child! And to beg you are ashamed? And so you're letting your
+tears cool Mr. Langhope's soup?" He had her in his arms now, his kisses
+drying her cheek; and she turned her head so that their lips met in a
+long pressure.
+
+"Will a hundred dollars do?" he asked with a smile as he released her.
+
+_A hundred dollars!_ No--she was almost sure they would not. But she
+tried to shape a murmur of gratitude. "Thank you--thank you! I hated to
+ask...."
+
+"I'll write the cheque at once."
+
+"No--no," she protested, "there's no hurry."
+
+But he went back to his room, and she turned again to the toilet-table.
+Her face was painful to look at still--but a light was breaking through
+its fear. She felt the touch of a narcotic in her veins. How calm and
+peaceful the room was--and how delicious to think that her life would go
+on in it, safely and peacefully, in the old familiar way!
+
+As she swept up her hair, passing the comb through it, and flinging it
+dexterously over her lifted wrist, she heard Amherst cross the floor
+behind her, and pause to lay something on her writing-table.
+
+"Thank you," she murmured again, lowering her head as he passed.
+
+When the door had closed on him she thrust the last pin into her hair,
+dashed some drops of Cologne on her face, and went over to the
+writing-table. As she picked up the cheque she saw it was for three
+hundred dollars.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+ONCE or twice, in the days that followed, Justine found herself thinking
+that she had never known happiness before. The old state of secure
+well-being seemed now like a dreamless sleep; but this new bliss, on its
+sharp pinnacle ringed with fire--this thrilling conscious joy, daily
+and hourly snatched from fear--this was living, not sleeping!
+
+Wyant acknowledged her gift with profuse, almost servile thanks. She had
+sent it without a word--saying to herself that pity for his situation
+made it possible to ignore his baseness. And the days went on as before.
+She was not conscious of any change, save in the heightened, almost
+artificial quality of her happiness, till one day in March, when Mr.
+Langhope announced that he was going for two or three weeks to a
+friend's shooting-box in the south. The anniversary of Bessy's death was
+approaching, and Justine knew that at that time he always absented
+himself.
+
+"Supposing you and Amherst were to carry off Cicely till I come back?
+Perhaps you could persuade him to break away from work for once--or, if
+that's impossible, you could take her with you to Hanaford. She looks a
+little pale, and the change would be good for her."
+
+This was a great concession on Mr. Langhope's part, and Justine saw the
+pleasure in her husband's face. It was the first time that his
+father-in-law had suggested Cicely's going to Hanaford.
+
+"I'm afraid I can't break away just now, sir," Amherst said, "but it
+will be delightful for Justine if you'll give us Cicely while you're
+away."
+
+"Take her by all means, my dear fellow: I always sleep on both ears when
+she's with your wife."
+
+It was nearly three months since Justine had left Hanaford--and now she
+was to return there alone with her husband! There would be hours, of
+course, when the child's presence was between them--or when, again, his
+work would keep him at the mills. But in the evenings, when Cicely was
+in bed--when he and she sat alone, together in the Westmore
+drawing-room--in Bessy's drawing-room!... No--she must find some excuse
+for remaining away till she had again grown used to the idea of being
+alone with Amherst. Every day she was growing a little more used to it;
+but it would take time--time, and the full assurance that Wyant was
+silenced. Till then she could not go back to Hanaford.
+
+She found a pretext in her own health. She pleaded that she was a little
+tired, below par...and to return to Hanaford meant returning to hard
+work; with the best will in the world she could not be idle there. Might
+she not, she suggested, take Cicely to Tuxedo or Lakewood, and thus get
+quite away from household cares and good works? The pretext rang
+hollow--it was so unlike her! She saw Amherst's eyes rest anxiously on
+her as Mr. Langhope uttered his prompt assent. Certainly she did look
+tired--Mr. Langhope himself had noticed it. Had he perhaps over-taxed
+her energies, left the household too entirely on her shoulders? Oh,
+no--it was only the New York air...like Cicely, she pined for a breath
+of the woods.... And so, the day Mr. Langhope left, she and Cicely were
+packed off to Lakewood.
+
+They stayed there a week: then a fit of restlessness drove Justine back
+to town. She found an excuse in the constant rain--it was really
+useless, as she wrote Mr. Langhope, to keep the child imprisoned in an
+over-heated hotel while they could get no benefit from the outdoor life.
+In reality, she found the long lonely hours unendurable. She pined for a
+sight of her husband, and thought of committing Cicely to Mrs. Ansell's
+care, and making a sudden dash for Hanaford. But the vision of the long
+evenings in the Westmore drawing-room again restrained her. No--she
+would simply go back to New York, dine out occasionally, go to a concert
+or two, trust to the usual demands of town life to crowd her hours with
+small activities.... And in another week Mr. Langhope would be back and
+the days would resume their normal course.
+
+On arriving, she looked feverishly through the letters in the hall. None
+from Wyant--that fear was allayed! Every day added to her reassurance. By
+this time, no doubt, he was on his feet again, and ashamed--unutterably
+ashamed--of the threat that despair had wrung from him. She felt almost
+sure that his shame would keep him from ever attempting to see her, or
+even from writing again.
+
+"A gentleman called to see you yesterday, madam--he would give no name,"
+the parlour-maid said. And there was the sick fear back on her again!
+She could hardly control the trembling of her lips as she asked: "Did he
+leave no message?"
+
+"No, madam: he only wanted to know when you'd be back."
+
+She longed to return: "And did you tell him?" but restrained herself,
+and passed into the drawing-room. After all, the parlour-maid had not
+described the caller--why jump to the conclusion that it was Wyant?
+
+Three days passed, and no letter came--no sign. She struggled with the
+temptation to describe Wyant to the servants, and to forbid his
+admission. But it would not do. They were nearly all old servants, in
+whose eyes she was still the intruder, the upstart sick-nurse--she could
+not wholly trust them. And each day she felt a little easier, a little
+more convinced that the unknown visitor had not been Wyant.
+
+On the fourth day she received a letter from Amherst. He hoped to be
+back on the morrow, but as his plans were still uncertain he would
+telegraph in the morning--and meanwhile she must keep well, and rest,
+and amuse herself....
+
+Amuse herself! That evening, as it happened, she was going to the
+theatre with Mrs. Ansell. She and Mrs. Ansell, though outwardly on
+perfect terms, had not greatly advanced in intimacy. The agitated,
+decentralized life of the older woman seemed futile and trivial to
+Justine; but on Mr. Langhope's account she wished to keep up an
+appearance of friendship with his friend, and the same motive doubtless
+inspired Mrs. Ansell. Just now, at any rate, Justine was grateful for
+her attentions, and glad to go about with her. Anything--anything to get
+away from her own thoughts! That was the pass she had come to.
+
+At the theatre, in a proscenium box, the publicity, the light and
+movement, the action of the play, all helped to distract and quiet her.
+At such moments she grew ashamed of her fears. Why was she tormenting
+herself? If anything happened she had only to ask her husband for more
+money. She never spoke to him of her good works, and there would be
+nothing to excite suspicion in her asking help again for the friend
+whose secret she was pledged to keep.... But nothing was going to
+happen. As the play progressed, and the stimulus of talk and laughter
+flowed through her veins, she felt a complete return of confidence. And
+then suddenly she glanced across the house, and saw Wyant looking at
+her.
+
+He sat rather far back, in one of the side rows just beneath the
+balcony, so that his face was partly shaded. But even in the shadow it
+frightened her. She had been prepared for a change, but not for this
+ghastly deterioration. And he continued to look at her.
+
+She began to be afraid that he would do something conspicuous--point at
+her, or stand up in his seat. She thought he looked half-mad--or was it
+her own hallucination that made him appear so? She and Mrs. Ansell were
+alone in the box for the moment, and she started up, pushing back her
+chair....
+
+Mrs. Ansell leaned forward. "What is it?"
+
+"Nothing--the heat--I'll sit back for a moment." But as she withdrew
+into the back of the box, she was seized by a new fear. If he was still
+watching, might he not come to the door and try to speak to her? Her
+only safety lay in remaining in full view of the audience; and she
+returned to Mrs. Ansell's side.
+
+The other members of the party came back--the bell rang, the foot-lights
+blazed, the curtain rose. She lost herself in the mazes of the play. She
+sat so motionless, her face so intently turned toward the stage, that
+the muscles at the back of her neck began to stiffen. And then, quite
+suddenly, toward the middle of the act, she felt an undefinable sense of
+relief. She could not tell what caused it--but slowly, cautiously, while
+the eyes of the others were intent upon the stage, she turned her head
+and looked toward Wyant's seat. It was empty.
+
+Her first thought was that he had gone to wait for her outside. But
+no--there were two more acts: why should he stand at the door for half
+the evening?
+
+At last the act ended; the entr'acte elapsed; the play went on
+again--and still the seat was empty. Gradually she persuaded herself
+that she had been mistaken in thinking that the man who had occupied it
+was Wyant. Her self-command returned, she began to think and talk
+naturally, to follow the dialogue on the stage--and when the evening was
+over, and Mrs. Ansell set her down at her door, she had almost forgotten
+her fears.
+
+The next morning she felt calmer than for many days. She was sure now
+that if Wyant had wished to speak to her he would have waited at the
+door of the theatre; and the recollection of his miserable face made
+apprehension yield to pity. She began to feel that she had treated him
+coldly, uncharitably. They had been friends once, as well as
+fellow-workers; but she had been false even to the comradeship of the
+hospital. She should have sought him out and given him sympathy as well
+as money; had she shown some sign of human kindness his last letter
+might never have been written.
+
+In the course of the morning Amherst telegraphed that he hoped to settle
+his business in time to catch the two o'clock express, but that his
+plans were still uncertain. Justine and Cicely lunched alone, and after
+luncheon the little girl was despatched to her dancing-class. Justine
+herself meant to go out when the brougham returned. She went up to her
+room to dress, planning to drive in the park, and to drop in on Mrs.
+Ansell before she called for Cicely; but on the way downstairs she saw
+the servant opening the door to a visitor. It was too late to draw back;
+and descending the last steps she found herself face to face with Wyant.
+
+They looked at each other a moment in silence; then Justine murmured a
+word of greeting and led the way to the drawing-room.
+
+It was a snowy afternoon, and in the raw ash-coloured light she thought
+he looked more changed than at the theatre. She remarked, too, that his
+clothes were worn and untidy, his gloveless hands soiled and tremulous.
+None of the degrading signs of his infirmity were lacking; and she saw
+at once that, while in the early days of the habit he had probably mixed
+his drugs, so that the conflicting symptoms neutralized each other, he
+had now sunk into open morphia-taking. She felt profoundly sorry for
+him; yet as he followed her into the room physical repulsion again
+mastered the sense of pity.
+
+But where action was possible she was always self-controlled, and she
+turned to him quietly as they seated themselves.
+
+"I have been wishing to see you," she said, looking at him. "I have felt
+that I ought to have done so sooner--to have told you how sorry I am for
+your bad luck."
+
+He returned her glance with surprise: they were evidently the last words
+he had expected.
+
+"You're very kind," he said in a low embarrassed voice. He had kept on
+his shabby over-coat, and he twirled his hat in his hands as he spoke.
+
+"I have felt," Justine continued, "that perhaps a talk with you might be
+of more use----"
+
+He raised his head, fixing her with bright narrowed eyes. "I have felt
+so too: that's my reason for coming. You sent me a generous present some
+weeks ago--but I don't want to go on living on charity."
+
+"I understand that," she answered. "But why have you had to do so? Won't
+you tell me just what has happened?"
+
+She felt the words to be almost a mockery; yet she could not say "I read
+your history at a glance"; and she hoped that her question might draw
+out his wretched secret, and thus give her the chance to speak frankly.
+
+He gave a nervous laugh. "Just what has happened? It's a long story--and
+some of the details are not particularly pretty." He broke off, moving
+his hat more rapidly through his trembling hands.
+
+"Never mind: tell me."
+
+"Well--after you all left Lynbrook I had rather a bad break-down--the
+strain of Mrs. Amherst's case, I suppose. You remember Bramble, the
+Clifton grocer? Miss Bramble nursed me--I daresay you remember her too.
+When I recovered I married her--and after that things didn't go well."
+
+He paused, breathing quickly, and looking about the room with odd,
+furtive glances. "I was only half-well, anyhow--I couldn't attend to my
+patients properly--and after a few months we decided to leave Clifton,
+and I bought a practice in New Jersey. But my wife was ill there, and
+things went wrong again--damnably. I suppose you've guessed that my
+marriage was a mistake. She had an idea that we should do better in New
+York--so we came here a few months ago, and we've done decidedly worse."
+
+Justine listened with a sense of discouragement. She saw now that he did
+not mean to acknowledge his failing, and knowing the secretiveness of
+the drug-taker she decided that he was deluded enough to think he could
+still deceive her.
+
+"Well," he began again, with an attempt at jauntiness, "I've found out
+that in my profession it's a hard struggle to get on your feet again,
+after illness or--or any bad set-back. That's the reason I asked you to
+say a word for me. It's not only the money, though I need that badly--I
+want to get back my self-respect. With my record I oughtn't to be where
+I am--and you can speak for me better than any one."
+
+"Why better than the doctors you've worked with?" Justine put the
+question abruptly, looking him straight in the eyes.
+
+His glance dropped, and an unpleasant flush rose to his thin cheeks.
+
+"Well--as it happens, you're better situated than any one to help me to
+the particular thing I want."
+
+"The particular thing----?"
+
+"Yes. I understand that Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell are both interested
+in the new wing for paying patients at Saint Christopher's. I want the
+position of house-physician there, and I know you can get it for me."
+
+His tone changed as he spoke, till with the last words it became rough
+and almost menacing.
+
+Justine felt her colour rise, and her heart began to beat confusedly.
+Here was the truth, then: she could no longer be the dupe of her own
+compassion. The man knew his power and meant to use it. But at the
+thought her courage was in arms.
+
+"I'm sorry--but it's impossible," she said.
+
+"Impossible--why?"
+
+She continued to look at him steadily. "You said just now that you
+wished to regain your self-respect. Well, you must regain it before you
+can ask me--or any one else--to recommend you to a position of trust."
+
+Wyant half-rose, with an angry murmur. "My self-respect? What do you
+mean? _I_ meant that I'd lost courage--through ill-luck----"
+
+"Yes; and your ill-luck has come through your own fault. Till you cure
+yourself you're not fit to cure others."
+
+He sank back into his seat, glowering at her under sullen brows; then
+his expression gradually changed to half-sneering admiration. "You're a
+plucky one!" he said.
+
+Justine repressed a movement of disgust. "I am very sorry for you," she
+said gravely. "I saw this trouble coming on you long ago--and if there
+is any other way in which I can help you----"
+
+"Thanks," he returned, still sneering. "Your sympathy is very
+precious--there was a time when I would have given my soul for it. But
+that's over, and I'm here to talk business. You say you saw my trouble
+coming on--did it ever occur to you that you were the cause of it?"
+
+Justine glanced at him with frank contempt. "No--for I was not," she
+replied.
+
+"That's an easy way out of it. But you took everything from me--first my
+hope of marrying you; then my chance of a big success in my career; and
+I was desperate--weak, if you like--and tried to deaden my feelings in
+order to keep up my pluck."
+
+Justine rose to her feet with a movement of impatience. "Every word you
+say proves how unfit you are to assume any responsibility--to do
+anything but try to recover your health. If I can help you to that, I am
+still willing to do so."
+
+Wyant rose also, moving a step nearer. "Well, get me that place,
+then--I'll see to the rest: I'll keep straight."
+
+"No--it's impossible."
+
+"You won't?"
+
+"I can't," she repeated firmly.
+
+"And you expect to put me off with that answer?"
+
+She hesitated. "Yes--if there's no other help you'll accept."
+
+He laughed again--his feeble sneering laugh was disgusting. "Oh, I don't
+say that. I'd like to earn my living honestly--funny preference--but if
+you cut me off from that, I suppose it's only fair to let you make up
+for it. My wife and child have got to live."
+
+"You choose a strange way of helping them; but I will do what I can if
+you will go for a while to some institution----"
+
+He broke in furiously. "Institution be damned! You can't shuffle me out
+of the way like that. I'm all right--good food is what I need. You
+think I've got morphia in me--why, it's hunger!"
+
+Justine heard him with a renewal of pity. "Oh, I'm sorry for you--very
+sorry! Why do you try to deceive me?"
+
+"Why do you deceive _me_? You know what I want and you know you've got
+to let me have it. If you won't give me a line to one of your friends at
+Saint Christopher's you'll have to give me another cheque--that's the
+size of it."
+
+As they faced each other in silence Justine's pity gave way to a sudden
+hatred for the poor creature who stood shivering and sneering before
+her.
+
+"You choose the wrong tone--and I think our talk has lasted long
+enough," she said, stretching her hand to the bell.
+
+Wyant did not move. "Don't ring--unless you want me to write to your
+husband," he rejoined.
+
+A sick feeling of helplessness overcame her; but she turned on him
+firmly. "I pardoned you once for that threat!"
+
+"Yes--and you sent me some money the next day."
+
+"I was mistaken enough to think that, in your distress, you had not
+realized what you wrote. But if you're a systematic blackmailer----"
+
+"Gently--gently. Bad names don't frighten me--it's hunger and debt I'm
+afraid of."
+
+Justine felt a last tremor of compassion. He was abominable--but he was
+pitiable too.
+
+"I will really help you--I will see your wife and do what I can--but I
+can give you no money today."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because I have none. I am not as rich as you think."
+
+He smiled incredulously. "Give me a line to Mr. Langhope, then."
+
+"No."
+
+He sat down once more, leaning back with a weak assumption of ease.
+"Perhaps Mr. Amherst will think differently."
+
+She whitened, but said steadily: "Mr. Amherst is away."
+
+"Very well--I can write."
+
+For the last five minutes Justine had foreseen this threat, and had
+tried to force her mind to face dispassionately the chances it involved.
+After all, why not let him write to Amherst? The very vileness of the
+deed must rouse an indignation which would be all in her favour, would
+inevitably dispose her husband to readier sympathy with the motive of
+her act, as contrasted with the base insinuations of her slanderer. It
+seemed impossible that Amherst should condemn her when his condemnation
+involved the fulfilling of Wyant's calculations: a reaction of scorn
+would throw him into unhesitating championship of her conduct. All this
+was so clear that, had she been advising any one else, her confidence in
+the course to be taken might have strengthened the feeblest will; but
+with the question lying between herself and Amherst--with the vision of
+those soiled hands literally laid on the spotless fabric of her
+happiness, judgment wavered, foresight was obscured--she felt
+tremulously unable to face the steps between exposure and vindication.
+Her final conclusion was that she must, at any rate, gain time: buy off
+Wyant till she had been able to tell her story in her own way, and at
+her own hour, and then defy him when he returned to the assault. The
+idea that whatever concession she made would be only provisional, helped
+to excuse the weakness of making it, and enabled her at last, without
+too painful a sense of falling below her own standards, to reply in a
+low voice: "If you'll go now, I will send you something next week."
+
+But Wyant did not respond as readily as she had expected. He merely
+asked, without altering his insolently easy attitude: "How much? Unless
+it's a good deal, I prefer the letter."
+
+Oh, why could she not cry out: "Leave the house at once--your vulgar
+threats are nothing to me"--Why could she not even say in her own heart:
+_I will tell my husband tonight?_
+
+"You're afraid," said Wyant, as if answering her thought. "What's the
+use of being afraid when you can make yourself comfortable so easily?
+You called me a systematic blackmailer--well, I'm not that yet. Give me
+a thousand and you'll see the last of me--on what used to be my honour."
+
+Justine's heart sank. She had reached the point of being ready to appeal
+again to Amherst--but on what pretext could she ask for such a sum?
+
+In a lifeless voice she said: "I could not possibly get more than one or
+two hundred."
+
+Wyant scrutinized her a moment: her despair must have rung true to him.
+"Well, you must have something of your own--I saw your jewelry last
+night at the theatre," he said.
+
+So it had been he--and he had sat there appraising her value like a
+murderer!
+
+"Jewelry--?" she faltered.
+
+"You had a thumping big sapphire--wasn't it?--with diamonds round it."
+
+It was her only jewel--Amherst's marriage gift. She would have preferred
+a less valuable present, but his mother had persuaded her to accept it,
+saying that it was the bride's duty to adorn herself for the bridegroom.
+
+"I will give you nothing--" she was about to exclaim; when suddenly her
+eyes fell on the clock. If Amherst had caught the two o'clock express he
+would be at the house within the hour; and the only thing that seemed
+of consequence now, was that he should not meet Wyant. Supposing she
+still found courage to refuse--there was no knowing how long the
+humiliating scene might be prolonged: and she must be rid of the
+creature at any cost. After all, she seldom wore the sapphire--months
+might pass without its absence being noted by Amherst's careless eye;
+and if Wyant should pawn it, she might somehow save money to buy it back
+before it was missed. She went through these calculations with feverish
+rapidity; then she turned again to Wyant.
+
+"You won't come back--ever?"
+
+"I swear I won't," he said.
+
+He moved away toward the window, as if to spare her; and she turned and
+slowly left the room.
+
+She never forgot the moments that followed. Once outside the door she
+was in such haste that she stumbled on the stairs, and had to pause on
+the landing to regain her breath. In her room she found one of the
+housemaids busy, and at first could think of no pretext for dismissing
+her. Then she bade the woman go down and send the brougham away, telling
+the coachman to call for Miss Cicely at six.
+
+Left alone, she bolted the door, and as if with a thief's hand, opened
+her wardrobe, unlocked her jewel-box, and drew out the sapphire in its
+flat morocco case. She restored the box to its place, the key to its
+ring--then she opened the case and looked at the sapphire. As she did
+so, a little tremor ran over her neck and throat, and closing her eyes
+she felt her husband's kiss, and the touch of his hands as he fastened
+on the jewel.
+
+She unbolted the door, listened intently on the landing, and then went
+slowly down the stairs. None of the servants were in sight, yet as she
+reached the lower hall she was conscious that the air had grown suddenly
+colder, as though the outer door had just been opened. She paused, and
+listened again. There was a sound of talking in the drawing-room. Could
+it be that in her absence a visitor had been admitted? The possibility
+frightened her at first--then she welcomed it as an unexpected means of
+ridding herself of her tormentor.
+
+She opened the drawing-room door, and saw her husband talking with
+Wyant.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+AMHERST, his back to the threshold, sat at a table writing: Wyant stood
+a few feet away, staring down at the fire.
+
+Neither had heard the door open; and before they were aware of her
+entrance Justine had calculated that she must have been away for at
+least five minutes, and that in that space of time almost anything
+might have passed between them.
+
+For a moment the power of connected thought left her; then her heart
+gave a bound of relief. She said to herself that Wyant had doubtless
+made some allusion to his situation, and that her husband, conscious
+only of a great debt of gratitude, had at once sat down to draw a cheque
+for him. The idea was so reassuring that it restored all her clearness
+of thought.
+
+Wyant was the first to see her. He made an abrupt movement, and Amherst,
+rising, turned and put an envelope in his hand.
+
+"There, my dear fellow----"
+
+As he turned he caught sight of his wife.
+
+"I caught the twelve o'clock train after all--you got my second wire?"
+he asked.
+
+"No," she faltered, pressing her left hand, with the little case in it,
+close to the folds of her dress.
+
+"I was afraid not. There was a bad storm at Hanaford, and they said
+there might be a delay."
+
+At the same moment she found Wyant advancing with extended hand, and
+understood that he had concealed the fact of having already seen her.
+She accepted the cue, and shook his hand, murmuring: "How do you do?"
+
+Amherst looked at her, perhaps struck by her manner.
+
+"You have not seen Dr. Wyant since Lynbrook?"
+
+"No," she answered, thankful to have this pretext for her emotion.
+
+"I have been telling him that he should not have left us so long without
+news--especially as he has been ill, and things have gone rather badly
+with him. But I hope we can help now. He has heard that Saint
+Christopher's is looking for a house-physician for the paying patients'
+wing, and as Mr. Langhope is away I have given him a line to Mrs.
+Ansell."
+
+"Extremely kind of you," Wyant murmured, passing his hand over his
+forehead.
+
+Justine stood silent. She wondered that her husband had not noticed that
+tremulous degraded hand. But he was always so blind to externals--and he
+had no medical experience to sharpen his perceptions.
+
+Suddenly she felt impelled to speak "I am sorry Dr. Wyant has
+been--unfortunate. Of course you will want to do everything to help him;
+but would it not be better to wait till Mr. Langhope comes back?"
+
+"Wyant thinks the delay might make him lose the place. It seems the
+board meets tomorrow. And Mrs. Ansell really knows much more about it.
+Isn't she the secretary of the ladies' committee?"
+
+"I'm not sure--I believe so. But surely Mr. Langhope should be
+consulted."
+
+She felt Wyant's face change: his eyes settled on her in a threatening
+stare.
+
+Amherst looked at her also, and there was surprise in his glance. "I
+think I can answer for my father-in-law. He feels as strongly as I do
+how much we all owe to Dr. Wyant."
+
+He seldom spoke of Mr. Langhope as his father-in-law, and the chance
+designation seemed to mark a closer tie between them, to exclude Justine
+from what was after all a family affair. For a moment she felt tempted
+to accept the suggestion, and let the responsibility fall where it
+would. But it would fall on Amherst--and that was intolerable.
+
+"I think you ought to wait," she insisted.
+
+An embarrassed silence settled on the three.
+
+Wyant broke it by advancing toward Amherst. "I shall never forget your
+kindness," he said; "and I hope to prove to Mrs. Amherst that it's not
+misplaced."
+
+The words were well chosen, and well spoken; Justine saw that they
+produced a good effect. Amherst grasped the physician's hand with a
+smile. "My dear fellow, I wish I could do more. Be sure to call on me
+again if you want help."
+
+"Oh, you've put me on my feet," said Wyant gratefully.
+
+He bowed slightly to Justine and turned to go; but as he reached the
+threshold she moved after him.
+
+"Dr. Wyant--you must give back that letter."
+
+He stopped short with a whitening face.
+
+She felt Amherst's eyes on her again; and she said desperately,
+addressing him: "Dr. Wyant understands my reasons."
+
+Her husband's glance turned abruptly to Wyant. "Do you?" he asked after
+a pause.
+
+Wyant looked from one to the other. The moisture came out on his
+forehead, and he passed his hand over it again. "Yes," he said in a dry
+voice. "Mrs. Amherst wants me farther off--out of New York."
+
+"Out of New York? What do you mean?"
+
+Justine interposed hastily, before the answer could come. "It is because
+Dr. Wyant is not in condition--for such a place--just at present."
+
+"But he assures me he is quite well."
+
+There was another silence; and again Wyant broke in, this time with a
+slight laugh. "I can explain what Mrs. Amherst means; she intends to
+accuse me of the morphine habit. And I can explain her reason for doing
+so--she wants me out of the way."
+
+Amherst turned on the speaker; and, as she had foreseen, his look was
+terrible. "You haven't explained that yet," he said.
+
+"Well--I can." Wyant waited another moment. "I know too much about her,"
+he declared.
+
+There was a low exclamation from Justine, and Amherst strode toward
+Wyant. "You infernal blackguard!" he cried.
+
+"Oh, gently----" Wyant muttered, flinching back from his outstretched
+arm.
+
+"My wife's wish is sufficient. Give me back that letter."
+
+Wyant straightened himself. "No, by God, I won't!" he retorted
+furiously. "I didn't ask you for it till you offered to help me; but I
+won't let it be taken back without a word, like a thief that you'd
+caught with your umbrella. If your wife won't explain I will. She's,
+afraid I'll talk about what happened at Lynbrook."
+
+Amherst's arm fell to his side. "At Lynbrook?"
+
+Behind him there was a sound of inarticulate appeal--but he took no
+notice.
+
+"Yes. It's she who used morphia--but not on herself. She gives it to
+other people. She gave an overdose to Mrs. Amherst."
+
+Amherst looked at him confusedly. "An overdose?"
+
+"Yes--purposely, I mean. And I came into the room at the wrong time. I
+can prove that Mrs. Amherst died of morphia-poisoning."
+
+"John!" Justine gasped out, pressing between them.
+
+Amherst gently put aside the hand with which she had caught his arm.
+"Wait a moment: this can't rest here. You can't want it to," he said to
+her in an undertone.
+
+"Why do you care...for what he says...when I don't?" she breathed back
+with trembling lips.
+
+"You can see I am not wanted here," Wyant threw in with a sneer.
+
+Amherst remained silent for a brief space; then he turned his eyes once
+more to his wife.
+
+Justine lifted her face: it looked small and spent, like an extinguished
+taper.
+
+"It's true," she said.
+
+"True?"
+
+"I _did_ give...an overdose...intentionally, when I knew there was no
+hope, and when the surgeons said she might go on suffering. She was very
+strong...and I couldn't bear it...you couldn't have borne it...."
+
+There was another silence; then she went on in a stronger voice, looking
+straight at her husband: "And now will you send this man away?"
+
+Amherst glanced at Wyant without moving. "Go," he said curtly.
+
+Wyant, instead, moved a step nearer. "Just a minute, please. It's only
+fair to hear my side. Your wife says there was no hope; yet the day
+before she...gave the dose, Dr. Garford told her in my presence that
+Mrs. Amherst might live."
+
+Again Amherst's eyes addressed themselves slowly to Justine; and she
+forced her lips to articulate an answer.
+
+"Dr. Garford said...one could never tell...but I know he didn't believe
+in the chance of recovery...no one did."
+
+"Dr. Garford is dead," said Wyant grimly.
+
+Amherst strode up to him again. "You scoundrel--leave the house!" he
+commanded.
+
+But still Wyant sneeringly stood his ground. "Not till I've finished. I
+can't afford to let myself be kicked out like a dog because I happen to
+be in the way. Every doctor knows that in cases of spinal lesion
+recovery is becoming more and more frequent--if the patient survives the
+third week there's every reason to hope. Those are the facts as they
+would appear to any surgeon. If they're not true, why is Mrs. Amherst
+afraid of having them stated? Why has she been paying me for nearly a
+year to keep them quiet?"
+
+"Oh----" Justine moaned.
+
+"I never thought of talking till luck went against me. Then I asked her
+for help--and reminded her of certain things. After that she kept me
+supplied pretty regularly." He thrust his shaking hand into an inner
+pocket. "Here are her envelopes...Quebec...Montreal...Saranac...I know
+just where you went on your honeymoon. She had to write often, because
+the sums were small. Why did she do it, if she wasn't afraid? And why
+did she go upstairs just now to fetch me something? If you don't believe
+me, ask her what she's got in her hand."
+
+Amherst did not heed this injunction. He stood motionless, gripping the
+back of a chair, as if his next gesture might be to lift and hurl it at
+the speaker.
+
+"Ask her----" Wyant repeated.
+
+Amherst turned his head slowly, and his dull gaze rested on his wife.
+His face looked years older--lips and eyes moved as heavily as an old
+man's.
+
+As he looked at her, Justine came forward without speaking, and laid the
+little morocco case in his hand. He held it there a moment, as if hardly
+understanding her action--then he tossed it on the table at his elbow,
+and walked up to Wyant.
+
+"You hound," he said--"now go!"
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+WHEN Wyant had left the room, and the house-door had closed on him,
+Amherst spoke to his wife.
+
+"Come upstairs," he said.
+
+Justine followed him, scarcely conscious where she went, but moving
+already with a lighter tread. Part of her weight of misery had been
+lifted with Wyant's going. She had suffered less from the fear of what
+her husband might think than from the shame of making her avowal in her
+defamer's presence. And her faith in Amherst's comprehension had begun
+to revive. He had dismissed Wyant with scorn and horror--did not that
+show that he was on her side already? And how many more arguments she
+had at her call! Her brain hummed with them as she followed him up the
+stairs.
+
+In her bedroom he closed the door and stood motionless, the same heavy
+half-paralyzed look on his face. It frightened her and she went up to
+him.
+
+"John!" she said timidly.
+
+He put his hand to his head. "Wait a moment----" he returned; and she
+waited, her heart slowly sinking again.
+
+The moment over, he seemed to recover his power of movement. He crossed
+the room and threw himself into the armchair near the hearth.
+
+"Now tell me everything."
+
+He sat thrown back, his eyes fixed on the fire, and the vertical lines
+between his brows forming a deep scar in his white face.
+
+Justine moved nearer, and touched his arm beseechingly. "Won't you look
+at me?"
+
+He turned his head slowly, as if with an effort, and his eyes rested
+reluctantly on hers.
+
+"Oh, not like that!" she exclaimed.
+
+He seemed to make a stronger effort at self-control. "Please don't heed
+me--but say what there is to say," he said in a level voice, his gaze on
+the fire.
+
+She stood before him, her arms hanging down, her clasped fingers
+twisting restlessly.
+
+"I don't know that there is much to say--beyond what I've told you."
+
+There was a slight sound in Amherst's throat, like the ghost of a
+derisive laugh. After another interval he said: "I wish to hear exactly
+what happened."
+
+She seated herself on the edge of a chair near by, bending forward, with
+hands interlocked and arms extended on her knees--every line reaching
+out to him, as though her whole slight body were an arrow winged with
+pleadings. It was a relief to speak at last, even face to face with the
+stony image that sat in her husband's place; and she told her story,
+detail by detail, omitting nothing, exaggerating nothing, speaking
+slowly, clearly, with precision, aware that the bare facts were her
+strongest argument.
+
+Amherst, as he listened, shifted his position once, raising his hand so
+that it screened his face; and in that attitude he remained when she had
+ended.
+
+As she waited for him to speak, Justine realized that her heart had been
+alive with tremulous hopes. All through her narrative she had counted on
+a murmur of perception, an exclamation of pity: she had felt sure of
+melting the stony image. But Amherst said no word.
+
+At length he spoke, still without turning his head. "You have not told
+me why you kept this from me."
+
+A sob formed in her throat, and she had to wait to steady her voice.
+
+"No--that was my wrong--my weakness. When I did it I never thought of
+being afraid to tell you--I had talked it over with you in my own
+mind...so often...before...."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Then--- when you came back it was harder...though I was still sure you
+would approve me."
+
+"Why harder?"
+
+"Because at first--at Lynbrook--I _could not_ tell it all over, in
+detail, as I have now...it was beyond human power...and without doing
+so, I couldn't make it all clear to you...and so should only have added
+to your pain. If you had been there you would have done as I did.... I
+felt sure of that from the first. But coming afterward, you couldn't
+judge...no one who was not there could judge...and I wanted to spare
+you...."
+
+"And afterward?"
+
+She had shrunk in advance from this question, and she could not answer
+it at once. To gain time she echoed it. "Afterward?"
+
+"Did it never occur to you, when we met later--when you first went to
+Mr. Langhope----"?
+
+"To tell you then? No--because by that time I had come to see that I
+could never be quite sure of making you understand. No one who was not
+there at the time could know what it was to see her suffer."
+
+"You thought it all over, then--decided definitely against telling me?"
+
+"I did not have to think long. I felt I had done right--I still feel
+so--and I was sure you would feel so, if you were in the same
+circumstances."
+
+There was another pause. Then Amherst said: "And last September--at
+Hanaford?"
+
+It was the word for which she had waited--the word of her inmost fears.
+She felt the blood mount to her face.
+
+"Did you see no difference--no special reason for telling me then?"
+
+"Yes----" she faltered.
+
+"Yet you said nothing."
+
+"No."
+
+Silence again. Her eyes strayed to the clock, and some dim association
+of ideas told her that Cicely would soon be coming in.
+
+"Why did you say nothing?"
+
+He lowered his hand and turned toward her as he spoke; and she looked up
+and faced him.
+
+"Because I regarded the question as settled. I had decided it in my own
+mind months before, and had never regretted my decision. I should have
+thought it morbid...unnatural...to go over the whole subject again...to
+let it affect a situation that had come about...so much later...so
+unexpectedly."
+
+"Did you never feel that, later, if I came to know--if others came to
+know--it might be difficult----?"
+
+"No; for I didn't care for the others--and I believed that, whatever
+your own feelings were, you would know I had done what I thought right."
+
+She spoke the words proudly, strongly, and for the first time the hard
+lines of his face relaxed, and a slight tremor crossed it.
+
+"If you believed this, why have you been letting that cur blackmail
+you?"
+
+"Because when he began I saw for the first time that what I had done
+might be turned against me by--by those who disliked our marriage. And I
+was afraid for my happiness. That was my weakness...it is what I am
+suffering for now."
+
+"_Suffering_!" he echoed ironically, as though she had presumed to apply
+to herself a word of which he had the grim monopoly. He rose and took a
+few aimless steps; then he halted before her.
+
+"That day--last month--when you asked me for money...was it...?"
+
+"Yes----" she said, her head sinking.
+
+He laughed. "You couldn't tell me--but you could use my money to bribe
+that fellow to conspire with you!"
+
+"I had none of my own."
+
+"No--nor I either! You used _her_ money.--God!" he groaned, turning away
+with clenched hands.
+
+Justine had risen also, and she stood motionless, her hands clasped
+against her breast, in the drawn shrinking attitude of a fugitive
+overtaken by a blinding storm. He moved back to her with an appealing
+gesture.
+
+"And you didn't see--it didn't occur to you--that your doing...as you
+did...was an obstacle--an insurmountable obstacle--to our ever ...?"
+
+She cut him short with an indignant cry. "No! No! for it was _not_. How
+could it have anything to do with what...came after...with you or me? I
+did it only for Bessy--it concerned only Bessy!"
+
+"Ah, don't name her!" broke from him harshly, and she drew back, cut to
+the heart.
+
+There was another pause, during which he seemed to fall into a kind of
+dazed irresolution, his head on his breast, as though unconscious of her
+presence. Then he roused himself and went to the door.
+
+As he passed her she sprang after him. "John--John! Is that all you have
+to say?"
+
+"What more is there?"
+
+"What more? Everything!--What right have you to turn from me as if I
+were a murderess? I did nothing but what your own reason, your own
+arguments, have justified a hundred times! I made a mistake in not
+telling you at once--but a mistake is not a crime. It can't be your real
+feeling that turns you from me--it must be the dread of what other
+people would think! But when have you cared for what other people
+thought? When have your own actions been governed by it?"
+
+He moved another step without speaking, and she caught him by the arm.
+"No! you sha'n't go--not like that!--Wait!"
+
+She turned and crossed the room. On the lower shelf of the little table
+by her bed a few books were ranged: she stooped and drew one hurriedly
+forth, opening it at the fly-leaf as she went back to Amherst.
+
+"There--read that. The book was at Lynbrook--in your room--and I came
+across it by chance the very day...."
+
+It was the little volume of Bacon which she was thrusting at him. He
+took it with a bewildered look, as if scarcely following what she said.
+
+"Read it--read it!" she commanded; and mechanically he read out the
+words he had written.
+
+"_La vraie morale se moque de la morale.... We perish because we follow
+other men's examples.... Socrates called the opinions of the many
+Lamiæ._--Good God!" he exclaimed, flinging the book from him with a
+gesture of abhorrence.
+
+Justine watched him with panting lips, her knees trembling under her.
+"But you wrote it--you wrote it! I thought you meant it!" she cried, as
+the book spun across a table and dropped to the floor.
+
+He looked at her coldly, almost apprehensively, as if she had grown
+suddenly dangerous and remote; then he turned and walked out of the
+room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The striking of the clock roused her. She rose to her feet, rang the
+bell, and told the maid, through the door, that she had a headache, and
+was unable to see Miss Cicely. Then she turned back into the room, and
+darkness closed on her. She was not the kind to take grief passively--it
+drove her in anguished pacings up and down the floor. She walked and
+walked till her legs flagged under her; then she dropped stupidly into
+the chair where Amherst had sat....
+
+All her world had crumbled about her. It was as if some law of mental
+gravity had been mysteriously suspended, and every firmly-anchored
+conviction, every accepted process of reasoning, spun disconnectedly
+through space. Amherst had not understood her--worse still, he had
+judged her as the world might judge her! The core of her misery was
+there. With terrible clearness she saw the suspicion that had crossed
+his mind--the suspicion that she had kept silence in the beginning
+because she loved him, and feared to lose him if she spoke.
+
+And what if it were true? What if her unconscious guilt went back even
+farther than his thought dared to track it? She could not now recall a
+time when she had not loved him. Every chance meeting with him, from
+their first brief talk at Hanaford, stood out embossed and glowing
+against the blur of lesser memories. Was it possible that she had loved
+him during Bessy's life--that she had even, sub-consciously, blindly,
+been urged by her feeling for him to perform the act?
+
+But she shook herself free from this morbid horror--the rebound of
+health was always prompt in her, and her mind instinctively rejected
+every form of moral poison. No! Her motive had been normal, sane and
+justifiable--completely justifiable. Her fault lay in having dared to
+rise above conventional restrictions, her mistake in believing that her
+husband could rise with her. These reflections steadied her but they did
+not bring much comfort. For her whole life was centred in Amherst, and
+she saw that he would never be able to free himself from the traditional
+view of her act. In looking back, and correcting her survey of his
+character in the revealing light of the last hours, she perceived that,
+like many men of emancipated thought, he had remained subject to the old
+conventions of feeling. And he had probably never given much thought to
+women till he met her--had always been content to deal with them in the
+accepted currency of sentiment. After all, it was the currency they
+liked best, and for which they offered their prettiest wares!
+
+But what of the intellectual accord between himself and her? She had not
+been deceived in that! He and she had really been wedded in mind as well
+as in heart. But until now there had not arisen in their lives one of
+those searching questions which call into play emotions rooted far below
+reason and judgment, in the dark primal depths of inherited feeling. It
+is easy to judge impersonal problems intellectually, turning on them the
+full light of acquired knowledge; but too often one must still grope
+one's way through the personal difficulty by the dim taper carried in
+long-dead hands....
+
+But was there then no hope of lifting one's individual life to a clearer
+height of conduct? Must one be content to think for the race, and to
+feel only--feel blindly and incoherently--for one's self? And was it not
+from such natures as Amherst's--natures in which independence of
+judgment was blent with strong human sympathy--that the liberating
+impulse should come?
+
+Her mind grew weary of revolving in this vain circle of questions. The
+fact was that, in their particular case, Amherst had not risen above
+prejudice and emotion; that, though her act was one to which his
+intellectual sanction was given, he had turned from her with instinctive
+repugnance, had dishonoured her by the most wounding suspicions. The
+tie between them was forever stained and debased.
+
+Justine's long hospital-discipline made it impossible for her to lose
+consciousness of the lapse of time, or to let her misery thicken into
+mental stupor. She could not help thinking and moving; and she presently
+lifted herself to her feet, turned on the light, and began to prepare
+for dinner. It would be terrible to face her husband across Mr.
+Langhope's pretty dinner-table, and afterward in the charming
+drawing-room, with its delicate old ornaments and intimate luxurious
+furniture; but she could not continue to sit motionless in the dark: it
+was her innermost instinct to pick herself up and go on.
+
+While she dressed she listened anxiously for Amherst's step in the next
+room; but there was no sound, and when she dragged herself downstairs
+the drawing-room was empty, and the parlour-maid, after a decent delay,
+came to ask if dinner should be postponed.
+
+She said no, murmuring some vague pretext for her husband's absence, and
+sitting alone through the succession of courses which composed the brief
+but carefully-studied _menu_. When this ordeal was over she returned to
+the drawing-room and took up a book. It chanced to be a new volume on
+labour problems, which Amherst must have brought back with him from
+Westmore; and it carried her thoughts instantly to the mills. Would
+this disaster poison their work there as well as their personal
+relation? Would he think of her as carrying contamination even into the
+task their love had illumined?
+
+The hours went on without his returning, and at length it occurred to
+her that he might have taken the night train to Hanaford. Her heart
+contracted at the thought: she remembered--though every nerve shrank
+from the analogy--his sudden flight at another crisis in his life, and
+she felt obscurely that if he escaped from her now she would never
+recover her hold on him. But could he be so cruel--could he wish any one
+to suffer as she was suffering?
+
+At ten o'clock she could endure the drawing-room no longer, and went up
+to her room again. She undressed slowly, trying to prolong the process
+as much as possible, to put off the period of silence and inaction which
+would close in on her when she lay down on her bed. But at length the
+dreaded moment came--there was nothing more between her and the night.
+She crept into bed and put out the light; but as she slipped between the
+cold sheets a trembling seized her, and after a moment she drew on her
+dressing-gown again and groped her way to the lounge by the fire.
+
+She pushed the lounge closer to the hearth and lay down, still
+shivering, though she had drawn the quilted coverlet up to her chin. She
+lay there a long time, with closed eyes, in a mental darkness torn by
+sudden flashes of memory. In one of these flashes a phrase of Amherst's
+stood out--a word spoken at Westmore, on the day of the opening of the
+Emergency Hospital, about a good-looking young man who had called to see
+her. She remembered Amherst's boyish burst of jealousy, his sudden
+relief at the thought that the visitor might have been Wyant. And no
+doubt it _was_ Wyant--Wyant who had come to Hanaford to threaten her,
+and who, baffled by her non-arrival, or for some other unexplained
+reason, had left again without carrying out his purpose.
+
+It was dreadful to think by how slight a chance her first draught of
+happiness had escaped that drop of poison; yet, when she understood, her
+inward cry was: "If it had happened, my dearest need not have
+suffered!"... Already she was feeling Amherst's pain more than her own,
+understanding that it was harder to bear than hers because it was at war
+with all the reflective part of his nature.
+
+As she lay there, her face pressed into the cushions, she heard a sound
+through the silent house--the opening and closing of the outer door. She
+turned cold, and lay listening with strained ears.... Yes; now there was
+a step on the stairs--her husband's step! She heard him turn into his
+own room. The throbs of her heart almost deafened her--she only
+distinguished confusedly that he was moving about within, so close that
+it was as if she felt his touch. Then her door opened and he entered.
+
+He stumbled slightly in the darkness before he found the switch of the
+lamp; and as he bent over it she saw that his face was flushed, and that
+his eyes had an excited light which, in any one less abstemious, might
+almost have seemed like the effect of wine.
+
+"Are you awake?" he asked.
+
+She started up against the cushions, her black hair streaming about her
+small ghostly face.
+
+"Yes."
+
+He walked over to the lounge and dropped into the low chair beside it.
+
+"I've given that cur a lesson he won't forget," he exclaimed, breathing
+hard, the redness deepening in his face.
+
+She turned on him in joy and trembling. "John!--Oh, John! You didn't
+follow him? Oh, what happened? What have you done?"
+
+"No. I didn't follow him. But there are some things that even the powers
+above can't stand. And so they managed to let me run across him--by the
+merest accident--and I gave him something to remember."
+
+He spoke in a strong clear voice that had a brightness like the
+brightness in his eyes. She felt its heat in her veins--the primitive
+woman in her glowed at contact with the primitive man. But reflection
+chilled her the next moment.
+
+"But why--why? Oh, how could you? Where did it happen--oh, not in the
+street?"
+
+As she questioned him, there rose before her the terrified vision of a
+crowd gathering--the police, newspapers, a hideous publicity. He must
+have been mad to do it--and yet he must have done it because he loved
+her!
+
+"No--no. Don't be afraid. The powers looked after that too. There was no
+one about--and I don't think he'll talk much about it."
+
+She trembled, fearing yet adoring him. Nothing could have been more
+unlike the Amherst she fancied she knew than this act of irrational
+anger which had magically lifted the darkness from his spirit; yet,
+magically also, it gave him back to her, made them one flesh once more.
+And suddenly the pressure of opposed emotions became too strong, and she
+burst into tears.
+
+She wept painfully, violently, with the resistance of strong natures
+unused to emotional expression; till at length, through the tumult of
+her tears, she felt her husband's reassuring touch.
+
+"Justine," he said, speaking once more in his natural voice.
+
+She raised her face from her hands, and they looked at each other.
+
+"Justine--this afternoon--I said things I didn't mean to say."
+
+Her lips parted, but her throat was still full of sobs, and she could
+only look at him while the tears ran down.
+
+"I believe I understand now," he continued, in the same quiet tone.
+
+Her hand shrank from his clasp, and she began to tremble again. "Oh, if
+you only _believe_...if you're not sure...don't pretend to be!"
+
+He sat down beside her and drew her into his arms. "I am sure," he
+whispered, holding her close, and pressing his lips against her face and
+hair.
+
+"Oh, my husband--my husband! You've come back to me?"
+
+He answered her with more kisses, murmuring through them: "Poor
+child--poor child--poor Justine...." while he held her fast.
+
+With her face against him she yielded to the childish luxury of
+murmuring out unjustified fears. "I was afraid you had gone back to
+Hanaford----"
+
+"Tonight? To Hanaford?"
+
+"To tell your mother."
+
+She felt a contraction of the arm embracing her, as though a throb of
+pain had stiffened it.
+
+"I shall never tell any one," he said abruptly; but as he felt in her a
+responsive shrinking he gathered her close again, whispering through the
+hair that fell about her cheek: "Don't talk, dear...let us never talk
+of it again...." And in the clasp of his arms her terror and anguish
+subsided, giving way, not to the deep peace of tranquillized thought,
+but to a confused well-being that lulled all thought to sleep.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+
+BUT thought could never be long silent between them; and Justine's
+triumph lasted but a day.
+
+With its end she saw what it had been made of: the ascendency of youth
+and sex over his subjugated judgment. Her first impulse was to try and
+maintain it--why not use the protective arts with which love inspired
+her? She who lived so keenly in the brain could live as intensely in her
+feelings; her quick imagination tutored her looks and words, taught her
+the spells to weave about shorn giants. And for a few days she and
+Amherst lost themselves in this self-evoked cloud of passion, both
+clinging fast to the visible, the palpable in their relation, as if
+conscious already that its finer essence had fled.
+
+Amherst made no allusion to what had passed, asked for no details,
+offered no reassurances--behaved as if the whole episode had been
+effaced from his mind. And from Wyant there came no sound: he seemed to
+have disappeared from life as he had from their talk.
+
+Toward the end of the week Amherst announced that he must return to
+Hanaford; and Justine at once declared her intention of going with him.
+
+He seemed surprised, disconcerted almost; and for the first time the
+shadow of what had happened fell visibly between them.
+
+"But ought you to leave Cicely before Mr. Langhope comes back?" he
+suggested.
+
+"He will be here in two days."
+
+"But he will expect to find you."
+
+"It is almost the first of April. We are to have Cicely with us for the
+summer. There is no reason why I should not go back to my work at
+Westmore."
+
+There was in fact no reason that he could produce; and the next day they
+returned to Hanaford together.
+
+With her perceptions strung to the last pitch of sensitiveness, she felt
+a change in Amherst as soon as they re-entered Bessy's house. He was
+still scrupulously considerate, almost too scrupulously tender; but with
+a tinge of lassitude, like a man who tries to keep up under the
+stupefying approach of illness. And she began to hate the power by which
+she held him. It was not thus they had once walked together, free in
+mind though so linked in habit and feeling; when their love was not a
+deadening drug but a vivifying element that cleared thought instead of
+stifling it. There were moments when she felt that open alienation would
+be easier, because it would be nearer the truth. And at such moments
+she longed to speak, to beg him to utter his mind, to go with her once
+for all into the depths of the subject they continued to avoid. But at
+the last her heart always failed her: she could not face the thought of
+losing him, of hearing him speak estranging words to her.
+
+They had been at Hanaford for about ten days when, one morning at
+breakfast, Amherst uttered a sudden exclamation over a letter he was
+reading.
+
+"What is it?" she asked in a tremor.
+
+He had grown very pale, and was pushing the hair from his forehead with
+the gesture habitual to him in moments of painful indecision.
+
+"What is it?" Justine repeated, her fear growing.
+
+"Nothing----" he began, thrusting the letter under the pile of envelopes
+by his plate; but she continued to look at him anxiously, till she drew
+his eyes to hers.
+
+"Mr. Langhope writes that they've appointed Wyant to Saint
+Christopher's," he said abruptly.
+
+"Oh, the letter--we forgot the letter!" she cried.
+
+"Yes--we forgot the letter."
+
+"But how dare he----?"
+
+Amherst said nothing, but the long silence between them seemed full of
+ironic answers, till she brought out, hardly above her breath: "What
+shall you do?"
+
+"Write at once--tell Mr. Langhope he's not fit for the place."
+
+"Of course----" she murmured.
+
+He went on tearing open his other letters, and glancing at their
+contents. She leaned back in her chair, her cup of coffee untasted,
+listening to the recurrent crackle of torn paper as he tossed aside one
+letter after another.
+
+Presently he rose from his seat, and as she followed him from the
+dining-room she noticed that his breakfast had also remained untasted.
+He gathered up his letters and walked toward the smoking-room; and after
+a moment's hesitation she joined him.
+
+"John," she said from the threshold.
+
+He was just seating himself at his desk, but he turned to her with an
+obvious effort at kindness which made the set look of his face the more
+marked.
+
+She closed the door and went up to him.
+
+"If you write that to Mr. Langhope--Dr. Wyant will--will tell him," she
+said.
+
+"Yes--we must be prepared for that."
+
+She was silent, and Amherst flung himself down on the leather ottoman
+against the wall. She stood before him, clasping and unclasping her
+hands in speechless distress.
+
+"What would you have me do?" he asked at length, almost irritably.
+
+"I only thought...he told me he would keep straight...if he only had a
+chance," she faltered out.
+
+Amherst lifted his head slowly, and looked at her. "You mean--I am to do
+nothing? Is that it?"
+
+She moved nearer to him with beseeching eyes. "I can't bear it.... I
+can't bear that others should come between us," she broke out
+passionately.
+
+He made no answer, but she could see a look of suffering cross his face,
+and coming still closer, she sank down on the ottoman, laying her hand
+on his. "John...oh, John, spare me," she whispered.
+
+For a moment his hand lay quiet under hers; then he drew it out, and
+enclosed her trembling fingers.
+
+"Very well--I'll give him a chance--I'll do nothing," he said, suddenly
+putting his other arm about her.
+
+The reaction caught her by the throat, forcing out a dry sob or two; and
+as she pressed her face against him he raised it up and gently kissed
+her.
+
+But even as their lips met she felt that they were sealing a treaty with
+dishonour. That his kiss should come to mean that to her! It was
+unbearable--worse than any personal pain--the thought of dragging him
+down to falsehood through her weakness.
+
+She drew back and rose to her feet, putting aside his detaining hand.
+
+"No--no! What am I saying? It can't be--you must tell the truth." Her
+voice gathered strength as she spoke. "Oh, forget what I said--I didn't
+mean it!"
+
+But again he seemed sunk in inaction, like a man over whom some baneful
+lethargy is stealing.
+
+"John--John--forget!" she repeated urgently.
+
+He looked up at her. "You realize what it will mean?"
+
+"Yes--I realize.... But it must be.... And it will make no difference
+between us...will it?"
+
+"No--no. Why should it?" he answered apathetically.
+
+"Then write--tell Mr. Langhope not to give him the place. I want it
+over."
+
+He rose slowly to his feet, without looking at her again, and walked
+over to the desk. She sank down on the ottoman and watched him with
+burning eyes while he drew forth a sheet of note-paper and began to
+write.
+
+But after he had written a few words he laid down his pen, and swung his
+chair about so that he faced her.
+
+"I can't do it in this way," he exclaimed.
+
+"How then? What do you mean?" she said, starting up.
+
+He looked at her. "Do you want the story to come from Wyant?"
+
+"Oh----" She looked back at him with sudden insight. "You mean to tell
+Mr. Langhope yourself?"
+
+"Yes. I mean to take the next train to town and tell him."
+
+Her trembling increased so much that she had to rest her hands against
+the edge of the ottoman to steady herself. "But if...if after
+all...Wyant should not speak?"
+
+"Well--if he shouldn't? Could you bear to owe our safety to _him_?"
+
+"Safety!"
+
+"It comes to that, doesn't it, if _we're_ afraid to speak?"
+
+She sat silent, letting the bitter truth of this sink into her till it
+poured courage into her veins.
+
+"Yes--it comes to that," she confessed.
+
+"Then you feel as I do?"
+
+"That you must go----?"
+
+"That this is intolerable!"
+
+The words struck down her last illusion, and she rose and went over to
+the writing-table. "Yes--go," she said.
+
+He stood up also, and took both her hands, not in a caress, but gravely,
+almost severely.
+
+"Listen, Justine. You must understand exactly what this means--may mean.
+I am willing to go on as we are now...as long as we can...because I
+love you...because I would do anything to spare you pain. But if I speak
+I must say everything--I must follow this thing up to its uttermost
+consequences. That's what I want to make clear to you."
+
+Her heart sank with a foreboding of new peril. "What consequences?"
+
+"Can't you see for yourself--when you look about this house?"
+
+"This house----?"
+
+He dropped her hands and took an abrupt turn across the room.
+
+"I owe everything to her," he broke out, "all I am, all I have, all I
+have been able to give you--and I must go and tell her father that
+you...."
+
+"Stop--stop!" she cried, lifting her hands as if to keep off a blow.
+
+"No--don't make me stop. We must face it," he said doggedly.
+
+"But this--this isn't the truth! You put it as if--almost as if----"
+
+"Yes--don't finish.--Has it occurred to you that _he_ may think that?"
+Amherst asked with a terrible laugh. But at that she recovered her
+courage, as she always did when an extreme call was made on it.
+
+"No--I don't believe it! If he _does_, it will be because you think it
+yourself...." Her voice sank, and she lifted her hands and pressed them
+to her temples. "And if you think it, nothing matters...one way or the
+other...." She paused, and her voice regained its strength. "That is
+what I must face before you go: what _you_ think, what _you_ believe of
+me. You've never told me that."
+
+Amherst, at the challenge, remained silent, while a slow red crept to
+his cheek-bones.
+
+"Haven't I told you by--by what I've done?" he said slowly.
+
+"No--what you've done has covered up what you thought; and I've helped
+you cover it--I'm to blame too! But it was not for this that we...that
+we had that half-year together...not to sink into connivance and
+evasion! I don't want another hour of sham happiness. I want the truth
+from you, whatever it is."
+
+He stood motionless, staring moodily at the floor. "Don't you see that's
+my misery--that I don't know myself?"
+
+"You don't know...what you think of me?"
+
+"Good God, Justine, why do you try to strip life naked? I don't know
+what's been going on in me these last weeks----"
+
+"You must know what you think of my motive...for doing what I did."
+
+She saw in his face how he shrank from the least allusion to the act
+about which their torment revolved. But he forced himself to raise his
+head and look at her. "I have never--for one moment--questioned your
+motive--or failed to see that it was justified...under the
+circumstances...."
+
+"Oh, John--John!" she broke out in the wild joy of hearing herself
+absolved; but the next instant her subtle perceptions felt the
+unconscious reserve behind his admission.
+
+"Your mind justifies me--not your heart; isn't _that_ your misery?" she
+said.
+
+He looked at her almost piteously, as if, in the last resort, it was
+from her that light must come to him. "On my soul, I don't know...I
+can't tell...it's all dark in me. I know you did what you thought
+best...if I had been there, I believe I should have asked you to do
+it...but I wish to God----"
+
+She interrupted him sobbingly. "Oh, I ought never to have let you love
+me! I ought to have seen that I was cut off from you forever. I have
+brought you wretchedness when I would have given my life for you! I
+don't deserve that you should forgive me for that."
+
+Her sudden outbreak seemed to restore his self-possession. He went up to
+her and took her hand with a quieting touch.
+
+"There is no question of forgiveness, Justine. Don't let us torture each
+other with vain repinings. Our business is to face the thing, and we
+shall be better for having talked it out. I shall be better, for my
+part, for having told Mr. Langhope. But before I go I want to be sure
+that you understand the view he may take...and the effect it will
+probably have on our future."
+
+"Our future?" She started. "No, I don't understand."
+
+Amherst paused a moment, as if trying to choose the words least likely
+to pain her. "Mr. Langhope knows that my marriage was...unhappy; through
+my fault, he no doubt thinks. And if he chooses to infer that...that you
+and I may have cared for each other...before...and that it was _because_
+there was a chance of recovery that you----"
+
+"Oh----"
+
+"We must face it," he repeated inflexibly. "And you must understand
+that, if there is the faintest hint of this kind, I shall give up
+everything here, as soon as it can be settled legally--God, how Tredegar
+will like the job!--and you and I will have to go and begin life over
+again...somewhere else."
+
+For an instant a mad hope swelled in her--the vision of escaping with
+him into new scenes, a new life, away from the coil of memories that
+bound them down as in a net. But the reaction of reason came at
+once--she saw him cut off from his chosen work, his career destroyed,
+his honour clouded, above all--ah, this was what wrung them both!--his
+task undone, his people flung back into the depths from which he had
+lifted them. And all through her doing--all because she had clutched at
+happiness with too rash a hand! The thought stung her to passionate
+activity of mind--made her resolve to risk anything, dare anything,
+before she involved him farther in her own ruin. She felt her brain
+clear gradually, and the thickness dissolve in her throat.
+
+"I understand," she said in a low voice, raising her eyes to his.
+
+"And you're ready to accept the consequences? Think again before it's
+too late."
+
+She paused. "That is what I should like...what I wanted to ask you...the
+time to think."
+
+She saw a slight shade cross his face, as if he had not expected this
+failure of courage in her; but he said quietly: "You don't want me to go
+today?"
+
+"Not today--give me one more day."
+
+"Very well."
+
+She laid a timid hand on his arm. "Please go out to Westmore as
+usual--as if nothing had happened. And tonight...when you come back...I
+shall have decided."
+
+"Very well," he repeated.
+
+"You'll be gone all day?"
+
+He glanced at his watch. "Yes--I had meant to be; unless----"
+
+"No; I would rather be alone. Good-bye," she said, letting her hand slip
+softly along his coat-sleeve as he turned to the door.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+
+AT half-past six that afternoon, just as Amherst, on his return from the
+mills, put the key into his door at Hanaford, Mrs. Ansell, in New York,
+was being shown into Mr. Langhope's library.
+
+As she entered, her friend rose from his chair by the fire, and turned
+on her a face so disordered by emotion that she stopped short with an
+exclamation of alarm.
+
+"Henry--what has happened? Why did you send for me?"
+
+"Because I couldn't go to you. I couldn't trust myself in the
+streets--in the light of day."
+
+"But why? What is it?--Not Cicely----?"
+
+He struck both hands upward with a comprehensive gesture.
+"Cicely--everyone--the whole world!" His clenched fist came down on the
+table against which he was leaning. "Maria, my girl might have been
+saved!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell looked at him with growing perturbation. "Saved--Bessy's
+life? But how? By whom?"
+
+"She might have been allowed to live, I mean--to recover. She was
+killed, Maria; that woman killed her!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell, with another cry of bewilderment, let herself drop
+helplessly into the nearest chair. "In heaven's name, Henry--what
+woman?"
+
+He seated himself opposite to her, clutching at his stick, and leaning
+his weight heavily on it--a white dishevelled old man. "I wonder why you
+ask--just to spare me?"
+
+Their eyes met in a piercing exchange of question and answer, and Mrs.
+Ansell tried to bring out reasonably: "I ask in order to understand what
+you are saying."
+
+"Well, then, if you insist on keeping up appearances--my daughter-in-law
+killed my daughter. There you have it." He laughed silently, with a tear
+on his reddened eye-lids.
+
+Mrs. Ansell groaned. "Henry, you are raving--I understand less and
+less."
+
+"I don't see how I can speak more plainly. She told me so herself, in
+this room, not an hour ago."
+
+"She told you? Who told you?"
+
+"John Amherst's wife. Told me she'd killed my child. It's as easy as
+breathing--if you know how to use a morphia-needle."
+
+Light seemed at last to break on his hearer. "Oh, my poor Henry--you
+mean--she gave too much? There was some dreadful accident?"
+
+"There was no accident. She killed my child--killed her deliberately.
+Don't look at me as if I were a madman. She sat in that chair you're in
+when she told me."
+
+"Justine? Has she been here today?" Mrs. Ansell paused in a painful
+effort to readjust her thoughts. "But _why_ did she tell you?"
+
+"That's simple enough. To prevent Wyant's doing it."
+
+"Oh----" broke from his hearer, in a long sigh of fear and intelligence.
+Mr. Langhope looked at her with a smile of miserable exultation.
+
+"You knew--you suspected all along?--But now you must speak out!" he
+exclaimed with a sudden note of command.
+
+She sat motionless, as if trying to collect herself. "I know nothing--I
+only meant--why was this never known before?"
+
+He was upon her at once. "You think--because they understood each other?
+And now there's been a break between them? He wanted too big a share of
+the spoils? Oh, it's all so abysmally vile!"
+
+He covered his face with a shaking hand, and Mrs. Ansell remained
+silent, plunged in a speechless misery of conjecture. At length she
+regained some measure of her habitual composure, and leaning forward,
+with her eyes on his face, said in a quiet tone: "If I am to help you,
+you must try to tell me just what has happened."
+
+He made an impatient gesture. "Haven't I told you? She found that her
+accomplice meant to speak, and rushed to town to forestall him."
+
+Mrs. Ansell reflected. "But why--with his place at Saint Christopher's
+secured--did Dr. Wyant choose this time to threaten her--if, as you
+imagine, he's an accomplice?"
+
+"Because he's a drug-taker, and she didn't wish him to have the place."
+
+"She didn't wish it? But that does not look as if she were afraid. She
+had only to hold her tongue!"
+
+Mr. Langhope laughed sardonically. "It's not quite so simple. Amherst
+was coming to town to tell me."
+
+"Ah--_he_ knows?"
+
+"Yes--and she preferred that I should have her version first."
+
+"And what is her version?"
+
+The furrows of misery deepened in Mr. Langhope's face. "Maria--don't ask
+too much of me! I can't go over it again. She says she wanted to spare
+my child--she says the doctors were keeping her alive, torturing her
+uselessly, as a...a sort of scientific experiment.... She forced on me
+the hideous details...."
+
+Mrs. Ansell waited a moment.
+
+"Well! May it not be true?"
+
+"Wyant's version is different. _He_ says Bessy would have recovered--he
+says Garford thought so too."
+
+"And what does she answer? She denies it?"
+
+"No. She admits that Garford was in doubt. But she says the chance was
+too remote--the pain too bad...that's her cue, naturally!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell, leaning back in her chair, with hands meditatively
+stretched along its arms, gave herself up to silent consideration of the
+fragmentary statements cast before her. The long habit of ministering to
+her friends in moments of perplexity and distress had given her an
+almost judicial keenness in disentangling and coordinating facts
+incoherently presented, and in seizing on the thread of motive that
+connected them; but she had never before been confronted with a
+situation so poignant in itself, and bearing so intimately on her
+personal feelings; and she needed time to free her thoughts from the
+impending rush of emotion.
+
+At last she raised her head and said: "Why did Mr. Amherst let her come
+to you, instead of coming himself?"
+
+"He knows nothing of her being here. She persuaded him to wait a day,
+and as soon as he had gone to the mills this morning she took the first
+train to town."
+
+"Ah----" Mrs. Ansell murmured thoughtfully; and Mr. Langhope rejoined,
+with a conclusive gesture: "Do you want more proofs of panic-stricken
+guilt?"
+
+"Oh, guilt--" His friend revolved her large soft muff about a drooping
+hand. "There's so much still to understand."
+
+"Your mind does not, as a rule, work so slowly!" he said with some
+asperity; but she paid no heed to his tone.
+
+"Amherst, for instance--how long has he known of this?" she continued.
+
+"A week or two only--she made that clear."
+
+"And what is his attitude?"
+
+"Ah--that, I conjecture, is just what she means to keep us from
+knowing!"
+
+"You mean she's afraid----?"
+
+Mr. Langhope gathered his haggard brows in a frown. "She's afraid, of
+course--mortally--I never saw a woman more afraid. I only wonder she had
+the courage to face me."
+
+"Ah--that's it! Why _did_ she face you? To extenuate her act--to give
+you her version, because she feared his might be worse? Do you gather
+that that was her motive?"
+
+It was Mr. Langhope's turn to hesitate. He furrowed the thick Turkey rug
+with the point of his ebony stick, pausing once or twice to revolve it
+gimlet-like in a gap of the pile.
+
+"Not her avowed motive, naturally."
+
+"Well--at least, then, let me have that."
+
+"Her avowed motive? Oh, she'd prepared one, of course--trust her to
+have a dozen ready! The one she produced was--simply the desire to
+protect her husband."
+
+"Her husband? Does _he_ too need protection?"
+
+"My God, if he takes her side----! At any rate, her fear seemed to be
+that what she had done might ruin him; might cause him to feel--as well
+he may!--that the mere fact of being her husband makes his situation as
+Cicely's step-father, as my son-in-law, intolerable. And she came to
+clear him, as it were--to find out, in short, on what terms I should be
+willing to continue my present relations with him as though this hideous
+thing had not been known to me."
+
+Mrs. Ansell raised her head quickly. "Well--and what were your terms?"
+
+He hesitated. "She spared me the pain of proposing any--I had only to
+accept hers."
+
+"Hers?"
+
+"That she should disappear altogether from my sight--and from the
+child's, naturally. Good heaven, I should like to include Amherst in
+that! But I'm tied hand and foot, as you see, by Cicely's interests; and
+I'm bound to say she exonerated him completely--completely!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell was again silent, but a swift flight of thoughts traversed
+her drooping face. "But if you are to remain on the old terms with her
+husband, how is she to disappear out of your life without also
+disappearing out of his?"
+
+Mr. Langhope gave a slight laugh. "I leave her to work out that
+problem."
+
+"And you think Amherst will consent to such conditions?"
+
+"He's not to know of them."
+
+The unexpectedness of the reply reduced Mrs. Ansell to a sound of
+inarticulate interrogation; and Mr. Langhope continued: "Not at first,
+that is. She had thought it all out--foreseen everything; and she wrung
+from me--I don't yet know how!--a promise that when I saw him I would
+make it appear that I cleared him completely, not only of any possible
+complicity, or whatever you choose to call it, but of any sort of
+connection with the matter in my thoughts of him. I am, in short, to let
+him feel that he and I are to continue on the old footing--and I agreed,
+on the condition of her effacing herself somehow--of course on some
+other pretext."
+
+"Some other pretext? But what conceivable pretext? My poor friend, he
+adores her!"
+
+Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "We haven't seen him since
+this became known to him. _She_ has; and she let slip that he was
+horror-struck."
+
+Mrs. Ansell looked up with a quick exclamation. "Let slip? Isn't it
+much more likely that she forced it on you--emphasized it to the last
+limit of credulity?" She sank her hands to the arms of the chair, and
+exclaimed, looking him straight in the eyes: "You say she was
+frightened? It strikes me she was dauntless!"
+
+Mr. Langhope stared a moment; then he said, with an ironic shrug: "No
+doubt, then, she counted on its striking me too."
+
+Mrs. Ansell breathed a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I understand your feeling
+as you do--I'm deep in the horror of it myself. But I can't help seeing
+that this woman might have saved herself--and that she's chosen to save
+her husband instead. What I don't see, from what I know of him," she
+musingly proceeded, "is how, on any imaginable pretext, she will induce
+him to accept the sacrifice."
+
+Mr. Langhope made a resentful movement. "If that's the only point your
+mind dwells on----!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell looked up. "It doesn't dwell anywhere as yet--except, my
+poor Henry," she murmured, rising to move toward him, and softly laying
+her hand on his bent shoulder--"except on your distress and misery--on
+the very part I can't yet talk of, can't question you about...."
+
+He let her hand rest there a moment; then he turned, and drawing it into
+his own tremulous fingers, pressed it silently, with a clinging
+helpless grasp that drew the tears to her eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Justine Brent, in her earliest girlhood, had gone through one of those
+emotional experiences that are the infantile diseases of the heart. She
+had fancied herself beloved of a youth of her own age; had secretly
+returned his devotion, and had seen it reft from her by another. Such an
+incident, as inevitable as the measles, sometimes, like that mild
+malady, leaves traces out of all proportion to its actual virulence. The
+blow fell on Justine with tragic suddenness, and she reeled under it,
+thinking darkly of death, and renouncing all hopes of future happiness.
+Her ready pen often beguiled her into recording her impressions, and she
+now found an escape from despair in writing the history of a damsel
+similarly wronged. In her tale, the heroine killed herself; but the
+author, saved by this vicarious sacrifice, lived, and in time even
+smiled over her manuscript.
+
+It was many years since Justine Amherst had recalled this youthful
+incident; but the memory of it recurred to her as she turned from Mr.
+Langhope's door. For a moment death seemed the easiest escape from what
+confronted her; but though she could no longer medicine her despair by
+turning it into fiction, she knew at once that she must somehow
+transpose it into terms of action, that she must always escape from
+life into more life, and not into its negation.
+
+She had been carried into Mr. Langhope's presence by that expiatory
+passion which still burns so high, and draws its sustenance from so deep
+down, in the unsleeping hearts of women. Though she had never wavered in
+her conviction that her act had been justified her ideas staggered under
+the sudden comprehension of its consequences. Not till that morning had
+she seen those consequences in their terrible, unsuspected extent, had
+she understood how one stone rashly loosened from the laboriously
+erected structure of human society may produce remote fissures in that
+clumsy fabric. She saw that, having hazarded the loosening of the stone,
+she should have held herself apart from ordinary human ties, like some
+priestess set apart for the service of the temple. And instead, she had
+seized happiness with both hands, taken it as the gift of the very fate
+she had herself precipitated! She remembered some old Greek saying to
+the effect that the gods never forgive the mortal who presumes to love
+and suffer like a god. She had dared to do both, and the gods were
+bringing ruin on that deeper self which had its life in those about her.
+
+So much had become clear to her when she heard Amherst declare his
+intention of laying the facts before Mr. Langhope. His few broken words
+lit up the farthest verge of their lives. She saw that his
+retrospective reverence for his wife's memory, which was far as possible
+removed from the strong passion of the mind and senses that bound him to
+herself, was indelibly stained and desecrated by the discovery that all
+he had received from the one woman had been won for him by the
+deliberate act of the other. This was what no reasoning, no appeal to
+the calmer judgment, could ever, in his inmost thoughts, undo or
+extenuate. It could find appeasement only in the renunciation of all
+that had come to him from Bessy; and this renunciation, so different
+from the mere sacrifice of material well-being, was bound up with
+consequences so far-reaching, so destructive to the cause which had
+inspired his whole life, that Justine felt the helpless terror of the
+mortal who has launched one of the heavenly bolts.
+
+She could think of no way of diverting it but the way she had chosen.
+She must see Mr. Langhope first, must clear Amherst of the least faint
+association with her act or her intention. And to do this she must
+exaggerate, not her own compunction--for she could not depart from the
+exact truth in reporting her feelings and convictions--but her husband's
+first instinctive movement of horror, the revulsion of feeling her
+confession had really produced in him. This was the most painful part of
+her task, and for this reason her excited imagination clothed it with a
+special expiatory value. If she could purchase Amherst's peace of mind,
+and the security of his future, by confessing, and even
+over-emphasizing, the momentary estrangement between them there would be
+a bitter joy in such payment!
+
+Her hour with Mr. Langhope proved the correctness of her intuition. She
+could save Amherst only by effacing herself from his life: those about
+him would be only too ready to let her bear the full burden of obloquy.
+She could see that, for a dozen reasons, Mr. Langhope, even in the first
+shock of his dismay, unconsciously craved a way of exonerating Amherst,
+of preserving intact the relation on which so much of his comfort had
+come to depend. And she had the courage to make the most of his desire,
+to fortify it by isolating Amherst's point of view from hers; so that,
+when the hour was over, she had the solace of feeling that she had
+completely freed him from any conceivable consequence of her act.
+
+So far, the impetus of self-sacrifice had carried her straight to her
+goal; but, as frequently happens with such atoning impulses, it left her
+stranded just short of any subsequent plan of conduct. Her next step,
+indeed, was clear enough: she must return to Hanaford, explain to her
+husband that she had felt impelled to tell her own story to Mr.
+Langhope, and then take up her ordinary life till chance offered her a
+pretext for fulfilling her promise. But what pretext was likely to
+present itself? No symbolic horn would sound the hour of fulfillment;
+she must be her own judge, and hear the call in the depths of her own
+conscience.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+
+WHEN Amherst, returning late that afternoon from Westmore, learned of
+his wife's departure, and read the note she had left, he found it, for a
+time, impossible to bring order out of the confusion of feeling produced
+in him.
+
+His mind had been disturbed enough before. All day, through the routine
+of work at the mills, he had laboured inwardly with the difficulties
+confronting him; and his unrest had been increased by the fact that his
+situation bore an ironic likeness to that in which, from a far different
+cause, he had found himself at the other crisis of his life. Once more
+he was threatened with the possibility of having to give up Westmore, at
+a moment when concentration of purpose and persistency of will were at
+last beginning to declare themselves in tangible results. Before, he had
+only given up dreams; now it was their fruition that he was asked to
+surrender. And he was fixed in his resolve to withdraw absolutely from
+Westmore if the statement he had to make to Mr. Langhope was received
+with the least hint of an offensive mental reservation. All forms of
+moral compromise had always been difficult to Amherst, and like many men
+absorbed in large and complicated questions he craved above all
+clearness and peace in his household relation. The first months of his
+second marriage had brought him, as a part of richer and deeper joys,
+this enveloping sense of a clear moral medium, in which no subterfuge or
+equivocation could draw breath. He had felt that henceforth he could
+pour into his work all the combative energy, the powers of endurance,
+resistance, renovation, which had once been unprofitably dissipated in
+the vain attempt to bring some sort of harmony into life with Bessy.
+Between himself and Justine, apart from their love for each other, there
+was the wider passion for their kind, which gave back to them an
+enlarged and deepened reflection of their personal feeling. In such an
+air it had seemed that no petty egotism could hamper their growth, no
+misintelligence obscure their love; yet all the while this pure
+happiness had been unfolding against a sordid background of falsehood
+and intrigue from which his soul turned with loathing.
+
+Justine was right in assuming that Amherst had never thought much about
+women. He had vaguely regarded them as meant to people that hazy domain
+of feeling designed to offer the busy man an escape from thought. His
+second marriage, leading him to the blissful discovery that woman can
+think as well as feel, that there are beings of the ornamental sex in
+whom brain and heart have so enlarged each other that their emotions are
+as clear as thought, their thoughts as warm as emotions--this discovery
+had had the effect of making him discard his former summary conception
+of woman as a bundle of inconsequent impulses, and admit her at a stroke
+to full mental equality with her lord. The result of this act of
+manumission was, that in judging Justine he could no longer allow for
+what was purely feminine in her conduct. It was incomprehensible to him
+that she, to whom truth had seemed the essential element of life, should
+have been able to draw breath, and find happiness, in an atmosphere of
+falsehood and dissimulation. His mind could assent--at least in the
+abstract--to the reasonableness of her act; but he was still unable to
+understand her having concealed it from him. He could enter far enough
+into her feelings to allow for her having kept silence on his first
+return to Lynbrook, when she was still under the strain of a prolonged
+and terrible trial; but that she should have continued to do so when he
+and she had discovered and confessed their love for each other, threw an
+intolerable doubt on her whole course.
+
+He stayed late at the mills, finding one pretext after another for
+delaying his return to Hanaford, and trying, while he gave one part of
+his mind to the methodical performance of his task, to adjust the other
+to some definite view of the future. But all was darkened and confused
+by the sense that, between himself and Justine, complete communion of
+thought was no longer possible. It had, in fact, never existed; there
+had always been a locked chamber in her mind, and he knew not yet what
+other secrets might inhabit it.
+
+The shock of finding her gone when he reached home gave a new turn to
+his feelings. She had made no mystery of her destination, leaving word
+with the servants that she had gone to town to see Mr. Langhope; and
+Amherst found a note from her on his study table.
+
+"I feel," she wrote, "that I ought to see Mr. Langhope myself, and be
+the first to tell him what must be told. It was like you, dearest, to
+wish to spare me this, but it would have made me more unhappy; and Mr.
+Langhope might wish to hear the facts in my own words. I shall come back
+tomorrow, and after that it will be for you to decide what must be
+done."
+
+The brevity and simplicity of the note were characteristic; in moments
+of high tension Justine was always calm and direct. And it was like her,
+too, not to make any covert appeal to his sympathy, not to seek to
+entrap his judgment by caressing words and plaintive allusions. The
+quiet tone in which she stated her purpose matched the firmness and
+courage of the act, and for a moment Amherst was shaken by a revulsion
+of feeling. Her heart was level with his, after all--if she had done
+wrong she would bear the brunt of it alone. It was so exactly what he
+himself would have felt and done in such a situation that faith in her
+flowed back through all the dried channels of his heart. But an instant
+later the current set the other way. The wretched years of his first
+marriage had left in him a residue of distrust, a tendency to dissociate
+every act from its ostensible motive. He had been too profoundly the
+dupe of his own enthusiasm not to retain this streak of scepticism, and
+it now moved him to ask if Justine's sudden departure had not been
+prompted by some other cause than the one she avowed. Had that alone
+actuated her, why not have told it to him, and asked his consent to her
+plan? Why let him leave the house without a hint of her purpose, and
+slip off by the first train as soon as he was safe at Westmore? Might it
+not be that she had special reasons for wishing Mr. Langhope to _hear
+her own version first_--that there were questions she wished to parry
+herself, explanations she could trust no one to make for her? The
+thought plunged Amherst into deeper misery. He knew not how to defend
+himself against these disintegrating suspicions--he felt only that, once
+the accord between two minds is broken, it is less easy to restore than
+the passion between two hearts. He dragged heavily through his solitary
+evening, and awaited with dread and yet impatience a message announcing
+his wife's return.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It would have been easier--far easier--when she left Mr. Langhope's
+door, to go straight out into the darkness and let it close in on her
+for good.
+
+Justine felt herself yielding to the spell of that suggestion as she
+walked along the lamplit pavement, hardly conscious of the turn her
+steps were taking. The door of the house which a few weeks before had
+been virtually hers had closed on her without a question. She had been
+suffered to go out into the darkness without being asked whither she was
+going, or under what roof her night would be spent. The contrast between
+her past and present sounded through the tumult of her thoughts like the
+evil laughter of temptation. The house at Hanaford, to which she was
+returning, would look at her with the same alien face--nowhere on earth,
+at that moment, was a door which would open to her like the door of
+home.
+
+In her painful self-absorption she followed the side street toward
+Madison Avenue, and struck southward down that tranquil thoroughfare.
+There was a physical relief in rapid motion, and she walked on, still
+hardly aware of her direction, toward the clustered lights of Madison
+Square. Should she return to Hanaford, she had still several hours to
+dispose of before the departure of the midnight train; and if she did
+not return, hours and dates no longer existed for her.
+
+It would be easier--infinitely easier--not to go back. To take up her
+life with Amherst would, under any circumstances, be painful enough; to
+take it up under the tacit restriction of her pledge to Mr. Langhope
+seemed more than human courage could face. As she approached the square
+she had almost reached the conclusion that such a temporary renewal was
+beyond her strength--beyond what any standard of duty exacted. The
+question of an alternative hardly troubled her. She would simply go on
+living, and find an escape in work and material hardship. It would not
+be hard for so inconspicuous a person to slip back into the obscure mass
+of humanity.
+
+She paused a moment on the edge of the square, vaguely seeking a
+direction for her feet that might permit the working of her thoughts to
+go on uninterrupted; and as she stood there, her eyes fell on the bench
+near the corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where she had sat with Amherst
+on the day of his flight from Lynbrook. He too had dreamed of escaping
+from insoluble problems into the clear air of hard work and simple
+duties; and she remembered the words with which she had turned him back.
+The cases, of course, were not identical, since he had been flying in
+anger and wounded pride from a situation for which he was in no wise to
+blame; yet, if even at such a moment she had insisted on charity and
+forbearance, how could she now show less self-denial than she had
+exacted of him?
+
+"If you go away for a time, surely it ought to be in such a way that
+your going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy...." That was
+how she had put it to him, and how, with the mere change of a name, she
+must now, for reasons as cogent, put it to herself. It was just as much
+a part of the course she had planned to return to her husband now, and
+take up their daily life together, as it would, later on, be her duty to
+drop out of that life, when her doing so could no longer involve him in
+the penalty to be paid.
+
+She stood a little while looking at the bench on which they had sat, and
+giving thanks in her heart for the past strength which was now helping
+to build up her failing courage: such a patchwork business are our best
+endeavours, yet so faithfully does each weak upward impulse reach back a
+hand to the next.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Justine's explanation of her visit to Mr. Langhope was not wholly
+satisfying to her husband. She did not conceal from him that the scene
+had been painful, but she gave him to understand, as briefly as
+possible, that Mr. Langhope, after his first movement of uncontrollable
+distress, had seemed able to make allowances for the pressure under
+which she had acted, and that he had, at any rate, given no sign of
+intending to let her confession make any change in the relation between
+the households. If she did not--as Amherst afterward recalled--put all
+this specifically into words, she contrived to convey it in her manner,
+in her allusions, above all in her recovered composure. She had the
+demeanour of one who has gone through a severe test of strength, but
+come out of it in complete control of the situation. There was something
+slightly unnatural in this prompt solution of so complicated a
+difficulty, and it had the effect of making Amherst ask himself what, to
+produce such a result, must have been the gist of her communication to
+Mr. Langhope. If the latter had shown any disposition to be cruel, or
+even unjust, Amherst's sympathies would have rushed instantly to his
+wife's defence; but the fact that there was apparently to be no call on
+them left his reason free to compare and discriminate, with the final
+result that the more he pondered on his father-in-law's attitude the
+less intelligible it became.
+
+A few days after Justine's return he was called to New York on business;
+and before leaving he told her that he should of course take the
+opportunity of having a talk with Mr. Langhope.
+
+She received the statement with the gentle composure from which she had
+not departed since her return from town; and he added tentatively, as if
+to provoke her to a clearer expression of feeling: "I shall not be
+satisfied, of course, till I see for myself just how he feels--just how
+much, at bottom, this has affected him--since my own future relation to
+him will, as I have already told you, depend entirely on his treatment
+of you."
+
+She met this without any sign of disturbance. "His treatment of me was
+very kind," she said. "But would it not, on your part," she continued
+hesitatingly, "be kinder not to touch on the subject so soon again?"
+
+The line deepened between his brows. "Touch on it? I sha'n't rest till
+I've gone to the bottom of it! Till then, you must understand," he
+summed up with decision, "I feel myself only on sufferance here at
+Westmore."
+
+"Yes--I understand," she assented; and as he bent over to kiss her for
+goodbye a tenuous impenetrable barrier seemed to lie between their lips.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was Justine's turn to await with a passionate anxiety her husband's
+home-coming; and when, on the third day, he reappeared, her dearly
+acquired self-control gave way to a tremulous eagerness. This was, after
+all, the turning-point in their lives: everything depended on how Mr.
+Langhope had "played up" to his cue; had kept to his side of their bond.
+
+Amherst's face showed signs of emotional havoc: when feeling once broke
+out in him it had full play, and she could see that his hour with Mr.
+Langhope had struck to the roots of life. But the resultant expression
+was one of invigoration, not defeat; and she gathered at a glance that
+her partner had not betrayed her. She drew a tragic solace from the
+success of her achievement; yet it flung her into her husband's arms
+with a passion of longing to which, as she instantly felt, he did not as
+completely respond.
+
+There was still, then, something "between" them: somewhere the mechanism
+of her scheme had failed, or its action had not produced the result she
+had counted on.
+
+As soon as they were alone in the study she said, as quietly as she
+could: "You saw your father-in-law? You talked with him?"
+
+"Yes--I spent the afternoon with him. Cicely sent you her love."
+
+She coloured at the mention of the child's name and murmured: "And Mr.
+Langhope?"
+
+"He is perfectly calm now--perfectly impartial.--This business has made
+me feel," Amherst added abruptly, "that I have never been quite fair to
+him. I never thought him a magnanimous man."
+
+"He has proved himself so," Justine murmured, her head bent low over a
+bit of needlework; and Amherst affirmed energetically: "He has been more
+than that--generous!"
+
+She looked up at him with a smile. "I am so glad, dear; so glad there is
+not to be the least shadow between you...."
+
+"No," Amherst said, his voice flagging slightly. There was a pause, and
+then he went on with renewed emphasis: "Of course I made my point clear
+to him."
+
+"Your point?"
+
+"That I stand or fall by his judgment of you."
+
+Oh, if he had but said it more tenderly! But he delivered it with the
+quiet resolution of a man who contends for an abstract principle of
+justice, and not for a passion grown into the fibres of his heart!
+
+"You are generous too," she faltered, her voice trembling a little.
+
+Amherst frowned; and she perceived that any hint, on her part, of
+recognizing the slightest change in their relations was still like
+pressure on a painful bruise.
+
+"There is no need for such words between us," he said impatiently; "and
+Mr. Langhope's attitude," he added, with an effort at a lighter tone,
+"has made it unnecessary, thank heaven, that we should ever revert to
+the subject again."
+
+He turned to his desk as he spoke, and plunged into perusal of the
+letters that had accumulated in his absence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a temporary excess of work at Westmore, and during the days
+that followed he threw himself into it with a zeal that showed Justine
+how eagerly he sought any pretext for avoiding confidential moments. The
+perception was painful enough, yet not as painful as another discovery
+that awaited her. She too had her tasks at Westmore: the supervision of
+the hospital, the day nursery, the mothers' club, and the various other
+organizations whereby she and Amherst were trying to put some sort of
+social unity into the lives of the mill-hands; and when, on the day
+after his return from New York, she presented herself, as usual, at the
+Westmore office, where she was in the habit of holding a brief
+consultation with him before starting on her rounds, she was at once
+aware of a new tinge of constraint in his manner. It hurt him, then, to
+see her at Westmore--hurt him more than to live with her, at Hanaford,
+under Bessy's roof! For it was there, at the mills, that his real life
+was led, the life with which Justine had been most identified, the life
+that had been made possible for both by the magnanimity of that other
+woman whose presence was now forever between them.
+
+Justine made no sign. She resumed her work as though unconscious of any
+change; but whereas in the past they had always found pretexts for
+seeking each other out, to discuss the order of the day's work, or
+merely to warm their hearts by a rapid word or two, now each went a
+separate way, sometimes not meeting till they regained the house at
+night-fall.
+
+And as the weeks passed she began to understand that, by a strange
+inversion of probability, the relation between Amherst and herself was
+to be the means of holding her to her compact with Mr. Langhope--if
+indeed it were not nearer the truth to say that it had made such a
+compact unnecessary. Amherst had done his best to take up their life
+together as though there had been no break in it; but slowly the fact
+was being forced on her that by remaining with him she was subjecting
+him to intolerable suffering--was coming to be the personification of
+the very thoughts and associations from which he struggled to escape.
+Happily her promptness of action had preserved Westmore to him, and in
+Westmore she believed that he would in time find a refuge from even the
+memory of what he was now enduring. But meanwhile her presence kept the
+thought alive; and, had every other incentive lost its power, this would
+have been enough to sustain her. Fate had, ironically enough, furnished
+her with an unanswerable reason for leaving Amherst; the impossibility
+of their keeping up such a relation as now existed between them would
+soon become too patent to be denied.
+
+Meanwhile, as summer approached, she knew that external conditions would
+also call upon her to act. The visible signal for her withdrawal would
+be Cicely's next visit to Westmore. The child's birthday fell in early
+June; and Amherst, some months previously, had asked that she should be
+permitted to spend it at Hanaford, and that it should be chosen as the
+date for the opening of the first model cottages at Hopewood.
+
+It was Justine who had originated the idea of associating Cicely's
+anniversaries with some significant moment in the annals of the mill
+colony; and struck by the happy suggestion, he had at once applied
+himself to hastening on the work at Hopewood. The eagerness of both
+Amherst and Justine that Cicely should be identified with the developing
+life of Westmore had been one of the chief influences in reconciling Mr.
+Langhope to his son-in-law's second marriage. Husband and wife had
+always made it clear that they regarded themselves as the mere trustees
+of the Westmore revenues, and that Cicely's name should, as early as
+possible, be associated with every measure taken for the welfare of the
+people. But now, as Justine knew, the situation was changed; and Cicely
+would not be allowed to come to Hanaford until she herself had left it.
+The manifold threads of divination that she was perpetually throwing out
+in Amherst's presence told her, without word or sign on his part, that
+he also awaited Cicely's birthday as a determining date in their lives.
+He spoke confidently, and as a matter of course, of Mr. Langhope's
+bringing his grand-daughter at the promised time; but Justine could hear
+a note of challenge in his voice, as though he felt that Mr. Langhope's
+sincerity had not yet been put to the test.
+
+As the time drew nearer it became more difficult for her to decide just
+how she should take the step she had determined on. She had no material
+anxiety for the future, for although she did not mean to accept a penny
+from her husband after she had left him, she knew it would be easy for
+her to take up her nursing again; and she knew also that her hospital
+connections would enable her to find work in a part of the country far
+enough distant to remove her entirely from his life. But she had not yet
+been able to invent a reason for leaving that should be convincing
+enough to satisfy him, without directing his suspicions to the truth. As
+she revolved the question she suddenly recalled an exclamation of
+Amherst's--a word spoken as they entered Mr. Langhope's door, on the
+fatal afternoon when she had found Wyant's letter awaiting her.
+
+"There's nothing you can't make people believe, you little Jesuit!"
+
+She had laughed in pure joy at his praise of her; for every bantering
+phrase had then been a caress. But now the words returned with a
+sinister meaning. She knew they were true as far as Amherst was
+concerned: in the arts of casuistry and equivocation a child could have
+outmatched him, and she had only to exert her will to dupe him as deeply
+as she pleased. Well! the task was odious, but it was needful: it was
+the bitterest part of her expiation that she must deceive him once more
+to save him from the results of her former deception. This decision once
+reached, every nerve in her became alert for an opportunity to do the
+thing and have it over; so that, whenever they were alone together, she
+was in an attitude of perpetual tension, her whole mind drawn up for its
+final spring.
+
+The decisive word came, one evening toward the end of May, in the form
+of an allusion on Amherst's part to Cicely's approaching visit. Husband
+and wife were seated in the drawing-room after dinner, he with a book in
+hand, she bending, as usual, over the needlework which served at once as
+a pretext for lowered eyes, and as a means of disguising her fixed
+preoccupation.
+
+"Have you worked out a plan?" he asked, laying down his book. "It
+occurred to me that it would be rather a good idea if we began with a
+sort of festivity for the kids at the day nursery. You could take Cicely
+there early, and I could bring out Mr. Langhope after luncheon. The
+whole performance would probably tire him too much."
+
+Justine listened with suspended thread. "Yes--that seems a good plan."
+
+"Will you see about the details, then? You know it's only a week off."
+
+"Yes, I know." She hesitated, and then took the spring. "I ought to
+tell you John--that I--I think I may not be here...."
+
+He raised his head abruptly, and she saw the blood mount under his fair
+skin. "Not be here?" he exclaimed.
+
+She met his look as steadily as she could. "I think of going away for
+awhile."
+
+"Going away? Where? What is the matter--are you not well?"
+
+There was her pretext--he had found it for her! Why should she not
+simply plead ill-health? Afterward she would find a way of elaborating
+the details and making them plausible. But suddenly, as she was about to
+speak, there came to her the feeling which, up to one fatal moment in
+their lives, had always ruled their intercourse--the feeling that there
+must be truth, and absolute truth, between them. Absolute, indeed, it
+could never be again, since he must never know of the condition exacted
+by Mr. Langhope; but that, at the moment, seemed almost a secondary
+motive compared to the deeper influences that were inexorably forcing
+them apart. At any rate, she would trump up no trivial excuse for the
+step she had resolved on; there should be truth, if not the whole truth,
+in this last decisive hour between them.
+
+"Yes; I am quite well--at least my body is," she said quietly. "But I am
+tired, perhaps; my mind has been going round too long in the same
+circle." She paused for a brief space, and then, raising her head, and
+looking him straight in the eyes: "Has it not been so with you?" she
+asked.
+
+The question seemed to startle Amherst. He rose from his chair and took
+a few steps toward the hearth, where a small fire was crumbling into
+embers. He turned his back to it, resting an arm on the mantel-shelf;
+then he said, in a somewhat unsteady tone: "I thought we had agreed not
+to speak of all that again."
+
+Justine shook her head with a fugitive half-smile. "I made no such
+agreement. And besides, what is the use, when we can always hear each
+other's thoughts speak, and they speak of nothing else?"
+
+Amherst's brows darkened. "It is not so with mine," he began; but she
+raised her hand with a silencing gesture.
+
+"I know you have tried your best that it should not be so; and perhaps
+you have succeeded better than I. But I am tired, horribly tired--I want
+to get away from everything!"
+
+She saw a look of pain in his eyes. He continued to lean against the
+mantel-shelf, his head slightly lowered, his unseeing gaze fixed on a
+remote scroll in the pattern of the carpet; then he said in a low tone:
+"I can only repeat again what I have said before--that I understand why
+you did what you did."
+
+"Thank you," she answered, in the same tone.
+
+There was another pause, for she could not trust herself to go on
+speaking; and presently he asked, with a tinge of bitterness in his
+voice: "That does not satisfy you?"
+
+She hesitated. "It satisfies me as much as it does you--and no more,"
+she replied at length.
+
+He looked up hastily. "What do you mean?"
+
+"Just what I say. We can neither of us go on living on that
+understanding just at present." She rose as she spoke, and crossed over
+to the hearth. "I want to go back to my nursing--to go out to Michigan,
+to a town where I spent a few months the year before I first came to
+Hanaford. I have friends there, and can get work easily. And you can
+tell people that I was ill and needed a change."
+
+It had been easier to say than she had imagined, and her voice held its
+clear note till the end; but when she had ceased, the whole room began
+to reverberate with her words, and through the clashing they made in her
+brain she felt a sudden uncontrollable longing that they should provoke
+in him a cry of protest, of resistance. Oh, if he refused to let her
+go--if he caught her to him, and defied the world to part them--what
+then of her pledge to Mr. Langhope, what then of her resolve to pay the
+penalty alone?
+
+But in the space of a heart-beat she knew that peril--that longed-for
+peril!--was past. Her husband had remained silent--he neither moved
+toward her nor looked at her; and she felt in every slackening nerve
+that in the end he would let her go.
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+
+MR. LANGHOPE, tossing down a note on Mrs. Ansell's drawing-room table,
+commanded imperiously: "Read that!"
+
+She set aside her tea-cup, and looked up, not at the note, but into his
+face, which was crossed by one of the waves of heat and tremulousness
+that she was beginning to fear for him. Mr. Langhope had changed greatly
+in the last three months; and as he stood there in the clear light of
+the June afternoon it came to her that he had at last suffered the
+sudden collapse which is the penalty of youth preserved beyond its time.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, still watching him as she put out her hand for
+the letter.
+
+"Amherst writes to remind me of my promise to take Cicely to Hanaford
+next week, for her birthday."
+
+"Well--it was a promise, wasn't it?" she rejoined, running her eyes over
+the page.
+
+"A promise--yes; but made before.... Read the note--you'll see there's
+no reference to his wife. For all I know, she'll be there to receive
+us."
+
+"But that was a promise too."
+
+"That neither Cicely nor I should ever set eyes on her? Yes. But why
+should she keep it? I was a fool that day--she fooled me as she's fooled
+us all! But you saw through it from the beginning--you said at once that
+she'd never leave him."
+
+Mrs. Ansell reflected. "I said that before I knew all the circumstances.
+Now I think differently."
+
+"You think she still means to go?"
+
+She handed the letter back to him. "I think this is to tell you so."
+
+"This?" He groped for his glasses, dubiously scanning the letter again.
+
+"Yes. And what's more, if you refuse to go she'll have every right to
+break her side of the agreement."
+
+Mr. Langhope sank into a chair, steadying himself painfully with his
+stick. "Upon my soul, I sometimes think you're on her side!" he
+ejaculated.
+
+"No--but I like fair play," she returned, measuring his tea carefully
+into his favourite little porcelain tea-pot.
+
+"Fair play?"
+
+"She's offering to do her part. It's for you to do yours now--to take
+Cicely to Hanaford."
+
+"If I find her there, I never cross Amherst's threshold again!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell, without answering, rose and put his tea-cup on the
+slender-legged table at his elbow; then, before returning to her seat,
+she found the enamelled match-box and laid it by the cup. It was
+becoming difficult for Mr. Langhope to guide his movements about her
+small encumbered room; and he had always liked being waited on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Ansell's prognostication proved correct. When Mr. Langhope and
+Cicely arrived at Hanaford they found Amherst alone to receive them. He
+explained briefly that his wife had been unwell, and had gone to seek
+rest and change at the house of an old friend in the west. Mr. Langhope
+expressed a decent amount of regret, and the subject was dropped as if
+by common consent. Cicely, however, was not so easily silenced. Poor
+Bessy's uncertain fits of tenderness had produced more bewilderment than
+pleasure in her sober-minded child; but the little girl's feelings and
+perceptions had developed rapidly in the equable atmosphere of her
+step-mother's affection. Cicely had reached the age when children put
+their questions with as much ingenuity as persistence, and both Mr.
+Langhope and Amherst longed for Mrs. Ansell's aid in parrying her
+incessant interrogations as to the cause and length of Justine's
+absence, what she had said before going, and what promise she had made
+about coming back. But Mrs. Ansell had not come to Hanaford. Though it
+had become a matter of habit to include her in the family pilgrimages to
+the mills she had firmly maintained the plea of more urgent engagements;
+and the two men, with only Cicely between them, had spent the long days
+and longer evenings in unaccustomed and unmitigated propinquity.
+
+Mr. Langhope, before leaving, thought it proper to touch tentatively on
+his promise of giving Cicely to Amherst for the summer; but to his
+surprise the latter, after a moment of hesitation, replied that he
+should probably go to Europe for two or three months.
+
+"To Europe? Alone?" escaped from Mr. Langhope before he had time to
+weigh his words.
+
+Amherst frowned slightly. "I have been made a delegate to the Berne
+conference on the housing of factory operatives," he said at length,
+without making a direct reply to the question; "and if there is nothing
+to keep me at Westmore, I shall probably go out in July." He waited a
+moment, and then added: "My wife has decided to spend the summer in
+Michigan."
+
+Mr. Langhope's answer was a vague murmur of assent, and Amherst turned
+the talk to other matters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Langhope returned to town with distinct views on the situation at
+Hanaford.
+
+"Poor devil--I'm sorry for him: he can hardly speak of her," he broke
+out at once to Mrs. Ansell, in the course of their first confidential
+hour together.
+
+"Because he cares too much--he's too unhappy?"
+
+"Because he loathes her!" Mr. Langhope brought out with emphasis.
+
+Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sigh which made him add accusingly: "I believe
+you're actually sorry!"
+
+"Sorry?" She raised her eye-brows with a slight smile. "Should one not
+always be sorry to know there's a little less love and a little more
+hate in the world?"
+
+"You'll be asking _me_ not to hate her next!"
+
+She still continued to smile on him. "It's the haters, not the hated,
+I'm sorry for," she said at length; and he flung back impatiently: "Oh,
+don't let's talk of her. I sometimes feel she takes up more place in our
+lives than when she was with us!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst went to the Berne conference in July, and spent six weeks
+afterward in rapid visits to various industrial centres and model
+factory villages. During his previous European pilgrimages his interest
+had by no means been restricted to sociological questions: the appeal of
+an old civilization, reaching him through its innumerable forms of
+tradition and beauty, had roused that side of his imagination which his
+work at home left untouched. But upon his present state of deep moral
+commotion the spells of art and history were powerless to work. The
+foundations of his life had been shaken, and the fair exterior of the
+world was as vacant as a maniac's face. He could only take refuge in his
+special task, barricading himself against every expression of beauty and
+poetry as so many poignant reminders of a phase of life that he was
+vainly trying to cast off and forget.
+
+Even his work had been embittered to him, thrust out of its place in the
+ordered scheme of things. It had cost him a hard struggle to hold fast
+to his main purpose, to convince himself that his real duty lay, not in
+renouncing the Westmore money and its obligations, but in carrying out
+his projected task as if nothing had occurred to affect his personal
+relation to it. The mere fact that such a renunciation would have been a
+deliberate moral suicide, a severing once for all of every artery of
+action, made it take on, at first, the semblance of an obligation, a
+sort of higher duty to the abstract conception of what he owed himself.
+But Justine had not erred in her forecast. Once she had passed out of
+his life, it was easier for him to return to a dispassionate view of his
+situation, to see, and boldly confess to himself that he saw, the still
+higher duty of sticking to his task, instead of sacrificing it to any
+ideal of personal disinterestedness. It was this gradual process of
+adjustment that saved him from the desolating scepticism which falls on
+the active man when the sources of his activity are tainted. Having
+accepted his fate, having consented to see in himself merely the
+necessary agent of a good to be done, he could escape from
+self-questioning only by shutting himself up in the practical exigencies
+of his work, closing his eyes and his thoughts to everything which had
+formerly related it to a wider world, had given meaning and beauty to
+life as a whole.
+
+The return from Europe, and the taking up of the daily routine at
+Hanaford, were the most difficult phases in this process of moral
+adaptation.
+
+Justine's departure had at first brought relief. He had been too sincere
+with himself to oppose her wish to leave Hanaford for a time, since he
+believed that, for her as well as for himself, a temporary separation
+would be less painful than a continuance of their actual relation. But
+as the weeks passed into months he found he was no nearer to a clear
+view of his own case: the future was still dark and enigmatic. Justine's
+desire to leave him had revived his unformulated distrust of her. What
+could it mean but that there were thoughts within her which could not be
+at rest in his presence? He had given her every proof of his wish to
+forget the past, and Mr. Langhope had behaved with unequalled
+magnanimity. Yet Justine's unhappiness was evident: she could not
+conceal her longing to escape from the conditions her act had created.
+Was it because, in reality, she was conscious of other motives than the
+one she acknowledged? She had insisted, almost unfeelingly as it might
+have seemed, on the abstract rightness of what she had done, on the fact
+that, ideally speaking, her act could not be made less right, less
+justifiable, by the special accidental consequences that had flowed from
+it. Because these consequences had caught her in a web of tragic
+fatality she would not be guilty of the weakness of tracing back the
+disaster to any intrinsic error in her original motive. Why, then, if
+this was her real, her proud attitude toward the past--and since those
+about her believed in her sincerity, and accepted her justification as
+valid from her point of view if not from theirs--why had she not been
+able to maintain her posture, to carry on life on the terms she had
+exacted from others?
+
+A special circumstance contributed to this feeling of distrust; the
+fact, namely, that Justine, a week after her departure from Hanaford,
+had written to say that she could not, from that moment till her return,
+consent to accept any money from Amherst. As her manner was, she put her
+reasons clearly and soberly, without evasion or ambiguity.
+
+"Since you and I," she wrote, "have always agreed in regarding the
+Westmore money as a kind of wage for our services at the mills, I
+cannot be satisfied to go on drawing that wage while I am unable to do
+any work in return. I am sure you must feel as I do about this; and you
+need have no anxiety as to the practical side of the question, since I
+have enough to live on in some savings from my hospital days, which were
+invested for me two years ago by Harry Dressel, and are beginning to
+bring in a small return. This being the case, I feel I can afford to
+interpret in any way I choose the terms of the bargain between myself
+and Westmore."
+
+On reading this, Amherst's mind had gone through the strange dual
+process which now marked all his judgments of his wife. At first he had
+fancied he understood her, and had felt that he should have done as she
+did; then the usual reaction of distrust set in, and he asked himself
+why she, who had so little of the conventional attitude toward money,
+should now develop this unexpected susceptibility. And so the old
+question presented itself in another shape: if she had nothing to
+reproach herself for, why was it intolerable to her to live on Bessy's
+money? The fact that she was doing no actual service at Westmore did not
+account for her scruples--she would have been the last person to think
+that a sick servant should be docked of his pay. Her reluctance could
+come only from that hidden cause of compunction which had prompted her
+departure, and which now forced her to sever even the merely material
+links between herself and her past.
+
+Amherst, on his return to Hanaford, had tried to find in these
+considerations a reason for his deep unrest. It was his wife's course
+which still cast a torturing doubt on what he had braced his will to
+accept and put behind him. And he now told himself that the perpetual
+galling sense of her absence was due to this uneasy consciousness of
+what it meant, of the dark secrets it enveloped and held back from him.
+In actual truth, every particle of his being missed her, he lacked her
+at every turn. She had been at once the partner of his task, and the
+_pays bleu_ into which he escaped from it; the vivifying thought which
+gave meaning to the life he had chosen, yet never let him forget that
+there was a larger richer life outside, to which he was rooted by deeper
+and more intrinsic things than any abstract ideal of altruism. His love
+had preserved his identity, saved him from shrinking into the mere
+nameless unit which the social enthusiast is in danger of becoming
+unless the humanitarian passion is balanced, and a little overweighed,
+by a merely human one. And now this equilibrium was lost forever, and
+his deepest pain lay in realizing that he could not regain it, even by
+casting off Westmore and choosing the narrower but richer individual
+existence that her love might once have offered. His life was in truth
+one indivisible organism, not two halves artificially united. Self and
+other-self were ingrown from the roots--whichever portion fate
+restricted him to would be but a mutilated half-live fragment of the
+whole.
+
+Happily for him, chance made this crisis of his life coincide with a
+strike at Westmore. Soon after his return to Hanaford he found himself
+compelled to grapple with the hardest problem of his industrial career,
+and he was carried through the ensuing three months on that tide of
+swift obligatory action that sweeps the ship-wrecked spirit over so many
+sunken reefs of fear and despair. The knowledge that he was better able
+to deal with the question than any one who might conceivably have taken
+his place--this conviction, which was presently confirmed by the
+peaceable adjustment of the strike, helped to make the sense of his
+immediate usefulness outbalance that other, disintegrating doubt as to
+the final value of such efforts. And so he tried to settle down into a
+kind of mechanical altruism, in which the reflexes of habit should take
+the place of that daily renewal of faith and enthusiasm which had been
+fed from the springs of his own joy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The autumn came and passed into winter; and after Mr. Langhope's
+re-establishment in town Amherst began to resume his usual visits to his
+step-daughter.
+
+His natural affection for the little girl had been deepened by the
+unforeseen manner in which her fate had been entrusted to him. The
+thought of Bessy, softened to compunction by the discovery that her love
+had persisted under their apparently hopeless estrangement--this
+feeling, intensified to the verge of morbidness by the circumstances
+attending her death, now sought expression in a passionate devotion to
+her child. Accident had, in short, created between Bessy and himself a
+retrospective sympathy which the resumption of life together would have
+dispelled in a week--one of the exhalations from the past that depress
+the vitality of those who linger too near the grave of dead experiences.
+
+Since Justine's departure Amherst had felt himself still more drawn to
+Cicely; but his relation to the child was complicated by the fact that
+she would not be satisfied as to the cause of her step-mother's absence.
+Whenever Amherst came to town, her first question was for Justine; and
+her memory had the precocious persistence sometimes developed in
+children too early deprived of their natural atmosphere of affection.
+Cicely had always been petted and adored, at odd times and by divers
+people; but some instinct seemed to tell her that, of all the tenderness
+bestowed on her, Justine's most resembled the all-pervading motherly
+element in which the child's heart expands without ever being conscious
+of its needs.
+
+If it had been embarrassing to evade Cicely's questions in June it
+became doubly so as the months passed, and the pretext of Justine's
+ill-health grew more and more difficult to sustain. And in the following
+March Amherst was suddenly called from Hanaford by the news that the
+little girl herself was ill. Serious complications had developed from a
+protracted case of scarlet fever, and for two weeks the child's fate was
+uncertain. Then she began to recover, and in the joy of seeing life come
+back to her, Mr. Langhope and Amherst felt as though they must not only
+gratify every wish she expressed, but try to guess at those they saw
+floating below the surface of her clear vague eyes.
+
+It was noticeable to Mrs. Ansell, if not to the others, that one of
+these unexpressed wishes was the desire to see her stepmother. Cicely no
+longer asked for Justine; but something in her silence, or in the
+gesture with which she gently put from her other offers of diversion and
+companionship, suddenly struck Mrs. Ansell as more poignant than speech.
+
+"What is it the child wants?" she asked the governess, in the course of
+one of their whispered consultations; and the governess, after a
+moment's hesitation, replied: "She said something about a letter she
+wrote to Mrs. Amherst just before she was taken ill--about having had no
+answer, I think."
+
+"Ah--she writes to Mrs. Amherst, does she?"
+
+The governess, evidently aware that she trod on delicate ground, tried
+at once to defend herself and her pupil.
+
+"It was my fault, perhaps. I suggested once that her little compositions
+should take the form of letters--it usually interests a child more--and
+she asked if they might be written to Mrs. Amherst."
+
+"Your fault? Why should not the child write to her step-mother?" Mrs.
+Ansell rejoined with studied surprise; and on the other's murmuring: "Of
+course--of course----" she added haughtily: "I trust the letters were
+sent?"
+
+The governess floundered. "I couldn't say--but perhaps the nurse...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That evening Cicely was less well. There was a slight return of fever,
+and the doctor, hastily summoned, hinted at the possibility of too much
+excitement in the sick-room.
+
+"Excitement? There has been no excitement," Mr. Langhope protested,
+quivering with the sudden renewal of fear.
+
+"No? The child seemed nervous, uneasy. It's hard to say why, because she
+is unusually reserved for her age."
+
+The medical man took his departure, and Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell
+faced each other in the disarray produced by a call to arms when all
+has seemed at peace.
+
+"I shall lose her--I shall lose her!" the grandfather broke out, sinking
+into his chair with a groan.
+
+Mrs. Ansell, gathering up her furs for departure, turned on him abruptly
+from the threshold.
+
+"It's stupid, what you're doing--stupid!" she exclaimed with unwonted
+vehemence.
+
+He raised his head with a startled look. "What do you mean--what I'm
+doing?"
+
+"The child misses Justine. You ought to send for her."
+
+Mr. Langhope's hands dropped to the arms of his chair, and he
+straightened himself up with a pale flash of indignation. "You've had
+moments lately----!"
+
+"I've had moments, yes; and so have you--when the child came back to us,
+and we stood there and wondered how we could keep her, tie her
+fast...and in those moments I saw...saw what she wanted...and so did
+you!"
+
+Mr. Langhope turned away his head. "You're a sentimentalist!" he flung
+scornfully back.
+
+"Oh, call me any bad names you please!"
+
+"I won't send for that woman!"
+
+"No." She fastened her furs slowly, with the gentle deliberate movements
+that no emotion ever hastened or disturbed.
+
+"Why do you say no?" he challenged her.
+
+"To make you contradict me, perhaps," she ventured, after looking at him
+again.
+
+"Ah----" He shifted his position, one elbow supporting his bowed head,
+his eyes fixed on the ground. Presently he brought out: "Could one ask
+her to come--and see the child--and go away again--for good?"
+
+"To break the compact at your pleasure, and enter into it again for the
+same reason?"
+
+"No--no--I see." He paused, and then looked up at her suddenly. "But
+what if Amherst won't have her back himself?"
+
+"Shall I ask him?"
+
+"I tell you he can't bear to hear her name!"
+
+"But he doesn't know why she has left him."
+
+Mr. Langhope gathered his brows in a frown. "Why--what on earth--what
+possible difference would that make?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell, from the doorway, shed a pitying glance on him. "Ah--if you
+don't see!" she murmured.
+
+He sank back into his seat with a groan. "Good heavens, Maria, how you
+torture me! I see enough as it is--I see too much of the cursed
+business!"
+
+She paused again, and then slowly moved a step or two nearer, laying her
+hand on his shoulder.
+
+"There's one thing you've never seen yet, Henry: what Bessy herself
+would do now--for the child--if she could."
+
+He sat motionless under her light touch, his eyes on hers, till their
+inmost thoughts felt for and found each other, as they still sometimes
+could, through the fog of years and selfishness and worldly habit; then
+he dropped his face into his hands, hiding it from her with the
+instinctive shrinking of an aged grief.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+
+AMHERST, Cicely's convalescence once assured, had been obliged to go
+back to Hanaford; but some ten days later, on hearing from Mrs. Ansell
+that the little girl's progress was less rapid than had been hoped, he
+returned to his father-in-law's for a Sunday.
+
+He came two days after the talk recorded in the last chapter--a talk of
+which Mrs. Ansell's letter to him had been the direct result. She had
+promised Mr. Langhope that, in writing to Amherst, she would not go
+beyond the briefest statement of fact; and she had kept her word,
+trusting to circumstances to speak for her.
+
+Mrs. Ansell, during Cicely's illness, had formed the habit of dropping
+in on Mr. Langhope at the tea hour instead of awaiting him in her own
+drawing-room; and on the Sunday in question she found him alone.
+Beneath his pleasure in seeing her, which had grown more marked as his
+dependence on her increased, she at once discerned traces of recent
+disturbance; and her first question was for Cicely.
+
+He met it with a discouraged gesture. "No great change--Amherst finds
+her less well than when he was here before."
+
+"He's upstairs with her?"
+
+"Yes--she seems to want him."
+
+Mrs. Ansell seated herself in silence behind the tea-tray, of which she
+was now recognized as the officiating priestess. As she drew off her
+long gloves, and mechanically straightened the row of delicate old cups,
+Mr. Langhope added with an effort: "I've spoken to him--told him what
+you said."
+
+She looked up quickly.
+
+"About the child's wish," he continued. "About her having written to his
+wife. It seems her last letters have not been answered."
+
+He paused, and Mrs. Ansell, with her usual calm precision, proceeded to
+measure the tea into the fluted Georgian tea-pot. She could be as
+reticent in approval as in reprehension, and not for the world would she
+have seemed to claim any share in the turn that events appeared to be
+taking. She even preferred the risk of leaving her old friend to add
+half-reproachfully: "I told Amherst what you and the nurse thought."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"That Cicely pines for his wife. I put it to him in black and white."
+The words came out on a deep strained breath, and Mrs. Ansell faltered:
+"Well?"
+
+"Well--he doesn't know where she is himself."
+
+"Doesn't _know_?"
+
+"They're separated--utterly separated. It's as I told you: he could
+hardly name her."
+
+Mrs. Ansell had unconsciously ceased her ministrations, letting her
+hands fall on her knee while she brooded in blank wonder on her
+companion's face.
+
+"I wonder what reason she could have given him?" she murmured at length.
+
+"For going? He loathes her, I tell you!"
+
+"Yes--but _how did she make him_?"
+
+He struck his hand violently on the arm of his chair. "Upon my soul, you
+seem to forget!"
+
+"No." She shook her head with a half smile. "I simply remember more than
+you do."
+
+"What more?" he began with a flush of anger; but she raised a quieting
+hand.
+
+"What does all that matter--if, now that we need her, we can't get her?"
+
+He made no answer, and she returned to the dispensing of his tea; but as
+she rose to put the cup in his hand he asked, half querulously: "You
+think it's going to be very bad for the child, then?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell smiled with the thin edge of her lips. "One can hardly set
+the police after her----!"
+
+"No; we're powerless," he groaned in assent.
+
+As the cup passed between them she dropped her eyes to his with a quick
+flash of interrogation; but he sat staring moodily before him, and she
+moved back to the sofa without a word.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the way downstairs she met Amherst descending from Cicely's room.
+
+Since the early days of his first marriage there had always been, on
+Amherst's side, a sense of obscure antagonism toward Mrs. Ansell. She
+was almost the embodied spirit of the world he dreaded and disliked: her
+serenity, her tolerance, her adaptability, seemed to smile away and
+disintegrate all the high enthusiasms, the stubborn convictions, that he
+had tried to plant in the shifting sands of his married life. And now
+that Bessy's death had given her back the attributes with which his
+fancy had originally invested her, he had come to regard Mrs. Ansell as
+embodying the evil influences that had come between himself and his
+wife.
+
+Mrs. Ansell was probably not unaware of the successive transitions of
+feeling which had led up to this unflattering view; but her life had
+been passed among petty rivalries and animosities, and she had the
+patience and adroitness of the spy in a hostile camp.
+
+She and Amherst exchanged a few words about Cicely; then she exclaimed,
+with a glance through the panes of the hall door: "But I must be
+off--I'm on foot, and the crossings appal me after dark."
+
+He could do no less, at that, than offer to guide her across the perils
+of Fifth Avenue; and still talking of Cicely, she led him down the
+thronged thoroughfare till her own corner was reached, and then her own
+door; turning there to ask, as if by an afterthought: "Won't you come
+up? There's one thing more I want to say."
+
+A shade of reluctance crossed his face, which, as the vestibule light
+fell on it, looked hard and tired, like a face set obstinately against a
+winter gale; but he murmured a word of assent, and followed her into the
+shining steel cage of the lift.
+
+In her little drawing-room, among the shaded lamps and bowls of spring
+flowers, she pushed a chair forward, settled herself in her usual corner
+of the sofa, and said with a directness that seemed an echo of his own
+tone: "I asked you to come up because I want to talk to you about Mr.
+Langhope."
+
+Amherst looked at her in surprise. Though his father-in-law's health had
+been more or less unsatisfactory for the last year, all their concern,
+of late, had been for Cicely.
+
+"You think him less well?" he enquired.
+
+She waited to draw off and smooth her gloves, with one of the
+deliberate gestures that served to shade and supplement her speech.
+
+"I think him extremely unhappy."
+
+Amherst moved uneasily in his seat. He did not know where she meant the
+talk to lead them, but he guessed that it would be over painful places,
+and he saw no reason why he should be forced to follow her.
+
+"You mean that he's still anxious about Cicely?"
+
+"Partly that--yes." She paused. "The child will get well, no doubt; but
+she is very lonely. She needs youth, heat, light. Mr. Langhope can't
+give her those, or even a semblance of them; and it's an art I've lost
+the secret of," she added with her shadowy smile.
+
+Amherst's brows darkened. "I realize all she has lost----"
+
+Mrs. Ansell glanced up at him quickly. "She is twice motherless," she
+said.
+
+The blood rose to his neck and temples, and he tightened his hand on the
+arm of his chair. But it was a part of Mrs. Ansell's expertness to know
+when such danger signals must be heeded and when they might be ignored,
+and she went on quietly: "It's the question of the future that is
+troubling Mr. Langhope. After such an illness, the next months of
+Cicely's life should be all happiness. And money won't buy the kind she
+needs: one can't pick out the right companion for such a child as one
+can match a ribbon. What she wants is spontaneous affection, not the
+most superlative manufactured article. She wants the sort of love that
+Justine gave her."
+
+It was the first time in months that Amherst had heard his wife's name
+spoken outside of his own house. No one but his mother mentioned Justine
+to him now; and of late even his mother had dropped her enquiries and
+allusions, prudently acquiescing in the habit of silence which his own
+silence had created about him. To hear the name again--the two little
+syllables which had been the key of life to him, and now shook him as
+the turning of a rusted lock shakes a long-closed door--to hear her name
+spoken familiarly, affectionately, as one speaks of some one who may
+come into the room the next moment--gave him a shock that was half pain,
+and half furtive unacknowledged joy. Men whose conscious thoughts are
+mostly projected outward, on the world of external activities, may be
+more moved by such a touch on the feelings than those who are
+perpetually testing and tuning their emotional chords. Amherst had
+foreseen from the first that Mrs. Ansell might mean to speak of his
+wife; but though he had intended, if she did so, to cut their talk
+short, he now felt himself irresistibly constrained to hear her out.
+
+Mrs. Ansell, having sped her shaft, followed its flight through lowered
+lashes, and saw that it had struck a vulnerable point; but she was far
+from assuming that the day was won.
+
+"I believe," she continued, "that Mr. Langhope has said something of
+this to you already, and my only excuse for speaking is that I
+understood he had not been successful in his appeal."
+
+No one but Mrs. Ansell--and perhaps she knew it--could have pushed so
+far beyond the conventional limits of discretion without seeming to
+overstep them by a hair; and she had often said, when pressed for the
+secret of her art, that it consisted simply in knowing the pass-word.
+That word once spoken, she might have added, the next secret was to give
+the enemy no time for resistance; and though she saw the frown reappear
+between Amherst's eyes, she went on, without heeding it: "I entreat you,
+Mr. Amherst, to let Cicely see your wife."
+
+He reddened again, and pushed back his chair, as if to rise.
+
+"No--don't break off like that! Let me say a word more. I know your
+answer to Mr. Langhope--that you and Justine are no longer together. But
+I thought of you as a man to sink your personal relations at such a
+moment as this."
+
+"To sink them?" he repeated vaguely: and she went on: "After all, what
+difference does it make?"
+
+"What difference?" He stared in unmitigated wonder, and then answered,
+with a touch of irony: "It might at least make the difference of my
+being unwilling to ask a favour of her."
+
+Mrs. Ansell, at this, raised her eyes and let them rest full on his.
+"Because she has done you so great a one already?"
+
+He stared again, sinking back automatically into his chair. "I don't
+understand you."
+
+"No." She smiled a little, as if to give herself time. "But I mean that
+you shall. If I were a man I suppose I couldn't, because a man's code of
+honour is such a clumsy cast-iron thing. But a woman's, luckily, can be
+cut over--if she's clever--to fit any new occasion; and in this case I
+should be willing to reduce mine to tatters if necessary."
+
+Amherst's look of bewilderment deepened. "What is it that I don't
+understand?" he asked at length, in a low voice.
+
+"Well--first of all, why Mr. Langhope had the right to ask you to send
+for your wife."
+
+"The right?"
+
+"You don't recognize such a right on his part?"
+
+"No--why should I?"
+
+"Supposing she had left you by his wish?"
+
+"His wish? _His----?_"
+
+He was on his feet now, gazing at her blindly, while the solid world
+seemed to grow thin about him. Her next words reduced it to a mist.
+
+"My poor Amherst--why else, on earth, should she have left you?"
+
+She brought it out clearly, in her small chiming tones; and as the sound
+travelled toward him it seemed to gather momentum, till her words rang
+through his brain as if every incomprehensible incident in the past had
+suddenly boomed forth the question. Why else, indeed, should she have
+left him? He stood motionless for a while; then he approached Mrs.
+Ansell and said: "Tell me."
+
+She drew farther back into her corner of the sofa, waving him to a seat
+beside her, as though to bring his inquisitory eyes on a level where her
+own could command them; but he stood where he was, unconscious of her
+gesture, and merely repeating: "Tell me."
+
+She may have said to herself that a woman would have needed no farther
+telling; but to him she only replied, slanting her head up to his: "To
+spare you and himself pain--to keep everything, between himself and you,
+as it had been before you married her."
+
+He dropped down beside her at that, grasping the back of the sofa as if
+he wanted something to clutch and throttle. The veins swelled in his
+temples, and as he pushed back his tossed hair Mrs. Ansell noticed for
+the first time how gray it had grown on the under side.
+
+"And he asked this of my wife--he accepted it?'"
+
+"Haven't _you_ accepted it?"
+
+"I? How could I guess her reasons--how could I imagine----?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell raised her brows a hair's breadth at that. "I don't know.
+But as a fact, he didn't ask--it was she who offered, who forced it on
+him, even!"
+
+"Forced her going on him?"
+
+"In a sense, yes; by making it appear that _you_ felt as he did
+about--about poor Bessy's death: that the thought of what had happened
+at that time was as abhorrent to you as to him--that _she_ was as
+abhorrent to you. No doubt she foresaw that, had she permitted the least
+doubt on that point, there would have been no need of her leaving you,
+since the relation between yourself and Mr. Langhope would have been
+altered--destroyed...."
+
+"Yes. I expected that--I warned her of it. But how did she make him
+think----?"
+
+"How can I tell? To begin with, I don't know your real feeling. For all
+I know she was telling the truth--and Mr. Langhope of course thought she
+was."
+
+"That I abhorred her? Oh----" he broke out, on his feet in an instant.
+
+"Then why----?"
+
+"Why did I let her leave me?" He strode across the room, as his habit
+was in moments of agitation, turning back to her again before he
+answered. "Because I _didn't_ know--didn't know anything! And because
+her insisting on going away like that, without any explanation, made me
+feel...imagine there was...something she didn't _want_ me to
+know...something she was afraid of not being able to hide from me if we
+stayed together any longer."
+
+"Well--there was: the extent to which she loved you."
+
+Mrs. Ansell; her hands clasped on her knee, her gaze holding his with a
+kind of visionary fixity, seemed to reconstruct the history of his past,
+bit by bit, with the words she was dragging out of him.
+
+"I see it--I see it all now," she went on, with a repressed fervour that
+he had never divined in her. "It was the only solution for her, as well
+as for the rest of you. The more she showed her love, the more it would
+have cast a doubt on her motive...the greater distance she would have
+put between herself and you. And so she showed it in the only way that
+was safe for both of you, by taking herself away and hiding it in her
+heart; and before going, she secured your peace of mind, your future. If
+she ruined anything, she rebuilt the ruin. Oh, she paid--she paid in
+full!"
+
+Justine had paid, yes--paid to the utmost limit of whatever debt toward
+society she had contracted by overstepping its laws. And her resolve to
+discharge the debt had been taken in a flash, as soon as she had seen
+that man can commit no act alone, whether for good or evil. The extent
+to which Amherst's fate was involved in hers had become clear to her
+with his first word of reassurance, of faith in her motive. And
+instantly a plan for releasing him had leapt full-formed into her mind,
+and had been carried out with swift unflinching resolution. As he forced
+himself, now, to look down the suddenly illuminated past to the weeks
+which had elapsed between her visit to Mr. Langhope and her departure
+from Hanaford, he wondered not so much at her swiftness of resolve as at
+her firmness in carrying out her plan--and he saw, with a blinding flash
+of insight, that it was in her love for him that she had found her
+strength.
+
+In all moments of strong mental tension he became totally unconscious of
+time and place, and he now remained silent so long, his hands clasped
+behind him, his eyes fixed on an indeterminate point in space, that Mrs.
+Ansell at length rose and laid a questioning touch on his arm.
+
+"It's not true that you don't know where she is?" His face contracted.
+"At this moment I don't. Lately she has preferred...not to write...."
+
+"But surely you must know how to find her?"
+
+He tossed back his hair with an energetic movement. "I should find her
+if I didn't know how!"
+
+They stood confronted in a gaze of silent intensity, each penetrating
+farther into the mind of the other than would once have seemed possible
+to either one; then Amherst held out his hand abruptly. "Good-bye--and
+thank you," he said.
+
+She detained him a moment. "We shall see you soon again--see you both?"
+
+His face grew stern. "It's not to oblige Mr. Langhope that I am going to
+find my wife."
+
+"Ah, now you are unjust to him!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Don't let us speak of him!" he broke in.
+
+"Why not? When it is from him the request comes--the entreaty--that
+everything in the past should be forgotten?"
+
+"Yes--when it suits his convenience!"
+
+"Do you imagine that--even judging him in that way--it has not cost him
+a struggle?"
+
+"I can only think of what it has cost her!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sighing breath. "Ah--but don't you see that she
+has gained her point, and that nothing else matters to her?"
+
+"Gained her point? Not if, by that, you mean that things here can ever
+go back to the old state--that she and I can remain at Westmore after
+this!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell dropped her eyes for a moment; then she lifted to his her
+sweet impenetrable face.
+
+"Do you know what you have to do--both you and he? Exactly what she
+decides," she affirmed.
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+
+JUSTINE'S answer to her husband's letter bore a New York address; and
+the surprise of finding her in the same town with himself, and not half
+an hour's walk from the room in which he sat, was so great that it
+seemed to demand some sudden and violent outlet of physical movement.
+
+He thrust the letter in his pocket, took up his hat, and leaving the
+house, strode up Fifth Avenue toward the Park in the early spring
+sunlight.
+
+The news had taken five days to reach him, for in order to reestablish
+communication with his wife he had been obliged to write to Michigan,
+with the request that his letter should be forwarded. He had never
+supposed that Justine would be hard to find, or that she had purposely
+enveloped her movements in mystery. When she ceased to write he had
+simply concluded that, like himself, she felt the mockery of trying to
+keep up a sort of distant, semi-fraternal relation, marked by the
+occasional interchange of inexpressive letters. The inextricable
+mingling of thought and sensation which made the peculiar closeness of
+their union could never, to such direct and passionate natures, be
+replaced by the pretense of a temperate friendship. Feeling thus
+himself, and instinctively assuming the same feeling in his wife,
+Amherst had respected her silence, her wish to break definitely with
+their former life. She had written him, in the autumn, that she intended
+to leave Michigan for a few months, but that, in any emergency, a letter
+addressed to her friend's house would reach her; and he had taken this
+as meaning that, unless the emergency arose, she preferred that their
+correspondence should cease. Acquiescence was all the easier because it
+accorded with his own desire. It seemed to him, as he looked back, that
+the love he and Justine had felt for each other was like some rare
+organism which could maintain life only in its special element; and that
+element was neither passion nor sentiment, but truth. It was only on the
+heights that they could breathe.
+
+Some men, in his place, even while accepting the inevitableness of the
+moral rupture, would have felt concerned for the material side of the
+case. But it was characteristic of Amherst that this did not trouble
+him. He took it for granted that his wife would return to her nursing.
+From the first he had felt certain that it would be intolerable to her
+to accept aid from him, and that she would choose rather to support
+herself by the exercise of her regular profession; and, aside from such
+motives, he, who had always turned to hard work as the rarest refuge
+from personal misery, thought it natural that she should seek the same
+means of escape.
+
+He had therefore not been surprised, on opening her letter that
+morning, to learn that she had taken up her hospital work; but in the
+amazement of finding her so near he hardly grasped her explanation of
+the coincidence. There was something about a Buffalo patient suddenly
+ordered to New York for special treatment, and refusing to go in with a
+new nurse--but these details made no impression on his mind, which had
+only room for the fact that chance had brought his wife back at the very
+moment when his whole being yearned for her.
+
+She wrote that, owing to her duties, she would be unable to see him till
+three that afternoon; and he had still six hours to consume before their
+meeting. But in spirit they had met already--they were one in an
+intensity of communion which, as he strode northward along the bright
+crowded thoroughfare, seemed to gather up the whole world into one
+throbbing point of life.
+
+He had a boyish wish to keep the secret of his happiness to himself, not
+to let Mr. Langhope or Mrs. Ansell know of his meeting with Justine till
+it was over; and after twice measuring the length of the Park he turned
+in at one of the little wooden restaurants which were beginning to
+unshutter themselves in anticipation of spring custom. If only he could
+have seen Justine that morning! If he could have brought her there, and
+they could have sat opposite each other, in the bare empty room, with
+sparrows bustling and twittering in the lilacs against the open window!
+The room was ugly enough--but how she would have delighted in the
+delicate green of the near slopes, and the purplish haze of the woods
+beyond! She took a childish pleasure in such small adventures, and had
+the knack of giving a touch of magic to their most commonplace details.
+Amherst, as he finished his cold beef and indifferent eggs, found
+himself boyishly planning to bring her back there the next day....
+
+Then, over the coffee, he re-read her letter.
+
+The address she gave was that of a small private hospital, and she
+explained that she would have to receive him in the public parlour,
+which at that hour was open to other visitors. As the time approached,
+the thought that they might not be alone when they met became
+insufferable; and he determined, if he found any one else, in possession
+of the parlour, to wait in the hall, and meet her as she came down the
+stairs.
+
+He continued to elaborate this plan as he walked back slowly through the
+Park, He had timed himself to reach the hospital a little before three;
+but though it lacked five minutes to the hour when he entered the
+parlour, two women were already seated in one of its windows. They
+looked around as he came in, evidently as much annoyed by his appearance
+as he had been to find them there. The older of the two showed a sallow
+middle-aged face beneath her limp crape veil; the other was a slight
+tawdry creature, with nodding feathers, and innumerable chains and
+bracelets which she fingered ceaselessly as she talked.
+
+They eyed Amherst with resentment, and then turned away, continuing
+their talk in low murmurs, while he seated himself at the marble-topped
+table littered with torn magazines. Now and then the younger woman's
+voice rose in a shrill staccato, and a phrase or two floated over to
+him. "She'd simply worked herself to death--the nurse told me so.... She
+expects to go home in another week, though how she's going to stand the
+_fatigue_----" and then, after an inaudible answer: "It's all _his_
+fault, and if I was her I wouldn't go back to him for anything!"
+
+"Oh, Cora, he's real sorry now," the older woman protestingly murmured;
+but the other, unappeased, rejoined with ominously nodding plumes:
+"_You_ see--if they do make it up, it'll never be the same between
+them!"
+
+Amherst started up nervously, and as he did so the clock struck three,
+and he opened the door and passed out into the hall. It was paved with
+black and white marble; the walls were washed in a dull yellowish tint,
+and the prevalent odour of antiseptics was mingled with a stale smell of
+cooking. At the back rose a straight staircase carpeted with brass-bound
+India-rubber, like a ship's companion-way; and down that staircase she
+would come in a moment--he fancied he heard her step now....
+
+But the step was that of an elderly black-gowned woman in a cap--the
+matron probably.
+
+She glanced at Amherst in surprise, and asked: "Are you waiting for some
+one?"
+
+He made a motion of assent, and she opened the parlour door, saying:
+"Please walk in."
+
+"May I not wait out here?" he urged.
+
+She looked at him more attentively. "Why, no, I'm afraid not. You'll
+find the papers and magazines in here."
+
+Mildly but firmly she drove him in before her, and closing the door,
+advanced to the two women in the window. Amherst's hopes leapt up:
+perhaps she had come to fetch the visitors upstairs! He strained his
+ears to catch what was being said, and while he was thus absorbed the
+door opened, and turning at the sound he found himself face to face with
+his wife.
+
+He had not reflected that Justine would be in her nurse's dress; and the
+sight of the dark blue uniform and small white cap, in which he had
+never seen her since their first meeting in the Hope Hospital,
+obliterated all bitter and unhappy memories, and gave him the illusion
+of passing back at once into the clear air of their early friendship.
+Then he looked at her and remembered.
+
+He noticed that she had grown thinner than ever, or rather that her
+thinness, which had formerly had a healthy reed-like strength, now
+suggested fatigue and languor. And her face was spent, extinguished--the
+very eyes were lifeless. All her vitality seemed to have withdrawn
+itself into the arch of dense black hair which still clasped her
+forehead like the noble metal of some antique bust.
+
+The sight stirred him with a deeper pity, a more vehement compunction;
+but the impulse to snatch her to him, and seek his pardon on her lips,
+was paralyzed by the sense that the three women in the window had
+stopped talking and turned their heads toward the door.
+
+He held his hand out, and Justine's touched it for a moment; then he
+said in a low voice: "Is there no other place where I can see you?"
+
+She made a negative gesture. "I am afraid not to-day."
+
+Ah, her deep sweet voice--how completely his ear had lost the sound of
+it!
+
+She looked doubtfully about the room, and pointed to a sofa at the end
+farthest from the windows.
+
+"Shall we sit there?" she said.
+
+He followed her in silence, and they sat down side by side. The matron
+had drawn up a chair and resumed her whispered conference with the women
+in the window. Between the two groups stretched the bare length of the
+room, broken only by a few arm-chairs of stained wood, and the
+marble-topped table covered with magazines.
+
+The impossibility of giving free rein to his feelings developed in
+Amherst an unwonted intensity of perception, as though a sixth sense had
+suddenly emerged to take the place of those he could not use. And with
+this new-made faculty he seemed to gather up, and absorb into himself,
+as he had never done in their hours of closest communion, every detail
+of his wife's person, of her face and hands and gestures. He noticed how
+her full upper lids, of the tint of yellowish ivory, had a slight bluish
+discolouration, and how little thread-like blue veins ran across her
+temples to the roots of her hair. The emaciation of her face, and the
+hollow shades beneath her cheek-bones, made her mouth seem redder and
+fuller, though a little line on each side, where it joined the cheek,
+gave it a tragic droop. And her hands! When her fingers met his he
+recalled having once picked up, in the winter woods, the little
+feather-light skeleton of a frozen bird--and that was what her touch was
+like.
+
+And it was he who had brought her to this by his cruelty, his
+obtuseness, his base readiness to believe the worst of her! He did not
+want to pour himself out in self-accusation--that seemed too easy a way
+of escape. He wanted simply to take her in his arms, to ask her to give
+him one more chance--and then to show her! And all the while he was
+paralyzed by the group in the window.
+
+"Can't we go out? I must speak to you," he began again nervously.
+
+"Not this afternoon--the doctor is coming. Tomorrow----"
+
+"I can't wait for tomorrow!"
+
+She made a faint, imperceptible gesture, which read to his eyes: "You've
+waited a whole year."
+
+"Yes, I know," he returned, still constrained by the necessity of
+muffling his voice, of perpetually measuring the distance between
+themselves and the window. "I know what you might say--don't you suppose
+I've said it to myself a million times? But I didn't know--I couldn't
+imagine----"
+
+She interrupted him with a rapid movement. "What do you know now?"
+
+"What you promised Langhope----"
+
+She turned her startled eyes on him, and he saw the blood run flame-like
+under her skin. "But _he_ promised not to speak!" she cried.
+
+"He hasn't--to me. But such things make themselves known. Should you
+have been content to go on in that way forever?"
+
+She raised her head and her eyes rested in his. "If you were," she
+answered simply.
+
+"Justine!"
+
+Again she checked him with a silencing motion. "Please tell me just what
+has happened."
+
+"Not now--there's too much else to say. And nothing matters except that
+I'm with you."
+
+"But Mr. Langhope----"
+
+"He asks you to come. You're to see Cicely to-morrow."
+
+Her lower lip trembled a little, and a tear flowed over and hung on her
+lashes.
+
+"But what does all that matter now? We're together after this horrible
+year," he insisted.
+
+She looked at him again. "But what is really changed?"
+
+"Everything--everything! Not changed, I mean--just gone back."
+
+"To where...we were...before?" she whispered; and he whispered back: "To
+where we were before."
+
+There was a scraping of chairs on the floor, and with a sense of release
+Amherst saw that the colloquy in the window was over.
+
+The two visitors, gathering their wraps about them, moved slowly across
+the room, still talking to the matron in excited undertones, through
+which, as they neared the threshold, the younger woman's staccato again
+broke out.
+
+"I tell you, if she does go back to him, it'll never be the same between
+them!"
+
+"Oh, Cora, I wouldn't say that," the other ineffectually wailed; then
+they moved toward the door, and a moment later it had closed on them.
+
+Amherst turned to his wife with outstretched arms. "Say you forgive me,
+Justine!"
+
+She held back a little from his entreating hands, not reproachfully, but
+as if with a last scruple for himself.
+
+"There's nothing left...of the horror?" she asked below her breath.
+
+"To be without you--that's the only horror!"
+
+"You're _sure_----?"
+
+"Sure!"
+
+"It's just the same to you...just as it was...before?"
+
+"Just the same, Justine!"
+
+"It's not for myself, but you."
+
+"Then, for me--never speak of it!" he implored.
+
+"Because it's _not_ the same, then?" leapt from her.
+
+"Because it's wiped out--because it's never been!"
+
+"Never?"
+
+"Never!"
+
+He felt her yield to him at that, and under his eyes, close under his
+lips, was her face at last. But as they kissed they heard the handle of
+the door turn, and drew apart quickly, her hand lingering in his under
+the fold of her dress.
+
+A nurse looked in, dressed in the white uniform and pointed cap of the
+hospital. Amherst fancied that she smiled a little as she saw them.
+
+"Miss Brent--the doctor wants you to come right up and give the
+morphine."
+
+The door shut again as Justine rose to her feet. Amherst remained
+seated--he had made no motion to retain her hand as it slipped from him.
+
+"I'm coming," she called out to the retreating nurse; then she turned
+slowly and saw her husband's face.
+
+"I must go," she said in a low tone.
+
+Her eyes met his for a moment; but he looked away again as he stood up
+and reached for his hat.
+
+"Tomorrow, then----" he said, without attempting to detain her.
+
+"Tomorrow?"
+
+"You must come away from here--you must come home," he repeated
+mechanically.
+
+She made no answer, and he held his hand out and took hers. "Tomorrow,"
+he said, drawing her toward him; and their lips met again, but not in
+the same kiss.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII
+
+
+JUNE again at Hanaford--and Cicely's birthday. The anniversary was to
+coincide, this year, with the opening of the old house at Hopewood, as a
+kind of pleasure-palace--gymnasium, concert-hall and museum--for the
+recreation of the mill-hands.
+
+The idea had first come to Amherst on the winter afternoon when Bessy
+Westmore had confessed her love for him under the snow-laden trees of
+Hopewood. Even then the sense that his personal happiness was enlarged
+and secured by its promise of happiness to others had made him wish that
+the scene associated with the opening of his new life should be made to
+commemorate a corresponding change in the fortunes of Westmore. But when
+the control of the mills passed into his hands other and more necessary
+improvements pressed upon him; and it was not till now that the
+financial condition of the company had permitted the execution of his
+plan.
+
+Justine, on her return to Hanaford, had found the work already in
+progress, and had been told by her husband that he was carrying out a
+projected scheme of Bessy's. She had felt a certain surprise, but had
+concluded that the plan in question dated back to the early days of his
+first marriage, when, in his wife's eyes, his connection with the mills
+still invested them with interest.
+
+Since Justine had come back to her husband, both had tacitly avoided all
+allusions to the past, and the recreation-house at Hopewood being, as
+she divined, in some sort an expiatory offering to Bessy's plaintive
+shade, she had purposely refrained from questioning Amherst about its
+progress, and had simply approved the plans he submitted to her.
+
+Fourteen months had passed since her return, and now, as she sat beside
+her husband in the carriage which was conveying them to Hopewood, she
+said to herself that her life had at last fallen into what promised to
+be its final shape--that as things now were they would probably be to
+the end. And outwardly at least they were what she and Amherst had
+always dreamed of their being. Westmore prospered under the new rule.
+The seeds of life they had sown there were springing up in a promising
+growth of bodily health and mental activity, and above all in a dawning
+social consciousness. The mill-hands were beginning to understand the
+meaning of their work, in its relation to their own lives and to the
+larger economy. And outwardly, also, the new growth was showing itself
+in the humanized aspect of the place. Amherst's young maples were tall
+enough now to cast a shade on the grass-bordered streets; and the
+well-kept turf, the bright cottage gardens, the new central group of
+library, hospital and club-house, gave to the mill-village the hopeful
+air of a "rising" residential suburb.
+
+In the bright June light, behind their fresh green mantle of trees and
+creepers, even the factory buildings looked less stern and prison-like
+than formerly; and the turfing and planting of the adjoining
+river-banks had transformed a waste of foul mud and refuse into a little
+park where the operatives might refresh themselves at midday.
+
+Yes--Westmore was alive at last: the dead city of which Justine had once
+spoken had risen from its grave, and its blank face had taken on a
+meaning. As Justine glanced at her husband she saw that the same thought
+was in his mind. However achieved, at whatever cost of personal misery
+and error, the work of awakening and freeing Westmore was done, and that
+work had justified itself.
+
+She looked from Amherst to Cicely, who sat opposite, eager and rosy in
+her mourning frock--for Mr. Langhope had died some two months
+previously--and as intent as her step-parents on the scene before her.
+Cicely was old enough now to regard her connection with Westmore as
+something more than a nursery game. She was beginning to learn a great
+deal about the mills, and to understand, in simple, friendly ways,
+something of her own relation to them. The work and play of the
+children, the interests and relaxations provided for their elders, had
+been gradually explained to her by Justine, and she knew that this
+shining tenth birthday of hers was to throw its light as far as the
+clouds of factory-smoke extended.
+
+As they mounted the slope to Hopewood, the spacious white building,
+with its enfolding colonnades, its broad terraces and tennis-courts,
+shone through the trees like some bright country-house adorned for its
+master's home-coming; and Amherst and his wife might have been driving
+up to the house which had been built to shelter their wedded happiness.
+The thought flashed across Justine as their carriage climbed the hill.
+She was as much absorbed as Amherst in the welfare of Westmore, it had
+become more and more, to both, the refuge in which their lives still met
+and mingled; but for a moment, as they paused before the flower-decked
+porch, and he turned to help her from the carriage, it occurred to her
+to wonder what her sensations would have been if he had been bringing
+her home--to a real home of their own--instead of accompanying her to
+another philanthropic celebration. But what need had they of a real
+home, when they no longer had any real life of their own? Nothing was
+left of that secret inner union which had so enriched and beautified
+their outward lives. Since Justine's return to Hanaford they had
+entered, tacitly, almost unconsciously, into a new relation to each
+other: a relation in which their personalities were more and more merged
+in their common work, so that, as it were, they met only by avoiding
+each other.
+
+From the first, Justine had accepted this as inevitable; just as she had
+understood, when Amherst had sought her out in New York, that his
+remaining at Westmore, which had once been contingent on her leaving
+him, now depended on her willingness to return and take up their former
+life.
+
+She accepted the last condition as she had accepted the other, pledged
+to the perpetual expiation of an act for which, in the abstract, she
+still refused to hold herself to blame. But life is not a matter of
+abstract principles, but a succession of pitiful compromises with fate,
+of concessions to old tradition, old beliefs, old charities and
+frailties. That was what her act had taught her--that was the word of
+the gods to the mortal who had laid a hand on their bolts. And she had
+humbled herself to accept the lesson, seeing human relations at last as
+a tangled and deep-rooted growth, a dark forest through which the
+idealist cannot cut his straight path without hearing at each stroke the
+cry of the severed branch: "_Why woundest thou me?_"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The lawns leading up to the house were already sprinkled with
+holiday-makers, while along the avenue came the rolling of wheels, the
+throb of motor-cars; and Justine, with Cicely beside her, stood in the
+wide hall to receive the incoming throng, in which Hanaford society was
+indiscriminately mingled with the operatives in their Sunday best.
+
+While his wife welcomed the new arrivals, Amherst, supported by some
+young Westmore cousins, was guiding them into the concert-hall, where he
+was to say a word on the uses of the building before declaring it open
+for inspection. And presently Justine and Cicely, summoned by Westy
+Gaines, made their way through the rows of seats to a corner near the
+platform. Her husband was there already, with Halford Gaines and a group
+of Hanaford dignitaries, and just below them sat Mrs. Gaines and her
+daughters, the Harry Dressels, and Amherst's radiant mother.
+
+As Justine passed between them, she wondered how much they knew of the
+events which had wrought so profound and permanent change in her life.
+She had never known how Hanaford explained her absence or what comments
+it had made on her return. But she saw to-day more clearly than ever
+that Amherst had become a power among his townsmen, and that if they
+were still blind to the inner meaning of his work, its practical results
+were beginning to impress them profoundly. Hanaford's sociological creed
+was largely based on commercial considerations, and Amherst had won
+Hanaford's esteem by the novel feat of defying its economic principles
+and snatching success out of his defiance.
+
+And now he had advanced a step or two in front of the "representative"
+semi-circle on the platform, and was beginning to speak.
+
+Justine did not hear his first words. She was looking up at him, trying
+to see him with the eyes of the crowd, and wondering what manner of man
+he would have seemed to her if she had known as little as they did of
+his inner history.
+
+He held himself straight, the heavy locks thrown back from his forehead,
+one hand resting on the table beside him, the other grasping a folded
+blue-print which the architect of the building had just advanced to give
+him. As he stood there, Justine recalled her first sight of him in the
+Hope Hospital, five years earlier--was it only five years? They had
+dealt deep strokes to his face, hollowing the eye-sockets, accentuating
+the strong modelling of nose and chin, fixing the lines between the
+brows; but every touch had a meaning--it was not the languid hand of
+time which had remade his features, but the sharp chisel of thought and
+action.
+
+She roused herself suddenly to the consciousness of what he was saying.
+
+"For the idea of this building--of a building dedicated to the
+recreation of Westmore--is not new in my mind; but while it remained
+there as a mere idea, it had already, without my knowledge, taken
+definite shape in the thoughts of the owner of Westmore."
+
+There was a slight drop in his voice as he designated Bessy, and he
+waited a moment before continuing: "It was not till after the death of
+my first wife that I learned of her intention--that I found by
+accident, among her papers, this carefully-studied plan for a
+pleasure-house at Hopewood."
+
+He paused again, and unrolling the blue-print, held it up before his
+audience.
+
+"You cannot, at this distance," he went on, "see all the admirable
+details of her plan; see how beautifully they were imagined, how
+carefully and intelligently elaborated. She who conceived them longed to
+see beauty everywhere--it was her dearest wish to bestow it on her
+people here. And her ardent imagination outran the bounds of practical
+possibility. We cannot give you, in its completeness, the beautiful
+thing she had imagined--the great terraces, the marble porches, the
+fountains, lily-tanks, and cloisters. But you will see that, wherever it
+was possible--though in humbler materials, and on a smaller scale--we
+have faithfully followed her design; and when presently you go through
+this building, and when, hereafter, you find health and refreshment and
+diversion here, I ask you to remember the beauty she dreamed of giving
+you, and to let the thought of it make her memory beautiful among you
+and among your children...."
+
+Justine had listened with deepening amazement. She was seated so close
+to her husband that she had recognized the blue-print the moment he
+unrolled it. There was no mistaking its origin--it was simply the plan
+of the gymnasium which Bessy had intended to build at Lynbrook, and
+which she had been constrained to abandon owing to her husband's
+increased expenditure at the mills. But how was it possible that Amherst
+knew nothing of the original purpose of the plans, and by what mocking
+turn of events had a project devised in deliberate defiance of his
+wishes, and intended to declare his wife's open contempt for them, been
+transformed into a Utopian vision for the betterment of the Westmore
+operatives?
+
+A wave of anger swept over Justine at this last derisive stroke of fate.
+It was grotesque and pitiable that a man like Amherst should create out
+of his regrets a being who had never existed, and then ascribe to her
+feelings and actions of which the real woman had again and again proved
+herself incapable!
+
+Ah, no, Justine had suffered enough--but to have this imaginary Bessy
+called from the grave, dressed in a semblance of self-devotion and
+idealism, to see her petty impulses of vindictiveness disguised as the
+motions of a lofty spirit--it was as though her small malicious ghost
+had devised this way of punishing the wife who had taken her place!
+
+Justine had suffered enough--suffered deliberately and unstintingly,
+paying the full price of her error, not seeking to evade its least
+consequence. But no sane judgment could ask her to sit quiet under this
+last hallucination. What! This unreal woman, this phantom that
+Amherst's uneasy imagination had evoked, was to come between himself and
+her, to supplant her first as his wife, and then as his fellow-worker?
+Why should she not cry out the truth to him, defend herself against the
+dead who came back to rob her of such wedded peace as was hers? She had
+only to tell the true story of the plans to lay poor Bessy's ghost
+forever!
+
+The confused throbbing impulses within her were stifled under a long
+burst of applause--then she saw Westy Gaines at her side again, and
+understood that he had come to lead Cicely to the platform. For a moment
+she clung jealously to the child's hand, hardly aware of what she did,
+feeling only that she was being thrust farther and farther into the
+background of the life she had helped to call out of chaos. Then a
+contrary impulse moved her. She gently freed Cicely's hand, and a moment
+later, as she sat with bent head and throbbing breast, she heard the
+child's treble piping out above her:
+
+"In my mother's name, I give this house to Westmore."
+
+Applause again--and then Justine found herself enveloped in a general
+murmur of compliment and congratulation. Mr. Amherst had spoken
+admirably--a "beautiful tribute--" ah, he had done poor Bessy justice!
+And to think that till now Hanaford had never fully known how she had
+the welfare of the mills at heart--how it was really only _her_ work
+that he was carrying on there! Well, he had made that perfectly
+clear--and no doubt Cicely was being taught to follow in her mother's
+footsteps: everyone had noticed how her step-father was associating her
+with the work at the mills. And his little speech would, as it were,
+consecrate the child's relation to that work, make it appear to her as
+the continuance of a beautiful, a sacred tradition....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now it was over. The building had been inspected, the operatives had
+dispersed, the Hanaford company had rolled off down the avenue, Cicely,
+among them, driving away tired and happy in Mrs. Dressel's victoria, and
+Amherst and his wife were alone.
+
+Amherst, after bidding good-bye to his last guests, had gone back to the
+empty concert-room to fetch the blue-print lying on the platform. He
+came back with it, between the uneven rows of empty chairs, and joined
+Justine, who stood waiting in the hall. His face was slightly flushed,
+and his eyes had the light which in happy moments burned through their
+veil of thought.
+
+He laid his hand on his wife's arm, and drawing her toward a table
+spread out the blueprint before her.
+
+"You haven't seen this, have you?" he said.
+
+She looked down at the plan without answering, reading in the left-hand
+corner the architect's conventional inscription: "Swimming-tank and
+gymnasium designed for Mrs. John Amherst."
+
+Amherst looked up, perhaps struck by her silence.
+
+"But perhaps you _have_ seen it--at Lynbrook? It must have been done
+while you were there."
+
+The quickened throb of her blood rushed to her brain like a signal.
+"Speak--speak now!" the signal commanded.
+
+Justine continued to look fixedly at the plan. "Yes, I have seen it,"
+she said at length.
+
+"At Lynbrook?"
+
+"At Lynbrook."
+
+"_She_ showed it to you, I suppose--while I was away?"
+
+Justine hesitated again. "Yes, while you were away."
+
+"And did she tell you anything about it, go into details about her
+wishes, her intentions?"
+
+Now was the moment--now! As her lips parted she looked up at her
+husband. The illumination still lingered on his face--and it was the
+face she loved. He was waiting eagerly for her next word.
+
+"No, I heard no details. I merely saw the plan lying there."
+
+She saw his look of disappointment. "She never told you about it?"
+
+"No--she never told me."
+
+It was best so, after all. She understood that now. It was now at last
+that she was paying her full price.
+
+Amherst rolled up the plan with a sigh and pushed it into the drawer of
+the table. It struck her that he too had the look of one who has laid a
+ghost. He turned to her and drew her hand through his arm.
+
+"You're tired, dear. You ought to have driven back with the others," he
+said.
+
+"No, I would rather stay with you."
+
+"You want to drain this good day to the dregs, as I do?"
+
+"Yes," she murmured, drawing her hand away.
+
+"It _is_ a good day, isn't it?" he continued, looking about him at the
+white-panelled walls, the vista of large bright rooms seen through the
+folding doors. "I feel as if we had reached a height, somehow--a height
+where one might pause and draw breath for the next climb. Don't you feel
+that too, Justine?"
+
+"Yes--I feel it."
+
+"Do you remember once, long ago--one day when you and I and Cicely went
+on a picnic to hunt orchids--how we got talking of the one best moment
+in life--the moment when one wanted most to stop the clock?"
+
+The colour rose in her face while he spoke. It was a long time since he
+had referred to the early days of their friendship--the days
+_before_....
+
+"Yes, I remember," she said.
+
+"And do you remember how we said that it was with most of us as it was
+with Faust? That the moment one wanted to hold fast to was not, in most
+lives, the moment of keenest personal happiness, but the other kind--the
+kind that would have seemed grey and colourless at first: the moment
+when the meaning of life began to come out from the mists--when one
+could look out at last over the marsh one had drained?"
+
+A tremor ran through Justine. "It was you who said that," she said,
+half-smiling.
+
+"But didn't you feel it with me? Don't you now?"
+
+"Yes--I do now," she murmured.
+
+He came close to her, and taking her hands in his, kissed them one after
+the other.
+
+"Dear," he said, "let us go out and look at the marsh we have drained."
+
+He turned and led her through the open doorway to the terrace above the
+river. The sun was setting behind the wooded slopes of Hopewood, and the
+trees about the house stretched long blue shadows across the lawn.
+Beyond them rose the smoke of Westmore.
+
+
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                    BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON                    |
+|                                                              |
+|             PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS             |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                        [12 mo. $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                      The House of Mirth                      |
+|                                                              |
+|               _Illustrations by_ A. B. WENZELL               |
+|                                                              |
+|   "In my judgment 'The House of Mirth' is a story of such    |
+|  vitality, of such artistic and moral insight, that it will  |
+| stand by itself in American fiction as a study of a certain  |
+|  kind of society. The title is a stroke of genius in irony,  |
+|    and gives the key to a novel of absorbing interest, as    |
+|  relentless as life itself in its judgment, but deeply and   |
+|    beautifully humanized at the end."--HAMILTON W. MABIE.    |
+|                                                              |
+| "Mrs. Wharton has done many good things. She has never done  |
+|         anything better than this."--_The Academy._          |
+|                                                              |
+|  "She is the first to make a really powerful and brilliant   |
+| book out of the material offered by American fashion to the  |
+| novelist.... A sterling piece of craftsmanship, a tale which |
+|  interests the reader at the start and never lets him rest   |
+|        till the end is reached."--New York _Tribune_.        |
+|                                                              |
+|    "So accurate an account of the thoughts and deeds of a    |
+| single human being has, we are certain, never hitherto been  |
+|               written."--Boston _Transcript_.                |
+|                                                              |
+|    "It is a great American novel, intensely interesting,     |
+|     marvelous in its literary finish and powerful in its     |
+|      delineation of Lily Bart."--Philadelphia _Press_.       |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                        [12 mo. $1.00]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                      Madame de Treymes                       |
+|                                                              |
+|           _Illustrated in color by_ A. B. WENZELL            |
+|                                                              |
+| "We know of no book in which the virtues of the short story  |
+| are united with the virtues of the novel in a higher degree  |
+|           than in this instance."--New York _Sun_.           |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                    BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON                    |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                        SIXTH EDITION                         |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo_, $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                   The Greater Inclination                    |
+|                                                              |
+|                           CONTENTS                           |
+|                                                              |
+|                     _The Muse's Tragedy_                     |
+|                         _A Journey_                          |
+|                        _The Pelican_                         |
+|                       _Souls Belated_                        |
+|                          _A Coward_                          |
+|                  _The Twilight of the Gods_                  |
+|                    _A Cup of Cold Water_                     |
+|                        _The Portrait_                        |
+|                                                              |
+|       "Between these stories and those of the ordinary       |
+| entertaining sort there is a great gulf fixed."--_The Dial._ |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo_, $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                      Crucial Instances                       |
+|                                                              |
+|                           CONTENTS                           |
+|                                                              |
+|                   _The Duchess at Prayer_                    |
+|                   _The Angel at the Grave_                   |
+|                        _The Recovery_                        |
+|                     _"Copy": A Dialogue_                     |
+|                       _The Rembrandt_                        |
+|                     _The Moving Finger_                      |
+|                      _The Confessional_                      |
+|                                                              |
+| "Tragedy and comedy, pathos and humor, are mingled in these  |
+|           pages of brilliant writing and splendid            |
+|             imagination."--Philadelphia _Press_.             |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo_, $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                    The Valley of Decision                    |
+|                                                              |
+|                        25TH THOUSAND                         |
+|                                                              |
+|  "Coming in the midst of an epoch overcrowded with works of  |
+|   fiction, 'The Valley of Decision' stands out giant-like    |
+| above its surroundings. It stands, indeed, almost without a  |
+| rival in the modern literary world, and there can be little  |
+| doubt that it places Mrs. Wharton at once side by side with  |
+|     the greatest novelists of the day."--Boston _Evening     |
+|                         Transcript_.                         |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                    BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON                    |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo, $1.25_]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                          Sanctuary                           |
+|                                                              |
+|              ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. APPLETON CLARK              |
+|                                                              |
+| "This is a striking little book--striking in its simplicity  |
+|     and penetration, its passion and restraint."--London     |
+|                           _Times_.                           |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo, $1.25_]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                        The Touchstone                        |
+|                                                              |
+|     "Its characters are real, their motives and actions      |
+|   thoroughly human. And the author's art is sufficient to    |
+| bring out the strength of every situation."--_The Argonaut._ |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo_, $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                      The Descent of Man                      |
+|                                                              |
+|                           CONTENTS                           |
+|                                                              |
+|                     _The Descent of Man_                     |
+|                    _The Mission of Jane_                     |
+|                       _The Other Two_                        |
+|                       _The Quicksand_                        |
+|                       _The Dilettante_                       |
+|                       _The Reckoning_                        |
+|                         _Expiation_                          |
+|                   _The Lady's Maid's Bell_                   |
+|              _A Venetian Night's Entertainment_              |
+|                                                              |
+|  "It is, of course, the extraordinary directness with which  |
+| Mrs. Wharton's probe goes to the spot under inspection, the  |
+| deftness with which she is able to bring to the light of day |
+| what we had hidden even from ourselves, that account for the |
+| admiration with which we regard her short stories."--London  |
+|                          _Academy_.                          |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                    BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON                    |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|             [_8vo, $2.50 net._ Postage 17 cents]             |
+|                                                              |
+|                     Italian Backgrounds                      |
+|                                                              |
+|                   ILLUSTRATED BY PEIXOTTO                    |
+|                                                              |
+|                           CONTENTS                           |
+|                                                              |
+|                   _An Alpine Posting Inn_                    |
+|                  _A Midsummer Week's Dream_                  |
+|               _The Sanctuaries of the Pennine_               |
+|                            _Alps_                            |
+|                    _What the Hermits Saw_                    |
+|                      _A Tuscan Shrine_                       |
+|                     _Sub Umbra Liliorum_                     |
+|                       _March in Italy_                       |
+|                     _Picturesque Milan_                      |
+|                    _Italian Backgrounds_                     |
+|                                                              |
+|  "Belongs in that small class of books of observation which  |
+|   are also books of artistic and spiritual interpretation;   |
+| which not only describe places and monuments, but convey an  |
+| impression of peoples, a sense of society, with the elusive  |
+|   atmosphere in which everything of historical or artistic   |
+|  value is seen by those who have the gift of sight."--_The   |
+|                          Outlook._                           |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                     [_12mo, $1.25 net_]                      |
+|                                                              |
+|                      The Joy of Living                       |
+|                                                              |
+|                    (_Es lebe das Leben_)                     |
+|                                                              |
+|  A play in five acts, by HERMANN SUDERMANN. Translated from  |
+|                 the German by EDITH WHARTON.                 |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                   [_Large 8vo, $2.50 net_]                   |
+|                                                              |
+|                   The Decoration of Houses                   |
+|                                                              |
+| With 56 full-page illustrations, by EDITH WHARTON and OGDEN  |
+|                         CODMAN, JR.                          |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+Most inconsistencies in hyphenation and spelling have been left as in the
+original. Missing or wrong punctuation has been added or corrected,
+where it is obvious (missing punctuation is often a result of the
+scanning/OCR process). In one case, a missing letter has also been
+added, and the following misspellings have been corrected: involuntairly to
+involuntarily, sensastions to sensations, Wetsmore to Westmore, Cilfton
+to Clifton, It to If
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRUIT OF THE TREE ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Fruit of the Tree
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+Illustrator: Alonzo Kimball
+
+Release Date: September 6, 2006 [EBook #19191]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRUIT OF THE TREE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Melissa Er-Raqabi
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FRUIT OF THE TREE
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured
+man.]
+
+
+
+
+THE FRUIT OF THE TREE
+BY
+EDITH WHARTON
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALONZO KIMBALL
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+MDCCCCVII
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+[Illustration: mark]
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+_He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured man_  _Frontispiece_
+_"No--I shall have to ask you to take my word for it"_     _Facing p. 82_
+_Half-way up the slope they met_                            130
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+
+
+THE FRUIT OF THE TREE
+
+I
+
+
+IN the surgical ward of the Hope Hospital at Hanaford, a nurse was
+bending over a young man whose bandaged right hand and arm lay stretched
+along the bed.
+
+His head stirred uneasily, and slipping her arm behind him she effected
+a professional readjustment of the pillows. "Is that better?"
+
+As she leaned over, he lifted his anxious bewildered eyes, deep-sunk
+under ridges of suffering. "I don't s'pose there's any kind of a show
+for me, is there?" he asked, pointing with his free hand--the stained
+seamed hand of the mechanic--to the inert bundle on the quilt.
+
+Her only immediate answer was to wipe the dampness from his forehead;
+then she said: "We'll talk about that to-morrow."
+
+"Why not now?"
+
+"Because Dr. Disbrow can't tell till the inflammation goes down."
+
+"Will it go down by to-morrow?"
+
+"It will begin to, if you don't excite yourself and keep up the fever."
+
+"Excite myself? I--there's four of 'em at home----"
+
+"Well, then there are four reasons for keeping quiet," she rejoined.
+
+She did not use, in speaking, the soothing inflection of her trade: she
+seemed to disdain to cajole or trick the sufferer. Her full young voice
+kept its cool note of authority, her sympathy revealing itself only in
+the expert touch of her hands and the constant vigilance of her dark
+steady eyes. This vigilance softened to pity as the patient turned his
+head away with a groan. His free left hand continued to travel the
+sheet, clasping and unclasping itself in contortions of feverish unrest.
+It was as though all the anguish of his mutilation found expression in
+that lonely hand, left without work in the world now that its mate was
+useless.
+
+The nurse felt a touch on her shoulder, and rose to face the matron, a
+sharp-featured woman with a soft intonation.
+
+"This is Mr. Amherst, Miss Brent. The assistant manager from the mills.
+He wishes to see Dillon."
+
+John Amherst's step was singularly noiseless. The nurse, sensitive by
+nature and training to all physical characteristics, was struck at once
+by the contrast between his alert face and figure and the silent way in
+which he moved. She noticed, too, that the same contrast was repeated in
+the face itself, its spare energetic outline, with the high nose and
+compressed lips of the mover of men, being curiously modified by the
+veiled inward gaze of the grey eyes he turned on her. It was one of the
+interests of Justine Brent's crowded yet lonely life to attempt a rapid
+mental classification of the persons she met; but the contradictions in
+Amherst's face baffled her, and she murmured inwardly "I don't know" as
+she drew aside to let him approach the bed. He stood by her in silence,
+his hands clasped behind him, his eyes on the injured man, who lay
+motionless, as if sunk in a lethargy. The matron, at the call of another
+nurse, had minced away down the ward, committing Amherst with a glance
+to Miss Brent; and the two remained alone by the bed.
+
+After a pause, Amherst moved toward the window beyond the empty cot
+adjoining Dillon's. One of the white screens used to isolate dying
+patients had been placed against this cot, which was the last at that
+end of the ward, and the space beyond formed a secluded corner, where a
+few words could be exchanged out of reach of the eyes in the other beds.
+
+"Is he asleep?" Amherst asked, as Miss Brent joined him.
+
+Miss Brent glanced at him again. His voice betokened not merely
+education, but something different and deeper--the familiar habit of
+gentle speech; and his shabby clothes--carefully brushed, but ill-cut
+and worn along the seams--sat on him easily, and with the same
+difference.
+
+"The morphine has made him drowsy," she answered. "The wounds were
+dressed about an hour ago, and the doctor gave him a hypodermic."
+
+"The wounds--how many are there?"
+
+"Besides the hand, his arm is badly torn up to the elbow."
+
+Amherst listened with bent head and frowning brow.
+
+"What do you think of the case?"
+
+She hesitated. "Dr. Disbrow hasn't said----"
+
+"And it's not your business to?" He smiled slightly. "I know hospital
+etiquette. But I have a particular reason for asking." He broke off and
+looked at her again, his veiled gaze sharpening to a glance of
+concentrated attention. "You're not one of the regular nurses, are you?
+Your dress seems to be of a different colour."
+
+She smiled at the "seems to be," which denoted a tardy and imperfect
+apprehension of the difference between dark-blue linen and white.
+
+"No: I happened to be staying at Hanaford, and hearing that they were in
+want of a surgical nurse, I offered my help."
+
+Amherst nodded. "So much the better. Is there any place where I can say
+two words to you?"
+
+"I could hardly leave the ward now, unless Mrs. Ogan comes back."
+
+"I don't care to have you call Mrs. Ogan," he interposed quickly. "When
+do you go off duty?"
+
+She looked at him in surprise. "If what you want to ask about
+is--anything connected with the management of things here--you know
+we're not supposed to talk of our patients outside of the hospital."
+
+"I know. But I am going to ask you to break through the rule--in that
+poor fellow's behalf."
+
+A protest wavered on her lip, but he held her eyes steadily, with a
+glint of good-humour behind his determination. "When do you go off
+duty?"
+
+"At six."
+
+"I'll wait at the corner of South Street and walk a little way with you.
+Let me put my case, and if you're not convinced you can refuse to
+answer."
+
+"Very well," she said, without farther hesitation; and Amherst, with a
+slight nod of farewell, passed through the door near which they had been
+standing.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+WHEN Justine Brent emerged from the Hope Hospital the October dusk had
+fallen and the wide suburban street was almost dark, except when the
+illuminated bulk of an electric car flashed by under the maples.
+
+She crossed the tracks and approached the narrower thoroughfare where
+Amherst awaited her. He hung back a moment, and she was amused to see
+that he failed to identify the uniformed nurse with the girl in her trim
+dark dress, soberly complete in all its accessories, who advanced to
+him, smiling under her little veil.
+
+"Thank you," he said as he turned and walked beside her. "Is this your
+way?"
+
+"I am staying in Oak Street. But it's just as short to go by Maplewood
+Avenue."
+
+"Yes; and quieter."
+
+For a few yards they walked on in silence, their long steps falling
+naturally into time, though Amherst was somewhat taller than his
+companion.
+
+At length he said: "I suppose you know nothing about the relation
+between Hope Hospital and the Westmore Mills."
+
+"Only that the hospital was endowed by one of the Westmore family."
+
+"Yes; an old Miss Hope, a great-aunt of Westmore's. But there is more
+than that between them--all kinds of subterranean passages." He paused,
+and began again: "For instance, Dr. Disbrow married the sister of our
+manager's wife."
+
+"Your chief at the mills?"
+
+"Yes," he said with a slight grimace. "So you see, if Truscomb--the
+manager--thinks one of the mill-hands is only slightly injured, it's
+natural that his brother-in-law, Dr. Disbrow, should take an optimistic
+view of the case."
+
+"Natural? I don't know----"
+
+"Don't you think it's natural that a man should be influenced by his
+wife?"
+
+"Not where his professional honour is concerned."
+
+Amherst smiled. "That sounds very young--if you'll excuse my saying so.
+Well, I won't go on to insinuate that, Truscomb being high in favour
+with the Westmores, and the Westmores having a lien on the hospital,
+Disbrow's position there is also bound up with his taking--more or
+less--the same view as Truscomb's."
+
+Miss Brent had paused abruptly on the deserted pavement.
+
+"No, don't go on--if you want me to think well of you," she flashed out.
+
+Amherst met the thrust composedly, perceiving, as she turned to face
+him, that what she resented was not so much his insinuation against his
+superiors as his allusion to the youthfulness of her sentiments. She
+was, in fact, as he now noticed, still young enough to dislike being
+excused for her youth. In her severe uniform of blue linen, her dusky
+skin darkened by the nurse's cap, and by the pale background of the
+hospital walls, she had seemed older, more competent and experienced;
+but he now saw how fresh was the pale curve of her cheek, and how
+smooth the brow clasped in close waves of hair.
+
+"I began at the wrong end," he acknowledged. "But let me put Dillon's
+case before you dismiss me."
+
+She softened. "It is only because of my interest in that poor fellow
+that I am here----"
+
+"Because you think he needs help--and that you can help him?"
+
+But she held back once more. "Please tell me about him first," she said,
+walking on.
+
+Amherst met the request with another question. "I wonder how much you
+know about factory life?"
+
+"Oh, next to nothing. Just what I've managed to pick up in these two
+days at the hospital."
+
+He glanced at her small determined profile under its dark roll of hair,
+and said, half to himself: "That might be a good deal."
+
+She took no notice of this, and he went on: "Well, I won't try to put
+the general situation before you, though Dillon's accident is really the
+result of it. He works in the carding room, and on the day of the
+accident his 'card' stopped suddenly, and he put his hand behind him to
+get a tool he needed out of his trouser-pocket. He reached back a little
+too far, and the card behind him caught his hand in its million of
+diamond-pointed wires. Truscomb and the overseer of the room maintain
+that the accident was due to his own carelessness; but the hands say
+that it was caused by the fact of the cards being too near together, and
+that just such an accident was bound to happen sooner or later."
+
+Miss Brent drew an eager breath. "And what do _you_ say?"
+
+"That they're right: the carding-room is shamefully overcrowded. Dillon
+hasn't been in it long--he worked his way up at the mills from being a
+bobbin-boy--and he hadn't yet learned how cautious a man must be in
+there. The cards are so close to each other that even the old hands run
+narrow risks, and it takes the cleverest operative some time to learn
+that he must calculate every movement to a fraction of an inch."
+
+"But why do they crowd the rooms in that way?"
+
+"To get the maximum of profit out of the minimum of floor-space. It
+costs more to increase the floor-space than to maim an operative now and
+then."
+
+"I see. Go on," she murmured.
+
+"That's the first point; here is the second. Dr. Disbrow told Truscomb
+this morning that Dillon's hand would certainly be saved, and that he
+might get back to work in a couple of months if the company would
+present him with an artificial finger or two."
+
+Miss Brent faced him with a flush of indignation. "Mr. Amherst--who gave
+you this version of Dr. Disbrow's report?"
+
+"The manager himself."
+
+"Verbally?"
+
+"No--he showed me Disbrow's letter."
+
+For a moment or two they walked on silently through the quiet street;
+then she said, in a voice still stirred with feeling: "As I told you
+this afternoon, Dr. Disbrow has said nothing in my hearing."
+
+"And Mrs. Ogan?"
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Ogan--" Her voice broke in a ripple of irony. "Mrs. Ogan
+'feels it to be such a beautiful dispensation, my dear, that, owing to a
+death that very morning in the surgical ward, we happened to have a bed
+ready for the poor man within three hours of the accident.'" She had
+exchanged her deep throat-tones for a high reedy note which perfectly
+simulated the matron's lady-like inflections.
+
+Amherst, at the change, turned on her with a boyish burst of laughter:
+she joined in it, and for a moment they were blent in that closest of
+unions, the discovery of a common fund of humour.
+
+She was the first to grow grave. "That three hours' delay didn't help
+matters--how is it there is no emergency hospital at the mills?"
+
+Amherst laughed again, but in a different key. "That's part of the
+larger question, which we haven't time for now." He waited a moment, and
+then added: "You've not yet given me your own impression of Dillon's
+case."
+
+"You shall have it, if you saw that letter. Dillon will certainly lose
+his hand--and probably the whole arm." She spoke with a thrilling of her
+slight frame that transformed the dispassionate professional into a girl
+shaken with indignant pity.
+
+Amherst stood still before her. "Good God! Never anything but useless
+lumber?"
+
+"Never----"
+
+"And he won't die?"
+
+"Alas!"
+
+"He has a consumptive wife and three children. She ruined her health
+swallowing cotton-dust at the factory," Amherst continued.
+
+"So she told me yesterday."
+
+He turned in surprise. "You've had a talk with her?"
+
+"I went out to Westmore last night. I was haunted by her face when she
+came to the hospital. She looks forty, but she told me she was only
+twenty-six." Miss Brent paused to steady her voice. "It's the curse of
+my trade that it's always tempting me to interfere in cases where I can
+do no possible good. The fact is, I'm not fit to be a nurse--I shall
+live and die a wretched sentimentalist!" she ended, with an angry dash
+at the tears on her veil.
+
+Her companion walked on in silence till she had regained her composure.
+Then he said: "What did you think of Westmore?"
+
+"I think it's one of the worst places I ever saw--and I am not unused to
+slums. It looks so dead. The slums of big cities are much more
+cheerful."
+
+He made no answer, and after a moment she asked: "Does the cotton-dust
+always affect the lungs?"
+
+"It's likely to, where there is the least phthisical tendency. But of
+course the harm could be immensely reduced by taking up the old rough
+floors which hold the dust, and by thorough cleanliness and
+ventilation."
+
+"What does the company do in such cases? Where an operative breaks down
+at twenty-five?"
+
+"The company says there was a phthisical tendency."
+
+"And will they give nothing in return for the two lives they have
+taken?"
+
+"They will probably pay for Dillon's care at the hospital, and they have
+taken the wife back as a scrubber."
+
+"To clean those uncleanable floors? She's not fit for it!"
+
+"She must work, fit for it or not; and there is less strain in scrubbing
+than in bending over the looms or cards. The pay is lower, of course,
+but she's very grateful for being taken back at all, now that she's no
+longer a first-class worker."
+
+Miss Brent's face glowed with a fine wrath. "She can't possibly stand
+more than two or three months of it without breaking down!"
+
+"Well, you see they've told her that in less than that time her husband
+will be at work again."
+
+"And what will the company do for them when the wife is a hopeless
+invalid, and the husband a cripple?"
+
+Amherst again uttered the dry laugh with which he had met her suggestion
+of an emergency hospital. "I know what I should do if I could get
+anywhere near Dillon--give him an overdose of morphine, and let the
+widow collect his life-insurance, and make a fresh start."
+
+She looked at him curiously. "Should you, I wonder?"
+
+"If I saw the suffering as you see it, and knew the circumstances as I
+know them, I believe I should feel justified--" He broke off. "In your
+work, don't you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?"
+
+She mused. "One might...but perhaps the professional instinct to save
+would always come first."
+
+"To save--what? When all the good of life is gone?"
+
+"I daresay," she sighed, "poor Dillon would do it himself if he
+could--when he realizes that all the good _is_ gone."
+
+"Yes, but he can't do it himself; and it's the irony of such cases that
+his employers, after ruining his life, will do all they can to patch up
+the ruins."
+
+"But that at least ought to count in their favour."
+
+"Perhaps; if--" He paused, as though reluctant to lay himself open once
+more to the charge of uncharitableness; and suddenly she exclaimed,
+looking about her: "I didn't notice we had walked so far down Maplewood
+Avenue!"
+
+They had turned a few minutes previously into the wide thoroughfare
+crowning the high ground which is covered by the residential quarter of
+Hanaford. Here the spacious houses, withdrawn behind shrubberies and
+lawns, revealed in their silhouettes every form of architectural
+experiment, from the symmetrical pre-Revolutionary structure, with its
+classic portico and clipped box-borders, to the latest outbreak in
+boulders and Moorish tiles.
+
+Amherst followed his companion's glance with surprise. "We _have_ gone a
+block or two out of our way. I always forget where I am when I'm talking
+about anything that interests me."
+
+Miss Brent looked at her watch. "My friends don't dine till seven, and I
+can get home in time by taking a Grove Street car," she said.
+
+"If you don't mind walking a little farther you can take a Liberty
+Street car instead. They run oftener, and you will get home just as
+soon."
+
+She made a gesture of assent, and as they walked on he continued: "I
+haven't yet explained why I am so anxious to get an unbiassed opinion of
+Dillon's case."
+
+She looked at him in surprise. "What you've told me about Dr. Disbrow
+and your manager is surely enough."
+
+"Well, hardly, considering that I am Truscomb's subordinate. I shouldn't
+have committed a breach of professional etiquette, or asked you to do
+so, if I hadn't a hope of bettering things; but I have, and that is why
+I've held on at Westmore for the last few months, instead of getting out
+of it altogether."
+
+"I'm glad of that," she said quickly.
+
+"The owner of the mills--young Richard Westmore--died last winter," he
+went on, "and my hope--it's no more--is that the new broom may sweep a
+little cleaner."
+
+"Who is the new broom?"
+
+"Westmore left everything to his widow, and she is coming here to-morrow
+to look into the management of the mills."
+
+"Coming? She doesn't live here, then?"
+
+"At Hanaford? Heaven forbid! It's an anomaly nowadays for the employer
+to live near the employed. The Westmores have always lived in New
+York--and I believe they have a big place on Long Island."
+
+"Well, at any rate she _is_ coming, and that ought to be a good sign.
+Did she never show any interest in the mills during her husband's life?"
+
+"Not as far as I know. I've been at Westmore three years, and she's not
+been seen there in my time. She is very young, and Westmore himself
+didn't care. It was a case of inherited money. He drew the dividends,
+and Truscomb did the rest."
+
+Miss Brent reflected. "I don't know much about the constitution of
+companies--but I suppose Mrs. Westmore doesn't unite all the offices in
+her own person. Is there no one to stand between Truscomb and the
+operatives?"
+
+"Oh, the company, on paper, shows the usual official hierarchy. Richard
+Westmore, of course, was president, and since his death the former
+treasurer--Halford Gaines--has replaced him, and his son, Westmore
+Gaines, has been appointed treasurer. You can see by the names that it's
+all in the family. Halford Gaines married a Miss Westmore, and
+represents the clan at Hanaford--leads society, and keeps up the social
+credit of the name. As treasurer, Mr. Halford Gaines kept strictly to
+his special business, and always refused to interfere between Truscomb
+and the operatives. As president he will probably follow the same
+policy, the more so as it fits in with his inherited respect for the
+_status quo_, and his blissful ignorance of economics."
+
+"And the new treasurer--young Gaines? Is there no hope of his breaking
+away from the family tradition?"
+
+"Westy Gaines has a better head than his father; but he hates Hanaford
+and the mills, and his chief object in life is to be taken for a New
+Yorker. So far he hasn't been here much, except for the quarterly
+meetings, and his routine work is done by another cousin--you perceive
+that Westmore is a nest of nepotism."
+
+Miss Brent's work among the poor had developed her interest in social
+problems, and she followed these details attentively.
+
+"Well, the outlook is not encouraging, but perhaps Mrs. Westmore's
+coming will make a change. I suppose she has more power than any one."
+
+"She might have, if she chose to exert it, for her husband was really
+the whole company. The official cousins hold only a few shares apiece."
+
+"Perhaps, then, her visit will open her eyes. Who knows but poor
+Dillon's case may help others--prove a beautiful dispensation, as Mrs.
+Ogan would say?"
+
+"It does come terribly pat as an illustration of some of the abuses I
+want to have remedied. The difficulty will be to get the lady's ear.
+That's her house we're coming to, by the way."
+
+An electric street-lamp irradiated the leafless trees and stone
+gate-posts of the building before them. Though gardens extended behind
+it, the house stood so near the pavement that only two short flights of
+steps intervened between the gate-posts and the portico. Light shone
+from every window of the pompous rusticated façade--in the turreted
+"Tuscan villa" style of the 'fifties--and as Miss Brent and Amherst
+approached, their advance was checked by a group of persons who were
+just descending from two carriages at the door.
+
+The lamp-light showed every detail of dress and countenance in the
+party, which consisted of two men, one slightly lame, with a long white
+moustache and a distinguished nose, the other short, lean and
+professional, and of two ladies and their laden attendants.
+
+"Why, that must be her party arriving!" Miss Brent exclaimed; and as she
+spoke the younger of the two ladies, turning back to her maid, exposed
+to the glare of the electric light a fair pale face shadowed by the
+projection of her widow's veil.
+
+"Is that Mrs. Westmore?" Miss Brent whispered; and as Amherst muttered:
+"I suppose so; I've never seen her----" she continued excitedly: "She
+looks so like--do you know what her name was before she married?"
+
+He drew his brows together in a hopeless effort of remembrance. "I don't
+know--I must have heard--but I never can recall people's names."
+
+"That's bad, for a leader of men!" she said mockingly, and he answered,
+as though touched on a sore point: "I mean people who don't count. I
+never forget an operative's name or face."
+
+"One can never tell who may be going to count," she rejoined
+sententiously.
+
+He dwelt on this in silence while they walked on catching as they
+passed a glimpse of the red-carpeted Westmore hall on which the glass
+doors were just being closed. At length he roused himself to ask: "Does
+Mrs. Westmore look like some one you know?"
+
+"I fancied so--a girl who was at the Sacred Heart in Paris with me. But
+isn't this my corner?" she exclaimed, as they turned into another
+street, down which a laden car was descending.
+
+Its approach left them time for no more than a hurried hand-clasp, and
+when Miss Brent had been absorbed into the packed interior her
+companion, as his habit was, stood for a while where she had left him,
+gazing at some indefinite point in space; then, waking to a sudden
+consciousness of his surroundings, he walked off toward the centre of
+the town.
+
+At the junction of two business streets he met an empty car marked
+"Westmore," and springing into it, seated himself in a corner and drew
+out a pocket Shakespeare. He read on, indifferent to his surroundings,
+till the car left the asphalt streets and illuminated shop-fronts for a
+grey intermediate region of mud and macadam. Then he pocketed his volume
+and sat looking out into the gloom.
+
+The houses grew less frequent, with darker gaps of night between; and
+the rare street-lamps shone on cracked pavements, crooked
+telegraph-poles, hoardings tapestried with patent-medicine posters, and
+all the mean desolation of an American industrial suburb. Farther on
+there came a weed-grown field or two, then a row of operatives' houses,
+the showy gables of the "Eldorado" road-house--the only building in
+Westmore on which fresh paint was freely lavished--then the company
+"store," the machine shops and other out-buildings, the vast forbidding
+bulk of the factories looming above the river-bend, and the sudden
+neatness of the manager's turf and privet hedges. The scene was so
+familiar to Amherst that he had lost the habit of comparison, and his
+absorption in the moral and material needs of the workers sometimes made
+him forget the outward setting of their lives. But to-night he recalled
+the nurse's comment--"it looks so dead"--and the phrase roused him to a
+fresh perception of the scene. With sudden disgust he saw the sordidness
+of it all--the poor monotonous houses, the trampled grass-banks, the
+lean dogs prowling in refuse-heaps, the reflection of a crooked gas-lamp
+in a stagnant loop of the river; and he asked himself how it was
+possible to put any sense of moral beauty into lives bounded forever by
+the low horizon of the factory. There is a fortuitous ugliness that has
+life and hope in it: the ugliness of overcrowded city streets, of the
+rush and drive of packed activities; but this out-spread meanness of the
+suburban working colony, uncircumscribed by any pressure of surrounding
+life, and sunk into blank acceptance of its isolation, its banishment
+from beauty and variety and surprise, seemed to Amherst the very
+negation of hope and life.
+
+"She's right," he mused--"it's dead--stone dead: there isn't a drop of
+wholesome blood left in it."
+
+The Moosuc River valley, in the hollow of which, for that river's sake,
+the Westmore mills had been planted, lingered in the memory of
+pre-industrial Hanaford as the pleasantest suburb of the town. Here,
+beyond a region of orchards and farm-houses, several "leading citizens"
+had placed, above the river-bank, their prim wood-cut "residences," with
+porticoes and terraced lawns; and from the chief of these, Hopewood,
+brought into the Westmore family by the Miss Hope who had married an
+earlier Westmore, the grim mill-village had been carved. The pillared
+"residences" had, after this, inevitably fallen to base uses; but the
+old house at Hopewood, in its wooded grounds, remained, neglected but
+intact, beyond the first bend of the river, deserted as a dwelling but
+"held" in anticipation of rising values, when the inevitable growth of
+Westmore should increase the demand for small building lots. Whenever
+Amherst's eyes were refreshed by the hanging foliage above the roofs of
+Westmore, he longed to convert the abandoned country-seat into a park
+and playground for the mill-hands; but he knew that the company counted
+on the gradual sale of Hopewood as a source of profit. No--the mill-town
+would not grow beautiful as it grew larger--rather, in obedience to the
+grim law of industrial prosperity, it would soon lose its one lingering
+grace and spread out in unmitigated ugliness, devouring green fields and
+shaded slopes like some insect-plague consuming the land. The conditions
+were familiar enough to Amherst; and their apparent inevitableness
+mocked the hopes he had based on Mrs. Westmore's arrival.
+
+"Where every stone is piled on another, through the whole stupid
+structure of selfishness and egotism, how can one be pulled out without
+making the whole thing topple? And whatever they're blind to, they
+always see that," he mused, reaching up for the strap of the car.
+
+He walked a few yards beyond the manager's house, and turned down a side
+street lined with scattered cottages. Approaching one of these by a
+gravelled path he pushed open the door, and entered a sitting-room where
+a green-shaded lamp shone pleasantly on bookshelves and a crowded
+writing-table.
+
+A brisk little woman in black, laying down the evening paper as she
+rose, lifted her hands to his tall shoulders.
+
+"Well, mother," he said, stooping to her kiss.
+
+"You're late, John," she smiled back at him, not reproachfully, but with
+affection.
+
+She was a wonderfully compact and active creature, with face so young
+and hair so white that she looked as unreal as a stage mother till a
+close view revealed the fine lines that experience had drawn about her
+mouth and eyes. The eyes themselves, brightly black and glancing, had
+none of the veiled depths of her son's gaze. Their look was outward, on
+a world which had dealt her hard blows and few favours, but in which her
+interest was still fresh, amused and unabated.
+
+Amherst glanced at his watch. "Never mind--Duplain will be later still.
+I had to go into Hanaford, and he is replacing me at the office."
+
+"So much the better, dear: we can have a minute to ourselves. Sit down
+and tell me what kept you."
+
+She picked up her knitting as she spoke, having the kind of hands that
+find repose in ceaseless small activities. Her son could not remember a
+time when he had not seen those small hands in motion--shaping garments,
+darning rents, repairing furniture, exploring the inner economy of
+clocks. "I make a sort of rag-carpet of the odd minutes," she had once
+explained to a friend who wondered at her turning to her needlework in
+the moment's interval between other tasks.
+
+Amherst threw himself wearily into a chair. "I was trying to find out
+something about Dillon's case," he said.
+
+His mother turned a quick glance toward the door, rose to close it, and
+reseated herself.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I managed to have a talk with his nurse when she went off duty this
+evening."
+
+"The nurse? I wonder you could get her to speak."
+
+"Luckily she's not the regular incumbent, but a volunteer who happened
+to be here on a visit. As it was, I had some difficulty in making her
+talk--till I told her of Disbrow's letter."
+
+Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright glance from the needles. "He's very bad,
+then?"
+
+"Hopelessly maimed!"
+
+She shivered and cast down her eyes. "Do you suppose she really knows?"
+
+"She struck me as quite competent to judge."
+
+"A volunteer, you say, here on a visit? What is her name?"
+
+He raised his head with a vague look. "I never thought of asking her."
+
+Mrs. Amherst laughed. "How like you! Did she say with whom she was
+staying?"
+
+"I think she said in Oak Street--but she didn't mention any name."
+
+Mrs. Amherst wrinkled her brows thoughtfully. "I wonder if she's not the
+thin dark girl I saw the other day with Mrs. Harry Dressel. Was she tall
+and rather handsome?"
+
+"I don't know," murmured Amherst indifferently. As a rule he was
+humorously resigned to his mother's habit of deserting the general for
+the particular, and following some irrelevant thread of association in
+utter disregard of the main issue. But to-night, preoccupied with his
+subject, and incapable of conceiving how anyone else could be unaffected
+by it, he resented her indifference as a sign of incurable frivolity.
+
+"How she can live close to such suffering and forget it!" was his
+thought; then, with a movement of self-reproach, he remembered that the
+work flying through her fingers was to take shape as a garment for one
+of the infant Dillons. "She takes her pity out in action, like that
+quiet nurse, who was as cool as a drum-major till she took off her
+uniform--and then!" His face softened at the recollection of the girl's
+outbreak. Much as he admired, in theory, the woman who kept a calm
+exterior in emergencies, he had all a man's desire to know that the
+springs of feeling lay close to the unruffled surface.
+
+Mrs. Amherst had risen and crossed over to his chair. She leaned on it a
+moment, pushing the tossed brown hair from his forehead.
+
+"John, have you considered what you mean to do next?"
+
+He threw back his head to meet her gaze.
+
+"About this Dillon case," she continued. "How are all these
+investigations going to help you?"
+
+Their eyes rested on each other for a moment; then he said coldly: "You
+are afraid I am going to lose my place."
+
+She flushed like a girl and murmured: "It's not the kind of place I ever
+wanted to see you in!"
+
+"I know it," he returned in a gentler tone, clasping one of the hands on
+his chair-back. "I ought to have followed a profession, like my
+grandfather; but my father's blood was too strong in me. I should never
+have been content as anything but a working-man."
+
+"How can you call your father a working-man? He had a genius for
+mechanics, and if he had lived he would have been as great in his way as
+any statesman or lawyer."
+
+Amherst smiled. "Greater, to my thinking; but he gave me his
+hard-working hands without the genius to create with them. I wish I had
+inherited more from him, or less; but I must make the best of what I am,
+rather than try to be somebody else." He laid her hand caressingly
+against his cheek. "It's hard on you, mother--but you must bear with
+me."
+
+"I have never complained, John; but now you've chosen your work, it's
+natural that I should want you to stick to it."
+
+He rose with an impatient gesture. "Never fear; I could easily get
+another job----"
+
+"What? If Truscomb black-listed you? Do you forget that Scotch overseer
+who was here when we came?"
+
+"And whom Truscomb hounded out of the trade? I remember him," said
+Amherst grimly; "but I have an idea I am going to do the hounding this
+time."
+
+His mother sighed, but her reply was cut short by the noisy opening of
+the outer door. Amherst seemed to hear the sound with relief. "There's
+Duplain," he said, going into the passage; but on the threshold he
+encountered, not the young Alsatian overseer who boarded with them, but
+a small boy who said breathlessly: "Mr. Truscomb wants you to come down
+bimeby."
+
+"This evening? To the office?"
+
+"No--he's sick a-bed."
+
+The blood rushed to Amherst's face, and he had to press his lips close
+to check an exclamation. "Say I'll come as soon as I've had supper," he
+said.
+
+The boy vanished, and Amherst turned back to the sitting-room.
+"Truscomb's ill--he has sent for me; and I saw Mrs. Westmore arriving
+tonight! Have supper, mother--we won't wait for Duplain." His face still
+glowed with excitement, and his eyes were dark with the concentration of
+his inward vision.
+
+"Oh, John, John!" Mrs. Amherst sighed, crossing the passage to the
+kitchen.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+AT the manager's door Amherst was met by Mrs. Truscomb, a large flushed
+woman in a soiled wrapper and diamond earrings.
+
+"Mr. Truscomb's very sick. He ought not to see you. The doctor thinks--"
+she began.
+
+Dr. Disbrow, at this point, emerged from the sitting-room. He was a pale
+man, with a beard of mixed grey-and-drab, and a voice of the same
+indeterminate quality.
+
+"Good evening, Mr. Amherst. Truscomb is pretty poorly--on the edge of
+pneumonia, I'm afraid. As he seems anxious to see you I think you'd
+better go up for two minutes--not more, please." He paused, and went on
+with a smile: "You won't excite him, of course--nothing unpleasant----"
+
+"He's worried himself sick over that wretched Dillon," Mrs. Truscomb
+interposed, draping her wrapper majestically about an indignant bosom.
+
+"That's it--puts too much heart into his work. But we'll have Dillon all
+right before long," the physician genially declared.
+
+Mrs. Truscomb, with a reluctant gesture, led Amherst up the handsomely
+carpeted stairs to the room where her husband lay, a prey to the cares
+of office. She ushered the young man in, and withdrew to the next room,
+where he heard her coughing at intervals, as if to remind him that he
+was under observation.
+
+The manager of the Westmore mills was not the type of man that Amherst's
+comments on his superior suggested. As he sat propped against the
+pillows, with a brick-red flush on his cheek-bones, he seemed at first
+glance to belong to the innumerable army of American business men--the
+sallow, undersized, lacklustre drudges who have never lifted their heads
+from the ledger. Even his eye, now bright with fever, was dull and
+non-committal in daily life; and perhaps only the ramifications of his
+wrinkles could have revealed what particular ambitions had seamed his
+soul.
+
+"Good evening, Amherst. I'm down with a confounded cold."
+
+"I'm sorry to hear it," the young man forced himself to say.
+
+"Can't get my breath--that's the trouble." Truscomb paused and gasped.
+"I've just heard that Mrs. Westmore is here--and I want you to go
+round--tomorrow morning--" He had to break off once more.
+
+"Yes, sir," said Amherst, his heart leaping.
+
+"Needn't see her--ask for her father, Mr. Langhope. Tell him what the
+doctor says--I'll be on my legs in a day or two--ask 'em to wait till I
+can take 'em over the mills."
+
+He shot one of his fugitive glances at his assistant, and held up a bony
+hand. "Wait a minute. On your way there, stop and notify Mr. Gaines. He
+was to meet them here. You understand?"
+
+"Yes, sir," said Amherst; and at that moment Mrs. Truscomb appeared on
+the threshold.
+
+"I must ask you to come now, Mr. Amherst," she began haughtily; but a
+glance from her husband reduced her to a heaving pink nonentity.
+
+"Hold on, Amherst. I hear you've been in to Hanaford. Did you go to the
+hospital?"
+
+"Ezra--" his wife murmured: he looked through her.
+
+"Yes," said Amherst.
+
+Truscomb's face seemed to grow smaller and dryer. He transferred his
+look from his wife to his assistant.
+
+"All right. You'll just bear in mind that it's Disbrow's business to
+report Dillon's case to Mrs. Westmore? You're to confine yourself to my
+message. Is that clear?"
+
+"Perfectly clear. Goodnight," Amherst answered, as he turned to follow
+Mrs. Truscomb.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That same evening, four persons were seated under the bronze chandelier
+in the red satin drawing-room of the Westmore mansion. One of the four,
+the young lady in widow's weeds whose face had arrested Miss Brent's
+attention that afternoon, rose from a massively upholstered sofa and
+drifted over to the fireplace near which her father sat.
+
+"Didn't I tell you it was awful, father?" she sighed, leaning
+despondently against the high carved mantelpiece surmounted by a bronze
+clock in the form of an obelisk.
+
+Mr. Langhope, who sat smoking, with one faultlessly-clad leg crossed on
+the other, and his ebony stick reposing against the arm of his chair,
+raised his clear ironical eyes to her face.
+
+"As an archæologist," he said, with a comprehensive wave of his hand, "I
+find it positively interesting. I should really like to come here and
+dig."
+
+There were no lamps in the room, and the numerous gas-jets of the
+chandelier shed their lights impartially on ponderously framed canvases
+of the Bay of Naples and the Hudson in Autumn, on Carrara busts and
+bronze Indians on velvet pedestals.
+
+"All this," murmured Mr. Langhope, "is getting to be as rare as the
+giant sequoias. In another fifty years we shall have collectors fighting
+for that Bay of Naples."
+
+Bessy Westmore turned from him impatiently. When she felt deeply on any
+subject her father's flippancy annoyed her.
+
+"_You_ can see, Maria," she said, seating herself beside the other lady
+of the party, "why I couldn't possibly live here."
+
+Mrs. Eustace Ansell, immediately after dinner, had bent her slender back
+above the velvet-covered writing-table, where an inkstand of Vienna
+ormolu offered its empty cup to her pen. Being habitually charged with a
+voluminous correspondence, she had foreseen this contingency and met it
+by despatching her maid for her own writing-case, which was now
+outspread before her in all its complex neatness; but at Bessy's appeal
+she wiped her pen, and turned a sympathetic gaze on her companion.
+
+Mrs. Ansell's face drew all its charm from its adaptability. It was a
+different face to each speaker: now kindling with irony, now gently
+maternal, now charged with abstract meditation--and few paused to
+reflect that, in each case, it was merely the mirror held up to some one
+else's view of life.
+
+"It needs doing over," she admitted, following the widow's melancholy
+glance about the room. "But you are a spoilt child to complain. Think of
+having a house of your own to come to, instead of having to put up at
+the Hanaford hotel!"
+
+Mrs. Westmore's attention was arrested by the first part of the reply.
+
+"Doing over? Why in the world should I do it over? No one could expect
+me to come here _now_--could they, Mr. Tredegar?" she exclaimed,
+transferring her appeal to the fourth member of the party.
+
+Mr. Tredegar, the family lawyer, who had deemed it his duty to accompany
+the widow on her visit of inspection, was strolling up and down the room
+with short pompous steps, a cigar between his lips, and his arms behind
+him. He cocked his sparrow-like head, scanned the offending apartment,
+and terminated his survey by resting his eyes on Mrs. Westmore's
+charming petulant face.
+
+"It all depends," he replied axiomatically, "how large an income you
+require."
+
+Mr. Tredegar uttered this remark with the air of one who pronounces on
+an important point in law: his lightest observation seemed a decision
+handed down from the bench to which he had never ascended. He restored
+the cigar to his lips, and sought approval in Mrs. Ansell's expressive
+eye.
+
+"Ah, that's it, Bessy. You've that to remember," the older lady
+murmured, as if struck by the profundity of the remark.
+
+Mrs. Westmore made an impatient gesture. "We've always had money
+enough--Dick was perfectly satisfied." Her voice trembled a little on
+her husband's name. "And you don't know what the place is like by
+daylight--and the people who come to call!"
+
+"Of course you needn't see any one now, dear," Mrs. Ansell reminded her,
+"except the Halford Gaineses."
+
+"I am sure they're bad enough. Juliana Gaines will say: 'My dear, is
+that the way widows' veils are worn in New York this autumn?' and
+Halford will insist on our going to one of those awful family dinners,
+all Madeira and terrapin."
+
+"It's too early for terrapin," Mrs. Ansell smiled consolingly; but Bessy
+had reverted to her argument. "Besides, what difference would my coming
+here make? I shall never understand anything about business," she
+declared.
+
+Mr. Tredegar pondered, and once more removed his cigar. "The necessity
+has never arisen. But now that you find yourself in almost sole control
+of a large property----"
+
+Mr. Langhope laughed gently. "Apply yourself, Bessy. Bring your masterly
+intellect to bear on the industrial problem."
+
+Mrs. Ansell restored the innumerable implements to her writing-case, and
+laid her arm with a caressing gesture on Mrs. Westmore's shoulder.
+"Don't tease her. She's tired, and she misses the baby."
+
+"I shall get a telegram tomorrow morning," exclaimed the young mother,
+brightening.
+
+"Of course you will. 'Cicely has just eaten two boiled eggs and a bowl
+of porridge, and is bearing up wonderfully.'"
+
+She drew Mrs. Westmore persuasively to her feet, but the widow refused
+to relinquish her hold on her grievance.
+
+"You all think I'm extravagant and careless about money," she broke out,
+addressing the room in general from the shelter of Mrs. Ansell's
+embrace; "but I know one thing: If I had my way I should begin to
+economize by selling this horrible house, instead of leaving it shut up
+from one year's end to another."
+
+Her father looked up: proposals of retrenchment always struck him as
+business-like when they did not affect his own expenditure. "What do you
+think of that, eh, Tredegar?"
+
+The eminent lawyer drew in his thin lips. "From the point of view of
+policy, I think unfavourably of it," he pronounced.
+
+Bessy's face clouded, and Mrs. Ansell argued gently: "Really, it's too
+late to look so far into the future. Remember, my dear, that we are due
+at the mills tomorrow at ten."
+
+The reminder that she must rise early had the effect of hastening Mrs.
+Westmore's withdrawal, and the two ladies, after an exchange of
+goodnights, left the men to their cigars.
+
+Mr. Langhope was the first to speak.
+
+"Bessy's as hopelessly vague about business as I am, Tredegar. Why the
+deuce Westmore left her everything outright--but he was only a heedless
+boy himself."
+
+"Yes. The way he allowed things to go, it's a wonder there was anything
+to leave. This Truscomb must be an able fellow."
+
+"Devoted to Dick's interests, I've always understood."
+
+"He makes the mills pay well, at any rate, and that's not so easy
+nowadays. But on general principles it's as well he should see that we
+mean to look into everything thoroughly. Of course Halford Gaines will
+never be more than a good figure-head, but Truscomb must be made to
+understand that Mrs. Westmore intends to interest herself personally in
+the business."
+
+"Oh, by all means--of course--" Mr. Langhope assented, his light smile
+stiffening into a yawn at the mere suggestion.
+
+He rose with an effort, supporting himself on his stick. "I think I'll
+turn in myself. There's not a readable book in that God-forsaken
+library, and I believe Maria Ansell has gone off with my volume of
+Loti."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning, when Amherst presented himself at the Westmore door,
+he had decided to follow his chief's instructions to the letter, and ask
+for Mr. Langhope only. The decision had cost him a struggle, for his
+heart was big with its purpose; but though he knew that he must soon
+place himself in open opposition to Truscomb, he recognized the prudence
+of deferring the declaration of war as long as possible.
+
+On his round of the mills, that morning, he had paused in the room where
+Mrs. Dillon knelt beside her mop and pail, and had found her, to his
+surprise, comparatively reassured and cheerful. Dr. Disbrow, she told
+him, had been in the previous evening, and had told her to take heart
+about Jim, and left her enough money to get along for a week--and a
+wonderful new cough-mixture that he'd put up for her special. Amherst
+found it difficult to listen calmly, with the nurse's words still in his
+ears, and the sight before him of Mrs. Dillon's lean shoulder-blades
+travelling painfully up and down with the sweep of the mop.
+
+"I don't suppose that cost Truscomb ten dollars," he said to himself, as
+the lift lowered him to the factory door; but another voice argued that
+he had no right to accuse Disbrow of acting as his brother-in-law's
+agent, when the gift to Mrs. Dillon might have been prompted by his own
+kindness of heart.
+
+"And what prompted the lie about her husband? Well, perhaps he's an
+incurable optimist," he summed up, springing into the Hanaford car.
+
+By the time he reached Mrs. Westmore's door his wrath had subsided, and
+he felt that he had himself well in hand. He had taken unusual pains
+with his appearance that morning--or rather his mother, learning of the
+errand on which Truscomb had sent him, had laid out his
+carefully-brushed Sunday clothes, and adjusted his tie with skilful
+fingers. "You'd really be handsome, Johnny, if you were only a little
+vainer," she said, pushing him away to survey the result; and when he
+stared at her, repeating: "I never heard that vanity made a man
+better-looking," she responded gaily: "Oh, up to a certain point,
+because it teaches him how to use what he's got. So remember," she
+charged him, as he smiled and took up his hat, "that you're going to see
+a pretty young woman, and that you're not a hundred years old yourself."
+
+"I'll try to," he answered, humouring her, "but as I've been forbidden
+to ask for her, I am afraid your efforts will be wasted."
+
+The servant to whom he gave his message showed him into the library,
+with a request that he should wait; and there, to his surprise, he
+found, not the white-moustached gentleman whom he had guessed the night
+before to be Mr. Langhope, but a young lady in deep black, who turned on
+him a look of not unfriendly enquiry.
+
+It was not Bessy's habit to anticipate the clock; but her distaste for
+her surroundings, and the impatience to have done with the tedious
+duties awaiting her, had sent her downstairs before the rest of the
+party. Her life had been so free from tiresome obligations that she had
+but a small stock of patience to meet them with; and already, after a
+night at Hanaford, she was pining to get back to the comforts of her own
+country-house, the soft rut of her daily habits, the funny chatter of
+her little girl, the long stride of her Irish hunter across the
+Hempstead plains--to everything, in short, that made it conceivably
+worth while to get up in the morning.
+
+The servant who ushered in Amherst, thinking the room empty, had not
+mentioned his name; and for a moment he and his hostess examined each
+other in silence, Bessy puzzled at the unannounced appearance of a
+good-looking young man who might have been some one she had met and
+forgotten, while Amherst felt his self-possession slipping away into the
+depths of a pair of eyes so dark-lashed and deeply blue that his only
+thought was one of wonder at his previous indifference to women's eyes.
+
+"Mrs. Westmore?" he asked, restored to self-command by the perception
+that his longed-for opportunity was at hand; and Bessy, his voice
+confirming the inference she had drawn from his appearance, replied with
+a smile: "I am Mrs. Westmore. But if you have come to see me, I ought to
+tell you that in a moment I shall be obliged to go out to our mills. I
+have a business appointment with our manager, but if----"
+
+She broke off, gracefully waiting for him to insert his explanation.
+
+"I have come from the manager; I am John Amherst--your assistant
+manager," he added, as the mention of his name apparently conveyed no
+enlightenment.
+
+Mrs. Westmore's face changed, and she let slip a murmur of surprise
+that would certainly have flattered Amherst's mother if she could have
+heard it; but it had an opposite effect on the young man, who inwardly
+accused himself of having tried to disguise his trade by not putting on
+his everyday clothes.
+
+"How stupid of me! I took you for--I had no idea; I didn't expect Mr.
+Truscomb here," his employer faltered in embarrassment; then their eyes
+met and both smiled.
+
+"Mr. Truscomb sent me to tell you that he is ill, and will not be able
+to show you the mills today. I didn't mean to ask for you--I was told to
+give the message to Mr. Langhope," Amherst scrupulously explained,
+trying to repress the sudden note of joy in his voice.
+
+He was subject to the unobservant man's acute flashes of vision, and
+Mrs. Westmore's beauty was like a blinding light abruptly turned on eyes
+subdued to obscurity. As he spoke, his glance passed from her face to
+her hair, and remained caught in its meshes. He had never seen such
+hair--it did not seem to grow in the usual orderly way, but bubbled up
+all over her head in independent clusters of brightness, breaking, about
+the brow, the temples, the nape, into little irrelevant waves and eddies
+of light, with dusky hollows of softness where the hand might plunge. It
+takes but the throb of a nerve to carry such a complex impression from
+the eye to the mind, but the object of the throb had perhaps felt the
+electric flash of its passage, for her colour rose while Amherst spoke.
+
+"Ah, here is my father now," she said with a vague accent of relief, as
+Mr. Langhope's stick was heard tapping its way across the hall.
+
+When he entered, accompanied by Mrs. Ansell, his sharp glance of
+surprise at her visitor told her that he was as much misled as herself,
+and gave her a sense of being agreeably justified in her blunder. "If
+_father_ thinks you're a gentleman----" her shining eyes seemed to say,
+as she explained: "This is Mr. Amherst, father: Mr. Truscomb has sent
+him."
+
+"Mr. Amherst?" Langhope, with extended hand, echoed affably but vaguely;
+and it became clear that neither Mrs. Westmore nor her father had ever
+before heard the name of their assistant manager.
+
+The discovery stung Amherst to a somewhat unreasoning resentment; and
+while he was trying to subordinate this sentiment to the larger feelings
+with which he had entered the house, Mrs. Ansell, turning her eyes on
+him, said gently: "Your name is unusual. I had a friend named Lucy Warne
+who married a very clever man--a mechanical genius----"
+
+Amherst's face cleared. "My father _was_ a genius; and my mother is Lucy
+Warne," he said, won by the soft look and the persuasive voice.
+
+"What a delightful coincidence! We were girls together at Albany. You
+must remember Judge Warne?" she said, turning to Mr. Langhope, who,
+twirling his white moustache, murmured, a shade less cordially: "Of
+course--of course--delightful--most interesting."
+
+Amherst did not notice the difference. His perceptions were already
+enveloped in the caress that emanated from Mrs. Ansell's voice and
+smile; and he only asked himself vaguely if it were possible that this
+graceful woman, with her sunny autumnal air, could really be his
+mother's contemporary. But the question brought an instant reaction of
+bitterness.
+
+"Poverty is the only thing that makes people old nowadays," he
+reflected, painfully conscious of his own share in the hardships his
+mother had endured; and when Mrs. Ansell went on: "I must go and see
+her--you must let me take her by surprise," he said stiffly: "We live
+out at the mills, a long way from here."
+
+"Oh, we're going there this morning," she rejoined, unrebuffed by what
+she probably took for a mere social awkwardness, while Mrs. Westmore
+interposed: "But, Maria, Mr. Truscomb is ill, and has sent Mr. Amherst
+to say that we are not to come."
+
+"Yes: so Gaines has just telephoned. It's most unfortunate," Mr.
+Langhope grumbled. He too was already beginning to chafe at the
+uncongenial exile of Hanaford, and he shared his daughter's desire to
+despatch the tiresome business before them.
+
+Mr. Tredegar had meanwhile appeared, and when Amherst had been named to
+him, and had received his Olympian nod, Bessy anxiously imparted her
+difficulty.
+
+"But how ill is Mr. Truscomb? Do you think he can take us over the mills
+tomorrow?" she appealed to Amherst.
+
+"I'm afraid not; I am sure he can't. He has a touch of bronchitis."
+
+This announcement was met by a general outcry, in which sympathy for the
+manager was not the predominating note. Mrs. Ansell saved the situation
+by breathing feelingly: "Poor man!" and after a decent echo of the
+phrase, and a doubtful glance at her father, Mrs. Westmore said: "If
+it's bronchitis he may be ill for days, and what in the world are we to
+do?"
+
+"Pack up and come back later," suggested Mr. Langhope briskly; but while
+Bessy sighed "Oh, that dreadful journey!" Mr. Tredegar interposed with
+authority: "One moment, Langhope, please. Mr. Amherst, is Mrs. Westmore
+expected at the mills?"
+
+"Yes, I believe they know she is coming."
+
+"Then I think, my dear, that to go back to New York without showing
+yourself would, under the circumstances, be--er--an error in judgment."
+
+"Good Lord, Tredegar, you don't expect to keep us kicking our heels here
+for days?" her father ejaculated.
+
+"I can certainly not afford to employ mine in that manner for even a
+fraction of a day," rejoined the lawyer, always acutely resentful of the
+suggestion that he had a disengaged moment; "but meanwhile----"
+
+"Father," Bessy interposed, with an eagerly flushing cheek, "don't you
+see that the only thing for us to do is to go over the mills now--at
+once--with Mr. Amherst?"
+
+Mr. Langhope stared: he was always adventurously ready to unmake plans,
+but it flustered him to be called on to remake them. "Eh--what? Now--at
+once? But Gaines was to have gone with us, and how on earth are we to
+get at him? He telephoned me that, as the visit was given up, he should
+ride out to his farm."
+
+"Oh, never mind--or, at least, all the better!" his daughter urged. "We
+can see the mills just as well without him; and we shall get on so much
+more quickly."
+
+"Well--well--what do you say, Tredegar?" murmured Mr. Langhope, allured
+by her last argument; and Bessy, clasping her hands, summed up
+enthusiastically: "And I shall understand so much better without a lot
+of people trying to explain to me at once!"
+
+Her sudden enthusiasm surprised no one, for even Mrs. Ansell, expert as
+she was in the interpreting of tones, set it down to the natural desire
+to have done as quickly as might be with Hanaford.
+
+"Mrs. Westmore has left her little girl at home," she said to Amherst,
+with a smile intended to counteract the possible ill-effect of the
+impression.
+
+But Amherst suspected no slight in his employer's eagerness to visit
+Westmore. His overmastering thought was one of joy as the fulness of his
+opportunity broke on him. To show her the mills himself--to bring her
+face to face with her people, unhampered by Truscomb's jealous
+vigilance, and Truscomb's false explanations; to see the angel of pity
+stir the depths of those unfathomable eyes, when they rested, perhaps
+for the first time, on suffering that it was in their power to smile
+away as easily as they had smiled away his own distrust--all this the
+wonderful moment had brought him, and thoughts and arguments thronged so
+hot on his lips that he kept silence, fearing lest he should say too
+much.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+JOHN AMHERST was no one-sided idealist. He felt keenly the growing
+complexity of the relation between employer and worker, the seeming
+hopelessness of permanently harmonizing their claims, the recurring
+necessity of fresh compromises and adjustments. He hated rant, demagogy,
+the rash formulating of emotional theories; and his contempt for bad
+logic and subjective judgments led him to regard with distrust the
+panaceas offered for the cure of economic evils. But his heart ached
+for the bitter throes with which the human machine moves on. He felt the
+menace of industrial conditions when viewed collectively, their
+poignancy when studied in the individual lives of the toilers among whom
+his lot was cast; and clearly as he saw the need of a philosophic survey
+of the question, he was sure that only through sympathy with its
+personal, human side could a solution be reached. The disappearance of
+the old familiar contact between master and man seemed to him one of the
+great wrongs of the new industrial situation. That the breach must be
+farther widened by the ultimate substitution of the stock-company for
+the individual employer--a fact obvious to any student of economic
+tendencies--presented to Amherst's mind one of the most painful problems
+in the scheme of social readjustment. But it was characteristic of him
+to dwell rather on the removal of immediate difficulties than in the
+contemplation of those to come, and while the individual employer was
+still to be reckoned with, the main thing was to bring him closer to his
+workers. Till he entered personally into their hardships and
+aspirations--till he learned what they wanted and why they wanted
+it--Amherst believed that no mere law-making, however enlightened, could
+create a wholesome relation between the two.
+
+This feeling was uppermost as he sat with Mrs. Westmore in the carriage
+which was carrying them to the mills. He had meant to take the trolley
+back to Westmore, but at a murmured word from Mr. Tredegar Bessy had
+offered him a seat at her side, leaving others to follow. This
+culmination of his hopes--the unlooked-for chance of a half-hour alone
+with her--left Amherst oppressed with the swiftness of the minutes. He
+had so much to say--so much to prepare her for--yet how begin, while he
+was in utter ignorance of her character and her point of view, and while
+her lovely nearness left him so little chance of perceiving anything
+except itself?
+
+But he was not often the victim of his sensations, and presently there
+emerged, out of the very consciousness of her grace and her
+completeness, a clearer sense of the conditions which, in a measure, had
+gone to produce them. Her dress could not have hung in such subtle
+folds, her white chin have nestled in such rich depths of fur, the
+pearls in her ears have given back the light from such pure curves, if
+thin shoulders in shapeless gingham had not bent, day in, day out, above
+the bobbins and carders, and weary ears throbbed even at night with the
+tumult of the looms. Amherst, however, felt no sensational resentment at
+the contrast. He had lived too much with ugliness and want not to
+believe in human nature's abiding need of their opposite. He was glad
+there was room for such beauty in the world, and sure that its purpose
+was an ameliorating one, if only it could be used as a beautiful spirit
+would use it.
+
+The carriage had turned into one of the nondescript thoroughfares, half
+incipient street, half decaying lane, which dismally linked the
+mill-village to Hanaford. Bessy looked out on the ruts, the hoardings,
+the starved trees dangling their palsied leaves in the radiant October
+light; then she sighed: "What a good day for a gallop!"
+
+Amherst felt a momentary chill, but the naturalness of the exclamation
+disarmed him, and the words called up thrilling memories of his own
+college days, when he had ridden his grandfather's horses in the famous
+hunting valley not a hundred miles from Hanaford.
+
+Bessy met his smile with a glow of understanding. "You like riding too,
+I'm sure?"
+
+"I used to; but I haven't been in the saddle for years. Factory managers
+don't keep hunters," he said laughing.
+
+Her murmur of embarrassment showed that she took this as an apologetic
+allusion to his reduced condition, and in his haste to correct this
+impression he added: "If I regretted anything in my other life, it would
+certainly be a gallop on a day like this; but I chose my trade
+deliberately, and I've never been sorry for my choice."
+
+He had hardly spoken when he felt the inappropriateness of this avowal;
+but her prompt response showed him, a moment later, that it was, after
+all, the straightest way to his end.
+
+"You find the work interesting? I'm sure it must be. You'll think me
+very ignorant--my husband and I came here so seldom...I feel as if I
+ought to know so much more about it," she explained.
+
+At last the note for which he waited had been struck. "Won't you try
+to--now you're here? There's so much worth knowing," he broke out
+impetuously.
+
+Mrs. Westmore coloured, but rather with surprise than displeasure. "I'm
+very stupid--I've no head for business--but I will try to," she said.
+
+"It's not business that I mean; it's the personal relation--just the
+thing the business point of view leaves out. Financially, I don't
+suppose your mills could be better run; but there are over seven hundred
+women working in them, and there's so much to be done, just for them and
+their children."
+
+He caught a faint hint of withdrawal in her tone. "I have always
+understood that Mr. Truscomb did everything----"
+
+Amherst flushed; but he was beyond caring for the personal rebuff. "Do
+you leave it to your little girl's nurses to do everything for her?" he
+asked.
+
+Her surprise seemed about to verge on annoyance: he saw the preliminary
+ruffling of the woman who is put to the trouble of defending her
+dignity. "Really, I don't see--" she began with distant politeness; then
+her face changed and melted, and again her blood spoke for her before
+her lips.
+
+"I am glad you told me that, Mr. Amherst. Of course I want to do
+whatever I can. I should like you to point out everything----"
+
+Amherst's resolve had been taken while she spoke. He _would_ point out
+everything, would stretch his opportunity to its limit. All thoughts of
+personal prudence were flung to the winds--her blush and tone had routed
+the waiting policy. He would declare war on Truscomb at once, and take
+the chance of dismissal. At least, before he went he would have brought
+this exquisite creature face to face with the wrongs from which her
+luxuries were drawn, and set in motion the regenerating impulses of
+indignation and pity. He did not stop to weigh the permanent advantage
+of this course. His only feeling was that the chance would never again
+be given him--that if he let her go away, back to her usual life, with
+eyes unopened and heart untouched, there would be no hope of her ever
+returning. It was far better that he should leave for good, and that she
+should come back, as come back she must, more and more often, if once
+she could be made to feel the crying need of her presence.
+
+But where was he to begin? How give her even a glimpse of the packed and
+intricate situation?
+
+"Mrs. Westmore," he said, "there's no time to say much now, but before
+we get to the mills I want to ask you a favour. If, as you go through
+them, you see anything that seems to need explaining, will you let me
+come and tell you about it tonight? I say tonight," he added, meeting
+her look of enquiry, "because later--tomorrow even--I might not have the
+chance. There are some things--a good many--in the management of the
+mills that Mr. Truscomb doesn't see as I do. I don't mean business
+questions: wages and dividends and so on--those are out of my province.
+I speak merely in the line of my own work--my care of the hands, and
+what I believe they need and don't get under the present system.
+Naturally, if Mr. Truscomb were well, I shouldn't have had this chance
+of putting the case to you; but since it's come my way, I must seize it
+and take the consequences."
+
+Even as he spoke, by a swift reaction of thought, those consequences
+rose before him in all their seriousness. It was not only, or chiefly,
+that he feared to lose his place; though he knew his mother had not
+spoken lightly in instancing the case of the foreman whom Truscomb, to
+gratify a personal spite, had for months kept out of a job in his trade.
+And there were special reasons why Amherst should heed her warning. In
+adopting a manual trade, instead of one of the gentlemanly professions
+which the men of her family had always followed, he had not only
+disappointed her hopes, and to a great extent thrown away the benefits
+of the education she had pinched herself to give him, but had disturbed
+all the habits of her life by removing her from her normal surroundings
+to the depressing exile of a factory-settlement. However much he blamed
+himself for exacting this sacrifice, it had been made so cheerfully that
+the consciousness of it never clouded his life with his mother; but her
+self-effacement made him the more alive to his own obligations, and
+having placed her in a difficult situation he had always been careful
+not to increase its difficulties by any imprudence in his conduct toward
+his employers. Yet, grave as these considerations were, they were really
+less potent than his personal desire to remain at Westmore. Lightly as
+he had just resolved to risk the chance of dismissal, all his future was
+bound up in the hope of retaining his place. His heart was in the work
+at Westmore, and the fear of not being able to get other employment was
+a small factor in his intense desire to keep his post. What he really
+wanted was to speak out, and yet escape the consequences: by some
+miraculous reversal of probability to retain his position and yet effect
+Truscomb's removal. The idea was so fantastic that he felt it merely as
+a quickening of all his activities, a tremendous pressure of will along
+undetermined lines. He had no wish to take the manager's place; but his
+dream was to see Truscomb superseded by a man of the new school, in
+sympathy with the awakening social movement--a man sufficiently
+practical to "run" the mills successfully, yet imaginative enough to
+regard that task as the least of his duties. He saw the promise of such
+a man in Louis Duplain, the overseer who boarded with Mrs. Amherst: a
+young fellow of Alsatian extraction, a mill-hand from childhood, who had
+worked at his trade in Europe as well as in America, and who united with
+more manual skill, and a greater nearness to the workman's standpoint,
+all Amherst's enthusiasm for the experiments in social betterment that
+were making in some of the English and continental factories. His
+strongest wish was to see such a man as Duplain in control at Westmore
+before he himself turned to the larger work which he had begun to see
+before him as the sequel to his factory-training.
+
+All these thoughts swept through him in the instant's pause before Mrs.
+Westmore, responding to his last appeal, said with a graceful eagerness:
+"Yes, you must come tonight. I want to hear all you can tell me--and if
+there is anything wrong you must show me how I can make it better."
+
+"I'll show her, and Truscomb shan't turn me out for it," was the vow he
+passionately registered as the carriage drew up at the office-door of
+the main building.
+
+How this impossible result was to be achieved he had no farther time to
+consider, for in another moment the rest of the party had entered the
+factory with them, and speech was followed up in the roar of the
+machinery.
+
+Amherst's zeal for his cause was always quickened by the sight of the
+mills in action. He loved the work itself as much as he hated the
+conditions under which it was done; and he longed to see on the
+operatives' faces something of the ardour that lit up his own when he
+entered the work-rooms. It was this passion for machinery that at school
+had turned him from his books, at college had drawn him to the courses
+least in the line of his destined profession; and it always seized on
+him afresh when he was face to face with the monstrous energies of the
+mills. It was not only the sense of power that thrilled him--he felt a
+beauty in the ordered activity of the whole intricate organism, in the
+rhythm of dancing bobbins and revolving cards, the swift continuous
+outpour of doublers and ribbon-laps, the steady ripple of the long
+ply-frames, the terrible gnashing play of the looms--all these varying
+subordinate motions, gathered up into the throb of the great engines
+which fed the giant's arteries, and were in turn ruled by the invisible
+action of quick thought and obedient hands, always produced in Amherst a
+responsive rush of life.
+
+He knew this sensation was too specialized to affect his companions; but
+he expected Mrs. Westmore to be all the more alive to the other
+side--the dark side of monotonous human toil, of the banquet of flesh
+and blood and brain perpetually served up to the monster whose
+insatiable jaws the looms so grimly typified. Truscomb, as he had told
+her, was a good manager from the profit-taking standpoint. Since it was
+profitable to keep the machinery in order, he maintained throughout the
+factory a high standard of mechanical supervision, except where one or
+two favoured overseers--for Truscomb was given to favoritism--shirked
+the duties of their departments. But it was of the essence of Truscomb's
+policy--and not the least of the qualities which made him a "paying"
+manager--that he saved money scrupulously where its outlay would not
+have resulted in larger earnings. To keep the floors scrubbed, the
+cotton-dust swept up, the rooms freshly whitewashed and well-ventilated,
+far from adding the smallest fraction to the quarterly dividends, would
+have deducted from them the slight cost of this additional labour; and
+Truscomb therefore economized on scrubbers, sweepers and window-washers,
+and on all expenses connected with improved ventilation and other
+hygienic precautions. Though the whole factory was over-crowded, the
+newest buildings were more carefully planned, and had the usual sanitary
+improvements; but the old mills had been left in their original state,
+and even those most recently built were fast lapsing into squalor. It
+was no wonder, therefore, that workers imprisoned within such walls
+should reflect their long hours of deadening toil in dull eyes and
+anæmic skins, and in the dreary lassitude with which they bent to their
+tasks.
+
+Surely, Amherst argued, Mrs. Westmore must feel this; must feel it all
+the more keenly, coming from an atmosphere so different, from a life
+where, as he instinctively divined, all was in harmony with her own
+graceful person. But a deep disappointment awaited him. He was still
+under the spell of their last moments in the carriage, when her face and
+voice had promised so much, when she had seemed so deeply, if vaguely,
+stirred by his appeal. But as they passed from one resounding room to
+the other--from the dull throb of the carding-room, the groan of the
+ply-frames, the long steady pound of the slashers, back to the angry
+shriek of the fierce unappeasable looms--the light faded from her eyes
+and she looked merely bewildered and stunned.
+
+Amherst, hardened to the din of the factory, could not measure its
+effect on nerves accustomed to the subdued sounds and spacious
+stillnesses which are the last refinement of luxury. Habit had made him
+unconscious of that malicious multiplication and subdivision of noise
+that kept every point of consciousness vibrating to a different note, so
+that while one set of nerves was torn as with pincers by the dominant
+scream of the looms, others were thrilled with a separate pain by the
+ceaseless accompaniment of drumming, hissing, grating and crashing that
+shook the great building. Amherst felt this tumult only as part of the
+atmosphere of the mills; and to ears trained like his own he could make
+his voice heard without difficulty. But his attempts at speech were
+unintelligible to Mrs. Westmore and her companions, and after vainly
+trying to communicate with him by signs they hurried on as if to escape
+as quickly as possible from the pursuing whirlwind.
+
+Amherst could not allow for the depressing effect of this enforced
+silence. He did not see that if Bessy could have questioned him the
+currents of sympathy might have remained open between them, whereas,
+compelled to walk in silence through interminable ranks of meaningless
+machines, to which the human workers seemed mere automatic appendages,
+she lost all perception of what the scene meant. He had forgotten, too,
+that the swift apprehension of suffering in others is as much the result
+of training as the immediate perception of beauty. Both perceptions may
+be inborn, but if they are not they can be developed only through the
+discipline of experience.
+
+"That girl in the hospital would have seen it all," he reflected, as the
+vision of Miss Brent's small incisive profile rose before him; but the
+next moment he caught the light on Mrs. Westmore's hair, as she bent
+above a card, and the paler image faded like a late moon in the sunrise.
+
+Meanwhile Mrs. Ansell, seeing that the detailed inspection of the
+buildings was as trying to Mr. Langhope's lameness as to his daughter's
+nerves, had proposed to turn back with him and drive to Mrs. Amherst's,
+where he might leave her to call while the others were completing their
+rounds. It was one of Mrs. Ansell's gifts to detect the first symptoms
+of _ennui_ in her companions, and produce a remedy as patly as old
+ladies whisk out a scent-bottle or a cough-lozenge; and Mr. Langhope's
+look of relief showed the timeliness of her suggestion.
+
+Amherst was too preoccupied to wonder how his mother would take this
+visit; but he welcomed Mr. Langhope's departure, hoping that the
+withdrawal of his ironic smile would leave his daughter open to gentler
+influences. Mr. Tredegar, meanwhile, was projecting his dry glance over
+the scene, trying to converse by signs with the overseers of the
+different rooms, and pausing now and then to contemplate, not so much
+the workers themselves as the special tasks which engaged them.
+
+How these spectators of the party's progress were affected by Mrs.
+Westmore's appearance, even Amherst, for all his sympathy with their
+views, could not detect. They knew that she was the new owner, that a
+disproportionate amount of the result of their toil would in future pass
+through her hands, spread carpets for her steps, and hang a setting of
+beauty about her eyes; but the knowledge seemed to produce no special
+interest in her personality. A change of employer was not likely to make
+any change in their lot: their welfare would probably continue to depend
+on Truscomb's favour. The men hardly raised their heads as Mrs. Westmore
+passed; the women stared, but with curiosity rather than interest; and
+Amherst could not tell whether their sullenness reacted on Mrs.
+Westmore, or whether they were unconsciously chilled by her
+indifference. The result was the same: the distance between them seemed
+to increase instead of diminishing; and he smiled ironically to think of
+the form his appeal had taken--"If you see anything that seems to need
+explaining." Why, she saw nothing--nothing but the greasy floor under
+her feet, the cotton-dust in her eyes, the dizzy incomprehensible
+whirring of innumerable belts and wheels! Once out of it all, she would
+make haste to forget the dreary scene without pausing to ask for any
+explanation of its dreariness.
+
+In the intensity of his disappointment he sought a pretext to cut short
+the tour of the buildings, that he might remove his eyes from the face
+he had so vainly watched for any sign of awakening. And then, as he
+despaired of it, the change came.
+
+They had entered the principal carding-room, and were half-way down its
+long central passage, when Mr. Tredegar, who led the procession, paused
+before one of the cards.
+
+"What's that?" he asked, pointing to a ragged strip of black cloth tied
+conspicuously to the frame of the card.
+
+The overseer of the room, a florid young man with dissipated eyes, who,
+at Amherst's signal, had attached himself to the party, stopped short
+and turned a furious glance on the surrounding operatives.
+
+"What in hell...? It's the first I seen of it," he exclaimed, making an
+ineffectual attempt to snatch the mourning emblem from its place.
+
+At the same instant the midday whistle boomed through the building, and
+at the signal the machinery stopped, and silence fell on the mills. The
+more distant workers at once left their posts to catch up the hats and
+coats heaped untidily in the corners; but those nearer by, attracted by
+the commotion around the card, stood spell-bound, fixing the visitors
+with a dull stare.
+
+Amherst had reddened to the roots of his hair. He knew in a flash what
+the token signified, and the sight stirred his pity; but it also jarred
+on his strong sense of discipline, and he turned sternly to the
+operatives.
+
+"What does this mean?"
+
+There was a short silence; then one of the hands, a thin bent man with
+mystic eyes, raised his head and spoke.
+
+"We done that for Dillon," he said.
+
+Amherst's glance swept the crowded faces. "But Dillon was not killed,"
+he exclaimed, while the overseer, drawing out his pen-knife, ripped off
+the cloth and tossed it contemptuously into a heap of cotton-refuse at
+his feet.
+
+"Might better ha' been," came from another hand; and a deep "That's so"
+of corroboration ran through the knot of workers.
+
+Amherst felt a touch on his arm, and met Mrs. Westmore's eyes. "What has
+happened? What do they mean?" she asked in a startled voice.
+
+"There was an accident here two days ago: a man got caught in the card
+behind him, and his right hand was badly crushed."
+
+Mr. Tredegar intervened with his dry note of command. "How serious is
+the accident? How did it happen?" he enquired.
+
+"Through the man's own carelessness--ask the manager," the overseer
+interposed before Amherst could answer.
+
+A deep murmur of dissent ran through the crowd, but Amherst, without
+noticing the overseer's reply, said to Mr. Tredegar: "He's at the Hope
+Hospital. He will lose his hand, and probably the whole arm."
+
+He had not meant to add this last phrase. However strongly his
+sympathies were aroused, it was against his rule, at such a time, to say
+anything which might inflame the quick passions of the workers: he had
+meant to make light of the accident, and dismiss the operatives with a
+sharp word of reproof. But Mrs. Westmore's face was close to his: he saw
+the pity in her eyes, and feared, if he checked its expression, that he
+might never again have the chance of calling it forth.
+
+"His right arm? How terrible! But then he will never be able to work
+again!" she exclaimed, in all the horror of a first confrontation with
+the inexorable fate of the poor.
+
+Her eyes turned from Amherst and rested on the faces pressing about her.
+There were many women's faces among them--the faces of fagged
+middle-age, and of sallow sedentary girlhood. For the first time Mrs.
+Westmore seemed to feel the bond of blood between herself and these dim
+creatures of the underworld: as Amherst watched her the lovely miracle
+was wrought. Her pallour gave way to a quick rush of colour, her eyes
+widened like a frightened child's, and two tears rose and rolled slowly
+down her face.
+
+"Oh, why wasn't I told? Is he married? Has he children? What does it
+matter whose fault it was?" she cried, her questions pouring out
+disconnectedly on a wave of anger and compassion.
+
+"It warn't his fault.... The cards are too close.... It'll happen
+again.... He's got three kids at home," broke from the operatives; and
+suddenly a voice exclaimed "Here's his wife now," and the crowd divided
+to make way for Mrs. Dillon, who, passing through the farther end of the
+room, had been waylaid and dragged toward the group.
+
+She hung back, shrinking from the murderous machine, which she beheld
+for the first time since her husband's accident; then she saw Amherst,
+guessed the identity of the lady at his side, and flushed up to her
+haggard forehead. Mrs. Dillon had been good-looking in her earlier
+youth, and sufficient prettiness lingered in her hollow-cheeked face to
+show how much more had been sacrificed to sickness and unwholesome toil.
+
+"Oh, ma'am, ma'am, it warn't Jim's fault--there ain't a steadier man
+living. The cards is too crowded," she sobbed out.
+
+Some of the other women began to cry: a wave of sympathy ran through
+the circle, and Mrs. Westmore moved forward with an answering
+exclamation. "You poor creature...you poor creature...." She opened her
+arms to Mrs. Dillon, and the scrubber's sobs were buried on her
+employer's breast.
+
+"I will go to the hospital--I will come and see you--I will see that
+everything is done," Bessy reiterated. "But why are you here? How is it
+that you have had to leave your children?" She freed herself to turn a
+reproachful glance on Amherst. "You don't mean to tell me that, at such
+a time, you keep the poor woman at work?"
+
+"Mrs. Dillon has not been working here lately," Amherst answered. "The
+manager took her back to-day at her own request, that she might earn
+something while her husband was in hospital."
+
+Mrs. Westmore's eyes shone indignantly. "Earn something? But surely----"
+
+She met a silencing look from Mr. Tredegar, who had stepped between Mrs.
+Dillon and herself.
+
+"My dear child, no one doubts--none of these good people doubt--that you
+will look into the case, and do all you can to alleviate it; but let me
+suggest that this is hardly the place----"
+
+She turned from him with an appealing glance at Amherst.
+
+"I think," the latter said, as their eyes met, "that you had better let
+me dismiss the hands: they have only an hour at midday."
+
+She signed her assent, and he turned to the operatives and said quietly:
+"You have heard Mrs. Westmore's promise; now take yourselves off, and
+give her a clear way to the stairs."
+
+They dropped back, and Mr. Tredegar drew Bessy's arm through his; but as
+he began to move away she turned and laid her hand on Mrs. Dillon's
+shoulder.
+
+"You must not stay here--you must go back to the children. I will make
+it right with Mr. Truscomb," she said in a reassuring whisper; then,
+through her tears, she smiled a farewell at the lingering knot of
+operatives, and followed her companions to the door.
+
+In silence they descended the many stairs and crossed the shabby
+unfenced grass-plot between the mills and the manager's office. It was
+not till they reached the carriage that Mrs. Westmore spoke.
+
+"But Maria is waiting for us--we must call for her!" she said, rousing
+herself; and as Amherst opened the carriage-door she added: "You will
+show us the way? You will drive with us?"
+
+During the drive Bessy remained silent, as if re-absorbed in the
+distress of the scene she had just witnessed; and Amherst found himself
+automatically answering Mr. Tredegar's questions, while his own mind
+had no room for anything but the sense of her tremulous lips and of her
+eyes enlarged by tears. He had been too much engrossed in the momentous
+issues of her visit to the mills to remember that she had promised to
+call at his mother's for Mrs. Ansell; but now that they were on their
+way thither he found himself wishing that the visit might have been
+avoided. He was too proud of his mother to feel any doubt of the
+impression she would produce; but what would Mrs. Westmore think of
+their way of living, of the cheap jauntiness of the cottage, and the
+smell of cooking penetrating all its thin partitions? Duplain, too,
+would be coming in for dinner; and Amherst, in spite of his liking for
+the young overseer, became conscious of a rather overbearing freedom in
+his manner, the kind of misplaced ease which the new-made American
+affects as the readiest sign of equality. All these trifles, usually
+non-existent or supremely indifferent to Amherst, now assumed a sudden
+importance, behind which he detected the uneasy desire that Mrs.
+Westmore should not regard him as less of her own class than his
+connections and his bringing-up entitled him to be thought. In a flash
+he saw what he had forfeited by his choice of a calling--equal contact
+with the little circle of people who gave life its crowning grace and
+facility; and the next moment he was blushing at this reversal of his
+standards, and wondering, almost contemptuously, what could be the
+nature of the woman whose mere presence could produce such a change.
+
+But there was no struggling against her influence; and as, the night
+before, he had looked at Westmore with the nurse's eyes, so he now found
+himself seeing his house as it must appear to Mrs. Westmore. He noticed
+the shabby yellow paint of the palings, the neglected garden of their
+neighbour, the week's wash flaunting itself indecently through the
+denuded shrubs about the kitchen porch; and as he admitted his
+companions to the narrow passage he was assailed by the expected whiff
+of "boiled dinner," with which the steam of wash-tubs was intimately
+mingled.
+
+Duplain was in the passage; he had just come out of the kitchen, and the
+fact that he had been washing his hands in the sink was made evident by
+his rolled-back shirt-sleeves, and by the shiny redness of the knuckles
+he was running through his stiff black hair.
+
+"Hallo, John," he said, in his aggressive voice, which rose abruptly at
+sight of Amherst's companions; and at the same moment the frowsy
+maid-of-all-work, crimson from stooping over the kitchen stove, thrust
+her head out to call after him: "See here, Mr. Duplain, don't you leave
+your cravat laying round in my dough."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+MRS. WESTMORE stayed just long enough not to break in too abruptly on
+the flow of her friend's reminiscences, and to impress herself on Mrs.
+Amherst's delighted eyes as an embodiment of tactfulness and
+grace--looking sympathetically about the little room, which, with its
+books, its casts, its photographs of memorable pictures, seemed, after
+all, a not incongruous setting to her charms; so that when she rose to
+go, saying, as her hand met Amherst's, "Tonight, then, you must tell me
+all about those poor Dillons," he had the sense of having penetrated so
+far into her intimacy that a new Westmore must inevitably result from
+their next meeting.
+
+"Say, John--the boss is a looker," Duplain commented across the
+dinner-table, with the slangy grossness he sometimes affected; but
+Amherst left it to his mother to look a quiet rebuke, feeling himself
+too aloof from such contacts to resent them.
+
+He had to rouse himself with an effort to take in the overseer's next
+observation. "There was another lady at the office this morning,"
+Duplain went on, while the two men lit their cigars in the porch.
+"Asking after you--tried to get me to show her over the mills when I
+said you were busy."
+
+"Asking after me? What did she look like?"
+
+"Well, her face was kinder white and small, with an awful lot of black
+hair fitting close to it. Said she came from Hope Hospital."
+
+Amherst looked up. "Did you show her over?" he asked with sudden
+interest.
+
+Duplain laughed slangily. "What? Me? And have Truscomb get on to it and
+turn me down? How'd I know she wasn't a yellow reporter?"
+
+Amherst uttered an impatient exclamation. "I wish to heaven a yellow
+reporter _would_ go through these mills, and show them up in head-lines
+a yard high!"
+
+He regretted not having seen the nurse again: he felt sure she would
+have been interested in the working of the mills, and quick to notice
+the signs of discouragement and ill-health in the workers' faces; but a
+moment later his regret was dispelled by the thought of his visit to
+Mrs. Westmore. The afternoon hours dragged slowly by in the office,
+where he was bound to his desk by Truscomb's continued absence; but at
+length the evening whistle blew, the clerks in the outer room caught
+their hats from the rack, Duplain presented himself with the day's
+report, and the two men were free to walk home.
+
+Two hours later Amherst was mounting Mrs. Westmore's steps; and his hand
+was on the bell when the door opened and Dr. Disbrow came out. The
+physician drew back, as if surprised and slightly disconcerted; but his
+smile promptly effaced all signs of vexation, and he held his hand out
+affably.
+
+"A fine evening, Mr. Amherst. I'm glad to say I have been able to bring
+Mrs. Westmore an excellent report of both patients--Mr. Truscomb, I
+mean, and poor Dillon. This mild weather is all in their favour, and I
+hope my brother-in-law will be about in a day or two." He passed on with
+a nod.
+
+Amherst was once more shown into the library where he had found Mrs.
+Westmore that morning; but on this occasion it was Mr. Tredegar who rose
+to meet him, and curtly waved him to a seat at a respectful distance
+from his own. Amherst at once felt a change of atmosphere, and it was
+easy to guess that the lowering of temperature was due to Dr. Disbrow's
+recent visit. The thought roused the young man's combative instincts,
+and caused him to say, as Mr. Tredegar continued to survey him in
+silence from the depths of a capacious easy-chair: "I understood from
+Mrs. Westmore that she wished to see me this evening."
+
+It was the wrong note, and he knew it; but he had been unable to conceal
+his sense of the vague current of opposition in the air.
+
+"Quite so: I believe she asked you to come," Mr. Tredegar assented,
+laying his hands together vertically, and surveying Amherst above the
+acute angle formed by his parched finger-tips. As he leaned back,
+small, dry, dictatorial, in the careless finish of his evening dress
+and pearl-studded shirt-front, his appearance put the finishing touch to
+Amherst's irritation. He felt the incongruousness of his rough clothes
+in this atmosphere of after-dinner ease, the mud on his walking-boots,
+the clinging cotton-dust which seemed to have entered into the very
+pores of the skin; and again his annoyance escaped in his voice.
+
+"Perhaps I have come too early--" he began; but Mr. Tredegar interposed
+with glacial amenity: "No, I believe you are exactly on time; but Mrs.
+Westmore is unexpectedly detained. The fact is, Mr. and Mrs. Halford
+Gaines are dining with her, and she has delegated to me the duty of
+hearing what you have to say."
+
+Amherst hesitated. His impulse was to exclaim: "There is no duty about
+it!" but a moment's thought showed the folly of thus throwing up the
+game. With the prospect of Truscomb's being about again in a day or two,
+it might well be that this was his last chance of reaching Mrs.
+Westmore's ear; and he was bound to put his case while he could,
+irrespective of personal feeling. But his disappointment was too keen to
+be denied, and after a pause he said: "Could I not speak with Mrs.
+Westmore later?"
+
+Mr. Tredegar's cool survey deepened to a frown. The young man's
+importunity was really out of proportion to what he signified. "Mrs.
+Westmore has asked me to replace her," he said, putting his previous
+statement more concisely.
+
+"Then I am not to see her at all?" Amherst exclaimed; and the lawyer
+replied indifferently: "I am afraid not, as she leaves tomorrow."
+
+Mr. Tredegar was in his element when refusing a favour. Not that he was
+by nature unkind; he was, indeed, capable of a cold beneficence; but to
+deny what it was in his power to accord was the readiest way of
+proclaiming his authority, that power of loosing and binding which made
+him regard himself as almost consecrated to his office.
+
+Having sacrificed to this principle, he felt free to add as a gratuitous
+concession to politeness: "You are perhaps not aware that I am Mrs.
+Westmore's lawyer, and one of the executors under her husband's will."
+
+He dropped this negligently, as though conscious of the absurdity of
+presenting his credentials to a subordinate; but his manner no longer
+incensed Amherst: it merely strengthened his resolve to sink all sense
+of affront in the supreme effort of obtaining a hearing.
+
+"With that stuffed canary to advise her," he reflected, "there's no hope
+for her unless I can assert myself now"; and the unconscious wording of
+his thought expressed his inward sense that Bessy Westmore stood in
+greater need of help than her work-people.
+
+Still he hesitated, hardly knowing how to begin. To Mr. Tredegar he was
+no more than an underling, without authority to speak in his superior's
+absence; and the lack of an official warrant, which he could have
+disregarded in appealing to Mrs. Westmore, made it hard for him to find
+a good opening in addressing her representative. He saw, too, from Mr.
+Tredegar's protracted silence, that the latter counted on the effect of
+this embarrassment, and was resolved not to minimize it by giving him a
+lead; and this had the effect of increasing his caution.
+
+He looked up and met the lawyer's eye. "Mrs. Westmore," he began, "asked
+me to let her know something about the condition of the people at the
+mills----"
+
+Mr. Tredegar raised his hand. "Excuse me," he said. "I understood from
+Mrs. Westmore that it was you who asked her permission to call this
+evening and set forth certain grievances on the part of the operatives."
+
+Amherst reddened. "I did ask her--yes. But I don't in any sense
+represent the operatives. I simply wanted to say a word for them."
+
+Mr. Tredegar folded his hands again, and crossed one lean little leg
+over the other, bringing into his line of vision the glossy tip of a
+patent-leather pump, which he studied for a moment in silence.
+
+"Does Mr. Truscomb know of your intention?" he then enquired.
+
+"No, sir," Amherst answered energetically, glad that he had forced the
+lawyer out of his passive tactics. "I am here on my own
+responsibility--and in direct opposition to my own interests," he
+continued with a slight smile. "I know that my proceeding is quite out
+of order, and that I have, personally, everything to lose by it, and in
+a larger way probably very little to gain; but I thought Mrs. Westmore's
+attention ought to be called to certain conditions at the mills, and no
+one else seemed likely to speak of them."
+
+"May I ask why you assume that Mr. Truscomb will not do so when he has
+the opportunity?"
+
+Amherst could not repress a smile. "Because it is owing to Mr. Truscomb
+that they exist."
+
+"The real object of your visit then," said Mr. Tredegar, speaking with
+deliberation, "is--er--an underhand attack on your manager's methods?"
+
+Amherst's face darkened, but he kept his temper. "I see nothing
+especially underhand in my course----"
+
+"Except," the other interposed ironically, "that you have waited to
+speak till Mr. Truscomb was not in a position to defend himself."
+
+"I never had the chance before. It was at Mrs. Westmore's own suggestion
+that I took her over the mills, and feeling as I do I should have
+thought it cowardly to shirk the chance of pointing out to her the
+conditions there."
+
+Mr. Tredegar mused, his eyes still bent on his gently-oscillating foot.
+Whenever a sufficient pressure from without parted the fog of
+self-complacency in which he moved, he had a shrewd enough outlook on
+men and motives; and it may be that the vigorous ring of Amherst's
+answer had effected this momentary clearing of the air.
+
+At any rate, his next words were spoken in a more accessible tone. "To
+what conditions do you refer?"
+
+"To the conditions under which the mill-hands work and live--to the
+whole management of the mills, in fact, in relation to the people
+employed."
+
+"That is a large question. Pardon my possible ignorance--" Mr. Tredegar
+paused to make sure that his hearer took in the full irony of this--"but
+surely in this state there are liability and inspection laws for the
+protection of the operatives?"
+
+"There are such laws, yes--but most of them are either a dead letter, or
+else so easily evaded that no employer thinks of conforming to them."
+
+"No employer? Then your specific charge against the Westmore mills is
+part of a general arraignment of all employers of labour?"
+
+"By no means, sir. I only meant that, where the hands are well treated,
+it is due rather to the personal good-will of the employer than to any
+fear of the law."
+
+"And in what respect do you think the Westmore hands unfairly treated?"
+
+Amherst paused to measure his words. "The question, as you say, is a
+large one," he rejoined. "It has its roots in the way the business is
+organized--in the traditional attitude of the company toward the
+operatives. I hoped that Mrs. Westmore might return to the mills--might
+visit some of the people in their houses. Seeing their way of living, it
+might have occurred to her to ask a reason for it--and one enquiry would
+have led to another. She spoke this morning of going to the hospital to
+see Dillon."
+
+"She did go to the hospital: I went with her. But as Dillon was
+sleeping, and as the matron told us he was much better--a piece of news
+which, I am happy to say, Dr. Disbrow has just confirmed--she did not go
+up to the ward."
+
+Amherst was silent, and Mr. Tredegar pursued: "I gather, from your
+bringing up Dillon's case, that for some reason you consider it typical
+of the defects you find in Mr. Truscomb's management. Suppose,
+therefore, we drop generalizations, and confine ourselves to the
+particular instance. What wrong, in your view, has been done the
+Dillons?"
+
+He turned, as he spoke, to extract a cigar from the box at his elbow.
+"Let me offer you one, Mr. Amherst: we shall talk more comfortably," he
+suggested with distant affability; but Amherst, with a gesture of
+refusal, plunged into his exposition of the Dillon case. He tried to put
+the facts succinctly, presenting them in their bare ugliness, without
+emotional drapery; setting forth Dillon's good record for sobriety and
+skill, dwelling on the fact that his wife's ill-health was the result of
+perfectly remediable conditions in the work-rooms, and giving his
+reasons for the belief that the accident had been caused, not by
+Dillon's carelessness, but by the over-crowding of the carding-room. Mr.
+Tredegar listened attentively, though the cloud of cigar-smoke between
+himself and Amherst masked from the latter his possible changes of
+expression. When he removed his cigar, his face looked smaller than
+ever, as though desiccated by the fumes of the tobacco.
+
+"Have you ever called Mr. Gaines's attention to these matters?"
+
+"No: that would have been useless. He has always refused to discuss the
+condition of the mills with any one but the manager."
+
+"H'm--that would seem to prove that Mr. Gaines, who lives here, sees as
+much reason for trusting Truscomb's judgment as Mr. Westmore, who
+delegated his authority from a distance."
+
+Amherst did not take this up, and after a pause Mr. Tredegar went on:
+"You know, of course, the answers I might make to such an indictment. As
+a lawyer, I might call your attention to the employé's waiver of risk,
+to the strong chances of contributory negligence, and so on; but happily
+in this case such arguments are superfluous. You are apparently not
+aware that Dillon's injury is much slighter than it ought to be to serve
+your purpose. Dr. Disbrow has just told us that he will probably get off
+with the loss of a finger; and I need hardly say that, whatever may have
+been Dillon's own share in causing the accident--and as to this, as you
+admit, opinions differ--Mrs. Westmore will assume all the expenses of
+his nursing, besides making a liberal gift to his wife." Mr. Tredegar
+laid down his cigar and drew forth a silver-mounted note-case. "Here, in
+fact," he continued, "is a cheque which she asks you to transmit, and
+which, as I think you will agree, ought to silence, on your part as well
+as Mrs. Dillon's, any criticism of Mrs. Westmore's dealings with her
+operatives."
+
+The blood rose to Amherst's forehead, and he just restrained himself
+from pushing back the cheque which Mr. Tredegar had laid on the table
+between them.
+
+"There is no question of criticizing Mrs. Westmore's dealings with her
+operatives--as far as I know, she has had none as yet," he rejoined,
+unable to control his voice as completely as his hand. "And the proof
+of it is the impunity with which her agents deceive her--in this case,
+for instance, of Dillon's injury. Dr. Disbrow, who is Mr. Truscomb's
+brother-in-law, and apt to be influenced by his views, assures you that
+the man will get off with the loss of a finger; but some one equally
+competent to speak told me last night that he would lose not only his
+hand but his arm."
+
+Amherst's voice had swelled to a deep note of anger, and with his tossed
+hair, and eyes darkening under furrowed brows, he presented an image of
+revolutionary violence which deepened the disdain on Mr. Tredegar's lip.
+
+"Some one equally competent to speak? Are you prepared to name this
+anonymous authority?"
+
+Amherst hesitated. "No--I shall have to ask you to take my word for it,"
+he returned with a shade of embarrassment.
+
+"Ah--" Mr. Tredegar murmured, giving to the expressive syllable its
+utmost measure of decent exultation.
+
+Amherst quivered under the thin lash, and broke out: "It is all you have
+required of Dr. Disbrow--" but at this point Mr. Tredegar rose to his
+feet.
+
+"My dear sir, your resorting to such arguments convinces me that nothing
+is to be gained by prolonging our talk. I will not even take up your
+insinuations against two of the most respected men in the
+community--such charges reflect only on those who make them."
+
+Amherst, whose flame of anger had subsided with the sudden sense of its
+futility, received this in silence, and the lawyer, reassured, continued
+with a touch of condescension: "My only specific charge from Mrs.
+Westmore was to hand you this cheque; but, in spite of what has passed,
+I take it upon myself to add, in her behalf, that your conduct of today
+will not be allowed to weigh against your record at the mills, and that
+the extraordinary charges you have seen fit to bring against your
+superiors will--if not repeated--simply be ignored."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When, the next morning at about ten, Mrs. Eustace Ansell joined herself
+to the two gentlemen who still lingered over a desultory breakfast in
+Mrs. Westmore's dining-room, she responded to their greeting with less
+than her usual vivacity.
+
+[Illustration: "No--I shall have to ask you to take my word for it."]
+
+It was one of Mrs. Ansell's arts to bring to the breakfast-table just
+the right shade of sprightliness, a warmth subdued by discretion as the
+early sunlight is tempered by the lingering coolness of night. She was,
+in short, as fresh, as temperate, as the hour, yet without the
+concomitant chill which too often marks its human atmosphere: rather her
+soft effulgence dissipated the morning frosts, opening pinched spirits
+to a promise of midday warmth. But on this occasion a mist of
+uncertainty hung on her smile, and veiled the glance which she turned
+on the contents of the heavy silver dishes successively presented to her
+notice. When, at the conclusion of this ceremony, the servants had
+withdrawn, she continued for a moment to stir her tea in silence, while
+her glance travelled from Mr. Tredegar, sunk in his morning mail, to Mr.
+Langhope, who leaned back resignedly in his chair, trying to solace
+himself with Hanaford Banner, till midday should bring him a sight of
+the metropolitan press.
+
+"I suppose you know," she said suddenly, "that Bessy has telegraphed for
+Cicely, and made her arrangements to stay here another week."
+
+Mr. Langhope's stick slipped to the floor with the sudden displacement
+of his whole lounging person, and Mr. Tredegar, removing his
+tortoise-shell reading-glasses, put them hastily into their case, as
+though to declare for instant departure.
+
+"My dear Maria--" Mr. Langhope gasped, while she rose and restored his
+stick.
+
+"She considers it, then, her duty to wait and see Truscomb?" the lawyer
+asked; and Mrs. Ansell, regaining her seat, murmured discreetly: "She
+puts it so--yes."
+
+"My dear Maria--" Mr. Langhope repeated helplessly, tossing aside his
+paper and drawing his chair up to the table.
+
+"But it would be perfectly easy to return: it is quite unnecessary to
+wait here for his recovery," Mr. Tredegar pursued, as though setting
+forth a fact which had not hitherto presented itself to the more limited
+intelligence of his hearers.
+
+Mr. Langhope emitted a short laugh, and Mrs. Ansell answered gently:
+"She says she detests the long journey."
+
+Mr. Tredegar rose and gathered up his letters with a gesture of
+annoyance. "In that case--if I had been notified earlier of this
+decision, I might have caught the morning train," he interrupted
+himself, glancing resentfully at his watch.
+
+"Oh, don't leave us, Tredegar," Mr. Langhope entreated. "We'll reason
+with her--we'll persuade her to go back by the three-forty."
+
+Mrs. Ansell smiled. "She telegraphed at seven. Cicely and the governess
+are already on their way."
+
+"At seven? But, my dear friend, why on earth didn't you tell us?"
+
+"I didn't know till a few minutes ago. Bessy called me in as I was
+coming down."
+
+"Ah--" Mr. Langhope murmured, meeting her eyes for a fraction of a
+second. In the encounter, she appeared to communicate something more
+than she had spoken, for as he stooped to pick up his paper he said,
+more easily: "My dear Tredegar, if we're in a box there's no reason why
+we should force you into it too. Ring for Ropes, and we'll look up a
+train for you."
+
+Mr. Tredegar appeared slightly ruffled at this prompt acquiescence in
+his threatened departure. "Of course, if I had been notified in advance,
+I might have arranged to postpone my engagements another day; but in any
+case, it is quite out of the question that I should return in a
+week--and quite unnecessary," he added, snapping his lips shut as though
+he were closing his last portmanteau.
+
+"Oh, quite--quite," Mr. Langhope assented. "It isn't, in fact, in the
+least necessary for any of us either to stay on now or to return.
+Truscomb could come to Long Island when he recovers, and answer any
+questions we may have to put; but if Bessy has sent for the child, we
+must of course put off going for today--at least I must," he added
+sighing, "and, though I know it's out of the question to exact such a
+sacrifice from you, I have a faint hope that our delightful friend here,
+with the altruistic spirit of her sex----"
+
+"Oh, I shall enjoy it--my maid is unpacking," Mrs. Ansell gaily
+affirmed; and Mr. Tredegar, shrugging his shoulders, said curtly: "In
+that case I will ring for the time-table."
+
+When he had withdrawn to consult it in the seclusion of the library, and
+Mrs. Ansell, affecting a sudden desire for a second cup of tea, had
+reseated herself to await the replenishment of the kettle, Mr. Langhope
+exchanged his own chair for a place at her side.
+
+"Now what on earth does this mean?" he asked, lighting a cigarette in
+response to her slight nod of consent.
+
+Mrs. Ansell's gaze lost itself in the depths of the empty tea-pot.
+
+"A number of things--or any one of them," she said at length, extending
+her arm toward the tea-caddy.
+
+"For instance--?" he rejoined, following appreciatively the movements of
+her long slim hands.
+
+She raised her head and met his eyes. "For instance: it may mean--don't
+resent the suggestion--that you and Mr. Tredegar were not quite
+well-advised in persuading her not to see Mr. Amherst yesterday
+evening."
+
+Mr. Langhope uttered an exclamation of surprise.
+
+"But, my dear Maria--in the name of reason...why, after the doctor's
+visit--after his coming here last night, at Truscomb's request, to put
+the actual facts before her--should she have gone over the whole
+business again with this interfering young fellow? How, in fact, could
+she have done so," he added, after vainly waiting for her reply,
+"without putting a sort of slight on Truscomb, who is, after all, the
+only person entitled to speak with authority?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell received his outburst in silence, and the butler,
+reappearing with the kettle and fresh toast, gave her the chance to
+prolong her pause for a full minute. When the door had closed on him,
+she said: "Judged by reason, your arguments are unanswerable; but when
+it comes to a question of feeling----"
+
+"Feeling? What kind of feeling? You don't mean to suggest anything so
+preposterous as that Bessy----?"
+
+She made a gesture of smiling protest. "I confess it is to be regretted
+that his mother is a lady, and that he looks--you must have noticed
+it?--so amazingly like the portraits of the young Schiller. But I only
+meant that Bessy forms all her opinions emotionally; and that she must
+have been very strongly affected by the scene Mr. Tredegar described to
+us."
+
+"Ah," Mr. Langhope interjected, replying first to her parenthesis, "how
+a woman of your good sense stumbled on that idea of hunting up the
+mother--!" but Mrs. Ansell answered, with a slight grimace: "My dear
+Henry, if you could see the house they live in you'd think I had been
+providentially guided there!" and, reverting to the main issue, he went
+on fretfully: "But why, after hearing the true version of the facts,
+should Bessy still be influenced by that sensational scene? Even if it
+was not, as Tredegar suspects, cooked up expressly to take her in, she
+must see that the hospital doctor is, after all, as likely as any one to
+know how the accident really happened, and how seriously the fellow is
+hurt."
+
+"There's the point. Why should Bessy believe Dr. Disbrow rather than Mr.
+Amherst?"
+
+"For the best of reasons--because Disbrow has nothing to gain by
+distorting the facts, whereas this young Amherst, as Tredegar pointed
+out, has the very obvious desire to give Truscomb a bad name and shove
+himself into his place."
+
+Mrs. Ansell contemplatively turned the rings upon her fingers. "From
+what I saw of Amherst I'm inclined to think that, if that is his object,
+he is too clever to have shown his hand so soon. But if you are right,
+was there not all the more reason for letting Bessy see him and find out
+as soon as possible what he was aiming at?"
+
+"If one could have trusted her to find out--but you credit my poor child
+with more penetration than I've ever seen in her."
+
+"Perhaps you've looked for it at the wrong time--and about the wrong
+things. Bessy has the penetration of the heart."
+
+"The heart! You make mine jump when you use such expressions."
+
+"Oh, I use this one in a general sense. But I want to help you to keep
+it from acquiring a more restricted significance."
+
+"Restricted--to the young man himself?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell's expressive hands seemed to commit the question to fate.
+"All I ask you to consider for the present is that Bessy is quite
+unoccupied and excessively bored."
+
+"Bored? Why, she has everything on earth she can want!"
+
+"The ideal state for producing boredom--the only atmosphere in which it
+really thrives. And besides--to be humanly inconsistent--there's just
+one thing she hasn't got."
+
+"Well?" Mr. Langhope groaned, fortifying himself with a second
+cigarette.
+
+"An occupation for that rudimentary little organ, the mention of which
+makes you jump."
+
+"There you go again! Good heavens, Maria, do you want to encourage her
+to fall in love?"
+
+"Not with a man, just at present, but with a hobby, an interest, by all
+means. If she doesn't, the man will take the place of the
+interest--there's a vacuum to be filled, and human nature abhors a
+vacuum."
+
+Mr. Langhope shrugged his shoulders. "I don't follow you. She adored her
+husband."
+
+His friend's fine smile was like a magnifying glass silently applied to
+the gross stupidity of his remark. "Oh, I don't say it was a great
+passion--but they got on perfectly," he corrected himself.
+
+"So perfectly that you must expect her to want a little storm and stress
+for a change. The mere fact that you and Mr. Tredegar objected to her
+seeing Mr. Amherst last night has roused the spirit of opposition in
+her. A year ago she hadn't any spirit of opposition."
+
+"There was nothing for her to oppose--poor Dick made her life so
+preposterously easy."
+
+"My ingenuous friend! Do you still think that's any reason? The fact is,
+Bessy wasn't awake, she wasn't even born, then.... She is now, and you
+know the infant's first conscious joy is to smash things."
+
+"It will be rather an expensive joy if the mills are the first thing she
+smashes."
+
+"Oh I imagine the mills are pretty substantial. I should, I own," Mrs.
+Ansell smiled, "not object to seeing her try her teeth on them."
+
+"Which, in terms of practical conduct, means----?"
+
+"That I advise you not to disapprove of her staying on, or of her
+investigating the young man's charges. You must remember that another
+peculiarity of the infant mind is to tire soonest of the toy that no one
+tries to take away from it."
+
+"_Que diable!_ But suppose Truscomb turns rusty at this very unusual
+form of procedure? Perhaps you don't quite know how completely he
+represents the prosperity of the mills."
+
+"All the more reason," Mrs. Ansell persisted, rising at the sound of Mr.
+Tredegar's approach. "For don't you perceive, my poor distracted friend,
+that if Truscomb turns rusty, as he undoubtedly will, the inevitable
+result will be his manager's dismissal--and that thereafter there will
+presumably be peace in Warsaw?"
+
+"Ah, you divinely wicked woman!" cried Mr. Langhope, snatching at an
+appreciative pressure of her hand as the lawyer reappeared in the
+doorway.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+BEFORE daylight that same morning Amherst, dressing by the gas-flame
+above his cheap wash-stand, strove to bring some order into his angry
+thoughts. It humbled him to feel his purpose tossing rudderless on
+unruly waves of emotion, yet strive as he would he could not regain a
+hold on it. The events of the last twenty-four hours had been too rapid
+and unexpected for him to preserve his usual clear feeling of mastery;
+and he had, besides, to reckon with the first complete surprise of his
+senses. His way of life had excluded him from all contact with the
+subtler feminine influences, and the primitive side of the relation left
+his imagination untouched. He was therefore the more assailable by those
+refined forms of the ancient spell that lurk in delicacy of feeling
+interpreted by loveliness of face. By his own choice he had cut himself
+off from all possibility of such communion; had accepted complete
+abstinence for that part of his nature which might have offered a
+refuge from the stern prose of his daily task. But his personal
+indifference to his surroundings--deliberately encouraged as a defiance
+to the attractions of the life he had renounced--proved no defence
+against this appeal; rather, the meanness of his surroundings combined
+with his inherited refinement of taste to deepen the effect of Bessy's
+charm.
+
+As he reviewed the incidents of the past hours, a reaction of
+self-derision came to his aid. What was this exquisite opportunity from
+which he had cut himself off? What, to reduce the question to a personal
+issue, had Mrs. Westmore said or done that, on the part of a plain
+woman, would have quickened his pulses by the least fraction of a
+second? Why, it was only the old story of the length of Cleopatra's
+nose! Because her eyes were a heavenly vehicle for sympathy, because her
+voice was pitched to thrill the tender chords, he had been deluded into
+thinking that she understood and responded to his appeal. And her own
+emotions had been wrought upon by means as cheap: it was only the
+obvious, theatrical side of the incident that had affected her. If
+Dillon's wife had been old and ugly, would she have been clasped to her
+employer's bosom? A more expert knowledge of the sex would have told
+Amherst that such ready sympathy is likely to be followed by as prompt a
+reaction of indifference. Luckily Mrs. Westmore's course had served as a
+corrective for his lack of experience; she had even, as it appeared,
+been at some pains to hasten the process of disillusionment. This timely
+discipline left him blushing at his own insincerity; for he now saw that
+he had risked his future not because of his zeal for the welfare of the
+mill-hands, but because Mrs. Westmore's look was like sunshine on his
+frozen senses, and because he was resolved, at any cost, to arrest her
+attention, to associate himself with her by the only means in his power.
+
+Well, he deserved to fail with such an end in view; and the futility of
+his scheme was matched by the vanity of his purpose. In the cold light
+of disenchantment it seemed as though he had tried to build an
+impregnable fortress out of nursery blocks. How could he have foreseen
+anything but failure for so preposterous an attempt? His breach of
+discipline would of course be reported at once to Mr. Gaines and
+Truscomb; and the manager, already jealous of his assistant's popularity
+with the hands, which was a tacit criticism of his own methods, would
+promptly seize the pretext to be rid of him. Amherst was aware that only
+his technical efficiency, and his knack of getting the maximum of work
+out of the operatives, had secured him from Truscomb's animosity. From
+the outset there had been small sympathy between the two; but the
+scarcity of competent and hard-working assistants had made Truscomb
+endure him for what he was worth to the mills. Now, however, his own
+folly had put the match to the manager's smouldering dislike, and he saw
+himself, in consequence, discharged and black-listed, and perhaps
+roaming for months in quest of a job. He knew the efficiency of that
+far-reaching system of defamation whereby the employers of labour pursue
+and punish the subordinate who incurs their displeasure. In the case of
+a mere operative this secret persecution often worked complete ruin; and
+even to a man of Amherst's worth it opened the dispiriting prospect of a
+long struggle for rehabilitation.
+
+Deep down, he suffered most at the thought that his blow for the
+operatives had failed; but on the surface it was the manner of his
+failure that exasperated him. For it seemed to prove him unfit for the
+very work to which he was drawn: that yearning to help the world forward
+that, in some natures, sets the measure to which the personal adventure
+must keep step. Amherst had hitherto felt himself secured by his insight
+and self-control from the emotional errors besetting the way of the
+enthusiast; and behold, he had stumbled into the first sentimental trap
+in his path, and tricked his eyes with a Christmas-chromo vision of
+lovely woman dispensing coals and blankets! Luckily, though such wounds
+to his self-confidence cut deep, he could apply to them the antiseptic
+of an unfailing humour; and before he had finished dressing, the
+picture of his wide schemes of social reform contracting to a blue-eyed
+philanthropy of cheques and groceries, had provoked a reaction of
+laughter. Perhaps the laughter came too soon, and rang too loud, to be
+true to the core; but at any rate it healed the edges of his hurt, and
+gave him a sound surface of composure.
+
+But he could not laugh away the thought of the trials to which his
+intemperance had probably exposed his mother; and when, at the
+breakfast-table, from which Duplain had already departed, she broke into
+praise of their visitor, it was like a burning irritant on his wound.
+
+"What a face, John! Of course I don't often see people of that kind
+now--" the words, falling from her too simply to be reproachful, wrung
+him, for that, all the more--"but I'm sure that kind of soft loveliness
+is rare everywhere; like a sweet summer morning with the mist on it. The
+Gaines girls, now, are my idea of the modern type; very handsome, of
+course, but you see just _how_ handsome the first minute. I like a story
+that keeps one wondering till the end. It was very kind of Maria
+Ansell," Mrs. Amherst wandered happily on, "to come and hunt me out
+yesterday, and I enjoyed our quiet talk about old times. But what I
+liked best was seeing Mrs. Westmore--and, oh, John, if she came to live
+here, what a benediction to the mills!"
+
+Amherst was silent, moved most of all by the unimpaired simplicity of
+heart with which his mother could take up past relations, and open her
+meagre life to the high visitations of grace and fashion, without a
+tinge of self-consciousness or apology. "I shall never be as genuine as
+that," he thought, remembering how he had wished to have Mrs. Westmore
+know that he was of her own class. How mixed our passions are, and how
+elastic must be the word that would cover any one of them! Amherst's, at
+that moment, were all stained with the deep wound to his self-love.
+
+The discolouration he carried in his eye made the mill-village seem more
+than commonly cheerless and ugly as he walked over to the office after
+breakfast. Beyond the grim roof-line of the factories a dazzle of rays
+sent upward from banked white clouds the promise of another brilliant
+day; and he reflected that Mrs. Westmore would soon be speeding home to
+the joy of a gallop over the plains.
+
+Far different was the task that awaited him--yet it gave him a pang to
+think that he might be performing it for the last time. In spite of Mr.
+Tredegar's assurances, he was certain that the report of his conduct
+must by this time have reached the President, and been transmitted to
+Truscomb; the latter was better that morning, and the next day he would
+doubtless call his rebellious assistant to account. Amherst, meanwhile,
+took up his routine with a dull heart. Even should his offense be
+condoned, his occupation presented, in itself, little future to a man
+without money or powerful connections. Money! He had spurned the thought
+of it in choosing his work, yet he now saw that, without its aid, he was
+powerless to accomplish the object to which his personal desires had
+been sacrificed. His love of his craft had gradually been merged in the
+larger love for his fellow-workers, and in the resulting desire to lift
+and widen their lot. He had once fancied that this end might be attained
+by an internal revolution in the management of the Westmore mills; that
+he might succeed in creating an industrial object-lesson conspicuous
+enough to point the way to wiser law-making and juster relations between
+the classes. But the last hours' experiences had shown him how vain it
+was to assault single-handed the strong barrier between money and
+labour, and how his own dash at the breach had only thrust him farther
+back into the obscure ranks of the stragglers. It was, after all, only
+through politics that he could return successfully to the attack; and
+financial independence was the needful preliminary to a political
+career. If he had stuck to the law he might, by this time, have been
+nearer his goal; but then the gold might not have mattered, since it was
+only by living among the workers that he had learned to care for their
+fate. And rather than have forfeited that poignant yet mighty vision of
+the onward groping of the mass, rather than have missed the widening of
+his own nature that had come through sharing their hopes and pains, he
+would still have turned from the easier way, have chosen the deeper
+initiation rather than the readier attainment.
+
+But this philosophic view of the situation was a mere thread of light on
+the farthest verge of his sky: much nearer were the clouds of immediate
+care, amid which his own folly, and his mother's possible suffering from
+it, loomed darkest; and these considerations made him resolve that, if
+his insubordination were overlooked, he would swallow the affront of a
+pardon, and continue for the present in the mechanical performance of
+his duties. He had just brought himself to this leaden state of
+acquiescence when one of the clerks in the outer office thrust his head
+in to say: "A lady asking for you--" and looking up, Amherst beheld
+Bessy Westmore.
+
+She came in alone, with an air of high self-possession in marked
+contrast to her timidity and indecision of the previous day. Amherst
+thought she looked taller, more majestic; so readily may the upward
+slant of a soft chin, the firmer line of yielding brows, add a cubit to
+the outward woman. Her aspect was so commanding that he fancied she had
+come to express her disapproval of his conduct, to rebuke him for lack
+of respect to Mr. Tredegar; but a moment later it became clear, even to
+his inexperienced perceptions, that it was not to himself that her
+challenge was directed.
+
+She advanced toward the seat he had moved forward, but in her absorption
+forgot to seat herself, and stood with her clasped hands resting on the
+back of the chair.
+
+"I have come back to talk to you," she began, in her sweet voice with
+its occasional quick lift of appeal. "I knew that, in Mr. Truscomb's
+absence, it would be hard for you to leave the mills, and there are one
+or two things I want you to explain before I go away--some of the
+things, for instance, that you spoke to Mr. Tredegar about last night."
+
+Amherst's feeling of constraint returned. "I'm afraid I expressed myself
+badly; I may have annoyed him--" he began.
+
+She smiled this away, as though irrelevant to the main issue. "Perhaps
+you don't quite understand each other--but I am sure you can make it
+clear to me." She sank into the chair, resting one arm on the edge of
+the desk behind which he had resumed his place. "That is the reason why
+I came alone," she continued. "I never can understand when a lot of
+people are trying to tell me a thing all at once. And I don't suppose I
+care as much as a man would--a lawyer especially--about the forms that
+ought to be observed. All I want is to find out what is wrong and how to
+remedy it."
+
+Her blue eyes met Amherst's in a look that flowed like warmth about his
+heart. How should he have doubted that her feelings were as exquisite as
+her means of expressing them? The iron bands of distrust were loosened
+from his spirit, and he blushed for his cheap scepticism of the morning.
+In a woman so evidently nurtured in dependence, whose views had been
+formed, and her actions directed, by the most conventional influences,
+the mere fact of coming alone to Westmore, in open defiance of her
+advisers, bespoke a persistence of purpose that put his doubts to shame.
+
+"It will make a great difference to the people here if you interest
+yourself in them," he rejoined. "I tried to explain to Mr. Tredegar that
+I had no wish to criticise the business management of the mills--even if
+there had been any excuse for my doing so--but that I was sure the
+condition of the operatives could be very much improved, without
+permanent harm to the business, by any one who felt a personal sympathy
+for them; and in the end I believe such sympathy produces better work,
+and so benefits the employer materially."
+
+She listened with her gentle look of trust, as though committing to him,
+with the good faith of a child, her ignorance, her credulity, her little
+rudimentary convictions and her little tentative aspirations, relying on
+him not to abuse or misdirect them in the boundless supremacy of his
+masculine understanding.
+
+"That is just what I want you to explain to me," she said. "But first I
+should like to know more about the poor man who was hurt. I meant to see
+his wife yesterday, but Mr. Gaines told me she would be at work till
+six, and it would have been difficult to go after that. I _did_ go to
+the hospital; but the man was sleeping--is Dillon his name?--and the
+matron told us he was much better. Dr. Disbrow came in the evening and
+said the same thing--told us it was all a false report about his having
+been so badly hurt, and that Mr. Truscomb was very much annoyed when he
+heard of your having said, before the operatives, that Dillon would lose
+his arm."
+
+Amherst smiled. "Ah--Mr. Truscomb heard that? Well, he's right to be
+annoyed: I ought not to have said it when I did. But unfortunately I am
+not the only one to be punished. The operative who tied on the black
+cloth was dismissed this morning."
+
+Mrs. Westmore flamed up. "Dismissed for that? Oh, how unjust--how
+cruel!"
+
+"You must look at both sides of the case," said Amherst, finding it much
+easier to remain temperate in the glow he had kindled than if he had had
+to force his own heat into frozen veins. "Of course any act of
+insubordination must be reprimanded--but I think a reprimand would have
+been enough."
+
+It gave him an undeniable throb of pleasure to find that she was not to
+be checked by such arguments. "But he shall be put back--I won't have
+any one discharged for such a reason! You must find him for me at
+once--you must tell him----"
+
+Once more Amherst gently restrained her. "If you'll forgive my saying
+so, I think it is better to let him go, and take his chance of getting
+work elsewhere. If he were taken back he might be made to suffer. As
+things are organized here, the hands are very much at the mercy of the
+overseers, and the overseer in that room would be likely to make it
+uncomfortable for a hand who had so openly defied him."
+
+With a heavy sigh she bent her puzzled brows on him. "How complicated it
+is! I wonder if I shall ever understand it all. _You_ don't think
+Dillon's accident was his own fault, then?"
+
+"Certainly not; there are too many cards in that room. I pointed out the
+fact to Mr. Truscomb when the new machines were set up three years ago.
+An operative may be ever so expert with his fingers, and yet not learn
+to measure his ordinary movements quite as accurately as if he were an
+automaton; and that is what a man must do to be safe in the
+carding-room."
+
+She sighed again. "The more you tell me, the more difficult it all
+seems. Why is the carding-room so over-crowded?"
+
+"To make it pay better," Amherst returned bluntly; and the colour
+flushed her sensitive skin.
+
+He thought she was about to punish him for his plain-speaking; but she
+went on after a pause: "What you say is dreadful. Each thing seems to
+lead back to another--and I feel so ignorant of it all." She hesitated
+again, and then said, turning her bluest glance on him: "I am going to
+be quite frank with you, Mr. Amherst. Mr. Tredegar repeated to me what
+you said to him last night, and I think he was annoyed that you were
+unwilling to give any proof of the charges you made."
+
+"Charges? Ah," Amherst exclaimed, with a start of recollection, "he
+means my refusing to say who told me that Dr. Disbrow was not telling
+the truth about Dillon?"
+
+"Yes. He said that was a very grave accusation to make, and that no one
+should have made it without being able to give proof."
+
+"That is quite true, theoretically. But in this case it would be easy
+for you or Mr. Tredegar to find out whether I was right."
+
+"But Mr. Tredegar said you refused to say who told you."
+
+"I was bound to, as it happened. But I am not bound to prevent your
+trying to get the same information."
+
+"Ah--" she murmured understandingly; and, a sudden thought striking him,
+he went on, with a glance at the clock: "If you really wish to judge for
+yourself, why not go to the hospital now? I shall be free in five
+minutes, and could go with you if you wish it."
+
+Amherst had remembered the nurse's cry of recognition when she saw Mrs.
+Westmore's face under the street-lamp; and it immediately occurred to
+him that, if the two women had really known each other, Mrs. Westmore
+would have no difficulty in obtaining the information she wanted; while,
+even if they met as strangers, the dark-eyed girl's perspicacity might
+still be trusted to come to their aid. It remained only to be seen how
+Mrs. Westmore would take his suggestion; but some instinct was already
+telling him that the highhanded method was the one she really preferred.
+
+"To the hospital--now? I should like it of all things," she exclaimed,
+rising with what seemed an almost childish zest in the adventure. "Of
+course that is the best way of finding out. I ought to have insisted on
+seeing Dillon yesterday--but I begin to think the matron didn't want me
+to."
+
+Amherst left this inference to work itself out in her mind, contenting
+himself, as they drove back to Hanaford, with answering her questions
+about Dillon's family, the ages of his children, and his wife's health.
+Her enquiries, he noticed, did not extend from the particular to the
+general: her curiosity, as yet, was too purely personal and emotional to
+lead to any larger consideration of the question. But this larger view
+might grow out of the investigation of Dillon's case; and meanwhile
+Amherst's own purposes were momentarily lost in the sweet confusion of
+feeling her near him--of seeing the exquisite grain of her skin, the way
+her lashes grew out of a dusky line on the edge of the white lids, the
+way her hair, stealing in spirals of light from brow to ear, wavered off
+into a fruity down on the edge of the cheek.
+
+At the hospital they were protestingly admitted by Mrs. Ogan, though the
+official "visitors' hour" was not till the afternoon; and beside the
+sufferer's bed, Amherst saw again that sudden flowering of compassion
+which seemed the key to his companion's beauty: as though her lips had
+been formed for consolation and her hands for tender offices. It was
+clear enough that Dillon, still sunk in a torpor broken by feverish
+tossings, was making no perceptible progress toward recovery; and Mrs.
+Ogan was reduced to murmuring some technical explanation about the state
+of the wound while Bessy hung above him with reassuring murmurs as to
+his wife's fate, and promises that the children should be cared for.
+
+Amherst had noticed, on entering, that a new nurse--a gaping young woman
+instantly lost in the study of Mrs. Westmore's toilet--had replaced the
+dark-eyed attendant of the day before; and supposing that the latter was
+temporarily off duty, he asked Mrs. Ogan if she might be seen.
+
+The matron's face was a picture of genteel perplexity. "The other nurse?
+Our regular surgical nurse, Miss Golden, is ill--Miss Hibbs, here, is
+replacing her for the present." She indicated the gaping damsel; then,
+as Amherst persisted: "Ah," she wondered negligently, "do you mean the
+young lady you saw here yesterday? Certainly--I had forgotten: Miss
+Brent was merely a--er--temporary substitute. I believe she was
+recommended to Dr. Disbrow by one of his patients; but we found her
+quite unsuitable--in fact, unfitted--and the doctor discharged her this
+morning."
+
+Mrs. Westmore had drawn near, and while the matron delivered her
+explanation, with an uneasy sorting and shifting of words, a quick
+signal of intelligence passed between her hearers. "You see?" Amherst's
+eyes exclaimed; "I see--they have sent her away because she told you,"
+Bessy's flashed back in wrath, and his answering look did not deny her
+inference.
+
+"Do you know where she has gone?" Amherst enquired; but Mrs. Ogan,
+permitting her brows a faint lift of surprise, replied that she had no
+idea of Miss Brent's movements, beyond having heard that she was to
+leave Hanaford immediately
+
+In the carriage Bessy exclaimed: "It was the nurse, of course--if we
+could only find her! Brent--did Mrs. Ogan say her name was Brent?"
+
+"Do you know the name?"
+
+"Yes--at least--but it couldn't, of course, be the girl I knew----"
+
+"Miss Brent saw you the night you arrived, and thought she recognized
+you. She said you and she had been at some school or convent together."
+
+"The Sacred Heart? Then it _is_ Justine Brent! I heard they had lost
+their money--I haven't seen her for years. But how strange that she
+should be a hospital nurse! And why is she at Hanaford, I wonder?"
+
+"She was here only on a visit; she didn't tell me where she lived. She
+said she heard that a surgical nurse was wanted at the hospital, and
+volunteered her services; I'm afraid she got small thanks for them."
+
+"Do you really think they sent her away for talking to you? How do you
+suppose they found out?"
+
+"I waited for her last night when she left the hospital, and I suppose
+Mrs. Ogan or one of the doctors saw us. It was thoughtless of me,"
+Amherst exclaimed with compunction.
+
+"I wish I had seen her--poor Justine! We were the greatest friends at
+the convent. She was the ringleader in all our mischief--I never saw any
+one so quick and clever. I suppose her fun is all gone now."
+
+For a moment Mrs. Westmore's mind continued to linger among her
+memories; then she reverted to the question of the Dillons, and of what
+might best be done for them if Miss Brent's fears should be realized.
+
+As the carriage neared her door she turned to her companion with
+extended hand. "Thank you so much, Mr. Amherst. I am glad you suggested
+that Mr. Truscomb should find some work for Dillon about the office. But
+I must talk to you about this again--can you come in this evening?"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+AMHERST could never afterward regain a detailed impression of the weeks
+that followed. They lived in his memory chiefly as exponents of the
+unforeseen, nothing he had looked for having come to pass in the way or
+at the time expected; while the whole movement of life was like the
+noon-day flow of a river, in which the separate ripples of brightness
+are all merged in one blinding glitter. His recurring conferences with
+Mrs. Westmore formed, as it were, the small surprising kernel of fact
+about which sensations gathered and grew with the swift ripening of a
+magician's fruit. That she should remain on at Hanaford to look into the
+condition of the mills did not, in itself, seem surprising to Amherst;
+for his short phase of doubt had been succeeded by an abundant inflow of
+faith in her intentions. It satisfied his inner craving for harmony that
+her face and spirit should, after all, so corroborate and complete each
+other; that it needed no moral sophistry to adjust her acts to her
+appearance, her words to the promise of her smile. But her immediate
+confidence in him, her resolve to support him in his avowed
+insubordination, to ignore, with the royal license of her sex, all that
+was irregular and inexpedient in asking his guidance while the whole
+official strength of the company darkened the background with a
+gathering storm of disapproval--this sense of being the glove flung by
+her hand in the face of convention, quickened astonishingly the flow of
+Amherst's sensations. It was as though a mountain-climber, braced to the
+strain of a hard ascent, should suddenly see the way break into roses,
+and level itself in a path for his feet.
+
+On his second visit he found the two ladies together, and Mrs. Ansell's
+smile of approval seemed to cast a social sanction on the episode, to
+classify it as comfortably usual and unimportant. He could see that her
+friend's manner put Bessy at ease, helping her to ask her own questions,
+and to reflect on his suggestions, with less bewilderment and more
+self-confidence. Mrs. Ansell had the faculty of restoring to her the
+belief in her reasoning powers that her father could dissolve in a
+monosyllable.
+
+The talk, on this occasion, had turned mainly on the future of the
+Dillon family, on the best means of compensating for the accident, and,
+incidentally, on the care of the young children of the mill-colony.
+Though Amherst did not believe in the extremer forms of industrial
+paternalism, he was yet of opinion that, where married women were
+employed, the employer should care for their children. He had been
+gradually, and somewhat reluctantly, brought to this conviction by the
+many instances of unavoidable neglect and suffering among the children
+of the women-workers at Westmore; and Mrs. Westmore took up the scheme
+with all the ardour of her young motherliness, quivering at the thought
+of hungry or ailing children while her Cicely, leaning a silken head
+against her, lifted puzzled eyes to her face.
+
+On the larger problems of the case it was less easy to fix Bessy's
+attention; but Amherst was far from being one of the extreme theorists
+who reject temporary remedies lest they defer the day of general
+renewal, and since he looked on every gain in the material condition of
+the mill-hands as a step in their moral growth, he was quite willing to
+hold back his fundamental plans while he discussed the establishment of
+a nursery, and of a night-school for the boys in the mills.
+
+The third time he called, he found Mr. Langhope and Mr. Halford Gaines
+of the company. The President of the Westmore mills was a trim
+middle-sized man, whose high pink varnish of good living would have
+turned to purple could he have known Mr. Langhope's opinion of his
+jewelled shirt-front and the padded shoulders of his evening-coat.
+Happily he had no inkling of these views, and was fortified in his
+command of the situation by an unimpaired confidence in his own
+appearance; while Mr. Langhope, discreetly withdrawn behind a veil of
+cigar-smoke, let his silence play like a fine criticism over the various
+phases of the discussion.
+
+It was a surprise to Amherst to find himself in Mr. Gaines's presence.
+The President, secluded in his high office, seldom visited the mills,
+and when there showed no consciousness of any presence lower than
+Truscomb's; and Amherst's first thought was that, in the manager's
+enforced absence, he was to be called to account by the head of the
+firm. But he was affably welcomed by Mr. Gaines, who made it clear that
+his ostensible purpose in coming was to hear Amherst's views as to the
+proposed night-schools and nursery. These were pointedly alluded to as
+Mrs. Westmore's projects, and the young man was made to feel that he was
+merely called in as a temporary adviser in Truscomb's absence. This was,
+in fact, the position Amherst preferred to take, and he scrupulously
+restricted himself to the answering of questions, letting Mrs. Westmore
+unfold his plans as though they had been her own. "It is much better,"
+he reflected, "that they should all think so, and she too, for Truscomb
+will be on his legs again in a day or two, and then my hours will be
+numbered."
+
+Meanwhile he was surprised to find Mr. Gaines oddly amenable to the
+proposed innovations, which he appeared to regard as new fashions in
+mill-management, to be adopted for the same cogent reasons as a new cut
+in coat-tails.
+
+"Of course we want to be up-to-date--there's no reason why the Westmore
+mills shouldn't do as well by their people as any mills in the country,"
+he affirmed, in the tone of the entertainer accustomed to say: "I want
+the thing done handsomely." But he seemed even less conscious than Mrs.
+Westmore that each particular wrong could be traced back to a radical
+vice in the system. He appeared to think that every murmur of assent to
+her proposals passed the sponge, once for all, over the difficulty
+propounded: as though a problem in algebra should be solved by wiping it
+off the blackboard.
+
+"My dear Bessy, we all owe you a debt of gratitude for coming here, and
+bringing, so to speak, a fresh eye to bear on the subject. If I've been,
+perhaps, a little too exclusively absorbed in making the mills
+profitable, my friend Langhope will, I believe, not be the first
+to--er--cast a stone at me." Mr. Gaines, who was the soul of delicacy,
+stumbled a little over the awkward associations connected with this
+figure, but, picking himself up, hastened on to affirm: "And in that
+respect, I think we can challenge comparison with any industry in the
+state; but I am the first to admit that there may be another side, a
+side that it takes a woman--a mother--to see. For instance," he threw in
+jocosely, "I flatter myself that I know how to order a good dinner; but
+I always leave the flowers to my wife. And if you'll permit me to say
+so," he went on, encouraged by the felicity of his image, "I believe it
+will produce a most pleasing effect--not only on the operatives
+themselves, but on the whole of Hanaford--on our own set of people
+especially--to have you come here and interest yourself in
+the--er--philanthropic side of the work."
+
+Bessy coloured a little. She blushed easily, and was perhaps not
+over-discriminating as to the quality of praise received; but under her
+ripple of pleasure a stronger feeling stirred, and she said hastily: "I
+am afraid I never should have thought of these things if Mr. Amherst had
+not pointed them out to me."
+
+Mr. Gaines met this blandly. "Very gratifying to Mr. Amherst to have you
+put it in that way; and I am sure we all appreciate his valuable hints.
+Truscomb himself could not have been more helpful, though his larger
+experience will no doubt be useful later on, in developing
+and--er--modifying your plans."
+
+It was difficult to reconcile this large view of the moral issue with
+the existence of abuses which made the management of the Westmore mills
+as unpleasantly notorious in one section of the community as it was
+agreeably notable in another. But Amherst was impartial enough to see
+that Mr. Gaines was unconscious of the incongruities of the situation.
+He left the reconciling of incompatibles to Truscomb with the simple
+faith of the believer committing a like task to his maker: it was in the
+manager's mind that the dark processes of adjustment took place. Mr.
+Gaines cultivated the convenient and popular idea that by ignoring
+wrongs one is not so much condoning as actually denying their existence;
+and in pursuance of this belief he devoutly abstained from studying the
+conditions at Westmore.
+
+A farther surprise awaited Amherst when Truscomb reappeared in the
+office. The manager was always a man of few words; and for the first
+days his intercourse with his assistant was restricted to asking
+questions and issuing orders. Soon afterward, it became known that
+Dillon's arm was to be amputated, and that afternoon Truscomb was
+summoned to see Mrs. Westmore. When he returned he sent for Amherst; and
+the young man felt sure that his hour had come.
+
+He was at dinner when the message reached him, and he knew from the
+tightening of his mother's lips that she too interpreted it in the same
+way. He was glad that Duplain's presence kept her from speaking her
+fears; and he thanked her inwardly for the smile with which she watched
+him go.
+
+That evening, when he returned, the smile was still at its post; but it
+dropped away wearily as he said, with his hands on her shoulders: "Don't
+worry, mother; I don't know exactly what's happening, but we're not
+blacklisted yet."
+
+Mrs. Amherst had immediately taken up her work, letting her nervous
+tension find its usual escape through her finger-tips. Her needles
+flagged as she lifted her eyes to his.
+
+"Something _is_ happening, then?" she murmured.
+
+"Oh, a number of things, evidently--but though I'm in the heart of them,
+I can't yet make out how they are going to affect me."
+
+His mother's glance twinkled in time with the flash of her needles.
+"There's always a safe place in the heart of a storm," she said
+shrewdly; and Amherst rejoined with a laugh: "Well, if it's Truscomb's
+heart, I don't know that it's particularly safe for me."
+
+"Tell me just what he said, John," she begged, making no attempt to
+carry the pleasantry farther, though its possibilities still seemed to
+flicker about her lip; and Amherst proceeded to recount his talk with
+the manager.
+
+Truscomb, it appeared, had made no allusion to Dillon; his avowed
+purpose in summoning his assistant had been to discuss with the latter
+the question of the proposed nursery and schools. Mrs. Westmore, at
+Amherst's suggestion, had presented these projects as her own; but the
+question of a site having come up, she had mentioned to Truscomb his
+assistant's proposal that the company should buy for the purpose the
+notorious Eldorado. The road-house in question had always been one of
+the most destructive influences in the mill-colony, and Amherst had made
+one or two indirect attempts to have the building converted to other
+uses; but the persistent opposition he encountered gave colour to the
+popular report that the manager took a high toll from the landlord.
+
+It therefore at once occurred to Amherst to suggest the purchase of the
+property to Mrs. Westmore; and he was not surprised to find that
+Truscomb's opposition to the scheme centred in the choice of the
+building. But even at this point the manager betrayed no open
+resistance; he seemed tacitly to admit Amherst's right to discuss the
+proposed plans, and even to be consulted concerning the choice of a
+site. He was ready with a dozen good reasons against the purchase of the
+road-house; but here also he proceeded with a discretion unexampled in
+his dealings with his subordinates. He acknowledged the harm done by the
+dance-hall, but objected that he could not conscientiously advise the
+company to pay the extortionate price at which it was held, and reminded
+Amherst that, if that particular source of offense were removed, others
+would inevitably spring up to replace it; marshalling the usual
+temporizing arguments of tolerance and expediency, with no marked change
+from his usual tone, till, just as the interview was ending, he asked,
+with a sudden drop to conciliation, if the assistant manager had
+anything to complain of in the treatment he received.
+
+This came as such a surprise to Amherst that before he had collected
+himself he found Truscomb ambiguously but unmistakably offering
+him--with the practised indirection of the man accustomed to cover his
+share in such transactions--a substantial "consideration" for dropping
+the matter of the road-house. It was incredible, yet it had really
+happened: the all-powerful Truscomb, who held Westmore in the hollow of
+his hand, had stooped to bribing his assistant because he was afraid to
+deal with him in a more summary manner. Amherst's leap of anger at the
+offer was curbed by the instant perception of its cause. He had no time
+to search for a reason; he could only rally himself to meet the
+unintelligible with a composure as abysmal as Truscomb's; and his voice
+still rang with the wonder of the incident as he retailed it to his
+mother.
+
+"Think of what it means, mother, for a young woman like Mrs. Westmore,
+without any experience or any habit of authority, to come here, and at
+the first glimpse of injustice, to be so revolted that she finds the
+courage and cleverness to put her little hand to the machine and
+reverse the engines--for it's nothing less that she's done! Oh, I know
+there'll be a reaction--the pendulum's sure to swing back: but you'll
+see it won't swing _as far_. Of course I shall go in the end--but
+Truscomb may go too: Jove, if I could pull him down on me, like
+what's-his-name and the pillars of the temple!"
+
+He had risen and was measuring the little sitting-room with his long
+strides, his head flung back and his eyes dark with the inward look his
+mother had not always cared to see there. But now her own glance seemed
+to have caught a ray from his, and the knitting flowed from her hands
+like the thread of fate, as she sat silent, letting him exhale his hopes
+and his wonder, and murmuring only, when he dropped again to the chair
+at her side: "You won't go, Johnny--you won't go."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Westmore lingered on for over two weeks, and during that time
+Amherst was able, in various directions, to develop her interest in the
+mill-workers. His own schemes involved a complete readjustment of the
+relation between the company and the hands: the suppression of the
+obsolete company "store" and tenements, which had so long sapped the
+thrift and ambition of the workers; the transformation of the Hopewood
+grounds into a park and athletic field, and the division of its
+remaining acres into building lots for the mill-hands; the establishing
+of a library, a dispensary and emergency hospital, and various other
+centres of humanizing influence; but he refrained from letting her see
+that his present suggestion was only a part of this larger plan, lest
+her growing sympathy should be checked. He had in his mother an example
+of the mind accessible only to concrete impressions: the mind which
+could die for the particular instance, yet remain serenely indifferent
+to its causes. To Mrs. Amherst, her son's work had been interesting
+simply because it _was_ his work: remove his presence from Westmore, and
+the whole industrial problem became to her as non-existent as star-dust
+to the naked eye. And in Bessy Westmore he divined a nature of the same
+quality--divined, but no longer criticized it. Was not that
+concentration on the personal issue just the compensating grace of her
+sex? Did it not offer a warm tint of human inconsistency to eyes chilled
+by contemplating life in the mass? It pleased Amherst for the moment to
+class himself with the impersonal student of social problems, though in
+truth his interest in them had its source in an imagination as open as
+Bessy's to the pathos of the personal appeal. But if he had the same
+sensitiveness, how inferior were his means of expressing it! Again and
+again, during their talks, he had the feeling which had come to him when
+she bent over Dillon's bed--that her exquisite lines were, in some
+mystical sense, the visible flowering of her nature, that they had taken
+shape in response to the inward motions of the heart.
+
+To a young man ruled by high enthusiasms there can be no more dazzling
+adventure than to work this miracle in the tender creature who yields
+her mind to his--to see, as it were, the blossoming of the spiritual
+seed in forms of heightened loveliness, the bluer beam of the eye, the
+richer curve of the lip, all the physical currents of life quickening
+under the breath of a kindled thought. It did not occur to him that any
+other emotion had effected the change he perceived. Bessy Westmore had
+in full measure that gift of unconscious hypocrisy which enables a woman
+to make the man in whom she is interested believe that she enters into
+all his thoughts. She had--more than this--the gift of self-deception,
+supreme happiness of the unreflecting nature, whereby she was able to
+believe herself solely engrossed in the subjects they discussed, to
+regard him as the mere spokesman of important ideas, thus saving their
+intercourse from present constraint, and from the awkward contemplation
+of future contingencies. So, in obedience to the ancient sorcery of
+life, these two groped for and found each other in regions seemingly so
+remote from the accredited domain of romance that it would have been as
+a great surprise to them to learn whither they had strayed as to see
+the arid streets of Westmore suddenly bursting into leaf.
+
+With Mrs. Westmore's departure Amherst, for the first time, became aware
+of a certain flatness in his life. His daily task seemed dull and
+purposeless, and he was galled by Truscomb's studied forbearance, under
+which he suspected a quickly accumulating store of animosity. He almost
+longed for some collision which would release the manager's pent-up
+resentment; yet he dreaded increasingly any accident that might make his
+stay at Westmore impossible.
+
+It was on Sundays, when he was freed from his weekly task, that he was
+most at the mercy of these opposing feelings. They drove him forth on
+long solitary walks beyond the town, walks ending most often in the
+deserted grounds of Hopewood, beautiful now in the ruined gold of
+October. As he sat under the beech-limbs above the river, watching its
+brown current sweep the willow-roots of the banks, he thought how this
+same current, within its next short reach, passed from wooded seclusion
+to the noise and pollution of the mills. So his own life seemed to have
+passed once more from the tranced flow of the last weeks into its old
+channel of unillumined labour. But other thoughts came to him too: the
+vision of converting that melancholy pleasure-ground into an outlet for
+the cramped lives of the mill-workers; and he pictured the weed-grown
+lawns and paths thronged with holiday-makers, and the slopes nearer the
+factories dotted with houses and gardens.
+
+An unexpected event revived these hopes. A few days before Christmas it
+became known to Hanaford that Mrs. Westmore would return for the
+holidays. Cicely was drooping in town air, and Bessy had persuaded Mr.
+Langhope that the bracing cold of Hanaford would be better for the child
+than the milder atmosphere of Long Island. They reappeared, and brought
+with them a breath of holiday cheerfulness such as Westmore had never
+known. It had always been the rule at the mills to let the operatives
+take their pleasure as they saw fit, and the Eldorado and the Hanaford
+saloons throve on this policy. But Mrs. Westmore arrived full of festal
+projects. There was to be a giant Christmas tree for the mill-children,
+a supper on the same scale for the operatives, and a bout of skating and
+coasting at Hopewood for the older lads--the "band" and "bobbin" boys in
+whom Amherst had always felt a special interest. The Gaines ladies,
+resolved to show themselves at home in the latest philanthropic
+fashions, actively seconded Bessy's endeavours, and for a week Westmore
+basked under a sudden heat-wave of beneficence.
+
+The time had passed when Amherst might have made light of such efforts.
+With Bessy Westmore smiling up, holly-laden, from the foot of the ladder
+on which she kept him perched, how could he question the efficacy of
+hanging the opening-room with Christmas wreaths, or the ultimate benefit
+of gorging the operatives with turkey and sheathing their offspring in
+red mittens? It was just like the end of a story-book with a pretty
+moral, and Amherst was in the mood to be as much taken by the tinsel as
+the youngest mill-baby held up to gape at the tree.
+
+At the New Year, when Mrs. Westmore left, the negotiations for the
+purchase of the Eldorado were well advanced, and it was understood that
+on their completion she was to return for the opening of the
+night-school and nursery. Suddenly, however, it became known that the
+proprietor of the road-house had decided not to sell. Amherst heard of
+the decision from Duplain, and at once foresaw the inevitable
+result--that Mrs. Westmore's plan would be given up owing to the
+difficulty of finding another site. Mr. Gaines and Truscomb had both
+discountenanced the erection of a special building for what was, after
+all, only a tentative enterprise. Among the purchasable houses in
+Westmore no other was suited to the purpose, and they had, therefore, a
+good excuse for advising Bessy to defer her experiment.
+
+Almost at the same time, however, another piece of news changed the
+aspect of affairs. A scandalous occurrence at the Eldorado, witnesses to
+which were unexpectedly forthcoming, put it in Amherst's power to
+threaten the landlord with exposure unless he should at once accept the
+company's offer and withdraw from Westmore. Amherst had no long time to
+consider the best means of putting this threat into effect. He knew it
+was not only idle to appeal to Truscomb, but essential to keep the facts
+from him till the deed was done; yet how obtain the authority to act
+without him? The seemingly insuperable difficulties of the situation
+whetted Amherst's craving for a struggle. He thought first of writing to
+Mrs. Westmore;, but now that the spell of her presence was withdrawn he
+felt how hard it would be to make her understand the need of prompt and
+secret action; and besides, was it likely that, at such short notice,
+she could command the needful funds? Prudence opposed the attempt, and
+on reflection he decided to appeal to Mr. Gaines, hoping that the
+flagrancy of the case would rouse the President from his usual attitude
+of indifference.
+
+Mr. Gaines was roused to the extent of showing a profound resentment
+against the cause of his disturbance. He relieved his sense of
+responsibility by some didactic remarks on the vicious tendencies of the
+working-classes, and concluded with the reflection that the more you did
+for them the less thanks you got. But when Amherst showed an
+unwillingness to let the matter rest on this time-honoured aphorism, the
+President retrenched himself behind ambiguities, suggestions that they
+should await Mrs. Westmore's return, and general considerations of a
+pessimistic nature, tapering off into a gloomy view of the weather.
+
+"By God, I'll write to her!" Amherst exclaimed, as the Gaines portals
+closed on him; and all the way back to Westmore he was busy marshalling
+his arguments and entreaties.
+
+He wrote the letter that night, but did not post it. Some unavowed
+distrust of her restrained him--a distrust not of her heart but of her
+intelligence. He felt that the whole future of Westmore was at stake,
+and decided to await the development of the next twenty-four hours. The
+letter was still in his pocket when, after dinner, he was summoned to
+the office by Truscomb.
+
+That evening, when he returned home, he entered the little sitting-room
+without speaking. His mother sat there alone, in her usual place--how
+many nights he had seen the lamplight slant at that particular angle
+across her fresh cheek and the fine wrinkles about her eyes! He was
+going to add another wrinkle to the number now--soon they would creep
+down and encroach upon the smoothness of the cheek.
+
+She looked up and saw that his glance was turned to the crowded
+bookshelves behind her.
+
+"There must be nearly a thousand of them," he said as their eyes met.
+
+"Books? Yes--with your father's. Why--were you thinking...?" She started
+up suddenly and crossed over to him.
+
+"Too many for wanderers," he continued, drawing her hands to his breast;
+then, as she clung to him, weeping and trembling a little: "It had to
+be, mother," he said, kissing her penitently where the fine wrinkles
+died into the cheek.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+AMHERST'S dismissal was not to take effect for a month; and in the
+interval he addressed himself steadily to his task.
+
+He went through the routine of the work numbly; but his intercourse with
+the hands tugged at deep fibres of feelings. He had always shared, as
+far as his duties allowed, in the cares and interests of their few free
+hours: the hours when the automatic appendages of the giant machine
+became men and women again, with desires and passions of their own.
+Under Amherst's influence the mixed elements of the mill-community had
+begun to crystallize into social groups: his books had served as an
+improvised lending-library, he had organized a club, a rudimentary
+orchestra, and various other means of binding together the better
+spirits of the community. With the older men, the attractions of the
+Eldorado, and kindred inducements, often worked against him; but among
+the younger hands, and especially the boys, he had gained a personal
+ascendency that it was bitter to relinquish.
+
+It was the severing of this tie that cost him most pain in the final
+days at Westmore; and after he had done what he could to console his
+mother, and to put himself in the way of getting work elsewhere, he
+tried to see what might be saved out of the ruins of the little polity
+he had built up. He hoped his influence might at least persist in the
+form of an awakened instinct of fellowship; and he gave every spare hour
+to strengthening the links he had tried to form. The boys, at any rate,
+would be honestly sorry to have him go: not, indeed, from the profounder
+reasons that affected him, but because he had not only stood
+persistently between the overseers and themselves, but had recognized
+their right to fun after work-hours as well as their right to protection
+while they worked.
+
+In the glow of Mrs. Westmore's Christmas visitation an athletic club had
+been formed, and leave obtained to use the Hopewood grounds for Saturday
+afternoon sports; and thither Amherst continued to conduct the boys
+after the mills closed at the week-end. His last Saturday had now come:
+a shining afternoon of late February, with a red sunset bending above
+frozen river and slopes of unruffled snow. For an hour or more he had
+led the usual sports, coasting down the steep descent from the house to
+the edge of the woods, and skating and playing hockey on the rough
+river-ice which eager hands kept clear after every snow-storm. He always
+felt the contagion of these sports: the glow of movement, the tumult of
+young voices, the sting of the winter air, roused all the boyhood in his
+blood. But today he had to force himself through his part in the
+performance. To the very last, as he now saw, he had hoped for a sign in
+the heavens: not the reversal of his own sentence--for, merely on
+disciplinary grounds, he perceived that to be impossible--but something
+pointing to a change in the management of the mills, some proof that
+Mrs. Westmore's intervention had betokened more than a passing impulse
+of compassion. Surely she would not accept without question the
+abandonment of her favourite scheme; and if she came back to put the
+question, the answer would lay bare the whole situation.... So Amherst's
+hopes had persuaded him; but the day before he had heard that she was to
+sail for Europe. The report, first announced in the papers, had been
+confirmed by his mother, who brought back from a visit to Hanaford the
+news that Mrs. Westmore was leaving at once for an indefinite period,
+and that the Hanaford house was to be closed. Irony would have been the
+readiest caustic for the wound inflicted; but Amherst, for that very
+reason, disdained it. He would not taint his disappointment with
+mockery, but would leave it among the unspoiled sadnesses of life....
+
+He flung himself into the boys' sports with his usual energy, meaning
+that their last Saturday with him should be their merriest; but he went
+through his part mechanically, and was glad when the sun began to dip
+toward the rim of the woods.
+
+He was standing on the ice, where the river widened just below the
+house, when a jingle of bells broke on the still air, and he saw a
+sleigh driven rapidly up the avenue. Amherst watched it in surprise.
+Who, at that hour, could be invading the winter solitude of Hopewood?
+The sleigh halted near the closed house, and a muffled figure, alighting
+alone, began to move down the snowy slope toward the skaters.
+
+In an instant he had torn off his skates and was bounding up the bank.
+He would have known the figure anywhere--known that lovely poise of the
+head, the mixture of hesitancy and quickness in the light tread which
+even the snow could not impede. Half-way up the slope to the house they
+met, and Mrs. Westmore held out her hand. Face and lips, as she stood
+above him, glowed with her swift passage through the evening air, and in
+the blaze of the sunset she seemed saturated with heavenly fires.
+
+"I drove out to find you--they told me you were here--I arrived this
+morning, quite suddenly...."
+
+She broke off, as though the encounter had checked her ardour instead of
+kindling it; but he drew no discouragement from her tone.
+
+"I hoped you would come before I left--I knew you would!" he exclaimed;
+and at his last words her face clouded anxiously.
+
+"I didn't know you were leaving Westmore till yesterday--the day
+before--I got a letter...." Again she wavered, perceptibly trusting her
+difficulty to him, in the sweet way he had been trying to forget; and he
+answered with recovered energy: "The great thing is that you should be
+here."
+
+She shook her head at his optimism. "What can I do if you go?"
+
+"You can give me a chance, before I go, to tell you a little about some
+of the loose ends I am leaving."
+
+"But why are you leaving them? I don't understand. Is it inevitable?"
+
+"Inevitable," he returned, with an odd glow of satisfaction in the word;
+and as her eyes besought him, he added, smiling: "I've been dismissed,
+you see; and from the manager's standpoint I think I deserved it. But
+the best part of my work needn't go with me--and that is what I should
+like to speak to you about. As assistant manager I can easily be
+replaced--have been, I understand, already; but among these boys here I
+should like to think that a little of me stayed--and it will, if
+you'll let me tell you what I've been doing."
+
+[Illustration: Half-way up the slope to the house they met.]
+
+She glanced away from him at the busy throng on the ice and at the other
+black cluster above the coasting-slide.
+
+"How they're enjoying it!" she murmured. "What a pity it was never done
+before! And who will keep it up when you're gone?"
+
+"You," he answered, meeting her eyes again; and as she coloured a little
+under his look he went on quickly: "Will you come over and look at the
+coasting? The time is almost up. One more slide and they'll be packing
+off to supper."
+
+She nodded "yes," and they walked in silence over the white lawn,
+criss-crossed with tramplings of happy feet, to the ridge from which the
+coasters started on their run. Amherst's object in turning the talk had
+been to gain a moment's respite. He could not bear to waste his perfect
+hour in futile explanations: he wanted to keep it undisturbed by any
+thought of the future. And the same feeling seemed to possess his
+companion, for she did not speak again till they reached the knoll where
+the boys were gathered.
+
+A sled packed with them hung on the brink: with a last shout it was off,
+dipping down the incline with the long curved flight of a swallow,
+flashing across the wide meadow at the base of the hill, and tossed
+upward again by its own impetus, till it vanished in the dark rim of
+wood on the opposite height. The lads waiting on the knoll sang out for
+joy, and Bessy clapped her hands and joined with them.
+
+"What fun! I wish I'd brought Cicely! I've not coasted for years," she
+laughed out, as the second detachment of boys heaped themselves on
+another sled and shot down. Amherst looked at her with a smile. He saw
+that every other feeling had vanished in the exhilaration of watching
+the flight of the sleds. She had forgotten why she had come--forgotten
+her distress at his dismissal--forgotten everything but the spell of the
+long white slope, and the tingle of cold in her veins.
+
+"Shall we go down? Should you like it?" he asked, feeling no resentment
+under the heightened glow of his pulses.
+
+"Oh, do take me--I shall love it!" Her eyes shone like a child's--she
+might have been a lovelier embodiment of the shouting boyhood about
+them.
+
+The first band of coasters, sled at heels, had by this time already
+covered a third of the homeward stretch; but Amherst was too impatient
+to wait. Plunging down to the meadow he caught up the sled-rope, and
+raced back with the pack of rejoicing youth in his wake. The sharp climb
+up the hill seemed to fill his lungs with flame: his whole body burned
+with a strange intensity of life. As he reached the top, a distant bell
+rang across the fields from Westmore, and the boys began to snatch up
+their coats and mufflers.
+
+"Be off with you--I'll look after the sleds," Amherst called to them as
+they dispersed; then he turned for a moment to see that the skaters
+below were also heeding the summons.
+
+A cold pallor lay on the river-banks and on the low meadow beneath the
+knoll; but the woodland opposite stood black against scarlet vapours
+that ravelled off in sheer light toward a sky hung with an icy moon.
+
+Amherst drew up the sled and held it steady while Bessy, seating
+herself, tucked her furs close with little breaks of laughter; then he
+placed himself in front.
+
+"Ready?" he cried over his shoulder, and "Ready!" she called back.
+
+Their craft quivered under them, hanging an instant over the long
+stretch of whiteness below; the level sun dazzled their eyes, and the
+first plunge seemed to dash them down into darkness. Amherst heard a cry
+of glee behind him; then all sounds were lost in the whistle of air
+humming by like the flight of a million arrows. They had dropped below
+the sunset and were tearing through the clear nether twilight of the
+descent; then, with a bound, the sled met the level, and shot away
+across the meadow toward the opposite height. It seemed to Amherst as
+though his body had been left behind, and only the spirit in him rode
+the wild blue currents of galloping air; but as the sled's rush began to
+slacken with the strain of the last ascent he was recalled to himself by
+the touch of the breathing warmth at his back. Bessy had put out a hand
+to steady herself, and as she leaned forward, gripping his arm, a flying
+end of her furs swept his face. There was a delicious pang in being thus
+caught back to life; and as the sled stopped, and he sprang to his feet,
+he still glowed with the sensation. Bessy too was under the spell. In
+the dusk of the beech-grove where they had landed, he could barely
+distinguish her features; but her eyes shone on him, and he heard her
+quick breathing as he stooped to help her to her feet.
+
+"Oh, how beautiful--it's the only thing better than a good gallop!"
+
+She leaned against a tree-bole, panting a little, and loosening her
+furs.
+
+"What a pity it's too dark to begin again!" she sighed, looking about
+her through the dim weaving of leafless boughs.
+
+"It's not so dark in the open--we might have one more," he proposed; but
+she shook her head, seized by a new whim.
+
+"It's so still and delicious in here--did you hear the snow fall when
+that squirrel jumped across to the pine?" She tilted her head, narrowing
+her lids as she peered upward. "There he is! One gets used to the
+light.... Look! See his little eyes shining down at us!"
+
+As Amherst looked where she pointed, the squirrel leapt to another tree,
+and they stole on after him through the hushed wood, guided by his grey
+flashes in the dimness. Here and there, in a break of the snow, they
+trod on a bed of wet leaves that gave out a breath of hidden life, or a
+hemlock twig dashed its spicy scent into their faces. As they grew used
+to the twilight their eyes began to distinguish countless delicate
+gradations of tint: cold mottlings of grey-black boles against the snow,
+wet russets of drifted beech-leaves, a distant network of mauve twigs
+melting into the woodland haze. And in the silence just such fine
+gradations of sound became audible: the soft drop of loosened
+snow-lumps, a stir of startled wings, the creak of a dead branch,
+somewhere far off in darkness.
+
+They walked on, still in silence, as though they had entered the glade
+of an enchanted forest and were powerless to turn back or to break the
+hush with a word. They made no pretense of following the squirrel any
+longer; he had flashed away to a high tree-top, from which his ironical
+chatter pattered down on their unheeding ears. Amherst's sensations were
+not of that highest order of happiness where mind and heart mingle their
+elements in the strong draught of life: it was a languid fume that stole
+through him from the cup at his lips. But after the sense of defeat and
+failure which the last weeks had brought, the reaction was too exquisite
+to be analyzed. All he asked of the moment was its immediate
+sweetness....
+
+They had reached the brink of a rocky glen where a little brook still
+sent its thread of sound through mufflings of ice and huddled branches.
+Bessy stood still a moment, bending her head to the sweet cold tinkle;
+then she moved away and said slowly: "We must go back."
+
+As they turned to retrace their steps a yellow line of light through the
+tree-trunks showed them that they had not, after all, gone very deep
+into the wood. A few minutes' walk would restore them to the lingering
+daylight, and on the farther side of the meadow stood the sleigh which
+was to carry Bessy back to Hanaford. A sudden sense of the evanescence
+of the moment roused Amherst from his absorption. Before the next change
+in the fading light he would be back again among the ugly realities of
+life. Did she, too, hate to return to them? Or why else did she walk so
+slowly--why did she seem as much afraid as himself to break the silence
+that held them in its magic circle?
+
+A dead pine-branch caught in the edge of her skirt, and she stood still
+while Amherst bent down to release her. As she turned to help him he
+looked up with a smile.
+
+"The wood doesn't want to let you go," he said.
+
+She made no reply, and he added, rising: "But you'll come back to
+it--you'll come back often, I hope."
+
+He could not see her face in the dimness, but her voice trembled a
+little as she answered: "I will do what you tell me--but I shall be
+alone--against all the others: they don't understand."
+
+The simplicity, the helplessness, of the avowal, appealed to him not as
+a weakness but as a grace. He understood what she was really saying:
+"How can you desert me? How can you put this great responsibility on me,
+and then leave me to bear it alone?" and in the light of her unuttered
+appeal his action seemed almost like cruelty. Why had he opened her eyes
+to wrongs she had no strength to redress without his aid?
+
+He could only answer, as he walked beside her toward the edge of the
+wood: "You will not be alone--in time you will make the others
+understand; in time they will be with you."
+
+"Ah, you don't believe that!" she exclaimed, pausing suddenly, and
+speaking with an intensity of reproach that amazed him.
+
+"I hope it, at any rate," he rejoined, pausing also. "And I'm sure that
+if you will come here oftener--if you'll really live among your
+people----"
+
+"How can you say that, when you're deserting them?" she broke in, with a
+feminine excess of inconsequence that fairly dashed the words from his
+lips.
+
+"Deserting them? Don't you understand----?"
+
+"I understand that you've made Mr. Gaines and Truscomb angry--yes; but
+if I should insist on your staying----"
+
+Amherst felt the blood rush to his forehead. "No--no, it's not
+possible!" he exclaimed, with a vehemence addressed more to himself than
+to her.
+
+"Then what will happen at the mills?"
+
+"Oh, some one else will be found--the new ideas are stirring everywhere.
+And if you'll only come back here, and help my successor----"
+
+"Do you think they are likely to choose any one else with your ideas?"
+she interposed with unexpected acuteness; and after a short silence he
+answered: "Not immediately, perhaps; but in time--in time there will be
+improvements."
+
+"As if the poor people could wait! Oh, it's cruel, cruel of you to go!"
+
+Her voice broke in a throb of entreaty that went to his inmost fibres.
+
+"You don't understand. It's impossible in the present state of things
+that I should do any good by staying."
+
+"Then you refuse? Even if I were to insist on their asking you to stay,
+you would still refuse?" she persisted.
+
+"Yes--I should still refuse."
+
+She made no answer, but moved a few steps nearer to the edge of the
+wood. The meadow was just below them now, and the sleigh in plain sight
+on the height beyond. Their steps made no sound on the sodden drifts
+underfoot, and in the silence he thought he heard a catch in her
+breathing. It was enough to make the brimming moment overflow. He stood
+still before her and bent his head to hers.
+
+"Bessy!" he said, with sudden vehemence.
+
+She did not speak or move, but in the quickened state of his perceptions
+he became aware that she was silently weeping. The gathering darkness
+under the trees enveloped them. It absorbed her outline into the shadowy
+background of the wood, from which her face emerged in a faint spot of
+pallor; and the same obscurity seemed to envelop his faculties, merging
+the hard facts of life in a blur of feeling in which the distinctest
+impression was the sweet sense of her tears.
+
+"Bessy!" he exclaimed again; and as he drew a step nearer he felt her
+yield to him, and bury her sobs against his arm.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+"BUT, Justine----"
+
+Mrs. Harry Dressel, seated in the June freshness of her Oak Street
+drawing-room, and harmonizing by her high lights and hard edges with the
+white-and-gold angularities of the best furniture, cast a rebuking eye
+on her friend Miss Brent, who stood arranging in a glass bowl the
+handful of roses she had just brought in from the garden.
+
+Mrs. Dressel's intonation made it clear that the entrance of Miss Brent
+had been the signal for renewing an argument which the latter had
+perhaps left the room to escape.
+
+"When you were here three years ago, Justine, I could understand your
+not wanting to go out, because you were in mourning for your mother--and
+besides, you'd volunteered for that bad surgical case in the Hope
+Hospital. But now that you've come back for a rest and a change I can't
+imagine why you persist in shutting yourself up--unless, of course," she
+concluded, in a higher key of reproach, "it's because you think so
+little of Hanaford society----"
+
+Justine Brent, putting the last rose in place, turned from her task with
+a protesting gesture.
+
+"My dear Effie, who am I to think little of any society, when I belong
+to none?" She passed a last light touch over the flowers, and crossing
+the room, brushed her friend's hand with the same caressing gesture.
+
+Mrs. Dressel met it with an unrelenting turn of her plump shoulder,
+murmuring: "Oh, if you take _that_ tone!" And on Miss Brent's gaily
+rejoining: "Isn't it better than to have other people take it for me?"
+she replied, with an air of affront that expressed itself in a ruffling
+of her whole pretty person: "If you'll excuse my saying so, Justine, the
+fact that you are staying with _me_ would be enough to make you welcome
+anywhere in Hanaford!"
+
+"I'm sure of it, dear; so sure that my horrid pride rather resents being
+floated in on the high tide of such overwhelming credentials."
+
+Mrs. Dressel glanced up doubtfully at the dark face laughing down on
+her. Though she was president of the Maplewood Avenue Book-club, and
+habitually figured in the society column of the "Banner" as one of the
+intellectual leaders of Hanaford, there were moments when her
+self-confidence trembled before Justine's light sallies. It was absurd,
+of course, given the relative situations of the two; and Mrs. Dressel,
+behind her friend's back, was quickly reassured by the thought that
+Justine was only a hospital nurse, who had to work for her living, and
+had really never "been anywhere"; but when Miss Brent's verbal arrows
+were flying, it seemed somehow of more immediate consequence that she
+was fairly well-connected, and lived in New York. No one placed a higher
+value on the abstract qualities of wit and irony than Mrs. Dressel; the
+difficulty was that she never quite knew when Justine's retorts were
+loaded, or when her own susceptibilities were the target aimed at; and
+between her desire to appear to take the joke, and the fear of being
+ridiculed without knowing it, her pretty face often presented an
+interesting study in perplexity. As usual, she now took refuge in
+bringing the talk back to a personal issue.
+
+"I can't imagine," she said, "why you won't go to the Gaines's
+garden-party. It's always the most brilliant affair of the season; and
+this year, with the John Amhersts here, and all their party--that
+fascinating Mrs. Eustace Ansell, and Mrs. Amherst's father, old Mr.
+Langhope, who is quite as quick and clever as _you_ are--you certainly
+can't accuse us of being dull and provincial!"
+
+Miss Brent smiled. "As far as I can remember, Effie, it is always you
+who accuse others of bringing that charge against Hanaford. For my part,
+I know too little of it to have formed any opinion; but whatever it may
+have to offer me, I am painfully conscious of having, at present,
+nothing but your kind commendation to give in return."
+
+Mrs. Dressel rose impatiently. "How absurdly you talk! You're a little
+thinner than usual, and I don't like those dark lines under your eyes;
+but Westy Gaines told me yesterday that he thought you handsomer than
+ever, and that it was intensely becoming to some women to look
+over-tired."
+
+"It's lucky I'm one of that kind," Miss Brent rejoined, between a sigh
+and a laugh, "and there's every promise of my getting handsomer every
+day if somebody doesn't soon arrest the geometrical progression of my
+good looks by giving me the chance to take a year's rest!"
+
+As she spoke, she stretched her arms above her head, with a gesture
+revealing the suppleness of her slim young frame, but also its tenuity
+of structure--the frailness of throat and shoulders, and the play of
+bones in the delicate neck. Justine Brent had one of those imponderable
+bodies that seem a mere pinch of matter shot through with light and
+colour. Though she did not flush easily, auroral lights ran under her
+clear skin, were lost in the shadows of her hair, and broke again in her
+eyes; and her voice seemed to shoot light too, as though her smile
+flashed back from her words as they fell--all her features being so
+fluid and changeful that the one solid thing about her was the massing
+of dense black hair which clasped her face like the noble metal of some
+antique bust.
+
+Mrs. Dressel's face softened at the note of weariness in the girl's
+voice. "Are you very tired, dear?" she asked drawing her down to a seat
+on the sofa.
+
+"Yes, and no--not so much bodily, perhaps, as in spirit." Justine Brent
+drew her brows together, and stared moodily at the thin brown hands
+interwoven between Mrs. Dressel's plump fingers. Seated thus, with
+hollowed shoulders and brooding head, she might have figured a young
+sibyl bowed above some mystery of fate; but the next moment her face,
+inclining toward her friend's, cast off its shadows and resumed the look
+of a plaintive child.
+
+"The worst of it is that I don't look forward with any interest to
+taking up the old drudgery again. Of course that loss of interest may be
+merely physical--I should call it so in a nervous patient, no doubt. But
+in myself it seems different--it seems to go to the roots of the world.
+You know it was always the imaginative side of my work that helped me
+over the ugly details--the pity and beauty that disinfected the physical
+horror; but now that feeling is lost, and only the mortal disgust
+remains. Oh, Effie, I don't want to be a ministering angel any more--I
+want to be uncertain, coy and hard to please. I want something dazzling
+and unaccountable to happen to me--something new and unlived and
+indescribable!"
+
+She snatched herself with a laugh from the bewildered Effie, and
+flinging up her arms again, spun on a light heel across the polished
+floor.
+
+"Well, then," murmured Mrs. Dressel with gentle obstinacy, "I can't see
+why in the world you won't go to the Gaines's garden-party!" And caught
+in the whirlwind of her friend's incomprehensible mirth, she still
+persisted, as she ducked her blonde head to it: "If you'll only let me
+lend you my dress with the Irish lace, you'll look smarter than anybody
+there...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before her toilet mirror, an hour later, Justine Brent seemed in a way
+to fulfill Mrs. Dressel's prediction. So mirror-like herself, she could
+no more help reflecting the happy effect of a bow or a feather than the
+subtler influence of word and look; and her face and figure were so new
+to the advantages of dress that, at four-and-twenty, she still produced
+the effect of a young girl in her first "good" frock. In Mrs. Dressel's
+festal raiment, which her dark tints subdued to a quiet elegance, she
+was like the golden core of a pale rose illuminating and scenting its
+petals.
+
+Three years of solitary life, following on a youth of confidential
+intimacy with the mother she had lost, had produced in her the quaint
+habit of half-loud soliloquy. "Fine feathers, Justine!" she laughed back
+at her laughing image. "You look like a phoenix risen from your ashes.
+But slip back into your own plumage, and you'll be no more than a little
+brown bird without a song!"
+
+The luxurious suggestions of her dress, and the way her warm youth
+became it, drew her back to memories of a childhood nestled in beauty
+and gentle ways, before her handsome prodigal father had died, and her
+mother's face had grown pinched in the long struggle with poverty. But
+those memories were after all less dear to Justine than the grey years
+following, when, growing up, she had helped to clear a space in the
+wilderness for their tiny hearth-fire, when her own efforts had fed the
+flame and roofed it in from the weather. A great heat, kindled at that
+hearth, had burned in her veins, making her devour her work, lighting
+and warming the long cold days, and reddening the horizon through dark
+passages of revolt and failure; and she felt all the more deeply the
+chill of reaction that set in with her mother's death.
+
+She thought she had chosen her work as a nurse in a spirit of high
+disinterestedness; but in the first hours of her bereavement it seemed
+as though only the personal aim had sustained her. For a while, after
+this, her sick people became to her mere bundles of disintegrating
+matter, and she shrank from physical pain with a distaste the deeper
+because, mechanically, she could not help working on to relieve it.
+Gradually her sound nature passed out of this morbid phase, and she took
+up her task with deeper pity if less exalted ardour; glad to do her part
+in the vast impersonal labour of easing the world's misery, but longing
+with all the warm instincts of youth for a special load to lift, a
+single hand to clasp.
+
+Ah, it was cruel to be alive, to be young, to bubble with springs of
+mirth and tenderness and folly, and to live in perpetual contact with
+decay and pain--to look persistently into the grey face of death without
+having lifted even a corner of life's veil! Now and then, when she felt
+her youth flame through the sheath of dullness which was gradually
+enclosing it, she rebelled at the conditions that tied a spirit like
+hers to its monotonous task, while others, without a quiver of wings on
+their dull shoulders, or a note of music in their hearts, had the whole
+wide world to range through, and saw in it no more than a frightful
+emptiness to be shut out with tight walls of habit....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A tap on the door announced Mrs. Dressel, garbed for conquest, and
+bestowing on her brilliant person the last anxious touches of the artist
+reluctant to part from a masterpiece.
+
+"My dear, how well you look! I _knew_ that dress would be becoming!" she
+exclaimed, generously transferring her self-approval to Justine; and
+adding, as the latter moved toward her: "I wish Westy Gaines could see
+you now!"
+
+"Well, he will presently," Miss Brent rejoined, ignoring the slight
+stress on the name.
+
+Mrs. Dressel continued to brood on her maternally. "Justine--I wish
+you'd tell me! You say you hate the life you're leading now--but isn't
+there somebody who might----?"
+
+"Give me another, with lace dresses in it?" Justine's slight shrug might
+have seemed theatrical, had it not been a part of the ceaseless dramatic
+play of her flexible person. "There might be, perhaps...only I'm not
+sure--" She broke off whimsically.
+
+"Not sure of what?"
+
+"That this kind of dress might not always be a little tight on the
+shoulders."
+
+"Tight on the shoulders? What do you mean, Justine? My clothes simply
+_hang_ on you!"
+
+"Oh, Effie dear, don't you remember the fable of the wings under the
+skin, that sprout when one meets a pair of kindred shoulders?" And, as
+Mrs. Dressel bent on her a brow of unenlightenment--"Well, it doesn't
+matter: I only meant that I've always been afraid good clothes might
+keep my wings from sprouting!" She turned back to the glass, giving
+herself a last light touch such as she had bestowed on the roses.
+
+"And that reminds me," she continued--"how about Mr. Amherst's wings?"
+
+"John Amherst?" Mrs. Dressel brightened into immediate attention. "Why,
+do you know him?"
+
+"Not as the owner of the Westmore Mills; but I came across him as their
+assistant manager three years ago, at the Hope Hospital, and he was
+starting a very promising pair then. I wonder if they're doing as well
+under his new coat."
+
+"I'm not sure that I understand you when you talk poetry," said Mrs.
+Dressel with less interest; "but personally I can't say I like John
+Amherst--and he is certainly not worthy of such a lovely woman as Mrs.
+Westmore. Of course she would never let any one see that she's not
+perfectly happy; but I'm told he has given them all a great deal of
+trouble by interfering in the management of the mills, and his manner is
+so cold and sarcastic--the truth is, I suppose he's never quite at ease
+in society. _Her_ family have never been really reconciled to the
+marriage; and Westy Gaines says----"
+
+"Ah, Westy Gaines _would_," Justine interposed lightly. "But if Mrs.
+Amherst is really the Bessy Langhope I used to know it must be rather a
+struggle for the wings!"
+
+Mrs. Dressel's flagging interest settled on the one glimpse of fact in
+this statement. "It's such a coincidence that you should have known her
+too! Was she always so perfectly fascinating? I wish I knew how she
+gives that look to her hair!"
+
+Justine gathered up the lace sunshade and long gloves which her friend
+had lent her. "There was not much more that was genuine about her
+character--that was her very own, I mean--than there is about my
+appearance at this moment. She was always the dearest little chameleon
+in the world, taking everybody's colour in the most flattering way, and
+giving back, I must say, a most charming reflection--if you'll excuse
+the mixed metaphor; but when one got her by herself, with no reflections
+to catch, one found she hadn't any particular colour of her own. One of
+the girls used to say she ought to wear a tag, because she was so easily
+mislaid---- Now then, I'm ready!"
+
+Justine advanced to the door, and Mrs. Dressel followed her downstairs,
+reflecting with pardonable complacency that one of the disadvantages of
+being clever was that it tempted one to say sarcastic things of other
+women--than which she could imagine no more crying social error.
+
+During the drive to the garden-party, Justine's thoughts, drawn to the
+past by the mention of Bessy Langhope's name, reverted to the comic
+inconsequences of her own lot--to that persistent irrelevance of
+incident that had once made her compare herself to an actor always
+playing his part before the wrong stage-setting. Was there not, for
+instance, a mocking incongruity in the fact that a creature so leaping
+with life should have, for chief outlet, the narrow mental channel of
+the excellent couple between whom she was now being borne to the Gaines
+garden-party? All her friendships were the result of propinquity or of
+early association, and fate had held her imprisoned in a circle of
+well-to-do mediocrity, peopled by just such figures as those of the
+kindly and prosperous Dressels. Effie Dressel, the daughter of a cousin
+of Mrs. Brent's, had obscurely but safely allied herself with the heavy
+blond young man who was to succeed his father as President of the Union
+Bank, and who was already regarded by the "solid business interests" of
+Hanaford as possessing talents likely to carry him far in the
+development of the paternal fortunes. Harry Dressel's honest countenance
+gave no evidence of peculiar astuteness, and he was in fact rather the
+product of special conditions than of an irresistible bent. He had the
+sound Saxon love of games, and the most interesting game he had ever
+been taught was "business." He was a simple domestic being, and
+according to Hanaford standards the most obvious obligation of the
+husband and father was to make his family richer. If Harry Dressel had
+ever formulated his aims, he might have said that he wanted to be the
+man whom Hanaford most respected, and that was only another way of
+saying, the richest man in Hanaford. Effie embraced his creed with a
+zeal facilitated by such evidence of its soundness as a growing income
+and the early prospects of a carriage. Her mother-in-law, a kind old
+lady with a simple unquestioning love of money, had told her on her
+wedding day that Harry's one object would always be to make his family
+proud of him; and the recent purchase of the victoria in which Justine
+and the Dressels were now seated was regarded by the family as a
+striking fulfillment of this prophecy.
+
+In the course of her hospital work Justine had of necessity run across
+far different types; but from the connections thus offered she was often
+held back by the subtler shades of taste that civilize human
+intercourse. Her world, in short, had been chiefly peopled by the dull
+or the crude, and, hemmed in between the two, she had created for
+herself an inner kingdom where the fastidiousness she had to set aside
+in her outward relations recovered its full sway. There must be actual
+beings worthy of admission to this secret precinct, but hitherto they
+had not come her way; and the sense that they were somewhere just out of
+reach still gave an edge of youthful curiosity to each encounter with a
+new group of people.
+
+Certainly, Mrs. Gaines's garden-party seemed an unlikely field for the
+exercise of such curiosity: Justine's few glimpses of Hanaford society
+had revealed it as rather a dull thick body, with a surface stimulated
+only by ill-advised references to the life of larger capitals; and the
+concentrated essence of social Hanaford was of course to be found at the
+Gaines entertainments. It presented itself, however, in the rich June
+afternoon, on the long shadows of the well-kept lawn, and among the
+paths of the rose-garden, in its most amiable aspect; and to Justine,
+wearied by habitual contact with ugliness and suffering, there was pure
+delight in the verdant setting of the picture, and in the light
+harmonious tints of the figures peopling it. If the company was dull, it
+was at least decorative; and poverty, misery and dirt were shut out by
+the placid unconsciousness of the guests as securely as by the leafy
+barriers of the garden.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+"AH, Mrs. Dressel, we were on the lookout for you--waiting for the
+curtain to rise. Your friend Miss Brent? Juliana, Mrs. Dressel's friend
+Miss Brent----"
+
+Near the brilliantly-striped marquee that formed the axis of the Gaines
+garden-parties, Mr. Halford Gaines, a few paces from his wife and
+daughters, stood radiating a royal welcome on the stream of visitors
+pouring across the lawn. It was only to eyes perverted by a different
+social perspective that there could be any doubt as to the importance
+of the Gaines entertainments. To Hanaford itself they were epoch-making;
+and if any rebellious spirit had cherished a doubt of the fact, it would
+have been quelled by the official majesty of Mr. Gaines's frock-coat and
+the comprehensive cordiality of his manner.
+
+There were moments when New York hung like a disquieting cloud on the
+social horizon of Mrs. Gaines and her daughters; but to Halford Gaines
+Hanaford was all in all. As an exponent of the popular and patriotic
+"good-enough-for-me" theory he stood in high favour at the Hanaford
+Club, where a too-keen consciousness of the metropolis was alternately
+combated by easy allusion and studied omission, and where the unsettled
+fancies of youth were chastened and steadied by the reflection that, if
+Hanaford was good enough for Halford Gaines, it must offer opportunities
+commensurate with the largest ideas of life.
+
+Never did Mr. Gaines's manner bear richer witness to what could be
+extracted from Hanaford than when he was in the act of applying to it
+the powerful pressure of his hospitality. The resultant essence was so
+bubbling with social exhilaration that, to its producer at any rate, its
+somewhat mixed ingredients were lost in one highly flavoured draught.
+Under ordinary circumstances no one discriminated more keenly than Mr.
+Gaines between different shades of social importance; but any one who
+was entertained by him was momentarily ennobled by the fact, and not all
+the anxious telegraphy of his wife and daughters could, for instance,
+recall to him that the striking young woman in Mrs. Dressel's wake was
+only some obscure protégée, whom it was odd of Effie to have brought,
+and whose presence was quite unnecessary to emphasize.
+
+"Juliana, Miss Brent tells me she has never seen our roses. Oh, there
+are other roses in Hanaford, Miss Brent; I don't mean to imply that no
+one else attempts them; but unless you can afford to give _carte
+blanche_ to your man--and mine happens to be something of a
+specialist...well, if you'll come with me, I'll let them speak for
+themselves. I always say that if people want to know what we can do they
+must come and see--they'll never find out from _me_!"
+
+A more emphatic signal from his wife arrested Mr. Gaines as he was in
+the act of leading Miss Brent away.
+
+"Eh?--What? The Amhersts and Mrs. Ansell? You must excuse me then, I'm
+afraid--but Westy shall take you. Westy, my boy, it's an ill-wind.... I
+want you to show this young lady our roses." And Mr. Gaines, with
+mingled reluctance and satisfaction, turned away to receive the most
+important guests of the day.
+
+It had not needed his father's summons to draw the expert Westy to Miss
+Brent: he was already gravitating toward her, with the nonchalance bred
+of cosmopolitan successes, but with a directness of aim due also to his
+larger opportunities of comparison.
+
+"The roses will do," he explained, as he guided her through the
+increasing circle of guests about his mother; and in answer to Justine's
+glance of enquiry: "To get you away, I mean. They're not much in
+themselves, you know; but everything of the governor's always begins
+with a capital letter."
+
+"Oh, but these roses deserve to," Justine exclaimed, as they paused
+under the evergreen archway at the farther end of the lawn.
+
+"I don't know--not if you've been in England," Westy murmured, watching
+furtively for the impression produced, on one who had presumably not, by
+the great blush of colour massed against its dusky background of clipped
+evergreens.
+
+Justine smiled. "I _have_ been--but I've been in the slums since; in
+horrible places that the least of those flowers would have lighted up
+like a lamp."
+
+Westy's guarded glance imprudently softened. "It's the beastliest kind
+of a shame, your ever having had to do such work----"
+
+"Oh, _had_ to?" she flashed back at him disconcertingly. "It was my
+choice, you know: there was a time when I couldn't live without it.
+Philanthropy is one of the subtlest forms of self-indulgence."
+
+Westy met this with a vague laugh. If a chap who was as knowing as the
+devil _did_, once in a way, indulge himself in the luxury of talking
+recklessly to a girl with exceptional eyes, it was rather upsetting to
+discover in those eyes no consciousness of the risk he had taken!
+
+"But I _am_ rather tired of it now," she continued, and his look grew
+guarded again. After all, they were all the same--except in that
+particular matter of the eyes. At the thought, he risked another look,
+hung on the sharp edge of betrayal, and was snatched back, not by the
+manly instinct of self-preservation, but by some imp of mockery lurking
+in the depths that lured him.
+
+He recovered his balance and took refuge in a tone of worldly ease. "I
+saw a chap the other day who said he knew you when you were at Saint
+Elizabeth's--wasn't that the name of your hospital?"
+
+Justine assented. "One of the doctors, I suppose. Where did you meet
+him?"
+
+Ah, _now_ she should see! He summoned his utmost carelessness of tone.
+"Down on Long Island last week--I was spending Sunday with the
+Amhersts." He held up the glittering fact to her, and watched for the
+least little blink of awe; but her lids never trembled. It was a
+confession of social blindness which painfully negatived Mrs. Dressel's
+hint that she knew the Amhersts; if she had even known _of_ them, she
+could not so fatally have missed his point.
+
+"Long Island?" She drew her brows together in puzzled retrospection. "I
+wonder if it could have been Stephen Wyant? I heard he had taken over
+his uncle's practice somewhere near New York."
+
+"Wyant--that's the name. He's the doctor at Clifton, the nearest town to
+the Amhersts' place. Little Cicely had a cold--Cicely Westmore, you
+know--a small cousin of mine, by the way--" he switched a rose-branch
+loftily out of her path, explaining, as she moved on, that Cicely was
+the daughter of Mrs. Amherst's first marriage to Richard Westmore.
+"That's the way I happened to see this Dr. Wyant. Bessy--Mrs.
+Amherst--asked him to stop to luncheon, after he'd seen the kid. He
+seems rather a discontented sort of a chap--grumbling at not having a
+New York practice. I should have thought he had rather a snug berth,
+down there at Lynbrook, with all those swells to dose."
+
+Justine smiled. "Dr. Wyant is ambitious, and swells don't have as
+interesting diseases as poor people. One gets tired of giving them bread
+pills for imaginary ailments. But Dr. Wyant is not strong himself and I
+fancy a country practice is better for him than hard work in town."
+
+"You think him clever though, do you?" Westy enquired absently. He was
+already bored with the subject of the Long Island doctor, and vexed at
+the lack of perception that led his companion to show more concern in
+the fortunes of a country practitioner than in the fact of his own visit
+to the Amhersts; but the topic was a safe one, and it was agreeable to
+see how her face kindled when she was interested.
+
+Justine mused on his question. "I think he has very great promise--which
+he is almost certain not to fulfill," she answered with a sigh which
+seemed to Westy's anxious ear to betray a more than professional
+interest in the person referred to.
+
+"Oh, come now--why not? With the Amhersts to give him a start--I heard
+my cousin recommending him to a lot of people the other day----"
+
+"Oh, he may become a fashionable doctor," Justine assented
+indifferently; to which her companion rejoined, with a puzzled stare:
+"That's just what I mean--with Bessy backing him!"
+
+"Has Mrs. Amherst become such a power, then?" Justine asked, taking up
+the coveted theme just as he despaired of attracting her to it.
+
+"My cousin?" he stretched the two syllables to the cracking-point.
+"Well, she's awfully rich, you know; and there's nobody smarter. Don't
+you think so?"
+
+"I don't know; it's so long since I've seen her."
+
+He brightened. "You _did_ know her, then?" But the discovery made her
+obtuseness the more inexplicable!
+
+"Oh, centuries ago: in another world."
+
+"_Centuries_--I like that!" Westy gallantly protested, his ardour
+kindling as she swam once more within his social ken. "And Amherst? You
+know him too, I suppose? By Jove, here he is now----"
+
+He signalled a tall figure strolling slowly toward them with bent head
+and brooding gaze. Justine's eye had retained a vivid image of the man
+with whom, scarcely three years earlier, she had lived through a moment
+of such poignant intimacy, and she recognized at once his lean outline,
+and the keen spring of his features, still veiled by the same look of
+inward absorption. She noticed, as he raised his hat in response to
+Westy Gaines's greeting, that the vertical lines between his brows had
+deepened; and a moment later she was aware that this change was the
+visible token of others which went deeper than the fact of his good
+clothes and his general air of leisure and well-being--changes
+perceptible to her only in the startled sense of how prosperity had aged
+him.
+
+"Hallo, Amherst--trying to get under cover?" Westy jovially accosted
+him, with a significant gesture toward the crowded lawn from which the
+new-comer had evidently fled. "I was just telling Miss Brent that this
+is the safest place on these painful occasions--Oh, confound it, it's
+not as safe as I thought! Here's one of my sisters making for me!"
+
+There ensued a short conflict of words, before his feeble flutter of
+resistance was borne down by a resolute Miss Gaines who, as she swept
+him back to the marquee, cried out to Amherst that her mother was asking
+for him too; and then Justine had time to observe that her remaining
+companion had no intention of responding to his hostess's appeal.
+
+Westy, in naming her, had laid just enough stress on the name to let it
+serve as a reminder or an introduction, as circumstances might decide,
+and she saw that Amherst, roused from his abstraction by the proffered
+clue, was holding his hand out doubtfully.
+
+"I think we haven't met for some years," he said.
+
+Justine smiled. "I have a better reason than you for remembering the
+exact date;" and in response to his look of surprise she added: "You
+made me commit a professional breach of faith, and I've never known
+since whether to be glad or sorry."
+
+Amherst still bent on her the gaze which seemed to find in external
+details an obstacle rather than a help to recognition; but suddenly his
+face cleared. "It was you who told me the truth about poor Dillon! I
+couldn't imagine why I seemed to see you in such a different
+setting...."
+
+"Oh, I'm disguised as a lady this afternoon," she said smiling. "But I'm
+glad you saw through the disguise."
+
+He smiled back at her. "Are you? Why?"
+
+"It seems to make it--if it's so transparent--less of a sham, less of a
+dishonesty," she began impulsively, and then paused again, a little
+annoyed at the overemphasis of her words. Why was she explaining and
+excusing herself to this stranger? Did she propose to tell him next that
+she had borrowed her dress from Effie Dressel? To cover her confusion
+she went on with a slight laugh: "But you haven't told me."
+
+"What was I to tell you?"
+
+"Whether to be glad or sorry that I broke my vow and told the truth
+about Dillon."
+
+They were standing face to face in the solitude of the garden-walk,
+forgetful of everything but the sudden surprised sense of intimacy that
+had marked their former brief communion. Justine had raised her eyes
+half-laughingly to Amherst, but they dropped before the unexpected
+seriousness of his.
+
+"Why do you want to know?" he asked.
+
+She made an effort to sustain the note of pleasantry.
+
+"Well--it might, for instance, determine my future conduct. You see I'm
+still a nurse, and such problems are always likely to present
+themselves."
+
+"Ah, then don't!"
+
+"Don't?"
+
+"I mean--" He hesitated a moment, reaching up to break a rose from the
+branch that tapped his shoulder. "I was only thinking what risks we run
+when we scramble into the chariot of the gods and try to do the driving.
+Be passive--be passive, and you'll be happier!"
+
+"Oh, as to that--!" She swept it aside with one of her airy motions.
+"But Dillon, for instance--would _he_ have been happier if I'd been
+passive?"
+
+Amherst seemed to ponder. "There again--how can one tell?"
+
+"And the risk's not worth taking?"
+
+"No!"
+
+She paused, and they looked at each other again. "Do you mean that
+seriously, I wonder? Do you----"
+
+"Act on it myself? God forbid! The gods drive so badly. There's poor
+Dillon...he happened to be in their way...as we all are at times." He
+pulled himself up, and went on in a matter-of-fact tone: "In Dillon's
+case, however, my axioms don't apply. When my wife heard the truth she
+was, of course, immensely kind to him; and if it hadn't been for you she
+might never have known."
+
+Justine smiled. "I think you would have found out--I was only the humble
+instrument. But now--" she hesitated--"now you must be able to do so
+much--"
+
+Amherst lifted his head, and she saw the colour rise under his fair
+skin. "Out at Westmore? You've never been there since? Yes--my wife has
+made some changes; but it's all so problematic--and one would have to
+live here...."
+
+"You don't, then?"
+
+He answered by an imperceptible shrug. "Of course I'm here often; and
+she comes now and then. But the journey's tiresome, and it is not always
+easy for her to get away." He checked himself, and Justine saw that he,
+in turn, was suddenly conscious of the incongruity of explaining and
+extenuating his personal situation to a stranger. "But then we're _not_
+strangers!" a voice in her exulted, just as he added, with an
+embarrassed attempt to efface and yet justify his moment of expansion:
+"That reminds me--I think you know my wife. I heard her asking Mrs.
+Dressel about you. She wants so much to see you."
+
+The transition had been effected, at the expense of dramatic interest,
+but to the obvious triumph of social observances; and to Justine, after
+all, regaining at his side the group about the marquee, the interest was
+not so much diminished as shifted to the no less suggestive problem of
+studying the friend of her youth in the unexpected character of John
+Amherst's wife.
+
+Meanwhile, however, during the brief transit across the Gaines
+greensward, her thoughts were still busy with Amherst. She had seen at
+once that the peculiar sense of intimacy reawakened by their meeting had
+been chilled and deflected by her first allusion to the topic which had
+previously brought them together: Amherst had drawn back as soon as she
+named the mills. What could be the cause of his reluctance? When they
+had last met, the subject burned within him: her being in actual fact a
+stranger had not, then, been an obstacle to his confidences. Now that he
+was master at Westmore it was plain that another tone became him--that
+his situation necessitated a greater reserve; but her enquiry did not
+imply the least wish to overstep this restriction: it merely showed her
+remembrance of his frankly-avowed interest in the operatives. Justine
+was struck by the fact that so natural an allusion should put him on the
+defensive. She did not for a moment believe that he had lost his
+interest in the mills; and that his point of view should have shifted
+with the fact of ownership she rejected as an equally superficial
+reading of his character. The man with whom she had talked at Dillon's
+bedside was one in whom the ruling purposes had already shaped
+themselves, and to whom life, in whatever form it came, must henceforth
+take their mould. As she reached this point in her analysis, it occurred
+to her that his shrinking from the subject might well imply not
+indifference, but a deeper preoccupation: a preoccupation for some
+reason suppressed and almost disavowed, yet sustaining the more
+intensely its painful hidden life. From this inference it was but a leap
+of thought to the next--that the cause of the change must be sought
+outside of himself, in some external influence strong enough to modify
+the innate lines of his character. And where could such an influence be
+more obviously sought than in the marriage which had transformed the
+assistant manager of the Westmore Mills not, indeed, into their
+owner--that would rather have tended to simplify the problem--but into
+the husband of Mrs. Westmore? After all, the mills were Bessy's--and for
+a farther understanding of the case it remained to find out what manner
+of person Bessy had become.
+
+Justine's first impression, as her friend's charming arms received
+her--with an eagerness of welcome not lost on the suspended judgment of
+feminine Hanaford--the immediate impression was of a gain of emphasis,
+of individuality, as though the fluid creature she remembered had belied
+her prediction, and run at last into a definite mould. Yes--Bessy had
+acquired an outline: a graceful one, as became her early promise, though
+with, perhaps, a little more sharpness of edge than her youthful texture
+had promised. But the side she turned to her friend was still all
+softness--had in it a hint of the old pliancy, the impulse to lean and
+enlace, that at once woke in Justine the corresponding instinct of
+guidance and protection, so that their first kiss, before a word was
+spoken, carried the two back to the precise relation in which their
+school-days had left them. So easy a reversion to the past left no room
+for the sense of subsequent changes by which such reunions are sometimes
+embarrassed. Justine's sympathies had, instinctively, and almost at
+once, transferred themselves to Bessy's side--passing over at a leap
+the pained recognition that there _were_ sides already--and Bessy had
+gathered up Justine into the circle of gentle self-absorption which left
+her very dimly aware of any distinctive characteristic in her friends
+except that of their affection for herself--since she asked only, as she
+appealingly put it, that they should all be "dreadfully fond" of her.
+
+"And I've wanted you so often, Justine: you're the only clever person
+I'm not afraid of, because your cleverness always used to make things
+clear instead of confusing them. I've asked so many people about
+you--but I never heard a word till just the other day--wasn't it
+odd?--when our new doctor at Rushton happened to say that he knew you.
+I've been rather unwell lately--nervous and tired, and sleeping
+badly--and he told me I ought to keep perfectly quiet, and be under the
+care of a nurse who could make me do as she chose: just such a nurse as
+a wonderful Miss Brent he had known at St. Elizabeth's, whose patients
+obeyed her as if she'd been the colonel of a regiment. His description
+made me laugh, it reminded me so much of the way you used to make me do
+what you wanted at the convent--and then it suddenly occurred to me that
+I had heard of you having gone in for nursing, and we compared notes,
+and I found it was really you! Wasn't it odd that we should discover
+each other in that way? I daresay we might have passed in the street
+and never known it--I'm sure I must be horribly changed...."
+
+Thus Bessy discoursed, in the semi-isolation to which, under an
+overarching beech-tree, the discretion of their hostess had allowed the
+two friends to withdraw for the freer exchange of confidences. There
+was, at first sight, nothing in her aspect to bear out Mrs. Amherst's
+plaintive allusion to her health, but Justine, who knew that she had
+lost a baby a few months previously, assumed that the effect of this
+shock still lingered, though evidently mitigated by a reviving interest
+in pretty clothes and the other ornamental accessories of life.
+Certainly Bessy Amherst had grown into the full loveliness which her
+childhood promised. She had the kind of finished prettiness that
+declares itself early, holds its own through the awkward transitions of
+girlhood, and resists the strain of all later vicissitudes, as though
+miraculously preserved in some clear medium impenetrable to the wear and
+tear of living.
+
+"You absurd child! You've not changed a bit except to grow more so!"
+Justine laughed, paying amused tribute to the childish craving for "a
+compliment" that still betrayed itself in Bessy's eyes.
+
+"Well, _you_ have, then, Justine--you've grown extraordinarily
+handsome!"
+
+"That _is_ extraordinary of me, certainly," the other acknowledged
+gaily. "But then think what room for improvement there was--and how
+much time I've had to improve in!"
+
+"It is a long time, isn't it?" Bessy assented. "I feel so intimate,
+still, with the old Justine of the convent, and I don't know the new one
+a bit. Just think--I've a great girl of my own, almost as old as we were
+when we went to the Sacred Heart: But perhaps you don't know anything
+about me either. You see, I married again two years ago, and my poor
+baby died last March...so I have only Cicely. It was such a
+disappointment--I wanted a boy dreadfully, and I understand little
+babies so much better than a big girl like Cicely.... Oh, dear, here is
+Juliana Gaines bringing up some more tiresome people! It's such a bore,
+but John says I must know them all. Well, thank goodness we've only one
+more day in this dreadful place--and of course I shall see you, dear,
+before we go...."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+AFTER conducting Miss Brent to his wife, John Amherst, by the exercise
+of considerable strategic skill, had once more contrived to detach
+himself from the throng on the lawn, and, regaining a path in the
+shrubbery, had taken refuge on the verandah of the house.
+
+Here, under the shade of the awning, two ladies were seated in a
+seclusion agreeably tempered by the distant strains of the Hanaford
+band, and by the shifting prospect of the groups below them.
+
+"Ah, here he is now!" the younger of the two exclaimed, turning on
+Amherst the smile of intelligence that Mrs. Eustace Ansell was in the
+habit of substituting for the idle preliminaries of conversation. "We
+were not talking of you, though," she added as Amherst took the seat to
+which his mother beckoned him, "but of Bessy--which, I suppose, is
+almost as indiscreet."
+
+She added the last phrase after an imperceptible pause, and as if in
+deprecation of the hardly more perceptible frown which, at the mention
+of his wife's name, had deepened the lines between Amherst's brows.
+
+"Indiscreet of his own mother and his wife's friend?" Mrs. Amherst
+protested, laying her trimly-gloved hand on her son's arm; while the
+latter, with his eyes on her companion, said slowly: "Mrs. Ansell knows
+that indiscretion is the last fault of which her friends are likely to
+accuse her."
+
+"_Raison de plus_, you mean?" she laughed, meeting squarely the
+challenge that passed between them under Mrs. Amherst's puzzled gaze.
+"Well, if I take advantage of my reputation for discretion to meddle a
+little now and then, at least I do so in a good cause. I was just saying
+how much I wish that you would take Bessy to Europe; and I am so sure
+of my cause, in this case, that I am going to leave it to your mother to
+give you my reasons."
+
+She rose as she spoke, not with any sign of haste or embarrassment, but
+as if gracefully recognizing the desire of mother and son to be alone
+together; but Amherst, rising also, made a motion to detain her.
+
+"No one else will be able to put your reasons half so convincingly," he
+said with a slight smile, "and I am sure my mother would much rather be
+spared the attempt."
+
+Mrs. Ansell met the smile as freely as she had met the challenge. "My
+dear Lucy," she rejoined, laying, as she reseated herself, a light
+caress on Mrs. Amherst's hand, "I'm sorry to be flattered at your
+expense, but it's not in human nature to resist such an appeal. You
+see," she added, raising her eyes to Amherst, "how sure I am of
+myself--and of _you_, when you've heard me."
+
+"Oh, John is always ready to hear one," his mother murmured innocently.
+
+"Well, I don't know that I shall even ask him to do as much as that--I'm
+so sure, after all, that my suggestion carries its explanation with it."
+
+There was a moment's pause, during which Amherst let his eyes wander
+absently over the dissolving groups on the lawn.
+
+"The suggestion that I should take Bessy to Europe?" He paused again.
+"When--next autumn?"
+
+"No: now--at once. On a long honeymoon."
+
+He frowned slightly at the last word, passing it by to revert to the
+direct answer to his question.
+
+"At once? No--I can't see that the suggestion carries its explanation
+with it."
+
+Mrs. Ansell looked at him hesitatingly. She was conscious of the
+ill-chosen word that still reverberated between them, and the unwonted
+sense of having blundered made her, for the moment, less completely
+mistress of herself.
+
+"Ah, you'll see farther presently--" She rose again, unfurling her lace
+sunshade, as if to give a touch of definiteness to her action. "It's
+not, after all," she added, with a sweet frankness, "a case for
+argument, and still less for persuasion. My reasons are excellent--I
+should insist on putting them to you myself if they were not! But
+they're so good that I can leave you to find them out--and to back them
+up with your own, which will probably be a great deal better."
+
+She summed up with a light nod, which included both Amherst and his
+mother, and turning to descend the verandah steps, waved a signal to Mr.
+Langhope, who was limping disconsolately toward the house.
+
+"What has she been saying to you, mother?" Amherst asked, returning to
+his seat beside his mother.
+
+Mrs. Amherst replied by a shake of her head and a raised forefinger of
+reproval. "Now, Johnny, I won't answer a single question till you smooth
+out those lines between your eyes."
+
+Her son relaxed his frown to smile back at her. "Well, dear, there have
+to be some wrinkles in every family, and as you absolutely refuse to
+take your share--" His eyes rested affectionately on the frosty sparkle
+of her charming old face, which had, in its setting of recovered
+prosperity, the freshness of a sunny winter morning, when the very snow
+gives out a suggestion of warmth.
+
+He remembered how, on the evening of his dismissal from the mills, he
+had paused on the threshold of their sitting-room to watch her a moment
+in the lamplight, and had thought with bitter compunction of the fresh
+wrinkle he was about to add to the lines about her eyes. The three years
+which followed had effaced that wrinkle and veiled the others in a tardy
+bloom of well-being. From the moment of turning her back on Westmore,
+and establishing herself in the pretty little house at Hanaford which
+her son's wife had placed at her disposal, Mrs. Amherst had shed all
+traces of the difficult years; and the fact that his marriage had
+enabled him to set free, before it was too late, the pent-up springs of
+her youthfulness, sometimes seemed to Amherst the clearest gain in his
+life's confused total of profit and loss. It was, at any rate, the sense
+of Bessy's share in the change that softened his voice when he spoke of
+her to his mother.
+
+"Now, then, if I present a sufficiently unruffled surface, let us go
+back to Mrs. Ansell--for I confess that her mysterious reasons are not
+yet apparent to me."
+
+Mrs. Amherst looked deprecatingly at her son. "Maria Ansell is devoted
+to you too, John----"
+
+"Of course she is! It's her _rôle_ to be devoted to
+everybody--especially to her enemies."
+
+"Her enemies?"
+
+"Oh, I didn't intend any personal application. But why does she want me
+to take Bessy abroad?"
+
+"She and Mr. Langhope think that Bessy is not looking well."
+
+Amherst paused, and the frown showed itself for a moment. "What do _you_
+think, mother?"
+
+"I hadn't noticed it myself: Bessy seems to me prettier than ever. But
+perhaps she has less colour--and she complains of not sleeping. Maria
+thinks she still frets over the baby."
+
+Amherst made an impatient gesture. "Is Europe the only panacea?"
+
+"You should consider, John, that Bessy is used to change and amusement.
+I think you sometimes forget that other people haven't your faculty of
+absorbing themselves in a single interest. And Maria says that the new
+doctor at Clifton, whom they seem to think so clever, is very anxious
+that Bessy should go to Europe this summer."
+
+"No doubt; and so is every one else: I mean her father and old
+Tredegar--and your friend Mrs. Ansell not least."
+
+Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright black eyes to his. "Well, then--if they
+all think she needs it----"
+
+"Good heavens, if travel were what she needed!--Why, we've never stopped
+travelling since we married. We've been everywhere on the globe except
+at Hanaford--this is her second visit here in three years!" He rose and
+took a rapid turn across the deserted verandah. "It's not because her
+health requires it--it's to get me away from Westmore, to prevent things
+being done there that ought to be done!" he broke out vehemently,
+halting again before his mother.
+
+The aged pink faded from Mrs. Amherst's face, but her eyes retained
+their lively glitter. "To prevent things being done? What a strange
+thing to say!"
+
+"I shouldn't have said it if I hadn't seen you falling under Mrs.
+Ansell's spell."
+
+His mother had a gesture which showed from whom he had inherited his
+impulsive movements. "Really, my son--!" She folded her hands, and added
+after a pause of self-recovery: "If you mean that I have ever attempted
+to interfere----"
+
+"No, no: but when they pervert things so damnably----"
+
+"John!"
+
+He dropped into his chair again, and pushed the hair from his forehead
+with a groan.
+
+"Well, then--put it that they have as much right to their view as I
+have: I only want you to see what it is. Whenever I try to do anything
+at Westmore--to give a real start to the work that Bessy and I planned
+together--some pretext is found to stop it: to pack us off to the ends
+of the earth, to cry out against reducing her income, to encourage her
+in some new extravagance to which the work at the mills must be
+sacrificed!"
+
+Mrs. Amherst, growing pale under this outbreak, assured herself by a
+nervous backward glance that their privacy was still uninvaded; then her
+eyes returned to her son's face.
+
+"John--are you sure you're not sacrificing your wife to the mills?"
+
+He grew pale in turn, and they looked at each other for a moment without
+speaking.
+
+"You see it as they do, then?" he rejoined with a discouraged sigh.
+
+"I see it as any old woman would, who had my experiences to look back
+to."
+
+"Mother!" he exclaimed.
+
+She smiled composedly. "Do you think I mean that as a reproach? That's
+because men will never understand women--least of all, sons their
+mothers. No real mother wants to come first; she puts her son's career
+ahead of everything. But it's different with a wife--and a wife as much
+in love as Bessy."
+
+Amherst looked away. "I should have thought that was a reason----"
+
+"That would reconcile her to being set aside, to counting only second in
+your plans?"
+
+"They were _her_ plans when we married!"
+
+"Ah, my dear--!" She paused on that, letting her shrewd old glance, and
+all the delicate lines of experience in her face, supply what farther
+comment the ineptitude of his argument invited.
+
+He took the full measure of her meaning, receiving it in a baffled
+silence that continued as she rose and gathered her lace mantle about
+her, as if to signify that their confidences could not, on such an
+occasion, be farther prolonged without singularity. Then he stood up
+also and joined her, resting his hand on hers while she leaned on the
+verandah rail.
+
+"Poor mother! And I've kept you to myself all this time, and spoiled
+your good afternoon."
+
+"No, dear; I was a little tired, and had slipped away to be quiet." She
+paused, and then went on, persuasively giving back his pressure: "I know
+how you feel about doing your duty, John; but now that things are so
+comfortably settled, isn't it a pity to unsettle them?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst had intended, on leaving his mother, to rejoin Bessy, whom he
+could still discern, on the lawn, in absorbed communion with Miss Brent;
+but after what had passed it seemed impossible, for the moment, to
+recover the garden-party tone, and he made his escape through the house
+while a trio of Cuban singers, who formed the crowning number of the
+entertainment, gathered the company in a denser circle about their
+guitars.
+
+As he walked on aimlessly under the deep June shadows of Maplewood
+Avenue his mother's last words formed an ironical accompaniment to his
+thoughts. "Now that things are comfortably settled--" he knew so well
+what that elastic epithet covered! Himself, for instance, ensconced in
+the impenetrable prosperity of his wonderful marriage; herself too
+(unconsciously, dear soul!), so happily tucked away in a cranny of that
+new and spacious life, and no more able to conceive why existing
+conditions should be disturbed than the bird in the eaves understands
+why the house should be torn down. Well--he had learned at last what his
+experience with his poor, valiant, puzzled mother might have taught him:
+that one must never ask from women any view but the personal one, any
+measure of conduct but that of their own pains and pleasures. She,
+indeed, had borne undauntedly enough the brunt of their earlier trials;
+but that was merely because, as she said, the mother's instinct bade her
+heap all her private hopes on the great devouring altar of her son's
+ambition; it was not because she had ever, in the very least, understood
+or sympathized with his aims.
+
+And Bessy--? Perhaps if their little son had lived she might in turn
+have obeyed the world-old instinct of self-effacement--but now! He
+remembered with an intenser self-derision that, not even in the first
+surprise of his passion, had he deluded himself with the idea that Bessy
+Westmore was an exception to her sex. He had argued rather that, being
+only a lovelier product of the common mould, she would abound in the
+adaptabilities and pliancies which the lords of the earth have seen fit
+to cultivate in their companions. She would care for his aims because
+they were his. During their precipitate wooing, and through the first
+brief months of marriage, this profound and original theory had been
+gratifyingly confirmed; then its perfect surface had begun to show a
+flaw. Amherst had always conveniently supposed that the poet's line
+summed up the good woman's rule of ethics: _He for God only, she for God
+in him._ It was for the god in him, surely, that she had loved him: for
+that first glimpse of an "ampler ether, a diviner air" that he had
+brought into her cramped and curtained life. He could never, now, evoke
+that earlier delusion without feeling on its still-tender surface the
+keen edge of Mrs. Ansell's smile. She, no doubt, could have told him at
+any time why Bessy had married him: it was for his _beaux yeux_, as Mrs.
+Ansell would have put it--because he was young, handsome, persecuted, an
+ardent lover if not a subtle one--because Bessy had met him at the fatal
+moment, because her family had opposed the marriage--because, in brief,
+the gods, that day, may have been a little short of amusement. Well,
+they were having their laugh out now--there were moments when high
+heaven seemed to ring with it....
+
+With these thoughts at his heels Amherst strode on, overtaken now and
+again by the wheels of departing guests from the garden-party, and
+knowing, as they passed him, what was in their minds--envy of his
+success, admiration of his cleverness in achieving it, and a little
+half-contemptuous pity for his wife, who, with her wealth and looks,
+might have done so much better. Certainly, if the case could have been
+put to Hanaford--the Hanaford of the Gaines garden-party--it would have
+sided with Bessy to a voice. And how much justice was there in what he
+felt would have been the unanimous verdict of her class? Was his mother
+right in hinting that he was sacrificing Bessy to the mills? But the
+mills _were_ Bessy--at least he had thought so when he married her!
+They were her particular form of contact with life, the expression of
+her relation to her fellow-men, her pretext, her opportunity--unless
+they were merely a vast purse in which to plunge for her pin-money! He
+had fancied it would rest with him to determine from which of these
+stand-points she should view Westmore; and at the outset she had
+enthusiastically viewed it from his. In her eager adoption of his ideas
+she had made a pet of the mills, organizing the Mothers' Club, laying
+out a recreation-ground on the Hopewood property, and playing with
+pretty plans in water-colour for the Emergency Hospital and the building
+which was to contain the night-schools, library and gymnasium; but even
+these minor projects--which he had urged her to take up as a means of
+learning their essential dependence on his larger scheme--were soon to
+be set aside by obstacles of a material order. Bessy always wanted
+money--not a great deal, but, as she reasonably put it, "enough"--and
+who was to blame if her father and Mr. Tredegar, each in his different
+capacity, felt obliged to point out that every philanthropic outlay at
+Westmore must entail a corresponding reduction in her income? Perhaps if
+she could have been oftener at Hanaford these arguments would have been
+counteracted, for she was tender-hearted, and prompt to relieve such
+suffering as she saw about her; but her imagination was not active, and
+it was easy for her to forget painful sights when they were not under
+her eye. This was perhaps--half-consciously--one of the reasons why she
+avoided Hanaford; why, as Amherst exclaimed, they had been everywhere
+since their marriage but to the place where their obligations called
+them. There had, at any rate, always been some good excuse for not
+returning there, and consequently for postponing the work of improvement
+which, it was generally felt, her husband could not fitly begin till she
+_had_ returned and gone over the ground with him. After their marriage,
+and especially in view of the comment excited by that romantic incident,
+it was impossible not to yield to her wish that they should go abroad
+for a few months; then, before her confinement, the doctors had exacted
+that she should be spared all fatigue and worry; and after the baby's
+death Amherst had felt with her too tenderly to venture an immediate
+return to unwelcome questions.
+
+For by this time it had become clear to him that such questions were,
+and always would be, unwelcome to her. As the easiest means of escaping
+them, she had once more dismissed the whole problem to the vague and
+tiresome sphere of "business," whence he had succeeded in detaching it
+for a moment in the early days of their union. Her first husband--poor
+unappreciated Westmore!--had always spared her the boredom of
+"business," and Halford Gaines and Mr. Tredegar were ready to show her
+the same consideration; it was part of the modern code of chivalry that
+lovely woman should not be bothered about ways and means. But Bessy was
+too much the wife--and the wife in love--to consent that her husband's
+views on the management of the mills should be totally disregarded.
+Precisely because her advisers looked unfavourably on his intervention,
+she felt bound--if only in defense of her illusions--to maintain and
+emphasize it. The mills were, in fact, the official "platform" on which
+she had married: Amherst's devoted _rôle_ at Westmore had justified the
+unconventionality of the step. And so she was committed--the more
+helplessly for her dense misintelligence of both sides of the
+question--to the policy of conciliating the opposing influences which
+had so uncomfortably chosen to fight out their case on the field of her
+poor little existence: theoretically siding with her husband, but
+surreptitiously, as he well knew, giving aid and comfort to the enemy,
+who were really defending her own cause.
+
+All this Amherst saw with that cruel insight which had replaced his
+former blindness. He was, in truth, more ashamed of the insight than of
+the blindness: it seemed to him horribly cold-blooded to be thus
+analyzing, after two years of marriage, the source of his wife's
+inconsistencies. And, partly for this reason, he had put off from month
+to month the final question of the future management of the mills, and
+of the radical changes to be made there if his system were to prevail.
+But the time had come when, if Bessy had to turn to Westmore for the
+justification of her marriage, he had even more need of calling upon it
+for the same service. He had not, assuredly, married her because of
+Westmore; but he would scarcely have contemplated marriage with a rich
+woman unless the source of her wealth had offered him some such
+opportunity as Westmore presented. His special training, and the natural
+bent of his mind, qualified him, in what had once seemed a predestined
+manner, to help Bessy to use her power nobly, for her own uplifting as
+well as for that of Westmore; and so the mills became, incongruously
+enough, the plank of safety to which both clung in their sense of
+impending disaster.
+
+It was not that Amherst feared the temptation to idleness if this outlet
+for his activity were cut off. He had long since found that the luxury
+with which his wife surrounded him merely quickened his natural bent for
+hard work and hard fare. He recalled with a touch of bitterness how he
+had once regretted having separated himself from his mother's class, and
+how seductive for a moment, to both mind and senses, that other life had
+appeared. Well--he knew it now, and it had neither charm nor peril for
+him. Capua must have been a dull place to one who had once drunk the joy
+of battle. What he dreaded was not that he should learn to love the
+life of ease, but that he should grow to loathe it uncontrollably, as
+the symbol of his mental and spiritual bondage. And Westmore was his
+safety-valve, his refuge--if he were cut off from Westmore what remained
+to him? It was not only the work he had found to his hand, but the one
+work for which his hand was fitted. It was his life that he was fighting
+for in insisting that now at last, before the close of this
+long-deferred visit to Hanaford, the question of the mills should be
+faced and settled. He had made that clear to Bessy, in a scene he still
+shrank from recalling; for it was of the essence of his somewhat
+unbending integrity that he would not trick her into a confused
+surrender to the personal influence he still possessed over her, but
+must seek to convince her by the tedious process of argument and
+exposition, against which she knew no defense but tears and petulance.
+But he had, at any rate, gained her consent to his setting forth his
+views at the meeting of directors the next morning; and meanwhile he had
+meant to be extraordinarily patient and reasonable with her, till the
+hint of Mrs. Ansell's stratagem produced in him a fresh reaction of
+distrust.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+THAT evening when dinner ended, Mrs. Ansell, with a glance through the
+tall dining-room windows, had suggested to Bessy that it would be
+pleasanter to take coffee on the verandah; but Amherst detained his wife
+with a glance.
+
+"I should like Bessy to stay," he said.
+
+The dining-room being on the cool side the house, with a refreshing
+outlook on the garden, the men preferred to smoke there rather than in
+the stuffily-draped Oriental apartment destined to such rites; and Bessy
+Amherst, with a faint sigh, sank back into her seat, while Mrs. Ansell
+drifted out through one of the open windows.
+
+The men surrounding Richard Westmore's table were the same who nearly
+three years earlier had gathered in his house for the same purpose: the
+discussion of conditions at the mills. The only perceptible change in
+the relation to each other of the persons composing this group was that
+John Amherst was now the host of the other two, instead of being a
+subordinate called in for cross-examination; but he was so indifferent,
+or at least so heedless, a host--so forgetful, for instance, of Mr.
+Tredegar's preference for a "light" cigar, and of Mr. Langhope's
+feelings on the duty of making the Westmore madeira circulate with the
+sun--that the change was manifest only in his evening-dress, and in the
+fact of his sitting at the foot of the table.
+
+If Amherst was conscious of the contrast thus implied, it was only as a
+restriction on his freedom. As far as the welfare of Westmore was
+concerned he would rather have stood before his companions as the
+assistant manager of the mills than as the husband of their owner; and
+it seemed to him, as he looked back, that he had done very little with
+the opportunity which looked so great in the light of his present
+restrictions. What he _had_ done with it--the use to which, as
+unfriendly critics might insinuate, he had so adroitly put it--had
+landed him, ironically enough, in the ugly _impasse_ of a situation from
+which no issue seemed possible without some wasteful sacrifice of
+feeling.
+
+His wife's feelings, for example, were already revealing themselves in
+an impatient play of her fan that made her father presently lean forward
+to suggest: "If we men are to talk shop, is it necessary to keep Bessy
+in this hot room?"
+
+Amherst rose and opened the window behind his wife's chair.
+
+"There's a breeze from the west--the room will be cooler now," he said,
+returning to his seat.
+
+"Oh, I don't mind--" Bessy murmured, in a tone intended to give her
+companions the full measure of what she was being called on to endure.
+
+Mr. Tredegar coughed slightly. "May I trouble you for that other box of
+cigars, Amherst? No, _not_ the Cabañas." Bessy rose and handed him the
+box on which his glance significantly rested. "Ah, thank you, my dear. I
+was about to ask," he continued, looking about for the cigar-lighter,
+which flamed unheeded at Amherst's elbow, "what special purpose will be
+served by a preliminary review of the questions to be discussed
+tomorrow."
+
+"Ah--exactly," murmured Mr. Langhope. "The madeira, my dear John?
+No--ah--_please_--to the left!"
+
+Amherst impatiently reversed the direction in which he had set the
+precious vessel moving, and turned to Mr. Tredegar, who was
+conspicuously lighting his cigar with a match extracted from his
+waist-coat pocket.
+
+"The purpose is to define my position in the matter; and I prefer that
+Bessy should do this with your help rather than with mine."
+
+Mr. Tredegar surveyed his cigar through drooping lids, as though the
+question propounded by Amherst were perched on its tip.
+
+"Is not your position naturally involved in and defined by hers? You
+will excuse my saying that--technically speaking, of course--I cannot
+distinctly conceive of it as having any separate existence."
+
+Mr. Tredegar spoke with the deliberate mildness that was regarded as his
+most effective weapon at the bar, since it was likely to abash those
+who were too intelligent to be propitiated by it.
+
+"Certainly it is involved in hers," Amherst agreed; "but how far that
+defines it is just what I have waited till now to find out."
+
+Bessy at this point recalled her presence by a restless turn of her
+graceful person, and her father, with an affectionate glance at her,
+interposed amicably: "But surely--according to old-fashioned ideas--it
+implies identity of interests?"
+
+"Yes; but whose interests?" Amherst asked.
+
+"Why--your wife's, man! She owns the mills."
+
+Amherst hesitated. "I would rather talk of my wife's interest in the
+mills than of her interests there; but we'll keep to the plural if you
+prefer it. Personally, I believe the terms should be interchangeable in
+the conduct of such a business."
+
+"Ah--I'm glad to hear that," said Mr. Tredegar quickly, "since it's
+precisely the view we all take."
+
+Amherst's colour rose. "Definitions are ambiguous," he said. "Before you
+adopt mine, perhaps I had better develop it a little farther. What I
+mean is, that Bessy's interests in Westmore should be regulated by her
+interest in it--in its welfare as a social body, aside from its success
+as a commercial enterprise. If we agree on this definition, we are at
+one as to the other: namely that my relation to the matter is defined by
+hers."
+
+He paused a moment, as if to give his wife time to contribute some sign
+of assent and encouragement; but she maintained a puzzled silence and he
+went on: "There is nothing new in this. I have tried to make Bessy
+understand from the beginning what obligations I thought the ownership
+of Westmore entailed, and how I hoped to help her fulfill them; but ever
+since our marriage all definite discussion of the subject has been put
+off for one cause or another, and that is my reason for urging that it
+should be brought up at the directors' meeting tomorrow."
+
+There was another pause, during which Bessy glanced tentatively at Mr.
+Tredegar, and then said, with a lovely rise of colour: "But, John, I
+sometimes think you forget how much has been done at Westmore--the
+Mothers' Club, and the play-ground, and all--in the way of carrying out
+your ideas."
+
+Mr. Tredegar discreetly dropped his glance to his cigar, and Mr.
+Langhope sounded an irrepressible note of approval and encouragement.
+
+Amherst smiled. "No, I have not forgotten; and I am grateful to you for
+giving my ideas a trial. But what has been done hitherto is purely
+superficial." Bessy's eyes clouded, and he added hastily: "Don't think I
+undervalue it for that reason--heaven knows the surface of life needs
+improving! But it's like picking flowers and sticking them in the ground
+to make a garden--unless you transplant the flower with its roots, and
+prepare the soil to receive it, your garden will be faded tomorrow. No
+radical changes have yet been made at Westmore; and it is of radical
+changes that I want to speak."
+
+Bessy's look grew more pained, and Mr. Langhope exclaimed with unwonted
+irascibility: "Upon my soul, Amherst, the tone you take about what your
+wife has done doesn't strike me as the likeliest way of encouraging her
+to do more!"
+
+"I don't want to encourage her to do more on such a basis--the sooner
+she sees the futility of it the better for Westmore!"
+
+"The futility--?" Bessy broke out, with a flutter of tears in her voice;
+but before her father could intervene Mr. Tredegar had raised his hand
+with the gesture of one accustomed to wield the gavel.
+
+"My dear child, I see Amherst's point, and it is best, as he says, that
+you should see it too. What he desires, as I understand it, is the
+complete reconstruction of the present state of things at Westmore; and
+he is right in saying that all your good works there--night-schools, and
+nursery, and so forth--leave that issue untouched."
+
+A smile quivered under Mr. Langhope's moustache. He and Amherst both
+knew that Mr. Tredegar's feint of recognizing the justice of his
+adversary's claim was merely the first step to annihilating it; but
+Bessy could never be made to understand this, and always felt herself
+deserted and betrayed when any side but her own was given a hearing.
+
+"I'm sorry if all I have tried to do at Westmore is useless--but I
+suppose I shall never understand business," she murmured, vainly seeking
+consolation in her father's eye.
+
+"This is not business," Amherst broke in. "It's the question of your
+personal relation to the people there--the last thing that business
+considers."
+
+Mr. Langhope uttered an impatient exclamation. "I wish to heaven the
+owner of the mills had made it clear just what that relation was to be!"
+
+"I think he did, sir," Amherst answered steadily, "in leaving his wife
+the unrestricted control of the property."
+
+He had reddened under Mr. Langhope's thrust, but his voice betrayed no
+irritation, and Bessy rewarded him with an unexpected beam of sympathy:
+she was always up in arms at the least sign of his being treated as an
+intruder.
+
+"I am sure, papa," she said, a little tremulously, "that poor Richard,
+though he knew I was not clever, felt he could trust me to take the best
+advice----"
+
+"Ah, that's all we ask of you, my child!" her father sighed, while Mr.
+Tredegar drily interposed: "We are merely losing time by this
+digression. Let me suggest that Amherst should give us an idea of the
+changes he wishes to make at Westmore."
+
+Amherst, as he turned to answer, remembered with what ardent faith in
+his powers of persuasion he had responded to the same appeal three years
+earlier. He had thought then that all his cause needed was a hearing;
+now he knew that the practical man's readiness to let the idealist talk
+corresponds with the busy parent's permission to destructive infancy to
+"run out and play." They would let him state his case to the four
+corners of the earth--if only he did not expect them to act on it! It
+was their policy to let him exhaust himself in argument and exhortation,
+to listen to him so politely and patiently that if he failed to enforce
+his ideas it should not be for lack of opportunity to expound them....
+And the alternative struck him as hardly less to be feared. Supposing
+that the incredible happened, that his reasons prevailed with his wife,
+and, through her, with the others--at what cost would the victory be
+won? Would Bessy ever forgive him for winning it? And what would his
+situation be, if it left him in control of Westmore but estranged from
+his wife?
+
+He recalled suddenly a phrase he had used that afternoon to the
+dark-eyed girl at the garden-party: "What risks we run when we scramble
+into the chariot of the gods!" And at the same instant he heard her
+retort, and saw her fine gesture of defiance. How could he ever have
+doubted that the thing was worth doing at whatever cost? Something in
+him--some secret lurking element of weakness and evasion--shrank out of
+sight in the light of her question: "Do _you_ act on that?" and the "God
+forbid!" he had instantly flashed back to her. He turned to Mr. Tredegar
+with his answer.
+
+Amherst knew that any large theoretical exposition of the case would be
+as much wasted on the two men as on his wife. To gain his point he must
+take only one step at a time, and it seemed to him that the first thing
+needed at Westmore was that the hands should work and live under
+healthier conditions. To attain this, two important changes were
+necessary: the floor-space of the mills must be enlarged, and the
+company must cease to rent out tenements, and give the operatives the
+opportunity to buy land for themselves. Both these changes involved the
+upheaval of the existing order. Whenever the Westmore mills had been
+enlarged, it had been for the sole purpose of increasing the revenues of
+the company; and now Amherst asked that these revenues should be
+materially and permanently reduced. As to the suppression of the company
+tenement, such a measure struck at the roots of the baneful paternalism
+which was choking out every germ of initiative in the workman. Once the
+operatives had room to work in, and the hope of homes of their own to
+go to when work was over, Amherst was willing to trust to time for the
+satisfaction of their other needs. He believed that a sounder
+understanding of these needs would develop on both sides the moment the
+employers proved their good faith by the deliberate and permanent
+sacrifice of excessive gain to the well-being of the employed; and once
+the two had learned to regard each other not as antagonists but as
+collaborators, a long step would have been taken toward a readjustment
+of the whole industrial relation. In regard to general and distant
+results, Amherst tried not to be too sanguine, even in his own thoughts.
+His aim was to remedy the abuse nearest at hand, in the hope of thus
+getting gradually closer to the central evil; and, had his action been
+unhampered, he would still have preferred the longer and more circuitous
+path of practical experiment to the sweeping adoption of a new
+industrial system.
+
+But his demands, moderate as they were, assumed in his hearers the
+consciousness of a moral claim superior to the obligation of making
+one's business "pay"; and it was the futility of this assumption that
+chilled the arguments on his lips, since in the orthodox creed of the
+business world it was a weakness and not a strength to be content with
+five per cent where ten was obtainable. Business was one thing,
+philanthropy another; and the enthusiasts who tried combining them were
+usually reduced, after a brief flight, to paying fifty cents on the
+dollar, and handing over their stock to a promoter presumably unhampered
+by humanitarian ideals.
+
+Amherst knew that this was the answer with which his plea would be met;
+knew, moreover, that the plea was given a hearing simply because his
+judges deemed it so pitiably easy to refute. But the knowledge, once he
+had begun to speak, fanned his argument to a white heat of pleading,
+since, with failure so plainly ahead, small concessions and compromises
+were not worth making. Reason would be wasted on all; but eloquence
+might at least prevail with Bessy....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When, late that night, he went upstairs after long pacings of the
+garden, he was surprised to see a light in her room. She was not given
+to midnight study, and fearing that she might be ill he knocked at her
+door. There was no answer, and after a short pause he turned the handle
+and entered.
+
+In the great canopied Westmore couch, her arms flung upward and her
+hands clasped beneath her head, she lay staring fretfully at the globe
+of electric light which hung from the centre of the embossed and gilded
+ceiling. Seen thus, with the soft curves of throat and arms revealed,
+and her face childishly set in a cloud of loosened hair, she looked no
+older than Cicely--and, like Cicely, inaccessible to grown-up arguments
+and the stronger logic of experience.
+
+It was a trick of hers, in such moods, to ignore any attempt to attract
+her notice; and Amherst was prepared for her remaining motionless as he
+paused on the threshold and then advanced toward the middle of the room.
+There had been a time when he would have been exasperated by her
+pretense of not seeing him, but a deep weariness of spirit now dulled
+him to these surface pricks.
+
+"I was afraid you were not well when I saw the light burning," he began.
+
+"Thank you--I am quite well," she answered in a colourless voice,
+without turning her head.
+
+"Shall I put it out, then? You can't sleep with such a glare in your
+eyes."
+
+"I should not sleep at any rate; and I hate to lie awake in the dark."
+
+"Why shouldn't you sleep?" He moved nearer, looking down compassionately
+on her perturbed face and struggling lips.
+
+She lay silent a moment; then she faltered out: "B--because I'm so
+unhappy!"
+
+The pretense of indifference was swept away by a gush of childish sobs
+as she flung over on her side and buried her face in the embroidered
+pillows.
+
+Amherst, bending down, laid a quieting hand on her shoulder. "Bessy----"
+
+She sobbed on.
+
+He seated himself silently in the arm-chair beside the bed, and kept his
+soothing hold on her shoulder. The time had come when he went through
+all these accustomed acts of pacification as mechanically as a nurse
+soothing a fretful child. And once he had thought her weeping eloquent!
+He looked about him at the spacious room, with its heavy hangings of
+damask and the thick velvet carpet which stifled his steps. Everywhere
+were the graceful tokens of her presence--the vast lace-draped
+toilet-table strewn with silver and crystal, the embroidered muslin
+cushions heaped on the lounge, the little rose-lined slippers she had
+just put off, the lace wrapper, with a scent of violets in its folds,
+which he had pushed aside when he sat down beside her; and he remembered
+how full of a mysterious and intimate charm these things had once
+appeared to him. It was characteristic that the remembrance made him
+more patient with her now. Perhaps, after all, it was his failure that
+she was crying over....
+
+"Don't be unhappy. You decided as seemed best to you," he said.
+
+She pressed her handkerchief against her lips, still keeping her head
+averted. "But I hate all these arguments and disputes. Why should you
+unsettle everything?" she murmured.
+
+His mother's words! Involuntarily he removed his hand from her
+shoulder, though he still remained seated by the bed.
+
+"You are right. I see the uselessness of it," he assented, with an
+uncontrollable note of irony.
+
+She turned her head at the tone, and fixed her plaintive brimming eyes
+on him. "You _are_ angry with me!"
+
+"Was that troubling you?" He leaned forward again, with compassion in
+his face. _Sancta simplicitas!_ was the thought within him.
+
+"I am not angry," he went on; "be reasonable and try to sleep."
+
+She started upright, the light masses of her hair floating about her
+like silken sea-weed lifted on an invisible tide. "Don't talk like that!
+I can't endure to be humoured like a baby. I am unhappy because I can't
+see why all these wretched questions should be dragged into our life. I
+hate to have you always disagreeing with Mr. Tredegar, who is so clever
+and has so much experience; and yet I hate to see you give way to him,
+because that makes it appear as if...as if...."
+
+"He didn't care a straw for my ideas?" Amherst smiled. "Well, he
+doesn't--and I never dreamed of making him. So don't worry about that
+either."
+
+"You never dreamed of making him care for your ideas? But then why do
+you----"
+
+"Why do I go on setting them forth at such great length?" Amherst smiled
+again. "To convince you--that's my only ambition."
+
+She stared at him, shaking her head back to toss a loose lock from her
+puzzled eyes. A tear still shone on her lashes, but with the motion it
+fell and trembled down her cheek.
+
+"To convince _me_? But you know I am so ignorant of such things."
+
+"Most women are."
+
+"I never pretended to understand anything about--economics, or whatever
+you call it."
+
+"No."
+
+"Then how----"
+
+He turned and looked at her gently. "I thought you might have begun to
+understand something about _me_."
+
+"About you?" The colour flowered softly under her clear skin.
+
+"About what my ideas on such subjects were likely to be worth--judging
+from what you know of me in other respects." He paused and glanced away
+from her. "Well," he concluded deliberately, "I suppose I've had my
+answer tonight."
+
+"Oh, John----!"
+
+He rose and wandered across the room, pausing a moment to finger
+absently the trinkets on the dressing-table. The act recalled with a
+curious vividness certain dulled sensations of their first days
+together, when to handle and examine these frail little accessories of
+her toilet had been part of the wonder and amusement of his new
+existence. He could still hear her laugh as she leaned over him,
+watching his mystified look in the glass, till their reflected eyes met
+there and drew down her lips to his. He laid down the fragrant
+powder-puff he had been turning slowly between his fingers, and moved
+back toward the bed. In the interval he had reached a decision.
+
+"Well--isn't it natural that I should think so?" he began again, as he
+stood beside her. "When we married I never expected you to care or know
+much about economics. It isn't a quality a man usually chooses his wife
+for. But I had a fancy--perhaps it shows my conceit--that when we had
+lived together a year or two, and you'd found out what kind of a fellow
+I was in other ways--ways any woman can judge of--I had a fancy that you
+might take my opinions on faith when it came to my own special
+business--the thing I'm generally supposed to know about."
+
+He knew that he was touching a sensitive chord, for Bessy had to the
+full her sex's pride of possessorship. He was human and faulty till
+others criticized him--then he became a god. But in this case a
+conflicting influence restrained her from complete response to his
+appeal.
+
+"I _do_ feel sure you know--about the treatment of the hands and all
+that; but you said yourself once--the first time we ever talked about
+Westmore--that the business part was different----"
+
+Here it was again, the ancient ineradicable belief in the separable body
+and soul! Even an industrial organization was supposed to be subject to
+the old theological distinction, and Bessy was ready to co-operate with
+her husband in the emancipation of Westmore's spiritual part if only its
+body remained under the law.
+
+Amherst controlled his impatience, as it was always easy for him to do
+when he had fixed on a definite line of conduct.
+
+"It was my situation that was different; not what you call the business
+part. That is inextricably bound up with the treatment of the hands. If
+I am to have anything to do with the mills now I can deal with them only
+as your representative; and as such I am bound to take in the whole
+question."
+
+Bessy's face clouded: was he going into it all again? But he read her
+look and went on reassuringly: "That was what I meant by saying that I
+hoped you would take me on faith. If I want the welfare of Westmore it's
+above all, I believe, because I want Westmore to see you as _I_ do--as
+the dispenser of happiness, who could not endure to benefit by any wrong
+or injustice to others."
+
+"Of course, of course I don't want to do them injustice!"
+
+"Well, then----"
+
+He had seated himself beside her again, clasping in his the hand with
+which she was fretting the lace-edged sheet. He felt her restless
+fingers surrender slowly, and her eyes turned to him in appeal.
+
+"But I care for what people say of you too! And you know--it's horrid,
+but one must consider it--if they say you're spending my money
+imprudently...." The blood rose to her neck and face. "I don't mind for
+myself...even if I have to give up as many things as papa and Mr.
+Tredegar think...but there is Cicely...and if people said...."
+
+"If people said I was spending Cicely's money on improving the condition
+of the people to whose work she will some day owe all her wealth--"
+Amherst paused: "Well, I would rather hear that said of me than any
+other thing I can think of, except one."
+
+"Except what?"
+
+"That I was doing it with her mother's help and approval."
+
+She drew a long tremulous sigh: he knew it was always a relief to her to
+have him assert himself strongly. But a residue of resistance still
+clouded her mind.
+
+"I should always want to help you, of course; but if Mr. Tredegar and
+Halford Gaines think your plan unbusinesslike----"
+
+"Mr. Tredegar and Halford Gaines are certain to think it so. And that is
+why I said, just now, that it comes, in the end, to your choosing
+between us; taking them on experience or taking me on faith."
+
+She looked at him wistfully. "Of course I should expect to give up
+things.... You wouldn't want me to live here?"
+
+"I should not ask you to," he said, half-smiling.
+
+"I suppose there would be a good many things we couldn't do----"
+
+"You would certainly have less money for a number of years; after that,
+I believe you would have more rather than less; but I should not want
+you to think that, beyond a reasonable point, the prosperity of the
+mills was ever to be measured by your dividends."
+
+"No." She leaned back wearily among the pillows. "I suppose, for
+instance, we should have to give up Europe this summer----?"
+
+Here at last was the bottom of her thought! It was always on the
+immediate pleasure that her soul hung: she had not enough imagination to
+look beyond, even in the projecting of her own desires. And it was on
+his knowledge of this limitation that Amherst had deliberately built.
+
+"I don't see how you could go to Europe," he said.
+
+"The doctor thinks I need it," she faltered.
+
+"In that case, of course--" He stood up, not abruptly, or with any show
+of irritation, but as if accepting this as her final answer. "What you
+need most, in the meantime, is a little sleep," he said. "I will tell
+your maid not to disturb you in the morning." He had returned to his
+soothing way of speech, as though definitely resigned to the inutility
+of farther argument. "And I will say goodbye now," he continued,
+"because I shall probably take an early train, before you wake----"
+
+She sat up with a start. "An early train? Why, where are you going?"
+
+"I must go to Chicago some time this month, and as I shall not be wanted
+here tomorrow I might as well run out there at once, and join you next
+week at Lynbrook."
+
+Bessy had grown pale. "But I don't understand----"
+
+Their eyes met. "Can't you understand that I am human enough to prefer,
+under the circumstances, not being present at tomorrow's meeting?" he
+said with a dry laugh.
+
+She sank back with a moan of discouragement, turning her face away as he
+began to move toward his room.
+
+"Shall I put the light out?" he asked, pausing with his hand on the
+electric button.
+
+"Yes, please."
+
+He pushed in the button and walked on, guided through the obscurity by
+the line of light under his door. As he reached the threshold he heard a
+little choking cry.
+
+"John--oh, John!"
+
+He paused.
+
+"I can't _bear_ it!" The sobs increased.
+
+"Bear what?"
+
+"That you should hate me----"
+
+"Don't be foolish," he said, groping for his door-handle.
+
+"But you do hate me--and I deserve it!"
+
+"Nonsense, dear. Try to sleep."
+
+"I can't sleep till you've forgiven me. Say you don't hate me! I'll do
+anything...only say you don't hate me!"
+
+He stood still a moment, thinking; then he turned back, and made his way
+across the room to her side. As he sat down beside her, he felt her arms
+reach for his neck and her wet face press itself against his cheek.
+
+"I'll do anything..." she sobbed; and in the darkness he held her to him
+and hated his victory.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+MRS. ANSELL was engaged in what she called picking up threads. She had
+been abroad for the summer--had, in, fact, transferred herself but a few
+hours earlier from her returning steamer to the little station at
+Lynbrook--and was now, in the bright September afternoon, which left her
+in sole possession of the terrace of Lynbrook House, using that pleasant
+eminence as a point of observation from which to gather up some of the
+loose ends of history dropped at her departure.
+
+It might have been thought that the actual scene out-spread below
+her--the descending gardens, the tennis-courts, the farm-lands sloping
+away to the blue sea-like shimmer of the Hempstead plains--offered, at
+the moment, little material for her purpose; but that was to view them
+with a superficial eye. Mrs. Ansell's trained gaze was, for example,
+greatly enlightened by the fact that the tennis-courts were fringed by a
+group of people indolently watchful of the figures agitating themselves
+about the nets; and that, as she turned her head toward the entrance
+avenue, the receding view of a station omnibus, followed by a
+luggage-cart, announced that more guests were to be added to those who
+had almost taxed to its limits the expansibility of the luncheon-table.
+
+All this, to the initiated eye, was full of suggestion; but its
+significance was as nothing to that presented by the approach of two
+figures which, as Mrs. Ansell watched, detached themselves from the
+cluster about the tennis-ground and struck, obliquely and at a desultory
+pace, across the lawn toward the terrace. The figures--those of a slight
+young man with stooping shoulders, and of a lady equally youthful but
+slenderly erect--moved forward in absorbed communion, as if unconscious
+of their surroundings and indefinite as to their direction, till, on the
+brink of the wide grass terrace just below their observer's parapet,
+they paused a moment and faced each other in closer speech. This
+interchange of words, though brief in measure of time, lasted long
+enough to add a vivid strand to Mrs. Ansell's thickening skein; then, on
+a gesture of the lady's, and without signs of formal leave-taking, the
+young man struck into a path which regained the entrance avenue, while
+his companion, quickening her pace, crossed the grass terrace and
+mounted the wide stone steps sweeping up to the house.
+
+These brought her out on the upper terrace a few yards from Mrs.
+Ansell's post, and exposed her, unprepared, to the full beam of welcome
+which that lady's rapid advance threw like a searchlight across her
+path.
+
+"Dear Miss Brent! I was just wondering how it was that I hadn't seen you
+before." Mrs. Ansell, as she spoke, drew the girl's hand into a long
+soft clasp which served to keep them confronted while she delicately
+groped for whatever thread the encounter seemed to proffer.
+
+Justine made no attempt to evade the scrutiny to which she found herself
+exposed; she merely released her hand by a movement instinctively
+evasive of the mechanical endearment, explaining, with a smile that
+softened the gesture: "I was out with Cicely when you arrived. We've
+just come in."
+
+"The dear child! I haven't seen her either." Mrs. Ansell continued to
+bestow upon the speaker's clear dark face an intensity of attention in
+which, for the moment, Cicely had no perceptible share. "I hear you are
+teaching her botany, and all kinds of wonderful things."
+
+Justine smiled again. "I am trying to teach her to wonder: that is the
+hardest faculty to cultivate in the modern child."
+
+"Yes--I suppose so; in myself," Mrs. Ansell admitted with a responsive
+brightness, "I find it develops with age. The world is a remarkable
+place." She threw this off absently, as though leaving Miss Brent to
+apply it either to the inorganic phenomena with which Cicely was
+supposed to be occupied, or to those subtler manifestations that engaged
+her own attention.
+
+"It's a great thing," she continued, "for Bessy to have had your
+help--for Cicely, and for herself too. There is so much that I want you
+to tell me about her. As an old friend I want the benefit of your
+fresher eye."
+
+"About Bessy?" Justine hesitated, letting her glance drift to the
+distant group still anchored about the tennis-nets. "Don't you find her
+looking better?"
+
+"Than when I left? So much so that I was unduly disturbed, just now, by
+seeing that clever little doctor--it _was_ he, wasn't it, who came up
+the lawn with you?"
+
+"Dr. Wyant? Yes." Miss Brent hesitated again. "But he merely
+called--with a message."
+
+"Not professionally? _Tant mieux!_ The truth is, I was anxious about
+Bessy when I left--I thought she ought to have gone abroad for a change.
+But, as it turns out, her little excursion with you did as well."
+
+"I think she only needed rest. Perhaps her six weeks in the Adirondacks
+were better than Europe."
+
+"Ah, under _your_ care--that made them better!" Mrs. Ansell in turn
+hesitated, the lines of her face melting and changing as if a rapid
+stage-hand had shifted them. When she spoke again they were as open as a
+public square, but also as destitute of personal significance, as flat
+and smooth as the painted drop before the real scene it hides.
+
+"I have always thought that Bessy, for all her health and activity,
+needs as much care as Cicely--the kind of care a clever friend can give.
+She is so wasteful of her strength and her nerves, and so unwilling to
+listen to reason. Poor Dick Westmore watched over her as if she were a
+baby; but perhaps Mr. Amherst, who must have been used to such a
+different type of woman, doesn't realize...and then he's so little
+here...." The drop was lit up by a smile that seemed to make it more
+impenetrable. "As an old friend I can't help telling you how much I hope
+she is to have you with her for a long time--a long, long time."
+
+Miss Brent bent her head in slight acknowledgment of the tribute. "Oh,
+soon she will not need any care----"
+
+"My dear Miss Brent, she will always need it!" Mrs. Ansell made a
+movement inviting the young girl to share the bench from which, at the
+latter's approach, she had risen. "But perhaps there is not enough in
+such a life to satisfy your professional energies."
+
+She seated herself, and after an imperceptible pause Justine sank into
+the seat beside her. "I am very glad, just now, to give my energies a
+holiday," she said, leaning back with a little sigh of retrospective
+weariness.
+
+"You are tired too? Bessy wrote me you had been quite used up by a
+trying case after we saw you at Hanaford."
+
+Miss Brent smiled. "When a nurse is fit for work she calls a trying case
+a 'beautiful' one."
+
+"But meanwhile--?" Mrs. Ansell shone on her with elder-sisterly
+solicitude. "Meanwhile, why not stay on with Cicely--above all, with
+Bessy? Surely she's a 'beautiful' case too."
+
+"Isn't she?" Justine laughingly agreed.
+
+"And if you want to be tried--" Mrs. Ansell swept the scene with a
+slight lift of her philosophic shoulders--"you'll find there are trials
+enough everywhere."
+
+Her companion started up with a glance at the small watch on her breast.
+"One of them is that it's already after four, and that I must see that
+tea is sent down to the tennis-ground, and the new arrivals looked
+after."
+
+"I saw the omnibus on its way to the station. Are many more people
+coming?"
+
+"Five or six, I believe. The house is usually full for Sunday."
+
+Mrs. Ansell made a slight motion to detain her. "And when is Mr. Amherst
+expected?"
+
+Miss Brent's pale cheek seemed to take on a darker tone of ivory, and
+her glance dropped from her companion's face to the vivid stretch of
+gardens at their feet. "Bessy has not told me," she said.
+
+"Ah--" the older woman rejoined, looking also toward the gardens, as if
+to intercept Miss Brent's glance in its flight. The latter stood still a
+moment, with the appearance of not wishing to evade whatever else her
+companion might have to say; then she moved away, entering the house by
+one window just as Mr. Langhope emerged from it by another.
+
+The sound of his stick tapping across the bricks roused Mrs. Ansell from
+her musings, but she showed her sense of his presence simply by
+returning to the bench she had just left; and accepting this mute
+invitation, Mr. Langhope crossed the terrace and seated himself at her
+side.
+
+When he had done so they continued to look at each other without
+speaking, after the manner of old friends possessed of occult means of
+communication; and as the result of this inward colloquy Mr. Langhope at
+length said: "Well, what do you make of it?"
+
+"What do _you_?" she rejoined, turning full upon him a face so released
+from its usual defences and disguises that it looked at once older and
+more simple than the countenance she presented to the world.
+
+Mr. Langhope waved a deprecating hand. "I want your fresher
+impressions."
+
+"That's what I just now said to Miss Brent."
+
+"You've been talking to Miss Brent?"
+
+"Only a flying word--she had to go and look after the new arrivals."
+
+Mr. Langhope's attention deepened. "Well, what did you say to her?"
+
+"Wouldn't you rather hear what she said to _me_?"
+
+He smiled. "A good cross-examiner always gets the answers he wants. Let
+me hear your side, and I shall know hers."
+
+"I should say that applied only to stupid cross-examiners; or to those
+who have stupid subjects to deal with. And Miss Brent is not stupid, you
+know."
+
+"Far from it! What else do you make out?"
+
+"I make out that she's in possession."
+
+"Here?"
+
+"Don't look startled. Do you dislike her?"
+
+"Heaven forbid--with those eyes! She has a wit of her own, too--and she
+certainly makes things easier for Bessy."
+
+"She guards her carefully, at any rate. I could find out nothing."
+
+"About Bessy?"
+
+"About the general situation."
+
+"Including Miss Brent?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell smiled faintly. "I made one little discovery about her."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"She's intimate with the new doctor."
+
+"Wyant?" Mr. Langhope's interest dropped. "What of that? I believe she
+knew him before."
+
+"I daresay. It's of no special importance, except as giving us a
+possible clue to her character. She strikes me as interesting and
+mysterious."
+
+Mr. Langhope smiled. "The things your imagination does for you!"
+
+"It helps me to see that we may find Miss Brent useful as a friend."
+
+"A friend?"
+
+"An ally." She paused, as if searching for a word. "She may restore the
+equilibrium."
+
+Mr. Langhope's handsome face darkened. "Open Bessy's eyes to Amherst?
+Damn him!" he said quietly.
+
+Mrs. Ansell let the imprecation pass. "When was he last here?" she
+asked.
+
+"Five or six weeks ago--for one night. His only visit since she came
+back from the Adirondacks."
+
+"What do you think his motive is? He must know what he risks in losing
+his hold on Bessy."
+
+"His motive? With your eye for them, can you ask? A devouring ambition,
+that's all! Haven't you noticed that, in all except the biggest minds,
+ambition takes the form of wanting to command where one has had to obey?
+Amherst has been made to toe the line at Westmore, and now he wants
+Truscomb--yes, and Halford Gaines, too!--to do the same. That's the
+secret of his servant-of-the-people pose--gad, I believe it's the whole
+secret of his marriage! He's devouring my daughter's substance to pay
+off an old score against the mills. He'll never rest till he has
+Truscomb out, and some creature of his own in command--and then, _vogue
+la galère_! If it were women, now," Mr. Langhope summed up impatiently,
+"one could understand it, at his age, and with that damned romantic
+head--but to be put aside for a lot of low mongrelly socialist
+mill-hands--ah, my poor girl--my poor girl!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell mused. "You didn't write me that things were so bad. There's
+been no actual quarrel?" she asked.
+
+"How can there be, when the poor child does all he wants? He's simply
+too busy to come and thank her!"
+
+"Too busy at Hanaford?"
+
+"So he says. Introducing the golden age at Westmore--it's likely to be
+the age of copper at Lynbrook."
+
+Mrs. Ansell drew a meditative breath. "I was thinking of that. I
+understood that Bessy would have to retrench while the changes at
+Westmore were going on."
+
+"Well--didn't she give up Europe, and cable over to countermand her new
+motor?"
+
+"But the life here! This mob of people! Miss Brent tells me the house is
+full for every week-end."
+
+"Would you have my daughter cut off from all her friends?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell met this promptly. "From some of the new ones, at any rate!
+Have you heard who has just arrived?"
+
+Mr. Langhope's hesitation showed a tinge of embarrassment. "I'm not
+sure--some one has always just arrived."
+
+"Well, the Fenton Carburys, then!" Mrs. Ansell left it to her tone to
+annotate the announcement.
+
+Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "Are they likely to be an
+exceptionally costly pleasure?"
+
+"If you're trying to prove that I haven't kept to the point--I can
+assure you that I'm well within it!"
+
+"But since the good Blanche has got her divorce and married Carbury,
+wherein do they differ from other week-end automata?"
+
+"Because most divorced women marry again to be respectable."
+
+Mr. Langhope smiled faintly. "Yes--that's their punishment. But it would
+be too dull for Blanche."
+
+"Precisely. _She_ married again to see Ned Bowfort!"
+
+"Ah--that may yet be hers!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell sighed at his perversity. "Meanwhile, she's brought him
+here, and it is unnatural to see Bessy lending herself to such
+combinations."
+
+"You're corrupted by a glimpse of the old societies. Here Bowfort and
+Carbury are simply hands at bridge."
+
+"Old hands at it--yes! And the bridge is another point: Bessy never used
+to play for money."
+
+"Well, she may make something, and offset her husband's prodigalities."
+
+"There again--with this _train de vie_, how on earth are both ends to
+meet?"
+
+Mr. Langhope grown suddenly grave, struck his cane resoundingly on the
+terrace. "Westmore and Lynbrook? I don't want them to--I want them to
+get farther and farther apart!"
+
+She cast on him a look of startled divination. "You want Bessy to go on
+spending too much money?"
+
+"How can I help it if it costs?"
+
+"If what costs--?" She stopped, her eyes still wide; then their glances
+crossed, and she exclaimed: "If your scheme costs? It _is_ your scheme,
+then?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders again. "It's a passive attitude----"
+
+"Ah, the deepest plans are that!" Mr. Langhope uttered no protest, and
+she continued to piece her conjectures together. "But you expect it to
+lead up to something active. Do you want a rupture?"
+
+"I want him brought back to his senses."
+
+"Do you think that will bring him back to _her_?"
+
+"Where the devil else will he have to go?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell's eyes dropped toward the gardens, across which desultory
+knots of people were straggling back from the ended tennis-match. "Ah,
+here they all come," she said, rising with a half-sigh; and as she stood
+watching the advance of the brightly-tinted groups she added slowly:
+"It's ingenious--but you don't understand him."
+
+Mr. Langhope stroked his moustache. "Perhaps not," he assented
+thoughtfully. "But suppose we go in before they join us? I want to show
+you a set of Ming I picked up the other day for Bessy. I flatter myself
+I _do_ understand Ming."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+JUSTINE BRENT, her household duties discharged, had gone upstairs to her
+room, a little turret chamber projecting above the wide terrace below,
+from which the sounds of lively intercourse now rose increasingly to her
+window.
+
+Bessy, she knew, would have preferred to have her remain with the party
+from whom these evidences of gaiety proceeded. Mrs. Amherst had grown to
+depend on her friend's nearness. She liked to feel that Justine's quick
+hand and eye were always in waiting on her impulses, prompt to interpret
+and execute them without any exertion of her own. Bessy combined great
+zeal in the pursuit of sport--a tireless passion for the saddle, the
+golf-course, the tennis-court--with an almost oriental inertia within
+doors, an indolence of body and brain that made her shrink from the
+active obligations of hospitality, though she had grown to depend more
+and more on the distractions of a crowded house.
+
+But Justine, though grateful, and anxious to show her gratitude, was
+unwilling to add to her other duties that of joining in the amusements
+of the house-party. She made no pretense of effacing herself when she
+thought her presence might be useful--but, even if she had cared for the
+diversions in favour at Lynbrook, a certain unavowed pride would have
+kept her from participating in them on the same footing with Bessy's
+guests. She was not in the least ashamed of her position in the
+household, but she chose that every one else should be aware of it, that
+she should not for an instant be taken for one of the nomadic damsels
+who form the camp-followers of the great army of pleasure. Yet even on
+this point her sensitiveness was not exaggerated. Adversity has a deft
+hand at gathering loose strands of impulse into character, and Justine's
+early contact with different phases of experience had given her a fairly
+clear view of life in the round, what might be called a sound working
+topography of its relative heights and depths. She was not seriously
+afraid of being taken for anything but what she really was, and still
+less did she fear to become, by force of propinquity and suggestion, the
+kind of being for whom she might be temporarily taken.
+
+When, at Bessy's summons, she had joined the latter at her camp in the
+Adirondacks, the transition from a fatiguing "case" at Hanaford to a
+life in which sylvan freedom was artfully blent with the most studied
+personal luxury, had come as a delicious refreshment to body and brain.
+She was weary, for the moment, of ugliness, pain and hard work, and life
+seemed to recover its meaning under the aspect of a graceful leisure.
+Lynbrook also, whither she had been persuaded to go with Bessy at the
+end of their woodland cure, had at first amused and interested her. The
+big house on its spreading terraces, with windows looking over bright
+gardens to the hazy distances of the plains, seemed a haven of harmless
+ease and gaiety. Justine was sensitive to the finer graces of luxurious
+living, to the warm lights on old pictures and bronzes, the soft
+mingling of tints in faded rugs and panellings of time-warmed oak. And
+the existence to which this background formed a setting seemed at first
+to have the same decorative qualities. It was pleasant, for once, to be
+among people whose chief business was to look well and take life
+lightly, and Justine's own buoyancy of nature won her immediate access
+among the amiable persons who peopled Bessy's week-end parties. If they
+had only abounded a little more in their own line she might have
+succumbed to their spell. But it seemed to her that they missed the
+poetry of their situation, transacting their pleasures with the dreary
+method and shortness of view of a race tethered to the ledger. Even the
+verbal flexibility which had made her feel that she was in a world of
+freer ideas, soon revealed itself as a form of flight from them, in
+which the race was distinctly to the swift; and Justine's phase of
+passive enjoyment passed with the return of her physical and mental
+activity. She was a creature tingling with energy, a little fleeting
+particle of the power that moves the sun and the other stars, and the
+deadening influences of the life at Lynbrook roused these tendencies to
+greater intensity, as a suffocated person will suddenly develop abnormal
+strength in the struggle for air.
+
+She did not, indeed, regret having come. She was glad to be with Bessy,
+partly because of the childish friendship which had left such deep
+traces in her lonely heart, and partly because what she had seen of her
+friend's situation stirred in her all the impulses of sympathy and
+service; but the idea of continuing in such a life, of sinking into any
+of the positions of semi-dependence that an adroit and handsome girl may
+create for herself in a fashionable woman's train--this possibility
+never presented itself to Justine till Mrs. Ansell, that afternoon, had
+put it into words. And to hear it was to revolt from it with all the
+strength of her inmost nature. The thought of the future troubled her,
+not so much materially--for she had a light bird-like trust in the
+morrow's fare--but because her own tendencies seemed to have grown less
+clear, because she could not rest in them for guidance as she had once
+done. The renewal of bodily activity had not brought back her faith in
+her calling: her work had lost the light of consecration. She no longer
+felt herself predestined to nurse the sick for the rest of her life, and
+in her inexperience she reproached herself with this instability. Youth
+and womanhood were in fact crying out in her for their individual
+satisfaction; but instincts as deep-seated protected her from even a
+momentary illusion as to the nature of this demand. She wanted
+happiness, and a life of her own, as passionately as young
+flesh-and-blood had ever wanted them; but they must come bathed in the
+light of imagination and penetrated by the sense of larger affinities.
+She could not conceive of shutting herself into a little citadel of
+personal well-being while the great tides of existence rolled on
+unheeded outside. Whether they swept treasure to her feet, or strewed
+her life with wreckage, she felt, even now; that her place was there, on
+the banks, in sound and sight of the great current; and just in
+proportion as the scheme of life at Lynbrook succeeded in shutting out
+all sense of that vaster human consciousness, so did its voice speak
+more thrillingly within her.
+
+Somewhere, she felt--but, alas! still out of reach--was the life she
+longed for, a life in which high chances of doing should be mated with
+the finer forms of enjoying. But what title had she to a share in such
+an existence? Why, none but her sense of what it was worth--and what did
+that count for, in a world which used all its resources to barricade
+itself against all its opportunities? She knew there were girls who
+sought, by what is called a "good" marriage, an escape into the outer
+world, of doing and thinking--utilizing an empty brain and full pocket
+as the key to these envied fields. Some such chance the life at Lynbrook
+seemed likely enough to offer--one is not, at Justine's age and with her
+penetration, any more blind to the poise of one's head than to the turn
+of one's ideas; but here the subtler obstacles of taste and pride
+intervened. Not even Bessy's transparent manoeuvrings, her tender
+solicitude for her friend's happiness, could for a moment weaken
+Justine's resistance. If she must marry without love--and this was
+growing conceivable to her--she must at least merge her craving for
+personal happiness in some view of life in harmony with hers.
+
+A tap on her door interrupted these musings, to one aspect of which
+Bessy Amherst's entrance seemed suddenly to give visible expression.
+
+"Why did you run off, Justine? You promised to be down-stairs when I
+came back from tennis."
+
+"_Till_ you came back--wasn't it, dear?" Justine corrected with a smile,
+pushing her arm-chair forward as Bessy continued to linger irresolutely
+in the doorway. "I saw that there was a fresh supply of tea in the
+drawing-room, and I knew you would be there before the omnibus came from
+the station."
+
+"Oh, I was there--but everybody was asking for you----"
+
+"Everybody?" Justine gave a mocking lift to her dark eyebrows.
+
+"Well--Westy Gaines, at any rate; the moment he set foot in the house!"
+Bessy declared with a laugh as she dropped into the arm-chair.
+
+Justine echoed the laugh, but offered no comment on the statement which
+accompanied it, and for a moment both women were silent, Bessy tilting
+her pretty discontented head against the back of the chair, so that her
+eyes were on a level with those of her friend, who leaned near her in
+the embrasure of the window.
+
+"I can't understand you, Justine. You know well enough what he's come
+back for."
+
+"In order to dazzle Hanaford with the fact that he has been staying at
+Lynbrook!"
+
+"Nonsense--the novelty of that has worn off. He's been here three times
+since we came back."
+
+"You are admirably hospitable to your family----"
+
+Bessy let her pretty ringed hands fall with a discouraged gesture. "Why
+do you find him so much worse than--than other people?"
+
+Justine's eye-brows rose again. "In the same capacity? You speak as if I
+had boundless opportunities of comparison."
+
+"Well, you've Dr. Wyant!" Mrs. Amherst suddenly flung back at her.
+
+Justine coloured under the unexpected thrust, but met her friend's eyes
+steadily. "As an alternative to Westy? Well, if I were on a desert
+island--but I'm not!" she concluded with a careless laugh.
+
+Bessy frowned and sighed. "You can't mean that, of the two--?" She
+paused and then went on doubtfully: "It's because he's cleverer?"
+
+"Dr. Wyant?" Justine smiled. "It's not making an enormous claim for
+him!"
+
+"Oh, I know Westy's not brilliant; but stupid men are not always the
+hardest to live with." She sighed again, and turned on Justine a glance
+charged with conjugal experience.
+
+Justine had sunk into the window-seat, her thin hands clasping her knee,
+in the attitude habitual to her meditative moments. "Perhaps not," she
+assented; "but I don't know that I should care for a man who made life
+easy; I should want some one who made it interesting."
+
+Bessy met this with a pitying exclamation. "Don't imagine you invented
+that! Every girl thinks it. Afterwards she finds out that it's much
+pleasanter to be thought interesting herself."
+
+She spoke with a bitterness that issued strangely from her lips. It was
+this bitterness which gave her soft personality the sharp edge that
+Justine had felt in it on the day of their meeting at Hanaford.
+
+The girl, at first, had tried to defend herself from these
+scarcely-veiled confidences, distasteful enough in themselves, and
+placing her, if she listened, in an attitude of implied disloyalty to
+the man under whose roof they were spoken. But a precocious experience
+of life had taught her that emotions too strong for the nature
+containing them turn, by some law of spiritual chemistry, into a
+rankling poison; and she had therefore resigned herself to serving as a
+kind of outlet for Bessy's pent-up discontent. It was not that her
+friend's grievance appealed to her personal sympathies; she had learned
+enough of the situation to give her moral assent unreservedly to the
+other side. But it was characteristic of Justine that where she
+sympathized least she sometimes pitied most. Like all quick spirits she
+was often intolerant of dulness; yet when the intolerance passed it left
+a residue of compassion for the very incapacity at which she chafed. It
+seemed to her that the tragic crises in wedded life usually turned on
+the stupidity of one of the two concerned; and of the two victims of
+such a catastrophe she felt most for the one whose limitations had
+probably brought it about. After all, there could be no imprisonment as
+cruel as that of being bounded by a hard small nature. Not to be
+penetrable at all points to the shifting lights, the wandering music of
+the world--she could imagine no physical disability as cramping as that.
+How the little parched soul, in solitary confinement for life, must pine
+and dwindle in its blind cranny of self-love!
+
+To be one's self wide open to the currents of life does not always
+contribute to an understanding of narrower natures; but in Justine the
+personal emotions were enriched and deepened by a sense of participation
+in all that the world about her was doing, suffering and enjoying; and
+this sense found expression in the instinct of ministry and solace. She
+was by nature a redresser, a restorer; and in her work, as she had once
+told Amherst, the longing to help and direct, to hasten on by personal
+intervention time's slow and clumsy processes, had often been in
+conflict with the restrictions imposed by her profession. But she had no
+idle desire to probe the depths of other lives; and where there seemed
+no hope of serving she shrank from fruitless confidences. She was
+beginning to feel this to be the case with Bessy Amherst. To touch the
+rock was not enough, if there were but a few drops within it; yet in
+this barrenness lay the pathos of the situation--and after all, may not
+the scanty spring be fed from a fuller current?
+
+"I'm not sure about that," she said, answering her friend's last words
+after a deep pause of deliberation. "I mean about its being so pleasant
+to be found interesting. I'm sure the passive part is always the dull
+one: life has been a great deal more thrilling since we found out that
+we revolved about the sun, instead of sitting still and fancying that
+all the planets were dancing attendance on us. After all, they were
+_not_; and it's rather humiliating to think how the morning stars must
+have laughed together about it!"
+
+There was no self-complacency in Justine's eagerness to help. It was far
+easier for her to express it in action than in counsel, to grope for the
+path with her friend than to point the way to it; and when she had to
+speak she took refuge in figures to escape the pedantry of appearing to
+advise. But it was not only to Mrs. Dressel that her parables were dark,
+and the blank look in Bessy's eyes soon snatched her down from the
+height of metaphor.
+
+"I mean," she continued with a smile, "that, as human nature is
+constituted, it has got to find its real self--the self to be interested
+in--outside of what we conventionally call 'self': the particular
+Justine or Bessy who is clamouring for her particular morsel of life.
+You see, self isn't a thing one can keep in a box--bits of it keep
+escaping, and flying off to lodge in all sorts of unexpected crannies;
+we come across scraps of ourselves in the most unlikely places--as I
+believe you would in Westmore, if you'd only go back there and look for
+them!"
+
+Bessy's lip trembled and the colour sprang to her face; but she answered
+with a flash of irritation: "Why doesn't _he_ look for me there,
+then--if he still wants to find me?"
+
+"Ah--it's for him to look here--to find himself _here_," Justine
+murmured.
+
+"Well, he never comes here! That's his answer."
+
+"He will--he will! Only, when he does, let him find you."
+
+"Find me? I don't understand. How can he, when he never sees me? I'm no
+more to him than the carpet on the floor!"
+
+Justine smiled again. "Well--be that then! The thing is to _be_."
+
+"Under his feet? Thank you! Is that what you mean to marry for? It's not
+what husbands admire in one, you know!"
+
+"No." Justine stood up with a sense of stealing discouragement. "But I
+don't think I want to be admired----"
+
+"Ah, that's because you know you are!" broke from the depths of the
+other's bitterness.
+
+The tone smote Justine, and she dropped into the seat at her friend's
+side, silently laying a hand on Bessy's feverishly-clasped fingers.
+
+"Oh, don't let us talk about me," complained the latter, from whose lips
+the subject was never long absent. "And you mustn't think I _want_ you
+to marry, Justine; not for myself, I mean--I'd so much rather keep you
+here. I feel much less lonely when you're with me. But you say you won't
+stay--and it's too dreadful to think of your going back to that dreary
+hospital."
+
+"But you know the hospital's not dreary to me," Justine interposed;
+"it's the most interesting place I've ever known."
+
+Mrs. Amherst smiled indulgently on this extravagance. "A great many
+people go through the craze for philanthropy--" she began in the tone of
+mature experience; but Justine interrupted her with a laugh.
+
+"Philanthropy? I'm not philanthropic. I don't think I ever felt inclined
+to do good in the abstract--any more than to do ill! I can't remember
+that I ever planned out a course of conduct in my life. It's only," she
+went on, with a puzzled frown, as if honestly trying to analyze her
+motives, "it's only that I'm so fatally interested in people that before
+I know it I've slipped into their skins; and then, of course, if
+anything goes wrong with them, it's just as if it had gone wrong with
+me; and I can't help trying to rescue myself from _their_ troubles! I
+suppose it's what you'd call meddling--and so should I, if I could only
+remember that the other people were not myself!"
+
+Bessy received this with the mild tolerance of superior wisdom. Once
+safe on the tried ground of traditional authority, she always felt
+herself Justine's superior. "That's all very well now--you see the
+romantic side of it," she said, as if humouring her friend's vagaries.
+"But in time you'll want something else; you'll want a husband and
+children--a life of your own. And then you'll have to be more practical.
+It's ridiculous to pretend that comfort and money don't make a
+difference. And if you married a rich man, just think what a lot of good
+you could do! Westy will be very well off--and I'm sure he'd let you
+endow hospitals and things. Think how interesting it would be to build a
+ward in the very hospital where you'd been a nurse! I read something
+like that in a novel the other day--it was beautifully described. All
+the nurses and doctors that the heroine had worked with were there to
+receive her...and her little boy went about and gave toys to the
+crippled children...."
+
+If the speaker's concluding instance hardly produced the effect she had
+intended, it was perhaps only because Justine's attention had been
+arrested by the earlier part of the argument. It was strange to have
+marriage urged on her by a woman who had twice failed to find happiness
+in it--strange, and yet how vivid a sign that, even to a nature absorbed
+in its personal demands, not happiness but completeness is the inmost
+craving! "A life of your own"--that was what even Bessy, in her obscure
+way, felt to be best worth suffering for. And how was a spirit like
+Justine's, thrilling with youth and sympathy, to conceive of an isolated
+existence as the final answer to that craving? A life circumscribed by
+one's own poor personal consciousness would not be life at all--far
+better the "adventure of the diver" than the shivering alone on the
+bank! Bessy, reading encouragement in her silence, returned her
+hand-clasp with an affectionate pressure.
+
+"You _would_ like that, Justine?" she said, secretly proud of having hit
+on the convincing argument.
+
+"To endow hospitals with your cousin's money? No; I should want
+something much more exciting!"
+
+Bessy's face kindled. "You mean travelling abroad--and I suppose New
+York in winter?"
+
+Justine broke into a laugh. "I was thinking of your cousin himself when
+I spoke." And to Bessy's disappointed cry--"Then it _is_ Dr. Wyant,
+after all?" she answered lightly, and without resenting the challenge:
+"I don't know. Suppose we leave it to the oracle."
+
+"The oracle?"
+
+"Time. His question-and-answer department is generally the most reliable
+in the long run." She started up, gently drawing Bessy to her feet. "And
+just at present he reminds me that it's nearly six, and that you
+promised Cicely to go and see her before you dress for dinner."
+
+Bessy rose obediently. "Does he remind you of _your_ promises too? You
+said you'd come down to dinner tonight."
+
+"Did I?" Justine hesitated. "Well, I'm coming," she said, smiling and
+kissing her friend.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+WHEN the door closed on Mrs. Amherst a resolve which had taken shape in
+Justine's mind during their talk together made her seat herself at her
+writing-table, where, after a moment's musing over her suspended pen,
+she wrote and addressed a hurried note. This business despatched, she
+put on her hat and jacket, and letter in hand passed down the corridor
+from her room, and descended to the entrance-hall below. She might have
+consigned her missive to the post-box which conspicuously tendered its
+services from a table near the door; but to do so would delay the
+letter's despatch till morning, and she felt a sudden impatience to see
+it start.
+
+The tumult on the terrace had transferred itself within doors, and as
+Justine went down the stairs she heard the click of cues from the
+billiard-room, the talk and laughter of belated bridge-players, the
+movement of servants gathering up tea-cups and mending fires. She had
+hoped to find the hall empty, but the sight of Westy Gaines's figure
+looming watchfully on the threshold of the smoking-room gave her, at the
+last bend of the stairs, a little start of annoyance. He would want to
+know where she was going, he would offer to go with her, and it would
+take some time and not a little emphasis to make him understand that his
+society was not desired.
+
+This was the thought that flashed through Justine's mind as she reached
+the landing; but the next moment it gave way to a contradictory feeling.
+Westy Gaines was not alone in the hall. From under the stairway rose the
+voices of a group ensconced in that popular retreat about a chess-board;
+and as Justine reached the last turn of the stairs she perceived that
+Mason Winch, an earnest youth with advanced views on political economy,
+was engaged, to the diversion of a circle of spectators, in teaching the
+Telfer girls chess. The futility of trying to fix the spasmodic
+attention of this effervescent couple, and their instructor's grave
+unconsciousness of the fact, constituted, for the lookers-on, the
+peculiar diversion of the scene. It was of course inevitable that young
+Winch, on his arrival at Lynbrook, should have succumbed at once to the
+tumultuous charms of the Telfer manner, which was equally attractive to
+inarticulate youth and to tired and talked-out middle-age; but that he
+should have perceived no resistance in their minds to the deliberative
+processes of the game of chess, was, even to the Telfers themselves, a
+source of unmitigated gaiety. Nothing seemed to them funnier than that
+any one should credit them with any mental capacity; and they had
+inexhaustibly amusing ways of drawing out and showing off each other's
+ignorance.
+
+It was on this scene that Westy's appreciative eyes had been fixed till
+Justine's appearance drew them to herself. He pronounced her name
+joyfully, and moved forward to greet her; but as their hands met she
+understood that he did not mean to press his company upon her. Under the
+eye of the Lynbrook circle he was chary of marked demonstrations, and
+even Mrs. Amherst's approval could not, at such moments, bridge over the
+gap between himself and the object of his attentions. A Gaines was a
+Gaines in the last analysis, and apart from any pleasing accident of
+personality; but what was Miss Brent but the transient vehicle of those
+graces which Providence has provided for the delectation of the
+privileged sex?
+
+These influences were visible in the temperate warmth of Westy's manner,
+and in his way of keeping a backward eye on the mute interchange of
+comment about the chess-board. At another time his embarrassment would
+have amused Justine; but the feelings stirred by her talk with Bessy had
+not subsided, and she recognized with a sting of mortification the
+resemblance between her view of the Lynbrook set and its estimate of
+herself. If Bessy's friends were negligible to her she was almost
+non-existent to them; and, as against herself, they were overwhelmingly
+provided with tangible means of proving their case.
+
+Such considerations, at a given moment, may prevail decisively even with
+a nature armed against them by insight and irony; and the mere fact that
+Westy Gaines did not mean to join her, and that he was withheld from
+doing so by the invisible pressure of the Lynbrook standards, had the
+effect of precipitating Justine's floating intentions.
+
+If anything farther had been needed to hasten this result, it would have
+been accomplished by the sound of footsteps which, over-taking her a
+dozen yards from the house, announced her admirer's impetuous if tardy
+pursuit. The act of dismissing him, though it took but a word and was
+effected with a laugh, left her pride quivering with a hurt the more
+painful because she would not acknowledge it. That she should waste a
+moment's resentment on the conduct of a person so unimportant as poor
+Westy, showed her in a flash the intrinsic falseness of her position at
+Lynbrook. She saw that to disdain the life about her had not kept her
+intact from it; and the knowledge made her feel anew the need of some
+strong decentralizing influence, some purifying influx of emotion and
+activity.
+
+She had walked on quickly through the clear October twilight, which was
+still saturated with the after-glow of a vivid sunset; and a few minutes
+brought her to the village stretching along the turnpike beyond the
+Lynbrook gates. The new post-office dominated the row of shabby houses
+and "stores" set disjointedly under reddening maples, and its arched
+doorway formed the centre of Lynbrook's evening intercourse.
+
+Justine, hastening toward the knot of loungers on the threshold, had no
+consciousness of anything outside of her own thoughts; and as she
+mounted the steps she was surprised to see Dr. Wyant detach himself from
+the group and advance to meet her.
+
+"May I post your letter?" he asked, lifting his hat.
+
+His gesture uncovered the close-curling hair of a small
+delicately-finished head just saved from effeminacy by the vigorous jut
+of heavy eye-brows meeting above full grey eyes. The eyes again, at
+first sight, might have struck one as too expressive, or as expressing
+things too purely decorative for the purposes of a young country doctor
+with a growing practice; but this estimate was corrected by an
+unexpected abruptness in their owner's voice and manner. Perhaps the
+final impression produced on a close observer by Dr. Stephen Wyant would
+have been that the contradictory qualities of which he was compounded
+had not yet been brought into equilibrium by the hand of time.
+
+Justine, in reply to his question, had drawn back a step, slipping her
+letter into the breast of her jacket.
+
+"That is hardly worth while, since it was addressed to you," she
+answered with a slight smile as she turned to descend the post-office
+steps.
+
+Wyant, still carrying his hat, and walking with quick uneven steps,
+followed her in silence till they had passed beyond earshot of the
+loiterers on the threshold; then, in the shade of the maple boughs, he
+pulled up and faced her.
+
+"You've written to say that I may come tomorrow?"
+
+Justine hesitated. "Yes," she said at length.
+
+"Good God! You give royally!" he broke out, pushing his hand with a
+nervous gesture through the thin dark curls on his forehead.
+
+Justine laughed, with a trace of nervousness in her own tone. "And you
+talk--well, imperially! Aren't you afraid to bankrupt the language?"
+
+"What do you mean?" he said, staring.
+
+"What do _you_ mean? I have merely said that I would see you
+tomorrow----"
+
+"Well," he retorted, "that's enough for my happiness!"
+
+She sounded her light laugh again. "I'm glad to know you're so easily
+pleased."
+
+"I'm not! But you couldn't have done a cruel thing without a struggle;
+and since you're ready to give me my answer tomorrow, I know it can't
+be a cruel one."
+
+They had begun to walk onward as they talked, but at this she halted.
+"Please don't take that tone. I dislike sentimentality!" she exclaimed,
+with a tinge of imperiousness that was a surprise to her own ears.
+
+It was not the first time in the course of her friendship with Stephen
+Wyant that she had been startled by this intervention of something
+within her that resisted and almost resented his homage. When they were
+apart, she was conscious only of the community of interests and
+sympathies that had first drawn them together. Why was it then--since
+his looks were of the kind generally thought to stand a suitor in good
+stead--that whenever they had met of late she had been subject to these
+rushes of obscure hostility, the half-physical, half-moral shrinking
+from some indefinable element in his nature against which she was
+constrained to defend herself by perpetual pleasantry and evasion?
+
+To Wyant, at any rate, the answer was not far to seek. His pale face
+reflected the disdain in hers as he returned ironically: "A thousand
+pardons; I know I'm not always in the key."
+
+"The key?"
+
+"I haven't yet acquired the Lynbrook tone. You must make allowances for
+my lack of opportunity."
+
+The retort on Justine's lips dropped to silence, as though his words
+had in fact brought an answer to her inward questioning. Could it be
+that he was right--that her shrinking from him was the result of an
+increased sensitiveness to faults of taste that she would once have
+despised herself for noticing? When she had first known him, in her work
+at St. Elizabeth's some three years earlier, his excesses of manner had
+seemed to her merely the boyish tokens of a richness of nature not yet
+controlled by experience. Though Wyant was somewhat older than herself
+there had always been an element of protection in her feeling for him,
+and it was perhaps this element which formed the real ground of her
+liking. It was, at any rate, uppermost as she returned, with a softened
+gleam of mockery: "Since you are so sure of my answer I hardly know why
+I should see you tomorrow."
+
+"You mean me to take it now?" he exclaimed.
+
+"I don't mean you to take it at all till it's given--above all not to
+take it for granted!"
+
+His jutting brows drew together again. "Ah, I can't split hairs with
+you. Won't you put me out of my misery?"
+
+She smiled, but not unkindly. "Do you want an anæsthetic?"
+
+"No--a clean cut with the knife!"
+
+"You forget that we're not allowed to despatch hopeless cases--more's
+the pity!"
+
+He flushed to the roots of his thin hair. "Hopeless cases? That's it,
+then--that's my answer?"
+
+They had reached the point where, at the farther edge of the straggling
+settlement, the tiled roof of the railway-station fronted the
+post-office cupola; and the shriek of a whistle now reminded Justine
+that the spot was not propitious to private talk. She halted a moment
+before speaking.
+
+"I have no answer to give you now but the one in my note--that I'll see
+you tomorrow."
+
+"But if you're sure of knowing tomorrow you must know now!"
+
+Their eyes met, his eloquently pleading, hers kind but still
+impenetrable. "If I knew now, you should know too. Please be content
+with that," she rejoined.
+
+"How can I be, when a day may make such a difference? When I know that
+every influence about you is fighting against me?"
+
+The words flashed a refracted light far down into the causes of her own
+uncertainty.
+
+"Ah," she said, drawing a little away from him, "I'm not so sure that I
+don't like a fight!"
+
+"Is that why you won't give in?" He moved toward her with a despairing
+gesture. "If I let you go now, you're lost to me!"
+
+She stood her ground, facing him with a quick lift of the head. "If you
+don't let me go I certainly am," she said; and he drew back, as if
+conscious of the uselessness of the struggle. His submission, as usual,
+had a disarming effect on her irritation, and she held out her hand.
+"Come tomorrow at three," she said, her voice and manner suddenly
+seeming to give back the hope she had withheld from him.
+
+He seized on her hand with an inarticulate murmur; but at the same
+moment a louder whistle and the thunder of an approaching train reminded
+her of the impossibility of prolonging the scene. She was ordinarily
+careless of appearances, but while she was Mrs. Amherst's guest she did
+not care to be seen romantically loitering through the twilight with
+Stephen Wyant; and she freed herself with a quick goodbye.
+
+He gave her a last look, hesitating and imploring; then, in obedience to
+her gesture, he turned away and strode off in the opposite direction.
+
+As soon as he had left her she began to retrace her steps toward
+Lynbrook House; but instead of traversing the whole length of the
+village she passed through a turnstile in the park fencing, taking a
+more circuitous but quieter way home.
+
+She walked on slowly through the dusk, wishing to give herself time to
+think over her conversation with Wyant. Now that she was alone again, it
+seemed to her that the part she had played had been both inconsistent
+and undignified. When she had written to Wyant that she would see him on
+the morrow she had done so with the clear understanding that she was to
+give, at that meeting, a definite answer to his offer of marriage; and
+during her talk with Bessy she had suddenly, and, as it seemed to her,
+irrevocably, decided that the answer should be favourable. From the
+first days of her acquaintance with Wyant she had appreciated his
+intelligence and had been stimulated by his zeal for his work. He had
+remained only six months at Saint Elizabeth's, and though his feeling
+for her had even then been manifest, it had been kept from expression by
+the restraint of their professional relation, and by her absorption in
+her duties. It was only when they had met again at Lynbrook that she had
+begun to feel a personal interest in him. His youthful promise seemed
+nearer fulfillment than she had once thought possible, and the contrast
+he presented to the young men in Bessy's train was really all in his
+favour. He had gained in strength and steadiness without losing his high
+flashes of enthusiasm; and though, even now, she was not in love with
+him, she began to feel that the union of their common interests might
+create a life full and useful enough to preclude the possibility of
+vague repinings. It would, at any rate, take her out of the stagnant
+circle of her present existence, and restore her to contact with the
+fruitful energies of life.
+
+All this had seemed quite clear when she wrote her letter; why, then,
+had she not made use of their chance encounter to give her answer,
+instead of capriciously postponing it? The act might have been that of a
+self-conscious girl in her teens; but neither inexperience nor coquetry
+had prompted it. She had merely yielded to the spirit of resistance that
+Wyant's presence had of late aroused in her; and the possibility that
+this resistance might be due to some sense of his social defects, his
+lack of measure and facility, was so humiliating that for a moment she
+stood still in the path, half-meaning to turn back and overtake him----
+
+As she paused she was surprised to hear a man's step behind her; and the
+thought that it might be Wyant's brought about another revulsion of
+feeling. What right had he to pursue her in this way, to dog her steps
+even into the Lynbrook grounds? She was sure that his persistent
+attentions had already attracted the notice of Bessy's visitors; and
+that he should thus force himself on her after her dismissal seemed
+suddenly to make their whole relation ridiculous.
+
+She turned about to rebuke him, and found herself face to face with John
+Amherst.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+AMHERST, on leaving the train at Lynbrook, had paused in doubt on the
+empty platform. His return was unexpected, and no carriage awaited him;
+but he caught the signal of the village cab-driver's ready whip.
+Amherst, however, felt a sudden desire to postpone the moment of
+arrival, and consigning his luggage to the cab he walked away toward the
+turnstile through which Justine had passed. In thus taking the longest
+way home he was yielding another point to his reluctance. He knew that
+at that hour his wife's visitors might still be assembled in the
+drawing-room, and he wished to avoid making his unannounced entrance
+among them.
+
+It was not till now that he felt the embarrassment of such an arrival.
+For some time past he had known that he ought to go back to Lynbrook,
+but he had not known how to tell Bessy that he was coming. Lack of habit
+made him inexpert in the art of easy transitions, and his inability to
+bridge over awkward gaps had often put him at a disadvantage with his
+wife and her friends. He had not yet learned the importance of observing
+the forms which made up the daily ceremonial of their lives, and at
+present there was just enough soreness between himself and Bessy to make
+such observances more difficult than usual.
+
+There had been no open estrangement, but peace had been preserved at the
+cost of a slowly accumulated tale of grievances on both sides. Since
+Amherst had won his point about the mills, the danger he had foreseen
+had been realized: his victory at Westmore had been a defeat at
+Lynbrook. It would be too crude to say that his wife had made him pay
+for her public concession by the private disregard of his wishes; and if
+something of this sort had actually resulted, his sense of fairness told
+him that it was merely the natural reaction of a soft nature against the
+momentary strain of self-denial. At first he had been hardly aware of
+this consequence of his triumph. The joy of being able to work his will
+at Westmore obscured all lesser emotions; and his sentiment for Bessy
+had long since shrunk into one of those shallow pools of feeling which a
+sudden tide might fill, but which could never again be the deep
+perennial spring from which his life was fed.
+
+The need of remaining continuously at Hanaford while the first changes
+were making had increased the strain of the situation. He had never
+expected that Bessy would stay there with him--had perhaps, at heart,
+hardly wished it--and her plan of going to the Adirondacks with Miss
+Brent seemed to him a satisfactory alternative to the European trip she
+had renounced. He felt as relieved as though some one had taken off his
+hands the task of amusing a restless child, and he let his wife go
+without suspecting that the moment might be a decisive one between them.
+But it had not occurred to Bessy that any one could regard six weeks in
+the Adirondacks as an adequate substitute for a summer abroad. She felt
+that her sacrifice deserved recognition, and personal devotion was the
+only form of recognition which could satisfy her. She had expected
+Amherst to join her at the camp, but he did not come; and when she went
+back to Long Island she did not stop to see him, though Hanaford lay in
+her way. At the moment of her return the work at the mills made it
+impossible for him to go to Lynbrook; and thus the weeks drifted on
+without their meeting.
+
+At last, urged by his mother, he had gone down to Long Island for a
+night; but though, on that occasion, he had announced his coming, he
+found the house full, and the whole party except Mr. Langhope in the act
+of starting off to a dinner in the neighbourhood. He was of course
+expected to go too, and Bessy appeared hurt when he declared that he was
+too tired and preferred to remain with Mr. Langhope; but she did not
+suggest staying at home herself, and drove off in a mood of exuberant
+gaiety. Amherst had been too busy all his life to know what intricacies
+of perversion a sentimental grievance may develop in an unoccupied mind,
+and he saw in Bessy's act only a sign of indifference. The next day she
+complained to him of money difficulties, as though surprised that her
+income had been suddenly cut down; and when he reminded her that she had
+consented of her own will to this temporary reduction, she burst into
+tears and accused him of caring only for Westmore.
+
+He went away exasperated by her inconsequence, and bills from Lynbrook
+continued to pour in on him. In the first days of their marriage, Bessy
+had put him in charge of her exchequer, and she was too indolent--and at
+heart perhaps too sensitive--to ask him to renounce the charge. It was
+clear to him, therefore, how little she was observing the spirit of
+their compact, and his mind was tormented by the anticipation of
+financial embarrassments. He wrote her a letter of gentle expostulation,
+but in her answer she ignored his remonstrance; and after that silence
+fell between them.
+
+The only way to break this silence was to return to Lynbrook; but now
+that he had come back, he did not know what step to take next. Something
+in the atmosphere of his wife's existence seemed to paralyze his
+will-power. When all about her spoke a language so different from his
+own, how could he hope to make himself heard? He knew that her family
+and her immediate friends--Mr. Langhope, the Gaineses, Mrs. Ansell and
+Mr. Tredegar--far from being means of communication, were so many
+sentinels ready to raise the drawbridge and drop the portcullis at his
+approach. They were all in league to stifle the incipient feelings he
+had roused in Bessy, to push her back into the deadening routine of her
+former life, and the only voice that might conceivably speak for him was
+Miss Brent's.
+
+The "case" which, unexpectedly presented to her by one of the Hope
+Hospital physicians, had detained Justine at Hanaford during the month
+of June, was the means of establishing a friendship between herself and
+Amherst. They did not meet often, or get to know each other very well;
+but he saw her occasionally at his mother's and at Mrs. Dressel's, and
+once he took her out to Westmore, to consult her about the emergency
+hospital which was to be included among the first improvements there.
+The expedition had been memorable to both; and when, some two weeks
+later, Bessy wrote suggesting that she should take Miss Brent to the
+Adirondacks, it seemed to Amherst that there was no one whom he would
+rather have his wife choose as her companion.
+
+He was much too busy at the time to cultivate or analyze his feeling for
+Miss Brent; he rested vaguely in the thought of her, as of the "nicest"
+girl he had ever met, and was frankly pleased when accident brought them
+together; but the seeds left in both their minds by these chance
+encounters had not yet begun to germinate.
+
+So unperceived had been their gradual growth in intimacy that it was a
+surprise to Amherst to find himself suddenly thinking of her as a means
+of communication with his wife; but the thought gave him such
+encouragement that, when he saw Justine in the path before him he went
+toward her with unusual eagerness.
+
+Justine, on her part, felt an equal pleasure. She knew that Bessy did
+not expect her husband, and that his prolonged absence had already been
+the cause of malicious comment at Lynbrook; and she caught at the hope
+that this sudden return might betoken a more favourable turn of affairs.
+
+"Oh, I am so glad to see you!" she exclaimed; and her tone had the
+effect of completing his reassurance, his happy sense that she would
+understand and help him.
+
+"I wanted to see you too," he began confusedly; then, conscious of the
+intimacy of the phrase, he added with a slight laugh: "The fact is, I'm
+a culprit looking for a peace-maker."
+
+"A culprit?"
+
+"I've been so tied down at the mills that I didn't know, till yesterday,
+just when I could break away; and in the hurry of leaving--" He paused
+again, checked by the impossibility of uttering, to the girl before him,
+the little conventional falsehoods which formed the small currency of
+Bessy's circle. Not that any scruple of probity restrained him: in
+trifling matters he recognized the usefulness of such counters in the
+social game; but when he was with Justine he always felt the obscure
+need of letting his real self be seen.
+
+"I was stupid enough not to telegraph," he said, "and I am afraid my
+wife will think me negligent: she often has to reproach me for my sins
+of omission, and this time I know they are many."
+
+The girl received this in silence, less from embarrassment than from
+surprise; for she had already guessed that it was as difficult for
+Amherst to touch, even lightly, on his private affairs, as it was
+instinctive with his wife to pour her grievances into any willing ear.
+Justine's first thought was one of gratification that he should have
+spoken, and of eagerness to facilitate the saying of whatever he wished
+to say; but before she could answer he went on hastily: "The fact is,
+Bessy does not know how complicated the work at Westmore is; and when I
+caught sight of you just now I was thinking that you are the only one of
+her friends who has any technical understanding of what I am trying to
+do, and who might consequently help her to see how hard it is for me to
+take my hand from the plough."
+
+Justine listened gravely, longing to cry out her comprehension and
+sympathy, but restrained by the sense that the moment was a critical
+one, where impulse must not be trusted too far. It was quite possible
+that a reaction of pride might cause Amherst to repent even so guarded
+an avowal; and if that happened, he might never forgive her for having
+encouraged him to speak. She looked up at him with a smile.
+
+"Why not tell Bessy yourself? Your understanding of the case is a good
+deal clearer than mine or any one else's."
+
+"Oh, Bessy is tired of hearing about it from me; and besides--" She
+detected a shade of disappointment in his tone, and was sorry she had
+said anything which might seem meant to discourage his confidence. It
+occurred to her also that she had been insincere in not telling him at
+once that she had already been let into the secret of his domestic
+differences: she felt the same craving as Amherst for absolute openness
+between them.
+
+"I know," she said, almost timidly, "that Bessy has not been quite
+content of late to have you give so much time to Westmore, and perhaps
+she herself thinks it is because the work there does not interest her;
+but I believe it is for a different reason."
+
+"What reason?" he asked with a look of surprise.
+
+"Because Westmore takes you from her; because she thinks you are happier
+there than at Lynbrook."
+
+The day had faded so rapidly that it was no longer possible for the
+speakers to see each other's faces, and it was easier for both to
+communicate through the veil of deepening obscurity.
+
+"But, good heavens, she might be there with me--she's as much needed
+there as I am!" Amherst exclaimed.
+
+"Yes; but you must remember that it's against all her habits--and
+against the point of view of every one about her--that she should lead
+that kind of life; and meanwhile----"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Meanwhile, isn't it expedient that you should, a little more, lead
+hers?"
+
+Always the same answer to his restless questioning! His mother's answer,
+the answer of Bessy and her friends. He had somehow hoped that the girl
+at his side would find a different solution to the problem, and his
+disappointment escaped in a bitter exclamation.
+
+"But Westmore is my life--hers too, if she knew it! I can't desert it
+now without being as false to her as to myself!"
+
+As he spoke, he was overcome once more by the hopelessness of trying to
+put his case clearly. How could Justine, for all her quickness and
+sympathy, understand a situation of which the deeper elements were
+necessarily unknown to her? The advice she gave him was natural enough,
+and on her lips it seemed not the counsel of a shallow expediency, but
+the plea of compassion and understanding. But she knew nothing of the
+long struggle for mutual adjustment which had culminated in this crisis
+between himself and his wife, and she could therefore not see that, if
+he yielded his point, and gave up his work at Westmore, the concession
+would mean not renewal but destruction. He felt that he should hate
+Bessy if he won her back at that price; and the violence of his feeling
+frightened him. It was, in truth, as he had said, his own life that he
+was fighting for. If he gave up Westmore he could not fall back on the
+futile activities of Lynbrook, and fate might yet have some lower
+alternative to offer. He could trust to his own strength and
+self-command while his energies had a normal outlet; but idleness and
+self-indulgence might work in him like a dangerous drug.
+
+Justine kept steadily to her point. "Westmore must be foremost to both
+of you in time; I don't see how either of you can escape that. But the
+realization of it must come to Bessy through _you_, and for that reason
+I think that you ought to be more patient--that you ought even to put
+the question aside for a time and enter a little more into her life
+while she is learning to understand yours." As she ended, it seemed to
+her that what she had said was trite and ineffectual, and yet that it
+might have passed the measure of discretion; and, torn between two
+doubts, she added hastily: "But you have done just that in coming back
+now--that is the real solution of the problem."
+
+While she spoke they passed out of the wood-path they had been
+following, and rounding a mass of shrubbery emerged on the lawn below
+the terraces. The long bulk of the house lay above them, dark against
+the lingering gleam of the west, with brightly-lit windows marking its
+irregular outline; and the sight produced in Amherst and Justine a vague
+sense of helplessness and constraint. It was impossible to speak with
+the same freedom, confronted by that substantial symbol of the accepted
+order, which seemed to glare down on them in massive disdain of their
+puny efforts to deflect the course of events: and Amherst, without
+reverting to her last words, asked after a moment if his wife had many
+guests.
+
+He listened in silence while Justine ran over the list of names--the
+Telfer girls and their brother, Mason Winch and Westy Gaines, a cluster
+of young bridge-playing couples, and, among the last arrivals, the
+Fenton Carburys and Ned Bowfort. The names were all familiar to
+Amherst--he knew they represented the flower of week-end fashion; but he
+did not remember having seen the Carburys among his wife's guests, and
+his mind paused on the name, seeking to regain some lost impression
+connected with it. But it evoked, like the others, merely the confused
+sense of stridency and unrest which he had brought away from his last
+Lynbrook visit; and this reminiscence made him ask Miss Brent, when her
+list was ended, if she did not think that so continuous a succession of
+visitors was too tiring for Bessy.
+
+"I sometimes think it tires her more than she knows; but I hope she can
+be persuaded to take better care of herself now that Mrs. Ansell has
+come back."
+
+Amherst halted abruptly. "Is Mrs. Ansell here?"
+
+"She arrived from Europe today."
+
+"And Mr. Langhope too, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes. He came from Newport about ten days ago."
+
+Amherst checked himself, conscious that his questions betrayed the fact
+that he and his wife no longer wrote to each other. The same thought
+appeared to strike Justine, and they walked across the lawn in silence,
+hastening their steps involuntarily, as though to escape the oppressive
+weight of the words which had passed between them. But Justine was
+unwilling that this fruitless sense of oppression should be the final
+outcome of their talk; and when they reached the upper terrace she
+paused and turned impulsively to Amherst. As she did so, the light from
+an uncurtained window fell on her face, which glowed with the inner
+brightness kindled in it by moments of strong feeling.
+
+"I am sure of one thing--Bessy will be very, very glad that you have
+come," she exclaimed.
+
+"Thank you," he answered.
+
+Their hands met mechanically, and she turned away and entered the house.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+BESSY had not seen her little girl that day, and filled with compunction
+by Justine's reminder, she hastened directly to the school-room.
+
+Of late, in certain moods, her maternal tenderness had been clouded by a
+sense of uneasiness in the child's presence, for Cicely was the argument
+most effectually used by Mr. Langhope and Mr. Tredegar in their efforts
+to check the triumph of Amherst's ideas. Bessy, still unable to form an
+independent opinion on the harassing question of the mills, continued to
+oscillate between the views of the contending parties, now regarding
+Cicely as an innocent victim and herself as an unnatural mother,
+sacrificing her child's prospects to further Amherst's enterprise, and
+now conscious of a vague animosity against the little girl, as the chief
+cause of the dissensions which had so soon clouded the skies of her
+second marriage. Then again, there were moments when Cicely's rosy bloom
+reminded her bitterly of the child she had lost--the son on whom her
+ambitions had been fixed. It seemed to her now that if their boy had
+lived she might have kept Amherst's love and have played a more
+important part in his life; and brooding on the tragedy of the child's
+sickly existence she resented the contrast of Cicely's brightness and
+vigour. The result was that in her treatment of her daughter she
+alternated between moments of exaggerated devotion and days of neglect,
+never long happy away from the little girl, yet restless and
+self-tormenting in her presence.
+
+After her talk with Justine she felt more than usually disturbed, as she
+always did when her unprofitable impulses of self-exposure had subsided.
+Bessy's mind was not made for introspection, and chance had burdened it
+with unintelligible problems. She felt herself the victim of
+circumstances to which her imagination attributed the deliberate malice
+that children ascribe to the furniture they run against in playing. This
+helped her to cultivate a sense of helpless injury and to disdain in
+advance the advice she was perpetually seeking. How absurd it was, for
+instance, to suppose that a girl could understand the feelings of a
+married woman! Justine's suggestion that she should humble herself still
+farther to Amherst merely left in Bessy's mind a rankling sense of being
+misunderstood and undervalued by those to whom she turned in her
+extremity, and she said to herself, in a phrase that sounded well in her
+own ears, that sooner or later every woman must learn to fight her
+battles alone.
+
+In this mood she entered the room where Cicely was at supper with her
+governess, and enveloped the child in a whirl of passionate caresses.
+But Cicely had inherited the soberer Westmore temper, and her mother's
+spasmodic endearments always had a repressive effect on her. She
+dutifully returned a small fraction of Bessy's kisses, and then, with an
+air of relief, addressed herself once more to her bread and marmalade.
+
+"You don't seem a bit glad to see me!" Bessy exclaimed, while the little
+governess made a nervous pretence of being greatly amused at this
+prodigious paradox, and Cicely, setting down her silver mug, asked
+judicially: "Why should I be gladder than other days? It isn't a
+birthday."
+
+This Cordelia-like answer cut Bessy to the quick. "You horrid child to
+say such a cruel thing when you know I love you better and better every
+minute! But you don't care for me any longer because Justine has taken
+you away from me!"
+
+This last charge had sprung into her mind in the act of uttering it, but
+now that it was spoken it instantly assumed the proportions of a fact,
+and seemed to furnish another justification for her wretchedness. Bessy
+was not naturally jealous, but her imagination was thrall to the spoken
+word, and it gave her a sudden incomprehensible relief to associate
+Justine with the obscure causes of her suffering.
+
+"I know she's cleverer than I am, and more amusing, and can tell you
+about plants and animals and things...and I daresay she tells you how
+tiresome and stupid I am...."
+
+She sprang up suddenly, abashed by Cicely's astonished gaze, and by the
+governess's tremulous attempt to continue to treat the scene as one of
+"Mamma's" most successful pleasantries.
+
+"Don't mind me--my head aches horribly. I think I'll rush off for a
+gallop on Impulse before dinner. Miss Dill, Cicely's nails are a
+sight--I suppose that comes of grubbing up wild-flowers."
+
+And with this parting shot at Justine's pursuits she swept out of the
+school-room, leaving pupil and teacher plunged in a stricken silence
+from which Cicely at length emerged to say, with the candour that Miss
+Dill dreaded more than any punishable offense: "Mother's prettiest--but
+I do like Justine the best."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was nearly dark when Bessy mounted the horse which had been hastily
+saddled in response to her order; but it was her habit to ride out alone
+at all hours, and of late nothing but a hard gallop had availed to quiet
+her nerves. Her craving for occupation had increased as her life became
+more dispersed and agitated, and the need to fill every hour drove her
+to excesses of bodily exertion, since other forms of activity were
+unknown to her.
+
+As she cantered along under the twilight sky, with a strong sea-breeze
+in her face, the rush of air and the effort of steadying her nervous
+thoroughbred filled her with a glow of bodily energy from which her
+thoughts emerged somewhat cleansed of their bitterness.
+
+She had been odious to poor little Cicely, for whom she now felt a
+sudden remorseful yearning which almost made her turn her horse's head
+homeward, that she might dash upstairs and do penance beside the child's
+bed. And that she should have accused Justine of taking Cicely from her!
+It frightened her to find herself thinking evil of Justine. Bessy, whose
+perceptions were keen enough in certain directions, knew that her second
+marriage had changed her relation to all her former circle of friends.
+Though they still rallied about her, keeping up the convenient habit of
+familiar intercourse, she had begun to be aware that their view of her
+had in it an element of criticism and compassion. She had once fancied
+that Amherst's good looks, and the other qualities she had seen in him,
+would immediately make him free of the charmed circle in which she
+moved; but she was discouraged by his disregard of his opportunities,
+and above all by the fundamental differences in his view of life. He was
+never common or ridiculous, but she saw that he would never acquire the
+small social facilities. He was fond of exercise, but it bored him to
+talk of it. The men's smoking-room anecdotes did not amuse him, he was
+unmoved by the fluctuations of the stock-market, he could not tell one
+card from another, and his perfunctory attempts at billiards had once
+caused Mr. Langhope to murmur, in his daughter's hearing: "Ah, that's
+the test--I always said so!"
+
+Thus debarred from what seemed to Bessy the chief points of contact with
+life, how could Amherst hope to impose himself on minds versed in these
+larger relations? As the sense of his social insufficiency grew on her,
+Bessy became more sensitive to that latent criticism of her marriage
+which--intolerable thought!--involved a judgment on herself. She was
+increasingly eager for the approval and applause of her little audience,
+yet increasingly distrustful of their sincerity, and more miserably
+persuaded that she and her husband were the butt of some of their most
+effective stories. She knew also that rumours of the disagreement about
+Westmore were abroad, and the suspicion that Amherst's conduct was the
+subject of unfriendly comment provoked in her a reaction of loyalty to
+his ideas....
+
+From this turmoil of conflicting influences only her friendship with
+Justine Brent remained secure. Though Justine's adaptability made it
+easy for her to fit into the Lynbrook life, Bessy knew that she stood as
+much outside of it as Amherst. She could never, for instance, be
+influenced by what Maria Ansell and the Gaineses and the Telfers
+thought. She had her own criteria of conduct, unintelligible to Bessy,
+but giving her an independence of mind on which her friend leaned in a
+kind of blind security. And that even her faith in Justine should
+suddenly be poisoned by a jealous thought seemed to prove that the
+consequences of her marriage were gradually infecting her whole life.
+Bessy could conceive of masculine devotion only as subservient to its
+divinity's least wish, and she argued that if Amherst had really loved
+her he could not so lightly have disturbed the foundations of her world.
+And so her tormented thoughts, perpetually circling on themselves,
+reverted once more to their central grievance--the failure of her
+marriage. If her own love had died out it would have been much
+simpler--she was surrounded by examples of the mutual evasion of a
+troublesome tie. There was Blanche Carbury, for instance, with whom she
+had lately struck up an absorbing friendship...it was perfectly clear
+that Blanche Carbury wondered how much more she was going to stand! But
+it was the torment of Bessy's situation that it involved a radical
+contradiction, that she still loved Amherst though she could not forgive
+him for having married her.
+
+Perhaps what she most suffered from was his too-prompt acceptance of the
+semi-estrangement between them. After nearly three years of marriage she
+had still to learn that it was Amherst's way to wrestle with the angel
+till dawn, and then to go about his other business. Her own mind could
+revolve in the same grievance as interminably as a squirrel in its
+wheel, and her husband's habit of casting off the accepted fact seemed
+to betoken poverty of feeling. If only he had striven a little harder to
+keep her--if, even now, he would come back to her, and make her feel
+that she was more to him than those wretched mills!
+
+When she turned her mare toward Lynbrook, the longing to see Amherst was
+again uppermost. He had not written for weeks--she had been obliged to
+tell Maria Ansell that she knew nothing of his plans, and it mortified
+her to think that every one was aware of his neglect. Yet, even now, if
+on reaching the house she should find a telegram to say that he was
+coming, the weight of loneliness would be lifted, and everything in life
+would seem different....
+
+Her high-strung mare, scenting the homeward road, and excited by the
+fantastic play of wayside lights and shadows, swept her along at a wild
+gallop with which the fevered rush of her thoughts kept pace, and when
+she reached the house she dropped from the saddle with aching wrists and
+brain benumbed.
+
+She entered by a side door, to avoid meeting any one, and ran upstairs
+at once, knowing that she had barely time to dress for dinner. As she
+opened the door of her sitting-room some one rose from the chair by the
+fire, and she stood still, facing her husband....
+
+It was the moment both had desired, yet when it came it found them
+tongue-tied and helpless.
+
+Bessy was the first to speak. "When did you get here? You never wrote me
+you were coming!"
+
+Amherst advanced toward her, holding out his hand. "No; you must forgive
+me. I have been very busy," he said.
+
+Always the same excuse! The same thrusting at her of the hateful fact
+that Westmore came first, and that she must put up with whatever was
+left of his time and thoughts!
+
+"You are always too busy to let me hear from you," she said coldly, and
+the hand which had sprung toward his fell back to her side.
+
+Even then, if he had only said frankly: "It was too difficult--I didn't
+know how," the note of truth would have reached and moved her; but he
+had striven for the tone of ease and self-restraint that was habitual
+among her friends, and as usual his attempt had been a failure.
+
+"I am sorry--I'm a bad hand at writing," he rejoined; and his evil
+genius prompted him to add: "I hope my coming is not inconvenient?"
+
+The colour rose to Bessy's face. "Of course not. But it must seem rather
+odd to our visitors that I should know so little of your plans."
+
+At this he humbled himself still farther. "I know I don't think enough
+about appearances--I'll try to do better the next time."
+
+Appearances! He spoke as if she had been reproaching him for a breach of
+etiquette...it never occurred to him that the cry came from her
+humiliated heart! The tide of warmth that always enveloped her in his
+presence was receding, and in its place a chill fluid seemed to creep up
+slowly to her throat and lips.
+
+In Amherst, meanwhile, the opposite process was taking place. His wife
+was still to him the most beautiful woman in the world, or rather,
+perhaps, the only woman to whose beauty his eyes had been opened. That
+beauty could never again penetrate to his heart, but it still touched
+his senses, not with passion but with a caressing kindliness, such as
+one might feel for the bright movements of a bird or a kitten. It seemed
+to plead with him not to ask of her more than she could give--to be
+content with the outward grace and not seek in it an inner meaning. He
+moved toward her again, and took her passive hands in his.
+
+"You look tired. Why do you ride so late?"
+
+"Oh, I just wanted to give Impulse a gallop. I hadn't time to take her
+out earlier, and if I let the grooms exercise her they'll spoil her
+mouth."
+
+Amherst frowned. "You ought not to ride that mare alone at night. She
+shies at everything after dark."
+
+"She's the only horse I care for--the others are all cows," she
+murmured, releasing her hands impatiently.
+
+"Well, you must take me with you the next time you ride her."
+
+She softened a little, in spite of herself. Riding was the only
+amusement he cared to share with her, and the thought of a long gallop
+across the plains at his side brought back the warmth to her veins.
+
+"Yes, we'll go tomorrow. How long do you mean to stay?" she asked,
+looking up at him eagerly.
+
+He was pleased that she should wish to know, yet the question
+embarrassed him, for it was necessary that he should be back at Westmore
+within three days, and he could not put her off with an evasion.
+
+Bessy saw his hesitation, and her colour rose again. "I only asked," she
+explained, "because there is to be a fancy ball at the Hunt Club on the
+twentieth, and I thought of giving a big dinner here first."
+
+Amherst did not understand that she too had her inarticulate moments,
+and that the allusion to the fancy ball was improvised to hide an
+eagerness to which he had been too slow in responding. He thought she
+had enquired about his plans only that he might not again interfere with
+the arrangements of her dinner-table. If that was all she cared about,
+it became suddenly easy to tell her that he could not stay, and he
+answered lightly: "Fancy balls are a little out of my line; but at any
+rate I shall have to be back at the mills the day after tomorrow."
+
+The disappointment brought a rush of bitterness to her lips. "The day
+after tomorrow? It seems hardly worth while to have come so far for two
+days!"
+
+"Oh, I don't mind the journey--and there are one or two matters I must
+consult you about."
+
+There could hardly have been a more ill-advised answer, but Amherst was
+reckless now. If she cared for his coming only that he might fill a
+place at a fancy-dress dinner, he would let her see that he had come
+only because he had to go through the form of submitting to her certain
+measures to be taken at Westmore.
+
+Bessy was beginning to feel the physical reaction of her struggle with
+the mare. The fatigue which at first had deadened her nerves now woke
+them to acuter sensibility, and an appealing word from her husband would
+have drawn her to his arms. But his answer seemed to drive all the blood
+back to her heart.
+
+"I don't see why you still go through the form of consulting me about
+Westmore, when you have always done just as you pleased there, without
+regard to me or Cicely."
+
+Amherst made no answer, silenced by the discouragement of hearing the
+same old grievance on her lips; and she too seemed struck, after she had
+spoken, by the unprofitableness of such retorts.
+
+"It doesn't matter--of course I'll do whatever you wish," she went on
+listlessly. "But I could have sent my signature, if that is all you came
+for----"
+
+"Thanks," said Amherst coldly. "I shall remember that the next time."
+
+They stood silent for a moment, he with his eyes fixed on her, she with
+averted head, twisting her riding-whip between her fingers; then she
+said suddenly: "We shall be late for dinner," and passing into her
+dressing-room she closed the door.
+
+Amherst roused himself as she disappeared.
+
+"Bessy!" he exclaimed, moving toward her; but as he approached the door
+he heard her maid's voice within, and turning away he went to his own
+room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bessy came down late to dinner, with vivid cheeks and an air of
+improvised ease; and the manner of her entrance, combined with her
+husband's unannounced arrival, produced in their observant guests the
+sense of latent complications. Mr. Langhope, though evidently unaware of
+his son-in-law's return till they greeted each other in the
+drawing-room, was too good a card-player to betray surprise, and Mrs.
+Ansell outdid herself in the delicate art of taking everything for
+granted; but these very dissimulations sharpened the perception of the
+other guests, whom long practice had rendered expert in interpreting
+such signs.
+
+Of all this Justine Brent was aware; and conscious also that, by every
+one but herself, the suspected estrangement between the Amhersts was
+regarded as turning merely on the question of money. To the greater
+number of persons present there was, in fact, no other conceivable
+source of conjugal discord, since every known complication could be
+adjusted by means of the universal lubricant. It was this unanimity of
+view which bound together in the compactness of a new feudalism the
+members of Bessy Amherst's world; which supplied them with their
+pass-words and social tests, and defended them securely against the
+insidious attack of ideas.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Genius of History, capriciously directing the antics of its
+marionettes, sometimes lets the drama languish through a series of
+unrelated episodes, and then, suddenly quickening the pace, packs into
+one scene the stuff of a dozen. The chance meeting of Amherst and
+Justine, seemingly of no significance to either, contained the germ of
+developments of which both had begun to be aware before the evening was
+over. Their short talk--the first really intimate exchange of words
+between them--had the effect of creating a sense of solidarity that grew
+apace in the atmosphere of the Lynbrook dinner-table.
+
+Justine was always reluctant to take part in Bessy's week-end dinners,
+but as she descended the stairs that evening she did not regret having
+promised to be present. She frankly wanted to see Amherst again--his
+tone, his view of life, reinforced her own convictions, restored her
+faith in the reality and importance of all that Lynbrook ignored and
+excluded. Her extreme sensitiveness to surrounding vibrations of thought
+and feeling told her, as she glanced at him between the flowers and
+candles of the long dinner-table, that he too was obscurely aware of the
+same effect; and it flashed across her that they were unconsciously
+drawn together by the fact that they were the only two strangers in the
+room. Every one else had the same standpoint, spoke the same language,
+drew on the same stock of allusions, used the same weights and measures
+in estimating persons and actions. Between Mr. Langhope's indolent
+acuteness of mind and the rudimentary processes of the rosy Telfers
+there was a difference of degree but not of kind. If Mr. Langhope viewed
+the spectacle more objectively, it was not because he had outlived the
+sense of its importance, but because years of experience had
+familiarized him with its minutest details; and this familiarity with
+the world he lived in had bred a profound contempt for any other.
+
+In no way could the points of contact between Amherst and Justine Brent
+have been more vividly brought out than by their tacit exclusion from
+the currents of opinion about them. Amherst, seated in unsmiling
+endurance at the foot of the table, between Mrs. Ansell, with her
+carefully-distributed affabilities, and Blanche Carbury, with her
+reckless hurling of conversational pebbles, seemed to Justine as much of
+a stranger as herself among the people to whom his marriage had
+introduced him. So strongly did she feel the sense of their common
+isolation that it was no surprise to her, when the men reappeared in the
+drawing-room after dinner, to have her host thread his way, between the
+unfolding bridge-tables, straight to the corner where she sat. Amherst's
+methods in the drawing-room were still as direct as in the cotton-mill.
+He always went up at once to the person he sought, without preliminary
+waste of tactics; and on this occasion Justine, without knowing what had
+passed between himself and Bessy, suspected from the appearance of both
+that their talk had resulted in increasing Amherst's desire to be with
+some one to whom he could speak freely and naturally on the subject
+nearest his heart.
+
+She began at once to question him about Westmore, and the change in his
+face showed that his work was still a refuge from all that made life
+disheartening and unintelligible. Whatever convictions had been thwarted
+or impaired in him, his faith in the importance of his task remained
+unshaken; and the firmness with which he held to it filled Justine with
+a sense of his strength. The feeling kindled her own desire to escape
+again into the world of deeds, yet by a sudden reaction it checked the
+growing inclination for Stephen Wyant that had resulted from her revolt
+against Lynbrook. Here was a man as careless as Wyant of the minor
+forms, yet her appreciation of him was not affected by the lack of
+adaptability that she accused herself of criticizing in her suitor. She
+began to see that it was not the sense of Wyant's social deficiencies
+that had held her back; and the discovery at once set free her judgment
+of him, enabling her to penetrate to the real causes of her reluctance.
+She understood now that the flaw she felt was far deeper than any defect
+of manner. It was the sense in him of something unstable and
+incalculable, something at once weak and violent, that was brought to
+light by the contrast of Amherst's quiet resolution. Here was a man whom
+no gusts of chance could deflect from his purpose; while she felt that
+the career to which Wyant had so ardently given himself would always be
+at the mercy of his passing emotions.
+
+As the distinction grew clearer, Justine trembled to think that she had
+so nearly pledged herself, without the excuse of love, to a man whose
+failings she could judge so lucidly.... But had she ever really thought
+of marrying Wyant? While she continued to talk with Amherst such a
+possibility became more and more remote, till she began to feel it was
+no more than a haunting dream. But her promise to see Wyant the next
+day reminded her of the nearness of her peril. How could she have played
+with her fate so lightly--she, who held her life so dear because she
+felt in it such untried powers of action and emotion? She continued to
+listen to Amherst's account of his work, with enough outward
+self-possession to place the right comment and put the right question,
+yet conscious only of the quiet strength she was absorbing from his
+presence, of the way in which his words, his voice, his mere nearness
+were slowly steadying and clarifying her will.
+
+In the smoking-room, after the ladies had gone upstairs, Amherst
+continued to acquit himself mechanically of his duties, against the
+incongruous back-ground of his predecessor's remarkable
+sporting-prints--for it was characteristic of his relation to Lynbrook
+that his life there was carried on in the setting of foils and
+boxing-gloves, firearms and racing-trophies, which had expressed Dick
+Westmore's ideals. Never very keenly alive to his material surroundings,
+and quite unconscious of the irony of this proximity, Amherst had come
+to accept his wife's guests as unquestioningly as their background, and
+with the same sense of their being an inevitable part of his new life.
+Their talk was no more intelligible to him than the red and yellow
+hieroglyphics of the racing-prints, and he smoked in silence while Mr.
+Langhope discoursed to Westy Gaines on the recent sale of Chinese
+porcelains at which he had been lucky enough to pick up the set of Ming
+for his daughter, and Mason Winch expounded to a group of languid
+listeners the essential dependence of the labouring-man on the
+prosperity of Wall Street. In a retired corner, Ned Bowfort was
+imparting facts of a more personal nature to a chosen following who
+hailed with suppressed enjoyment the murmured mention of proper names;
+and now and then Amherst found himself obliged to say to Fenton Carbury,
+who with one accord had been left on his hands, "Yes, I understand the
+flat-tread tire is best," or, "There's a good deal to be said for the
+low tension magneto----"
+
+But all the while his conscious thoughts were absorbed in the
+remembrance of his talk with Justine Brent. He had left his wife's
+presence in that state of moral lassitude when the strongest hopes droop
+under the infection of indifference and hostility, and the effort of
+attainment seems out of all proportion to the end in view; but as he
+listened to Justine all his energies sprang to life again. Here at last
+was some one who felt the urgency of his task: her every word and look
+confirmed her comment of the afternoon: "Westmore must be foremost to
+you both in time--I don't see how either of you can escape it."
+
+She saw it, as he did, to be the special outlet offered for the
+expression of what he was worth to the world; and with the knowledge
+that one other person recognized his call, it sounded again loudly in
+his heart. Yes, he would go on, patiently and persistently, conquering
+obstacles, suffering delay, enduring criticism--hardest of all, bearing
+with his wife's deepening indifference and distrust. Justine had said
+"Westmore must be foremost to you both," and he would prove that she was
+right--spite of the powers leagued against him he would win over Bessy
+in the end!
+
+Those observers who had been struck by the length and animation of Miss
+Brent's talk with her host--and among whom Mrs. Ansell and Westy Gaines
+were foremost--would hardly have believed how small a part her personal
+charms had played in attracting him. Amherst was still under the power
+of the other kind of beauty--the soft graces personifying the first
+triumph of sex in his heart--and Justine's dark slenderness could not at
+once dispel the milder image. He watched her with pleasure while she
+talked, but her face interested him only as the vehicle of her
+ideas--she looked as a girl must look who felt and thought as she did.
+He was aware that everything about her was quick and fine and supple,
+and that the muscles of character lay close to the surface of feeling;
+but the interpenetration of spirit and flesh that made her body seem
+like the bright projection of her mind left him unconscious of anything
+but the oneness of their thoughts.
+
+So these two, in their hour of doubt, poured strength into each other's
+hearts, each unconscious of what they gave, and of its hidden power of
+renewing their own purposes.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+IF Mr. Langhope had ever stooped to such facile triumphs as that summed
+up in the convenient "I told you so," he would have loosed the phrase on
+Mrs. Ansell in the course of a colloquy which these two, the next
+afternoon, were at some pains to defend from the incursions of the
+Lynbrook house-party.
+
+Mrs. Ansell was the kind of woman who could encircle herself with
+privacy on an excursion-boat and create a nook in an hotel drawing-room,
+but it taxed even her ingenuity to segregate herself from the Telfers.
+When the feat was accomplished, and it became evident that Mr. Langhope
+could yield himself securely to the joys of confidential discourse, he
+paused on the brink of disclosure to say: "It's as well I saved that
+Ming from the ruins."
+
+"What ruins?" she exclaimed, her startled look giving him the full
+benefit of the effect he was seeking to produce.
+
+He addressed himself deliberately to the selecting and lighting of a
+cigarette. "Truscomb is down and out--resigned, 'the wise it call.' And
+the alterations at Westmore are going to cost a great deal more than my
+experienced son-in-law expected. This is Westy's morning budget--he and
+Amherst had it out last night. I tell my poor girl that at least she'll
+lose nothing when the _bibelots_ I've bought for her go up the spout."
+
+Mrs. Ansell received this with a troubled countenance. "What has become
+of Bessy? I've not seen her since luncheon."
+
+"No. She and Blanche Carbury have motored over to dine with the Nick
+Ledgers at Islip."
+
+"Did you see her before she left?"
+
+"For a moment, but she said very little. Westy tells me that Amherst
+hints at leasing the New York house. One can understand that she's left
+speechless."
+
+Mrs. Ansell, at this, sat bolt upright. "The New York house?" But she
+broke off to add, with seeming irrelevance: "If you knew how I detest
+Blanche Carbury!"
+
+Mr. Langhope made a gesture of semi-acquiescence. "She is not the friend
+I should have chosen for Bessy--but we know that Providence makes use of
+strange instruments."
+
+"Providence and Blanche Carbury?" She stared at him. "Ah, you are
+profoundly corrupt!"
+
+"I have the coarse masculine habit of looking facts in the face.
+Woman-like, you prefer to make use of them privately, and cut them when
+you meet in public."
+
+"Blanche is not the kind of fact I should care to make use of under any
+circumstances whatever!"
+
+"No one asks you to. Simply regard her as a force of nature--let her
+alone, and don't put up too many lightning-rods."
+
+She raised her eyes to his face. "Do you really mean that you want Bessy
+to get a divorce?"
+
+"Your style is elliptical, dear Maria; but divorce does not frighten me
+very much. It has grown almost as painless as modern dentistry."
+
+"It's our odious insensibility that makes it so!"
+
+Mr. Langhope received this with the mildness of suspended judgment. "How
+else, then, do you propose that Bessy shall save what is left of her
+money?"
+
+"I would rather see her save what is left of her happiness. Bessy will
+never be happy in the new way."
+
+"What do you call the new way?"
+
+"Launching one's boat over a human body--or several, as the case may
+be!"
+
+"But don't you see that, as an expedient to bring this madman to
+reason----"
+
+"I've told you that you don't understand him!"
+
+Mr. Langhope turned on her with what would have been a show of temper in
+any one less provided with shades of manner. "Well, then, explain him,
+for God's sake!"
+
+"I might explain him by saying that she's still in love with him."
+
+"Ah, if you're still imprisoned in the old formulas!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell confronted him with a grave face. "Isn't that precisely what
+Bessy is? Isn't she one of the most harrowing victims of the plan of
+bringing up our girls in the double bondage of expediency and unreality,
+corrupting their bodies with luxury and their brains with sentiment, and
+leaving them to reconcile the two as best they can, or lose their souls
+in the attempt?"
+
+Mr. Langhope smiled. "I may observe that, with my poor child so early
+left alone to me, I supposed I was doing my best in committing her
+guidance to some of the most admirable women I know."
+
+"Of whom I was one--and not the least lamentable example of the system!
+Of course the only thing that saves us from their vengeance," Mrs.
+Ansell added, "is that so few of them ever stop to think...."
+
+"And yet, as I make out, it's precisely what you would have Bessy do!"
+
+"It's what neither you nor I can help her doing. You've given her just
+acuteness enough to question, without consecutiveness enough to explain.
+But if she must perish in the struggle--and I see no hope for her--"
+cried Mrs. Ansell, starting suddenly and dramatically to her feet, "at
+least let her perish defending her ideals and not denying them--even if
+she has to sell the New York house and all your china pots into the
+bargain!"
+
+Mr. Langhope, rising also, deprecatingly lifted his hands, "If that's
+what you call saving me from her vengeance--sending the crockery
+crashing round my ears!" And, as she turned away without any pretense of
+capping his pleasantry, he added, with a gleam of friendly malice: "I
+suppose you're going to the Hunt ball as Cassandra?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst, that morning, had sought out his wife with the definite resolve
+to efface the unhappy impression of their previous talk. He blamed
+himself for having been too easily repelled by her impatience. As the
+stronger of the two, with the power of a fixed purpose to sustain him,
+he should have allowed for the instability of her impulses, and above
+all for the automatic influences of habit.
+
+Knowing that she did not keep early hours he delayed till ten o'clock to
+present himself at her sitting-room door, but the maid who answered his
+knock informed him that Mrs. Amherst was not yet up.
+
+His reply that he would wait did not appear to hasten the leisurely
+process of her toilet, and he had the room to himself for a full
+half-hour. Many months had passed since he had spent so long a time in
+it, and though habitually unobservant of external details, he now found
+an outlet for his restlessness in mechanically noting the intimate
+appurtenances of Bessy's life. He was at first merely conscious of a
+soothing harmony of line and colour, extending from the blurred tints of
+the rug to the subdued gleam of light on old picture-frames and on the
+slender flanks of porcelain vases; but gradually he began to notice how
+every chair and screen and cushion, and even every trifling utensil on
+the inlaid writing-desk, had been chosen with reference to the whole
+composition, and to the minutest requirements of a fastidious leisure. A
+few months ago this studied setting, if he had thought of it at all,
+would have justified itself as expressing the pretty woman's natural
+affinity with pretty toys; but now it was the cost of it that struck
+him. He was beginning to learn from Bessy's bills that no commodity is
+taxed as high as beauty, and the beauty about him filled him with sudden
+repugnance, as the disguise of the evil influences that were separating
+his wife's life from his.
+
+But with her entrance he dismissed the thought, and tried to meet her as
+if nothing stood in the way of their full communion. Her hair, still wet
+from the bath, broke from its dryad-like knot in dusky rings and spirals
+threaded with gold, and from her loose flexible draperies, and her whole
+person as she moved, there came a scent of youth and morning freshness.
+Her beauty touched him, and made it easier for him to humble himself.
+
+"I was stupid and disagreeable last night. I can never say what I want
+when I have to count the minutes, and I've come back now for a quiet
+talk," he began.
+
+A shade of distrust passed over Bessy's face. "About business?" she
+asked, pausing a few feet away from him.
+
+"Don't let us give it that name!" He went up to her and drew her two
+hands into his. "You used to call it our work--won't you go back to that
+way of looking at it?"
+
+Her hands resisted his pressure. "I didn't know, then, that it was going
+to be the only thing you cared for----"
+
+But for her own sake he would not let her go on. "Some day I shall make
+you see how much my caring for it means my caring for you. But
+meanwhile," he urged, "won't you overcome your aversion to the subject,
+and bear with it as my work, if you no longer care to think of it as
+yours?"
+
+Bessy, freeing herself, sat down on the edge of the straight-backed
+chair near the desk, as though to mark the parenthetical nature of the
+interview.
+
+"I know you think me stupid--but wives are not usually expected to go
+into all the details of their husband's business. I have told you to do
+whatever you wish at Westmore, and I can't see why that is not enough."
+
+Amherst looked at her in surprise. Something in her quick mechanical
+utterance suggested that not only the thought but the actual words she
+spoke had been inspired, and he fancied he heard in them an echo of
+Blanche Carbury's tones. Though Bessy's intimacy with Mrs. Carbury was
+of such recent date, fragments of unheeded smoking-room gossip now
+recurred to confirm the vague antipathy which Amherst had felt for her
+the previous evening.
+
+"I know that, among your friends, wives are not expected to interest
+themselves in their husbands' work, and if the mills were mine I should
+try to conform to the custom, though I should always think it a pity
+that the questions that fill a man's thoughts should be ruled out of his
+talk with his wife; but as it is, I am only your representative at
+Westmore, and I don't see how we can help having the subject come up
+between us."
+
+Bessy remained silent, not as if acquiescing in his plea, but as though
+her own small stock of arguments had temporarily failed her; and he went
+on, enlarging on his theme with a careful avoidance of technical terms,
+and with the constant effort to keep the human and personal side of the
+question before her.
+
+She listened without comment, her eyes fixed on a little jewelled
+letter-opener which she had picked up from the writing-table, and which
+she continued to turn in her fingers while he spoke.
+
+The full development of Amherst's plans at Westmore, besides resulting,
+as he had foreseen, in Truscomb's resignation, and in Halford Gaines's
+outspoken resistance to the new policy, had necessitated a larger
+immediate outlay of capital than the first estimates demanded, and
+Amherst, in putting his case to Bessy, was prepared to have her meet it
+on the old ground of the disapproval of all her advisers. But when he
+had ended she merely said, without looking up from the toy in her hand:
+"I always expected that you would need a great deal more money than you
+thought."
+
+The comment touched him at his most vulnerable point. "But you see why?
+You understand how the work has gone on growing--?"
+
+His wife lifted her head to glance at him for a moment. "I am not sure
+that I understand," she said indifferently; "but if another loan is
+necessary, of course I will sign the note for it."
+
+The words checked his reply by bringing up, before he was prepared to
+deal with it, the other and more embarrassing aspect of the question. He
+had hoped to reawaken in Bessy some feeling for the urgency of his task
+before having to take up the subject of its cost; but her cold
+anticipation of his demands as part of a disagreeable business to be
+despatched and put out of mind, doubled the difficulty of what he had
+left to say; and it occurred to him that she had perhaps foreseen and
+reckoned on this result.
+
+He met her eyes gravely. "Another loan _is_ necessary; but if any proper
+provision is to be made for paying it back, your expenses will have to
+be cut down a good deal for the next few months."
+
+The blood leapt to Bessy's face. "My expenses? You seem to forget how
+much I've had to cut them down already."
+
+"The household bills certainly don't show it. They are increasing
+steadily, and there have been some very heavy incidental payments
+lately."
+
+"What do you mean by incidental payments?"
+
+"Well, there was the pair of cobs you bought last month----"
+
+She returned to a resigned contemplation of the letter-opener. "With
+only one motor, one must have more horses, of course."
+
+"The stables seemed to me fairly full before. But if you required more
+horses, I don't see why, at this particular moment, it was also
+necessary to buy a set of Chinese vases for twenty-five hundred
+dollars."
+
+Bessy, at this, lifted her head with an air of decision that surprised
+him. Her blush had faded as quickly as it came, and he noticed that she
+was pale to the lips.
+
+"I know you don't care about such things; but I had an exceptional
+chance of securing the vases at a low price--they are really worth
+twice as much--and Dick always wanted a set of Ming for the drawing-room
+mantelpiece."
+
+Richard Westmore's name was always tacitly avoided between them, for in
+Amherst's case the disagreeable sense of dependence on a dead man's
+bounty increased that feeling of obscure constraint and repugnance which
+any reminder of the first husband's existence is wont to produce in his
+successor.
+
+He reddened at the reply, and Bessy, profiting by an embarrassment which
+she had perhaps consciously provoked, went on hastily, and as if by
+rote: "I have left you perfectly free to do as you think best at the
+mills, but this perpetual discussion of my personal expenses is very
+unpleasant to me, as I am sure it must be to you, and in future I think
+it would be much better for us to have separate accounts."
+
+"Separate accounts?" Amherst echoed in genuine astonishment.
+
+"I should like my personal expenses to be under my own control again--I
+have never been used to accounting for every penny I spend."
+
+The vertical lines deepened between Amherst's brows. "You are of course
+free to spend your money as you like--and I thought you were doing so
+when you authorized me, last spring, to begin the changes at Westmore."
+
+Her lip trembled. "Do you reproach me for that? I didn't
+understand...you took advantage...."
+
+"Oh!" he exclaimed.
+
+At his tone the blood rushed back to her face. "It was my fault, of
+course--I only wanted to please you----"
+
+Amherst was silent, confronted by the sudden sense of his own
+responsibility. What she said was true--he had known, when he exacted
+the sacrifice, that she made it only to please him, on an impulse of
+reawakened feeling, and not from any real recognition of a larger duty.
+The perception of this made him answer gently: "I am willing to take any
+blame you think I deserve; but it won't help us now to go back to the
+past. It is more important that we should come to an understanding about
+the future. If by keeping your personal account separate, you mean that
+you wish to resume control of your whole income, then you ought to
+understand that the improvements at the mills will have to be dropped at
+once, and things there go back to their old state."
+
+She started up with an impatient gesture. "Oh, I should like never to
+hear of the mills again!"
+
+He looked at her a moment in silence. "Am I to take that as your
+answer?"
+
+She walked toward her door without returning his look. "Of course," she
+murmured, "you will end by doing as you please."
+
+The retort moved him, for he heard in it the cry of her wounded pride.
+He longed to be able to cry out in return that Westmore was nothing to
+him, that all he asked was to see her happy.... But it was not true, and
+his manhood revolted from the deception. Besides, its effect would be
+only temporary--would wear no better than her vain efforts to simulate
+an interest in his work. Between them, forever, were the insurmountable
+barriers of character, of education, of habit--and yet it was not in him
+to believe that any barrier was insurmountable.
+
+"Bessy," he exclaimed, following her, "don't let us part in this
+way----"
+
+She paused with her hand on her dressing-room door. "It is time to dress
+for church," she objected, turning to glance at the little gilt clock on
+the chimney-piece.
+
+"For church?" Amherst stared, wondering that at such a crisis she should
+have remained detached enough to take note of the hour.
+
+"You forget," she replied, with an air of gentle reproof, "that before
+we married I was in the habit of going to church every Sunday."
+
+"Yes--to be sure. Would you not like me to go with you?" he rejoined
+gently, as if roused to the consciousness of another omission in the
+long list of his social shortcomings; for church-going, at Lynbrook, had
+always struck him as a purely social observance.
+
+But Bessy had opened the door of her dressing-room. "I much prefer that
+you should do what you like," she said as she passed from the room.
+
+Amherst made no farther attempt to detain her, and the door closed on
+her as though it were closing on a chapter in their lives.
+
+"That's the end of it!" he murmured, picking up the letter-opener she
+had been playing with, and twirling it absently in his fingers. But
+nothing in life ever ends, and the next moment a new question confronted
+him--how was the next chapter to open?
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+IT was late in October when Amherst returned to Lynbrook.
+
+He had begun to learn, in the interval, the lesson most difficult to his
+direct and trenchant nature: that compromise is the law of married life.
+On the afternoon of his talk with his wife he had sought her out,
+determined to make a final effort to clear up the situation between
+them; but he learned that, immediately after luncheon, she had gone off
+in the motor with Mrs. Carbury and two men of the party, leaving word
+that they would probably not be back till evening. It cost Amherst a
+struggle, when he had humbled himself to receive this information from
+the butler, not to pack his portmanteau and take the first train for
+Hanaford; but he was still under the influence of Justine Brent's words,
+and also of his own feeling that, at this juncture, a break between
+himself and Bessy would be final.
+
+He stayed on accordingly, enduring as best he might the mute observation
+of the household, and the gentle irony of Mr. Langhope's attentions; and
+before he left Lynbrook, two days later, a provisional understanding had
+been reached.
+
+His wife proved more firm than he had foreseen in her resolve to regain
+control of her income, and the talk between them ended in reciprocal
+concessions, Bessy consenting to let the town house for the winter and
+remain at Lynbrook, while Amherst agreed to restrict his improvements at
+Westmore to such alterations as had already been begun, and to reduce
+the expenditure on these as much as possible. It was virtually the
+defeat of his policy, and he had to suffer the decent triumph of the
+Gaineses, as well as the bitterer pang of his foiled aspirations. In
+spite of the opposition of the directors, he had taken advantage of
+Truscomb's resignation to put Duplain at the head of the mills; but the
+new manager's outspoken disgust at the company's change of plan made it
+clear that he would not remain long at Westmore, and it was one of the
+miseries of Amherst's situation that he could not give the reasons for
+his defection, but must bear to figure in Duplain's terse vocabulary as
+a "quitter." The difficulty of finding a new manager expert enough to
+satisfy the directors, yet in sympathy with his own social theories,
+made Amherst fear that Duplain's withdrawal would open the way for
+Truscomb's reinstatement, an outcome on which he suspected Halford
+Gaines had always counted; and this possibility loomed before him as the
+final defeat of his hopes.
+
+Meanwhile the issues ahead had at least the merit of keeping him busy.
+The task of modifying and retrenching his plans contrasted drearily with
+the hopeful activity of the past months, but he had an iron capacity for
+hard work under adverse conditions, and the fact of being too busy for
+thought helped him to wear through the days. This pressure of work
+relieved him, at first, from too close consideration of his relation to
+Bessy. He had yielded up his dearest hopes at her wish, and for the
+moment his renunciation had set a chasm between them; but gradually he
+saw that, as he was patching together the ruins of his Westmore plans,
+so he must presently apply himself to the reconstruction of his married
+life.
+
+Before leaving Lynbrook he had had a last word with Miss Brent; not a
+word of confidence--for the same sense of reserve kept both from any
+explicit renewal of their moment's intimacy--but one of those exchanges
+of commonplace phrase that circumstances may be left to charge with
+special meaning. Justine had merely asked if he were really leaving and,
+on his assenting, had exclaimed quickly: "But you will come back soon?"
+
+"I shall certainly come back," he answered; and after a pause he added:
+"I shall find you here? You will remain at Lynbrook?"
+
+On her part also there was a shade of hesitation; then she said with a
+smile: "Yes, I shall stay."
+
+His look brightened. "And you'll write me if anything--if Bessy should
+not be well?"
+
+"I will write you," she promised; and a few weeks after his return to
+Hanaford he had, in fact, received a short note from her. Its ostensible
+purpose was to reassure him as to Bessy's health, which had certainly
+grown stronger since Dr. Wyant had persuaded her, at the close of the
+last house-party, to accord herself a period of quiet; but (the writer
+added) now that Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell had also left, the quiet
+was perhaps too complete, and Bessy's nerves were beginning to suffer
+from the reaction.
+
+Amherst had no difficulty in interpreting this brief communication. "I
+have succeeded in dispersing the people who are always keeping you and
+your wife apart; now is your chance: come and take it." That was what
+Miss Brent's letter meant; and his answer was a telegram to Bessy,
+announcing his return to Long Island.
+
+The step was not an easy one; but decisive action, however hard, was
+always easier to Amherst than the ensuing interval of readjustment. To
+come to Lynbrook had required a strong effort of will; but the effort of
+remaining there called into play less disciplined faculties.
+
+Amherst had always been used to doing things; now he had to resign
+himself to enduring a state of things. The material facilities of the
+life about him, the way in which the machinery of the great empty house
+ran on like some complex apparatus working in the void, increased the
+exasperation of his nerves. Dr. Wyant's suggestion--which Amherst
+suspected Justine of having prompted--that Mrs. Amherst should cancel
+her autumn engagements, and give herself up to a quiet outdoor life with
+her husband, seemed to present the very opportunity these two distracted
+spirits needed to find and repossess each other. But, though Amherst was
+grateful to Bessy for having dismissed her visitors--partly to please
+him, as he guessed--yet he found the routine of the establishment more
+oppressive than when the house was full. If he could have been alone
+with her in a quiet corner--the despised cottage at Westmore, even!--he
+fancied they might still have been brought together by restricted space
+and the familiar exigencies of life. All the primitive necessities which
+bind together, through their recurring daily wants, natures fated to
+find no higher point of union, had been carefully eliminated from the
+life at Lynbrook, where material needs were not only provided for but
+anticipated by a hidden mechanism that filled the house with the
+perpetual sense of invisible attendance. Though Amherst knew that he and
+Bessy could never meet in the region of great issues, he thought he
+might have regained the way to her heart, and found relief from his own
+inaction, in the small ministrations of daily life; but the next moment
+he smiled to picture Bessy in surroundings where the clocks were not
+wound of themselves and the doors did not fly open at her approach.
+Those thick-crowding cares and drudgeries which serve as merciful
+screens between so many discordant natures would have been as
+intolerable to her as was to Amherst the great glare of leisure in which
+he and she were now confronted.
+
+He saw that Bessy was in the state of propitiatory eagerness which
+always followed on her gaining a point in their long duel; and he could
+guess that she was tremulously anxious not only to make up to him, by
+all the arts she knew, for the sacrifice she had exacted, but also to
+conceal from every one the fact that, as Mr. Langhope bluntly put it, he
+had been "brought to terms." Amherst was touched by her efforts, and
+half-ashamed of his own inability to respond to them. But his mind,
+released from its normal preoccupations, had become a dangerous
+instrument of analysis and disintegration, and conditions which, a few
+months before, he might have accepted with the wholesome tolerance of
+the busy man, now pressed on him unendurably. He saw that he and his
+wife were really face to face for the first time since their marriage.
+Hitherto something had always intervened between them--first the spell
+of her grace and beauty, and the brief joy of her participation in his
+work; then the sorrow of their child's death, and after that the
+temporary exhilaration of carrying out his ideas at Westmore--but now
+that the last of these veils had been torn away they faced each other as
+strangers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The habit of keeping factory hours always drove Amherst forth long
+before his wife's day began, and in the course of one of his early
+tramps he met Miss Brent and Cicely setting out for a distant swamp
+where rumour had it that a rare native orchid might be found. Justine's
+sylvan tastes had developed in the little girl a passion for such
+pillaging expeditions, and Cicely, who had discovered that her
+step-father knew almost as much about birds and squirrels as Miss Brent
+did about flowers, was not to be appeased till Amherst had scrambled
+into the pony-cart, wedging his long legs between a fern-box and a
+lunch-basket, and balancing a Scotch terrier's telescopic body across
+his knees.
+
+The season was so mild that only one or two light windless frosts had
+singed the foliage of oaks and beeches, and gilded the roadsides with a
+smooth carpeting of maple leaves. The morning haze rose like smoke from
+burnt-out pyres of sumach and sugar-maple; a silver bloom lay on the
+furrows of the ploughed fields; and now and then, as they drove on, the
+wooded road showed at its end a tarnished disk of light, where sea and
+sky were merged.
+
+At length they left the road for a winding track through scrub-oaks and
+glossy thickets of mountain-laurel; the track died out at the foot of a
+wooded knoll, and clambering along its base they came upon the swamp.
+There it lay in charmed solitude, shut in by a tawny growth of larch and
+swamp-maple, its edges burnt out to smouldering shades of russet,
+ember-red and ashen-grey, while the quaking centre still preserved a
+jewel-like green, where hidden lanes of moisture wound between islets
+tufted with swamp-cranberry and with the charred browns of fern and wild
+rose and bay. Sodden earth and decaying branches gave forth a strange
+sweet odour, as of the aromatic essences embalming a dead summer; and
+the air charged with this scent was so still that the snapping of
+witch-hazel pods, the drop of a nut, the leap of a startled frog,
+pricked the silence with separate points of sound.
+
+The pony made fast, the terrier released, and fern-box and lunch-basket
+slung over Amherst's shoulder, the three explorers set forth on their
+journey. Amherst, as became his sex, went first; but after a few
+absent-minded plunges into the sedgy depths between the islets, he was
+ordered to relinquish his command and fall to the rear, where he might
+perform the humbler service of occasionally lifting Cicely over
+unspannable gulfs of moisture.
+
+Justine, leading the way, guided them across the treacherous surface as
+fearlessly as a king-fisher, lighting instinctively on every
+grass-tussock and submerged tree-stump of the uncertain path. Now and
+then she paused, her feet drawn close on their narrow perch, and her
+slender body swaying over as she reached down for some rare growth
+detected among the withered reeds and grasses; then she would right
+herself again by a backward movement as natural as the upward spring of
+a branch--so free and flexible in all her motions that she seemed akin
+to the swaying reeds and curving brambles which caught at her as she
+passed.
+
+At length the explorers reached the mossy corner where the orchids grew,
+and Cicely, securely balanced on a fallen tree-trunk, was allowed to dig
+the coveted roots. When they had been packed away, it was felt that this
+culminating moment must be celebrated with immediate libations of jam
+and milk; and having climbed to a dry slope among the pepper-bushes, the
+party fell on the contents of the lunch-basket. It was just the hour
+when Bessy's maid was carrying her breakfast-tray, with its delicate
+service of old silver and porcelain, into the darkened bed-room at
+Lynbrook; but early rising and hard scrambling had whetted the appetites
+of the naturalists, and the nursery fare which Cicely spread before
+them seemed a sumptuous reward for their toil.
+
+"I do like this kind of picnic much better than the ones where mother
+takes all the footmen, and the mayonnaise has to be scraped off things
+before I can eat them," Cicely declared, lifting her foaming mouth from
+a beaker of milk.
+
+Amherst, lighting his pipe, stretched himself contentedly among the
+pepper-bushes, steeped in that unreflecting peace which is shed into
+some hearts by communion with trees and sky. He too was glad to get away
+from the footmen and the mayonnaise, and he imagined that his
+stepdaughter's exclamation summed up all the reasons for his happiness.
+The boyish wood-craft which he had cultivated in order to encourage the
+same taste in his factory lads came to life in this sudden return to
+nature, and he redeemed his clumsiness in crossing the swamp by spying a
+marsh-wren's nest that had escaped Justine, and detecting in a
+swiftly-flitting olive-brown bird a belated tanager in autumn incognito.
+
+Cicely sat rapt while he pictured the bird's winter pilgrimage, with
+glimpses of the seas and islands that fled beneath him till his long
+southern flight ended in the dim glades of the equatorial forests.
+
+"Oh, what a good life--how I should like to be a wander-bird, and look
+down people's chimneys twice a year!" Justine laughed, tilting her head
+back to catch a last glimpse of the tanager.
+
+The sun beamed full on their ledge from a sky of misty blue, and she had
+thrown aside her hat, uncovering her thick waves of hair, blue-black in
+the hollows, with warm rusty edges where they took the light. Cicely
+dragged down a plumy spray of traveller's joy and wound it above her
+friend's forehead; and thus wreathed, with her bright pallour relieved
+against the dusky autumn tints, Justine looked like a wood-spirit who
+had absorbed into herself the last golden juices of the year.
+
+She leaned back laughing against a tree-trunk, pelting Cicely with
+witch-hazel pods, making the terrier waltz for scraps of ginger-bread,
+and breaking off now and then to imitate, with her clear full notes, the
+call of some hidden marsh-bird, or the scolding chatter of a squirrel in
+the scrub-oaks.
+
+"Is that what you'd like most about the journey--looking down the
+chimneys?" Amherst asked with a smile.
+
+"Oh, I don't know--I should love it all! Think of the joy of skimming
+over half the earth--seeing it born again out of darkness every morning!
+Sometimes, when I've been up all night with a patient, and have seen the
+world _come back to me_ like that, I've been almost mad with its beauty;
+and then the thought that I've never seen more than a little corner of
+it makes me feel as if I were chained. But I think if I had wings I
+should choose to be a house-swallow; and then, after I'd had my fill of
+wonders, I should come back to my familiar corner, and my house full of
+busy humdrum people, and fly low to warn them of rain, and wheel up high
+to show them it was good haying weather, and know what was going on in
+every room in the house, and every house in the village; and all the
+while I should be hugging my wonderful big secret--the secret of
+snow-plains and burning deserts, and coral islands and buried
+cities--and should put it all into my chatter under the eaves, that the
+people in the house were always too busy to stop and listen to--and when
+winter came I'm sure I should hate to leave them, even to go back to my
+great Brazilian forests full of orchids and monkeys!"
+
+"But, Justine, in winter you could take care of the monkeys," the
+practical Cicely suggested.
+
+"Yes--and that would remind me of home!" Justine cried, swinging about
+to pinch the little girl's chin.
+
+She was in one of the buoyant moods when the spirit of life caught her
+in its grip, and shook and tossed her on its mighty waves as a sea-bird
+is tossed through the spray of flying rollers. At such moments all the
+light and music of the world seemed distilled into her veins, and forced
+up in bubbles of laughter to her lips and eyes. Amherst had never seen
+her thus, and he watched her with the sense of relaxation which the
+contact of limpid gaiety brings to a mind obscured by failure and
+self-distrust. The world was not so dark a place after all, if such
+springs of merriment could well up in a heart as sensitive as hers to
+the burden and toil of existence.
+
+"Isn't it strange," she went on with a sudden drop to gravity, "that the
+bird whose wings carry him farthest and show him the most wonderful
+things, is the one who always comes back to the eaves, and is happiest
+in the thick of everyday life?"
+
+Her eyes met Amherst's. "It seems to me," he said, "that you're like
+that yourself--loving long flights, yet happiest in the thick of life."
+
+She raised her dark brows laughingly. "So I imagine--but then you see
+I've never had the long flight!"
+
+Amherst smiled. "Ah, there it is--one never knows--one never says, _This
+is the moment_! because, however good it is, it always seems the door to
+a better one beyond. Faust never said it till the end, when he'd nothing
+left of all he began by thinking worth while; and then, with what a
+difference it was said!"
+
+She pondered. "Yes--but it _was_ the best, after all--the moment in
+which he had nothing left...."
+
+"Oh," Cicely broke in suddenly, "do look at the squirrel up there! See,
+father--he's off! Let's follow him!"
+
+As she crouched there, with head thrown back, and sparkling lips and
+eyes, her fair hair--of her mother's very hue--making a shining haze
+about her face, Amherst recalled the winter evening at Hopewood, when he
+and Bessy had tracked the grey squirrel under the snowy beeches.
+Scarcely three years ago--and how bitter memory had turned! A chilly
+cloud spread over his spirit, reducing everything once more to the
+leaden hue of reality....
+
+"It's too late for any more adventures--we must be going," he said.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+AMHERST'S morning excursions with his step-daughter and Miss Brent
+renewed themselves more than once. He welcomed any pretext for escaping
+from the unprofitable round of his thoughts, and these woodland
+explorations, with their gay rivalry of search for some rare plant or
+elusive bird, and the contact with the child's happy wonder, and with
+the morning brightness of Justine's mood, gave him his only moments of
+self-forgetfulness.
+
+But the first time that Cicely's chatter carried home an echo of their
+adventures, Amherst saw a cloud on his wife's face. Her resentment of
+Justine's influence over the child had long since subsided, and in the
+temporary absence of the governess she was glad to have Cicely amused;
+but she was never quite satisfied that those about her should have
+pursuits and diversions in which she did not share. Her jealousy did not
+concentrate itself on her husband and Miss Brent: Amherst had never
+shown any inclination for the society of other women, and if the
+possibility had been suggested to her, she would probably have said that
+Justine was not "in his style"--so unconscious is a pretty woman apt to
+be of the versatility of masculine tastes. But Amherst saw that she felt
+herself excluded from amusements in which she had no desire to join, and
+of which she consequently failed to see the purpose; and he gave up
+accompanying his stepdaughter.
+
+Bessy, as if in acknowledgment of his renunciation, rose earlier in
+order to prolong their rides together. Dr. Wyant had counselled her
+against the fatigue of following the hounds, and she instinctively
+turned their horses away from the course the hunt was likely to take;
+but now and then the cry of the pack, or the flash of red on a distant
+slope, sent the blood to her face and made her press her mare to a
+gallop. When they escaped such encounters she showed no great zest in
+the exercise, and their rides resolved themselves into a spiritless
+middle-aged jog along the autumn lanes. In the early days of their
+marriage the joy of a canter side by side had merged them in a community
+of sensation beyond need of speech; but now that the physical spell had
+passed they felt the burden of a silence that neither knew how to break.
+
+Once only, a moment's friction galvanized these lifeless rides. It was
+one morning when Bessy's wild mare Impulse, under-exercised and
+over-fed, suddenly broke from her control, and would have unseated her
+but for Amherst's grasp on the bridle.
+
+"The horse is not fit for you to ride," he exclaimed, as the hot
+creature, with shudders of defiance rippling her flanks, lapsed into
+sullen subjection.
+
+"It's only because I don't ride her enough," Bessy panted. "That new
+groom is ruining her mouth."
+
+"You must not ride her alone, then."
+
+"I shall not let that man ride her."
+
+"I say you must not ride her alone."
+
+"It's ridiculous to have a groom at one's heels!"
+
+"Nevertheless you must, if you ride Impulse."
+
+Their eyes met, and she quivered and yielded like the horse. "Oh, if you
+say so--" She always hugged his brief flashes of authority.
+
+"I do say so. You promise me?"
+
+"If you like----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst had made an attempt to occupy himself with the condition of
+Lynbrook, one of those slovenly villages, without individual character
+or the tradition of self-respect, which spring up in America on the
+skirts of the rich summer colonies. But Bessy had never given Lynbrook a
+thought, and he realized the futility of hoping to interest her in its
+mongrel population of day-labourers and publicans so soon after his
+glaring failure at Westmore. The sight of the village irritated him
+whenever he passed through the Lynbrook gates, but having perforce
+accepted the situation of prince consort, without voice in the
+government, he tried to put himself out of relation with all the
+questions which had hitherto engrossed him, and to see life simply as a
+spectator. He could even conceive that, under certain conditions, there
+might be compensations in the passive attitude; but unfortunately these
+conditions were not such as the life at Lynbrook presented.
+
+The temporary cessation of Bessy's week-end parties had naturally not
+closed her doors to occasional visitors, and glimpses of the autumnal
+animation of Long Island passed now and then across the Amhersts'
+horizon. Blanche Carbury had installed herself at Mapleside, a
+fashionable colony half-way between Lynbrook and Clifton, and even
+Amherst, unused as he was to noting the seemingly inconsecutive
+movements of idle people, could not but remark that her visits to his
+wife almost invariably coincided with Ned Bowfort's cantering over
+unannounced from the Hunt Club, where he had taken up his autumn
+quarters.
+
+There was something very likeable about Bowfort, to whom Amherst was
+attracted by the fact that he was one of the few men of Bessy's circle
+who knew what was going on in the outer world. Throughout an existence
+which one divined to have been both dependent and desultory, he had
+preserved a sense of wider relations and acquired a smattering of
+information to which he applied his only independent faculty, that of
+clear thought. He could talk intelligently and not too inaccurately of
+the larger questions which Lynbrook ignored, and a gay indifference to
+the importance of money seemed the crowning grace of his nature, till
+Amherst suddenly learned that this attitude of detachment was generally
+ascribed to the liberality of Mrs. Fenton Carbury. "Everybody knows she
+married Fenton to provide for Ned," some one let fall in the course of
+one of the smoking-room dissertations on which the host of Lynbrook had
+such difficulty in fixing his attention; and the speaker's
+matter-of-course tone, and the careless acquiescence of his hearers,
+were more offensive to Amherst than the fact itself. In the first flush
+of his disgust he classed the story as one of the lies bred in the
+malarious air of after-dinner gossip; but gradually he saw that, whether
+true or not, it had sufficient circulation to cast a shade of ambiguity
+on the persons concerned. Bessy alone seemed deaf to the rumours about
+her friend. There was something captivating to her in Mrs. Carbury's
+slang and noise, in her defiance of decorum and contempt of criticism.
+"I like Blanche because she doesn't pretend," was Bessy's vague
+justification of the lady; but in reality she was under the mysterious
+spell which such natures cast over the less venturesome imaginations of
+their own sex.
+
+Amherst at first tried to deaden himself to the situation, as part of
+the larger coil of miseries in which he found himself; but all his
+traditions were against such tolerance, and they were roused to revolt
+by the receipt of a newspaper clipping, sent by an anonymous hand,
+enlarging on the fact that the clandestine meetings of a fashionable
+couple were being facilitated by the connivance of a Long Island
+_châtelaine_. Amherst, hot from the perusal of this paragraph, sprang
+into the first train, and laid the clipping before his father-in-law,
+who chanced to be passing through town on his way from the Hudson to the
+Hot Springs.
+
+Mr. Langhope, ensconced in the cushioned privacy of the reading-room at
+the Amsterdam Club, where he had invited his son-in-law to meet him,
+perused the article with the cool eye of the collector to whom a new
+curiosity is offered.
+
+"I suppose," he mused, "that in the time of the Pharaohs the Morning
+Papyrus used to serve up this kind of thing"--and then, as the nervous
+tension of his hearer expressed itself in an abrupt movement, he added,
+handing back the clipping with a smile: "What do you propose to do? Kill
+the editor, and forbid Blanche and Bowfort the house?"
+
+"I mean to do something," Amherst began, suddenly chilled by the
+realization that his wrath had not yet shaped itself into a definite
+plan of action.
+
+"Well, it must be that or nothing," said Mr. Langhope, drawing his stick
+meditatively across his knee. "And, of course, if it's _that_, you'll
+land Bessy in a devil of a mess."
+
+Without giving his son-in-law time to protest, he touched rapidly but
+vividly on the inutility and embarrassment of libel suits, and on the
+devices whereby the legal means of vindication from such attacks may be
+turned against those who have recourse to them; and Amherst listened
+with a sickened sense of the incompatibility between abstract standards
+of honour and their practical application.
+
+"What should you do, then?" he murmured, as Mr. Langhope ended with his
+light shrug and a "See Tredegar, if you don't believe me"--; and his
+father-in-law replied with an evasive gesture: "Why, leave the
+responsibility where it belongs!"
+
+"Where it belongs?"
+
+"To Fenton Carbury, of course. Luckily it's nobody's business but his,
+and if he doesn't mind what is said about his wife I don't see how you
+can take up the cudgels for her without casting another shade on her
+somewhat chequered reputation."
+
+Amherst stared. "His wife? What do I care what's said of her? I'm
+thinking of mine!"
+
+"Well, if Carbury has no objection to his wife's meeting Bowfort, I
+don't see how you can object to her meeting him at your house. In such
+matters, as you know, it has mercifully been decided that the husband's
+attitude shall determine other people's; otherwise we should be deprived
+of the legitimate pleasure of slandering our neighbours." Mr. Langhope
+was always careful to temper his explanations with an "as you know": he
+would have thought it ill-bred to omit this parenthesis in elucidating
+the social code to his son-in-law.
+
+"Then you mean that I can do nothing?" Amherst exclaimed.
+
+Mr. Langhope smiled. "What applies to Carbury applies to you--by doing
+nothing you establish the fact that there's nothing to do; just as you
+create the difficulty by recognizing it." And he added, as Amherst sat
+silent: "Take Bessy away, and they'll have to see each other elsewhere."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst returned to Lynbrook with the echoes of this casuistry in his
+brain. It seemed to him but a part of the ingenious system of evasion
+whereby a society bent on the undisturbed pursuit of amusement had
+contrived to protect itself from the intrusion of the disagreeable: a
+policy summed up in Mr. Langhope's concluding advice that Amherst should
+take his wife away. Yes--that was wealth's contemptuous answer to every
+challenge of responsibility: duty, sorrow and disgrace were equally to
+be evaded by a change of residence, and nothing in life need be faced
+and fought out while one could pay for a passage to Europe!
+
+In a calmer mood Amherst's sense of humour would have preserved him from
+such a view of his father-in-law's advice; but just then it fell like a
+spark on his smouldering prejudices. He was clear-sighted enough to
+recognize the obstacles to legal retaliation; but this only made him the
+more resolved to assert his will in his own house. He no longer paused
+to consider the possible effect of such a course on his already strained
+relations with his wife: the man's will rose in him and spoke.
+
+The scene between Bessy and himself was short and sharp; and it ended in
+a way that left him more than ever perplexed at the ways of her sex.
+Impatient of preamble, he had opened the attack with his ultimatum: the
+suspected couple were to be denied the house. Bessy flamed into
+immediate defence of her friend; but to Amherst's surprise she no
+longer sounded the note of her own rights. Husband and wife were
+animated by emotions deeper-seated and more instinctive than had ever
+before confronted them; yet while Amherst's resistance was gathering
+strength from the conflict, Bessy unexpectedly collapsed in tears and
+submission. She would do as he wished, of course--give up seeing
+Blanche, dismiss Bowfort, wash her hands, in short, of the imprudent
+pair--in such matters a woman needed a man's guidance, a wife must of
+necessity see with her husband's eyes; and she looked up into his
+through a mist of penitence and admiration....
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+IN the first reaction from her brief delusion about Stephen Wyant,
+Justine accepted with a good grace the necessity of staying on at
+Lynbrook. Though she was now well enough to return to her regular work,
+her talk with Amherst had made her feel that, for the present, she could
+be of more use by remaining with Bessy; and she was not sorry to have a
+farther period of delay and reflection before taking the next step in
+her life. These at least were the reasons she gave herself for deciding
+not to leave; and if any less ostensible lurked beneath, they were not
+as yet visible even to her searching self-scrutiny.
+
+At first she was embarrassed by the obligation of meeting Dr. Wyant, on
+whom her definite refusal had produced an effect for which she could not
+hold herself blameless. She had not kept her promise of seeing him on
+the day after their encounter at the post-office, but had written,
+instead, in terms which obviously made such a meeting unnecessary. But
+all her efforts to soften the abruptness of her answer could not
+conceal, from either herself or her suitor, that it was not the one she
+had led him to expect; and she foresaw that if she remained at Lynbrook
+she could not escape a scene of recrimination.
+
+When the scene took place, Wyant's part in it went far toward justifying
+her decision; yet his vehement reproaches contained a sufficient core of
+truth to humble her pride. It was lucky for her somewhat exaggerated
+sense of fairness that he overshot the mark by charging her with a
+coquetry of which she knew herself innocent, and laying on her the
+responsibility for any follies to which her rejection might drive him.
+Such threats, as a rule, no longer move the feminine imagination; yet
+Justine's pity for all forms of weakness made her recognize, in the very
+heat of her contempt for Wyant, that his reproaches were not the mere
+cry of wounded vanity but the appeal of a nature conscious of its lack
+of recuperative power. It seemed to her as though she had done him
+irreparable harm, and the feeling might have betrayed her into too
+great a show of compassion had she not been restrained by a salutary
+fear of the result.
+
+The state of Bessy's nerves necessitated frequent visits from her
+physician, but Justine, on these occasions, could usually shelter
+herself behind the professional reserve which kept even Wyant from any
+open expression of feeling. One day, however, they chanced to find
+themselves alone before Bessy's return from her ride. The servant had
+ushered Wyant into the library where Justine was writing, and when she
+had replied to his enquiries about his patient they found themselves
+face to face with an awkward period of waiting. Justine was too proud to
+cut it short by leaving the room; but Wyant answered her commonplaces at
+random, stirring uneasily to and fro between window and fireside, and at
+length halting behind the table at which she sat.
+
+"May I ask how much longer you mean to stay here?" he said in a low
+voice, his eyes darkening under the sullen jut of the brows.
+
+As she glanced up in surprise she noticed for the first time an odd
+contraction of his pupils, and the discovery, familiar enough in her
+professional experience, made her disregard the abruptness of his
+question and softened the tone in which she answered. "I hardly know--I
+suppose as long as I am needed."
+
+Wyant laughed. "Needed by whom? By John Amherst?"
+
+A moment passed before Justine took in the full significance of the
+retort; then the blood rushed to her face. "Yes--I believe both Mr. and
+Mrs. Amherst need me," she answered, keeping her eyes on his; and Wyant
+laughed again.
+
+"You didn't think so till Amherst came back from Hanaford. His return
+seems to have changed your plans in several respects."
+
+She looked away from him, for even now his eyes moved her to pity and
+self-reproach. "Dr. Wyant, you are not well; why do you wait to see Mrs.
+Amherst?" she said.
+
+He stared at her and then his glance fell. "I'm much obliged--I'm as
+well as usual," he muttered, pushing the hair from his forehead with a
+shaking hand; and at that moment the sound of Bessy's voice gave Justine
+a pretext for escape.
+
+In her own room she sank for a moment under a rush of self-disgust; but
+it soon receded before the saner forces of her nature, leaving only a
+residue of pity for the poor creature whose secret she had surprised.
+She had never before suspected Wyant of taking a drug, nor did she now
+suppose that he did so habitually; but to see him even momentarily under
+such an influence explained her instinctive sense of his weakness. She
+felt now that what would have been an insult on other lips was only a
+cry of distress from his; and once more she blamed herself and forgave
+him.
+
+But if she had been inclined to any morbidness of self-reproach she
+would have been saved from it by other cares. For the moment she was
+more concerned with Bessy's fate than with her own--her poor friend
+seemed to have so much more at stake, and so much less strength to bring
+to the defence of her happiness. Justine was always saved from any
+excess of self-compassion by the sense, within herself, of abounding
+forces of growth and self-renewal, as though from every lopped
+aspiration a fresh shoot of energy must spring; but she felt that Bessy
+had no such sources of renovation, and that every disappointment left an
+arid spot in her soul.
+
+Even without her friend's confidences, Justine would have had no
+difficulty in following the successive stages of the Amhersts' inner
+history. She knew that Amherst had virtually resigned his rule at
+Westmore, and that his wife, in return for the sacrifice, was trying to
+conform to the way of life she thought he preferred; and the futility of
+both attempts was more visible to Justine than to either of the two
+concerned. She saw that the failure of the Amhersts' marriage lay not in
+any accident of outward circumstances but in the lack of all natural
+points of contact. As she put it to herself, they met neither underfoot
+nor overhead: practical necessities united them no more than imaginative
+joys.
+
+There were moments when Justine thought Amherst hard to Bessy, as she
+suspected that he had once been hard to his mother--as the leader of men
+must perhaps always be hard to the hampering sex. Yet she did justice to
+his efforts to accept the irretrievable, and to waken in his wife some
+capacity for sharing in his minor interests, since she had none of her
+own with which to fill their days.
+
+Amherst had always been a reader; not, like Justine herself, a
+flame-like devourer of the page, but a slow absorber of its essence; and
+in the early days of his marriage he had fancied it would be easy to
+make Bessy share this taste. Though his mother was not a bookish woman,
+he had breathed at her side an air rich in allusion and filled with the
+bright presences of romance; and he had always regarded this commerce of
+the imagination as one of the normal conditions of life. The discovery
+that there were no books at Lynbrook save a few morocco "sets"
+imprisoned behind the brass trellisings of the library had been one of
+the many surprises of his new state. But in his first months with Bessy
+there was no room for books, and if he thought of the matter it was only
+in a glancing vision of future evenings, when he and she, in the calm
+afterglow of happiness, should lean together over some cherished page.
+Her lack of response to any reference outside the small circle of daily
+facts had long since dispelled that vision; but now that his own mind
+felt the need of inner sustenance he began to ask himself whether he
+might not have done more to rouse her imagination. During the long
+evenings over the library fire he tried to lead the talk to books, with
+a parenthesis, now and again, from the page beneath his eye; and Bessy
+met the experiment with conciliatory eagerness. She showed, in especial,
+a hopeful but misleading preference for poetry, leaning back with
+dreaming lids and lovely parted lips while he rolled out the immortal
+measures; but her outward signs of attention never ripened into any
+expression of opinion, or any after-allusion to what she heard, and
+before long he discovered that Justine Brent was his only listener. It
+was to her that the words he read began to be unconsciously addressed;
+her comments directed him in his choice of subjects, and the ensuing
+discussions restored him to some semblance of mental activity.
+
+Bessy, true to her new rôle of acquiescence, shone silently on this
+interchange of ideas; Amherst even detected in her a vague admiration
+for his power of conversing on subjects which she regarded as abstruse;
+and this childlike approval, combined with her submission to his will,
+deluded him with a sense of recovered power over her. He could not but
+note that the new phase in their relations had coincided with his first
+assertion of mastery; and he rashly concluded that, with the removal of
+the influences tending to separate them, his wife might gradually be won
+back to her earlier sympathy with his views.
+
+To accept this theory was to apply it; for nothing could long divert
+Amherst from his main purpose, and all the thwarted strength of his will
+was only gathering to itself fresh stores of energy. He had never been a
+skilful lover, for no woman had as yet stirred in him those feelings
+which call the finer perceptions into play; and there was no instinct to
+tell him that Bessy's sudden conformity to his wishes was as unreasoning
+as her surrender to his first kiss. He fancied that he and she were at
+length reaching some semblance of that moral harmony which should grow
+out of the physical accord, and that, poor and incomplete as the
+understanding was, it must lift and strengthen their relation.
+
+He waited till early winter had brought solitude to Lynbrook, dispersing
+the hunting colony to various points of the compass, and sending Mr.
+Langhope to Egypt and the Riviera, while Mrs. Ansell, as usual, took up
+her annual tour of a social circuit whose extreme points were marked by
+Boston and Baltimore--and then he made his final appeal to his wife.
+
+His pretext for speaking was a letter from Duplain, definitely
+announcing his resolve not to remain at Westmore. A year earlier
+Amherst, deeply moved by the letter, would have given it to his wife in
+the hope of its producing the same effect on her. He knew better now--he
+had learned her instinct for detecting "business" under every serious
+call on her attention. His only hope, as always, was to reach her
+through the personal appeal; and he put before her the fact of Duplain's
+withdrawal as the open victory of his antagonists. But he saw at once
+that even this could not infuse new life into the question.
+
+"If I go back he'll stay--I can hold him, can gain time till things take
+a turn," he urged.
+
+"Another? I thought they were definitely settled," she objected
+languidly.
+
+"No--they're not; they can't be, on such a basis," Amherst broke out
+with sudden emphasis. He walked across the room, and came back to her
+side with a determined face. "It's a delusion, a deception," he
+exclaimed, "to think I can stand by any longer and see things going to
+ruin at Westmore! If I've made you think so, I've unconsciously deceived
+us both. As long as you're my wife we've only one honour between us, and
+that honour is mine to take care of."
+
+"Honour? What an odd expression!" she said with a forced laugh, and a
+little tinge of pink in her cheek. "You speak as if I had--had made
+myself talked about --when you know I've never even looked at another
+man!"
+
+"Another man?" Amherst looked at her in wonder. "Good God! Can't you
+conceive of any vow to be kept between husband and wife but the
+primitive one of bodily fidelity? Heaven knows I've never looked at
+another woman--but, by my reading of our compact, I shouldn't be keeping
+faith with you if I didn't help you to keep faith with better things.
+And you owe me the same help--the same chance to rise through you, and
+not sink by you--else we've betrayed each other more deeply than any
+adultery could make us!"
+
+She had drawn back, turning pale again, and shrinking a little at the
+sound of words which, except when heard in church, she vaguely
+associated with oaths, slammed doors, and other evidences of
+ill-breeding; but Amherst had been swept too far on the flood of his
+indignation to be checked by such small signs of disapproval.
+
+"You'll say that what I'm asking you is to give me back the free use of
+your money. Well! Why not? Is it so much for a wife to give? I know you
+all think that a man who marries a rich woman forfeits his self-respect
+if he spends a penny without her approval. But that's because money is
+so sacred to you all! It seems to me the least important thing that a
+woman entrusts to her husband. What of her dreams and her hopes, her
+belief in justice and goodness and decency? If he takes those and
+destroys them, he'd better have had a mill-stone about his neck. But
+nobody has a word to say till he touches her dividends--then he's a
+calculating brute who has married her for her fortune!"
+
+He had come close again, facing her with outstretched hands,
+half-commanding, half in appeal. "Don't you see that I can't go on in
+this way--that I've _no right_ to let you keep me from Westmore?"
+
+Bessy was looking at him coldly, under the half-dropped lids of
+indifference. "I hardly know what you mean--you use such peculiar words;
+but I don't see why you should expect me to give up all the ideas I was
+brought up in. Our standards _are_ different--but why should yours
+always be right?"
+
+"You believed they were right when you married me--have they changed
+since then?"
+
+"No; but----" Her face seemed to harden and contract into a small
+expressionless mask, in which he could no longer read anything but blank
+opposition to his will.
+
+"You trusted my judgment not long ago," he went on, "when I asked you to
+give up seeing Mrs. Carbury----"
+
+She flushed, but with anger, not compunction. "It seems to me that
+should be a reason for your not asking me to make other sacrifices! When
+I gave up Blanche I thought you would see that I wanted to please
+you--and that you would do something for me in return...."
+
+Amherst interrupted her with a laugh. "Thank you for telling me your
+real reasons. I was fool enough to think you acted from conviction--not
+that you were simply striking a bargain----"
+
+He broke off, and they looked at each other with a kind of fear, each
+hearing between them the echo of irreparable words. Amherst's only clear
+feeling was that he must not speak again till he had beaten down the
+horrible sensation in his breast--the rage of hate which had him in its
+grip, and which made him almost afraid, while it lasted, to let his eyes
+rest on the fair weak creature before him. Bessy, too, was in the clutch
+of a mute anger which slowly poured its benumbing current around her
+heart. Strong waves of passion did not quicken her vitality: she grew
+inert and cold under their shock. Only one little pulse of self-pity
+continued to beat in her, trembling out at last on the cry: "Ah, I know
+it's not because you care so much for Westmore--it's only because you
+want to get away from me!"
+
+Amherst stared as if her words had flashed a light into the darkest
+windings of his misery. "Yes--I want to get away..." he said; and he
+turned and walked out of the room.
+
+He went down to the smoking-room, and ringing for a servant, ordered
+his horse to be saddled. The foot-man who answered his summons brought
+the afternoon's mail, and Amherst, throwing himself down on the sofa,
+began to tear open his letters while he waited.
+
+He ran through the first few without knowing what he read; but presently
+his attention was arrested by the hand-writing of a man he had known well
+in college, and who had lately come into possession of a large cotton-mill
+in the South. He wrote now to ask if Amherst could recommend a good
+manager--"not one of your old routine men, but a young fellow with the new
+ideas. Things have been in pretty bad shape down here," the writer added,
+"and now that I'm in possession I want to see what can be done to civilize
+the place"; and he went on to urge that Amherst should come down himself
+to inspect the mills, and propose such improvements as his experience
+suggested. "We've all heard of the great things you're doing at Westmore,"
+the letter ended; and Amherst cast it from him with a groan....
+
+It was Duplain's chance, of course...that was his first thought. He took
+up the letter and read it over. He knew the man who wrote--no
+sentimentalist seeking emotional variety from vague philanthropic
+experiments, but a serious student of social conditions, now
+unexpectedly provided with the opportunity to apply his ideas. Yes, it
+was Duplain's chance--if indeed it might not be his own!... Amherst sat
+upright, dazzled by the thought. Why Duplain--why not himself? Bessy had
+spoken the illuminating word--what he wanted was to get away--to get
+away at any cost! Escape had become his one thought: escape from the
+bondage of Lynbrook, from the bitter memory of his failure at Westmore;
+and here was the chance to escape back into life--into independence,
+activity and usefulness! Every atrophied faculty in him suddenly started
+from its torpor, and his brain throbbed with the pain of the
+awakening.... The servant came to tell him that his horse waited, and he
+sprang up, took his riding-whip from the rack, stared a moment,
+absently, after the man's retreating back, and then dropped down again
+on the sofa....
+
+What was there to keep him from accepting? His wife's affection was
+dead--if her sentimental fancy for him had ever deserved the name! And
+his passing mastery over her was gone too--he smiled to remember that,
+hardly two hours earlier, he had been fatuous enough to think he could
+still regain it! Now he said to himself that she would sooner desert a
+friend to please him than sacrifice a fraction of her income; and the
+discovery cast a stain of sordidness on their whole relation. He could
+still imagine struggling to win her back from another man, or even to
+save her from some folly into which mistaken judgment or perverted
+enthusiasm might have hurried her; but to go on battling against the
+dull unimaginative subservience to personal luxury--the slavery to
+houses and servants and clothes--ah, no, while he had any fight left in
+him it was worth spending in a better cause than that!
+
+Through the open window he could hear, in the mild December stillness,
+his horse's feet coming and going on the gravel. _Her_ horse, led up and
+down by _her_ servant, at the door of _her_ house!... The sound
+symbolized his whole future...the situation his marriage had made for
+him, and to which he must henceforth bend, unless he broke with it then
+and there.... He tried to look ahead, to follow up, one by one, the
+consequences of such a break. That it would be final he had no doubt.
+There are natures which seem to be drawn closer by dissension, to
+depend, for the renewal of understanding, on the spark of generosity and
+compunction that anger strikes out of both; but Amherst knew that
+between himself and his wife no such clearing of the moral atmosphere
+was possible. The indignation which left him with tingling nerves and a
+burning need of some immediate escape into action, crystallized in Bessy
+into a hard kernel of obstinacy, into which, after each fresh collision,
+he felt that a little more of herself had been absorbed.... No, the
+break between them would be final--if he went now he would not come
+back. And it flashed across him that this solution might have been
+foreseen by his wife--might even have been deliberately planned and led
+up to by those about her. His father-in-law had never liked him--the
+disturbing waves of his activity had rippled even the sheltered surface
+of Mr. Langhope's existence. He must have been horribly in their way!
+Well--it was not too late to take himself out of it. In Bessy's circle
+the severing of such ties was regarded as an expensive but unhazardous
+piece of surgery--nobody bled to death of the wound.... The footman came
+back to remind him that his horse was waiting, and Amherst rose to his
+feet.
+
+"Send him back to the stable," he said with a glance at his watch, "and
+order a trap to take me to the next train."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+WHEN Amherst woke, the next morning, in the hotel to which he had gone
+up from Lynbrook, he was oppressed by the sense that the hardest step he
+had to take still lay before him. It had been almost easy to decide that
+the moment of separation had come, for circumstances seemed to have
+closed every other issue from his unhappy situation; but how tell his
+wife of his decision? Amherst, to whom action was the first necessity of
+being, became a weak procrastinator when he was confronted by the need
+of writing instead of speaking.
+
+To account for his abrupt departure from Lynbrook he had left word that
+he was called to town on business; but, since he did not mean to return,
+some farther explanation was now necessary, and he was paralyzed by the
+difficulty of writing. He had already telegraphed to his friend that he
+would be at the mills the next day; but the southern express did not
+leave till the afternoon, and he still had several hours in which to
+consider what he should say to his wife. To postpone the dreaded task,
+he invented the pretext of some business to be despatched, and taking
+the Subway to Wall Street consumed the morning in futile activities. But
+since the renunciation of his work at Westmore he had no active concern
+with the financial world, and by twelve o'clock he had exhausted his
+imaginary affairs and was journeying up town again. He left the train at
+Union Square, and walked along Fourth Avenue, now definitely resolved to
+go back to the hotel and write his letter before lunching.
+
+At Twenty-sixth Street he had struck into Madison Avenue, and was
+striding onward with the fixed eye and aimless haste of the man who has
+empty hours to fill, when a hansom drew up ahead of him and Justine
+Brent sprang out. She was trimly dressed, as if for travel, with a small
+bag in her hand; but at sight of him she paused with a cry of pleasure.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Amherst, I'm so glad! I was afraid I might not see you for
+goodbye."
+
+"For goodbye?" Amherst paused, embarrassed. How had she guessed that he
+did not mean to return to Lynbrook?
+
+"You know," she reminded him, "I'm going to some friends near
+Philadelphia for ten days"--and he remembered confusedly that a long
+time ago--probably yesterday morning--he had heard her speak of her
+projected visit.
+
+"I had no idea," she continued, "that you were coming up to town
+yesterday, or I should have tried to see you before you left. I wanted
+to ask you to send me a line if Bessy needs me--I'll come back at once
+if she does." Amherst continued to listen blankly, as if making a
+painful effort to regain some consciousness of what was being said to
+him, and she went on: "She seemed so nervous and poorly yesterday
+evening that I was sorry I had decided to go----"
+
+Her intent gaze reminded him that the emotions of the last twenty-four
+hours must still be visible in his face; and the thought of what she
+might detect helped to restore his self-possession. "You must not think
+of giving up your visit," he began hurriedly--he had meant to add "on
+account of Bessy," but he found himself unable to utter his wife's name.
+
+Justine was still looking at him. "Oh, I'm sure everything will be all
+right," she rejoined. "You go back this afternoon, I suppose? I've left
+you a little note, with my address, and I want you to promise----"
+
+She paused, for Amherst had made a motion as though to interrupt her.
+The old confused sense that there must always be truth between them was
+struggling in him with the strong restraints of habit and character; and
+suddenly, before he was conscious of having decided to speak, he heard
+himself say: "I ought to tell you that I am not going back."
+
+"Not going back?" A flash of apprehension crossed Justine's face. "Not
+till tomorrow, you mean?" she added, recovering herself.
+
+Amherst hesitated, glancing vaguely up and down the street. At that
+noonday hour it was nearly deserted, and Justine's driver dozed on his
+perch above the hansom. They could speak almost as openly as if they had
+been in one of the wood-paths at Lynbrook.
+
+"Nor tomorrow," Amherst said in a low voice. There was another pause
+before he added: "It may be some time before--" He broke off, and then
+continued with an effort: "The fact is, I am thinking of going back to
+my old work."
+
+She caught him up with an exclamation of surprise and sympathy. "Your
+old work? You mean at----"
+
+She was checked by the quick contraction of pain in his face. "Not that!
+I mean that I'm thinking of taking a new job--as manager of a Georgia
+mill.... It's the only thing I know how to do, and I've got to do
+something--" He forced a laugh. "The habit of work is incurable!"
+
+Justine's face had grown as grave as his. She hesitated a moment,
+looking down the street toward the angle of Madison Square, which was
+visible from the corner where they stood.
+
+"Will you walk back to the square with me? Then we can sit down a
+moment."
+
+She began to move as she spoke, and he walked beside her in silence till
+they had gained the seat she pointed out. Her hansom trailed after them,
+drawing up at the corner.
+
+As Amherst sat down beside her, Justine turned to him with an air of
+quiet resolution. "Mr. Amherst--will you let me ask you something? Is
+this a sudden decision?"
+
+"Yes. I decided yesterday."
+
+"And Bessy----?"
+
+His glance dropped for the first time, but Justine pressed her point.
+"Bessy approves?"
+
+"She--she will, I think--when she knows----"
+
+"When she knows?" Her emotion sprang into her face. "When she knows?
+Then she does not--yet?"
+
+"No. The offer came suddenly. I must go at once."
+
+"Without seeing her?" She cut him short with a quick commanding gesture.
+"Mr. Amherst, you can't do this--you won't do it! You will not go away
+without seeing Bessy!" she said.
+
+Her eyes sought his and drew them upward, constraining them to meet the
+full beam of her rebuking gaze.
+
+"I must do what seems best under the circumstances," he answered
+hesitatingly. "She will hear from me, of course; I shall write
+today--and later----"
+
+"Not later! _Now_--you will go back now to Lynbrook! Such things can't
+be told in writing--if they must be said at all, they must be spoken.
+Don't tell me that I don't understand--or that I'm meddling in what
+doesn't concern me. I don't care a fig for that! I've always meddled in
+what didn't concern me--I always shall, I suppose, till I die! And I
+understand enough to know that Bessy is very unhappy--and that you're
+the wiser and stronger of the two. I know what it's been to you to give
+up your work--to feel yourself useless," she interrupted herself, with
+softening eyes, "and I know how you've tried...I've watched you...but
+Bessy has tried too; and even if you've both failed--if you've come to
+the end of your resources--it's for you to face the fact, and help her
+face it--not to run away from it like this!"
+
+Amherst sat silent under the assault of her eloquence. He was conscious
+of no instinctive resentment, no sense that she was, as she confessed,
+meddling in matters which did not concern her. His ebbing spirit was
+revived by the shock of an ardour like his own. She had not shrunk from
+calling him a coward--and it did him good to hear her call him so! Her
+words put life back into its true perspective, restored their meaning to
+obsolete terms: to truth and manliness and courage. He had lived so long
+among equivocations that he had forgotten how to look a fact in the
+face; but here was a woman who judged life by his own standards--and by
+those standards she had found him wanting!
+
+Still, he could not forget the last bitter hours, or change his opinion
+as to the futility of attempting to remain at Lynbrook. He felt as
+strongly as ever the need of moral and mental liberation--the right to
+begin life again on his own terms. But Justine Brent had made him see
+that his first step toward self-assertion had been the inconsistent one
+of trying to evade its results.
+
+"You are right--I will go back," he said.
+
+She thanked him with her eyes, as she had thanked him on the terrace at
+Lynbrook, on the autumn evening which had witnessed their first broken
+exchange of confidences; and he was struck once more with the change
+that feeling produced in her. Emotions flashed across her face like the
+sweep of sun-rent clouds over a quiet landscape, bringing out the gleam
+of hidden waters, the fervour of smouldering colours, all the subtle
+delicacies of modelling that are lost under the light of an open sky.
+And it was extraordinary how she could infuse into a principle the
+warmth and colour of a passion! If conduct, to most people, seemed a
+cold matter of social prudence or inherited habit, to her it was always
+the newly-discovered question of her own relation to life--as most women
+see the great issues only through their own wants and prejudices, so she
+seemed always to see her personal desires in the light of the larger
+claims.
+
+"But I don't think," Amherst went on, "that anything can be said to
+convince me that I ought to alter my decision. These months of idleness
+have shown me that I'm one of the members of society who are a danger to
+the community if their noses are not kept to the grindstone----"
+
+Justine lowered her eyes musingly, and he saw she was undergoing the
+reaction of constraint which always followed on her bursts of
+unpremeditated frankness.
+
+"That is not for me to judge," she answered after a moment. "But if you
+decide to go away for a time--surely it ought to be in such a way that
+your going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy, or subject her
+to any unkind criticism."
+
+Amherst, reddening slightly, glanced at her in surprise. "I don't think
+you need fear that--I shall be the only one criticized," he said drily.
+
+"Are you sure--if you take such a position as you spoke of? So few
+people understand the love of hard work for its own sake. They will say
+that your quarrel with your wife has driven you to support yourself--and
+that will be cruel to Bessy."
+
+Amherst shrugged his shoulders. "They'll be more likely to say I tried
+to play the gentleman and failed, and wasn't happy till I got back to my
+own place in life--which is true enough," he added with a touch of
+irony.
+
+"They may say that too; but they will make Bessy suffer first--and it
+will be your fault if she is humiliated in that way. If you decide to
+take up your factory work for a time, can't you do so without--without
+accepting a salary? Oh, you see I stick at nothing," she broke in upon
+herself with a laugh, "and Bessy has said things which make me see that
+she would suffer horribly if--if you put such a slight on her." He
+remained silent, and she went on urgently: "From Bessy's standpoint it
+would mean a decisive break--the repudiating of your whole past. And it
+is a question on which you can afford to be generous, because I know...I
+think...it's less important in your eyes than hers...."
+
+Amherst glanced at her quickly. "That particular form of indebtedness,
+you mean?"
+
+She smiled. "The easiest to cancel, and therefore the least galling;
+isn't that the way you regard it?"
+
+"I used to--yes; but--" He was about to add: "No one at Lynbrook does,"
+but the flash of intelligence in her eyes restrained him, while at the
+same time it seemed to answer: "There's my point! To see their
+limitation is to allow for it, since every enlightenment brings a
+corresponding obligation."
+
+She made no attempt to put into words the argument her look conveyed,
+but rose from her seat with a rapid glance at her watch.
+
+"And now I must go, or I shall miss my train." She held out her hand,
+and as Amherst's met it, he said in a low tone, as if in reply to her
+unspoken appeal: "I shall remember all you have said."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a new experience for Amherst to be acting under the pressure of
+another will; but during his return journey to Lynbrook that afternoon
+it was pure relief to surrender himself to this pressure, and the
+surrender brought not a sense of weakness but of recovered energy. It
+was not in his nature to analyze his motives, or spend his strength in
+weighing closely balanced alternatives of conduct; and though, during
+the last purposeless months, he had grown to brood over every spring of
+action in himself and others, this tendency disappeared at once in
+contact with the deed to be done. It was as though a tributary stream,
+gathering its crystal speed among the hills, had been suddenly poured
+into the stagnant waters of his will; and he saw now how thick and
+turbid those waters had become--how full of the slime-bred life that
+chokes the springs of courage.
+
+His whole desire now was to be generous to his wife: to bear the full
+brunt of whatever pain their parting brought. Justine had said that
+Bessy seemed nervous and unhappy: it was clear, therefore, that she also
+had suffered from the wounds they had dealt each other, though she kept
+her unmoved front to the last. Poor child! Perhaps that insensible
+exterior was the only way she knew of expressing courage! It seemed to
+Amherst that all means of manifesting the finer impulses must slowly
+wither in the Lynbrook air. As he approached his destination, his
+thoughts of her were all pitiful: nothing remained of the personal
+resentment which had debased their parting. He had telephoned from town
+to announce the hour of his return, and when he emerged from the station
+he half-expected to find her seated in the brougham whose lamps
+signalled him through the early dusk. It would be like her to undergo
+such a reaction of feeling, and to express it, not in words, but by
+taking up their relation as if there had been no break in it. He had
+once condemned this facility of renewal as a sign of lightness, a
+result of that continual evasion of serious issues which made the life
+of Bessy's world a thin crust of custom above a void of thought. But he
+now saw that, if she was the product of her environment, that
+constituted but another claim on his charity, and made the more precious
+any impulses of natural feeling that had survived the unifying pressure
+of her life. As he approached the brougham, he murmured mentally: "What
+if I were to try once more?"
+
+Bessy had not come to meet him; but he said to himself that he should
+find her alone at the house, and that he would make his confession at
+once. As the carriage passed between the lights on the tall stone
+gate-posts, and rolled through the bare shrubberies of the avenue, he
+felt a momentary tightening of the heart--a sense of stepping back into
+the trap from which he had just wrenched himself free--a premonition of
+the way in which the smooth systematized routine of his wife's existence
+might draw him back into its revolutions as he had once seen a careless
+factory hand seized and dragged into a flying belt....
+
+But it was only for a moment; then his thoughts reverted to Bessy. It
+was she who was to be considered--this time he must be strong enough for
+both.
+
+The butler met him on the threshold, flanked by the usual array of
+footmen; and as he saw his portmanteau ceremoniously passed from hand
+to hand, Amherst once more felt the steel of the springe on his neck.
+
+"Is Mrs. Amherst in the drawing-room, Knowles?" he asked.
+
+"No, sir," said Knowles, who had too high a sense of fitness to
+volunteer any information beyond the immediate fact required of him.
+
+"She has gone up to her sitting-room, then?" Amherst continued, turning
+toward the broad sweep of the stairway.
+
+"No, sir," said the butler slowly; "Mrs. Amherst has gone away."
+
+"Gone away?" Amherst stopped short, staring blankly at the man's smooth
+official mask.
+
+"This afternoon, sir; to Mapleside."
+
+"To Mapleside?"
+
+"Yes, sir, by motor--to stay with Mrs. Carbury."
+
+There was a moment's silence. It had all happened so quickly that
+Amherst, with the dual vision which comes at such moments, noticed that
+the third footman--or was it the fourth?--was just passing his
+portmanteau on to a shirt-sleeved arm behind the door which led to the
+servant's wing....
+
+He roused himself to look at the tall clock. It was just six. He had
+telephoned from town at two.
+
+"At what time did Mrs. Amherst leave?"
+
+The butler meditated. "Sharp at four, sir. The maid took the three-forty
+with the luggage."
+
+With the luggage! So it was not a mere one-night visit. The blood rose
+slowly to Amherst's face. The footmen had disappeared, but presently the
+door at the back of the hall reopened, and one of them came out,
+carrying an elaborately-appointed tea-tray toward the smoking-room. The
+routine of the house was going on as if nothing had happened.... The
+butler looked at Amherst with respectful--too respectful--interrogation,
+and he was suddenly conscious that he was standing motionless in the
+middle of the hall, with one last intolerable question on his lips.
+
+Well--it had to be spoken! "Did Mrs. Amherst receive my telephone
+message?"
+
+"Yes, sir. I gave it to her myself."
+
+It occurred confusedly to Amherst that a well-bred man--as Lynbrook
+understood the phrase--would, at this point, have made some tardy feint
+of being in his wife's confidence, of having, on second thoughts, no
+reason to be surprised at her departure. It was humiliating, he
+supposed, to be thus laying bare his discomfiture to his dependents--he
+could see that even Knowles was affected by the manifest impropriety of
+the situation--but no pretext presented itself to his mind, and after
+another interval of silence he turned slowly toward the door of the
+smoking-room.
+
+"My letters are here, I suppose?" he paused on the threshold to enquire;
+and on the butler's answering in the affirmative, he said to himself,
+with a last effort to suspend his judgment: "She has left a line--there
+will be some explanation----"
+
+But there was nothing--neither word nor message; nothing but the
+reverberating retort of her departure in the face of his return--her
+flight to Blanche Carbury as the final answer to his final appeal.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+JUSTINE was coming back to Lynbrook. She had been, after all, unable to
+stay out the ten days of her visit: the undefinable sense of being
+needed, so often the determining motive of her actions, drew her back to
+Long Island at the end of the week. She had received no word from
+Amherst or Bessy; only Cicely had told her, in a big round hand, that
+mother had been away three days, and that it had been very lonely, and
+that the housekeeper's cat had kittens, and she was to have one; and
+were kittens christened, or how did they get their names?--because she
+wanted to call hers Justine; and she had found in her book a bird like
+the one father had shown them in the swamp; and they were not alone now,
+because the Telfers were there, and they had all been out sleighing;
+but it would be much nicer when Justine came back....
+
+It was as difficult to extract any sequence of facts from Cicely's
+letter as from an early chronicle. She made no reference to Amherst's
+return, which was odd, since she was fond of her step-father, yet not
+significant, since the fact of his arrival might have been crowded out
+by the birth of the kittens, or some incident equally prominent in her
+perspectiveless grouping of events; nor did she name the date of her
+mother's departure, so that Justine could not guess whether it had been
+contingent on Amherst's return, or wholly unconnected with it. What
+puzzled her most was Bessy's own silence--yet that too, in a sense, was
+reassuring, for Bessy thought of others chiefly when it was painful to
+think of herself, and her not writing implied that she had felt no
+present need of her friend's sympathy.
+
+Justine did not expect to find Amherst at Lynbrook. She had felt
+convinced, when they parted, that he would persist in his plan of going
+south; and the fact that the Telfer girls were again in possession made
+it seem probable that he had already left. Under the circumstances,
+Justine thought the separation advisable; but she was eager to be
+assured that it had been effected amicably, and without open affront to
+Bessy's pride.
+
+She arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and when she entered the house the
+sound of voices from the drawing-room, and the prevailing sense of
+bustle and movement amid which her own coming was evidently an
+unconsidered detail, showed that the normal life of Lynbrook had resumed
+its course. The Telfers, as usual, had brought a lively throng in their
+train; and amid the bursts of merriment about the drawing-room tea-table
+she caught Westy Gaines's impressive accents, and the screaming laughter
+of Blanche Carbury....
+
+So Blanche Carbury was back at Lynbrook! The discovery gave Justine
+fresh cause for conjecture. Whatever reciprocal concessions might have
+resulted from Amherst's return to his wife, it seemed hardly probable
+that they included a renewal of relations with Mrs. Carbury. Had his
+mission failed then--had he and Bessy parted in anger, and was Mrs.
+Carbury's presence at Lynbrook Bessy's retort to his assertion of
+independence?
+
+In the school-room, where Justine was received with the eager outpouring
+of Cicely's minutest experiences, she dared not put the question that
+would have solved these doubts; and she left to dress for dinner without
+knowing whether Amherst had returned to Lynbrook. Yet in her heart she
+never questioned that he had done so; all her fears revolved about what
+had since taken place.
+
+She saw Bessy first in the drawing-room, surrounded by her guests; and
+their brief embrace told her nothing, except that she had never beheld
+her friend more brilliant, more triumphantly in possession of recovered
+spirits and health.
+
+That Amherst was absent was now made evident by Bessy's requesting Westy
+Gaines to lead the way to the dining-room with Mrs. Ansell, who was one
+of the reassembled visitors; and the only one, as Justine presently
+observed, not in key with the prevailing gaiety. Mrs. Ansell, usually so
+tinged with the colours of her environment, preserved on this occasion a
+grey neutrality of tone which was the only break in the general
+brightness. It was not in her graceful person to express anything as
+gross as disapproval, yet that sentiment was manifest, to the nice
+observer, in a delicate aloofness which made the waves of laughter fall
+back from her, and spread a circle of cloudy calm about her end of the
+table. Justine had never been greatly drawn to Mrs. Ansell. Her own
+adaptability was not in the least akin to the older woman's studied
+self-effacement; and the independence of judgment which Justine
+preserved in spite of her perception of divergent standpoints made her a
+little contemptuous of an excess of charity that seemed to have been
+acquired at the cost of all individual convictions. To-night for the
+first time she felt in Mrs. Ansell a secret sympathy with her own
+fears; and a sense of this tacit understanding made her examine with
+sudden interest the face of her unexpected ally.... After all, what did
+she know of Mrs. Ansell's history--of the hidden processes which had
+gradually subdued her own passions and desires, making of her, as it
+were, a mere decorative background, a connecting link between other
+personalities? Perhaps, for a woman alone in the world, without the
+power and opportunity that money gives, there was no alternative between
+letting one's individuality harden into a small dry nucleus of egoism,
+or diffuse itself thus in the interstices of other lives--and there fell
+upon Justine the chill thought that just such a future might await her
+if she missed the liberating gift of personal happiness....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Neither that night nor the next day had she a private word with
+Bessy--and it became evident, as the hours passed, that Mrs. Amherst was
+deliberately postponing the moment when they should find themselves
+alone. But the Lynbrook party was to disperse on the Monday; and Bessy,
+who hated early rising, and all the details of housekeeping, tapped at
+Justine's door late on Sunday night to ask her to speed the departing
+visitors.
+
+She pleaded this necessity as an excuse for her intrusion, and the
+playful haste of her manner showed a nervous shrinking from any renewal
+of confidence; but as she leaned in the doorway, fingering the diamond
+chain about her neck, while one satin-tipped foot emerged restlessly
+from the edge of her lace gown, her face lost the bloom of animation
+which talk and laughter always produced in it, and she looked so pale
+and weary that Justine needed no better pretext for drawing her into the
+room.
+
+It was not in Bessy to resist a soothing touch in her moments of nervous
+reaction. She sank into the chair by the fire and let her head rest
+wearily against the cushion which Justine slipped behind it.
+
+Justine dropped into the low seat beside her, and laid a hand on hers.
+"You don't look as well as when I went away, Bessy. Are you sure you've
+done wisely in beginning your house-parties so soon?"
+
+It always alarmed Bessy to be told that she was not looking her best,
+and she sat upright, a wave of pink rising under her sensitive skin.
+
+"I am quite well, on the contrary; but I was dying of inanition in this
+big empty house, and I suppose I haven't got the boredom out of my
+system yet!"
+
+Justine recognized the echo of Mrs. Carbury's manner.
+
+"Even if you _were_ bored," she rejoined, "the inanition was probably
+good for you. What does Dr. Wyant say to your breaking away from his
+régime?" She named Wyant purposely, knowing that Bessy had that respect
+for the medical verdict which is the last trace of reverence for
+authority in the mind of the modern woman. But Mrs. Amherst laughed with
+gentle malice.
+
+"Oh, I haven't seen Dr. Wyant lately. His interest in me died out the
+day you left."
+
+Justine forced a laugh to hide her annoyance. She had not yet recovered
+from the shrinking disgust of her last scene with Wyant.
+
+"Don't be a goose, Bessy. If he hasn't come, it must be because you've
+told him not to--because you're afraid of letting him see that you're
+disobeying him."
+
+Bessy laughed again. "My dear, I'm afraid of nothing--nothing! Not even
+of your big eyes when they glare at me like coals. I suppose you must
+have looked at poor Wyant like that to frighten him away! And yet the
+last time we talked of him you seemed to like him--you even hinted that
+it was because of him that Westy had no chance."
+
+Justine uttered an impatient exclamation. "If neither of them existed it
+wouldn't affect the other's chances in the least. Their only merit is
+that they both enhance the charms of celibacy!"
+
+Bessy's smile dropped, and she turned a grave glance on her friend. "Ah,
+most men do that--you're so clever to have found it out!"
+
+It was Justine's turn to smile. "Oh, but I haven't--as a
+generalization. I mean to marry as soon as I get the chance!"
+
+"The chance----?"
+
+"To meet the right man. I'm gambler enough to believe in my luck yet!"
+
+Mrs. Amherst sighed compassionately. "There _is_ no right man! As
+Blanche says, matrimony's as uncomfortable as a ready-made shoe. How can
+one and the same institution fit every individual case? And why should
+we all have to go lame because marriage was once invented to suit an
+imaginary case?"
+
+Justine gave a slight shrug. "You talk of walking lame--how else do we
+all walk? It seems to me that life's the tight boot, and marriage the
+crutch that may help one to hobble along!" She drew Bessy's hand into
+hers with a caressing pressure. "When you philosophize I always know
+you're tired. No one who feels well stops to generalize about symptoms.
+If you won't let your doctor prescribe for you, your nurse is going to
+carry out his orders. What you want is quiet. Be reasonable and send
+away everybody before Mr. Amherst comes back!"
+
+She dropped the last phrase carelessly, glancing away as she spoke; but
+the stiffening of the fingers in her clasp sent a little tremor through
+her hand.
+
+"Thanks for your advice. It would be excellent but for one thing--my
+husband is not coming back!"
+
+The mockery in Bessy's voice seemed to pass into her features, hardening
+and contracting them as frost shrivels a flower. Justine's face, on the
+contrary, was suddenly illuminated by compassion, as though a light had
+struck up into it from the cold glitter of her friend's unhappiness.
+
+"Bessy! What do you mean by not coming back?"
+
+"I mean he's had the tact to see that we shall be more comfortable
+apart--without putting me to the unpleasant necessity of telling him
+so."
+
+Again the piteous echo of Blanche Carbury's phrases! The laboured
+mimicry of her ideas!
+
+Justine looked anxiously at her friend. It seemed horribly false not to
+mention her own talk with Amherst, yet she felt it wiser to feign
+ignorance, since Bessy could never be trusted to interpret rightly any
+departure from the conventional.
+
+"Please tell me what has happened," she said at length.
+
+Bessy, with a smile, released her hand. "John has gone back to the life
+he prefers--which I take to be a hint to me to do the same."
+
+Justine hesitated again; then the pressure of truth overcame every
+barrier of expediency. "Bessy--I ought to tell you that I saw Mr.
+Amherst in town the day I went to Philadelphia. He spoke of going away
+for a time...he seemed unhappy...but he told me he was coming back to
+see you first--" She broke off, her clear eyes on her friend's; and she
+saw at once that Bessy was too self-engrossed to feel any surprise at
+her avowal. "Surely he came back?" she went on.
+
+"Oh, yes--he came back!" Bessy sank into the cushions, watching the
+firelight play on her diamond chain as she repeated the restless gesture
+of lifting it up and letting it slip through her fingers.
+
+"Well--and then?"
+
+"Then--nothing! I was not here when he came."
+
+"You were not here? What had happened?"
+
+"I had gone over to Blanche Carbury's for a day or two. I was just
+leaving when I heard he was coming back, and I couldn't throw her over
+at the last moment."
+
+Justine tried to catch the glance that fluttered evasively under Bessy's
+lashes. "You knew he was coming--and you chose that time to go to Mrs.
+Carbury's?"
+
+"I didn't choose, my dear--it just happened! And it really happened for
+the best. I suppose he was annoyed at my going--you know he has a
+ridiculous prejudice against Blanche--and so the next morning he rushed
+off to his cotton mill."
+
+There was a pause, while the diamonds continued to flow in threads of
+fire through Mrs. Amherst's fingers.
+
+At length Justine said: "Did Mr. Amherst know that you knew he was
+coming back before you left for Mrs. Carbury's?"
+
+Bessy feigned to meditate the question. "Did he know that I knew that he
+knew?" she mocked. "Yes--I suppose so--he must have known." She stifled
+a slight yawn as she drew herself languidly to her feet.
+
+"Then he took that as your answer?"
+
+"My answer----?"
+
+"To his coming back----"
+
+"So it appears. I told you he had shown unusual tact." Bessy stretched
+her softly tapering arms above her head and then dropped them along her
+sides with another yawn. "But it's almost morning--it's wicked of me to
+have kept you so late, when you must be up to look after all those
+people!"
+
+She flung her arms with a light gesture about Justine's shoulders, and
+laid a dry kiss on her cheek.
+
+"Don't look at me with those big eyes--they've eaten up the whole of
+your face! And you needn't think I'm sorry for what I've done," she
+declared. "I'm _not_--the--least--little--atom--of a bit!"
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+JUSTINE was pacing the long library at Lynbrook, between the caged sets
+of standard authors.
+
+She felt as much caged as they: as much a part of a conventional
+stage-setting totally unrelated to the action going on before it. Two
+weeks had passed since her return from Philadelphia; and during that
+time she had learned that her usefulness at Lynbrook was over. Though
+not unwelcome, she might almost call herself unwanted; life swept by,
+leaving her tethered to the stake of inaction; a bitter lot for one who
+chose to measure existence by deeds instead of days. She had found Bessy
+ostensibly busy with a succession of guests; no one in the house needed
+her but Cicely, and even Cicely, at times, was caught up into the whirl
+of her mother's life, swept off on sleighing parties and motor-trips, or
+carried to town for a dancing-class or an opera matinée.
+
+Mrs. Fenton Carbury was not among the visitors who left Lynbrook on the
+Monday after Justine's return.
+
+Mr. Carbury, with the other bread-winners of the party, had hastened
+back to his treadmill in Wall Street after a Sunday spent in silently
+studying the files of the Financial Record; but his wife stayed on,
+somewhat aggressively in possession, criticizing and rearranging the
+furniture, ringing for the servants, making sudden demands on the
+stable, telegraphing, telephoning, ordering fires lighted or windows
+opened, and leaving everywhere in her wake a trail of cigarette ashes
+and cocktail glasses.
+
+Ned Bowfort had not been included in the house-party; but on the day of
+its dispersal he rode over unannounced for luncheon, put up his horse in
+the stable, threaded his way familiarly among the dozing dogs in the
+hall, greeted Mrs. Ansell and Justine with just the right shade of quiet
+deference, produced from his pocket a new puzzle-game for Cicely, and
+sat down beside her mother with the quiet urbanity of the family friend
+who knows his privileges but is too discreet to abuse them.
+
+After that he came every day, sometimes riding home late to the Hunt
+Club, sometimes accompanying Bessy and Mrs. Carbury to town for dinner
+and the theatre; but always with his deprecating air of having dropped
+in by accident, and modestly hoping that his intrusion was not
+unwelcome.
+
+The following Sunday brought another influx of visitors, and Bessy
+seemed to fling herself with renewed enthusiasm into the cares of
+hospitality. She had avoided Justine since their midnight talk,
+contriving to see her in Cicely's presence, or pleading haste when they
+found themselves alone. The winter was unusually open, and she spent
+long hours in the saddle when her time was not taken up with her
+visitors. For a while she took Cicely on her daily rides; but she soon
+wearied of adapting her hunter's stride to the pace of the little girl's
+pony, and Cicely was once more given over to the coachman's care.
+
+Then came snow and a long frost, and Bessy grew restless at her
+imprisonment, and grumbled that there was no way of keeping well in a
+winter climate which made regular exercise impossible.
+
+"Why not build a squash-court?" Blanche Carbury proposed; and the two
+fell instantly to making plans under the guidance of Ned Bowfort and
+Westy Gaines. As the scheme developed, various advisers suggested that
+it was a pity not to add a bowling-alley, a swimming-tank and a
+gymnasium; a fashionable architect was summoned from town, measurements
+were taken, sites discussed, sketches compared, and engineers consulted
+as to the cost of artesian wells and the best system for heating the
+tank.
+
+Bessy seemed filled with a feverish desire to carry out the plan as
+quickly as possible, and on as large a scale as even the architect's
+invention soared to; but it was finally decided that, before signing the
+contracts, she should run over to New Jersey to see a building of the
+same kind on which a sporting friend of Mrs. Carbury's had recently
+lavished a fortune.
+
+It was on this errand that the two ladies, in company with Westy Gaines
+and Bowfort, had departed on the day which found Justine restlessly
+measuring the length of the library. She and Mrs. Ansell had the house
+to themselves; and it was hardly a surprise to her when, in the course
+of the afternoon, Mrs. Ansell, after a discreet pause on the threshold,
+advanced toward her down the long room.
+
+Since the night of her return Justine had felt sure that Mrs. Ansell
+would speak; but the elder lady was given to hawk-like circlings about
+her subject, to hanging over it and contemplating it before her wings
+dropped for the descent.
+
+Now, however, it was plain that she had resolved to strike; and Justine
+had a sense of relief at the thought. She had been too long isolated in
+her anxiety, her powerlessness to help; and she had a vague hope that
+Mrs. Ansell's worldly wisdom might accomplish what her inexperience had
+failed to achieve.
+
+"Shall we sit by the fire? I am glad to find you alone," Mrs. Ansell
+began, with the pleasant abruptness that was one of the subtlest
+instruments of her indirection; and as Justine acquiesced, she added,
+yielding her slight lines to the luxurious depths of an arm-chair: "I
+have been rather suddenly asked by an invalid cousin to go to Europe
+with her next week, and I can't go contentedly without being at peace
+about our friends."
+
+She paused, but Justine made no answer. In spite of her growing sympathy
+for Mrs. Ansell she could not overcome an inherent distrust, not of her
+methods, but of her ultimate object. What, for instance, was her
+conception of being at peace about the Amhersts? Justine's own
+conviction was that, as far as their final welfare was concerned, any
+terms were better between them than the external harmony which had
+prevailed during Amherst's stay at Lynbrook.
+
+The subtle emanation of her distrust may have been felt by Mrs. Ansell;
+for the latter presently continued, with a certain nobleness: "I am the
+more concerned because I believe I must hold myself, in a small degree,
+responsible for Bessy's marriage--" and, as Justine looked at her in
+surprise, she added: "I thought she could never be happy unless her
+affections were satisfied--and even now I believe so."
+
+"I believe so too," Justine said, surprised into assent by the
+simplicity of Mrs. Ansell's declaration.
+
+"Well, then--since we are agreed in our diagnosis," the older woman went
+on, smiling, "what remedy do you suggest? Or rather, how can we
+administer it?"
+
+"What remedy?" Justine hesitated.
+
+"Oh, I believe we are agreed on that too. Mr. Amherst must be brought
+back--but how to bring him?" She paused, and then added, with a singular
+effect of appealing frankness: "I ask you, because I believe you to be
+the only one of Bessy's friends who is in the least in her husband's
+confidence."
+
+Justine's embarrassment increased. Would it not be disloyal both to
+Bessy and Amherst to acknowledge to a third person a fact of which Bessy
+herself was unaware? Yet to betray embarrassment under Mrs. Ansell's
+eyes was to risk giving it a dangerous significance.
+
+"Bessy has spoken to me once or twice--but I know very little of Mr.
+Amherst's point of view; except," Justine added, after another moment's
+weighing of alternatives, "that I believe he suffers most from being cut
+off from his work at Westmore."
+
+"Yes--so I think; but that is a difficulty that time and expediency must
+adjust. All _we_ can do--their friends, I mean--is to get them together
+again before the breach is too wide."
+
+Justine pondered. She was perhaps more ignorant of the situation than
+Mrs. Ansell imagined, for since her talk with Bessy the latter had not
+again alluded to Amherst's absence, and Justine could merely conjecture
+that he had carried out his plan of taking the management of the mill he
+had spoken of. What she most wished to know was whether he had listened
+to her entreaty, and taken the position temporarily, without binding
+himself by the acceptance of a salary; or whether, wounded by the
+outrage of Bessy's flight, he had freed himself from financial
+dependence by engaging himself definitely as manager.
+
+"I really know very little of the present situation," Justine said,
+looking at Mrs. Ansell. "Bessy merely told me that Mr. Amherst had taken
+up his old work in a cotton mill in the south."
+
+As her eyes met Mrs. Ansell's it flashed across her that the latter did
+not believe what she said, and the perception made her instantly shrink
+back into herself. But there was nothing in Mrs. Ansell's tone to
+confirm the doubt which her look betrayed.
+
+"Ah--I hoped you knew more," she said simply; "for, like you, I have
+only heard from Bessy that her husband went away suddenly to help a
+friend who is reorganizing some mills in Georgia. Of course, under the
+circumstances, such a temporary break is natural enough--perhaps
+inevitable--only he must not stay away too long."
+
+Justine was silent. Mrs. Ansell's momentary self-betrayal had checked
+all farther possibility of frank communion, and the discerning lady had
+seen her error too late to remedy it.
+
+But her hearer's heart gave a leap of joy. It was clear from what Mrs.
+Ansell said that Amherst had not bound himself definitely, since he
+would not have done so without informing his wife. And with a secret
+thrill of happiness Justine recalled his last word to her: "I will
+remember all you have said."
+
+He had kept that word and acted on it; in spite of Bessy's last assault
+on his pride he had borne with her, and deferred the day of final
+rupture; and the sense that she had had a part in his decision filled
+Justine with a glow of hope. The consciousness of Mrs. Ansell's
+suspicions faded to insignificance--Mrs. Ansell and her kind might think
+what they chose, since all that mattered now was that she herself
+should act bravely and circumspectly in her last attempt to save her
+friends.
+
+"I am not sure," Mrs. Ansell continued, gently scrutinizing her
+companion, "that I think it unwise of him to have gone; but if he stays
+too long Bessy may listen to bad advice--advice disastrous to her
+happiness." She paused, and turned her eyes meditatively toward the
+fire. "As far as I know," she said, with the same air of serious
+candour, "you are the only person who can tell him this."
+
+"I?" exclaimed Justine, with a leap of colour to her pale cheeks.
+
+Mrs. Ansell's eyes continued to avoid her. "My dear Miss Brent, Bessy
+has told me something of the wise counsels you have given her. Mr.
+Amherst is also your friend. As I said just now, you are the only person
+who might act as a link between them--surely you will not renounce the
+rôle."
+
+Justine controlled herself. "My only rôle, as you call it, has been to
+urge Bessy to--to try to allow for her husband's views----"
+
+"And have you not given the same advice to Mr. Amherst?"
+
+The eyes of the two women met. "Yes," said Justine, after a moment.
+
+"Then why refuse your help now? The moment is crucial."
+
+Justine's thoughts had flown beyond the stage of resenting Mrs. Ansell's
+gentle pertinacity. All her faculties were absorbed in the question as
+to how she could most effectually use whatever influence she possessed.
+
+"I put it to you as one old friend to another--will you write to Mr.
+Amherst to come back?" Mrs. Ansell urged her.
+
+Justine was past considering even the strangeness of this request, and
+its oblique reflection on the kind of power ascribed to her. Through the
+confused beatings of her heart she merely struggled for a clearer sense
+of guidance.
+
+"No," she said slowly. "I cannot."
+
+"You cannot? With a friend's happiness in extremity?" Mrs. Ansell paused
+a moment before she added. "Unless you believe that Bessy would be
+happier divorced?"
+
+"Divorced--? Oh, no," Justine shuddered.
+
+"That is what it will come to."
+
+"No, no! In time----"
+
+"Time is what I am most afraid of, when Blanche Carbury disposes of it."
+
+Justine breathed a deep sigh.
+
+"You'll write?" Mrs. Ansell murmured, laying a soft touch on her hand.
+
+"I have not the influence you think----"
+
+"Can you do any harm by trying?"
+
+"I might--" Justine faltered, losing her exact sense of the words she
+used.
+
+"Ah," the other flashed back, "then you _have_ influence! Why will you
+not use it?"
+
+Justine waited a moment; then her resolve gathered itself into words.
+"If I have any influence, I am not sure it would be well to use it as
+you suggest."
+
+"Not to urge Mr. Amherst's return?"
+
+"No--not now."
+
+She caught the same veiled gleam of incredulity under Mrs. Ansell's
+lids--caught and disregarded it.
+
+"It must be now or never," Mrs. Ansell insisted.
+
+"I can't think so," Justine held out.
+
+"Nevertheless--will you try?"
+
+"No--no! It might be fatal."
+
+"To whom?"
+
+"To both." She considered. "If he came back now I know he would not
+stay."
+
+Mrs. Ansell was upon her abruptly. "You _know_? Then you speak with
+authority?"
+
+"No--what authority? I speak as I feel," Justine faltered.
+
+The older woman drew herself to her feet. "Ah--then you shoulder a great
+responsibility!" She moved nearer to Justine, and once more laid a
+fugitive touch upon her. "You won't write to him?"
+
+"No--no," the girl flung back; and the voices of the returning party in
+the hall made Mrs. Ansell, with an almost imperceptible gesture of
+warning, turn musingly away toward the fire.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bessy came back brimming with the wonders she had seen. A glazed
+"sun-room," mosaic pavements, a marble fountain to feed the marble
+tank--and outside a water-garden, descending in successive terraces, to
+take up and utilize--one could see how practically!--the overflow from
+the tank. If one did the thing at all, why not do it decently? She had
+given up her new motor, had let her town house, had pinched and stinted
+herself in a hundred ways--if ever woman was entitled to a little
+compensating pleasure, surely she was that woman!
+
+The days were crowded with consultations. Architect, contractors,
+engineers, a landscape gardener, and a dozen minor craftsmen, came and
+went, unrolled plans, moistened pencils, sketched, figured, argued,
+persuaded, and filled Bessy with the dread of appearing, under Blanche
+Carbury's eyes, subject to any restraining influences of economy. What!
+She was a young woman, with an independent fortune, and she was always
+wavering, considering, secretly referring back to the mute criticism of
+an invisible judge--of the husband who had been first to shake himself
+free of any mutual subjection? The accomplished Blanche did not have to
+say this--she conveyed it by the raising of painted brows, by a smile of
+mocking interrogation, a judiciously placed silence or a resigned glance
+at the architect. So the estimates poured in, were studied,
+resisted--then yielded to and signed; then the hour of advance payments
+struck, and an imperious appeal was despatched to Mr. Tredegar, to whom
+the management of Bessy's affairs had been transferred.
+
+Mr. Tredegar, to his client's surprise, answered the appeal in person.
+He had not been lately to Lynbrook, dreading the cold and damp of the
+country in winter; and his sudden arrival had therefore an ominous
+significance.
+
+He came for an evening in mid-week, when even Blanche Carbury was
+absent, and Bessy and Justine had the house to themselves. Mrs. Ansell
+had sailed the week before with her invalid cousin. No farther words had
+passed between herself and Justine--but the latter was conscious that
+their talk had increased instead of lessened the distance between them.
+Justine herself meant to leave soon. Her hope of regaining Bessy's
+confidence had been deceived, and seeing herself definitely superseded,
+she chafed anew at her purposeless inactivity. She had already written
+to one or two doctors in New York, and to the matron of Saint
+Elizabeth's. She had made herself a name in surgical cases, and it could
+not be long before a summons came....
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Tredegar arrived, and the three dined together, the two
+women bending meekly to his discourse, which was never more oracular and
+authoritative than when delivered to the gentler sex alone. Amherst's
+absence, in particular, seemed to loose the thin current of Mr.
+Tredegar's eloquence. He was never quite at ease in the presence of an
+independent mind, and Justine often reflected that, even had the two men
+known nothing of each other's views, there would have been between them
+an instinctive and irreducible hostility--they would have disliked each
+other if they had merely jostled elbows in the street.
+
+Yet even freed from Amherst's presence Mr. Tredegar showed a darkling
+brow, and as Justine slipped away after dinner she felt that she left
+Bessy to something more serious than the usual business conference.
+
+How serious, she was to learn that very night, when, in the small hours,
+her friend burst in on her tearfully. Bessy was ruined--ruined--that was
+what Mr. Tredegar had come to tell her! She might have known he would
+not have travelled to Lynbrook for a trifle.... She had expected to find
+herself cramped, restricted--to be warned that she must "manage,"
+hateful word!... But this! This was incredible! Unendurable! There was
+no money to build the gymnasium--none at all! And all because it had
+been swallowed up at Westmore--because the ridiculous changes there,
+the changes that nobody wanted, nobody approved of--that Truscomb and
+all the other experts had opposed and derided from the first--these
+changes, even modified and arrested, had already involved so much of her
+income, that it might be years--yes, he said _years_!--before she would
+feel herself free again--free of her own fortune, of Cicely's
+fortune...of the money poor Dick Westmore had meant his wife and child
+to enjoy!
+
+Justine listened anxiously to this confused outpouring of resentments.
+Bessy's born incapacity for figures made it indeed possible that the
+facts came on her as a surprise--that she had quite forgotten the
+temporary reduction of her income, and had begun to imagine that what
+she had saved in one direction was hers to spend in another. All this
+was conceivable. But why had Mr. Tredegar drawn so dark a picture of the
+future? Or was it only that, thwarted of her immediate desire, Bessy's
+disappointment blackened the farthest verge of her horizon? Justine,
+though aware of her friend's lack of perspective, suspected that a
+conniving hand had helped to throw the prospect out of drawing....
+
+Could it be possible, then, that Mr. Tredegar was among those who
+desired a divorce? That the influences at which Mrs. Ansell had hinted
+proceeded not only from Blanche Carbury and her group? Helpless amid
+this rush of forebodings, Justine could do no more than soothe and
+restrain--to reason would have been idle. She had never till now
+realized how completely she had lost ground with Bessy.
+
+"The humiliation--before my friends! Oh, I was warned...my father, every
+one...for Cicely's sake I was warned...but I wouldn't listen--and _now_!
+From the first it was all he cared for--in Europe, even, he was always
+dragging me to factories. _Me?_--I was only the owner of Westmore! He
+wanted power--power, that's all--when he lost it he left me...oh, I'm
+glad now my baby is dead! Glad there's nothing between us--nothing,
+nothing in the world to tie us together any longer!"
+
+The disproportion between this violent grief and its trivial cause would
+have struck Justine as simply grotesque, had she not understood that the
+incident of the gymnasium, which followed with cumulative pressure on a
+series of similar episodes, seemed to Bessy like the reaching out of a
+retaliatory hand--a mocking reminder that she was still imprisoned in
+the consequences of her unhappy marriage.
+
+Such folly seemed past weeping for--it froze Justine's compassion into
+disdain, till she remembered that the sources of our sorrow are
+sometimes nobler than their means of expression, and that a baffled
+unappeased love was perhaps the real cause of Bessy's anger against her
+husband.
+
+At any rate, the moment was a critical one, and Justine remembered with
+a pang that Mrs. Ansell had foreseen such a contingency, and implored
+her to take measures against it. She had refused, from a sincere dread
+of precipitating a definite estrangement--but had she been right in
+judging the situation so logically? With a creature of Bessy's emotional
+uncertainties the result of contending influences was really
+incalculable--it might still be that, at this juncture, Amherst's return
+would bring about a reaction of better feelings....
+
+Justine sat and mused on these things after leaving her friend exhausted
+upon a tearful pillow. She felt that she had perhaps taken too large a
+survey of the situation--that the question whether there could ever be
+happiness between this tormented pair was not one to concern those who
+struggled for their welfare. Most marriages are a patch-work of jarring
+tastes and ill-assorted ambitions--if here and there, for a moment, two
+colours blend, two textures are the same, so much the better for the
+pattern! Justine, certainly, could foresee in reunion no positive
+happiness for either of her friends; but she saw positive disaster for
+Bessy in separation from her husband....
+
+Suddenly she rose from her chair by the falling fire, and crossed over
+to the writing-table. She would write to Amherst herself--she would tell
+him to come. The decision once reached, hope flowed back to her
+heart--the joy of action so often deceived her into immediate faith in
+its results!
+
+"Dear Mr. Amherst," she wrote, "the last time I saw you, you told me you
+would remember what I said. I ask you to do so now--to remember that I
+urged you not to be away too long. I believe you ought to come back now,
+though I know Bessy will not ask you to. I am writing without her
+knowledge, but with the conviction that she needs you, though perhaps
+without knowing it herself...."
+
+She paused, and laid down her pen. Why did it make her so happy to write
+to him? Was it merely the sense of recovered helpfulness, or something
+warmer, more personal, that made it a joy to trace his name, and to
+remind him of their last intimate exchange of words? Well--perhaps it
+was that too. There were moments when she was so mortally lonely that
+any sympathetic contact with another life sent a glow into her
+veins--that she was thankful to warm herself at any fire.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+BESSY, languidly glancing through her midday mail some five days later,
+uttered a slight exclamation as she withdrew her finger-tip from the
+flap of the envelope she had begun to open.
+
+It was a black sleety day, with an east wind bowing the trees beyond the
+drenched window-panes, and the two friends, after luncheon, had
+withdrawn to the library, where Justine sat writing notes for Bessy,
+while the latter lay back in her arm-chair, in the state of dreamy
+listlessness into which she always sank when not under the stimulus of
+amusement or exercise.
+
+She sat suddenly upright as her eyes fell on the letter.
+
+"I beg your pardon! I thought it was for me," she said, holding it out
+to Justine.
+
+The latter reddened as she glanced at the superscription. It had not
+occurred to her that Amherst would reply to her appeal: she had pictured
+him springing on the first north-bound train, perhaps not even pausing
+to announce his return to his wife.... And to receive his letter under
+Bessy's eye was undeniably embarrassing, since Justine felt the
+necessity of keeping her intervention secret.
+
+But under Bessy's eye she certainly was--it continued to rest on her
+curiously, speculatively, with an under-gleam of malicious significance.
+
+"So stupid of me--I can't imagine why I should have expected my husband
+to write to me!" Bessy went on, leaning back in lazy contemplation of
+her other letters, but still obliquely including Justine in her angle of
+vision.
+
+The latter, after a moment's pause, broke the seal and read.
+
+
+     "Millfield, Georgia.
+     "My dear Miss Brent,
+
+     "Your letter reached me yesterday and I have thought it over
+     carefully. I appreciate the feeling that prompted it--but I don't
+     know that any friend, however kind and discerning, can give the
+     final advice in such matters. You tell me you are sure my wife will
+     not ask me to return--well, under present conditions that seems to
+     me a sufficient reason for staying away.
+
+     "Meanwhile, I assure you that I have remembered all you said to me
+     that day. I have made no binding arrangement here--nothing to
+     involve my future action--and I have done this solely because you
+     asked it. This will tell you better than words how much I value
+     your advice, and what strong reasons I must have for not following
+     it now.
+
+     "I suppose there are no more exploring parties in this weather. I
+     wish I could show Cicely some of the birds down here.
+
+     "Yours faithfully,
+     "John Amherst.
+
+     "Please don't let my wife ride Impulse."
+
+
+Latent under Justine's acute consciousness of what this letter meant,
+was the sense of Bessy's inferences and conjectures. She could feel them
+actually piercing the page in her hand like some hypersensitive visual
+organ to which matter offers no obstruction. Or rather, baffled in their
+endeavour, they were evoking out of the unseen, heaven knew what
+fantastic structure of intrigue--scrawling over the innocent page with
+burning evidences of perfidy and collusion....
+
+One thing became instantly clear to her: she must show the letter to
+Bessy. She ran her eyes over it again, trying to disentangle the
+consequences. There was the allusion to their talk in town--well, she
+had told Bessy of that! But the careless reference to their woodland
+excursions--what might not Bessy, in her present mood, make of it?
+Justine's uppermost thought was of distress at the failure of her plan.
+Perhaps she might still have induced Amherst to come back, had it not
+been for this accident; but now that hope was destroyed.
+
+She raised her eyes and met Bessy's. "Will you read it?" she said,
+holding out the letter.
+
+Bessy received it with lifted brows, and a protesting murmur--but as she
+read, Justine saw the blood mount under her clear skin, invade the
+temples, the nape, even the little flower-like ears; then it receded as
+suddenly, ebbing at last from the very lips, so that the smile with
+which she looked up from her reading was as white as if she had been
+under the stress of physical pain.
+
+"So you have written my husband to come back?"
+
+"As you see."
+
+Bessy looked her straight in the eyes. "I am very much obliged to
+you--extremely obliged!"
+
+Justine met the look quietly. "Which means that you resent my
+interference----"
+
+"Oh, I leave you to call it that!" Bessy mocked, tossing the letter down
+on the table at her side.
+
+"Bessy! Don't take it in that way. If I made a mistake I did so with the
+hope of helping you. How can I stand by, after all these months
+together, and see you deliberately destroying your life without trying
+to stop you?"
+
+The smile withered on Bessy's lips. "It is very dear and good of you--I
+know you're never happy unless you're helping people--but in this case I
+can only repeat what my husband says. He and I don't often look at
+things in the same light--but I quite agree with him that the management
+of such matters is best left to--to the persons concerned."
+
+Justine hesitated. "I might answer that, if you take that view, it was
+inconsistent of you to talk with me so openly. You've certainly made me
+feel that you wanted help--you've turned to me for it. But perhaps that
+does not justify my writing to Mr. Amherst without your knowing it."
+
+Bessy laughed. "Ah, my dear, you knew that if you asked me the letter
+would never be sent!"
+
+"Perhaps I did," said Justine simply. "I was trying to help you against
+your will."
+
+"Well, you see the result." Bessy laid a derisive touch on the letter.
+"Do you understand now whose fault it is if I am alone?"
+
+Justine faced her steadily. "There is nothing in Mr. Amherst's letter to
+make me change my opinion. I still think it lies with you to bring him
+back."
+
+Bessy raised a glittering face to her--all hardness and laughter. "Such
+modesty, my dear! As if I had a chance of succeeding where you failed!"
+
+She sprang up, brushing the curls from her temples with a petulant
+gesture. "Don't mind me if I'm cross--but I've had a dose of preaching
+from Maria Ansell, and I don't know why my friends should treat me like
+a puppet without any preferences of my own, and press me upon a man who
+has done his best to show that he doesn't want me. As a matter of fact,
+he and I are luckily agreed on that point too--and I'm afraid all the
+good advice in the world won't persuade us to change our opinion!"
+
+Justine held her ground. "If I believed that of either of you, I
+shouldn't have written--I should not be pleading with you now--And Mr.
+Amherst doesn't believe it either," she added, after a pause, conscious
+of the risk she was taking, but thinking the words might act like a blow
+in the face of a person sinking under a deadly narcotic.
+
+Bessy's smile deepened to a sneer. "I see you've talked me over
+thoroughly--and on _his_ views I ought perhaps not to have risked an
+opinion----"
+
+"We have not talked you over," Justine exclaimed. "Mr. Amherst could
+never talk of you...in the way you think...." And under the light
+staccato of Bessy's laugh she found resolution to add: "It is not in
+that way that I know what he feels."
+
+"Ah? I should be curious to hear, then----"
+
+Justine turned to the letter, which still lay between them. "Will you
+read the last sentence again? The postscript, I mean."
+
+Bessy, after a surprised glance at her, took the letter up with the
+deprecating murmur of one who acts under compulsion rather than dispute
+about a trifle.
+
+"The postscript? Let me see...'Don't let my wife ride Impulse.'--_Et
+puis?_" she murmured, dropping the page again.
+
+"Well, does it tell you nothing? It's a cold letter--at first I thought
+so--the letter of a man who believes himself deeply hurt--so deeply that
+he will make no advance, no sign of relenting. That's what I thought
+when I first read it...but the postscript undoes it all."
+
+Justine, as she spoke, had drawn near Bessy, laying a hand on her arm,
+and shedding on her the radiance of a face all charity and sweet
+compassion. It was her rare gift, at such moments, to forget her own
+relation to the person for whose fate she was concerned, to cast aside
+all consciousness of criticism and distrust in the heart she strove to
+reach, as pitiful people forget their physical timidity in the attempt
+to help a wounded animal.
+
+For a moment Bessy seemed to waver. The colour flickered faintly up her
+cheek, her long lashes drooped--she had the tenderest lids!--and all her
+face seemed melting under the beams of Justine's ardour. But the letter
+was still in her hand--her eyes, in sinking, fell upon it, and she
+sounded beneath her breath the fatal phrase: "'I have done this solely
+because you asked it.'
+
+"After such a tribute to your influence I don't wonder you feel
+competent to set everybody's affairs in order! But take my advice, my
+dear--_don't_ ask me not to ride Impulse!"
+
+The pity froze on Justine's lip: she shrank back cut to the quick. For a
+moment the silence between the two women rang with the flight of arrowy,
+wounding thoughts; then Bessy's anger flagged, she gave one of her
+embarrassed half-laughs, and turning back, laid a deprecating touch on
+her friend's arm.
+
+"I didn't mean that, Justine...but let us not talk now--I can't!"
+
+Justine did not move: the reaction could not come as quickly in her
+case. But she turned on Bessy two eyes full of pardon, full of
+speechless pity...and Bessy received the look silently before she moved
+to the door and went out.
+
+"Oh, poor thing--poor thing!" Justine gasped as the door closed.
+
+She had already forgotten her own hurt--she was alone again with Bessy's
+sterile pain. She stood staring before her for a moment--then her eyes
+fell on Amherst's letter, which had fluttered to the floor between them.
+The fatal letter! If it had not come at that unlucky moment perhaps she
+might still have gained her end.... She picked it up and re-read it.
+Yes--there were phrases in it that a wounded suspicious heart might
+misconstrue.... Yet Bessy's last words had absolved her.... Why had she
+not answered them? Why had she stood there dumb? The blow to her pride
+had been too deep, had been dealt too unexpectedly--for one miserable
+moment she had thought first of herself! Ah, that importunate,
+irrepressible self--the _moi haïssable_ of the Christian--if only one
+could tear it from one's breast! She had missed an opportunity--her last
+opportunity perhaps! By this time, even, a hundred hostile influences,
+cold whispers of vanity, of selfishness, of worldly pride, might have
+drawn their freezing ring about Bessy's heart....
+
+Justine started up to follow her...then paused, recalling her last
+words. "Let us not talk now--I can't!" She had no right to intrude on
+that bleeding privacy--if the chance had been hers she had lost it. She
+dropped back into her seat at the desk, hiding her face in her hands.
+
+Presently she heard the clock strike, and true to her tireless instinct
+of activity, she lifted her head, took up her pen, and went on with the
+correspondence she had dropped.... It was hard at first to collect her
+thoughts, or even to summon to her pen the conventional phrases that
+sufficed for most of the notes. Groping for a word, she pushed aside her
+writing and stared out at the sallow frozen landscape framed by the
+window at which she sat. The sleet had ceased, and hollows of sunless
+blue showed through the driving wind-clouds. A hard sky and a hard
+ground--frost-bound ringing earth under rigid ice-mailed trees.
+
+As Justine looked out, shivering a little, she saw a woman's figure
+riding down the avenue toward the gate. The figure disappeared behind a
+clump of evergreens--showed again farther down, through the boughs of a
+skeleton beech--and revealed itself in the next open space as
+Bessy--Bessy in the saddle on a day of glaring frost, when no horse
+could keep his footing out of a walk!
+
+Justine went to the window and strained her eyes for a confirming
+glimpse. Yes--it was Bessy! There was no mistaking that light flexible
+figure, every line swaying true to the beat of the horse's stride. But
+Justine remembered that Bessy had not meant to ride--had countermanded
+her horse because of the bad going.... Well, she was a perfect
+horsewoman and had no doubt chosen her surest-footed mount...probably
+the brown cob, Tony Lumpkin.
+
+But when did Tony's sides shine so bright through the leafless branches?
+And when did he sweep his rider on with such long free play of the
+hind-quarters? Horse and rider shot into sight again, rounding the curve
+of the avenue near the gates, and in a break of sunlight Justine saw the
+glitter of chestnut flanks--and remembered that Impulse was the only
+chestnut in the stables....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She went back to her seat and continued writing. Bessy had left a
+formidable heap of bills and letters; and when this was demolished,
+Justine had her own correspondence to despatch. She had heard that
+morning from the matron of Saint Elizabeth's: an interesting "case" was
+offered her, but she must come within two days. For the first few hours
+she had wavered, loath to leave Lynbrook without some definite light on
+her friend's future; but now Amherst's letter had shed that light--or
+rather, had deepened the obscurity--and she had no pretext for lingering
+on where her uselessness had been so amply demonstrated.
+
+She wrote to the matron accepting the engagement; and the acceptance
+involved the writing of other letters, the general reorganizing of that
+minute polity, the life of Justine Brent. She smiled a little to think
+how easily she could be displaced and transplanted--how slender were her
+material impedimenta, how few her invisible bonds! She was as light and
+detachable as a dead leaf on the autumn breeze--yet she was in the
+season of sap and flower, when there is life and song in the trees!
+
+But she did not think long of herself, for an undefinable anxiety ran
+through her thoughts like a black thread. It found expression, now and
+then, in the long glances she threw through the window--in her rising to
+consult the clock and compare her watch with it--in a nervous snatch of
+humming as she paced the room once or twice before going back to her
+desk....
+
+Why was Bessy so late? Dusk was falling already--the early end of the
+cold slate-hued day. But Bessy always rode late--there was always a
+rational answer to Justine's irrational conjectures.... It was the sight
+of those chestnut flanks that tormented her--she knew of Bessy's
+previous struggles with the mare. But the indulging of idle
+apprehensions was not in her nature, and when the tea-tray came, and
+with it Cicely, sparkling from a gusty walk, and coral-pink in her cloud
+of crinkled hair, Justine sprang up and cast off her cares.
+
+It cost her a pang, again, to see the lamps lit and the curtains
+drawn--shutting in the warmth and brightness of the house from that
+wind-swept frozen twilight through which Bessy rode alone. But the icy
+touch of the thought slipped from Justine's mind as she bent above the
+tea-tray, gravely measuring Cicely's milk into a "grown-up" teacup,
+hearing the confidential details of the child's day, and capping them
+with banter and fantastic narrative.
+
+She was not sorry to go--ah, no! The house had become a prison to her,
+with ghosts walking its dreary floors. But to lose Cicely would be
+bitter--she had not felt how bitter till the child pressed against her
+in the firelight, insisting raptly, with little sharp elbows stabbing
+her knee: "And _then_ what happened, Justine?"
+
+The door opened, and some one came in to look at the fire. Justine,
+through the mazes of her fairy-tale, was dimly conscious that it was
+Knowles, and not one of the footmen...the proud Knowles, who never
+mended the fires himself.... As he passed out again, hovering slowly
+down the long room, she rose, leaving Cicely on the hearth-rug, and
+followed him to the door.
+
+"Has Mrs. Amherst not come in?" she asked, not knowing why she wished to
+ask it out of the child's hearing.
+
+"No, miss. I looked in myself to see--thinking she might have come by
+the side-door."
+
+"She may have gone to her sitting-room."
+
+"She's not upstairs."
+
+They both paused. Then Justine said: "What horse was she riding?"
+
+"Impulse, Miss." The butler looked at his large responsible watch. "It's
+not late--" he said, more to himself than to her.
+
+"No. Has she been riding Impulse lately?"
+
+"No, Miss. Not since that day the mare nearly had her off. I understood
+Mr. Amherst did not wish it."
+
+Justine went back to Cicely and the fairy-tale.--As she took up the
+thread of the Princess's adventures, she asked herself why she had ever
+had any hope of helping Bessy. The seeds of disaster were in the poor
+creature's soul.... Even when she appeared to be moved, lifted out of
+herself, her escaping impulses were always dragged back to the magnetic
+centre of hard distrust and resistance that sometimes forms the core of
+soft-fibred natures. As she had answered her husband's previous appeal
+by her flight to the woman he disliked, so she answered this one by
+riding the horse he feared.... Justine's last illusions crumbled. The
+distance between two such natures was unspannable. Amherst had done well
+to remain away...and with a tidal rush her sympathies swept back to his
+side....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The governess came to claim Cicely. One of the footmen came to put
+another log on the fire. Then the rite of removing the tea-table was
+majestically performed--the ceremonial that had so often jarred on
+Amherst's nerves. As she watched it, Justine had a vague sense of the
+immutability of the household routine--a queer awed feeling that,
+whatever happened, a machine so perfectly adjusted would work on
+inexorably, like a natural law....
+
+She rose to look out of the window, staring vainly into blackness
+between the parted curtains. As she turned back, passing the
+writing-table, she noticed that Cicely's irruption had made her forget
+to post her letters--an unusual oversight. A glance at the clock told
+her that she was not too late for the mail--reminding her, at the same
+time, that it was scarcely three hours since Bessy had started on her
+ride.... She saw the foolishness of her fears. Even in winter, Bessy
+often rode for more than three hours; and now that the days were growing
+longer----
+
+Suddenly reassured, Justine went out into the hall, intending to carry
+her batch of letters to the red pillar-box by the door. As she did so, a
+cold blast struck her. Could it be that for once the faultless routine
+of the house had been relaxed, that one of the servants had left the
+outer door ajar? She walked over to the vestibule--yes, both doors were
+wide. The night rushed in on a vicious wind. As she pushed the vestibule
+door shut, she heard the dogs sniffing and whining on the threshold. She
+crossed the vestibule, and heard voices and the tramping of feet in the
+darkness--then saw a lantern gleam. Suddenly Knowles shot out of the
+night--the lantern struck on his bleached face.
+
+Justine, stepping back, pressed the electric button in the wall, and the
+wide door-step was abruptly illuminated, with its huddled, pushing,
+heavily-breathing group...black figures writhing out of darkness,
+strange faces distorted in the glare.
+
+"Bessy!" she cried, and sprang forward; but suddenly Wyant was before
+her, his hand on her arm; and as the dreadful group struggled by into
+the hall, he froze her to him with a whisper: "The spine----"
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+WITHIN Justine there was a moment's darkness; then, like terror-struck
+workers rallying to their tasks, every faculty was again at its post,
+receiving and transmitting signals, taking observations, anticipating
+orders, making her brain ring with the hum of a controlled activity.
+
+She had known the sensation before--the transmuting of terror and pity
+into this miraculous lucidity of thought and action; but never had it
+snatched her from such depths. Oh, thank heaven for her knowledge
+now--for the trained mind that could take command of her senses and bend
+them firmly to its service!
+
+Wyant seconded her well, after a moment's ague-fit of fear. She pitied
+and pardoned the moment, aware of its cause, and respecting him for the
+way in which he rose above it into the clear air of professional
+self-command. Through the first hours they worked shoulder to shoulder,
+conscious of each other only as of kindred will-powers, stretched to the
+utmost tension of discernment and activity, and hardly needing speech or
+look to further their swift co-operation. It was thus that she had known
+him in the hospital, in the heat of his youthful zeal: the doctor she
+liked best to work with, because no other so tempered ardour with
+judgment.
+
+The great surgeon, arriving from town at midnight, confirmed his
+diagnosis: there was undoubted injury to the spine. Other consultants
+were summoned in haste, and in the winter dawn the verdict was
+pronounced--a fractured vertebra, and possibly lesion of the cord....
+
+Justine got a moment alone when the surgeons returned to the sick-room.
+Other nurses were there now, capped, aproned, quickly and silently
+unpacking their appliances.... She must call a halt, clear her brain
+again, decide rapidly what was to be done next.... Oh, if only the
+crawling hours could bring Amherst! It was strange that there was no
+telegram yet--no, not strange, after all, since it was barely six in the
+morning, and her message had not been despatched till seven the night
+before. It was not unlikely that, in that little southern settlement,
+the telegraph office closed at six.
+
+She stood in Bessy's sitting-room, her forehead pressed to the
+window-pane, her eyes straining out into the thin February darkness,
+through which the morning star swam white. As soon as she had yielded
+her place to the other nurses her nervous tension relaxed, and she hung
+again above the deeps of anguish, terrified and weak. In a moment the
+necessity for action would snatch her back to a firm footing--her
+thoughts would clear, her will affirm itself, all the wheels of the
+complex machine resume their functions. But now she felt only the
+horror....
+
+She knew so well what was going on in the next room. Dr. Garford, the
+great surgeon, who had known her at Saint Elizabeth's, had evidently
+expected her to take command of the nurses he had brought from town;
+but there were enough without her, and there were other cares which, for
+the moment, she only could assume--the despatching of messages to the
+scattered family, the incessant telephoning and telegraphing to town,
+the general guidance of the household swinging rudderless in the tide of
+disaster. Cicely, above all, must be watched over and guarded from
+alarm. The little governess, reduced to a twittering heap of fears, had
+been quarantined in a distant room till reason returned to her; and the
+child, meanwhile, slept quietly in the old nurse's care.
+
+Cicely would wake presently, and Justine must go up to her with a bright
+face; other duties would press thick on the heels of this; their feet
+were already on the threshold. But meanwhile she could only follow in
+imagination what was going on in the other room....
+
+She had often thought with dread of such a contingency. She always
+sympathized too much with her patients--she knew it was the joint in her
+armour. Her quick-gushing pity lay too near that professional exterior
+which she had managed to endue with such a bright glaze of insensibility
+that some sentimental patients--without much the matter--had been known
+to call her "a little hard." How, then, should she steel herself if it
+fell to her lot to witness a cruel accident to some one she loved, and
+to have to perform a nurse's duties, steadily, expertly, unflinchingly,
+while every fibre was torn with inward anguish?
+
+She knew the horror of it now--and she knew also that her self-enforced
+exile from the sick-room was a hundred times worse. To stand there,
+knowing, with each tick of the clock, what was being said and done
+within--how the great luxurious room, with its pale draperies and
+scented cushions, and the hundred pretty trifles strewing the lace
+toilet-table and the delicate old furniture, was being swept bare,
+cleared for action like a ship's deck, drearily garnished with rows of
+instruments, rolls of medicated cotton, oiled silk, bottles, bandages,
+water-pillows--all the grim paraphernalia of the awful rites of pain: to
+know this, and to be able to call up with torturing vividness that poor
+pale face on the pillows, vague-eyed, expressionless, perhaps, as she
+had last seen it, or--worse yet--stirred already with the first creeping
+pangs of consciousness: to have these images slowly, deliberately burn
+themselves into her brain, and to be aware, at the same time, of that
+underlying moral disaster, of which the accident seemed the monstrous
+outward symbol--ah, this was worse than anything she had ever dreamed!
+
+She knew that the final verdict could not be pronounced till the
+operation which was about to take place should reveal the extent of
+injury to the spine. Bessy, in falling, must have struck on the back of
+her head and shoulders, and it was but too probable that the fractured
+vertebra had caused a bruise if not a lesion of the spinal cord. In that
+case paralysis was certain--and a slow crawling death the almost
+inevitable outcome. There had been cases, of course--Justine's
+professional memory evoked them--cases of so-called "recovery," where
+actual death was kept at bay, a semblance of life preserved for years in
+the poor petrified body.... But the mind shrank from such a fate for
+Bessy. And it might still be that the injury to the spine was not
+grave--though, here again, the fracturing of the fourth vertebra was
+ominous.
+
+The door opened and some one came from the inner room--Wyant, in search
+of an instrument-case. Justine turned and they looked at each other.
+
+"It will be now?"
+
+"Yes. Dr. Garford asked if there was no one you could send for."
+
+"No one but Mr. Tredegar and the Halford Gaineses. They'll be here this
+evening, I suppose."
+
+They exchanged a discouraged glance, knowing how little difference the
+presence of the Halford Gaineses would make.
+
+"He wanted to know if there was no telegram from Amherst."
+
+"No."
+
+"Then they mean to begin."
+
+A nursemaid appeared in the doorway. "Miss Cicely--" she said; and
+Justine bounded upstairs.
+
+The day's work had begun. From Cicely to the governess--from the
+governess to the housekeeper--from the telephone to the
+writing-table--Justine vibrated back and forth, quick, noiseless,
+self-possessed--sobering, guiding, controlling her confused and
+panic-stricken world. It seemed to her that half the day had elapsed
+before the telegraph office at Lynbrook opened--she was at the telephone
+at the stroke of the hour. No telegram? Only one--a message from Halford
+Gaines--"Arrive at eight tonight." Amherst was still silent! Was there a
+difference of time to be allowed for? She tried to remember, to
+calculate, but her brain was too crowded with other thoughts.... She
+turned away from the instrument discouraged.
+
+Whenever she had time to think, she was overwhelmed by the weight of her
+solitude. Mr. Langhope was in Egypt, accessible only through a London
+banker--Mrs. Ansell presumably wandering on the continent. Her cables
+might not reach them for days. And among the throng of Lynbrook
+habitués, she knew not to whom to turn. To loose the Telfer tribe and
+Mrs. Carbury upon that stricken house--her thought revolted from it, and
+she was thankful to know that February had dispersed their migratory
+flock to southern shores. But if only Amherst would come!
+
+Cicely and the tranquillized governess had been despatched on a walk
+with the dogs, and Justine was returning upstairs when she met one of
+the servants with a telegram. She tore it open with a great throb of
+relief. It was her own message to Amherst--_address unknown_....
+
+Had she misdirected it, then? In that first blinding moment her mind
+might so easily have failed her. But no--there was the name of the town
+before her...Millfield, Georgia...the same name as in his letter.... She
+had made no mistake, but he was gone! Gone--and without leaving an
+address.... For a moment her tired mind refused to work; then she roused
+herself, ran down the stairs again, and rang up the telegraph-office.
+The thing to do, of course, was to telegraph to the owner of the
+mills--of whose very name she was ignorant!--enquiring where Amherst
+was, and asking him to forward the message. Precious hours must be lost
+meanwhile--but, after all, they were waiting for no one upstairs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The verdict had been pronounced: dislocation and fracture of the fourth
+vertebra, with consequent injury to the spinal cord. Dr. Garford and
+Wyant came out alone to tell her. The surgeon ran over the technical
+details, her brain instantly at attention as he developed his diagnosis
+and issued his orders. She asked no questions as to the future--she
+knew it was impossible to tell. But there were no immediate signs of a
+fatal ending: the patient had rallied well, and the general conditions
+were not unfavourable.
+
+"You have heard from Mr. Amherst?" Dr. Garford concluded.
+
+"Not yet...he may be travelling," Justine faltered, unwilling to say
+that her telegram had been returned. As she spoke there was a tap on the
+door, and a folded paper was handed in--a telegram telephoned from the
+village.
+
+"Amherst gone South America to study possibilities cotton growing have
+cabled our correspondent Buenos Ayres."
+
+Concealment was no longer possible. Justine handed the message to the
+surgeon.
+
+"Ah--and there would be no chance of finding his address among Mrs.
+Amherst's papers?"
+
+"I think not--no."
+
+"Well--we must keep her alive, Wyant."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At dusk, Justine sat in the library, waiting for Cicely to be brought to
+her. A lull had descended on the house--a new order developed out of the
+morning's chaos. With soundless steps, with lowered voices, the
+machinery of life was carried on. And Justine, caught in one of the
+pauses of inaction which she had fought off since morning, was reliving,
+for the hundredth time, her few moments at Bessy's bedside....
+
+She had been summoned in the course of the afternoon, and stealing into
+the darkened room, had bent over the bed while the nurses noiselessly
+withdrew. There lay the white face which had been burnt into her inward
+vision--the motionless body, and the head stirring ceaselessly, as
+though to release the agitation of the imprisoned limbs. Bessy's eyes
+turned to her, drawing her down.
+
+"Am I going to die, Justine?"
+
+"No."
+
+"The pain is...so awful...."
+
+"It will pass...you will sleep...."
+
+"Cicely----"
+
+"She has gone for a walk. You'll see her presently."
+
+The eyes faded, releasing Justine. She stole away, and the nurses came
+back.
+
+Bessy had spoken of Cicely--but not a word of her husband! Perhaps her
+poor dazed mind groped for him, or perhaps it shrank from his name....
+Justine was thankful for her silence. For the moment her heart was
+bitter against Amherst. Why, so soon after her appeal and his answer,
+had he been false to the spirit of their agreement? This unannounced,
+unexplained departure was nothing less than a breach of his tacit
+pledge--the pledge not to break definitely with Lynbrook. And why had he
+gone to South America? She drew her aching brows together, trying to
+retrace a vague memory of some allusion to the cotton-growing
+capabilities of the region.... Yes, he had spoken of it once in talking
+of the world's area of cotton production. But what impulse had sent him
+off on such an exploration? Mere unrest, perhaps--the intolerable burden
+of his useless life? The questions spun round and round in her head,
+weary, profitless, yet persistent....
+
+It was a relief when Cicely came--a relief to measure out the cambric
+tea, to make the terrier beg for ginger-bread, even to take up the
+thread of the interrupted fairy-tale--though through it all she was
+wrung by the thought that, just twenty-four hours earlier, she and the
+child had sat in the same place, listening for the trot of Bessy's
+horse....
+
+The day passed: the hands of the clocks moved, food was cooked and
+served, blinds were drawn up or down, lamps lit and fires renewed...all
+these tokens of the passage of time took place before her, while her
+real consciousness seemed to hang in some dim central void, where
+nothing happened, nothing would ever happen....
+
+And now Cicely was in bed, the last "long-distance" call was answered,
+the last orders to kitchen and stable had been despatched, Wyant had
+stolen down to her with his hourly report--"no change"--and she was
+waiting in the library for the Gaineses.
+
+Carriage-wheels on the gravel: they were there at last. Justine started up
+and went into the hall. As she passed out of the library the outer door
+opened, and the gusty night swooped in--as, at the same hour the day
+before, it had swooped in ahead of the dreadful procession--preceding now
+the carriageful of Hanaford relations: Mr. Gaines, red-glazed, brief and
+interrogatory; Westy, small, nervous, ill at ease with his grief; and Mrs.
+Gaines, supreme in the possession of a consolatory yet funereal manner,
+and sinking on Justine's breast with the solemn whisper: "Have you sent
+for the clergyman?"
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+THE house was empty again.
+
+A week had passed since Bessy's accident, and friends and relations had
+dispersed. The household had fallen into its routine, the routine of
+sickness and silence, and once more the perfectly-adjusted machine was
+working on steadily, inexorably, like a natural law....
+
+So at least it seemed to Justine's nerves, intolerably stretched, at
+times, on the rack of solitude, of suspense, of forebodings. She had
+been thankful when the Gaineses left--doubly thankful when a telegram
+from Bermuda declared Mrs. Carbury to be "in despair" at her inability
+to fly to Bessy's side--thankful even that Mr. Tredegar's professional
+engagements made it impossible for him to do more than come down, every
+second or third day, for a few hours; yet, though in some ways it was a
+relief to be again in sole command, there were moments when the weight
+of responsibility, and the inability to cry out her fears and her
+uncertainties, seemed almost unendurable.
+
+Wyant was her chief reliance. He had risen so gallantly above his
+weakness, become again so completely the indefatigable worker of former
+days, that she accused herself of injustice in ascribing to physical
+causes the vague eye and tremulous hand which might merely have
+betokened a passing access of nervous sensibility. Now, at any rate, he
+had his nerves so well under control, and had shown such a grasp of the
+case, and such marked executive capacity, that on the third day after
+the accident Dr. Garford, withdrawing his own assistant, had left him in
+control at Lynbrook.
+
+At the same time Justine had taken up her attendance in the sick-room,
+replacing one of the subordinate nurses who had been suddenly called
+away. She had done this the more willingly because Bessy, who was now
+conscious for the greater part of the time, had asked for her once or
+twice, and had seemed easier when she was in the room. But she still
+gave only occasional aid, relieving the other nurses when they dined or
+rested, but keeping herself partly free in order to have an eye on the
+household, and give a few hours daily to Cicely.
+
+All this had become part of a system that already seemed as old as
+memory. She could hardly recall what life had been before the
+accident--the seven dreadful days seemed as long as the days of
+creation. Every morning she rose to the same report--"no change"--and
+every day passed without a word from Amherst. Minor news, of course, had
+come: poor Mr. Langhope, at length overtaken at Wady Halfa, was
+hastening back as fast as ship and rail could carry him; Mrs. Ansell,
+anchored at Algiers with her invalid, cabled anxious enquiries; but
+still no word from Amherst. The correspondent at Buenos Ayres had simply
+cabled "Not here. Will enquire"--and since then, silence.
+
+Justine had taken to sitting in a small room beyond Amherst's bedroom,
+near enough to Bessy to be within call, yet accessible to the rest of
+the household. The walls were hung with old prints, and with two or
+three photographs of early Italian pictures; and in a low bookcase
+Amherst had put the books he had brought from Hanaford--the English
+poets, the Greek dramatists, some text-books of biology and kindred
+subjects, and a few stray well-worn volumes: Lecky's European Morals,
+Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm Meister, Seneca, Epictetus, a German
+grammar, a pocket Bacon.
+
+It was unlike any other room at Lynbrook--even through her benumbing
+misery, Justine felt the relief of escaping there from the rest of the
+great soulless house. Sometimes she took up one of the books and read a
+page or two, letting the beat of the verse lull her throbbing brain, or
+the strong words of stoic wisdom sink into her heart. And even when
+there was no time for these brief flights from reality, it soothed her
+to feel herself in the presence of great thoughts--to know that in this
+room, among these books, another restless baffled mind had sought escape
+from the "dusty answer" of life. Her hours there made her think less
+bitterly of Amherst--but also, alas, made her see more clearly the
+irreconcilable difference between the two natures she had striven to
+reunite. That which was the essence of life to one was a meaningless
+shadow to the other; and the gulf between them was too wide for the
+imagination of either to bridge.
+
+As she sat there on the seventh afternoon there was a knock on the door
+and Wyant entered. She had only time to notice that he was very
+pale--she had been struck once or twice with his look of sudden
+exhaustion, which passed as quickly as it came--then she saw that he
+carried a telegram, and her mind flew back to its central anxiety. She
+grew pale herself as she read the message.
+
+"He has been found--at Corrientes. It will take him at least a month to
+get here."
+
+"A month--good God!"
+
+"And it may take Mr. Langhope longer." Their eyes met. "It's too
+long----?" she asked.
+
+"I don't know--I don't know." He shivered slightly, turning away into
+the window.
+
+Justine sat down to dash off messages to Mr. Tredegar and the Gaineses:
+Amherst's return must be made known at once. When she glanced up, Wyant
+was standing near her. His air of intense weariness had passed, and he
+looked calm and ready for action.
+
+"Shall I take these down?"
+
+"No. Ring, please. I want to ask you a few questions."
+
+The servant who answered the bell brought in a tea-tray, and Justine,
+having despatched the telegrams, seated herself and began to pour out
+her tea. Food had been repugnant to her during the first anguished
+unsettled days, but with the resumption of the nurse's systematic habits
+the nurse's punctual appetite returned. Every drop of energy must be
+husbanded now, and only sleep and nourishment could fill the empty
+cisterns.
+
+She held out a cup to Wyant, but he drew back with a gesture of
+aversion.
+
+"Thanks; I'm not hungry."
+
+"You ought to eat more."
+
+"No, no. I'm very well."
+
+She lifted her head, revived by the warm draught. The mechanical act of
+nourishment performed, her mind leapt back to the prospect of Amherst's
+return. A whole month before he reached Lynbrook! He had instructed her
+where news might find him on the way ... but a whole month to wait!
+
+She looked at Wyant, and they read each other's thoughts.
+
+"It's a long time," he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But Garford can do wonders--and she's very strong."
+
+Justine shuddered. Just so a skilled agent of the Inquisition might have
+spoken, calculating how much longer the power of suffering might be
+artificially preserved in a body broken on the wheel....
+
+"How does she seem to you today?"
+
+"The general conditions are about the same. The heart keeps up
+wonderfully, but there is a little more oppression of the diaphragm."
+
+"Yes--her breathing is harder. Last night she suffered horribly at
+times."
+
+"Oh--she'll suffer," Wyant murmured. "Of course the hypodermics can be
+increased."
+
+"Just what did Dr. Garford say this morning?"
+
+"He is astonished at her strength."
+
+"But there's no hope?--I don't know why I ask!"
+
+"Hope?" Wyant looked at her. "You mean of what's called recovery--of
+deferring death indefinitely?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"How can Garford tell--or any one? We all know there have been cases
+where such injury to the cord has not caused death. This may be one of
+those cases; but the biggest man couldn't say now."
+
+Justine hid her eyes. "What a fate!"
+
+"Recovery? Yes. Keeping people alive in such cases is one of the
+refinements of cruelty that it was left for Christianity to invent."
+
+"And yet--?"
+
+"And yet--it's got to be! Science herself says so--not for the patient,
+of course; but for herself--for unborn generations, rather. Queer, isn't
+it? The two creeds are at one."
+
+Justine murmured through her clasped hands: "I wish she were not so
+strong----"
+
+"Yes; it's wonderful what those frail petted bodies can stand. The fight
+is going to be a hard one."
+
+She rose with a shiver. "I must go to Cicely----" The rector of Saint
+Anne's had called again. Justine, in obedience to Mrs. Gaines's
+suggestion, had summoned him from Clifton the day after the accident;
+but, supported by the surgeons and Wyant, she had resisted his admission
+to the sick-room. Bessy's religious practices had been purely
+mechanical: her faith had never been associated with the graver moments
+of her life, and the apparition of a clerical figure at her bedside
+would portend not consolation but calamity. Since it was all-important
+that her nervous strength should be sustained, and the gravity of the
+situation kept from her, Mrs. Gaines yielded to the medical commands,
+consoled by the ready acquiescence of the rector. But before she left
+she extracted a promise that he would call frequently at Lynbrook, and
+wait his opportunity to say an uplifting word to Mrs. Amherst.
+
+The Reverend Ernest Lynde, who was a young man, with more zeal than
+experience, deemed it his duty to obey this injunction to the letter;
+but hitherto he had had to content himself with a talk with the
+housekeeper, or a brief word on the doorstep from Wyant. Today, however,
+he had asked somewhat insistently for Miss Brent; and Justine, who was
+free at the moment, felt that she could not refuse to go down. She had
+seen him only in the pulpit, when once or twice, in Bessy's absence, she
+had taken Cicely to church: he struck her as a grave young man, with a
+fine voice but halting speech. His sermons were earnest but ineffective.
+
+As he rose to meet her, she felt that she should like him better out of
+church. His glance was clear and honest, and there was sweetness in his
+hesitating smile.
+
+"I am sorry to seem persistent--but I heard you had news of Mr.
+Langhope, and I was anxious to know the particulars," he explained.
+
+Justine replied that her message had overtaken Mr. Langhope at Wady
+Haifa, and that he hoped to reach Alexandria in time to catch a steamer
+to Brindisi at the end of the week.
+
+"Not till then? So it will be almost three weeks--?"
+
+"As nearly as I can calculate, a month."
+
+The rector hesitated. "And Mr. Amherst?"
+
+"He is coming back too."
+
+"Ah, you have heard? I'm glad of that. He will be here soon?"
+
+"No. He is in South America--at Buenos Ayres. There will be no steamer
+for some days, and he may not get here till after Mr. Langhope."
+
+Mr. Lynde looked at her kindly, with grave eyes that proffered help.
+"This is terrible for you, Miss Brent."
+
+"Yes," Justine answered simply.
+
+"And Mrs. Amherst's condition----?"
+
+"It is about the same."
+
+"The doctors are hopeful?"
+
+"They have not lost hope."
+
+"She seems to keep her strength wonderfully."
+
+"Yes, wonderfully."
+
+Mr. Lynde paused, looking downward, and awkwardly turning his soft
+clerical hat in his large kind-looking hands. "One might almost see in
+it a dispensation--_we_ should see one, Miss Brent."
+
+"_We?_" She glanced up apologetically, not quite sure that her tired
+mind had followed his meaning.
+
+"We, I mean, who believe...that not one sparrow falls to the ground...."
+He flushed, and went on in a more mundane tone: "I am glad you have the
+hope of Mr. Langhope's arrival to keep you up. Modern science--thank
+heaven!--can do such wonders in sustaining and prolonging life that,
+even if there is little chance of recovery, the faint spark may be
+nursed until...."
+
+He paused again, conscious that the dusky-browed young woman, slenderly
+erect in her dark blue linen and nurse's cap, was examining him with an
+intentness which contrasted curiously with the absent-minded glance she
+had dropped on him in entering.
+
+"In such cases," she said in a low tone, "there is practically no chance
+of recovery."
+
+"So I understand."
+
+"Even if there were, it would probably be death-in-life: complete
+paralysis of the lower body."
+
+He shuddered. "A dreadful fate! She was so gay and active----"
+
+"Yes--and the struggle with death, for the next few weeks, must involve
+incessant suffering...frightful suffering...perhaps vainly...."
+
+"I feared so," he murmured, his kind face paling.
+
+"Then why do you thank heaven that modern science has found such
+wonderful ways of prolonging life?"
+
+He raised his head with a start and their eyes met. He saw that the
+nurse's face was pale and calm--almost judicial in its composure--and
+his self-possession returned to him.
+
+"As a Christian," he answered, with his slow smile, "I can hardly do
+otherwise."
+
+Justine continued to consider him thoughtfully. "The men of the older
+generation--clergymen, I mean," she went on in a low controlled voice,
+"would of course take that view--must take it. But the conditions are so
+changed--so many undreamed-of means of prolonging life--prolonging
+suffering--have been discovered and applied in the last few years, that
+I wondered...in my profession one often wonders...."
+
+"I understand," he rejoined sympathetically, forgetting his youth and
+his inexperience in the simple desire to bring solace to a troubled
+mind. "I understand your feeling--but you need have no doubt. Human
+life is sacred, and the fact that, even in this materialistic age,
+science is continually struggling to preserve and prolong it,
+shows--very beautifully, I think--how all things work together to
+fulfill the divine will."
+
+"Then you believe that the divine will delights in mere pain--mere
+meaningless animal suffering--for its own sake?"
+
+"Surely not; but for the sake of the spiritual life that may be
+mysteriously wrung out of it."
+
+Justine bent her puzzled brows on him. "I could understand that view of
+moral suffering--or even of physical pain moderate enough to leave the
+mind clear, and to call forth qualities of endurance and renunciation.
+But where the body has been crushed to a pulp, and the mind is no more
+than a machine for the registering of sense-impressions of physical
+anguish, of what use can such suffering be to its owner--or to the
+divine will?"
+
+The young rector looked at her sadly, almost severely. "There, Miss
+Brent, we touch on inscrutable things, and human reason must leave the
+answer to faith."
+
+Justine pondered. "So that--one may say--Christianity recognizes no
+exceptions--?"
+
+"None--none," its authorized exponent pronounced emphatically.
+
+"Then Christianity and science are agreed." She rose, and the young
+rector, with visible reluctance, stood up also.
+
+"That, again, is one of the most striking evidences--" he began; and
+then, as the necessity of taking leave was forced upon him, he added
+appealingly: "I understand your uncertainties, your questionings, and I
+wish I could have made my point clearer----"
+
+"Thank you; it is quite clear. The reasons, of course, are different;
+but the result is exactly the same."
+
+She held out her hand, smiling sadly on him, and with a sudden return of
+youth and self-consciousness, he murmured shyly: "I feel for you"--the
+man in him yearning over her loneliness, though the pastor dared not
+press his help....
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+THAT evening, when Justine took her place at the bedside, and the other
+two nurses had gone down to supper, Bessy turned her head slightly,
+resting her eyes on her friend.
+
+The rose-shaded lamp cast a tint of life on her face, and the dark
+circles of pain made her eyes look deeper and brighter. Justine was
+almost deceived by the delusive semblance of vitality, and a hope that
+was half anguish stirred in her. She sat down by the bed, clasping the
+hand on the sheet.
+
+"You feel better tonight?"
+
+"I breathe...better...." The words came brokenly, between long pauses,
+but without the hard agonized gasps of the previous night.
+
+"That's a good sign." Justine paused, and then, letting her fingers
+glide once or twice over the back of Bessy's hand--"You know, dear, Mr.
+Amherst is coming," she leaned down to say.
+
+Bessy's eyes moved again, slowly, inscrutably. She had never asked for
+her husband.
+
+"Soon?" she whispered.
+
+"He had started on a long journey--to out-of-the-way places--to study
+something about cotton growing--my message has just overtaken him,"
+Justine explained.
+
+Bessy lay still, her breast straining for breath. She remained so long
+without speaking that Justine began to think she was falling back into
+the somnolent state that intervened between her moments of complete
+consciousness. But at length she lifted her lids again, and her lips
+stirred.
+
+"He will be...long...coming?"
+
+"Some days."
+
+"How...many?"
+
+"We can't tell yet."
+
+Silence again. Bessy's features seemed to shrink into a kind of waxen
+quietude--as though her face were seen under clear water, a long way
+down. And then, as she lay thus, without sound or movement, two tears
+forced themselves through her lashes and rolled down her cheeks.
+
+Justine, bending close, wiped them away. "Bessy--"
+
+The wet lashes were raised--an anguished look met her gaze.
+
+"I--I can't bear it...."
+
+"What, dear?"
+
+"The pain.... Shan't I die...before?"
+
+"You may get well, Bessy."
+
+Justine felt her hand quiver. "Walk again...?"
+
+"Perhaps...not that."
+
+"_This?_ I can't bear it...." Her head drooped sideways, turning away
+toward the wall.
+
+Justine, that night, kept her vigil with an aching heart. The news of
+Amherst's return had produced no sign of happiness in his wife--- the
+tears had been forced from her merely by the dread of being kept alive
+during the long days of pain before he came. The medical explanation
+might have been that repeated crises of intense physical anguish, and
+the deep lassitude succeeding them, had so overlaid all other feelings,
+or at least so benumbed their expression, that it was impossible to
+conjecture how Bessy's little half-smothered spark of soul had really
+been affected by the news. But Justine did not believe in this argument.
+Her experience among the sick had convinced her, on the contrary, that
+the shafts of grief or joy will find a crack in the heaviest armour of
+physical pain, that the tiniest gleam of hope will light up depths of
+mental inanition, and somehow send a ray to the surface.... It was true
+that Bessy had never known how to bear pain, and that her own sensations
+had always formed the centre of her universe--yet, for that very reason,
+if the thought of seeing Amherst had made her happier it would have
+lifted, at least momentarily, the weight of death from her body.
+
+Justine, at first, had almost feared the contrary effect--feared that
+the moral depression might show itself in a lowering of physical
+resistance. But the body kept up its obstinate struggle against death,
+drawing strength from sources of vitality unsuspected in that frail
+envelope. The surgeon's report the next day was more favourable, and
+every day won from death pointed now to a faint chance of recovery.
+
+Such at least was Wyant's view. Dr. Garford and the consulting surgeons
+had not yet declared themselves; but the young doctor, strung to the
+highest point of watchfulness, and constantly in attendance on the
+patient, was tending toward a hopeful prognosis. The growing conviction
+spurred him to fresh efforts; at Dr. Garford's request, he had
+temporarily handed over his Clifton practice to a young New York doctor
+in need of change, and having installed himself at Lynbrook he gave up
+his days and nights to Mrs. Amherst's case.
+
+"If any one can save her, Wyant will," Dr. Garford had declared to
+Justine, when, on the tenth day after the accident, the surgeons held
+their third consultation. Dr. Garford reserved his own judgment. He had
+seen cases--they had all seen cases...but just at present the signs
+might point either way.... Meanwhile Wyant's confidence was an
+invaluable asset toward the patient's chances of recovery. Hopefulness
+in the physician was almost as necessary as in the patient--contact with
+such faith had been known to work miracles.
+
+Justine listened in silence, wishing that she too could hope. But
+whichever way the prognosis pointed, she felt only a dull despair. She
+believed no more than Dr. Garford in the chance of recovery--that
+conviction seemed to her a mirage of Wyant's imagination, of his boyish
+ambition to achieve the impossible--and every hopeful symptom pointed,
+in her mind, only to a longer period of useless suffering.
+
+Her hours at Bessy's side deepened her revolt against the energy spent
+in the fight with death. Since Bessy had learned that her husband was
+returning she had never, by sign or word, reverted to the fact. Except
+for a gleam of tenderness, now and then, when Cicely was brought to
+her, she seemed to have sunk back into herself, as though her poor
+little flicker of consciousness were wholly centred in the contemplation
+of its pain. It was not that her mind was clouded--only that it was
+immersed, absorbed, in that dread mystery of disproportionate anguish
+which a capricious fate had laid on it.... And what if she recovered, as
+they called it? If the flood-tide of pain should ebb, leaving her
+stranded, a helpless wreck on the desert shores of inactivity? What
+would life be to Bessy without movement? Thought would never set her
+blood flowing--motion, in her, could only take the form of the physical
+processes. Her love for Amherst was dead--even if it flickered into life
+again, it could but put the spark to smouldering discords and
+resentments; and would her one uncontaminated sentiment--her affection
+for Cicely--suffice to reconcile her to the desolate half-life which was
+the utmost that science could hold out?
+
+Here again, Justine's experience answered no. She did not believe in
+Bessy's powers of moral recuperation--her body seemed less near death
+than her spirit. Life had been poured out to her in generous measure,
+and she had spilled the precious draught--the few drops remaining in the
+cup could no longer renew her strength.
+
+Pity, not condemnation--profound illimitable pity--flowed from this
+conclusion of Justine's. To a compassionate heart there could be no
+sadder instance of the wastefulness of life than this struggle of the
+small half-formed soul with a destiny too heavy for its strength. If
+Bessy had had any moral hope to fight for, every pang of suffering would
+have been worth enduring; but it was intolerable to witness the
+spectacle of her useless pain.
+
+Incessant commerce with such thoughts made Justine, as the days passed,
+crave any escape from solitude, any contact with other ideas. Even the
+reappearance of Westy Gaines, bringing a breath of common-place
+conventional grief into the haunted silence of the house, was a respite
+from her questionings. If it was hard to talk to him, to answer his
+enquiries, to assent to his platitudes, it was harder, a thousand times,
+to go on talking to herself....
+
+Mr. Tredegar's coming was a distinct relief. His dryness was like
+cautery to her wound. Mr. Tredegar undoubtedly grieved for Bessy; but
+his grief struck inward, exuding only now and then, through the fissures
+of his hard manner, in a touch of extra solemnity, the more laboured
+rounding of a period. Yet, on the whole, it was to his feeling that
+Justine felt her own to be most akin. If his stoic acceptance of the
+inevitable proceeded from the resolve to spare himself pain, that at
+least was a form of strength, an indication of character. She had never
+cared for the fluencies of invertebrate sentiment.
+
+Now, on the evening of the day after her talk with Bessy, it was more
+than ever a solace to escape from the torment of her thoughts into the
+rarefied air of Mr. Tredegar's presence. The day had been a bad one for
+the patient, and Justine's distress had been increased by the receipt of
+a cable from Mr. Langhope, announcing that, owing to delay in reaching
+Brindisi, he had missed the fast steamer from Cherbourg, and would not
+arrive till four or five days later than he had expected. Mr. Tredegar,
+in response to her report, had announced his intention of coming down by
+a late train, and now he and Justine and Dr. Wyant, after dining
+together, were seated before the fire in the smoking-room.
+
+"I take it, then," Mr. Tredegar said, turning to Wyant, "that the
+chances of her living to see her father are very slight."
+
+The young doctor raised his head eagerly. "Not in my opinion, sir.
+Unless unforeseen complications arise, I can almost promise to keep her
+alive for another month--I'm not afraid to call it six weeks!"
+
+"H'm--Garford doesn't say so."
+
+"No; Dr. Garford argues from precedent."
+
+"And you?" Mr. Tredegar's thin lips were visited by the ghost of a
+smile.
+
+"Oh, I don't argue--I just feel my way," said Wyant imperturbably.
+
+"And yet you don't hesitate to predict----"
+
+"No, I don't, sir; because the case, as I see it, presents certain
+definite indications." He began to enumerate them, cleverly avoiding the
+use of technicalities and trying to make his point clear by the use of
+simple illustration and analogy. It sickened Justine to listen to his
+passionate exposition--she had heard it so often, she believed in it so
+little.
+
+Mr. Tredegar turned a probing glance on him as he ended. "Then, today
+even, you believe not only in the possibility of prolonging life, but of
+ultimate recovery?"
+
+Wyant hesitated. "I won't call it recovery--today. Say--life
+indefinitely prolonged."
+
+"And the paralysis?"
+
+"It might disappear--after a few months--or a few years."
+
+"Such an outcome would be unusual?"
+
+"Exceptional. But then there _are_ exceptions. And I'm straining every
+nerve to make this one!"
+
+"And the suffering--such as today's, for instance--is unavoidable?"
+
+"Unhappily."
+
+"And bound to increase?"
+
+"Well--as the anæsthetics lose their effect...."
+
+There was a tap on the door, and one of the nurses entered to report to
+Wyant. He went out with her, and Justine was left with Mr. Tredegar.
+
+He turned to her thoughtfully. "That young fellow seems sure of himself.
+You believe in him?"
+
+Justine hesitated. "Not in his expectation of recovery--no one does."
+
+"But you think they can keep the poor child alive till Langhope and her
+husband get back?"
+
+There was a moment's pause; then Justine murmured: "It can be done...I
+think...."
+
+"Yes--it's horrible," said Mr. Tredegar suddenly, as if in answer to her
+thought.
+
+She looked up in surprise, and saw his eye resting on her with what
+seemed like a mist of sympathy on its vitreous surface. Her lips
+trembled, parting as if for speech--but she looked away without
+answering.
+
+"These new devices for keeping people alive," Mr. Tredegar continued;
+"they increase the suffering besides prolonging it?"
+
+"Yes--in some cases."
+
+"In this case?"
+
+"I am afraid so."
+
+The lawyer drew out his fine cambric handkerchief, and furtively wiped a
+slight dampness from his forehead. "I wish to God she had been killed!"
+he said.
+
+Justine lifted her head again, with an answering exclamation. "Oh, yes!"
+
+"It's infernal--the time they can make it last."
+
+"It's useless!" Justine broke out.
+
+"Useless?" He turned his critical glance on her. "Well, that's beside
+the point--since it's inevitable."
+
+She wavered a moment--but his words had loosened the bonds about her
+heart, and she could not check herself so suddenly. "Why inevitable?"
+
+Mr. Tredegar looked at her in surprise, as though wondering at so
+unprofessional an utterance from one who, under ordinary circumstances,
+showed the absolute self-control and submission of the well-disciplined
+nurse.
+
+"Human life is sacred," he said sententiously.
+
+"Ah, that must have been decreed by some one who had never suffered!"
+Justine exclaimed.
+
+Mr. Tredegar smiled compassionately: he evidently knew how to make
+allowances for the fact that she was overwrought by the sight of her
+friend's suffering: "Society decreed it--not one person," he corrected.
+
+"Society--science--religion!" she murmured, as if to herself.
+
+"Precisely. It's the universal consensus--the result of the world's
+accumulated experience. Cruel in individual instances--necessary for the
+general welfare. Of course your training has taught you all this; but I
+can understand that at such a time...."
+
+"Yes," she said, rising wearily as Wyant came in.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her worst misery, now, was to have to discuss Bessy's condition with
+Wyant. To the young physician Bessy was no longer a suffering,
+agonizing creature: she was a case--a beautiful case. As the problem
+developed new intricacies, becoming more and more of a challenge to his
+faculties of observation and inference, Justine saw the abstract
+scientific passion supersede his personal feeling of pity. Though his
+professional skill made him exquisitely tender to the patient under his
+hands, he seemed hardly conscious that she was a woman who had
+befriended him, and whom he had so lately seen in the brightness of
+health and enjoyment. This view was normal enough--it was, as Justine
+knew, the ideal state of mind for the successful physician, in whom
+sympathy for the patient as an individual must often impede swift choice
+and unfaltering action. But what she shrank from was his resolve to save
+Bessy's life--a resolve fortified to the point of exasperation by the
+scepticism of the consulting surgeons, who saw in it only the
+youngster's natural desire to distinguish himself by performing a feat
+which his elders deemed impossible.
+
+As the days dragged on, and Bessy's sufferings increased, Justine longed
+for a protesting word from Dr. Garford or one of his colleagues. In her
+hospital experience she had encountered cases where the useless agonies
+of death were mercifully shortened by the physician; why was not this a
+case for such treatment? The answer was simple enough--in the first
+place, it was the duty of the surgeons to keep their patient alive till
+her husband and her father could reach her; and secondly, there was that
+faint illusive hope of so-called recovery, in which none of them
+believed, yet which they could not ignore in their treatment. The
+evening after Mr. Tredegar's departure Wyant was setting this forth at
+great length to Justine. Bessy had had a bad morning: the bronchial
+symptoms which had developed a day or two before had greatly increased
+her distress, and there had been, at dawn, a moment of weakness when it
+seemed that some pitiful power was about to defeat the relentless
+efforts of science. But Wyant had fought off the peril. By the prompt
+and audacious use of stimulants--by a rapid marshalling of resources, a
+display of self-reliance and authority, which Justine could not but
+admire as she mechanically seconded his efforts--the spark of life had
+been revived, and Bessy won back for fresh suffering.
+
+"Yes--I say it can be done: tonight I say it more than ever," Wyant
+exclaimed, pushing the disordered hair from his forehead, and leaning
+toward Justine across the table on which their brief evening meal had
+been served. "I say the way the heart has rallied proves that we've got
+more strength to draw on than any of them have been willing to admit.
+The breathing's better too. If we can fight off the degenerative
+processes--and, by George, I believe we can!" He looked up suddenly at
+Justine. "With you to work with, I believe I could do anything. How you
+do back a man up! You think with your hands--with every individual
+finger!"
+
+Justine turned her eyes away: she felt a shudder of repulsion steal over
+her tired body. It was not that she detected any note of personal
+admiration in his praise--he had commended her as the surgeon might
+commend a fine instrument fashioned for his use. But that she should be
+the instrument to serve such a purpose--that her skill, her promptness,
+her gift of divining and interpreting the will she worked with, should
+be at the service of this implacable scientific passion! Ah, no--she
+could be silent no longer....
+
+She looked up at Wyant, and their eyes met.
+
+"Why do you do it?" she asked.
+
+He stared, as if thinking that she referred to some special point in his
+treatment. "Do what?"
+
+"It's so useless...you all know she must die."
+
+"I know nothing of the kind...and even the others are not so sure
+today." He began to go over it all again--repeating his arguments,
+developing new theories, trying to force into her reluctant mind his own
+faith in the possibility of success.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Justine sat resting her chin on her clasped hands, her eyes gazing
+straight before her under dark tormented brows. When he paused she
+remained silent.
+
+"Well--don't you believe me?" he broke out with sudden asperity.
+
+"I don't know...I can't tell...."
+
+"But as long as there's a doubt, even--a doubt my way--and I'll show you
+there is, if you'll give me time----"
+
+"How much time?" she murmured, without shifting her gaze.
+
+"Ah--that depends on ourselves: on you and me chiefly. That's what
+Garford admits. _They_ can't do much now--they've got to leave the game
+to us. It's a question of incessant vigilance...of utilizing every hour,
+every moment.... Time's all I ask, and _you_ can give it to me, if any
+one can!"
+
+Under the challenge of his tone Justine rose to her feet with a low
+murmur of fear. "Ah, don't ask me!"
+
+"Don't ask you----?"
+
+"I can't--I can't."
+
+Wyant stood up also, turning on her an astonished glance.
+
+"You can't what--?"
+
+Their eyes met, and she thought she read in his a sudden divination of
+her inmost thoughts. The discovery electrified her flagging strength,
+restoring her to immediate clearness of brain. She saw the gulf of
+self-betrayal over which she had hung, and the nearness of the peril
+nerved her to a last effort of dissimulation.
+
+"I can't...talk of it...any longer," she faltered, letting her tears
+flow, and turning on him a face of pure womanly weakness.
+
+Wyant looked at her without answering. Did he distrust even these plain
+physical evidences of exhaustion, or was he merely disappointed in her,
+as in one whom he had believed to be above the emotional failings of her
+sex?
+
+"You're over-tired," he said coldly. "Take tonight to rest. Miss Mace
+can replace you for the next few hours--and I may need you more
+tomorrow."
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+FOUR more days had passed. Bessy seldom spoke when Justine was with her.
+She was wrapped in a thickening cloud of opiates--morphia by day,
+bromides, sulphonal, chloral hydrate at night. When the cloud broke and
+consciousness emerged, it was centred in the one acute point of bodily
+anguish. Darting throes of neuralgia, agonized oppression of the breath,
+the diffused misery of the whole helpless body--these were reducing
+their victim to a mere instrument on which pain played its incessant
+deadly variations. Once or twice she turned her dull eyes on Justine,
+breathing out: "I want to die," as some inevitable lifting or
+readjusting thrilled her body with fresh pangs; but there were no signs
+of contact with the outer world--she had ceased even to ask for
+Cicely....
+
+And yet, according to the doctors, the patient held her own. Certain
+alarming symptoms had diminished, and while others persisted, the
+strength to fight them persisted too. With such strength to call on,
+what fresh agonies were reserved for the poor body when the narcotics
+had lost their power?
+
+That was the question always before Justine. She never again betrayed
+her fears to Wyant--she carried out his orders with morbid precision,
+trembling lest any failure in efficiency should revive his suspicions.
+She hardly knew what she feared his suspecting--she only had a confused
+sense that they were enemies, and that she was the weaker of the two.
+
+And then the anæsthetics began to fail. It was the sixteenth day since
+the accident, and the resources of alleviation were almost exhausted. It
+was not sure, even now, that Bessy was going to die--and she was
+certainly going to suffer a long time. Wyant seemed hardly conscious of
+the increase of pain--his whole mind was fixed on the prognosis. What
+matter if the patient suffered, as long as he proved his case? That, of
+course, was not his way of putting it. In reality, he did all he could
+to allay the pain, surpassed himself in new devices and experiments. But
+death confronted him implacably, claiming his due: so many hours robbed
+from him, so much tribute to pay; and Wyant, setting his teeth, fought
+on--and Bessy paid.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Justine had begun to notice that it was hard for her to get a word alone
+with Dr. Garford. The other nurses were not in the way--it was Wyant who
+always contrived to be there. Perhaps she was unreasonable in seeing a
+special intention in his presence: it was natural enough that the two
+persons in charge of the case should confer together with their chief.
+But his persistence annoyed her, and she was glad when, one afternoon,
+the surgeon asked him to telephone an important message to town.
+
+As soon as the door had closed, Justine said to Dr. Garford: "She is
+beginning to suffer terribly."
+
+He answered with the large impersonal gesture of the man to whom
+physical suffering has become a painful general fact of life, no longer
+divisible into individual cases. "We are doing all we can."
+
+"Yes." She paused, and then raised her eyes to his dry kind face. "Is
+there any hope?"
+
+Another gesture--the fatalistic sweep of the lifted palms. "The next ten
+days will tell--the fight is on, as Wyant says. And if any one can do
+it, that young fellow can. There's stuff in him--and infernal
+ambition."
+
+"Yes: but do _you_ believe she can live--?"
+
+Dr. Garford smiled indulgently on such unprofessional insistence; but
+she was past wondering what they must all think of her.
+
+"My dear Miss Brent," he said, "I have reached the age when one always
+leaves a door open to the unexpected."
+
+As he spoke, a slight sound at her back made her turn. Wyant was behind
+her--he must have entered as she put her question. And he certainly
+could not have had time to descend the stairs, walk the length of the
+house, ring up New York, and deliver Dr Garford's message.... The same
+thought seemed to strike the surgeon. "Hello, Wyant?" he said.
+
+"Line busy," said Wyant curtly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About this time, Justine gave up her night vigils. She could no longer
+face the struggle of the dawn hour, when life ebbs lowest; and since her
+duties extended beyond the sick-room she could fairly plead that she was
+more needed about the house by day. But Wyant protested: he wanted her
+most at the difficult hour.
+
+"You know you're taking a chance from her," he said, almost sternly.
+
+"Oh, no----"
+
+He looked at her searchingly. "You don't feel up to it?"
+
+"No."
+
+He turned away with a slight shrug; but she knew he resented her
+defection.
+
+The day watches were miserable enough. It was the nineteenth day now;
+and Justine lay on the sofa in Amherst's sitting-room, trying to nerve
+herself for the nurse's summons. A page torn out of the calendar lay
+before her--she had been calculating again how many days must elapse
+before Mr. Langhope could arrive. Ten days--ten days and ten nights! And
+the length of the nights was double.... As for Amherst, it was
+impossible to set a date for his coming, for his steamer from Buenos
+Ayres called at various ports on the way northward, and the length of
+her stay at each was dependent on the delivery of freight, and on the
+dilatoriness of the South American official.
+
+She threw down the calendar and leaned back, pressing her hands to her
+temples. Oh, for a word with Amherst--he alone would have understood
+what she was undergoing! Mr. Langhope's coming would make no
+difference--or rather, it would only increase the difficulty of the
+situation. Instinctively Justine felt that, though his heart would be
+wrung by the sight of Bessy's pain, his cry would be the familiar one,
+the traditional one: _Keep her alive!_ Under his surface originality,
+his verbal audacities and ironies, Mr. Langhope was the creature of
+accepted forms, inherited opinions: he had never really thought for
+himself on any of the pressing problems of life.
+
+But Amherst was different. Close contact with many forms of wretchedness
+had freed him from the bondage of accepted opinion. He looked at life
+through no eyes but his own; and what he saw, he confessed to seeing. He
+never tried to evade the consequences of his discoveries.
+
+Justine's remembrance flew back to their first meeting at Hanaford, when
+his confidence in his own powers was still unshaken, his trust in others
+unimpaired. And, gradually, she began to relive each detail of their
+talk at Dillon's bedside--her first impression of him, as he walked down
+the ward; the first sound of his voice; her surprised sense of his
+authority; her almost involuntary submission to his will.... Then her
+thoughts passed on to their walk home from the hospital--she recalled
+his sober yet unsparing summary of the situation at Westmore, and the
+note of insight with which he touched on the hardships of the
+workers.... Then, word by word, their talk about Dillon came
+back...Amherst's indignation and pity...his shudder of revolt at the
+man's doom.
+
+"_In your work, don't you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?_"
+And then, after her conventional murmur of protest: "_To save what,
+when all the good of life is gone?_"
+
+To distract her thoughts she stretched her hand toward the book-case,
+taking out the first volume in reach--the little copy of Bacon. She
+leaned back, fluttering its pages aimlessly--so wrapped in her own
+misery that the meaning of the words could not reach her. It was useless
+to try to read: every perception of the outer world was lost in the hum
+of inner activity that made her mind like a forge throbbing with heat
+and noise. But suddenly her glance fell on some pencilled sentences on
+the fly-leaf. They were in Amherst's hand, and the sight arrested her as
+though she had heard him speak.
+
+_La vraie morale se moque de la morale...._
+
+_We perish because we follow other men's examples...._
+
+_Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of
+Lamiæ--bugbears to frighten children...._
+
+A rush of air seemed to have been let into her stifled mind. Were they
+his own thoughts? No--her memory recalled some confused association with
+great names. But at least they must represent his beliefs--must embody
+deeply-felt convictions--or he would scarcely have taken the trouble to
+record them.
+
+She murmured over the last sentence once or twice: _The opinions of the
+many--bugbears to frighten children...._ Yes, she had often heard him
+speak of current judgments in that way...she had never known a mind so
+free from the spell of the Lamiæ.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some one knocked, and she put aside the book and rose to her feet. It
+was a maid bringing a note from Wyant.
+
+"There has been a motor accident beyond Clifton, and I have been sent
+for. I think I can safely be away for two or three hours, but ring me up
+at Clifton if you want me. Miss Mace has instructions, and Garford's
+assistant will be down at seven."
+
+She looked at the clock: it was just three, the hour at which she was to
+relieve Miss Mace. She smoothed the hair from her forehead, straightened
+her cap, tied on the apron she had laid aside....
+
+As she entered Bessy's sitting-room the nurse came out, memoranda in
+hand. The two moved to the window for a moment's conference, and as the
+wintry light fell on Miss Mace's face, Justine saw that it was white
+with fatigue.
+
+"You're ill!" she exclaimed.
+
+The nurse shook her head. "No--but it's awful...this afternoon...." Her
+glance turned to the sick-room.
+
+"Go and rest--I'll stay till bedtime," Justine said.
+
+"Miss Safford's down with another headache."
+
+"I know: it doesn't matter. I'm quite fresh."
+
+"You _do_ look rested!" the other exclaimed, her eyes lingering
+enviously on Justine's face.
+
+She stole away, and Justine entered the room. It was true that she felt
+fresh--a new spring of hope had welled up in her. She had her nerves in
+hand again, she had regained her steady vision of life....
+
+But in the room, as the nurse had said, it was awful. The time had come
+when the effect of the anæsthetics must be carefully husbanded, when
+long intervals of pain must purchase the diminishing moments of relief.
+Yet from Wyant's standpoint it was a good day--things were looking well,
+as he would have phrased it. And each day now was a fresh victory.
+
+Justine went through her task mechanically. The glow of strength and
+courage remained, steeling her to bear what had broken down Miss Mace's
+professional fortitude. But when she sat down by the bed Bessy's moaning
+began to wear on her. It was no longer the utterance of human pain, but
+the monotonous whimper of an animal--the kind of sound that a
+compassionate hand would instinctively crush into silence. But her hand
+had other duties; she must keep watch on pulse and heart, must reinforce
+their action with the tremendous stimulants which Wyant was now using,
+and, having revived fresh sensibility to pain, must presently try to
+allay it by the cautious use of narcotics.
+
+It was all simple enough--but suppose she should not do it? Suppose she
+left the stimulants untouched? Wyant was absent, one nurse exhausted
+with fatigue, the other laid low by headache. Justine had the field to
+herself. For three hours at least no one was likely to cross the
+threshold of the sick-room.... Ah, if no more time were needed! But
+there was too much life in Bessy--her youth was fighting too hard for
+her! She would not sink out of life in three hours...and Justine could
+not count on more than that.
+
+She looked at the little travelling-clock on the dressing-table, and saw
+that its hands marked four. An hour had passed already.... She rose and
+administered the prescribed restorative; then she took the pulse, and
+listened to the beat of the heart. Strong still--too strong!
+
+As she lifted her head, the vague animal wailing ceased, and she heard
+her name: "Justine----"
+
+She bent down eagerly. "Yes?"
+
+No answer: the wailing had begun again. But the one word showed her that
+the mind still lived in its torture-house, that the poor powerless body
+before her was not yet a mere bundle of senseless reflexes, but her
+friend Bessy Amherst, dying, and feeling herself die....
+
+Justine reseated herself, and the vigil began again. The second hour
+ebbed slowly--ah, no, it was flying now! Her eyes were on the hands of
+the clock and they seemed leagued against her to devour the precious
+minutes. And now she could see by certain spasmodic symptoms that
+another crisis of pain was approaching--one of the struggles that Wyant,
+at times, had almost seemed to court and exult in.
+
+Bessy's eyes turned on her again. "_Justine_----"
+
+She knew what that meant: it was an appeal for the hypodermic needle.
+The little instrument lay at hand, beside a newly-filled bottle of
+morphia. But she must wait--must let the pain grow more severe. Yet she
+could not turn her gaze from Bessy, and Bessy's eyes entreated her
+again--_Justine_! There was really no word now--the whimperings were
+uninterrupted. But Justine heard an inner voice, and its pleading shook
+her heart. She rose and filled the syringe--and returning with it, bent
+above the bed....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She lifted her head and looked at the clock. The second hour had passed.
+As she looked, she heard a step in the sitting-room. Who could it be?
+Not Dr. Garford's assistant--he was not due till seven. She listened
+again.... One of the nurses? No, not a woman's step----
+
+The door opened, and Wyant came in. Justine stood by the bed without
+moving toward him. He paused also, as if surprised to see her there
+motionless. In the intense silence she fancied for a moment that she
+heard Bessy's violent agonized breathing. She tried to speak, to drown
+the sound of the breathing; but her lips trembled too much, and she
+remained silent.
+
+Wyant seemed to hear nothing. He stood so still that she felt she must
+move forward. As she did so, she picked up from the table by the bed the
+memoranda that it was her duty to submit to him.
+
+"Well?" he said, in the familiar sick-room whisper.
+
+"She is dead."
+
+He fell back a step, glaring at her, white and incredulous.
+
+"_Dead?_--When----?"
+
+"A few minutes ago...."
+
+"_Dead--?_ It's not possible!"
+
+He swept past her, shouldering her aside, pushing in an electric button
+as he sprang to the bed. She perceived then that the room had been
+almost in darkness. She recovered command of herself, and followed him.
+He was going through the usual rapid examination--pulse, heart,
+breath--hanging over the bed like some angry animal balked of its prey.
+Then he lifted the lids and bent close above the eyes.
+
+"Take the shade off that lamp!" he commanded.
+
+Justine obeyed him.
+
+He stooped down again to examine the eyes...he remained stooping a long
+time. Suddenly he stood up and faced her.
+
+"Had she been in great pain?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Worse than usual?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What had you done?"
+
+"Nothing--there was no time."
+
+"No time?" He broke off to sweep the room again with his excited
+incredulous glance. "Where are the others? Why were you here alone?" he
+demanded.
+
+"It came suddenly. I was going to call----"
+
+Their eyes met for a moment. Her face was perfectly calm--she could feel
+that her lips no longer trembled. She was not in the least afraid of
+Wyant's scrutiny.
+
+As he continued to look at her, his expression slowly passed from
+incredulous wrath to something softer--more human--she could not tell
+what....
+
+"This has been too much for you--go and send one of the others.... It's
+all over," he said.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+ON a September day, somewhat more than a year and a half after Bessy
+Amherst's death, her husband and his mother sat at luncheon in the
+dining-room of the Westmore house at Hanaford.
+
+The house was John Amherst's now, and shortly after the loss of his wife
+he had established himself there with his mother. By a will made some
+six months before her death, Bessy had divided her estate between her
+husband and daughter, placing Cicely's share in trust, and appointing
+Mr. Langhope and Amherst as her guardians. As the latter was also her
+trustee, the whole management of the estate devolved on him, while his
+control of the Westmore mills was ensured by his receiving a slightly
+larger proportion of the stock than his step-daughter.
+
+The will had come as a surprise, not only to Amherst himself, but to his
+wife's family, and more especially to her legal adviser. Mr. Tredegar
+had in fact had nothing to do with the drawing of the instrument; but as
+it had been drawn in due form, and by a firm of excellent standing, he
+was obliged, in spite of his private views, and Mr. Langhope's open
+adjurations that he should "do something," to declare that there was no
+pretext for questioning the validity of the document.
+
+To Amherst the will was something more than a proof of his wife's
+confidence: it came as a reconciling word from her grave. For the date
+showed that it had been made at a moment when he supposed himself to
+have lost all influence over her--on the morrow of the day when she had
+stipulated that he should give up the management of the Westmore mills,
+and yield the care of her property to Mr. Tredegar.
+
+While she smote him with one hand, she sued for pardon with the other;
+and the contradiction was so characteristic, it explained and excused in
+so touching a way the inconsistencies of her impulsive heart and
+hesitating mind, that he was filled with that tender compunction, that
+searching sense of his own shortcomings, which generous natures feel
+when they find they have underrated the generosity of others. But
+Amherst's was not an introspective mind, and his sound moral sense told
+him, when the first pang of self-reproach had subsided, that he had done
+his best by his wife, and was in no way to blame if her recognition of
+the fact had come too late. The self-reproach subsided; and, instead of
+the bitterness of the past, it left a softened memory which made him
+take up his task with the sense that he was now working with Bessy and
+not against her.
+
+Yet perhaps, after all, it was chiefly the work itself which had healed
+old wounds, and quelled the tendency to vain regrets. Amherst was only
+thirty-four; and in the prime of his energies the task he was made for
+had been given back to him. To a sound nature, which finds its outlet in
+fruitful action, nothing so simplifies the complexities of life, so
+tends to a large acceptance of its vicissitudes and mysteries, as the
+sense of doing something each day toward clearing one's own bit of the
+wilderness. And this was the joy at last conceded to Amherst. The mills
+were virtually his; and the fact that he ruled them not only in his own
+right but as Cicely's representative, made him doubly eager to justify
+his wife's trust in him.
+
+Mrs. Amherst, looking up from a telegram which the parlour-maid had
+handed her, smiled across the table at her son.
+
+"From Maria Ansell--they are all coming tomorrow."
+
+"Ah--that's good," Amherst rejoined. "I should have been sorry if Cicely
+had not been here."
+
+"Mr. Langhope is coming too," his mother continued. "I'm glad of that,
+John."
+
+"Yes," Amherst again assented.
+
+The morrow was to be a great day at Westmore. The Emergency Hospital,
+planned in the first months of his marriage, and abandoned in the
+general reduction of expenditure at the mills, had now been completed on
+a larger and more elaborate scale, as a memorial to Bessy. The strict
+retrenchment of all personal expenses, and the leasing of Lynbrook and
+the town house, had enabled Amherst, in eighteen months, to lay by
+enough income to carry out this plan, which he was impatient to see
+executed as a visible commemoration of his wife's generosity to
+Westmore. For Amherst persisted in regarding the gift of her fortune as
+a gift not to himself but to the mills: he looked on himself merely as
+the agent of her beneficent intentions. He was anxious that Westmore and
+Hanaford should take the same view; and the opening of the Westmore
+Memorial Hospital was therefore to be performed with an unwonted degree
+of ceremony.
+
+"I am glad Mr. Langhope is coming," Mrs. Amherst repeated, as they rose
+from the table. "It shows, dear--doesn't it?--that he's really
+gratified--that he appreciates your motive...."
+
+She raised a proud glance to her tall son, whose head seemed to tower
+higher than ever above her small proportions. Renewed self-confidence,
+and the habit of command, had in fact restored the erectness to
+Amherst's shoulders and the clearness to his eyes. The cleft between the
+brows was gone, and his veiled inward gaze had given place to a glance
+almost as outward-looking and unspeculative as his mother's.
+
+"It shows--well, yes--what you say!" he rejoined with a slight laugh,
+and a tap on her shoulder as she passed.
+
+He was under no illusions as to his father-in-law's attitude: he knew
+that Mr. Langhope would willingly have broken the will which deprived
+his grand-daughter of half her inheritance, and that his subsequent show
+of friendliness was merely a concession to expediency. But in his
+present mood Amherst almost believed that time and closer relations
+might turn such sentiments into honest liking. He was very fond of his
+little step-daughter, and deeply sensible of his obligations toward her;
+and he hoped that, as Mr. Langhope came to recognize this, it might
+bring about a better understanding between them.
+
+His mother detained him. "You're going back to the mills at once? I
+wanted to consult you about the rooms. Miss Brent had better be next to
+Cicely?"
+
+"I suppose so--yes. I'll see you before I go." He nodded affectionately
+and passed on, his hands full of papers, into the Oriental smoking-room,
+now dedicated to the unexpected uses of an office and study.
+
+Mrs. Amherst, as she turned away, found the parlour-maid in the act of
+opening the front door to the highly-tinted and well-dressed figure of
+Mrs. Harry Dressel.
+
+"I'm so delighted to hear that you're expecting Justine," began Mrs.
+Dressel as the two ladies passed into the drawing-room.
+
+"Ah, you've heard too?" Mrs. Amherst rejoined, enthroning her visitor in
+one of the monumental plush armchairs beneath the threatening weight of
+the Bay of Naples.
+
+"I hadn't till this moment; in fact I flew in to ask for news, and on
+the door-step there was such a striking-looking young man enquiring for
+her, and I heard the parlour-maid say she was arriving tomorrow."
+
+"A young man? Some one you didn't know?" Striking apparitions of the
+male sex were of infrequent occurrence at Hanaford, and Mrs. Amherst's
+unabated interest in the movement of life caused her to dwell on this
+statement.
+
+"Oh, no--I'm sure he was a stranger. Extremely slight and pale, with
+remarkable eyes. He was so disappointed--he seemed sure of finding her."
+
+"Well, no doubt he'll come back tomorrow.--You know we're expecting the
+whole party," added Mrs. Amherst, to whom the imparting of good news was
+always an irresistible temptation.
+
+Mrs. Dressel's interest deepened at once. "Really? Mr. Langhope too?"
+
+"Yes. It's a great pleasure to my son."
+
+"It must be! I'm so glad. I suppose in a way it will be rather sad for
+Mr. Langhope--seeing everything here so unchanged----"
+
+Mrs. Amherst straightened herself a little. "I think he will prefer to
+find it so," she said, with a barely perceptible change of tone.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. They were never very fond of this house."
+
+There was an added note of authority in Mrs. Dressel's accent. In the
+last few months she had been to Europe and had had nervous prostration,
+and these incontestable evidences of growing prosperity could not always
+be kept out of her voice and bearing. At any rate, they justified her in
+thinking that her opinion on almost any subject within the range of
+human experience was a valuable addition to the sum-total of wisdom; and
+unabashed by the silence with which her comment was received, she
+continued her critical survey of the drawing-room.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Amherst--you know I can't help saying what I think--and I've
+so often wondered why you don't do this room over. With these high
+ceilings you could do something lovely in Louis Seize."
+
+A faint pink rose to Mrs. Amherst's cheeks. "I don't think my son would
+ever care to make any changes here," she said.
+
+"Oh, I understand his feeling; but when he begins to entertain--and you
+know poor Bessy always _hated_ this furniture."
+
+Mrs. Amherst smiled slightly. "Perhaps if he marries again--" she said,
+seizing at random on a pretext for changing the subject.
+
+Mrs. Dressel dropped the hands with which she was absent-mindedly
+assuring herself of the continuance of unbroken relations between her
+hat and her hair.
+
+"_Marries again?_ Why--you don't mean--? He doesn't think of it?"
+
+"Not in the least--I spoke figuratively," her hostess rejoined with a
+laugh.
+
+"Oh, of course--I see. He really _couldn't_ marry, could he? I mean, it
+would be so wrong to Cicely--under the circumstances."
+
+Mrs. Amherst's black eye-brows gathered in a slight frown. She had
+already noticed, on the part of the Hanaford clan, a disposition to
+regard Amherst as imprisoned in the conditions of his trust, and
+committed to the obligation of handing on unimpaired to Cicely the
+fortune his wife's caprice had bestowed on him; and this open expression
+of the family view was singularly displeasing to her.
+
+"I had not thought of it in that light--but it's really of no
+consequence how one looks at a thing that is not going to happen," she
+said carelessly.
+
+"No--naturally; I see you were only joking. He's so devoted to Cicely,
+isn't he?" Mrs. Dressel rejoined, with her bright obtuseness.
+
+A step on the threshold announced Amherst's approach.
+
+"I'm afraid I must be off, mother--" he began, halting in the doorway
+with the instinctive masculine recoil from the afternoon caller.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Amherst, how d'you do? I suppose you're very busy about
+tomorrow? I just flew in to find out if Justine was really coming," Mrs.
+Dressel explained, a little fluttered by the effort of recalling what
+she had been saying when he entered.
+
+"I believe my mother expects the whole party," Amherst replied, shaking
+hands with the false _bonhomie_ of the man entrapped.
+
+"How delightful! And it's so nice to think that Mr. Langhope's
+arrangement with Justine still works so well," Mrs. Dressel hastened on,
+nervously hoping that her volubility would smother any recollection of
+what he had chanced to overhear.
+
+"Mr. Langhope is lucky in having persuaded Miss Brent to take charge of
+Cicely," Mrs. Amherst quietly interposed.
+
+"Yes--and it was so lucky for Justine too! When she came back from
+Europe with us last autumn, I could see she simply hated the idea of
+taking up her nursing again."
+
+Amherst's face darkened at the allusion, and his mother said hurriedly:
+"Ah, she was tired, poor child; but I'm only afraid that, after the
+summer's rest, she may want some more active occupation than looking
+after a little girl."
+
+"Oh, I think not--she's so fond of Cicely. And of course it's everything
+to her to have a comfortable home."
+
+Mrs. Amherst smiled. "At her age, it's not always everything."
+
+Mrs. Dressel stared slightly. "Oh, Justine's twenty-seven, you know;
+she's not likely to marry now," she said, with the mild finality of the
+early-wedded.
+
+She rose as she spoke, extending cordial hands of farewell. "You must be
+so busy preparing for the great day...if only it doesn't rain!... No,
+_please_, Mr. Amherst!... It's a mere step--I'm walking...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That afternoon, as Amherst walked out toward Westmore for a survey of
+the final preparations, he found that, among the pleasant thoughts
+accompanying him, one of the pleasantest was the anticipation of seeing
+Justine Brent.
+
+Among the little group who were to surround him on the morrow, she was
+the only one discerning enough to understand what the day meant to him,
+or with sufficient knowledge to judge of the use he had made of his
+great opportunity. Even now that the opportunity had come, and all
+obstacles were levelled, sympathy with his work was as much lacking as
+ever; and only Duplain, at length reinstated as manager, really
+understood and shared in his aims. But Justine Brent's sympathy was of a
+different kind from the manager's. If less logical, it was warmer, more
+penetrating--like some fine imponderable fluid, so subtle that it could
+always find a way through the clumsy processes of human intercourse.
+Amherst had thought very often of this quality in her during the weeks
+which followed his abrupt departure for Georgia; and in trying to define
+it he had said to himself that she felt with her brain.
+
+And now, aside from the instinctive understanding between them, she was
+set apart in his thoughts by her association with his wife's last days.
+On his arrival from the south he had gathered on all sides evidences of
+her tender devotion to Bessy: even Mr. Tredegar's chary praise swelled
+the general commendation. From the surgeons he heard how her unwearied
+skill had helped them in their fruitless efforts; poor Cicely, awed by
+her loss, clung to her mother's friend with childish tenacity; and the
+young rector of Saint Anne's, shyly acquitting himself of his visit of
+condolence, dwelt chiefly on the consolatory thought of Miss Brent's
+presence at the death-bed.
+
+The knowledge that Justine had been with his wife till the end had, in
+fact, done more than anything else to soften Amherst's regrets; and he
+had tried to express something of this in the course of his first talk
+with her. Justine had given him a clear and self-possessed report of the
+dreadful weeks at Lynbrook; but at his first allusion to her own part in
+them, she shrank into a state of distress which seemed to plead with him
+to refrain from even the tenderest touch on her feelings. It was a
+peculiarity of their friendship that silence and absence had always
+mysteriously fostered its growth; and he now felt that her reticence
+deepened the understanding between them as the freest confidences might
+not have done.
+
+Soon afterward, an opportune attack of nervous prostration had sent Mrs.
+Harry Dressel abroad; and Justine was selected as her companion. They
+remained in Europe for six months; and on their return Amherst learned
+with pleasure that Mr. Langhope had asked Miss Brent to take charge of
+Cicely.
+
+Mr. Langhope's sorrow for his daughter had been aggravated by futile
+wrath at her unaccountable will; and the mixed sentiment thus engendered
+had found expression in a jealous outpouring of affection toward Cicely.
+He took immediate possession of the child, and in the first stages of
+his affliction her companionship had been really consoling. But as time
+passed, and the pleasant habits of years reasserted themselves, her
+presence became, in small unacknowledged ways, a source of domestic
+irritation. Nursery hours disturbed the easy routine of his household;
+the elderly parlour-maid who had long ruled it resented the intervention
+of Cicely's nurse; the little governess, involved in the dispute, broke
+down and had to be shipped home to Germany; a successor was hard to
+find, and in the interval Mr. Langhope's privacy was invaded by a stream
+of visiting teachers, who were always wanting to consult him about
+Cicely's lessons, and lay before him their tiresome complaints and
+perplexities. Poor Mr. Langhope found himself in the position of the
+mourner who, in the first fervour of bereavement, has undertaken the
+construction of an imposing monument without having counted the cost. He
+had meant that his devotion to Cicely should be a monument to his
+paternal grief; but the foundations were scarcely laid when he found
+that the funds of time and patience were almost exhausted.
+
+Pride forbade his consigning Cicely to her step-father, though Mrs.
+Amherst would gladly have undertaken her care; Mrs. Ansell's migratory
+habits made it impossible for her to do more than intermittently hover
+and advise; and a new hope rose before Mr. Langhope when it occurred to
+him to appeal to Miss Brent.
+
+The experiment had proved a success, and when Amherst met Justine again
+she had been for some months in charge of the little girl, and change
+and congenial occupation had restored her to a normal view of life.
+There was no trace in her now of the dumb misery which had haunted him
+at their parting; she was again the vivid creature who seemed more
+charged with life than any one he had ever known. The crisis through
+which she had passed showed itself only in a smoothing of the brow and
+deepening of the eyes, as though a bloom of experience had veiled
+without deadening the first brilliancy of youth.
+
+As he lingered on the image thus evoked, he recalled Mrs. Dressel's
+words: "Justine is twenty-seven--she's not likely to marry now."
+
+Oddly enough, he had never thought of her marrying--but now that he
+heard the possibility questioned, he felt a disagreeable conviction of
+its inevitableness. Mrs. Dressel's view was of course absurd. In spite
+of Justine's feminine graces, he had formerly felt in her a kind of
+elfin immaturity, as of a flitting Ariel with untouched heart and
+senses: it was only of late that she had developed the subtle quality
+which calls up thoughts of love. Not marry? Why, the vagrant fire had
+just lighted on her--and the fact that she was poor and unattached, with
+her own way to make, and no setting of pleasure and elegance to
+embellish her--these disadvantages seemed as nothing to Amherst against
+the warmth of personality in which she moved. And besides, she would
+never be drawn to the kind of man who needed fine clothes and luxury to
+point him to the charm of sex. She was always finished and graceful in
+appearance, with the pretty woman's art of wearing her few plain dresses
+as if they were many and varied; yet no one could think of her as
+attaching much importance to the upholstery of life.... No, the man who
+won her would be of a different type, have other inducements to
+offer...and Amherst found himself wondering just what those inducements
+would be.
+
+Suddenly he remembered something his mother had said as he left the
+house--something about a distinguished-looking young man who had called
+to ask for Miss Brent. Mrs. Amherst, innocently inquisitive in small
+matters, had followed her son into the hall to ask the parlour-maid if
+the gentleman had left his name; and the parlour-maid had answered in
+the negative. The young man was evidently not indigenous: all the social
+units of Hanaford were intimately known to each other. He was a
+stranger, therefore, presumably drawn there by the hope of seeing Miss
+Brent. But if he knew that she was coming he must be intimately
+acquainted with her movements.... The thought came to Amherst as an
+unpleasant surprise. It showed him for the first time how little he knew
+of Justine's personal life, of the ties she might have formed outside
+the Lynbrook circle. After all, he had seen her chiefly not among her
+own friends but among his wife's. Was it reasonable to suppose that a
+creature of her keen individuality would be content to subsist on the
+fringe of other existences? Somewhere, of course, she must have a centre
+of her own, must be subject to influences of which he was wholly
+ignorant. And since her departure from Lynbrook he had known even less
+of her life. She had spent the previous winter with Mr. Langhope in New
+York, where Amherst had seen her only on his rare visits to Cicely; and
+Mr. Langhope, on going abroad for the summer, had established his
+grand-daughter in a Bar Harbour cottage, where, save for two flying
+visits from Mrs. Ansell, Miss Brent had reigned alone till his return in
+September.
+
+Very likely, Amherst reflected, the mysterious visitor was a Bar Harbour
+acquaintance--no, more than an acquaintance: a friend. And as Mr.
+Langhope's party had left Mount Desert but three days previously, the
+arrival of the unknown at Hanaford showed a singular impatience to
+rejoin Miss Brent.
+
+As he reached this point in his meditations, Amherst found himself at
+the street-corner where it was his habit to pick up the Westmore
+trolley. Just as it bore down on him, and he sprang to the platform,
+another car, coming in from the mills, stopped to discharge its
+passengers. Among them Amherst noticed a slender undersized man in
+shabby clothes, about whose retreating back, as he crossed the street to
+signal a Station Avenue car, there was something dimly familiar, and
+suggestive of troubled memories. Amherst leaned out and looked again:
+yes, the back was certainly like Dr. Wyant's--but what could Wyant be
+doing at Hanaford, and in a Westmore car?
+
+Amherst's first impulse was to spring out and overtake him. He knew how
+admirably the young physician had borne himself at Lynbrook; he even
+recalled Dr. Garford's saying, with his kindly sceptical smile: "Poor
+Wyant believed to the end that we could save her"--and felt again his
+own inward movement of thankfulness that the cruel miracle had not been
+worked.
+
+He owed a great deal to Wyant, and had tried to express his sense of the
+fact by warm words and a liberal fee; but since Bessy's death he had
+never returned to Lynbrook, and had consequently lost sight of the young
+doctor.
+
+Now he felt that he ought to try to rejoin him, to find out why he was
+at Hanaford, and make some proffer of hospitality; but if the stranger
+were really Wyant, his choice of the Station Avenue car made it appear
+that he was on his way to catch the New York express; and in any case
+Amherst's engagements at Westmore made immediate pursuit impossible.
+
+He consoled himself with the thought that if the physician was not
+leaving Hanaford he would be certain to call at the house; and then his
+mind flew back to Justine Brent. But the pleasure of looking forward to
+her arrival was disturbed by new feelings. A sense of reserve and
+embarrassment had sprung up in his mind, checking that free mental
+communion which, as he now perceived, had been one of the unconscious
+promoters of their friendship. It was as though his thoughts faced a
+stranger instead of the familiar presence which had so long dwelt in
+them; and he began to see that the feeling of intelligence existing
+between Justine and himself was not the result of actual intimacy, but
+merely of the charm she knew how to throw over casual intercourse.
+
+When he had left his house, his mind was like a summer sky, all open
+blue and sunlit rolling clouds; but gradually the clouds had darkened
+and massed themselves, till they drew an impenetrable veil over the
+upper light and stretched threateningly across his whole horizon.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+THE celebrations at Westmore were over. Hanaford society, mustering for
+the event, had streamed through the hospital, inspected the clinic,
+complimented Amherst, recalled itself to Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell,
+and streamed out again to regain its carriages and motors.
+
+The chief actors in the ceremony were also taking leave. Mr. Langhope,
+somewhat pale and nervous after the ordeal, had been helped into the
+Gaines landau with Mrs. Ansell and Cicely; Mrs. Amherst had accepted a
+seat in the Dressel victoria; and Westy Gaines, with an _empressement_
+slightly tinged by condescension, was in the act of placing his electric
+phaeton at Miss Brent's disposal.
+
+She stood in the pretty white porch of the hospital, looking out across
+its squares of flower-edged turf at the long street of Westmore. In the
+warm gold-powdered light of September the factory town still seemed a
+blot on the face of nature; yet here and there, on all sides, Justine's
+eye saw signs of humanizing change. The rough banks along the street had
+been levelled and sodded; young maples, set in rows, already made a long
+festoon of gold against the dingy house-fronts; and the houses
+themselves--once so irreclaimably outlawed and degraded--showed, in
+their white-curtained windows, their flowery white-railed yards, a
+growing approach to civilized human dwellings.
+
+Glancing the other way, one still met the grim pile of factories cutting
+the sky with their harsh roof-lines and blackened chimneys; but here
+also were signs of improvement. One of the mills had already been
+enlarged, another was scaffolded for the same purpose, and young trees
+and neatly-fenced turf replaced the surrounding desert of trampled
+earth.
+
+As Amherst came out of the hospital, he heard Miss Brent declining a
+seat in Westy's phaeton.
+
+"Thank you so much; but there's some one here I want to see first--one
+of the operatives--and I can easily take a Hanaford car." She held out
+her hand with the smile that ran like colour over her whole face; and
+Westy, nettled by this unaccountable disregard of her privileges,
+mounted his chariot alone.
+
+As he glided mournfully away, Amherst turned to Justine. "You wanted to
+see the Dillons?" he asked.
+
+Their eyes met, and she smiled again. He had never seen her so
+sunned-over, so luminous, since the distant November day when they had
+picnicked with Cicely beside the swamp. He wondered vaguely if she were
+more elaborately dressed than usual, or if the festal impression she
+produced were simply a reflection of her mood.
+
+"I do want to see the Dillons--how did you guess?" she rejoined; and
+Amherst felt a sudden impulse to reply: "For the same reason that made
+you think of them."
+
+The fact of her remembering the Dillons made him absurdly happy; it
+re-established between them the mental communion that had been checked
+by his thoughts of the previous day.
+
+"I suppose I'm rather self-conscious about the Dillons, because they're
+one of my object lessons--they illustrate the text," he said laughing,
+as they went down the steps.
+
+Westmore had been given a half-holiday for the opening of the hospital,
+and as Amherst and Justine turned into the street, parties of workers
+were dispersing toward their houses. They were still a dull-eyed stunted
+throng, to whom air and movement seemed to have been too long denied;
+but there was more animation in the groups, more light in individual
+faces; many of the younger men returned Amherst's good-day with a look
+of friendliness, and the women to whom he spoke met him with a
+volubility that showed the habit of frequent intercourse.
+
+"How much you have done!" Justine exclaimed, as he rejoined her after
+one of these asides; but the next moment he saw a shade of embarrassment
+cross her face, as though she feared to have suggested comparisons she
+had meant to avoid.
+
+He answered quite naturally: "Yes--I'm beginning to see my way now; and
+it's wonderful how they respond--" and they walked on without a shadow
+of constraint between them, while he described to her what was already
+done, and what direction his projected experiments were taking.
+
+The Dillons had been placed in charge of one of the old factory
+tenements, now transformed into a lodging-house for unmarried
+operatives. Even its harsh brick exterior, hung with creepers and
+brightened by flower-borders, had taken on a friendly air; and indoors
+it had a clean sunny kitchen, a big dining-room with cheerful-coloured
+walls, and a room where the men could lounge and smoke about a table
+covered with papers.
+
+The creation of these model lodging-houses had always been a favourite
+scheme of Amherst's, and the Dillons, incapacitated for factory work,
+had shown themselves admirably adapted to their new duties. In Mrs.
+Dillon's small hot sitting-room, among the starched sofa-tidies and pink
+shells that testified to the family prosperity, Justine shone with
+enjoyment and sympathy. She had always taken an interest in the lives
+and thoughts of working-people: not so much the constructive interest of
+the sociological mind as the vivid imaginative concern of a heart open
+to every human appeal. She liked to hear about their hard struggles and
+small pathetic successes: the children's sicknesses, the father's lucky
+job, the little sum they had been able to put by, the plans they had
+formed for Tommy's advancement, and how Sue's good marks at school were
+still ahead of Mrs. Hagan's Mary's.
+
+"What I really like is to gossip with them, and give them advice about
+the baby's cough, and the cheapest way to do their marketing," she said
+laughing, as she and Amherst emerged once more into the street. "It's
+the same kind of interest I used to feel in my dolls and guinea pigs--a
+managing, interfering old maid's interest. I don't believe I should care
+a straw for them if I couldn't dose them and order them about."
+
+Amherst laughed too: he recalled the time when he had dreamed that just
+such warm personal sympathy was her sex's destined contribution to the
+broad work of human beneficence. Well, it had not been a dream: here was
+a woman whose deeds spoke for her. And suddenly the thought came to him:
+what might they not do at Westmore together! The brightness of it was
+blinding--like the dazzle of sunlight which faced them as they walked
+toward the mills. But it left him speechless, confused--glad to have a
+pretext for routing Duplain out of the office, introducing him to Miss
+Brent, and asking him for the keys of the buildings....
+
+It was wonderful, again, how she grasped what he was doing in the mills,
+and saw how his whole scheme hung together, harmonizing the work and
+leisure of the operatives, instead of treating them as half machine,
+half man, and neglecting the man for the machine. Nor was she content
+with Utopian generalities: she wanted to know the how and why of each
+case, to hear what conclusions he drew from his results, to what
+solutions his experiments pointed.
+
+In explaining the mill work he forgot his constraint and returned to the
+free comradery of mind that had always marked their relation. He turned
+the key reluctantly in the last door, and paused a moment on the
+threshold.
+
+"Anything more?" he said, with a laugh meant to hide his desire to
+prolong their tour.
+
+She glanced up at the sun, which still swung free of the tall factory
+roofs.
+
+"As much as you've time for. Cicely doesn't need me this afternoon, and
+I can't tell when I shall see Westmore again."
+
+Her words fell on him with a chill. His smile faded, and he looked away
+for a moment.
+
+"But I hope Cicely will be here often," he said.
+
+"Oh, I hope so too," she rejoined, with seeming unconsciousness of any
+connection between the wish and her previous words.
+
+Amherst hesitated. He had meant to propose a visit to the old Eldorado
+building, which now at last housed the long-desired night-schools and
+nursery; but since she had spoken he felt a sudden indifference to
+showing her anything more. What was the use, if she meant to leave
+Cicely, and drift out of his reach? He could get on well enough without
+sympathy and comprehension, but his momentary indulgence in them made
+the ordinary taste of life a little flat.
+
+"There must be more to see?" she continued, as they turned back toward
+the village; and he answered absently: "Oh, yes--if you like."
+
+He heard the change in his own voice, and knew by her quick side-glance
+that she had heard it too.
+
+"Please let me see everything that is compatible with my getting a car
+to Hanaford by six."
+
+"Well, then--the night-school next," he said with an effort at
+lightness; and to shake off the importunity of his own thoughts he added
+carelessly, as they walked on: "By the way--it seems improbable--but I
+think I saw Dr. Wyant yesterday in a Westmore car."
+
+She echoed the name in surprise. "Dr. Wyant? Really! Are you sure?"
+
+"Not quite; but if it wasn't he it was his ghost. You haven't heard of
+his being at Hanaford?"
+
+"No. I've heard nothing of him for ages."
+
+Something in her tone made him return her side-glance; but her voice, on
+closer analysis, denoted only indifference, and her profile seemed to
+express the same negative sentiment. He remembered a vague Lynbrook
+rumour to the effect that the young doctor had been attracted to Miss
+Brent. Such floating seeds of gossip seldom rooted themselves in his
+mind, but now the fact acquired a new significance, and he wondered how
+he could have thought so little of it at the time. Probably her somewhat
+exaggerated air of indifference simply meant that she had been bored by
+Wyant's attentions, and that the reminder of them still roused a slight
+self-consciousness.
+
+Amherst was relieved by this conclusion, and murmuring: "Oh, I suppose
+it can't have been he," led her rapidly on to the Eldorado. But the old
+sense of free communion was again obstructed, and her interest in the
+details of the schools and nursery now seemed to him only a part of her
+wonderful art of absorbing herself in other people's affairs. He was a
+fool to have been duped by it--to have fancied it was anything more
+personal than a grace of manner.
+
+As she turned away from inspecting the blackboards in one of the empty
+school-rooms he paused before her and said suddenly: "You spoke of not
+seeing Westmore again. Are you thinking of leaving Cicely?"
+
+The words were almost the opposite of those he had intended to speak; it
+was as if some irrepressible inner conviction flung defiance at his
+surface distrust of her.
+
+She stood still also, and he saw a thought move across her face. "Not
+immediately--but perhaps when Mr. Langhope can make some other
+arrangement----"
+
+Owing to the half-holiday they had the school-building to themselves,
+and the fact of being alone with her, without fear of interruption, woke
+in Amherst an uncontrollable longing to taste for once the joy of
+unguarded utterance.
+
+"Why do you go?" he asked, moving close to the platform on which she
+stood.
+
+She hesitated, resting her hand on the teacher's desk. Her eyes were
+kind, but he thought her tone was cold.
+
+"This easy life is rather out of my line," she said at length, with a
+smile that draped her words in vagueness.
+
+Amherst looked at her again--she seemed to be growing remote and
+inaccessible. "You mean that you don't want to stay?"
+
+His tone was so abrupt that it called forth one of her rare blushes.
+"No--not that. I have been very happy with Cicely--but soon I shall have
+to be doing something else."
+
+Why was she blushing? And what did her last phrase mean? "Something
+else--?" The blood hummed in his ears--he began to hope she would not
+answer too quickly.
+
+She had sunk into the seat behind the desk, propping her elbows on its
+lid, and letting her interlaced hands support her chin. A little bunch
+of violets which had been thrust into the folds of her dress detached
+itself and fell to the floor.
+
+"What I mean is," she said in a low voice, raising her eyes to
+Amherst's, "that I've had a great desire lately to get back to real
+work--my special work.... I've been too idle for the last year--I want
+to do some hard nursing; I want to help people who are miserable."
+
+She spoke earnestly, almost passionately, and as he listened his
+undefined fear was lifted. He had never before seen her in this mood,
+with brooding brows, and the darkness of the world's pain in her eyes.
+All her glow had faded--she was a dun thrush-like creature, clothed in
+semi-tints; yet she seemed much nearer than when her smile shot light on
+him.
+
+He stood motionless, his eyes absently fixed on the bunch of violets at
+her feet. Suddenly he raised his head, and broke out with a boyish
+blush: "Could it have been Wyant who was trying to see you?"
+
+"Dr. Wyant--trying to see me?" She lowered her hands to the desk, and
+sat looking at him with open wonder.
+
+He saw the irrelevance of his question, and burst, in spite of himself,
+into youthful laughter.
+
+"I mean--It's only that an unknown visitor called at the house
+yesterday, and insisted that you must have arrived. He seemed so annoyed
+at not finding you, that I thought...I imagined...it must be some one
+who knew you very well...and who had followed you here...for some
+special reason...."
+
+Her colour rose again, as if caught from his; but her eyes still
+declared her ignorance. "Some special reason----?"
+
+"And just now," he blurted out, "when you said you might not stay much
+longer with Cicely--I thought of the visit--and wondered if there was
+some one you meant to marry...."
+
+A silence fell between them. Justine rose slowly, her eyes screened
+under the veil she had lowered. "No--I don't mean to marry," she said,
+half-smiling, as she came down from the platform.
+
+Restored to his level, her small shadowy head just in a line with his
+eyes, she seemed closer, more approachable and feminine--yet Amherst did
+not dare to speak.
+
+She took a few steps toward the window, looking out into the deserted
+street. "It's growing dark--I must go home," she said.
+
+"Yes," he assented absently as he followed her. He had no idea what she
+was saying. The inner voices in which they habitually spoke were growing
+louder than outward words. Or was it only the voice of his own desires
+that he heard--the cry of new hopes and unguessed capacities of living?
+All within him was flood-tide: this was the top of life, surely--to feel
+her alike in his brain and his pulses, to steep sight and hearing in the
+joy of her nearness, while all the while thought spoke clear: "This is
+the mate of my mind."
+
+He began again abruptly. "Wouldn't you marry, if it gave you the chance
+to do what you say--if it offered you hard work, and the opportunity to
+make things better...for a great many people...as no one but yourself
+could do it?"
+
+It was a strange way of putting his case: he was aware of it before he
+ended. But it had not occurred to him to tell her that she was lovely
+and desirable--in his humility he thought that what he had to give would
+plead for him better than what he was.
+
+The effect produced on her by his question, though undecipherable, was
+extraordinary. She stiffened a little, remaining quite motionless, her
+eyes on the street.
+
+"_You!_" she just breathed; and he saw that she was beginning to
+tremble.
+
+His wooing had been harsh and clumsy--he was afraid it had offended her,
+and his hand trembled too as it sought hers.
+
+"I only thought--it would be a dull business to most women--and I'm tied
+to it for life...but I thought...I've seen so often how you pity
+suffering...how you long to relieve it...."
+
+She turned away from him with a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I _hate_
+suffering!" she broke out, raising her hands to her face.
+
+Amherst was frightened. How senseless of him to go on reiterating the
+old plea! He ought to have pleaded for himself--to have let the man in
+him seek her and take his defeat, instead of beating about the flimsy
+bush of philanthropy.
+
+"I only meant--I was trying to make my work recommend me..." he said
+with a half-laugh, as she remained silent, her eyes still turned away.
+
+The silence continued for a long time--it stretched between them like a
+narrowing interminable road, down which, with a leaden heart, he seemed
+to watch her gradually disappearing. And then, unexpectedly, as she
+shrank to a tiny speck at the dip of the road, the perspective was
+mysteriously reversed, and he felt her growing nearer again, felt her
+close to him--felt her hand in his.
+
+"I'm really just like other women, you know--I shall like it because
+it's your work," she said.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+EVERY one agreed that, on the whole, Mr. Langhope had behaved extremely
+well.
+
+He was just beginning to regain his equanimity in the matter of the
+will--to perceive that, in the eyes of the public, something important
+and distinguished was being done at Westmore, and that the venture,
+while reducing Cicely's income during her minority, might, in some
+incredible way, actually make for its ultimate increase. So much Mr.
+Langhope, always eager to take the easiest view of the inevitable, had
+begun to let fall in his confidential comments on Amherst; when his
+newly-regained balance was rudely shaken by the news of his son-in-law's
+marriage.
+
+The free expression of his anger was baffled by the fact that, even by
+the farthest stretch of self-extenuating logic, he could find no one to
+blame for the event but himself.
+
+"Why on earth don't you say so--don't you call me a triple-dyed fool for
+bringing them together?" he challenged Mrs. Ansell, as they had the
+matter out together in the small intimate drawing-room of her New York
+apartment.
+
+Mrs. Ansell, stirring her tea with a pensive hand, met the challenge
+composedly.
+
+"At present you're doing it for me," she reminded him; "and after all,
+I'm not so disposed to agree with you."
+
+"Not agree with me? But you told me not to engage Miss Brent! Didn't you
+tell me not to engage her?"
+
+She made a hesitating motion of assent.
+
+"But, good Lord, how was I to help myself? No man was ever in such a
+quandary!" he broke off, leaping back to the other side of the argument.
+
+"No," she said, looking up at him suddenly. "I believe that, for the
+only time in your life, you were sorry then that you hadn't married me."
+
+She held his eyes for a moment with a look of gentle malice; then he
+laughed, and drew forth his cigarette-case.
+
+"Oh, come--you've inverted the formula," he said, reaching out for the
+enamelled match-box at his elbow. She let the pleasantry pass with a
+slight smile, and he went on reverting to his grievance: "Why _didn't_
+you want me to engage Miss Brent?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know...some instinct."
+
+"You won't tell me?"
+
+"I couldn't if I tried; and now, after all----"
+
+"After all--what?"
+
+She reflected. "You'll have Cicely off your mind, I mean."
+
+"Cicely off my mind?" Mr. Langhope was beginning to find his charming
+friend less consolatory than usual. After all, the most magnanimous
+woman has her circuitous way of saying _I told you so_. "As if any good
+governess couldn't have done that for me!" he grumbled.
+
+"Ah--the present care for her. But I was looking ahead," she rejoined.
+
+"To what--if I may ask?"
+
+"The next few years--when Mrs. Amherst may have children of her own."
+
+"Children of her own?" He bounded up, furious at the suggestion.
+
+"Had it never occurred to you?"
+
+"Hardly as a source of consolation!"
+
+"I think a philosophic mind might find it so."
+
+"I should really be interested to know how!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell put down her cup, and again turned her gentle tolerant eyes
+upon him.
+
+"Mr. Amherst, as a father, will take a more conservative view of his
+duties. Every one agrees that, in spite of his theories, he has a good
+head for business; and whatever he does at Westmore for the advantage of
+his children will naturally be for Cicely's advantage too."
+
+Mr. Langhope returned her gaze thoughtfully. "There's something in what
+you say," he admitted after a pause. "But it doesn't alter the fact
+that, with Amherst unmarried, the whole of the Westmore fortune would
+have gone back to Cicely--where it belongs."
+
+"Possibly. But it was so unlikely that he would remain unmarried."
+
+"I don't see why! A man of honour would have felt bound to keep the
+money for Cicely."
+
+"But you must remember that, from Mr. Amherst's standpoint, the money
+belongs rather to Westmore than to Cicely."
+
+"He's no better than a socialist, then!"
+
+"Well--supposing he isn't: the birth of a son and heir will cure that."
+
+Mr. Langhope winced, but she persisted gently: "It's really safer for
+Cicely as it is--" and before the end of the conference he found himself
+confessing, half against his will: "Well, since he hadn't the decency
+to remain single, I'm thankful he hasn't inflicted a stranger on us; and
+I shall never forget what Miss Brent did for my poor Bessy...."
+
+It was the view she had wished to bring him to, and the view which, in
+due course, with all his accustomed grace and adaptability, he presented
+to the searching gaze of a society profoundly moved by the incident of
+Amherst's marriage. "Of course, if Mr. Langhope approves--" society
+reluctantly murmured; and that Mr. Langhope did approve was presently
+made manifest by every outward show of consideration toward the
+newly-wedded couple.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst and Justine had been married in September; and after a holiday
+in Canada and the Adirondacks they returned to Hanaford for the winter.
+Amherst had proposed a short flight to Europe; but his wife preferred to
+settle down at once to her new duties.
+
+The announcement of her marriage had been met by Mrs. Dressel with a
+comment which often afterward returned to her memory. "It's splendid for
+you, of course, dear, _in one way_," her friend had murmured, between
+disparagement and envy--"that is, if you can stand talking about the
+Westmore mill-hands all the rest of your life."
+
+"Oh, but I couldn't--I should hate it!" Justine had energetically
+rejoined; meeting Mrs. Dressel's admonitory "Well, then?" with the
+laughing assurance that _she_ meant to lead the conversation.
+
+She knew well enough what the admonition meant. To Amherst, so long
+thwarted in his chosen work, the subject of Westmore was becoming an
+_idée fixe_; and it was natural that Hanaford should class him as a man
+of one topic. But Justine had guessed at his other side; a side as long
+thwarted, and far less articulate, which she intended to wake into life.
+She had felt it in him from the first, though their talks had so
+uniformly turned on the subject which palled on Hanaford; and it had
+been revealed to her during the silent hours among his books, when she
+had grown into such close intimacy with his mind.
+
+She did not, assuredly, mean to spend the rest of her days talking about
+the Westmore mill-hands; but in the arrogance of her joy she wished to
+begin her married life in the setting of its habitual duties, and to
+achieve the victory of evoking the secret unsuspected Amherst out of the
+preoccupied business man chained to his task. Dull lovers might have to
+call on romantic scenes to wake romantic feelings; but Justine's
+glancing imagination leapt to the challenge of extracting poetry from
+the prose of routine.
+
+And this was precisely the triumph that the first months brought her. To
+mortal eye, Amherst and Justine seemed to be living at Hanaford: in
+reality they were voyaging on unmapped seas of adventure. The seas were
+limitless, and studded with happy islands: every fresh discovery they
+made about each other, every new agreement of ideas and feelings,
+offered itself to these intrepid explorers as a friendly coast where
+they might beach their keel and take their bearings. Thus, in the
+thronging hum of metaphor, Justine sometimes pictured their relation;
+seeing it, again, as a journey through crowded populous cities, where
+every face she met was Amherst's; or, contrarily, as a multiplication of
+points of perception, so that one became, for the world's contact, a
+surface so multitudinously alive that the old myth of hearing the grass
+grow and walking the rainbow explained itself as the heightening of
+personality to the utmost pitch of sympathy.
+
+In reality, the work at Westmore became an almost necessary sedative
+after these flights into the blue. She felt sometimes that they would
+have been bankrupted of sensations if daily hours of drudgery had not
+provided a reservoir in which fresh powers of enjoyment could slowly
+gather. And their duties had the rarer quality of constituting,
+precisely, the deepest, finest bond between them, the clarifying element
+which saved their happiness from stagnation, and kept it in the strong
+mid-current of human feeling.
+
+It was this element in their affection which, in the last days of
+November, was unexpectedly put on trial. Mr. Langhope, since his return
+from his annual visit to Europe, showed signs of diminishing strength
+and elasticity. He had had to give up his nightly dinner parties, to
+desert his stall at the Opera: to take, in short, as he plaintively put
+it, his social pleasures homoeopathically. Certain of his friends
+explained the change by saying that he had never been "quite the same"
+since his daughter's death; while others found its determining cause in
+the shock of Amherst's second marriage. But this insinuation Mr.
+Langhope in due time discredited by writing to ask the Amhersts if they
+would not pity his loneliness and spend the winter in town with him. The
+proposal came in a letter to Justine, which she handed to her husband
+one afternoon on his return from the mills.
+
+She sat behind the tea-table in the Westmore drawing-room, now at last
+transformed, not into Mrs. Dressel's vision of "something lovely in
+Louis Seize," but into a warm yet sober setting for books, for scattered
+flowers, for deep chairs and shaded lamps in pleasant nearness to each
+other.
+
+Amherst raised his eyes from the letter, thinking as he did so how well
+her bright head, with its flame-like play of meanings, fitted into the
+background she had made for it. Still unobservant of external details,
+he was beginning to feel a vague well-being of the eye wherever her
+touch had passed.
+
+"Well, we must do it," he said simply.
+
+"Oh, must we?" she murmured, holding out his cup.
+
+He smiled at her note of dejection. "Unnatural woman! New York _versus_
+Hanaford--do you really dislike it so much?"
+
+She tried to bring a tone of consent into her voice. "I shall be very
+glad to be with Cicely again--and that, of course," she reflected, "is
+the reason why Mr. Langhope wants us."
+
+"Well--if it is, it's a good reason."
+
+"Yes. But how much shall you be with us?"
+
+"If you say so, I'll arrange to get away for a month or two."
+
+"Oh, no: I don't want that!" she said, with a smile that triumphed a
+little. "But why should not Cicely come here?"
+
+"If Mr. Langhope is cut off from his usual amusements, I'm afraid that
+would only make him more lonely."
+
+"Yes, I suppose so." She put aside her untasted cup, resting her elbows
+on her knees, and her chin on her clasped hands, in the attitude
+habitual to her in moments of inward debate.
+
+Amherst rose and seated himself on the sofa beside her. "Dear! What is
+it?" he said, drawing her hands down, so that she had to turn her face
+to his.
+
+"Nothing...I don't know...a superstition. I've been so happy here!"
+
+"Is our happiness too perishable to be transplanted?"
+
+She smiled and answered by another question. "You don't mind doing it,
+then?"
+
+Amherst hesitated. "Shall I tell you? I feel that it's a sort of ring of
+Polycrates. It may buy off the jealous gods."
+
+A faint shrinking from some importunate suggestion seemed to press her
+closer to him. "Then you feel they _are_ jealous?" she breathed, in a
+half-laugh.
+
+"I pity them if they're not!"
+
+"Yes," she agreed, rallying to his tone. "I only had a fancy that they
+might overlook such a dull place as Hanaford."
+
+Amherst drew her to him. "Isn't it, on the contrary, in the ash-heaps
+that the rag-pickers prowl?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no disguising it: she was growing afraid of her happiness. Her
+husband's analogy of the ring expressed her fear. She seemed to herself
+to carry a blazing jewel on her breast--something that singled her out
+for human envy and divine pursuit. She had a preposterous longing to
+dress plainly and shabbily, to subdue her voice and gestures, to try to
+slip through life unnoticed; yet all the while she knew that her jewel
+would shoot its rays through every disguise. And from the depths of
+ancient atavistic instincts came the hope that Amherst was right--that
+by sacrificing their precious solitude to Mr. Langhope's convenience
+they might still deceive the gods.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once pledged to her new task, Justine, as usual, espoused it with
+ardour. It was pleasant, even among greater joys, to see her husband
+again frankly welcomed by Mr. Langhope; to see Cicely bloom into
+happiness at their coming; and to overhear Mr. Langhope exclaim, in a
+confidential aside to his son-in-law: "It's wonderful, the _bien-être_
+that wife of yours diffuses about her!"
+
+The element of _bien-être_ was the only one in which Mr. Langhope could
+draw breath; and to those who kept him immersed in it he was prodigal of
+delicate attentions. The experiment, in short, was a complete success;
+and even Amherst's necessary weeks at Hanaford had the merit of giving a
+finer flavour to his brief appearances.
+
+Of all this Justine was thinking as she drove down Fifth Avenue one
+January afternoon to meet her husband at the Grand Central station. She
+had tamed her happiness at last: the quality of fear had left it, and it
+nestled in her heart like some wild creature subdued to human ways.
+And, as her inward bliss became more and more a quiet habit of the mind,
+the longing to help and minister returned, absorbing her more deeply in
+her husband's work.
+
+She dismissed the carriage at the station, and when his train had
+arrived they emerged together into the cold winter twilight and turned
+up Madison Avenue. These walks home from the station gave them a little
+more time to themselves than if they had driven; and there was always so
+much to tell on both sides. This time the news was all good: the work at
+Westmore was prospering, and on Justine's side there was a more cheerful
+report of Mr. Langhope's health, and--best of all--his promise to give
+them Cicely for the summer. Amherst and Justine were both anxious that
+the child should spend more time at Hanaford, that her young
+associations should begin to gather about Westmore; and Justine exulted
+in the fact that the suggestion had come from Mr. Langhope himself,
+while she and Amherst were still planning how to lead him up to it.
+
+They reached the house while this triumph was still engaging them; and
+in the doorway Amherst turned to her with a smile.
+
+"And of course--dear man!--he believes the idea is all his. There's
+nothing you can't make people believe, you little Jesuit!"
+
+"I don't think there is!" she boasted, falling gaily into his tone; and
+then, as the door opened, and she entered the hall, her eyes fell on a
+blotted envelope which lay among the letters on the table.
+
+The parlour-maid proffered it with a word of explanation. "A gentleman
+left it for you, madam; he asked to see you, and said he'd call for the
+answer in a day or two."
+
+"Another begging letter, I suppose," said Amherst, turning into the
+drawing-room, where Mr. Langhope and Cicely awaited them; and Justine,
+carelessly pushing the envelope into her muff, murmured "I suppose so"
+as she followed him.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+OVER the tea-table Justine forgot the note in her muff; but when she
+went upstairs to dress it fell to the floor, and she picked it up and
+laid it on her dressing-table.
+
+She had already recognized the hand as Wyant's, for it was not the first
+letter she had received from him.
+
+Three times since her marriage he had appealed to her for help, excusing
+himself on the plea of difficulties and ill-health. The first time he
+wrote, he alluded vaguely to having married, and to being compelled,
+through illness, to give up his practice at Clifton. On receiving this
+letter she made enquiries, and learned that, a month or two after her
+departure from Lynbrook, Wyant had married a Clifton girl--a pretty
+piece of flaunting innocence, whom she remembered about the lanes,
+generally with a young man in a buggy. There had evidently been
+something obscure and precipitate about the marriage, which was a
+strange one for the ambitious young doctor. Justine conjectured that it
+might have been the cause of his leaving Clifton--or or perhaps he had
+already succumbed to the fatal habit she had suspected in him. At any
+rate he seemed, in some mysterious way, to have dropped in two years
+from promise to failure; yet she could not believe that, with his
+talents, and the name he had begun to make, such a lapse could be more
+than temporary. She had often heard Dr. Garford prophesy great things
+for him; but Dr. Garford had died suddenly during the previous summer,
+and the loss of this powerful friend was mentioned by Wyant among his
+misfortunes.
+
+Justine was anxious to help him, but her marriage to a rich man had not
+given her the command of much money. She and Amherst, choosing to regard
+themselves as pensioners on the Westmore fortune, were scrupulous in
+restricting their personal expenditure; and her work among the
+mill-hands brought many demands on the modest allowance which her
+husband had insisted on her accepting. In reply to Wyant's first appeal,
+which reached her soon after her marriage, she had sent him a hundred
+dollars; but when the second came, some two months later--with a fresh
+tale of ill-luck and ill-health--she had not been able to muster more
+than half the amount. Finally a third letter had arrived, a short time
+before their leaving for New York. It told the same story of persistent
+misfortune, but on this occasion Wyant, instead of making a direct
+appeal for money, suggested that, through her hospital connections, she
+should help him to establish a New York practice. His tone was
+half-whining, half-peremptory, his once precise writing smeared and
+illegible; and these indications, combined with her former suspicions,
+convinced her that, for the moment, he was unfit for medical work. At
+any rate, she could not assume the responsibility of recommending him;
+and in answering she advised him to apply to some of the physicians he
+had worked with at Lynbrook, softening her refusal by the enclosure of a
+small sum of money. To this letter she received no answer. Wyant
+doubtless found the money insufficient, and resented her unwillingness
+to help him by the use of her influence; and she felt sure that the note
+before her contained a renewal of his former request.
+
+An obscure reluctance made her begin to undress before opening it. She
+felt slightly tired and indolently happy, and she did not wish any
+jarring impression to break in on the sense of completeness which her
+husband's coming always put into her life. Her happiness was making her
+timid and luxurious: she was beginning to shrink from even trivial
+annoyances.
+
+But when at length, in her dressing-gown, her loosened hair about her
+shoulders, she seated herself before the toilet-mirror, Wyant's note
+once more confronted her. It was absurd to put off reading it--if he
+asked for money again, she would simply confide the whole business to
+Amherst.
+
+She had never spoken to her husband of her correspondence with Wyant.
+The mere fact that the latter had appealed to her, instead of addressing
+himself to Amherst, made her suspect that he had a weakness to hide, and
+counted on her professional discretion. But his continued importunities
+would certainly release her from any such supposed obligation; and she
+thought with relief of casting the weight of her difficulty on her
+husband's shoulders.
+
+She opened the note and read.
+
+"I did not acknowledge your last letter because I was ashamed to tell
+you that the money was not enough to be of any use. But I am past shame
+now. My wife was confined three weeks ago, and has been desperately ill
+ever since. She is in no state to move, but we shall be put out of these
+rooms unless I can get money or work at once. A word from you would have
+given me a start in New York--and I'd be willing to begin again as an
+interne or a doctor's assistant.
+
+"I have never reminded you of what you owe me, and I should not do so
+now if I hadn't been to hell and back since I saw you. But I suppose you
+would rather have me remind you than apply to Mr. Amherst. You can tell
+me when to call for my answer."
+
+Justine laid down the letter and looked up. Her eyes rested on her own
+reflection in the glass, and it frightened her. She sat motionless, with
+a thickly-beating heart, one hand clenched on the letter.
+
+_"I suppose you would rather have me remind you than apply to Mr.
+Amherst."_
+
+That was what his importunity meant, then! She had been paying blackmail
+all this time.... Somewhere, from the first, in an obscure fold of
+consciousness, she had felt the stir of an unnamed, unacknowledged fear;
+and now the fear raised its head and looked at her. Well! She would look
+back at it, then: look it straight in the malignant eye. What was it,
+after all, but a "bugbear to scare children"--the ghost of the opinion
+of the many? She had suspected from the first that Wyant knew of her
+having shortened the term of Bessy Amherst's sufferings--returning to
+the room when he did, it was almost impossible that he should not have
+guessed what had happened; and his silence had made her believe that he
+understood her motive and approved it. But, supposing she had been
+mistaken, she still had nothing to fear, since she had done nothing that
+her own conscience condemned. If the act were to do again she would do
+it--she had never known a moment's regret!
+
+Suddenly she heard Amherst's step in the passage--heard him laughing and
+talking as he chased Cicely up the stairs to the nursery.
+
+_If she was not afraid, why had she never told Amherst?_
+
+Why, the answer to that was simple enough! She had not told him _because
+she was not afraid_. From the first she had retained sufficient
+detachment to view her act impartially, to find it completely justified
+by circumstances, and to decide that, since those circumstances could be
+but partly and indirectly known to her husband, she not only had the
+right to keep her own counsel, but was actually under a kind of
+obligation not to force on him the knowledge of a fact that he could not
+alter and could not completely judge.... Was there any flaw in this line
+of reasoning? Did it not show a deliberate weighing of conditions, a
+perfect rectitude of intention? And, after all, she had had Amherst's
+virtual consent to her act! She knew his feelings on such matters--his
+independence of traditional judgments, his horror of inflicting needless
+pain--she was as sure of his intellectual assent as of her own. She was
+even sure that, when she told him, he would appreciate her reasons for
+not telling him before....
+
+For now of course he must know everything--this horrible letter made it
+inevitable. She regretted that she had decided, though for the best of
+reasons, not to speak to him of her own accord; for it was intolerable
+that he should think of any external pressure as having brought her to
+avowal. But no! he would not think that. The understanding between them
+was so complete that no deceptive array of circumstances could ever make
+her motives obscure to him. She let herself rest a moment in the
+thought....
+
+Presently she heard him moving in the next room--he had come back to
+dress for dinner. She would go to him now, at once--she could not bear
+this weight on her mind the whole evening. She pushed back her chair,
+crumpling the letter in her hand; but as she did so, her eyes again fell
+on her reflection. She could not go to her husband with such a face! If
+she was not afraid, why did she look like that?
+
+Well--she was afraid! It would be easier and simpler to admit it. She
+was afraid--afraid for the first time--afraid for her own happiness! She
+had had just eight months of happiness--it was horrible to think of
+losing it so soon.... Losing it? But why should she lose it? The letter
+must have affected her brain...all her thoughts were in a blur of
+fear.... Fear of what? Of the man who understood her as no one else
+understood her? The man to whose wisdom and mercy she trusted as the
+believer trusts in God? This was a kind of abominable nightmare--even
+Amherst's image had been distorted in her mind! The only way to clear
+her brain, to recover the normal sense of things, was to go to him now,
+at once, to feel his arms about her, to let his kiss dispel her
+fears.... She rose with a long breath of relief.
+
+She had to cross the length of the room to reach his door, and when she
+had gone half-way she heard him knock.
+
+"May I come in?"
+
+She was close to the fire-place, and a bright fire burned on the hearth.
+
+"Come in!" she answered; and as she did so, she turned and dropped
+Wyant's letter into the fire. Her hand had crushed it into a little
+ball, and she saw the flames spring up and swallow it before her husband
+entered.
+
+It was not that she had changed her mind--she still meant to tell him
+everything. But to hold the letter was like holding a venomous
+snake--she wanted to exterminate it, to forget that she had ever seen
+the blotted repulsive characters. And she could not bear to have
+Amherst's eyes rest on it, to have him know that any man had dared to
+write to her in that tone. What vile meanings might not be read between
+Wyant's phrases? She had a right to tell the story in her own way--the
+true way....
+
+As Amherst approached, in his evening clothes, the heavy locks smoothed
+from his forehead, a flower of Cicely's giving in his button-hole, she
+thought she had never seen him look so kind and handsome.
+
+"Not dressed? Do you know that it's ten minutes to eight?" he said,
+coming up to her with a smile.
+
+She roused herself, putting her hands to her hair. "Yes, I know--I
+forgot," she murmured, longing to feel his arms about her, but standing
+rooted to the ground, unable to move an inch nearer.
+
+It was he who came close, drawing her lifted hands into his. "You look
+worried--I hope it was nothing troublesome that made you forget?"
+
+The divine kindness in his voice, his eyes! Yes--it would be easy, quite
+easy, to tell him....
+
+"No--yes--I was a little troubled...." she said, feeling the warmth of
+his touch flow through her hands reassuringly.
+
+"Dear! What about?"
+
+She drew a deep breath. "The letter----"
+
+He looked puzzled. "What letter?"
+
+"Downstairs...when we came in...it was not an ordinary begging-letter."
+
+"No? What then?" he asked, his face clouding.
+
+She noticed the change, and it frightened her. Was he angry? Was he
+going to be angry? But how absurd! He was only distressed at her
+distress.
+
+"What then?" he repeated, more gently.
+
+She looked up into his eyes for an instant. "It was a horrible
+letter----" she whispered, as she pressed her clasped hands against him.
+
+His grasp tightened on her wrists, and again the stern look crossed his
+face. "Horrible? What do you mean?"
+
+She had never seen him angry--but she felt suddenly that, to the guilty
+creature, his anger would be terrible. He would crush Wyant--she must be
+careful how she spoke.
+
+"I didn't mean that--only painful...."
+
+"Where is the letter? Let me see it."
+
+"Oh, no" she exclaimed, shrinking away.
+
+"Justine, what has happened? What ails you?"
+
+On a blind impulse she had backed toward the hearth, propping her arms
+against the mantel-piece while she stole a secret glance at the embers.
+Nothing remained of it--no, nothing.
+
+But suppose it was against herself that his anger turned? The idea was
+preposterous, yet she trembled at it. It was clear that she must say
+_something_ at once--must somehow account for her agitation. But the
+sense that she was unnerved--no longer in control of her face, her
+voice--made her feel that she would tell her story badly if she told it
+now.... Had she not the right to gain a respite, to choose her own hour?
+Weakness--weakness again! Every delay would only increase the phantom
+terror. Now, _now_--with her head on his breast!
+
+She turned toward him and began to speak impulsively.
+
+"I can't show you the letter, because it's not--not my secret----"
+
+"Ah?" he murmured, perceptibly relieved.
+
+"It's from some one--unlucky--whom I've known about...."
+
+"And whose troubles have been troubling you? But can't we help?"
+
+She shone on him through gleaming lashes. "Some one poor and ill--who
+needs money, I mean----" She tried to laugh away her tears. "And I
+haven't any! That's _my_ trouble!"
+
+"Foolish child! And to beg you are ashamed? And so you're letting your
+tears cool Mr. Langhope's soup?" He had her in his arms now, his kisses
+drying her cheek; and she turned her head so that their lips met in a
+long pressure.
+
+"Will a hundred dollars do?" he asked with a smile as he released her.
+
+_A hundred dollars!_ No--she was almost sure they would not. But she
+tried to shape a murmur of gratitude. "Thank you--thank you! I hated to
+ask...."
+
+"I'll write the cheque at once."
+
+"No--no," she protested, "there's no hurry."
+
+But he went back to his room, and she turned again to the toilet-table.
+Her face was painful to look at still--but a light was breaking through
+its fear. She felt the touch of a narcotic in her veins. How calm and
+peaceful the room was--and how delicious to think that her life would go
+on in it, safely and peacefully, in the old familiar way!
+
+As she swept up her hair, passing the comb through it, and flinging it
+dexterously over her lifted wrist, she heard Amherst cross the floor
+behind her, and pause to lay something on her writing-table.
+
+"Thank you," she murmured again, lowering her head as he passed.
+
+When the door had closed on him she thrust the last pin into her hair,
+dashed some drops of Cologne on her face, and went over to the
+writing-table. As she picked up the cheque she saw it was for three
+hundred dollars.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+ONCE or twice, in the days that followed, Justine found herself thinking
+that she had never known happiness before. The old state of secure
+well-being seemed now like a dreamless sleep; but this new bliss, on its
+sharp pinnacle ringed with fire--this thrilling conscious joy, daily
+and hourly snatched from fear--this was living, not sleeping!
+
+Wyant acknowledged her gift with profuse, almost servile thanks. She had
+sent it without a word--saying to herself that pity for his situation
+made it possible to ignore his baseness. And the days went on as before.
+She was not conscious of any change, save in the heightened, almost
+artificial quality of her happiness, till one day in March, when Mr.
+Langhope announced that he was going for two or three weeks to a
+friend's shooting-box in the south. The anniversary of Bessy's death was
+approaching, and Justine knew that at that time he always absented
+himself.
+
+"Supposing you and Amherst were to carry off Cicely till I come back?
+Perhaps you could persuade him to break away from work for once--or, if
+that's impossible, you could take her with you to Hanaford. She looks a
+little pale, and the change would be good for her."
+
+This was a great concession on Mr. Langhope's part, and Justine saw the
+pleasure in her husband's face. It was the first time that his
+father-in-law had suggested Cicely's going to Hanaford.
+
+"I'm afraid I can't break away just now, sir," Amherst said, "but it
+will be delightful for Justine if you'll give us Cicely while you're
+away."
+
+"Take her by all means, my dear fellow: I always sleep on both ears when
+she's with your wife."
+
+It was nearly three months since Justine had left Hanaford--and now she
+was to return there alone with her husband! There would be hours, of
+course, when the child's presence was between them--or when, again, his
+work would keep him at the mills. But in the evenings, when Cicely was
+in bed--when he and she sat alone, together in the Westmore
+drawing-room--in Bessy's drawing-room!... No--she must find some excuse
+for remaining away till she had again grown used to the idea of being
+alone with Amherst. Every day she was growing a little more used to it;
+but it would take time--time, and the full assurance that Wyant was
+silenced. Till then she could not go back to Hanaford.
+
+She found a pretext in her own health. She pleaded that she was a little
+tired, below par...and to return to Hanaford meant returning to hard
+work; with the best will in the world she could not be idle there. Might
+she not, she suggested, take Cicely to Tuxedo or Lakewood, and thus get
+quite away from household cares and good works? The pretext rang
+hollow--it was so unlike her! She saw Amherst's eyes rest anxiously on
+her as Mr. Langhope uttered his prompt assent. Certainly she did look
+tired--Mr. Langhope himself had noticed it. Had he perhaps over-taxed
+her energies, left the household too entirely on her shoulders? Oh,
+no--it was only the New York air...like Cicely, she pined for a breath
+of the woods.... And so, the day Mr. Langhope left, she and Cicely were
+packed off to Lakewood.
+
+They stayed there a week: then a fit of restlessness drove Justine back
+to town. She found an excuse in the constant rain--it was really
+useless, as she wrote Mr. Langhope, to keep the child imprisoned in an
+over-heated hotel while they could get no benefit from the outdoor life.
+In reality, she found the long lonely hours unendurable. She pined for a
+sight of her husband, and thought of committing Cicely to Mrs. Ansell's
+care, and making a sudden dash for Hanaford. But the vision of the long
+evenings in the Westmore drawing-room again restrained her. No--she
+would simply go back to New York, dine out occasionally, go to a concert
+or two, trust to the usual demands of town life to crowd her hours with
+small activities.... And in another week Mr. Langhope would be back and
+the days would resume their normal course.
+
+On arriving, she looked feverishly through the letters in the hall. None
+from Wyant--that fear was allayed! Every day added to her reassurance. By
+this time, no doubt, he was on his feet again, and ashamed--unutterably
+ashamed--of the threat that despair had wrung from him. She felt almost
+sure that his shame would keep him from ever attempting to see her, or
+even from writing again.
+
+"A gentleman called to see you yesterday, madam--he would give no name,"
+the parlour-maid said. And there was the sick fear back on her again!
+She could hardly control the trembling of her lips as she asked: "Did he
+leave no message?"
+
+"No, madam: he only wanted to know when you'd be back."
+
+She longed to return: "And did you tell him?" but restrained herself,
+and passed into the drawing-room. After all, the parlour-maid had not
+described the caller--why jump to the conclusion that it was Wyant?
+
+Three days passed, and no letter came--no sign. She struggled with the
+temptation to describe Wyant to the servants, and to forbid his
+admission. But it would not do. They were nearly all old servants, in
+whose eyes she was still the intruder, the upstart sick-nurse--she could
+not wholly trust them. And each day she felt a little easier, a little
+more convinced that the unknown visitor had not been Wyant.
+
+On the fourth day she received a letter from Amherst. He hoped to be
+back on the morrow, but as his plans were still uncertain he would
+telegraph in the morning--and meanwhile she must keep well, and rest,
+and amuse herself....
+
+Amuse herself! That evening, as it happened, she was going to the
+theatre with Mrs. Ansell. She and Mrs. Ansell, though outwardly on
+perfect terms, had not greatly advanced in intimacy. The agitated,
+decentralized life of the older woman seemed futile and trivial to
+Justine; but on Mr. Langhope's account she wished to keep up an
+appearance of friendship with his friend, and the same motive doubtless
+inspired Mrs. Ansell. Just now, at any rate, Justine was grateful for
+her attentions, and glad to go about with her. Anything--anything to get
+away from her own thoughts! That was the pass she had come to.
+
+At the theatre, in a proscenium box, the publicity, the light and
+movement, the action of the play, all helped to distract and quiet her.
+At such moments she grew ashamed of her fears. Why was she tormenting
+herself? If anything happened she had only to ask her husband for more
+money. She never spoke to him of her good works, and there would be
+nothing to excite suspicion in her asking help again for the friend
+whose secret she was pledged to keep.... But nothing was going to
+happen. As the play progressed, and the stimulus of talk and laughter
+flowed through her veins, she felt a complete return of confidence. And
+then suddenly she glanced across the house, and saw Wyant looking at
+her.
+
+He sat rather far back, in one of the side rows just beneath the
+balcony, so that his face was partly shaded. But even in the shadow it
+frightened her. She had been prepared for a change, but not for this
+ghastly deterioration. And he continued to look at her.
+
+She began to be afraid that he would do something conspicuous--point at
+her, or stand up in his seat. She thought he looked half-mad--or was it
+her own hallucination that made him appear so? She and Mrs. Ansell were
+alone in the box for the moment, and she started up, pushing back her
+chair....
+
+Mrs. Ansell leaned forward. "What is it?"
+
+"Nothing--the heat--I'll sit back for a moment." But as she withdrew
+into the back of the box, she was seized by a new fear. If he was still
+watching, might he not come to the door and try to speak to her? Her
+only safety lay in remaining in full view of the audience; and she
+returned to Mrs. Ansell's side.
+
+The other members of the party came back--the bell rang, the foot-lights
+blazed, the curtain rose. She lost herself in the mazes of the play. She
+sat so motionless, her face so intently turned toward the stage, that
+the muscles at the back of her neck began to stiffen. And then, quite
+suddenly, toward the middle of the act, she felt an undefinable sense of
+relief. She could not tell what caused it--but slowly, cautiously, while
+the eyes of the others were intent upon the stage, she turned her head
+and looked toward Wyant's seat. It was empty.
+
+Her first thought was that he had gone to wait for her outside. But
+no--there were two more acts: why should he stand at the door for half
+the evening?
+
+At last the act ended; the entr'acte elapsed; the play went on
+again--and still the seat was empty. Gradually she persuaded herself
+that she had been mistaken in thinking that the man who had occupied it
+was Wyant. Her self-command returned, she began to think and talk
+naturally, to follow the dialogue on the stage--and when the evening was
+over, and Mrs. Ansell set her down at her door, she had almost forgotten
+her fears.
+
+The next morning she felt calmer than for many days. She was sure now
+that if Wyant had wished to speak to her he would have waited at the
+door of the theatre; and the recollection of his miserable face made
+apprehension yield to pity. She began to feel that she had treated him
+coldly, uncharitably. They had been friends once, as well as
+fellow-workers; but she had been false even to the comradeship of the
+hospital. She should have sought him out and given him sympathy as well
+as money; had she shown some sign of human kindness his last letter
+might never have been written.
+
+In the course of the morning Amherst telegraphed that he hoped to settle
+his business in time to catch the two o'clock express, but that his
+plans were still uncertain. Justine and Cicely lunched alone, and after
+luncheon the little girl was despatched to her dancing-class. Justine
+herself meant to go out when the brougham returned. She went up to her
+room to dress, planning to drive in the park, and to drop in on Mrs.
+Ansell before she called for Cicely; but on the way downstairs she saw
+the servant opening the door to a visitor. It was too late to draw back;
+and descending the last steps she found herself face to face with Wyant.
+
+They looked at each other a moment in silence; then Justine murmured a
+word of greeting and led the way to the drawing-room.
+
+It was a snowy afternoon, and in the raw ash-coloured light she thought
+he looked more changed than at the theatre. She remarked, too, that his
+clothes were worn and untidy, his gloveless hands soiled and tremulous.
+None of the degrading signs of his infirmity were lacking; and she saw
+at once that, while in the early days of the habit he had probably mixed
+his drugs, so that the conflicting symptoms neutralized each other, he
+had now sunk into open morphia-taking. She felt profoundly sorry for
+him; yet as he followed her into the room physical repulsion again
+mastered the sense of pity.
+
+But where action was possible she was always self-controlled, and she
+turned to him quietly as they seated themselves.
+
+"I have been wishing to see you," she said, looking at him. "I have felt
+that I ought to have done so sooner--to have told you how sorry I am for
+your bad luck."
+
+He returned her glance with surprise: they were evidently the last words
+he had expected.
+
+"You're very kind," he said in a low embarrassed voice. He had kept on
+his shabby over-coat, and he twirled his hat in his hands as he spoke.
+
+"I have felt," Justine continued, "that perhaps a talk with you might be
+of more use----"
+
+He raised his head, fixing her with bright narrowed eyes. "I have felt
+so too: that's my reason for coming. You sent me a generous present some
+weeks ago--but I don't want to go on living on charity."
+
+"I understand that," she answered. "But why have you had to do so? Won't
+you tell me just what has happened?"
+
+She felt the words to be almost a mockery; yet she could not say "I read
+your history at a glance"; and she hoped that her question might draw
+out his wretched secret, and thus give her the chance to speak frankly.
+
+He gave a nervous laugh. "Just what has happened? It's a long story--and
+some of the details are not particularly pretty." He broke off, moving
+his hat more rapidly through his trembling hands.
+
+"Never mind: tell me."
+
+"Well--after you all left Lynbrook I had rather a bad break-down--the
+strain of Mrs. Amherst's case, I suppose. You remember Bramble, the
+Clifton grocer? Miss Bramble nursed me--I daresay you remember her too.
+When I recovered I married her--and after that things didn't go well."
+
+He paused, breathing quickly, and looking about the room with odd,
+furtive glances. "I was only half-well, anyhow--I couldn't attend to my
+patients properly--and after a few months we decided to leave Clifton,
+and I bought a practice in New Jersey. But my wife was ill there, and
+things went wrong again--damnably. I suppose you've guessed that my
+marriage was a mistake. She had an idea that we should do better in New
+York--so we came here a few months ago, and we've done decidedly worse."
+
+Justine listened with a sense of discouragement. She saw now that he did
+not mean to acknowledge his failing, and knowing the secretiveness of
+the drug-taker she decided that he was deluded enough to think he could
+still deceive her.
+
+"Well," he began again, with an attempt at jauntiness, "I've found out
+that in my profession it's a hard struggle to get on your feet again,
+after illness or--or any bad set-back. That's the reason I asked you to
+say a word for me. It's not only the money, though I need that badly--I
+want to get back my self-respect. With my record I oughtn't to be where
+I am--and you can speak for me better than any one."
+
+"Why better than the doctors you've worked with?" Justine put the
+question abruptly, looking him straight in the eyes.
+
+His glance dropped, and an unpleasant flush rose to his thin cheeks.
+
+"Well--as it happens, you're better situated than any one to help me to
+the particular thing I want."
+
+"The particular thing----?"
+
+"Yes. I understand that Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell are both interested
+in the new wing for paying patients at Saint Christopher's. I want the
+position of house-physician there, and I know you can get it for me."
+
+His tone changed as he spoke, till with the last words it became rough
+and almost menacing.
+
+Justine felt her colour rise, and her heart began to beat confusedly.
+Here was the truth, then: she could no longer be the dupe of her own
+compassion. The man knew his power and meant to use it. But at the
+thought her courage was in arms.
+
+"I'm sorry--but it's impossible," she said.
+
+"Impossible--why?"
+
+She continued to look at him steadily. "You said just now that you
+wished to regain your self-respect. Well, you must regain it before you
+can ask me--or any one else--to recommend you to a position of trust."
+
+Wyant half-rose, with an angry murmur. "My self-respect? What do you
+mean? _I_ meant that I'd lost courage--through ill-luck----"
+
+"Yes; and your ill-luck has come through your own fault. Till you cure
+yourself you're not fit to cure others."
+
+He sank back into his seat, glowering at her under sullen brows; then
+his expression gradually changed to half-sneering admiration. "You're a
+plucky one!" he said.
+
+Justine repressed a movement of disgust. "I am very sorry for you," she
+said gravely. "I saw this trouble coming on you long ago--and if there
+is any other way in which I can help you----"
+
+"Thanks," he returned, still sneering. "Your sympathy is very
+precious--there was a time when I would have given my soul for it. But
+that's over, and I'm here to talk business. You say you saw my trouble
+coming on--did it ever occur to you that you were the cause of it?"
+
+Justine glanced at him with frank contempt. "No--for I was not," she
+replied.
+
+"That's an easy way out of it. But you took everything from me--first my
+hope of marrying you; then my chance of a big success in my career; and
+I was desperate--weak, if you like--and tried to deaden my feelings in
+order to keep up my pluck."
+
+Justine rose to her feet with a movement of impatience. "Every word you
+say proves how unfit you are to assume any responsibility--to do
+anything but try to recover your health. If I can help you to that, I am
+still willing to do so."
+
+Wyant rose also, moving a step nearer. "Well, get me that place,
+then--I'll see to the rest: I'll keep straight."
+
+"No--it's impossible."
+
+"You won't?"
+
+"I can't," she repeated firmly.
+
+"And you expect to put me off with that answer?"
+
+She hesitated. "Yes--if there's no other help you'll accept."
+
+He laughed again--his feeble sneering laugh was disgusting. "Oh, I don't
+say that. I'd like to earn my living honestly--funny preference--but if
+you cut me off from that, I suppose it's only fair to let you make up
+for it. My wife and child have got to live."
+
+"You choose a strange way of helping them; but I will do what I can if
+you will go for a while to some institution----"
+
+He broke in furiously. "Institution be damned! You can't shuffle me out
+of the way like that. I'm all right--good food is what I need. You
+think I've got morphia in me--why, it's hunger!"
+
+Justine heard him with a renewal of pity. "Oh, I'm sorry for you--very
+sorry! Why do you try to deceive me?"
+
+"Why do you deceive _me_? You know what I want and you know you've got
+to let me have it. If you won't give me a line to one of your friends at
+Saint Christopher's you'll have to give me another cheque--that's the
+size of it."
+
+As they faced each other in silence Justine's pity gave way to a sudden
+hatred for the poor creature who stood shivering and sneering before
+her.
+
+"You choose the wrong tone--and I think our talk has lasted long
+enough," she said, stretching her hand to the bell.
+
+Wyant did not move. "Don't ring--unless you want me to write to your
+husband," he rejoined.
+
+A sick feeling of helplessness overcame her; but she turned on him
+firmly. "I pardoned you once for that threat!"
+
+"Yes--and you sent me some money the next day."
+
+"I was mistaken enough to think that, in your distress, you had not
+realized what you wrote. But if you're a systematic blackmailer----"
+
+"Gently--gently. Bad names don't frighten me--it's hunger and debt I'm
+afraid of."
+
+Justine felt a last tremor of compassion. He was abominable--but he was
+pitiable too.
+
+"I will really help you--I will see your wife and do what I can--but I
+can give you no money today."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because I have none. I am not as rich as you think."
+
+He smiled incredulously. "Give me a line to Mr. Langhope, then."
+
+"No."
+
+He sat down once more, leaning back with a weak assumption of ease.
+"Perhaps Mr. Amherst will think differently."
+
+She whitened, but said steadily: "Mr. Amherst is away."
+
+"Very well--I can write."
+
+For the last five minutes Justine had foreseen this threat, and had
+tried to force her mind to face dispassionately the chances it involved.
+After all, why not let him write to Amherst? The very vileness of the
+deed must rouse an indignation which would be all in her favour, would
+inevitably dispose her husband to readier sympathy with the motive of
+her act, as contrasted with the base insinuations of her slanderer. It
+seemed impossible that Amherst should condemn her when his condemnation
+involved the fulfilling of Wyant's calculations: a reaction of scorn
+would throw him into unhesitating championship of her conduct. All this
+was so clear that, had she been advising any one else, her confidence in
+the course to be taken might have strengthened the feeblest will; but
+with the question lying between herself and Amherst--with the vision of
+those soiled hands literally laid on the spotless fabric of her
+happiness, judgment wavered, foresight was obscured--she felt
+tremulously unable to face the steps between exposure and vindication.
+Her final conclusion was that she must, at any rate, gain time: buy off
+Wyant till she had been able to tell her story in her own way, and at
+her own hour, and then defy him when he returned to the assault. The
+idea that whatever concession she made would be only provisional, helped
+to excuse the weakness of making it, and enabled her at last, without
+too painful a sense of falling below her own standards, to reply in a
+low voice: "If you'll go now, I will send you something next week."
+
+But Wyant did not respond as readily as she had expected. He merely
+asked, without altering his insolently easy attitude: "How much? Unless
+it's a good deal, I prefer the letter."
+
+Oh, why could she not cry out: "Leave the house at once--your vulgar
+threats are nothing to me"--Why could she not even say in her own heart:
+_I will tell my husband tonight?_
+
+"You're afraid," said Wyant, as if answering her thought. "What's the
+use of being afraid when you can make yourself comfortable so easily?
+You called me a systematic blackmailer--well, I'm not that yet. Give me
+a thousand and you'll see the last of me--on what used to be my honour."
+
+Justine's heart sank. She had reached the point of being ready to appeal
+again to Amherst--but on what pretext could she ask for such a sum?
+
+In a lifeless voice she said: "I could not possibly get more than one or
+two hundred."
+
+Wyant scrutinized her a moment: her despair must have rung true to him.
+"Well, you must have something of your own--I saw your jewelry last
+night at the theatre," he said.
+
+So it had been he--and he had sat there appraising her value like a
+murderer!
+
+"Jewelry--?" she faltered.
+
+"You had a thumping big sapphire--wasn't it?--with diamonds round it."
+
+It was her only jewel--Amherst's marriage gift. She would have preferred
+a less valuable present, but his mother had persuaded her to accept it,
+saying that it was the bride's duty to adorn herself for the bridegroom.
+
+"I will give you nothing--" she was about to exclaim; when suddenly her
+eyes fell on the clock. If Amherst had caught the two o'clock express he
+would be at the house within the hour; and the only thing that seemed
+of consequence now, was that he should not meet Wyant. Supposing she
+still found courage to refuse--there was no knowing how long the
+humiliating scene might be prolonged: and she must be rid of the
+creature at any cost. After all, she seldom wore the sapphire--months
+might pass without its absence being noted by Amherst's careless eye;
+and if Wyant should pawn it, she might somehow save money to buy it back
+before it was missed. She went through these calculations with feverish
+rapidity; then she turned again to Wyant.
+
+"You won't come back--ever?"
+
+"I swear I won't," he said.
+
+He moved away toward the window, as if to spare her; and she turned and
+slowly left the room.
+
+She never forgot the moments that followed. Once outside the door she
+was in such haste that she stumbled on the stairs, and had to pause on
+the landing to regain her breath. In her room she found one of the
+housemaids busy, and at first could think of no pretext for dismissing
+her. Then she bade the woman go down and send the brougham away, telling
+the coachman to call for Miss Cicely at six.
+
+Left alone, she bolted the door, and as if with a thief's hand, opened
+her wardrobe, unlocked her jewel-box, and drew out the sapphire in its
+flat morocco case. She restored the box to its place, the key to its
+ring--then she opened the case and looked at the sapphire. As she did
+so, a little tremor ran over her neck and throat, and closing her eyes
+she felt her husband's kiss, and the touch of his hands as he fastened
+on the jewel.
+
+She unbolted the door, listened intently on the landing, and then went
+slowly down the stairs. None of the servants were in sight, yet as she
+reached the lower hall she was conscious that the air had grown suddenly
+colder, as though the outer door had just been opened. She paused, and
+listened again. There was a sound of talking in the drawing-room. Could
+it be that in her absence a visitor had been admitted? The possibility
+frightened her at first--then she welcomed it as an unexpected means of
+ridding herself of her tormentor.
+
+She opened the drawing-room door, and saw her husband talking with
+Wyant.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+AMHERST, his back to the threshold, sat at a table writing: Wyant stood
+a few feet away, staring down at the fire.
+
+Neither had heard the door open; and before they were aware of her
+entrance Justine had calculated that she must have been away for at
+least five minutes, and that in that space of time almost anything
+might have passed between them.
+
+For a moment the power of connected thought left her; then her heart
+gave a bound of relief. She said to herself that Wyant had doubtless
+made some allusion to his situation, and that her husband, conscious
+only of a great debt of gratitude, had at once sat down to draw a cheque
+for him. The idea was so reassuring that it restored all her clearness
+of thought.
+
+Wyant was the first to see her. He made an abrupt movement, and Amherst,
+rising, turned and put an envelope in his hand.
+
+"There, my dear fellow----"
+
+As he turned he caught sight of his wife.
+
+"I caught the twelve o'clock train after all--you got my second wire?"
+he asked.
+
+"No," she faltered, pressing her left hand, with the little case in it,
+close to the folds of her dress.
+
+"I was afraid not. There was a bad storm at Hanaford, and they said
+there might be a delay."
+
+At the same moment she found Wyant advancing with extended hand, and
+understood that he had concealed the fact of having already seen her.
+She accepted the cue, and shook his hand, murmuring: "How do you do?"
+
+Amherst looked at her, perhaps struck by her manner.
+
+"You have not seen Dr. Wyant since Lynbrook?"
+
+"No," she answered, thankful to have this pretext for her emotion.
+
+"I have been telling him that he should not have left us so long without
+news--especially as he has been ill, and things have gone rather badly
+with him. But I hope we can help now. He has heard that Saint
+Christopher's is looking for a house-physician for the paying patients'
+wing, and as Mr. Langhope is away I have given him a line to Mrs.
+Ansell."
+
+"Extremely kind of you," Wyant murmured, passing his hand over his
+forehead.
+
+Justine stood silent. She wondered that her husband had not noticed that
+tremulous degraded hand. But he was always so blind to externals--and he
+had no medical experience to sharpen his perceptions.
+
+Suddenly she felt impelled to speak "I am sorry Dr. Wyant has
+been--unfortunate. Of course you will want to do everything to help him;
+but would it not be better to wait till Mr. Langhope comes back?"
+
+"Wyant thinks the delay might make him lose the place. It seems the
+board meets tomorrow. And Mrs. Ansell really knows much more about it.
+Isn't she the secretary of the ladies' committee?"
+
+"I'm not sure--I believe so. But surely Mr. Langhope should be
+consulted."
+
+She felt Wyant's face change: his eyes settled on her in a threatening
+stare.
+
+Amherst looked at her also, and there was surprise in his glance. "I
+think I can answer for my father-in-law. He feels as strongly as I do
+how much we all owe to Dr. Wyant."
+
+He seldom spoke of Mr. Langhope as his father-in-law, and the chance
+designation seemed to mark a closer tie between them, to exclude Justine
+from what was after all a family affair. For a moment she felt tempted
+to accept the suggestion, and let the responsibility fall where it
+would. But it would fall on Amherst--and that was intolerable.
+
+"I think you ought to wait," she insisted.
+
+An embarrassed silence settled on the three.
+
+Wyant broke it by advancing toward Amherst. "I shall never forget your
+kindness," he said; "and I hope to prove to Mrs. Amherst that it's not
+misplaced."
+
+The words were well chosen, and well spoken; Justine saw that they
+produced a good effect. Amherst grasped the physician's hand with a
+smile. "My dear fellow, I wish I could do more. Be sure to call on me
+again if you want help."
+
+"Oh, you've put me on my feet," said Wyant gratefully.
+
+He bowed slightly to Justine and turned to go; but as he reached the
+threshold she moved after him.
+
+"Dr. Wyant--you must give back that letter."
+
+He stopped short with a whitening face.
+
+She felt Amherst's eyes on her again; and she said desperately,
+addressing him: "Dr. Wyant understands my reasons."
+
+Her husband's glance turned abruptly to Wyant. "Do you?" he asked after
+a pause.
+
+Wyant looked from one to the other. The moisture came out on his
+forehead, and he passed his hand over it again. "Yes," he said in a dry
+voice. "Mrs. Amherst wants me farther off--out of New York."
+
+"Out of New York? What do you mean?"
+
+Justine interposed hastily, before the answer could come. "It is because
+Dr. Wyant is not in condition--for such a place--just at present."
+
+"But he assures me he is quite well."
+
+There was another silence; and again Wyant broke in, this time with a
+slight laugh. "I can explain what Mrs. Amherst means; she intends to
+accuse me of the morphine habit. And I can explain her reason for doing
+so--she wants me out of the way."
+
+Amherst turned on the speaker; and, as she had foreseen, his look was
+terrible. "You haven't explained that yet," he said.
+
+"Well--I can." Wyant waited another moment. "I know too much about her,"
+he declared.
+
+There was a low exclamation from Justine, and Amherst strode toward
+Wyant. "You infernal blackguard!" he cried.
+
+"Oh, gently----" Wyant muttered, flinching back from his outstretched
+arm.
+
+"My wife's wish is sufficient. Give me back that letter."
+
+Wyant straightened himself. "No, by God, I won't!" he retorted
+furiously. "I didn't ask you for it till you offered to help me; but I
+won't let it be taken back without a word, like a thief that you'd
+caught with your umbrella. If your wife won't explain I will. She's,
+afraid I'll talk about what happened at Lynbrook."
+
+Amherst's arm fell to his side. "At Lynbrook?"
+
+Behind him there was a sound of inarticulate appeal--but he took no
+notice.
+
+"Yes. It's she who used morphia--but not on herself. She gives it to
+other people. She gave an overdose to Mrs. Amherst."
+
+Amherst looked at him confusedly. "An overdose?"
+
+"Yes--purposely, I mean. And I came into the room at the wrong time. I
+can prove that Mrs. Amherst died of morphia-poisoning."
+
+"John!" Justine gasped out, pressing between them.
+
+Amherst gently put aside the hand with which she had caught his arm.
+"Wait a moment: this can't rest here. You can't want it to," he said to
+her in an undertone.
+
+"Why do you care...for what he says...when I don't?" she breathed back
+with trembling lips.
+
+"You can see I am not wanted here," Wyant threw in with a sneer.
+
+Amherst remained silent for a brief space; then he turned his eyes once
+more to his wife.
+
+Justine lifted her face: it looked small and spent, like an extinguished
+taper.
+
+"It's true," she said.
+
+"True?"
+
+"I _did_ give...an overdose...intentionally, when I knew there was no
+hope, and when the surgeons said she might go on suffering. She was very
+strong...and I couldn't bear it...you couldn't have borne it...."
+
+There was another silence; then she went on in a stronger voice, looking
+straight at her husband: "And now will you send this man away?"
+
+Amherst glanced at Wyant without moving. "Go," he said curtly.
+
+Wyant, instead, moved a step nearer. "Just a minute, please. It's only
+fair to hear my side. Your wife says there was no hope; yet the day
+before she...gave the dose, Dr. Garford told her in my presence that
+Mrs. Amherst might live."
+
+Again Amherst's eyes addressed themselves slowly to Justine; and she
+forced her lips to articulate an answer.
+
+"Dr. Garford said...one could never tell...but I know he didn't believe
+in the chance of recovery...no one did."
+
+"Dr. Garford is dead," said Wyant grimly.
+
+Amherst strode up to him again. "You scoundrel--leave the house!" he
+commanded.
+
+But still Wyant sneeringly stood his ground. "Not till I've finished. I
+can't afford to let myself be kicked out like a dog because I happen to
+be in the way. Every doctor knows that in cases of spinal lesion
+recovery is becoming more and more frequent--if the patient survives the
+third week there's every reason to hope. Those are the facts as they
+would appear to any surgeon. If they're not true, why is Mrs. Amherst
+afraid of having them stated? Why has she been paying me for nearly a
+year to keep them quiet?"
+
+"Oh----" Justine moaned.
+
+"I never thought of talking till luck went against me. Then I asked her
+for help--and reminded her of certain things. After that she kept me
+supplied pretty regularly." He thrust his shaking hand into an inner
+pocket. "Here are her envelopes...Quebec...Montreal...Saranac...I know
+just where you went on your honeymoon. She had to write often, because
+the sums were small. Why did she do it, if she wasn't afraid? And why
+did she go upstairs just now to fetch me something? If you don't believe
+me, ask her what she's got in her hand."
+
+Amherst did not heed this injunction. He stood motionless, gripping the
+back of a chair, as if his next gesture might be to lift and hurl it at
+the speaker.
+
+"Ask her----" Wyant repeated.
+
+Amherst turned his head slowly, and his dull gaze rested on his wife.
+His face looked years older--lips and eyes moved as heavily as an old
+man's.
+
+As he looked at her, Justine came forward without speaking, and laid the
+little morocco case in his hand. He held it there a moment, as if hardly
+understanding her action--then he tossed it on the table at his elbow,
+and walked up to Wyant.
+
+"You hound," he said--"now go!"
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+WHEN Wyant had left the room, and the house-door had closed on him,
+Amherst spoke to his wife.
+
+"Come upstairs," he said.
+
+Justine followed him, scarcely conscious where she went, but moving
+already with a lighter tread. Part of her weight of misery had been
+lifted with Wyant's going. She had suffered less from the fear of what
+her husband might think than from the shame of making her avowal in her
+defamer's presence. And her faith in Amherst's comprehension had begun
+to revive. He had dismissed Wyant with scorn and horror--did not that
+show that he was on her side already? And how many more arguments she
+had at her call! Her brain hummed with them as she followed him up the
+stairs.
+
+In her bedroom he closed the door and stood motionless, the same heavy
+half-paralyzed look on his face. It frightened her and she went up to
+him.
+
+"John!" she said timidly.
+
+He put his hand to his head. "Wait a moment----" he returned; and she
+waited, her heart slowly sinking again.
+
+The moment over, he seemed to recover his power of movement. He crossed
+the room and threw himself into the armchair near the hearth.
+
+"Now tell me everything."
+
+He sat thrown back, his eyes fixed on the fire, and the vertical lines
+between his brows forming a deep scar in his white face.
+
+Justine moved nearer, and touched his arm beseechingly. "Won't you look
+at me?"
+
+He turned his head slowly, as if with an effort, and his eyes rested
+reluctantly on hers.
+
+"Oh, not like that!" she exclaimed.
+
+He seemed to make a stronger effort at self-control. "Please don't heed
+me--but say what there is to say," he said in a level voice, his gaze on
+the fire.
+
+She stood before him, her arms hanging down, her clasped fingers
+twisting restlessly.
+
+"I don't know that there is much to say--beyond what I've told you."
+
+There was a slight sound in Amherst's throat, like the ghost of a
+derisive laugh. After another interval he said: "I wish to hear exactly
+what happened."
+
+She seated herself on the edge of a chair near by, bending forward, with
+hands interlocked and arms extended on her knees--every line reaching
+out to him, as though her whole slight body were an arrow winged with
+pleadings. It was a relief to speak at last, even face to face with the
+stony image that sat in her husband's place; and she told her story,
+detail by detail, omitting nothing, exaggerating nothing, speaking
+slowly, clearly, with precision, aware that the bare facts were her
+strongest argument.
+
+Amherst, as he listened, shifted his position once, raising his hand so
+that it screened his face; and in that attitude he remained when she had
+ended.
+
+As she waited for him to speak, Justine realized that her heart had been
+alive with tremulous hopes. All through her narrative she had counted on
+a murmur of perception, an exclamation of pity: she had felt sure of
+melting the stony image. But Amherst said no word.
+
+At length he spoke, still without turning his head. "You have not told
+me why you kept this from me."
+
+A sob formed in her throat, and she had to wait to steady her voice.
+
+"No--that was my wrong--my weakness. When I did it I never thought of
+being afraid to tell you--I had talked it over with you in my own
+mind...so often...before...."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Then--- when you came back it was harder...though I was still sure you
+would approve me."
+
+"Why harder?"
+
+"Because at first--at Lynbrook--I _could not_ tell it all over, in
+detail, as I have now...it was beyond human power...and without doing
+so, I couldn't make it all clear to you...and so should only have added
+to your pain. If you had been there you would have done as I did.... I
+felt sure of that from the first. But coming afterward, you couldn't
+judge...no one who was not there could judge...and I wanted to spare
+you...."
+
+"And afterward?"
+
+She had shrunk in advance from this question, and she could not answer
+it at once. To gain time she echoed it. "Afterward?"
+
+"Did it never occur to you, when we met later--when you first went to
+Mr. Langhope----"?
+
+"To tell you then? No--because by that time I had come to see that I
+could never be quite sure of making you understand. No one who was not
+there at the time could know what it was to see her suffer."
+
+"You thought it all over, then--decided definitely against telling me?"
+
+"I did not have to think long. I felt I had done right--I still feel
+so--and I was sure you would feel so, if you were in the same
+circumstances."
+
+There was another pause. Then Amherst said: "And last September--at
+Hanaford?"
+
+It was the word for which she had waited--the word of her inmost fears.
+She felt the blood mount to her face.
+
+"Did you see no difference--no special reason for telling me then?"
+
+"Yes----" she faltered.
+
+"Yet you said nothing."
+
+"No."
+
+Silence again. Her eyes strayed to the clock, and some dim association
+of ideas told her that Cicely would soon be coming in.
+
+"Why did you say nothing?"
+
+He lowered his hand and turned toward her as he spoke; and she looked up
+and faced him.
+
+"Because I regarded the question as settled. I had decided it in my own
+mind months before, and had never regretted my decision. I should have
+thought it morbid...unnatural...to go over the whole subject again...to
+let it affect a situation that had come about...so much later...so
+unexpectedly."
+
+"Did you never feel that, later, if I came to know--if others came to
+know--it might be difficult----?"
+
+"No; for I didn't care for the others--and I believed that, whatever
+your own feelings were, you would know I had done what I thought right."
+
+She spoke the words proudly, strongly, and for the first time the hard
+lines of his face relaxed, and a slight tremor crossed it.
+
+"If you believed this, why have you been letting that cur blackmail
+you?"
+
+"Because when he began I saw for the first time that what I had done
+might be turned against me by--by those who disliked our marriage. And I
+was afraid for my happiness. That was my weakness...it is what I am
+suffering for now."
+
+"_Suffering_!" he echoed ironically, as though she had presumed to apply
+to herself a word of which he had the grim monopoly. He rose and took a
+few aimless steps; then he halted before her.
+
+"That day--last month--when you asked me for money...was it...?"
+
+"Yes----" she said, her head sinking.
+
+He laughed. "You couldn't tell me--but you could use my money to bribe
+that fellow to conspire with you!"
+
+"I had none of my own."
+
+"No--nor I either! You used _her_ money.--God!" he groaned, turning away
+with clenched hands.
+
+Justine had risen also, and she stood motionless, her hands clasped
+against her breast, in the drawn shrinking attitude of a fugitive
+overtaken by a blinding storm. He moved back to her with an appealing
+gesture.
+
+"And you didn't see--it didn't occur to you--that your doing...as you
+did...was an obstacle--an insurmountable obstacle--to our ever ...?"
+
+She cut him short with an indignant cry. "No! No! for it was _not_. How
+could it have anything to do with what...came after...with you or me? I
+did it only for Bessy--it concerned only Bessy!"
+
+"Ah, don't name her!" broke from him harshly, and she drew back, cut to
+the heart.
+
+There was another pause, during which he seemed to fall into a kind of
+dazed irresolution, his head on his breast, as though unconscious of her
+presence. Then he roused himself and went to the door.
+
+As he passed her she sprang after him. "John--John! Is that all you have
+to say?"
+
+"What more is there?"
+
+"What more? Everything!--What right have you to turn from me as if I
+were a murderess? I did nothing but what your own reason, your own
+arguments, have justified a hundred times! I made a mistake in not
+telling you at once--but a mistake is not a crime. It can't be your real
+feeling that turns you from me--it must be the dread of what other
+people would think! But when have you cared for what other people
+thought? When have your own actions been governed by it?"
+
+He moved another step without speaking, and she caught him by the arm.
+"No! you sha'n't go--not like that!--Wait!"
+
+She turned and crossed the room. On the lower shelf of the little table
+by her bed a few books were ranged: she stooped and drew one hurriedly
+forth, opening it at the fly-leaf as she went back to Amherst.
+
+"There--read that. The book was at Lynbrook--in your room--and I came
+across it by chance the very day...."
+
+It was the little volume of Bacon which she was thrusting at him. He
+took it with a bewildered look, as if scarcely following what she said.
+
+"Read it--read it!" she commanded; and mechanically he read out the
+words he had written.
+
+"_La vraie morale se moque de la morale.... We perish because we follow
+other men's examples.... Socrates called the opinions of the many
+Lamiæ._--Good God!" he exclaimed, flinging the book from him with a
+gesture of abhorrence.
+
+Justine watched him with panting lips, her knees trembling under her.
+"But you wrote it--you wrote it! I thought you meant it!" she cried, as
+the book spun across a table and dropped to the floor.
+
+He looked at her coldly, almost apprehensively, as if she had grown
+suddenly dangerous and remote; then he turned and walked out of the
+room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The striking of the clock roused her. She rose to her feet, rang the
+bell, and told the maid, through the door, that she had a headache, and
+was unable to see Miss Cicely. Then she turned back into the room, and
+darkness closed on her. She was not the kind to take grief passively--it
+drove her in anguished pacings up and down the floor. She walked and
+walked till her legs flagged under her; then she dropped stupidly into
+the chair where Amherst had sat....
+
+All her world had crumbled about her. It was as if some law of mental
+gravity had been mysteriously suspended, and every firmly-anchored
+conviction, every accepted process of reasoning, spun disconnectedly
+through space. Amherst had not understood her--worse still, he had
+judged her as the world might judge her! The core of her misery was
+there. With terrible clearness she saw the suspicion that had crossed
+his mind--the suspicion that she had kept silence in the beginning
+because she loved him, and feared to lose him if she spoke.
+
+And what if it were true? What if her unconscious guilt went back even
+farther than his thought dared to track it? She could not now recall a
+time when she had not loved him. Every chance meeting with him, from
+their first brief talk at Hanaford, stood out embossed and glowing
+against the blur of lesser memories. Was it possible that she had loved
+him during Bessy's life--that she had even, sub-consciously, blindly,
+been urged by her feeling for him to perform the act?
+
+But she shook herself free from this morbid horror--the rebound of
+health was always prompt in her, and her mind instinctively rejected
+every form of moral poison. No! Her motive had been normal, sane and
+justifiable--completely justifiable. Her fault lay in having dared to
+rise above conventional restrictions, her mistake in believing that her
+husband could rise with her. These reflections steadied her but they did
+not bring much comfort. For her whole life was centred in Amherst, and
+she saw that he would never be able to free himself from the traditional
+view of her act. In looking back, and correcting her survey of his
+character in the revealing light of the last hours, she perceived that,
+like many men of emancipated thought, he had remained subject to the old
+conventions of feeling. And he had probably never given much thought to
+women till he met her--had always been content to deal with them in the
+accepted currency of sentiment. After all, it was the currency they
+liked best, and for which they offered their prettiest wares!
+
+But what of the intellectual accord between himself and her? She had not
+been deceived in that! He and she had really been wedded in mind as well
+as in heart. But until now there had not arisen in their lives one of
+those searching questions which call into play emotions rooted far below
+reason and judgment, in the dark primal depths of inherited feeling. It
+is easy to judge impersonal problems intellectually, turning on them the
+full light of acquired knowledge; but too often one must still grope
+one's way through the personal difficulty by the dim taper carried in
+long-dead hands....
+
+But was there then no hope of lifting one's individual life to a clearer
+height of conduct? Must one be content to think for the race, and to
+feel only--feel blindly and incoherently--for one's self? And was it not
+from such natures as Amherst's--natures in which independence of
+judgment was blent with strong human sympathy--that the liberating
+impulse should come?
+
+Her mind grew weary of revolving in this vain circle of questions. The
+fact was that, in their particular case, Amherst had not risen above
+prejudice and emotion; that, though her act was one to which his
+intellectual sanction was given, he had turned from her with instinctive
+repugnance, had dishonoured her by the most wounding suspicions. The
+tie between them was forever stained and debased.
+
+Justine's long hospital-discipline made it impossible for her to lose
+consciousness of the lapse of time, or to let her misery thicken into
+mental stupor. She could not help thinking and moving; and she presently
+lifted herself to her feet, turned on the light, and began to prepare
+for dinner. It would be terrible to face her husband across Mr.
+Langhope's pretty dinner-table, and afterward in the charming
+drawing-room, with its delicate old ornaments and intimate luxurious
+furniture; but she could not continue to sit motionless in the dark: it
+was her innermost instinct to pick herself up and go on.
+
+While she dressed she listened anxiously for Amherst's step in the next
+room; but there was no sound, and when she dragged herself downstairs
+the drawing-room was empty, and the parlour-maid, after a decent delay,
+came to ask if dinner should be postponed.
+
+She said no, murmuring some vague pretext for her husband's absence, and
+sitting alone through the succession of courses which composed the brief
+but carefully-studied _menu_. When this ordeal was over she returned to
+the drawing-room and took up a book. It chanced to be a new volume on
+labour problems, which Amherst must have brought back with him from
+Westmore; and it carried her thoughts instantly to the mills. Would
+this disaster poison their work there as well as their personal
+relation? Would he think of her as carrying contamination even into the
+task their love had illumined?
+
+The hours went on without his returning, and at length it occurred to
+her that he might have taken the night train to Hanaford. Her heart
+contracted at the thought: she remembered--though every nerve shrank
+from the analogy--his sudden flight at another crisis in his life, and
+she felt obscurely that if he escaped from her now she would never
+recover her hold on him. But could he be so cruel--could he wish any one
+to suffer as she was suffering?
+
+At ten o'clock she could endure the drawing-room no longer, and went up
+to her room again. She undressed slowly, trying to prolong the process
+as much as possible, to put off the period of silence and inaction which
+would close in on her when she lay down on her bed. But at length the
+dreaded moment came--there was nothing more between her and the night.
+She crept into bed and put out the light; but as she slipped between the
+cold sheets a trembling seized her, and after a moment she drew on her
+dressing-gown again and groped her way to the lounge by the fire.
+
+She pushed the lounge closer to the hearth and lay down, still
+shivering, though she had drawn the quilted coverlet up to her chin. She
+lay there a long time, with closed eyes, in a mental darkness torn by
+sudden flashes of memory. In one of these flashes a phrase of Amherst's
+stood out--a word spoken at Westmore, on the day of the opening of the
+Emergency Hospital, about a good-looking young man who had called to see
+her. She remembered Amherst's boyish burst of jealousy, his sudden
+relief at the thought that the visitor might have been Wyant. And no
+doubt it _was_ Wyant--Wyant who had come to Hanaford to threaten her,
+and who, baffled by her non-arrival, or for some other unexplained
+reason, had left again without carrying out his purpose.
+
+It was dreadful to think by how slight a chance her first draught of
+happiness had escaped that drop of poison; yet, when she understood, her
+inward cry was: "If it had happened, my dearest need not have
+suffered!"... Already she was feeling Amherst's pain more than her own,
+understanding that it was harder to bear than hers because it was at war
+with all the reflective part of his nature.
+
+As she lay there, her face pressed into the cushions, she heard a sound
+through the silent house--the opening and closing of the outer door. She
+turned cold, and lay listening with strained ears.... Yes; now there was
+a step on the stairs--her husband's step! She heard him turn into his
+own room. The throbs of her heart almost deafened her--she only
+distinguished confusedly that he was moving about within, so close that
+it was as if she felt his touch. Then her door opened and he entered.
+
+He stumbled slightly in the darkness before he found the switch of the
+lamp; and as he bent over it she saw that his face was flushed, and that
+his eyes had an excited light which, in any one less abstemious, might
+almost have seemed like the effect of wine.
+
+"Are you awake?" he asked.
+
+She started up against the cushions, her black hair streaming about her
+small ghostly face.
+
+"Yes."
+
+He walked over to the lounge and dropped into the low chair beside it.
+
+"I've given that cur a lesson he won't forget," he exclaimed, breathing
+hard, the redness deepening in his face.
+
+She turned on him in joy and trembling. "John!--Oh, John! You didn't
+follow him? Oh, what happened? What have you done?"
+
+"No. I didn't follow him. But there are some things that even the powers
+above can't stand. And so they managed to let me run across him--by the
+merest accident--and I gave him something to remember."
+
+He spoke in a strong clear voice that had a brightness like the
+brightness in his eyes. She felt its heat in her veins--the primitive
+woman in her glowed at contact with the primitive man. But reflection
+chilled her the next moment.
+
+"But why--why? Oh, how could you? Where did it happen--oh, not in the
+street?"
+
+As she questioned him, there rose before her the terrified vision of a
+crowd gathering--the police, newspapers, a hideous publicity. He must
+have been mad to do it--and yet he must have done it because he loved
+her!
+
+"No--no. Don't be afraid. The powers looked after that too. There was no
+one about--and I don't think he'll talk much about it."
+
+She trembled, fearing yet adoring him. Nothing could have been more
+unlike the Amherst she fancied she knew than this act of irrational
+anger which had magically lifted the darkness from his spirit; yet,
+magically also, it gave him back to her, made them one flesh once more.
+And suddenly the pressure of opposed emotions became too strong, and she
+burst into tears.
+
+She wept painfully, violently, with the resistance of strong natures
+unused to emotional expression; till at length, through the tumult of
+her tears, she felt her husband's reassuring touch.
+
+"Justine," he said, speaking once more in his natural voice.
+
+She raised her face from her hands, and they looked at each other.
+
+"Justine--this afternoon--I said things I didn't mean to say."
+
+Her lips parted, but her throat was still full of sobs, and she could
+only look at him while the tears ran down.
+
+"I believe I understand now," he continued, in the same quiet tone.
+
+Her hand shrank from his clasp, and she began to tremble again. "Oh, if
+you only _believe_...if you're not sure...don't pretend to be!"
+
+He sat down beside her and drew her into his arms. "I am sure," he
+whispered, holding her close, and pressing his lips against her face and
+hair.
+
+"Oh, my husband--my husband! You've come back to me?"
+
+He answered her with more kisses, murmuring through them: "Poor
+child--poor child--poor Justine...." while he held her fast.
+
+With her face against him she yielded to the childish luxury of
+murmuring out unjustified fears. "I was afraid you had gone back to
+Hanaford----"
+
+"Tonight? To Hanaford?"
+
+"To tell your mother."
+
+She felt a contraction of the arm embracing her, as though a throb of
+pain had stiffened it.
+
+"I shall never tell any one," he said abruptly; but as he felt in her a
+responsive shrinking he gathered her close again, whispering through the
+hair that fell about her cheek: "Don't talk, dear...let us never talk
+of it again...." And in the clasp of his arms her terror and anguish
+subsided, giving way, not to the deep peace of tranquillized thought,
+but to a confused well-being that lulled all thought to sleep.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+
+BUT thought could never be long silent between them; and Justine's
+triumph lasted but a day.
+
+With its end she saw what it had been made of: the ascendency of youth
+and sex over his subjugated judgment. Her first impulse was to try and
+maintain it--why not use the protective arts with which love inspired
+her? She who lived so keenly in the brain could live as intensely in her
+feelings; her quick imagination tutored her looks and words, taught her
+the spells to weave about shorn giants. And for a few days she and
+Amherst lost themselves in this self-evoked cloud of passion, both
+clinging fast to the visible, the palpable in their relation, as if
+conscious already that its finer essence had fled.
+
+Amherst made no allusion to what had passed, asked for no details,
+offered no reassurances--behaved as if the whole episode had been
+effaced from his mind. And from Wyant there came no sound: he seemed to
+have disappeared from life as he had from their talk.
+
+Toward the end of the week Amherst announced that he must return to
+Hanaford; and Justine at once declared her intention of going with him.
+
+He seemed surprised, disconcerted almost; and for the first time the
+shadow of what had happened fell visibly between them.
+
+"But ought you to leave Cicely before Mr. Langhope comes back?" he
+suggested.
+
+"He will be here in two days."
+
+"But he will expect to find you."
+
+"It is almost the first of April. We are to have Cicely with us for the
+summer. There is no reason why I should not go back to my work at
+Westmore."
+
+There was in fact no reason that he could produce; and the next day they
+returned to Hanaford together.
+
+With her perceptions strung to the last pitch of sensitiveness, she felt
+a change in Amherst as soon as they re-entered Bessy's house. He was
+still scrupulously considerate, almost too scrupulously tender; but with
+a tinge of lassitude, like a man who tries to keep up under the
+stupefying approach of illness. And she began to hate the power by which
+she held him. It was not thus they had once walked together, free in
+mind though so linked in habit and feeling; when their love was not a
+deadening drug but a vivifying element that cleared thought instead of
+stifling it. There were moments when she felt that open alienation would
+be easier, because it would be nearer the truth. And at such moments
+she longed to speak, to beg him to utter his mind, to go with her once
+for all into the depths of the subject they continued to avoid. But at
+the last her heart always failed her: she could not face the thought of
+losing him, of hearing him speak estranging words to her.
+
+They had been at Hanaford for about ten days when, one morning at
+breakfast, Amherst uttered a sudden exclamation over a letter he was
+reading.
+
+"What is it?" she asked in a tremor.
+
+He had grown very pale, and was pushing the hair from his forehead with
+the gesture habitual to him in moments of painful indecision.
+
+"What is it?" Justine repeated, her fear growing.
+
+"Nothing----" he began, thrusting the letter under the pile of envelopes
+by his plate; but she continued to look at him anxiously, till she drew
+his eyes to hers.
+
+"Mr. Langhope writes that they've appointed Wyant to Saint
+Christopher's," he said abruptly.
+
+"Oh, the letter--we forgot the letter!" she cried.
+
+"Yes--we forgot the letter."
+
+"But how dare he----?"
+
+Amherst said nothing, but the long silence between them seemed full of
+ironic answers, till she brought out, hardly above her breath: "What
+shall you do?"
+
+"Write at once--tell Mr. Langhope he's not fit for the place."
+
+"Of course----" she murmured.
+
+He went on tearing open his other letters, and glancing at their
+contents. She leaned back in her chair, her cup of coffee untasted,
+listening to the recurrent crackle of torn paper as he tossed aside one
+letter after another.
+
+Presently he rose from his seat, and as she followed him from the
+dining-room she noticed that his breakfast had also remained untasted.
+He gathered up his letters and walked toward the smoking-room; and after
+a moment's hesitation she joined him.
+
+"John," she said from the threshold.
+
+He was just seating himself at his desk, but he turned to her with an
+obvious effort at kindness which made the set look of his face the more
+marked.
+
+She closed the door and went up to him.
+
+"If you write that to Mr. Langhope--Dr. Wyant will--will tell him," she
+said.
+
+"Yes--we must be prepared for that."
+
+She was silent, and Amherst flung himself down on the leather ottoman
+against the wall. She stood before him, clasping and unclasping her
+hands in speechless distress.
+
+"What would you have me do?" he asked at length, almost irritably.
+
+"I only thought...he told me he would keep straight...if he only had a
+chance," she faltered out.
+
+Amherst lifted his head slowly, and looked at her. "You mean--I am to do
+nothing? Is that it?"
+
+She moved nearer to him with beseeching eyes. "I can't bear it.... I
+can't bear that others should come between us," she broke out
+passionately.
+
+He made no answer, but she could see a look of suffering cross his face,
+and coming still closer, she sank down on the ottoman, laying her hand
+on his. "John...oh, John, spare me," she whispered.
+
+For a moment his hand lay quiet under hers; then he drew it out, and
+enclosed her trembling fingers.
+
+"Very well--I'll give him a chance--I'll do nothing," he said, suddenly
+putting his other arm about her.
+
+The reaction caught her by the throat, forcing out a dry sob or two; and
+as she pressed her face against him he raised it up and gently kissed
+her.
+
+But even as their lips met she felt that they were sealing a treaty with
+dishonour. That his kiss should come to mean that to her! It was
+unbearable--worse than any personal pain--the thought of dragging him
+down to falsehood through her weakness.
+
+She drew back and rose to her feet, putting aside his detaining hand.
+
+"No--no! What am I saying? It can't be--you must tell the truth." Her
+voice gathered strength as she spoke. "Oh, forget what I said--I didn't
+mean it!"
+
+But again he seemed sunk in inaction, like a man over whom some baneful
+lethargy is stealing.
+
+"John--John--forget!" she repeated urgently.
+
+He looked up at her. "You realize what it will mean?"
+
+"Yes--I realize.... But it must be.... And it will make no difference
+between us...will it?"
+
+"No--no. Why should it?" he answered apathetically.
+
+"Then write--tell Mr. Langhope not to give him the place. I want it
+over."
+
+He rose slowly to his feet, without looking at her again, and walked
+over to the desk. She sank down on the ottoman and watched him with
+burning eyes while he drew forth a sheet of note-paper and began to
+write.
+
+But after he had written a few words he laid down his pen, and swung his
+chair about so that he faced her.
+
+"I can't do it in this way," he exclaimed.
+
+"How then? What do you mean?" she said, starting up.
+
+He looked at her. "Do you want the story to come from Wyant?"
+
+"Oh----" She looked back at him with sudden insight. "You mean to tell
+Mr. Langhope yourself?"
+
+"Yes. I mean to take the next train to town and tell him."
+
+Her trembling increased so much that she had to rest her hands against
+the edge of the ottoman to steady herself. "But if...if after
+all...Wyant should not speak?"
+
+"Well--if he shouldn't? Could you bear to owe our safety to _him_?"
+
+"Safety!"
+
+"It comes to that, doesn't it, if _we're_ afraid to speak?"
+
+She sat silent, letting the bitter truth of this sink into her till it
+poured courage into her veins.
+
+"Yes--it comes to that," she confessed.
+
+"Then you feel as I do?"
+
+"That you must go----?"
+
+"That this is intolerable!"
+
+The words struck down her last illusion, and she rose and went over to
+the writing-table. "Yes--go," she said.
+
+He stood up also, and took both her hands, not in a caress, but gravely,
+almost severely.
+
+"Listen, Justine. You must understand exactly what this means--may mean.
+I am willing to go on as we are now...as long as we can...because I
+love you...because I would do anything to spare you pain. But if I speak
+I must say everything--I must follow this thing up to its uttermost
+consequences. That's what I want to make clear to you."
+
+Her heart sank with a foreboding of new peril. "What consequences?"
+
+"Can't you see for yourself--when you look about this house?"
+
+"This house----?"
+
+He dropped her hands and took an abrupt turn across the room.
+
+"I owe everything to her," he broke out, "all I am, all I have, all I
+have been able to give you--and I must go and tell her father that
+you...."
+
+"Stop--stop!" she cried, lifting her hands as if to keep off a blow.
+
+"No--don't make me stop. We must face it," he said doggedly.
+
+"But this--this isn't the truth! You put it as if--almost as if----"
+
+"Yes--don't finish.--Has it occurred to you that _he_ may think that?"
+Amherst asked with a terrible laugh. But at that she recovered her
+courage, as she always did when an extreme call was made on it.
+
+"No--I don't believe it! If he _does_, it will be because you think it
+yourself...." Her voice sank, and she lifted her hands and pressed them
+to her temples. "And if you think it, nothing matters...one way or the
+other...." She paused, and her voice regained its strength. "That is
+what I must face before you go: what _you_ think, what _you_ believe of
+me. You've never told me that."
+
+Amherst, at the challenge, remained silent, while a slow red crept to
+his cheek-bones.
+
+"Haven't I told you by--by what I've done?" he said slowly.
+
+"No--what you've done has covered up what you thought; and I've helped
+you cover it--I'm to blame too! But it was not for this that we...that
+we had that half-year together...not to sink into connivance and
+evasion! I don't want another hour of sham happiness. I want the truth
+from you, whatever it is."
+
+He stood motionless, staring moodily at the floor. "Don't you see that's
+my misery--that I don't know myself?"
+
+"You don't know...what you think of me?"
+
+"Good God, Justine, why do you try to strip life naked? I don't know
+what's been going on in me these last weeks----"
+
+"You must know what you think of my motive...for doing what I did."
+
+She saw in his face how he shrank from the least allusion to the act
+about which their torment revolved. But he forced himself to raise his
+head and look at her. "I have never--for one moment--questioned your
+motive--or failed to see that it was justified...under the
+circumstances...."
+
+"Oh, John--John!" she broke out in the wild joy of hearing herself
+absolved; but the next instant her subtle perceptions felt the
+unconscious reserve behind his admission.
+
+"Your mind justifies me--not your heart; isn't _that_ your misery?" she
+said.
+
+He looked at her almost piteously, as if, in the last resort, it was
+from her that light must come to him. "On my soul, I don't know...I
+can't tell...it's all dark in me. I know you did what you thought
+best...if I had been there, I believe I should have asked you to do
+it...but I wish to God----"
+
+She interrupted him sobbingly. "Oh, I ought never to have let you love
+me! I ought to have seen that I was cut off from you forever. I have
+brought you wretchedness when I would have given my life for you! I
+don't deserve that you should forgive me for that."
+
+Her sudden outbreak seemed to restore his self-possession. He went up to
+her and took her hand with a quieting touch.
+
+"There is no question of forgiveness, Justine. Don't let us torture each
+other with vain repinings. Our business is to face the thing, and we
+shall be better for having talked it out. I shall be better, for my
+part, for having told Mr. Langhope. But before I go I want to be sure
+that you understand the view he may take...and the effect it will
+probably have on our future."
+
+"Our future?" She started. "No, I don't understand."
+
+Amherst paused a moment, as if trying to choose the words least likely
+to pain her. "Mr. Langhope knows that my marriage was...unhappy; through
+my fault, he no doubt thinks. And if he chooses to infer that...that you
+and I may have cared for each other...before...and that it was _because_
+there was a chance of recovery that you----"
+
+"Oh----"
+
+"We must face it," he repeated inflexibly. "And you must understand
+that, if there is the faintest hint of this kind, I shall give up
+everything here, as soon as it can be settled legally--God, how Tredegar
+will like the job!--and you and I will have to go and begin life over
+again...somewhere else."
+
+For an instant a mad hope swelled in her--the vision of escaping with
+him into new scenes, a new life, away from the coil of memories that
+bound them down as in a net. But the reaction of reason came at
+once--she saw him cut off from his chosen work, his career destroyed,
+his honour clouded, above all--ah, this was what wrung them both!--his
+task undone, his people flung back into the depths from which he had
+lifted them. And all through her doing--all because she had clutched at
+happiness with too rash a hand! The thought stung her to passionate
+activity of mind--made her resolve to risk anything, dare anything,
+before she involved him farther in her own ruin. She felt her brain
+clear gradually, and the thickness dissolve in her throat.
+
+"I understand," she said in a low voice, raising her eyes to his.
+
+"And you're ready to accept the consequences? Think again before it's
+too late."
+
+She paused. "That is what I should like...what I wanted to ask you...the
+time to think."
+
+She saw a slight shade cross his face, as if he had not expected this
+failure of courage in her; but he said quietly: "You don't want me to go
+today?"
+
+"Not today--give me one more day."
+
+"Very well."
+
+She laid a timid hand on his arm. "Please go out to Westmore as
+usual--as if nothing had happened. And tonight...when you come back...I
+shall have decided."
+
+"Very well," he repeated.
+
+"You'll be gone all day?"
+
+He glanced at his watch. "Yes--I had meant to be; unless----"
+
+"No; I would rather be alone. Good-bye," she said, letting her hand slip
+softly along his coat-sleeve as he turned to the door.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+
+AT half-past six that afternoon, just as Amherst, on his return from the
+mills, put the key into his door at Hanaford, Mrs. Ansell, in New York,
+was being shown into Mr. Langhope's library.
+
+As she entered, her friend rose from his chair by the fire, and turned
+on her a face so disordered by emotion that she stopped short with an
+exclamation of alarm.
+
+"Henry--what has happened? Why did you send for me?"
+
+"Because I couldn't go to you. I couldn't trust myself in the
+streets--in the light of day."
+
+"But why? What is it?--Not Cicely----?"
+
+He struck both hands upward with a comprehensive gesture.
+"Cicely--everyone--the whole world!" His clenched fist came down on the
+table against which he was leaning. "Maria, my girl might have been
+saved!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell looked at him with growing perturbation. "Saved--Bessy's
+life? But how? By whom?"
+
+"She might have been allowed to live, I mean--to recover. She was
+killed, Maria; that woman killed her!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell, with another cry of bewilderment, let herself drop
+helplessly into the nearest chair. "In heaven's name, Henry--what
+woman?"
+
+He seated himself opposite to her, clutching at his stick, and leaning
+his weight heavily on it--a white dishevelled old man. "I wonder why you
+ask--just to spare me?"
+
+Their eyes met in a piercing exchange of question and answer, and Mrs.
+Ansell tried to bring out reasonably: "I ask in order to understand what
+you are saying."
+
+"Well, then, if you insist on keeping up appearances--my daughter-in-law
+killed my daughter. There you have it." He laughed silently, with a tear
+on his reddened eye-lids.
+
+Mrs. Ansell groaned. "Henry, you are raving--I understand less and
+less."
+
+"I don't see how I can speak more plainly. She told me so herself, in
+this room, not an hour ago."
+
+"She told you? Who told you?"
+
+"John Amherst's wife. Told me she'd killed my child. It's as easy as
+breathing--if you know how to use a morphia-needle."
+
+Light seemed at last to break on his hearer. "Oh, my poor Henry--you
+mean--she gave too much? There was some dreadful accident?"
+
+"There was no accident. She killed my child--killed her deliberately.
+Don't look at me as if I were a madman. She sat in that chair you're in
+when she told me."
+
+"Justine? Has she been here today?" Mrs. Ansell paused in a painful
+effort to readjust her thoughts. "But _why_ did she tell you?"
+
+"That's simple enough. To prevent Wyant's doing it."
+
+"Oh----" broke from his hearer, in a long sigh of fear and intelligence.
+Mr. Langhope looked at her with a smile of miserable exultation.
+
+"You knew--you suspected all along?--But now you must speak out!" he
+exclaimed with a sudden note of command.
+
+She sat motionless, as if trying to collect herself. "I know nothing--I
+only meant--why was this never known before?"
+
+He was upon her at once. "You think--because they understood each other?
+And now there's been a break between them? He wanted too big a share of
+the spoils? Oh, it's all so abysmally vile!"
+
+He covered his face with a shaking hand, and Mrs. Ansell remained
+silent, plunged in a speechless misery of conjecture. At length she
+regained some measure of her habitual composure, and leaning forward,
+with her eyes on his face, said in a quiet tone: "If I am to help you,
+you must try to tell me just what has happened."
+
+He made an impatient gesture. "Haven't I told you? She found that her
+accomplice meant to speak, and rushed to town to forestall him."
+
+Mrs. Ansell reflected. "But why--with his place at Saint Christopher's
+secured--did Dr. Wyant choose this time to threaten her--if, as you
+imagine, he's an accomplice?"
+
+"Because he's a drug-taker, and she didn't wish him to have the place."
+
+"She didn't wish it? But that does not look as if she were afraid. She
+had only to hold her tongue!"
+
+Mr. Langhope laughed sardonically. "It's not quite so simple. Amherst
+was coming to town to tell me."
+
+"Ah--_he_ knows?"
+
+"Yes--and she preferred that I should have her version first."
+
+"And what is her version?"
+
+The furrows of misery deepened in Mr. Langhope's face. "Maria--don't ask
+too much of me! I can't go over it again. She says she wanted to spare
+my child--she says the doctors were keeping her alive, torturing her
+uselessly, as a...a sort of scientific experiment.... She forced on me
+the hideous details...."
+
+Mrs. Ansell waited a moment.
+
+"Well! May it not be true?"
+
+"Wyant's version is different. _He_ says Bessy would have recovered--he
+says Garford thought so too."
+
+"And what does she answer? She denies it?"
+
+"No. She admits that Garford was in doubt. But she says the chance was
+too remote--the pain too bad...that's her cue, naturally!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell, leaning back in her chair, with hands meditatively
+stretched along its arms, gave herself up to silent consideration of the
+fragmentary statements cast before her. The long habit of ministering to
+her friends in moments of perplexity and distress had given her an
+almost judicial keenness in disentangling and coordinating facts
+incoherently presented, and in seizing on the thread of motive that
+connected them; but she had never before been confronted with a
+situation so poignant in itself, and bearing so intimately on her
+personal feelings; and she needed time to free her thoughts from the
+impending rush of emotion.
+
+At last she raised her head and said: "Why did Mr. Amherst let her come
+to you, instead of coming himself?"
+
+"He knows nothing of her being here. She persuaded him to wait a day,
+and as soon as he had gone to the mills this morning she took the first
+train to town."
+
+"Ah----" Mrs. Ansell murmured thoughtfully; and Mr. Langhope rejoined,
+with a conclusive gesture: "Do you want more proofs of panic-stricken
+guilt?"
+
+"Oh, guilt--" His friend revolved her large soft muff about a drooping
+hand. "There's so much still to understand."
+
+"Your mind does not, as a rule, work so slowly!" he said with some
+asperity; but she paid no heed to his tone.
+
+"Amherst, for instance--how long has he known of this?" she continued.
+
+"A week or two only--she made that clear."
+
+"And what is his attitude?"
+
+"Ah--that, I conjecture, is just what she means to keep us from
+knowing!"
+
+"You mean she's afraid----?"
+
+Mr. Langhope gathered his haggard brows in a frown. "She's afraid, of
+course--mortally--I never saw a woman more afraid. I only wonder she had
+the courage to face me."
+
+"Ah--that's it! Why _did_ she face you? To extenuate her act--to give
+you her version, because she feared his might be worse? Do you gather
+that that was her motive?"
+
+It was Mr. Langhope's turn to hesitate. He furrowed the thick Turkey rug
+with the point of his ebony stick, pausing once or twice to revolve it
+gimlet-like in a gap of the pile.
+
+"Not her avowed motive, naturally."
+
+"Well--at least, then, let me have that."
+
+"Her avowed motive? Oh, she'd prepared one, of course--trust her to
+have a dozen ready! The one she produced was--simply the desire to
+protect her husband."
+
+"Her husband? Does _he_ too need protection?"
+
+"My God, if he takes her side----! At any rate, her fear seemed to be
+that what she had done might ruin him; might cause him to feel--as well
+he may!--that the mere fact of being her husband makes his situation as
+Cicely's step-father, as my son-in-law, intolerable. And she came to
+clear him, as it were--to find out, in short, on what terms I should be
+willing to continue my present relations with him as though this hideous
+thing had not been known to me."
+
+Mrs. Ansell raised her head quickly. "Well--and what were your terms?"
+
+He hesitated. "She spared me the pain of proposing any--I had only to
+accept hers."
+
+"Hers?"
+
+"That she should disappear altogether from my sight--and from the
+child's, naturally. Good heaven, I should like to include Amherst in
+that! But I'm tied hand and foot, as you see, by Cicely's interests; and
+I'm bound to say she exonerated him completely--completely!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell was again silent, but a swift flight of thoughts traversed
+her drooping face. "But if you are to remain on the old terms with her
+husband, how is she to disappear out of your life without also
+disappearing out of his?"
+
+Mr. Langhope gave a slight laugh. "I leave her to work out that
+problem."
+
+"And you think Amherst will consent to such conditions?"
+
+"He's not to know of them."
+
+The unexpectedness of the reply reduced Mrs. Ansell to a sound of
+inarticulate interrogation; and Mr. Langhope continued: "Not at first,
+that is. She had thought it all out--foreseen everything; and she wrung
+from me--I don't yet know how!--a promise that when I saw him I would
+make it appear that I cleared him completely, not only of any possible
+complicity, or whatever you choose to call it, but of any sort of
+connection with the matter in my thoughts of him. I am, in short, to let
+him feel that he and I are to continue on the old footing--and I agreed,
+on the condition of her effacing herself somehow--of course on some
+other pretext."
+
+"Some other pretext? But what conceivable pretext? My poor friend, he
+adores her!"
+
+Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "We haven't seen him since
+this became known to him. _She_ has; and she let slip that he was
+horror-struck."
+
+Mrs. Ansell looked up with a quick exclamation. "Let slip? Isn't it
+much more likely that she forced it on you--emphasized it to the last
+limit of credulity?" She sank her hands to the arms of the chair, and
+exclaimed, looking him straight in the eyes: "You say she was
+frightened? It strikes me she was dauntless!"
+
+Mr. Langhope stared a moment; then he said, with an ironic shrug: "No
+doubt, then, she counted on its striking me too."
+
+Mrs. Ansell breathed a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I understand your feeling
+as you do--I'm deep in the horror of it myself. But I can't help seeing
+that this woman might have saved herself--and that she's chosen to save
+her husband instead. What I don't see, from what I know of him," she
+musingly proceeded, "is how, on any imaginable pretext, she will induce
+him to accept the sacrifice."
+
+Mr. Langhope made a resentful movement. "If that's the only point your
+mind dwells on----!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell looked up. "It doesn't dwell anywhere as yet--except, my
+poor Henry," she murmured, rising to move toward him, and softly laying
+her hand on his bent shoulder--"except on your distress and misery--on
+the very part I can't yet talk of, can't question you about...."
+
+He let her hand rest there a moment; then he turned, and drawing it into
+his own tremulous fingers, pressed it silently, with a clinging
+helpless grasp that drew the tears to her eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Justine Brent, in her earliest girlhood, had gone through one of those
+emotional experiences that are the infantile diseases of the heart. She
+had fancied herself beloved of a youth of her own age; had secretly
+returned his devotion, and had seen it reft from her by another. Such an
+incident, as inevitable as the measles, sometimes, like that mild
+malady, leaves traces out of all proportion to its actual virulence. The
+blow fell on Justine with tragic suddenness, and she reeled under it,
+thinking darkly of death, and renouncing all hopes of future happiness.
+Her ready pen often beguiled her into recording her impressions, and she
+now found an escape from despair in writing the history of a damsel
+similarly wronged. In her tale, the heroine killed herself; but the
+author, saved by this vicarious sacrifice, lived, and in time even
+smiled over her manuscript.
+
+It was many years since Justine Amherst had recalled this youthful
+incident; but the memory of it recurred to her as she turned from Mr.
+Langhope's door. For a moment death seemed the easiest escape from what
+confronted her; but though she could no longer medicine her despair by
+turning it into fiction, she knew at once that she must somehow
+transpose it into terms of action, that she must always escape from
+life into more life, and not into its negation.
+
+She had been carried into Mr. Langhope's presence by that expiatory
+passion which still burns so high, and draws its sustenance from so deep
+down, in the unsleeping hearts of women. Though she had never wavered in
+her conviction that her act had been justified her ideas staggered under
+the sudden comprehension of its consequences. Not till that morning had
+she seen those consequences in their terrible, unsuspected extent, had
+she understood how one stone rashly loosened from the laboriously
+erected structure of human society may produce remote fissures in that
+clumsy fabric. She saw that, having hazarded the loosening of the stone,
+she should have held herself apart from ordinary human ties, like some
+priestess set apart for the service of the temple. And instead, she had
+seized happiness with both hands, taken it as the gift of the very fate
+she had herself precipitated! She remembered some old Greek saying to
+the effect that the gods never forgive the mortal who presumes to love
+and suffer like a god. She had dared to do both, and the gods were
+bringing ruin on that deeper self which had its life in those about her.
+
+So much had become clear to her when she heard Amherst declare his
+intention of laying the facts before Mr. Langhope. His few broken words
+lit up the farthest verge of their lives. She saw that his
+retrospective reverence for his wife's memory, which was far as possible
+removed from the strong passion of the mind and senses that bound him to
+herself, was indelibly stained and desecrated by the discovery that all
+he had received from the one woman had been won for him by the
+deliberate act of the other. This was what no reasoning, no appeal to
+the calmer judgment, could ever, in his inmost thoughts, undo or
+extenuate. It could find appeasement only in the renunciation of all
+that had come to him from Bessy; and this renunciation, so different
+from the mere sacrifice of material well-being, was bound up with
+consequences so far-reaching, so destructive to the cause which had
+inspired his whole life, that Justine felt the helpless terror of the
+mortal who has launched one of the heavenly bolts.
+
+She could think of no way of diverting it but the way she had chosen.
+She must see Mr. Langhope first, must clear Amherst of the least faint
+association with her act or her intention. And to do this she must
+exaggerate, not her own compunction--for she could not depart from the
+exact truth in reporting her feelings and convictions--but her husband's
+first instinctive movement of horror, the revulsion of feeling her
+confession had really produced in him. This was the most painful part of
+her task, and for this reason her excited imagination clothed it with a
+special expiatory value. If she could purchase Amherst's peace of mind,
+and the security of his future, by confessing, and even
+over-emphasizing, the momentary estrangement between them there would be
+a bitter joy in such payment!
+
+Her hour with Mr. Langhope proved the correctness of her intuition. She
+could save Amherst only by effacing herself from his life: those about
+him would be only too ready to let her bear the full burden of obloquy.
+She could see that, for a dozen reasons, Mr. Langhope, even in the first
+shock of his dismay, unconsciously craved a way of exonerating Amherst,
+of preserving intact the relation on which so much of his comfort had
+come to depend. And she had the courage to make the most of his desire,
+to fortify it by isolating Amherst's point of view from hers; so that,
+when the hour was over, she had the solace of feeling that she had
+completely freed him from any conceivable consequence of her act.
+
+So far, the impetus of self-sacrifice had carried her straight to her
+goal; but, as frequently happens with such atoning impulses, it left her
+stranded just short of any subsequent plan of conduct. Her next step,
+indeed, was clear enough: she must return to Hanaford, explain to her
+husband that she had felt impelled to tell her own story to Mr.
+Langhope, and then take up her ordinary life till chance offered her a
+pretext for fulfilling her promise. But what pretext was likely to
+present itself? No symbolic horn would sound the hour of fulfillment;
+she must be her own judge, and hear the call in the depths of her own
+conscience.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+
+WHEN Amherst, returning late that afternoon from Westmore, learned of
+his wife's departure, and read the note she had left, he found it, for a
+time, impossible to bring order out of the confusion of feeling produced
+in him.
+
+His mind had been disturbed enough before. All day, through the routine
+of work at the mills, he had laboured inwardly with the difficulties
+confronting him; and his unrest had been increased by the fact that his
+situation bore an ironic likeness to that in which, from a far different
+cause, he had found himself at the other crisis of his life. Once more
+he was threatened with the possibility of having to give up Westmore, at
+a moment when concentration of purpose and persistency of will were at
+last beginning to declare themselves in tangible results. Before, he had
+only given up dreams; now it was their fruition that he was asked to
+surrender. And he was fixed in his resolve to withdraw absolutely from
+Westmore if the statement he had to make to Mr. Langhope was received
+with the least hint of an offensive mental reservation. All forms of
+moral compromise had always been difficult to Amherst, and like many men
+absorbed in large and complicated questions he craved above all
+clearness and peace in his household relation. The first months of his
+second marriage had brought him, as a part of richer and deeper joys,
+this enveloping sense of a clear moral medium, in which no subterfuge or
+equivocation could draw breath. He had felt that henceforth he could
+pour into his work all the combative energy, the powers of endurance,
+resistance, renovation, which had once been unprofitably dissipated in
+the vain attempt to bring some sort of harmony into life with Bessy.
+Between himself and Justine, apart from their love for each other, there
+was the wider passion for their kind, which gave back to them an
+enlarged and deepened reflection of their personal feeling. In such an
+air it had seemed that no petty egotism could hamper their growth, no
+misintelligence obscure their love; yet all the while this pure
+happiness had been unfolding against a sordid background of falsehood
+and intrigue from which his soul turned with loathing.
+
+Justine was right in assuming that Amherst had never thought much about
+women. He had vaguely regarded them as meant to people that hazy domain
+of feeling designed to offer the busy man an escape from thought. His
+second marriage, leading him to the blissful discovery that woman can
+think as well as feel, that there are beings of the ornamental sex in
+whom brain and heart have so enlarged each other that their emotions are
+as clear as thought, their thoughts as warm as emotions--this discovery
+had had the effect of making him discard his former summary conception
+of woman as a bundle of inconsequent impulses, and admit her at a stroke
+to full mental equality with her lord. The result of this act of
+manumission was, that in judging Justine he could no longer allow for
+what was purely feminine in her conduct. It was incomprehensible to him
+that she, to whom truth had seemed the essential element of life, should
+have been able to draw breath, and find happiness, in an atmosphere of
+falsehood and dissimulation. His mind could assent--at least in the
+abstract--to the reasonableness of her act; but he was still unable to
+understand her having concealed it from him. He could enter far enough
+into her feelings to allow for her having kept silence on his first
+return to Lynbrook, when she was still under the strain of a prolonged
+and terrible trial; but that she should have continued to do so when he
+and she had discovered and confessed their love for each other, threw an
+intolerable doubt on her whole course.
+
+He stayed late at the mills, finding one pretext after another for
+delaying his return to Hanaford, and trying, while he gave one part of
+his mind to the methodical performance of his task, to adjust the other
+to some definite view of the future. But all was darkened and confused
+by the sense that, between himself and Justine, complete communion of
+thought was no longer possible. It had, in fact, never existed; there
+had always been a locked chamber in her mind, and he knew not yet what
+other secrets might inhabit it.
+
+The shock of finding her gone when he reached home gave a new turn to
+his feelings. She had made no mystery of her destination, leaving word
+with the servants that she had gone to town to see Mr. Langhope; and
+Amherst found a note from her on his study table.
+
+"I feel," she wrote, "that I ought to see Mr. Langhope myself, and be
+the first to tell him what must be told. It was like you, dearest, to
+wish to spare me this, but it would have made me more unhappy; and Mr.
+Langhope might wish to hear the facts in my own words. I shall come back
+tomorrow, and after that it will be for you to decide what must be
+done."
+
+The brevity and simplicity of the note were characteristic; in moments
+of high tension Justine was always calm and direct. And it was like her,
+too, not to make any covert appeal to his sympathy, not to seek to
+entrap his judgment by caressing words and plaintive allusions. The
+quiet tone in which she stated her purpose matched the firmness and
+courage of the act, and for a moment Amherst was shaken by a revulsion
+of feeling. Her heart was level with his, after all--if she had done
+wrong she would bear the brunt of it alone. It was so exactly what he
+himself would have felt and done in such a situation that faith in her
+flowed back through all the dried channels of his heart. But an instant
+later the current set the other way. The wretched years of his first
+marriage had left in him a residue of distrust, a tendency to dissociate
+every act from its ostensible motive. He had been too profoundly the
+dupe of his own enthusiasm not to retain this streak of scepticism, and
+it now moved him to ask if Justine's sudden departure had not been
+prompted by some other cause than the one she avowed. Had that alone
+actuated her, why not have told it to him, and asked his consent to her
+plan? Why let him leave the house without a hint of her purpose, and
+slip off by the first train as soon as he was safe at Westmore? Might it
+not be that she had special reasons for wishing Mr. Langhope to _hear
+her own version first_--that there were questions she wished to parry
+herself, explanations she could trust no one to make for her? The
+thought plunged Amherst into deeper misery. He knew not how to defend
+himself against these disintegrating suspicions--he felt only that, once
+the accord between two minds is broken, it is less easy to restore than
+the passion between two hearts. He dragged heavily through his solitary
+evening, and awaited with dread and yet impatience a message announcing
+his wife's return.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It would have been easier--far easier--when she left Mr. Langhope's
+door, to go straight out into the darkness and let it close in on her
+for good.
+
+Justine felt herself yielding to the spell of that suggestion as she
+walked along the lamplit pavement, hardly conscious of the turn her
+steps were taking. The door of the house which a few weeks before had
+been virtually hers had closed on her without a question. She had been
+suffered to go out into the darkness without being asked whither she was
+going, or under what roof her night would be spent. The contrast between
+her past and present sounded through the tumult of her thoughts like the
+evil laughter of temptation. The house at Hanaford, to which she was
+returning, would look at her with the same alien face--nowhere on earth,
+at that moment, was a door which would open to her like the door of
+home.
+
+In her painful self-absorption she followed the side street toward
+Madison Avenue, and struck southward down that tranquil thoroughfare.
+There was a physical relief in rapid motion, and she walked on, still
+hardly aware of her direction, toward the clustered lights of Madison
+Square. Should she return to Hanaford, she had still several hours to
+dispose of before the departure of the midnight train; and if she did
+not return, hours and dates no longer existed for her.
+
+It would be easier--infinitely easier--not to go back. To take up her
+life with Amherst would, under any circumstances, be painful enough; to
+take it up under the tacit restriction of her pledge to Mr. Langhope
+seemed more than human courage could face. As she approached the square
+she had almost reached the conclusion that such a temporary renewal was
+beyond her strength--beyond what any standard of duty exacted. The
+question of an alternative hardly troubled her. She would simply go on
+living, and find an escape in work and material hardship. It would not
+be hard for so inconspicuous a person to slip back into the obscure mass
+of humanity.
+
+She paused a moment on the edge of the square, vaguely seeking a
+direction for her feet that might permit the working of her thoughts to
+go on uninterrupted; and as she stood there, her eyes fell on the bench
+near the corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where she had sat with Amherst
+on the day of his flight from Lynbrook. He too had dreamed of escaping
+from insoluble problems into the clear air of hard work and simple
+duties; and she remembered the words with which she had turned him back.
+The cases, of course, were not identical, since he had been flying in
+anger and wounded pride from a situation for which he was in no wise to
+blame; yet, if even at such a moment she had insisted on charity and
+forbearance, how could she now show less self-denial than she had
+exacted of him?
+
+"If you go away for a time, surely it ought to be in such a way that
+your going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy...." That was
+how she had put it to him, and how, with the mere change of a name, she
+must now, for reasons as cogent, put it to herself. It was just as much
+a part of the course she had planned to return to her husband now, and
+take up their daily life together, as it would, later on, be her duty to
+drop out of that life, when her doing so could no longer involve him in
+the penalty to be paid.
+
+She stood a little while looking at the bench on which they had sat, and
+giving thanks in her heart for the past strength which was now helping
+to build up her failing courage: such a patchwork business are our best
+endeavours, yet so faithfully does each weak upward impulse reach back a
+hand to the next.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Justine's explanation of her visit to Mr. Langhope was not wholly
+satisfying to her husband. She did not conceal from him that the scene
+had been painful, but she gave him to understand, as briefly as
+possible, that Mr. Langhope, after his first movement of uncontrollable
+distress, had seemed able to make allowances for the pressure under
+which she had acted, and that he had, at any rate, given no sign of
+intending to let her confession make any change in the relation between
+the households. If she did not--as Amherst afterward recalled--put all
+this specifically into words, she contrived to convey it in her manner,
+in her allusions, above all in her recovered composure. She had the
+demeanour of one who has gone through a severe test of strength, but
+come out of it in complete control of the situation. There was something
+slightly unnatural in this prompt solution of so complicated a
+difficulty, and it had the effect of making Amherst ask himself what, to
+produce such a result, must have been the gist of her communication to
+Mr. Langhope. If the latter had shown any disposition to be cruel, or
+even unjust, Amherst's sympathies would have rushed instantly to his
+wife's defence; but the fact that there was apparently to be no call on
+them left his reason free to compare and discriminate, with the final
+result that the more he pondered on his father-in-law's attitude the
+less intelligible it became.
+
+A few days after Justine's return he was called to New York on business;
+and before leaving he told her that he should of course take the
+opportunity of having a talk with Mr. Langhope.
+
+She received the statement with the gentle composure from which she had
+not departed since her return from town; and he added tentatively, as if
+to provoke her to a clearer expression of feeling: "I shall not be
+satisfied, of course, till I see for myself just how he feels--just how
+much, at bottom, this has affected him--since my own future relation to
+him will, as I have already told you, depend entirely on his treatment
+of you."
+
+She met this without any sign of disturbance. "His treatment of me was
+very kind," she said. "But would it not, on your part," she continued
+hesitatingly, "be kinder not to touch on the subject so soon again?"
+
+The line deepened between his brows. "Touch on it? I sha'n't rest till
+I've gone to the bottom of it! Till then, you must understand," he
+summed up with decision, "I feel myself only on sufferance here at
+Westmore."
+
+"Yes--I understand," she assented; and as he bent over to kiss her for
+goodbye a tenuous impenetrable barrier seemed to lie between their lips.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was Justine's turn to await with a passionate anxiety her husband's
+home-coming; and when, on the third day, he reappeared, her dearly
+acquired self-control gave way to a tremulous eagerness. This was, after
+all, the turning-point in their lives: everything depended on how Mr.
+Langhope had "played up" to his cue; had kept to his side of their bond.
+
+Amherst's face showed signs of emotional havoc: when feeling once broke
+out in him it had full play, and she could see that his hour with Mr.
+Langhope had struck to the roots of life. But the resultant expression
+was one of invigoration, not defeat; and she gathered at a glance that
+her partner had not betrayed her. She drew a tragic solace from the
+success of her achievement; yet it flung her into her husband's arms
+with a passion of longing to which, as she instantly felt, he did not as
+completely respond.
+
+There was still, then, something "between" them: somewhere the mechanism
+of her scheme had failed, or its action had not produced the result she
+had counted on.
+
+As soon as they were alone in the study she said, as quietly as she
+could: "You saw your father-in-law? You talked with him?"
+
+"Yes--I spent the afternoon with him. Cicely sent you her love."
+
+She coloured at the mention of the child's name and murmured: "And Mr.
+Langhope?"
+
+"He is perfectly calm now--perfectly impartial.--This business has made
+me feel," Amherst added abruptly, "that I have never been quite fair to
+him. I never thought him a magnanimous man."
+
+"He has proved himself so," Justine murmured, her head bent low over a
+bit of needlework; and Amherst affirmed energetically: "He has been more
+than that--generous!"
+
+She looked up at him with a smile. "I am so glad, dear; so glad there is
+not to be the least shadow between you...."
+
+"No," Amherst said, his voice flagging slightly. There was a pause, and
+then he went on with renewed emphasis: "Of course I made my point clear
+to him."
+
+"Your point?"
+
+"That I stand or fall by his judgment of you."
+
+Oh, if he had but said it more tenderly! But he delivered it with the
+quiet resolution of a man who contends for an abstract principle of
+justice, and not for a passion grown into the fibres of his heart!
+
+"You are generous too," she faltered, her voice trembling a little.
+
+Amherst frowned; and she perceived that any hint, on her part, of
+recognizing the slightest change in their relations was still like
+pressure on a painful bruise.
+
+"There is no need for such words between us," he said impatiently; "and
+Mr. Langhope's attitude," he added, with an effort at a lighter tone,
+"has made it unnecessary, thank heaven, that we should ever revert to
+the subject again."
+
+He turned to his desk as he spoke, and plunged into perusal of the
+letters that had accumulated in his absence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a temporary excess of work at Westmore, and during the days
+that followed he threw himself into it with a zeal that showed Justine
+how eagerly he sought any pretext for avoiding confidential moments. The
+perception was painful enough, yet not as painful as another discovery
+that awaited her. She too had her tasks at Westmore: the supervision of
+the hospital, the day nursery, the mothers' club, and the various other
+organizations whereby she and Amherst were trying to put some sort of
+social unity into the lives of the mill-hands; and when, on the day
+after his return from New York, she presented herself, as usual, at the
+Westmore office, where she was in the habit of holding a brief
+consultation with him before starting on her rounds, she was at once
+aware of a new tinge of constraint in his manner. It hurt him, then, to
+see her at Westmore--hurt him more than to live with her, at Hanaford,
+under Bessy's roof! For it was there, at the mills, that his real life
+was led, the life with which Justine had been most identified, the life
+that had been made possible for both by the magnanimity of that other
+woman whose presence was now forever between them.
+
+Justine made no sign. She resumed her work as though unconscious of any
+change; but whereas in the past they had always found pretexts for
+seeking each other out, to discuss the order of the day's work, or
+merely to warm their hearts by a rapid word or two, now each went a
+separate way, sometimes not meeting till they regained the house at
+night-fall.
+
+And as the weeks passed she began to understand that, by a strange
+inversion of probability, the relation between Amherst and herself was
+to be the means of holding her to her compact with Mr. Langhope--if
+indeed it were not nearer the truth to say that it had made such a
+compact unnecessary. Amherst had done his best to take up their life
+together as though there had been no break in it; but slowly the fact
+was being forced on her that by remaining with him she was subjecting
+him to intolerable suffering--was coming to be the personification of
+the very thoughts and associations from which he struggled to escape.
+Happily her promptness of action had preserved Westmore to him, and in
+Westmore she believed that he would in time find a refuge from even the
+memory of what he was now enduring. But meanwhile her presence kept the
+thought alive; and, had every other incentive lost its power, this would
+have been enough to sustain her. Fate had, ironically enough, furnished
+her with an unanswerable reason for leaving Amherst; the impossibility
+of their keeping up such a relation as now existed between them would
+soon become too patent to be denied.
+
+Meanwhile, as summer approached, she knew that external conditions would
+also call upon her to act. The visible signal for her withdrawal would
+be Cicely's next visit to Westmore. The child's birthday fell in early
+June; and Amherst, some months previously, had asked that she should be
+permitted to spend it at Hanaford, and that it should be chosen as the
+date for the opening of the first model cottages at Hopewood.
+
+It was Justine who had originated the idea of associating Cicely's
+anniversaries with some significant moment in the annals of the mill
+colony; and struck by the happy suggestion, he had at once applied
+himself to hastening on the work at Hopewood. The eagerness of both
+Amherst and Justine that Cicely should be identified with the developing
+life of Westmore had been one of the chief influences in reconciling Mr.
+Langhope to his son-in-law's second marriage. Husband and wife had
+always made it clear that they regarded themselves as the mere trustees
+of the Westmore revenues, and that Cicely's name should, as early as
+possible, be associated with every measure taken for the welfare of the
+people. But now, as Justine knew, the situation was changed; and Cicely
+would not be allowed to come to Hanaford until she herself had left it.
+The manifold threads of divination that she was perpetually throwing out
+in Amherst's presence told her, without word or sign on his part, that
+he also awaited Cicely's birthday as a determining date in their lives.
+He spoke confidently, and as a matter of course, of Mr. Langhope's
+bringing his grand-daughter at the promised time; but Justine could hear
+a note of challenge in his voice, as though he felt that Mr. Langhope's
+sincerity had not yet been put to the test.
+
+As the time drew nearer it became more difficult for her to decide just
+how she should take the step she had determined on. She had no material
+anxiety for the future, for although she did not mean to accept a penny
+from her husband after she had left him, she knew it would be easy for
+her to take up her nursing again; and she knew also that her hospital
+connections would enable her to find work in a part of the country far
+enough distant to remove her entirely from his life. But she had not yet
+been able to invent a reason for leaving that should be convincing
+enough to satisfy him, without directing his suspicions to the truth. As
+she revolved the question she suddenly recalled an exclamation of
+Amherst's--a word spoken as they entered Mr. Langhope's door, on the
+fatal afternoon when she had found Wyant's letter awaiting her.
+
+"There's nothing you can't make people believe, you little Jesuit!"
+
+She had laughed in pure joy at his praise of her; for every bantering
+phrase had then been a caress. But now the words returned with a
+sinister meaning. She knew they were true as far as Amherst was
+concerned: in the arts of casuistry and equivocation a child could have
+outmatched him, and she had only to exert her will to dupe him as deeply
+as she pleased. Well! the task was odious, but it was needful: it was
+the bitterest part of her expiation that she must deceive him once more
+to save him from the results of her former deception. This decision once
+reached, every nerve in her became alert for an opportunity to do the
+thing and have it over; so that, whenever they were alone together, she
+was in an attitude of perpetual tension, her whole mind drawn up for its
+final spring.
+
+The decisive word came, one evening toward the end of May, in the form
+of an allusion on Amherst's part to Cicely's approaching visit. Husband
+and wife were seated in the drawing-room after dinner, he with a book in
+hand, she bending, as usual, over the needlework which served at once as
+a pretext for lowered eyes, and as a means of disguising her fixed
+preoccupation.
+
+"Have you worked out a plan?" he asked, laying down his book. "It
+occurred to me that it would be rather a good idea if we began with a
+sort of festivity for the kids at the day nursery. You could take Cicely
+there early, and I could bring out Mr. Langhope after luncheon. The
+whole performance would probably tire him too much."
+
+Justine listened with suspended thread. "Yes--that seems a good plan."
+
+"Will you see about the details, then? You know it's only a week off."
+
+"Yes, I know." She hesitated, and then took the spring. "I ought to
+tell you John--that I--I think I may not be here...."
+
+He raised his head abruptly, and she saw the blood mount under his fair
+skin. "Not be here?" he exclaimed.
+
+She met his look as steadily as she could. "I think of going away for
+awhile."
+
+"Going away? Where? What is the matter--are you not well?"
+
+There was her pretext--he had found it for her! Why should she not
+simply plead ill-health? Afterward she would find a way of elaborating
+the details and making them plausible. But suddenly, as she was about to
+speak, there came to her the feeling which, up to one fatal moment in
+their lives, had always ruled their intercourse--the feeling that there
+must be truth, and absolute truth, between them. Absolute, indeed, it
+could never be again, since he must never know of the condition exacted
+by Mr. Langhope; but that, at the moment, seemed almost a secondary
+motive compared to the deeper influences that were inexorably forcing
+them apart. At any rate, she would trump up no trivial excuse for the
+step she had resolved on; there should be truth, if not the whole truth,
+in this last decisive hour between them.
+
+"Yes; I am quite well--at least my body is," she said quietly. "But I am
+tired, perhaps; my mind has been going round too long in the same
+circle." She paused for a brief space, and then, raising her head, and
+looking him straight in the eyes: "Has it not been so with you?" she
+asked.
+
+The question seemed to startle Amherst. He rose from his chair and took
+a few steps toward the hearth, where a small fire was crumbling into
+embers. He turned his back to it, resting an arm on the mantel-shelf;
+then he said, in a somewhat unsteady tone: "I thought we had agreed not
+to speak of all that again."
+
+Justine shook her head with a fugitive half-smile. "I made no such
+agreement. And besides, what is the use, when we can always hear each
+other's thoughts speak, and they speak of nothing else?"
+
+Amherst's brows darkened. "It is not so with mine," he began; but she
+raised her hand with a silencing gesture.
+
+"I know you have tried your best that it should not be so; and perhaps
+you have succeeded better than I. But I am tired, horribly tired--I want
+to get away from everything!"
+
+She saw a look of pain in his eyes. He continued to lean against the
+mantel-shelf, his head slightly lowered, his unseeing gaze fixed on a
+remote scroll in the pattern of the carpet; then he said in a low tone:
+"I can only repeat again what I have said before--that I understand why
+you did what you did."
+
+"Thank you," she answered, in the same tone.
+
+There was another pause, for she could not trust herself to go on
+speaking; and presently he asked, with a tinge of bitterness in his
+voice: "That does not satisfy you?"
+
+She hesitated. "It satisfies me as much as it does you--and no more,"
+she replied at length.
+
+He looked up hastily. "What do you mean?"
+
+"Just what I say. We can neither of us go on living on that
+understanding just at present." She rose as she spoke, and crossed over
+to the hearth. "I want to go back to my nursing--to go out to Michigan,
+to a town where I spent a few months the year before I first came to
+Hanaford. I have friends there, and can get work easily. And you can
+tell people that I was ill and needed a change."
+
+It had been easier to say than she had imagined, and her voice held its
+clear note till the end; but when she had ceased, the whole room began
+to reverberate with her words, and through the clashing they made in her
+brain she felt a sudden uncontrollable longing that they should provoke
+in him a cry of protest, of resistance. Oh, if he refused to let her
+go--if he caught her to him, and defied the world to part them--what
+then of her pledge to Mr. Langhope, what then of her resolve to pay the
+penalty alone?
+
+But in the space of a heart-beat she knew that peril--that longed-for
+peril!--was past. Her husband had remained silent--he neither moved
+toward her nor looked at her; and she felt in every slackening nerve
+that in the end he would let her go.
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+
+MR. LANGHOPE, tossing down a note on Mrs. Ansell's drawing-room table,
+commanded imperiously: "Read that!"
+
+She set aside her tea-cup, and looked up, not at the note, but into his
+face, which was crossed by one of the waves of heat and tremulousness
+that she was beginning to fear for him. Mr. Langhope had changed greatly
+in the last three months; and as he stood there in the clear light of
+the June afternoon it came to her that he had at last suffered the
+sudden collapse which is the penalty of youth preserved beyond its time.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, still watching him as she put out her hand for
+the letter.
+
+"Amherst writes to remind me of my promise to take Cicely to Hanaford
+next week, for her birthday."
+
+"Well--it was a promise, wasn't it?" she rejoined, running her eyes over
+the page.
+
+"A promise--yes; but made before.... Read the note--you'll see there's
+no reference to his wife. For all I know, she'll be there to receive
+us."
+
+"But that was a promise too."
+
+"That neither Cicely nor I should ever set eyes on her? Yes. But why
+should she keep it? I was a fool that day--she fooled me as she's fooled
+us all! But you saw through it from the beginning--you said at once that
+she'd never leave him."
+
+Mrs. Ansell reflected. "I said that before I knew all the circumstances.
+Now I think differently."
+
+"You think she still means to go?"
+
+She handed the letter back to him. "I think this is to tell you so."
+
+"This?" He groped for his glasses, dubiously scanning the letter again.
+
+"Yes. And what's more, if you refuse to go she'll have every right to
+break her side of the agreement."
+
+Mr. Langhope sank into a chair, steadying himself painfully with his
+stick. "Upon my soul, I sometimes think you're on her side!" he
+ejaculated.
+
+"No--but I like fair play," she returned, measuring his tea carefully
+into his favourite little porcelain tea-pot.
+
+"Fair play?"
+
+"She's offering to do her part. It's for you to do yours now--to take
+Cicely to Hanaford."
+
+"If I find her there, I never cross Amherst's threshold again!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell, without answering, rose and put his tea-cup on the
+slender-legged table at his elbow; then, before returning to her seat,
+she found the enamelled match-box and laid it by the cup. It was
+becoming difficult for Mr. Langhope to guide his movements about her
+small encumbered room; and he had always liked being waited on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Ansell's prognostication proved correct. When Mr. Langhope and
+Cicely arrived at Hanaford they found Amherst alone to receive them. He
+explained briefly that his wife had been unwell, and had gone to seek
+rest and change at the house of an old friend in the west. Mr. Langhope
+expressed a decent amount of regret, and the subject was dropped as if
+by common consent. Cicely, however, was not so easily silenced. Poor
+Bessy's uncertain fits of tenderness had produced more bewilderment than
+pleasure in her sober-minded child; but the little girl's feelings and
+perceptions had developed rapidly in the equable atmosphere of her
+step-mother's affection. Cicely had reached the age when children put
+their questions with as much ingenuity as persistence, and both Mr.
+Langhope and Amherst longed for Mrs. Ansell's aid in parrying her
+incessant interrogations as to the cause and length of Justine's
+absence, what she had said before going, and what promise she had made
+about coming back. But Mrs. Ansell had not come to Hanaford. Though it
+had become a matter of habit to include her in the family pilgrimages to
+the mills she had firmly maintained the plea of more urgent engagements;
+and the two men, with only Cicely between them, had spent the long days
+and longer evenings in unaccustomed and unmitigated propinquity.
+
+Mr. Langhope, before leaving, thought it proper to touch tentatively on
+his promise of giving Cicely to Amherst for the summer; but to his
+surprise the latter, after a moment of hesitation, replied that he
+should probably go to Europe for two or three months.
+
+"To Europe? Alone?" escaped from Mr. Langhope before he had time to
+weigh his words.
+
+Amherst frowned slightly. "I have been made a delegate to the Berne
+conference on the housing of factory operatives," he said at length,
+without making a direct reply to the question; "and if there is nothing
+to keep me at Westmore, I shall probably go out in July." He waited a
+moment, and then added: "My wife has decided to spend the summer in
+Michigan."
+
+Mr. Langhope's answer was a vague murmur of assent, and Amherst turned
+the talk to other matters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Langhope returned to town with distinct views on the situation at
+Hanaford.
+
+"Poor devil--I'm sorry for him: he can hardly speak of her," he broke
+out at once to Mrs. Ansell, in the course of their first confidential
+hour together.
+
+"Because he cares too much--he's too unhappy?"
+
+"Because he loathes her!" Mr. Langhope brought out with emphasis.
+
+Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sigh which made him add accusingly: "I believe
+you're actually sorry!"
+
+"Sorry?" She raised her eye-brows with a slight smile. "Should one not
+always be sorry to know there's a little less love and a little more
+hate in the world?"
+
+"You'll be asking _me_ not to hate her next!"
+
+She still continued to smile on him. "It's the haters, not the hated,
+I'm sorry for," she said at length; and he flung back impatiently: "Oh,
+don't let's talk of her. I sometimes feel she takes up more place in our
+lives than when she was with us!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst went to the Berne conference in July, and spent six weeks
+afterward in rapid visits to various industrial centres and model
+factory villages. During his previous European pilgrimages his interest
+had by no means been restricted to sociological questions: the appeal of
+an old civilization, reaching him through its innumerable forms of
+tradition and beauty, had roused that side of his imagination which his
+work at home left untouched. But upon his present state of deep moral
+commotion the spells of art and history were powerless to work. The
+foundations of his life had been shaken, and the fair exterior of the
+world was as vacant as a maniac's face. He could only take refuge in his
+special task, barricading himself against every expression of beauty and
+poetry as so many poignant reminders of a phase of life that he was
+vainly trying to cast off and forget.
+
+Even his work had been embittered to him, thrust out of its place in the
+ordered scheme of things. It had cost him a hard struggle to hold fast
+to his main purpose, to convince himself that his real duty lay, not in
+renouncing the Westmore money and its obligations, but in carrying out
+his projected task as if nothing had occurred to affect his personal
+relation to it. The mere fact that such a renunciation would have been a
+deliberate moral suicide, a severing once for all of every artery of
+action, made it take on, at first, the semblance of an obligation, a
+sort of higher duty to the abstract conception of what he owed himself.
+But Justine had not erred in her forecast. Once she had passed out of
+his life, it was easier for him to return to a dispassionate view of his
+situation, to see, and boldly confess to himself that he saw, the still
+higher duty of sticking to his task, instead of sacrificing it to any
+ideal of personal disinterestedness. It was this gradual process of
+adjustment that saved him from the desolating scepticism which falls on
+the active man when the sources of his activity are tainted. Having
+accepted his fate, having consented to see in himself merely the
+necessary agent of a good to be done, he could escape from
+self-questioning only by shutting himself up in the practical exigencies
+of his work, closing his eyes and his thoughts to everything which had
+formerly related it to a wider world, had given meaning and beauty to
+life as a whole.
+
+The return from Europe, and the taking up of the daily routine at
+Hanaford, were the most difficult phases in this process of moral
+adaptation.
+
+Justine's departure had at first brought relief. He had been too sincere
+with himself to oppose her wish to leave Hanaford for a time, since he
+believed that, for her as well as for himself, a temporary separation
+would be less painful than a continuance of their actual relation. But
+as the weeks passed into months he found he was no nearer to a clear
+view of his own case: the future was still dark and enigmatic. Justine's
+desire to leave him had revived his unformulated distrust of her. What
+could it mean but that there were thoughts within her which could not be
+at rest in his presence? He had given her every proof of his wish to
+forget the past, and Mr. Langhope had behaved with unequalled
+magnanimity. Yet Justine's unhappiness was evident: she could not
+conceal her longing to escape from the conditions her act had created.
+Was it because, in reality, she was conscious of other motives than the
+one she acknowledged? She had insisted, almost unfeelingly as it might
+have seemed, on the abstract rightness of what she had done, on the fact
+that, ideally speaking, her act could not be made less right, less
+justifiable, by the special accidental consequences that had flowed from
+it. Because these consequences had caught her in a web of tragic
+fatality she would not be guilty of the weakness of tracing back the
+disaster to any intrinsic error in her original motive. Why, then, if
+this was her real, her proud attitude toward the past--and since those
+about her believed in her sincerity, and accepted her justification as
+valid from her point of view if not from theirs--why had she not been
+able to maintain her posture, to carry on life on the terms she had
+exacted from others?
+
+A special circumstance contributed to this feeling of distrust; the
+fact, namely, that Justine, a week after her departure from Hanaford,
+had written to say that she could not, from that moment till her return,
+consent to accept any money from Amherst. As her manner was, she put her
+reasons clearly and soberly, without evasion or ambiguity.
+
+"Since you and I," she wrote, "have always agreed in regarding the
+Westmore money as a kind of wage for our services at the mills, I
+cannot be satisfied to go on drawing that wage while I am unable to do
+any work in return. I am sure you must feel as I do about this; and you
+need have no anxiety as to the practical side of the question, since I
+have enough to live on in some savings from my hospital days, which were
+invested for me two years ago by Harry Dressel, and are beginning to
+bring in a small return. This being the case, I feel I can afford to
+interpret in any way I choose the terms of the bargain between myself
+and Westmore."
+
+On reading this, Amherst's mind had gone through the strange dual
+process which now marked all his judgments of his wife. At first he had
+fancied he understood her, and had felt that he should have done as she
+did; then the usual reaction of distrust set in, and he asked himself
+why she, who had so little of the conventional attitude toward money,
+should now develop this unexpected susceptibility. And so the old
+question presented itself in another shape: if she had nothing to
+reproach herself for, why was it intolerable to her to live on Bessy's
+money? The fact that she was doing no actual service at Westmore did not
+account for her scruples--she would have been the last person to think
+that a sick servant should be docked of his pay. Her reluctance could
+come only from that hidden cause of compunction which had prompted her
+departure, and which now forced her to sever even the merely material
+links between herself and her past.
+
+Amherst, on his return to Hanaford, had tried to find in these
+considerations a reason for his deep unrest. It was his wife's course
+which still cast a torturing doubt on what he had braced his will to
+accept and put behind him. And he now told himself that the perpetual
+galling sense of her absence was due to this uneasy consciousness of
+what it meant, of the dark secrets it enveloped and held back from him.
+In actual truth, every particle of his being missed her, he lacked her
+at every turn. She had been at once the partner of his task, and the
+_pays bleu_ into which he escaped from it; the vivifying thought which
+gave meaning to the life he had chosen, yet never let him forget that
+there was a larger richer life outside, to which he was rooted by deeper
+and more intrinsic things than any abstract ideal of altruism. His love
+had preserved his identity, saved him from shrinking into the mere
+nameless unit which the social enthusiast is in danger of becoming
+unless the humanitarian passion is balanced, and a little overweighed,
+by a merely human one. And now this equilibrium was lost forever, and
+his deepest pain lay in realizing that he could not regain it, even by
+casting off Westmore and choosing the narrower but richer individual
+existence that her love might once have offered. His life was in truth
+one indivisible organism, not two halves artificially united. Self and
+other-self were ingrown from the roots--whichever portion fate
+restricted him to would be but a mutilated half-live fragment of the
+whole.
+
+Happily for him, chance made this crisis of his life coincide with a
+strike at Westmore. Soon after his return to Hanaford he found himself
+compelled to grapple with the hardest problem of his industrial career,
+and he was carried through the ensuing three months on that tide of
+swift obligatory action that sweeps the ship-wrecked spirit over so many
+sunken reefs of fear and despair. The knowledge that he was better able
+to deal with the question than any one who might conceivably have taken
+his place--this conviction, which was presently confirmed by the
+peaceable adjustment of the strike, helped to make the sense of his
+immediate usefulness outbalance that other, disintegrating doubt as to
+the final value of such efforts. And so he tried to settle down into a
+kind of mechanical altruism, in which the reflexes of habit should take
+the place of that daily renewal of faith and enthusiasm which had been
+fed from the springs of his own joy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The autumn came and passed into winter; and after Mr. Langhope's
+re-establishment in town Amherst began to resume his usual visits to his
+step-daughter.
+
+His natural affection for the little girl had been deepened by the
+unforeseen manner in which her fate had been entrusted to him. The
+thought of Bessy, softened to compunction by the discovery that her love
+had persisted under their apparently hopeless estrangement--this
+feeling, intensified to the verge of morbidness by the circumstances
+attending her death, now sought expression in a passionate devotion to
+her child. Accident had, in short, created between Bessy and himself a
+retrospective sympathy which the resumption of life together would have
+dispelled in a week--one of the exhalations from the past that depress
+the vitality of those who linger too near the grave of dead experiences.
+
+Since Justine's departure Amherst had felt himself still more drawn to
+Cicely; but his relation to the child was complicated by the fact that
+she would not be satisfied as to the cause of her step-mother's absence.
+Whenever Amherst came to town, her first question was for Justine; and
+her memory had the precocious persistence sometimes developed in
+children too early deprived of their natural atmosphere of affection.
+Cicely had always been petted and adored, at odd times and by divers
+people; but some instinct seemed to tell her that, of all the tenderness
+bestowed on her, Justine's most resembled the all-pervading motherly
+element in which the child's heart expands without ever being conscious
+of its needs.
+
+If it had been embarrassing to evade Cicely's questions in June it
+became doubly so as the months passed, and the pretext of Justine's
+ill-health grew more and more difficult to sustain. And in the following
+March Amherst was suddenly called from Hanaford by the news that the
+little girl herself was ill. Serious complications had developed from a
+protracted case of scarlet fever, and for two weeks the child's fate was
+uncertain. Then she began to recover, and in the joy of seeing life come
+back to her, Mr. Langhope and Amherst felt as though they must not only
+gratify every wish she expressed, but try to guess at those they saw
+floating below the surface of her clear vague eyes.
+
+It was noticeable to Mrs. Ansell, if not to the others, that one of
+these unexpressed wishes was the desire to see her stepmother. Cicely no
+longer asked for Justine; but something in her silence, or in the
+gesture with which she gently put from her other offers of diversion and
+companionship, suddenly struck Mrs. Ansell as more poignant than speech.
+
+"What is it the child wants?" she asked the governess, in the course of
+one of their whispered consultations; and the governess, after a
+moment's hesitation, replied: "She said something about a letter she
+wrote to Mrs. Amherst just before she was taken ill--about having had no
+answer, I think."
+
+"Ah--she writes to Mrs. Amherst, does she?"
+
+The governess, evidently aware that she trod on delicate ground, tried
+at once to defend herself and her pupil.
+
+"It was my fault, perhaps. I suggested once that her little compositions
+should take the form of letters--it usually interests a child more--and
+she asked if they might be written to Mrs. Amherst."
+
+"Your fault? Why should not the child write to her step-mother?" Mrs.
+Ansell rejoined with studied surprise; and on the other's murmuring: "Of
+course--of course----" she added haughtily: "I trust the letters were
+sent?"
+
+The governess floundered. "I couldn't say--but perhaps the nurse...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That evening Cicely was less well. There was a slight return of fever,
+and the doctor, hastily summoned, hinted at the possibility of too much
+excitement in the sick-room.
+
+"Excitement? There has been no excitement," Mr. Langhope protested,
+quivering with the sudden renewal of fear.
+
+"No? The child seemed nervous, uneasy. It's hard to say why, because she
+is unusually reserved for her age."
+
+The medical man took his departure, and Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell
+faced each other in the disarray produced by a call to arms when all
+has seemed at peace.
+
+"I shall lose her--I shall lose her!" the grandfather broke out, sinking
+into his chair with a groan.
+
+Mrs. Ansell, gathering up her furs for departure, turned on him abruptly
+from the threshold.
+
+"It's stupid, what you're doing--stupid!" she exclaimed with unwonted
+vehemence.
+
+He raised his head with a startled look. "What do you mean--what I'm
+doing?"
+
+"The child misses Justine. You ought to send for her."
+
+Mr. Langhope's hands dropped to the arms of his chair, and he
+straightened himself up with a pale flash of indignation. "You've had
+moments lately----!"
+
+"I've had moments, yes; and so have you--when the child came back to us,
+and we stood there and wondered how we could keep her, tie her
+fast...and in those moments I saw...saw what she wanted...and so did
+you!"
+
+Mr. Langhope turned away his head. "You're a sentimentalist!" he flung
+scornfully back.
+
+"Oh, call me any bad names you please!"
+
+"I won't send for that woman!"
+
+"No." She fastened her furs slowly, with the gentle deliberate movements
+that no emotion ever hastened or disturbed.
+
+"Why do you say no?" he challenged her.
+
+"To make you contradict me, perhaps," she ventured, after looking at him
+again.
+
+"Ah----" He shifted his position, one elbow supporting his bowed head,
+his eyes fixed on the ground. Presently he brought out: "Could one ask
+her to come--and see the child--and go away again--for good?"
+
+"To break the compact at your pleasure, and enter into it again for the
+same reason?"
+
+"No--no--I see." He paused, and then looked up at her suddenly. "But
+what if Amherst won't have her back himself?"
+
+"Shall I ask him?"
+
+"I tell you he can't bear to hear her name!"
+
+"But he doesn't know why she has left him."
+
+Mr. Langhope gathered his brows in a frown. "Why--what on earth--what
+possible difference would that make?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell, from the doorway, shed a pitying glance on him. "Ah--if you
+don't see!" she murmured.
+
+He sank back into his seat with a groan. "Good heavens, Maria, how you
+torture me! I see enough as it is--I see too much of the cursed
+business!"
+
+She paused again, and then slowly moved a step or two nearer, laying her
+hand on his shoulder.
+
+"There's one thing you've never seen yet, Henry: what Bessy herself
+would do now--for the child--if she could."
+
+He sat motionless under her light touch, his eyes on hers, till their
+inmost thoughts felt for and found each other, as they still sometimes
+could, through the fog of years and selfishness and worldly habit; then
+he dropped his face into his hands, hiding it from her with the
+instinctive shrinking of an aged grief.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+
+AMHERST, Cicely's convalescence once assured, had been obliged to go
+back to Hanaford; but some ten days later, on hearing from Mrs. Ansell
+that the little girl's progress was less rapid than had been hoped, he
+returned to his father-in-law's for a Sunday.
+
+He came two days after the talk recorded in the last chapter--a talk of
+which Mrs. Ansell's letter to him had been the direct result. She had
+promised Mr. Langhope that, in writing to Amherst, she would not go
+beyond the briefest statement of fact; and she had kept her word,
+trusting to circumstances to speak for her.
+
+Mrs. Ansell, during Cicely's illness, had formed the habit of dropping
+in on Mr. Langhope at the tea hour instead of awaiting him in her own
+drawing-room; and on the Sunday in question she found him alone.
+Beneath his pleasure in seeing her, which had grown more marked as his
+dependence on her increased, she at once discerned traces of recent
+disturbance; and her first question was for Cicely.
+
+He met it with a discouraged gesture. "No great change--Amherst finds
+her less well than when he was here before."
+
+"He's upstairs with her?"
+
+"Yes--she seems to want him."
+
+Mrs. Ansell seated herself in silence behind the tea-tray, of which she
+was now recognized as the officiating priestess. As she drew off her
+long gloves, and mechanically straightened the row of delicate old cups,
+Mr. Langhope added with an effort: "I've spoken to him--told him what
+you said."
+
+She looked up quickly.
+
+"About the child's wish," he continued. "About her having written to his
+wife. It seems her last letters have not been answered."
+
+He paused, and Mrs. Ansell, with her usual calm precision, proceeded to
+measure the tea into the fluted Georgian tea-pot. She could be as
+reticent in approval as in reprehension, and not for the world would she
+have seemed to claim any share in the turn that events appeared to be
+taking. She even preferred the risk of leaving her old friend to add
+half-reproachfully: "I told Amherst what you and the nurse thought."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"That Cicely pines for his wife. I put it to him in black and white."
+The words came out on a deep strained breath, and Mrs. Ansell faltered:
+"Well?"
+
+"Well--he doesn't know where she is himself."
+
+"Doesn't _know_?"
+
+"They're separated--utterly separated. It's as I told you: he could
+hardly name her."
+
+Mrs. Ansell had unconsciously ceased her ministrations, letting her
+hands fall on her knee while she brooded in blank wonder on her
+companion's face.
+
+"I wonder what reason she could have given him?" she murmured at length.
+
+"For going? He loathes her, I tell you!"
+
+"Yes--but _how did she make him_?"
+
+He struck his hand violently on the arm of his chair. "Upon my soul, you
+seem to forget!"
+
+"No." She shook her head with a half smile. "I simply remember more than
+you do."
+
+"What more?" he began with a flush of anger; but she raised a quieting
+hand.
+
+"What does all that matter--if, now that we need her, we can't get her?"
+
+He made no answer, and she returned to the dispensing of his tea; but as
+she rose to put the cup in his hand he asked, half querulously: "You
+think it's going to be very bad for the child, then?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell smiled with the thin edge of her lips. "One can hardly set
+the police after her----!"
+
+"No; we're powerless," he groaned in assent.
+
+As the cup passed between them she dropped her eyes to his with a quick
+flash of interrogation; but he sat staring moodily before him, and she
+moved back to the sofa without a word.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the way downstairs she met Amherst descending from Cicely's room.
+
+Since the early days of his first marriage there had always been, on
+Amherst's side, a sense of obscure antagonism toward Mrs. Ansell. She
+was almost the embodied spirit of the world he dreaded and disliked: her
+serenity, her tolerance, her adaptability, seemed to smile away and
+disintegrate all the high enthusiasms, the stubborn convictions, that he
+had tried to plant in the shifting sands of his married life. And now
+that Bessy's death had given her back the attributes with which his
+fancy had originally invested her, he had come to regard Mrs. Ansell as
+embodying the evil influences that had come between himself and his
+wife.
+
+Mrs. Ansell was probably not unaware of the successive transitions of
+feeling which had led up to this unflattering view; but her life had
+been passed among petty rivalries and animosities, and she had the
+patience and adroitness of the spy in a hostile camp.
+
+She and Amherst exchanged a few words about Cicely; then she exclaimed,
+with a glance through the panes of the hall door: "But I must be
+off--I'm on foot, and the crossings appal me after dark."
+
+He could do no less, at that, than offer to guide her across the perils
+of Fifth Avenue; and still talking of Cicely, she led him down the
+thronged thoroughfare till her own corner was reached, and then her own
+door; turning there to ask, as if by an afterthought: "Won't you come
+up? There's one thing more I want to say."
+
+A shade of reluctance crossed his face, which, as the vestibule light
+fell on it, looked hard and tired, like a face set obstinately against a
+winter gale; but he murmured a word of assent, and followed her into the
+shining steel cage of the lift.
+
+In her little drawing-room, among the shaded lamps and bowls of spring
+flowers, she pushed a chair forward, settled herself in her usual corner
+of the sofa, and said with a directness that seemed an echo of his own
+tone: "I asked you to come up because I want to talk to you about Mr.
+Langhope."
+
+Amherst looked at her in surprise. Though his father-in-law's health had
+been more or less unsatisfactory for the last year, all their concern,
+of late, had been for Cicely.
+
+"You think him less well?" he enquired.
+
+She waited to draw off and smooth her gloves, with one of the
+deliberate gestures that served to shade and supplement her speech.
+
+"I think him extremely unhappy."
+
+Amherst moved uneasily in his seat. He did not know where she meant the
+talk to lead them, but he guessed that it would be over painful places,
+and he saw no reason why he should be forced to follow her.
+
+"You mean that he's still anxious about Cicely?"
+
+"Partly that--yes." She paused. "The child will get well, no doubt; but
+she is very lonely. She needs youth, heat, light. Mr. Langhope can't
+give her those, or even a semblance of them; and it's an art I've lost
+the secret of," she added with her shadowy smile.
+
+Amherst's brows darkened. "I realize all she has lost----"
+
+Mrs. Ansell glanced up at him quickly. "She is twice motherless," she
+said.
+
+The blood rose to his neck and temples, and he tightened his hand on the
+arm of his chair. But it was a part of Mrs. Ansell's expertness to know
+when such danger signals must be heeded and when they might be ignored,
+and she went on quietly: "It's the question of the future that is
+troubling Mr. Langhope. After such an illness, the next months of
+Cicely's life should be all happiness. And money won't buy the kind she
+needs: one can't pick out the right companion for such a child as one
+can match a ribbon. What she wants is spontaneous affection, not the
+most superlative manufactured article. She wants the sort of love that
+Justine gave her."
+
+It was the first time in months that Amherst had heard his wife's name
+spoken outside of his own house. No one but his mother mentioned Justine
+to him now; and of late even his mother had dropped her enquiries and
+allusions, prudently acquiescing in the habit of silence which his own
+silence had created about him. To hear the name again--the two little
+syllables which had been the key of life to him, and now shook him as
+the turning of a rusted lock shakes a long-closed door--to hear her name
+spoken familiarly, affectionately, as one speaks of some one who may
+come into the room the next moment--gave him a shock that was half pain,
+and half furtive unacknowledged joy. Men whose conscious thoughts are
+mostly projected outward, on the world of external activities, may be
+more moved by such a touch on the feelings than those who are
+perpetually testing and tuning their emotional chords. Amherst had
+foreseen from the first that Mrs. Ansell might mean to speak of his
+wife; but though he had intended, if she did so, to cut their talk
+short, he now felt himself irresistibly constrained to hear her out.
+
+Mrs. Ansell, having sped her shaft, followed its flight through lowered
+lashes, and saw that it had struck a vulnerable point; but she was far
+from assuming that the day was won.
+
+"I believe," she continued, "that Mr. Langhope has said something of
+this to you already, and my only excuse for speaking is that I
+understood he had not been successful in his appeal."
+
+No one but Mrs. Ansell--and perhaps she knew it--could have pushed so
+far beyond the conventional limits of discretion without seeming to
+overstep them by a hair; and she had often said, when pressed for the
+secret of her art, that it consisted simply in knowing the pass-word.
+That word once spoken, she might have added, the next secret was to give
+the enemy no time for resistance; and though she saw the frown reappear
+between Amherst's eyes, she went on, without heeding it: "I entreat you,
+Mr. Amherst, to let Cicely see your wife."
+
+He reddened again, and pushed back his chair, as if to rise.
+
+"No--don't break off like that! Let me say a word more. I know your
+answer to Mr. Langhope--that you and Justine are no longer together. But
+I thought of you as a man to sink your personal relations at such a
+moment as this."
+
+"To sink them?" he repeated vaguely: and she went on: "After all, what
+difference does it make?"
+
+"What difference?" He stared in unmitigated wonder, and then answered,
+with a touch of irony: "It might at least make the difference of my
+being unwilling to ask a favour of her."
+
+Mrs. Ansell, at this, raised her eyes and let them rest full on his.
+"Because she has done you so great a one already?"
+
+He stared again, sinking back automatically into his chair. "I don't
+understand you."
+
+"No." She smiled a little, as if to give herself time. "But I mean that
+you shall. If I were a man I suppose I couldn't, because a man's code of
+honour is such a clumsy cast-iron thing. But a woman's, luckily, can be
+cut over--if she's clever--to fit any new occasion; and in this case I
+should be willing to reduce mine to tatters if necessary."
+
+Amherst's look of bewilderment deepened. "What is it that I don't
+understand?" he asked at length, in a low voice.
+
+"Well--first of all, why Mr. Langhope had the right to ask you to send
+for your wife."
+
+"The right?"
+
+"You don't recognize such a right on his part?"
+
+"No--why should I?"
+
+"Supposing she had left you by his wish?"
+
+"His wish? _His----?_"
+
+He was on his feet now, gazing at her blindly, while the solid world
+seemed to grow thin about him. Her next words reduced it to a mist.
+
+"My poor Amherst--why else, on earth, should she have left you?"
+
+She brought it out clearly, in her small chiming tones; and as the sound
+travelled toward him it seemed to gather momentum, till her words rang
+through his brain as if every incomprehensible incident in the past had
+suddenly boomed forth the question. Why else, indeed, should she have
+left him? He stood motionless for a while; then he approached Mrs.
+Ansell and said: "Tell me."
+
+She drew farther back into her corner of the sofa, waving him to a seat
+beside her, as though to bring his inquisitory eyes on a level where her
+own could command them; but he stood where he was, unconscious of her
+gesture, and merely repeating: "Tell me."
+
+She may have said to herself that a woman would have needed no farther
+telling; but to him she only replied, slanting her head up to his: "To
+spare you and himself pain--to keep everything, between himself and you,
+as it had been before you married her."
+
+He dropped down beside her at that, grasping the back of the sofa as if
+he wanted something to clutch and throttle. The veins swelled in his
+temples, and as he pushed back his tossed hair Mrs. Ansell noticed for
+the first time how gray it had grown on the under side.
+
+"And he asked this of my wife--he accepted it?'"
+
+"Haven't _you_ accepted it?"
+
+"I? How could I guess her reasons--how could I imagine----?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell raised her brows a hair's breadth at that. "I don't know.
+But as a fact, he didn't ask--it was she who offered, who forced it on
+him, even!"
+
+"Forced her going on him?"
+
+"In a sense, yes; by making it appear that _you_ felt as he did
+about--about poor Bessy's death: that the thought of what had happened
+at that time was as abhorrent to you as to him--that _she_ was as
+abhorrent to you. No doubt she foresaw that, had she permitted the least
+doubt on that point, there would have been no need of her leaving you,
+since the relation between yourself and Mr. Langhope would have been
+altered--destroyed...."
+
+"Yes. I expected that--I warned her of it. But how did she make him
+think----?"
+
+"How can I tell? To begin with, I don't know your real feeling. For all
+I know she was telling the truth--and Mr. Langhope of course thought she
+was."
+
+"That I abhorred her? Oh----" he broke out, on his feet in an instant.
+
+"Then why----?"
+
+"Why did I let her leave me?" He strode across the room, as his habit
+was in moments of agitation, turning back to her again before he
+answered. "Because I _didn't_ know--didn't know anything! And because
+her insisting on going away like that, without any explanation, made me
+feel...imagine there was...something she didn't _want_ me to
+know...something she was afraid of not being able to hide from me if we
+stayed together any longer."
+
+"Well--there was: the extent to which she loved you."
+
+Mrs. Ansell; her hands clasped on her knee, her gaze holding his with a
+kind of visionary fixity, seemed to reconstruct the history of his past,
+bit by bit, with the words she was dragging out of him.
+
+"I see it--I see it all now," she went on, with a repressed fervour that
+he had never divined in her. "It was the only solution for her, as well
+as for the rest of you. The more she showed her love, the more it would
+have cast a doubt on her motive...the greater distance she would have
+put between herself and you. And so she showed it in the only way that
+was safe for both of you, by taking herself away and hiding it in her
+heart; and before going, she secured your peace of mind, your future. If
+she ruined anything, she rebuilt the ruin. Oh, she paid--she paid in
+full!"
+
+Justine had paid, yes--paid to the utmost limit of whatever debt toward
+society she had contracted by overstepping its laws. And her resolve to
+discharge the debt had been taken in a flash, as soon as she had seen
+that man can commit no act alone, whether for good or evil. The extent
+to which Amherst's fate was involved in hers had become clear to her
+with his first word of reassurance, of faith in her motive. And
+instantly a plan for releasing him had leapt full-formed into her mind,
+and had been carried out with swift unflinching resolution. As he forced
+himself, now, to look down the suddenly illuminated past to the weeks
+which had elapsed between her visit to Mr. Langhope and her departure
+from Hanaford, he wondered not so much at her swiftness of resolve as at
+her firmness in carrying out her plan--and he saw, with a blinding flash
+of insight, that it was in her love for him that she had found her
+strength.
+
+In all moments of strong mental tension he became totally unconscious of
+time and place, and he now remained silent so long, his hands clasped
+behind him, his eyes fixed on an indeterminate point in space, that Mrs.
+Ansell at length rose and laid a questioning touch on his arm.
+
+"It's not true that you don't know where she is?" His face contracted.
+"At this moment I don't. Lately she has preferred...not to write...."
+
+"But surely you must know how to find her?"
+
+He tossed back his hair with an energetic movement. "I should find her
+if I didn't know how!"
+
+They stood confronted in a gaze of silent intensity, each penetrating
+farther into the mind of the other than would once have seemed possible
+to either one; then Amherst held out his hand abruptly. "Good-bye--and
+thank you," he said.
+
+She detained him a moment. "We shall see you soon again--see you both?"
+
+His face grew stern. "It's not to oblige Mr. Langhope that I am going to
+find my wife."
+
+"Ah, now you are unjust to him!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Don't let us speak of him!" he broke in.
+
+"Why not? When it is from him the request comes--the entreaty--that
+everything in the past should be forgotten?"
+
+"Yes--when it suits his convenience!"
+
+"Do you imagine that--even judging him in that way--it has not cost him
+a struggle?"
+
+"I can only think of what it has cost her!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sighing breath. "Ah--but don't you see that she
+has gained her point, and that nothing else matters to her?"
+
+"Gained her point? Not if, by that, you mean that things here can ever
+go back to the old state--that she and I can remain at Westmore after
+this!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell dropped her eyes for a moment; then she lifted to his her
+sweet impenetrable face.
+
+"Do you know what you have to do--both you and he? Exactly what she
+decides," she affirmed.
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+
+JUSTINE'S answer to her husband's letter bore a New York address; and
+the surprise of finding her in the same town with himself, and not half
+an hour's walk from the room in which he sat, was so great that it
+seemed to demand some sudden and violent outlet of physical movement.
+
+He thrust the letter in his pocket, took up his hat, and leaving the
+house, strode up Fifth Avenue toward the Park in the early spring
+sunlight.
+
+The news had taken five days to reach him, for in order to reestablish
+communication with his wife he had been obliged to write to Michigan,
+with the request that his letter should be forwarded. He had never
+supposed that Justine would be hard to find, or that she had purposely
+enveloped her movements in mystery. When she ceased to write he had
+simply concluded that, like himself, she felt the mockery of trying to
+keep up a sort of distant, semi-fraternal relation, marked by the
+occasional interchange of inexpressive letters. The inextricable
+mingling of thought and sensation which made the peculiar closeness of
+their union could never, to such direct and passionate natures, be
+replaced by the pretense of a temperate friendship. Feeling thus
+himself, and instinctively assuming the same feeling in his wife,
+Amherst had respected her silence, her wish to break definitely with
+their former life. She had written him, in the autumn, that she intended
+to leave Michigan for a few months, but that, in any emergency, a letter
+addressed to her friend's house would reach her; and he had taken this
+as meaning that, unless the emergency arose, she preferred that their
+correspondence should cease. Acquiescence was all the easier because it
+accorded with his own desire. It seemed to him, as he looked back, that
+the love he and Justine had felt for each other was like some rare
+organism which could maintain life only in its special element; and that
+element was neither passion nor sentiment, but truth. It was only on the
+heights that they could breathe.
+
+Some men, in his place, even while accepting the inevitableness of the
+moral rupture, would have felt concerned for the material side of the
+case. But it was characteristic of Amherst that this did not trouble
+him. He took it for granted that his wife would return to her nursing.
+From the first he had felt certain that it would be intolerable to her
+to accept aid from him, and that she would choose rather to support
+herself by the exercise of her regular profession; and, aside from such
+motives, he, who had always turned to hard work as the rarest refuge
+from personal misery, thought it natural that she should seek the same
+means of escape.
+
+He had therefore not been surprised, on opening her letter that
+morning, to learn that she had taken up her hospital work; but in the
+amazement of finding her so near he hardly grasped her explanation of
+the coincidence. There was something about a Buffalo patient suddenly
+ordered to New York for special treatment, and refusing to go in with a
+new nurse--but these details made no impression on his mind, which had
+only room for the fact that chance had brought his wife back at the very
+moment when his whole being yearned for her.
+
+She wrote that, owing to her duties, she would be unable to see him till
+three that afternoon; and he had still six hours to consume before their
+meeting. But in spirit they had met already--they were one in an
+intensity of communion which, as he strode northward along the bright
+crowded thoroughfare, seemed to gather up the whole world into one
+throbbing point of life.
+
+He had a boyish wish to keep the secret of his happiness to himself, not
+to let Mr. Langhope or Mrs. Ansell know of his meeting with Justine till
+it was over; and after twice measuring the length of the Park he turned
+in at one of the little wooden restaurants which were beginning to
+unshutter themselves in anticipation of spring custom. If only he could
+have seen Justine that morning! If he could have brought her there, and
+they could have sat opposite each other, in the bare empty room, with
+sparrows bustling and twittering in the lilacs against the open window!
+The room was ugly enough--but how she would have delighted in the
+delicate green of the near slopes, and the purplish haze of the woods
+beyond! She took a childish pleasure in such small adventures, and had
+the knack of giving a touch of magic to their most commonplace details.
+Amherst, as he finished his cold beef and indifferent eggs, found
+himself boyishly planning to bring her back there the next day....
+
+Then, over the coffee, he re-read her letter.
+
+The address she gave was that of a small private hospital, and she
+explained that she would have to receive him in the public parlour,
+which at that hour was open to other visitors. As the time approached,
+the thought that they might not be alone when they met became
+insufferable; and he determined, if he found any one else, in possession
+of the parlour, to wait in the hall, and meet her as she came down the
+stairs.
+
+He continued to elaborate this plan as he walked back slowly through the
+Park, He had timed himself to reach the hospital a little before three;
+but though it lacked five minutes to the hour when he entered the
+parlour, two women were already seated in one of its windows. They
+looked around as he came in, evidently as much annoyed by his appearance
+as he had been to find them there. The older of the two showed a sallow
+middle-aged face beneath her limp crape veil; the other was a slight
+tawdry creature, with nodding feathers, and innumerable chains and
+bracelets which she fingered ceaselessly as she talked.
+
+They eyed Amherst with resentment, and then turned away, continuing
+their talk in low murmurs, while he seated himself at the marble-topped
+table littered with torn magazines. Now and then the younger woman's
+voice rose in a shrill staccato, and a phrase or two floated over to
+him. "She'd simply worked herself to death--the nurse told me so.... She
+expects to go home in another week, though how she's going to stand the
+_fatigue_----" and then, after an inaudible answer: "It's all _his_
+fault, and if I was her I wouldn't go back to him for anything!"
+
+"Oh, Cora, he's real sorry now," the older woman protestingly murmured;
+but the other, unappeased, rejoined with ominously nodding plumes:
+"_You_ see--if they do make it up, it'll never be the same between
+them!"
+
+Amherst started up nervously, and as he did so the clock struck three,
+and he opened the door and passed out into the hall. It was paved with
+black and white marble; the walls were washed in a dull yellowish tint,
+and the prevalent odour of antiseptics was mingled with a stale smell of
+cooking. At the back rose a straight staircase carpeted with brass-bound
+India-rubber, like a ship's companion-way; and down that staircase she
+would come in a moment--he fancied he heard her step now....
+
+But the step was that of an elderly black-gowned woman in a cap--the
+matron probably.
+
+She glanced at Amherst in surprise, and asked: "Are you waiting for some
+one?"
+
+He made a motion of assent, and she opened the parlour door, saying:
+"Please walk in."
+
+"May I not wait out here?" he urged.
+
+She looked at him more attentively. "Why, no, I'm afraid not. You'll
+find the papers and magazines in here."
+
+Mildly but firmly she drove him in before her, and closing the door,
+advanced to the two women in the window. Amherst's hopes leapt up:
+perhaps she had come to fetch the visitors upstairs! He strained his
+ears to catch what was being said, and while he was thus absorbed the
+door opened, and turning at the sound he found himself face to face with
+his wife.
+
+He had not reflected that Justine would be in her nurse's dress; and the
+sight of the dark blue uniform and small white cap, in which he had
+never seen her since their first meeting in the Hope Hospital,
+obliterated all bitter and unhappy memories, and gave him the illusion
+of passing back at once into the clear air of their early friendship.
+Then he looked at her and remembered.
+
+He noticed that she had grown thinner than ever, or rather that her
+thinness, which had formerly had a healthy reed-like strength, now
+suggested fatigue and languor. And her face was spent, extinguished--the
+very eyes were lifeless. All her vitality seemed to have withdrawn
+itself into the arch of dense black hair which still clasped her
+forehead like the noble metal of some antique bust.
+
+The sight stirred him with a deeper pity, a more vehement compunction;
+but the impulse to snatch her to him, and seek his pardon on her lips,
+was paralyzed by the sense that the three women in the window had
+stopped talking and turned their heads toward the door.
+
+He held his hand out, and Justine's touched it for a moment; then he
+said in a low voice: "Is there no other place where I can see you?"
+
+She made a negative gesture. "I am afraid not to-day."
+
+Ah, her deep sweet voice--how completely his ear had lost the sound of
+it!
+
+She looked doubtfully about the room, and pointed to a sofa at the end
+farthest from the windows.
+
+"Shall we sit there?" she said.
+
+He followed her in silence, and they sat down side by side. The matron
+had drawn up a chair and resumed her whispered conference with the women
+in the window. Between the two groups stretched the bare length of the
+room, broken only by a few arm-chairs of stained wood, and the
+marble-topped table covered with magazines.
+
+The impossibility of giving free rein to his feelings developed in
+Amherst an unwonted intensity of perception, as though a sixth sense had
+suddenly emerged to take the place of those he could not use. And with
+this new-made faculty he seemed to gather up, and absorb into himself,
+as he had never done in their hours of closest communion, every detail
+of his wife's person, of her face and hands and gestures. He noticed how
+her full upper lids, of the tint of yellowish ivory, had a slight bluish
+discolouration, and how little thread-like blue veins ran across her
+temples to the roots of her hair. The emaciation of her face, and the
+hollow shades beneath her cheek-bones, made her mouth seem redder and
+fuller, though a little line on each side, where it joined the cheek,
+gave it a tragic droop. And her hands! When her fingers met his he
+recalled having once picked up, in the winter woods, the little
+feather-light skeleton of a frozen bird--and that was what her touch was
+like.
+
+And it was he who had brought her to this by his cruelty, his
+obtuseness, his base readiness to believe the worst of her! He did not
+want to pour himself out in self-accusation--that seemed too easy a way
+of escape. He wanted simply to take her in his arms, to ask her to give
+him one more chance--and then to show her! And all the while he was
+paralyzed by the group in the window.
+
+"Can't we go out? I must speak to you," he began again nervously.
+
+"Not this afternoon--the doctor is coming. Tomorrow----"
+
+"I can't wait for tomorrow!"
+
+She made a faint, imperceptible gesture, which read to his eyes: "You've
+waited a whole year."
+
+"Yes, I know," he returned, still constrained by the necessity of
+muffling his voice, of perpetually measuring the distance between
+themselves and the window. "I know what you might say--don't you suppose
+I've said it to myself a million times? But I didn't know--I couldn't
+imagine----"
+
+She interrupted him with a rapid movement. "What do you know now?"
+
+"What you promised Langhope----"
+
+She turned her startled eyes on him, and he saw the blood run flame-like
+under her skin. "But _he_ promised not to speak!" she cried.
+
+"He hasn't--to me. But such things make themselves known. Should you
+have been content to go on in that way forever?"
+
+She raised her head and her eyes rested in his. "If you were," she
+answered simply.
+
+"Justine!"
+
+Again she checked him with a silencing motion. "Please tell me just what
+has happened."
+
+"Not now--there's too much else to say. And nothing matters except that
+I'm with you."
+
+"But Mr. Langhope----"
+
+"He asks you to come. You're to see Cicely to-morrow."
+
+Her lower lip trembled a little, and a tear flowed over and hung on her
+lashes.
+
+"But what does all that matter now? We're together after this horrible
+year," he insisted.
+
+She looked at him again. "But what is really changed?"
+
+"Everything--everything! Not changed, I mean--just gone back."
+
+"To where...we were...before?" she whispered; and he whispered back: "To
+where we were before."
+
+There was a scraping of chairs on the floor, and with a sense of release
+Amherst saw that the colloquy in the window was over.
+
+The two visitors, gathering their wraps about them, moved slowly across
+the room, still talking to the matron in excited undertones, through
+which, as they neared the threshold, the younger woman's staccato again
+broke out.
+
+"I tell you, if she does go back to him, it'll never be the same between
+them!"
+
+"Oh, Cora, I wouldn't say that," the other ineffectually wailed; then
+they moved toward the door, and a moment later it had closed on them.
+
+Amherst turned to his wife with outstretched arms. "Say you forgive me,
+Justine!"
+
+She held back a little from his entreating hands, not reproachfully, but
+as if with a last scruple for himself.
+
+"There's nothing left...of the horror?" she asked below her breath.
+
+"To be without you--that's the only horror!"
+
+"You're _sure_----?"
+
+"Sure!"
+
+"It's just the same to you...just as it was...before?"
+
+"Just the same, Justine!"
+
+"It's not for myself, but you."
+
+"Then, for me--never speak of it!" he implored.
+
+"Because it's _not_ the same, then?" leapt from her.
+
+"Because it's wiped out--because it's never been!"
+
+"Never?"
+
+"Never!"
+
+He felt her yield to him at that, and under his eyes, close under his
+lips, was her face at last. But as they kissed they heard the handle of
+the door turn, and drew apart quickly, her hand lingering in his under
+the fold of her dress.
+
+A nurse looked in, dressed in the white uniform and pointed cap of the
+hospital. Amherst fancied that she smiled a little as she saw them.
+
+"Miss Brent--the doctor wants you to come right up and give the
+morphine."
+
+The door shut again as Justine rose to her feet. Amherst remained
+seated--he had made no motion to retain her hand as it slipped from him.
+
+"I'm coming," she called out to the retreating nurse; then she turned
+slowly and saw her husband's face.
+
+"I must go," she said in a low tone.
+
+Her eyes met his for a moment; but he looked away again as he stood up
+and reached for his hat.
+
+"Tomorrow, then----" he said, without attempting to detain her.
+
+"Tomorrow?"
+
+"You must come away from here--you must come home," he repeated
+mechanically.
+
+She made no answer, and he held his hand out and took hers. "Tomorrow,"
+he said, drawing her toward him; and their lips met again, but not in
+the same kiss.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII
+
+
+JUNE again at Hanaford--and Cicely's birthday. The anniversary was to
+coincide, this year, with the opening of the old house at Hopewood, as a
+kind of pleasure-palace--gymnasium, concert-hall and museum--for the
+recreation of the mill-hands.
+
+The idea had first come to Amherst on the winter afternoon when Bessy
+Westmore had confessed her love for him under the snow-laden trees of
+Hopewood. Even then the sense that his personal happiness was enlarged
+and secured by its promise of happiness to others had made him wish that
+the scene associated with the opening of his new life should be made to
+commemorate a corresponding change in the fortunes of Westmore. But when
+the control of the mills passed into his hands other and more necessary
+improvements pressed upon him; and it was not till now that the
+financial condition of the company had permitted the execution of his
+plan.
+
+Justine, on her return to Hanaford, had found the work already in
+progress, and had been told by her husband that he was carrying out a
+projected scheme of Bessy's. She had felt a certain surprise, but had
+concluded that the plan in question dated back to the early days of his
+first marriage, when, in his wife's eyes, his connection with the mills
+still invested them with interest.
+
+Since Justine had come back to her husband, both had tacitly avoided all
+allusions to the past, and the recreation-house at Hopewood being, as
+she divined, in some sort an expiatory offering to Bessy's plaintive
+shade, she had purposely refrained from questioning Amherst about its
+progress, and had simply approved the plans he submitted to her.
+
+Fourteen months had passed since her return, and now, as she sat beside
+her husband in the carriage which was conveying them to Hopewood, she
+said to herself that her life had at last fallen into what promised to
+be its final shape--that as things now were they would probably be to
+the end. And outwardly at least they were what she and Amherst had
+always dreamed of their being. Westmore prospered under the new rule.
+The seeds of life they had sown there were springing up in a promising
+growth of bodily health and mental activity, and above all in a dawning
+social consciousness. The mill-hands were beginning to understand the
+meaning of their work, in its relation to their own lives and to the
+larger economy. And outwardly, also, the new growth was showing itself
+in the humanized aspect of the place. Amherst's young maples were tall
+enough now to cast a shade on the grass-bordered streets; and the
+well-kept turf, the bright cottage gardens, the new central group of
+library, hospital and club-house, gave to the mill-village the hopeful
+air of a "rising" residential suburb.
+
+In the bright June light, behind their fresh green mantle of trees and
+creepers, even the factory buildings looked less stern and prison-like
+than formerly; and the turfing and planting of the adjoining
+river-banks had transformed a waste of foul mud and refuse into a little
+park where the operatives might refresh themselves at midday.
+
+Yes--Westmore was alive at last: the dead city of which Justine had once
+spoken had risen from its grave, and its blank face had taken on a
+meaning. As Justine glanced at her husband she saw that the same thought
+was in his mind. However achieved, at whatever cost of personal misery
+and error, the work of awakening and freeing Westmore was done, and that
+work had justified itself.
+
+She looked from Amherst to Cicely, who sat opposite, eager and rosy in
+her mourning frock--for Mr. Langhope had died some two months
+previously--and as intent as her step-parents on the scene before her.
+Cicely was old enough now to regard her connection with Westmore as
+something more than a nursery game. She was beginning to learn a great
+deal about the mills, and to understand, in simple, friendly ways,
+something of her own relation to them. The work and play of the
+children, the interests and relaxations provided for their elders, had
+been gradually explained to her by Justine, and she knew that this
+shining tenth birthday of hers was to throw its light as far as the
+clouds of factory-smoke extended.
+
+As they mounted the slope to Hopewood, the spacious white building,
+with its enfolding colonnades, its broad terraces and tennis-courts,
+shone through the trees like some bright country-house adorned for its
+master's home-coming; and Amherst and his wife might have been driving
+up to the house which had been built to shelter their wedded happiness.
+The thought flashed across Justine as their carriage climbed the hill.
+She was as much absorbed as Amherst in the welfare of Westmore, it had
+become more and more, to both, the refuge in which their lives still met
+and mingled; but for a moment, as they paused before the flower-decked
+porch, and he turned to help her from the carriage, it occurred to her
+to wonder what her sensations would have been if he had been bringing
+her home--to a real home of their own--instead of accompanying her to
+another philanthropic celebration. But what need had they of a real
+home, when they no longer had any real life of their own? Nothing was
+left of that secret inner union which had so enriched and beautified
+their outward lives. Since Justine's return to Hanaford they had
+entered, tacitly, almost unconsciously, into a new relation to each
+other: a relation in which their personalities were more and more merged
+in their common work, so that, as it were, they met only by avoiding
+each other.
+
+From the first, Justine had accepted this as inevitable; just as she had
+understood, when Amherst had sought her out in New York, that his
+remaining at Westmore, which had once been contingent on her leaving
+him, now depended on her willingness to return and take up their former
+life.
+
+She accepted the last condition as she had accepted the other, pledged
+to the perpetual expiation of an act for which, in the abstract, she
+still refused to hold herself to blame. But life is not a matter of
+abstract principles, but a succession of pitiful compromises with fate,
+of concessions to old tradition, old beliefs, old charities and
+frailties. That was what her act had taught her--that was the word of
+the gods to the mortal who had laid a hand on their bolts. And she had
+humbled herself to accept the lesson, seeing human relations at last as
+a tangled and deep-rooted growth, a dark forest through which the
+idealist cannot cut his straight path without hearing at each stroke the
+cry of the severed branch: "_Why woundest thou me?_"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The lawns leading up to the house were already sprinkled with
+holiday-makers, while along the avenue came the rolling of wheels, the
+throb of motor-cars; and Justine, with Cicely beside her, stood in the
+wide hall to receive the incoming throng, in which Hanaford society was
+indiscriminately mingled with the operatives in their Sunday best.
+
+While his wife welcomed the new arrivals, Amherst, supported by some
+young Westmore cousins, was guiding them into the concert-hall, where he
+was to say a word on the uses of the building before declaring it open
+for inspection. And presently Justine and Cicely, summoned by Westy
+Gaines, made their way through the rows of seats to a corner near the
+platform. Her husband was there already, with Halford Gaines and a group
+of Hanaford dignitaries, and just below them sat Mrs. Gaines and her
+daughters, the Harry Dressels, and Amherst's radiant mother.
+
+As Justine passed between them, she wondered how much they knew of the
+events which had wrought so profound and permanent change in her life.
+She had never known how Hanaford explained her absence or what comments
+it had made on her return. But she saw to-day more clearly than ever
+that Amherst had become a power among his townsmen, and that if they
+were still blind to the inner meaning of his work, its practical results
+were beginning to impress them profoundly. Hanaford's sociological creed
+was largely based on commercial considerations, and Amherst had won
+Hanaford's esteem by the novel feat of defying its economic principles
+and snatching success out of his defiance.
+
+And now he had advanced a step or two in front of the "representative"
+semi-circle on the platform, and was beginning to speak.
+
+Justine did not hear his first words. She was looking up at him, trying
+to see him with the eyes of the crowd, and wondering what manner of man
+he would have seemed to her if she had known as little as they did of
+his inner history.
+
+He held himself straight, the heavy locks thrown back from his forehead,
+one hand resting on the table beside him, the other grasping a folded
+blue-print which the architect of the building had just advanced to give
+him. As he stood there, Justine recalled her first sight of him in the
+Hope Hospital, five years earlier--was it only five years? They had
+dealt deep strokes to his face, hollowing the eye-sockets, accentuating
+the strong modelling of nose and chin, fixing the lines between the
+brows; but every touch had a meaning--it was not the languid hand of
+time which had remade his features, but the sharp chisel of thought and
+action.
+
+She roused herself suddenly to the consciousness of what he was saying.
+
+"For the idea of this building--of a building dedicated to the
+recreation of Westmore--is not new in my mind; but while it remained
+there as a mere idea, it had already, without my knowledge, taken
+definite shape in the thoughts of the owner of Westmore."
+
+There was a slight drop in his voice as he designated Bessy, and he
+waited a moment before continuing: "It was not till after the death of
+my first wife that I learned of her intention--that I found by
+accident, among her papers, this carefully-studied plan for a
+pleasure-house at Hopewood."
+
+He paused again, and unrolling the blue-print, held it up before his
+audience.
+
+"You cannot, at this distance," he went on, "see all the admirable
+details of her plan; see how beautifully they were imagined, how
+carefully and intelligently elaborated. She who conceived them longed to
+see beauty everywhere--it was her dearest wish to bestow it on her
+people here. And her ardent imagination outran the bounds of practical
+possibility. We cannot give you, in its completeness, the beautiful
+thing she had imagined--the great terraces, the marble porches, the
+fountains, lily-tanks, and cloisters. But you will see that, wherever it
+was possible--though in humbler materials, and on a smaller scale--we
+have faithfully followed her design; and when presently you go through
+this building, and when, hereafter, you find health and refreshment and
+diversion here, I ask you to remember the beauty she dreamed of giving
+you, and to let the thought of it make her memory beautiful among you
+and among your children...."
+
+Justine had listened with deepening amazement. She was seated so close
+to her husband that she had recognized the blue-print the moment he
+unrolled it. There was no mistaking its origin--it was simply the plan
+of the gymnasium which Bessy had intended to build at Lynbrook, and
+which she had been constrained to abandon owing to her husband's
+increased expenditure at the mills. But how was it possible that Amherst
+knew nothing of the original purpose of the plans, and by what mocking
+turn of events had a project devised in deliberate defiance of his
+wishes, and intended to declare his wife's open contempt for them, been
+transformed into a Utopian vision for the betterment of the Westmore
+operatives?
+
+A wave of anger swept over Justine at this last derisive stroke of fate.
+It was grotesque and pitiable that a man like Amherst should create out
+of his regrets a being who had never existed, and then ascribe to her
+feelings and actions of which the real woman had again and again proved
+herself incapable!
+
+Ah, no, Justine had suffered enough--but to have this imaginary Bessy
+called from the grave, dressed in a semblance of self-devotion and
+idealism, to see her petty impulses of vindictiveness disguised as the
+motions of a lofty spirit--it was as though her small malicious ghost
+had devised this way of punishing the wife who had taken her place!
+
+Justine had suffered enough--suffered deliberately and unstintingly,
+paying the full price of her error, not seeking to evade its least
+consequence. But no sane judgment could ask her to sit quiet under this
+last hallucination. What! This unreal woman, this phantom that
+Amherst's uneasy imagination had evoked, was to come between himself and
+her, to supplant her first as his wife, and then as his fellow-worker?
+Why should she not cry out the truth to him, defend herself against the
+dead who came back to rob her of such wedded peace as was hers? She had
+only to tell the true story of the plans to lay poor Bessy's ghost
+forever!
+
+The confused throbbing impulses within her were stifled under a long
+burst of applause--then she saw Westy Gaines at her side again, and
+understood that he had come to lead Cicely to the platform. For a moment
+she clung jealously to the child's hand, hardly aware of what she did,
+feeling only that she was being thrust farther and farther into the
+background of the life she had helped to call out of chaos. Then a
+contrary impulse moved her. She gently freed Cicely's hand, and a moment
+later, as she sat with bent head and throbbing breast, she heard the
+child's treble piping out above her:
+
+"In my mother's name, I give this house to Westmore."
+
+Applause again--and then Justine found herself enveloped in a general
+murmur of compliment and congratulation. Mr. Amherst had spoken
+admirably--a "beautiful tribute--" ah, he had done poor Bessy justice!
+And to think that till now Hanaford had never fully known how she had
+the welfare of the mills at heart--how it was really only _her_ work
+that he was carrying on there! Well, he had made that perfectly
+clear--and no doubt Cicely was being taught to follow in her mother's
+footsteps: everyone had noticed how her step-father was associating her
+with the work at the mills. And his little speech would, as it were,
+consecrate the child's relation to that work, make it appear to her as
+the continuance of a beautiful, a sacred tradition....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now it was over. The building had been inspected, the operatives had
+dispersed, the Hanaford company had rolled off down the avenue, Cicely,
+among them, driving away tired and happy in Mrs. Dressel's victoria, and
+Amherst and his wife were alone.
+
+Amherst, after bidding good-bye to his last guests, had gone back to the
+empty concert-room to fetch the blue-print lying on the platform. He
+came back with it, between the uneven rows of empty chairs, and joined
+Justine, who stood waiting in the hall. His face was slightly flushed,
+and his eyes had the light which in happy moments burned through their
+veil of thought.
+
+He laid his hand on his wife's arm, and drawing her toward a table
+spread out the blueprint before her.
+
+"You haven't seen this, have you?" he said.
+
+She looked down at the plan without answering, reading in the left-hand
+corner the architect's conventional inscription: "Swimming-tank and
+gymnasium designed for Mrs. John Amherst."
+
+Amherst looked up, perhaps struck by her silence.
+
+"But perhaps you _have_ seen it--at Lynbrook? It must have been done
+while you were there."
+
+The quickened throb of her blood rushed to her brain like a signal.
+"Speak--speak now!" the signal commanded.
+
+Justine continued to look fixedly at the plan. "Yes, I have seen it,"
+she said at length.
+
+"At Lynbrook?"
+
+"At Lynbrook."
+
+"_She_ showed it to you, I suppose--while I was away?"
+
+Justine hesitated again. "Yes, while you were away."
+
+"And did she tell you anything about it, go into details about her
+wishes, her intentions?"
+
+Now was the moment--now! As her lips parted she looked up at her
+husband. The illumination still lingered on his face--and it was the
+face she loved. He was waiting eagerly for her next word.
+
+"No, I heard no details. I merely saw the plan lying there."
+
+She saw his look of disappointment. "She never told you about it?"
+
+"No--she never told me."
+
+It was best so, after all. She understood that now. It was now at last
+that she was paying her full price.
+
+Amherst rolled up the plan with a sigh and pushed it into the drawer of
+the table. It struck her that he too had the look of one who has laid a
+ghost. He turned to her and drew her hand through his arm.
+
+"You're tired, dear. You ought to have driven back with the others," he
+said.
+
+"No, I would rather stay with you."
+
+"You want to drain this good day to the dregs, as I do?"
+
+"Yes," she murmured, drawing her hand away.
+
+"It _is_ a good day, isn't it?" he continued, looking about him at the
+white-panelled walls, the vista of large bright rooms seen through the
+folding doors. "I feel as if we had reached a height, somehow--a height
+where one might pause and draw breath for the next climb. Don't you feel
+that too, Justine?"
+
+"Yes--I feel it."
+
+"Do you remember once, long ago--one day when you and I and Cicely went
+on a picnic to hunt orchids--how we got talking of the one best moment
+in life--the moment when one wanted most to stop the clock?"
+
+The colour rose in her face while he spoke. It was a long time since he
+had referred to the early days of their friendship--the days
+_before_....
+
+"Yes, I remember," she said.
+
+"And do you remember how we said that it was with most of us as it was
+with Faust? That the moment one wanted to hold fast to was not, in most
+lives, the moment of keenest personal happiness, but the other kind--the
+kind that would have seemed grey and colourless at first: the moment
+when the meaning of life began to come out from the mists--when one
+could look out at last over the marsh one had drained?"
+
+A tremor ran through Justine. "It was you who said that," she said,
+half-smiling.
+
+"But didn't you feel it with me? Don't you now?"
+
+"Yes--I do now," she murmured.
+
+He came close to her, and taking her hands in his, kissed them one after
+the other.
+
+"Dear," he said, "let us go out and look at the marsh we have drained."
+
+He turned and led her through the open doorway to the terrace above the
+river. The sun was setting behind the wooded slopes of Hopewood, and the
+trees about the house stretched long blue shadows across the lawn.
+Beyond them rose the smoke of Westmore.
+
+
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                    BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON                    |
+|                                                              |
+|             PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS             |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                        [12 mo. $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                      The House of Mirth                      |
+|                                                              |
+|               _Illustrations by_ A. B. WENZELL               |
+|                                                              |
+|   "In my judgment 'The House of Mirth' is a story of such    |
+|  vitality, of such artistic and moral insight, that it will  |
+| stand by itself in American fiction as a study of a certain  |
+|  kind of society. The title is a stroke of genius in irony,  |
+|    and gives the key to a novel of absorbing interest, as    |
+|  relentless as life itself in its judgment, but deeply and   |
+|    beautifully humanized at the end."--HAMILTON W. MABIE.    |
+|                                                              |
+| "Mrs. Wharton has done many good things. She has never done  |
+|         anything better than this."--_The Academy._          |
+|                                                              |
+|  "She is the first to make a really powerful and brilliant   |
+| book out of the material offered by American fashion to the  |
+| novelist.... A sterling piece of craftsmanship, a tale which |
+|  interests the reader at the start and never lets him rest   |
+|        till the end is reached."--New York _Tribune_.        |
+|                                                              |
+|    "So accurate an account of the thoughts and deeds of a    |
+| single human being has, we are certain, never hitherto been  |
+|               written."--Boston _Transcript_.                |
+|                                                              |
+|    "It is a great American novel, intensely interesting,     |
+|     marvelous in its literary finish and powerful in its     |
+|      delineation of Lily Bart."--Philadelphia _Press_.       |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                        [12 mo. $1.00]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                      Madame de Treymes                       |
+|                                                              |
+|           _Illustrated in color by_ A. B. WENZELL            |
+|                                                              |
+| "We know of no book in which the virtues of the short story  |
+| are united with the virtues of the novel in a higher degree  |
+|           than in this instance."--New York _Sun_.           |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                    BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON                    |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                        SIXTH EDITION                         |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo_, $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                   The Greater Inclination                    |
+|                                                              |
+|                           CONTENTS                           |
+|                                                              |
+|                     _The Muse's Tragedy_                     |
+|                         _A Journey_                          |
+|                        _The Pelican_                         |
+|                       _Souls Belated_                        |
+|                          _A Coward_                          |
+|                  _The Twilight of the Gods_                  |
+|                    _A Cup of Cold Water_                     |
+|                        _The Portrait_                        |
+|                                                              |
+|       "Between these stories and those of the ordinary       |
+| entertaining sort there is a great gulf fixed."--_The Dial._ |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo_, $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                      Crucial Instances                       |
+|                                                              |
+|                           CONTENTS                           |
+|                                                              |
+|                   _The Duchess at Prayer_                    |
+|                   _The Angel at the Grave_                   |
+|                        _The Recovery_                        |
+|                     _"Copy": A Dialogue_                     |
+|                       _The Rembrandt_                        |
+|                     _The Moving Finger_                      |
+|                      _The Confessional_                      |
+|                                                              |
+| "Tragedy and comedy, pathos and humor, are mingled in these  |
+|           pages of brilliant writing and splendid            |
+|             imagination."--Philadelphia _Press_.             |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo_, $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                    The Valley of Decision                    |
+|                                                              |
+|                        25TH THOUSAND                         |
+|                                                              |
+|  "Coming in the midst of an epoch overcrowded with works of  |
+|   fiction, 'The Valley of Decision' stands out giant-like    |
+| above its surroundings. It stands, indeed, almost without a  |
+| rival in the modern literary world, and there can be little  |
+| doubt that it places Mrs. Wharton at once side by side with  |
+|     the greatest novelists of the day."--Boston _Evening     |
+|                         Transcript_.                         |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                    BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON                    |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo, $1.25_]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                          Sanctuary                           |
+|                                                              |
+|              ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. APPLETON CLARK              |
+|                                                              |
+| "This is a striking little book--striking in its simplicity  |
+|     and penetration, its passion and restraint."--London     |
+|                           _Times_.                           |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo, $1.25_]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                        The Touchstone                        |
+|                                                              |
+|     "Its characters are real, their motives and actions      |
+|   thoroughly human. And the author's art is sufficient to    |
+| bring out the strength of every situation."--_The Argonaut._ |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo_, $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                      The Descent of Man                      |
+|                                                              |
+|                           CONTENTS                           |
+|                                                              |
+|                     _The Descent of Man_                     |
+|                    _The Mission of Jane_                     |
+|                       _The Other Two_                        |
+|                       _The Quicksand_                        |
+|                       _The Dilettante_                       |
+|                       _The Reckoning_                        |
+|                         _Expiation_                          |
+|                   _The Lady's Maid's Bell_                   |
+|              _A Venetian Night's Entertainment_              |
+|                                                              |
+|  "It is, of course, the extraordinary directness with which  |
+| Mrs. Wharton's probe goes to the spot under inspection, the  |
+| deftness with which she is able to bring to the light of day |
+| what we had hidden even from ourselves, that account for the |
+| admiration with which we regard her short stories."--London  |
+|                          _Academy_.                          |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                    BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON                    |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|             [_8vo, $2.50 net._ Postage 17 cents]             |
+|                                                              |
+|                     Italian Backgrounds                      |
+|                                                              |
+|                   ILLUSTRATED BY PEIXOTTO                    |
+|                                                              |
+|                           CONTENTS                           |
+|                                                              |
+|                   _An Alpine Posting Inn_                    |
+|                  _A Midsummer Week's Dream_                  |
+|               _The Sanctuaries of the Pennine_               |
+|                            _Alps_                            |
+|                    _What the Hermits Saw_                    |
+|                      _A Tuscan Shrine_                       |
+|                     _Sub Umbra Liliorum_                     |
+|                       _March in Italy_                       |
+|                     _Picturesque Milan_                      |
+|                    _Italian Backgrounds_                     |
+|                                                              |
+|  "Belongs in that small class of books of observation which  |
+|   are also books of artistic and spiritual interpretation;   |
+| which not only describe places and monuments, but convey an  |
+| impression of peoples, a sense of society, with the elusive  |
+|   atmosphere in which everything of historical or artistic   |
+|  value is seen by those who have the gift of sight."--_The   |
+|                          Outlook._                           |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                     [_12mo, $1.25 net_]                      |
+|                                                              |
+|                      The Joy of Living                       |
+|                                                              |
+|                    (_Es lebe das Leben_)                     |
+|                                                              |
+|  A play in five acts, by HERMANN SUDERMANN. Translated from  |
+|                 the German by EDITH WHARTON.                 |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                   [_Large 8vo, $2.50 net_]                   |
+|                                                              |
+|                   The Decoration of Houses                   |
+|                                                              |
+| With 56 full-page illustrations, by EDITH WHARTON and OGDEN  |
+|                         CODMAN, JR.                          |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+Most inconsistencies in hyphenation and spelling have been left as in the
+original. Missing or wrong punctuation has been added or corrected,
+where it is obvious (missing punctuation is often a result of the
+scanning/OCR process). In one case, a missing letter has also been
+added, and the following misspellings have been corrected: involuntairly to
+involuntarily, sensastions to sensations, Wetsmore to Westmore, Cilfton
+to Clifton, It to If
+
+
+
+
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+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton.
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Fruit of the Tree
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+Illustrator: Alonzo Kimball
+
+Release Date: September 6, 2006 [EBook #19191]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRUIT OF THE TREE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Melissa Er-Raqabi
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>THE FRUIT OF THE TREE</h1>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/illus-01.jpg"
+alt="He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured man."
+title="He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured man." />
+<br />
+<span class="caption">He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured man.</span>
+<br /><br /></div>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>THE FRUIT OF THE TREE</h1>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2>EDITH WHARTON<br /></h2>
+
+<h3>WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALONZO KIMBALL</h3>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="center">NEW YORK<br />
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br />
+MDCCCCVII</p>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="center">COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/mark.png"
+alt="mark" title="mark" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="List of Illustrations">
+<tr><td align='left'><i>He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured man&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</i></td><td align='right'><i>Frontispiece</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>"No&mdash;I shall have to ask you to take my word for it"</i></td><td align='right'><i>Facing p. 82</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>Half-way up the slope they met</i></td><td align='right'>130</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE<br />
+FRUIT OF THE TREE</h2>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>I</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the surgical ward of the Hope Hospital at Hanaford,
+a nurse was bending over a young man
+whose bandaged right hand and arm lay stretched
+along the bed.</p>
+
+<p>His head stirred uneasily, and slipping her arm behind
+him she effected a professional readjustment of
+the pillows. "Is that better?"</p>
+
+<p>As she leaned over, he lifted his anxious bewildered
+eyes, deep-sunk under ridges of suffering. "I don't
+s'pose there's any kind of a show for me, is there?" he
+asked, pointing with his free hand&mdash;the stained seamed
+hand of the mechanic&mdash;to the inert bundle on the quilt.</p>
+
+<p>Her only immediate answer was to wipe the dampness
+from his forehead; then she said: "We'll talk
+about that to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because Dr. Disbrow can't tell till the inflammation
+goes down."</p>
+
+<p>"Will it go down by to-morrow?"</p>
+
+<p>"It will begin to, if you don't excite yourself and
+keep up the fever."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[p 4]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Excite myself? I&mdash;there's four of 'em at home&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then there are four reasons for keeping quiet,"
+she rejoined.</p>
+
+<p>She did not use, in speaking, the soothing inflection
+of her trade: she seemed to disdain to cajole or trick
+the sufferer. Her full young voice kept its cool note of
+authority, her sympathy revealing itself only in the
+expert touch of her hands and the constant vigilance
+of her dark steady eyes. This vigilance softened to
+pity as the patient turned his head away with a groan.
+His free left hand continued to travel the sheet, clasping
+and unclasping itself in contortions of feverish
+unrest. It was as though all the anguish of his mutilation
+found expression in that lonely hand, left
+without work in the world now that its mate was
+useless.</p>
+
+<p>The nurse felt a touch on her shoulder, and rose to
+face the matron, a sharp-featured woman with a soft
+intonation.</p>
+
+<p>"This is Mr. Amherst, Miss Brent. The assistant
+manager from the mills. He wishes to see Dillon."</p>
+
+<p>John Amherst's step was singularly noiseless. The
+nurse, sensitive by nature and training to all physical
+characteristics, was struck at once by the contrast between
+his alert face and figure and the silent way in
+which he moved. She noticed, too, that the same contrast
+was repeated in the face itself, its spare energetic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[p 5]</a></span>
+outline, with the high nose and compressed lips of the
+mover of men, being curiously modified by the veiled
+inward gaze of the grey eyes he turned on her. It was
+one of the interests of Justine Brent's crowded yet
+lonely life to attempt a rapid mental classification of
+the persons she met; but the contradictions in Amherst's
+face baffled her, and she murmured inwardly
+"I don't know" as she drew aside to let him approach
+the bed. He stood by her in silence, his hands clasped
+behind him, his eyes on the injured man, who lay
+motionless, as if sunk in a lethargy. The matron, at
+the call of another nurse, had minced away down the
+ward, committing Amherst with a glance to Miss Brent;
+and the two remained alone by the bed.</p>
+
+<p>After a pause, Amherst moved toward the window
+beyond the empty cot adjoining Dillon's. One of the
+white screens used to isolate dying patients had been
+placed against this cot, which was the last at that
+end of the ward, and the space beyond formed a
+secluded corner, where a few words could be exchanged
+out of reach of the eyes in the other beds.</p>
+
+<p>"Is he asleep?" Amherst asked, as Miss Brent
+joined him.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brent glanced at him again. His voice betokened
+not merely education, but something different
+and deeper&mdash;the familiar habit of gentle speech; and
+his shabby clothes&mdash;carefully brushed, but ill-cut and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[p 6]</a></span>
+worn along the seams&mdash;sat on him easily, and with the
+same difference.</p>
+
+<p>"The morphine has made him drowsy," she answered.
+"The wounds were dressed about an hour
+ago, and the doctor gave him a hypodermic."</p>
+
+<p>"The wounds&mdash;how many are there?"</p>
+
+<p>"Besides the hand, his arm is badly torn up to the
+elbow."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst listened with bent head and frowning brow.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think of the case?"</p>
+
+<p>She hesitated. "Dr. Disbrow hasn't said&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And it's not your business to?" He smiled slightly.
+"I know hospital etiquette. But I have a particular reason
+for asking." He broke off and looked at her again,
+his veiled gaze sharpening to a glance of concentrated
+attention. "You're not one of the regular nurses, are
+you? Your dress seems to be of a different colour."</p>
+
+<p>She smiled at the "seems to be," which denoted a
+tardy and imperfect apprehension of the difference
+between dark-blue linen and white.</p>
+
+<p>"No: I happened to be staying at Hanaford, and
+hearing that they were in want of a surgical nurse, I
+offered my help."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst nodded. "So much the better. Is there
+any place where I can say two words to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I could hardly leave the ward now, unless Mrs.
+Ogan comes back."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[p 7]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I don't care to have you call Mrs. Ogan," he interposed
+quickly. "When do you go off duty?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him in surprise. "If what you want
+to ask about is&mdash;anything connected with the management
+of things here&mdash;you know we're not supposed to
+talk of our patients outside of the hospital."</p>
+
+<p>"I know. But I am going to ask you to break
+through the rule&mdash;in that poor fellow's behalf."</p>
+
+<p>A protest wavered on her lip, but he held her eyes
+steadily, with a glint of good-humour behind his determination.
+"When do you go off duty?"</p>
+
+<p>"At six."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll wait at the corner of South Street and walk
+a little way with you. Let me put my case, and if
+you're not convinced you can refuse to answer."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," she said, without farther hesitation;
+and Amherst, with a slight nod of farewell, passed
+through the door near which they had been standing.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">When</span> Justine Brent emerged from the Hope
+Hospital the October dusk had fallen and the
+wide suburban street was almost dark, except when
+the illuminated bulk of an electric car flashed by under
+the maples.</p>
+
+<p>She crossed the tracks and approached the narrower<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[p 8]</a></span>
+thoroughfare where Amherst awaited her. He hung
+back a moment, and she was amused to see that he
+failed to identify the uniformed nurse with the girl in
+her trim dark dress, soberly complete in all its accessories,
+who advanced to him, smiling under her little veil.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," he said as he turned and walked beside
+her. "Is this your way?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am staying in Oak Street. But it's just as short
+to go by Maplewood Avenue."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; and quieter."</p>
+
+<p>For a few yards they walked on in silence, their long
+steps falling naturally into time, though Amherst was
+somewhat taller than his companion.</p>
+
+<p>At length he said: "I suppose you know nothing
+about the relation between Hope Hospital and the
+Westmore Mills."</p>
+
+<p>"Only that the hospital was endowed by one of the
+Westmore family."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; an old Miss Hope, a great-aunt of Westmore's.
+But there is more than that between them&mdash;all
+kinds of subterranean passages." He paused, and
+began again: "For instance, Dr. Disbrow married the
+sister of our manager's wife."</p>
+
+<p>"Your chief at the mills?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said with a slight grimace. "So you see,
+if Truscomb&mdash;the manager&mdash;thinks one of the mill-hands
+is only slightly injured, it's natural that his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[p 9]</a></span>
+brother-in-law, Dr. Disbrow, should take an optimistic
+view of the case."</p>
+
+<p>"Natural? I don't know&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think it's natural that a man should be
+influenced by his wife?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not where his professional honour is concerned."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst smiled. "That sounds very young&mdash;if
+you'll excuse my saying so. Well, I won't go on to
+insinuate that, Truscomb being high in favour with
+the Westmores, and the Westmores having a lien on
+the hospital, Disbrow's position there is also bound up
+with his taking&mdash;more or less&mdash;the same view as Truscomb's."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brent had paused abruptly on the deserted
+pavement.</p>
+
+<p>"No, don't go on&mdash;if you want me to think well of
+you," she flashed out.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst met the thrust composedly, perceiving, as
+she turned to face him, that what she resented was not
+so much his insinuation against his superiors as his
+allusion to the youthfulness of her sentiments. She
+was, in fact, as he now noticed, still young enough to
+dislike being excused for her youth. In her severe
+uniform of blue linen, her dusky skin darkened by the
+nurse's cap, and by the pale background of the hospital
+walls, she had seemed older, more competent and
+experienced; but he now saw how fresh was the pale<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[p 10]</a></span>
+curve of her cheek, and how smooth the brow clasped
+in close waves of hair.</p>
+
+<p>"I began at the wrong end," he acknowledged.
+"But let me put Dillon's case before you dismiss me."</p>
+
+<p>She softened. "It is only because of my interest in
+that poor fellow that I am here&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Because you think he needs help&mdash;and that you
+can help him?"</p>
+
+<p>But she held back once more. "Please tell me about
+him first," she said, walking on.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst met the request with another question.
+"I wonder how much you know about factory life?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, next to nothing. Just what I've managed to
+pick up in these two days at the hospital."</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at her small determined profile under its
+dark roll of hair, and said, half to himself: "That
+might be a good deal."</p>
+
+<p>She took no notice of this, and he went on: "Well,
+I won't try to put the general situation before you,
+though Dillon's accident is really the result of it. He
+works in the carding room, and on the day of the accident
+his 'card' stopped suddenly, and he put his hand
+behind him to get a tool he needed out of his trouser-pocket.
+He reached back a little too far, and the card
+behind him caught his hand in its million of diamond-pointed
+wires. Truscomb and the overseer of the room
+maintain that the accident was due to his own care<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[p 11]</a></span>lessness;
+but the hands say that it was caused by the
+fact of the cards being too near together, and that just
+such an accident was bound to happen sooner or later."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brent drew an eager breath. "And what do
+<i>you</i> say?"</p>
+
+<p>"That they're right: the carding-room is shamefully
+overcrowded. Dillon hasn't been in it long&mdash;he
+worked his way up at the mills from being a bobbin-boy&mdash;and
+he hadn't yet learned how cautious a man
+must be in there. The cards are so close to each other
+that even the old hands run narrow risks, and it takes
+the cleverest operative some time to learn that he must
+calculate every movement to a fraction of an inch."</p>
+
+<p>"But why do they crowd the rooms in that way?"</p>
+
+<p>"To get the maximum of profit out of the minimum
+of floor-space. It costs more to increase the floor-space
+than to maim an operative now and then."</p>
+
+<p>"I see. Go on," she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"That's the first point; here is the second. Dr.
+Disbrow told Truscomb this morning that Dillon's
+hand would certainly be saved, and that he might get
+back to work in a couple of months if the company
+would present him with an artificial finger or two."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brent faced him with a flush of indignation.
+"Mr. Amherst&mdash;who gave you this version of Dr. Disbrow's
+report?"</p>
+
+<p>"The manager himself."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[p 12]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Verbally?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;he showed me Disbrow's letter."</p>
+
+<p>For a moment or two they walked on silently through
+the quiet street; then she said, in a voice still stirred
+with feeling: "As I told you this afternoon, Dr. Disbrow
+has said nothing in my hearing."</p>
+
+<p>"And Mrs. Ogan?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mrs. Ogan&mdash;" Her voice broke in a ripple of
+irony. "Mrs. Ogan 'feels it to be such a beautiful
+dispensation, my dear, that, owing to a death that very
+morning in the surgical ward, we happened to have a
+bed ready for the poor man within three hours of the
+accident.'" She had exchanged her deep throat-tones
+for a high reedy note which perfectly simulated the
+matron's lady-like inflections.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst, at the change, turned on her with a boyish
+burst of laughter: she joined in it, and for a moment
+they were blent in that closest of unions, the discovery
+of a common fund of humour.</p>
+
+<p>She was the first to grow grave. "That three hours'
+delay didn't help matters&mdash;how is it there is no emergency
+hospital at the mills?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst laughed again, but in a different key.
+"That's part of the larger question, which we haven't
+time for now." He waited a moment, and then added:
+"You've not yet given me your own impression of
+Dillon's case."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[p 13]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You shall have it, if you saw that letter. Dillon
+will certainly lose his hand&mdash;and probably the whole
+arm." She spoke with a thrilling of her slight frame
+that transformed the dispassionate professional into a
+girl shaken with indignant pity.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst stood still before her. "Good God! Never
+anything but useless lumber?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And he won't die?"</p>
+
+<p>"Alas!"</p>
+
+<p>"He has a consumptive wife and three children.
+She ruined her health swallowing cotton-dust at the
+factory," Amherst continued.</p>
+
+<p>"So she told me yesterday."</p>
+
+<p>He turned in surprise. "You've had a talk with her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I went out to Westmore last night. I was haunted
+by her face when she came to the hospital. She looks
+forty, but she told me she was only twenty-six." Miss
+Brent paused to steady her voice. "It's the curse of
+my trade that it's always tempting me to interfere in
+cases where I can do no possible good. The fact is,
+I'm not fit to be a nurse&mdash;I shall live and die a wretched
+sentimentalist!" she ended, with an angry dash at the
+tears on her veil.</p>
+
+<p>Her companion walked on in silence till she had
+regained her composure. Then he said: "What did you
+think of Westmore?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[p 14]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I think it's one of the worst places I ever saw&mdash;and
+I am not unused to slums. It looks so dead. The
+slums of big cities are much more cheerful."</p>
+
+<p>He made no answer, and after a moment she asked:
+"Does the cotton-dust always affect the lungs?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's likely to, where there is the least phthisical tendency.
+But of course the harm could be immensely
+reduced by taking up the old rough floors which hold
+the dust, and by thorough cleanliness and ventilation."</p>
+
+<p>"What does the company do in such cases? Where
+an operative breaks down at twenty-five?"</p>
+
+<p>"The company says there was a phthisical tendency."</p>
+
+<p>"And will they give nothing in return for the two
+lives they have taken?"</p>
+
+<p>"They will probably pay for Dillon's care at the
+hospital, and they have taken the wife back as a
+scrubber."</p>
+
+<p>"To clean those uncleanable floors? She's not fit
+for it!"</p>
+
+<p>"She must work, fit for it or not; and there is less
+strain in scrubbing than in bending over the looms or
+cards. The pay is lower, of course, but she's very
+grateful for being taken back at all, now that <ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'he's'">she's</ins> no
+longer a first-class worker."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brent's face glowed with a fine wrath. "She
+can't possibly stand more than two or three months of
+it without breaking down!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[p 15]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, you see they've told her that in less than that
+time her husband will be at work again."</p>
+
+<p>"And what will the company do for them when the
+wife is a hopeless invalid, and the husband a cripple?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst again uttered the dry laugh with which he
+had met her suggestion of an emergency hospital. "I
+know what I should do if I could get anywhere near
+Dillon&mdash;give him an overdose of morphine, and let the
+widow collect his life-insurance, and make a fresh start."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him curiously. "Should you, I wonder?"</p>
+
+<p>"If I saw the suffering as you see it, and knew the
+circumstances as I know them, I believe I should feel
+justified&mdash;" He broke off. "In your work, don't you
+ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?"</p>
+
+<p>She mused. "One might...but perhaps the professional
+instinct to save would always come first."</p>
+
+<p>"To save&mdash;what? When all the good of life is
+gone?"</p>
+
+<p>"I daresay," she sighed, "poor Dillon would do it
+himself if he could&mdash;when he realizes that all the good
+<i>is</i> gone."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but he can't do it himself; and it's the irony
+of such cases that his employers, after ruining his life,
+will do all they can to patch up the ruins."</p>
+
+<p>"But that at least ought to count in their favour."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps; if&mdash;" He paused, as though reluctant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[p 16]</a></span>
+to lay himself open once more to the charge of uncharitableness;
+and suddenly she exclaimed, looking
+about her: "I didn't notice we had walked so far down
+Maplewood Avenue!"</p>
+
+<p>They had turned a few minutes previously into the
+wide thoroughfare crowning the high ground which is
+covered by the residential quarter of Hanaford. Here
+the spacious houses, withdrawn behind shrubberies and
+lawns, revealed in their silhouettes every form of architectural
+experiment, from the symmetrical pre-Revolutionary
+structure, with its classic portico and clipped
+box-borders, to the latest outbreak in boulders and
+Moorish tiles.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst followed his companion's glance with surprise.
+"We <i>have</i> gone a block or two out of our way.
+I always forget where I am when I'm talking about
+anything that interests me."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brent looked at her watch. "My friends don't
+dine till seven, and I can get home in time by taking a
+Grove Street car," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"If you don't mind walking a little farther you can
+take a Liberty Street car instead. They run oftener,
+and you will get home just as soon."</p>
+
+<p>She made a gesture of assent, and as they walked on
+he continued: "I haven't yet explained why I am so
+anxious to get an unbiassed opinion of Dillon's case."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him in surprise. "What you've told<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[p 17]</a></span>
+me about Dr. Disbrow and your manager is surely
+enough."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, hardly, considering that I am Truscomb's
+subordinate. I shouldn't have committed a breach of
+professional etiquette, or asked you to do so, if I hadn't
+a hope of bettering things; but I have, and that is why
+I've held on at Westmore for the last few months, instead
+of getting out of it altogether."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad of that," she said quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"The owner of the mills&mdash;young Richard Westmore&mdash;died
+last winter," he went on, "and my hope&mdash;it's
+no more&mdash;is that the new broom may sweep a little
+cleaner."</p>
+
+<p>"Who is the new broom?"</p>
+
+<p>"Westmore left everything to his widow, and she is
+coming here to-morrow to look into the management of
+the mills."</p>
+
+<p>"Coming? She doesn't live here, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"At Hanaford? Heaven forbid! It's an anomaly
+nowadays for the employer to live near the employed.
+The Westmores have always lived in New York&mdash;and
+I believe they have a big place on Long Island."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, at any rate she <i>is</i> coming, and that ought to
+be a good sign. Did she never show any interest in
+the mills during her husband's life?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not as far as I know. I've been at Westmore
+three years, and she's not been seen there in my time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[p 18]</a></span>
+She is very young, and Westmore himself didn't care.
+It was a case of inherited money. He drew the dividends,
+and Truscomb did the rest."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brent reflected. "I don't know much about
+the constitution of companies&mdash;but I suppose Mrs.
+Westmore doesn't unite all the offices in her own person.
+Is there no one to stand between Truscomb and
+the operatives?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the company, on paper, shows the usual official
+hierarchy. Richard Westmore, of course, was president,
+and since his death the former treasurer&mdash;Halford
+Gaines&mdash;has replaced him, and his son, Westmore
+Gaines, has been appointed treasurer. You can see
+by the names that it's all in the family. Halford Gaines
+married a Miss Westmore, and represents the clan at
+Hanaford&mdash;leads society, and keeps up the social credit
+of the name. As treasurer, Mr. Halford Gaines kept
+strictly to his special business, and always refused to
+interfere between Truscomb and the operatives. As
+president he will probably follow the same policy, the
+more so as it fits in with his inherited respect for the
+<i>status quo</i>, and his blissful ignorance of economics."</p>
+
+<p>"And the new treasurer&mdash;young Gaines? Is there no
+hope of his breaking away from the family tradition?"</p>
+
+<p>"Westy Gaines has a better head than his father;
+but he hates Hanaford and the mills, and his chief object
+in life is to be taken for a New Yorker. So far he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[p 19]</a></span>
+hasn't been here much, except for the quarterly meetings,
+and his routine work is done by another cousin&mdash;you
+perceive that Westmore is a nest of nepotism."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brent's work among the poor had developed
+her interest in social problems, and she followed these
+details attentively.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the outlook is not encouraging, but perhaps
+Mrs. Westmore's coming will make a change. I suppose
+she has more power than any one."</p>
+
+<p>"She might have, if she chose to exert it, for her
+husband was really the whole company. The official
+cousins hold only a few shares apiece."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps, then, her visit will open her eyes. Who
+knows but poor Dillon's case may help others&mdash;prove a
+beautiful dispensation, as Mrs. Ogan would say?"</p>
+
+<p>"It does come terribly pat as an illustration of some
+of the abuses I want to have remedied. The difficulty
+will be to get the lady's ear. That's her house we're
+coming to, by the way."</p>
+
+<p>An electric street-lamp irradiated the leafless trees
+and stone gate-posts of the building before them.
+Though gardens extended behind it, the house stood
+so near the pavement that only two short flights of steps
+intervened between the gate-posts and the portico.
+Light shone from every window of the pompous rusticated
+fa&ccedil;ade&mdash;in the turreted "Tuscan villa" style of
+the 'fifties&mdash;and as Miss Brent and Amherst approached,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[p 20]</a></span>
+their advance was checked by a group of persons who
+were just descending from two carriages at the door.</p>
+
+<p>The lamp-light showed every detail of dress and
+countenance in the party, which consisted of two men,
+one slightly lame, with a long white moustache and a
+distinguished nose, the other short, lean and professional,
+and of two ladies and their laden attendants.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, that must be her party arriving!" Miss Brent
+exclaimed; and as she spoke the younger of the two
+ladies, turning back to her maid, exposed to the glare
+of the electric light a fair pale face shadowed by the
+projection of her widow's veil.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that Mrs. Westmore?" Miss Brent whispered;
+and as Amherst muttered: "I suppose so; I've never
+seen her&mdash;&mdash;" she continued excitedly: "She looks so
+like&mdash;do you know what her name was before she
+married?"</p>
+
+<p>He drew his brows together in a hopeless effort of remembrance.
+"I don't know&mdash;I must have heard&mdash;but
+I never can recall people's names."</p>
+
+<p>"That's bad, for a leader of men!" she said mockingly,
+and he answered, as though touched on a sore
+point: "I mean people who don't count. I never
+forget an operative's name or face."</p>
+
+<p>"One can never tell who may be going to count,"
+she rejoined sententiously.</p>
+
+<p>He dwelt on this in silence while they walked on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[p 21]</a></span>
+catching as they passed a glimpse of the red-carpeted
+Westmore hall on which the glass doors were just
+being closed. At length he roused himself to ask:
+"Does Mrs. Westmore look like some one you know?"</p>
+
+<p>"I fancied so&mdash;a girl who was at the Sacred Heart
+in Paris with me. But isn't this my corner?" she exclaimed,
+as they turned into another street, down which
+a laden car was descending.</p>
+
+<p>Its approach left them time for no more than a
+hurried hand-clasp, and when Miss Brent had been
+absorbed into the packed interior her companion, as
+his habit was, stood for a while where she had left him,
+gazing at some indefinite point in space; then, waking
+to a sudden consciousness of his surroundings, he
+walked off toward the centre of the town.</p>
+
+<p>At the junction of two business streets he met an
+empty car marked "Westmore," and springing into it,
+seated himself in a corner and drew out a pocket Shakespeare.
+He read on, indifferent to his surroundings,
+till the car left the asphalt streets and illuminated shop-fronts
+for a grey intermediate region of mud and
+macadam. Then he pocketed his volume and sat
+looking out into the gloom.</p>
+
+<p>The houses grew less frequent, with darker gaps of
+night between; and the rare street-lamps shone on
+cracked pavements, crooked telegraph-poles, hoardings
+tapestried with patent-medicine posters, and all the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[p 22]</a></span>
+mean desolation of an American industrial suburb.
+Farther on there came a weed-grown field or two, then
+a row of operatives' houses, the showy gables of the
+"Eldorado" road-house&mdash;the only building in Westmore
+on which fresh paint was freely lavished&mdash;then
+the company "store," the machine shops and other out-buildings,
+the vast forbidding bulk of the factories looming
+above the river-bend, and the sudden neatness of the
+manager's turf and privet hedges. The scene was so
+familiar to Amherst that he had lost the habit of comparison,
+and his absorption in the moral and material
+needs of the workers sometimes made him forget the
+outward setting of their lives. But to-night he recalled
+the nurse's comment&mdash;"it looks so dead"&mdash;and the
+phrase roused him to a fresh perception of the scene.
+With sudden disgust he saw the sordidness of it all&mdash;the
+poor monotonous houses, the trampled grass-banks,
+the lean dogs prowling in refuse-heaps, the reflection of
+a crooked gas-lamp in a stagnant loop of the river; and
+he asked himself how it was possible to put any sense
+of moral beauty into lives bounded forever by the low
+horizon of the factory. There is a fortuitous ugliness
+that has life and hope in it: the ugliness of overcrowded
+city streets, of the rush and drive of packed activities;
+but this out-spread meanness of the suburban working
+colony, uncircumscribed by any pressure of surrounding
+life, and sunk into blank acceptance of its isolation, its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[p 23]</a></span>
+banishment from beauty and variety and surprise,
+seemed to Amherst the very negation of hope and life.</p>
+
+<p>"She's right," he mused&mdash;"it's dead&mdash;stone dead:
+there isn't a drop of wholesome blood left in it."</p>
+
+<p>The Moosuc River valley, in the hollow of which,
+for that river's sake, the Westmore mills had been
+planted, lingered in the memory of pre-industrial Hanaford
+as the pleasantest suburb of the town. Here, beyond
+a region of orchards and farm-houses, several
+"leading citizens" had placed, above the river-bank,
+their prim wood-cut "residences," with porticoes and
+terraced lawns; and from the chief of these, Hopewood,
+brought into the Westmore family by the Miss Hope
+who had married an earlier Westmore, the grim mill-village
+had been carved. The pillared "residences"
+had, after this, inevitably fallen to base uses; but the
+old house at Hopewood, in its wooded grounds, remained,
+neglected but intact, beyond the first bend of
+the river, deserted as a dwelling but "held" in anticipation
+of rising values, when the inevitable growth of
+Westmore should increase the demand for small building
+lots. Whenever Amherst's eyes were refreshed by
+the hanging foliage above the roofs of Westmore, he
+longed to convert the abandoned country-seat into a
+park and playground for the mill-hands; but he knew
+that the company counted on the gradual sale of Hopewood
+as a source of profit. No&mdash;the mill-town would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[p 24]</a></span>
+not grow beautiful as it grew larger&mdash;rather, in obedience
+to the grim law of industrial prosperity, it would soon
+lose its one lingering grace and spread out in unmitigated
+ugliness, devouring green fields and shaded
+slopes like some insect-plague consuming the land.
+The conditions were familiar enough to Amherst; and
+their apparent inevitableness mocked the hopes he had
+based on Mrs. Westmore's arrival.</p>
+
+<p>"Where every stone is piled on another, through the
+whole stupid structure of selfishness and egotism, how
+can one be pulled out without making the whole thing
+topple? And whatever they're blind to, they always
+see that," he mused, reaching up for the strap of the car.</p>
+
+<p>He walked a few yards beyond the manager's house,
+and turned down a side street lined with scattered cottages.
+Approaching one of these by a gravelled path
+he pushed open the door, and entered a sitting-room
+where a green-shaded lamp shone pleasantly on bookshelves
+and a crowded writing-table.</p>
+
+<p>A brisk little woman in black, laying down the evening
+paper as she rose, lifted her hands to his tall
+shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, mother," he said, stooping to her kiss.</p>
+
+<p>"You're late, John," she smiled back at him, not reproachfully,
+but with affection.</p>
+
+<p>She was a wonderfully compact and active creature,
+with face so young and hair so white that she looked as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[p 25]</a></span>
+unreal as a stage mother till a close view revealed the
+fine lines that experience had drawn about her mouth
+and eyes. The eyes themselves, brightly black and
+glancing, had none of the veiled depths of her son's
+gaze. Their look was outward, on a world which had
+dealt her hard blows and few favours, but in which her
+interest was still fresh, amused and unabated.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst glanced at his watch. "Never mind&mdash;Duplain
+will be later still. I had to go into Hanaford,
+and he is replacing me at the office."</p>
+
+<p>"So much the better, dear: we can have a minute to
+ourselves. Sit down and tell me what kept you."</p>
+
+<p>She picked up her knitting as she spoke, having the
+kind of hands that find repose in ceaseless small activities.
+Her son could not remember a time when he
+had not seen those small hands in motion&mdash;shaping
+garments, darning rents, repairing furniture, exploring
+the inner economy of clocks. "I make a sort of rag-carpet
+of the odd minutes," she had once explained
+to a friend who wondered at her turning to her needlework
+in the moment's interval between other tasks.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst threw himself wearily into a chair. "I was
+trying to find out something about Dillon's case," he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>His mother turned a quick glance toward the door,
+rose to close it, and reseated herself.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[p 26]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I managed to have a talk with his nurse when she
+went off duty this evening."</p>
+
+<p>"The nurse? I wonder you could get her to speak."</p>
+
+<p>"Luckily she's not the regular incumbent, but a
+volunteer who happened to be here on a visit. As it
+was, I had some difficulty in making her talk&mdash;till I
+told her of Disbrow's letter."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright glance from the
+needles. "He's very bad, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hopelessly maimed!"</p>
+
+<p>She shivered and cast down her eyes. "Do you
+suppose she really knows?"</p>
+
+<p>"She struck me as quite competent to judge."</p>
+
+<p>"A volunteer, you say, here on a visit? What is her
+name?"</p>
+
+<p>He raised his head with a vague look. "I never
+thought of asking her."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst laughed. "How like you! Did she
+say with whom she was staying?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think she said in Oak Street&mdash;but she didn't mention
+any name."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst wrinkled her brows thoughtfully. "I
+wonder if she's not the thin dark girl I saw the other
+day with Mrs. Harry Dressel. Was she tall and rather
+handsome?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," murmured Amherst indifferently.
+As a rule he was humorously resigned to his mother's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[p 27]</a></span>
+habit of deserting the general for the particular, and
+following some irrelevant thread of association in utter
+disregard of the main issue. But to-night, preoccupied
+with his subject, and incapable of conceiving how anyone
+else could be unaffected by it, he resented her indifference
+as a sign of incurable frivolity.</p>
+
+<p>"How she can live close to such suffering and forget
+it!" was his thought; then, with a movement of self-reproach,
+he remembered that the work flying through
+her fingers was to take shape as a garment for one of
+the infant Dillons. "She takes her pity out in action,
+like that quiet nurse, who was as cool as a drum-major
+till she took off her uniform&mdash;and then!" His face
+softened at the recollection of the girl's outbreak.
+Much as he admired, in theory, the woman who kept
+a calm exterior in emergencies, he had all a man's
+desire to know that the springs of feeling lay close to
+the unruffled surface.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst had risen and crossed over to his chair.
+She leaned on it a moment, pushing the tossed brown
+hair from his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>"John, have you considered what you mean to do next?"</p>
+
+<p>He threw back his head to meet her gaze.</p>
+
+<p>"About this Dillon case," she continued. "How
+are all these investigations going to help you?"</p>
+
+<p>Their eyes rested on each other for a moment; then he
+said coldly: "You are afraid I am going to lose my place."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[p 28]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She flushed like a girl and murmured: "It's not the
+kind of place I ever wanted to see you in!"</p>
+
+<p>"I know it," he returned in a gentler tone, clasping
+one of the hands on his chair-back. "I ought to have
+followed a profession, like my grandfather; but my
+father's blood was too strong in me. I should never
+have been content as anything but a working-man."</p>
+
+<p>"How can you call your father a working-man? He
+had a genius for mechanics, and if he had lived he would
+have been as great in his way as any statesman or lawyer."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst smiled. "Greater, to my thinking; but
+he gave me his hard-working hands without the genius
+to create with them. I wish I had inherited more from
+him, or less; but I must make the best of what I am,
+rather than try to be somebody else." He laid her
+hand caressingly against his cheek. "It's hard on you,
+mother&mdash;but you must bear with me."</p>
+
+<p>"I have never complained, John; but now you've
+chosen your work, it's natural that I should want you
+to stick to it."</p>
+
+<p>He rose with an impatient gesture. "Never fear; I
+could easily get another job&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What? If Truscomb black-listed you? Do you forget
+that Scotch overseer who was here when we came?"</p>
+
+<p>"And whom Truscomb hounded out of the trade?
+I remember him," said Amherst grimly; "but I have
+an idea I am going to do the hounding this time."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[p 29]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His mother sighed, but her reply was cut short by
+the noisy opening of the outer door. Amherst seemed
+to hear the sound with relief. "There's Duplain," he
+said, going into the passage; but on the threshold he
+encountered, not the young Alsatian overseer who
+boarded with them, but a small boy who said breathlessly:
+"Mr. Truscomb wants you to come down
+bimeby."</p>
+
+<p>"This evening? To the office?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;he's sick a-bed."</p>
+
+<p>The blood rushed to Amherst's face, and he had to
+press his lips close to check an exclamation. "Say
+I'll come as soon as I've had supper," he said.</p>
+
+<p>The boy vanished, and Amherst turned back to the
+sitting-room. "Truscomb's ill&mdash;he has sent for me;
+and I saw Mrs. Westmore arriving tonight! Have
+supper, mother&mdash;we won't wait for Duplain." His
+face still glowed with excitement, and his eyes were
+dark with the concentration of his inward vision.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, John, John!" Mrs. Amherst sighed, crossing
+the passage to the kitchen.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">At</span> the manager's door Amherst was met by Mrs.
+Truscomb, a large flushed woman in a soiled
+wrapper and diamond earrings.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[p 30]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Truscomb's very sick. He ought not to see
+you. The doctor thinks&mdash;" she began.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Disbrow, at this point, emerged from the sitting-room.
+He was a pale man, with a beard of mixed
+grey-and-drab, and a voice of the same indeterminate
+quality.</p>
+
+<p>"Good evening, Mr. Amherst. Truscomb is pretty
+poorly&mdash;on the edge of pneumonia, I'm afraid. As he
+seems anxious to see you I think you'd better go up for
+two minutes&mdash;not more, please." He paused, and
+went on with a smile: "You won't excite him, of course&mdash;nothing
+unpleasant&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He's worried himself sick over that wretched Dillon,"
+Mrs. Truscomb interposed, draping her wrapper
+majestically about an indignant bosom.</p>
+
+<p>"That's it&mdash;puts too much heart into his work. But
+we'll have Dillon all right before long," the physician
+genially declared.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Truscomb, with a reluctant gesture, led Amherst
+up the handsomely carpeted stairs to the room
+where her husband lay, a prey to the cares of office.
+She ushered the young man in, and withdrew to the
+next room, where he heard her coughing at intervals,
+as if to remind him that he was under observation.</p>
+
+<p>The manager of the Westmore mills was not the
+type of man that Amherst's comments on his superior
+suggested. As he sat propped against the pillows,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[p 31]</a></span>
+with a brick-red flush on his cheek-bones, he seemed
+at first glance to belong to the innumerable army of
+American business men&mdash;the sallow, undersized, lacklustre
+drudges who have never lifted their heads from
+the ledger. Even his eye, now bright with fever, was
+dull and non-committal in daily life; and perhaps only
+the ramifications of his wrinkles could have revealed
+what particular ambitions had seamed his soul.</p>
+
+<p>"Good evening, Amherst. I'm down with a confounded
+cold."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry to hear it," the young man forced himself
+to say.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't get my breath&mdash;that's the trouble." Truscomb
+paused and gasped. "I've just heard that Mrs.
+Westmore is here&mdash;and I want you to go round&mdash;tomorrow
+morning&mdash;" He had to break off once more.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir," said Amherst, his heart leaping.</p>
+
+<p>"Needn't see her&mdash;ask for her father, Mr. Langhope.
+Tell him what the doctor says&mdash;I'll be on my legs in a
+day or two&mdash;ask 'em to wait till I can take 'em over the
+mills."</p>
+
+<p>He shot one of his fugitive glances at his assistant,
+and held up a bony hand. "Wait a minute. On your
+way there, stop and notify Mr. Gaines. He was to
+meet them here. You understand?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir," said Amherst; and at that moment Mrs.
+Truscomb appeared on the threshold.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[p 32]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I must ask you to come now, Mr. Amherst," she
+began haughtily; but a glance from her husband reduced
+her to a heaving pink nonentity.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on, Amherst. I hear you've been in to Hanaford.
+Did you go to the hospital?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ezra&mdash;" his wife murmured: he looked through her.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Amherst.</p>
+
+<p>Truscomb's face seemed to grow smaller and dryer.
+He transferred his look from his wife to his assistant.</p>
+
+<p>"All right. You'll just bear in mind that it's Disbrow's
+business to report Dillon's case to Mrs. Westmore?
+You're to confine yourself to my message. Is
+that clear?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly clear. Goodnight," Amherst answered,
+as he turned to follow Mrs. Truscomb.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>That same evening, four persons were seated under
+the bronze chandelier in the red satin drawing-room
+of the Westmore mansion. One of the four, the young
+lady in widow's weeds whose face had arrested Miss
+Brent's attention that afternoon, rose from a massively
+upholstered sofa and drifted over to the fireplace near
+which her father sat.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't I tell you it was awful, father?" she sighed,
+leaning despondently against the high carved mantelpiece
+surmounted by a bronze clock in the form of an
+obelisk.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[p 33]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope, who sat smoking, with one faultlessly-clad
+leg crossed on the other, and his ebony stick
+reposing against the arm of his chair, raised his clear
+ironical eyes to her face.</p>
+
+<p>"As an arch&aelig;ologist," he said, with a comprehensive
+wave of his hand, "I find it positively interesting. I
+should really like to come here and dig."</p>
+
+<p>There were no lamps in the room, and the numerous
+gas-jets of the chandelier shed their lights impartially
+on ponderously framed canvases of the Bay of Naples
+and the Hudson in Autumn, on Carrara busts and
+bronze Indians on velvet pedestals.</p>
+
+<p>"All this," murmured Mr. Langhope, "is getting to
+be as rare as the giant sequoias. In another fifty years
+we shall have collectors fighting for that Bay of Naples."</p>
+
+<p>Bessy Westmore turned from him impatiently. When
+she felt deeply on any subject her father's flippancy
+annoyed her.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>You</i> can see, Maria," she said, seating herself beside
+the other lady of the party, "why I couldn't possibly
+live here."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eustace Ansell, immediately after dinner, had
+bent her slender back above the velvet-covered writing-table,
+where an inkstand of Vienna ormolu offered its
+empty cup to her pen. Being habitually charged with
+a voluminous correspondence, she had foreseen this
+contingency and met it by despatching her maid for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[p 34]</a></span>
+her own writing-case, which was now outspread before
+her in all its complex neatness; but at Bessy's appeal
+she wiped her pen, and turned a sympathetic gaze on
+her companion.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell's face drew all its charm from its adaptability.
+It was a different face to each speaker: now
+kindling with irony, now gently maternal, now charged
+with abstract meditation&mdash;and few paused to reflect
+that, in each case, it was merely the mirror held up to
+some one else's view of life.</p>
+
+<p>"It needs doing over," she admitted, following the
+widow's melancholy glance about the room. "But you
+are a spoilt child to complain. Think of having a
+house of your own to come to, instead of having to put up
+at the Hanaford hotel!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Westmore's attention was arrested by the first
+part of the reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Doing over? Why in the world should I do it
+over? No one could expect me to come here <i>now</i>&mdash;could
+they, Mr. Tredegar?" she exclaimed, transferring
+her appeal to the fourth member of the party.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar, the family lawyer, who had deemed it
+his duty to accompany the widow on her visit of inspection,
+was strolling up and down the room with
+short pompous steps, a cigar between his lips, and his
+arms behind him. He cocked his sparrow-like head,
+scanned the offending apartment, and terminated his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[p 35]</a></span>
+survey by resting his eyes on Mrs. Westmore's charming
+petulant face.</p>
+
+<p>"It all depends," he replied axiomatically, "how
+large an income you require."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar uttered this remark with the air of
+one who pronounces on an important point in law:
+his lightest observation seemed a decision handed down
+from the bench to which he had never ascended. He
+restored the cigar to his lips, and sought approval in
+Mrs. Ansell's expressive eye.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, that's it, Bessy. You've that to remember,"
+the older lady murmured, as if struck by the profundity
+of the remark.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Westmore made an impatient gesture. "We've
+always had money enough&mdash;Dick was perfectly satisfied."
+Her voice trembled a little on her husband's
+name. "And you don't know what the place is like
+by daylight&mdash;and the people who come to call!"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you needn't see any one now, dear," Mrs.
+Ansell reminded her, "except the Halford Gaineses."</p>
+
+<p>"I am sure they're bad enough. Juliana Gaines will
+say: 'My dear, is that the way widows' veils are worn
+in New York this autumn?' and Halford will insist on
+our going to one of those awful family dinners, all
+Madeira and terrapin."</p>
+
+<p>"It's too early for terrapin," Mrs. Ansell smiled consolingly;
+but Bessy had reverted to her argument.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[p 36]</a></span>
+"Besides, what difference would my coming here make?
+I shall never understand anything about business," she
+declared.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar pondered, and once more removed his
+cigar. "The necessity has never arisen. But now
+that you find yourself in almost sole control of a large
+property&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope laughed gently. "Apply yourself,
+Bessy. Bring your masterly intellect to bear on the
+industrial problem."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell restored the innumerable implements to
+her writing-case, and laid her arm with a caressing
+gesture on Mrs. Westmore's shoulder. "Don't tease
+her. She's tired, and she misses the baby."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall get a telegram tomorrow morning," exclaimed
+the young mother, brightening.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you will. 'Cicely has just eaten two
+boiled eggs and a bowl of porridge, and is bearing up
+wonderfully.'"</p>
+
+<p>She drew Mrs. Westmore persuasively to her feet,
+but the widow refused to relinquish her hold on her
+grievance.</p>
+
+<p>"You all think I'm extravagant and careless about
+money," she broke out, addressing the room in general
+from the shelter of Mrs. Ansell's embrace; "but
+I know one thing: If I had my way I should begin
+to economize by selling this horrible house, instead<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[p 37]</a></span>
+of leaving it shut up from one year's end to another."</p>
+
+<p>Her father looked up: proposals of retrenchment
+always struck him as business-like when they did not
+affect his own expenditure. "What do you think of
+that, eh, Tredegar?"</p>
+
+<p>The eminent lawyer drew in his thin lips. "From
+the point of view of policy, I think unfavourably of it,"
+he pronounced.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy's face clouded, and Mrs. Ansell argued gently:
+"Really, it's too late to look so far into the future.
+Remember, my dear, that we are due at the mills tomorrow
+at ten."</p>
+
+<p>The reminder that she must rise early had the effect
+of hastening Mrs. Westmore's withdrawal, and the two
+ladies, after an exchange of goodnights, left the men
+to their cigars.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope was the first to speak.</p>
+
+<p>"Bessy's as hopelessly vague about business as I am,
+Tredegar. Why the deuce Westmore left her everything
+outright&mdash;but he was only a heedless boy himself."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. The way he allowed things to go, it's a
+wonder there was anything to leave. This Truscomb
+must be an able fellow."</p>
+
+<p>"Devoted to Dick's interests, I've always understood."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[p 38]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"He makes the mills pay well, at any rate, and that's
+not so easy nowadays. But on general principles it's
+as well he should see that we mean to look into everything
+thoroughly. Of course Halford Gaines will never
+be more than a good figure-head, but Truscomb must
+be made to understand that Mrs. Westmore intends to
+interest herself personally in the business."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, by all means&mdash;of course&mdash;" Mr. Langhope assented,
+his light smile stiffening into a yawn at the mere
+suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>He rose with an effort, supporting himself on his
+stick. "I think I'll turn in myself. There's not a
+readable book in that God-forsaken library, and I believe
+Maria Ansell has gone off with my volume of
+Loti."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The next morning, when Amherst presented himself at
+the Westmore door, he had decided to follow his chief's
+instructions to the letter, and ask for Mr. Langhope
+only. The decision had cost him a struggle, for his
+heart was big with its purpose; but though he knew
+that he must soon place himself in open opposition to
+Truscomb, he recognized the prudence of deferring the
+declaration of war as long as possible.</p>
+
+<p>On his round of the mills, that morning, he had
+paused in the room where Mrs. Dillon knelt beside her
+mop and pail, and had found her, to his surprise, com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[p 39]</a></span>paratively
+reassured and cheerful. Dr. Disbrow, she
+told him, had been in the previous evening, and had
+told her to take heart about Jim, and left her enough
+money to get along for a week&mdash;and a wonderful new
+cough-mixture that he'd put up for her special. Amherst
+found it difficult to listen calmly, with the nurse's
+words still in his ears, and the sight before him of
+Mrs. Dillon's lean shoulder-blades travelling painfully
+up and down with the sweep of the mop.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't suppose that cost Truscomb ten dollars,"
+he said to himself, as the lift lowered him to the factory
+door; but another voice argued that he had no right to
+accuse Disbrow of acting as his brother-in-law's agent,
+when the gift to Mrs. Dillon might have been prompted
+by his own kindness of heart.</p>
+
+<p>"And what prompted the lie about her husband?
+Well, perhaps he's an incurable optimist," he summed
+up, springing into the Hanaford car.</p>
+
+<p>By the time he reached Mrs. Westmore's door his
+wrath had subsided, and he felt that he had himself
+well in hand. He had taken unusual pains with his
+appearance that morning&mdash;or rather his mother, learning
+of the errand on which Truscomb had sent him,
+had laid out his carefully-brushed Sunday clothes, and
+adjusted his tie with skilful fingers. "You'd really be
+handsome, Johnny, if you were only a little vainer,"
+she said, pushing him away to survey the result; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[p 40]</a></span>
+when he stared at her, repeating: "I never heard that
+vanity made a man better-looking," she responded
+gaily: "Oh, up to a certain point, because it teaches
+him how to use what he's got. So remember," she
+charged him, as he smiled and took up his hat, "that
+you're going to see a pretty young woman, and that
+you're not a hundred years old yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll try to," he answered, humouring her, "but as
+I've been forbidden to ask for her, I am afraid your
+efforts will be wasted."</p>
+
+<p>The servant to whom he gave his message showed
+him into the library, with a request that he should wait;
+and there, to his surprise, he found, not the white-moustached
+gentleman whom he had guessed the night
+before to be Mr. Langhope, but a young lady in deep
+black, who turned on him a look of not unfriendly
+enquiry.</p>
+
+<p>It was not Bessy's habit to anticipate the clock; but
+her distaste for her surroundings, and the impatience
+to have done with the tedious duties awaiting her, had
+sent her downstairs before the rest of the party. Her
+life had been so free from tiresome obligations that she
+had but a small stock of patience to meet them with;
+and already, after a night at Hanaford, she was pining
+to get back to the comforts of her own country-house,
+the soft rut of her daily habits, the funny chatter of
+her little girl, the long stride of her Irish hunter across<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[p 41]</a></span>
+the Hempstead plains&mdash;to everything, in short, that
+made it conceivably worth while to get up in the
+morning.</p>
+
+<p>The servant who ushered in Amherst, thinking the
+room empty, had not mentioned his name; and for a
+moment he and his hostess examined each other in
+silence, Bessy puzzled at the unannounced appearance
+of a good-looking young man who might have been
+some one she had met and forgotten, while Amherst
+felt his self-possession slipping away into the depths of
+a pair of eyes so dark-lashed and deeply blue that his
+only thought was one of wonder at his previous indifference
+to women's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Westmore?" he asked, restored to self-command
+by the perception that his longed-for opportunity
+was at hand; and Bessy, his voice confirming the inference
+she had drawn from his appearance, replied
+with a smile: "I am Mrs. Westmore. But if you have
+come to see me, I ought to tell you that in a moment I
+shall be obliged to go out to our mills. I have a business
+appointment with our manager, but if&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She broke off, gracefully waiting for him to insert his
+explanation.</p>
+
+<p>"I have come from the manager; I am John Amherst&mdash;your
+assistant manager," he added, as the mention
+of his name apparently conveyed no enlightenment.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Westmore's face changed, and she let slip a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[p 42]</a></span>
+murmur of surprise that would certainly have flattered
+Amherst's mother if she could have heard it;
+but it had an opposite effect on the young man, who
+inwardly accused himself of having tried to disguise
+his trade by not putting on his everyday clothes.</p>
+
+<p>"How stupid of me! I took you for&mdash;I had no idea;
+I didn't expect Mr. Truscomb here," his employer
+faltered in embarrassment; then their eyes met and
+both smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Truscomb sent me to tell you that he is ill, and
+will not be able to show you the mills today. I didn't
+mean to ask for you&mdash;I was told to give the message to
+Mr. Langhope," Amherst scrupulously explained,
+trying to repress the sudden note of joy in his voice.</p>
+
+<p>He was subject to the unobservant man's acute
+flashes of vision, and Mrs. Westmore's beauty was like
+a blinding light abruptly turned on eyes subdued to
+obscurity. As he spoke, his glance passed from her
+face to her hair, and remained caught in its meshes.
+He had never seen such hair&mdash;it did not seem to grow
+in the usual orderly way, but bubbled up all over her
+head in independent clusters of brightness, breaking,
+about the brow, the temples, the nape, into little irrelevant
+waves and eddies of light, with dusky hollows
+of softness where the hand might plunge. It takes but
+the throb of a nerve to carry such a complex impression
+from the eye to the mind, but the object of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[p 43]</a></span>
+throb had perhaps felt the electric flash of its passage,
+for her colour rose while Amherst spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, here is my father now," she said with a vague
+accent of relief, as Mr. Langhope's stick was heard
+tapping its way across the hall.</p>
+
+<p>When he entered, accompanied by Mrs. Ansell, his
+sharp glance of surprise at her visitor told her that he
+was as much misled as herself, and gave her a sense of
+being agreeably justified in her blunder. "If <i>father</i>
+thinks you're a gentleman&mdash;&mdash;" her shining eyes seemed
+to say, as she explained: "This is Mr. Amherst, father:
+Mr. Truscomb has sent him."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Amherst?" Langhope, with extended hand,
+echoed affably but vaguely; and it became clear that
+neither Mrs. Westmore nor her father had ever before
+heard the name of their assistant manager.</p>
+
+<p>The discovery stung Amherst to a somewhat unreasoning
+resentment; and while he was trying to subordinate
+this sentiment to the larger feelings with which
+he had entered the house, Mrs. Ansell, turning her
+eyes on him, said gently: "Your name is unusual. I
+had a friend named Lucy Warne who married a very
+clever man&mdash;a mechanical genius&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's face cleared. "My father <i>was</i> a genius;
+and my mother is Lucy Warne," he said, won by the
+soft look and the persuasive voice.</p>
+
+<p>"What a delightful coincidence! We were girls to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[p 44]</a></span>gether
+at Albany. You must remember Judge Warne?"
+she said, turning to Mr. Langhope, who, twirling his
+white moustache, murmured, a shade less cordially:
+"Of course&mdash;of course&mdash;delightful&mdash;most interesting."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst did not notice the difference. His perceptions
+were already enveloped in the caress that emanated
+from Mrs. Ansell's voice and smile; and he only
+asked himself vaguely if it were possible that this graceful
+woman, with her sunny autumnal air, could really
+be his mother's contemporary. But the question
+brought an instant reaction of bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>"Poverty is the only thing that makes people old
+nowadays," he reflected, painfully conscious of his own
+share in the hardships his mother had endured; and
+when Mrs. Ansell went on: "I must go and see her&mdash;you
+must let me take her by surprise," he said stiffly:
+"We live out at the mills, a long way from here."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, we're going there this morning," she rejoined,
+unrebuffed by what she probably took for a mere
+social awkwardness, while Mrs. Westmore interposed:
+"But, Maria, Mr. Truscomb is ill, and has sent Mr.
+Amherst to say that we are not to come."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes: so Gaines has just telephoned. It's most unfortunate,"
+Mr. Langhope grumbled. He too was
+already beginning to chafe at the uncongenial exile of
+Hanaford, and he shared his daughter's desire to despatch
+the tiresome business before them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[p 45]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar had meanwhile appeared, and when
+Amherst had been named to him, and had received his
+Olympian nod, Bessy anxiously imparted her difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>"But how ill is Mr. Truscomb? Do you think he
+can take us over the mills tomorrow?" she appealed to
+Amherst.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid not; I am sure he can't. He has a
+touch of bronchitis."</p>
+
+<p>This announcement was met by a general outcry,
+in which sympathy for the manager was not the predominating
+note. Mrs. Ansell saved the situation by
+breathing feelingly: "Poor man!" and after a decent
+echo of the phrase, and a doubtful glance at her father,
+Mrs. Westmore said: "If it's bronchitis he may be
+ill for days, and what in the world are we to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pack up and come back later," suggested Mr.
+Langhope briskly; but while Bessy sighed "Oh, that
+dreadful journey!" Mr. Tredegar interposed with authority:
+"One moment, Langhope, please. Mr. Amherst,
+is Mrs. Westmore expected at the mills?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I believe they know she is coming."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I think, my dear, that to go back to New
+York without showing yourself would, under the circumstances,
+be&mdash;er&mdash;an error in judgment."</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord, Tredegar, you don't expect to keep us
+kicking our heels here for days?" her father ejaculated.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[p 46]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I can certainly not afford to employ mine in that
+manner for even a fraction of a day," rejoined the
+lawyer, always acutely resentful of the suggestion that
+he had a disengaged moment; "but meanwhile&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Father," Bessy interposed, with an eagerly flushing
+cheek, "don't you see that the only thing for us to do is to
+go over the mills now&mdash;at once&mdash;with Mr. Amherst?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope stared: he was always adventurously
+ready to unmake plans, but it flustered him to be called
+on to remake them. "Eh&mdash;what? Now&mdash;at once?
+But Gaines was to have gone with us, and how on earth
+are we to get at him? He telephoned me that, as the
+visit was given up, he should ride out to his farm."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, never mind&mdash;or, at least, all the better!" his
+daughter urged. "We can see the mills just as well
+without him; and we shall get on so much more
+quickly."</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;well&mdash;what do you say, Tredegar?" murmured
+Mr. Langhope, allured by her last argument;
+and Bessy, clasping her hands, summed up enthusiastically:
+"And I shall understand so much better without
+a lot of people trying to explain to me at once!"</p>
+
+<p>Her sudden enthusiasm surprised no one, for even
+Mrs. Ansell, expert as she was in the interpreting of
+tones, set it down to the natural desire to have done as
+quickly as might be with Hanaford.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Westmore has left her little girl at home,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[p 47]</a></span>
+she said to Amherst, with a smile intended to counteract
+the possible ill-effect of the impression.</p>
+
+<p>But Amherst suspected no slight in his employer's
+eagerness to visit Westmore. His overmastering thought
+was one of joy as the fulness of his opportunity broke
+on him. To show her the mills himself&mdash;to bring her
+face to face with her people, unhampered by Truscomb's
+jealous vigilance, and Truscomb's false explanations;
+to see the angel of pity stir the depths of those unfathomable
+eyes, when they rested, perhaps for the
+first time, on suffering that it was in their power to
+smile away as easily as they had smiled away his own
+distrust&mdash;all this the wonderful moment had brought
+him, and thoughts and arguments thronged so hot on
+his lips that he kept silence, fearing lest he should say
+too much.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">John Amherst</span> was no one-sided idealist. He
+felt keenly the growing complexity of the relation
+between employer and worker, the seeming hopelessness
+of permanently harmonizing their claims, the recurring
+necessity of fresh compromises and adjustments.
+He hated rant, demagogy, the rash formulating
+of emotional theories; and his contempt for bad logic
+and subjective judgments led him to regard with distrust
+the panaceas offered for the cure of economic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[p 48]</a></span>
+evils. But his heart ached for the bitter throes with
+which the human machine moves on. He felt the
+menace of industrial conditions when viewed collectively,
+their poignancy when studied in the individual
+lives of the toilers among whom his lot was cast; and
+clearly as he saw the need of a philosophic survey of
+the question, he was sure that only through sympathy
+with its personal, human side could a solution be
+reached. The disappearance of the old familiar contact
+between master and man seemed to him one of the
+great wrongs of the new industrial situation. That the
+breach must be farther widened by the ultimate substitution
+of the stock-company for the individual employer&mdash;a
+fact obvious to any student of economic tendencies&mdash;presented
+to Amherst's mind one of the most
+painful problems in the scheme of social readjustment.
+But it was characteristic of him to dwell rather on the
+removal of immediate difficulties than in the contemplation
+of those to come, and while the individual employer
+was still to be reckoned with, the main thing
+was to bring him closer to his workers. Till he entered
+personally into their hardships and aspirations&mdash;till he
+learned what they wanted and why they wanted it&mdash;Amherst
+believed that no mere law-making, however
+enlightened, could create a wholesome relation between
+the two.</p>
+
+<p>This feeling was uppermost as he sat with Mrs.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[p 49]</a></span>
+Westmore in the carriage which was carrying them to
+the mills. He had meant to take the trolley back to
+Westmore, but at a murmured word from Mr. Tredegar
+Bessy had offered him a seat at her side, leaving
+others to follow. This culmination of his hopes&mdash;the
+unlooked-for chance of a half-hour alone with her&mdash;left
+Amherst oppressed with the swiftness of the
+minutes. He had so much to say&mdash;so much to prepare
+her for&mdash;yet how begin, while he was in utter ignorance
+of her character and her point of view, and while
+her lovely nearness left him so little chance of perceiving
+anything except itself?</p>
+
+<p>But he was not often the victim of his sensations, and
+presently there emerged, out of the very consciousness
+of her grace and her completeness, a clearer sense of
+the conditions which, in a measure, had gone to produce
+them. Her dress could not have hung in such
+subtle folds, her white chin have nestled in such rich
+depths of fur, the pearls in her ears have given back the
+light from such pure curves, if thin shoulders in shapeless
+gingham had not bent, day in, day out, above the
+bobbins and carders, and weary ears throbbed even at
+night with the tumult of the looms. Amherst, however,
+felt no sensational resentment at the contrast. He
+had lived too much with ugliness and want not to believe
+in human nature's abiding need of their opposite.
+He was glad there was room for such beauty in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[p 50]</a></span>
+the world, and sure that its purpose was an ameliorating
+one, if only it could be used as a beautiful spirit would
+use it.</p>
+
+<p>The carriage had turned into one of the nondescript
+thoroughfares, half incipient street, half decaying lane,
+which dismally linked the mill-village to Hanaford.
+Bessy looked out on the ruts, the hoardings, the starved
+trees dangling their palsied leaves in the radiant October
+light; then she sighed: "What a good day for a
+gallop!"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst felt a momentary chill, but the naturalness
+of the exclamation disarmed him, and the words called
+up thrilling memories of his own college days, when he
+had ridden his grandfather's horses in the famous
+hunting valley not a hundred miles from Hanaford.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy met his smile with a glow of understanding.
+"You like riding too, I'm sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"I used to; but I haven't been in the saddle for
+years. Factory managers don't keep hunters," he said
+laughing.</p>
+
+<p>Her murmur of embarrassment showed that she took
+this as an apologetic allusion to his reduced condition,
+and in his haste to correct this impression he added:
+"If I regretted anything in my other life, it would certainly
+be a gallop on a day like this; but I chose my
+trade deliberately, and I've never been sorry for my
+choice."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[p 51]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He had hardly spoken when he felt the inappropriateness
+of this avowal; but her prompt response showed
+him, a moment later, that it was, after all, the straightest
+way to his end.</p>
+
+<p>"You find the work interesting? I'm sure it must
+be. You'll think me very ignorant&mdash;my husband and
+I came here so seldom...I feel as if I ought to
+know so much more about it," she explained.</p>
+
+<p>At last the note for which he waited had been struck.
+"Won't you try to&mdash;now you're here? There's so
+much worth knowing," he broke out impetuously.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Westmore coloured, but rather with surprise
+than displeasure. "I'm very stupid&mdash;I've no head for
+business&mdash;but I will try to," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"It's not business that I mean; it's the personal
+relation&mdash;just the thing the business point of view
+leaves out. Financially, I don't suppose your mills
+could be better run; but there are over seven hundred
+women working in them, and there's so much to be
+done, just for them and their children."</p>
+
+<p>He caught a faint hint of withdrawal in her tone.
+"I have always understood that Mr. Truscomb did
+everything&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst flushed; but he was beyond caring for the
+personal rebuff. "Do you leave it to your little girl's
+nurses to do everything for her?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Her surprise seemed about to verge on annoyance:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[p 52]</a></span>
+he saw the preliminary ruffling of the woman who is
+put to the trouble of defending her dignity. "Really,
+I don't see&mdash;" she began with distant politeness; then
+her face changed and melted, and again her blood
+spoke for her before her lips.</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad you told me that, Mr. Amherst. Of
+course I want to do whatever I can. I should like you
+to point out everything&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's resolve had been taken while she spoke.
+He <i>would</i> point out everything, would stretch his opportunity
+to its limit. All thoughts of personal prudence
+were flung to the winds&mdash;her blush and tone had
+routed the waiting policy. He would declare war on
+Truscomb at once, and take the chance of dismissal.
+At least, before he went he would have brought this
+exquisite creature face to face with the wrongs from
+which her luxuries were drawn, and set in motion the
+regenerating impulses of indignation and pity. He did
+not stop to weigh the permanent advantage of this
+course. His only feeling was that the chance would
+never again be given him&mdash;that if he let her go away,
+back to her usual life, with eyes unopened and heart
+untouched, there would be no hope of her ever returning.
+It was far better that he should leave for good,
+and that she should come back, as come back she
+must, more and more often, if once she could be made
+to feel the crying need of her presence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[p 53]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But where was he to begin? How give her even a
+glimpse of the packed and intricate situation?</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Westmore," he said, "there's no time to
+say much now, but before we get to the mills I want
+to ask you a favour. If, as you go through them, you
+see anything that seems to need explaining, will you
+let me come and tell you about it tonight? I say tonight,"
+he added, meeting her look of enquiry, "because
+later&mdash;tomorrow even&mdash;I might not have the
+chance. There are some things&mdash;a good many&mdash;in
+the management of the mills that Mr. Truscomb
+doesn't see as I do. I don't mean business questions:
+wages and dividends and so on&mdash;those are out of my
+province. I speak merely in the line of my own work&mdash;my
+care of the hands, and what I believe they need
+and don't get under the present system. Naturally, if
+Mr. Truscomb were well, I shouldn't have had this
+chance of putting the case to you; but since it's come
+my way, I must seize it and take the consequences."</p>
+
+<p>Even as he spoke, by a swift reaction of thought,
+those consequences rose before him in all their seriousness.
+It was not only, or chiefly, that he feared to lose
+his place; though he knew his mother had not spoken
+lightly in instancing the case of the foreman whom
+Truscomb, to gratify a personal spite, had for months
+kept out of a job in his trade. And there were special
+reasons why Amherst should heed her warning. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[p 54]</a></span>
+adopting a manual trade, instead of one of the gentlemanly
+professions which the men of her family had
+always followed, he had not only disappointed her
+hopes, and to a great extent thrown away the benefits
+of the education she had pinched herself to give him,
+but had disturbed all the habits of her life by removing
+her from her normal surroundings to the depressing
+exile of a factory-settlement. However much he
+blamed himself for exacting this sacrifice, it had been
+made so cheerfully that the consciousness of it never
+clouded his life with his mother; but her self-effacement
+made him the more alive to his own obligations,
+and having placed her in a difficult situation he had
+always been careful not to increase its difficulties by
+any imprudence in his conduct toward his employers.
+Yet, grave as these considerations were, they were
+really less potent than his personal desire to remain at
+Westmore. Lightly as he had just resolved to risk the
+chance of dismissal, all his future was bound up in the
+hope of retaining his place. His heart was in the work
+at Westmore, and the fear of not being able to get other
+employment was a small factor in his intense desire to
+keep his post. What he really wanted was to speak
+out, and yet escape the consequences: by some miraculous
+reversal of probability to retain his position and
+yet effect Truscomb's removal. The idea was so
+fantastic that he felt it merely as a quickening of all his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[p 55]</a></span>
+activities, a tremendous pressure of will along undetermined
+lines. He had no wish to take the manager's
+place; but his dream was to see Truscomb superseded
+by a man of the new school, in sympathy with the
+awakening social movement&mdash;a man sufficiently practical
+to "run" the mills successfully, yet imaginative
+enough to regard that task as the least of his duties.
+He saw the promise of such a man in Louis Duplain,
+the overseer who boarded with Mrs. Amherst: a young
+fellow of Alsatian extraction, a mill-hand from childhood,
+who had worked at his trade in Europe as well
+as in America, and who united with more manual skill,
+and a greater nearness to the workman's standpoint,
+all Amherst's enthusiasm for the experiments in social
+betterment that were making in some of the English
+and continental factories. His strongest wish was to
+see such a man as Duplain in control at Westmore
+before he himself turned to the larger work which he
+had begun to see before him as the sequel to his factory-training.</p>
+
+<p>All these thoughts swept through him in the instant's
+pause before Mrs. Westmore, responding to his last
+appeal, said with a graceful eagerness: "Yes, you must
+come tonight. I want to hear all you can tell me&mdash;and
+if there is anything wrong you must show me how
+I can make it better."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll show her, and Truscomb shan't turn me out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[p 56]</a></span>
+for it," was the vow he passionately registered as
+the carriage drew up at the office-door of the main
+building.</p>
+
+<p>How this impossible result was to be achieved he
+had no farther time to consider, for in another moment
+the rest of the party had entered the factory with
+them, and speech was followed up in the roar of the
+machinery.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's zeal for his cause was always quickened
+by the sight of the mills in action. He loved the work
+itself as much as he hated the conditions under which
+it was done; and he longed to see on the operatives'
+faces something of the ardour that lit up his own when
+he entered the work-rooms. It was this passion for
+machinery that at school had turned him from his
+books, at college had drawn him to the courses least
+in the line of his destined profession; and it always
+seized on him afresh when he was face to face with the
+monstrous energies of the mills. It was not only the
+sense of power that thrilled him&mdash;he felt a beauty in
+the ordered activity of the whole intricate organism,
+in the rhythm of dancing bobbins and revolving cards,
+the swift continuous outpour of doublers and ribbon-laps,
+the steady ripple of the long ply-frames, the terrible
+gnashing play of the looms&mdash;all these varying
+subordinate motions, gathered up into the throb of
+the great engines which fed the giant's arteries, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[p 57]</a></span>
+were in turn ruled by the invisible action of quick
+thought and obedient hands, always produced in Amherst
+a responsive rush of life.</p>
+
+<p>He knew this sensation was too specialized to affect
+his companions; but he expected Mrs. Westmore to
+be all the more alive to the other side&mdash;the dark side of
+monotonous human toil, of the banquet of flesh and
+blood and brain perpetually served up to the monster
+whose insatiable jaws the looms so grimly typified.
+Truscomb, as he had told her, was a good manager
+from the profit-taking standpoint. Since it was profitable
+to keep the machinery in order, he maintained
+throughout the factory a high standard of mechanical
+supervision, except where one or two favoured overseers&mdash;for
+Truscomb was given to favoritism&mdash;shirked
+the duties of their departments. But it was of the essence
+of Truscomb's policy&mdash;and not the least of the
+qualities which made him a "paying" manager&mdash;that
+he saved money scrupulously where its outlay would
+not have resulted in larger earnings. To keep the
+floors scrubbed, the cotton-dust swept up, the rooms
+freshly whitewashed and well-ventilated, far from adding
+the smallest fraction to the quarterly dividends,
+would have deducted from them the slight cost of this
+additional labour; and Truscomb therefore economized
+on scrubbers, sweepers and window-washers, and on
+all expenses connected with improved ventilation and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[p 58]</a></span>
+other hygienic precautions. Though the whole factory
+was over-crowded, the newest buildings were more
+carefully planned, and had the usual sanitary improvements;
+but the old mills had been left in their original
+state, and even those most recently built were fast
+lapsing into squalor. It was no wonder, therefore, that
+workers imprisoned within such walls should reflect
+their long hours of deadening toil in dull eyes and
+an&aelig;mic skins, and in the dreary lassitude with which
+they bent to their tasks.</p>
+
+<p>Surely, Amherst argued, Mrs. Westmore must feel
+this; must feel it all the more keenly, coming from an
+atmosphere so different, from a life where, as he instinctively
+divined, all was in harmony with her own
+graceful person. But a deep disappointment awaited
+him. He was still under the spell of their last moments
+in the carriage, when her face and voice had promised
+so much, when she had seemed so deeply, if vaguely,
+stirred by his appeal. But as they passed from one resounding
+room to the other&mdash;from the dull throb of the
+carding-room, the groan of the ply-frames, the long
+steady pound of the slashers, back to the angry shriek
+of the fierce unappeasable looms&mdash;the light faded from
+her eyes and she looked merely bewildered and stunned.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst, hardened to the din of the factory, could
+not measure its effect on nerves accustomed to the
+subdued sounds and spacious stillnesses which are the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[p 59]</a></span>
+last refinement of luxury. Habit had made him unconscious
+of that malicious multiplication and subdivision
+of noise that kept every point of consciousness
+vibrating to a different note, so that while one set of
+nerves was torn as with pincers by the dominant scream
+of the looms, others were thrilled with a separate pain
+by the ceaseless accompaniment of drumming, hissing,
+grating and crashing that shook the great building.
+Amherst felt this tumult only as part of the atmosphere
+of the mills; and to ears trained like his own he could
+make his voice heard without difficulty. But his
+attempts at speech were unintelligible to Mrs. Westmore
+and her companions, and after vainly trying to
+communicate with him by signs they hurried on as if
+to escape as quickly as possible from the pursuing
+whirlwind.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst could not allow for the depressing effect of
+this enforced silence. He did not see that if Bessy
+could have questioned him the currents of sympathy
+might have remained open between them, whereas,
+compelled to walk in silence through interminable
+ranks of meaningless machines, to which the human
+workers seemed mere automatic appendages, she lost
+all perception of what the scene meant. He had
+forgotten, too, that the swift apprehension of suffering
+in others is as much the result of training as the immediate
+perception of beauty. Both perceptions may be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[p 60]</a></span>
+inborn, but if they are not they can be developed only
+through the discipline of experience.</p>
+
+<p>"That girl in the hospital would have seen it all,"
+he reflected, as the vision of Miss Brent's small incisive
+profile rose before him; but the next moment he caught
+the light on Mrs. Westmore's hair, as she bent above a
+card, and the paler image faded like a late moon in
+the sunrise.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile Mrs. Ansell, seeing that the detailed inspection
+of the buildings was as trying to Mr. Langhope's
+lameness as to his daughter's nerves, had proposed
+to turn back with him and drive to Mrs. Amherst's,
+where he might leave her to call while the
+others were completing their rounds. It was one of Mrs.
+Ansell's gifts to detect the first symptoms of <i>ennui</i> in her
+companions, and produce a remedy as patly as old ladies
+whisk out a scent-bottle or a cough-lozenge; and Mr.
+Langhope's look of relief showed the timeliness of her
+suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst was too preoccupied to wonder how his
+mother would take this visit; but he welcomed Mr.
+Langhope's departure, hoping that the withdrawal of
+his ironic smile would leave his daughter open to gentler
+influences. Mr. Tredegar, meanwhile, was projecting
+his dry glance over the scene, trying to converse by
+signs with the overseers of the different rooms, and
+pausing now and then to contemplate, not so much the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[p 61]</a></span>
+workers themselves as the special tasks which engaged
+them.</p>
+
+<p>How these spectators of the party's progress were
+affected by Mrs. Westmore's appearance, even Amherst,
+for all his sympathy with their views, could
+not detect. They knew that she was the new owner,
+that a disproportionate amount of the result of their
+toil would in future pass through her hands, spread
+carpets for her steps, and hang a setting of beauty about
+her eyes; but the knowledge seemed to produce no
+special interest in her personality. A change of employer
+was not likely to make any change in their lot:
+their welfare would probably continue to depend on
+Truscomb's favour. The men hardly raised their
+heads as Mrs. Westmore passed; the women stared,
+but with curiosity rather than interest; and Amherst
+could not tell whether their sullenness reacted on Mrs.
+Westmore, or whether they were unconsciously chilled
+by her indifference. The result was the same: the
+distance between them seemed to increase instead of
+diminishing; and he smiled ironically to think of the
+form his appeal had taken&mdash;"If you see anything that
+seems to need explaining." Why, she saw nothing&mdash;nothing
+but the greasy floor under her feet, the cotton-dust
+in her eyes, the dizzy incomprehensible whirring
+of innumerable belts and wheels! Once out of it all,
+she would make haste to forget the dreary scene<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[p 62]</a></span>
+without pausing to ask for any explanation of its
+dreariness.</p>
+
+<p>In the intensity of his disappointment he sought a
+pretext to cut short the tour of the buildings, that he
+might remove his eyes from the face he had so vainly
+watched for any sign of awakening. And then, as he
+despaired of it, the change came.</p>
+
+<p>They had entered the principal carding-room, and
+were half-way down its long central passage, when Mr.
+Tredegar, who led the procession, paused before one
+of the cards.</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" he asked, pointing to a ragged strip
+of black cloth tied conspicuously to the frame of the
+card.</p>
+
+<p>The overseer of the room, a florid young man with
+dissipated eyes, who, at Amherst's signal, had attached
+himself to the party, stopped short and turned a furious
+glance on the surrounding operatives.</p>
+
+<p>"What in hell...? It's the first I seen of it," he
+exclaimed, making an ineffectual attempt to snatch the
+mourning emblem from its place.</p>
+
+<p>At the same instant the midday whistle boomed
+through the building, and at the signal the machinery
+stopped, and silence fell on the mills. The more distant
+workers at once left their posts to catch up the
+hats and coats heaped untidily in the corners; but
+those nearer by, attracted by the commotion around<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[p 63]</a></span>
+the card, stood spell-bound, fixing the visitors with a
+dull stare.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst had reddened to the roots of his hair. He
+knew in a flash what the token signified, and the sight
+stirred his pity; but it also jarred on his strong sense of
+discipline, and he turned sternly to the operatives.</p>
+
+<p>"What does this mean?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a short silence; then one of the hands, a thin
+bent man with mystic eyes, raised his head and spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"We done that for Dillon," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's glance swept the crowded faces. "But
+Dillon was not killed," he exclaimed, while the overseer,
+drawing out his pen-knife, ripped off the cloth and
+tossed it contemptuously into a heap of cotton-refuse
+at his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Might better ha' been," came from another hand;
+and a deep "That's so" of corroboration ran through
+the knot of workers.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst felt a touch on his arm, and met Mrs. Westmore's
+eyes. "What has happened? What do they
+mean?" she asked in a startled voice.</p>
+
+<p>"There was an accident here two days ago: a man
+got caught in the card behind him, and his right hand
+was badly crushed."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar intervened with his dry note of command.
+"How serious is the accident? How did it
+happen?" he enquired.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[p 64]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Through the man's own carelessness&mdash;ask the
+manager," the overseer interposed before Amherst
+could answer.</p>
+
+<p>A deep murmur of dissent ran through the crowd,
+but Amherst, without noticing the overseer's reply,
+said to Mr. Tredegar: "He's at the Hope Hospital.
+He will lose his hand, and probably the whole arm."</p>
+
+<p>He had not meant to add this last phrase. However
+strongly his sympathies were aroused, it was against his
+rule, at such a time, to say anything which might inflame
+the quick passions of the workers: he had meant
+to make light of the accident, and dismiss the operatives
+with a sharp word of reproof. But Mrs. Westmore's
+face was close to his: he saw the pity in her
+eyes, and feared, if he checked its expression, that he
+might never again have the chance of calling it forth.</p>
+
+<p>"His right arm? How terrible! But then he will
+never be able to work again!" she exclaimed, in all the
+horror of a first confrontation with the inexorable fate
+of the poor.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes turned from Amherst and rested on the
+faces pressing about her. There were many women's
+faces among them&mdash;the faces of fagged middle-age, and
+of sallow sedentary girlhood. For the first time Mrs.
+Westmore seemed to feel the bond of blood between
+herself and these dim creatures of the underworld: as
+Amherst watched her the lovely miracle was wrought.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[p 65]</a></span>
+Her pallour gave way to a quick rush of colour, her
+eyes widened like a frightened child's, and two tears
+rose and rolled slowly down her face.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, why wasn't I told? Is he married? Has he
+children? What does it matter whose fault it was?"
+she cried, her questions pouring out disconnectedly on
+a wave of anger and compassion.</p>
+
+<p>"It warn't his fault.... The cards are too close.... It'll
+happen again.... He's got three kids at
+home," broke from the operatives; and suddenly a
+voice exclaimed "Here's his wife now," and the crowd
+divided to make way for Mrs. Dillon, who, passing
+through the farther end of the room, had been waylaid
+and dragged toward the group.</p>
+
+<p>She hung back, shrinking from the murderous machine,
+which she beheld for the first time since her
+husband's accident; then she saw Amherst, guessed
+the identity of the lady at his side, and flushed up to
+her haggard forehead. Mrs. Dillon had been good-looking
+in her earlier youth, and sufficient prettiness
+lingered in her hollow-cheeked face to show how much
+more had been sacrificed to sickness and unwholesome
+toil.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, ma'am, ma'am, it warn't Jim's fault&mdash;there
+ain't a steadier man living. The cards is too crowded,"
+she sobbed out.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the other women began to cry: a wave of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[p 66]</a></span>
+sympathy ran through the circle, and Mrs. Westmore
+moved forward with an answering exclamation. "You
+poor creature...you poor creature...." She opened
+her arms to Mrs. Dillon, and the scrubber's sobs were
+buried on her employer's breast.</p>
+
+<p>"I will go to the hospital&mdash;I will come and see you&mdash;I
+will see that everything is done," Bessy reiterated.
+"But why are you here? How is it that you have had
+to leave your children?" She freed herself to turn a
+reproachful glance on Amherst. "You don't mean to
+tell me that, at such a time, you keep the poor woman
+at work?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Dillon has not been working here lately,"
+Amherst answered. "The manager took her back to-day
+at her own request, that she might earn something
+while her husband was in hospital."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Westmore's eyes shone indignantly. "Earn
+something? But surely&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She met a silencing look from Mr. Tredegar, who had
+stepped between Mrs. Dillon and herself.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear child, no one doubts&mdash;none of these good
+people doubt&mdash;that you will look into the case, and do
+all you can to alleviate it; but let me suggest that this
+is hardly the place&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She turned from him with an appealing glance at
+Amherst.</p>
+
+<p>"I think," the latter said, as their eyes met, "that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[p 67]</a></span>
+you had better let me dismiss the hands: they have
+only an hour at midday."</p>
+
+<p>She signed her assent, and he turned to the operatives
+and said quietly: "You have heard Mrs. Westmore's
+promise; now take yourselves off, and give her
+a clear way to the stairs."</p>
+
+<p>They dropped back, and Mr. Tredegar drew Bessy's
+arm through his; but as he began to move away she
+turned and laid her hand on Mrs. Dillon's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"You must not stay here&mdash;you must go back to the
+children. I will make it right with Mr. Truscomb,"
+she said in a reassuring whisper; then, through her
+tears, she smiled a farewell at the lingering knot of
+operatives, and followed her companions to the
+door.</p>
+
+<p>In silence they descended the many stairs and crossed
+the shabby unfenced grass-plot between the mills and
+the manager's office. It was not till they reached the
+carriage that Mrs. Westmore spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"But Maria is waiting for us&mdash;we must call for her!"
+she said, rousing herself; and as Amherst opened the
+carriage-door she added: "You will show us the way?
+You will drive with us?"</p>
+
+<p>During the drive Bessy remained silent, as if re-absorbed
+in the distress of the scene she had just witnessed;
+and Amherst found himself automatically answering
+Mr. Tredegar's questions, while his own mind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[p 68]</a></span>
+had no room for anything but the sense of her tremulous
+lips and of her eyes enlarged by tears. He had
+been too much engrossed in the momentous issues of
+her visit to the mills to remember that she had promised
+to call at his mother's for Mrs. Ansell; but now
+that they were on their way thither he found himself
+wishing that the visit might have been avoided. He
+was too proud of his mother to feel any doubt of the
+impression she would produce; but what would Mrs.
+Westmore think of their way of living, of the cheap
+jauntiness of the cottage, and the smell of cooking penetrating
+all its thin partitions? Duplain, too, would be
+coming in for dinner; and Amherst, in spite of his liking
+for the young overseer, became conscious of a
+rather overbearing freedom in his manner, the kind of
+misplaced ease which the new-made American affects
+as the readiest sign of equality. All these trifles, usually
+non-existent or supremely indifferent to Amherst, now
+assumed a sudden importance, behind which he detected
+the uneasy desire that Mrs. Westmore should not regard
+him as less of her own class than his connections and
+his bringing-up entitled him to be thought. In a flash
+he saw what he had forfeited by his choice of a calling&mdash;equal
+contact with the little circle of people who gave
+life its crowning grace and facility; and the next moment
+he was blushing at this reversal of his standards,
+and wondering, almost contemptuously, what could be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[p 69]</a></span>
+the nature of the woman whose mere presence could
+produce such a change.</p>
+
+<p>But there was no struggling against her influence;
+and as, the night before, he had looked at Westmore
+with the nurse's eyes, so he now found himself seeing
+his house as it must appear to Mrs. Westmore. He
+noticed the shabby yellow paint of the palings, the neglected
+garden of their neighbour, the week's wash
+flaunting itself indecently through the denuded shrubs
+about the kitchen porch; and as he admitted his companions
+to the narrow passage he was assailed by the
+expected whiff of "boiled dinner," with which the steam
+of wash-tubs was intimately mingled.</p>
+
+<p>Duplain was in the passage; he had just come out
+of the kitchen, and the fact that he had been washing
+his hands in the sink was made evident by his rolled-back
+shirt-sleeves, and by the shiny redness of the
+knuckles he was running through his stiff black hair.</p>
+
+<p>"Hallo, John," he said, in his aggressive voice, which
+rose abruptly at sight of Amherst's companions; and
+at the same moment the frowsy maid-of-all-work,
+crimson from stooping over the kitchen stove, thrust
+her head out to call after him: "See here, Mr. Duplain,
+don't you leave your cravat laying round in my
+dough."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[p 70]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Westmore</span> stayed just long enough not to
+break in too abruptly on the flow of her friend's
+reminiscences, and to impress herself on Mrs. Amherst's
+delighted eyes as an embodiment of tactfulness
+and grace&mdash;looking sympathetically about the little
+room, which, with its books, its casts, its photographs
+of memorable pictures, seemed, after all, a not incongruous
+setting to her charms; so that when she rose to
+go, saying, as her hand met Amherst's, "Tonight, then,
+you must tell me all about those poor Dillons," he had
+the sense of having penetrated so far into her intimacy
+that a new Westmore must inevitably result from their
+next meeting.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, John&mdash;the boss is a looker," Duplain commented
+across the dinner-table, with the slangy grossness
+he sometimes affected; but Amherst left it to his
+mother to look a quiet rebuke, feeling himself too aloof
+from such contacts to resent them.</p>
+
+<p>He had to rouse himself with an effort to take in the
+overseer's next observation. "There was another lady
+at the office this morning," Duplain went on, while the
+two men lit their cigars in the porch. "Asking after
+you&mdash;tried to get me to show her over the mills when I
+said you were busy."</p>
+
+<p>"Asking after me? What did she look like?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[p 71]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, her face was kinder white and small, with an
+awful lot of black hair fitting close to it. Said she came
+from Hope Hospital."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst looked up. "Did you show her over?" he
+asked with sudden interest.</p>
+
+<p>Duplain laughed slangily. "What? Me? And have
+Truscomb get on to it and turn me down? How'd I
+know she wasn't a yellow reporter?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst uttered an impatient exclamation. "I wish
+to heaven a yellow reporter <i>would</i> go through these
+mills, and show them up in head-lines a yard high!"</p>
+
+<p>He regretted not having seen the nurse again: he
+felt sure she would have been interested in the working
+of the mills, and quick to notice the signs of discouragement
+and ill-health in the workers' faces; but a moment
+later his regret was dispelled by the thought
+of his visit to Mrs. Westmore. The afternoon hours
+dragged slowly by in the office, where he was bound
+to his desk by Truscomb's continued absence; but
+at length the evening whistle blew, the clerks in the
+outer room caught their hats from the rack, Duplain
+presented himself with the day's report, and the two
+men were free to walk home.</p>
+
+<p>Two hours later Amherst was mounting Mrs. Westmore's
+steps; and his hand was on the bell when the
+door opened and Dr. Disbrow came out. The physician
+drew back, as if surprised and slightly discon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[p 72]</a></span>certed;
+but his smile promptly effaced all signs of
+vexation, and he held his hand out affably.</p>
+
+<p>"A fine evening, Mr. Amherst. I'm glad to say I
+have been able to bring Mrs. Westmore an excellent
+report of both patients&mdash;Mr. Truscomb, I mean, and
+poor Dillon. This mild weather is all in their favour,
+and I hope my brother-in-law will be about in a day or
+two." He passed on with a nod.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst was once more shown into the library where
+he had found Mrs. Westmore that morning; but on
+this occasion it was Mr. Tredegar who rose to meet him, and
+curtly waved him to a seat at a respectful distance
+from his own. Amherst at once felt a change of atmosphere,
+and it was easy to guess that the lowering of
+temperature was due to Dr. Disbrow's recent visit.
+The thought roused the young man's combative instincts,
+and caused him to say, as Mr. Tredegar continued
+to survey him in silence from the depths of a
+capacious easy-chair: "I understood from Mrs. Westmore
+that she wished to see me this evening."</p>
+
+<p>It was the wrong note, and he knew it; but he had
+been unable to conceal his sense of the vague current
+of opposition in the air.</p>
+
+<p>"Quite so: I believe she asked you to come," Mr.
+Tredegar assented, laying his hands together vertically,
+and surveying Amherst above the acute angle formed
+by his parched finger-tips. As he leaned back, small,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[p 73]</a></span>
+dry, dictatorial, in the careless finish of his evening
+dress and pearl-studded shirt-front, his appearance put
+the finishing touch to Amherst's irritation. He felt the
+incongruousness of his rough clothes in this atmosphere
+of after-dinner ease, the mud on his walking-boots, the
+clinging cotton-dust which seemed to have entered into
+the very pores of the skin; and again his annoyance
+escaped in his voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I have come too early&mdash;" he began; but
+Mr. Tredegar interposed with glacial amenity: "No,
+I believe you are exactly on time; but Mrs. Westmore
+is unexpectedly detained. The fact is, Mr. and Mrs.
+Halford Gaines are dining with her, and she has
+delegated to me the duty of hearing what you have to
+say."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst hesitated. His impulse was to exclaim:
+"There is no duty about it!" but a moment's thought
+showed the folly of thus throwing up the game. With
+the prospect of Truscomb's being about again in a day
+or two, it might well be that this was his last chance
+of reaching Mrs. Westmore's ear; and he was bound
+to put his case while he could, irrespective of personal
+feeling. But his disappointment was too keen to be
+denied, and after a pause he said: "Could I not speak
+with Mrs. Westmore later?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar's cool survey deepened to a frown.
+The young man's importunity was really out of pro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[p 74]</a></span>portion
+to what he signified. "Mrs. Westmore has
+asked me to replace her," he said, putting his previous
+statement more concisely.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I am not to see her at all?" Amherst exclaimed;
+and the lawyer replied indifferently: "I am
+afraid not, as she leaves tomorrow."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar was in his element when refusing a
+favour. Not that he was by nature unkind; he was,
+indeed, capable of a cold beneficence; but to deny
+what it was in his power to accord was the readiest way
+of proclaiming his authority, that power of loosing and
+binding which made him regard himself as almost consecrated
+to his office.</p>
+
+<p>Having sacrificed to this principle, he felt free to add
+as a gratuitous concession to politeness: "You are perhaps
+not aware that I am Mrs. Westmore's lawyer,
+and one of the executors under her husband's will."</p>
+
+<p>He dropped this negligently, as though conscious of
+the absurdity of presenting his credentials to a subordinate;
+but his manner no longer incensed Amherst:
+it merely strengthened his resolve to sink all sense of
+affront in the supreme effort of obtaining a hearing.</p>
+
+<p>"With that stuffed canary to advise her," he reflected,
+"there's no hope for her unless I can assert myself
+now"; and the unconscious wording of his thought
+expressed his inward sense that Bessy Westmore stood
+in greater need of help than her work-people.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[p 75]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Still he hesitated, hardly knowing how to begin.
+To Mr. Tredegar he was no more than an underling,
+without authority to speak in his superior's absence;
+and the lack of an official warrant, which he
+could have disregarded in appealing to Mrs. Westmore,
+made it hard for him to find a good opening in addressing
+her representative. He saw, too, from Mr. Tredegar's
+protracted silence, that the latter counted on the
+effect of this embarrassment, and was resolved not to
+minimize it by giving him a lead; and this had the
+effect of increasing his caution.</p>
+
+<p>He looked up and met the lawyer's eye. "Mrs.
+Westmore," he began, "asked me to let her know
+something about the condition of the people at the
+mills&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar raised his hand. "Excuse me," he
+said. "I understood from Mrs. Westmore that it
+was you who asked her permission to call this evening
+and set forth certain grievances on the part of the
+operatives."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst reddened. "I did ask her&mdash;yes. But I
+don't in any sense represent the operatives. I simply
+wanted to say a word for them."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar folded his hands again, and crossed
+one lean little leg over the other, bringing into his line
+of vision the glossy tip of a patent-leather pump, which
+he studied for a moment in silence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[p 76]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Does Mr. Truscomb know of your intention?" he
+then enquired.</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir," Amherst answered energetically, glad that
+he had forced the lawyer out of his passive tactics. "I
+am here on my own responsibility&mdash;and in direct opposition
+to my own interests," he continued with a slight
+smile. "I know that my proceeding is quite out of
+order, and that I have, personally, everything to lose
+by it, and in a larger way probably very little to gain;
+but I thought Mrs. Westmore's attention ought to be
+called to certain conditions at the mills, and no one
+else seemed likely to speak of them."</p>
+
+<p>"May I ask why you assume that Mr. Truscomb
+will not do so when he has the opportunity?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst could not repress a smile. "Because it is
+owing to Mr. Truscomb that they exist."</p>
+
+<p>"The real object of your visit then," said Mr. Tredegar,
+speaking with deliberation, "is&mdash;er&mdash;an underhand
+attack on your manager's methods?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's face darkened, but he kept his temper.
+"I see nothing especially underhand in my course&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Except," the other interposed ironically, "that you
+have waited to speak till Mr. Truscomb was not in a
+position to defend himself."</p>
+
+<p>"I never had the chance before. It was at Mrs.
+Westmore's own suggestion that I took her over the
+mills, and feeling as I do I should have thought it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[p 77]</a></span>
+cowardly to shirk the chance of pointing out to her the
+conditions there."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar mused, his eyes still bent on his gently-oscillating
+foot. Whenever a sufficient pressure from
+without parted the fog of self-complacency in which he
+moved, he had a shrewd enough outlook on men and
+motives; and it may be that the vigorous ring of Amherst's
+answer had effected this momentary clearing of
+the air.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, his next words were spoken in a more
+accessible tone. "To what conditions do you refer?"</p>
+
+<p>"To the conditions under which the mill-hands work
+and live&mdash;to the whole management of the mills, in
+fact, in relation to the people employed."</p>
+
+<p>"That is a large question. Pardon my possible ignorance&mdash;" Mr.
+Tredegar paused to make sure that
+his hearer took in the full irony of this&mdash;"but surely in
+this state there are liability and inspection laws for the
+protection of the operatives?"</p>
+
+<p>"There are such laws, yes&mdash;but most of them are
+either a dead letter, or else so easily evaded that no
+employer thinks of conforming to them."</p>
+
+<p>"No employer? Then your specific charge against
+the Westmore mills is part of a general arraignment of
+all employers of labour?"</p>
+
+<p>"By no means, sir. I only meant that, where the
+hands are well treated, it is due rather to the personal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[p 78]</a></span>
+good-will of the employer than to any fear of the
+law."</p>
+
+<p>"And in what respect do you think the Westmore
+hands unfairly treated?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst paused to measure his words. "The question,
+as you say, is a large one," he rejoined. "It has
+its roots in the way the business is organized&mdash;in the
+traditional attitude of the company toward the operatives.
+I hoped that Mrs. Westmore might return to
+the mills&mdash;might visit some of the people in their houses.
+Seeing their way of living, it might have occurred to her
+to ask a reason for it&mdash;and one enquiry would have led
+to another. She spoke this morning of going to the
+hospital to see Dillon."</p>
+
+<p>"She did go to the hospital: I went with her. But
+as Dillon was sleeping, and as the matron told us he
+was much better&mdash;a piece of news which, I am happy
+to say, Dr. Disbrow has just confirmed&mdash;she did not
+go up to the ward."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst was silent, and Mr. Tredegar pursued: "I
+gather, from your bringing up Dillon's case, that for
+some reason you consider it typical of the defects you
+find in Mr. Truscomb's management. Suppose, therefore,
+we drop generalizations, and confine ourselves to
+the particular instance. What wrong, in your view,
+has been done the Dillons?"</p>
+
+<p>He turned, as he spoke, to extract a cigar from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[p 79]</a></span>
+box at his elbow. "Let me offer you one, Mr. Amherst:
+we shall talk more comfortably," he suggested
+with distant affability; but Amherst, with a gesture of
+refusal, plunged into his exposition of the Dillon case.
+He tried to put the facts succinctly, presenting them in
+their bare ugliness, without emotional drapery; setting
+forth Dillon's good record for sobriety and skill, dwelling
+on the fact that his wife's ill-health was the result
+of perfectly remediable conditions in the work-rooms,
+and giving his reasons for the belief that the accident
+had been caused, not by Dillon's carelessness, but by
+the over-crowding of the carding-room. Mr. Tredegar
+listened attentively, though the cloud of cigar-smoke
+between himself and Amherst masked from the latter
+his possible changes of expression. When he removed
+his cigar, his face looked smaller than ever, as though
+desiccated by the fumes of the tobacco.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you ever called Mr. Gaines's attention to
+these matters?"</p>
+
+<p>"No: that would have been useless. He has always
+refused to discuss the condition of the mills with any
+one but the manager."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm&mdash;that would seem to prove that Mr. Gaines,
+who lives here, sees as much reason for trusting Truscomb's
+judgment as Mr. Westmore, who delegated his
+authority from a distance."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst did not take this up, and after a pause Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[p 80]</a></span>
+Tredegar went on: "You know, of course, the answers
+I might make to such an indictment. As a lawyer, I
+might call your attention to the employ&eacute;'s waiver of
+risk, to the strong chances of contributory negligence,
+and so on; but happily in this case such arguments are
+superfluous. You are apparently not aware that Dillon's
+injury is much slighter than it ought to be to
+serve your purpose. Dr. Disbrow has just told us
+that he will probably get off with the loss of a finger;
+and I need hardly say that, whatever may have been
+Dillon's own share in causing the accident&mdash;and as to
+this, as you admit, opinions differ&mdash;Mrs. Westmore
+will assume all the expenses of his nursing, besides
+making a liberal gift to his wife." Mr. Tredegar laid
+down his cigar and drew forth a silver-mounted note-case.
+"Here, in fact," he continued, "is a cheque
+which she asks you to transmit, and which, as I think
+you will agree, ought to silence, on your part as well
+as Mrs. Dillon's, any criticism of Mrs. Westmore's
+dealings with her operatives."</p>
+
+<p>The blood rose to Amherst's forehead, and he just
+restrained himself from pushing back the cheque which
+Mr. Tredegar had laid on the table between them.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no question of criticizing Mrs. Westmore's
+dealings with her operatives&mdash;as far as I know, she has
+had none as yet," he rejoined, unable to control his
+voice as completely as his hand. "And the proof of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[p 81]</a></span>
+it is the impunity with which her agents deceive her&mdash;in
+this case, for instance, of Dillon's injury. Dr. Disbrow,
+who is Mr. Truscomb's brother-in-law, and apt
+to be influenced by his views, assures you that the man
+will get off with the loss of a finger; but some one
+equally competent to speak told me last night that he
+would lose not only his hand but his arm."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's voice had swelled to a deep note of anger,
+and with his tossed hair, and eyes darkening under furrowed
+brows, he presented an image of revolutionary violence
+which deepened the disdain on Mr. Tredegar's lip.</p>
+
+<p>"Some one equally competent to speak? Are you
+prepared to name this anonymous authority?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst hesitated. "No&mdash;I shall have to ask you
+to take my word for it," he returned with a shade of
+embarrassment.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;" Mr. Tredegar murmured, giving to the expressive
+syllable its utmost measure of decent exultation.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst quivered under the thin lash, and broke out:
+"It is all you have required of Dr. Disbrow&mdash;" but at
+this point Mr. Tredegar rose to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear sir, your resorting to such arguments convinces
+me that nothing is to be gained by prolonging
+our talk. I will not even take up your insinuations
+against two of the most respected men in the community&mdash;such
+charges reflect only on those who make them."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[p 82]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Amherst, whose flame of anger had subsided with
+the sudden sense of its futility, received this in silence,
+and the lawyer, reassured, continued with a touch of
+condescension: "My only specific charge from Mrs.
+Westmore was to hand you this cheque; but, in spite
+of what has passed, I take it upon myself to add, in her
+behalf, that your conduct of today will not be allowed
+to weigh against your record at the mills, and that the
+extraordinary charges you have seen fit to bring against
+your superiors will&mdash;if not repeated&mdash;simply be ignored."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When, the next morning at about ten, Mrs. Eustace
+Ansell joined herself to the two gentlemen who still
+lingered over a desultory breakfast in Mrs. Westmore's
+dining-room, she responded to their greeting with less
+than her usual vivacity.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/illus-02.jpg"
+alt="&quot;No&mdash;I shall have to ask you to take my word for it.&quot;"
+title="&quot;No&mdash;I shall have to ask you to take my word for it.&quot;" />
+<br /><span class="caption">&quot;No&mdash;I shall have to ask you to take my word for it.&quot;</span>
+<br /><br /></div>
+
+<p>It was one of Mrs. Ansell's arts to bring to the breakfast-table
+just the right shade of sprightliness, a warmth
+subdued by discretion as the early sunlight is tempered
+by the lingering coolness of night. She was, in short,
+as fresh, as temperate, as the hour, yet without the
+concomitant chill which too often marks its human
+atmosphere: rather her soft effulgence dissipated the
+morning frosts, opening pinched spirits to a promise of
+midday warmth. But on this occasion a mist of uncertainty
+hung on her smile, and veiled the glance which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[p 83]</a></span>
+she turned on the contents of the heavy silver dishes
+successively presented to her notice. When, at the
+conclusion of this ceremony, the servants had withdrawn,
+she continued for a moment to stir her tea in
+silence, while her glance travelled from Mr. Tredegar,
+sunk in his morning mail, to Mr. Langhope, who
+leaned back resignedly in his chair, trying to solace
+himself with Hanaford Banner, till midday should
+bring him a sight of the metropolitan press.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you know," she said suddenly, "that
+Bessy has telegraphed for Cicely, and made her arrangements
+to stay here another week."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope's stick slipped to the floor with the
+sudden displacement of his whole lounging person, and
+Mr. Tredegar, removing his tortoise-shell reading-glasses,
+put them hastily into their case, as though to
+declare for instant departure.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Maria&mdash;" Mr. Langhope gasped, while
+she rose and restored his stick.</p>
+
+<p>"She considers it, then, her duty to wait and see
+Truscomb?" the lawyer asked; and Mrs. Ansell, regaining
+her seat, murmured discreetly: "She puts it
+so&mdash;yes."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Maria&mdash;" Mr. Langhope repeated helplessly,
+tossing aside his paper and drawing his chair up
+to the table.</p>
+
+<p>"But it would be perfectly easy to return: it is quite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[p 84]</a></span>
+unnecessary to wait here for his recovery," Mr. Tredegar
+pursued, as though setting forth a fact which had
+not hitherto presented itself to the more limited intelligence
+of his hearers.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope emitted a short laugh, and Mrs. Ansell
+answered gently: "She says she detests the long
+journey."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar rose and gathered up his letters with
+a gesture of annoyance. "In that case&mdash;if I had been
+notified earlier of this decision, I might have caught
+the morning train," he interrupted himself, glancing
+resentfully at his watch.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, don't leave us, Tredegar," Mr. Langhope entreated.
+"We'll reason with her&mdash;we'll persuade her
+to go back by the three-forty."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell smiled. "She telegraphed at seven.
+Cicely and the governess are already on their way."</p>
+
+<p>"At seven? But, my dear friend, why on earth
+didn't you tell us?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know till a few minutes ago. Bessy called
+me in as I was coming down."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;" Mr. Langhope murmured, meeting her
+eyes for a fraction of a second. In the encounter, she
+appeared to communicate something more than she
+had spoken, for as he stooped to pick up his paper he
+said, more easily: "My dear Tredegar, if we're in a
+box there's no reason why we should force you into it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[p 85]</a></span>
+too. Ring for Ropes, and we'll look up a train for
+you."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar appeared slightly ruffled at this prompt
+acquiescence in his threatened departure. "Of course,
+if I had been notified in advance, I might have arranged
+to postpone my engagements another day; but
+in any case, it is quite out of the question that I should
+return in a week&mdash;and quite unnecessary," he added,
+snapping his lips shut as though he were closing his
+last portmanteau.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, quite&mdash;quite," Mr. Langhope assented. "It
+isn't, in fact, in the least necessary for any of us either
+to stay on now or to return. Truscomb could come
+to Long Island when he recovers, and answer any questions
+we may have to put; but if Bessy has sent for
+the child, we must of course put off going for today&mdash;at
+least I must," he added sighing, "and, though
+I know it's out of the question to exact such a sacrifice
+from you, I have a faint hope that our delightful
+friend here, with the altruistic spirit of her sex&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I shall enjoy it&mdash;my maid is unpacking," Mrs.
+Ansell gaily affirmed; and Mr. Tredegar, shrugging
+his shoulders, said curtly: "In that case I will ring for
+the time-table."</p>
+
+<p>When he had withdrawn to consult it in the seclusion
+of the library, and Mrs. Ansell, affecting a sudden desire
+for a second cup of tea, had reseated herself to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[p 86]</a></span>
+await the replenishment of the kettle, Mr. Langhope
+exchanged his own chair for a place at her side.</p>
+
+<p>"Now what on earth does this mean?" he asked,
+lighting a cigarette in response to her slight nod of
+consent.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell's gaze lost itself in the depths of the
+empty tea-pot.</p>
+
+<p>"A number of things&mdash;or any one of them," she said
+at length, extending her arm toward the tea-caddy.</p>
+
+<p>"For instance&mdash;?" he rejoined, following appreciatively
+the movements of her long slim hands.</p>
+
+<p>She raised her head and met his eyes. "For instance:
+it may mean&mdash;don't resent the suggestion&mdash;that
+you and Mr. Tredegar were not quite well-advised in persuading
+her not to see Mr. Amherst yesterday evening."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope uttered an exclamation of surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"But, my dear Maria&mdash;in the name of reason...why,
+after the doctor's visit&mdash;after his coming here last
+night, at Truscomb's request, to put the actual facts
+before her&mdash;should she have gone over the whole business
+again with this interfering young fellow? How,
+in fact, could she have done so," he added, after vainly
+waiting for her reply, "without putting a sort of slight
+on Truscomb, who is, after all, the only person entitled
+to speak with authority?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell received his outburst in silence, and the
+butler, reappearing with the kettle and fresh toast, gave<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[p 87]</a></span>
+her the chance to prolong her pause for a full minute.
+When the door had closed on him, she said: "Judged
+by reason, your arguments are unanswerable; but when
+it comes to a question of feeling&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Feeling? What kind of feeling? You don't mean
+to suggest anything so preposterous as that Bessy&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>She made a gesture of smiling protest. "I confess
+it is to be regretted that his mother is a lady, and that
+he looks&mdash;you must have noticed it?&mdash;so amazingly
+like the portraits of the young Schiller. But I only
+meant that Bessy forms all her opinions emotionally;
+and that she must have been very strongly affected by
+the scene Mr. Tredegar described to us."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," Mr. Langhope interjected, replying first to
+her parenthesis, "how a woman of your good sense
+stumbled on that idea of hunting up the mother&mdash;!"
+but Mrs. Ansell answered, with a slight grimace: "My
+dear Henry, if you could see the house they live in you'd
+think I had been providentially guided there!" and,
+reverting to the main issue, he went on fretfully: "But
+why, after hearing the true version of the facts, should
+Bessy still be influenced by that sensational scene?
+Even if it was not, as Tredegar suspects, cooked up
+expressly to take her in, she must see that the hospital
+doctor is, after all, as likely as any one to know how
+the accident really happened, and how seriously the
+fellow is hurt."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[p 88]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"There's the point. Why should Bessy believe Dr.
+Disbrow rather than Mr. Amherst?"</p>
+
+<p>"For the best of reasons&mdash;because Disbrow has
+nothing to gain by distorting the facts, whereas this
+young Amherst, as Tredegar pointed out, has the very
+obvious desire to give Truscomb a bad name and shove
+himself into his place."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell contemplatively turned the rings upon
+her fingers. "From what I saw of Amherst I'm inclined
+to think that, if that is his object, he is too clever
+to have shown his hand so soon. But if you are right,
+was there not all the more reason for letting Bessy see
+him and find out as soon as possible what he was aiming
+at?"</p>
+
+<p>"If one could have trusted her to find out&mdash;but you
+credit my poor child with more penetration than I've
+ever seen in her."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you've looked for it at the wrong time&mdash;and
+about the wrong things. Bessy has the penetration
+of the heart."</p>
+
+<p>"The heart! You make mine jump when you use
+such expressions."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I use this one in a general sense. But I want
+to help you to keep it from acquiring a more restricted
+significance."</p>
+
+<p>"Restricted&mdash;to the young man himself?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell's expressive hands seemed to commit the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[p 89]</a></span>
+question to fate. "All I ask you to consider for the
+present is that Bessy is quite unoccupied and excessively
+bored."</p>
+
+<p>"Bored? Why, she has everything on earth she can
+want!"</p>
+
+<p>"The ideal state for producing boredom&mdash;the only
+atmosphere in which it really thrives. And besides&mdash;to
+be humanly inconsistent&mdash;there's just one thing she
+hasn't got."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" Mr. Langhope groaned, fortifying himself
+with a second cigarette.</p>
+
+<p>"An occupation for that rudimentary little organ,
+the mention of which makes you jump."</p>
+
+<p>"There you go again! Good heavens, Maria, do you
+want to encourage her to fall in love?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not with a man, just at present, but with a hobby,
+an interest, by all means. If she doesn't, the man will
+take the place of the interest&mdash;there's a vacuum to be
+filled, and human nature abhors a vacuum."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope shrugged his shoulders. "I don't
+follow you. She adored her husband."</p>
+
+<p>His friend's fine smile was like a magnifying glass
+silently applied to the gross stupidity of his remark.
+"Oh, I don't say it was a great passion&mdash;but they got
+on perfectly," he corrected himself.</p>
+
+<p>"So perfectly that you must expect her to want a
+little storm and stress for a change. The mere fact<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[p 90]</a></span>
+that you and Mr. Tredegar objected to her seeing Mr.
+Amherst last night has roused the spirit of opposition
+in her. A year ago she hadn't any spirit of opposition."</p>
+
+<p>"There was nothing for her to oppose&mdash;poor Dick
+made her life so preposterously easy."</p>
+
+<p>"My ingenuous friend! Do you still think that's any
+reason? The fact is, Bessy wasn't awake, she wasn't
+even born, then.... She is now, and you know the
+infant's first conscious joy is to smash things."</p>
+
+<p>"It will be rather an expensive joy if the mills are
+the first thing she smashes."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh I imagine the mills are pretty substantial. I
+should, I own," Mrs. Ansell smiled, "not object to seeing
+her try her teeth on them."</p>
+
+<p>"Which, in terms of practical conduct, means&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"That I advise you not to disapprove of her staying
+on, or of her investigating the young man's charges.
+You must remember that another peculiarity of the
+infant mind is to tire soonest of the toy that no one
+tries to take away from it."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Que diable!</i> But suppose Truscomb turns rusty
+at this very unusual form of procedure? Perhaps you
+don't quite know how completely he represents the
+prosperity of the mills."</p>
+
+<p>"All the more reason," Mrs. Ansell persisted, rising
+at the sound of Mr. Tredegar's approach. "For don't
+you perceive, my poor distracted friend, that if Trus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[p 91]</a></span>comb
+turns rusty, as he undoubtedly will, the inevitable
+result will be his manager's dismissal&mdash;and that thereafter
+there will presumably be peace in Warsaw?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you divinely wicked woman!" cried Mr. Langhope,
+snatching at an appreciative pressure of her hand
+as the lawyer reappeared in the doorway.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Before</span> daylight that same morning Amherst,
+dressing by the gas-flame above his cheap wash-stand,
+strove to bring some order into his angry thoughts.
+It humbled him to feel his purpose tossing rudderless
+on unruly waves of emotion, yet strive as he would he
+could not regain a hold on it. The events of the last
+twenty-four hours had been too rapid and unexpected
+for him to preserve his usual clear feeling of mastery;
+and he had, besides, to reckon with the first complete
+surprise of his senses. His way of life had excluded
+him from all contact with the subtler feminine influences,
+and the primitive side of the relation left his
+imagination untouched. He was therefore the more assailable
+by those refined forms of the ancient spell that
+lurk in delicacy of feeling interpreted by loveliness of
+face. By his own choice he had cut himself off from
+all possibility of such communion; had accepted complete
+abstinence for that part of his nature which might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[p 92]</a></span>
+have offered a refuge from the stern prose of his daily
+task. But his personal indifference to his surroundings&mdash;deliberately
+encouraged as a defiance to the attractions
+of the life he had renounced&mdash;proved no defence
+against this appeal; rather, the meanness of his surroundings
+combined with his inherited refinement of
+taste to deepen the effect of Bessy's charm.</p>
+
+<p>As he reviewed the incidents of the past hours, a reaction
+of self-derision came to his aid. What was this
+exquisite opportunity from which he had cut himself
+off? What, to reduce the question to a personal issue,
+had Mrs. Westmore said or done that, on the part of a
+plain woman, would have quickened his pulses by the
+least fraction of a second? Why, it was only the old
+story of the length of Cleopatra's nose! Because her
+eyes were a heavenly vehicle for sympathy, because her
+voice was pitched to thrill the tender chords, he had
+been deluded into thinking that she understood and responded
+to his appeal. And her own emotions had
+been wrought upon by means as cheap: it was only the
+obvious, theatrical side of the incident that had affected
+her. If Dillon's wife had been old and ugly, would
+she have been clasped to her employer's bosom? A
+more expert knowledge of the sex would have told Amherst
+that such ready sympathy is likely to be followed
+by as prompt a reaction of indifference. Luckily Mrs.
+Westmore's course had served as a corrective for his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[p 93]</a></span>
+lack of experience; she had even, as it appeared, been
+at some pains to hasten the process of disillusionment.
+This timely discipline left him blushing at his own insincerity;
+for he now saw that he had risked his future
+not because of his zeal for the welfare of the mill-hands,
+but because Mrs. Westmore's look was like sunshine
+on his frozen senses, and because he was resolved,
+at any cost, to arrest her attention, to associate himself
+with her by the only means in his power.</p>
+
+<p>Well, he deserved to fail with such an end in view;
+and the futility of his scheme was matched by the
+vanity of his purpose. In the cold light of disenchantment
+it seemed as though he had tried to build an impregnable
+fortress out of nursery blocks. How could
+he have foreseen anything but failure for so preposterous
+an attempt? His breach of discipline would of course
+be reported at once to Mr. Gaines and Truscomb; and
+the manager, already jealous of his assistant's popularity
+with the hands, which was a tacit criticism of his
+own methods, would promptly seize the pretext to be
+rid of him. Amherst was aware that only his technical
+efficiency, and his knack of getting the maximum
+of work out of the operatives, had secured him from
+Truscomb's animosity. From the outset there had
+been small sympathy between the two; but the scarcity
+of competent and hard-working assistants had made
+Truscomb endure him for what he was worth to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[p 94]</a></span>
+mills. Now, however, his own folly had put the match
+to the manager's smouldering dislike, and he saw himself,
+in consequence, discharged and black-listed, and
+perhaps roaming for months in quest of a job. He
+knew the efficiency of that far-reaching system of
+defamation whereby the employers of labour pursue
+and punish the subordinate who incurs their displeasure.
+In the case of a mere operative this secret persecution
+often worked complete ruin; and even to a
+man of Amherst's worth it opened the dispiriting prospect
+of a long struggle for rehabilitation.</p>
+
+<p>Deep down, he suffered most at the thought that his
+blow for the operatives had failed; but on the surface
+it was the manner of his failure that exasperated him.
+For it seemed to prove him unfit for the very work to
+which he was drawn: that yearning to help the world
+forward that, in some natures, sets the measure to
+which the personal adventure must keep step. Amherst
+had hitherto felt himself secured by his insight
+and self-control from the emotional errors besetting
+the way of the enthusiast; and behold, he had stumbled
+into the first sentimental trap in his path, and
+tricked his eyes with a Christmas-chromo vision of
+lovely woman dispensing coals and blankets! Luckily,
+though such wounds to his self-confidence cut deep, he
+could apply to them the antiseptic of an unfailing
+humour; and before he had finished dressing, the pic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[p 95]</a></span>ture
+of his wide schemes of social reform contracting
+to a blue-eyed philanthropy of cheques and groceries,
+had provoked a reaction of laughter. Perhaps the
+laughter came too soon, and rang too loud, to be true
+to the core; but at any rate it healed the edges of his
+hurt, and gave him a sound surface of composure.</p>
+
+<p>But he could not laugh away the thought of the trials
+to which his intemperance had probably exposed his
+mother; and when, at the breakfast-table, from which
+Duplain had already departed, she broke into praise
+of their visitor, it was like a burning irritant on his
+wound.</p>
+
+<p>"What a face, John! Of course I don't often see
+people of that kind now&mdash;" the words, falling from her
+too simply to be reproachful, wrung him, for that, all
+the more&mdash;"but I'm sure that kind of soft loveliness is
+rare everywhere; like a sweet summer morning with
+the mist on it. The Gaines girls, now, are my idea of
+the modern type; very handsome, of course, but you
+see just <i>how</i> handsome the first minute. I like a story
+that keeps one wondering till the end. It was very
+kind of Maria Ansell," Mrs. Amherst wandered happily
+on, "to come and hunt me out yesterday, and I enjoyed
+our quiet talk about old times. But what I liked best
+was seeing Mrs. Westmore&mdash;and, oh, John, if she came
+to live here, what a benediction to the mills!"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst was silent, moved most of all by the unim<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[p 96]</a></span>paired
+simplicity of heart with which his mother could
+take up past relations, and open her meagre life to the
+high visitations of grace and fashion, without a tinge of
+self-consciousness or apology. "I shall never be as
+genuine as that," he thought, remembering how he
+had wished to have Mrs. Westmore know that he was
+of her own class. How mixed our passions are, and
+how elastic must be the word that would cover any one
+of them! Amherst's, at that moment, were all stained
+with the deep wound to his self-love.</p>
+
+<p>The discolouration he carried in his eye made the
+mill-village seem more than commonly cheerless and
+ugly as he walked over to the office after breakfast.
+Beyond the grim roof-line of the factories a dazzle of
+rays sent upward from banked white clouds the promise
+of another brilliant day; and he reflected that Mrs.
+Westmore would soon be speeding home to the joy of
+a gallop over the plains.</p>
+
+<p>Far different was the task that awaited him&mdash;yet it
+gave him a pang to think that he might be performing
+it for the last time. In spite of Mr. Tredegar's assurances,
+he was certain that the report of his conduct
+must by this time have reached the President, and been
+transmitted to Truscomb; the latter was better that
+morning, and the next day he would doubtless call his
+rebellious assistant to account. Amherst, meanwhile,
+took up his routine with a dull heart. Even should his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[p 97]</a></span>
+offense be condoned, his occupation presented, in itself,
+little future to a man without money or powerful connections.
+Money! He had spurned the thought of it in
+choosing his work, yet he now saw that, without its aid,
+he was powerless to accomplish the object to which his
+personal desires had been sacrificed. His love of his
+craft had gradually been merged in the larger love for
+his fellow-workers, and in the resulting desire to lift
+and widen their lot. He had once fancied that this
+end might be attained by an internal revolution in the
+management of the Westmore mills; that he might
+succeed in creating an industrial object-lesson conspicuous
+enough to point the way to wiser law-making
+and juster relations between the classes. But the last
+hours' experiences had shown him how vain it was
+to assault single-handed the strong barrier between
+money and labour, and how his own dash at the breach
+had only thrust him farther back into the obscure ranks
+of the stragglers. It was, after all, only through politics
+that he could return successfully to the attack; and
+financial independence was the needful preliminary to
+a political career. If he had stuck to the law he might,
+by this time, have been nearer his goal; but then the
+gold might not have mattered, since it was only by
+living among the workers that he had learned to care
+for their fate. And rather than have forfeited that
+poignant yet mighty vision of the onward groping of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[p 98]</a></span>
+the mass, rather than have missed the widening of his
+own nature that had come through sharing their hopes
+and pains, he would still have turned from the easier
+way, have chosen the deeper initiation rather than the
+readier attainment.</p>
+
+<p>But this philosophic view of the situation was a mere
+thread of light on the farthest verge of his sky: much
+nearer were the clouds of immediate care, amid which
+his own folly, and his mother's possible suffering from
+it, loomed darkest; and these considerations made him
+resolve that, if his insubordination were overlooked, he
+would swallow the affront of a pardon, and continue
+for the present in the mechanical performance of his
+duties. He had just brought himself to this leaden
+state of acquiescence when one of the clerks in the outer
+office thrust his head in to say: "A lady asking for
+you&mdash;" and looking up, Amherst beheld Bessy Westmore.</p>
+
+<p>She came in alone, with an air of high self-possession
+in marked contrast to her timidity and indecision of the
+previous day. Amherst thought she looked taller, more
+majestic; so readily may the upward slant of a soft
+chin, the firmer line of yielding brows, add a cubit to
+the outward woman. Her aspect was so commanding
+that he fancied she had come to express her disapproval
+of his conduct, to rebuke him for lack of respect
+to Mr. Tredegar; but a moment later it became<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[p 99]</a></span>
+clear, even to his inexperienced perceptions, that it was
+not to himself that her challenge was directed.</p>
+
+<p>She advanced toward the seat he had moved forward,
+but in her absorption forgot to seat herself, and stood
+with her clasped hands resting on the back of the chair.</p>
+
+<p>"I have come back to talk to you," she began, in her
+sweet voice with its occasional quick lift of appeal. "I
+knew that, in Mr. Truscomb's absence, it would be
+hard for you to leave the mills, and there are one or two
+things I want you to explain before I go away&mdash;some
+of the things, for instance, that you spoke to Mr. Tredegar
+about last night."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's feeling of constraint returned. "I'm
+afraid I expressed myself badly; I may have annoyed
+him&mdash;" he began.</p>
+
+<p>She smiled this away, as though irrelevant to the
+main issue. "Perhaps you don't quite understand each
+other&mdash;but I am sure you can make it clear to me."
+She sank into the chair, resting one arm on the edge of
+the desk behind which he had resumed his place.
+"That is the reason why I came alone," she continued.
+"I never can understand when a lot of people are trying
+to tell me a thing all at once. And I don't suppose I
+care as much as a man would&mdash;a lawyer especially&mdash;about
+the forms that ought to be observed. All I want
+is to find out what is wrong and how to remedy it."</p>
+
+<p>Her blue eyes met Amherst's in a look that flowed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[p 100]</a></span>
+like warmth about his heart. How should he have
+doubted that her feelings were as exquisite as her means
+of expressing them? The iron bands of distrust were
+loosened from his spirit, and he blushed for his cheap
+scepticism of the morning. In a woman so evidently
+nurtured in dependence, whose views had been formed,
+and her actions directed, by the most conventional influences,
+the mere fact of coming alone to Westmore,
+in open defiance of her advisers, bespoke a persistence
+of purpose that put his doubts to shame.</p>
+
+<p>"It will make a great difference to the people here if
+you interest yourself in them," he rejoined. "I tried
+to explain to Mr. Tredegar that I had no wish to criticise
+the business management of the mills&mdash;even if
+there had been any excuse for my doing so&mdash;but that I
+was sure the condition of the operatives could be very
+much improved, without permanent harm to the business,
+by any one who felt a personal sympathy for
+them; and in the end I believe such sympathy produces
+better work, and so benefits the employer materially."</p>
+
+<p>She listened with her gentle look of trust, as though
+committing to him, with the good faith of a child, her
+ignorance, her credulity, her little rudimentary convictions
+and her little tentative aspirations, relying on him
+not to abuse or misdirect them in the boundless supremacy
+of his masculine understanding.</p>
+
+<p>"That is just what I want you to explain to me,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[p 101]</a></span>
+she said. "But first I should like to know more about
+the poor man who was hurt. I meant to see his wife
+yesterday, but Mr. Gaines told me she would be at work
+till six, and it would have been difficult to go after that.
+I <i>did</i> go to the hospital; but the man was sleeping&mdash;is
+Dillon his name?&mdash;and the matron told us he was much
+better. Dr. Disbrow came in the evening and said the
+same thing&mdash;told us it was all a false report about his
+having been so badly hurt, and that Mr. Truscomb was
+very much annoyed when he heard of your having said,
+before the operatives, that Dillon would lose his arm."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst smiled. "Ah&mdash;Mr. Truscomb heard that?
+Well, he's right to be annoyed: I ought not to have
+said it when I did. But unfortunately I am not the
+only one to be punished. The operative who tied on
+the black cloth was dismissed this morning."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Westmore flamed up. "Dismissed for that?
+Oh, how unjust&mdash;how cruel!"</p>
+
+<p>"You must look at both sides of the case," said Amherst,
+finding it much easier to remain temperate in the
+glow he had kindled than if he had had to force his
+own heat into frozen veins. "Of course any act of insubordination
+must be reprimanded&mdash;but I think a
+reprimand would have been enough."</p>
+
+<p>It gave him an undeniable throb of pleasure to find
+that she was not to be checked by such arguments.
+"But he shall be put back&mdash;I won't have any one dis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[p 102]</a></span>charged
+for such a reason! You must find him for me
+at once&mdash;you must tell him&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Once more Amherst gently restrained her. "If
+you'll forgive my saying so, I think it is better to let
+him go, and take his chance of getting work elsewhere.
+If he were taken back he might be made to suffer. As
+things are organized here, the hands are very much at
+the mercy of the overseers, and the overseer in that
+room would be likely to make it uncomfortable for a
+hand who had so openly defied him."</p>
+
+<p>With a heavy sigh she bent her puzzled brows on him.
+"How complicated it is! I wonder if I shall ever
+understand it all. <i>You</i> don't think Dillon's accident
+was his own fault, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not; there are too many cards in that
+room. I pointed out the fact to Mr. Truscomb when
+the new machines were set up three years ago. An
+operative may be ever so expert with his fingers, and
+yet not learn to measure his ordinary movements quite
+as accurately as if he were an automaton; and that is
+what a man must do to be safe in the carding-room."</p>
+
+<p>She sighed again. "The more you tell me, the more
+difficult it all seems. Why is the carding-room so over-crowded?"</p>
+
+<p>"To make it pay better," Amherst returned bluntly;
+and the colour flushed her sensitive skin.</p>
+
+<p>He thought she was about to punish him for his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[p 103]</a></span>
+plain-speaking; but she went on after a pause: "What
+you say is dreadful. Each thing seems to lead back to
+another&mdash;and I feel so ignorant of it all." She hesitated
+again, and then said, turning her bluest glance on
+him: "I am going to be quite frank with you, Mr.
+Amherst. Mr. Tredegar repeated to me what you said
+to him last night, and I think he was annoyed that you
+were unwilling to give any proof of the charges you
+made."</p>
+
+<p>"Charges? Ah," Amherst exclaimed, with a start of
+recollection, "he means my refusing to say who told me
+that Dr. Disbrow was not telling the truth about Dillon?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. He said that was a very grave accusation to
+make, and that no one should have made it without
+being able to give proof."</p>
+
+<p>"That is quite true, theoretically. But in this case
+it would be easy for you or Mr. Tredegar to find out
+whether I was right."</p>
+
+<p>"But Mr. Tredegar said you refused to say who told
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"I was bound to, as it happened. But I am not
+bound to prevent your trying to get the same information."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;" she murmured understandingly; and, a sudden
+thought striking him, he went on, with a glance at
+the clock: "If you really wish to judge for yourself,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[p 104]</a></span>
+why not go to the hospital now? I shall be free in
+five minutes, and could go with you if you wish it."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst had remembered the nurse's cry of recognition
+when she saw Mrs. Westmore's face under the
+street-lamp; and it immediately occurred to him that,
+if the two women had really known each other, Mrs.
+Westmore would have no difficulty in obtaining the information
+she wanted; while, even if they met as
+strangers, the dark-eyed girl's perspicacity might still
+be trusted to come to their aid. It remained only to
+be seen how Mrs. Westmore would take his suggestion;
+but some instinct was already telling him that the highhanded
+method was the one she really preferred.</p>
+
+<p>"To the hospital&mdash;now? I should like it of all
+things," she exclaimed, rising with what seemed an
+almost childish zest in the adventure. "Of course that
+is the best way of finding out. I ought to have insisted
+on seeing Dillon yesterday&mdash;but I begin to think the
+matron didn't want me to."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst left this inference to work itself out in her
+mind, contenting himself, as they drove back to Hanaford,
+with answering her questions about Dillon's family,
+the ages of his children, and his wife's health. Her
+enquiries, he noticed, did not extend from the particular
+to the general: her curiosity, as yet, was too purely personal
+and emotional to lead to any larger consideration
+of the question. But this larger view might grow out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[p 105]</a></span>
+of the investigation of Dillon's case; and meanwhile
+Amherst's own purposes were momentarily lost in the
+sweet confusion of feeling her near him&mdash;of seeing the
+exquisite grain of her skin, the way her lashes grew out
+of a dusky line on the edge of the white lids, the way
+her hair, stealing in spirals of light from brow to ear,
+wavered off into a fruity down on the edge of the cheek.</p>
+
+<p>At the hospital they were protestingly admitted by
+Mrs. Ogan, though the official "visitors' hour" was not
+till the afternoon; and beside the sufferer's bed, Amherst
+saw again that sudden flowering of compassion
+which seemed the key to his companion's beauty: as
+though her lips had been formed for consolation and
+her hands for tender offices. It was clear enough that
+Dillon, still sunk in a torpor broken by feverish tossings,
+was making no perceptible progress toward recovery;
+and Mrs. Ogan was reduced to murmuring
+some technical explanation about the state of the wound
+while Bessy hung above him with reassuring murmurs
+as to his wife's fate, and promises that the children
+should be cared for.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst had noticed, on entering, that a new nurse&mdash;a
+gaping young woman instantly lost in the study of
+Mrs. Westmore's toilet&mdash;had replaced the dark-eyed
+attendant of the day before; and supposing that the
+latter was temporarily off duty, he asked Mrs. Ogan
+if she might be seen.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[p 106]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The matron's face was a picture of genteel perplexity.
+"The other nurse? Our regular surgical nurse, Miss
+Golden, is ill&mdash;Miss Hibbs, here, is replacing her for
+the present." She indicated the gaping damsel; then,
+as Amherst persisted: "Ah," she wondered negligently,
+"do you mean the young lady you saw here yesterday?
+Certainly&mdash;I had forgotten: Miss Brent was merely a&mdash;er&mdash;temporary
+substitute. I believe she was recommended
+to Dr. Disbrow by one of his patients; but we
+found her quite unsuitable&mdash;in fact, unfitted&mdash;and the
+doctor discharged her this morning."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Westmore had drawn near, and while the matron
+delivered her explanation, with an uneasy sorting
+and shifting of words, a quick signal of intelligence
+passed between her hearers. "You see?" Amherst's
+eyes exclaimed; "I see&mdash;they have sent her away because
+she told you," Bessy's flashed back in wrath, and
+his answering look did not deny her inference.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know where she has gone?" Amherst enquired;
+but Mrs. Ogan, permitting her brows a faint
+lift of surprise, replied that she had no idea of Miss
+Brent's movements, beyond having heard that she was
+to leave Hanaford immediately</p>
+
+<p>In the carriage Bessy exclaimed: "It was the nurse,
+of course&mdash;if we could only find her! Brent&mdash;did Mrs.
+Ogan say her name was Brent?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know the name?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[p 107]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;at least&mdash;but it couldn't, of course, be the
+girl I knew&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Brent saw you the night you arrived, and
+thought she recognized you. She said you and she had
+been at some school or convent together."</p>
+
+<p>"The Sacred Heart? Then it <i>is</i> Justine Brent! I
+heard they had lost their money&mdash;I haven't seen her for
+years. But how strange that she should be a hospital
+nurse! And why is she at Hanaford, I wonder?"</p>
+
+<p>"She was here only on a visit; she didn't tell me
+where she lived. She said she heard that a surgical
+nurse was wanted at the hospital, and volunteered her
+services; I'm afraid she got small thanks for them."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you really think they sent her away for talking
+to you? How do you suppose they found out?"</p>
+
+<p>"I waited for her last night when she left the hospital,
+and I suppose Mrs. Ogan or one of the doctors
+saw us. It was thoughtless of me," Amherst exclaimed
+with compunction.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I had seen her&mdash;poor Justine! We were the
+greatest friends at the convent. She was the ringleader
+in all our mischief&mdash;I never saw any one so quick
+and clever. I suppose her fun is all gone now."</p>
+
+<p>For a moment Mrs. Westmore's mind continued to
+linger among her memories; then she reverted to the
+question of the Dillons, and of what might best be done
+for them if Miss Brent's fears should be realized.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[p 108]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As the carriage neared her door she turned to her
+companion with extended hand. "Thank you so
+much, Mr. Amherst. I am glad you suggested that
+Mr. Truscomb should find some work for Dillon about
+the office. But I must talk to you about this again&mdash;can
+you come in this evening?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Amherst</span> could never afterward regain a detailed
+impression of the weeks that followed. They
+lived in his memory chiefly as exponents of the unforeseen,
+nothing he had looked for having come to pass
+in the way or at the time expected; while the whole
+movement of life was like the noon-day flow of a river,
+in which the separate ripples of brightness are all
+merged in one blinding glitter. His recurring conferences
+with Mrs. Westmore formed, as it were, the small
+surprising kernel of fact about which sensations gathered
+and grew with the swift ripening of a magician's
+fruit. That she should remain on at Hanaford to look
+into the condition of the mills did not, in itself, seem
+surprising to Amherst; for his short phase of doubt
+had been succeeded by an abundant inflow of faith in
+her intentions. It satisfied his inner craving for harmony
+that her face and spirit should, after all, so corroborate
+and complete each other; that it needed no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[p 109]</a></span>
+moral sophistry to adjust her acts to her appearance,
+her words to the promise of her smile. But her immediate
+confidence in him, her resolve to support him in
+his avowed insubordination, to ignore, with the royal
+license of her sex, all that was irregular and inexpedient
+in asking his guidance while the whole official strength
+of the company darkened the background with a gathering
+storm of disapproval&mdash;this sense of being the glove
+flung by her hand in the face of convention, quickened
+astonishingly the flow of Amherst's sensations. It was
+as though a mountain-climber, braced to the strain of
+a hard ascent, should suddenly see the way break into
+roses, and level itself in a path for his feet.</p>
+
+<p>On his second visit he found the two ladies together,
+and Mrs. Ansell's smile of approval seemed to cast a
+social sanction on the episode, to classify it as comfortably
+usual and unimportant. He could see that her
+friend's manner put Bessy at ease, helping her to ask
+her own questions, and to reflect on his suggestions,
+with less bewilderment and more self-confidence.
+Mrs. Ansell had the faculty of restoring to her the belief
+in her reasoning powers that her father could dissolve
+in a monosyllable.</p>
+
+<p>The talk, on this occasion, had turned mainly on the
+future of the Dillon family, on the best means of compensating
+for the accident, and, incidentally, on the
+care of the young children of the mill-colony. Though<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[p 110]</a></span>
+Amherst did not believe in the extremer forms of industrial
+paternalism, he was yet of opinion that, where
+married women were employed, the employer should
+care for their children. He had been gradually, and
+somewhat reluctantly, brought to this conviction by the
+many instances of unavoidable neglect and suffering
+among the children of the women-workers at Westmore;
+and Mrs. Westmore took up the scheme with all the
+ardour of her young motherliness, quivering at the
+thought of hungry or ailing children while her Cicely,
+leaning a silken head against her, lifted puzzled eyes
+to her face.</p>
+
+<p>On the larger problems of the case it was less easy to
+fix Bessy's attention; but Amherst was far from being
+one of the extreme theorists who reject temporary
+remedies lest they defer the day of general renewal, and
+since he looked on every gain in the material condition
+of the mill-hands as a step in their moral growth,
+he was quite willing to hold back his fundamental plans
+while he discussed the establishment of a nursery, and
+of a night-school for the boys in the mills.</p>
+
+<p>The third time he called, he found Mr. Langhope
+and Mr. Halford Gaines of the company. The President
+of the Westmore mills was a trim middle-sized
+man, whose high pink varnish of good living would
+have turned to purple could he have known Mr. Langhope's
+opinion of his jewelled shirt-front and the padded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[p 111]</a></span>
+shoulders of his evening-coat. Happily he had no
+inkling of these views, and was fortified in his command
+of the situation by an unimpaired confidence in his own
+appearance; while Mr. Langhope, discreetly withdrawn
+behind a veil of cigar-smoke, let his silence play like a
+fine criticism over the various phases of the discussion.</p>
+
+<p>It was a surprise to Amherst to find himself in Mr.
+Gaines's presence. The President, secluded in his
+high office, seldom visited the mills, and when there
+showed no consciousness of any presence lower than
+Truscomb's; and Amherst's first thought was that, in
+the manager's enforced absence, he was to be called to
+account by the head of the firm. But he was affably
+welcomed by Mr. Gaines, who made it clear that his
+ostensible purpose in coming was to hear Amherst's
+views as to the proposed night-schools and nursery.
+These were pointedly alluded to as Mrs. Westmore's
+projects, and the young man was made to feel that he
+was merely called in as a temporary adviser in Truscomb's
+absence. This was, in fact, the position Amherst
+preferred to take, and he scrupulously restricted
+himself to the answering of questions, letting Mrs.
+Westmore unfold his plans as though they had been
+her own. "It is much better," he reflected, "that they
+should all think so, and she too, for Truscomb will be
+on his legs again in a day or two, and then my hours
+will be numbered."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[p 112]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile he was surprised to find Mr. Gaines oddly
+amenable to the proposed innovations, which he appeared
+to regard as new fashions in mill-management,
+to be adopted for the same cogent reasons as a new
+cut in coat-tails.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course we want to be up-to-date&mdash;there's no
+reason why the Westmore mills shouldn't do as well
+by their people as any mills in the country," he affirmed,
+in the tone of the entertainer accustomed to
+say: "I want the thing done handsomely." But he
+seemed even less conscious than Mrs. Westmore that
+each particular wrong could be traced back to a radical
+vice in the system. He appeared to think that every
+murmur of assent to her proposals passed the sponge,
+once for all, over the difficulty propounded: as though
+a problem in algebra should be solved by wiping it off
+the blackboard.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Bessy, we all owe you a debt of gratitude
+for coming here, and bringing, so to speak, a fresh eye
+to bear on the subject. If I've been, perhaps, a little
+too exclusively absorbed in making the mills profitable,
+my friend Langhope will, I believe, not be the first to&mdash;er&mdash;cast
+a stone at me." Mr. Gaines, who was the
+soul of delicacy, stumbled a little over the awkward
+associations connected with this figure, but, picking himself
+up, hastened on to affirm: "And in that respect, I
+think we can challenge comparison with any industry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[p 113]</a></span>
+in the state; but I am the first to admit that there may
+be another side, a side that it takes a woman&mdash;a mother&mdash;to
+see. For instance," he threw in jocosely, "I flatter
+myself that I know how to order a good dinner;
+but I always leave the flowers to my wife. And if
+you'll permit me to say so," he went on, encouraged by
+the felicity of his image, "I believe it will produce a
+most pleasing effect&mdash;not only on the operatives themselves,
+but on the whole of Hanaford&mdash;on our own set of
+people especially&mdash;to have you come here and interest
+yourself in the&mdash;er&mdash;philanthropic side of the work."</p>
+
+<p>Bessy coloured a little. She blushed easily, and was
+perhaps not over-discriminating as to the quality of
+praise received; but under her ripple of pleasure a
+stronger feeling stirred, and she said hastily: "I am
+afraid I never should have thought of these things if
+Mr. Amherst had not pointed them out to me."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gaines met this blandly. "Very gratifying to
+Mr. Amherst to have you put it in that way; and I am
+sure we all appreciate his valuable hints. Truscomb
+himself could not have been more helpful, though his
+larger experience will no doubt be useful later on, in
+developing and&mdash;er&mdash;modifying your plans."</p>
+
+<p>It was difficult to reconcile this large view of the moral
+issue with the existence of abuses which made the management
+of the Westmore mills as unpleasantly notorious
+in one section of the community as it was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[p 114]</a></span>
+agreeably notable in another. But Amherst was impartial
+enough to see that Mr. Gaines was unconscious
+of the incongruities of the situation. He left the reconciling
+of incompatibles to Truscomb with the simple
+faith of the believer committing a like task to his
+maker: it was in the manager's mind that the dark
+processes of adjustment took place. Mr. Gaines cultivated
+the convenient and popular idea that by ignoring
+wrongs one is not so much condoning as actually denying
+their existence; and in pursuance of this belief he
+devoutly abstained from studying the conditions at
+Westmore.</p>
+
+<p>A farther surprise awaited Amherst when Truscomb
+reappeared in the office. The manager was always a
+man of few words; and for the first days his intercourse
+with his assistant was restricted to asking questions and
+issuing orders. Soon afterward, it became known that
+Dillon's arm was to be amputated, and that afternoon
+Truscomb was summoned to see Mrs. Westmore. When
+he returned he sent for Amherst; and the young man
+felt sure that his hour had come.</p>
+
+<p>He was at dinner when the message reached him,
+and he knew from the tightening of his mother's lips
+that she too interpreted it in the same way. He was
+glad that Duplain's presence kept her from speaking
+her fears; and he thanked her inwardly for the smile
+with which she watched him go.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[p 115]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>That evening, when he returned, the smile was still
+at its post; but it dropped away wearily as he said, with
+his hands on her shoulders: "Don't worry, mother; I
+don't know exactly what's happening, but we're not
+blacklisted yet."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst had immediately taken up her work,
+letting her nervous tension find its usual escape through
+her finger-tips. Her needles flagged as she lifted her
+eyes to his.</p>
+
+<p>"Something <i>is</i> happening, then?" she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, a number of things, evidently&mdash;but though I'm
+in the heart of them, I can't yet make out how they
+are going to affect me."</p>
+
+<p>His mother's glance twinkled in time with the flash
+of her needles. "There's always a safe place in the
+heart of a storm," she said shrewdly; and Amherst rejoined
+with a laugh: "Well, if it's Truscomb's heart,
+I don't know that it's particularly safe for me."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me just what he said, John," she begged,
+making no attempt to carry the pleasantry farther,
+though its possibilities still seemed to flicker about her
+lip; and Amherst proceeded to recount his talk with
+the manager.</p>
+
+<p>Truscomb, it appeared, had made no allusion to
+Dillon; his avowed purpose in summoning his assistant
+had been to discuss with the latter the question of
+the proposed nursery and schools. Mrs. Westmore, at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[p 116]</a></span>
+Amherst's suggestion, had presented these projects as
+her own; but the question of a site having come up,
+she had mentioned to Truscomb his assistant's proposal
+that the company should buy for the purpose
+the notorious Eldorado. The road-house in question
+had always been one of the most destructive influences
+in the mill-colony, and Amherst had made one or two
+indirect attempts to have the building converted to
+other uses; but the persistent opposition he encountered
+gave colour to the popular report that the manager
+took a high toll from the landlord.</p>
+
+<p>It therefore at once occurred to Amherst to suggest
+the purchase of the property to Mrs. Westmore; and
+he was not surprised to find that Truscomb's opposition
+to the scheme centred in the choice of the building.
+But even at this point the manager betrayed no open
+resistance; he seemed tacitly to admit Amherst's right
+to discuss the proposed plans, and even to be consulted
+concerning the choice of a site. He was ready with a
+dozen good reasons against the purchase of the road-house;
+but here also he proceeded with a discretion
+unexampled in his dealings with his subordinates. He
+acknowledged the harm done by the dance-hall, but
+objected that he could not conscientiously advise the
+company to pay the extortionate price at which it was
+held, and reminded Amherst that, if that particular
+source of offense were removed, others would inevitably<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[p 117]</a></span>
+spring up to replace it; marshalling the usual temporizing
+arguments of tolerance and expediency, with
+no marked change from his usual tone, till, just as the
+interview was ending, he asked, with a sudden drop
+to conciliation, if the assistant manager had anything
+to complain of in the treatment he received.</p>
+
+<p>This came as such a surprise to Amherst that before
+he had collected himself he found Truscomb ambiguously
+but unmistakably offering him&mdash;with the practised
+indirection of the man accustomed to cover his
+share in such transactions&mdash;a substantial "consideration"
+for dropping the matter of the road-house. It
+was incredible, yet it had really happened: the all-powerful
+Truscomb, who held Westmore in the hollow
+of his hand, had stooped to bribing his assistant because
+he was afraid to deal with him in a more summary
+manner. Amherst's leap of anger at the offer
+was curbed by the instant perception of its cause. He
+had no time to search for a reason; he could only rally
+himself to meet the unintelligible with a composure as
+abysmal as Truscomb's; and his voice still rang with
+the wonder of the incident as he retailed it to his
+mother.</p>
+
+<p>"Think of what it means, mother, for a young woman
+like Mrs. Westmore, without any experience or any
+habit of authority, to come here, and at the first glimpse
+of injustice, to be so revolted that she finds the courage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[p 118]</a></span>
+and cleverness to put her little hand to the machine and
+reverse the engines&mdash;for it's nothing less that she's
+done! Oh, I know there'll be a reaction&mdash;the pendulum's
+sure to swing back: but you'll see it won't swing
+<i>as far</i>. Of course I shall go in the end&mdash;but Truscomb
+may go too: Jove, if I could pull him down on me, like
+what's-his-name and the pillars of the temple!"</p>
+
+<p>He had risen and was measuring the little sitting-room
+with his long strides, his head flung back and his
+eyes dark with the inward look his mother had not
+always cared to see there. But now her own glance
+seemed to have caught a ray from his, and the knitting
+flowed from her hands like the thread of fate, as she
+sat silent, letting him exhale his hopes and his wonder,
+and murmuring only, when he dropped again to the
+chair at her side: "You won't go, Johnny&mdash;you won't
+go."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Mrs. Westmore lingered on for over two weeks, and
+during that time Amherst was able, in various directions,
+to develop her interest in the mill-workers. His
+own schemes involved a complete readjustment of the
+relation between the company and the hands: the suppression
+of the obsolete company "store" and tenements,
+which had so long sapped the thrift and ambition
+of the workers; the transformation of the Hopewood
+grounds into a park and athletic field, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[p 119]</a></span>
+division of its remaining acres into building lots for the
+mill-hands; the establishing of a library, a dispensary
+and emergency hospital, and various other centres of
+humanizing influence; but he refrained from letting her
+see that his present suggestion was only a part of this
+larger plan, lest her growing sympathy should be
+checked. He had in his mother an example of the
+mind accessible only to concrete impressions: the mind
+which could die for the particular instance, yet remain
+serenely indifferent to its causes. To Mrs. Amherst,
+her son's work had been interesting simply because it
+<i>was</i> his work: remove his presence from Westmore,
+and the whole industrial problem became to her as non-existent
+as star-dust to the naked eye. And in Bessy
+Westmore he divined a nature of the same quality&mdash;divined,
+but no longer criticized it. Was not that concentration
+on the personal issue just the compensating
+grace of her sex? Did it not offer a warm tint of human
+inconsistency to eyes chilled by contemplating life
+in the mass? It pleased Amherst for the moment to
+class himself with the impersonal student of social problems,
+though in truth his interest in them had its source
+in an imagination as open as Bessy's to the pathos of
+the personal appeal. But if he had the same sensitiveness,
+how inferior were his means of expressing it!
+Again and again, during their talks, he had the feeling
+which had come to him when she bent over Dillon's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[p 120]</a></span>
+bed&mdash;that her exquisite lines were, in some mystical
+sense, the visible flowering of her nature, that they had
+taken shape in response to the inward motions of the
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>To a young man ruled by high enthusiasms there
+can be no more dazzling adventure than to work this
+miracle in the tender creature who yields her mind to
+his&mdash;to see, as it were, the blossoming of the spiritual
+seed in forms of heightened loveliness, the bluer beam
+of the eye, the richer curve of the lip, all the physical
+currents of life quickening under the breath of a kindled
+thought. It did not occur to him that any other emotion
+had effected the change he perceived. Bessy Westmore
+had in full measure that gift of unconscious hypocrisy
+which enables a woman to make the man in whom
+she is interested believe that she enters into all his
+thoughts. She had&mdash;more than this&mdash;the gift of self-deception,
+supreme happiness of the unreflecting nature,
+whereby she was able to believe herself solely engrossed
+in the subjects they discussed, to regard him as
+the mere spokesman of important ideas, thus saving
+their intercourse from present constraint, and from the
+awkward contemplation of future contingencies. So,
+in obedience to the ancient sorcery of life, these two
+groped for and found each other in regions seemingly
+so remote from the accredited domain of romance that
+it would have been as a great surprise to them to learn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[p 121]</a></span>
+whither they had strayed as to see the arid streets of
+Westmore suddenly bursting into leaf.</p>
+
+<p>With Mrs. Westmore's departure Amherst, for the
+first time, became aware of a certain flatness in his life.
+His daily task seemed dull and purposeless, and he was
+galled by Truscomb's studied forbearance, under which
+he suspected a quickly accumulating store of animosity.
+He almost longed for some collision which would release
+the manager's pent-up resentment; yet he dreaded
+increasingly any accident that might make his stay at
+Westmore impossible.</p>
+
+<p>It was on Sundays, when he was freed from his
+weekly task, that he was most at the mercy of these
+opposing feelings. They drove him forth on long solitary
+walks beyond the town, walks ending most often
+in the deserted grounds of Hopewood, beautiful now in
+the ruined gold of October. As he sat under the beech-limbs
+above the river, watching its brown current sweep
+the willow-roots of the banks, he thought how this
+same current, within its next short reach, passed from
+wooded seclusion to the noise and pollution of the mills.
+So his own life seemed to have passed once more from
+the tranced flow of the last weeks into its old channel of
+unillumined labour. But other thoughts came to him
+too: the vision of converting that melancholy pleasure-ground
+into an outlet for the cramped lives of the mill-workers;
+and he pictured the weed-grown lawns and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[p 122]</a></span>
+paths thronged with holiday-makers, and the slopes
+nearer the factories dotted with houses and gardens.</p>
+
+<p>An unexpected event revived these hopes. A few
+days before Christmas it became known to Hanaford
+that Mrs. Westmore would return for the holidays.
+Cicely was drooping in town air, and Bessy had persuaded
+Mr. Langhope that the bracing cold of Hanaford
+would be better for the child than the milder atmosphere
+of Long Island. They reappeared, and brought
+with them a breath of holiday cheerfulness such as Westmore
+had never known. It had always been the rule
+at the mills to let the operatives take their pleasure as
+they saw fit, and the Eldorado and the Hanaford saloons
+throve on this policy. But Mrs. Westmore arrived full
+of festal projects. There was to be a giant Christmas
+tree for the mill-children, a supper on the same scale
+for the operatives, and a bout of skating and coasting
+at Hopewood for the older lads&mdash;the "band" and "bobbin"
+boys in whom Amherst had always felt a special
+interest. The Gaines ladies, resolved to show themselves
+at home in the latest philanthropic fashions, actively
+seconded Bessy's endeavours, and for a week
+Westmore basked under a sudden heat-wave of beneficence.</p>
+
+<p>The time had passed when Amherst might have made
+light of such efforts. With Bessy Westmore smiling up,
+holly-laden, from the foot of the ladder on which she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[p 123]</a></span>
+kept him perched, how could he question the efficacy
+of hanging the opening-room with Christmas wreaths,
+or the ultimate benefit of gorging the operatives with
+turkey and sheathing their offspring in red mittens?
+It was just like the end of a story-book with a pretty
+moral, and Amherst was in the mood to be as much
+taken by the tinsel as the youngest mill-baby held up to
+gape at the tree.</p>
+
+<p>At the New Year, when Mrs. Westmore left, the negotiations
+for the purchase of the Eldorado were well
+advanced, and it was understood that on their completion
+she was to return for the opening of the night-school
+and nursery. Suddenly, however, it became
+known that the proprietor of the road-house had decided
+not to sell. Amherst heard of the decision from
+Duplain, and at once foresaw the inevitable result&mdash;that
+Mrs. Westmore's plan would be given up owing
+to the difficulty of finding another site. Mr. Gaines
+and Truscomb had both discountenanced the erection
+of a special building for what was, after all, only a
+tentative enterprise. Among the purchasable houses
+in Westmore no other was suited to the purpose, and
+they had, therefore, a good excuse for advising Bessy
+to defer her experiment.</p>
+
+<p>Almost at the same time, however, another piece of
+news changed the aspect of affairs. A scandalous occurrence
+at the Eldorado, witnesses to which were un<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[p 124]</a></span>expectedly
+forthcoming, put it in Amherst's power to
+threaten the landlord with exposure unless he should
+at once accept the company's offer and withdraw from
+Westmore. Amherst had no long time to consider the
+best means of putting this threat into effect. He knew
+it was not only idle to appeal to Truscomb, but essential
+to keep the facts from him till the deed was done;
+yet how obtain the authority to act without him? The
+seemingly insuperable difficulties of the situation whetted
+Amherst's craving for a struggle. He thought first
+of writing to Mrs. Westmore;, but now that the spell of
+her presence was withdrawn he felt how hard it would
+be to make her understand the need of prompt and
+secret action; and besides, was it likely that, at such
+short notice, she could command the needful funds?
+Prudence opposed the attempt, and on reflection he
+decided to appeal to Mr. Gaines, hoping that the flagrancy
+of the case would rouse the President from his
+usual attitude of indifference.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gaines was roused to the extent of showing a
+profound resentment against the cause of his disturbance.
+He relieved his sense of responsibility by some
+didactic remarks on the vicious tendencies of the working-classes,
+and concluded with the reflection that the
+more you did for them the less thanks you got. But
+when Amherst showed an unwillingness to let the matter
+rest on this time-honoured aphorism, the President<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[p 125]</a></span>
+retrenched himself behind ambiguities, suggestions that
+they should await Mrs. Westmore's return, and general
+considerations of a pessimistic nature, tapering off into
+a gloomy view of the weather.</p>
+
+<p>"By God, I'll write to her!" Amherst exclaimed, as
+the Gaines portals closed on him; and all the way back
+to Westmore he was busy marshalling his arguments
+and entreaties.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote the letter that night, but did not post it.
+Some unavowed distrust of her restrained him&mdash;a distrust
+not of her heart but of her intelligence. He felt
+that the whole future of Westmore was at stake, and
+decided to await the development of the next twenty-four
+hours. The letter was still in his pocket when, after
+dinner, he was summoned to the office by Truscomb.</p>
+
+<p>That evening, when he returned home, he entered
+the little sitting-room without speaking. His mother
+sat there alone, in her usual place&mdash;how many nights
+he had seen the lamplight slant at that particular angle
+across her fresh cheek and the fine wrinkles about her
+eyes! He was going to add another wrinkle to the
+number now&mdash;soon they would creep down and encroach
+upon the smoothness of the cheek.</p>
+
+<p>She looked up and saw that his glance was turned to
+the crowded bookshelves behind her.</p>
+
+<p>"There must be nearly a thousand of them," he said
+as their eyes met.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[p 126]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Books? Yes&mdash;with your father's. Why&mdash;were you
+thinking...?" She started up suddenly and crossed
+over to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Too many for wanderers," he continued, drawing
+her hands to his breast; then, as she clung to him,
+weeping and trembling a little: "It had to be, mother,"
+he said, kissing her penitently where the fine wrinkles
+died into the cheek.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Amherst's</span> dismissal was not to take effect for a
+month; and in the interval he addressed himself
+steadily to his task.</p>
+
+<p>He went through the routine of the work numbly;
+but his intercourse with the hands tugged at deep fibres
+of feelings. He had always shared, as far as his duties
+allowed, in the cares and interests of their few free
+hours: the hours when the automatic appendages of
+the giant machine became men and women again, with
+desires and passions of their own. Under Amherst's
+influence the mixed elements of the mill-community had
+begun to crystallize into social groups: his books had
+served as an improvised lending-library, he had organized
+a club, a rudimentary orchestra, and various other
+means of binding together the better spirits of the community.
+With the older men, the attractions of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[p 127]</a></span>
+Eldorado, and kindred inducements, often worked
+against him; but among the younger hands, and especially
+the boys, he had gained a personal ascendency
+that it was bitter to relinquish.</p>
+
+<p>It was the severing of this tie that cost him most pain
+in the final days at Westmore; and after he had done
+what he could to console his mother, and to put himself
+in the way of getting work elsewhere, he tried to see
+what might be saved out of the ruins of the little polity
+he had built up. He hoped his influence might at
+least persist in the form of an awakened instinct of
+fellowship; and he gave every spare hour to strengthening
+the links he had tried to form. The boys, at any
+rate, would be honestly sorry to have him go: not, indeed,
+from the profounder reasons that affected him,
+but because he had not only stood persistently between
+the overseers and themselves, but had recognized their
+right to fun after work-hours as well as their right to
+protection while they worked.</p>
+
+<p>In the glow of Mrs. Westmore's Christmas visitation
+an athletic club had been formed, and leave obtained
+to use the Hopewood grounds for Saturday afternoon
+sports; and thither Amherst continued to conduct the
+boys after the mills closed at the week-end. His last
+Saturday had now come: a shining afternoon of late
+February, with a red sunset bending above frozen river
+and slopes of unruffled snow. For an hour or more he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[p 128]</a></span>
+had led the usual sports, coasting down the steep descent
+from the house to the edge of the woods, and
+skating and playing hockey on the rough river-ice which
+eager hands kept clear after every snow-storm. He
+always felt the contagion of these sports: the glow of
+movement, the tumult of young voices, the sting of the
+winter air, roused all the boyhood in his blood. But
+today he had to force himself through his part in the
+performance. To the very last, as he now saw, he had
+hoped for a sign in the heavens: not the reversal of
+his own sentence&mdash;for, merely on disciplinary grounds,
+he perceived that to be impossible&mdash;but something
+pointing to a change in the management of the mills,
+some proof that Mrs. Westmore's intervention had betokened
+more than a passing impulse of compassion.
+Surely she would not accept without question the abandonment
+of her favourite scheme; and if she came
+back to put the question, the answer would lay bare
+the whole situation.... So Amherst's hopes had persuaded
+him; but the day before he had heard that she
+was to sail for Europe. The report, first announced
+in the papers, had been confirmed by his mother, who
+brought back from a visit to Hanaford the news that
+Mrs. Westmore was leaving at once for an indefinite
+period, and that the Hanaford house was to be closed.
+Irony would have been the readiest caustic for the
+wound inflicted; but Amherst, for that very reason, dis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[p 129]</a></span>dained
+it. He would not taint his disappointment with
+mockery, but would leave it among the unspoiled sadnesses
+of life....</p>
+
+<p>He flung himself into the boys' sports with his
+usual energy, meaning that their last Saturday with
+him should be their merriest; but he went through his
+part mechanically, and was glad when the sun began
+to dip toward the rim of the woods.</p>
+
+<p>He was standing on the ice, where the river widened
+just below the house, when a jingle of bells broke on
+the still air, and he saw a sleigh driven rapidly up the
+avenue. Amherst watched it in surprise. Who, at
+that hour, could be invading the winter solitude of
+Hopewood? The sleigh halted near the closed house,
+and a muffled figure, alighting alone, began to move
+down the snowy slope toward the skaters.</p>
+
+<p>In an instant he had torn off his skates and was bounding
+up the bank. He would have known the figure anywhere&mdash;known
+that lovely poise of the head, the mixture
+of hesitancy and quickness in the light tread which even
+the snow could not impede. Half-way up the slope to the
+house they met, and Mrs. Westmore held out her hand.
+Face and lips, as she stood above him, glowed with her
+swift passage through the evening air, and in the blaze
+of the sunset she seemed saturated with heavenly fires.</p>
+
+<p>"I drove out to find you&mdash;they told me you were
+here&mdash;I arrived this morning, quite suddenly...."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[p 130]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She broke off, as though the encounter had checked
+her ardour instead of kindling it; but he drew no discouragement
+from her tone.</p>
+
+<p>"I hoped you would come before I left&mdash;I knew you
+would!" he exclaimed; and at his last words her face
+clouded anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know you were leaving Westmore till yesterday&mdash;the
+day before&mdash;I got a letter...." Again she
+wavered, perceptibly trusting her difficulty to him, in
+the sweet way he had been trying to forget; and he
+answered with recovered energy: "The great thing is
+that you should be here."</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head at his optimism. "What can I
+do if you go?"</p>
+
+<p>"You can give me a chance, before I go, to tell you
+a little about some of the loose ends I am leaving."</p>
+
+<p>"But why are you leaving them? I don't understand.
+Is it inevitable?"</p>
+
+<p>"Inevitable," he returned, with an odd glow of satisfaction
+in the word; and as her eyes besought him, he
+added, smiling: "I've been dismissed, you see; and
+from the manager's standpoint I think I deserved it.
+But the best part of my work needn't go with me&mdash;and
+that is what I should like to speak to you about. As
+assistant manager I can easily be replaced&mdash;have
+been, I understand, already; but among these boys
+here I should like to think that a little of me stayed&mdash;and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[p 131]</a></span>
+it will, if you'll let me tell you what I've been
+doing."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/illus-03.jpg"
+alt="Half-way up the slope to the house they met."
+title="Half-way up the slope to the house they met." />
+<br /><span class="caption">Half-way up the slope to the house they met.</span>
+<br /><br /></div>
+
+<p>She glanced away from him at the busy throng on
+the ice and at the other black cluster above the coasting-slide.</p>
+
+<p>"How they're enjoying it!" she murmured. "What
+a pity it was never done before! And who will keep it
+up when you're gone?"</p>
+
+<p>"You," he answered, meeting her eyes again; and
+as she coloured a little under his look he went on
+quickly: "Will you come over and look at the coasting?
+The time is almost up. One more slide and they'll be
+packing off to supper."</p>
+
+<p>She nodded "yes," and they walked in silence over
+the white lawn, criss-crossed with tramplings of happy
+feet, to the ridge from which the coasters started on
+their run. Amherst's object in turning the talk had
+been to gain a moment's respite. He could not bear
+to waste his perfect hour in futile explanations: he
+wanted to keep it undisturbed by any thought of the
+future. And the same feeling seemed to possess his
+companion, for she did not speak again till they reached
+the knoll where the boys were gathered.</p>
+
+<p>A sled packed with them hung on the brink: with a
+last shout it was off, dipping down the incline with the
+long curved flight of a swallow, flashing across the wide
+meadow at the base of the hill, and tossed upward again<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[p 132]</a></span>
+by its own impetus, till it vanished in the dark rim of
+wood on the opposite height. The lads waiting on the
+knoll sang out for joy, and Bessy clapped her hands
+and joined with them.</p>
+
+<p>"What fun! I wish I'd brought Cicely! I've not
+coasted for years," she laughed out, as the second detachment
+of boys heaped themselves on another sled
+and shot down. Amherst looked at her with a smile.
+He saw that every other feeling had vanished in the
+exhilaration of watching the flight of the sleds. She
+had forgotten why she had come&mdash;forgotten her distress
+at his dismissal&mdash;forgotten everything but the
+spell of the long white slope, and the tingle of cold
+in her veins.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we go down? Should you like it?" he asked,
+feeling no resentment under the heightened glow of his
+pulses.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, do take me&mdash;I shall love it!" Her eyes shone
+like a child's&mdash;she might have been a lovelier embodiment
+of the shouting boyhood about them.</p>
+
+<p>The first band of coasters, sled at heels, had by this
+time already covered a third of the homeward stretch;
+but Amherst was too impatient to wait. Plunging
+down to the meadow he caught up the sled-rope, and
+raced back with the pack of rejoicing youth in his wake.
+The sharp climb up the hill seemed to fill his lungs
+with flame: his whole body burned with a strange in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[p 133]</a></span>tensity
+of life. As he reached the top, a distant bell
+rang across the fields from Westmore, and the boys
+began to snatch up their coats and mufflers.</p>
+
+<p>"Be off with you&mdash;I'll look after the sleds," Amherst
+called to them as they dispersed; then he turned for a
+moment to see that the skaters below were also heeding
+the summons.</p>
+
+<p>A cold pallor lay on the river-banks and on the low
+meadow beneath the knoll; but the woodland opposite
+stood black against scarlet vapours that ravelled off in
+sheer light toward a sky hung with an icy moon.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst drew up the sled and held it steady while
+Bessy, seating herself, tucked her furs close with little
+breaks of laughter; then he placed himself in front.</p>
+
+<p>"Ready?" he cried over his shoulder, and "Ready!"
+she called back.</p>
+
+<p>Their craft quivered under them, hanging an instant
+over the long stretch of whiteness below; the level
+sun dazzled their eyes, and the first plunge seemed to
+dash them down into darkness. Amherst heard a cry
+of glee behind him; then all sounds were lost in the
+whistle of air humming by like the flight of a million
+arrows. They had dropped below the sunset and were
+tearing through the clear nether twilight of the descent;
+then, with a bound, the sled met the level, and shot
+away across the meadow toward the opposite height.
+It seemed to Amherst as though his body had been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[p 134]</a></span>
+left behind, and only the spirit in him rode the wild
+blue currents of galloping air; but as the sled's rush
+began to slacken with the strain of the last ascent he
+was recalled to himself by the touch of the breathing
+warmth at his back. Bessy had put out a hand to
+steady herself, and as she leaned forward, gripping his
+arm, a flying end of her furs swept his face. There was
+a delicious pang in being thus caught back to life; and
+as the sled stopped, and he sprang to his feet, he still
+glowed with the sensation. Bessy too was under the
+spell. In the dusk of the beech-grove where they had
+landed, he could barely distinguish her features; but
+her eyes shone on him, and he heard her quick breathing
+as he stooped to help her to her feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, how beautiful&mdash;it's the only thing better than
+a good gallop!"</p>
+
+<p>She leaned against a tree-bole, panting a little, and
+loosening her furs.</p>
+
+<p>"What a pity it's too dark to begin again!" she
+sighed, looking about her through the dim weaving of
+leafless boughs.</p>
+
+<p>"It's not so dark in the open&mdash;we might have one
+more," he proposed; but she shook her head, seized
+by a new whim.</p>
+
+<p>"It's so still and delicious in here&mdash;did you hear the
+snow fall when that squirrel jumped across to the pine?"
+She tilted her head, narrowing her lids as she peered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[p 135]</a></span>
+upward. "There he is! One gets used to the light....
+Look! See his little eyes shining down at us!"</p>
+
+<p>As Amherst looked where she pointed, the squirrel
+leapt to another tree, and they stole on after him through
+the hushed wood, guided by his grey flashes in the dimness.
+Here and there, in a break of the snow, they
+trod on a bed of wet leaves that gave out a breath of
+hidden life, or a hemlock twig dashed its spicy scent
+into their faces. As they grew used to the twilight
+their eyes began to distinguish countless delicate gradations
+of tint: cold mottlings of grey-black boles
+against the snow, wet russets of drifted beech-leaves, a
+distant network of mauve twigs melting into the woodland
+haze. And in the silence just such fine gradations
+of sound became audible: the soft drop of loosened
+snow-lumps, a stir of startled wings, the creak of a
+dead branch, somewhere far off in darkness.</p>
+
+<p>They walked on, still in silence, as though they had
+entered the glade of an enchanted forest and were
+powerless to turn back or to break the hush with a
+word. They made no pretense of following the squirrel
+any longer; he had flashed away to a high tree-top,
+from which his ironical chatter pattered down on their
+unheeding ears. Amherst's sensations were not of that
+highest order of happiness where mind and heart mingle
+their elements in the strong draught of life: it was a
+languid fume that stole through him from the cup at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[p 136]</a></span>
+his lips. But after the sense of defeat and failure
+which the last weeks had brought, the reaction was too
+exquisite to be analyzed. All he asked of the moment
+was its immediate sweetness....</p>
+
+<p>They had reached the brink of a rocky glen where a
+little brook still sent its thread of sound through mufflings
+of ice and huddled branches. Bessy stood still a
+moment, bending her head to the sweet cold tinkle; then
+she moved away and said slowly: "We must go back."</p>
+
+<p>As they turned to retrace their steps a yellow line of
+light through the tree-trunks showed them that they
+had not, after all, gone very deep into the wood. A few
+minutes' walk would restore them to the lingering daylight,
+and on the farther side of the meadow stood the
+sleigh which was to carry Bessy back to Hanaford. A
+sudden sense of the evanescence of the moment roused
+Amherst from his absorption. Before the next change
+in the fading light he would be back again among the
+ugly realities of life. Did she, too, hate to return to
+them? Or why else did she walk so slowly&mdash;why did
+she seem as much afraid as himself to break the silence
+that held them in its magic circle?</p>
+
+<p>A dead pine-branch caught in the edge of her skirt,
+and she stood still while Amherst bent down to release
+her. As she turned to help him he looked up with a
+smile.</p>
+
+<p>"The wood doesn't want to let you go," he said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[p 137]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She made no reply, and he added, rising: "But you'll
+come back to it&mdash;you'll come back often, I hope."</p>
+
+<p>He could not see her face in the dimness, but her
+voice trembled a little as she answered: "I will do
+what you tell me&mdash;but I shall be alone&mdash;against all the
+others: they don't understand."</p>
+
+<p>The simplicity, the helplessness, of the avowal, appealed
+to him not as a weakness but as a grace. He
+understood what she was really saying: "How can you
+desert me? How can you put this great responsibility
+on me, and then leave me to bear it alone?" and in the
+light of her unuttered appeal his action seemed almost
+like cruelty. Why had he opened her eyes to wrongs
+she had no strength to redress without his aid?</p>
+
+<p>He could only answer, as he walked beside her toward
+the edge of the wood: "You will not be alone&mdash;in time
+you will make the others understand; in time they will
+be with you."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you don't believe that!" she exclaimed, pausing
+suddenly, and speaking with an intensity of reproach
+that amazed him.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope it, at any rate," he rejoined, pausing also.
+"And I'm sure that if you will come here oftener&mdash;if
+you'll really live among your people&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"How can you say that, when you're deserting them?"
+she broke in, with a feminine excess of inconsequence
+that fairly dashed the words from his lips.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[p 138]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Deserting them? Don't you understand&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"I understand that you've made Mr. Gaines and
+Truscomb angry&mdash;yes; but if I should insist on your
+staying&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst felt the blood rush to his forehead. "No&mdash;no,
+it's not possible!" he exclaimed, with a vehemence
+addressed more to himself than to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Then what will happen at the mills?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, some one else will be found&mdash;the new ideas are
+stirring everywhere. And if you'll only come back here,
+and help my successor&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think they are likely to choose any one else
+with your ideas?" she interposed with unexpected
+acuteness; and after a short silence he answered: "Not
+immediately, perhaps; but in time&mdash;in time there will
+be improvements."</p>
+
+<p>"As if the poor people could wait! Oh, it's cruel,
+cruel of you to go!"</p>
+
+<p>Her voice broke in a throb of entreaty that went to
+his inmost fibres.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't understand. It's impossible in the present
+state of things that I should do any good by staying."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you refuse? Even if I were to insist on
+their asking you to stay, you would still refuse?" she
+persisted.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;I should still refuse."</p>
+
+<p>She made no answer, but moved a few steps nearer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[p 139]</a></span>
+to the edge of the wood. The meadow was just below
+them now, and the sleigh in plain sight on the height
+beyond. Their steps made no sound on the sodden
+drifts underfoot, and in the silence he thought he heard
+a catch in her breathing. It was enough to make the
+brimming moment overflow. He stood still before her
+and bent his head to hers.</p>
+
+<p>"Bessy!" he said, with sudden vehemence.</p>
+
+<p>She did not speak or move, but in the quickened
+state of his perceptions he became aware that she was
+silently weeping. The gathering darkness under the
+trees enveloped them. It absorbed her outline into the
+shadowy background of the wood, from which her face
+emerged in a faint spot of pallor; and the same obscurity
+seemed to envelop his faculties, merging the
+hard facts of life in a blur of feeling in which the distinctest
+impression was the sweet sense of her tears.</p>
+
+<p>"Bessy!" he exclaimed again; and as he drew a step
+nearer he felt her yield to him, and bury her sobs
+against his arm.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[p 140]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_II" id="BOOK_II"></a>BOOK II</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">But</span>, Justine&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Harry Dressel, seated in the June freshness
+of her Oak Street drawing-room, and harmonizing by
+her high lights and hard edges with the white-and-gold
+angularities of the best furniture, cast a rebuking
+eye on her friend Miss Brent, who stood arranging in
+a glass bowl the handful of roses she had just brought
+in from the garden.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Dressel's intonation made it clear that the entrance
+of Miss Brent had been the signal for renewing
+an argument which the latter had perhaps left the
+room to escape.</p>
+
+<p>"When you were here three years ago, Justine, I
+could understand your not wanting to go out, because
+you were in mourning for your mother&mdash;and besides,
+you'd volunteered for that bad surgical case in the Hope
+Hospital. But now that you've come back for a rest
+and a change I can't imagine why you persist in shutting
+yourself up&mdash;unless, of course," she concluded, in
+a higher key of reproach, "it's because you think so
+little of Hanaford society&mdash;&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[p 141]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Justine Brent, putting the last rose in place, turned
+from her task with a protesting gesture.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Effie, who am I to think little of any society,
+when I belong to none?" She passed a last
+light touch over the flowers, and crossing the room,
+brushed her friend's hand with the same caressing
+gesture.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Dressel met it with an unrelenting turn of her
+plump shoulder, murmuring: "Oh, if you take <i>that</i>
+tone!" And on Miss Brent's gaily rejoining: "Isn't
+it better than to have other people take it for me?"
+she replied, with an air of affront that expressed itself
+in a ruffling of her whole pretty person: "If you'll
+excuse my saying so, Justine, the fact that you are staying
+with <i>me</i> would be enough to make you welcome
+anywhere in Hanaford!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure of it, dear; so sure that my horrid pride
+rather resents being floated in on the high tide of
+such overwhelming credentials."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Dressel glanced up doubtfully at the dark face
+laughing down on her. Though she was president of
+the Maplewood Avenue Book-club, and habitually
+figured in the society column of the "Banner" as one
+of the intellectual leaders of Hanaford, there were moments
+when her self-confidence trembled before Justine's
+light sallies. It was absurd, of course, given the
+relative situations of the two; and Mrs. Dressel, behind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[p 142]</a></span>
+her friend's back, was quickly reassured by the thought
+that Justine was only a hospital nurse, who had to
+work for her living, and had really never "been anywhere";
+but when Miss Brent's verbal arrows were
+flying, it seemed somehow of more immediate consequence
+that she was fairly well-connected, and lived in
+New York. No one placed a higher value on the abstract
+qualities of wit and irony than Mrs. Dressel; the
+difficulty was that she never quite knew when Justine's
+retorts were loaded, or when her own susceptibilities
+were the target aimed at; and between her desire
+to appear to take the joke, and the fear of being
+ridiculed without knowing it, her pretty face often presented
+an interesting study in perplexity. As usual,
+she now took refuge in bringing the talk back to a
+personal issue.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't imagine," she said, "why you won't go to
+the Gaines's garden-party. It's always the most brilliant
+affair of the season; and this year, with the John
+Amhersts here, and all their party&mdash;that fascinating
+Mrs. Eustace Ansell, and Mrs. Amherst's father, old
+Mr. Langhope, who is quite as quick and clever as <i>you</i>
+are&mdash;you certainly can't accuse us of being dull and
+provincial!"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brent smiled. "As far as I can remember,
+Effie, it is always you who accuse others of bringing
+that charge against Hanaford. For my part, I know<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[p 143]</a></span>
+too little of it to have formed any opinion; but whatever
+it may have to offer me, I am painfully conscious of
+having, at present, nothing but your kind commendation
+to give in return."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Dressel rose impatiently. "How absurdly you
+talk! You're a little thinner than usual, and I don't
+like those dark lines under your eyes; but Westy Gaines
+told me yesterday that he thought you handsomer than
+ever, and that it was intensely becoming to some women
+to look over-tired."</p>
+
+<p>"It's lucky I'm one of that kind," Miss Brent rejoined,
+between a sigh and a laugh, "and there's every
+promise of my getting handsomer every day if somebody
+doesn't soon arrest the geometrical progression of
+my good looks by giving me the chance to take a year's
+rest!"</p>
+
+<p>As she spoke, she stretched her arms above her head,
+with a gesture revealing the suppleness of her slim
+young frame, but also its tenuity of structure&mdash;the
+frailness of throat and shoulders, and the play of bones
+in the delicate neck. Justine Brent had one of those
+imponderable bodies that seem a mere pinch of matter
+shot through with light and colour. Though she did
+not flush easily, auroral lights ran under her clear skin,
+were lost in the shadows of her hair, and broke again
+in her eyes; and her voice seemed to shoot light too,
+as though her smile flashed back from her words as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[p 144]</a></span>
+they fell&mdash;all her features being so fluid and changeful
+that the one solid thing about her was the massing of
+dense black hair which clasped her face like the noble
+metal of some antique bust.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Dressel's face softened at the note of weariness
+in the girl's voice. "Are you very tired, dear?" she
+asked drawing her down to a seat on the sofa.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and no&mdash;not so much bodily, perhaps, as in
+spirit." Justine Brent drew her brows together, and
+stared moodily at the thin brown hands interwoven between
+Mrs. Dressel's plump fingers. Seated thus, with
+hollowed shoulders and brooding head, she might have
+figured a young sibyl bowed above some mystery of
+fate; but the next moment her face, inclining toward
+her friend's, cast off its shadows and resumed the look
+of a plaintive child.</p>
+
+<p>"The worst of it is that I don't look forward with
+any interest to taking up the old drudgery again. Of
+course that loss of interest may be merely physical&mdash;I
+should call it so in a nervous patient, no doubt. But
+in myself it seems different&mdash;it seems to go to the roots
+of the world. You know it was always the imaginative
+side of my work that helped me over the ugly details&mdash;the
+pity and beauty that disinfected the physical horror;
+but now that feeling is lost, and only the mortal disgust
+remains. Oh, Effie, I don't want to be a ministering
+angel any more&mdash;I want to be uncertain, coy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[p 145]</a></span>
+and hard to please. I want something dazzling and
+unaccountable to happen to me&mdash;something new and
+unlived and indescribable!"</p>
+
+<p>She snatched herself with a laugh from the bewildered
+Effie, and flinging up her arms again, spun on a light
+heel across the polished floor.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then," murmured Mrs. Dressel with gentle
+obstinacy, "I can't see why in the world you won't go
+to the Gaines's garden-party!" And caught in the
+whirlwind of her friend's incomprehensible mirth, she
+still persisted, as she ducked her blonde head to it: "If
+you'll only let me lend you my dress with the Irish lace,
+you'll look smarter than anybody there...."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Before her toilet mirror, an hour later, Justine Brent
+seemed in a way to fulfill Mrs. Dressel's prediction. So
+mirror-like herself, she could no more help reflecting
+the happy effect of a bow or a feather than the subtler
+influence of word and look; and her face and figure
+were so new to the advantages of dress that, at four-and-twenty,
+she still produced the effect of a young girl
+in her first "good" frock. In Mrs. Dressel's festal
+raiment, which her dark tints subdued to a quiet elegance,
+she was like the golden core of a pale rose illuminating
+and scenting its petals.</p>
+
+<p>Three years of solitary life, following on a youth of
+confidential intimacy with the mother she had lost, had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[p 146]</a></span>
+produced in her the quaint habit of half-loud soliloquy.
+"Fine feathers, Justine!" she laughed back at her
+laughing image. "You look like a phoenix risen from
+your ashes. But slip back into your own plumage, and
+you'll be no more than a little brown bird without a
+song!"</p>
+
+<p>The luxurious suggestions of her dress, and the way
+her warm youth became it, drew her back to memories
+of a childhood nestled in beauty and gentle ways, before
+her handsome prodigal father had died, and
+her mother's face had grown pinched in the long
+struggle with poverty. But those memories were after
+all less dear to Justine than the grey years following,
+when, growing up, she had helped to clear a space in
+the wilderness for their tiny hearth-fire, when her own
+efforts had fed the flame and roofed it in from the
+weather. A great heat, kindled at that hearth, had
+burned in her veins, making her devour her work,
+lighting and warming the long cold days, and reddening
+the horizon through dark passages of revolt and failure;
+and she felt all the more deeply the chill of reaction that
+set in with her mother's death.</p>
+
+<p>She thought she had chosen her work as a nurse in
+a spirit of high disinterestedness; but in the first hours
+of her bereavement it seemed as though only the personal
+aim had sustained her. For a while, after this,
+her sick people became to her mere bundles of disin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[p 147]</a></span>tegrating
+matter, and she shrank from physical pain
+with a distaste the deeper because, mechanically, she
+could not help working on to relieve it. Gradually her
+sound nature passed out of this morbid phase, and she
+took up her task with deeper pity if less exalted ardour;
+glad to do her part in the vast impersonal labour of
+easing the world's misery, but longing with all the warm
+instincts of youth for a special load to lift, a single hand
+to clasp.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, it was cruel to be alive, to be young, to bubble
+with springs of mirth and tenderness and folly, and to
+live in perpetual contact with decay and pain&mdash;to look
+persistently into the grey face of death without having
+lifted even a corner of life's veil! Now and then, when
+she felt her youth flame through the sheath of dullness
+which was gradually enclosing it, she rebelled at the
+conditions that tied a spirit like hers to its monotonous
+task, while others, without a quiver of wings on their
+dull shoulders, or a note of music in their hearts, had
+the whole wide world to range through, and saw in it
+no more than a frightful emptiness to be shut out with
+tight walls of habit....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A tap on the door announced Mrs. Dressel, garbed for
+conquest, and bestowing on her brilliant person the
+last anxious touches of the artist reluctant to part from
+a masterpiece.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[p 148]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"My dear, how well you look! I <i>knew</i> that dress
+would be becoming!" she exclaimed, generously transferring
+her self-approval to Justine; and adding, as the
+latter moved toward her: "I wish Westy Gaines could
+see you now!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he will presently," Miss Brent rejoined,
+ignoring the slight stress on the name.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Dressel continued to brood on her maternally.
+"Justine&mdash;I wish you'd tell me! You say you hate
+the life you're leading now&mdash;but isn't there somebody
+who might&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Give me another, with lace dresses in it?" Justine's
+slight shrug might have seemed theatrical, had it
+not been a part of the ceaseless dramatic play of her
+flexible person. "There might be, perhaps...only
+I'm not sure&mdash;" She broke off whimsically.</p>
+
+<p>"Not sure of what?"</p>
+
+<p>"That this kind of dress might not always be a little
+tight on the shoulders."</p>
+
+<p>"Tight on the shoulders? What do you mean, Justine?
+My clothes simply <i>hang</i> on you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Effie dear, don't you remember the fable of the
+wings under the skin, that sprout when one meets a
+pair of kindred shoulders?" And, as Mrs. Dressel
+bent on her a brow of unenlightenment&mdash;"Well, it
+doesn't matter: I only meant that I've always been
+afraid good clothes might keep my wings from sprout<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[p 149]</a></span>ing!"
+She turned back to the glass, giving herself a
+last light touch such as she had bestowed on the roses.</p>
+
+<p>"And that reminds me," she continued&mdash;"how about
+Mr. Amherst's wings?"</p>
+
+<p>"John Amherst?" Mrs. Dressel brightened into
+immediate attention. "Why, do you know him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not as the owner of the Westmore Mills; but I
+came across him as their assistant manager three years
+ago, at the Hope Hospital, and he was starting a very
+promising pair then. I wonder if they're doing as well
+under his new coat."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not sure that I understand you when you talk
+poetry," said Mrs. Dressel with less interest; "but personally
+I can't say I like John Amherst&mdash;and he is certainly
+not worthy of such a lovely woman as Mrs. Westmore.
+Of course she would never let any one see that
+she's not perfectly happy; but I'm told he has given
+them all a great deal of trouble by interfering in the
+management of the mills, and his manner is so cold and
+sarcastic&mdash;the truth is, I suppose he's never quite at
+ease in society. <i>Her</i> family have never been really reconciled
+to the marriage; and Westy Gaines says&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Westy Gaines <i>would</i>," Justine interposed lightly.
+"But if Mrs. Amherst is really the Bessy Langhope I
+used to know it must be rather a struggle for the wings!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Dressel's flagging interest settled on the one
+glimpse of fact in this statement. "It's such a coinci<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[p 150]</a></span>dence
+that you should have known her too! Was she
+always so perfectly fascinating? I wish I knew how
+she gives that look to her hair!"</p>
+
+<p>Justine gathered up the lace sunshade and long
+gloves which her friend had lent her. "There was not
+much more that was genuine about her character&mdash;that
+was her very own, I mean&mdash;than there is about my
+appearance at this moment. She was always the dearest
+little chameleon in the world, taking everybody's
+colour in the most flattering way, and giving back, I
+must say, a most charming reflection&mdash;if you'll excuse
+the mixed metaphor; but when one got her by herself,
+with no reflections to catch, one found she hadn't any
+particular colour of her own. One of the girls used to
+say she ought to wear a tag, because she was so easily
+mislaid&mdash;&mdash; Now then, I'm ready!"</p>
+
+<p>Justine advanced to the door, and Mrs. Dressel followed
+her downstairs, reflecting with pardonable complacency
+that one of the disadvantages of being clever
+was that it tempted one to say sarcastic things of other
+women&mdash;than which she could imagine no more crying
+social error.</p>
+
+<p>During the drive to the garden-party, Justine's
+thoughts, drawn to the past by the mention of Bessy
+Langhope's name, reverted to the comic inconsequences
+of her own lot&mdash;to that persistent irrelevance of incident
+that had once made her compare herself to an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[p 151]</a></span>
+actor always playing his part before the wrong stage-setting.
+Was there not, for instance, a mocking incongruity
+in the fact that a creature so leaping with
+life should have, for chief outlet, the narrow mental
+channel of the excellent couple between whom she was
+now being borne to the Gaines garden-party? All her
+friendships were the result of propinquity or of early
+association, and fate had held her imprisoned in a circle
+of well-to-do mediocrity, peopled by just such figures
+as those of the kindly and prosperous Dressels. Effie
+Dressel, the daughter of a cousin of Mrs. Brent's, had
+obscurely but safely allied herself with the heavy blond
+young man who was to succeed his father as President
+of the Union Bank, and who was already regarded by
+the "solid business interests" of Hanaford as possessing
+talents likely to carry him far in the development
+of the paternal fortunes. Harry Dressel's honest countenance
+gave no evidence of peculiar astuteness, and he
+was in fact rather the product of special conditions than
+of an irresistible bent. He had the sound Saxon love
+of games, and the most interesting game he had ever
+been taught was "business." He was a simple domestic
+being, and according to Hanaford standards the
+most obvious obligation of the husband and father was
+to make his family richer. If Harry Dressel had ever
+formulated his aims, he might have said that he wanted
+to be the man whom Hanaford most respected, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[p 152]</a></span>
+that was only another way of saying, the richest man
+in Hanaford. Effie embraced his creed with a zeal
+facilitated by such evidence of its soundness as a growing
+income and the early prospects of a carriage. Her
+mother-in-law, a kind old lady with a simple unquestioning
+love of money, had told her on her wedding day
+that Harry's one object would always be to make his
+family proud of him; and the recent purchase of the
+victoria in which Justine and the Dressels were now
+seated was regarded by the family as a striking fulfillment
+of this prophecy.</p>
+
+<p>In the course of her hospital work Justine had of
+necessity run across far different types; but from the
+connections thus offered she was often held back by
+the subtler shades of taste that civilize human intercourse.
+Her world, in short, had been chiefly peopled
+by the dull or the crude, and, hemmed in between the
+two, she had created for herself an inner kingdom where
+the fastidiousness she had to set aside in her outward
+relations recovered its full sway. There must be
+actual beings worthy of admission to this secret precinct,
+but hitherto they had not come her way; and the
+sense that they were somewhere just out of reach still
+gave an edge of youthful curiosity to each encounter
+with a new group of people.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly, Mrs. Gaines's garden-party seemed an unlikely
+field for the exercise of such curiosity: Justine's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[p 153]</a></span>
+few glimpses of Hanaford society had revealed it as
+rather a dull thick body, with a surface stimulated only
+by ill-advised references to the life of larger capitals;
+and the concentrated essence of social Hanaford was
+of course to be found at the Gaines entertainments. It
+presented itself, however, in the rich June afternoon,
+on the long shadows of the well-kept lawn, and among
+the paths of the rose-garden, in its most amiable aspect;
+and to Justine, wearied by habitual contact with ugliness
+and suffering, there was pure delight in the verdant
+setting of the picture, and in the light harmonious tints
+of the figures peopling it. If the company was dull,
+it was at least decorative; and poverty, misery and dirt
+were shut out by the placid unconsciousness of the
+guests as securely as by the leafy barriers of the garden.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">Ah</span>, Mrs. Dressel, we were on the lookout for you&mdash;waiting
+for the curtain to rise. Your friend Miss
+Brent? Juliana, Mrs. Dressel's friend Miss Brent&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Near the brilliantly-striped marquee that formed the
+axis of the Gaines garden-parties, Mr. Halford Gaines,
+a few paces from his wife and daughters, stood radiating
+a royal welcome on the stream of visitors pouring across
+the lawn. It was only to eyes perverted by a different
+social perspective that there could be any doubt as to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[p 154]</a></span>
+the importance of the Gaines entertainments. To
+Hanaford itself they were epoch-making; and if any
+rebellious spirit had cherished a doubt of the fact, it
+would have been quelled by the official majesty of Mr.
+Gaines's frock-coat and the comprehensive cordiality
+of his manner.</p>
+
+<p>There were moments when New York hung like a
+disquieting cloud on the social horizon of Mrs. Gaines
+and her daughters; but to Halford Gaines Hanaford
+was all in all. As an exponent of the popular and
+patriotic "good-enough-for-me" theory he stood in
+high favour at the Hanaford Club, where a too-keen
+consciousness of the metropolis was alternately combated
+by easy allusion and studied omission, and where
+the unsettled fancies of youth were chastened and
+steadied by the reflection that, if Hanaford was good
+enough for Halford Gaines, it must offer opportunities
+commensurate with the largest ideas of life.</p>
+
+<p>Never did Mr. Gaines's manner bear richer witness
+to what could be extracted from Hanaford than when
+he was in the act of applying to it the powerful pressure
+of his hospitality. The resultant essence was so bubbling
+with social exhilaration that, to its producer at
+any rate, its somewhat mixed ingredients were lost in
+one highly flavoured draught. Under ordinary circumstances
+no one discriminated more keenly than Mr.
+Gaines between different shades of social importance;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[p 155]</a></span>
+but any one who was entertained by him was momentarily
+ennobled by the fact, and not all the anxious
+telegraphy of his wife and daughters could, for instance,
+recall to him that the striking young woman in Mrs.
+Dressel's wake was only some obscure prot&eacute;g&eacute;e, whom
+it was odd of Effie to have brought, and whose presence
+was quite unnecessary to emphasize.</p>
+
+<p>"Juliana, Miss Brent tells me she has never seen our
+roses. Oh, there are other roses in Hanaford, Miss
+Brent; I don't mean to imply that no one else attempts
+them; but unless you can afford to give <i>carte blanche</i>
+to your man&mdash;and mine happens to be something of
+a specialist...well, if you'll come with me, I'll let
+them speak for themselves. I always say that if
+people want to know what we can do they must come
+and see&mdash;they'll never find out from <i>me</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>A more emphatic signal from his wife arrested Mr.
+Gaines as he was in the act of leading Miss Brent away.</p>
+
+<p>"Eh?&mdash;What? The Amhersts and Mrs. Ansell?
+You must excuse me then, I'm afraid&mdash;but Westy shall
+take you. Westy, my boy, it's an ill-wind.... I want
+you to show this young lady our roses." And Mr.
+Gaines, with mingled reluctance and satisfaction, turned
+away to receive the most important guests of the day.</p>
+
+<p>It had not needed his father's summons to draw the
+expert Westy to Miss Brent: he was already gravitating
+toward her, with the nonchalance bred of cosmopolitan<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[p 156]</a></span>
+successes, but with a directness of aim due also to his
+larger opportunities of comparison.</p>
+
+<p>"The roses will do," he explained, as he guided her
+through the increasing circle of guests about his mother;
+and in answer to Justine's glance of enquiry: "To get
+you away, I mean. They're not much in themselves,
+you know; but everything of the governor's always
+begins with a capital letter."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but these roses deserve to," Justine exclaimed,
+as they paused under the evergreen archway at the
+farther end of the lawn.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know&mdash;not if you've been in England,"
+Westy murmured, watching furtively for the impression
+produced, on one who had presumably not, by
+the great blush of colour massed against its dusky
+background of clipped evergreens.</p>
+
+<p>Justine smiled. "I <i>have</i> been&mdash;but I've been in the
+slums since; in horrible places that the least of those
+flowers would have lighted up like a lamp."</p>
+
+<p>Westy's guarded glance imprudently softened. "It's
+the beastliest kind of a shame, your ever having had
+to do such work&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, <i>had</i> to?" she flashed back at him disconcertingly.
+"It was my choice, you know: there was a
+time when I couldn't live without it. Philanthropy is
+one of the subtlest forms of self-indulgence."</p>
+
+<p>Westy met this with a vague laugh. If a chap who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[p 157]</a></span>
+was as knowing as the devil <i>did</i>, once in a way, indulge
+himself in the luxury of talking recklessly to a
+girl with exceptional eyes, it was rather upsetting to
+discover in those eyes no consciousness of the risk he
+had taken!</p>
+
+<p>"But I <i>am</i> rather tired of it now," she continued, and
+his look grew guarded again. After all, they were all
+the same&mdash;except in that particular matter of the eyes.
+At the thought, he risked another look, hung on the
+sharp edge of betrayal, and was snatched back, not by
+the manly instinct of self-preservation, but by some
+imp of mockery lurking in the depths that lured him.</p>
+
+<p>He recovered his balance and took refuge in a tone
+of worldly ease. "I saw a chap the other day who
+said he knew you when you were at Saint Elizabeth's&mdash;wasn't
+that the name of your hospital?"</p>
+
+<p>Justine assented. "One of the doctors, I suppose.
+Where did you meet him?"</p>
+
+<p>Ah, <i>now</i> she should see! He summoned his utmost
+carelessness of tone. "Down on Long Island last week&mdash;I
+was spending Sunday with the Amhersts." He
+held up the glittering fact to her, and watched for the
+least little blink of awe; but her lids never trembled.
+It was a confession of social blindness which painfully
+negatived Mrs. Dressel's hint that she knew the Amhersts;
+if she had even known <i>of</i> them, she could not
+so fatally have missed his point.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[p 158]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Long Island?" She drew her brows together in
+puzzled retrospection. "I wonder if it could have been
+Stephen Wyant? I heard he had taken over his uncle's
+practice somewhere near New York."</p>
+
+<p>"Wyant&mdash;that's the name. He's the doctor at Clifton,
+the nearest town to the Amhersts' place. Little
+Cicely had a cold&mdash;Cicely Westmore, you know&mdash;a
+small cousin of mine, by the way&mdash;" he switched a rose-branch
+loftily out of her path, explaining, as she moved
+on, that Cicely was the daughter of Mrs. Amherst's
+first marriage to Richard Westmore. "That's the way
+I happened to see this Dr. Wyant. Bessy&mdash;Mrs. Amherst&mdash;asked
+him to stop to luncheon, after he'd seen
+the kid. He seems rather a discontented sort of a
+chap&mdash;grumbling at not having a New York practice.
+I should have thought he had rather a snug berth, down
+there at Lynbrook, with all those swells to dose."</p>
+
+<p>Justine smiled. "Dr. Wyant is ambitious, and swells
+don't have as interesting diseases as poor people. One
+gets tired of giving them bread pills for imaginary ailments.
+But Dr. Wyant is not strong himself and I
+fancy a country practice is better for him than hard
+work in town."</p>
+
+<p>"You think him clever though, do you?" Westy enquired
+absently. He was already bored with the subject
+of the Long Island doctor, and vexed at the lack
+of perception that led his companion to show more con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[p 159]</a></span>cern
+in the fortunes of a country practitioner than in
+the fact of his own visit to the Amhersts; but the topic
+was a safe one, and it was agreeable to see how her
+face kindled when she was interested.</p>
+
+<p>Justine mused on his question. "I think he has very
+great promise&mdash;which he is almost certain not to fulfill,"
+she answered with a sigh which seemed to Westy's
+anxious ear to betray a more than professional interest
+in the person referred to.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come now&mdash;why not? With the Amhersts to
+give him a start&mdash;I heard my cousin recommending him
+to a lot of people the other day&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he may become a fashionable doctor," Justine
+assented indifferently; to which her companion rejoined,
+with a puzzled stare: "That's just what I mean&mdash;with
+Bessy backing him!"</p>
+
+<p>"Has Mrs. Amherst become such a power, then?"
+Justine asked, taking up the coveted theme just as he
+despaired of attracting her to it.</p>
+
+<p>"My cousin?" he stretched the two syllables to the
+cracking-point. "Well, she's awfully rich, you know;
+and there's nobody smarter. Don't you think so?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know; it's so long since I've seen her."</p>
+
+<p>He brightened. "You <i>did</i> know her, then?" But the
+discovery made her obtuseness the more inexplicable!</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, centuries ago: in another world."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Centuries</i>&mdash;I like that!" Westy gallantly protested,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[p 160]</a></span>
+his ardour kindling as she swam once more within his
+social ken. "And Amherst? You know him too, I
+suppose? By Jove, here he is now&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He signalled a tall figure strolling slowly toward
+them with bent head and brooding gaze. Justine's eye
+had retained a vivid image of the man with whom,
+scarcely three years earlier, she had lived through a
+moment of such poignant intimacy, and she recognized
+at once his lean outline, and the keen spring of his
+features, still veiled by the same look of inward absorption.
+She noticed, as he raised his hat in response to
+Westy Gaines's greeting, that the vertical lines between
+his brows had deepened; and a moment later she was
+aware that this change was the visible token of others
+which went deeper than the fact of his good clothes and
+his general air of leisure and well-being&mdash;changes perceptible
+to her only in the startled sense of how prosperity
+had aged him.</p>
+
+<p>"Hallo, Amherst&mdash;trying to get under cover?" Westy
+jovially accosted him, with a significant gesture toward
+the crowded lawn from which the new-comer had evidently
+fled. "I was just telling Miss Brent that this
+is the safest place on these painful occasions&mdash;Oh, confound
+it, it's not as safe as I thought! Here's one of
+my sisters making for me!"</p>
+
+<p>There ensued a short conflict of words, before his
+feeble flutter of resistance was borne down by a resolute<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[p 161]</a></span>
+Miss Gaines who, as she swept him back to the marquee,
+cried out to Amherst that her mother was asking
+for him too; and then Justine had time to observe
+that her remaining companion had no intention of
+responding to his hostess's appeal.</p>
+
+<p>Westy, in naming her, had laid just enough stress on
+the name to let it serve as a reminder or an introduction,
+as circumstances might decide, and she saw that Amherst,
+roused from his abstraction by the proffered clue,
+was holding his hand out doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we haven't met for some years," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Justine smiled. "I have a better reason than you
+for remembering the exact date;" and in response to
+his look of surprise she added: "You made me commit
+a professional breach of faith, and I've never known
+since whether to be glad or sorry."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst still bent on her the gaze which seemed to
+find in external details an obstacle rather than a help
+to recognition; but suddenly his face cleared. "It was
+you who told me the truth about poor Dillon! I
+couldn't imagine why I seemed to see you in such a
+different setting...."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm disguised as a lady this afternoon," she said
+smiling. "But I'm glad you saw through the disguise."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled back at her. "Are you? Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to make it&mdash;if it's so transparent&mdash;less of
+a sham, less of a dishonesty," she began impulsively,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[p 162]</a></span>
+and then paused again, a little annoyed at the overemphasis
+of her words. Why was she explaining and
+excusing herself to this stranger? Did she propose to
+tell him next that she had borrowed her dress from
+Effie Dressel? To cover her confusion she went on
+with a slight laugh: "But you haven't told me."</p>
+
+<p>"What was I to tell you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Whether to be glad or sorry that I broke my vow
+and told the truth about Dillon."</p>
+
+<p>They were standing face to face in the solitude of
+the garden-walk, forgetful of everything but the sudden
+surprised sense of intimacy that had marked their
+former brief communion. Justine had raised her eyes
+half-laughingly to Amherst, but they dropped before
+the unexpected seriousness of his.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you want to know?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>She made an effort to sustain the note of pleasantry.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;it might, for instance, determine my future
+conduct. You see I'm still a nurse, and such problems
+are always likely to present themselves."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, then don't!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean&mdash;" He hesitated a moment, reaching up
+to break a rose from the branch that tapped his shoulder.
+"I was only thinking what risks we run when we scramble
+into the chariot of the gods and try to do the driving.
+Be passive&mdash;be passive, and you'll be happier!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[p 163]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, as to that&mdash;!" She swept it aside with one of
+her airy motions. "But Dillon, for instance&mdash;would <i>he</i>
+have been happier if I'd been passive?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst seemed to ponder. "There again&mdash;how
+can one tell?"</p>
+
+<p>"And the risk's not worth taking?"</p>
+
+<p>"No!"</p>
+
+<p>She paused, and they looked at each other again.
+"Do you mean that seriously, I wonder? Do you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Act on it myself? God forbid! The gods drive
+so badly. There's poor Dillon...he happened to
+be in their way...as we all are at times." He
+pulled himself up, and went on in a matter-of-fact tone:
+"In Dillon's case, however, my axioms don't apply.
+When my wife heard the truth she was, of course, immensely
+kind to him; and if it hadn't been for you she
+might never have known."</p>
+
+<p>Justine smiled. "I think you would have found out&mdash;I
+was only the humble instrument. But now&mdash;" she
+hesitated&mdash;"now you must be able to do so much&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst lifted his head, and she saw the colour rise
+under his fair skin. "Out at Westmore? You've
+never been there since? Yes&mdash;my wife has made some
+changes; but it's all so problematic&mdash;and one would
+have to live here...."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't, then?"</p>
+
+<p>He answered by an imperceptible shrug. "Of course<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[p 164]</a></span>
+I'm here often; and she comes now and then. But the
+journey's tiresome, and it is not always easy for her to
+get away." He checked himself, and Justine saw that
+he, in turn, was suddenly conscious of the incongruity
+of explaining and extenuating his personal situation to
+a stranger. "But then we're <i>not</i> strangers!" a voice
+in her exulted, just as he added, with an embarrassed
+attempt to efface and yet justify his moment of expansion:
+"That reminds me&mdash;I think you know my wife.
+I heard her asking Mrs. Dressel about you. She wants
+so much to see you."</p>
+
+<p>The transition had been effected, at the expense of
+dramatic interest, but to the obvious triumph of social
+observances; and to Justine, after all, regaining at his
+side the group about the marquee, the interest was not
+so much diminished as shifted to the no less suggestive
+problem of studying the friend of her youth in the unexpected
+character of John Amherst's wife.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, however, during the brief transit across
+the Gaines greensward, her thoughts were still busy
+with Amherst. She had seen at once that the peculiar
+sense of intimacy reawakened by their meeting had
+been chilled and deflected by her first allusion to the
+topic which had previously brought them together:
+Amherst had drawn back as soon as she named the
+mills. What could be the cause of his reluctance?
+When they had last met, the subject burned within<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[p 165]</a></span>
+him: her being in actual fact a stranger had not, then,
+been an obstacle to his confidences. Now that he was
+master at Westmore it was plain that another tone
+became him&mdash;that his situation necessitated a greater
+reserve; but her enquiry did not imply the least wish
+to overstep this restriction: it merely showed her remembrance
+of his frankly-avowed interest in the operatives.
+Justine was struck by the fact that so natural
+an allusion should put him on the defensive. She did
+not for a moment believe that he had lost his interest
+in the mills; and that his point of view should have
+shifted with the fact of ownership she rejected as an
+equally superficial reading of his character. The man
+with whom she had talked at Dillon's bedside was one
+in whom the ruling purposes had already shaped themselves,
+and to whom life, in whatever form it came,
+must henceforth take their mould. As she reached this
+point in her analysis, it occurred to her that his shrinking
+from the subject might well imply not indifference,
+but a deeper preoccupation: a preoccupation for some
+reason suppressed and almost disavowed, yet sustaining
+the more intensely its painful hidden life. From this
+inference it was but a leap of thought to the next&mdash;that
+the cause of the change must be sought outside of
+himself, in some external influence strong enough to
+modify the innate lines of his character. And where
+could such an influence be more obviously sought than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[p 166]</a></span>
+in the marriage which had transformed the assistant
+manager of the Westmore Mills not, indeed, into their
+owner&mdash;that would rather have tended to simplify the
+problem&mdash;but into the husband of Mrs. Westmore?
+After all, the mills were Bessy's&mdash;and for a farther
+understanding of the case it remained to find out what
+manner of person Bessy had become.</p>
+
+<p>Justine's first impression, as her friend's charming
+arms received her&mdash;with an eagerness of welcome not
+lost on the suspended judgment of feminine Hanaford&mdash;the
+immediate impression was of a gain of emphasis,
+of individuality, as though the fluid creature she remembered
+had belied her prediction, and run at last
+into a definite mould. Yes&mdash;Bessy had acquired an
+outline: a graceful one, as became her early promise,
+though with, perhaps, a little more sharpness of edge
+than her youthful texture had promised. But the side
+she turned to her friend was still all softness&mdash;had in it
+a hint of the old pliancy, the impulse to lean and enlace,
+that at once woke in Justine the corresponding
+instinct of guidance and protection, so that their first
+kiss, before a word was spoken, carried the two back
+to the precise relation in which their school-days had
+left them. So easy a reversion to the past left no room
+for the sense of subsequent changes by which such
+reunions are sometimes embarrassed. Justine's sympathies
+had, instinctively, and almost at once, transferred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[p 167]</a></span>
+themselves to Bessy's side&mdash;passing over at a leap the
+pained recognition that there <i>were</i> sides already&mdash;and
+Bessy had gathered up Justine into the circle of gentle
+self-absorption which left her very dimly aware of any
+distinctive characteristic in her friends except that of
+their affection for herself&mdash;since she asked only, as
+she appealingly put it, that they should all be "dreadfully
+fond" of her.</p>
+
+<p>"And I've wanted you so often, Justine: you're the
+only clever person I'm not afraid of, because your
+cleverness always used to make things clear instead of
+confusing them. I've asked so many people about
+you&mdash;but I never heard a word till just the other day&mdash;wasn't
+it odd?&mdash;when our new doctor at Rushton happened
+to say that he knew you. I've been rather unwell
+lately&mdash;nervous and tired, and sleeping badly&mdash;and
+he told me I ought to keep perfectly quiet, and be
+under the care of a nurse who could make me do as
+she chose: just such a nurse as a wonderful Miss Brent
+he had known at St. Elizabeth's, whose patients obeyed
+her as if she'd been the colonel of a regiment. His description
+made me laugh, it reminded me so much of
+the way you used to make me do what you wanted at
+the convent&mdash;and then it suddenly occurred to me that
+I had heard of you having gone in for nursing, and we
+compared notes, and I found it was really you! Wasn't
+it odd that we should discover each other in that way?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[p 168]</a></span>
+I daresay we might have passed in the street and never
+known it&mdash;I'm sure I must be horribly changed...."</p>
+
+<p>Thus Bessy discoursed, in the semi-isolation to
+which, under an overarching beech-tree, the discretion
+of their hostess had allowed the two friends to withdraw
+for the freer exchange of confidences. There was, at
+first sight, nothing in her aspect to bear out Mrs. Amherst's
+plaintive allusion to her health, but Justine,
+who knew that she had lost a baby a few months previously,
+assumed that the effect of this shock still lingered,
+though evidently mitigated by a reviving interest
+in pretty clothes and the other ornamental accessories
+of life. Certainly Bessy Amherst had grown into the
+full loveliness which her childhood promised. She had
+the kind of finished prettiness that declares itself early,
+holds its own through the awkward transitions of girlhood,
+and resists the strain of all later vicissitudes, as
+though miraculously preserved in some clear medium
+impenetrable to the wear and tear of living.</p>
+
+<p>"You absurd child! You've not changed a bit except
+to grow more so!" Justine laughed, paying
+amused tribute to the childish craving for "a compliment"
+that still betrayed itself in Bessy's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, <i>you</i> have, then, Justine&mdash;you've grown extraordinarily
+handsome!"</p>
+
+<p>"That <i>is</i> extraordinary of me, certainly," the other
+acknowledged gaily. "But then think what room for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[p 169]</a></span>
+improvement there was&mdash;and how much time I've had
+to improve in!"</p>
+
+<p>"It is a long time, isn't it?" Bessy assented. "I
+feel so intimate, still, with the old Justine of the convent,
+and I don't know the new one a bit. Just think&mdash;I've
+a great girl of my own, almost as old as we were
+when we went to the Sacred Heart: But perhaps you
+don't know anything about me either. You see, I
+married again two years ago, and my poor baby
+died last March...so I have only Cicely. It was
+such a disappointment&mdash;I wanted a boy dreadfully,
+and I understand little babies so much better than
+a big girl like Cicely.... Oh, dear, here is Juliana
+Gaines bringing up some more tiresome people! It's
+such a bore, but John says I must know them all. Well,
+thank goodness we've only one more day in this dreadful
+place&mdash;and of course I shall see you, dear, before
+we go...."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">After</span> conducting Miss Brent to his wife, John
+Amherst, by the exercise of considerable strategic
+skill, had once more contrived to detach himself from
+the throng on the lawn, and, regaining a path in the
+shrubbery, had taken refuge on the verandah of the
+house.</p>
+
+<p>Here, under the shade of the awning, two ladies were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[p 170]</a></span>
+seated in a seclusion agreeably tempered by the distant
+strains of the Hanaford band, and by the shifting prospect
+of the groups below them.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, here he is now!" the younger of the two exclaimed,
+turning on Amherst the smile of intelligence
+that Mrs. Eustace Ansell was in the habit of substituting
+for the idle preliminaries of conversation. "We
+were not talking of you, though," she added as Amherst
+took the seat to which his mother beckoned him,
+"but of Bessy&mdash;which, I suppose, is almost as indiscreet."</p>
+
+<p>She added the last phrase after an imperceptible
+pause, and as if in deprecation of the hardly more perceptible
+frown which, at the mention of his wife's name,
+had deepened the lines between Amherst's brows.</p>
+
+<p>"Indiscreet of his own mother and his wife's friend?"
+Mrs. Amherst protested, laying her trimly-gloved hand
+on her son's arm; while the latter, with his eyes on
+her companion, said slowly: "Mrs. Ansell knows that
+indiscretion is the last fault of which her friends are
+likely to accuse her."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Raison de plus</i>, you mean?" she laughed, meeting
+squarely the challenge that passed between them under
+Mrs. Amherst's puzzled gaze. "Well, if I take advantage
+of my reputation for discretion to meddle a little
+now and then, at least I do so in a good cause. I was
+just saying how much I wish that you would take Bessy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[p 171]</a></span>
+to Europe; and I am so sure of my cause, in this case,
+that I am going to leave it to your mother to give you
+my reasons."</p>
+
+<p>She rose as she spoke, not with any sign of haste or
+embarrassment, but as if gracefully recognizing the
+desire of mother and son to be alone together; but
+Amherst, rising also, made a motion to detain her.</p>
+
+<p>"No one else will be able to put your reasons half so
+convincingly," he said with a slight smile, "and I am sure
+my mother would much rather be spared the attempt."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell met the smile as freely as she had met
+the challenge. "My dear Lucy," she rejoined, laying,
+as she reseated herself, a light caress on Mrs. Amherst's
+hand, "I'm sorry to be flattered at your expense, but
+it's not in human nature to resist such an appeal. You
+see," she added, raising her eyes to Amherst, "how sure
+I am of myself&mdash;and of <i>you</i>, when you've heard me."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, John is always ready to hear one," his mother
+murmured innocently.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know that I shall even ask him to do
+as much as that&mdash;I'm so sure, after all, that my suggestion
+carries its explanation with it."</p>
+
+<p>There was a moment's pause, during which Amherst
+let his eyes wander absently over the dissolving groups
+on the lawn.</p>
+
+<p>"The suggestion that I should take Bessy to Europe?"
+He paused again. "When&mdash;next autumn?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[p 172]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No: now&mdash;at once. On a long honeymoon."</p>
+
+<p>He frowned slightly at the last word, passing it by to
+revert to the direct answer to his question.</p>
+
+<p>"At once? No&mdash;I can't see that the suggestion
+carries its explanation with it."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell looked at him hesitatingly. She was
+conscious of the ill-chosen word that still reverberated
+between them, and the unwonted sense of having blundered
+made her, for the moment, less completely mistress
+of herself.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you'll see farther presently&mdash;" She rose again,
+unfurling her lace sunshade, as if to give a touch of
+definiteness to her action. "It's not, after all," she
+added, with a sweet frankness, "a case for argument,
+and still less for persuasion. My reasons are excellent&mdash;I
+should insist on putting them to you myself if they
+were not! But they're so good that I can leave you to
+find them out&mdash;and to back them up with your own,
+which will probably be a great deal better."</p>
+
+<p>She summed up with a light nod, which included both
+Amherst and his mother, and turning to descend the
+verandah steps, waved a signal to Mr. Langhope, who
+was limping disconsolately toward the house.</p>
+
+<p>"What has she been saying to you, mother?"
+Amherst asked, returning to his seat beside his
+mother.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst replied by a shake of her head and a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[p 173]</a></span>
+raised forefinger of reproval. "Now, Johnny, I won't
+answer a single question till you smooth out those lines
+between your eyes."</p>
+
+<p>Her son relaxed his frown to smile back at her.
+"Well, dear, there have to be some wrinkles in every
+family, and as you absolutely refuse to take your
+share&mdash;" His eyes rested affectionately on the frosty
+sparkle of her charming old face, which had, in its
+setting of recovered prosperity, the freshness of a sunny
+winter morning, when the very snow gives out a suggestion
+of warmth.</p>
+
+<p>He remembered how, on the evening of his dismissal
+from the mills, he had paused on the threshold of their
+sitting-room to watch her a moment in the lamplight,
+and had thought with bitter compunction of the fresh
+wrinkle he was about to add to the lines about her eyes.
+The three years which followed had effaced that wrinkle
+and veiled the others in a tardy bloom of well-being.
+From the moment of turning her back on Westmore,
+and establishing herself in the pretty little house at
+Hanaford which her son's wife had placed at her disposal,
+Mrs. Amherst had shed all traces of the difficult
+years; and the fact that his marriage had enabled him
+to set free, before it was too late, the pent-up springs
+of her youthfulness, sometimes seemed to Amherst the
+clearest gain in his life's confused total of profit and
+loss. It was, at any rate, the sense of Bessy's share in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[p 174]</a></span>
+the change that softened his voice when he spoke of
+her to his mother.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, then, if I present a sufficiently unruffled surface,
+let us go back to Mrs. Ansell&mdash;for I confess that
+her mysterious reasons are not yet apparent to me."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst looked deprecatingly at her son.
+"Maria Ansell is devoted to you too, John&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course she is! It's her <i>r&ocirc;le</i> to be devoted to
+everybody&mdash;especially to her enemies."</p>
+
+<p>"Her enemies?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I didn't intend any personal application. But
+why does she want me to take Bessy abroad?"</p>
+
+<p>"She and Mr. Langhope think that Bessy is not
+looking well."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst paused, and the frown showed itself for a
+moment. "What do <i>you</i> think, mother?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hadn't noticed it myself: Bessy seems to me
+prettier than ever. But perhaps she has less colour&mdash;and
+she complains of not sleeping. Maria thinks she
+still frets over the baby."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst made an impatient gesture. "Is Europe
+the only panacea?"</p>
+
+<p>"You should consider, John, that Bessy is used to
+change and amusement. I think you sometimes forget
+that other people haven't your faculty of absorbing
+themselves in a single interest. And Maria says that
+the new doctor at Clifton, whom they seem to think so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[p 175]</a></span>
+clever, is very anxious that Bessy should go to Europe
+this summer."</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt; and so is every one else: I mean her
+father and old Tredegar&mdash;and your friend Mrs. Ansell
+not least."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright black eyes to his.
+"Well, then&mdash;if they all think she needs it&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Good heavens, if travel were what she needed!&mdash;Why,
+we've never stopped travelling since we married.
+We've been everywhere on the globe except at Hanaford&mdash;this
+is her second visit here in three years!" He
+rose and took a rapid turn across the deserted verandah.
+"It's not because her health requires it&mdash;it's to get me
+away from Westmore, to prevent things being done
+there that ought to be done!" he broke out vehemently,
+halting again before his mother.</p>
+
+<p>The aged pink faded from Mrs. Amherst's face,
+but her eyes retained their lively glitter. "To prevent
+things being done? What a strange thing to
+say!"</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't have said it if I hadn't seen you falling
+under Mrs. Ansell's spell."</p>
+
+<p>His mother had a gesture which showed from whom
+he had inherited his impulsive movements. "Really,
+my son&mdash;!" She folded her hands, and added after a
+pause of self-recovery: "If you mean that I have ever
+attempted to interfere&mdash;&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[p 176]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No, no: but when they pervert things so damnably&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"John!"</p>
+
+<p>He dropped into his chair again, and pushed the hair
+from his forehead with a groan.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then&mdash;put it that they have as much right to
+their view as I have: I only want you to see what it is.
+Whenever I try to do anything at Westmore&mdash;to give a
+real start to the work that Bessy and I planned together&mdash;some
+pretext is found to stop it: to pack us off to
+the ends of the earth, to cry out against reducing her
+income, to encourage her in some new extravagance to
+which the work at the mills must be sacrificed!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst, growing pale under this outbreak, assured
+herself by a nervous backward glance that their
+privacy was still uninvaded; then her eyes returned
+to her son's face.</p>
+
+<p>"John&mdash;are you sure you're not sacrificing your wife
+to the mills?"</p>
+
+<p>He grew pale in turn, and they looked at each other
+for a moment without speaking.</p>
+
+<p>"You see it as they do, then?" he rejoined with a
+discouraged sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"I see it as any old woman would, who had my experiences
+to look back to."</p>
+
+<p>"Mother!" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>She smiled composedly. "Do you think I mean<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[p 177]</a></span>
+that as a reproach? That's because men will never
+understand women&mdash;least of all, sons their mothers.
+No real mother wants to come first; she puts her son's
+career ahead of everything. But it's different with a
+wife&mdash;and a wife as much in love as Bessy."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst looked away. "I should have thought that
+was a reason&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That would reconcile her to being set aside, to
+counting only second in your plans?"</p>
+
+<p>"They were <i>her</i> plans when we married!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, my dear&mdash;!" She paused on that, letting her
+shrewd old glance, and all the delicate lines of experience
+in her face, supply what farther comment the
+ineptitude of his argument invited.</p>
+
+<p>He took the full measure of her meaning, receiving it
+in a baffled silence that continued as she rose and gathered
+her lace mantle about her, as if to signify that
+their confidences could not, on such an occasion, be
+farther prolonged without singularity. Then he stood
+up also and joined her, resting his hand on hers while
+she leaned on the verandah rail.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor mother! And I've kept you to myself all this
+time, and spoiled your good afternoon."</p>
+
+<p>"No, dear; I was a little tired, and had slipped away
+to be quiet." She paused, and then went on, persuasively
+giving back his pressure: "I know how you
+feel about doing your duty, John; but now that things<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[p 178]</a></span>
+are so comfortably settled, isn't it a pity to unsettle
+them?"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Amherst had intended, on leaving his mother, to rejoin
+Bessy, whom he could still discern, on the lawn, in absorbed
+communion with Miss Brent; but after what
+had passed it seemed impossible, for the moment, to recover
+the garden-party tone, and he made his escape
+through the house while a trio of Cuban singers, who
+formed the crowning number of the entertainment,
+gathered the company in a denser circle about their
+guitars.</p>
+
+<p>As he walked on aimlessly under the deep June
+shadows of Maplewood Avenue his mother's last words
+formed an ironical accompaniment to his thoughts.
+"Now that things are comfortably settled&mdash;" he knew
+so well what that elastic epithet covered! Himself, for
+instance, ensconced in the impenetrable prosperity of
+his wonderful marriage; herself too (unconsciously,
+dear soul!), so happily tucked away in a cranny of that
+new and spacious life, and no more able to conceive
+why existing conditions should be disturbed than the
+bird in the eaves understands why the house should be
+torn down. Well&mdash;he had learned at last what his experience
+with his poor, valiant, puzzled mother might
+have taught him: that one must never ask from women
+any view but the personal one, any measure of conduct<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[p 179]</a></span>
+but that of their own pains and pleasures. She, indeed,
+had borne undauntedly enough the brunt of their
+earlier trials; but that was merely because, as she said,
+the mother's instinct bade her heap all her private
+hopes on the great devouring altar of her son's ambition;
+it was not because she had ever, in the very least,
+understood or sympathized with his aims.</p>
+
+<p>And Bessy&mdash;? Perhaps if their little son had lived
+she might in turn have obeyed the world-old instinct of
+self-effacement&mdash;but now! He remembered with an
+intenser self-derision that, not even in the first surprise
+of his passion, had he deluded himself with the idea
+that Bessy Westmore was an exception to her sex. He
+had argued rather that, being only a lovelier product of
+the common mould, she would abound in the adaptabilities
+and pliancies which the lords of the earth have
+seen fit to cultivate in their companions. She would
+care for his aims because they were his. During their
+precipitate wooing, and through the first brief months
+of marriage, this profound and original theory had been
+gratifyingly confirmed; then its perfect surface had
+begun to show a flaw. Amherst had always conveniently
+supposed that the poet's line summed up the good
+woman's rule of ethics: <i>He for God only, she for God
+in him.</i> It was for the god in him, surely, that she had
+loved him: for that first glimpse of an "ampler ether,
+a diviner air" that he had brought into her cramped<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[p 180]</a></span>
+and curtained life. He could never, now, evoke that
+earlier delusion without feeling on its still-tender surface
+the keen edge of Mrs. Ansell's smile. She, no
+doubt, could have told him at any time why Bessy had
+married him: it was for his <i>beaux yeux</i>, as Mrs. Ansell
+would have put it&mdash;because he was young, handsome,
+persecuted, an ardent lover if not a subtle one&mdash;because
+Bessy had met him at the fatal moment, because her
+family had opposed the marriage&mdash;because, in brief, the
+gods, that day, may have been a little short of amusement.
+Well, they were having their laugh out now&mdash;there
+were moments when high heaven seemed to ring
+with it....</p>
+
+<p>With these thoughts at his heels Amherst strode on,
+overtaken now and again by the wheels of departing
+guests from the garden-party, and knowing, as they
+passed him, what was in their minds&mdash;envy of his success,
+admiration of his cleverness in achieving it, and a
+little half-contemptuous pity for his wife, who, with her
+wealth and looks, might have done so much better.
+Certainly, if the case could have been put to Hanaford&mdash;the
+Hanaford of the Gaines garden-party&mdash;it would
+have sided with Bessy to a voice. And how much justice
+was there in what he felt would have been the unanimous
+verdict of her class? Was his mother right in
+hinting that he was sacrificing Bessy to the mills? But
+the mills <i>were</i> Bessy&mdash;at least he had thought so when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[p 181]</a></span>
+he married her! They were her particular form of
+contact with life, the expression of her relation to her
+fellow-men, her pretext, her opportunity&mdash;unless they
+were merely a vast purse in which to plunge for her pin-money!
+He had fancied it would rest with him to determine
+from which of these stand-points she should
+view Westmore; and at the outset she had enthusiastically
+viewed it from his. In her eager adoption of his
+ideas she had made a pet of the mills, organizing the
+Mothers' Club, laying out a recreation-ground on the
+Hopewood property, and playing with pretty plans in
+water-colour for the Emergency Hospital and the building
+which was to contain the night-schools, library and
+gymnasium; but even these minor projects&mdash;which he
+had urged her to take up as a means of learning their
+essential dependence on his larger scheme&mdash;were soon
+to be set aside by obstacles of a material order. Bessy
+always wanted money&mdash;not a great deal, but, as she
+reasonably put it, "enough"&mdash;and who was to blame if
+her father and Mr. Tredegar, each in his different capacity,
+felt obliged to point out that every philanthropic
+outlay at Westmore must entail a corresponding reduction
+in her income? Perhaps if she could have been
+oftener at Hanaford these arguments would have been
+counteracted, for she was tender-hearted, and prompt
+to relieve such suffering as she saw about her; but her
+imagination was not active, and it was easy for her to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[p 182]</a></span>
+forget painful sights when they were not under her eye.
+This was perhaps&mdash;half-consciously&mdash;one of the reasons
+why she avoided Hanaford; why, as Amherst exclaimed,
+they had been everywhere since their marriage but to
+the place where their obligations called them. There
+had, at any rate, always been some good excuse for not
+returning there, and consequently for postponing the
+work of improvement which, it was generally felt, her
+husband could not fitly begin till she <i>had</i> returned and
+gone over the ground with him. After their marriage,
+and especially in view of the comment excited by that
+romantic incident, it was impossible not to yield to her
+wish that they should go abroad for a few months;
+then, before her confinement, the doctors had exacted
+that she should be spared all fatigue and worry; and
+after the baby's death Amherst had felt with her too
+tenderly to venture an immediate return to unwelcome
+questions.</p>
+
+<p>For by this time it had become clear to him that such
+questions were, and always would be, unwelcome to
+her. As the easiest means of escaping them, she had
+once more dismissed the whole problem to the vague
+and tiresome sphere of "business," whence he had succeeded
+in detaching it for a moment in the early days of
+their union. Her first husband&mdash;poor unappreciated
+Westmore!&mdash;had always spared her the boredom of
+"business," and Halford Gaines and Mr. Tredegar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[p 183]</a></span>
+were ready to show her the same consideration; it was
+part of the modern code of chivalry that lovely woman
+should not be bothered about ways and means. But
+Bessy was too much the wife&mdash;and the wife in love&mdash;to
+consent that her husband's views on the management
+of the mills should be totally disregarded. Precisely
+because her advisers looked unfavourably on his intervention,
+she felt bound&mdash;if only in defense of her
+illusions&mdash;to maintain and emphasize it. The mills
+were, in fact, the official "platform" on which she had
+married: Amherst's devoted <i>r&ocirc;le</i> at Westmore had justified
+the unconventionality of the step. And so she
+was committed&mdash;the more helplessly for her dense misintelligence
+of both sides of the question&mdash;to the policy
+of conciliating the opposing influences which had so
+uncomfortably chosen to fight out their case on the
+field of her poor little existence: theoretically siding
+with her husband, but surreptitiously, as he well knew,
+giving aid and comfort to the enemy, who were really
+defending her own cause.</p>
+
+<p>All this Amherst saw with that cruel insight which
+had replaced his former blindness. He was, in truth,
+more ashamed of the insight than of the blindness: it
+seemed to him horribly cold-blooded to be thus analyzing,
+after two years of marriage, the source of his wife's
+inconsistencies. And, partly for this reason, he had
+put off from month to month the final question of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[p 184]</a></span>
+future management of the mills, and of the radical
+changes to be made there if his system were to prevail.
+But the time had come when, if Bessy had to turn to
+Westmore for the justification of her marriage, he had
+even more need of calling upon it for the same service.
+He had not, assuredly, married her because of Westmore;
+but he would scarcely have contemplated marriage
+with a rich woman unless the source of her wealth
+had offered him some such opportunity as Westmore
+presented. His special training, and the natural bent
+of his mind, qualified him, in what had once seemed a
+predestined manner, to help Bessy to use her power
+nobly, for her own uplifting as well as for that of Westmore;
+and so the mills became, incongruously enough,
+the plank of safety to which both clung in their sense
+of impending disaster.</p>
+
+<p>It was not that Amherst feared the temptation to
+idleness if this outlet for his activity were cut off. He
+had long since found that the luxury with which his
+wife surrounded him merely quickened his natural bent
+for hard work and hard fare. He recalled with a touch
+of bitterness how he had once regretted having separated
+himself from his mother's class, and how seductive
+for a moment, to both mind and senses, that other life
+had appeared. Well&mdash;he knew it now, and it had
+neither charm nor peril for him. Capua must have been
+a dull place to one who had once drunk the joy of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[p 185]</a></span>
+battle. What he dreaded was not that he should learn
+to love the life of ease, but that he should grow to loathe
+it uncontrollably, as the symbol of his mental and
+spiritual bondage. And Westmore was his safety-valve,
+his refuge&mdash;if he were cut off from Westmore what remained
+to him? It was not only the work he had
+found to his hand, but the one work for which his hand
+was fitted. It was his life that he was fighting for in
+insisting that now at last, before the close of this long-deferred
+visit to Hanaford, the question of the mills
+should be faced and settled. He had made that clear
+to Bessy, in a scene he still shrank from recalling; for it
+was of the essence of his somewhat unbending integrity
+that he would not trick her into a confused surrender to
+the personal influence he still possessed over her, but
+must seek to convince her by the tedious process of
+argument and exposition, against which she knew no
+defense but tears and petulance. But he had, at any
+rate, gained her consent to his setting forth his views at
+the meeting of directors the next morning; and meanwhile
+he had meant to be extraordinarily patient and
+reasonable with her, till the hint of Mrs. Ansell's stratagem
+produced in him a fresh reaction of distrust.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[p 186]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">That</span> evening when dinner ended, Mrs. Ansell, with
+a glance through the tall dining-room windows,
+had suggested to Bessy that it would be pleasanter to
+take coffee on the verandah; but Amherst detained his
+wife with a glance.</p>
+
+<p>"I should like Bessy to stay," he said.</p>
+
+<p>The dining-room being on the cool side the house,
+with a refreshing outlook on the garden, the men preferred
+to smoke there rather than in the stuffily-draped
+Oriental apartment destined to such rites; and Bessy
+Amherst, with a faint sigh, sank back into her seat,
+while Mrs. Ansell drifted out through one of the open
+windows.</p>
+
+<p>The men surrounding Richard Westmore's table
+were the same who nearly three years earlier had
+gathered in his house for the same purpose: the discussion
+of conditions at the mills. The only perceptible
+change in the relation to each other of the persons composing
+this group was that John Amherst was now the
+host of the other two, instead of being a subordinate
+called in for cross-examination; but he was so indifferent,
+or at least so heedless, a host&mdash;so forgetful, for
+instance, of Mr. Tredegar's preference for a "light"
+cigar, and of Mr. Langhope's feelings on the duty of
+making the Westmore madeira circulate with the sun<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[p 187]</a></span>&mdash;that
+the change was manifest only in his evening-dress,
+and in the fact of his sitting at the foot of the table.</p>
+
+<p>If Amherst was conscious of the contrast thus implied,
+it was only as a restriction on his freedom. As
+far as the welfare of Westmore was concerned he would
+rather have stood before his companions as the assistant
+manager of the mills than as the husband of their
+owner; and it seemed to him, as he looked back, that
+he had done very little with the opportunity which
+looked so great in the light of his present restrictions.
+What he <i>had</i> done with it&mdash;the use to which, as unfriendly
+critics might insinuate, he had so adroitly put
+it&mdash;had landed him, ironically enough, in the ugly <i>impasse</i>
+of a situation from which no issue seemed possible
+without some wasteful sacrifice of feeling.</p>
+
+<p>His wife's feelings, for example, were already revealing
+themselves in an impatient play of her fan that
+made her father presently lean forward to suggest:
+"If we men are to talk shop, is it necessary to keep
+Bessy in this hot room?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst rose and opened the window behind his wife's
+chair.</p>
+
+<p>"There's a breeze from the west&mdash;the room will be
+cooler now," he said, returning to his seat.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't mind&mdash;" Bessy murmured, in a tone intended
+to give her companions the full measure of what
+she was being called on to endure.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[p 188]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar coughed slightly. "May I trouble you
+for that other box of cigars, Amherst? No, <i>not</i> the
+Caba&ntilde;as." Bessy rose and handed him the box on
+which his glance significantly rested. "Ah, thank you,
+my dear. I was about to ask," he continued, looking
+about for the cigar-lighter, which flamed unheeded at
+Amherst's elbow, "what special purpose will be served
+by a preliminary review of the questions to be discussed
+tomorrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;exactly," murmured Mr. Langhope. "The
+madeira, my dear John? No&mdash;ah&mdash;<i>please</i>&mdash;to the left!"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst impatiently reversed the direction in which
+he had set the precious vessel moving, and turned to
+Mr. Tredegar, who was conspicuously lighting his cigar
+with a match extracted from his waist-coat pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"The purpose is to define my position in the matter;
+and I prefer that Bessy should do this with your help
+rather than with mine."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar surveyed his cigar through drooping
+lids, as though the question propounded by Amherst
+were perched on its tip.</p>
+
+<p>"Is not your position naturally involved in and defined
+by hers? You will excuse my saying that&mdash;technically
+speaking, of course&mdash;I cannot distinctly conceive
+of it as having any separate existence."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar spoke with the deliberate mildness
+that was regarded as his most effective weapon at the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[p 189]</a></span>
+bar, since it was likely to abash those who were too
+intelligent to be propitiated by it.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly it is involved in hers," Amherst agreed;
+"but how far that defines it is just what I have waited
+till now to find out."</p>
+
+<p>Bessy at this point recalled her presence by a restless
+turn of her graceful person, and her father, with an
+affectionate glance at her, interposed amicably: "But
+surely&mdash;according to old-fashioned ideas&mdash;it implies
+identity of interests?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but whose interests?" Amherst asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;your wife's, man! She owns the mills."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst hesitated. "I would rather talk of my
+wife's interest in the mills than of her interests there;
+but we'll keep to the plural if you prefer it. Personally,
+I believe the terms should be interchangeable in the
+conduct of such a business."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;I'm glad to hear that," said Mr. Tredegar
+quickly, "since it's precisely the view we all take."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's colour rose. "Definitions are ambiguous,"
+he said. "Before you adopt mine, perhaps I had better
+develop it a little farther. What I mean is, that Bessy's
+interests in Westmore should be regulated by her interest
+in it&mdash;in its welfare as a social body, aside from
+its success as a commercial enterprise. If we agree on
+this definition, we are at one as to the other: namely
+that my relation to the matter is defined by hers."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[p 190]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He paused a moment, as if to give his wife time to
+contribute some sign of assent and encouragement; but
+she maintained a puzzled silence and he went on:
+"There is nothing new in this. I have tried to make
+Bessy understand from the beginning what obligations
+I thought the ownership of Westmore entailed, and
+how I hoped to help her fulfill them; but ever since
+our marriage all definite discussion of the subject has
+been put off for one cause or another, and that is my
+reason for urging that it should be brought up at the
+directors' meeting tomorrow."</p>
+
+<p>There was another pause, during which Bessy glanced
+tentatively at Mr. Tredegar, and then said, with a
+lovely rise of colour: "But, John, I sometimes think
+you forget how much has been done at Westmore&mdash;the
+Mothers' Club, and the play-ground, and all&mdash;in the
+way of carrying out your ideas."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar discreetly dropped his glance to his
+cigar, and Mr. Langhope sounded an irrepressible note
+of approval and encouragement.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst smiled. "No, I have not forgotten; and I
+am grateful to you for giving my ideas a trial. But
+what has been done hitherto is purely superficial."
+Bessy's eyes clouded, and he added hastily: "Don't
+think I undervalue it for that reason&mdash;heaven knows
+the surface of life needs improving! But it's like picking
+flowers and sticking them in the ground to make a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[p 191]</a></span>
+garden&mdash;unless you transplant the flower with its roots,
+and prepare the soil to receive it, your garden will be
+faded tomorrow. No radical changes have yet been
+made at Westmore; and it is of radical changes that I
+want to speak."</p>
+
+<p>Bessy's look grew more pained, and Mr. Langhope
+exclaimed with unwonted irascibility: "Upon my soul,
+Amherst, the tone you take about what your wife has
+done doesn't strike me as the likeliest way of encouraging
+her to do more!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to encourage her to do more on such a
+basis&mdash;the sooner she sees the futility of it the better for
+Westmore!"</p>
+
+<p>"The futility&mdash;?" Bessy broke out, with a flutter of
+tears in her voice; but before her father could intervene
+Mr. Tredegar had raised his hand with the gesture
+of one accustomed to wield the gavel.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear child, I see Amherst's point, and it is best,
+as he says, that you should see it too. What he desires,
+as I understand it, is the complete reconstruction of the
+present state of things at Westmore; and he is right in
+saying that all your good works there&mdash;night-schools,
+and nursery, and so forth&mdash;leave that issue untouched."</p>
+
+<p>A smile quivered under Mr. Langhope's moustache.
+He and Amherst both knew that Mr. Tredegar's feint
+of recognizing the justice of his adversary's claim was
+merely the first step to annihilating it; but Bessy could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[p 192]</a></span>
+never be made to understand this, and always felt herself
+deserted and betrayed when any side but her own
+was given a hearing.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry if all I have tried to do at Westmore is
+useless&mdash;but I suppose I shall never understand business,"
+she murmured, vainly seeking consolation in her
+father's eye.</p>
+
+<p>"This is not business," Amherst broke in. "It's
+the question of your personal relation to the people
+there&mdash;the last thing that business considers."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope uttered an impatient exclamation.
+"I wish to heaven the owner of the mills had made it
+clear just what that relation was to be!"</p>
+
+<p>"I think he did, sir," Amherst answered steadily,
+"in leaving his wife the unrestricted control of the
+property."</p>
+
+<p>He had reddened under Mr. Langhope's thrust, but
+his voice betrayed no irritation, and Bessy rewarded
+him with an unexpected beam of sympathy: she was
+always up in arms at the least sign of his being treated
+as an intruder.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sure, papa," she said, a little tremulously, "that
+poor Richard, though he knew I was not clever, felt he
+could trust me to take the best advice&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, that's all we ask of you, my child!" her father
+sighed, while Mr. Tredegar drily interposed: "We are
+merely losing time by this digression. Let me suggest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[p 193]</a></span>
+that Amherst should give us an idea of the changes he
+wishes to make at Westmore."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst, as he turned to answer, remembered with
+what ardent faith in his powers of persuasion he had
+responded to the same appeal three years earlier. He
+had thought then that all his cause needed was a hearing;
+now he knew that the practical man's readiness to
+let the idealist talk corresponds with the busy parent's
+permission to destructive infancy to "run out and play."
+They would let him state his case to the four corners of
+the earth&mdash;if only he did not expect them to act on it!
+It was their policy to let him exhaust himself in argument
+and exhortation, to listen to him so politely and
+patiently that if he failed to enforce his ideas it should
+not be for lack of opportunity to expound them....
+And the alternative struck him as hardly less to be
+feared. Supposing that the incredible happened, that
+his reasons prevailed with his wife, and, through her,
+with the others&mdash;at what cost would the victory be won?
+Would Bessy ever forgive him for winning it? And
+what would his situation be, if it left him in control of
+Westmore but estranged from his wife?</p>
+
+<p>He recalled suddenly a phrase he had used that afternoon
+to the dark-eyed girl at the garden-party: "What
+risks we run when we scramble into the chariot of the
+gods!" And at the same instant he heard her retort,
+and saw her fine gesture of defiance. How could he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[p 194]</a></span>
+ever have doubted that the thing was worth doing at
+whatever cost? Something in him&mdash;some secret lurking
+element of weakness and evasion&mdash;shrank out of
+sight in the light of her question: "Do <i>you</i> act on
+that?" and the "God forbid!" he had instantly flashed
+back to her. He turned to Mr. Tredegar with his
+answer.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst knew that any large theoretical exposition
+of the case would be as much wasted on the two men
+as on his wife. To gain his point he must take only
+one step at a time, and it seemed to him that the first
+thing needed at Westmore was that the hands should
+work and live under healthier conditions. To attain
+this, two important changes were necessary: the floor-space
+of the mills must be enlarged, and the company
+must cease to rent out tenements, and give the operatives
+the opportunity to buy land for themselves. Both
+these changes involved the upheaval of the existing
+order. Whenever the Westmore mills had been enlarged,
+it had been for the sole purpose of increasing
+the revenues of the company; and now Amherst asked
+that these revenues should be materially and permanently
+reduced. As to the suppression of the company
+tenement, such a measure struck at the roots of the
+baneful paternalism which was choking out every germ
+of initiative in the workman. Once the operatives had
+room to work in, and the hope of homes of their own to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[p 195]</a></span>
+go to when work was over, Amherst was willing to
+trust to time for the satisfaction of their other needs.
+He believed that a sounder understanding of these needs
+would develop on both sides the moment the employers
+proved their good faith by the deliberate and permanent
+sacrifice of excessive gain to the well-being of the employed;
+and once the two had learned to regard each
+other not as antagonists but as collaborators, a long
+step would have been taken toward a readjustment of
+the whole industrial relation. In regard to general and
+distant results, Amherst tried not to be too sanguine,
+even in his own thoughts. His aim was to remedy
+the abuse nearest at hand, in the hope of thus getting
+gradually closer to the central evil; and, had his action
+been unhampered, he would still have preferred the
+longer and more circuitous path of practical experiment
+to the sweeping adoption of a new industrial system.</p>
+
+<p>But his demands, moderate as they were, assumed in
+his hearers the consciousness of a moral claim superior
+to the obligation of making one's business "pay"; and
+it was the futility of this assumption that chilled the
+arguments on his lips, since in the orthodox creed of the
+business world it was a weakness and not a strength to
+be content with five per cent where ten was obtainable.
+Business was one thing, philanthropy another; and the
+enthusiasts who tried combining them were usually reduced,
+after a brief flight, to paying fifty cents on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[p 196]</a></span>
+dollar, and handing over their stock to a promoter presumably
+unhampered by humanitarian ideals.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst knew that this was the answer with which
+his plea would be met; knew, moreover, that the plea
+was given a hearing simply because his judges deemed
+it so pitiably easy to refute. But the knowledge, once
+he had begun to speak, fanned his argument to a white
+heat of pleading, since, with failure so plainly ahead,
+small concessions and compromises were not worth making.
+Reason would be wasted on all; but eloquence
+might at least prevail with Bessy....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When, late that night, he went upstairs after long
+pacings of the garden, he was surprised to see a light
+in her room. She was not given to midnight study,
+and fearing that she might be ill he knocked at her
+door. There was no answer, and after a short pause
+he turned the handle and entered.</p>
+
+<p>In the great canopied Westmore couch, her arms
+flung upward and her hands clasped beneath her head,
+she lay staring fretfully at the globe of electric light
+which hung from the centre of the embossed and gilded
+ceiling. Seen thus, with the soft curves of throat and
+arms revealed, and her face childishly set in a cloud of
+loosened hair, she looked no older than Cicely&mdash;and,
+like Cicely, inaccessible to grown-up arguments and the
+stronger logic of experience.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[p 197]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was a trick of hers, in such moods, to ignore any
+attempt to attract her notice; and Amherst was prepared
+for her remaining motionless as he paused on the
+threshold and then advanced toward the middle of the
+room. There had been a time when he would have
+been exasperated by her pretense of not seeing him,
+but a deep weariness of spirit now dulled him to these
+surface pricks.</p>
+
+<p>"I was afraid you were not well when I saw the light
+burning," he began.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you&mdash;I am quite well," she answered in a
+colourless voice, without turning her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I put it out, then? You can't sleep with such
+a glare in your eyes."</p>
+
+<p>"I should not sleep at any rate; and I hate to lie
+awake in the dark."</p>
+
+<p>"Why shouldn't you sleep?" He moved nearer,
+looking down compassionately on her perturbed face
+and struggling lips.</p>
+
+<p>She lay silent a moment; then she faltered out:
+"B&mdash;because I'm so unhappy!"</p>
+
+<p>The pretense of indifference was swept away by a
+gush of childish sobs as she flung over on her side and
+buried her face in the embroidered pillows.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst, bending down, laid a quieting hand on her
+shoulder. "Bessy&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She sobbed on.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[p 198]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He seated himself silently in the arm-chair beside the
+bed, and kept his soothing hold on her shoulder.
+The time had come when he went through all these
+accustomed acts of pacification as mechanically as a
+nurse soothing a fretful child. And once he had thought
+her weeping eloquent! He looked about him at the
+spacious room, with its heavy hangings of damask and
+the thick velvet carpet which stifled his steps. Everywhere
+were the graceful tokens of her presence&mdash;the
+vast lace-draped toilet-table strewn with silver and
+crystal, the embroidered muslin cushions heaped on
+the lounge, the little rose-lined slippers she had just
+put off, the lace wrapper, with a scent of violets in
+its folds, which he had pushed aside when he sat
+down beside her; and he remembered how full of a
+mysterious and intimate charm these things had once
+appeared to him. It was characteristic that the remembrance
+made him more patient with her now.
+Perhaps, after all, it was his failure that she was crying
+over....</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be unhappy. You decided as seemed best
+to you," he said.</p>
+
+<p>She pressed her handkerchief against her lips, still
+keeping her head averted. "But I hate all these arguments
+and disputes. Why should you unsettle everything?"
+she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>His mother's words! Involuntarily he removed his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[p 199]</a></span>
+hand from her shoulder, though he still remained seated
+by the bed.</p>
+
+<p>"You are right. I see the uselessness of it," he assented,
+with an uncontrollable note of irony.</p>
+
+<p>She turned her head at the tone, and fixed her plaintive
+brimming eyes on him. "You <i>are</i> angry with
+me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Was that troubling you?" He leaned forward
+again, with compassion in his face. <i>Sancta simplicitas!</i>
+was the thought within him.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not angry," he went on; "be reasonable and
+try to sleep."</p>
+
+<p>She started upright, the light masses of her hair
+floating about her like silken sea-weed lifted on an invisible
+tide. "Don't talk like that! I can't endure to
+be humoured like a baby. I am unhappy because I
+can't see why all these wretched questions should be
+dragged into our life. I hate to have you always disagreeing
+with Mr. Tredegar, who is so clever and has
+so much experience; and yet I hate to see you give way
+to him, because that makes it appear as if...as
+if...."</p>
+
+<p>"He didn't care a straw for my ideas?" Amherst
+smiled. "Well, he doesn't&mdash;and I never dreamed of
+making him. So don't worry about that either."</p>
+
+<p>"You never dreamed of making him care for your
+ideas? But then why do you&mdash;&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[p 200]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why do I go on setting them forth at such great
+length?" Amherst smiled again. "To convince you&mdash;that's
+my only ambition."</p>
+
+<p>She stared at him, shaking her head back to toss a
+loose lock from her puzzled eyes. A tear still shone on
+her lashes, but with the motion it fell and trembled
+down her cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"To convince <i>me</i>? But you know I am so ignorant
+of such things."</p>
+
+<p>"Most women are."</p>
+
+<p>"I never pretended to understand anything about&mdash;economics,
+or whatever you call it."</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Then how&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He turned and looked at her gently. "I thought you
+might have begun to understand something about <i>me</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"About you?" The colour flowered softly under
+her clear skin.</p>
+
+<p>"About what my ideas on such subjects were likely
+to be worth&mdash;judging from what you know of me in
+other respects." He paused and glanced away from
+her. "Well," he concluded deliberately, "I suppose
+I've had my answer tonight."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, John&mdash;&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>He rose and wandered across the room, pausing a
+moment to finger absently the trinkets on the dressing-table.
+The act recalled with a curious vividness cer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[p 201]</a></span>tain
+dulled sensations of their first days together, when
+to handle and examine these frail little accessories of
+her toilet had been part of the wonder and amusement
+of his new existence. He could still hear her
+laugh as she leaned over him, watching his mystified
+look in the glass, till their reflected eyes met there and
+drew down her lips to his. He laid down the fragrant
+powder-puff he had been turning slowly between his
+fingers, and moved back toward the bed. In the interval
+he had reached a decision.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;isn't it natural that I should think so?" he
+began again, as he stood beside her. "When we married
+I never expected you to care or know much about
+economics. It isn't a quality a man usually chooses his
+wife for. But I had a fancy&mdash;perhaps it shows my
+conceit&mdash;that when we had lived together a year or
+two, and you'd found out what kind of a fellow I was
+in other ways&mdash;ways any woman can judge of&mdash;I had a
+fancy that you might take my opinions on faith when it
+came to my own special business&mdash;the thing I'm generally
+supposed to know about."</p>
+
+<p>He knew that he was touching a sensitive chord, for
+Bessy had to the full her sex's pride of possessorship.
+He was human and faulty till others criticized him&mdash;then
+he became a god. But in this case a conflicting
+influence restrained her from complete response to his
+appeal.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[p 202]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I <i>do</i> feel sure you know&mdash;about the treatment of the
+hands and all that; but you said yourself once&mdash;the
+first time we ever talked about Westmore&mdash;that the
+business part was different&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Here it was again, the ancient ineradicable belief in
+the separable body and soul! Even an industrial organization
+was supposed to be subject to the old theological
+distinction, and Bessy was ready to co-operate
+with her husband in the emancipation of Westmore's
+spiritual part if only its body remained under the law.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst controlled his impatience, as it was always
+easy for him to do when he had fixed on a definite line
+of conduct.</p>
+
+<p>"It was my situation that was different; not what
+you call the business part. That is inextricably bound
+up with the treatment of the hands. If I am to have
+anything to do with the mills now I can deal with them
+only as your representative; and as such I am bound
+to take in the whole question."</p>
+
+<p>Bessy's face clouded: was he going into it all again?
+But he read her look and went on reassuringly: "That
+was what I meant by saying that I hoped you would
+take me on faith. If I want the welfare of Westmore
+it's above all, I believe, because I want Westmore to
+see you as <i>I</i> do&mdash;as the dispenser of happiness, who
+could not endure to benefit by any wrong or injustice
+to others."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[p 203]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Of course, of course I don't want to do them
+injustice!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He had seated himself beside her again, clasping in
+his the hand with which she was fretting the lace-edged
+sheet. He felt her restless fingers surrender slowly, and
+her eyes turned to him in appeal.</p>
+
+<p>"But I care for what people say of you too! And
+you know&mdash;it's horrid, but one must consider it&mdash;if they
+say you're spending my money imprudently...." The
+blood rose to her neck and face. "I don't mind for
+myself...even if I have to give up as many things as
+papa and Mr. Tredegar think...but there is Cicely...and
+if people said...."</p>
+
+<p>"If people said I was spending Cicely's money on
+improving the condition of the people to whose work
+she will some day owe all her wealth&mdash;" Amherst
+paused: "Well, I would rather hear that said of me
+than any other thing I can think of, except one."</p>
+
+<p>"Except what?"</p>
+
+<p>"That I was doing it with her mother's help and
+approval."</p>
+
+<p>She drew a long tremulous sigh: he knew it was
+always a relief to her to have him assert himself
+strongly. But a residue of resistance still clouded her
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>"I should always want to help you, of course; but if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[p 204]</a></span>
+Mr. Tredegar and Halford Gaines think your plan unbusinesslike&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Tredegar and Halford Gaines are certain to
+think it so. And that is why I said, just now, that it
+comes, in the end, to your choosing between us; taking
+them on experience or taking me on faith."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him wistfully. "Of course I should
+expect to give up things.... You wouldn't want me
+to live here?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should not ask you to," he said, half-smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose there would be a good many things we
+couldn't do&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You would certainly have less money for a number
+of years; after that, I believe you would have more
+rather than less; but I should not want you to think
+that, beyond a reasonable point, the prosperity of the
+mills was ever to be measured by your dividends."</p>
+
+<p>"No." She leaned back wearily among the pillows.
+"I suppose, for instance, we should have to give up
+Europe this summer&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>Here at last was the bottom of her thought! It was
+always on the immediate pleasure that her soul hung:
+she had not enough imagination to look beyond, even
+in the projecting of her own desires. And it was on
+his knowledge of this limitation that Amherst had deliberately
+built.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see how you could go to Europe," he said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[p 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"The doctor thinks I need it," she faltered.</p>
+
+<p>"In that case, of course&mdash;" He stood up, not abruptly,
+or with any show of irritation, but as if accepting
+this as her final answer. "What you need most, in the
+meantime, is a little sleep," he said. "I will tell your
+maid not to disturb you in the morning." He had returned
+to his soothing way of speech, as though definitely
+resigned to the inutility of farther argument.
+"And I will say goodbye now," he continued, "because
+I shall probably take an early train, before you
+wake&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She sat up with a start. "An early train? Why,
+where are you going?"</p>
+
+<p>"I must go to Chicago some time this month, and as
+I shall not be wanted here tomorrow I might as well
+run out there at once, and join you next week at
+Lynbrook."</p>
+
+<p>Bessy had grown pale. "But I don't understand&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Their eyes met. "Can't you understand that I am
+human enough to prefer, under the circumstances, not
+being present at tomorrow's meeting?" he said with a
+dry laugh.</p>
+
+<p>She sank back with a moan of discouragement,
+turning her face away as he began to move toward
+his room.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I put the light out?" he asked, pausing with
+his hand on the electric button.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[p 206]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, please."</p>
+
+<p>He pushed in the button and walked on, guided
+through the obscurity by the line of light under his
+door. As he reached the threshold he heard a little
+choking cry.</p>
+
+<p>"John&mdash;oh, John!"</p>
+
+<p>He paused.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't <i>bear</i> it!" The sobs increased.</p>
+
+<p>"Bear what?"</p>
+
+<p>"That you should hate me&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be foolish," he said, groping for his door-handle.</p>
+
+<p>"But you do hate me&mdash;and I deserve it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense, dear. Try to sleep."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't sleep till you've forgiven me. Say you
+don't hate me! I'll do anything...only say you don't
+hate me!"</p>
+
+<p>He stood still a moment, thinking; then he turned
+back, and made his way across the room to her side.
+As he sat down beside her, he felt her arms reach for
+his neck and her wet face press itself against his cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll do anything..." she sobbed; and in the darkness
+he held her to him and hated his victory.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[p 207]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Ansell</span> was engaged in what she called picking
+up threads. She had been abroad for the
+summer&mdash;had, in, fact, transferred herself but a few
+hours earlier from her returning steamer to the little
+station at Lynbrook&mdash;and was now, in the bright September
+afternoon, which left her in sole possession of
+the terrace of Lynbrook House, using that pleasant
+eminence as a point of observation from which to
+gather up some of the loose ends of history dropped at
+her departure.</p>
+
+<p>It might have been thought that the actual scene out-spread
+below her&mdash;the descending gardens, the tennis-courts,
+the farm-lands sloping away to the blue sea-like
+shimmer of the Hempstead plains&mdash;offered, at the
+moment, little material for her purpose; but that
+was to view them with a superficial eye. Mrs. Ansell's
+trained gaze was, for example, greatly enlightened
+by the fact that the tennis-courts were fringed by
+a group of people indolently watchful of the figures
+agitating themselves about the nets; and that, as she
+turned her head toward the entrance avenue, the receding
+view of a station omnibus, followed by a luggage-cart,
+announced that more guests were to be added to
+those who had almost taxed to its limits the expansibility
+of the luncheon-table.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[p 208]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All this, to the initiated eye, was full of suggestion;
+but its significance was as nothing to that presented by
+the approach of two figures which, as Mrs. Ansell
+watched, detached themselves from the cluster about
+the tennis-ground and struck, obliquely and at a desultory
+pace, across the lawn toward the terrace. The
+figures&mdash;those of a slight young man with stooping
+shoulders, and of a lady equally youthful but slenderly
+erect&mdash;moved forward in absorbed communion, as if
+unconscious of their surroundings and indefinite as to
+their direction, till, on the brink of the wide grass terrace
+just below their observer's parapet, they paused a
+moment and faced each other in closer speech. This
+interchange of words, though brief in measure of time,
+lasted long enough to add a vivid strand to Mrs. Ansell's
+thickening skein; then, on a gesture of the lady's,
+and without signs of formal leave-taking, the young
+man struck into a path which regained the entrance
+avenue, while his companion, quickening her pace,
+crossed the grass terrace and mounted the wide stone
+steps sweeping up to the house.</p>
+
+<p>These brought her out on the upper terrace a few
+yards from Mrs. Ansell's post, and exposed her, unprepared,
+to the full beam of welcome which that lady's
+rapid advance threw like a searchlight across her path.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear Miss Brent! I was just wondering how it was
+that I hadn't seen you before." Mrs. Ansell, as she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[p 209]</a></span>
+spoke, drew the girl's hand into a long soft clasp which
+served to keep them confronted while she delicately
+groped for whatever thread the encounter seemed to
+proffer.</p>
+
+<p>Justine made no attempt to evade the scrutiny to
+which she found herself exposed; she merely released
+her hand by a movement instinctively evasive of the
+mechanical endearment, explaining, with a smile that
+softened the gesture: "I was out with Cicely when you
+arrived. We've just come in."</p>
+
+<p>"The dear child! I haven't seen her either." Mrs.
+Ansell continued to bestow upon the speaker's clear dark
+face an intensity of attention in which, for the moment,
+Cicely had no perceptible share. "I hear you are
+teaching her botany, and all kinds of wonderful things."</p>
+
+<p>Justine smiled again. "I am trying to teach her to
+wonder: that is the hardest faculty to cultivate in the
+modern child."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;I suppose so; in myself," Mrs. Ansell admitted
+with a responsive brightness, "I find it develops
+with age. The world is a remarkable place." She
+threw this off absently, as though leaving Miss Brent to
+apply it either to the inorganic phenomena with which
+Cicely was supposed to be occupied, or to those subtler
+manifestations that engaged her own attention.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a great thing," she continued, "for Bessy to
+have had your help&mdash;for Cicely, and for herself too.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[p 210]</a></span>
+There is so much that I want you to tell me about her.
+As an old friend I want the benefit of your fresher eye."</p>
+
+<p>"About Bessy?" Justine hesitated, letting her glance
+drift to the distant group still anchored about the tennis-nets.
+"Don't you find her looking better?"</p>
+
+<p>"Than when I left? So much so that I was unduly
+disturbed, just now, by seeing that clever little doctor&mdash;it
+<i>was</i> he, wasn't it, who came up the lawn with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Wyant? Yes." Miss Brent hesitated again.
+"But he merely called&mdash;with a message."</p>
+
+<p>"Not professionally? <i>Tant mieux!</i> The truth is, I
+was anxious about Bessy when I left&mdash;I thought she
+ought to have gone abroad for a change. But, as it
+turns out, her little excursion with you did as well."</p>
+
+<p>"I think she only needed rest. Perhaps her six
+weeks in the Adirondacks were better than Europe."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, under <i>your</i> care&mdash;that made them better!"
+Mrs. Ansell in turn hesitated, the lines of her face
+melting and changing as if a rapid stage-hand had
+shifted them. When she spoke again they were as
+open as a public square, but also as destitute of personal
+significance, as flat and smooth as the painted
+drop before the real scene it hides.</p>
+
+<p>"I have always thought that Bessy, for all her health
+and activity, needs as much care as Cicely&mdash;the kind
+of care a clever friend can give. She is so wasteful of
+her strength and her nerves, and so unwilling to listen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[p 211]</a></span>
+to reason. Poor Dick Westmore watched over her as
+if she were a baby; but perhaps Mr. Amherst, who
+must have been used to such a different type of woman,
+doesn't realize...and then he's so little here...."
+The drop was lit up by a smile that seemed to make
+it more impenetrable. "As an old friend I can't help
+telling you how much I hope she is to have you with
+her for a long time&mdash;a long, long time."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brent bent her head in slight acknowledgment
+of the tribute. "Oh, soon she will not need any
+care&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Miss Brent, she will always need it!" Mrs.
+Ansell made a movement inviting the young girl to share
+the bench from which, at the latter's approach, she had
+risen. "But perhaps there is not enough in such a
+life to satisfy your professional energies."</p>
+
+<p>She seated herself, and after an imperceptible pause
+Justine sank into the seat beside her. "I am very glad,
+just now, to give my energies a holiday," she said, leaning
+back with a little sigh of retrospective weariness.</p>
+
+<p>"You are tired too? Bessy wrote me you had been
+quite used up by a trying case after we saw you at
+Hanaford."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brent smiled. "When a nurse is fit for work
+she calls a trying case a 'beautiful' one."</p>
+
+<p>"But meanwhile&mdash;?" Mrs. Ansell shone on her
+with elder-sisterly solicitude. "Meanwhile, why not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[p 212]</a></span>
+stay on with Cicely&mdash;above all, with Bessy? Surely she's
+a 'beautiful' case too."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't she?" Justine laughingly agreed.</p>
+
+<p>"And if you want to be tried&mdash;" Mrs. Ansell swept
+the scene with a slight lift of her philosophic shoulders&mdash;"you'll
+find there are trials enough everywhere."</p>
+
+<p>Her companion started up with a glance at the small
+watch on her breast. "One of them is that it's already
+after four, and that I must see that tea is sent down to
+the tennis-ground, and the new arrivals looked after."</p>
+
+<p>"I saw the omnibus on its way to the station. Are
+many more people coming?"</p>
+
+<p>"Five or six, I believe. The house is usually full for
+Sunday."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell made a slight motion to detain her.
+"And when is Mr. Amherst expected?"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brent's pale cheek seemed to take on a darker
+tone of ivory, and her glance dropped from her companion's
+face to the vivid stretch of gardens at their
+feet. "Bessy has not told me," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;" the older woman rejoined, looking also
+toward the gardens, as if to intercept Miss Brent's
+glance in its flight. The latter stood still a moment,
+with the appearance of not wishing to evade whatever
+else her companion might have to say; then she moved
+away, entering the house by one window just as Mr.
+Langhope emerged from it by another.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[p 213]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The sound of his stick tapping across the bricks roused
+Mrs. Ansell from her musings, but she showed her
+sense of his presence simply by returning to the bench
+she had just left; and accepting this mute invitation,
+Mr. Langhope crossed the terrace and seated himself
+at her side.</p>
+
+<p>When he had done so they continued to look at each
+other without speaking, after the manner of old friends
+possessed of occult means of communication; and as
+the result of this inward colloquy Mr. Langhope at
+length said: "Well, what do you make of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"What do <i>you</i>?" she rejoined, turning full upon him
+a face so released from its usual defences and disguises
+that it looked at once older and more simple than the
+countenance she presented to the world.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope waved a deprecating hand. "I want
+your fresher impressions."</p>
+
+<p>"That's what I just now said to Miss Brent."</p>
+
+<p>"You've been talking to Miss Brent?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only a flying word&mdash;she had to go and look after
+the new arrivals."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope's attention deepened. "Well, what
+did you say to her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't you rather hear what she said to <i>me</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>He smiled. "A good cross-examiner always gets the
+answers he wants. Let me hear your side, and I shall
+know hers."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[p 214]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I should say that applied only to stupid cross-examiners;
+or to those who have stupid subjects
+to deal with. And Miss Brent is not stupid, you
+know."</p>
+
+<p>"Far from it! What else do you make out?"</p>
+
+<p>"I make out that she's in possession."</p>
+
+<p>"Here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't look startled. Do you dislike her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Heaven forbid&mdash;with those eyes! She has a wit of
+her own, too&mdash;and she certainly makes things easier
+for Bessy."</p>
+
+<p>"She guards her carefully, at any rate. I could find
+out nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"About Bessy?"</p>
+
+<p>"About the general situation."</p>
+
+<p>"Including Miss Brent?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell smiled faintly. "I made one little discovery
+about her."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's intimate with the new doctor."</p>
+
+<p>"Wyant?" Mr. Langhope's interest dropped. "What
+of that? I believe she knew him before."</p>
+
+<p>"I daresay. It's of no special importance, except as
+giving us a possible clue to her character. She strikes
+me as interesting and mysterious."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope smiled. "The things your imagination
+does for you!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[p 215]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It helps me to see that we may find Miss Brent useful
+as a friend."</p>
+
+<p>"A friend?"</p>
+
+<p>"An ally." She paused, as if searching for a word.
+"She may restore the equilibrium."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope's handsome face darkened. "Open
+Bessy's eyes to Amherst? Damn him!" he said quietly.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell let the imprecation pass. "When was he
+last here?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Five or six weeks ago&mdash;for one night. His only
+visit since she came back from the Adirondacks."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think his motive is? He must know
+what he risks in losing his hold on Bessy."</p>
+
+<p>"His motive? With your eye for them, can you ask?
+A devouring ambition, that's all! Haven't you noticed
+that, in all except the biggest minds, ambition takes the
+form of wanting to command where one has had to
+obey? Amherst has been made to toe the line at Westmore,
+and now he wants Truscomb&mdash;yes, and Halford
+Gaines, too!&mdash;to do the same. That's the secret of his
+servant-of-the-people pose&mdash;gad, I believe it's the whole
+secret of his marriage! He's devouring my daughter's
+substance to pay off an old score against the mills.
+He'll never rest till he has Truscomb out, and some
+creature of his own in command&mdash;and then, <i>vogue la
+gal&egrave;re</i>! If it were women, now," Mr. Langhope
+summed up impatiently, "one could understand it, at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[p 216]</a></span>
+his age, and with that damned romantic head&mdash;but to be
+put aside for a lot of low mongrelly socialist mill-hands&mdash;ah,
+my poor girl&mdash;my poor girl!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell mused. "You didn't write me that
+things were so bad. There's been no actual quarrel?"
+she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"How can there be, when the poor child does all he
+wants? He's simply too busy to come and thank her!"</p>
+
+<p>"Too busy at Hanaford?"</p>
+
+<p>"So he says. Introducing the golden age at Westmore&mdash;it's
+likely to be the age of copper at Lynbrook."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell drew a meditative breath. "I was
+thinking of that. I understood that Bessy would have
+to retrench while the changes at Westmore were going
+on."</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;didn't she give up Europe, and cable over to
+countermand her new motor?"</p>
+
+<p>"But the life here! This mob of people! Miss
+Brent tells me the house is full for every week-end."</p>
+
+<p>"Would you have my daughter cut off from all her
+friends?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell met this promptly. "From some of the
+new ones, at any rate! Have you heard who has just
+arrived?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope's hesitation showed a tinge of embarrassment.
+"I'm not sure&mdash;some one has always
+just arrived."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[p 217]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, the Fenton Carburys, then!" Mrs. Ansell
+left it to her tone to annotate the announcement.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "Are
+they likely to be an exceptionally costly pleasure?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you're trying to prove that I haven't kept to the
+point&mdash;I can assure you that I'm well within it!"</p>
+
+<p>"But since the good Blanche has got her divorce and
+married Carbury, wherein do they differ from other
+week-end automata?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because most divorced women marry again to be
+respectable."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope smiled faintly. "Yes&mdash;that's their
+punishment. But it would be too dull for Blanche."</p>
+
+<p>"Precisely. <i>She</i> married again to see Ned Bowfort!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;that may yet be hers!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell sighed at his perversity. "Meanwhile,
+she's brought him here, and it is unnatural to see Bessy
+lending herself to such combinations."</p>
+
+<p>"You're corrupted by a glimpse of the old societies.
+Here Bowfort and Carbury are simply hands at bridge."</p>
+
+<p>"Old hands at it&mdash;yes! And the bridge is another
+point: Bessy never used to play for money."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she may make something, and offset her husband's
+prodigalities."</p>
+
+<p>"There again&mdash;with this <i>train de vie</i>, how on earth
+are both ends to meet?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[p 218]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope grown suddenly grave, struck his cane
+resoundingly on the terrace. "Westmore and Lynbrook?
+I don't want them to&mdash;I want them to get
+farther and farther apart!"</p>
+
+<p>She cast on him a look of startled divination. "You
+want Bessy to go on spending too much money?"</p>
+
+<p>"How can I help it if it costs?"</p>
+
+<p>"If what costs&mdash;?" She stopped, her eyes still wide;
+then their glances crossed, and she exclaimed: "If
+your scheme costs? It <i>is</i> your scheme, then?"</p>
+
+<p>He shrugged his shoulders again. "It's a passive
+attitude&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, the deepest plans are that!" Mr. Langhope
+uttered no protest, and she continued to piece her conjectures
+together. "But you expect it to lead up to
+something active. Do you want a rupture?"</p>
+
+<p>"I want him brought back to his senses."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think that will bring him back to <i>her</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"Where the devil else will he have to go?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell's eyes dropped toward the gardens, across
+which desultory knots of people were straggling back
+from the ended tennis-match. "Ah, here they all
+come," she said, rising with a half-sigh; and as she
+stood watching the advance of the brightly-tinted groups
+she added slowly: "It's ingenious&mdash;but you don't understand
+him."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope stroked his moustache. "Perhaps<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[p 219]</a></span>
+not," he assented thoughtfully. "But suppose we go
+in before they join us? I want to show you a set of
+Ming I picked up the other day for Bessy. I flatter
+myself I <i>do</i> understand Ming."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Justine Brent</span>, her household duties discharged,
+had gone upstairs to her room, a little turret
+chamber projecting above the wide terrace below, from
+which the sounds of lively intercourse now rose increasingly
+to her window.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy, she knew, would have preferred to have her remain
+with the party from whom these evidences of gaiety
+proceeded. Mrs. Amherst had grown to depend on her
+friend's nearness. She liked to feel that Justine's quick
+hand and eye were always in waiting on her impulses,
+prompt to interpret and execute them without any
+exertion of her own. Bessy combined great zeal in
+the pursuit of sport&mdash;a tireless passion for the saddle,
+the golf-course, the tennis-court&mdash;with an almost oriental
+inertia within doors, an indolence of body and
+brain that made her shrink from the active obligations
+of hospitality, though she had grown to depend more
+and more on the distractions of a crowded house.</p>
+
+<p>But Justine, though grateful, and anxious to show
+her gratitude, was unwilling to add to her other duties<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[p 220]</a></span>
+that of joining in the amusements of the house-party.
+She made no pretense of effacing herself when she
+thought her presence might be useful&mdash;but, even if she
+had cared for the diversions in favour at Lynbrook, a
+certain unavowed pride would have kept her from participating
+in them on the same footing with Bessy's
+guests. She was not in the least ashamed of her
+position in the household, but she chose that every one
+else should be aware of it, that she should not for an
+instant be taken for one of the nomadic damsels who
+form the camp-followers of the great army of pleasure.
+Yet even on this point her sensitiveness was not exaggerated.
+Adversity has a deft hand at gathering loose
+strands of impulse into character, and Justine's early
+contact with different phases of experience had given
+her a fairly clear view of life in the round, what might
+be called a sound working topography of its relative
+heights and depths. She was not seriously afraid of
+being taken for anything but what she really was,
+and still less did she fear to become, by force of propinquity
+and suggestion, the kind of being for whom
+she might be temporarily taken.</p>
+
+<p>When, at Bessy's summons, she had joined the
+latter at her camp in the Adirondacks, the transition
+from a fatiguing "case" at Hanaford to a life in which
+sylvan freedom was artfully blent with the most studied
+personal luxury, had come as a delicious refreshment to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[p 221]</a></span>
+body and brain. She was weary, for the moment, of
+ugliness, pain and hard work, and life seemed to recover
+its meaning under the aspect of a graceful leisure.
+Lynbrook also, whither she had been persuaded to go
+with Bessy at the end of their woodland cure, had at
+first amused and interested her. The big house on its
+spreading terraces, with windows looking over bright
+gardens to the hazy distances of the plains, seemed a
+haven of harmless ease and gaiety. Justine was sensitive
+to the finer graces of luxurious living, to the warm
+lights on old pictures and bronzes, the soft mingling of
+tints in faded rugs and panellings of time-warmed oak.
+And the existence to which this background formed a
+setting seemed at first to have the same decorative
+qualities. It was pleasant, for once, to be among people
+whose chief business was to look well and take life
+lightly, and Justine's own buoyancy of nature won her
+immediate access among the amiable persons who
+peopled Bessy's week-end parties. If they had only
+abounded a little more in their own line she might have
+succumbed to their spell. But it seemed to her that
+they missed the poetry of their situation, transacting
+their pleasures with the dreary method and shortness
+of view of a race tethered to the ledger. Even the
+verbal flexibility which had made her feel that she was
+in a world of freer ideas, soon revealed itself as a form
+of flight from them, in which the race was distinctly to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[p 222]</a></span>
+the swift; and Justine's phase of passive enjoyment
+passed with the return of her physical and mental activity.
+She was a creature tingling with energy, a little
+fleeting particle of the power that moves the sun and
+the other stars, and the deadening influences of the life
+at Lynbrook roused these tendencies to greater intensity,
+as a suffocated person will suddenly develop abnormal
+strength in the struggle for air.</p>
+
+<p>She did not, indeed, regret having come. She was
+glad to be with Bessy, partly because of the childish
+friendship which had left such deep traces in her lonely
+heart, and partly because what she had seen of her
+friend's situation stirred in her all the impulses of sympathy
+and service; but the idea of continuing in such a
+life, of sinking into any of the positions of semi-dependence
+that an adroit and handsome girl may create for
+herself in a fashionable woman's train&mdash;this possibility
+never presented itself to Justine till Mrs. Ansell, that
+afternoon, had put it into words. And to hear it was
+to revolt from it with all the strength of her inmost nature.
+The thought of the future troubled her, not so
+much materially&mdash;for she had a light bird-like trust in
+the morrow's fare&mdash;but because her own tendencies
+seemed to have grown less clear, because she could not
+rest in them for guidance as she had once done. The
+renewal of bodily activity had not brought back her
+faith in her calling: her work had lost the light of con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[p 223]</a></span>secration.
+She no longer felt herself predestined to
+nurse the sick for the rest of her life, and in her inexperience
+she reproached herself with this instability.
+Youth and womanhood were in fact crying out in her
+for their individual satisfaction; but instincts as deep-seated
+protected her from even a momentary illusion
+as to the nature of this demand. She wanted happiness,
+and a life of her own, as passionately as young
+flesh-and-blood had ever wanted them; but they must
+come bathed in the light of imagination and penetrated
+by the sense of larger affinities. She could not conceive
+of shutting herself into a little citadel of personal well-being
+while the great tides of existence rolled on unheeded
+outside. Whether they swept treasure to her
+feet, or strewed her life with wreckage, she felt, even
+now; that her place was there, on the banks, in sound
+and sight of the great current; and just in proportion
+as the scheme of life at Lynbrook succeeded in shutting
+out all sense of that vaster human consciousness, so did
+its voice speak more thrillingly within her.</p>
+
+<p>Somewhere, she felt&mdash;but, alas! still out of reach&mdash;was
+the life she longed for, a life in which high chances
+of doing should be mated with the finer forms of enjoying.
+But what title had she to a share in such an existence?
+Why, none but her sense of what it was
+worth&mdash;and what did that count for, in a world which
+used all its resources to barricade itself against all its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[p 224]</a></span>
+opportunities? She knew there were girls who sought,
+by what is called a "good" marriage, an escape into
+the outer world, of doing and thinking&mdash;utilizing an
+empty brain and full pocket as the key to these envied
+fields. Some such chance the life at Lynbrook seemed
+likely enough to offer&mdash;one is not, at Justine's age and
+with her penetration, any more blind to the poise of
+one's head than to the turn of one's ideas; but here the
+subtler obstacles of taste and pride intervened. Not
+even Bessy's transparent man&#339;uvrings, her tender
+solicitude for her friend's happiness, could for a moment
+weaken Justine's resistance. If she must marry
+without love&mdash;and this was growing conceivable to
+her&mdash;she must at least merge her craving for personal
+happiness in some view of life in harmony with
+hers.</p>
+
+<p>A tap on her door interrupted these musings, to one
+aspect of which Bessy Amherst's entrance seemed suddenly
+to give visible expression.</p>
+
+<p>"Why did you run off, Justine? You promised to be
+down-stairs when I came back from tennis."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Till</i> you came back&mdash;wasn't it, dear?" Justine corrected
+with a smile, pushing her arm-chair forward as
+Bessy continued to linger irresolutely in the doorway.
+"I saw that there was a fresh supply of tea in the
+drawing-room, and I knew you would be there before
+the omnibus came from the station."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[p 225]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I was there&mdash;but everybody was asking for
+you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Everybody?" Justine gave a mocking lift to her
+dark eyebrows.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;Westy Gaines, at any rate; the moment he
+set foot in the house!" Bessy declared with a laugh as
+she dropped into the arm-chair.</p>
+
+<p>Justine echoed the laugh, but offered no comment
+on the statement which accompanied it, and for a
+moment both women were silent, Bessy tilting her
+pretty discontented head against the back of the
+chair, so that her eyes were on a level with those of
+her friend, who leaned near her in the embrasure of
+the window.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't understand you, Justine. You know well
+enough what he's come back for."</p>
+
+<p>"In order to dazzle Hanaford with the fact that he
+has been staying at Lynbrook!"</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense&mdash;the novelty of that has worn off. He's
+been here three times since we came back."</p>
+
+<p>"You are admirably hospitable to your family&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Bessy let her pretty ringed hands fall with a discouraged
+gesture. "Why do you find him so much
+worse than&mdash;than other people?"</p>
+
+<p>Justine's eye-brows rose again. "In the same capacity?
+You speak as if I had boundless opportunities
+of comparison."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[p 226]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, you've Dr. Wyant!" Mrs. Amherst suddenly
+flung back at her.</p>
+
+<p>Justine coloured under the unexpected thrust, but
+met her friend's eyes steadily. "As an alternative to
+Westy? Well, if I were on a desert island&mdash;but I'm
+not!" she concluded with a careless laugh.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy frowned and sighed. "You can't mean that,
+of the two&mdash;?" She paused and then went on doubtfully:
+"It's because he's cleverer?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Wyant?" Justine smiled. "It's not making an
+enormous claim for him!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know Westy's not brilliant; but stupid men
+are not always the hardest to live with." She sighed
+again, and turned on Justine a glance charged with conjugal
+experience.</p>
+
+<p>Justine had sunk into the window-seat, her thin hands
+clasping her knee, in the attitude habitual to her meditative
+moments. "Perhaps not," she assented; "but
+I don't know that I should care for a man who made
+life easy; I should want some one who made it interesting."</p>
+
+<p>Bessy met this with a pitying exclamation. "Don't
+imagine you invented that! Every girl thinks it. Afterwards
+she finds out that it's much pleasanter to be
+thought interesting herself."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke with a bitterness that issued strangely from
+her lips. It was this bitterness which gave her soft<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[p 227]</a></span>
+personality the sharp edge that Justine had felt in it
+on the day of their meeting at Hanaford.</p>
+
+<p>The girl, at first, had tried to defend herself from
+these scarcely-veiled confidences, distasteful enough in
+themselves, and placing her, if she listened, in an attitude
+of implied disloyalty to the man under whose roof
+they were spoken. But a precocious experience of life
+had taught her that emotions too strong for the nature
+containing them turn, by some law of spiritual chemistry,
+into a rankling poison; and she had therefore resigned
+herself to serving as a kind of outlet for Bessy's
+pent-up discontent. It was not that her friend's grievance
+appealed to her personal sympathies; she had
+learned enough of the situation to give her moral assent
+unreservedly to the other side. But it was characteristic
+of Justine that where she sympathized least she
+sometimes pitied most. Like all quick spirits she was
+often intolerant of dulness; yet when the intolerance
+passed it left a residue of compassion for the very incapacity
+at which she chafed. It seemed to her that
+the tragic crises in wedded life usually turned on the
+stupidity of one of the two concerned; and of the two
+victims of such a catastrophe she felt most for the one
+whose limitations had probably brought it about. After
+all, there could be no imprisonment as cruel as that of
+being bounded by a hard small nature. Not to be
+penetrable at all points to the shifting lights, the wan<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[p 228]</a></span>dering
+music of the world&mdash;she could imagine no physical
+disability as cramping as that. How the little
+parched soul, in solitary confinement for life, must pine
+and dwindle in its blind cranny of self-love!</p>
+
+<p>To be one's self wide open to the currents of life
+does not always contribute to an understanding of
+narrower natures; but in Justine the personal emotions
+were enriched and deepened by a sense of participation
+in all that the world about her was doing, suffering
+and enjoying; and this sense found expression in the
+instinct of ministry and solace. She was by nature a
+redresser, a restorer; and in her work, as she had once
+told Amherst, the longing to help and direct, to hasten
+on by personal intervention time's slow and clumsy
+processes, had often been in conflict with the restrictions
+imposed by her profession. But she had no idle
+desire to probe the depths of other lives; and where
+there seemed no hope of serving she shrank from fruitless
+confidences. She was beginning to feel this to be
+the case with Bessy Amherst. To touch the rock was
+not enough, if there were but a few drops within it; yet
+in this barrenness lay the pathos of the situation&mdash;and
+after all, may not the scanty spring be fed from a fuller
+current?</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not sure about that," she said, answering her
+friend's last words after a deep pause of deliberation.
+"I mean about its being so pleasant to be found inter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[p 229]</a></span>esting.
+I'm sure the passive part is always the dull
+one: life has been a great deal more thrilling since we
+found out that we revolved about the sun, instead of
+sitting still and fancying that all the planets were dancing
+attendance on us. After all, they were <i>not</i>; and
+it's rather humiliating to think how the morning stars
+must have laughed together about it!"</p>
+
+<p>There was no self-complacency in Justine's eagerness
+to help. It was far easier for her to express it in
+action than in counsel, to grope for the path with her
+friend than to point the way to it; and when she had to
+speak she took refuge in figures to escape the pedantry
+of appearing to advise. But it was not only to Mrs.
+Dressel that her parables were dark, and the blank
+look in Bessy's eyes soon snatched her down from the
+height of metaphor.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean," she continued with a smile, "that, as
+human nature is constituted, it has got to find its real
+self&mdash;the self to be interested in&mdash;outside of what we
+conventionally call 'self': the particular Justine or Bessy
+who is clamouring for her particular morsel of life.
+You see, self isn't a thing one can keep in a box&mdash;bits
+of it keep escaping, and flying off to lodge in all sorts
+of unexpected crannies; we come across scraps of ourselves
+in the most unlikely places&mdash;as I believe you
+would in Westmore, if you'd only go back there and
+look for them!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[p 230]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Bessy's lip trembled and the colour sprang to her
+face; but she answered with a flash of irritation: "Why
+doesn't <i>he</i> look for me there, then&mdash;if he still wants to
+find me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;it's for him to look here&mdash;to find himself <i>here</i>,"
+Justine murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he never comes here! That's his answer."</p>
+
+<p>"He will&mdash;he will! Only, when he does, let him
+find you."</p>
+
+<p>"Find me? I don't understand. How can he,
+when he never sees me? I'm no more to him than the
+carpet on the floor!"</p>
+
+<p>Justine smiled again. "Well&mdash;be that then! The
+thing is to <i>be</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Under his feet? Thank you! Is that what you
+mean to marry for? It's not what husbands admire
+in one, you know!"</p>
+
+<p>"No." Justine stood up with a sense of stealing
+discouragement. "But I don't think I want to be
+admired&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, that's because you know you are!" broke from
+the depths of the other's bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>The tone smote Justine, and she dropped into the
+seat at her friend's side, silently laying a hand on Bessy's
+feverishly-clasped fingers.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, don't let us talk about me," complained the
+latter, from whose lips the subject was never long<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[p 231]</a></span>
+absent. "And you mustn't think I <i>want</i> you to
+marry, Justine; not for myself, I mean&mdash;I'd so much
+rather keep you here. I feel much less lonely when
+you're with me. But you say you won't stay&mdash;and it's
+too dreadful to think of your going back to that dreary
+hospital."</p>
+
+<p>"But you know the hospital's not dreary to me,"
+Justine interposed; "it's the most interesting place I've
+ever known."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst smiled indulgently on this extravagance.
+"A great many people go through the craze
+for philanthropy&mdash;" she began in the tone of mature
+experience; but Justine interrupted her with a laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"Philanthropy? I'm not philanthropic. I don't
+think I ever felt inclined to do good in the abstract&mdash;any
+more than to do ill! I can't remember that I ever
+planned out a course of conduct in my life. It's only,"
+she went on, with a puzzled frown, as if honestly trying
+to analyze her motives, "it's only that I'm so fatally
+interested in people that before I know it I've slipped
+into their skins; and then, of course, if anything goes
+wrong with them, it's just as if it had gone wrong with
+me; and I can't help trying to rescue myself from <i>their</i>
+troubles! I suppose it's what you'd call meddling&mdash;and
+so should I, if I could only remember that the other
+people were not myself!"</p>
+
+<p>Bessy received this with the mild tolerance of su<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[p 232]</a></span>perior
+wisdom. Once safe on the tried ground of traditional
+authority, she always felt herself Justine's
+superior. "That's all very well now&mdash;you see the
+romantic side of it," she said, as if humouring her
+friend's vagaries. "But in time you'll want something
+else; you'll want a husband and children&mdash;a life of
+your own. And then you'll have to be more practical.
+It's ridiculous to pretend that comfort and money don't
+make a difference. And if you married a rich man,
+just think what a lot of good you could do! Westy will
+be very well off&mdash;and I'm sure he'd let you endow
+hospitals and things. Think how interesting it would
+be to build a ward in the very hospital where you'd
+been a nurse! I read something like that in a novel
+the other day&mdash;it was beautifully described. All the
+nurses and doctors that the heroine had worked with
+were there to receive her...and her little boy went
+about and gave toys to the crippled children...."</p>
+
+<p>If the speaker's concluding instance hardly produced
+the effect she had intended, it was perhaps only because
+Justine's attention had been arrested by the earlier part
+of the argument. It was strange to have marriage
+urged on her by a woman who had twice failed to find
+happiness in it&mdash;strange, and yet how vivid a sign that,
+even to a nature absorbed in its personal demands, not
+happiness but completeness is the inmost craving! "A
+life of your own"&mdash;that was what even Bessy, in her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[p 233]</a></span>
+obscure way, felt to be best worth suffering for. And
+how was a spirit like Justine's, thrilling with youth and
+sympathy, to conceive of an isolated existence as the
+final answer to that craving? A life circumscribed by
+one's own poor personal consciousness would not be
+life at all&mdash;far better the "adventure of the diver" than
+the shivering alone on the bank! Bessy, reading encouragement
+in her silence, returned her hand-clasp
+with an affectionate pressure.</p>
+
+<p>"You <i>would</i> like that, Justine?" she said, secretly
+proud of having hit on the convincing argument.</p>
+
+<p>"To endow hospitals with your cousin's money? No;
+I should want something much more exciting!"</p>
+
+<p>Bessy's face kindled. "You mean travelling abroad&mdash;and
+I suppose New York in winter?"</p>
+
+<p>Justine broke into a laugh. "I was thinking of your
+cousin himself when I spoke." And to Bessy's disappointed
+cry&mdash;"Then it <i>is</i> Dr. Wyant, after all?" she
+answered lightly, and without resenting the challenge:
+"I don't know. Suppose we leave it to the oracle."</p>
+
+<p>"The oracle?"</p>
+
+<p>"Time. His question-and-answer department is generally
+the most reliable in the long run." She started
+up, gently drawing Bessy to her feet. "And just at
+present he reminds me that it's nearly six, and that you
+promised Cicely to go and see her before you dress for
+dinner."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[p 234]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Bessy rose obediently. "Does he remind you of
+<i>your</i> promises too? You said you'd come down to
+dinner tonight."</p>
+
+<p>"Did I?" Justine hesitated. "Well, I'm coming,"
+she said, smiling and kissing her friend.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">When</span> the door closed on Mrs. Amherst a resolve
+which had taken shape in Justine's mind during
+their talk together made her seat herself at her
+writing-table, where, after a moment's musing over her
+suspended pen, she wrote and addressed a hurried note.
+This business despatched, she put on her hat and jacket,
+and letter in hand passed down the corridor from her
+room, and descended to the entrance-hall below. She
+might have consigned her missive to the post-box which
+conspicuously tendered its services from a table near
+the door; but to do so would delay the letter's despatch
+till morning, and she felt a sudden impatience to see
+it start.</p>
+
+<p>The tumult on the terrace had transferred itself
+within doors, and as Justine went down the stairs she
+heard the click of cues from the billiard-room, the talk
+and laughter of belated bridge-players, the movement
+of servants gathering up tea-cups and mending fires.
+She had hoped to find the hall empty, but the sight<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[p 235]</a></span>
+of Westy Gaines's figure looming watchfully on the
+threshold of the smoking-room gave her, at the last
+bend of the stairs, a little start of annoyance. He
+would want to know where she was going, he would
+offer to go with her, and it would take some time and
+not a little emphasis to make him understand that his
+society was not desired.</p>
+
+<p>This was the thought that flashed through Justine's
+mind as she reached the landing; but the next moment
+it gave way to a contradictory feeling. Westy Gaines
+was not alone in the hall. From under the stairway
+rose the voices of a group ensconced in that popular
+retreat about a chess-board; and as Justine reached
+the last turn of the stairs she perceived that Mason
+Winch, an earnest youth with advanced views on political
+economy, was engaged, to the diversion of a
+circle of spectators, in teaching the Telfer girls chess.
+The futility of trying to fix the spasmodic attention of
+this effervescent couple, and their instructor's grave
+unconsciousness of the fact, constituted, for the lookers-on,
+the peculiar diversion of the scene. It was of
+course inevitable that young Winch, on his arrival at
+Lynbrook, should have succumbed at once to the tumultuous
+charms of the Telfer manner, which was
+equally attractive to inarticulate youth and to tired and
+talked-out middle-age; but that he should have perceived
+no resistance in their minds to the deliberative<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[p 236]</a></span>
+processes of the game of chess, was, even to the Telfers
+themselves, a source of unmitigated gaiety. Nothing
+seemed to them funnier than that any one should credit
+them with any mental capacity; and they had inexhaustibly
+amusing ways of drawing out and showing off
+each other's ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>It was on this scene that Westy's appreciative eyes
+had been fixed till Justine's appearance drew them to
+herself. He pronounced her name joyfully, and moved
+forward to greet her; but as their hands met she understood
+that he did not mean to press his company upon
+her. Under the eye of the Lynbrook circle he was
+chary of marked demonstrations, and even Mrs. Amherst's
+approval could not, at such moments, bridge
+over the gap between himself and the object of his
+attentions. A Gaines was a Gaines in the last analysis,
+and apart from any pleasing accident of personality;
+but what was Miss Brent but the transient vehicle of
+those graces which Providence has provided for the
+delectation of the privileged sex?</p>
+
+<p>These influences were visible in the temperate warmth
+of Westy's manner, and in his way of keeping a backward
+eye on the mute interchange of comment about
+the chess-board. At another time his embarrassment
+would have amused Justine; but the feelings stirred by
+her talk with Bessy had not subsided, and she recognized
+with a sting of mortification the resemblance be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[p 237]</a></span>tween
+her view of the Lynbrook set and its estimate of
+herself. If Bessy's friends were negligible to her she
+was almost non-existent to them; and, as against herself,
+they were overwhelmingly provided with tangible
+means of proving their case.</p>
+
+<p>Such considerations, at a given moment, may prevail
+decisively even with a nature armed against them by
+insight and irony; and the mere fact that Westy Gaines
+did not mean to join her, and that he was withheld
+from doing so by the invisible pressure of the Lynbrook
+standards, had the effect of precipitating Justine's
+floating intentions.</p>
+
+<p>If anything farther had been needed to hasten this
+result, it would have been accomplished by the sound
+of footsteps which, over-taking her a dozen yards from
+the house, announced her admirer's impetuous if tardy
+pursuit. The act of dismissing him, though it took but
+a word and was effected with a laugh, left her pride
+quivering with a hurt the more painful because she
+would not acknowledge it. That she should waste a
+moment's resentment on the conduct of a person so
+unimportant as poor Westy, showed her in a flash the
+intrinsic falseness of her position at Lynbrook. She
+saw that to disdain the life about her had not kept her
+intact from it; and the knowledge made her feel anew
+the need of some strong decentralizing influence, some
+purifying influx of emotion and activity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[p 238]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She had walked on quickly through the clear October
+twilight, which was still saturated with the after-glow
+of a vivid sunset; and a few minutes brought her to the
+village stretching along the turnpike beyond the Lynbrook
+gates. The new post-office dominated the row
+of shabby houses and "stores" set disjointedly under
+reddening maples, and its arched doorway formed the
+centre of Lynbrook's evening intercourse.</p>
+
+<p>Justine, hastening toward the knot of loungers on
+the threshold, had no consciousness of anything outside
+of her own thoughts; and as she mounted the steps she
+was surprised to see Dr. Wyant detach himself from
+the group and advance to meet her.</p>
+
+<p>"May I post your letter?" he asked, lifting his hat.</p>
+
+<p>His gesture uncovered the close-curling hair of a
+small delicately-finished head just saved from effeminacy
+by the vigorous jut of heavy eye-brows meeting
+above full grey eyes. The eyes again, at first sight,
+might have struck one as too expressive, or as expressing
+things too purely decorative for the purposes of a
+young country doctor with a growing practice; but this
+estimate was corrected by an unexpected abruptness
+in their owner's voice and manner. Perhaps the final
+impression produced on a close observer by Dr.
+Stephen Wyant would have been that the contradictory
+qualities of which he was compounded had not yet been
+brought into equilibrium by the hand of time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[p 239]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Justine, in reply to his question, had drawn back a
+step, slipping her letter into the breast of her jacket.</p>
+
+<p>"That is hardly worth while, since it was addressed
+to you," she answered with a slight smile as she turned
+to descend the post-office steps.</p>
+
+<p>Wyant, still carrying his hat, and walking with quick
+uneven steps, followed her in silence till they had passed
+beyond earshot of the loiterers on the threshold; then,
+in the shade of the maple boughs, he pulled up and
+faced her.</p>
+
+<p>"You've written to say that I may come tomorrow?"</p>
+
+<p>Justine hesitated. "Yes," she said at length.</p>
+
+<p>"Good God! You give royally!" he broke out, pushing
+his hand with a nervous gesture through the thin
+dark curls on his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>Justine laughed, with a trace of nervousness in her
+own tone. "And you talk&mdash;well, imperially! Aren't
+you afraid to bankrupt the language?"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?" he said, staring.</p>
+
+<p>"What do <i>you</i> mean? I have merely said that I
+would see you tomorrow&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he retorted, "that's enough for my happiness!"</p>
+
+<p>She sounded her light laugh again. "I'm glad to
+know you're so easily pleased."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not! But you couldn't have done a cruel thing
+without a struggle; and since you're ready to give<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[p 240]</a></span>
+me my answer tomorrow, I know it can't be a cruel
+one."</p>
+
+<p>They had begun to walk onward as they talked, but
+at this she halted. "Please don't take that tone. I
+dislike sentimentality!" she exclaimed, with a tinge of
+imperiousness that was a surprise to her own ears.</p>
+
+<p>It was not the first time in the course of her friendship
+with Stephen Wyant that she had been startled by
+this intervention of something within her that resisted
+and almost resented his homage. When they were
+apart, she was conscious only of the community of interests
+and sympathies that had first drawn them together.
+Why was it then&mdash;since his looks were of the
+kind generally thought to stand a suitor in good stead&mdash;that
+whenever they had met of late she had been subject
+to these rushes of obscure hostility, the half-physical,
+half-moral shrinking from some indefinable element in
+his nature against which she was constrained to defend
+herself by perpetual pleasantry and evasion?</p>
+
+<p>To Wyant, at any rate, the answer was not far to
+seek. His pale face reflected the disdain in hers as he
+returned ironically: "A thousand pardons; I know I'm
+not always in the key."</p>
+
+<p>"The key?"</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't yet acquired the Lynbrook tone. You
+must make allowances for my lack of opportunity."</p>
+
+<p>The retort on Justine's lips dropped to silence, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[p 241]</a></span>
+though his words had in fact brought an answer to her
+inward questioning. Could it be that he was right&mdash;that
+her shrinking from him was the result of an increased
+sensitiveness to faults of taste that she would
+once have despised herself for noticing? When she had
+first known him, in her work at St. Elizabeth's some
+three years earlier, his excesses of manner had seemed
+to her merely the boyish tokens of a richness of nature
+not yet controlled by experience. Though Wyant was
+somewhat older than herself there had always been an
+element of protection in her feeling for him, and it was
+perhaps this element which formed the real ground of
+her liking. It was, at any rate, uppermost as she returned,
+with a softened gleam of mockery: "Since you
+are so sure of my answer I hardly know why I should
+see you tomorrow."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean me to take it now?" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mean you to take it at all till it's given&mdash;above
+all not to take it for granted!"</p>
+
+<p>His jutting brows drew together again. "Ah, I can't
+split hairs with you. Won't you put me out of my
+misery?"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled, but not unkindly. "Do you want an
+an&aelig;sthetic?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;a clean cut with the knife!"</p>
+
+<p>"You forget that we're not allowed to despatch hopeless
+cases&mdash;more's the pity!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[p 242]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He flushed to the roots of his thin hair. "Hopeless
+cases? That's it, then&mdash;that's my answer?"</p>
+
+<p>They had reached the point where, at the farther
+edge of the straggling settlement, the tiled roof of the
+railway-station fronted the post-office cupola; and the
+shriek of a whistle now reminded Justine that the spot
+was not propitious to private talk. She halted a moment
+before speaking.</p>
+
+<p>"I have no answer to give you now but the one in
+my note&mdash;that I'll see you tomorrow."</p>
+
+<p>"But if you're sure of knowing tomorrow you must
+know now!"</p>
+
+<p>Their eyes met, his eloquently pleading, hers kind
+but still impenetrable. "If I knew now, you should
+know too. Please be content with that," she rejoined.</p>
+
+<p>"How can I be, when a day may make such a difference?
+When I know that every influence about you
+is fighting against me?"</p>
+
+<p>The words flashed a refracted light far down into
+the causes of her own uncertainty.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," she said, drawing a little away from him,
+"I'm not so sure that I don't like a fight!"</p>
+
+<p>"Is that why you won't give in?" He moved toward
+her with a despairing gesture. "If I let you go now,
+you're lost to me!"</p>
+
+<p>She stood her ground, facing him with a quick lift of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[p 243]</a></span>
+the head. "If you don't let me go I certainly am," she
+said; and he drew back, as if conscious of the uselessness
+of the struggle. His submission, as usual, had a
+disarming effect on her irritation, and she held out her
+hand. "Come tomorrow at three," she said, her voice
+and manner suddenly seeming to give back the hope
+she had withheld from him.</p>
+
+<p>He seized on her hand with an inarticulate murmur;
+but at the same moment a louder whistle and the
+thunder of an approaching train reminded her of the
+impossibility of prolonging the scene. She was ordinarily
+careless of appearances, but while she was Mrs.
+Amherst's guest she did not care to be seen romantically
+loitering through the twilight with Stephen Wyant;
+and she freed herself with a quick goodbye.</p>
+
+<p>He gave her a last look, hesitating and imploring;
+then, in obedience to her gesture, he turned away and
+strode off in the opposite direction.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as he had left her she began to retrace her
+steps toward Lynbrook House; but instead of traversing
+the whole length of the village she passed through a
+turnstile in the park fencing, taking a more circuitous
+but quieter way home.</p>
+
+<p>She walked on slowly through the dusk, wishing to
+give herself time to think over her conversation with
+Wyant. Now that she was alone again, it seemed to
+her that the part she had played had been both incon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[p 244]</a></span>sistent
+and undignified. When she had written to
+Wyant that she would see him on the morrow she had
+done so with the clear understanding that she was to
+give, at that meeting, a definite answer to his offer of
+marriage; and during her talk with Bessy she had suddenly,
+and, as it seemed to her, irrevocably, decided
+that the answer should be favourable. From the first
+days of her acquaintance with Wyant she had appreciated
+his intelligence and had been stimulated by his
+zeal for his work. He had remained only six months
+at Saint Elizabeth's, and though his feeling for her had
+even then been manifest, it had been kept from expression
+by the restraint of their professional relation, and
+by her absorption in her duties. It was only when
+they had met again at Lynbrook that she had begun to
+feel a personal interest in him. His youthful promise
+seemed nearer fulfillment than she had once thought
+possible, and the contrast he presented to the young
+men in Bessy's train was really all in his favour. He
+had gained in strength and steadiness without losing
+his high flashes of enthusiasm; and though, even now,
+she was not in love with him, she began to feel that the
+union of their common interests might create a life
+full and useful enough to preclude the possibility of
+vague repinings. It would, at any rate, take her out
+of the stagnant circle of her present existence, and restore
+her to contact with the fruitful energies of life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[p 245]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All this had seemed quite clear when she wrote her
+letter; why, then, had she not made use of their chance
+encounter to give her answer, instead of capriciously
+postponing it? The act might have been that of a
+self-conscious girl in her teens; but neither inexperience
+nor coquetry had prompted it. She had merely yielded
+to the spirit of resistance that Wyant's presence had of
+late aroused in her; and the possibility that this resistance
+might be due to some sense of his social defects,
+his lack of measure and facility, was so humiliating
+that for a moment she stood still in the path, half-meaning
+to turn back and overtake him&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>As she paused she was surprised to hear a man's
+step behind her; and the thought that it might be
+Wyant's brought about another revulsion of feeling.
+What right had he to pursue her in this way, to dog her
+steps even into the Lynbrook grounds? She was sure
+that his persistent attentions had already attracted the
+notice of Bessy's visitors; and that he should thus force
+himself on her after her dismissal seemed suddenly to
+make their whole relation ridiculous.</p>
+
+<p>She turned about to rebuke him, and found herself
+face to face with John Amherst.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[p 246]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Amherst</span>, on leaving the train at Lynbrook, had
+paused in doubt on the empty platform. His
+return was unexpected, and no carriage awaited him;
+but he caught the signal of the village cab-driver's ready
+whip. Amherst, however, felt a sudden desire to postpone
+the moment of arrival, and consigning his luggage
+to the cab he walked away toward the turnstile through
+which Justine had passed. In thus taking the longest
+way home he was yielding another point to his reluctance.
+He knew that at that hour his wife's visitors
+might still be assembled in the drawing-room, and he
+wished to avoid making his unannounced entrance
+among them.</p>
+
+<p>It was not till now that he felt the embarrassment
+of such an arrival. For some time past he had
+known that he ought to go back to Lynbrook, but he
+had not known how to tell Bessy that he was coming.
+Lack of habit made him inexpert in the art of easy
+transitions, and his inability to bridge over awkward
+gaps had often put him at a disadvantage with his wife
+and her friends. He had not yet learned the importance
+of observing the forms which made up the daily
+ceremonial of their lives, and at present there was just
+enough soreness between himself and Bessy to make
+such observances more difficult than usual.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[p 247]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There had been no open estrangement, but peace had
+been preserved at the cost of a slowly accumulated tale
+of grievances on both sides. Since Amherst had won his
+point about the mills, the danger he had foreseen had
+been realized: his victory at Westmore had been a
+defeat at Lynbrook. It would be too crude to say that
+his wife had made him pay for her public concession
+by the private disregard of his wishes; and if something
+of this sort had actually resulted, his sense of
+fairness told him that it was merely the natural reaction
+of a soft nature against the momentary strain of self-denial.
+At first he had been hardly aware of this consequence
+of his triumph. The joy of being able to
+work his will at Westmore obscured all lesser emotions;
+and his sentiment for Bessy had long since shrunk into
+one of those shallow pools of feeling which a sudden
+tide might fill, but which could never again be the deep
+perennial spring from which his life was fed.</p>
+
+<p>The need of remaining continuously at Hanaford
+while the first changes were making had increased the
+strain of the situation. He had never expected that
+Bessy would stay there with him&mdash;had perhaps, at heart,
+hardly wished it&mdash;and her plan of going to the Adirondacks
+with Miss Brent seemed to him a satisfactory
+alternative to the European trip she had renounced.
+He felt as relieved as though some one had taken off his
+hands the task of amusing a restless child, and he let<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[p 248]</a></span>
+his wife go without suspecting that the moment might
+be a decisive one between them. But it had not occurred
+to Bessy that any one could regard six weeks in
+the Adirondacks as an adequate substitute for a summer
+abroad. She felt that her sacrifice deserved recognition,
+and personal devotion was the only form of recognition
+which could satisfy her. She had expected Amherst
+to join her at the camp, but he did not come; and
+when she went back to Long Island she did not stop to
+see him, though Hanaford lay in her way. At the
+moment of her return the work at the mills made it
+impossible for him to go to Lynbrook; and thus the
+weeks drifted on without their meeting.</p>
+
+<p>At last, urged by his mother, he had gone down to
+Long Island for a night; but though, on that occasion,
+he had announced his coming, he found the house full,
+and the whole party except Mr. Langhope in the act
+of starting off to a dinner in the neighbourhood. He
+was of course expected to go too, and Bessy appeared
+hurt when he declared that he was too tired and preferred
+to remain with Mr. Langhope; but she did not
+suggest staying at home herself, and drove off in a
+mood of exuberant gaiety. Amherst had been too busy
+all his life to know what intricacies of perversion a sentimental
+grievance may develop in an unoccupied mind,
+and he saw in Bessy's act only a sign of indifference.
+The next day she complained to him of money difficul<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[p 249]</a></span>ties,
+as though surprised that her income had been
+suddenly cut down; and when he reminded her that
+she had consented of her own will to this temporary reduction,
+she burst into tears and accused him of caring
+only for Westmore.</p>
+
+<p>He went away exasperated by her inconsequence, and
+bills from Lynbrook continued to pour in on him. In
+the first days of their marriage, Bessy had put him in
+charge of her exchequer, and she was too indolent&mdash;and
+at heart perhaps too sensitive&mdash;to ask him to renounce
+the charge. It was clear to him, therefore, how little
+she was observing the spirit of their compact, and his
+mind was tormented by the anticipation of financial
+embarrassments. He wrote her a letter of gentle expostulation,
+but in her answer she ignored his remonstrance;
+and after that silence fell between them.</p>
+
+<p>The only way to break this silence was to return to
+Lynbrook; but now that he had come back, he did not
+know what step to take next. Something in the atmosphere
+of his wife's existence seemed to paralyze his
+will-power. When all about her spoke a language so
+different from his own, how could he hope to make
+himself heard? He knew that her family and her
+immediate friends&mdash;Mr. Langhope, the Gaineses, Mrs.
+Ansell and Mr. Tredegar&mdash;far from being means of
+communication, were so many sentinels ready to raise
+the drawbridge and drop the portcullis at his ap<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[p 250]</a></span>proach.
+They were all in league to stifle the incipient
+feelings he had roused in Bessy, to push her back
+into the deadening routine of her former life, and the
+only voice that might conceivably speak for him was
+Miss Brent's.</p>
+
+<p>The "case" which, unexpectedly presented to her by
+one of the Hope Hospital physicians, had detained Justine
+at Hanaford during the month of June, was the
+means of establishing a friendship between herself and
+Amherst. They did not meet often, or get to know each
+other very well; but he saw her occasionally at his
+mother's and at Mrs. Dressel's, and once he took her
+out to Westmore, to consult her about the emergency
+hospital which was to be included among the first improvements
+there. The expedition had been memorable
+to both; and when, some two weeks later, Bessy
+wrote suggesting that she should take Miss Brent to
+the Adirondacks, it seemed to Amherst that there was
+no one whom he would rather have his wife choose as
+her companion.</p>
+
+<p>He was much too busy at the time to cultivate or
+analyze his feeling for Miss Brent; he rested vaguely in
+the thought of her, as of the "nicest" girl he had ever
+met, and was frankly pleased when accident brought
+them together; but the seeds left in both their minds
+by these chance encounters had not yet begun to germinate.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[p 251]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So unperceived had been their gradual growth in
+intimacy that it was a surprise to Amherst to find himself
+suddenly thinking of her as a means of communication
+with his wife; but the thought gave him such encouragement
+that, when he saw Justine in the path
+before him he went toward her with unusual eagerness.</p>
+
+<p>Justine, on her part, felt an equal pleasure. She
+knew that Bessy did not expect her husband, and that
+his prolonged absence had already been the cause of
+malicious comment at Lynbrook; and she caught at
+the hope that this sudden return might betoken a more
+favourable turn of affairs.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I am so glad to see you!" she exclaimed; and
+her tone had the effect of completing his reassurance,
+his happy sense that she would understand and help
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"I wanted to see you too," he began confusedly;
+then, conscious of the intimacy of the phrase, he added
+with a slight laugh: "The fact is, I'm a culprit looking
+for a peace-maker."</p>
+
+<p>"A culprit?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've been so tied down at the mills that I didn't
+know, till yesterday, just when I could break away;
+and in the hurry of leaving&mdash;" He paused again,
+checked by the impossibility of uttering, to the girl
+before him, the little conventional falsehoods which
+formed the small currency of Bessy's circle. Not that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[p 252]</a></span>
+any scruple of probity restrained him: in trifling matters
+he recognized the usefulness of such counters in
+the social game; but when he was with Justine he
+always felt the obscure need of letting his real self be
+seen.</p>
+
+<p>"I was stupid enough not to telegraph," he said,
+"and I am afraid my wife will think me negligent: she
+often has to reproach me for my sins of omission, and
+this time I know they are many."</p>
+
+<p>The girl received this in silence, less from embarrassment
+than from surprise; for she had already
+guessed that it was as difficult for Amherst to touch,
+even lightly, on his private affairs, as it was instinctive
+with his wife to pour her grievances into any willing ear.
+Justine's first thought was one of gratification that he
+should have spoken, and of eagerness to facilitate the
+saying of whatever he wished to say; but before she
+could answer he went on hastily: "The fact is, Bessy
+does not know how complicated the work at Westmore
+is; and when I caught sight of you just now I was
+thinking that you are the only one of her friends who
+has any technical understanding of what I am trying
+to do, and who might consequently help her to see how
+hard it is for me to take my hand from the plough."</p>
+
+<p>Justine listened gravely, longing to cry out her comprehension
+and sympathy, but restrained by the sense
+that the moment was a critical one, where impulse must<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[p 253]</a></span>
+not be trusted too far. It was quite possible that a reaction
+of pride might cause Amherst to repent even so
+guarded an avowal; and if that happened, he might
+never forgive her for having encouraged him to speak.
+She looked up at him with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not tell Bessy yourself? Your understanding
+of the case is a good deal clearer than mine or any one
+else's."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Bessy is tired of hearing about it from me; and
+besides&mdash;" She detected a shade of disappointment in
+his tone, and was sorry she had said anything which
+might seem meant to discourage his confidence. It
+occurred to her also that she had been insincere in not
+telling him at once that she had already been let into
+the secret of his domestic differences: she felt the same
+craving as Amherst for absolute openness between
+them.</p>
+
+<p>"I know," she said, almost timidly, "that Bessy has
+not been quite content of late to have you give so much
+time to Westmore, and perhaps she herself thinks it is
+because the work there does not interest her; but I
+believe it is for a different reason."</p>
+
+<p>"What reason?" he asked with a look of surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"Because Westmore takes you from her; because she
+thinks you are happier there than at Lynbrook."</p>
+
+<p>The day had faded so rapidly that it was no longer
+possible for the speakers to see each other's faces, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[p 254]</a></span>
+it was easier for both to communicate through the veil
+of deepening obscurity.</p>
+
+<p>"But, good heavens, she might be there with me&mdash;she's
+as much needed there as I am!" Amherst exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but you must remember that it's against all
+her habits&mdash;and against the point of view of every one
+about her&mdash;that she should lead that kind of life; and
+meanwhile&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Meanwhile, isn't it expedient that you should, a
+little more, lead hers?"</p>
+
+<p>Always the same answer to his restless questioning!
+His mother's answer, the answer of Bessy and her
+friends. He had somehow hoped that the girl at his side
+would find a different solution to the problem, and his
+disappointment escaped in a bitter exclamation.</p>
+
+<p>"But Westmore is my life&mdash;hers too, if she knew it!
+I can't desert it now without being as false to her as
+to myself!"</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke, he was overcome once more by the
+hopelessness of trying to put his case clearly. How
+could Justine, for all her quickness and sympathy,
+understand a situation of which the deeper elements
+were necessarily unknown to her? The advice she
+gave him was natural enough, and on her lips it seemed
+not the counsel of a shallow expediency, but the plea of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[p 255]</a></span>
+compassion and understanding. But she knew nothing
+of the long struggle for mutual adjustment which had
+culminated in this crisis between himself and his wife,
+and she could therefore not see that, if he yielded his
+point, and gave up his work at Westmore, the concession
+would mean not renewal but destruction. He felt
+that he should hate Bessy if he won her back at that
+price; and the violence of his feeling frightened him.
+It was, in truth, as he had said, his own life that he
+was fighting for. If he gave up Westmore he could not
+fall back on the futile activities of Lynbrook, and fate
+might yet have some lower alternative to offer. He
+could trust to his own strength and self-command while
+his energies had a normal outlet; but idleness and
+self-indulgence might work in him like a dangerous
+drug.</p>
+
+<p>Justine kept steadily to her point. "Westmore must
+be foremost to both of you in time; I don't see how
+either of you can escape that. But the realization of
+it must come to Bessy through <i>you</i>, and for that reason
+I think that you ought to be more patient&mdash;that you
+ought even to put the question aside for a time and
+enter a little more into her life while she is learning to
+understand yours." As she ended, it seemed to her
+that what she had said was trite and ineffectual, and
+yet that it might have passed the measure of discretion;
+and, torn between two doubts, she added hastily:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[p 256]</a></span>
+"But you have done just that in coming back now&mdash;that
+is the real solution of the problem."</p>
+
+<p>While she spoke they passed out of the wood-path
+they had been following, and rounding a mass of shrubbery
+emerged on the lawn below the terraces. The
+long bulk of the house lay above them, dark against the
+lingering gleam of the west, with brightly-lit windows
+marking its irregular outline; and the sight produced
+in Amherst and Justine a vague sense of helplessness
+and constraint. It was impossible to speak with the
+same freedom, confronted by that substantial symbol
+of the accepted order, which seemed to glare down on
+them in massive disdain of their puny efforts to deflect
+the course of events: and Amherst, without reverting
+to her last words, asked after a moment if his wife
+had many guests.</p>
+
+<p>He listened in silence while Justine ran over the list
+of names&mdash;the Telfer girls and their brother, Mason
+Winch and Westy Gaines, a cluster of young bridge-playing
+couples, and, among the last arrivals, the
+Fenton Carburys and Ned Bowfort. The names were
+all familiar to Amherst&mdash;he knew they represented the
+flower of week-end fashion; but he did not remember
+having seen the Carburys among his wife's guests, and
+his mind paused on the name, seeking to regain some
+lost impression connected with it. But it evoked, like
+the others, merely the confused sense of stridency and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[p 257]</a></span>
+unrest which he had brought away from his last Lynbrook
+visit; and this reminiscence made him ask Miss
+Brent, when her list was ended, if she did not think
+that so continuous a succession of visitors was too
+tiring for Bessy.</p>
+
+<p>"I sometimes think it tires her more than she knows;
+but I hope she can be persuaded to take better care of
+herself now that Mrs. Ansell has come back."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst halted abruptly. "Is Mrs. Ansell here?"</p>
+
+<p>"She arrived from Europe today."</p>
+
+<p>"And Mr. Langhope too, I suppose?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. He came from Newport about ten days ago."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst checked himself, conscious that his questions
+betrayed the fact that he and his wife no longer
+wrote to each other. The same thought appeared to
+strike Justine, and they walked across the lawn in
+silence, hastening their steps involuntarily, as though to
+escape the oppressive weight of the words which had
+passed between them. But Justine was unwilling that
+this fruitless sense of oppression should be the final
+outcome of their talk; and when they reached the
+upper terrace she paused and turned impulsively to
+Amherst. As she did so, the light from an uncurtained
+window fell on her face, which glowed with the inner
+brightness kindled in it by moments of strong feeling.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sure of one thing&mdash;Bessy will be very, very
+glad that you have come," she exclaimed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[p 258]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>Their hands met mechanically, and she turned away
+and entered the house.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Bessy</span> had not seen her little girl that day, and
+filled with compunction by Justine's reminder,
+she hastened directly to the school-room.</p>
+
+<p>Of late, in certain moods, her maternal tenderness
+had been clouded by a sense of uneasiness in the child's
+presence, for Cicely was the argument most effectually
+used by Mr. Langhope and Mr. Tredegar in their
+efforts to check the triumph of Amherst's ideas. Bessy,
+still unable to form an independent opinion on the
+harassing question of the mills, continued to oscillate
+between the views of the contending parties, now regarding
+Cicely as an innocent victim and herself as an
+unnatural mother, sacrificing her child's prospects to
+further Amherst's enterprise, and now conscious of a
+vague animosity against the little girl, as the chief cause
+of the dissensions which had so soon clouded the skies
+of her second marriage. Then again, there were moments
+when Cicely's rosy bloom reminded her bitterly
+of the child she had lost&mdash;the son on whom her
+ambitions had been fixed. It seemed to her now that
+if their boy had lived she might have kept Amherst's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[p 259]</a></span>
+love and have played a more important part in his life;
+and brooding on the tragedy of the child's sickly existence
+she resented the contrast of Cicely's brightness and
+vigour. The result was that in her treatment of her
+daughter she alternated between moments of exaggerated
+devotion and days of neglect, never long happy
+away from the little girl, yet restless and self-tormenting
+in her presence.</p>
+
+<p>After her talk with Justine she felt more than usually
+disturbed, as she always did when her unprofitable
+impulses of self-exposure had subsided. Bessy's mind
+was not made for introspection, and chance had burdened
+it with unintelligible problems. She felt herself
+the victim of circumstances to which her imagination
+attributed the deliberate malice that children ascribe
+to the furniture they run against in playing. This
+helped her to cultivate a sense of helpless injury and
+to disdain in advance the advice she was perpetually
+seeking. How absurd it was, for instance, to suppose
+that a girl could understand the feelings of a married
+woman! Justine's suggestion that she should humble
+herself still farther to Amherst merely left in Bessy's
+mind a rankling sense of being misunderstood and
+undervalued by those to whom she turned in her extremity,
+and she said to herself, in a phrase that sounded
+well in her own ears, that sooner or later every woman
+must learn to fight her battles alone.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[p 260]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In this mood she entered the room where Cicely was
+at supper with her governess, and enveloped the child
+in a whirl of passionate caresses. But Cicely had inherited
+the soberer Westmore temper, and her mother's
+spasmodic endearments always had a repressive effect
+on her. She dutifully returned a small fraction of
+Bessy's kisses, and then, with an air of relief, addressed
+herself once more to her bread and marmalade.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't seem a bit glad to see me!" Bessy exclaimed,
+while the little governess made a nervous pretence
+of being greatly amused at this prodigious paradox,
+and Cicely, setting down her silver mug, asked
+judicially: "Why should I be gladder than other days?
+It isn't a birthday."</p>
+
+<p>This Cordelia-like answer cut Bessy to the quick.
+"You horrid child to say such a cruel thing when you
+know I love you better and better every minute! But
+you don't care for me any longer because Justine has
+taken you away from me!"</p>
+
+<p>This last charge had sprung into her mind in the act
+of uttering it, but now that it was spoken it instantly
+assumed the proportions of a fact, and seemed to furnish
+another justification for her wretchedness. Bessy
+was not naturally jealous, but her imagination was
+thrall to the spoken word, and it gave her a sudden incomprehensible
+relief to associate Justine with the
+obscure causes of her suffering.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[p 261]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I know she's cleverer than I am, and more amusing,
+and can tell you about plants and animals and
+things...and I daresay she tells you how tiresome
+and stupid I am...."</p>
+
+<p>She sprang up suddenly, abashed by Cicely's astonished
+gaze, and by the governess's tremulous attempt to
+continue to treat the scene as one of "Mamma's"
+most successful pleasantries.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't mind me&mdash;my head aches horribly. I think
+I'll rush off for a gallop on Impulse before dinner. Miss
+Dill, Cicely's nails are a sight&mdash;I suppose that comes of
+grubbing up wild-flowers."</p>
+
+<p>And with this parting shot at Justine's pursuits she
+swept out of the school-room, leaving pupil and teacher
+plunged in a stricken silence from which Cicely at
+length emerged to say, with the candour that Miss Dill
+dreaded more than any punishable offense: "Mother's
+prettiest&mdash;but I do like Justine the best."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It was nearly dark when Bessy mounted the horse
+which had been hastily saddled in response to her order;
+but it was her habit to ride out alone at all hours, and of
+late nothing but a hard gallop had availed to quiet her
+nerves. Her craving for occupation had increased as her
+life became more dispersed and agitated, and the need
+to fill every hour drove her to excesses of bodily exertion,
+since other forms of activity were unknown to her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[p 262]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As she cantered along under the twilight sky, with a
+strong sea-breeze in her face, the rush of air and the
+effort of steadying her nervous thoroughbred filled her
+with a glow of bodily energy from which her thoughts
+emerged somewhat cleansed of their bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>She had been odious to poor little Cicely, for whom
+she now felt a sudden remorseful yearning which almost
+made her turn her horse's head homeward, that she
+might dash upstairs and do penance beside the child's
+bed. And that she should have accused Justine of
+taking Cicely from her! It frightened her to find herself
+thinking evil of Justine. Bessy, whose perceptions
+were keen enough in certain directions, knew that her
+second marriage had changed her relation to all her
+former circle of friends. Though they still rallied about
+her, keeping up the convenient habit of familiar intercourse,
+she had begun to be aware that their view of
+her had in it an element of criticism and compassion.
+She had once fancied that Amherst's good looks, and
+the other qualities she had seen in him, would immediately
+make him free of the charmed circle in which
+she moved; but she was discouraged by his disregard
+of his opportunities, and above all by the fundamental
+differences in his view of life. He was never common
+or ridiculous, but she saw that he would never acquire
+the small social facilities. He was fond of exercise,
+but it bored him to talk of it. The men's smoking-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[p 263]</a></span>room
+anecdotes did not amuse him, he was unmoved
+by the fluctuations of the stock-market, he could not
+tell one card from another, and his perfunctory attempts
+at billiards had once caused Mr. Langhope to
+murmur, in his daughter's hearing: "Ah, that's the
+test&mdash;I always said so!"</p>
+
+<p>Thus debarred from what seemed to Bessy the chief
+points of contact with life, how could Amherst hope to
+impose himself on minds versed in these larger relations?
+As the sense of his social insufficiency grew
+on her, Bessy became more sensitive to that latent
+criticism of her marriage which&mdash;intolerable thought!&mdash;involved
+a judgment on herself. She was increasingly
+eager for the approval and applause of her little audience,
+yet increasingly distrustful of their sincerity, and
+more miserably persuaded that she and her husband
+were the butt of some of their most effective stories.
+She knew also that rumours of the disagreement about
+Westmore were abroad, and the suspicion that Amherst's
+conduct was the subject of unfriendly comment
+provoked in her a reaction of loyalty to his ideas....</p>
+
+<p>From this turmoil of conflicting influences only her
+friendship with Justine Brent remained secure. Though
+Justine's adaptability made it easy for her to fit into
+the Lynbrook life, Bessy knew that she stood as much
+outside of it as Amherst. She could never, for instance,
+be influenced by what Maria Ansell and the Gaineses<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[p 264]</a></span>
+and the Telfers thought. She had her own criteria of
+conduct, unintelligible to Bessy, but giving her an independence
+of mind on which her friend leaned in a
+kind of blind security. And that even her faith in
+Justine should suddenly be poisoned by a jealous
+thought seemed to prove that the consequences of her
+marriage were gradually infecting her whole life. Bessy
+could conceive of masculine devotion only as subservient
+to its divinity's least wish, and she argued that
+if Amherst had really loved her he could not so lightly
+have disturbed the foundations of her world. And so
+her tormented thoughts, perpetually circling on themselves,
+reverted once more to their central grievance&mdash;the
+failure of her marriage. If her own love had died
+out it would have been much simpler&mdash;she was surrounded
+by examples of the mutual evasion of a troublesome
+tie. There was Blanche Carbury, for instance,
+with whom she had lately struck up an absorbing
+friendship...it was perfectly clear that Blanche Carbury
+wondered how much more she was going to
+stand! But it was the torment of Bessy's situation
+that it involved a radical contradiction, that she still
+loved Amherst though she could not forgive him for
+having married her.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps what she most suffered from was his too-prompt
+acceptance of the semi-estrangement between
+them. After nearly three years of marriage she had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[p 265]</a></span>
+still to learn that it was Amherst's way to wrestle with
+the angel till dawn, and then to go about his other
+business. Her own mind could revolve in the same
+grievance as interminably as a squirrel in its wheel,
+and her husband's habit of casting off the accepted fact
+seemed to betoken poverty of feeling. If only he had
+striven a little harder to keep her&mdash;if, even now, he
+would come back to her, and make her feel that she
+was more to him than those wretched mills!</p>
+
+<p>When she turned her mare toward Lynbrook, the
+longing to see Amherst was again uppermost. He had
+not written for weeks&mdash;she had been obliged to tell
+Maria Ansell that she knew nothing of his plans, and
+it mortified her to think that every one was aware of
+his neglect. Yet, even now, if on reaching the house
+she should find a telegram to say that he was coming,
+the weight of loneliness would be lifted, and everything
+in life would seem different....</p>
+
+<p>Her high-strung mare, scenting the homeward road,
+and excited by the fantastic play of wayside lights and
+shadows, swept her along at a wild gallop with which
+the fevered rush of her thoughts kept pace, and when
+she reached the house she dropped from the saddle with
+aching wrists and brain benumbed.</p>
+
+<p>She entered by a side door, to avoid meeting any one,
+and ran upstairs at once, knowing that she had barely
+time to dress for dinner. As she opened the door of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[p 266]</a></span>
+her sitting-room some one rose from the chair by the
+fire, and she stood still, facing her husband....</p>
+
+<p>It was the moment both had desired, yet when it
+came it found them tongue-tied and helpless.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy was the first to speak. "When did you get
+here? You never wrote me you were coming!"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst advanced toward her, holding out his hand.
+"No; you must forgive me. I have been very busy,"
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>Always the same excuse! The same thrusting at her
+of the hateful fact that Westmore came first, and that
+she must put up with whatever was left of his time and
+thoughts!</p>
+
+<p>"You are always too busy to let me hear from you,"
+she said coldly, and the hand which had sprung toward
+his fell back to her side.</p>
+
+<p>Even then, if he had only said frankly: "It was too
+difficult&mdash;I didn't know how," the note of truth would
+have reached and moved her; but he had striven for the
+tone of ease and self-restraint that was habitual among
+her friends, and as usual his attempt had been a failure.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry&mdash;I'm a bad hand at writing," he rejoined;
+and his evil genius prompted him to add: "I
+hope my coming is not inconvenient?"</p>
+
+<p>The colour rose to Bessy's face. "Of course not.
+But it must seem rather odd to our visitors that I should
+know so little of your plans."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[p 267]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At this he humbled himself still farther. "I know I
+don't think enough about appearances&mdash;I'll try to do
+better the next time."</p>
+
+<p>Appearances! He spoke as if she had been reproaching
+him for a breach of etiquette...it never
+occurred to him that the cry came from her humiliated
+heart! The tide of warmth that always enveloped her
+in his presence was receding, and in its place a chill
+fluid seemed to creep up slowly to her throat and lips.</p>
+
+<p>In Amherst, meanwhile, the opposite process was
+taking place. His wife was still to him the most beautiful
+woman in the world, or rather, perhaps, the only
+woman to whose beauty his eyes had been opened.
+That beauty could never again penetrate to his heart,
+but it still touched his senses, not with passion but with
+a caressing kindliness, such as one might feel for the
+bright movements of a bird or a kitten. It seemed to
+plead with him not to ask of her more than she could
+give&mdash;to be content with the outward grace and not
+seek in it an inner meaning. He moved toward her
+again, and took her passive hands in his.</p>
+
+<p>"You look tired. Why do you ride so late?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I just wanted to give Impulse a gallop. I
+hadn't time to take her out earlier, and if I let the
+grooms exercise her they'll spoil her mouth."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst frowned. "You ought not to ride that mare
+alone at night. She shies at everything after dark."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[p 268]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"She's the only horse I care for&mdash;the others are all
+cows," she murmured, releasing her hands impatiently.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you must take me with you the next time you
+ride her."</p>
+
+<p>She softened a little, in spite of herself. Riding was
+the only amusement he cared to share with her, and the
+thought of a long gallop across the plains at his side
+brought back the warmth to her veins.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, we'll go tomorrow. How long do you mean
+to stay?" she asked, looking up at him eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>He was pleased that she should wish to know, yet
+the question embarrassed him, for it was necessary that
+he should be back at Westmore within three days, and
+he could not put her off with an evasion.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy saw his hesitation, and her colour rose again.
+"I only asked," she explained, "because there is to
+be a fancy ball at the Hunt Club on the twentieth,
+and I thought of giving a big dinner here first."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst did not understand that she too had her inarticulate
+moments, and that the allusion to the fancy
+ball was improvised to hide an eagerness to which
+he had been too slow in responding. He thought she
+had enquired about his plans only that he might not
+again interfere with the arrangements of her dinner-table.
+If that was all she cared about, it became suddenly
+easy to tell her that he could not stay, and he
+answered lightly: "Fancy balls are a little out of my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[p 269]</a></span>
+line; but at any rate I shall have to be back at the mills
+the day after tomorrow."</p>
+
+<p>The disappointment brought a rush of bitterness to
+her lips. "The day after tomorrow? It seems hardly
+worth while to have come so far for two days!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't mind the journey&mdash;and there are one
+or two matters I must consult you about."</p>
+
+<p>There could hardly have been a more ill-advised
+answer, but Amherst was reckless now. If she cared
+for his coming only that he might fill a place at a fancy-dress
+dinner, he would let her see that he had come only
+because he had to go through the form of submitting to
+her certain measures to be taken at Westmore.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy was beginning to feel the physical reaction of
+her struggle with the mare. The fatigue which at first
+had deadened her nerves now woke them to acuter sensibility,
+and an appealing word from her husband
+would have drawn her to his arms. But his answer
+seemed to drive all the blood back to her heart.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why you still go through the form of
+consulting me about Westmore, when you have always
+done just as you pleased there, without regard to me
+or Cicely."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst made no answer, silenced by the discouragement
+of hearing the same old grievance on her lips;
+and she too seemed struck, after she had spoken, by
+the unprofitableness of such retorts.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[p 270]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It doesn't matter&mdash;of course I'll do whatever you
+wish," she went on listlessly. "But I could have sent
+my signature, if that is all you came for&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks," said Amherst coldly. "I shall remember
+that the next time."</p>
+
+<p>They stood silent for a moment, he with his eyes fixed
+on her, she with averted head, twisting her riding-whip
+between her fingers; then she said suddenly: "We
+shall be late for dinner," and passing into her dressing-room
+she closed the door.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst roused himself as she disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>"Bessy!" he exclaimed, moving toward her; but as
+he approached the door he heard her maid's voice
+within, and turning away he went to his own room.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Bessy came down late to dinner, with vivid cheeks and
+an air of improvised ease; and the manner of her entrance,
+combined with her husband's unannounced
+arrival, produced in their observant guests the sense of
+latent complications. Mr. Langhope, though evidently
+unaware of his son-in-law's return till they greeted each
+other in the drawing-room, was too good a card-player
+to betray surprise, and Mrs. Ansell outdid herself in
+the delicate art of taking everything for granted; but
+these very dissimulations sharpened the perception of
+the other guests, whom long practice had rendered
+expert in interpreting such signs.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[p 271]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Of all this Justine Brent was aware; and conscious
+also that, by every one but herself, the suspected estrangement
+between the Amhersts was regarded as
+turning merely on the question of money. To the
+greater number of persons present there was, in fact,
+no other conceivable source of conjugal discord, since
+every known complication could be adjusted by means
+of the universal lubricant. It was this unanimity of
+view which bound together in the compactness of a
+new feudalism the members of Bessy Amherst's world;
+which supplied them with their pass-words and social
+tests, and defended them securely against the insidious
+attack of ideas.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The Genius of History, capriciously directing the antics
+of its marionettes, sometimes lets the drama languish
+through a series of unrelated episodes, and then, suddenly
+quickening the pace, packs into one scene the
+stuff of a dozen. The chance meeting of Amherst and
+Justine, seemingly of no significance to either, contained
+the germ of developments of which both had
+begun to be aware before the evening was over. Their
+short talk&mdash;the first really intimate exchange of words
+between them&mdash;had the effect of creating a sense of
+solidarity that grew apace in the atmosphere of the
+Lynbrook dinner-table.</p>
+
+<p>Justine was always reluctant to take part in Bessy's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[p 272]</a></span>
+week-end dinners, but as she descended the stairs that
+evening she did not regret having promised to be
+present. She frankly wanted to see Amherst again&mdash;his
+tone, his view of life, reinforced her own convictions,
+restored her faith in the reality and importance of all
+that Lynbrook ignored and excluded. Her extreme
+sensitiveness to surrounding vibrations of thought and
+feeling told her, as she glanced at him between the
+flowers and candles of the long dinner-table, that he
+too was obscurely aware of the same effect; and it
+flashed across her that they were unconsciously drawn
+together by the fact that they were the only two strangers
+in the room. Every one else had the same standpoint,
+spoke the same language, drew on the same stock of
+allusions, used the same weights and measures in estimating
+persons and actions. Between Mr. Langhope's
+indolent acuteness of mind and the rudimentary processes
+of the rosy Telfers there was a difference of
+degree but not of kind. If Mr. Langhope viewed the
+spectacle more objectively, it was not because he had
+outlived the sense of its importance, but because years
+of experience had familiarized him with its minutest
+details; and this familiarity with the world he lived in
+had bred a profound contempt for any other.</p>
+
+<p>In no way could the points of contact between Amherst
+and Justine Brent have been more vividly brought
+out than by their tacit exclusion from the currents of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[p 273]</a></span>
+opinion about them. Amherst, seated in unsmiling endurance
+at the foot of the table, between Mrs. Ansell,
+with her carefully-distributed affabilities, and Blanche
+Carbury, with her reckless hurling of conversational
+pebbles, seemed to Justine as much of a stranger as
+herself among the people to whom his marriage had
+introduced him. So strongly did she feel the sense of
+their common isolation that it was no surprise to her,
+when the men reappeared in the drawing-room after
+dinner, to have her host thread his way, between the
+unfolding bridge-tables, straight to the corner where
+she sat. Amherst's methods in the drawing-room were
+still as direct as in the cotton-mill. He always went up
+at once to the person he sought, without preliminary
+waste of tactics; and on this occasion Justine, without
+knowing what had passed between himself and Bessy,
+suspected from the appearance of both that their talk
+had resulted in increasing Amherst's desire to be with
+some one to whom he could speak freely and naturally
+on the subject nearest his heart.</p>
+
+<p>She began at once to question him about Westmore,
+and the change in his face showed that his work was
+still a refuge from all that made life disheartening and
+unintelligible. Whatever convictions had been thwarted
+or impaired in him, his faith in the importance of his
+task remained unshaken; and the firmness with which
+he held to it filled Justine with a sense of his strength.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[p 274]</a></span>
+The feeling kindled her own desire to escape again into
+the world of deeds, yet by a sudden reaction it checked
+the growing inclination for Stephen Wyant that had
+resulted from her revolt against Lynbrook. Here was
+a man as careless as Wyant of the minor forms, yet
+her appreciation of him was not affected by the lack of
+adaptability that she accused herself of criticizing in
+her suitor. She began to see that it was not the sense
+of Wyant's social deficiencies that had held her back;
+and the discovery at once set free her judgment of him,
+enabling her to penetrate to the real causes of her
+reluctance. She understood now that the flaw she felt
+was far deeper than any defect of manner. It was the
+sense in him of something unstable and incalculable,
+something at once weak and violent, that was brought
+to light by the contrast of Amherst's quiet resolution.
+Here was a man whom no gusts of chance could deflect
+from his purpose; while she felt that the career to
+which Wyant had so ardently given himself would
+always be at the mercy of his passing emotions.</p>
+
+<p>As the distinction grew clearer, Justine trembled to
+think that she had so nearly pledged herself, without
+the excuse of love, to a man whose failings she
+could judge so lucidly.... But had she ever really
+thought of marrying Wyant? While she continued to
+talk with Amherst such a possibility became more and
+more remote, till she began to feel it was no more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[p 275]</a></span>
+than a haunting dream. But her promise to see Wyant
+the next day reminded her of the nearness of her peril.
+How could she have played with her fate so lightly&mdash;she,
+who held her life so dear because she felt in it such
+untried powers of action and emotion? She continued to
+listen to Amherst's account of his work, with enough
+outward self-possession to place the right comment
+and put the right question, yet conscious only of the
+quiet strength she was absorbing from his presence, of
+the way in which his words, his voice, his mere nearness
+were slowly steadying and clarifying her will.</p>
+
+<p>In the smoking-room, after the ladies had gone upstairs,
+Amherst continued to acquit himself mechanically
+of his duties, against the incongruous back-ground
+of his predecessor's remarkable sporting-prints&mdash;for it
+was characteristic of his relation to Lynbrook that his
+life there was carried on in the setting of foils and boxing-gloves,
+firearms and racing-trophies, which had expressed
+Dick Westmore's ideals. Never very keenly
+alive to his material surroundings, and quite unconscious
+of the irony of this proximity, Amherst had come
+to accept his wife's guests as unquestioningly as their
+background, and with the same sense of their being an
+inevitable part of his new life. Their talk was no more
+intelligible to him than the red and yellow hieroglyphics
+of the racing-prints, and he smoked in silence while Mr.
+Langhope discoursed to Westy Gaines on the recent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[p 276]</a></span>
+sale of Chinese porcelains at which he had been lucky
+enough to pick up the set of Ming for his daughter, and
+Mason Winch expounded to a group of languid listeners
+the essential dependence of the labouring-man
+on the prosperity of Wall Street. In a retired corner,
+Ned Bowfort was imparting facts of a more personal
+nature to a chosen following who hailed with suppressed
+enjoyment the murmured mention of proper
+names; and now and then Amherst found himself
+obliged to say to Fenton Carbury, who with one accord
+had been left on his hands, "Yes, I understand the
+flat-tread tire is best," or, "There's a good deal to be
+said for the low tension magneto&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But all the while his conscious thoughts were absorbed
+in the remembrance of his talk with Justine
+Brent. He had left his wife's presence in that state of
+moral lassitude when the strongest hopes droop under
+the infection of indifference and hostility, and the effort
+of attainment seems out of all proportion to the end
+in view; but as he listened to Justine all his energies
+sprang to life again. Here at last was some one who
+felt the urgency of his task: her every word and look
+confirmed her comment of the afternoon: "Westmore
+must be foremost to you both in time&mdash;I don't
+see how either of you can escape it."</p>
+
+<p>She saw it, as he did, to be the special outlet offered
+for the expression of what he was worth to the world;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[p 277]</a></span>
+and with the knowledge that one other person recognized
+his call, it sounded again loudly in his heart. Yes,
+he would go on, patiently and persistently, conquering
+obstacles, suffering delay, enduring criticism&mdash;hardest
+of all, bearing with his wife's deepening indifference and
+distrust. Justine had said "Westmore must be foremost
+to you both," and he would prove that she was
+right&mdash;spite of the powers leagued against him he would
+win over Bessy in the end!</p>
+
+<p>Those observers who had been struck by the length
+and animation of Miss Brent's talk with her host&mdash;and
+among whom Mrs. Ansell and Westy Gaines were foremost&mdash;would
+hardly have believed how small a part
+her personal charms had played in attracting him.
+Amherst was still under the power of the other kind of
+beauty&mdash;the soft graces personifying the first triumph
+of sex in his heart&mdash;and Justine's dark slenderness
+could not at once dispel the milder image. He watched
+her with pleasure while she talked, but her face interested
+him only as the vehicle of her ideas&mdash;she looked
+as a girl must look who felt and thought as she did.
+He was aware that everything about her was quick and
+fine and supple, and that the muscles of character lay
+close to the surface of feeling; but the interpenetration
+of spirit and flesh that made her body seem like the
+bright projection of her mind left him unconscious
+of anything but the oneness of their thoughts.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[p 278]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So these two, in their hour of doubt, poured strength
+into each other's hearts, each unconscious of what they
+gave, and of its hidden power of renewing their own
+purposes.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">If</span> Mr. Langhope had ever stooped to such facile
+triumphs as that summed up in the convenient
+"I told you so," he would have loosed the phrase on
+Mrs. Ansell in the course of a colloquy which these two,
+the next afternoon, were at some pains to defend from
+the incursions of the Lynbrook house-party.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell was the kind of woman who could encircle
+herself with privacy on an excursion-boat and
+create a nook in an hotel drawing-room, but it taxed
+even her ingenuity to segregate herself from the Telfers.
+When the feat was accomplished, and it became evident
+that Mr. Langhope could yield himself securely to the
+joys of confidential discourse, he paused on the brink
+of disclosure to say: "It's as well I saved that Ming
+from the ruins."</p>
+
+<p>"What ruins?" she exclaimed, her startled look giving
+him the full benefit of the effect he was seeking to
+produce.</p>
+
+<p>He addressed himself deliberately to the selecting
+and lighting of a cigarette. "Truscomb is down and
+out&mdash;resigned, 'the wise it call.' And the alterations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[p 279]</a></span>
+at Westmore are going to cost a great deal more than
+my experienced son-in-law expected. This is Westy's
+morning budget&mdash;he and Amherst had it out last night.
+I tell my poor girl that at least she'll lose nothing when
+the <i>bibelots</i> I've bought for her go up the spout."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell received this with a troubled countenance.
+"What has become of Bessy? I've not seen
+her since luncheon."</p>
+
+<p>"No. She and Blanche Carbury have motored over
+to dine with the Nick Ledgers at Islip."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you see her before she left?"</p>
+
+<p>"For a moment, but she said very little. Westy tells
+me that Amherst hints at leasing the New York house.
+One can understand that she's left speechless."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell, at this, sat bolt upright. "The New
+York house?" But she broke off to add, with seeming
+irrelevance: "If you knew how I detest Blanche Carbury!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope made a gesture of semi-acquiescence.
+"She is not the friend I should have chosen for Bessy&mdash;but
+we know that Providence makes use of strange
+instruments."</p>
+
+<p>"Providence and Blanche Carbury?" She stared at
+him. "Ah, you are profoundly corrupt!"</p>
+
+<p>"I have the coarse masculine habit of looking facts
+in the face. Woman-like, you prefer to make use of
+them privately, and cut them when you meet in public."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[p 280]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Blanche is not the kind of fact I should care to
+make use of under any circumstances whatever!"</p>
+
+<p>"No one asks you to. Simply regard her as a force of
+nature&mdash;let her alone, and don't put up too many
+lightning-rods."</p>
+
+<p>She raised her eyes to his face. "Do you really
+mean that you want Bessy to get a divorce?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your style is elliptical, dear Maria; but divorce
+does not frighten me very much. It has grown almost
+as painless as modern dentistry."</p>
+
+<p>"It's our odious insensibility that makes it so!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope received this with the mildness of suspended
+judgment. "How else, then, do you propose
+that Bessy shall save what is left of her money?"</p>
+
+<p>"I would rather see her save what is left of her
+happiness. Bessy will never be happy in the new
+way."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you call the new way?"</p>
+
+<p>"Launching one's boat over a human body&mdash;or several,
+as the case may be!"</p>
+
+<p>"But don't you see that, as an expedient to bring this
+madman to reason&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I've told you that you don't understand him!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope turned on her with what would have
+been a show of temper in any one less provided with
+shades of manner. "Well, then, explain him, for God's
+sake!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[p 281]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I might explain him by saying that she's still in love
+with him."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, if you're still imprisoned in the old formulas!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell confronted him with a grave face. "Isn't
+that precisely what Bessy is? Isn't she one of the most
+harrowing victims of the plan of bringing up our girls
+in the double bondage of expediency and unreality,
+corrupting their bodies with luxury and their brains
+with sentiment, and leaving them to reconcile the two
+as best they can, or lose their souls in the attempt?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope smiled. "I may observe that, with
+my poor child so early left alone to me, I supposed I
+was doing my best in committing her guidance to some
+of the most admirable women I know."</p>
+
+<p>"Of whom I was one&mdash;and not the least lamentable
+example of the system! Of course the only thing that
+saves us from their vengeance," Mrs. Ansell added,
+"is that so few of them ever stop to think...."</p>
+
+<p>"And yet, as I make out, it's precisely what you
+would have Bessy do!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's what neither you nor I can help her doing.
+You've given her just acuteness enough to question,
+without consecutiveness enough to explain. But if she
+must perish in the struggle&mdash;and I see no hope for
+her&mdash;" cried Mrs. Ansell, starting suddenly and dramatically
+to her feet, "at least let her perish defending
+her ideals and not denying them&mdash;even if she has to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[p 282]</a></span>
+sell the New York house and all your china pots into
+the bargain!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope, rising also, deprecatingly lifted his
+hands, "If that's what you call saving me from her
+vengeance&mdash;sending the crockery crashing round my
+ears!" And, as she turned away without any pretense
+of capping his pleasantry, he added, with a gleam of
+friendly malice: "I suppose you're going to the Hunt
+ball as Cassandra?"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Amherst, that morning, had sought out his wife with the
+definite resolve to efface the unhappy impression of their
+previous talk. He blamed himself for having been too
+easily repelled by her impatience. As the stronger of the
+two, with the power of a fixed purpose to sustain him, he
+should have allowed for the instability of her impulses,
+and above all for the automatic influences of habit.</p>
+
+<p>Knowing that she did not keep early hours he delayed
+till ten o'clock to present himself at her sitting-room
+door, but the maid who answered his knock informed
+him that Mrs. Amherst was not yet up.</p>
+
+<p>His reply that he would wait did not appear to hasten
+the leisurely process of her toilet, and he had the room
+to himself for a full half-hour. Many months had
+passed since he had spent so long a time in it, and
+though habitually unobservant of external details, he
+now found an outlet for his restlessness in mechanically<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[p 283]</a></span>
+noting the intimate appurtenances of Bessy's life. He
+was at first merely conscious of a soothing harmony of
+line and colour, extending from the blurred tints of the
+rug to the subdued gleam of light on old picture-frames
+and on the slender flanks of porcelain vases; but gradually
+he began to notice how every chair and screen and
+cushion, and even every trifling utensil on the inlaid
+writing-desk, had been chosen with reference to the
+whole composition, and to the minutest requirements
+of a fastidious leisure. A few months ago this studied
+setting, if he had thought of it at all, would have justified
+itself as expressing the pretty woman's natural
+affinity with pretty toys; but now it was the cost of it
+that struck him. He was beginning to learn from
+Bessy's bills that no commodity is taxed as high as
+beauty, and the beauty about him filled him with sudden
+repugnance, as the disguise of the evil influences
+that were separating his wife's life from his.</p>
+
+<p>But with her entrance he dismissed the thought, and
+tried to meet her as if nothing stood in the way of their
+full communion. Her hair, still wet from the bath,
+broke from its dryad-like knot in dusky rings and
+spirals threaded with gold, and from her loose flexible
+draperies, and her whole person as she moved, there
+came a scent of youth and morning freshness. Her
+beauty touched him, and made it easier for him to
+humble himself.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[p 284]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I was stupid and disagreeable last night. I can
+never say what I want when I have to count the minutes,
+and I've come back now for a quiet talk," he
+began.</p>
+
+<p>A shade of distrust passed over Bessy's face. "About
+business?" she asked, pausing a few feet away from him.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't let us give it that name!" He went up to
+her and drew her two hands into his. "You used to
+call it our work&mdash;won't you go back to that way of
+looking at it?"</p>
+
+<p>Her hands resisted his pressure. "I didn't know,
+then, that it was going to be the only thing you cared
+for&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But for her own sake he would not let her go on.
+"Some day I shall make you see how much my caring
+for it means my caring for you. But meanwhile," he
+urged, "won't you overcome your aversion to the subject,
+and bear with it as my work, if you no longer care
+to think of it as yours?"</p>
+
+<p>Bessy, freeing herself, sat down on the edge of the
+straight-backed chair near the desk, as though to mark
+the parenthetical nature of the interview.</p>
+
+<p>"I know you think me stupid&mdash;but wives are not
+usually expected to go into all the details of their husband's
+business. I have told you to do whatever you
+wish at Westmore, and I can't see why that is not
+enough."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[p 285]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Amherst looked at her in surprise. Something in
+her quick mechanical utterance suggested that not only
+the thought but the actual words she spoke had been
+inspired, and he fancied he heard in them an echo of
+Blanche Carbury's tones. Though Bessy's intimacy
+with Mrs. Carbury was of such recent date, fragments
+of unheeded smoking-room gossip now recurred to confirm
+the vague antipathy which Amherst had felt for
+her the previous evening.</p>
+
+<p>"I know that, among your friends, wives are not
+expected to interest themselves in their husbands' work,
+and if the mills were mine I should try to conform to
+the custom, though I should always think it a pity that
+the questions that fill a man's thoughts should be ruled
+out of his talk with his wife; but as it is, I am only
+your representative at Westmore, and I don't see how
+we can help having the subject come up between us."</p>
+
+<p>Bessy remained silent, not as if acquiescing in his
+plea, but as though her own small stock of arguments
+had temporarily failed her; and he went on, enlarging
+on his theme with a careful avoidance of technical
+terms, and with the constant effort to keep the human
+and personal side of the question before her.</p>
+
+<p>She listened without comment, her eyes fixed on a
+little jewelled letter-opener which she had picked up
+from the writing-table, and which she continued to
+turn in her fingers while he spoke.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[p 286]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The full development of Amherst's plans at Westmore,
+besides resulting, as he had foreseen, in Truscomb's
+resignation, and in Halford Gaines's outspoken
+resistance to the new policy, had necessitated a larger
+immediate outlay of capital than the first estimates
+demanded, and Amherst, in putting his case to Bessy,
+was prepared to have her meet it on the old ground
+of the disapproval of all her advisers. But when
+he had ended she merely said, without looking up
+from the toy in her hand: "I always expected that
+you would need a great deal more money than you
+thought."</p>
+
+<p>The comment touched him at his most vulnerable
+point. "But you see why? You understand how the
+work has gone on growing&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>His wife lifted her head to glance at him for a moment.
+"I am not sure that I understand," she said
+indifferently; "but if another loan is necessary, of
+course I will sign the note for it."</p>
+
+<p>The words checked his reply by bringing up, before
+he was prepared to deal with it, the other and more
+embarrassing aspect of the question. He had hoped
+to reawaken in Bessy some feeling for the urgency of
+his task before having to take up the subject of its
+cost; but her cold anticipation of his demands as part
+of a disagreeable business to be despatched and put
+out of mind, doubled the difficulty of what he had left<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[p 287]</a></span>
+to say; and it occurred to him that she had perhaps
+foreseen and reckoned on this result.</p>
+
+<p>He met her eyes gravely. "Another loan <i>is</i> necessary;
+but if any proper provision is to be made for
+paying it back, your expenses will have to be cut down
+a good deal for the next few months."</p>
+
+<p>The blood leapt to Bessy's face. "My expenses?
+You seem to forget how much I've had to cut them
+down already."</p>
+
+<p>"The household bills certainly don't show it. They
+are increasing steadily, and there have been some very
+heavy incidental payments lately."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean by incidental payments?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, there was the pair of cobs you bought last
+month&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She returned to a resigned contemplation of the letter-opener.
+"With only one motor, one must have more
+horses, of course."</p>
+
+<p>"The stables seemed to me fairly full before. But
+if you required more horses, I don't see why, at this
+particular moment, it was also necessary to buy a set of
+Chinese vases for twenty-five hundred dollars."</p>
+
+<p>Bessy, at this, lifted her head with an air of decision
+that surprised him. Her blush had faded as quickly
+as it came, and he noticed that she was pale to the lips.</p>
+
+<p>"I know you don't care about such things; but I
+had an exceptional chance of securing the vases at a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[p 288]</a></span>
+low price&mdash;they are really worth twice as much&mdash;and
+Dick always wanted a set of Ming for the drawing-room
+mantelpiece."</p>
+
+<p>Richard Westmore's name was always tacitly avoided
+between them, for in Amherst's case the disagreeable
+sense of dependence on a dead man's bounty increased
+that feeling of obscure constraint and repugnance which
+any reminder of the first husband's existence is wont
+to produce in his successor.</p>
+
+<p>He reddened at the reply, and Bessy, profiting by an
+embarrassment which she had perhaps consciously
+provoked, went on hastily, and as if by rote: "I have
+left you perfectly free to do as you think best at the
+mills, but this perpetual discussion of my personal expenses
+is very unpleasant to me, as I am sure it must be
+to you, and in future I think it would be much better
+for us to have separate accounts."</p>
+
+<p>"Separate accounts?" Amherst echoed in genuine
+astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>"I should like my personal expenses to be under my
+own control again&mdash;I have never been used to accounting
+for every penny I spend."</p>
+
+<p>The vertical lines deepened between Amherst's brows.
+"You are of course free to spend your money as you
+like&mdash;and I thought you were doing so when you authorized
+me, last spring, to begin the changes at Westmore."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[p 289]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Her lip trembled. "Do you reproach me for that?
+I didn't understand...you took advantage...."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>At his tone the blood rushed back to her face. "It
+was my fault, of course&mdash;I only wanted to please
+you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst was silent, confronted by the sudden sense
+of his own responsibility. What she said was true&mdash;he
+had known, when he exacted the sacrifice, that she
+made it only to please him, on an impulse of reawakened
+feeling, and not from any real recognition of a larger
+duty. The perception of this made him answer gently:
+"I am willing to take any blame you think I deserve; but
+it won't help us now to go back to the past. It is more
+important that we should come to an understanding
+about the future. If by keeping your personal account
+separate, you mean that you wish to resume control of
+your whole income, then you ought to understand that
+the improvements at the mills will have to be dropped
+at once, and things there go back to their old state."</p>
+
+<p>She started up with an impatient gesture. "Oh, I
+should like never to hear of the mills again!"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her a moment in silence. "Am I to
+take that as your answer?"</p>
+
+<p>She walked toward her door without returning his
+look. "Of course," she murmured, "you will end by
+doing as you please."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[p 290]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The retort moved him, for he heard in it the cry of
+her wounded pride. He longed to be able to cry out
+in return that Westmore was nothing to him, that
+all he asked was to see her happy.... But it was
+not true, and his manhood revolted from the deception.
+Besides, its effect would be only temporary&mdash;would
+wear no better than her vain efforts to simulate
+an interest in his work. Between them, forever, were
+the insurmountable barriers of character, of education,
+of habit&mdash;and yet it was not in him to believe that any
+barrier was insurmountable.</p>
+
+<p>"Bessy," he exclaimed, following her, "don't let us
+part in this way&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She paused with her hand on her dressing-room door.
+"It is time to dress for church," she objected, turning
+to glance at the little gilt clock on the chimney-piece.</p>
+
+<p>"For church?" Amherst stared, wondering that at
+such a crisis she should have remained detached enough
+to take note of the hour.</p>
+
+<p>"You forget," she replied, with an air of gentle reproof,
+"that before we married I was in the habit of
+going to church every Sunday."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;to be sure. Would you not like me to go
+with you?" he rejoined gently, as if roused to the consciousness
+of another omission in the long list of his
+social shortcomings; for church-going, at Lynbrook,
+had always struck him as a purely social observance.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[p 291]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But Bessy had opened the door of her dressing-room.
+"I much prefer that you should do what you like," she
+said as she passed from the room.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst made no farther attempt to detain her, and
+the door closed on her as though it were closing on a
+chapter in their lives.</p>
+
+<p>"That's the end of it!" he murmured, picking up the
+letter-opener she had been playing with, and twirling
+it absently in his fingers. But nothing in life ever ends,
+and the next moment a new question confronted him&mdash;how
+was the next chapter to open?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[p 292]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_III" id="BOOK_III"></a>BOOK III</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was late in October when Amherst returned to
+Lynbrook.</p>
+
+<p>He had begun to learn, in the interval, the lesson
+most difficult to his direct and trenchant nature: that
+compromise is the law of married life. On the afternoon
+of his talk with his wife he had sought her out,
+determined to make a final effort to clear up the situation
+between them; but he learned that, immediately
+after luncheon, she had gone off in the motor with Mrs.
+Carbury and two men of the party, leaving word that
+they would probably not be back till evening. It cost
+Amherst a struggle, when he had humbled himself to
+receive this information from the butler, not to pack
+his portmanteau and take the first train for Hanaford;
+but he was still under the influence of Justine Brent's
+words, and also of his own feeling that, at this juncture,
+a break between himself and Bessy would be final.</p>
+
+<p>He stayed on accordingly, enduring as best he might
+the mute observation of the household, and the gentle
+irony of Mr. Langhope's attentions; and before he left
+Lynbrook, two days later, a provisional understanding
+had been reached.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[p 293]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His wife proved more firm than he had foreseen in
+her resolve to regain control of her income, and the
+talk between them ended in reciprocal concessions,
+Bessy consenting to let the town house for the winter
+and remain at Lynbrook, while Amherst agreed to restrict
+his improvements at Westmore to such alterations
+as had already been begun, and to reduce the
+expenditure on these as much as possible. It was virtually
+the defeat of his policy, and he had to suffer the
+decent triumph of the Gaineses, as well as the bitterer
+pang of his foiled aspirations. In spite of the opposition
+of the directors, he had taken advantage of Truscomb's
+resignation to put Duplain at the head of the
+mills; but the new manager's outspoken disgust at the
+company's change of plan made it clear that he would
+not remain long at Westmore, and it was one of the
+miseries of Amherst's situation that he could not give
+the reasons for his defection, but must bear to figure in
+Duplain's terse vocabulary as a "quitter." The difficulty
+of finding a new manager expert enough to satisfy
+the directors, yet in sympathy with his own social
+theories, made Amherst fear that Duplain's withdrawal
+would open the way for Truscomb's reinstatement, an
+outcome on which he suspected Halford Gaines had
+always counted; and this possibility loomed before him
+as the final defeat of his hopes.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the issues ahead had at least the merit of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[p 294]</a></span>
+keeping him busy. The task of modifying and retrenching
+his plans contrasted drearily with the hopeful
+activity of the past months, but he had an iron capacity
+for hard work under adverse conditions, and the fact of
+being too busy for thought helped him to wear through
+the days. This pressure of work relieved him, at first,
+from too close consideration of his relation to Bessy.
+He had yielded up his dearest hopes at her wish, and
+for the moment his renunciation had set a chasm between
+them; but gradually he saw that, as he was
+patching together the ruins of his Westmore plans, so
+he must presently apply himself to the reconstruction
+of his married life.</p>
+
+<p>Before leaving Lynbrook he had had a last word with
+Miss Brent; not a word of confidence&mdash;for the same
+sense of reserve kept both from any explicit renewal of
+their moment's intimacy&mdash;but one of those exchanges
+of commonplace phrase that circumstances may be
+left to charge with special meaning. Justine had
+merely asked if he were really leaving and, on his assenting,
+had exclaimed quickly: "But you will come
+back soon?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall certainly come back," he answered; and
+after a pause he added: "I shall find you here? You
+will remain at Lynbrook?"</p>
+
+<p>On her part also there was a shade of hesitation;
+then she said with a smile: "Yes, I shall stay."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[p 295]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His look brightened. "And you'll write me if anything&mdash;if
+Bessy should not be well?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will write you," she promised; and a few weeks
+after his return to Hanaford he had, in fact, received
+a short note from her. Its ostensible purpose was to
+reassure him as to Bessy's health, which had certainly
+grown stronger since Dr. Wyant had persuaded her,
+at the close of the last house-party, to accord herself a
+period of quiet; but (the writer added) now that Mr.
+Langhope and Mrs. Ansell had also left, the quiet was
+perhaps too complete, and Bessy's nerves were beginning
+to suffer from the reaction.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst had no difficulty in interpreting this brief
+communication. "I have succeeded in dispersing the
+people who are always keeping you and your wife
+apart; now is your chance: come and take it." That
+was what Miss Brent's letter meant; and his answer
+was a telegram to Bessy, announcing his return to Long
+Island.</p>
+
+<p>The step was not an easy one; but decisive action,
+however hard, was always easier to Amherst than the
+ensuing interval of readjustment. To come to Lynbrook
+had required a strong effort of will; but the
+effort of remaining there called into play less disciplined
+faculties.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst had always been used to doing things; now
+he had to resign himself to enduring a state of things.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[p 296]</a></span>
+The material facilities of the life about him, the way in
+which the machinery of the great empty house ran on
+like some complex apparatus working in the void, increased
+the exasperation of his nerves. Dr. Wyant's
+suggestion&mdash;which Amherst suspected Justine of having
+prompted&mdash;that Mrs. Amherst should cancel her autumn
+engagements, and give herself up to a quiet outdoor
+life with her husband, seemed to present the very
+opportunity these two distracted spirits needed to find
+and repossess each other. But, though Amherst was
+grateful to Bessy for having dismissed her visitors&mdash;partly
+to please him, as he guessed&mdash;yet he found the
+routine of the establishment more oppressive than when
+the house was full. If he could have been alone with
+her in a quiet corner&mdash;the despised cottage at Westmore,
+even!&mdash;he fancied they might still have been
+brought together by restricted space and the familiar
+exigencies of life. All the primitive necessities which
+bind together, through their recurring daily wants, natures
+fated to find no higher point of union, had been
+carefully eliminated from the life at Lynbrook, where
+material needs were not only provided for but anticipated
+by a hidden mechanism that filled the house with
+the perpetual sense of invisible attendance. Though
+Amherst knew that he and Bessy could never meet in
+the region of great issues, he thought he might have
+regained the way to her heart, and found relief from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[p 297]</a></span>
+his own inaction, in the small ministrations of daily
+life; but the next moment he smiled to picture Bessy
+in surroundings where the clocks were not wound of
+themselves and the doors did not fly open at her approach.
+Those thick-crowding cares and drudgeries
+which serve as merciful screens between so many discordant
+natures would have been as intolerable to her
+as was to Amherst the great glare of leisure in which
+he and she were now confronted.</p>
+
+<p>He saw that Bessy was in the state of propitiatory
+eagerness which always followed on her gaining a point
+in their long duel; and he could guess that she was
+tremulously anxious not only to make up to him, by
+all the arts she knew, for the sacrifice she had exacted,
+but also to conceal from every one the fact that, as Mr.
+Langhope bluntly put it, he had been "brought to
+terms." Amherst was touched by her efforts, and
+half-ashamed of his own inability to respond to them.
+But his mind, released from its normal preoccupations,
+had become a dangerous instrument of analysis and
+disintegration, and conditions which, a few months
+before, he might have accepted with the wholesome
+tolerance of the busy man, now pressed on him unendurably.
+He saw that he and his wife were really
+face to face for the first time since their marriage.
+Hitherto something had always intervened between
+them&mdash;first the spell of her grace and beauty, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[p 298]</a></span>
+brief joy of her participation in his work; then the
+sorrow of their child's death, and after that the temporary
+exhilaration of carrying out his ideas at Westmore&mdash;but
+now that the last of these veils had been
+torn away they faced each other as strangers.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The habit of keeping factory hours always drove Amherst
+forth long before his wife's day began, and in the
+course of one of his early tramps he met Miss Brent and
+Cicely setting out for a distant swamp where rumour
+had it that a rare native orchid might be found. Justine's
+sylvan tastes had developed in the little girl a
+passion for such pillaging expeditions, and Cicely, who
+had discovered that her step-father knew almost as
+much about birds and squirrels as Miss Brent did
+about flowers, was not to be appeased till Amherst
+had scrambled into the pony-cart, wedging his long
+legs between a fern-box and a lunch-basket, and balancing
+a Scotch terrier's telescopic body across his
+knees.</p>
+
+<p>The season was so mild that only one or two light
+windless frosts had singed the foliage of oaks and
+beeches, and gilded the roadsides with a smooth carpeting
+of maple leaves. The morning haze rose like
+smoke from burnt-out pyres of sumach and sugar-maple;
+a silver bloom lay on the furrows of the ploughed
+fields; and now and then, as they drove on, the wooded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[p 299]</a></span>
+road showed at its end a tarnished disk of light, where
+sea and sky were merged.</p>
+
+<p>At length they left the road for a winding track
+through scrub-oaks and glossy thickets of mountain-laurel;
+the track died out at the foot of a wooded knoll,
+and clambering along its base they came upon the
+swamp. There it lay in charmed solitude, shut in by
+a tawny growth of larch and swamp-maple, its edges
+burnt out to smouldering shades of russet, ember-red
+and ashen-grey, while the quaking centre still preserved
+a jewel-like green, where hidden lanes of moisture
+wound between islets tufted with swamp-cranberry
+and with the charred browns of fern and wild rose
+and bay. Sodden earth and decaying branches gave
+forth a strange sweet odour, as of the aromatic essences
+embalming a dead summer; and the air charged
+with this scent was so still that the snapping of witch-hazel
+pods, the drop of a nut, the leap of a startled
+frog, pricked the silence with separate points of
+sound.</p>
+
+<p>The pony made fast, the terrier released, and fern-box
+and lunch-basket slung over Amherst's shoulder,
+the three explorers set forth on their journey. Amherst,
+as became his sex, went first; but after a few
+absent-minded plunges into the sedgy depths between
+the islets, he was ordered to relinquish his command
+and fall to the rear, where he might perform the hum<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[p 300]</a></span>bler
+service of occasionally lifting Cicely over unspannable
+gulfs of moisture.</p>
+
+<p>Justine, leading the way, guided them across the
+treacherous surface as fearlessly as a king-fisher, lighting
+instinctively on every grass-tussock and submerged
+tree-stump of the uncertain path. Now and then she
+paused, her feet drawn close on their narrow perch,
+and her slender body swaying over as she reached down
+for some rare growth detected among the withered reeds
+and grasses; then she would right herself again by a
+backward movement as natural as the upward spring
+of a branch&mdash;so free and flexible in all her motions that
+she seemed akin to the swaying reeds and curving
+brambles which caught at her as she passed.</p>
+
+<p>At length the explorers reached the mossy corner
+where the orchids grew, and Cicely, securely balanced
+on a fallen tree-trunk, was allowed to dig the coveted
+roots. When they had been packed away, it was felt
+that this culminating moment must be celebrated with
+immediate libations of jam and milk; and having
+climbed to a dry slope among the pepper-bushes, the
+party fell on the contents of the lunch-basket. It was
+just the hour when Bessy's maid was carrying her
+breakfast-tray, with its delicate service of old silver
+and porcelain, into the darkened bed-room at Lynbrook;
+but early rising and hard scrambling had
+whetted the appetites of the naturalists, and the nurs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[p 301]</a></span>ery
+fare which Cicely spread before them seemed a
+sumptuous reward for their toil.</p>
+
+<p>"I do like this kind of picnic much better than the
+ones where mother takes all the footmen, and the
+mayonnaise has to be scraped off things before I can
+eat them," Cicely declared, lifting her foaming mouth
+from a beaker of milk.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst, lighting his pipe, stretched himself contentedly
+among the pepper-bushes, steeped in that unreflecting
+peace which is shed into some hearts by
+communion with trees and sky. He too was glad to get
+away from the footmen and the mayonnaise, and he
+imagined that his stepdaughter's exclamation summed
+up all the reasons for his happiness. The boyish
+wood-craft which he had cultivated in order to encourage
+the same taste in his factory lads came to life in
+this sudden return to nature, and he redeemed his
+clumsiness in crossing the swamp by spying a marsh-wren's
+nest that had escaped Justine, and detecting in
+a swiftly-flitting olive-brown bird a belated tanager in
+autumn incognito.</p>
+
+<p>Cicely sat rapt while he pictured the bird's winter
+pilgrimage, with glimpses of the seas and islands that
+fled beneath him till his long southern flight ended in
+the dim glades of the equatorial forests.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, what a good life&mdash;how I should like to be a
+wander-bird, and look down people's chimneys twice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[p 302]</a></span>
+a year!" Justine laughed, tilting her head back to
+catch a last glimpse of the tanager.</p>
+
+<p>The sun beamed full on their ledge from a sky of
+misty blue, and she had thrown aside her hat, uncovering
+her thick waves of hair, blue-black in the hollows,
+with warm rusty edges where they took the light. Cicely
+dragged down a plumy spray of traveller's joy and
+wound it above her friend's forehead; and thus
+wreathed, with her bright pallour relieved against the
+dusky autumn tints, Justine looked like a wood-spirit
+who had absorbed into herself the last golden juices
+of the year.</p>
+
+<p>She leaned back laughing against a tree-trunk, pelting
+Cicely with witch-hazel pods, making the terrier
+waltz for scraps of ginger-bread, and breaking off now
+and then to imitate, with her clear full notes, the call
+of some hidden marsh-bird, or the scolding chatter of
+a squirrel in the scrub-oaks.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that what you'd like most about the journey&mdash;looking
+down the chimneys?" Amherst asked with a
+smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know&mdash;I should love it all! Think of
+the joy of skimming over half the earth&mdash;seeing it born
+again out of darkness every morning! Sometimes,
+when I've been up all night with a patient, and have
+seen the world <i>come back to me</i> like that, I've been
+almost mad with its beauty; and then the thought that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[p 303]</a></span>
+I've never seen more than a little corner of it makes me
+feel as if I were chained. But I think if I had wings I
+should choose to be a house-swallow; and then, after
+I'd had my fill of wonders, I should come back to my
+familiar corner, and my house full of busy humdrum
+people, and fly low to warn them of rain, and wheel up
+high to show them it was good haying weather, and
+know what was going on in every room in the house,
+and every house in the village; and all the while I
+should be hugging my wonderful big secret&mdash;the secret
+of snow-plains and burning deserts, and coral islands
+and buried cities&mdash;and should put it all into my chatter
+under the eaves, that the people in the house were
+always too busy to stop and listen to&mdash;and when winter
+came I'm sure I should hate to leave them, even to go
+back to my great Brazilian forests full of orchids and
+monkeys!"</p>
+
+<p>"But, Justine, in winter you could take care of the
+monkeys," the practical Cicely suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;and that would remind me of home!" Justine
+cried, swinging about to pinch the little girl's chin.</p>
+
+<p>She was in one of the buoyant moods when the spirit
+of life caught her in its grip, and shook and tossed her
+on its mighty waves as a sea-bird is tossed through the
+spray of flying rollers. At such moments all the light
+and music of the world seemed distilled into her veins,
+and forced up in bubbles of laughter to her lips and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[p 304]</a></span>
+eyes. Amherst had never seen her thus, and he watched
+her with the sense of relaxation which the contact of
+limpid gaiety brings to a mind obscured by failure and
+self-distrust. The world was not so dark a place after
+all, if such springs of merriment could well up in a
+heart as sensitive as hers to the burden and toil of
+existence.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it strange," she went on with a sudden drop
+to gravity, "that the bird whose wings carry him
+farthest and show him the most wonderful things, is
+the one who always comes back to the eaves, and is
+happiest in the thick of everyday life?"</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes met Amherst's. "It seems to me," he
+said, "that you're like that yourself&mdash;loving long
+flights, yet happiest in the thick of life."</p>
+
+<p>She raised her dark brows laughingly. "So I imagine&mdash;but
+then you see I've never had the long
+flight!"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst smiled. "Ah, there it is&mdash;one never knows&mdash;one
+never says, <i>This is the moment</i>! because, however
+good it is, it always seems the door to a better one
+beyond. Faust never said it till the end, when he'd
+nothing left of all he began by thinking worth while;
+and then, with what a difference it was said!"</p>
+
+<p>She pondered. "Yes&mdash;but it <i>was</i> the best, after all&mdash;the
+moment in which he had nothing left...."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," Cicely broke in suddenly, "do look at the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[p 305]</a></span>
+squirrel up there! See, father&mdash;he's off! Let's follow
+him!"</p>
+
+<p>As she crouched there, with head thrown back, and
+sparkling lips and eyes, her fair hair&mdash;of her mother's
+very hue&mdash;making a shining haze about her face, Amherst
+recalled the winter evening at Hopewood, when
+he and Bessy had tracked the grey squirrel under the
+snowy beeches. Scarcely three years ago&mdash;and how
+bitter memory had turned! A chilly cloud spread
+over his spirit, reducing everything once more to the
+leaden hue of reality....</p>
+
+<p>"It's too late for any more adventures&mdash;we must be
+going," he said.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XX" id="XX"></a>XX</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Amherst's</span> morning excursions with his step-daughter
+and Miss Brent renewed themselves
+more than once. He welcomed any pretext for escaping
+from the unprofitable round of his thoughts, and
+these woodland explorations, with their gay rivalry of
+search for some rare plant or elusive bird, and the
+contact with the child's happy wonder, and with the
+morning brightness of Justine's mood, gave him his
+only moments of self-forgetfulness.</p>
+
+<p>But the first time that Cicely's chatter carried home
+an echo of their adventures, Amherst saw a cloud on
+his wife's face. Her resentment of Justine's influence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[p 306]</a></span>
+over the child had long since subsided, and in the
+temporary absence of the governess she was glad to
+have Cicely amused; but she was never quite satisfied
+that those about her should have pursuits and diversions
+in which she did not share. Her jealousy did
+not concentrate itself on her husband and Miss Brent:
+Amherst had never shown any inclination for the
+society of other women, and if the possibility had
+been suggested to her, she would probably have said
+that Justine was not "in his style"&mdash;so unconscious is
+a pretty woman apt to be of the versatility of masculine
+tastes. But Amherst saw that she felt herself excluded
+from amusements in which she had no desire to join,
+and of which she consequently failed to see the
+purpose; and he gave up accompanying his stepdaughter.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy, as if in acknowledgment of his renunciation,
+rose earlier in order to prolong their rides together.
+Dr. Wyant had counselled her against the fatigue of
+following the hounds, and she instinctively turned their
+horses away from the course the hunt was likely to
+take; but now and then the cry of the pack, or the
+flash of red on a distant slope, sent the blood to her
+face and made her press her mare to a gallop. When
+they escaped such encounters she showed no great zest
+in the exercise, and their rides resolved themselves into
+a spiritless middle-aged jog along the autumn lanes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[p 307]</a></span>
+In the early days of their marriage the joy of a canter
+side by side had merged them in a community of sensation
+beyond need of speech; but now that the physical
+spell had passed they felt the burden of a silence that
+neither knew how to break.</p>
+
+<p>Once only, a moment's friction galvanized these lifeless
+rides. It was one morning when Bessy's wild mare
+Impulse, under-exercised and over-fed, suddenly broke
+from her control, and would have unseated her but for
+Amherst's grasp on the bridle.</p>
+
+<p>"The horse is not fit for you to ride," he exclaimed,
+as the hot creature, with shudders of defiance rippling
+her flanks, lapsed into sullen subjection.</p>
+
+<p>"It's only because I don't ride her enough," Bessy
+panted. "That new groom is ruining her mouth."</p>
+
+<p>"You must not ride her alone, then."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall not let that man ride her."</p>
+
+<p>"I say you must not ride her alone."</p>
+
+<p>"It's ridiculous to have a groom at one's heels!"</p>
+
+<p>"Nevertheless you must, if you ride Impulse."</p>
+
+<p>Their eyes met, and she quivered and yielded like the
+horse. "Oh, if you say so&mdash;" She always hugged his
+brief flashes of authority.</p>
+
+<p>"I do say so. You promise me?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you like&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Amherst had made an attempt to occupy himself with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[p 308]</a></span>
+the condition of Lynbrook, one of those slovenly villages,
+without individual character or the tradition of
+self-respect, which spring up in America on the skirts
+of the rich summer colonies. But Bessy had never
+given Lynbrook a thought, and he realized the futility
+of hoping to interest her in its mongrel population of
+day-labourers and publicans so soon after his glaring
+failure at Westmore. The sight of the village irritated
+him whenever he passed through the Lynbrook gates,
+but having perforce accepted the situation of prince
+consort, without voice in the government, he tried to
+put himself out of relation with all the questions which
+had hitherto engrossed him, and to see life simply as a
+spectator. He could even conceive that, under certain
+conditions, there might be compensations in the passive
+attitude; but unfortunately these conditions were not
+such as the life at Lynbrook presented.</p>
+
+<p>The temporary cessation of Bessy's week-end parties
+had naturally not closed her doors to occasional visitors,
+and glimpses of the autumnal animation of Long Island
+passed now and then across the Amhersts' horizon.
+Blanche Carbury had installed herself at Mapleside, a
+fashionable colony half-way between Lynbrook and
+Clifton, and even Amherst, unused as he was to noting
+the seemingly inconsecutive movements of idle people,
+could not but remark that her visits to his wife almost
+invariably coincided with Ned Bowfort's cantering over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[p 309]</a></span>
+unannounced from the Hunt Club, where he had taken
+up his autumn quarters.</p>
+
+<p>There was something very likeable about Bowfort, to
+whom Amherst was attracted by the fact that he was
+one of the few men of Bessy's circle who knew what
+was going on in the outer world. Throughout an existence
+which one divined to have been both dependent
+and desultory, he had preserved a sense of wider relations
+and acquired a smattering of information to which
+he applied his only independent faculty, that of clear
+thought. He could talk intelligently and not too inaccurately
+of the larger questions which Lynbrook
+ignored, and a gay indifference to the importance of
+money seemed the crowning grace of his nature, till
+Amherst suddenly learned that this attitude of detachment
+was generally ascribed to the liberality of Mrs.
+Fenton Carbury. "Everybody knows she married Fenton
+to provide for Ned," some one let fall in the course
+of one of the smoking-room dissertations on which the
+host of Lynbrook had such difficulty in fixing his attention;
+and the speaker's matter-of-course tone, and the
+careless acquiescence of his hearers, were more offensive
+to Amherst than the fact itself. In the first flush
+of his disgust he classed the story as one of the lies bred
+in the malarious air of after-dinner gossip; but gradually
+he saw that, whether true or not, it had sufficient
+circulation to cast a shade of ambiguity on the persons<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[p 310]</a></span>
+concerned. Bessy alone seemed deaf to the rumours
+about her friend. There was something captivating
+to her in Mrs. Carbury's slang and noise, in her defiance
+of decorum and contempt of criticism. "I like
+Blanche because she doesn't pretend," was Bessy's
+vague justification of the lady; but in reality she was
+under the mysterious spell which such natures cast
+over the less venturesome imaginations of their own
+sex.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst at first tried to deaden himself to the situation,
+as part of the larger coil of miseries in which he
+found himself; but all his traditions were against such
+tolerance, and they were roused to revolt by the receipt
+of a newspaper clipping, sent by an anonymous hand,
+enlarging on the fact that the clandestine meetings of a
+fashionable couple were being facilitated by the connivance
+of a Long Island <i>ch&acirc;telaine</i>. Amherst, hot
+from the perusal of this paragraph, sprang into the
+first train, and laid the clipping before his father-in-law,
+who chanced to be passing through town on his
+way from the Hudson to the Hot Springs.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope, ensconced in the cushioned privacy
+of the reading-room at the Amsterdam Club, where he
+had invited his son-in-law to meet him, perused the
+article with the cool eye of the collector to whom a new
+curiosity is offered.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose," he mused, "that in the time of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[p 311]</a></span>
+Pharaohs the Morning Papyrus used to serve up this
+kind of thing"&mdash;and then, as the nervous tension of his
+hearer expressed itself in an abrupt movement, he added,
+handing back the clipping with a smile: "What do you propose
+to do? Kill the editor, and forbid Blanche
+and Bowfort the house?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean to do something," Amherst began, suddenly
+chilled by the realization that his wrath had not yet
+shaped itself into a definite plan of action.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it must be that or nothing," said Mr. Langhope,
+drawing his stick meditatively across his knee.
+"And, of course, if it's <i>that</i>, you'll land Bessy in a devil
+of a mess."</p>
+
+<p>Without giving his son-in-law time to protest, he
+touched rapidly but vividly on the inutility and embarrassment
+of libel suits, and on the devices whereby the
+legal means of vindication from such attacks may be
+turned against those who have recourse to them; and
+Amherst listened with a sickened sense of the incompatibility
+between abstract standards of honour and
+their practical application.</p>
+
+<p>"What should you do, then?" he murmured, as Mr.
+Langhope ended with his light shrug and a "See Tredegar,
+if you don't believe me"&mdash;; and his father-in-law
+replied with an evasive gesture: "Why, leave the responsibility
+where it belongs!"</p>
+
+<p>"Where it belongs?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[p 312]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"To Fenton Carbury, of course. Luckily it's nobody's
+business but his, and if he doesn't mind what is
+said about his wife I don't see how you can take up
+the cudgels for her without casting another shade on
+her somewhat chequered reputation."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst stared. "His wife? What do I care what's
+said of her? I'm thinking of mine!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if Carbury has no objection to his wife's meeting
+Bowfort, I don't see how you can object to her
+meeting him at your house. In such matters, as you
+know, it has mercifully been decided that the husband's
+attitude shall determine other people's; otherwise we
+should be deprived of the legitimate pleasure of slandering
+our neighbours." Mr. Langhope was always careful
+to temper his explanations with an "as you know":
+he would have thought it ill-bred to omit this parenthesis
+in elucidating the social code to his son-in-law.</p>
+
+<p>"Then you mean that I can do nothing?" Amherst
+exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope smiled. "What applies to Carbury
+applies to you&mdash;by doing nothing you establish the fact
+that there's nothing to do; just as you create the difficulty
+by recognizing it." And he added, as Amherst
+sat silent: "Take Bessy away, and they'll have to see
+each other elsewhere."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Amherst returned to Lynbrook with the echoes of this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[p 313]</a></span>
+casuistry in his brain. It seemed to him but a part of
+the ingenious system of evasion whereby a society bent
+on the undisturbed pursuit of amusement had contrived
+to protect itself from the intrusion of the disagreeable:
+a policy summed up in Mr. Langhope's concluding
+advice that Amherst should take his wife away.
+Yes&mdash;that was wealth's contemptuous answer to every
+challenge of responsibility: duty, sorrow and disgrace
+were equally to be evaded by a change of residence, and
+nothing in life need be faced and fought out while one
+could pay for a passage to Europe!</p>
+
+<p>In a calmer mood Amherst's sense of humour would
+have preserved him from such a view of his father-in-law's
+advice; but just then it fell like a spark on his
+smouldering prejudices. He was clear-sighted enough
+to recognize the obstacles to legal retaliation; but this
+only made him the more resolved to assert his will in
+his own house. He no longer paused to consider the
+possible effect of such a course on his already strained
+relations with his wife: the man's will rose in him and
+spoke.</p>
+
+<p>The scene between Bessy and himself was short and
+sharp; and it ended in a way that left him more than
+ever perplexed at the ways of her sex. Impatient of
+preamble, he had opened the attack with his ultimatum:
+the suspected couple were to be denied the house.
+Bessy flamed into immediate defence of her friend;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[p 314]</a></span>
+but to Amherst's surprise she no longer sounded the
+note of her own rights. Husband and wife were animated
+by emotions deeper-seated and more instinctive
+than had ever before confronted them; yet while Amherst's
+resistance was gathering strength from the conflict,
+Bessy unexpectedly collapsed in tears and submission.
+She would do as he wished, of course&mdash;give up
+seeing Blanche, dismiss Bowfort, wash her hands, in
+short, of the imprudent pair&mdash;in such matters a woman
+needed a man's guidance, a wife must of necessity see
+with her husband's eyes; and she looked up into his
+through a mist of penitence and admiration....</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXI" id="XXI"></a>XXI</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the first reaction from her brief delusion about
+Stephen Wyant, Justine accepted with a good
+grace the necessity of staying on at Lynbrook. Though
+she was now well enough to return to her regular work,
+her talk with Amherst had made her feel that, for the
+present, she could be of more use by remaining with
+Bessy; and she was not sorry to have a farther period
+of delay and reflection before taking the next step in
+her life. These at least were the reasons she gave herself
+for deciding not to leave; and if any less ostensible
+lurked beneath, they were not as yet visible even to her
+searching self-scrutiny.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[p 315]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At first she was embarrassed by the obligation of
+meeting Dr. Wyant, on whom her definite refusal had
+produced an effect for which she could not hold herself
+blameless. She had not kept her promise of seeing him
+on the day after their encounter at the post-office, but
+had written, instead, in terms which obviously made
+such a meeting unnecessary. But all her efforts to
+soften the abruptness of her answer could not conceal,
+from either herself or her suitor, that it was not the one
+she had led him to expect; and she foresaw that if she
+remained at Lynbrook she could not escape a scene of
+recrimination.</p>
+
+<p>When the scene took place, Wyant's part in it went
+far toward justifying her decision; yet his vehement
+reproaches contained a sufficient core of truth to humble
+her pride. It was lucky for her somewhat exaggerated
+sense of fairness that he overshot the mark by
+charging her with a coquetry of which she knew herself
+innocent, and laying on her the responsibility for
+any follies to which her rejection might drive him.
+Such threats, as a rule, no longer move the feminine
+imagination; yet Justine's pity for all forms of weakness
+made her recognize, in the very heat of her contempt
+for Wyant, that his reproaches were not the mere
+cry of wounded vanity but the appeal of a nature conscious
+of its lack of recuperative power. It seemed to
+her as though she had done him irreparable harm,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[p 316]</a></span>
+and the feeling might have betrayed her into too great
+a show of compassion had she not been restrained by
+a salutary fear of the result.</p>
+
+<p>The state of Bessy's nerves necessitated frequent
+visits from her physician, but Justine, on these occasions,
+could usually shelter herself behind the professional
+reserve which kept even Wyant from any open
+expression of feeling. One day, however, they chanced
+to find themselves alone before Bessy's return from her
+ride. The servant had ushered Wyant into the library
+where Justine was writing, and when she had replied
+to his enquiries about his patient they found themselves
+face to face with an awkward period of waiting. Justine
+was too proud to cut it short by leaving the room;
+but Wyant answered her commonplaces at random,
+stirring uneasily to and fro between window and fireside,
+and at length halting behind the table at which
+she sat.</p>
+
+<p>"May I ask how much longer you mean to stay
+here?" he said in a low voice, his eyes darkening under
+the sullen jut of the brows.</p>
+
+<p>As she glanced up in surprise she noticed for the first
+time an odd contraction of his pupils, and the discovery,
+familiar enough in her professional experience, made
+her disregard the abruptness of his question and softened
+the tone in which she answered. "I hardly know&mdash;I
+suppose as long as I am needed."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[p 317]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Wyant laughed. "Needed by whom? By John
+Amherst?"</p>
+
+<p>A moment passed before Justine took in the full
+significance of the retort; then the blood rushed to her
+face. "Yes&mdash;I believe both Mr. and Mrs. Amherst
+need me," she answered, keeping her eyes on his; and
+Wyant laughed again.</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't think so till Amherst came back from
+Hanaford. His return seems to have changed your
+plans in several respects."</p>
+
+<p>She looked away from him, for even now his
+eyes moved her to pity and self-reproach. "Dr.
+Wyant, you are not well; why do you wait to see
+Mrs. Amherst?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>He stared at her and then his glance fell. "I'm much
+obliged&mdash;I'm as well as usual," he muttered, pushing
+the hair from his forehead with a shaking hand; and
+at that moment the sound of Bessy's voice gave Justine
+a pretext for escape.</p>
+
+<p>In her own room she sank for a moment under a
+rush of self-disgust; but it soon receded before the
+saner forces of her nature, leaving only a residue of
+pity for the poor creature whose secret she had surprised.
+She had never before suspected Wyant of
+taking a drug, nor did she now suppose that he did
+so habitually; but to see him even momentarily under
+such an influence explained her instinctive sense of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[p 318]</a></span>
+weakness. She felt now that what would have been an
+insult on other lips was only a cry of distress from his;
+and once more she blamed herself and forgave him.</p>
+
+<p>But if she had been inclined to any morbidness of
+self-reproach she would have been saved from it by
+other cares. For the moment she was more concerned
+with Bessy's fate than with her own&mdash;her poor friend
+seemed to have so much more at stake, and so much
+less strength to bring to the defence of her happiness.
+Justine was always saved from any excess of self-compassion
+by the sense, within herself, of abounding
+forces of growth and self-renewal, as though from every
+lopped aspiration a fresh shoot of energy must spring;
+but she felt that Bessy had no such sources of renovation,
+and that every disappointment left an arid spot
+in her soul.</p>
+
+<p>Even without her friend's confidences, Justine would
+have had no difficulty in following the successive
+stages of the Amhersts' inner history. She knew that
+Amherst had virtually resigned his rule at Westmore,
+and that his wife, in return for the sacrifice, was trying
+to conform to the way of life she thought he preferred;
+and the futility of both attempts was more visible to
+Justine than to either of the two concerned. She saw
+that the failure of the Amhersts' marriage lay not in
+any accident of outward circumstances but in the lack
+of all natural points of contact. As she put it to her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[p 319]</a></span>self,
+they met neither underfoot nor overhead: practical
+necessities united them no more than imaginative
+joys.</p>
+
+<p>There were moments when Justine thought Amherst
+hard to Bessy, as she suspected that he had once been
+hard to his mother&mdash;as the leader of men must perhaps
+always be hard to the hampering sex. Yet she
+did justice to his efforts to accept the irretrievable,
+and to waken in his wife some capacity for sharing in
+his minor interests, since she had none of her own
+with which to fill their days.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst had always been a reader; not, like Justine
+herself, a flame-like devourer of the page, but a slow
+absorber of its essence; and in the early days of his
+marriage he had fancied it would be easy to make
+Bessy share this taste. Though his mother was not a
+bookish woman, he had breathed at her side an air rich
+in allusion and filled with the bright presences of romance;
+and he had always regarded this commerce of
+the imagination as one of the normal conditions of life.
+The discovery that there were no books at Lynbrook
+save a few morocco "sets" imprisoned behind the brass
+trellisings of the library had been one of the many surprises
+of his new state. But in his first months with
+Bessy there was no room for books, and if he thought
+of the matter it was only in a glancing vision of future
+evenings, when he and she, in the calm afterglow of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[p 320]</a></span>
+happiness, should lean together over some cherished
+page. Her lack of response to any reference outside
+the small circle of daily facts had long since dispelled
+that vision; but now that his own mind felt the need
+of inner sustenance he began to ask himself whether he
+might not have done more to rouse her imagination.
+During the long evenings over the library fire he tried
+to lead the talk to books, with a parenthesis, now and
+again, from the page beneath his eye; and Bessy met
+the experiment with conciliatory eagerness. She showed,
+in especial, a hopeful but misleading preference for
+poetry, leaning back with dreaming lids and lovely
+parted lips while he rolled out the immortal measures;
+but her outward signs of attention never ripened into
+any expression of opinion, or any after-allusion to what
+she heard, and before long he discovered that Justine
+Brent was his only listener. It was to her that the
+words he read began to be unconsciously addressed;
+her comments directed him in his choice of subjects,
+and the ensuing discussions restored him to some
+semblance of mental activity.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy, true to her new r&ocirc;le of acquiescence, shone
+silently on this interchange of ideas; Amherst even detected
+in her a vague admiration for his power of conversing
+on subjects which she regarded as abstruse;
+and this childlike approval, combined with her submission
+to his will, deluded him with a sense of recovered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[p 321]</a></span>
+power over her. He could not but note that the new
+phase in their relations had coincided with his first
+assertion of mastery; and he rashly concluded that,
+with the removal of the influences tending to separate
+them, his wife might gradually be won back to her
+earlier sympathy with his views.</p>
+
+<p>To accept this theory was to apply it; for nothing
+could long divert Amherst from his main purpose, and
+all the thwarted strength of his will was only gathering
+to itself fresh stores of energy. He had never been a
+skilful lover, for no woman had as yet stirred in him
+those feelings which call the finer perceptions into
+play; and there was no instinct to tell him that Bessy's
+sudden conformity to his wishes was as unreasoning as
+her surrender to his first kiss. He fancied that he and
+she were at length reaching some semblance of that
+moral harmony which should grow out of the physical
+accord, and that, poor and incomplete as the understanding
+was, it must lift and strengthen their relation.</p>
+
+<p>He waited till early winter had brought solitude
+to Lynbrook, dispersing the hunting colony to various
+points of the compass, and sending Mr. Langhope to
+Egypt and the Riviera, while Mrs. Ansell, as usual,
+took up her annual tour of a social circuit whose extreme
+points were marked by Boston and Baltimore&mdash;and
+then he made his final appeal to his wife.</p>
+
+<p>His pretext for speaking was a letter from Duplain,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[p 322]</a></span>
+definitely announcing his resolve not to remain at Westmore.
+A year earlier Amherst, deeply moved by the
+letter, would have given it to his wife in the hope of
+its producing the same effect on her. He knew better
+now&mdash;he had learned her instinct for detecting "business"
+under every serious call on her attention. His
+only hope, as always, was to reach her through the
+personal appeal; and he put before her the fact of
+Duplain's withdrawal as the open victory of his antagonists.
+But he saw at once that even this could
+not infuse new life into the question.</p>
+
+<p>"If I go back he'll stay&mdash;I can hold him, can gain
+time till things take a turn," he urged.</p>
+
+<p>"Another? I thought they were definitely settled,"
+she objected languidly.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;they're not; they can't be, on such a basis,"
+Amherst broke out with sudden emphasis. He walked
+across the room, and came back to her side with a determined
+face. "It's a delusion, a deception," he exclaimed,
+"to think I can stand by any longer and see
+things going to ruin at Westmore! If I've made you
+think so, I've unconsciously deceived us both. As long
+as you're my wife we've only one honour between us,
+and that honour is mine to take care of."</p>
+
+<p>"Honour? What an odd expression!" she said with
+a forced laugh, and a little tinge of pink in her cheek.
+"You speak as if I had&mdash;had made myself talked about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[p 323]</a></span>
+&mdash;when you know I've never even looked at another
+man!"</p>
+
+<p>"Another man?" Amherst looked at her in wonder.
+"Good God! Can't you conceive of any vow to be
+kept between husband and wife but the primitive one
+of bodily fidelity? Heaven knows I've never looked at
+another woman&mdash;but, by my reading of our compact, I
+shouldn't be keeping faith with you if I didn't help you
+to keep faith with better things. And you owe me the
+same help&mdash;the same chance to rise through you, and
+not sink by you&mdash;else we've betrayed each other more
+deeply than any adultery could make us!"</p>
+
+<p>She had drawn back, turning pale again, and shrinking
+a little at the sound of words which, except when
+heard in church, she vaguely associated with oaths,
+slammed doors, and other evidences of ill-breeding; but
+Amherst had been swept too far on the flood of his indignation
+to be checked by such small signs of disapproval.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll say that what I'm asking you is to give me
+back the free use of your money. Well! Why not?
+Is it so much for a wife to give? I know you all think
+that a man who marries a rich woman forfeits his self-respect
+if he spends a penny without her approval. But
+that's because money is so sacred to you all! It seems
+to me the least important thing that a woman entrusts
+to her husband. What of her dreams and her hopes,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[p 324]</a></span>
+her belief in justice and goodness and decency? If he
+takes those and destroys them, he'd better have had a
+mill-stone about his neck. But nobody has a word to
+say till he touches her dividends&mdash;then he's a calculating
+brute who has married her for her fortune!"</p>
+
+<p>He had come close again, facing her with outstretched
+hands, half-commanding, half in appeal. "Don't you
+see that I can't go on in this way&mdash;that I've <i>no right</i> to
+let you keep me from Westmore?"</p>
+
+<p>Bessy was looking at him coldly, under the half-dropped
+lids of indifference. "I hardly know what you
+mean&mdash;you use such peculiar words; but I don't see
+why you should expect me to give up all the ideas I was
+brought up in. Our standards <i>are</i> different&mdash;but why
+should yours always be right?"</p>
+
+<p>"You believed they were right when you married me&mdash;have
+they changed since then?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; but&mdash;&mdash;" Her face seemed to harden and
+contract into a small expressionless mask, in which he
+could no longer read anything but blank opposition to
+his will.</p>
+
+<p>"You trusted my judgment not long ago," he went
+on, "when I asked you to give up seeing Mrs. Carbury&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She flushed, but with anger, not compunction. "It
+seems to me that should be a reason for your not asking
+me to make other sacrifices! When I gave up Blanche<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[p 325]</a></span>
+I thought you would see that I wanted to please you&mdash;and
+that you would do something for me in return...."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst interrupted her with a laugh. "Thank you
+for telling me your real reasons. I was fool enough to
+think you acted from conviction&mdash;not that you were
+simply striking a bargain&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He broke off, and they looked at each other with a
+kind of fear, each hearing between them the echo of
+irreparable words. Amherst's only clear feeling was
+that he must not speak again till he had beaten down
+the horrible sensation in his breast&mdash;the rage of hate
+which had him in its grip, and which made him almost
+afraid, while it lasted, to let his eyes rest on the fair
+weak creature before him. Bessy, too, was in the
+clutch of a mute anger which slowly poured its benumbing
+current around her heart. Strong waves of
+passion did not quicken her vitality: she grew inert and
+cold under their shock. Only one little pulse of self-pity
+continued to beat in her, trembling out at last on
+the cry: "Ah, I know it's not because you care so much
+for Westmore&mdash;it's only because you want to get away
+from me!"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst stared as if her words had flashed a light
+into the darkest windings of his misery. "Yes&mdash;I
+want to get away..." he said; and he turned and
+walked out of the room.</p>
+
+<p>He went down to the smoking-room, and ringing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[p 326]</a></span>
+for a servant, ordered his horse to be saddled. The
+foot-man who answered his summons brought the
+afternoon's mail, and Amherst, throwing himself down
+on the sofa, began to tear open his letters while he
+waited.</p>
+
+<p>He ran through the first few without knowing what
+he read; but presently his attention was arrested by the
+hand-writing of a man he had known well in college,
+and who had lately come into possession of a large
+cotton-mill in the South. He wrote now to ask if
+Amherst could recommend a good manager&mdash;"not
+one of your old routine men, but a young fellow with
+the new ideas. Things have been in pretty bad shape
+down here," the writer added, "and now that I'm in
+possession I want to see what can be done to civilize
+the place"; and he went on to urge that Amherst
+should come down himself to inspect the mills, and
+propose such improvements as his experience suggested.
+"We've all heard of the great things you're doing at
+Westmore," the letter ended; and Amherst cast it
+from him with a groan....</p>
+
+<p>It was Duplain's chance, of course...that was
+his first thought. He took up the letter and read it
+over. He knew the man who wrote&mdash;no sentimentalist
+seeking emotional variety from vague philanthropic
+experiments, but a serious student of social conditions,
+now unexpectedly provided with the opportunity to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[p 327]</a></span>
+apply his ideas. Yes, it was Duplain's chance&mdash;if
+indeed it might not be his own!... Amherst sat
+upright, dazzled by the thought. Why Duplain&mdash;why
+not himself? Bessy had spoken the illuminating word&mdash;what
+he wanted was to get away&mdash;to get away at
+any cost! Escape had become his one thought: escape
+from the bondage of Lynbrook, from the bitter
+memory of his failure at Westmore; and here was the
+chance to escape back into life&mdash;into independence,
+activity and usefulness! Every atrophied faculty in
+him suddenly started from its torpor, and his brain
+throbbed with the pain of the awakening.... The
+servant came to tell him that his horse waited, and he
+sprang up, took his riding-whip from the rack, stared a
+moment, absently, after the man's retreating back, and
+then dropped down again on the sofa....</p>
+
+<p>What was there to keep him from accepting? His
+wife's affection was dead&mdash;if her sentimental fancy for
+him had ever deserved the name! And his passing
+mastery over her was gone too&mdash;he smiled to remember
+that, hardly two hours earlier, he had been fatuous
+enough to think he could still regain it! Now he said
+to himself that she would sooner desert a friend to
+please him than sacrifice a fraction of her income; and
+the discovery cast a stain of sordidness on their whole
+relation. He could still imagine struggling to win her
+back from another man, or even to save her from some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[p 328]</a></span>
+folly into which mistaken judgment or perverted enthusiasm
+might have hurried her; but to go on battling
+against the dull unimaginative subservience to personal
+luxury&mdash;the slavery to houses and servants and clothes&mdash;ah,
+no, while he had any fight left in him it was worth
+spending in a better cause than that!</p>
+
+<p>Through the open window he could hear, in the mild
+December stillness, his horse's feet coming and going
+on the gravel. <i>Her</i> horse, led up and down by <i>her</i>
+servant, at the door of <i>her</i> house!... The sound symbolized
+his whole future...the situation his marriage
+had made for him, and to which he must henceforth
+bend, unless he broke with it then and there.... He
+tried to look ahead, to follow up, one by one, the consequences
+of such a break. That it would be final he
+had no doubt. There are natures which seem to be
+drawn closer by dissension, to depend, for the renewal
+of understanding, on the spark of generosity and compunction
+that anger strikes out of both; but Amherst
+knew that between himself and his wife no such clearing
+of the moral atmosphere was possible. The indignation
+which left him with tingling nerves and a
+burning need of some immediate escape into action,
+crystallized in Bessy into a hard kernel of obstinacy,
+into which, after each fresh collision, he felt that a
+little more of herself had been absorbed.... No, the
+break between them would be final&mdash;if he went now<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[p 329]</a></span>
+he would not come back. And it flashed across him
+that this solution might have been foreseen by his wife&mdash;might
+even have been deliberately planned and led
+up to by those about her. His father-in-law had never
+liked him&mdash;the disturbing waves of his activity had
+rippled even the sheltered surface of Mr. Langhope's
+existence. He must have been horribly in their way!
+Well&mdash;it was not too late to take himself out of it. In
+Bessy's circle the severing of such ties was regarded as
+an expensive but unhazardous piece of surgery&mdash;nobody
+bled to death of the wound.... The footman came
+back to remind him that his horse was waiting, and
+Amherst rose to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Send him back to the stable," he said with a glance
+at his watch, "and order a trap to take me to the next
+train."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXII" id="XXII"></a>XXII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">When</span> Amherst woke, the next morning, in the
+hotel to which he had gone up from Lynbrook, he
+was oppressed by the sense that the hardest step he had
+to take still lay before him. It had been almost easy
+to decide that the moment of separation had come, for
+circumstances seemed to have closed every other issue
+from his unhappy situation; but how tell his wife of
+his decision? Amherst, to whom action was the first
+necessity of being, became a weak procrastinator when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[p 330]</a></span>
+he was confronted by the need of writing instead of
+speaking.</p>
+
+<p>To account for his abrupt departure from Lynbrook
+he had left word that he was called to town on business;
+but, since he did not mean to return, some farther explanation
+was now necessary, and he was paralyzed by
+the difficulty of writing. He had already telegraphed
+to his friend that he would be at the mills the next day;
+but the southern express did not leave till the afternoon,
+and he still had several hours in which to consider what
+he should say to his wife. To postpone the dreaded
+task, he invented the pretext of some business to be
+despatched, and taking the Subway to Wall Street consumed
+the morning in futile activities. But since the
+renunciation of his work at Westmore he had no active
+concern with the financial world, and by twelve o'clock
+he had exhausted his imaginary affairs and was journeying
+up town again. He left the train at Union Square, and
+walked along Fourth Avenue, now definitely resolved to
+go back to the hotel and write his letter before lunching.</p>
+
+<p>At Twenty-sixth Street he had struck into Madison
+Avenue, and was striding onward with the fixed eye and
+aimless haste of the man who has empty hours to fill,
+when a hansom drew up ahead of him and Justine
+Brent sprang out. She was trimly dressed, as if for
+travel, with a small bag in her hand; but at sight of
+him she paused with a cry of pleasure.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[p 331]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mr. Amherst, I'm so glad! I was afraid I
+might not see you for goodbye."</p>
+
+<p>"For goodbye?" Amherst paused, embarrassed.
+How had she guessed that he did not mean to return
+to Lynbrook?</p>
+
+<p>"You know," she reminded him, "I'm going to some
+friends near Philadelphia for ten days"&mdash;and he remembered
+confusedly that a long time ago&mdash;probably
+yesterday morning&mdash;he had heard her speak of her
+projected visit.</p>
+
+<p>"I had no idea," she continued, "that you were
+coming up to town yesterday, or I should have tried
+to see you before you left. I wanted to ask you to
+send me a line if Bessy needs me&mdash;I'll come back at
+once if she does." Amherst continued to listen blankly,
+as if making a painful effort to regain some consciousness
+of what was being said to him, and she went on:
+"She seemed so nervous and poorly yesterday evening
+that I was sorry I had decided to go&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Her intent gaze reminded him that the emotions of
+the last twenty-four hours must still be visible in his
+face; and the thought of what she might detect helped
+to restore his self-possession. "You must not think of
+giving up your visit," he began hurriedly&mdash;he had
+meant to add "on account of Bessy," but he found
+himself unable to utter his wife's name.</p>
+
+<p>Justine was still looking at him. "Oh, I'm sure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[p 332]</a></span>
+everything will be all right," she rejoined. "You go
+back this afternoon, I suppose? I've left you a little
+note, with my address, and I want you to promise&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She paused, for Amherst had made a motion as
+though to interrupt her. The old confused sense that
+there must always be truth between them was struggling
+in him with the strong restraints of habit and
+character; and suddenly, before he was conscious of
+having decided to speak, he heard himself say: "I
+ought to tell you that I am not going back."</p>
+
+<p>"Not going back?" A flash of apprehension crossed
+Justine's face. "Not till tomorrow, you mean?" she
+added, recovering herself.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst hesitated, glancing vaguely up and down
+the street. At that noonday hour it was nearly deserted,
+and Justine's driver dozed on his perch above
+the hansom. They could speak almost as openly as
+if they had been in one of the wood-paths at Lynbrook.</p>
+
+<p>"Nor tomorrow," Amherst said in a low voice. There
+was another pause before he added: "It may be some
+time before&mdash;" He broke off, and then continued with
+an effort: "The fact is, I am thinking of going back to
+my old work."</p>
+
+<p>She caught him up with an exclamation of surprise
+and sympathy. "Your old work? You mean at&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She was checked by the quick contraction of pain in
+his face. "Not that! I mean that I'm thinking of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[p 333]</a></span>
+taking a new job&mdash;as manager of a Georgia mill....
+It's the only thing I know how to do, and I've got to do
+something&mdash;" He forced a laugh. "The habit of
+work is incurable!"</p>
+
+<p>Justine's face had grown as grave as his. She hesitated
+a moment, looking down the street toward the
+angle of Madison Square, which was visible from the
+corner where they stood.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you walk back to the square with me? Then
+we can sit down a moment."</p>
+
+<p>She began to move as she spoke, and he walked beside
+her in silence till they had gained the seat she pointed
+out. Her hansom trailed after them, drawing up at the
+corner.</p>
+
+<p>As Amherst sat down beside her, Justine turned to
+him with an air of quiet resolution. "Mr. Amherst&mdash;will
+you let me ask you something? Is this a sudden
+decision?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I decided yesterday."</p>
+
+<p>"And Bessy&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>His glance dropped for the first time, but Justine
+pressed her point. "Bessy approves?"</p>
+
+<p>"She&mdash;she will, I think&mdash;when she knows&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"When she knows?" Her emotion sprang into her
+face. "When she knows? Then she does not&mdash;yet?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. The offer came suddenly. I must go at
+once."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[p 334]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Without seeing her?" She cut him short with a
+quick commanding gesture. "Mr. Amherst, you can't
+do this&mdash;you won't do it! You will not go away without
+seeing Bessy!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes sought his and drew them upward, constraining
+them to meet the full beam of her rebuking
+gaze.</p>
+
+<p>"I must do what seems best under the circumstances,"
+he answered hesitatingly. "She will hear from me, of
+course; I shall write today&mdash;and later&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Not later! <i>Now</i>&mdash;you will go back now to Lynbrook!
+Such things can't be told in writing&mdash;if they
+must be said at all, they must be spoken. Don't tell
+me that I don't understand&mdash;or that I'm meddling in
+what doesn't concern me. I don't care a fig for that!
+I've always meddled in what didn't concern me&mdash;I
+always shall, I suppose, till I die! And I understand
+enough to know that Bessy is very unhappy&mdash;and that
+you're the wiser and stronger of the two. I know what
+it's been to you to give up your work&mdash;to feel yourself
+useless," she interrupted herself, with softening eyes,
+"and I know how you've tried...I've watched you...but
+Bessy has tried too; and even if you've both failed&mdash;if
+you've come to the end of your resources&mdash;it's
+for you to face the fact, and help her face it&mdash;not to
+run away from it like this!"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst sat silent under the assault of her eloquence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[p 335]</a></span>
+He was conscious of no instinctive resentment, no
+sense that she was, as she confessed, meddling in
+matters which did not concern her. His ebbing spirit
+was revived by the shock of an ardour like his own.
+She had not shrunk from calling him a coward&mdash;and
+it did him good to hear her call him so! Her words
+put life back into its true perspective, restored their
+meaning to obsolete terms: to truth and manliness
+and courage. He had lived so long among equivocations
+that he had forgotten how to look a fact in the
+face; but here was a woman who judged life by his
+own standards&mdash;and by those standards she had found
+him wanting!</p>
+
+<p>Still, he could not forget the last bitter hours, or
+change his opinion as to the futility of attempting to
+remain at Lynbrook. He felt as strongly as ever the
+need of moral and mental liberation&mdash;the right to begin
+life again on his own terms. But Justine Brent had
+made him see that his first step toward self-assertion
+had been the inconsistent one of trying to evade its
+results.</p>
+
+<p>"You are right&mdash;I will go back," he said.</p>
+
+<p>She thanked him with her eyes, as she had thanked
+him on the terrace at Lynbrook, on the autumn evening
+which had witnessed their first broken exchange of
+confidences; and he was struck once more with the
+change that feeling produced in her. Emotions flashed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[p 336]</a></span>
+across her face like the sweep of sun-rent clouds over
+a quiet landscape, bringing out the gleam of hidden
+waters, the fervour of smouldering colours, all the
+subtle delicacies of modelling that are lost under the
+light of an open sky. And it was extraordinary how
+she could infuse into a principle the warmth and
+colour of a passion! If conduct, to most people, seemed
+a cold matter of social prudence or inherited habit, to
+her it was always the newly-discovered question of her
+own relation to life&mdash;as most women see the great
+issues only through their own wants and prejudices, so
+she seemed always to see her personal desires in the
+light of the larger claims.</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't think," Amherst went on, "that anything
+can be said to convince me that I ought to alter
+my decision. These months of idleness have shown
+me that I'm one of the members of society who are a
+danger to the community if their noses are not kept to
+the grindstone&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Justine lowered her eyes musingly, and he saw she
+was undergoing the reaction of constraint which always
+followed on her bursts of unpremeditated frankness.</p>
+
+<p>"That is not for me to judge," she answered after a
+moment. "But if you decide to go away for a time&mdash;surely
+it ought to be in such a way that your going
+does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy, or
+subject her to any unkind criticism."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[p 337]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Amherst, reddening slightly, glanced at her in surprise.
+"I don't think you need fear that&mdash;I shall be
+the only one criticized," he said drily.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you sure&mdash;if you take such a position as you
+spoke of? So few people understand the love of hard
+work for its own sake. They will say that your quarrel
+with your wife has driven you to support yourself&mdash;and
+that will be cruel to Bessy."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst shrugged his shoulders. "They'll be more
+likely to say I tried to play the gentleman and failed,
+and wasn't happy till I got back to my own place in
+life&mdash;which is true enough," he added with a touch of
+irony.</p>
+
+<p>"They may say that too; but they will make Bessy
+suffer first&mdash;and it will be your fault if she is humiliated
+in that way. If you decide to take up your factory
+work for a time, can't you do so without&mdash;without accepting
+a salary? Oh, you see I stick at nothing," she
+broke in upon herself with a laugh, "and Bessy has
+said things which make me see that she would suffer
+horribly if&mdash;if you put such a slight on her." He remained
+silent, and she went on urgently: "From
+Bessy's standpoint it would mean a decisive break&mdash;the
+repudiating of your whole past. And it is a question
+on which you can afford to be generous, because I
+know...I think...it's less important in your eyes
+than hers...."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[p 338]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Amherst glanced at her quickly. "That particular
+form of indebtedness, you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled. "The easiest to cancel, and therefore
+the least galling; isn't that the way you regard it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I used to&mdash;yes; but&mdash;" He was about to add:
+"No one at Lynbrook does," but the flash of intelligence
+in her eyes restrained him, while at the same
+time it seemed to answer: "There's my point! To
+see their limitation is to allow for it, since every enlightenment
+brings a corresponding obligation."</p>
+
+<p>She made no attempt to put into words the argument
+her look conveyed, but rose from her seat with a rapid
+glance at her watch.</p>
+
+<p>"And now I must go, or I shall miss my train." She
+held out her hand, and as Amherst's met it, he said in
+a low tone, as if in reply to her unspoken appeal: "I
+shall remember all you have said."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It was a new experience for Amherst to be acting under
+the pressure of another will; but during his return
+journey to Lynbrook that afternoon it was pure relief
+to surrender himself to this pressure, and the surrender
+brought not a sense of weakness but of recovered energy.
+It was not in his nature to analyze his motives, or spend
+his strength in weighing closely balanced alternatives
+of conduct; and though, during the last purposeless
+months, he had grown to brood over every spring of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[p 339]</a></span>
+action in himself and others, this tendency disappeared
+at once in contact with the deed to be done. It was as
+though a tributary stream, gathering its crystal speed
+among the hills, had been suddenly poured into the
+stagnant waters of his will; and he saw now how thick
+and turbid those waters had become&mdash;how full of the
+slime-bred life that chokes the springs of courage.</p>
+
+<p>His whole desire now was to be generous to his wife:
+to bear the full brunt of whatever pain their parting
+brought. Justine had said that Bessy seemed nervous
+and unhappy: it was clear, therefore, that she also had
+suffered from the wounds they had dealt each other,
+though she kept her unmoved front to the last. Poor
+child! Perhaps that insensible exterior was the only
+way she knew of expressing courage! It seemed to
+Amherst that all means of manifesting the finer impulses
+must slowly wither in the Lynbrook air. As
+he approached his destination, his thoughts of her were
+all pitiful: nothing remained of the personal resentment
+which had debased their parting. He had telephoned
+from town to announce the hour of his return,
+and when he emerged from the station he half-expected
+to find her seated in the brougham whose lamps signalled
+him through the early dusk. It would be like
+her to undergo such a reaction of feeling, and to express
+it, not in words, but by taking up their relation as
+if there had been no break in it. He had once con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[p 340]</a></span>demned
+this facility of renewal as a sign of lightness,
+a result of that continual evasion of serious issues which
+made the life of Bessy's world a thin crust of custom
+above a void of thought. But he now saw that, if she
+was the product of her environment, that constituted
+but another claim on his charity, and made the more
+precious any impulses of natural feeling that had survived
+the unifying pressure of her life. As he approached
+the brougham, he murmured mentally: "What
+if I were to try once more?"</p>
+
+<p>Bessy had not come to meet him; but he said to himself
+that he should find her alone at the house, and that
+he would make his confession at once. As the carriage
+passed between the lights on the tall stone gate-posts,
+and rolled through the bare shrubberies of the avenue,
+he felt a momentary tightening of the heart&mdash;a sense
+of stepping back into the trap from which he had just
+wrenched himself free&mdash;a premonition of the way in
+which the smooth systematized routine of his wife's existence
+might draw him back into its revolutions as he
+had once seen a careless factory hand seized and dragged
+into a flying belt....</p>
+
+<p>But it was only for a moment; then his thoughts reverted
+to Bessy. It was she who was to be considered&mdash;this
+time he must be strong enough for both.</p>
+
+<p>The butler met him on the threshold, flanked by the
+usual array of footmen; and as he saw his portmanteau<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[p 341]</a></span>
+ceremoniously passed from hand to hand, Amherst
+once more felt the steel of the springe on his neck.</p>
+
+<p>"Is Mrs. Amherst in the drawing-room, Knowles?"
+he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir," said Knowles, who had too high a sense
+of fitness to volunteer any information beyond the
+immediate fact required of him.</p>
+
+<p>"She has gone up to her sitting-room, then?"
+Amherst continued, turning toward the broad sweep
+of the stairway.</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir," said the butler slowly; "Mrs. Amherst
+has gone away."</p>
+
+<p>"Gone away?" Amherst stopped short, staring
+blankly at the man's smooth official mask.</p>
+
+<p>"This afternoon, sir; to Mapleside."</p>
+
+<p>"To Mapleside?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir, by motor&mdash;to stay with Mrs. Carbury."</p>
+
+<p>There was a moment's silence. It had all happened
+so quickly that Amherst, with the dual vision which
+comes at such moments, noticed that the third footman&mdash;or
+was it the fourth?&mdash;was just passing his
+portmanteau on to a shirt-sleeved arm behind the door
+which led to the servant's wing....</p>
+
+<p>He roused himself to look at the tall clock. It
+was just six. He had telephoned from town at
+two.</p>
+
+<p>"At what time did Mrs. Amherst leave?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[p 342]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The butler meditated. "Sharp at four, sir. The
+maid took the three-forty with the luggage."</p>
+
+<p>With the luggage! So it was not a mere one-night
+visit. The blood rose slowly to Amherst's face. The
+footmen had disappeared, but presently the door at
+the back of the hall reopened, and one of them came
+out, carrying an elaborately-appointed tea-tray toward
+the smoking-room. The routine of the house was
+going on as if nothing had happened.... The butler
+looked at Amherst with respectful&mdash;too respectful&mdash;interrogation,
+and he was suddenly conscious that
+he was standing motionless in the middle of the hall,
+with one last intolerable question on his lips.</p>
+
+<p>Well&mdash;it had to be spoken! "Did Mrs. Amherst
+receive my telephone message?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir. I gave it to her myself."</p>
+
+<p>It occurred confusedly to Amherst that a well-bred
+man&mdash;as Lynbrook understood the phrase&mdash;would, at
+this point, have made some tardy feint of being in his
+wife's confidence, of having, on second thoughts, no
+reason to be surprised at her departure. It was humiliating,
+he supposed, to be thus laying bare his discomfiture
+to his dependents&mdash;he could see that even
+Knowles was affected by the manifest impropriety of
+the situation&mdash;but no pretext presented itself to his
+mind, and after another interval of silence he turned
+slowly toward the door of the smoking-room.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[p 343]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"My letters are here, I suppose?" he paused on the
+threshold to enquire; and on the butler's answering in
+the affirmative, he said to himself, with a last effort
+to suspend his judgment: "She has left a line&mdash;there
+will be some explanation&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But there was nothing&mdash;neither word nor message;
+nothing but the reverberating retort of her departure
+in the face of his return&mdash;her flight to Blanche Carbury
+as the final answer to his final appeal.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIII" id="XXIII"></a>XXIII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Justine</span> was coming back to Lynbrook.
+She had been, after all, unable to stay out the ten
+days of her visit: the undefinable sense of being needed,
+so often the determining motive of her actions, drew her
+back to Long Island at the end of the week. She had
+received no word from Amherst or Bessy; only Cicely
+had told her, in a big round hand, that mother had been
+away three days, and that it had been very lonely, and
+that the housekeeper's cat had kittens, and she was to
+have one; and were kittens christened, or how did
+they get their names?&mdash;because she wanted to call hers
+Justine; and she had found in her book a bird like the
+one father had shown them in the swamp; and they
+were not alone now, because the Telfers were there,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[p 344]</a></span>
+and they had all been out sleighing; but it would be
+much nicer when Justine came back....</p>
+
+<p>It was as difficult to extract any sequence of facts
+from Cicely's letter as from an early chronicle. She
+made no reference to Amherst's return, which was odd,
+since she was fond of her step-father, yet not significant,
+since the fact of his arrival might have been
+crowded out by the birth of the kittens, or some incident
+equally prominent in her perspectiveless grouping
+of events; nor did she name the date of her mother's
+departure, so that Justine could not guess whether it
+had been contingent on Amherst's return, or wholly
+unconnected with it. What puzzled her most was
+Bessy's own silence&mdash;yet that too, in a sense, was
+reassuring, for Bessy thought of others chiefly when it
+was painful to think of herself, and her not writing
+implied that she had felt no present need of her
+friend's sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>Justine did not expect to find Amherst at Lynbrook.
+She had felt convinced, when they parted, that he
+would persist in his plan of going south; and the fact
+that the Telfer girls were again in possession made it
+seem probable that he had already left. Under the circumstances,
+Justine thought the separation advisable;
+but she was eager to be assured that it had been effected
+amicably, and without open affront to Bessy's pride.</p>
+
+<p>She arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and when she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[p 345]</a></span>
+entered the house the sound of voices from the drawing-room,
+and the prevailing sense of bustle and movement
+amid which her own coming was evidently an
+unconsidered detail, showed that the normal life of
+Lynbrook had resumed its course. The Telfers, as
+usual, had brought a lively throng in their train; and
+amid the bursts of merriment about the drawing-room
+tea-table she caught Westy Gaines's impressive accents,
+and the screaming laughter of Blanche Carbury....</p>
+
+<p>So Blanche Carbury was back at Lynbrook! The
+discovery gave Justine fresh cause for conjecture.
+Whatever reciprocal concessions might have resulted
+from Amherst's return to his wife, it seemed hardly
+probable that they included a renewal of relations with
+Mrs. Carbury. Had his mission failed then&mdash;had he
+and Bessy parted in anger, and was Mrs. Carbury's
+presence at Lynbrook Bessy's retort to his assertion of
+independence?</p>
+
+<p>In the school-room, where Justine was received with
+the eager outpouring of Cicely's minutest experiences,
+she dared not put the question that would have solved
+these doubts; and she left to dress for dinner without
+knowing whether Amherst had returned to Lynbrook.
+Yet in her heart she never questioned that he had done
+so; all her fears revolved about what had since taken
+place.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[p 346]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She saw Bessy first in the drawing-room, surrounded
+by her guests; and their brief embrace told her nothing,
+except that she had never beheld her friend more
+brilliant, more triumphantly in possession of recovered
+spirits and health.</p>
+
+<p>That Amherst was absent was now made evident by
+Bessy's requesting Westy Gaines to lead the way to
+the dining-room with Mrs. Ansell, who was one of the
+reassembled visitors; and the only one, as Justine
+presently observed, not in key with the prevailing
+gaiety. Mrs. Ansell, usually so tinged with the colours
+of her environment, preserved on this occasion a grey
+neutrality of tone which was the only break in the
+general brightness. It was not in her graceful person
+to express anything as gross as disapproval, yet that
+sentiment was manifest, to the nice observer, in a delicate
+aloofness which made the waves of laughter fall
+back from her, and spread a circle of cloudy calm
+about her end of the table. Justine had never been
+greatly drawn to Mrs. Ansell. Her own adaptability
+was not in the least akin to the older woman's studied
+self-effacement; and the independence of judgment
+which Justine preserved in spite of her perception of
+divergent standpoints made her a little contemptuous
+of an excess of charity that seemed to have been acquired
+at the cost of all individual convictions. To-night
+for the first time she felt in Mrs. Ansell a secret<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[p 347]</a></span>
+sympathy with her own fears; and a sense of this tacit
+understanding made her examine with sudden interest
+the face of her unexpected ally.... After all, what
+did she know of Mrs. Ansell's history&mdash;of the hidden
+processes which had gradually subdued her own passions
+and desires, making of her, as it were, a mere
+decorative background, a connecting link between
+other personalities? Perhaps, for a woman alone in
+the world, without the power and opportunity that
+money gives, there was no alternative between letting
+one's individuality harden into a small dry nucleus of
+egoism, or diffuse itself thus in the interstices of other
+lives&mdash;and there fell upon Justine the chill thought that
+just such a future might await her if she missed the
+liberating gift of personal happiness....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Neither that night nor the next day had she a private
+word with Bessy&mdash;and it became evident, as the hours
+passed, that Mrs. Amherst was deliberately postponing
+the moment when they should find themselves alone.
+But the Lynbrook party was to disperse on the Monday;
+and Bessy, who hated early rising, and all the details
+of housekeeping, tapped at Justine's door late on Sunday
+night to ask her to speed the departing visitors.</p>
+
+<p>She pleaded this necessity as an excuse for her intrusion,
+and the playful haste of her manner showed a
+nervous shrinking from any renewal of confidence; but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[p 348]</a></span>
+as she leaned in the doorway, fingering the diamond
+chain about her neck, while one satin-tipped foot
+emerged restlessly from the edge of her lace gown, her
+face lost the bloom of animation which talk and
+laughter always produced in it, and she looked so pale
+and weary that Justine needed no better pretext for
+drawing her into the room.</p>
+
+<p>It was not in Bessy to resist a soothing touch in her
+moments of nervous reaction. She sank into the chair
+by the fire and let her head rest wearily against the
+cushion which Justine slipped behind it.</p>
+
+<p>Justine dropped into the low seat beside her, and
+laid a hand on hers. "You don't look as well as when
+I went away, Bessy. Are you sure you've done wisely
+in beginning your house-parties so soon?"</p>
+
+<p>It always alarmed Bessy to be told that she was not
+looking her best, and she sat upright, a wave of pink
+rising under her sensitive skin.</p>
+
+<p>"I am quite well, on the contrary; but I was dying
+of inanition in this big empty house, and I suppose I
+haven't got the boredom out of my system yet!"</p>
+
+<p>Justine recognized the echo of Mrs. Carbury's manner.</p>
+
+<p>"Even if you <i>were</i> bored," she rejoined, "the inanition
+was probably good for you. What does Dr.
+Wyant say to your breaking away from his r&eacute;gime?"
+She named Wyant purposely, knowing that Bessy had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[p 349]</a></span>
+that respect for the medical verdict which is the last
+trace of reverence for authority in the mind of the
+modern woman. But Mrs. Amherst laughed with
+gentle malice.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I haven't seen Dr. Wyant lately. His interest
+in me died out the day you left."</p>
+
+<p>Justine forced a laugh to hide her annoyance. She
+had not yet recovered from the shrinking disgust of her
+last scene with Wyant.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be a goose, Bessy. If he hasn't come, it must
+be because you've told him not to&mdash;because you're
+afraid of letting him see that you're disobeying him."</p>
+
+<p>Bessy laughed again. "My dear, I'm afraid of nothing&mdash;nothing!
+Not even of your big eyes when they
+glare at me like coals. I suppose you must have looked
+at poor Wyant like that to frighten him away! And
+yet the last time we talked of him you seemed to like
+him&mdash;you even hinted that it was because of him that
+Westy had no chance."</p>
+
+<p>Justine uttered an impatient exclamation. "If
+neither of them existed it wouldn't affect the other's
+chances in the least. Their only merit is that they
+both enhance the charms of celibacy!"</p>
+
+<p>Bessy's smile dropped, and she turned a grave glance
+on her friend. "Ah, most men do that&mdash;you're so
+clever to have found it out!"</p>
+
+<p>It was Justine's turn to smile. "Oh, but I haven't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[p 350]</a></span>&mdash;as
+a generalization. I mean to marry as soon as I get
+the chance!"</p>
+
+<p>"The chance&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"To meet the right man. I'm gambler enough to
+believe in my luck yet!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst sighed compassionately. "There <i>is</i>
+no right man! As Blanche says, matrimony's as uncomfortable
+as a ready-made shoe. How can one and
+the same institution fit every individual case? And
+why should we all have to go lame because marriage
+was once invented to suit an imaginary case?"</p>
+
+<p>Justine gave a slight shrug. "You talk of walking
+lame&mdash;how else do we all walk? It seems to me that
+life's the tight boot, and marriage the crutch that may
+help one to hobble along!" She drew Bessy's hand
+into hers with a caressing pressure. "When you philosophize
+I always know you're tired. No one who
+feels well stops to generalize about symptoms. If you
+won't let your doctor prescribe for you, your nurse is
+going to carry out his orders. What you want is quiet.
+Be reasonable and send away everybody before Mr.
+Amherst comes back!"</p>
+
+<p>She dropped the last phrase carelessly, glancing away
+as she spoke; but the stiffening of the fingers in her
+clasp sent a little tremor through her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks for your advice. It would be excellent but
+for one thing&mdash;my husband is not coming back!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[p 351]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The mockery in Bessy's voice seemed to pass into
+her features, hardening and contracting them as frost
+shrivels a flower. Justine's face, on the contrary, was
+suddenly illuminated by compassion, as though a light
+had struck up into it from the cold glitter of her friend's
+unhappiness.</p>
+
+<p>"Bessy! What do you mean by not coming back?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean he's had the tact to see that we shall be
+more comfortable apart&mdash;without putting me to the
+unpleasant necessity of telling him so."</p>
+
+<p>Again the piteous echo of Blanche Carbury's phrases!
+The laboured mimicry of her ideas!</p>
+
+<p>Justine looked anxiously at her friend. It seemed
+horribly false not to mention her own talk with Amherst,
+yet she felt it wiser to feign ignorance, since
+Bessy could never be trusted to interpret rightly any
+departure from the conventional.</p>
+
+<p>"Please tell me what has happened," she said at length.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy, with a smile, released her hand. "John has
+gone back to the life he prefers&mdash;which I take to be
+a hint to me to do the same."</p>
+
+<p>Justine hesitated again; then the pressure of truth
+overcame every barrier of expediency. "Bessy&mdash;I
+ought to tell you that I saw Mr. Amherst in town the
+day I went to Philadelphia. He spoke of going away
+for a time...he seemed unhappy...but he told me
+he was coming back to see you first&mdash;" She broke<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[p 352]</a></span>
+off, her clear eyes on her friend's; and she saw at
+once that Bessy was too self-engrossed to feel any surprise
+at her avowal. "Surely he came back?" she
+went on.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes&mdash;he came back!" Bessy sank into the
+cushions, watching the firelight play on her diamond
+chain as she repeated the restless gesture of lifting it
+up and letting it slip through her fingers.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;and then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then&mdash;nothing! I was not here when he came."</p>
+
+<p>"You were not here? What had happened?"</p>
+
+<p>"I had gone over to Blanche Carbury's for a day
+or two. I was just leaving when I heard he was coming
+back, and I couldn't throw her over at the last moment."</p>
+
+<p>Justine tried to catch the glance that fluttered evasively
+under Bessy's lashes. "You knew he was coming&mdash;and
+you chose that time to go to Mrs. Carbury's?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't choose, my dear&mdash;it just happened! And
+it really happened for the best. I suppose he was
+annoyed at my going&mdash;you know he has a ridiculous
+prejudice against Blanche&mdash;and so the next morning
+he rushed off to his cotton mill."</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause, while the diamonds continued to
+flow in threads of fire through Mrs. Amherst's fingers.</p>
+
+<p>At length Justine said: "Did Mr. Amherst know
+that you knew he was coming back before you left for
+Mrs. Carbury's?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[p 353]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Bessy feigned to meditate the question. "Did he
+know that I knew that he knew?" she mocked. "Yes&mdash;I
+suppose so&mdash;he must have known." She stifled
+a slight yawn as she drew herself languidly to her feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Then he took that as your answer?"</p>
+
+<p>"My answer&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"To his coming back&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"So it appears. I told you he had shown unusual
+tact." Bessy stretched her softly tapering arms above
+her head and then dropped them along her sides with
+another yawn. "But it's almost morning&mdash;it's wicked
+of me to have kept you so late, when you must be up
+to look after all those people!"</p>
+
+<p>She flung her arms with a light gesture about Justine's
+shoulders, and laid a dry kiss on her cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't look at me with those big eyes&mdash;they've
+eaten up the whole of your face! And you needn't
+think I'm sorry for what I've done," she declared.
+"I'm <i>not</i>&mdash;the&mdash;least&mdash;little&mdash;atom&mdash;of a bit!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIV" id="XXIV"></a>XXIV</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Justine</span> was pacing the long library at Lynbrook,
+between the caged sets of standard authors.</p>
+
+<p>She felt as much caged as they: as much a part of a
+conventional stage-setting totally unrelated to the
+action going on before it. Two weeks had passed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[p 354]</a></span>
+since her return from Philadelphia; and during that
+time she had learned that her usefulness at Lynbrook
+was over. Though not unwelcome, she might almost
+call herself unwanted; life swept by, leaving her tethered
+to the stake of inaction; a bitter lot for one who
+chose to measure existence by deeds instead of days.
+She had found Bessy ostensibly busy with a succession
+of guests; no one in the house needed her but Cicely,
+and even Cicely, at times, was caught up into the
+whirl of her mother's life, swept off on sleighing parties
+and motor-trips, or carried to town for a dancing-class
+or an opera matin&eacute;e.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Fenton Carbury was not among the visitors
+who left Lynbrook on the Monday after Justine's return.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Carbury, with the other bread-winners of the
+party, had hastened back to his treadmill in Wall Street
+after a Sunday spent in silently studying the files of the
+Financial Record; but his wife stayed on, somewhat
+aggressively in possession, criticizing and rearranging
+the furniture, ringing for the servants, making sudden
+demands on the stable, telegraphing, telephoning, ordering
+fires lighted or windows opened, and leaving
+everywhere in her wake a trail of cigarette ashes and
+cocktail glasses.</p>
+
+<p>Ned Bowfort had not been included in the house-party;
+but on the day of its dispersal he rode over unannounced
+for luncheon, put up his horse in the stable,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[p 355]</a></span>
+threaded his way familiarly among the dozing dogs in
+the hall, greeted Mrs. Ansell and Justine with just the
+right shade of quiet deference, produced from his
+pocket a new puzzle-game for Cicely, and sat down
+beside her mother with the quiet urbanity of the family
+friend who knows his privileges but is too discreet to
+abuse them.</p>
+
+<p>After that he came every day, sometimes riding home
+late to the Hunt Club, sometimes accompanying Bessy
+and Mrs. Carbury to town for dinner and the theatre;
+but always with his deprecating air of having dropped
+in by accident, and modestly hoping that his intrusion
+was not unwelcome.</p>
+
+<p>The following Sunday brought another influx of
+visitors, and Bessy seemed to fling herself with renewed
+enthusiasm into the cares of hospitality. She had
+avoided Justine since their midnight talk, contriving to
+see her in Cicely's presence, or pleading haste when
+they found themselves alone. The winter was unusually
+open, and she spent long hours in the saddle
+when her time was not taken up with her visitors. For
+a while she took Cicely on her daily rides; but she
+soon wearied of adapting her hunter's stride to the
+pace of the little girl's pony, and Cicely was once more
+given over to the coachman's care.</p>
+
+<p>Then came snow and a long frost, and Bessy grew
+restless at her imprisonment, and grumbled that there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[p 356]</a></span>
+was no way of keeping well in a winter climate which
+made regular exercise impossible.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not build a squash-court?" Blanche Carbury
+proposed; and the two fell instantly to making plans
+under the guidance of Ned Bowfort and Westy Gaines.
+As the scheme developed, various advisers suggested
+that it was a pity not to add a bowling-alley, a swimming-tank
+and a gymnasium; a fashionable architect
+was summoned from town, measurements were taken,
+sites discussed, sketches compared, and engineers consulted
+as to the cost of artesian wells and the best
+system for heating the tank.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy seemed filled with a feverish desire to carry
+out the plan as quickly as possible, and on as large a
+scale as even the architect's invention soared to; but
+it was finally decided that, before signing the contracts,
+she should run over to New Jersey to see a building of
+the same kind on which a sporting friend of Mrs. Carbury's
+had recently lavished a fortune.</p>
+
+<p>It was on this errand that the two ladies, in company
+with Westy Gaines and Bowfort, had departed on the
+day which found Justine restlessly measuring the
+length of the library. She and Mrs. Ansell had the
+house to themselves; and it was hardly a surprise to
+her when, in the course of the afternoon, Mrs. Ansell,
+after a discreet pause on the threshold, advanced toward
+her down the long room.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[p 357]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Since the night of her return Justine had felt sure
+that Mrs. Ansell would speak; but the elder lady was
+given to hawk-like circlings about her subject, to
+hanging over it and contemplating it before her wings
+dropped for the descent.</p>
+
+<p>Now, however, it was plain that she had resolved to
+strike; and Justine had a sense of relief at the thought.
+She had been too long isolated in her anxiety, her powerlessness
+to help; and she had a vague hope that Mrs.
+Ansell's worldly wisdom might accomplish what her
+inexperience had failed to achieve.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we sit by the fire? I am glad to find you
+alone," Mrs. Ansell began, with the pleasant abruptness
+that was one of the subtlest instruments of her
+indirection; and as Justine acquiesced, she added,
+yielding her slight lines to the luxurious depths of an
+arm-chair: "I have been rather suddenly asked by an
+invalid cousin to go to Europe with her next week, and
+I can't go contentedly without being at peace about
+our friends."</p>
+
+<p>She paused, but Justine made no answer. In spite
+of her growing sympathy for Mrs. Ansell she could not
+overcome an inherent distrust, not of her methods, but
+of her ultimate object. What, for instance, was her
+conception of being at peace about the Amhersts?
+Justine's own conviction was that, as far as their final
+welfare was concerned, any terms were better between<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[p 358]</a></span>
+them than the external harmony which had prevailed
+during Amherst's stay at Lynbrook.</p>
+
+<p>The subtle emanation of her distrust may have been
+felt by Mrs. Ansell; for the latter presently continued,
+with a certain nobleness: "I am the more concerned
+because I believe I must hold myself, in a small degree,
+responsible for Bessy's marriage&mdash;" and, as Justine
+looked at her in surprise, she added: "I thought she
+could never be happy unless her affections were satisfied&mdash;and
+even now I believe so."</p>
+
+<p>"I believe so too," Justine said, surprised into assent
+by the simplicity of Mrs. Ansell's declaration.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then&mdash;since we are agreed in our diagnosis,"
+the older woman went on, smiling, "what remedy do
+you suggest? Or rather, how can we administer it?"</p>
+
+<p>"What remedy?" Justine hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I believe we are agreed on that too. Mr.
+Amherst must be brought back&mdash;but how to bring
+him?" She paused, and then added, with a singular
+effect of appealing frankness: "I ask you, because I
+believe you to be the only one of Bessy's friends who
+is in the least in her husband's confidence."</p>
+
+<p>Justine's embarrassment increased. Would it not be
+disloyal both to Bessy and Amherst to acknowledge to
+a third person a fact of which Bessy herself was unaware?
+Yet to betray embarrassment under Mrs. Ansell's
+eyes was to risk giving it a dangerous significance.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[p 359]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Bessy has spoken to me once or twice&mdash;but I know
+very little of Mr. Amherst's point of view; except,"
+Justine added, after another moment's weighing of
+alternatives, "that I believe he suffers most from being
+cut off from his work at Westmore."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;so I think; but that is a difficulty that time
+and expediency must adjust. All <i>we</i> can do&mdash;their
+friends, I mean&mdash;is to get them together again before
+the breach is too wide."</p>
+
+<p>Justine pondered. She was perhaps more ignorant
+of the situation than Mrs. Ansell imagined, for since her
+talk with Bessy the latter had not again alluded to
+Amherst's absence, and Justine could merely conjecture
+that he had carried out his plan of taking the
+management of the mill he had spoken of. What
+she most wished to know was whether he had listened
+to her entreaty, and taken the position temporarily,
+without binding himself by the acceptance of a salary;
+or whether, wounded by the outrage of Bessy's flight,
+he had freed himself from financial dependence by
+engaging himself definitely as manager.</p>
+
+<p>"I really know very little of the present situation,"
+Justine said, looking at Mrs. Ansell. "Bessy merely
+told me that Mr. Amherst had taken up his old work
+in a cotton mill in the south."</p>
+
+<p>As her eyes met Mrs. Ansell's it flashed across her
+that the latter did not believe what she said, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[p 360]</a></span>
+perception made her instantly shrink back into herself.
+But there was nothing in Mrs. Ansell's tone to confirm
+the doubt which her look betrayed.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;I hoped you knew more," she said simply;
+"for, like you, I have only heard from Bessy that her
+husband went away suddenly to help a friend who is
+reorganizing some mills in Georgia. Of course, under
+the circumstances, such a temporary break is natural
+enough&mdash;perhaps inevitable&mdash;only he must not stay
+away too long."</p>
+
+<p>Justine was silent. Mrs. Ansell's momentary self-betrayal
+had checked all farther possibility of frank
+communion, and the discerning lady had seen her error
+too late to remedy it.</p>
+
+<p>But her hearer's heart gave a leap of joy. It was
+clear from what Mrs. Ansell said that Amherst had not
+bound himself definitely, since he would not have done
+so without informing his wife. And with a secret thrill
+of happiness Justine recalled his last word to her: "I
+will remember all you have said."</p>
+
+<p>He had kept that word and acted on it; in spite of
+Bessy's last assault on his pride he had borne with her,
+and deferred the day of final rupture; and the sense
+that she had had a part in his decision filled Justine
+with a glow of hope. The consciousness of Mrs. Ansell's
+suspicions faded to insignificance&mdash;Mrs. Ansell
+and her kind might think what they chose, since all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[p 361]</a></span>
+that mattered now was that she herself should act bravely
+and circumspectly in her last attempt to save her friends.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not sure," Mrs. Ansell continued, gently
+scrutinizing her companion, "that I think it unwise of
+him to have gone; but if he stays too long Bessy may
+listen to bad advice&mdash;advice disastrous to her happiness."
+She paused, and turned her eyes meditatively
+toward the fire. "As far as I know," she said, with
+the same air of serious candour, "you are the only
+person who can tell him this."</p>
+
+<p>"I?" exclaimed Justine, with a leap of colour to her
+pale cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell's eyes continued to avoid her. "My
+dear Miss Brent, Bessy has told me something of the
+wise counsels you have given her. Mr. Amherst is
+also your friend. As I said just now, you are the only
+person who might act as a link between them&mdash;surely
+you will not renounce the r&ocirc;le."</p>
+
+<p>Justine controlled herself. "My only r&ocirc;le, as you
+call it, has been to urge Bessy to&mdash;to try to allow for
+her husband's views&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And have you not given the same advice to Mr.
+Amherst?"</p>
+
+<p>The eyes of the two women met. "Yes," said Justine,
+after a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Then why refuse your help now? The moment is
+crucial."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[p 362]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Justine's thoughts had flown beyond the stage of resenting
+Mrs. Ansell's gentle pertinacity. All her faculties
+were absorbed in the question as to how she could
+most effectually use whatever influence she possessed.</p>
+
+<p>"I put it to you as one old friend to another&mdash;will
+you write to Mr. Amherst to come back?" Mrs. Ansell
+urged her.</p>
+
+<p>Justine was past considering even the strangeness of
+this request, and its oblique reflection on the kind of
+power ascribed to her. Through the confused beatings
+of her heart she merely struggled for a clearer sense of
+guidance.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said slowly. "I cannot."</p>
+
+<p>"You cannot? With a friend's happiness in extremity?"
+Mrs. Ansell paused a moment before she
+added. "Unless you believe that Bessy would be happier
+divorced?"</p>
+
+<p>"Divorced&mdash;? Oh, no," Justine shuddered.</p>
+
+<p>"That is what it will come to."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no! In time&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Time is what I am most afraid of, when Blanche
+Carbury disposes of it."</p>
+
+<p>Justine breathed a deep sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll write?" Mrs. Ansell murmured, laying a
+soft touch on her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I have not the influence you think&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Can you do any harm by trying?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[p 363]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I might&mdash;" Justine faltered, losing her exact
+sense of the words she used.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," the other flashed back, "then you <i>have</i> influence!
+Why will you not use it?"</p>
+
+<p>Justine waited a moment; then her resolve gathered
+itself into words. "If I have any influence, I am not
+sure it would be well to use it as you suggest."</p>
+
+<p>"Not to urge Mr. Amherst's return?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;not now."</p>
+
+<p>She caught the same veiled gleam of incredulity under
+Mrs. Ansell's lids&mdash;caught and disregarded it.</p>
+
+<p>"It must be now or never," Mrs. Ansell insisted.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't think so," Justine held out.</p>
+
+<p>"Nevertheless&mdash;will you try?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no! It might be fatal."</p>
+
+<p>"To whom?"</p>
+
+<p>"To both." She considered. "If he came back
+now I know he would not stay."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell was upon her abruptly. "You <i>know</i>?
+Then you speak with authority?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;what authority? I speak as I feel," Justine
+faltered.</p>
+
+<p>The older woman drew herself to her feet. "Ah&mdash;then
+you shoulder a great responsibility!" She moved
+nearer to Justine, and once more laid a fugitive touch
+upon her. "You won't write to him?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no," the girl flung back; and the voices of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[p 364]</a></span>
+returning party in the hall made Mrs. Ansell, with an
+almost imperceptible gesture of warning, turn musingly
+away toward the fire.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Bessy came back brimming with the wonders she had
+seen. A glazed "sun-room," mosaic pavements, a
+marble fountain to feed the marble tank&mdash;and outside
+a water-garden, descending in successive terraces, to
+take up and utilize&mdash;one could see how practically!&mdash;the
+overflow from the tank. If one did the thing at all,
+why not do it decently? She had given up her new
+motor, had let her town house, had pinched and stinted
+herself in a hundred ways&mdash;if ever woman was entitled
+to a little compensating pleasure, surely she was that
+woman!</p>
+
+<p>The days were crowded with consultations. Architect,
+contractors, engineers, a landscape gardener, and
+a dozen minor craftsmen, came and went, unrolled
+plans, moistened pencils, sketched, figured, argued,
+persuaded, and filled Bessy with the dread of appearing,
+under Blanche Carbury's eyes, subject to any restraining
+influences of economy. What! She was a
+young woman, with an independent fortune, and she
+was always wavering, considering, secretly referring
+back to the mute criticism of an invisible judge&mdash;of the
+husband who had been first to shake himself free of
+any mutual subjection? The accomplished Blanche<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[p 365]</a></span>
+did not have to say this&mdash;she conveyed it by the raising
+of painted brows, by a smile of mocking interrogation,
+a judiciously placed silence or a resigned glance at the
+architect. So the estimates poured in, were studied,
+resisted&mdash;then yielded to and signed; then the hour of
+advance payments struck, and an imperious appeal was
+despatched to Mr. Tredegar, to whom the management
+of Bessy's affairs had been transferred.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar, to his client's surprise, answered the
+appeal in person. He had not been lately to Lynbrook,
+dreading the cold and damp of the country in winter; and
+his sudden arrival had therefore an ominous significance.</p>
+
+<p>He came for an evening in mid-week, when even
+Blanche Carbury was absent, and Bessy and Justine
+had the house to themselves. Mrs. Ansell had sailed
+the week before with her invalid cousin. No farther
+words had passed between herself and Justine&mdash;but the
+latter was conscious that their talk had increased instead
+of lessened the distance between them. Justine
+herself meant to leave soon. Her hope of regaining
+Bessy's confidence had been deceived, and seeing herself
+definitely superseded, she chafed anew at her purposeless
+inactivity. She had already written to one or
+two doctors in New York, and to the matron of Saint
+Elizabeth's. She had made herself a name in surgical
+cases, and it could not be long before a summons
+came....<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[p 366]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile Mr. Tredegar arrived, and the three dined
+together, the two women bending meekly to his discourse,
+which was never more oracular and authoritative
+than when delivered to the gentler sex alone. Amherst's
+absence, in particular, seemed to loose the thin
+current of Mr. Tredegar's eloquence. He was never
+quite at ease in the presence of an independent mind,
+and Justine often reflected that, even had the two men
+known nothing of each other's views, there would have
+been between them an instinctive and irreducible hostility&mdash;they
+would have disliked each other if they had
+merely jostled elbows in the street.</p>
+
+<p>Yet even freed from Amherst's presence Mr. Tredegar
+showed a darkling brow, and as Justine slipped
+away after dinner she felt that she left Bessy to something
+more serious than the usual business conference.</p>
+
+<p>How serious, she was to learn that very night, when,
+in the small hours, her friend burst in on her tearfully.
+Bessy was ruined&mdash;ruined&mdash;that was what Mr.
+Tredegar had come to tell her! She might have
+known he would not have travelled to Lynbrook for a
+trifle.... She had expected to find herself cramped,
+restricted&mdash;to be warned that she must "manage,"
+hateful word!... But this! This was incredible!
+Unendurable! There was no money to build the gymnasium&mdash;none
+at all! And all because it had been
+swallowed up at Westmore&mdash;because the ridiculous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[p 367]</a></span>
+changes there, the changes that nobody wanted, nobody
+approved of&mdash;that Truscomb and all the other experts
+had opposed and derided from the first&mdash;these
+changes, even modified and arrested, had already involved
+so much of her income, that it might be years&mdash;yes,
+he said <i>years</i>!&mdash;before she would feel herself free
+again&mdash;free of her own fortune, of Cicely's fortune...of
+the money poor Dick Westmore had meant his wife
+and child to enjoy!</p>
+
+<p>Justine listened anxiously to this confused outpouring
+of resentments. Bessy's born incapacity for figures
+made it indeed possible that the facts came on her as a
+surprise&mdash;that she had quite forgotten the temporary
+reduction of her income, and had begun to imagine
+that what she had saved in one direction was hers to
+spend in another. All this was conceivable. But why
+had Mr. Tredegar drawn so dark a picture of the future?
+Or was it only that, thwarted of her immediate desire,
+Bessy's disappointment blackened the farthest verge of
+her horizon? Justine, though aware of her friend's
+lack of perspective, suspected that a conniving hand
+had helped to throw the prospect out of drawing....</p>
+
+<p>Could it be possible, then, that Mr. Tredegar was
+among those who desired a divorce? That the influences
+at which Mrs. Ansell had hinted proceeded not
+only from Blanche Carbury and her group? Helpless
+amid this rush of forebodings, Justine could do no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[p 368]</a></span>
+more than soothe and restrain&mdash;to reason would have
+been idle. She had never till now realized how completely
+she had lost ground with Bessy.</p>
+
+<p>"The humiliation&mdash;before my friends! Oh, I was
+warned...my father, every one...for Cicely's sake
+I was warned...but I wouldn't listen&mdash;and <i>now</i>!
+From the first it was all he cared for&mdash;in Europe,
+even, he was always dragging me to factories. <i>Me?</i>&mdash;I
+was only the owner of Westmore! He wanted
+power&mdash;power, that's all&mdash;when he lost it he left me...oh,
+I'm glad now my baby is dead! Glad there's
+nothing between us&mdash;nothing, nothing in the world to
+tie us together any longer!"</p>
+
+<p>The disproportion between this violent grief and its
+trivial cause would have struck Justine as simply grotesque,
+had she not understood that the incident of the
+gymnasium, which followed with cumulative pressure
+on a series of similar episodes, seemed to Bessy like the
+reaching out of a retaliatory hand&mdash;a mocking reminder
+that she was still imprisoned in the consequences of
+her unhappy marriage.</p>
+
+<p>Such folly seemed past weeping for&mdash;it froze Justine's
+compassion into disdain, till she remembered
+that the sources of our sorrow are sometimes nobler
+than their means of expression, and that a baffled
+unappeased love was perhaps the real cause of Bessy's
+anger against her husband.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[p 369]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At any rate, the moment was a critical one, and Justine
+remembered with a pang that Mrs. Ansell had
+foreseen such a contingency, and implored her to take
+measures against it. She had refused, from a sincere
+dread of precipitating a definite estrangement&mdash;but
+had she been right in judging the situation so logically?
+With a creature of Bessy's emotional uncertainties the
+result of contending influences was really incalculable&mdash;it
+might still be that, at this juncture, Amherst's return
+would bring about a reaction of better feelings....</p>
+
+<p>Justine sat and mused on these things after leaving
+her friend exhausted upon a tearful pillow. She
+felt that she had perhaps taken too large a survey
+of the situation&mdash;that the question whether there
+could ever be happiness between this tormented pair
+was not one to concern those who struggled for their
+welfare. Most marriages are a patch-work of jarring
+tastes and ill-assorted ambitions&mdash;if here and there,
+for a moment, two colours blend, two textures are
+the same, so much the better for the pattern! Justine,
+certainly, could foresee in reunion no positive
+happiness for either of her friends; but she saw positive
+disaster for Bessy in separation from her husband....</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she rose from her chair by the falling fire,
+and crossed over to the writing-table. She would write
+to Amherst herself&mdash;she would tell him to come. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[p 370]</a></span>
+decision once reached, hope flowed back to her heart&mdash;the
+joy of action so often deceived her into immediate
+faith in its results!</p>
+
+<p>"Dear Mr. Amherst," she wrote, "the last time I
+saw you, you told me you would remember what I said.
+I ask you to do so now&mdash;to remember that I urged you
+not to be away too long. I believe you ought to come
+back now, though I know Bessy will not ask you to. I
+am writing without her knowledge, but with the conviction
+that she needs you, though perhaps without
+knowing it herself...."</p>
+
+<p>She paused, and laid down her pen. Why did it
+make her so happy to write to him? Was it merely
+the sense of recovered helpfulness, or something warmer,
+more personal, that made it a joy to trace his name,
+and to remind him of their last intimate exchange of
+words? Well&mdash;perhaps it was that too. There were
+moments when she was so mortally lonely that any
+sympathetic contact with another life sent a glow into
+her veins&mdash;that she was thankful to warm herself at
+any fire.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXV" id="XXV"></a>XXV</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Bessy</span>, languidly glancing through her midday mail
+some five days later, uttered a slight exclamation as
+she withdrew her finger-tip from the flap of the envelope
+she had begun to open.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[p 371]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was a black sleety day, with an east wind bowing
+the trees beyond the drenched window-panes, and the
+two friends, after luncheon, had withdrawn to the
+library, where Justine sat writing notes for Bessy, while
+the latter lay back in her arm-chair, in the state of
+dreamy listlessness into which she always sank when
+not under the stimulus of amusement or exercise.</p>
+
+<p>She sat suddenly upright as her eyes fell on the
+letter.</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon! I thought it was for me," she
+said, holding it out to Justine.</p>
+
+<p>The latter reddened as she glanced at the superscription.
+It had not occurred to her that Amherst
+would reply to her appeal: she had pictured him
+springing on the first north-bound train, perhaps not
+even pausing to announce his return to his wife....
+And to receive his letter under Bessy's eye was undeniably
+embarrassing, since Justine felt the necessity
+of keeping her intervention secret.</p>
+
+<p>But under Bessy's eye she certainly was&mdash;it continued
+to rest on her curiously, speculatively, with an under-gleam
+of malicious significance.</p>
+
+<p>"So stupid of me&mdash;I can't imagine why I should have
+expected my husband to write to me!" Bessy went on,
+leaning back in lazy contemplation of her other letters,
+but still obliquely including Justine in her angle of
+vision.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[p 372]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The latter, after a moment's pause, broke the seal
+and read.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Millfield, Georgia.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"My dear Miss Brent,</p>
+
+<p>"Your letter reached me yesterday and I have
+thought it over carefully. I appreciate the feeling that
+prompted it&mdash;but I don't know that any friend, however
+kind and discerning, can give the final advice in
+such matters. You tell me you are sure my wife will
+not ask me to return&mdash;well, under present conditions
+that seems to me a sufficient reason for staying away.</p>
+
+<p>"Meanwhile, I assure you that I have remembered
+all you said to me that day. I have made no binding
+arrangement here&mdash;nothing to involve my future action&mdash;and
+I have done this solely because you asked it.
+This will tell you better than words how much I value
+your advice, and what strong reasons I must have for
+not following it now.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose there are no more exploring parties in
+this weather. I wish I could show Cicely some of the
+birds down here.</p>
+
+<p class="margin4">"Yours faithfully,</p>
+
+<p class="margin5">"John Amherst.</p>
+
+
+<p>"Please don't let my wife ride Impulse."</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Latent under Justine's acute consciousness of what this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[p 373]</a></span>
+letter meant, was the sense of Bessy's inferences and
+conjectures. She could feel them actually piercing the
+page in her hand like some hypersensitive visual organ
+to which matter offers no obstruction. Or rather,
+baffled in their endeavour, they were evoking out of
+the unseen, heaven knew what fantastic structure of
+intrigue&mdash;scrawling over the innocent page with burning
+evidences of perfidy and collusion....</p>
+
+<p>One thing became instantly clear to her: she must
+show the letter to Bessy. She ran her eyes over it
+again, trying to disentangle the consequences. There
+was the allusion to their talk in town&mdash;well, she had
+told Bessy of that! But the careless reference to their
+woodland excursions&mdash;what might not Bessy, in her
+present mood, make of it? Justine's uppermost thought
+was of distress at the failure of her plan. Perhaps she
+might still have induced Amherst to come back, had it
+not been for this accident; but now that hope was
+destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>She raised her eyes and met Bessy's. "Will you
+read it?" she said, holding out the letter.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy received it with lifted brows, and a protesting
+murmur&mdash;but as she read, Justine saw the blood mount
+under her clear skin, invade the temples, the nape, even
+the little flower-like ears; then it receded as suddenly,
+ebbing at last from the very lips, so that the smile
+with which she looked up from her reading was as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[p 374]</a></span>
+white as if she had been under the stress of physical
+pain.</p>
+
+<p>"So you have written my husband to come back?"</p>
+
+<p>"As you see."</p>
+
+<p>Bessy looked her straight in the eyes. "I am very
+much obliged to you&mdash;extremely obliged!"</p>
+
+<p>Justine met the look quietly. "Which means that
+you resent my interference&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I leave you to call it that!" Bessy mocked,
+tossing the letter down on the table at her side.</p>
+
+<p>"Bessy! Don't take it in that way. If I made a
+mistake I did so with the hope of helping you. How can
+I stand by, after all these months together, and see you deliberately
+destroying your life without trying to stop you?"</p>
+
+<p>The smile withered on Bessy's lips. "It is very dear
+and good of you&mdash;I know you're never happy unless
+you're helping people&mdash;but in this case I can only
+repeat what my husband says. He and I don't often
+look at things in the same light&mdash;but I quite agree with
+him that the management of such matters is best left
+to&mdash;to the persons concerned."</p>
+
+<p>Justine hesitated. "I might answer that, if you take
+that view, it was inconsistent of you to talk with me
+so openly. You've certainly made me feel that you
+wanted help&mdash;you've turned to me for it. But perhaps
+that does not justify my writing to Mr. Amherst without
+your knowing it."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[p 375]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Bessy laughed. "Ah, my dear, you knew that if you
+asked me the letter would never be sent!"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I did," said Justine simply. "I was trying
+to help you against your will."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you see the result." Bessy laid a derisive
+touch on the letter. "Do you understand now whose
+fault it is if I am alone?"</p>
+
+<p>Justine faced her steadily. "There is nothing in
+Mr. Amherst's letter to make me change my opinion.
+I still think it lies with you to bring him back."</p>
+
+<p>Bessy raised a glittering face to her&mdash;all hardness and
+laughter. "Such modesty, my dear! As if I had a
+chance of succeeding where you failed!"</p>
+
+<p>She sprang up, brushing the curls from her temples
+with a petulant gesture. "Don't mind me if I'm cross&mdash;but
+I've had a dose of preaching from Maria Ansell,
+and I don't know why my friends should treat me like
+a puppet without any preferences of my own, and
+press me upon a man who has done his best to show
+that he doesn't want me. As a matter of fact, he and
+I are luckily agreed on that point too&mdash;and I'm afraid
+all the good advice in the world won't persuade us to
+change our opinion!"</p>
+
+<p>Justine held her ground. "If I believed that of
+either of you, I shouldn't have written&mdash;I should not
+be pleading with you now&mdash;And Mr. Amherst
+doesn't believe it either," she added, after a pause,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[p 376]</a></span>
+conscious of the risk she was taking, but thinking the
+words might act like a blow in the face of a person
+sinking under a deadly narcotic.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy's smile deepened to a sneer. "I see you've
+talked me over thoroughly&mdash;and on <i>his</i> views I ought
+perhaps not to have risked an opinion&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"We have not talked you over," Justine exclaimed.
+"Mr. Amherst could never talk of you...in the way
+you think...." And under the light staccato of Bessy's
+laugh she found resolution to add: "It is not in that
+way that I know what he feels."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah? I should be curious to hear, then&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Justine turned to the letter, which still lay between
+them. "Will you read the last sentence again? The
+postscript, I mean."</p>
+
+<p>Bessy, after a surprised glance at her, took the letter
+up with the deprecating murmur of one who acts under
+compulsion rather than dispute about a trifle.</p>
+
+<p>"The postscript? Let me see...'Don't let my
+wife ride Impulse.'&mdash;<i>Et puis?</i>" she murmured, dropping
+the page again.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, does it tell you nothing? It's a cold letter&mdash;at
+first I thought so&mdash;the letter of a man who believes
+himself deeply hurt&mdash;so deeply that he will make no
+advance, no sign of relenting. That's what I thought
+when I first read it...but the postscript undoes
+it all."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[p 377]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Justine, as she spoke, had drawn near Bessy, laying
+a hand on her arm, and shedding on her the radiance
+of a face all charity and sweet compassion. It was
+her rare gift, at such moments, to forget her own relation
+to the person for whose fate she was concerned,
+to cast aside all consciousness of criticism and distrust
+in the heart she strove to reach, as pitiful people forget
+their physical timidity in the attempt to help a wounded
+animal.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment Bessy seemed to waver. The colour
+flickered faintly up her cheek, her long lashes drooped&mdash;she
+had the tenderest lids!&mdash;and all her face seemed
+melting under the beams of Justine's ardour. But
+the letter was still in her hand&mdash;her eyes, in sinking,
+fell upon it, and she sounded beneath her breath the
+fatal phrase: "'I have done this solely because you
+asked it.'</p>
+
+<p>"After such a tribute to your influence I don't wonder
+you feel competent to set everybody's affairs in
+order! But take my advice, my dear&mdash;<i>don't</i> ask me
+not to ride Impulse!"</p>
+
+<p>The pity froze on Justine's lip: she shrank back cut
+to the quick. For a moment the silence between the
+two women rang with the flight of arrowy, wounding
+thoughts; then Bessy's anger flagged, she gave one of
+her embarrassed half-laughs, and turning back, laid a
+deprecating touch on her friend's arm.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[p 378]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I didn't mean that, Justine...but let us not talk
+now&mdash;I can't!"</p>
+
+<p>Justine did not move: the reaction could not come
+as quickly in her case. But she turned on Bessy
+two eyes full of pardon, full of speechless pity...and
+Bessy received the look silently before she moved
+to the door and went out.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, poor thing&mdash;poor thing!" Justine gasped as
+the door closed.</p>
+
+<p>She had already forgotten her own hurt&mdash;she was
+alone again with Bessy's sterile pain. She stood
+staring before her for a moment&mdash;then her eyes fell on
+Amherst's letter, which had fluttered to the floor between
+them. The fatal letter! If it had not come at
+that unlucky moment perhaps she might still have
+gained her end.... She picked it up and re-read it.
+Yes&mdash;there were phrases in it that a wounded suspicious
+heart might misconstrue.... Yet Bessy's last
+words had absolved her.... Why had she not answered
+them? Why had she stood there dumb? The blow
+to her pride had been too deep, had been dealt too
+unexpectedly&mdash;for one miserable moment she had
+thought first of herself! Ah, that importunate, irrepressible
+self&mdash;the <i>moi ha&iuml;ssable</i> of the Christian&mdash;if
+only one could tear it from one's breast! She had
+missed an opportunity&mdash;her last opportunity perhaps!
+By this time, even, a hundred hostile influences, cold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[p 379]</a></span>
+whispers of vanity, of selfishness, of worldly pride,
+might have drawn their freezing ring about Bessy's
+heart....</p>
+
+<p>Justine started up to follow her...then paused, recalling
+her last words. "Let us not talk now&mdash;I can't!"
+She had no right to intrude on that bleeding privacy&mdash;if
+the chance had been hers she had lost it. She
+dropped back into her seat at the desk, hiding her face
+in her hands.</p>
+
+<p>Presently she heard the clock strike, and true to her
+tireless instinct of activity, she lifted her head, took up
+her pen, and went on with the correspondence she had
+dropped.... It was hard at first to collect her thoughts,
+or even to summon to her pen the conventional phrases
+that sufficed for most of the notes. Groping for a
+word, she pushed aside her writing and stared out at
+the sallow frozen landscape framed by the window at
+which she sat. The sleet had ceased, and hollows of
+sunless blue showed through the driving wind-clouds.
+A hard sky and a hard ground&mdash;frost-bound ringing
+earth under rigid ice-mailed trees.</p>
+
+<p>As Justine looked out, shivering a little, she saw a
+woman's figure riding down the avenue toward the gate.
+The figure disappeared behind a clump of evergreens&mdash;showed
+again farther down, through the boughs of
+a skeleton beech&mdash;and revealed itself in the next open
+space as Bessy&mdash;Bessy in the saddle on a day of glaring<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[p 380]</a></span>
+frost, when no horse could keep his footing out of a
+walk!</p>
+
+<p>Justine went to the window and strained her eyes
+for a confirming glimpse. Yes&mdash;it was Bessy! There
+was no mistaking that light flexible figure, every line
+swaying true to the beat of the horse's stride. But
+Justine remembered that Bessy had not meant to ride&mdash;had
+countermanded her horse because of the bad
+going.... Well, she was a perfect horsewoman and had
+no doubt chosen her surest-footed mount...probably
+the brown cob, Tony Lumpkin.</p>
+
+<p>But when did Tony's sides shine so bright through
+the leafless branches? And when did he sweep his
+rider on with such long free play of the hind-quarters?
+Horse and rider shot into sight again, rounding the
+curve of the avenue near the gates, and in a break of
+sunlight Justine saw the glitter of chestnut flanks&mdash;and
+remembered that Impulse was the only chestnut in
+the stables....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>She went back to her seat and continued writing.
+Bessy had left a formidable heap of bills and letters;
+and when this was demolished, Justine had her own
+correspondence to despatch. She had heard that morning
+from the matron of Saint Elizabeth's: an interesting
+"case" was offered her, but she must come within
+two days. For the first few hours she had wavered,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[p 381]</a></span>
+loath to leave Lynbrook without some definite light on
+her friend's future; but now Amherst's letter had shed
+that light&mdash;or rather, had deepened the obscurity&mdash;and
+she had no pretext for lingering on where her uselessness
+had been so amply demonstrated.</p>
+
+<p>She wrote to the matron accepting the engagement;
+and the acceptance involved the writing of other letters,
+the general reorganizing of that minute polity, the life
+of Justine Brent. She smiled a little to think how
+easily she could be displaced and transplanted&mdash;how
+slender were her material impedimenta, how few her
+invisible bonds! She was as light and detachable as
+a dead leaf on the autumn breeze&mdash;yet she was in the
+season of sap and flower, when there is life and song
+in the trees!</p>
+
+<p>But she did not think long of herself, for an undefinable
+anxiety ran through her thoughts like a black
+thread. It found expression, now and then, in the long
+glances she threw through the window&mdash;in her rising
+to consult the clock and compare her watch with it&mdash;in
+a nervous snatch of humming as she paced the room
+once or twice before going back to her desk....</p>
+
+<p>Why was Bessy so late? Dusk was falling already&mdash;the
+early end of the cold slate-hued day. But Bessy
+always rode late&mdash;there was always a rational answer
+to Justine's irrational conjectures.... It was the sight
+of those chestnut flanks that tormented her&mdash;she knew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[p 382]</a></span>
+of Bessy's previous struggles with the mare. But the
+indulging of idle apprehensions was not in her nature,
+and when the tea-tray came, and with it Cicely, sparkling
+from a gusty walk, and coral-pink in her cloud of
+crinkled hair, Justine sprang up and cast off her cares.</p>
+
+<p>It cost her a pang, again, to see the lamps lit and
+the curtains drawn&mdash;shutting in the warmth and
+brightness of the house from that wind-swept frozen
+twilight through which Bessy rode alone. But the icy
+touch of the thought slipped from Justine's mind as
+she bent above the tea-tray, gravely measuring Cicely's
+milk into a "grown-up" teacup, hearing the confidential
+details of the child's day, and capping them with
+banter and fantastic narrative.</p>
+
+<p>She was not sorry to go&mdash;ah, no! The house had
+become a prison to her, with ghosts walking its dreary
+floors. But to lose Cicely would be bitter&mdash;she had not
+felt how bitter till the child pressed against her in the
+firelight, insisting raptly, with little sharp elbows stabbing
+her knee: "And <i>then</i> what happened, Justine?"</p>
+
+<p>The door opened, and some one came in to look at
+the fire. Justine, through the mazes of her fairy-tale,
+was dimly conscious that it was Knowles, and not one
+of the footmen...the proud Knowles, who never
+mended the fires himself.... As he passed out again,
+hovering slowly down the long room, she rose, leaving
+Cicely on the hearth-rug, and followed him to the door.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[p 383]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Has Mrs. Amherst not come in?" she asked, not
+knowing why she wished to ask it out of the child's
+hearing.</p>
+
+<p>"No, miss. I looked in myself to see&mdash;thinking she
+might have come by the side-door."</p>
+
+<p>"She may have gone to her sitting-room."</p>
+
+<p>"She's not upstairs."</p>
+
+<p>They both paused. Then Justine said: "What
+horse was she riding?"</p>
+
+<p>"Impulse, Miss." The butler looked at his large
+responsible watch. "It's not late&mdash;" he said, more to
+himself than to her.</p>
+
+<p>"No. Has she been riding Impulse lately?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, Miss. Not since that day the mare nearly had
+her off. I understood Mr. Amherst did not wish it."</p>
+
+<p>Justine went back to Cicely and the fairy-tale.&mdash;As
+she took up the thread of the Princess's adventures, she
+asked herself why she had ever had any hope of helping
+Bessy. The seeds of disaster were in the poor
+creature's soul.... Even when she appeared to be
+moved, lifted out of herself, her escaping impulses were
+always dragged back to the magnetic centre of hard
+distrust and resistance that sometimes forms the core
+of soft-fibred natures. As she had answered her husband's
+previous appeal by her flight to the woman he
+disliked, so she answered this one by riding the horse
+he feared.... Justine's last illusions crumbled. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[p 384]</a></span>
+distance between two such natures was unspannable.
+Amherst had done well to remain away...and with
+a tidal rush her sympathies swept back to his side....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The governess came to claim Cicely. One of the footmen
+came to put another log on the fire. Then the
+rite of removing the tea-table was majestically performed&mdash;the
+ceremonial that had so often jarred on
+Amherst's nerves. As she watched it, Justine had a
+vague sense of the immutability of the household
+routine&mdash;a queer awed feeling that, whatever happened,
+a machine so perfectly adjusted would work
+on inexorably, like a natural law....</p>
+
+<p>She rose to look out of the window, staring vainly
+into blackness between the parted curtains. As she
+turned back, passing the writing-table, she noticed
+that Cicely's irruption had made her forget to post her
+letters&mdash;an unusual oversight. A glance at the clock
+told her that she was not too late for the mail&mdash;reminding
+her, at the same time, that it was scarcely
+three hours since Bessy had started on her ride....
+She saw the foolishness of her fears. Even in winter,
+Bessy often rode for more than three hours; and now
+that the days were growing longer&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly reassured, Justine went out into the hall,
+intending to carry her batch of letters to the red pillar-box
+by the door. As she did so, a cold blast struck<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[p 385]</a></span>
+her. Could it be that for once the faultless routine of
+the house had been relaxed, that one of the servants
+had left the outer door ajar? She walked over to the
+vestibule&mdash;yes, both doors were wide. The night
+rushed in on a vicious wind. As she pushed the
+vestibule door shut, she heard the dogs sniffing and
+whining on the threshold. She crossed the vestibule,
+and heard voices and the tramping of feet in the darkness&mdash;then
+saw a lantern gleam. Suddenly Knowles
+shot out of the night&mdash;the lantern struck on his
+bleached face.</p>
+
+<p>Justine, stepping back, pressed the electric button
+in the wall, and the wide door-step was abruptly illuminated,
+with its huddled, pushing, heavily-breathing
+group...black figures writhing out of darkness,
+strange faces distorted in the glare.</p>
+
+<p>"Bessy!" she cried, and sprang forward; but suddenly
+Wyant was before her, his hand on her arm;
+and as the dreadful group struggled by into the hall,
+he froze her to him with a whisper: "The spine&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVI" id="XXVI"></a>XXVI</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Within</span> Justine there was a moment's darkness;
+then, like terror-struck workers rallying to their
+tasks, every faculty was again at its post, receiving
+and transmitting signals, taking observations,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[p 386]</a></span>
+anticipating orders, making her brain ring with the
+hum of a controlled activity.</p>
+
+<p>She had known the sensation before&mdash;the transmuting
+of terror and pity into this miraculous lucidity of
+thought and action; but never had it snatched her
+from such depths. Oh, thank heaven for her knowledge
+now&mdash;for the trained mind that could take command
+of her senses and bend them firmly to its service!</p>
+
+<p>Wyant seconded her well, after a moment's ague-fit
+of fear. She pitied and pardoned the moment, aware
+of its cause, and respecting him for the way in which
+he rose above it into the clear air of professional self-command.
+Through the first hours they worked
+shoulder to shoulder, conscious of each other only as
+of kindred will-powers, stretched to the utmost tension
+of discernment and activity, and hardly needing speech
+or look to further their swift co-operation. It was thus
+that she had known him in the hospital, in the heat of
+his youthful zeal: the doctor she liked best to work
+with, because no other so tempered ardour with judgment.</p>
+
+<p>The great surgeon, arriving from town at midnight,
+confirmed his diagnosis: there was undoubted injury
+to the spine. Other consultants were summoned in
+haste, and in the winter dawn the verdict was pronounced&mdash;a
+fractured vertebra, and possibly lesion of
+the cord....<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[p 387]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Justine got a moment alone when the surgeons returned
+to the sick-room. Other nurses were there now,
+capped, aproned, quickly and silently unpacking their
+appliances.... She must call a halt, clear her brain
+again, decide rapidly what was to be done next....
+Oh, if only the crawling hours could bring Amherst!
+It was strange that there was no telegram yet&mdash;no, not
+strange, after all, since it was barely six in the morning,
+and her message had not been despatched till seven
+the night before. It was not unlikely that, in that
+little southern settlement, the telegraph office closed at
+six.</p>
+
+<p>She stood in Bessy's sitting-room, her forehead
+pressed to the window-pane, her eyes straining out into
+the thin February darkness, through which the morning
+star swam white. As soon as she had yielded her
+place to the other nurses her nervous tension relaxed,
+and she hung again above the deeps of anguish, terrified
+and weak. In a moment the necessity for action
+would snatch her back to a firm footing&mdash;her thoughts
+would clear, her will affirm itself, all the wheels of the
+complex machine resume their functions. But now
+she felt only the horror....</p>
+
+<p>She knew so well what was going on in the next room.
+Dr. Garford, the great surgeon, who had known her at
+Saint Elizabeth's, had evidently expected her to take
+command of the nurses he had brought from town;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[p 388]</a></span>
+but there were enough without her, and there were
+other cares which, for the moment, she only could
+assume&mdash;the despatching of messages to the scattered
+family, the incessant telephoning and telegraphing to
+town, the general guidance of the household swinging
+rudderless in the tide of disaster. Cicely, above all,
+must be watched over and guarded from alarm. The
+little governess, reduced to a twittering heap of fears,
+had been quarantined in a distant room till reason returned
+to her; and the child, meanwhile, slept quietly
+in the old nurse's care.</p>
+
+<p>Cicely would wake presently, and Justine must go
+up to her with a bright face; other duties would press
+thick on the heels of this; their feet were already on
+the threshold. But meanwhile she could only follow
+in imagination what was going on in the other
+room....</p>
+
+<p>She had often thought with dread of such a contingency.
+She always sympathized too much with her
+patients&mdash;she knew it was the joint in her armour.
+Her quick-gushing pity lay too near that professional
+exterior which she had managed to endue with such a
+bright glaze of insensibility that some sentimental
+patients&mdash;without much the matter&mdash;had been known
+to call her "a little hard." How, then, should she
+steel herself if it fell to her lot to witness a cruel accident
+to some one she loved, and to have to perform<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[p 389]</a></span>
+a nurse's duties, steadily, expertly, unflinchingly, while
+every fibre was torn with inward anguish?</p>
+
+<p>She knew the horror of it now&mdash;and she knew also
+that her self-enforced exile from the sick-room was a
+hundred times worse. To stand there, knowing, with
+each tick of the clock, what was being said and done
+within&mdash;how the great luxurious room, with its pale
+draperies and scented cushions, and the hundred pretty
+trifles strewing the lace toilet-table and the delicate old
+furniture, was being swept bare, cleared for action like
+a ship's deck, drearily garnished with rows of instruments,
+rolls of medicated cotton, oiled silk, bottles,
+bandages, water-pillows&mdash;all the grim paraphernalia
+of the awful rites of pain: to know this, and to be able
+to call up with torturing vividness that poor pale face
+on the pillows, vague-eyed, expressionless, perhaps, as
+she had last seen it, or&mdash;worse yet&mdash;stirred already with
+the first creeping pangs of consciousness: to have these
+images slowly, deliberately burn themselves into her
+brain, and to be aware, at the same time, of that underlying
+moral disaster, of which the accident seemed the
+monstrous outward symbol&mdash;ah, this was worse than
+anything she had ever dreamed!</p>
+
+<p>She knew that the final verdict could not be pronounced
+till the operation which was about to take
+place should reveal the extent of injury to the spine.
+Bessy, in falling, must have struck on the back of her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[p 390]</a></span>
+head and shoulders, and it was but too probable that
+the fractured vertebra had caused a bruise if not a lesion
+of the spinal cord. In that case paralysis was certain&mdash;and
+a slow crawling death the almost inevitable outcome.
+There had been cases, of course&mdash;Justine's professional
+memory evoked them&mdash;cases of so-called "recovery,"
+where actual death was kept at bay, a semblance
+of life preserved for years in the poor petrified
+body.... But the mind shrank from such a fate for
+Bessy. And it might still be that the injury to the
+spine was not grave&mdash;though, here again, the fracturing
+of the fourth vertebra was ominous.</p>
+
+<p>The door opened and some one came from the inner
+room&mdash;Wyant, in search of an instrument-case. Justine
+turned and they looked at each other.</p>
+
+<p>"It will be now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Dr. Garford asked if there was no one you
+could send for."</p>
+
+<p>"No one but Mr. Tredegar and the Halford Gaineses.
+They'll be here this evening, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>They exchanged a discouraged glance, knowing how
+little difference the presence of the Halford Gaineses
+would make.</p>
+
+<p>"He wanted to know if there was no telegram from
+Amherst."</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Then they mean to begin."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[p 391]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A nursemaid appeared in the doorway. "Miss
+Cicely&mdash;" she said; and Justine bounded upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>The day's work had begun. From Cicely to the governess&mdash;from
+the governess to the housekeeper&mdash;from
+the telephone to the writing-table&mdash;Justine vibrated
+back and forth, quick, noiseless, self-possessed&mdash;sobering,
+guiding, controlling her confused and panic-stricken
+world. It seemed to her that half the day had
+elapsed before the telegraph office at Lynbrook opened&mdash;she
+was at the telephone at the stroke of the hour.
+No telegram? Only one&mdash;a message from Halford
+Gaines&mdash;"Arrive at eight tonight." Amherst was still
+silent! Was there a difference of time to be allowed
+for? She tried to remember, to calculate, but her
+brain was too crowded with other thoughts.... She
+turned away from the instrument discouraged.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever she had time to think, she was overwhelmed
+by the weight of her solitude. Mr. Langhope
+was in Egypt, accessible only through a London banker&mdash;Mrs.
+Ansell presumably wandering on the continent.
+Her cables might not reach them for days. And among
+the throng of Lynbrook habitu&eacute;s, she knew not to whom
+to turn. To loose the Telfer tribe and Mrs. Carbury
+upon that stricken house&mdash;her thought revolted from
+it, and she was thankful to know that February had
+dispersed their migratory flock to southern shores.
+But if only Amherst would come!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[p 392]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Cicely and the tranquillized governess had been despatched
+on a walk with the dogs, and Justine was
+returning upstairs when she met one of the servants
+with a telegram. She tore it open with a great throb
+of relief. It was her own message to Amherst&mdash;<i>address
+unknown</i>....</p>
+
+<p>Had she misdirected it, then? In that first blinding
+moment her mind might so easily have failed her. But
+no&mdash;there was the name of the town before her...Millfield,
+Georgia...the same name as in his letter....
+She had made no mistake, but he was gone! Gone&mdash;and
+without leaving an address.... For a moment her
+tired mind refused to work; then she roused herself,
+ran down the stairs again, and rang up the telegraph-office.
+The thing to do, of course, was to telegraph
+to the owner of the mills&mdash;of whose very name she was
+ignorant!&mdash;enquiring where Amherst was, and asking
+him to forward the message. Precious hours must be
+lost meanwhile&mdash;but, after all, they were waiting for
+no one upstairs.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The verdict had been pronounced: dislocation and
+fracture of the fourth vertebra, with consequent injury
+to the spinal cord. Dr. Garford and Wyant came out
+alone to tell her. The surgeon ran over the technical
+details, her brain instantly at attention as he developed
+his diagnosis and issued his orders. She asked no ques<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[p 393]</a></span>tions
+as to the future&mdash;she knew it was impossible to
+tell. But there were no immediate signs of a fatal
+ending: the patient had rallied well, and the general
+conditions were not unfavourable.</p>
+
+<p>"You have heard from Mr. Amherst?" Dr. Garford
+concluded.</p>
+
+<p>"Not yet...he may be travelling," Justine faltered,
+unwilling to say that her telegram had been returned.
+As she spoke there was a tap on the door,
+and a folded paper was handed in&mdash;a telegram telephoned
+from the village.</p>
+
+<p>"Amherst gone South America to study possibilities
+cotton growing have cabled our correspondent Buenos
+Ayres."</p>
+
+<p>Concealment was no longer possible. Justine
+handed the message to the surgeon.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;and there would be no chance of finding his
+address among Mrs. Amherst's papers?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think not&mdash;no."</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;we must keep her alive, Wyant."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At dusk, Justine sat in the library, waiting for Cicely
+to be brought to her. A lull had descended on the
+house&mdash;a new order developed out of the morning's
+chaos. With soundless steps, with lowered voices, the
+machinery of life was carried on. And Justine, caught<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[p 394]</a></span>
+in one of the pauses of inaction which she had fought
+off since morning, was reliving, for the hundredth time,
+her few moments at Bessy's bedside....</p>
+
+<p>She had been summoned in the course of the afternoon,
+and stealing into the darkened room, had bent
+over the bed while the nurses noiselessly withdrew.
+There lay the white face which had been burnt into
+her inward vision&mdash;the motionless body, and the head
+stirring ceaselessly, as though to release the agitation
+of the imprisoned limbs. Bessy's eyes turned to her,
+drawing her down.</p>
+
+<p>"Am I going to die, Justine?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"The pain is...so awful...."</p>
+
+<p>"It will pass...you will sleep...."</p>
+
+<p>"Cicely&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"She has gone for a walk. You'll see her presently."</p>
+
+<p>The eyes faded, releasing Justine. She stole away,
+and the nurses came back.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy had spoken of Cicely&mdash;but not a word of her
+husband! Perhaps her poor dazed mind groped for
+him, or perhaps it shrank from his name.... Justine
+was thankful for her silence. For the moment her
+heart was bitter against Amherst. Why, so soon after
+her appeal and his answer, had he been false to the
+spirit of their agreement? This unannounced, unex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[p 395]</a></span>plained
+departure was nothing less than a breach of
+his tacit pledge&mdash;the pledge not to break definitely with
+Lynbrook. And why had he gone to South America?
+She drew her aching brows together, trying to retrace
+a vague memory of some allusion to the cotton-growing
+capabilities of the region.... Yes, he had spoken of it
+once in talking of the world's area of cotton production.
+But what impulse had sent him off on such an exploration?
+Mere unrest, perhaps&mdash;the intolerable burden
+of his useless life? The questions spun round and
+round in her head, weary, profitless, yet persistent....</p>
+
+<p>It was a relief when Cicely came&mdash;a relief to measure
+out the cambric tea, to make the terrier beg for ginger-bread,
+even to take up the thread of the interrupted
+fairy-tale&mdash;though through it all she was wrung by the
+thought that, just twenty-four hours earlier, she and
+the child had sat in the same place, listening for the
+trot of Bessy's horse....</p>
+
+<p>The day passed: the hands of the clocks moved,
+food was cooked and served, blinds were drawn up or
+down, lamps lit and fires renewed...all these tokens
+of the passage of time took place before her, while her
+real consciousness seemed to hang in some dim central
+void, where nothing happened, nothing would ever
+happen....</p>
+
+<p>And now Cicely was in bed, the last "long-distance"
+call was answered, the last orders to kitchen and stable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[p 396]</a></span>
+had been despatched, Wyant had stolen down to her
+with his hourly report&mdash;"no change"&mdash;and she was
+waiting in the library for the Gaineses.</p>
+
+<p>Carriage-wheels on the gravel: they were there at
+last. Justine started up and went into the hall.
+As she passed out of the library the outer door
+opened, and the gusty night swooped in&mdash;as, at the
+same hour the day before, it had swooped in ahead of
+the dreadful procession&mdash;preceding now the carriageful
+of Hanaford relations: Mr. Gaines, red-glazed, brief
+and interrogatory; Westy, small, nervous, ill at ease
+with his grief; and Mrs. Gaines, supreme in the possession
+of a consolatory yet funereal manner, and sinking
+on Justine's breast with the solemn whisper: "Have
+you sent for the clergyman?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVII" id="XXVII"></a>XXVII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> house was empty again.</p>
+
+<p>A week had passed since Bessy's accident, and
+friends and relations had dispersed. The household
+had fallen into its routine, the routine of sickness and
+silence, and once more the perfectly-adjusted machine
+was working on steadily, inexorably, like a natural
+law....</p>
+
+<p>So at least it seemed to Justine's nerves, intolerably
+stretched, at times, on the rack of solitude, of suspense,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[p 397]</a></span>
+of forebodings. She had been thankful when the
+Gaineses left&mdash;doubly thankful when a telegram from
+Bermuda declared Mrs. Carbury to be "in despair" at
+her inability to fly to Bessy's side&mdash;thankful even that
+Mr. Tredegar's professional engagements made it impossible
+for him to do more than come down, every
+second or third day, for a few hours; yet, though in
+some ways it was a relief to be again in sole command,
+there were moments when the weight of responsibility,
+and the inability to cry out her fears and her uncertainties,
+seemed almost unendurable.</p>
+
+<p>Wyant was her chief reliance. He had risen so gallantly
+above his weakness, become again so completely
+the indefatigable worker of former days, that she
+accused herself of injustice in ascribing to physical
+causes the vague eye and tremulous hand which might
+merely have betokened a passing access of nervous
+sensibility. Now, at any rate, he had his nerves so
+well under control, and had shown such a grasp of the
+case, and such marked executive capacity, that on the
+third day after the accident Dr. Garford, withdrawing
+his own assistant, had left him in control at Lynbrook.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time Justine had taken up her attendance
+in the sick-room, replacing one of the subordinate
+nurses who had been suddenly called away. She had
+done this the more willingly because Bessy, who was
+now conscious for the greater part of the time, had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[p 398]</a></span>
+asked for her once or twice, and had seemed easier
+when she was in the room. But she still gave only
+occasional aid, relieving the other nurses when they
+dined or rested, but keeping herself partly free in order
+to have an eye on the household, and give a few hours
+daily to Cicely.</p>
+
+<p>All this had become part of a system that already
+seemed as old as memory. She could hardly recall
+what life had been before the accident&mdash;the seven
+dreadful days seemed as long as the days of creation.
+Every morning she rose to the same report&mdash;"no
+change"&mdash;and every day passed without a word from
+Amherst. Minor news, of course, had come: poor Mr.
+Langhope, at length overtaken at Wady Halfa, was
+hastening back as fast as ship and rail could carry him;
+Mrs. Ansell, anchored at Algiers with her invalid, cabled
+anxious enquiries; but still no word from Amherst.
+The correspondent at Buenos Ayres had simply cabled
+"Not here. Will enquire"&mdash;and since then, silence.</p>
+
+<p>Justine had taken to sitting in a small room beyond
+Amherst's bedroom, near enough to Bessy to be within
+call, yet accessible to the rest of the household. The
+walls were hung with old prints, and with two or three
+photographs of early Italian pictures; and in a low
+bookcase Amherst had put the books he had brought
+from Hanaford&mdash;the English poets, the Greek dramatists,
+some text-books of biology and kindred sub<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[p 399]</a></span>jects,
+and a few stray well-worn volumes: Lecky's
+European Morals, Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm
+Meister, Seneca, Epictetus, a German grammar, a
+pocket Bacon.</p>
+
+<p>It was unlike any other room at Lynbrook&mdash;even
+through her benumbing misery, Justine felt the relief of
+escaping there from the rest of the great soulless house.
+Sometimes she took up one of the books and read a
+page or two, letting the beat of the verse lull her throbbing
+brain, or the strong words of stoic wisdom sink
+into her heart. And even when there was no time for
+these brief flights from reality, it soothed her to feel
+herself in the presence of great thoughts&mdash;to know that
+in this room, among these books, another restless
+baffled mind had sought escape from the "dusty answer"
+of life. Her hours there made her think less
+bitterly of Amherst&mdash;but also, alas, made her see more
+clearly the irreconcilable difference between the two
+natures she had striven to reunite. That which was
+the essence of life to one was a meaningless shadow to
+the other; and the gulf between them was too wide for
+the imagination of either to bridge.</p>
+
+<p>As she sat there on the seventh afternoon there was
+a knock on the door and Wyant entered. She had
+only time to notice that he was very pale&mdash;she had been
+struck once or twice with his look of sudden exhaustion,
+which passed as quickly as it came&mdash;then she saw that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[p 400]</a></span>
+he carried a telegram, and her mind flew back to its
+central anxiety. She grew pale herself as she read the
+message.</p>
+
+<p>"He has been found&mdash;at Corrientes. It will take
+him at least a month to get here."</p>
+
+<p>"A month&mdash;good God!"</p>
+
+<p>"And it may take Mr. Langhope longer." Their
+eyes met. "It's too long&mdash;&mdash;?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know&mdash;I don't know." He shivered slightly,
+turning away into the window.</p>
+
+<p>Justine sat down to dash off messages to Mr. Tredegar
+and the Gaineses: Amherst's return must be made
+known at once. When she glanced up, Wyant was
+standing near her. His air of intense weariness had
+passed, and he looked calm and ready for action.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I take these down?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. Ring, please. I want to ask you a few
+questions."</p>
+
+<p>The servant who answered the bell brought in a tea-tray,
+and Justine, having despatched the telegrams,
+seated herself and began to pour out her tea. Food
+had been repugnant to her during the first anguished
+unsettled days, but with the resumption of the nurse's
+systematic habits the nurse's punctual appetite returned.
+Every drop of energy must be husbanded
+now, and only sleep and nourishment could fill the
+empty cisterns.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[p 401]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She held out a cup to Wyant, but he drew back
+with a gesture of aversion.</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks; I'm not hungry."</p>
+
+<p>"You ought to eat more."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no. I'm very well."</p>
+
+<p>She lifted her head, revived by the warm draught.
+The mechanical act of nourishment performed, her
+mind leapt back to the prospect of Amherst's return.
+A whole month before he reached Lynbrook! He had
+instructed her where news might find him on the
+way...but a whole month to wait!</p>
+
+<p>She looked at Wyant, and they read each other's
+thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a long time," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"But Garford can do wonders&mdash;and she's very
+strong."</p>
+
+<p>Justine shuddered. Just so a skilled agent of the
+Inquisition might have spoken, calculating how much
+longer the power of suffering might be artificially preserved
+in a body broken on the wheel....</p>
+
+<p>"How does she seem to you today?"</p>
+
+<p>"The general conditions are about the same. The
+heart keeps up wonderfully, but there is a little more
+oppression of the diaphragm."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;her breathing is harder. Last night she suffered
+horribly at times."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[p 402]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;she'll suffer," Wyant murmured. "Of course
+the hypodermics can be increased."</p>
+
+<p>"Just what did Dr. Garford say this morning?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is astonished at her strength."</p>
+
+<p>"But there's no hope?&mdash;I don't know why I ask!"</p>
+
+<p>"Hope?" Wyant looked at her. "You mean of
+what's called recovery&mdash;of deferring death indefinitely?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"How can Garford tell&mdash;or any one? We all know
+there have been cases where such injury to the cord
+has not caused death. This may be one of those cases;
+but the biggest man couldn't say now."</p>
+
+<p>Justine hid her eyes. "What a fate!"</p>
+
+<p>"Recovery? Yes. Keeping people alive in such
+cases is one of the refinements of cruelty that it was
+left for Christianity to invent."</p>
+
+<p>"And yet&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"And yet&mdash;it's got to be! Science herself says so&mdash;not
+for the patient, of course; but for herself&mdash;for unborn
+generations, rather. Queer, isn't it? The two
+creeds are at one."</p>
+
+<p>Justine murmured through her clasped hands: "I
+wish she were not so strong&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; it's wonderful what those frail petted bodies
+can stand. The fight is going to be a hard one."</p>
+
+<p>She rose with a shiver. "I must go to Cicely&mdash;&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[p 403]</a></span>
+The rector of Saint Anne's had called again. Justine,
+in obedience to Mrs. Gaines's suggestion, had summoned
+him from Clifton the day after the accident;
+but, supported by the surgeons and Wyant, she had
+resisted his admission to the sick-room. Bessy's religious
+practices had been purely mechanical: her
+faith had never been associated with the graver moments
+of her life, and the apparition of a clerical figure
+at her bedside would portend not consolation but
+calamity. Since it was all-important that her nervous
+strength should be sustained, and the gravity of the
+situation kept from her, Mrs. Gaines yielded to
+the medical commands, consoled by the ready acquiescence
+of the rector. But before she left she extracted
+a promise that he would call frequently at Lynbrook,
+and wait his opportunity to say an uplifting word to
+Mrs. Amherst.</p>
+
+<p>The Reverend Ernest Lynde, who was a young man,
+with more zeal than experience, deemed it his duty to
+obey this injunction to the letter; but hitherto he had
+had to content himself with a talk with the housekeeper,
+or a brief word on the doorstep from Wyant. Today,
+however, he had asked somewhat insistently for Miss
+Brent; and Justine, who was free at the moment, felt
+that she could not refuse to go down. She had seen
+him only in the pulpit, when once or twice, in Bessy's
+absence, she had taken Cicely to church: he struck<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[p 404]</a></span>
+her as a grave young man, with a fine voice
+but halting speech. His sermons were earnest but
+ineffective.</p>
+
+<p>As he rose to meet her, she felt that she should like
+him better out of church. His glance was clear and
+honest, and there was sweetness in his hesitating smile.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry to seem persistent&mdash;but I heard you had
+news of Mr. Langhope, and I was anxious to know the
+particulars," he explained.</p>
+
+<p>Justine replied that her message had overtaken Mr.
+Langhope at Wady Haifa, and that he hoped to reach
+Alexandria in time to catch a steamer to Brindisi at
+the end of the week.</p>
+
+<p>"Not till then? So it will be almost three weeks&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"As nearly as I can calculate, a month."</p>
+
+<p>The rector hesitated. "And Mr. Amherst?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is coming back too."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you have heard? I'm glad of that. He will
+be here soon?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. He is in South America&mdash;at Buenos Ayres.
+There will be no steamer for some days, and he may
+not get here till after Mr. Langhope."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lynde looked at her kindly, with grave eyes
+that proffered help. "This is terrible for you, Miss
+Brent."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Justine answered simply.</p>
+
+<p>"And Mrs. Amherst's condition&mdash;&mdash;?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[p 405]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It is about the same."</p>
+
+<p>"The doctors are hopeful?"</p>
+
+<p>"They have not lost hope."</p>
+
+<p>"She seems to keep her strength wonderfully."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, wonderfully."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lynde paused, looking downward, and awkwardly
+turning his soft clerical hat in his large kind-looking
+hands. "One might almost see in it a dispensation&mdash;<i>we</i>
+should see one, Miss Brent."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>We?</i>" She glanced up apologetically, not quite
+sure that her tired mind had followed his meaning.</p>
+
+<p>"We, I mean, who believe...that not one sparrow
+falls to the ground...." He flushed, and went on in
+a more mundane tone: "I am glad you have the hope
+of Mr. Langhope's arrival to keep you up. Modern
+science&mdash;thank heaven!&mdash;can do such wonders in sustaining
+and prolonging life that, even if there is little
+chance of recovery, the faint spark may be nursed
+until...."</p>
+
+<p>He paused again, conscious that the dusky-browed
+young woman, slenderly erect in her dark blue linen
+and nurse's cap, was examining him with an intentness
+which contrasted curiously with the absent-minded
+glance she had dropped on him in entering.</p>
+
+<p>"In such cases," she said in a low tone, "there is
+practically no chance of recovery."</p>
+
+<p>"So I understand."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[p 406]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Even if there were, it would probably be death-in-life:
+complete paralysis of the lower body."</p>
+
+<p>He shuddered. "A dreadful fate! She was so gay
+and active&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;and the struggle with death, for the next few
+weeks, must involve incessant suffering...frightful
+suffering...perhaps vainly...."</p>
+
+<p>"I feared so," he murmured, his kind face paling.</p>
+
+<p>"Then why do you thank heaven that modern science
+has found such wonderful ways of prolonging life?"</p>
+
+<p>He raised his head with a start and their eyes met.
+He saw that the nurse's face was pale and calm&mdash;almost
+judicial in its composure&mdash;and his self-possession
+returned to him.</p>
+
+<p>"As a Christian," he answered, with his slow smile,
+"I can hardly do otherwise."</p>
+
+<p>Justine continued to consider him thoughtfully. "The
+men of the older generation&mdash;clergymen, I mean," she
+went on in a low controlled voice, "would of course
+take that view&mdash;must take it. But the conditions are
+so changed&mdash;so many undreamed-of means of prolonging
+life&mdash;prolonging suffering&mdash;have been discovered
+and applied in the last few years, that I wondered...in
+my profession one often wonders...."</p>
+
+<p>"I understand," he rejoined sympathetically, forgetting
+his youth and his inexperience in the simple
+desire to bring solace to a troubled mind. "I under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[p 407]</a></span>stand
+your feeling&mdash;but you need have no doubt. Human
+life is sacred, and the fact that, even in this materialistic
+age, science is continually struggling to
+preserve and prolong it, shows&mdash;very beautifully, I
+think&mdash;how all things work together to fulfill the divine
+will."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you believe that the divine will delights in
+mere pain&mdash;mere meaningless animal suffering&mdash;for its
+own sake?"</p>
+
+<p>"Surely not; but for the sake of the spiritual life
+that may be mysteriously wrung out of it."</p>
+
+<p>Justine bent her puzzled brows on him. "I could
+understand that view of moral suffering&mdash;or even of
+physical pain moderate enough to leave the mind clear,
+and to call forth qualities of endurance and renunciation.
+But where the body has been crushed to a pulp,
+and the mind is no more than a machine for the registering
+of sense-impressions of physical anguish, of
+what use can such suffering be to its owner&mdash;or to the
+divine will?"</p>
+
+<p>The young rector looked at her sadly, almost severely.
+"There, Miss Brent, we touch on inscrutable things,
+and human reason must leave the answer to faith."</p>
+
+<p>Justine pondered. "So that&mdash;one may say&mdash;Christianity
+recognizes no exceptions&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"None&mdash;none," its authorized exponent pronounced
+emphatically.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[p 408]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Then Christianity and science are agreed." She
+rose, and the young rector, with visible reluctance,
+stood up also.</p>
+
+<p>"That, again, is one of the most striking evidences&mdash;"
+he began; and then, as the necessity of taking
+leave was forced upon him, he added appealingly:
+"I understand your uncertainties, your questionings,
+and I wish I could have made my point clearer&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you; it is quite clear. The reasons, of
+course, are different; but the result is exactly the same."</p>
+
+<p>She held out her hand, smiling sadly on him, and
+with a sudden return of youth and self-consciousness,
+he murmured shyly: "I feel for you"&mdash;the man in him
+yearning over her loneliness, though the pastor dared not
+press his help....</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVIII" id="XXVIII"></a>XXVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">That</span> evening, when Justine took her place at the
+bedside, and the other two nurses had gone down
+to supper, Bessy turned her head slightly, resting her
+eyes on her friend.</p>
+
+<p>The rose-shaded lamp cast a tint of life on her face,
+and the dark circles of pain made her eyes look deeper
+and brighter. Justine was almost deceived by the delusive
+semblance of vitality, and a hope that was half
+anguish stirred in her. She sat down by the bed, clasping
+the hand on the sheet.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[p 409]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You feel better tonight?"</p>
+
+<p>"I breathe...better...." The words came brokenly,
+between long pauses, but without the hard
+agonized gasps of the previous night.</p>
+
+<p>"That's a good sign." Justine paused, and then,
+letting her fingers glide once or twice over the back of
+Bessy's hand&mdash;"You know, dear, Mr. Amherst is
+coming," she leaned down to say.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy's eyes moved again, slowly, inscrutably. She
+had never asked for her husband.</p>
+
+<p>"Soon?" she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>"He had started on a long journey&mdash;to out-of-the-way
+places&mdash;to study something about cotton growing&mdash;my
+message has just overtaken him," Justine explained.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy lay still, her breast straining for breath. She
+remained so long without speaking that Justine began
+to think she was falling back into the somnolent state
+that intervened between her moments of complete consciousness.
+But at length she lifted her lids again, and
+her lips stirred.</p>
+
+<p>"He will be...long...coming?"</p>
+
+<p>"Some days."</p>
+
+<p>"How...many?"</p>
+
+<p>"We can't tell yet."</p>
+
+<p>Silence again. Bessy's features seemed to shrink
+into a kind of waxen quietude&mdash;as though her face<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[p 410]</a></span>
+were seen under clear water, a long way down. And
+then, as she lay thus, without sound or movement, two
+tears forced themselves through her lashes and rolled
+down her cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>Justine, bending close, wiped them away. "Bessy&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The wet lashes were raised&mdash;an anguished look met
+her gaze.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I can't bear it...."</p>
+
+<p>"What, dear?"</p>
+
+<p>"The pain.... Shan't I die...before?"</p>
+
+<p>"You may get well, Bessy."</p>
+
+<p>Justine felt her hand quiver. "Walk again...?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps...not that."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>This?</i> I can't bear it...." Her head drooped
+sideways, turning away toward the wall.</p>
+
+<p>Justine, that night, kept her vigil with an aching
+heart. The news of Amherst's return had produced
+no sign of happiness in his wife&mdash;- the tears had been
+forced from her merely by the dread of being kept
+alive during the long days of pain before he came.
+The medical explanation might have been that repeated
+crises of intense physical anguish, and the deep lassitude
+succeeding them, had so overlaid all other feelings, or
+at least so benumbed their expression, that it was impossible
+to conjecture how Bessy's little half-smothered
+spark of soul had really been affected by the news.
+But Justine did not believe in this argument. Her ex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[p 411]</a></span>perience
+among the sick had convinced her, on the contrary,
+that the shafts of grief or joy will find a crack in
+the heaviest armour of physical pain, that the tiniest
+gleam of hope will light up depths of mental inanition,
+and somehow send a ray to the surface.... It was
+true that Bessy had never known how to bear pain,
+and that her own sensations had always formed the
+centre of her universe&mdash;yet, for that very reason, if the
+thought of seeing Amherst had made her happier it
+would have lifted, at least momentarily, the weight of
+death from her body.</p>
+
+<p>Justine, at first, had almost feared the contrary effect&mdash;feared
+that the moral depression might show itself
+in a lowering of physical resistance. But the body
+kept up its obstinate struggle against death, drawing
+strength from sources of vitality unsuspected in that
+frail envelope. The surgeon's report the next day was
+more favourable, and every day won from death
+pointed now to a faint chance of recovery.</p>
+
+<p>Such at least was Wyant's view. Dr. Garford and
+the consulting surgeons had not yet declared themselves;
+but the young doctor, strung to the highest
+point of watchfulness, and constantly in attendance on
+the patient, was tending toward a hopeful prognosis.
+The growing conviction spurred him to fresh efforts;
+at Dr. Garford's request, he had temporarily handed
+over his Clifton practice to a young New York doctor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[p 412]</a></span>
+in need of change, and having installed himself at Lynbrook
+he gave up his days and nights to Mrs. Amherst's
+case.</p>
+
+<p>"If any one can save her, Wyant will," Dr. Garford
+had declared to Justine, when, on the tenth day after
+the accident, the surgeons held their third consultation.
+Dr. Garford reserved his own judgment. He had seen
+cases&mdash;they had all seen cases...but just at present
+the signs might point either way.... Meanwhile Wyant's
+confidence was an invaluable asset toward the
+patient's chances of recovery. Hopefulness in the physician
+was almost as necessary as in the patient&mdash;contact
+with such faith had been known to work
+miracles.</p>
+
+<p>Justine listened in silence, wishing that she too could
+hope. But whichever way the prognosis pointed, she
+felt only a dull despair. She believed no more than
+Dr. Garford in the chance of recovery&mdash;that conviction
+seemed to her a mirage of Wyant's imagination, of his
+boyish ambition to achieve the impossible&mdash;and every
+hopeful symptom pointed, in her mind, only to a longer
+period of useless suffering.</p>
+
+<p>Her hours at Bessy's side deepened her revolt against
+the energy spent in the fight with death. Since Bessy
+had learned that her husband was returning she had
+never, by sign or word, reverted to the fact. Except
+for a gleam of tenderness, now and then, when Cicely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[p 413]</a></span>
+was brought to her, she seemed to have sunk back into
+herself, as though her poor little flicker of consciousness
+were wholly centred in the contemplation of its pain.
+It was not that her mind was clouded&mdash;only that it was
+immersed, absorbed, in that dread mystery of disproportionate
+anguish which a capricious fate had laid on
+it.... And what if she recovered, as they called it? If
+the flood-tide of pain should ebb, leaving her stranded,
+a helpless wreck on the desert shores of inactivity?
+What would life be to Bessy without movement?
+Thought would never set her blood flowing&mdash;motion, in
+her, could only take the form of the physical processes.
+Her love for Amherst was dead&mdash;even if it flickered
+into life again, it could but put the spark to smouldering
+discords and resentments; and would her one
+uncontaminated sentiment&mdash;her affection for Cicely&mdash;suffice
+to reconcile her to the desolate half-life which
+was the utmost that science could hold out?</p>
+
+<p>Here again, Justine's experience answered no. She
+did not believe in Bessy's powers of moral recuperation&mdash;her
+body seemed less near death than her spirit.
+Life had been poured out to her in generous measure,
+and she had spilled the precious draught&mdash;the few drops
+remaining in the cup could no longer renew her strength.</p>
+
+<p>Pity, not condemnation&mdash;profound illimitable pity&mdash;flowed
+from this conclusion of Justine's. To a compassionate
+heart there could be no sadder instance of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[p 414]</a></span>
+the wastefulness of life than this struggle of the small
+half-formed soul with a destiny too heavy for its
+strength. If Bessy had had any moral hope to fight
+for, every pang of suffering would have been worth
+enduring; but it was intolerable to witness the spectacle
+of her useless pain.</p>
+
+<p>Incessant commerce with such thoughts made Justine,
+as the days passed, crave any escape from solitude,
+any contact with other ideas. Even the reappearance
+of Westy Gaines, bringing a breath of common-place
+conventional grief into the haunted silence
+of the house, was a respite from her questionings. If
+it was hard to talk to him, to answer his enquiries, to
+assent to his platitudes, it was harder, a thousand times,
+to go on talking to herself....</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar's coming was a distinct relief. His
+dryness was like cautery to her wound. Mr. Tredegar
+undoubtedly grieved for Bessy; but his grief struck
+inward, exuding only now and then, through the fissures
+of his hard manner, in a touch of extra solemnity,
+the more laboured rounding of a period. Yet, on the
+whole, it was to his feeling that Justine felt her own to
+be most akin. If his stoic acceptance of the inevitable
+proceeded from the resolve to spare himself pain, that
+at least was a form of strength, an indication of character.
+She had never cared for the fluencies of invertebrate
+sentiment.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[p 415]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now, on the evening of the day after her talk with
+Bessy, it was more than ever a solace to escape from
+the torment of her thoughts into the rarefied air of Mr.
+Tredegar's presence. The day had been a bad one
+for the patient, and Justine's distress had been increased
+by the receipt of a cable from Mr. Langhope,
+announcing that, owing to delay in reaching Brindisi,
+he had missed the fast steamer from Cherbourg, and
+would not arrive till four or five days later than he had
+expected. Mr. Tredegar, in response to her report,
+had announced his intention of coming down by a late
+train, and now he and Justine and Dr. Wyant, after
+dining together, were seated before the fire in the
+smoking-room.</p>
+
+<p>"I take it, then," Mr. Tredegar said, turning to
+Wyant, "that the chances of her living to see her father
+are very slight."</p>
+
+<p>The young doctor raised his head eagerly. "Not in
+my opinion, sir. Unless unforeseen complications arise,
+I can almost promise to keep her alive for another
+month&mdash;I'm not afraid to call it six weeks!"</p>
+
+<p>"H'm&mdash;Garford doesn't say so."</p>
+
+<p>"No; Dr. Garford argues from precedent."</p>
+
+<p>"And you?" Mr. Tredegar's thin lips were visited
+by the ghost of a smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't argue&mdash;I just feel my way," said Wyant
+imperturbably.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[p 416]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And yet you don't hesitate to predict&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't, sir; because the case, as I see it, presents
+certain definite indications." He began to enumerate
+them, cleverly avoiding the use of technicalities
+and trying to make his point clear by the use of simple
+illustration and analogy. It sickened Justine to listen
+to his passionate exposition&mdash;she had heard it so often,
+she believed in it so little.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar turned a probing glance on him as he
+ended. "Then, today even, you believe not only in the
+possibility of prolonging life, but of ultimate recovery?"</p>
+
+<p>Wyant hesitated. "I won't call it recovery&mdash;today.
+Say&mdash;life indefinitely prolonged."</p>
+
+<p>"And the paralysis?"</p>
+
+<p>"It might disappear&mdash;after a few months&mdash;or a few
+years."</p>
+
+<p>"Such an outcome would be unusual?"</p>
+
+<p>"Exceptional. But then there <i>are</i> exceptions. And
+I'm straining every nerve to make this one!"</p>
+
+<p>"And the suffering&mdash;such as today's, for instance&mdash;is
+unavoidable?"</p>
+
+<p>"Unhappily."</p>
+
+<p>"And bound to increase?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;as the an&aelig;sthetics lose their effect...."</p>
+
+<p>There was a tap on the door, and one of the nurses
+entered to report to Wyant. He went out with her, and
+Justine was left with Mr. Tredegar.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[p 417]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He turned to her thoughtfully. "That young fellow
+seems sure of himself. You believe in him?"</p>
+
+<p>Justine hesitated. "Not in his expectation of recovery&mdash;no
+one does."</p>
+
+<p>"But you think they can keep the poor child alive
+till Langhope and her husband get back?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a moment's pause; then Justine murmured:
+"It can be done...I think...."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;it's horrible," said Mr. Tredegar suddenly,
+as if in answer to her thought.</p>
+
+<p>She looked up in surprise, and saw his eye resting
+on her with what seemed like a mist of sympathy on
+its vitreous surface. Her lips trembled, parting as if
+for speech&mdash;but she looked away without answering.</p>
+
+<p>"These new devices for keeping people alive," Mr.
+Tredegar continued; "they increase the suffering besides
+prolonging it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;in some cases."</p>
+
+<p>"In this case?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid so."</p>
+
+<p>The lawyer drew out his fine cambric handkerchief,
+and furtively wiped a slight dampness from his forehead.
+"I wish to God she had been killed!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>Justine lifted her head again, with an answering exclamation.
+"Oh, yes!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's infernal&mdash;the time they can make it last."</p>
+
+<p>"It's useless!" Justine broke out.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[p 418]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Useless?" He turned his critical glance on her.
+"Well, that's beside the point&mdash;since it's inevitable."</p>
+
+<p>She wavered a moment&mdash;but his words had loosened
+the bonds about her heart, and she could not check
+herself so suddenly. "Why inevitable?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar looked at her in surprise, as though
+wondering at so unprofessional an utterance from one
+who, under ordinary circumstances, showed the absolute
+self-control and submission of the well-disciplined nurse.</p>
+
+<p>"Human life is sacred," he said sententiously.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, that must have been decreed by some one who
+had never suffered!" Justine exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tredegar smiled compassionately: he evidently
+knew how to make allowances for the fact that she was
+overwrought by the sight of her friend's suffering:
+"Society decreed it&mdash;not one person," he corrected.</p>
+
+<p>"Society&mdash;science&mdash;religion!" she murmured, as if
+to herself.</p>
+
+<p>"Precisely. It's the universal consensus&mdash;the result
+of the world's accumulated experience. Cruel in individual
+instances&mdash;necessary for the general welfare.
+Of course your training has taught you all this; but I
+can understand that at such a time...."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, rising wearily as Wyant came in.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Her worst misery, now, was to have to discuss Bessy's
+condition with Wyant. To the young physician Bessy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[p 419]</a></span>
+was no longer a suffering, agonizing creature: she was
+a case&mdash;a beautiful case. As the problem developed
+new intricacies, becoming more and more of a challenge
+to his faculties of observation and inference, Justine saw
+the abstract scientific passion supersede his personal
+feeling of pity. Though his professional skill made him
+exquisitely tender to the patient under his hands, he
+seemed hardly conscious that she was a woman who
+had befriended him, and whom he had so lately seen
+in the brightness of health and enjoyment. This view
+was normal enough&mdash;it was, as Justine knew, the ideal
+state of mind for the successful physician, in whom
+sympathy for the patient as an individual must often
+impede swift choice and unfaltering action. But what
+she shrank from was his resolve to save Bessy's life&mdash;a
+resolve fortified to the point of exasperation by the
+scepticism of the consulting surgeons, who saw in it
+only the youngster's natural desire to distinguish himself
+by performing a feat which his elders deemed impossible.</p>
+
+<p>As the days dragged on, and Bessy's sufferings increased,
+Justine longed for a protesting word from
+Dr. Garford or one of his colleagues. In her
+hospital experience she had encountered cases where
+the useless agonies of death were mercifully shortened
+by the physician; why was not this a case for such
+treatment? The answer was simple enough&mdash;in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[p 420]</a></span>
+first place, it was the duty of the surgeons to keep
+their patient alive till her husband and her father could
+reach her; and secondly, there was that faint illusive
+hope of so-called recovery, in which none of them believed,
+yet which they could not ignore in their treatment.
+The evening after Mr. Tredegar's departure
+Wyant was setting this forth at great length to Justine.
+Bessy had had a bad morning: the bronchial symptoms
+which had developed a day or two before had
+greatly increased her distress, and there had been, at
+dawn, a moment of weakness when it seemed that
+some pitiful power was about to defeat the relentless
+efforts of science. But Wyant had fought off the peril.
+By the prompt and audacious use of stimulants&mdash;by a
+rapid marshalling of resources, a display of self-reliance
+and authority, which Justine could not but admire as
+she mechanically seconded his efforts&mdash;the spark of
+life had been revived, and Bessy won back for fresh
+suffering.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;I say it can be done: tonight I say it more
+than ever," Wyant exclaimed, pushing the disordered
+hair from his forehead, and leaning toward Justine
+across the table on which their brief evening meal had
+been served. "I say the way the heart has rallied
+proves that we've got more strength to draw on than
+any of them have been willing to admit. The breathing's
+better too. If we can fight off the degenerative<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[p 421]</a></span>
+processes&mdash;and, by George, I believe we can!" He
+looked up suddenly at Justine. "With you to work
+with, I believe I could do anything. How you do back
+a man up! You think with your hands&mdash;with every
+individual finger!"</p>
+
+<p>Justine turned her eyes away: she felt a shudder of
+repulsion steal over her tired body. It was not that
+she detected any note of personal admiration in his
+praise&mdash;he had commended her as the surgeon might
+commend a fine instrument fashioned for his use.
+But that she should be the instrument to serve such a
+purpose&mdash;that her skill, her promptness, her gift of
+divining and interpreting the will she worked with,
+should be at the service of this implacable scientific
+passion! Ah, no&mdash;she could be silent no longer....</p>
+
+<p>She looked up at Wyant, and their eyes met.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you do it?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>He stared, as if thinking that she referred to some
+special point in his treatment. "Do what?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's so useless...you all know she must die."</p>
+
+<p>"I know nothing of the kind...and even the others
+are not so sure today." He began to go over it all
+again&mdash;repeating his arguments, developing new theories,
+trying to force into her reluctant mind his own
+faith in the possibility of success.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Justine sat resting her chin on her clasped hands, her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[p 422]</a></span>
+eyes gazing straight before her under dark tormented
+brows. When he paused she remained silent.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;don't you believe me?" he broke out with
+sudden asperity.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know...I can't tell...."</p>
+
+<p>"But as long as there's a doubt, even&mdash;a doubt my
+way&mdash;and I'll show you there is, if you'll give me
+time&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"How much time?" she murmured, without shifting
+her gaze.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;that depends on ourselves: on you and me
+chiefly. That's what Garford admits. <i>They</i> can't do
+much now&mdash;they've got to leave the game to us. It's
+a question of incessant vigilance...of utilizing every
+hour, every moment.... Time's all I ask, and <i>you</i>
+can give it to me, if any one can!"</p>
+
+<p>Under the challenge of his tone Justine rose to her
+feet with a low murmur of fear. "Ah, don't ask me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't ask you&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't&mdash;I can't."</p>
+
+<p>Wyant stood up also, turning on her an astonished
+glance.</p>
+
+<p>"You can't what&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>Their eyes met, and she thought she read in his a
+sudden divination of her inmost thoughts. The discovery
+electrified her flagging strength, restoring her
+to immediate clearness of brain. She saw the gulf of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[p 423]</a></span>
+self-betrayal over which she had hung, and the nearness
+of the peril nerved her to a last effort of dissimulation.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't...talk of it...any longer," she faltered,
+letting her tears flow, and turning on him a face of
+pure womanly weakness.</p>
+
+<p>Wyant looked at her without answering. Did he
+distrust even these plain physical evidences of exhaustion,
+or was he merely disappointed in her, as in
+one whom he had believed to be above the emotional
+failings of her sex?</p>
+
+<p>"You're over-tired," he said coldly. "Take tonight
+to rest. Miss Mace can replace you for the next few
+hours&mdash;and I may need you more tomorrow."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIX" id="XXIX"></a>XXIX</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Four</span> more days had passed. Bessy seldom spoke
+when Justine was with her. She was wrapped in
+a thickening cloud of opiates&mdash;morphia by day, bromides,
+sulphonal, chloral hydrate at night. When the
+cloud broke and consciousness emerged, it was centred
+in the one acute point of bodily anguish. Darting
+throes of neuralgia, agonized oppression of the breath,
+the diffused misery of the whole helpless body&mdash;these
+were reducing their victim to a mere instrument on
+which pain played its incessant deadly variations. Once<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[p 424]</a></span>
+or twice she turned her dull eyes on Justine, breathing
+out: "I want to die," as some inevitable lifting or readjusting
+thrilled her body with fresh pangs; but there
+were no signs of contact with the outer world&mdash;she had
+ceased even to ask for Cicely....</p>
+
+<p>And yet, according to the doctors, the patient held
+her own. Certain alarming symptoms had diminished,
+and while others persisted, the strength to fight them
+persisted too. With such strength to call on, what
+fresh agonies were reserved for the poor body when
+the narcotics had lost their power?</p>
+
+<p>That was the question always before Justine. She
+never again betrayed her fears to Wyant&mdash;she carried
+out his orders with morbid precision, trembling lest any
+failure in efficiency should revive his suspicions. She
+hardly knew what she feared his suspecting&mdash;she only
+had a confused sense that they were enemies, and that
+she was the weaker of the two.</p>
+
+<p>And then the an&aelig;sthetics began to fail. It was the
+sixteenth day since the accident, and the resources of
+alleviation were almost exhausted. It was not sure,
+even now, that Bessy was going to die&mdash;and she was
+certainly going to suffer a long time. Wyant seemed
+hardly conscious of the increase of pain&mdash;his whole
+mind was fixed on the prognosis. What matter if the
+patient suffered, as long as he proved his case? That,
+of course, was not his way of putting it. In reality,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[p 425]</a></span>
+he did all he could to allay the pain, surpassed himself
+in new devices and experiments. But death confronted
+him implacably, claiming his due: so many hours robbed
+from him, so much tribute to pay; and Wyant, setting
+his teeth, fought on&mdash;and Bessy paid.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Justine had begun to notice that it was hard for her to
+get a word alone with Dr. Garford. The other nurses
+were not in the way&mdash;it was Wyant who always contrived
+to be there. Perhaps she was unreasonable in
+seeing a special intention in his presence: it was natural
+enough that the two persons in charge of the case
+should confer together with their chief. But his persistence
+annoyed her, and she was glad when, one
+afternoon, the surgeon asked him to telephone an important
+message to town.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the door had closed, Justine said to Dr.
+Garford: "She is beginning to suffer terribly."</p>
+
+<p>He answered with the large impersonal gesture of the
+man to whom physical suffering has become a painful
+general fact of life, no longer divisible into individual
+cases. "We are doing all we can."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes." She paused, and then raised her eyes to his
+dry kind face. "Is there any hope?"</p>
+
+<p>Another gesture&mdash;the fatalistic sweep of the lifted
+palms. "The next ten days will tell&mdash;the fight is on,
+as Wyant says. And if any one can do it, that young<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[p 426]</a></span>
+fellow can. There's stuff in him&mdash;and infernal ambition."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes: but do <i>you</i> believe she can live&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Garford smiled indulgently on such unprofessional
+insistence; but she was past wondering what
+they must all think of her.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Miss Brent," he said, "I have reached the
+age when one always leaves a door open to the unexpected."</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke, a slight sound at her back made her
+turn. Wyant was behind her&mdash;he must have entered
+as she put her question. And he certainly could not
+have had time to descend the stairs, walk the length
+of the house, ring up New York, and deliver Dr
+Garford's message.... The same thought seemed to
+strike the surgeon. "Hello, Wyant?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Line busy," said Wyant curtly.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>About this time, Justine gave up her night vigils. She
+could no longer face the struggle of the dawn hour,
+when life ebbs lowest; and since her duties extended
+beyond the sick-room she could fairly plead that she
+was more needed about the house by day. But Wyant
+protested: he wanted her most at the difficult hour.</p>
+
+<p>"You know you're taking a chance from her," he
+said, almost sternly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no&mdash;&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[p 427]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He looked at her searchingly. "You don't feel up to
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>He turned away with a slight shrug; but she knew he
+resented her defection.</p>
+
+<p>The day watches were miserable enough. It was the
+nineteenth day now; and Justine lay on the sofa in
+Amherst's sitting-room, trying to nerve herself for the
+nurse's summons. A page torn out of the calendar lay
+before her&mdash;she had been calculating again how many
+days must elapse before Mr. Langhope could arrive.
+Ten days&mdash;ten days and ten nights! And the length of
+the nights was double.... As for Amherst, it was
+impossible to set a date for his coming, for his steamer
+from Buenos Ayres called at various ports on the way
+northward, and the length of her stay at each was dependent
+on the delivery of freight, and on the dilatoriness
+of the South American official.</p>
+
+<p>She threw down the calendar and leaned back,
+pressing her hands to her temples. Oh, for a word
+with Amherst&mdash;he alone would have understood what
+she was undergoing! Mr. Langhope's coming would
+make no difference&mdash;or rather, it would only increase
+the difficulty of the situation. Instinctively Justine
+felt that, though his heart would be wrung by the sight
+of Bessy's pain, his cry would be the familiar one,
+the traditional one: <i>Keep her alive!</i> Under his sur<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[p 428]</a></span>face
+originality, his verbal audacities and ironies, Mr.
+Langhope was the creature of accepted forms, inherited
+opinions: he had never really thought for himself on
+any of the pressing problems of life.</p>
+
+<p>But Amherst was different. Close contact with many
+forms of wretchedness had freed him from the bondage
+of accepted opinion. He looked at life through no eyes
+but his own; and what he saw, he confessed to seeing.
+He never tried to evade the consequences of his discoveries.</p>
+
+<p>Justine's remembrance flew back to their first meeting
+at Hanaford, when his confidence in his own powers
+was still unshaken, his trust in others unimpaired.
+And, gradually, she began to relive each detail of their
+talk at Dillon's bedside&mdash;her first impression of him,
+as he walked down the ward; the first sound of his
+voice; her surprised sense of his authority; her almost
+involuntary submission to his will.... Then her
+thoughts passed on to their walk home from the hospital&mdash;she
+recalled his sober yet unsparing summary of
+the situation at Westmore, and the note of insight with
+which he touched on the hardships of the workers....
+Then, word by word, their talk about Dillon came
+back...Amherst's indignation and pity...his shudder
+of revolt at the man's doom.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>In your work, don't you ever feel tempted to set a
+poor devil free?</i>" And then, after her conventional<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[p 429]</a></span>
+murmur of protest: "<i>To save what, when all the good
+of life is gone?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>To distract her thoughts she stretched her hand
+toward the book-case, taking out the first volume in
+reach&mdash;the little copy of Bacon. She leaned back,
+fluttering its pages aimlessly&mdash;so wrapped in her own
+misery that the meaning of the words could not reach
+her. It was useless to try to read: every perception of
+the outer world was lost in the hum of inner activity
+that made her mind like a forge throbbing with heat and
+noise. But suddenly her glance fell on some pencilled
+sentences on the fly-leaf. They were in Amherst's hand,
+and the sight arrested her as though she had heard
+him speak.</p>
+
+<p><i>La vraie morale se moque de la morale....</i></p>
+
+<p><i>We perish because we follow other men's examples....</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the
+name of Lami&aelig;&mdash;bugbears to frighten children....</i></p>
+
+<p>A rush of air seemed to have been let into her stifled
+mind. Were they his own thoughts? No&mdash;her memory
+recalled some confused association with great names.
+But at least they must represent his beliefs&mdash;must embody
+deeply-felt convictions&mdash;or he would scarcely have
+taken the trouble to record them.</p>
+
+<p>She murmured over the last sentence once or twice:
+<i>The opinions of the many&mdash;bugbears to frighten children....</i>
+Yes, she had often heard him speak of cur<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[p 430]</a></span>rent
+judgments in that way...she had never known
+a mind so free from the spell of the Lami&aelig;.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Some one knocked, and she put aside the book and
+rose to her feet. It was a maid bringing a note from
+Wyant.</p>
+
+<p>"There has been a motor accident beyond Clifton,
+and I have been sent for. I think I can safely be away
+for two or three hours, but ring me up at Clifton if you
+want me. Miss Mace has instructions, and Garford's
+assistant will be down at seven."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at the clock: it was just three, the hour
+at which she was to relieve Miss Mace. She smoothed
+the hair from her forehead, straightened her cap, tied
+on the apron she had laid aside....</p>
+
+<p>As she entered Bessy's sitting-room the nurse came
+out, memoranda in hand. The two moved to the window
+for a moment's conference, and as the wintry light
+fell on Miss Mace's face, Justine saw that it was white
+with fatigue.</p>
+
+<p>"You're ill!" she exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>The nurse shook her head. "No&mdash;but it's awful...this
+afternoon...." Her glance turned to the sick-room.</p>
+
+<p>"Go and rest&mdash;I'll stay till bedtime," Justine said.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Safford's down with another headache."</p>
+
+<p>"I know: it doesn't matter. I'm quite fresh."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[p 431]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You <i>do</i> look rested!" the other exclaimed, her eyes
+lingering enviously on Justine's face.</p>
+
+<p>She stole away, and Justine entered the room. It
+was true that she felt fresh&mdash;a new spring of hope
+had welled up in her. She had her nerves in hand
+again, she had regained her steady vision of life....</p>
+
+<p>But in the room, as the nurse had said, it was awful.
+The time had come when the effect of the an&aelig;sthetics
+must be carefully husbanded, when long intervals of
+pain must purchase the diminishing moments of relief.
+Yet from Wyant's standpoint it was a good day&mdash;things
+were looking well, as he would have phrased it. And
+each day now was a fresh victory.</p>
+
+<p>Justine went through her task mechanically. The
+glow of strength and courage remained, steeling her to
+bear what had broken down Miss Mace's professional
+fortitude. But when she sat down by the bed Bessy's
+moaning began to wear on her. It was no longer the
+utterance of human pain, but the monotonous whimper
+of an animal&mdash;the kind of sound that a compassionate
+hand would instinctively crush into silence. But her
+hand had other duties; she must keep watch on pulse
+and heart, must reinforce their action with the tremendous
+stimulants which Wyant was now using, and,
+having revived fresh sensibility to pain, must presently
+try to allay it by the cautious use of narcotics.</p>
+
+<p>It was all simple enough&mdash;but suppose she should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[p 432]</a></span>
+not do it? Suppose she left the stimulants untouched?
+Wyant was absent, one nurse exhausted with
+fatigue, the other laid low by headache. Justine had
+the field to herself. For three hours at least no one
+was likely to cross the threshold of the sick-room....
+Ah, if no more time were needed! But there was too
+much life in Bessy&mdash;her youth was fighting too hard
+for her! She would not sink out of life in three hours...and
+Justine could not count on more than that.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at the little travelling-clock on the dressing-table,
+and saw that its hands marked four. An
+hour had passed already.... She rose and administered
+the prescribed restorative; then she took the pulse,
+and listened to the beat of the heart. Strong still&mdash;too
+strong!</p>
+
+<p>As she lifted her head, the vague animal wailing
+ceased, and she heard her name: "Justine&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She bent down eagerly. "Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>No answer: the wailing had begun again. But the
+one word showed her that the mind still lived in its
+torture-house, that the poor powerless body before her
+was not yet a mere bundle of senseless reflexes, but her
+friend Bessy Amherst, dying, and feeling herself die....</p>
+
+<p>Justine reseated herself, and the vigil began again.
+The second hour ebbed slowly&mdash;ah, no, it was flying
+now! Her eyes were on the hands of the clock and
+they seemed leagued against her to devour the precious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[p 433]</a></span>
+minutes. And now she could see by certain spasmodic
+symptoms that another crisis of pain was approaching&mdash;one
+of the struggles that Wyant, at times, had almost
+seemed to court and exult in.</p>
+
+<p>Bessy's eyes turned on her again. "<i>Justine</i>&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She knew what that meant: it was an appeal for the
+hypodermic needle. The little instrument lay at hand,
+beside a newly-filled bottle of morphia. But she must
+wait&mdash;must let the pain grow more severe. Yet she
+could not turn her gaze from Bessy, and Bessy's eyes
+entreated her again&mdash;<i>Justine</i>! There was really no
+word now&mdash;the whimperings were uninterrupted. But
+Justine heard an inner voice, and its pleading shook her
+heart. She rose and filled the syringe&mdash;and returning
+with it, bent above the bed....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>She lifted her head and looked at the clock. The second
+hour had passed. As she looked, she heard a step
+in the sitting-room. Who could it be? Not Dr. Garford's
+assistant&mdash;he was not due till seven. She listened
+again.... One of the nurses? No, not a
+woman's step&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>The door opened, and Wyant came in. Justine
+stood by the bed without moving toward him. He
+paused also, as if surprised to see her there motionless.
+In the intense silence she fancied for a moment that
+she heard Bessy's violent agonized breathing. She<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[p 434]</a></span>
+tried to speak, to drown the sound of the breathing;
+but her lips trembled too much, and she remained
+silent.</p>
+
+<p>Wyant seemed to hear nothing. He stood so still
+that she felt she must move forward. As she did so,
+she picked up from the table by the bed the memoranda
+that it was her duty to submit to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" he said, in the familiar sick-room whisper.</p>
+
+<p>"She is dead."</p>
+
+<p>He fell back a step, glaring at her, white and incredulous.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Dead?</i>&mdash;When&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"A few minutes ago...."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Dead&mdash;?</i> It's not possible!"</p>
+
+<p>He swept past her, shouldering her aside, pushing in
+an electric button as he sprang to the bed. She perceived
+then that the room had been almost in darkness.
+She recovered command of herself, and followed him.
+He was going through the usual rapid examination&mdash;pulse,
+heart, breath&mdash;hanging over the bed like some
+angry animal balked of its prey. Then he lifted the
+lids and bent close above the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Take the shade off that lamp!" he commanded.</p>
+
+<p>Justine obeyed him.</p>
+
+<p>He stooped down again to examine the eyes...he
+remained stooping a long time. Suddenly he stood up
+and faced her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[p 435]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Had she been in great pain?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Worse than usual?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"What had you done?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing&mdash;there was no time."</p>
+
+<p>"No time?" He broke off to sweep the room again
+with his excited incredulous glance. "Where are the
+others? Why were you here alone?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"It came suddenly. I was going to call&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Their eyes met for a moment. Her face was perfectly
+calm&mdash;she could feel that her lips no longer trembled.
+She was not in the least afraid of Wyant's
+scrutiny.</p>
+
+<p>As he continued to look at her, his expression slowly
+passed from incredulous wrath to something softer&mdash;more
+human&mdash;she could not tell what....</p>
+
+<p>"This has been too much for you&mdash;go and send one of
+the others.... It's all over," he said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[p 436]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_IV" id="BOOK_IV"></a>BOOK IV</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXX" id="XXX"></a>XXX</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On</span> a September day, somewhat more than a year
+and a half after Bessy Amherst's death, her
+husband and his mother sat at luncheon in the dining-room
+of the Westmore house at Hanaford.</p>
+
+<p>The house was John Amherst's now, and shortly
+after the loss of his wife he had established himself
+there with his mother. By a will made some six
+months before her death, Bessy had divided her
+estate between her husband and daughter, placing
+Cicely's share in trust, and appointing Mr. Langhope
+and Amherst as her guardians. As the latter was also
+her trustee, the whole management of the estate devolved
+on him, while his control of the Westmore mills
+was ensured by his receiving a slightly larger proportion
+of the stock than his step-daughter.</p>
+
+<p>The will had come as a surprise, not only to
+Amherst himself, but to his wife's family, and more
+especially to her legal adviser. Mr. Tredegar had in
+fact had nothing to do with the drawing of the instrument;
+but as it had been drawn in due form, and by a
+firm of excellent standing, he was obliged, in spite of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[p 437]</a></span>
+private views, and Mr. Langhope's open adjurations
+that he should "do something," to declare that there
+was no pretext for questioning the validity of the
+document.</p>
+
+<p>To Amherst the will was something more than a
+proof of his wife's confidence: it came as a reconciling
+word from her grave. For the date showed that it had
+been made at a moment when he supposed himself to
+have lost all influence over her&mdash;on the morrow of the
+day when she had stipulated that he should give up
+the management of the Westmore mills, and yield the
+care of her property to Mr. Tredegar.</p>
+
+<p>While she smote him with one hand, she sued for
+pardon with the other; and the contradiction was so
+characteristic, it explained and excused in so touching
+a way the inconsistencies of her impulsive heart and
+hesitating mind, that he was filled with that tender
+compunction, that searching sense of his own shortcomings,
+which generous natures feel when they find
+they have underrated the generosity of others. But
+Amherst's was not an introspective mind, and his
+sound moral sense told him, when the first pang of
+self-reproach had subsided, that he had done his best
+by his wife, and was in no way to blame if her recognition
+of the fact had come too late. The self-reproach
+subsided; and, instead of the bitterness of the past, it
+left a softened memory which made him take up his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[p 438]</a></span>
+task with the sense that he was now working with Bessy
+and not against her.</p>
+
+<p>Yet perhaps, after all, it was chiefly the work itself
+which had healed old wounds, and quelled the tendency
+to vain regrets. Amherst was only thirty-four;
+and in the prime of his energies the task he was made
+for had been given back to him. To a sound nature,
+which finds its outlet in fruitful action, nothing so simplifies
+the complexities of life, so tends to a large acceptance
+of its vicissitudes and mysteries, as the sense
+of doing something each day toward clearing one's own
+bit of the wilderness. And this was the joy at last conceded
+to Amherst. The mills were virtually his; and
+the fact that he ruled them not only in his own right but
+as Cicely's representative, made him doubly eager to
+justify his wife's trust in him.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst, looking up from a telegram which the
+parlour-maid had handed her, smiled across the table
+at her son.</p>
+
+<p>"From Maria Ansell&mdash;they are all coming tomorrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;that's good," Amherst rejoined. "I should
+have been sorry if Cicely had not been here."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Langhope is coming too," his mother continued.
+"I'm glad of that, John."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Amherst again assented.</p>
+
+<p>The morrow was to be a great day at Westmore.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[p 439]</a></span>
+The Emergency Hospital, planned in the first months
+of his marriage, and abandoned in the general reduction
+of expenditure at the mills, had now been completed
+on a larger and more elaborate scale, as a memorial
+to Bessy. The strict retrenchment of all personal
+expenses, and the leasing of Lynbrook and the
+town house, had enabled Amherst, in eighteen months,
+to lay by enough income to carry out this plan, which
+he was impatient to see executed as a visible commemoration
+of his wife's generosity to Westmore. For
+Amherst persisted in regarding the gift of her fortune
+as a gift not to himself but to the mills: he looked on
+himself merely as the agent of her beneficent intentions.
+He was anxious that Westmore and Hanaford
+should take the same view; and the opening of the
+Westmore Memorial Hospital was therefore to be performed
+with an unwonted degree of ceremony.</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad Mr. Langhope is coming," Mrs. Amherst
+repeated, as they rose from the table. "It shows,
+dear&mdash;doesn't it?&mdash;that he's really gratified&mdash;that he
+appreciates your motive...."</p>
+
+<p>She raised a proud glance to her tall son, whose head
+seemed to tower higher than ever above her small proportions.
+Renewed self-confidence, and the habit of
+command, had in fact restored the erectness to Amherst's
+shoulders and the clearness to his eyes. The
+cleft between the brows was gone, and his veiled in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[p 440]</a></span>ward
+gaze had given place to a glance almost as outward-looking
+and unspeculative as his mother's.</p>
+
+<p>"It shows&mdash;well, yes&mdash;what you say!" he rejoined
+with a slight laugh, and a tap on her shoulder as she
+passed.</p>
+
+<p>He was under no illusions as to his father-in-law's
+attitude: he knew that Mr. Langhope would willingly
+have broken the will which deprived his grand-daughter
+of half her inheritance, and that his subsequent show
+of friendliness was merely a concession to expediency.
+But in his present mood Amherst almost believed that
+time and closer relations might turn such sentiments
+into honest liking. He was very fond of his little step-daughter,
+and deeply sensible of his obligations toward
+her; and he hoped that, as Mr. Langhope came to
+recognize this, it might bring about a better understanding
+between them.</p>
+
+<p>His mother detained him. "You're going back to
+the mills at once? I wanted to consult you about the
+rooms. Miss Brent had better be next to Cicely?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so&mdash;yes. I'll see you before I go." He
+nodded affectionately and passed on, his hands full of
+papers, into the Oriental smoking-room, now dedicated
+to the unexpected uses of an office and study.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst, as she turned away, found the parlour-maid
+in the act of opening the front door to the highly-tinted
+and well-dressed figure of Mrs. Harry Dressel.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[p 441]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I'm so delighted to hear that you're expecting Justine,"
+began Mrs. Dressel as the two ladies passed into
+the drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you've heard too?" Mrs. Amherst rejoined,
+enthroning her visitor in one of the monumental plush
+armchairs beneath the threatening weight of the Bay
+of Naples.</p>
+
+<p>"I hadn't till this moment; in fact I flew in to ask
+for news, and on the door-step there was such a striking-looking
+young man enquiring for her, and I heard the
+parlour-maid say she was arriving tomorrow."</p>
+
+<p>"A young man? Some one you didn't know?"
+Striking apparitions of the male sex were of infrequent
+occurrence at Hanaford, and Mrs. Amherst's unabated
+interest in the movement of life caused her to dwell on
+this statement.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no&mdash;I'm sure he was a stranger. Extremely
+slight and pale, with remarkable eyes. He was so
+disappointed&mdash;he seemed sure of finding her."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, no doubt he'll come back tomorrow.&mdash;You
+know we're expecting the whole party," added Mrs.
+Amherst, to whom the imparting of good news was
+always an irresistible temptation.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Dressel's interest deepened at once. "Really?
+Mr. Langhope too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. It's a great pleasure to my son."</p>
+
+<p>"It must be! I'm so glad. I suppose in a way it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[p 442]</a></span>
+will be rather sad for Mr. Langhope&mdash;seeing everything
+here so unchanged&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst straightened herself a little. "I think
+he will prefer to find it so," she said, with a barely
+perceptible change of tone.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know. They were never very fond of
+this house."</p>
+
+<p>There was an added note of authority in Mrs.
+Dressel's accent. In the last few months she had been
+to Europe and had had nervous prostration, and these
+incontestable evidences of growing prosperity could not
+always be kept out of her voice and bearing. At any
+rate, they justified her in thinking that her opinion on
+almost any subject within the range of human experience
+was a valuable addition to the sum-total of wisdom;
+and unabashed by the silence with which her
+comment was received, she continued her critical survey
+of the drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear Mrs. Amherst&mdash;you know I can't help
+saying what I think&mdash;and I've so often wondered
+why you don't do this room over. With these
+high ceilings you could do something lovely in Louis
+Seize."</p>
+
+<p>A faint pink rose to Mrs. Amherst's cheeks. "I
+don't think my son would ever care to make any
+changes here," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I understand his feeling; but when he begins<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[p 443]</a></span>
+to entertain&mdash;and you know poor Bessy always <i>hated</i>
+this furniture."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst smiled slightly. "Perhaps if he marries
+again&mdash;" she said, seizing at random on a pretext
+for changing the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Dressel dropped the hands with which she was
+absent-mindedly assuring herself of the continuance of
+unbroken relations between her hat and her hair.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Marries again?</i> Why&mdash;you don't mean&mdash;? He
+doesn't think of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not in the least&mdash;I spoke figuratively," her hostess
+rejoined with a laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course&mdash;I see. He really <i>couldn't</i> marry,
+could he? I mean, it would be so wrong to Cicely&mdash;under
+the circumstances."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst's black eye-brows gathered in a slight
+frown. She had already noticed, on the part of the
+Hanaford clan, a disposition to regard Amherst as
+imprisoned in the conditions of his trust, and committed
+to the obligation of handing on unimpaired to
+Cicely the fortune his wife's caprice had bestowed on
+him; and this open expression of the family view was
+singularly displeasing to her.</p>
+
+<p>"I had not thought of it in that light&mdash;but it's really
+of no consequence how one looks at a thing that is not
+going to happen," she said carelessly.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;naturally; I see you were only joking. He's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[p 444]</a></span>
+so devoted to Cicely, isn't he?" Mrs. Dressel rejoined,
+with her bright obtuseness.</p>
+
+<p>A step on the threshold announced Amherst's approach.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I must be off, mother&mdash;" he began, halting
+in the doorway with the instinctive masculine recoil
+from the afternoon caller.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mr. Amherst, how d'you do? I suppose you're
+very busy about tomorrow? I just flew in to find out
+if Justine was really coming," Mrs. Dressel explained,
+a little fluttered by the effort of recalling what she had
+been saying when he entered.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe my mother expects the whole party," Amherst
+replied, shaking hands with the false <i>bonhomie</i> of
+the man entrapped.</p>
+
+<p>"How delightful! And it's so nice to think that Mr.
+Langhope's arrangement with Justine still works so
+well," Mrs. Dressel hastened on, nervously hoping that
+her volubility would smother any recollection of what
+he had chanced to overhear.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Langhope is lucky in having persuaded Miss
+Brent to take charge of Cicely," Mrs. Amherst quietly
+interposed.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;and it was so lucky for Justine too! When
+she came back from Europe with us last autumn, I
+could see she simply hated the idea of taking up her
+nursing again."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[p 445]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Amherst's face darkened at the allusion, and his
+mother said hurriedly: "Ah, she was tired, poor child;
+but I'm only afraid that, after the summer's rest, she
+may want some more active occupation than looking
+after a little girl."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I think not&mdash;she's so fond of Cicely. And of
+course it's everything to her to have a comfortable
+home."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Amherst smiled. "At her age, it's not always
+everything."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Dressel stared slightly. "Oh, Justine's twenty-seven,
+you know; she's not likely to marry now," she
+said, with the mild finality of the early-wedded.</p>
+
+<p>She rose as she spoke, extending cordial hands of
+farewell. "You must be so busy preparing for the
+great day...if only it doesn't rain!... No, <i>please</i>,
+Mr. Amherst!... It's a mere step&mdash;I'm walking...."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>That afternoon, as Amherst walked out toward Westmore
+for a survey of the final preparations, he found
+that, among the pleasant thoughts accompanying him,
+one of the pleasantest was the anticipation of seeing
+Justine Brent.</p>
+
+<p>Among the little group who were to surround him on
+the morrow, she was the only one discerning enough to
+understand what the day meant to him, or with sufficient
+knowledge to judge of the use he had made of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[p 446]</a></span>
+his great opportunity. Even now that the opportunity
+had come, and all obstacles were levelled, sympathy
+with his work was as much lacking as ever; and only
+Duplain, at length reinstated as manager, really understood
+and shared in his aims. But Justine Brent's
+sympathy was of a different kind from the manager's.
+If less logical, it was warmer, more penetrating&mdash;like
+some fine imponderable fluid, so subtle that it could
+always find a way through the clumsy processes of
+human intercourse. Amherst had thought very often
+of this quality in her during the weeks which followed
+his abrupt departure for Georgia; and in trying
+to define it he had said to himself that she felt with her
+brain.</p>
+
+<p>And now, aside from the instinctive understanding
+between them, she was set apart in his thoughts by her
+association with his wife's last days. On his arrival
+from the south he had gathered on all sides evidences
+of her tender devotion to Bessy: even Mr. Tredegar's
+chary praise swelled the general commendation. From
+the surgeons he heard how her unwearied skill had
+helped them in their fruitless efforts; poor Cicely,
+awed by her loss, clung to her mother's friend with
+childish tenacity; and the young rector of Saint Anne's,
+shyly acquitting himself of his visit of condolence,
+dwelt chiefly on the consolatory thought of Miss
+Brent's presence at the death-bed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[p 447]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The knowledge that Justine had been with his wife
+till the end had, in fact, done more than anything else
+to soften Amherst's regrets; and he had tried to express
+something of this in the course of his first talk
+with her. Justine had given him a clear and self-possessed
+report of the dreadful weeks at Lynbrook;
+but at his first allusion to her own part in them, she
+shrank into a state of distress which seemed to plead
+with him to refrain from even the tenderest touch on
+her feelings. It was a peculiarity of their friendship
+that silence and absence had always mysteriously fostered
+its growth; and he now felt that her reticence
+deepened the understanding between them as the freest
+confidences might not have done.</p>
+
+<p>Soon afterward, an opportune attack of nervous prostration
+had sent Mrs. Harry Dressel abroad; and Justine
+was selected as her companion. They remained
+in Europe for six months; and on their return Amherst
+learned with pleasure that Mr. Langhope had asked
+Miss Brent to take charge of Cicely.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope's sorrow for his daughter had been
+aggravated by futile wrath at her unaccountable will;
+and the mixed sentiment thus engendered had found
+expression in a jealous outpouring of affection toward
+Cicely. He took immediate possession of the child,
+and in the first stages of his affliction her companionship
+had been really consoling. But as time passed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[p 448]</a></span>
+and the pleasant habits of years reasserted themselves,
+her presence became, in small unacknowledged
+ways, a source of domestic irritation. Nursery hours
+disturbed the easy routine of his household; the elderly
+parlour-maid who had long ruled it resented the intervention
+of Cicely's nurse; the little governess, involved
+in the dispute, broke down and had to be shipped home
+to Germany; a successor was hard to find, and in the
+interval Mr. Langhope's privacy was invaded by a
+stream of visiting teachers, who were always wanting
+to consult him about Cicely's lessons, and lay before
+him their tiresome complaints and perplexities. Poor
+Mr. Langhope found himself in the position of the
+mourner who, in the first fervour of bereavement, has
+undertaken the construction of an imposing monument
+without having counted the cost. He had meant that
+his devotion to Cicely should be a monument to his
+paternal grief; but the foundations were scarcely laid
+when he found that the funds of time and patience
+were almost exhausted.</p>
+
+<p>Pride forbade his consigning Cicely to her step-father,
+though Mrs. Amherst would gladly have undertaken
+her care; Mrs. Ansell's migratory habits made it
+impossible for her to do more than intermittently hover
+and advise; and a new hope rose before Mr. Langhope
+when it occurred to him to appeal to Miss Brent.</p>
+
+<p>The experiment had proved a success, and when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[p 449]</a></span>
+Amherst met Justine again she had been for some
+months in charge of the little girl, and change and congenial
+occupation had restored her to a normal view
+of life. There was no trace in her now of the dumb
+misery which had haunted him at their parting; she
+was again the vivid creature who seemed more charged
+with life than any one he had ever known. The crisis
+through which she had passed showed itself only in a
+smoothing of the brow and deepening of the eyes, as
+though a bloom of experience had veiled without deadening
+the first brilliancy of youth.</p>
+
+<p>As he lingered on the image thus evoked, he recalled
+Mrs. Dressel's words: "Justine is twenty-seven&mdash;she's
+not likely to marry now."</p>
+
+<p>Oddly enough, he had never thought of her marrying&mdash;but
+now that he heard the possibility questioned,
+he felt a disagreeable conviction of its inevitableness.
+Mrs. Dressel's view was of course absurd. In spite of
+Justine's feminine graces, he had formerly felt in her a
+kind of elfin immaturity, as of a flitting Ariel with untouched
+heart and senses: it was only of late that she
+had developed the subtle quality which calls up thoughts
+of love. Not marry? Why, the vagrant fire had just
+lighted on her&mdash;and the fact that she was poor and unattached,
+with her own way to make, and no setting
+of pleasure and elegance to embellish her&mdash;these disadvantages
+seemed as nothing to Amherst against the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[p 450]</a></span>
+warmth of personality in which she moved. And besides,
+she would never be drawn to the kind of man
+who needed fine clothes and luxury to point him to
+the charm of sex. She was always finished and graceful
+in appearance, with the pretty woman's art of wearing
+her few plain dresses as if they were many and
+varied; yet no one could think of her as attaching much
+importance to the upholstery of life.... No, the man
+who won her would be of a different type, have other
+inducements to offer...and Amherst found himself
+wondering just what those inducements would be.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he remembered something his mother had
+said as he left the house&mdash;something about a distinguished-looking
+young man who had called to ask
+for Miss Brent. Mrs. Amherst, innocently inquisitive
+in small matters, had followed her son into the hall to
+ask the parlour-maid if the gentleman had left his
+name; and the parlour-maid had answered in the negative.
+The young man was evidently not indigenous:
+all the social units of Hanaford were intimately known
+to each other. He was a stranger, therefore, presumably
+drawn there by the hope of seeing Miss Brent.
+But if he knew that she was coming he must be intimately
+acquainted with her movements.... The
+thought came to Amherst as an unpleasant surprise.
+It showed him for the first time how little he knew of
+Justine's personal life, of the ties she might have formed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[p 451]</a></span>
+outside the Lynbrook circle. After all, he had seen
+her chiefly not among her own friends but among his
+wife's. Was it reasonable to suppose that a creature
+of her keen individuality would be content to subsist
+on the fringe of other existences? Somewhere, of
+course, she must have a centre of her own, must be
+subject to influences of which he was wholly ignorant.
+And since her departure from Lynbrook he had known
+even less of her life. She had spent the previous winter
+with Mr. Langhope in New York, where Amherst
+had seen her only on his rare visits to Cicely; and Mr.
+Langhope, on going abroad for the summer, had established
+his grand-daughter in a Bar Harbour cottage,
+where, save for two flying visits from Mrs.
+Ansell, Miss Brent had reigned alone till his return in
+September.</p>
+
+<p>Very likely, Amherst reflected, the mysterious visitor
+was a Bar Harbour acquaintance&mdash;no, more than an
+acquaintance: a friend. And as Mr. Langhope's party
+had left Mount Desert but three days previously, the
+arrival of the unknown at Hanaford showed a singular
+impatience to rejoin Miss Brent.</p>
+
+<p>As he reached this point in his meditations, Amherst
+found himself at the street-corner where it was his
+habit to pick up the Westmore trolley. Just as it bore
+down on him, and he sprang to the platform, another
+car, coming in from the mills, stopped to discharge its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[p 452]</a></span>
+passengers. Among them Amherst noticed a slender
+undersized man in shabby clothes, about whose retreating
+back, as he crossed the street to signal a Station
+Avenue car, there was something dimly familiar, and
+suggestive of troubled memories. Amherst leaned out
+and looked again: yes, the back was certainly like Dr.
+Wyant's&mdash;but what could Wyant be doing at Hanaford,
+and in a Westmore car?</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's first impulse was to spring out and overtake
+him. He knew how admirably the young physician
+had borne himself at Lynbrook; he even recalled
+Dr. Garford's saying, with his kindly sceptical
+smile: "Poor Wyant believed to the end that we could
+save her"&mdash;and felt again his own inward movement of
+thankfulness that the cruel miracle had not been worked.</p>
+
+<p>He owed a great deal to Wyant, and had tried to
+express his sense of the fact by warm words and a
+liberal fee; but since Bessy's death he had never returned
+to Lynbrook, and had consequently lost sight
+of the young doctor.</p>
+
+<p>Now he felt that he ought to try to rejoin him, to
+find out why he was at Hanaford, and make some
+proffer of hospitality; but if the stranger were really
+Wyant, his choice of the Station Avenue car made it
+appear that he was on his way to catch the New
+York express; and in any case Amherst's engagements
+at Westmore made immediate pursuit impossible.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[p 453]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He consoled himself with the thought that if the physician
+was not leaving Hanaford he would be certain
+to call at the house; and then his mind flew back to
+Justine Brent. But the pleasure of looking forward
+to her arrival was disturbed by new feelings. A sense
+of reserve and embarrassment had sprung up in his
+mind, checking that free mental communion which, as
+he now perceived, had been one of the unconscious
+promoters of their friendship. It was as though his
+thoughts faced a stranger instead of the familiar presence
+which had so long dwelt in them; and he began
+to see that the feeling of intelligence existing between
+Justine and himself was not the result of actual intimacy,
+but merely of the charm she knew how to throw
+over casual intercourse.</p>
+
+<p>When he had left his house, his mind was like a summer
+sky, all open blue and sunlit rolling clouds; but
+gradually the clouds had darkened and massed themselves,
+till they drew an impenetrable veil over the
+upper light and stretched threateningly across his
+whole horizon.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXI" id="XXXI"></a>XXXI</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> celebrations at Westmore were over. Hanaford
+society, mustering for the event, had streamed
+through the hospital, inspected the clinic, complimented
+Amherst, recalled itself to Mr. Langhope and Mrs.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[p 454]</a></span>
+Ansell, and streamed out again to regain its carriages
+and motors.</p>
+
+<p>The chief actors in the ceremony were also taking
+leave. Mr. Langhope, somewhat pale and nervous
+after the ordeal, had been helped into the Gaines
+landau with Mrs. Ansell and Cicely; Mrs. Amherst
+had accepted a seat in the Dressel victoria; and
+Westy Gaines, with an <i>empressement</i> slightly tinged by
+condescension, was in the act of placing his electric
+phaeton at Miss Brent's disposal.</p>
+
+<p>She stood in the pretty white porch of the hospital,
+looking out across its squares of flower-edged turf at
+the long street of Westmore. In the warm gold-powdered
+light of September the factory town still
+seemed a blot on the face of nature; yet here and
+there, on all sides, Justine's eye saw signs of humanizing
+change. The rough banks along the street had
+been levelled and sodded; young maples, set in rows,
+already made a long festoon of gold against the dingy
+house-fronts; and the houses themselves&mdash;once so
+irreclaimably outlawed and degraded&mdash;showed, in their
+white-curtained windows, their flowery white-railed
+yards, a growing approach to civilized human dwellings.</p>
+
+<p>Glancing the other way, one still met the grim pile
+of factories cutting the sky with their harsh roof-lines
+and blackened chimneys; but here also were signs of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[p 455]</a></span>
+improvement. One of the mills had already been enlarged,
+another was scaffolded for the same purpose,
+and young trees and neatly-fenced turf replaced the
+surrounding desert of trampled earth.</p>
+
+<p>As Amherst came out of the hospital, he heard Miss
+Brent declining a seat in Westy's phaeton.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you so much; but there's some one here I
+want to see first&mdash;one of the operatives&mdash;and I can
+easily take a Hanaford car." She held out her hand
+with the smile that ran like colour over her whole face;
+and Westy, nettled by this unaccountable disregard of
+her privileges, mounted his chariot alone.</p>
+
+<p>As he glided mournfully away, Amherst turned to
+Justine. "You wanted to see the Dillons?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Their eyes met, and she smiled again. He had never
+seen her so sunned-over, so luminous, since the distant
+November day when they had picnicked with Cicely
+beside the swamp. He wondered vaguely if she were
+more elaborately dressed than usual, or if the festal
+impression she produced were simply a reflection of
+her mood.</p>
+
+<p>"I do want to see the Dillons&mdash;how did you
+guess?" she rejoined; and Amherst felt a sudden impulse
+to reply: "For the same reason that made you
+think of them."</p>
+
+<p>The fact of her remembering the Dillons made
+him absurdly happy; it re-established between them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[p 456]</a></span>
+the mental communion that had been checked by his
+thoughts of the previous day.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I'm rather self-conscious about the Dillons,
+because they're one of my object lessons&mdash;they illustrate
+the text," he said laughing, as they went down the steps.</p>
+
+<p>Westmore had been given a half-holiday for the
+opening of the hospital, and as Amherst and Justine
+turned into the street, parties of workers were dispersing
+toward their houses. They were still a dull-eyed
+stunted throng, to whom air and movement seemed
+to have been too long denied; but there was more animation
+in the groups, more light in individual faces;
+many of the younger men returned Amherst's good-day
+with a look of friendliness, and the women to whom he
+spoke met him with a volubility that showed the habit
+of frequent intercourse.</p>
+
+<p>"How much you have done!" Justine exclaimed, as
+he rejoined her after one of these asides; but the next
+moment he saw a shade of embarrassment cross her
+face, as though she feared to have suggested comparisons
+she had meant to avoid.</p>
+
+<p>He answered quite naturally: "Yes&mdash;I'm beginning
+to see my way now; and it's wonderful how they respond&mdash;"
+and they walked on without a shadow of
+constraint between them, while he described to her
+what was already done, and what direction his projected
+experiments were taking.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[p 457]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Dillons had been placed in charge of one of the
+old factory tenements, now transformed into a lodging-house
+for unmarried operatives. Even its harsh brick
+exterior, hung with creepers and brightened by flower-borders,
+had taken on a friendly air; and indoors it had
+a clean sunny kitchen, a big dining-room with cheerful-coloured
+walls, and a room where the men could lounge
+and smoke about a table covered with papers.</p>
+
+<p>The creation of these model lodging-houses had
+always been a favourite scheme of Amherst's, and the
+Dillons, incapacitated for factory work, had shown
+themselves admirably adapted to their new duties. In
+Mrs. Dillon's small hot sitting-room, among the starched
+sofa-tidies and pink shells that testified to the family
+prosperity, Justine shone with enjoyment and sympathy.
+She had always taken an interest in the lives
+and thoughts of working-people: not so much the
+constructive interest of the sociological mind as the
+vivid imaginative concern of a heart open to every
+human appeal. She liked to hear about their hard
+struggles and small pathetic successes: the children's
+sicknesses, the father's lucky job, the little sum they
+had been able to put by, the plans they had formed for
+Tommy's advancement, and how Sue's good marks at
+school were still ahead of Mrs. Hagan's Mary's.</p>
+
+<p>"What I really like is to gossip with them, and give
+them advice about the baby's cough, and the cheapest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[p 458]</a></span>
+way to do their marketing," she said laughing, as she
+and Amherst emerged once more into the street. "It's
+the same kind of interest I used to feel in my dolls and
+guinea pigs&mdash;a managing, interfering old maid's interest.
+I don't believe I should care a straw for them
+if I couldn't dose them and order them about."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst laughed too: he recalled the time when he
+had dreamed that just such warm personal sympathy
+was her sex's destined contribution to the broad work
+of human beneficence. Well, it had not been a dream:
+here was a woman whose deeds spoke for her. And
+suddenly the thought came to him: what might they
+not do at Westmore together! The brightness of it
+was blinding&mdash;like the dazzle of sunlight which faced
+them as they walked toward the mills. But it left him
+speechless, confused&mdash;glad to have a pretext for routing
+Duplain out of the office, introducing him to Miss
+Brent, and asking him for the keys of the buildings....</p>
+
+<p>It was wonderful, again, how she grasped what he
+was doing in the mills, and saw how his whole scheme
+hung together, harmonizing the work and leisure of the
+operatives, instead of treating them as half machine,
+half man, and neglecting the man for the machine.
+Nor was she content with Utopian generalities: she
+wanted to know the how and why of each case, to hear
+what conclusions he drew from his results, to what
+solutions his experiments pointed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[p 459]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In explaining the mill work he forgot his constraint
+and returned to the free comradery of mind that had
+always marked their relation. He turned the key reluctantly
+in the last door, and paused a moment on the
+threshold.</p>
+
+<p>"Anything more?" he said, with a laugh meant to
+hide his desire to prolong their tour.</p>
+
+<p>She glanced up at the sun, which still swung free of
+the tall factory roofs.</p>
+
+<p>"As much as you've time for. Cicely doesn't need
+me this afternoon, and I can't tell when I shall see
+Westmore again."</p>
+
+<p>Her words fell on him with a chill. His smile faded,
+and he looked away for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"But I hope Cicely will be here often," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I hope so too," she rejoined, with seeming unconsciousness
+of any connection between the wish and
+her previous words.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst hesitated. He had meant to propose a visit
+to the old Eldorado building, which now at last housed
+the long-desired night-schools and nursery; but since
+she had spoken he felt a sudden indifference to showing
+her anything more. What was the use, if she
+meant to leave Cicely, and drift out of his reach? He
+could get on well enough without sympathy and comprehension,
+but his momentary indulgence in them
+made the ordinary taste of life a little flat.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[p 460]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"There must be more to see?" she continued, as they
+turned back toward the village; and he answered absently:
+"Oh, yes&mdash;if you like."</p>
+
+<p>He heard the change in his own voice, and knew by
+her quick side-glance that she had heard it too.</p>
+
+<p>"Please let me see everything that is compatible with
+my getting a car to Hanaford by six."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then&mdash;the night-school next," he said with an
+effort at lightness; and to shake off the importunity of
+his own thoughts he added carelessly, as they walked
+on: "By the way&mdash;it seems improbable&mdash;but I think I
+saw Dr. Wyant yesterday in a Westmore car."</p>
+
+<p>She echoed the name in surprise. "Dr. Wyant?
+Really! Are you sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not quite; but if it wasn't he it was his ghost.
+You haven't heard of his being at Hanaford?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. I've heard nothing of him for ages."</p>
+
+<p>Something in her tone made him return her side-glance;
+but her voice, on closer analysis, denoted only
+indifference, and her profile seemed to express the same
+negative sentiment. He remembered a vague Lynbrook
+rumour to the effect that the young doctor had
+been attracted to Miss Brent. Such floating seeds
+of gossip seldom rooted themselves in his mind, but
+now the fact acquired a new significance, and he wondered
+how he could have thought so little of it at the
+time. Probably her somewhat exaggerated air of in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[p 461]</a></span>difference
+simply meant that she had been bored by
+Wyant's attentions, and that the reminder of them
+still roused a slight self-consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst was relieved by this conclusion, and murmuring:
+"Oh, I suppose it can't have been he," led
+her rapidly on to the Eldorado. But the old sense of
+free communion was again obstructed, and her interest
+in the details of the schools and nursery now seemed
+to him only a part of her wonderful art of absorbing
+herself in other people's affairs. He was a fool to have
+been duped by it&mdash;to have fancied it was anything
+more personal than a grace of manner.</p>
+
+<p>As she turned away from inspecting the blackboards
+in one of the empty school-rooms he paused before her
+and said suddenly: "You spoke of not seeing Westmore
+again. Are you thinking of leaving Cicely?"</p>
+
+<p>The words were almost the opposite of those he had
+intended to speak; it was as if some irrepressible inner
+conviction flung defiance at his surface distrust of her.</p>
+
+<p>She stood still also, and he saw a thought move
+across her face. "Not immediately&mdash;but perhaps when
+Mr. Langhope can make some other arrangement&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Owing to the half-holiday they had the school-building
+to themselves, and the fact of being alone
+with her, without fear of interruption, woke in Amherst
+an uncontrollable longing to taste for once the
+joy of unguarded utterance.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[p 462]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why do you go?" he asked, moving close to the
+platform on which she stood.</p>
+
+<p>She hesitated, resting her hand on the teacher's desk.
+Her eyes were kind, but he thought her tone was cold.</p>
+
+<p>"This easy life is rather out of my line," she said at
+length, with a smile that draped her words in vagueness.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst looked at her again&mdash;she seemed to be
+growing remote and inaccessible. "You mean that you
+don't want to stay?"</p>
+
+<p>His tone was so abrupt that it called forth one of
+her rare blushes. "No&mdash;not that. I have been very
+happy with Cicely&mdash;but soon I shall have to be doing
+something else."</p>
+
+<p>Why was she blushing? And what did her last
+phrase mean? "Something else&mdash;?" The blood
+hummed in his ears&mdash;he began to hope she would
+not answer too quickly.</p>
+
+<p>She had sunk into the seat behind the desk, propping
+her elbows on its lid, and letting her interlaced hands
+support her chin. A little bunch of violets which had
+been thrust into the folds of her dress detached itself
+and fell to the floor.</p>
+
+<p>"What I mean is," she said in a low voice, raising
+her eyes to Amherst's, "that I've had a great desire
+lately to get back to real work&mdash;my special work....
+I've been too idle for the last year&mdash;I want to do some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[p 463]</a></span>
+hard nursing; I want to help people who are miserable."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke earnestly, almost passionately, and as he
+listened his undefined fear was lifted. He had never
+before seen her in this mood, with brooding brows, and
+the darkness of the world's pain in her eyes. All her
+glow had faded&mdash;she was a dun thrush-like creature,
+clothed in semi-tints; yet she seemed much nearer
+than when her smile shot light on him.</p>
+
+<p>He stood motionless, his eyes absently fixed on the
+bunch of violets at her feet. Suddenly he raised his
+head, and broke out with a boyish blush: "Could it
+have been Wyant who was trying to see you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Wyant&mdash;trying to see me?" She lowered her
+hands to the desk, and sat looking at him with open
+wonder.</p>
+
+<p>He saw the irrelevance of his question, and burst,
+in spite of himself, into youthful laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean&mdash;It's only that an unknown visitor called
+at the house yesterday, and insisted that you must have
+arrived. He seemed so annoyed at not finding you,
+that I thought...I imagined...it must be some one
+who knew you very well...and who had followed you
+here...for some special reason...."</p>
+
+<p>Her colour rose again, as if caught from his; but
+her eyes still declared her ignorance. "Some special
+reason&mdash;&mdash;?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[p 464]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And just now," he blurted out, "when you said you
+might not stay much longer with Cicely&mdash;I thought of
+the visit&mdash;and wondered if there was some one you
+meant to marry...."</p>
+
+<p>A silence fell between them. Justine rose slowly, her
+eyes screened under the veil she had lowered. "No&mdash;I
+don't mean to marry," she said, half-smiling, as she
+came down from the platform.</p>
+
+<p>Restored to his level, her small shadowy head just in
+a line with his eyes, she seemed closer, more approachable
+and feminine&mdash;yet Amherst did not dare to speak.</p>
+
+<p>She took a few steps toward the window, looking out
+into the deserted street. "It's growing dark&mdash;I must
+go home," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he assented absently as he followed her. He
+had no idea what she was saying. The inner voices
+in which they habitually spoke were growing louder
+than outward words. Or was it only the voice of his
+own desires that he heard&mdash;the cry of new hopes and
+unguessed capacities of living? All within him was
+flood-tide: this was the top of life, surely&mdash;to feel her
+alike in his brain and his pulses, to steep sight and
+hearing in the joy of her nearness, while all the while
+thought spoke clear: "This is the mate of my mind."</p>
+
+<p>He began again abruptly. "Wouldn't you marry,
+if it gave you the chance to do what you say&mdash;if it
+offered you hard work, and the opportunity to make<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465">[p 465]</a></span>
+things better...for a great many people...as no
+one but yourself could do it?"</p>
+
+<p>It was a strange way of putting his case: he was
+aware of it before he ended. But it had not occurred
+to him to tell her that she was lovely and desirable&mdash;in
+his humility he thought that what he had to give
+would plead for him better than what he was.</p>
+
+<p>The effect produced on her by his question, though
+undecipherable, was extraordinary. She stiffened a
+little, remaining quite motionless, her eyes on the street.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>You!</i>" she just breathed; and he saw that she was
+beginning to tremble.</p>
+
+<p>His wooing had been harsh and clumsy&mdash;he was
+afraid it had offended her, and his hand trembled too
+as it sought hers.</p>
+
+<p>"I only thought&mdash;it would be a dull business to most
+women&mdash;and I'm tied to it for life...but I thought...I've
+seen so often how you pity suffering...how
+you long to relieve it...."</p>
+
+<p>She turned away from him with a shuddering sigh.
+"Oh, I <i>hate</i> suffering!" she broke out, raising her
+hands to her face.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst was frightened. How senseless of him to
+go on reiterating the old plea! He ought to have
+pleaded for himself&mdash;to have let the man in him seek
+her and take his defeat, instead of beating about the
+flimsy bush of philanthropy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_466" id="Page_466">[p 466]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I only meant&mdash;I was trying to make my work recommend
+me..." he said with a half-laugh, as she
+remained silent, her eyes still turned away.</p>
+
+<p>The silence continued for a long time&mdash;it stretched
+between them like a narrowing interminable road, down
+which, with a leaden heart, he seemed to watch her
+gradually disappearing. And then, unexpectedly, as
+she shrank to a tiny speck at the dip of the road, the
+perspective was mysteriously reversed, and he felt her
+growing nearer again, felt her close to him&mdash;felt her
+hand in his.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm really just like other women, you know&mdash;I
+shall like it because it's your work," she said.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXII" id="XXXII"></a>XXXII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Every</span> one agreed that, on the whole, Mr. Langhope
+had behaved extremely well.</p>
+
+<p>He was just beginning to regain his equanimity in
+the matter of the will&mdash;to perceive that, in the eyes of
+the public, something important and distinguished was
+being done at Westmore, and that the venture, while
+reducing Cicely's income during her minority, might,
+in some incredible way, actually make for its ultimate
+increase. So much Mr. Langhope, always eager to
+take the easiest view of the inevitable, had begun to
+let fall in his confidential comments on Amherst; when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[p 467]</a></span>
+his newly-regained balance was rudely shaken by the
+news of his son-in-law's marriage.</p>
+
+<p>The free expression of his anger was baffled by the
+fact that, even by the farthest stretch of self-extenuating
+logic, he could find no one to blame for the event but
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Why on earth don't you say so&mdash;don't you call me
+a triple-dyed fool for bringing them together?" he
+challenged Mrs. Ansell, as they had the matter out together
+in the small intimate drawing-room of her New
+York apartment.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell, stirring her tea with a pensive hand,
+met the challenge composedly.</p>
+
+<p>"At present you're doing it for me," she reminded him;
+"and after all, I'm not so disposed to agree with you."</p>
+
+<p>"Not agree with me? But you told me not to engage
+Miss Brent! Didn't you tell me not to engage her?"</p>
+
+<p>She made a hesitating motion of assent.</p>
+
+<p>"But, good Lord, how was I to help myself? No
+man was ever in such a quandary!" he broke off, leaping
+back to the other side of the argument.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said, looking up at him suddenly. "I
+believe that, for the only time in your life, you were
+sorry then that you hadn't married me."</p>
+
+<p>She held his eyes for a moment with a look of gentle
+malice; then he laughed, and drew forth his cigarette-case.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_468" id="Page_468">[p 468]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come&mdash;you've inverted the formula," he said,
+reaching out for the enamelled match-box at his elbow.
+She let the pleasantry pass with a slight smile, and he
+went on reverting to his grievance: "Why <i>didn't</i> you
+want me to engage Miss Brent?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know...some instinct."</p>
+
+<p>"You won't tell me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't if I tried; and now, after all&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"After all&mdash;what?"</p>
+
+<p>She reflected. "You'll have Cicely off your mind, I
+mean."</p>
+
+<p>"Cicely off my mind?" Mr. Langhope was beginning
+to find his charming friend less consolatory than
+usual. After all, the most magnanimous woman has
+her circuitous way of saying <i>I told you so</i>. "As if any
+good governess couldn't have done that for me!" he
+grumbled.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;the present care for her. But I was looking
+ahead," she rejoined.</p>
+
+<p>"To what&mdash;if I may ask?"</p>
+
+<p>"The next few years&mdash;when Mrs. Amherst may have
+children of her own."</p>
+
+<p>"Children of her own?" He bounded up, furious
+at the suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>"Had it never occurred to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hardly as a source of consolation!"</p>
+
+<p>"I think a philosophic mind might find it so."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_469" id="Page_469">[p 469]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I should really be interested to know how!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell put down her cup, and again turned her
+gentle tolerant eyes upon him.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Amherst, as a father, will take a more conservative
+view of his duties. Every one agrees that, in
+spite of his theories, he has a good head for business;
+and whatever he does at Westmore for the advantage
+of his children will naturally be for Cicely's advantage
+too."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope returned her gaze thoughtfully.
+"There's something in what you say," he admitted
+after a pause. "But it doesn't alter the fact that, with
+Amherst unmarried, the whole of the Westmore fortune
+would have gone back to Cicely&mdash;where it belongs."</p>
+
+<p>"Possibly. But it was so unlikely that he would
+remain unmarried."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why! A man of honour would have felt
+bound to keep the money for Cicely."</p>
+
+<p>"But you must remember that, from Mr. Amherst's
+standpoint, the money belongs rather to Westmore than
+to Cicely."</p>
+
+<p>"He's no better than a socialist, then!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;supposing he isn't: the birth of a son and
+heir will cure that."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope winced, but she persisted gently: "It's
+really safer for Cicely as it is&mdash;" and before the end of
+the conference he found himself confessing, half against<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_470" id="Page_470">[p 470]</a></span>
+his will: "Well, since he hadn't the decency to remain
+single, I'm thankful he hasn't inflicted a stranger on us;
+and I shall never forget what Miss Brent did for my
+poor Bessy...."</p>
+
+<p>It was the view she had wished to bring him to, and
+the view which, in due course, with all his accustomed
+grace and adaptability, he presented to the searching
+gaze of a society profoundly moved by the incident of
+Amherst's marriage. "Of course, if Mr. Langhope
+approves&mdash;" society reluctantly murmured; and that
+Mr. Langhope did approve was presently made manifest
+by every outward show of consideration toward the
+newly-wedded couple.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Amherst and Justine had been married in September;
+and after a holiday in Canada and the Adirondacks
+they returned to Hanaford for the winter. Amherst
+had proposed a short flight to Europe; but his wife
+preferred to settle down at once to her new duties.</p>
+
+<p>The announcement of her marriage had been met by
+Mrs. Dressel with a comment which often afterward
+returned to her memory. "It's splendid for you, of
+course, dear, <i>in one way</i>," her friend had murmured,
+between disparagement and envy&mdash;"that is, if you can
+stand talking about the Westmore mill-hands all the
+rest of your life."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but I couldn't&mdash;I should hate it!" Justine had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[p 471]</a></span>
+energetically rejoined; meeting Mrs. Dressel's admonitory
+"Well, then?" with the laughing assurance that
+<i>she</i> meant to lead the conversation.</p>
+
+<p>She knew well enough what the admonition meant.
+To Amherst, so long thwarted in his chosen work, the
+subject of Westmore was becoming an <i>id&eacute;e fixe</i>; and
+it was natural that Hanaford should class him as a man
+of one topic. But Justine had guessed at his other
+side; a side as long thwarted, and far less articulate,
+which she intended to wake into life. She had felt
+it in him from the first, though their talks had so uniformly
+turned on the subject which palled on Hanaford;
+and it had been revealed to her during the silent
+hours among his books, when she had grown into
+such close intimacy with his mind.</p>
+
+<p>She did not, assuredly, mean to spend the rest of her
+days talking about the Westmore mill-hands; but in
+the arrogance of her joy she wished to begin her married
+life in the setting of its habitual duties, and to achieve
+the victory of evoking the secret unsuspected Amherst
+out of the preoccupied business man chained to his task.
+Dull lovers might have to call on romantic scenes to
+wake romantic feelings; but Justine's glancing imagination
+leapt to the challenge of extracting poetry from the
+prose of routine.</p>
+
+<p>And this was precisely the triumph that the first
+months brought her. To mortal eye, Amherst and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[p 472]</a></span>
+Justine seemed to be living at Hanaford: in reality
+they were voyaging on unmapped seas of adventure.
+The seas were limitless, and studded with happy islands:
+every fresh discovery they made about each other,
+every new agreement of ideas and feelings, offered itself
+to these intrepid explorers as a friendly coast where
+they might beach their keel and take their bearings.
+Thus, in the thronging hum of metaphor, Justine sometimes
+pictured their relation; seeing it, again, as a
+journey through crowded populous cities, where every
+face she met was Amherst's; or, contrarily, as a
+multiplication of points of perception, so that one
+became, for the world's contact, a surface so multitudinously
+alive that the old myth of hearing the
+grass grow and walking the rainbow explained itself
+as the heightening of personality to the utmost pitch
+of sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>In reality, the work at Westmore became an almost
+necessary sedative after these flights into the blue. She
+felt sometimes that they would have been bankrupted
+of sensations if daily hours of drudgery had not provided
+a reservoir in which fresh powers of enjoyment
+could slowly gather. And their duties had the rarer
+quality of constituting, precisely, the deepest, finest
+bond between them, the clarifying element which saved
+their happiness from stagnation, and kept it in the
+strong mid-current of human feeling.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[p 473]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was this element in their affection which, in the
+last days of November, was unexpectedly put on trial.
+Mr. Langhope, since his return from his annual visit to
+Europe, showed signs of diminishing strength and
+elasticity. He had had to give up his nightly dinner
+parties, to desert his stall at the Opera: to take, in
+short, as he plaintively put it, his social pleasures hom&#339;opathically.
+Certain of his friends explained the
+change by saying that he had never been "quite the
+same" since his daughter's death; while others found
+its determining cause in the shock of Amherst's second
+marriage. But this insinuation Mr. Langhope in due
+time discredited by writing to ask the Amhersts if they
+would not pity his loneliness and spend the winter in
+town with him. The proposal came in a letter to Justine,
+which she handed to her husband one afternoon
+on his return from the mills.</p>
+
+<p>She sat behind the tea-table in the Westmore drawing-room,
+now at last transformed, not into Mrs.
+Dressel's vision of "something lovely in Louis Seize,"
+but into a warm yet sober setting for books, for scattered
+flowers, for deep chairs and shaded lamps in
+pleasant nearness to each other.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst raised his eyes from the letter, thinking as
+he did so how well her bright head, with its flame-like
+play of meanings, fitted into the background she had
+made for it. Still unobservant of external details, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[p 474]</a></span>
+was beginning to feel a vague well-being of the eye
+wherever her touch had passed.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we must do it," he said simply.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, must we?" she murmured, holding out his
+cup.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled at her note of dejection. "Unnatural
+woman! New York <i>versus</i> Hanaford&mdash;do you really
+dislike it so much?"</p>
+
+<p>She tried to bring a tone of consent into her voice.
+"I shall be very glad to be with Cicely again&mdash;and that,
+of course," she reflected, "is the reason why Mr. Langhope
+wants us."</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;if it is, it's a good reason."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. But how much shall you be with us?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you say so, I'll arrange to get away for a month
+or two."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no: I don't want that!" she said, with a smile
+that triumphed a little. "But why should not Cicely
+come here?"</p>
+
+<p>"If Mr. Langhope is cut off from his usual amusements,
+I'm afraid that would only make him more
+lonely."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I suppose so." She put aside her untasted
+cup, resting her elbows on her knees, and her chin on
+her clasped hands, in the attitude habitual to her in
+moments of inward debate.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst rose and seated himself on the sofa beside<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_475" id="Page_475">[p 475]</a></span>
+her. "Dear! What is it?" he said, drawing her hands
+down, so that she had to turn her face to his.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing...I don't know...a superstition. I've
+been so happy here!"</p>
+
+<p>"Is our happiness too perishable to be transplanted?"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled and answered by another question. "You
+don't mind doing it, then?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst hesitated. "Shall I tell you? I feel that
+it's a sort of ring of Polycrates. It may buy off the
+jealous gods."</p>
+
+<p>A faint shrinking from some importunate suggestion
+seemed to press her closer to him. "Then you feel
+they <i>are</i> jealous?" she breathed, in a half-laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"I pity them if they're not!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she agreed, rallying to his tone. "I only had
+a fancy that they might overlook such a dull place as
+Hanaford."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst drew her to him. "Isn't it, on the contrary,
+in the ash-heaps that the rag-pickers prowl?"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There was no disguising it: she was growing afraid
+of her happiness. Her husband's analogy of the ring
+expressed her fear. She seemed to herself to carry a
+blazing jewel on her breast&mdash;something that singled
+her out for human envy and divine pursuit. She had
+a preposterous longing to dress plainly and shabbily,
+to subdue her voice and gestures, to try to slip through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_476" id="Page_476">[p 476]</a></span>
+life unnoticed; yet all the while she knew that her jewel
+would shoot its rays through every disguise. And from
+the depths of ancient atavistic instincts came the hope
+that Amherst was right&mdash;that by sacrificing their
+precious solitude to Mr. Langhope's convenience they
+might still deceive the gods.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Once pledged to her new task, Justine, as usual, espoused
+it with ardour. It was pleasant, even among
+greater joys, to see her husband again frankly welcomed
+by Mr. Langhope; to see Cicely bloom into
+happiness at their coming; and to overhear Mr. Langhope
+exclaim, in a confidential aside to his son-in-law:
+"It's wonderful, the <i>bien-&ecirc;tre</i> that wife of yours diffuses
+about her!"</p>
+
+<p>The element of <i>bien-&ecirc;tre</i> was the only one in which
+Mr. Langhope could draw breath; and to those who
+kept him immersed in it he was prodigal of delicate
+attentions. The experiment, in short, was a complete
+success; and even Amherst's necessary weeks at Hanaford
+had the merit of giving a finer flavour to his brief
+appearances.</p>
+
+<p>Of all this Justine was thinking as she drove down
+Fifth Avenue one January afternoon to meet her husband
+at the Grand Central station. She had tamed
+her happiness at last: the quality of fear had left it,
+and it nestled in her heart like some wild creature<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[p 477]</a></span>
+subdued to human ways. And, as her inward bliss
+became more and more a quiet habit of the mind, the
+longing to help and minister returned, absorbing her
+more deeply in her husband's work.</p>
+
+<p>She dismissed the carriage at the station, and when
+his train had arrived they emerged together into the
+cold winter twilight and turned up Madison Avenue.
+These walks home from the station gave them a little
+more time to themselves than if they had driven; and
+there was always so much to tell on both sides. This
+time the news was all good: the work at Westmore was
+prospering, and on Justine's side there was a more
+cheerful report of Mr. Langhope's health, and&mdash;best
+of all&mdash;his promise to give them Cicely for the summer.
+Amherst and Justine were both anxious that the child
+should spend more time at Hanaford, that her young
+associations should begin to gather about Westmore;
+and Justine exulted in the fact that the suggestion had
+come from Mr. Langhope himself, while she and Amherst
+were still planning how to lead him up to it.</p>
+
+<p>They reached the house while this triumph was still
+engaging them; and in the doorway Amherst turned to
+her with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>"And of course&mdash;dear man!&mdash;he believes the idea is
+all his. There's nothing you can't make people believe,
+you little Jesuit!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think there is!" she boasted, falling gaily<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_478" id="Page_478">[p 478]</a></span>
+into his tone; and then, as the door opened, and she
+entered the hall, her eyes fell on a blotted envelope
+which lay among the letters on the table.</p>
+
+<p>The parlour-maid proffered it with a word of explanation.
+"A gentleman left it for you, madam; he
+asked to see you, and said he'd call for the answer in a
+day or two."</p>
+
+<p>"Another begging letter, I suppose," said Amherst,
+turning into the drawing-room, where Mr. Langhope
+and Cicely awaited them; and Justine, carelessly pushing
+the envelope into her muff, murmured "I suppose
+so" as she followed him.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXIII" id="XXXIII"></a>XXXIII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Over</span> the tea-table Justine forgot the note in
+her muff; but when she went upstairs to dress
+it fell to the floor, and she picked it up and laid it on
+her dressing-table.</p>
+
+<p>She had already recognized the hand as Wyant's,
+for it was not the first letter she had received from him.</p>
+
+<p>Three times since her marriage he had appealed to
+her for help, excusing himself on the plea of difficulties
+and ill-health. The first time he wrote, he alluded
+vaguely to having married, and to being compelled,
+through illness, to give up his practice at Clifton. On
+receiving this letter she made enquiries, and learned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_479" id="Page_479">[p 479]</a></span>
+that, a month or two after her departure from Lynbrook,
+Wyant had married a Clifton girl&mdash;a pretty
+piece of flaunting innocence, whom she remembered
+about the lanes, generally with a young man in a buggy.
+There had evidently been something obscure and precipitate
+about the marriage, which was a strange one
+for the ambitious young doctor. Justine conjectured
+that it might have been the cause of his leaving Clifton&mdash;or
+or perhaps he had already succumbed to the fatal
+habit she had suspected in him. At any rate he seemed,
+in some mysterious way, to have dropped in two years
+from promise to failure; yet she could not believe that,
+with his talents, and the name he had begun to make,
+such a lapse could be more than temporary. She had
+often heard Dr. Garford prophesy great things for him;
+but Dr. Garford had died suddenly during the previous
+summer, and the loss of this powerful friend was mentioned
+by Wyant among his misfortunes.</p>
+
+<p>Justine was anxious to help him, but her marriage
+to a rich man had not given her the command of much
+money. She and Amherst, choosing to regard themselves
+as pensioners on the Westmore fortune, were
+scrupulous in restricting their personal expenditure;
+and her work among the mill-hands brought many demands
+on the modest allowance which her husband had
+insisted on her accepting. In reply to Wyant's first
+appeal, which reached her soon after her marriage, she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_480" id="Page_480">[p 480]</a></span>
+had sent him a hundred dollars; but when the second
+came, some two months later&mdash;with a fresh tale of ill-luck
+and ill-health&mdash;she had not been able to muster
+more than half the amount. Finally a third letter had
+arrived, a short time before their leaving for New York.
+It told the same story of persistent misfortune, but on
+this occasion Wyant, instead of making a direct appeal
+for money, suggested that, through her hospital connections,
+she should help him to establish a New York
+practice. His tone was half-whining, half-peremptory,
+his once precise writing smeared and illegible; and
+these indications, combined with her former suspicions,
+convinced her that, for the moment, he was unfit for
+medical work. At any rate, she could not assume the
+responsibility of recommending him; and in answering
+she advised him to apply to some of the physicians he
+had worked with at Lynbrook, softening her refusal by
+the enclosure of a small sum of money. To this letter
+she received no answer. Wyant doubtless found the
+money insufficient, and resented her unwillingness to
+help him by the use of her influence; and she felt sure
+that the note before her contained a renewal of his
+former request.</p>
+
+<p>An obscure reluctance made her begin to undress
+before opening it. She felt slightly tired and indolently
+happy, and she did not wish any jarring impression to
+break in on the sense of completeness which her hus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_481" id="Page_481">[p 481]</a></span>band's
+coming always put into her life. Her happiness
+was making her timid and luxurious: she was beginning
+to shrink from even trivial annoyances.</p>
+
+<p>But when at length, in her dressing-gown, her loosened
+hair about her shoulders, she seated herself before the
+toilet-mirror, Wyant's note once more confronted her.
+It was absurd to put off reading it&mdash;if he asked for
+money again, she would simply confide the whole business
+to Amherst.</p>
+
+<p>She had never spoken to her husband of her correspondence
+with Wyant. The mere fact that the latter
+had appealed to her, instead of addressing himself to
+Amherst, made her suspect that he had a weakness to
+hide, and counted on her professional discretion. But
+his continued importunities would certainly release her
+from any such supposed obligation; and she thought
+with relief of casting the weight of her difficulty on her
+husband's shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>She opened the note and read.</p>
+
+<p>"I did not acknowledge your last letter because I
+was ashamed to tell you that the money was not enough
+to be of any use. But I am past shame now. My
+wife was confined three weeks ago, and has been desperately
+ill ever since. She is in no state to move, but
+we shall be put out of these rooms unless I can get
+money or work at once. A word from you would
+have given me a start in New York&mdash;and I'd be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_482" id="Page_482">[p 482]</a></span>
+willing to begin again as an interne or a doctor's
+assistant.</p>
+
+<p>"I have never reminded you of what you owe me,
+and I should not do so now if I hadn't been to hell and
+back since I saw you. But I suppose you would rather
+have me remind you than apply to Mr. Amherst. You
+can tell me when to call for my answer."</p>
+
+<p>Justine laid down the letter and looked up. Her
+eyes rested on her own reflection in the glass, and it
+frightened her. She sat motionless, with a thickly-beating
+heart, one hand clenched on the letter.</p>
+
+<p><i>"I suppose you would rather have me remind you
+than apply to Mr. Amherst."</i></p>
+
+<p>That was what his importunity meant, then! She
+had been paying blackmail all this time.... Somewhere,
+from the first, in an obscure fold of consciousness,
+she had felt the stir of an unnamed, unacknowledged
+fear; and now the fear raised its head and looked
+at her. Well! She would look back at it, then: look
+it straight in the malignant eye. What was it, after
+all, but a "bugbear to scare children"&mdash;the ghost of
+the opinion of the many? She had suspected from the
+first that Wyant knew of her having shortened the term
+of Bessy Amherst's sufferings&mdash;returning to the room
+when he did, it was almost impossible that he should
+not have guessed what had happened; and his silence
+had made her believe that he understood her motive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_483" id="Page_483">[p 483]</a></span>
+and approved it. But, supposing she had been mistaken,
+she still had nothing to fear, since she had done
+nothing that her own conscience condemned. If the
+act were to do again she would do it&mdash;she had never
+known a moment's regret!</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she heard Amherst's step in the passage&mdash;heard
+him laughing and talking as he chased Cicely up
+the stairs to the nursery.</p>
+
+<p><i>If she was not afraid, why had she never told Amherst?</i></p>
+
+<p>Why, the answer to that was simple enough! She
+had not told him <i>because she was not afraid</i>. From the
+first she had retained sufficient detachment to view her
+act impartially, to find it completely justified by circumstances,
+and to decide that, since those circumstances
+could be but partly and indirectly known to her
+husband, she not only had the right to keep her own
+counsel, but was actually under a kind of obligation
+not to force on him the knowledge of a fact that he
+could not alter and could not completely judge....
+Was there any flaw in this line of reasoning? Did it
+not show a deliberate weighing of conditions, a perfect
+rectitude of intention? And, after all, she had had
+Amherst's virtual consent to her act! She knew his
+feelings on such matters&mdash;his independence of traditional
+judgments, his horror of inflicting needless pain&mdash;she
+was as sure of his intellectual assent as of her own.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_484" id="Page_484">[p 484]</a></span>
+She was even sure that, when she told him, he would
+appreciate her reasons for not telling him before....</p>
+
+<p>For now of course he must know everything&mdash;this
+horrible letter made it inevitable. She regretted that
+she had decided, though for the best of reasons, not to
+speak to him of her own accord; for it was intolerable
+that he should think of any external pressure as having
+brought her to avowal. But no! he would not think
+that. The understanding between them was so complete
+that no deceptive array of circumstances could
+ever make her motives obscure to him. She let herself
+rest a moment in the thought....</p>
+
+<p>Presently she heard him moving in the next room&mdash;he
+had come back to dress for dinner. She would go
+to him now, at once&mdash;she could not bear this weight on
+her mind the whole evening. She pushed back her
+chair, crumpling the letter in her hand; but as she did
+so, her eyes again fell on her reflection. She could not
+go to her husband with such a face! If she was not
+afraid, why did she look like that?</p>
+
+<p>Well&mdash;she was afraid! It would be easier and simpler
+to admit it. She was afraid&mdash;afraid for the first
+time&mdash;afraid for her own happiness! She had had just
+eight months of happiness&mdash;it was horrible to think of
+losing it so soon.... Losing it? But why should she
+lose it? The letter must have affected her brain...all
+her thoughts were in a blur of fear.... Fear of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_485" id="Page_485">[p 485]</a></span>
+what? Of the man who understood her as no one
+else understood her? The man to whose wisdom and
+mercy she trusted as the believer trusts in God? This
+was a kind of abominable nightmare&mdash;even Amherst's
+image had been distorted in her mind! The only way
+to clear her brain, to recover the normal sense of things,
+was to go to him now, at once, to feel his arms about
+her, to let his kiss dispel her fears.... She rose with
+a long breath of relief.</p>
+
+<p>She had to cross the length of the room to reach his
+door, and when she had gone half-way she heard him
+knock.</p>
+
+<p>"May I come in?"</p>
+
+<p>She was close to the fire-place, and a bright fire
+burned on the hearth.</p>
+
+<p>"Come in!" she answered; and as she did so, she
+turned and dropped Wyant's letter into the fire. Her
+hand had crushed it into a little ball, and she saw the
+flames spring up and swallow it before her husband
+entered.</p>
+
+<p>It was not that she had changed her mind&mdash;she still
+meant to tell him everything. But to hold the letter
+was like holding a venomous snake&mdash;she wanted to
+exterminate it, to forget that she had ever seen the
+blotted repulsive characters. And she could not bear
+to have Amherst's eyes rest on it, to have him know
+that any man had dared to write to her in that tone.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_486" id="Page_486">[p 486]</a></span>
+What vile meanings might not be read between Wyant's
+phrases? She had a right to tell the story in her own
+way&mdash;the true way....</p>
+
+<p>As Amherst approached, in his evening clothes, the
+heavy locks smoothed from his forehead, a flower of
+Cicely's giving in his button-hole, she thought she had
+never seen him look so kind and handsome.</p>
+
+<p>"Not dressed? Do you know that it's ten minutes
+to eight?" he said, coming up to her with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>She roused herself, putting her hands to her hair.
+"Yes, I know&mdash;I forgot," she murmured, longing to
+feel his arms about her, but standing rooted to the
+ground, unable to move an inch nearer.</p>
+
+<p>It was he who came close, drawing her lifted hands
+into his. "You look worried&mdash;I hope it was nothing
+troublesome that made you forget?"</p>
+
+<p>The divine kindness in his voice, his eyes! Yes&mdash;it
+would be easy, quite easy, to tell him....</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;yes&mdash;I was a little troubled...." she said,
+feeling the warmth of his touch flow through her hands
+reassuringly.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear! What about?"</p>
+
+<p>She drew a deep breath. "The letter&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He looked puzzled. "What letter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Downstairs...when we came in...it was not an
+ordinary begging-letter."</p>
+
+<p>"No? What then?" he asked, his face clouding.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_487" id="Page_487">[p 487]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She noticed the change, and it frightened her. Was
+he angry? Was he going to be angry? But how
+absurd! He was only distressed at her distress.</p>
+
+<p>"What then?" he repeated, more gently.</p>
+
+<p>She looked up into his eyes for an instant. "It was
+a horrible letter&mdash;&mdash;" she whispered, as she pressed her
+clasped hands against him.</p>
+
+<p>His grasp tightened on her wrists, and again the stern
+look crossed his face. "Horrible? What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>She had never seen him angry&mdash;but she felt suddenly
+that, to the guilty creature, his anger would be terrible.
+He would crush Wyant&mdash;she must be careful how she
+spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't mean that&mdash;only painful...."</p>
+
+<p>"Where is the letter? Let me see it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no" she exclaimed, shrinking away.</p>
+
+<p>"Justine, what has happened? What ails you?"</p>
+
+<p>On a blind impulse she had backed toward the
+hearth, propping her arms against the mantel-piece
+while she stole a secret glance at the embers. Nothing
+remained of it&mdash;no, nothing.</p>
+
+<p>But suppose it was against herself that his anger
+turned? The idea was preposterous, yet she trembled
+at it. It was clear that she must say <i>something</i> at
+once&mdash;must somehow account for her agitation. But
+the sense that she was unnerved&mdash;no longer in control
+of her face, her voice&mdash;made her feel that she would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_488" id="Page_488">[p 488]</a></span>
+tell her story badly if she told it now.... Had she not
+the right to gain a respite, to choose her own hour?
+Weakness&mdash;weakness again! Every delay would only
+increase the phantom terror. Now, <i>now</i>&mdash;with her
+head on his breast!</p>
+
+<p>She turned toward him and began to speak impulsively.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't show you the letter, because it's not&mdash;not
+my secret&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah?" he murmured, perceptibly relieved.</p>
+
+<p>"It's from some one&mdash;unlucky&mdash;whom I've known
+about...."</p>
+
+<p>"And whose troubles have been troubling you? But
+can't we help?"</p>
+
+<p>She shone on him through gleaming lashes. "Some
+one poor and ill&mdash;who needs money, I mean&mdash;&mdash;" She
+tried to laugh away her tears. "And I haven't any!
+That's <i>my</i> trouble!"</p>
+
+<p>"Foolish child! And to beg you are ashamed? And
+so you're letting your tears cool Mr. Langhope's soup?"
+He had her in his arms now, his kisses drying her
+cheek; and she turned her head so that their lips met
+in a long pressure.</p>
+
+<p>"Will a hundred dollars do?" he asked with a smile
+as he released her.</p>
+
+<p><i>A hundred dollars!</i> No&mdash;she was almost sure they
+would not. But she tried to shape a murmur of gratitude.
+"Thank you&mdash;thank you! I hated to ask...."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_489" id="Page_489">[p 489]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I'll write the cheque at once."</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no," she protested, "there's no hurry."</p>
+
+<p>But he went back to his room, and she turned again
+to the toilet-table. Her face was painful to look at
+still&mdash;but a light was breaking through its fear. She
+felt the touch of a narcotic in her veins. How calm
+and peaceful the room was&mdash;and how delicious to
+think that her life would go on in it, safely and peacefully,
+in the old familiar way!</p>
+
+<p>As she swept up her hair, passing the comb through
+it, and flinging it dexterously over her lifted wrist, she
+heard Amherst cross the floor behind her, and pause to
+lay something on her writing-table.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," she murmured again, lowering her
+head as he passed.</p>
+
+<p>When the door had closed on him she thrust the last
+pin into her hair, dashed some drops of Cologne on her
+face, and went over to the writing-table. As she picked
+up the cheque she saw it was for three hundred dollars.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXIV" id="XXXIV"></a>XXXIV</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Once</span> or twice, in the days that followed, Justine
+found herself thinking that she had never
+known happiness before. The old state of secure well-being
+seemed now like a dreamless sleep; but this new
+bliss, on its sharp pinnacle ringed with fire&mdash;this thrill<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_490" id="Page_490">[p 490]</a></span>ing
+conscious joy, daily and hourly snatched from fear&mdash;this
+was living, not sleeping!</p>
+
+<p>Wyant acknowledged her gift with profuse, almost
+servile thanks. She had sent it without a word&mdash;saying
+to herself that pity for his situation made it possible
+to ignore his baseness. And the days went on as
+before. She was not conscious of any change, save in
+the heightened, almost artificial quality of her happiness,
+till one day in March, when Mr. Langhope announced
+that he was going for two or three weeks to
+a friend's shooting-box in the south. The anniversary
+of Bessy's death was approaching, and Justine knew
+that at that time he always absented himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Supposing you and Amherst were to carry off Cicely
+till I come back? Perhaps you could persuade him to
+break away from work for once&mdash;or, if that's impossible,
+you could take her with you to Hanaford. She looks
+a little pale, and the change would be good for her."</p>
+
+<p>This was a great concession on Mr. Langhope's
+part, and Justine saw the pleasure in her husband's
+face. It was the first time that his father-in-law had
+suggested Cicely's going to Hanaford.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I can't break away just now, sir," Amherst
+said, "but it will be delightful for Justine if
+you'll give us Cicely while you're away."</p>
+
+<p>"Take her by all means, my dear fellow: I always
+sleep on both ears when she's with your wife."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_491" id="Page_491">[p 491]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was nearly three months since Justine had left
+Hanaford&mdash;and now she was to return there alone with
+her husband! There would be hours, of course, when
+the child's presence was between them&mdash;or when, again,
+his work would keep him at the mills. But in the
+evenings, when Cicely was in bed&mdash;when he and she
+sat alone, together in the Westmore drawing-room&mdash;in
+Bessy's drawing-room!... No&mdash;she must find some
+excuse for remaining away till she had again grown
+used to the idea of being alone with Amherst. Every
+day she was growing a little more used to it; but it
+would take time&mdash;time, and the full assurance that
+Wyant was silenced. Till then she could not go back
+to Hanaford.</p>
+
+<p>She found a pretext in her own health. She pleaded
+that she was a little tired, below par...and to return
+to Hanaford meant returning to hard work; with the
+best will in the world she could not be idle there.
+Might she not, she suggested, take Cicely to Tuxedo
+or Lakewood, and thus get quite away from household
+cares and good works? The pretext rang hollow&mdash;it
+was so unlike her! She saw Amherst's eyes rest
+anxiously on her as Mr. Langhope uttered his prompt
+assent. Certainly she did look tired&mdash;Mr. Langhope
+himself had noticed it. Had he perhaps over-taxed
+her energies, left the household too entirely on her
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_492" id="Page_492">[p 492]</a></span>shoulders? Oh, no&mdash;it was only the New York air...like
+Cicely, she pined for a breath of the woods....
+And so, the day Mr. Langhope left, she and Cicely
+were packed off to Lakewood.</p>
+
+<p>They stayed there a week: then a fit of restlessness
+drove Justine back to town. She found an excuse in
+the constant rain&mdash;it was really useless, as she wrote
+Mr. Langhope, to keep the child imprisoned in an
+over-heated hotel while they could get no benefit from
+the outdoor life. In reality, she found the long lonely
+hours unendurable. She pined for a sight of her husband,
+and thought of committing Cicely to Mrs. Ansell's
+care, and making a sudden dash for Hanaford.
+But the vision of the long evenings in the Westmore
+drawing-room again restrained her. No&mdash;she would
+simply go back to New York, dine out occasionally,
+go to a concert or two, trust to the usual demands of
+town life to crowd her hours with small activities....
+And in another week Mr. Langhope would be back
+and the days would resume their normal course.</p>
+
+<p>On arriving, she looked feverishly through the letters
+in the hall. None from Wyant&mdash;that fear was allayed!
+Every day added to her reassurance. By this time, no
+doubt, he was on his feet again, and ashamed&mdash;unutterably
+ashamed&mdash;of the threat that despair had
+wrung from him. She felt almost sure that his shame
+would keep him from ever attempting to see her, or
+even from writing again.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_493" id="Page_493">[p 493]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"A gentleman called to see you yesterday, madam&mdash;he
+would give no name," the parlour-maid said. And
+there was the sick fear back on her again! She could
+hardly control the trembling of her lips as she asked:
+"Did he leave no message?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, madam: he only wanted to know when you'd
+be back."</p>
+
+<p>She longed to return: "And did you tell him?"
+but restrained herself, and passed into the drawing-room.
+After all, the parlour-maid had not described
+the caller&mdash;why jump to the conclusion that it was
+Wyant?</p>
+
+<p>Three days passed, and no letter came&mdash;no sign.
+She struggled with the temptation to describe Wyant
+to the servants, and to forbid his admission. But it
+would not do. They were nearly all old servants, in
+whose eyes she was still the intruder, the upstart sick-nurse&mdash;she
+could not wholly trust them. And each
+day she felt a little easier, a little more convinced that
+the unknown visitor had not been Wyant.</p>
+
+<p>On the fourth day she received a letter from Amherst.
+He hoped to be back on the morrow, but as
+his plans were still uncertain he would telegraph in
+the morning&mdash;and meanwhile she must keep well, and
+rest, and amuse herself....</p>
+
+<p>Amuse herself! That evening, as it happened, she
+was going to the theatre with Mrs. Ansell. She and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_494" id="Page_494">[p 494]</a></span>
+Mrs. Ansell, though outwardly on perfect terms, had
+not greatly advanced in intimacy. The agitated, decentralized
+life of the older woman seemed futile and
+trivial to Justine; but on Mr. Langhope's account
+she wished to keep up an appearance of friendship with
+his friend, and the same motive doubtless inspired Mrs.
+Ansell. Just now, at any rate, Justine was grateful for
+her attentions, and glad to go about with her. Anything&mdash;anything
+to get away from her own thoughts!
+That was the pass she had come to.</p>
+
+<p>At the theatre, in a proscenium box, the publicity,
+the light and movement, the action of the play, all
+helped to distract and quiet her. At such moments
+she grew ashamed of her fears. Why was she tormenting
+herself? If anything happened she had only to
+ask her husband for more money. She never spoke
+to him of her good works, and there would be nothing
+to excite suspicion in her asking help again for the
+friend whose secret she was pledged to keep.... But
+nothing was going to happen. As the play progressed,
+and the stimulus of talk and laughter flowed through
+her veins, she felt a complete return of confidence.
+And then suddenly she glanced across the house, and
+saw Wyant looking at her.</p>
+
+<p>He sat rather far back, in one of the side rows just
+beneath the balcony, so that his face was partly shaded.
+But even in the shadow it frightened her. She had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_495" id="Page_495">[p 495]</a></span>
+been prepared for a change, but not for this ghastly
+deterioration. And he continued to look at her.</p>
+
+<p>She began to be afraid that he would do something
+conspicuous&mdash;point at her, or stand up in his seat.
+She thought he looked half-mad&mdash;or was it her own
+hallucination that made him appear so? She and Mrs.
+Ansell were alone in the box for the moment, and she
+started up, pushing back her chair....</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell leaned forward. "What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing&mdash;the heat&mdash;I'll sit back for a moment."
+But as she withdrew into the back of the box, she
+was seized by a new fear. If he was still watching,
+might he not come to the door and try to speak to
+her? Her only safety lay in remaining in full view of
+the audience; and she returned to Mrs. Ansell's side.</p>
+
+<p>The other members of the party came back&mdash;the
+bell rang, the foot-lights blazed, the curtain rose. She
+lost herself in the mazes of the play. She sat so motionless,
+her face so intently turned toward the stage,
+that the muscles at the back of her neck began to
+stiffen. And then, quite suddenly, toward the middle
+of the act, she felt an undefinable sense of relief. She
+could not tell what caused it&mdash;but slowly, cautiously,
+while the eyes of the others were intent upon the stage,
+she turned her head and looked toward Wyant's seat.
+It was empty.</p>
+
+<p>Her first thought was that he had gone to wait for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_496" id="Page_496">[p 496]</a></span>
+her outside. But no&mdash;there were two more acts: why
+should he stand at the door for half the evening?</p>
+
+<p>At last the act ended; the entr'acte elapsed; the play
+went on again&mdash;and still the seat was empty. Gradually
+she persuaded herself that she had been mistaken
+in thinking that the man who had occupied it was
+Wyant. Her self-command returned, she began to
+think and talk naturally, to follow the dialogue on the
+stage&mdash;and when the evening was over, and Mrs. Ansell
+set her down at her door, she had almost forgotten
+her fears.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning she felt calmer than for many days.
+She was sure now that if Wyant had wished to speak
+to her he would have waited at the door of the theatre;
+and the recollection of his miserable face made apprehension
+yield to pity. She began to feel that she had
+treated him coldly, uncharitably. They had been
+friends once, as well as fellow-workers; but she had
+been false even to the comradeship of the hospital.
+She should have sought him out and given him sympathy
+as well as money; had she shown some sign of
+human kindness his last letter might never have been
+written.</p>
+
+<p>In the course of the morning Amherst telegraphed
+that he hoped to settle his business in time to catch
+the two o'clock express, but that his plans were still
+uncertain. Justine and Cicely lunched alone, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_497" id="Page_497">[p 497]</a></span>
+after luncheon the little girl was despatched to her
+dancing-class. Justine herself meant to go out when
+the brougham returned. She went up to her room to
+dress, planning to drive in the park, and to drop in on
+Mrs. Ansell before she called for Cicely; but on the
+way downstairs she saw the servant opening the door
+to a visitor. It was too late to draw back; and descending
+the last steps she found herself face to face
+with Wyant.</p>
+
+<p>They looked at each other a moment in silence; then
+Justine murmured a word of greeting and led the way
+to the drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>It was a snowy afternoon, and in the raw ash-coloured
+light she thought he looked more changed than at the
+theatre. She remarked, too, that his clothes were
+worn and untidy, his gloveless hands soiled and tremulous.
+None of the degrading signs of his infirmity were
+lacking; and she saw at once that, while in the early
+days of the habit he had probably mixed his drugs, so
+that the conflicting symptoms neutralized each other,
+he had now sunk into open morphia-taking. She felt
+profoundly sorry for him; yet as he followed her into
+the room physical repulsion again mastered the sense
+of pity.</p>
+
+<p>But where action was possible she was always self-controlled,
+and she turned to him quietly as they seated
+themselves.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_498" id="Page_498">[p 498]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I have been wishing to see you," she said, looking
+at him. "I have felt that I ought to have done so
+sooner&mdash;to have told you how sorry I am for your bad
+luck."</p>
+
+<p>He returned her glance with surprise: they were
+evidently the last words he had expected.</p>
+
+<p>"You're very kind," he said in a low embarrassed
+voice. He had kept on his shabby over-coat, and he
+twirled his hat in his hands as he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"I have felt," Justine continued, "that perhaps a
+talk with you might be of more use&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He raised his head, fixing her with bright narrowed
+eyes. "I have felt so too: that's my reason for coming.
+You sent me a generous present some weeks ago&mdash;but
+I don't want to go on living on charity."</p>
+
+<p>"I understand that," she answered. "But why have
+you had to do so? Won't you tell me just what has
+happened?"</p>
+
+<p>She felt the words to be almost a mockery; yet she
+could not say "I read your history at a glance"; and
+she hoped that her question might draw out his
+wretched secret, and thus give her the chance to
+speak frankly.</p>
+
+<p>He gave a nervous laugh. "Just what has happened?
+It's a long story&mdash;and some of the details are
+not particularly pretty." He broke off, moving his hat
+more rapidly through his trembling hands.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_499" id="Page_499">[p 499]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Never mind: tell me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;after you all left Lynbrook I had rather a
+bad break-down&mdash;the strain of Mrs. Amherst's case, I
+suppose. You remember Bramble, the Clifton grocer?
+Miss Bramble nursed me&mdash;I daresay you remember her
+too. When I recovered I married her&mdash;and after that
+things didn't go well."</p>
+
+<p>He paused, breathing quickly, and looking about the
+room with odd, furtive glances. "I was only half-well,
+anyhow&mdash;I couldn't attend to my patients properly&mdash;and
+after a few months we decided to leave Clifton,
+and I bought a practice in New Jersey. But my wife
+was ill there, and things went wrong again&mdash;damnably.
+I suppose you've guessed that my marriage was a mistake.
+She had an idea that we should do better in
+New York&mdash;so we came here a few months ago, and
+we've done decidedly worse."</p>
+
+<p>Justine listened with a sense of discouragement.
+She saw now that he did not mean to acknowledge his
+failing, and knowing the secretiveness of the drug-taker
+she decided that he was deluded enough to think
+he could still deceive her.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he began again, with an attempt at jauntiness,
+"I've found out that in my profession it's a hard
+struggle to get on your feet again, after illness or&mdash;or
+any bad set-back. That's the reason I asked you to
+say a word for me. It's not only the money, though I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_500" id="Page_500">[p 500]</a></span>
+need that badly&mdash;I want to get back my self-respect.
+With my record I oughtn't to be where I am&mdash;and you
+can speak for me better than any one."</p>
+
+<p>"Why better than the doctors you've worked with?"
+Justine put the question abruptly, looking him straight
+in the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>His glance dropped, and an unpleasant flush rose to
+his thin cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;as it happens, you're better situated than
+any one to help me to the particular thing I want."</p>
+
+<p>"The particular thing&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I understand that Mr. Langhope and Mrs.
+Ansell are both interested in the new wing for paying
+patients at Saint Christopher's. I want the position of
+house-physician there, and I know you can get it for
+me."</p>
+
+<p>His tone changed as he spoke, till with the last words
+it became rough and almost menacing.</p>
+
+<p>Justine felt her colour rise, and her heart began to
+beat confusedly. Here was the truth, then: she could
+no longer be the dupe of her own compassion. The
+man knew his power and meant to use it. But at the
+thought her courage was in arms.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry&mdash;but it's impossible," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Impossible&mdash;why?"</p>
+
+<p>She continued to look at him steadily. "You said
+just now that you wished to regain your self-respect.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_501" id="Page_501">[p 501]</a></span>
+Well, you must regain it before you can ask me&mdash;or
+any one else&mdash;to recommend you to a position of
+trust."</p>
+
+<p>Wyant half-rose, with an angry murmur. "My
+self-respect? What do you mean? <i>I</i> meant that I'd
+lost courage&mdash;through ill-luck&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; and your ill-luck has come through your own
+fault. Till you cure yourself you're not fit to cure
+others."</p>
+
+<p>He sank back into his seat, glowering at her under
+sullen brows; then his expression gradually changed
+to half-sneering admiration. "You're a plucky one!"
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>Justine repressed a movement of disgust. "I am
+very sorry for you," she said gravely. "I saw this
+trouble coming on you long ago&mdash;and if there is any
+other way in which I can help you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks," he returned, still sneering. "Your sympathy
+is very precious&mdash;there was a time when I would
+have given my soul for it. But that's over, and I'm
+here to talk business. You say you saw my trouble
+coming on&mdash;did it ever occur to you that you were the
+cause of it?"</p>
+
+<p>Justine glanced at him with frank contempt. "No&mdash;for
+I was not," she replied.</p>
+
+<p>"That's an easy way out of it. But you took everything
+from me&mdash;first my hope of marrying you; then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_502" id="Page_502">[p 502]</a></span>
+my chance of a big success in my career; and I was
+desperate&mdash;weak, if you like&mdash;and tried to deaden my
+feelings in order to keep up my pluck."</p>
+
+<p>Justine rose to her feet with a movement of impatience.
+"Every word you say proves how unfit you
+are to assume any responsibility&mdash;to do anything but
+try to recover your health. If I can help you to that,
+I am still willing to do so."</p>
+
+<p>Wyant rose also, moving a step nearer. "Well, get
+me that place, then&mdash;I'll see to the rest: I'll keep
+straight."</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;it's impossible."</p>
+
+<p>"You won't?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't," she repeated firmly.</p>
+
+<p>"And you expect to put me off with that answer?"</p>
+
+<p>She hesitated. "Yes&mdash;if there's no other help you'll
+accept."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed again&mdash;his feeble sneering laugh was disgusting.
+"Oh, I don't say that. I'd like to earn my
+living honestly&mdash;funny preference&mdash;but if you cut me
+off from that, I suppose it's only fair to let you make
+up for it. My wife and child have got to live."</p>
+
+<p>"You choose a strange way of helping them; but I
+will do what I can if you will go for a while to some
+institution&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He broke in furiously. "Institution be damned!
+You can't shuffle me out of the way like that. I'm all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_503" id="Page_503">[p 503]</a></span>
+right&mdash;good food is what I need. You think I've got
+morphia in me&mdash;why, it's hunger!"</p>
+
+<p>Justine heard him with a renewal of pity. "Oh,
+I'm sorry for you&mdash;very sorry! Why do you try to
+deceive me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you deceive <i>me</i>? You know what I want
+and you know you've got to let me have it. If you
+won't give me a line to one of your friends at Saint
+Christopher's you'll have to give me another cheque&mdash;that's
+the size of it."</p>
+
+<p>As they faced each other in silence Justine's pity
+gave way to a sudden hatred for the poor creature who
+stood shivering and sneering before her.</p>
+
+<p>"You choose the wrong tone&mdash;and I think our talk
+has lasted long enough," she said, stretching her hand
+to the bell.</p>
+
+<p>Wyant did not move. "Don't ring&mdash;unless you want
+me to write to your husband," he rejoined.</p>
+
+<p>A sick feeling of helplessness overcame her; but she
+turned on him firmly. "I pardoned you once for that
+threat!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;and you sent me some money the next day."</p>
+
+<p>"I was mistaken enough to think that, in your distress,
+you had not realized what you wrote. But if
+you're a systematic blackmailer&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Gently&mdash;gently. Bad names don't frighten me&mdash;it's
+hunger and debt I'm afraid of."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_504" id="Page_504">[p 504]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Justine felt a last tremor of compassion. He was
+abominable&mdash;but he was pitiable too.</p>
+
+<p>"I will really help you&mdash;I will see your wife and
+do what I can&mdash;but I can give you no money today."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I have none. I am not as rich as you
+think."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled incredulously. "Give me a line to Mr.
+Langhope, then."</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>He sat down once more, leaning back with a weak
+assumption of ease. "Perhaps Mr. Amherst will think
+differently."</p>
+
+<p>She whitened, but said steadily: "Mr. Amherst is
+away."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well&mdash;I can write."</p>
+
+<p>For the last five minutes Justine had foreseen this
+threat, and had tried to force her mind to face dispassionately
+the chances it involved. After all, why
+not let him write to Amherst? The very vileness of
+the deed must rouse an indignation which would be
+all in her favour, would inevitably dispose her husband
+to readier sympathy with the motive of her act, as
+contrasted with the base insinuations of her slanderer.
+It seemed impossible that Amherst should condemn
+her when his condemnation involved the fulfilling of
+Wyant's calculations: a reaction of scorn would throw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_505" id="Page_505">[p 505]</a></span>
+him into unhesitating championship of her conduct.
+All this was so clear that, had she been advising any
+one else, her confidence in the course to be taken might
+have strengthened the feeblest will; but with the question
+lying between herself and Amherst&mdash;with the vision
+of those soiled hands literally laid on the spotless fabric
+of her happiness, judgment wavered, foresight was obscured&mdash;she
+felt tremulously unable to face the steps
+between exposure and vindication. Her final conclusion
+was that she must, at any rate, gain time: buy
+off Wyant till she had been able to tell her story in her
+own way, and at her own hour, and then defy him
+when he returned to the assault. The idea that whatever
+concession she made would be only provisional,
+helped to excuse the weakness of making it, and enabled
+her at last, without too painful a sense of falling
+below her own standards, to reply in a low voice: "If
+you'll go now, I will send you something next week."</p>
+
+<p>But Wyant did not respond as readily as she had
+expected. He merely asked, without altering his insolently
+easy attitude: "How much? Unless it's a
+good deal, I prefer the letter."</p>
+
+<p>Oh, why could she not cry out: "Leave the house
+at once&mdash;your vulgar threats are nothing to me"&mdash;Why
+could she not even say in her own heart: <i>I will
+tell my husband tonight?</i></p>
+
+<p>"You're afraid," said Wyant, as if answering her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_506" id="Page_506">[p 506]</a></span>
+thought. "What's the use of being afraid when you
+can make yourself comfortable so easily? You called
+me a systematic blackmailer&mdash;well, I'm not that yet.
+Give me a thousand and you'll see the last of me&mdash;on
+what used to be my honour."</p>
+
+<p>Justine's heart sank. She had reached the point of
+being ready to appeal again to Amherst&mdash;but on what
+pretext could she ask for such a sum?</p>
+
+<p>In a lifeless voice she said: "I could not possibly get
+more than one or two hundred."</p>
+
+<p>Wyant scrutinized her a moment: her despair must
+have rung true to him. "Well, you must have something
+of your own&mdash;I saw your jewelry last night at
+the theatre," he said.</p>
+
+<p>So it had been he&mdash;and he had sat there appraising
+her value like a murderer!</p>
+
+<p>"Jewelry&mdash;?" she faltered.</p>
+
+<p>"You had a thumping big sapphire&mdash;wasn't it?&mdash;with
+diamonds round it."</p>
+
+<p>It was her only jewel&mdash;Amherst's marriage gift. She
+would have preferred a less valuable present, but his
+mother had persuaded her to accept it, saying that it
+was the bride's duty to adorn herself for the bridegroom.</p>
+
+<p>"I will give you nothing&mdash;" she was about to exclaim;
+when suddenly her eyes fell on the clock. If
+Amherst had caught the two o'clock express he would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_507" id="Page_507">[p 507]</a></span>
+be at the house within the hour; and the only thing
+that seemed of consequence now, was that he should
+not meet Wyant. Supposing she still found courage
+to refuse&mdash;there was no knowing how long the humiliating
+scene might be prolonged: and she must be rid
+of the creature at any cost. After all, she seldom wore
+the sapphire&mdash;months might pass without its absence
+being noted by Amherst's careless eye; and if Wyant
+should pawn it, she might somehow save money to buy
+it back before it was missed. She went through these
+calculations with feverish rapidity; then she turned
+again to Wyant.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't come back&mdash;ever?"</p>
+
+<p>"I swear I won't," he said.</p>
+
+<p>He moved away toward the window, as if to spare
+her; and she turned and slowly left the room.</p>
+
+<p>She never forgot the moments that followed. Once
+outside the door she was in such haste that she stumbled
+on the stairs, and had to pause on the landing to
+regain her breath. In her room she found one of the
+housemaids busy, and at first could think of no pretext
+for dismissing her. Then she bade the woman go
+down and send the brougham away, telling the coachman
+to call for Miss Cicely at six.</p>
+
+<p>Left alone, she bolted the door, and as if with a
+thief's hand, opened her wardrobe, unlocked her jewel-box,
+and drew out the sapphire in its flat morocco case.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_508" id="Page_508">[p 508]</a></span>
+She restored the box to its place, the key to its ring&mdash;then
+she opened the case and looked at the sapphire.
+As she did so, a little tremor ran over her neck and
+throat, and closing her eyes she felt her husband's kiss,
+and the touch of his hands as he fastened on the jewel.</p>
+
+<p>She unbolted the door, listened intently on the landing,
+and then went slowly down the stairs. None of
+the servants were in sight, yet as she reached the lower
+hall she was conscious that the air had grown suddenly
+colder, as though the outer door had just been opened.
+She paused, and listened again. There was a sound
+of talking in the drawing-room. Could it be that in
+her absence a visitor had been admitted? The possibility
+frightened her at first&mdash;then she welcomed it as
+an unexpected means of ridding herself of her tormentor.</p>
+
+<p>She opened the drawing-room door, and saw her
+husband talking with Wyant.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXV" id="XXXV"></a>XXXV</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Amherst</span>, his back to the threshold, sat at a
+table writing: Wyant stood a few feet away,
+staring down at the fire.</p>
+
+<p>Neither had heard the door open; and before they
+were aware of her entrance Justine had calculated that
+she must have been away for at least five minutes, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_509" id="Page_509">[p 509]</a></span>
+that in that space of time almost anything might have
+passed between them.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment the power of connected thought left
+her; then her heart gave a bound of relief. She said to
+herself that Wyant had doubtless made some allusion
+to his situation, and that her husband, conscious only
+of a great debt of gratitude, had at once sat down to
+draw a cheque for him. The idea was so reassuring
+that it restored all her clearness of thought.</p>
+
+<p>Wyant was the first to see her. He made an abrupt
+movement, and Amherst, rising, turned and put an
+envelope in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"There, my dear fellow&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>As he turned he caught sight of his wife.</p>
+
+<p>"I caught the twelve o'clock train after all&mdash;you got
+my second wire?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she faltered, pressing her left hand, with the
+little case in it, close to the folds of her dress.</p>
+
+<p>"I was afraid not. There was a bad storm at Hanaford,
+and they said there might be a delay."</p>
+
+<p>At the same moment she found Wyant advancing
+with extended hand, and understood that he had concealed
+the fact of having already seen her. She accepted
+the cue, and shook his hand, murmuring:
+"How do you do?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst looked at her, perhaps struck by her manner.</p>
+
+<p>"You have not seen Dr. Wyant since Lynbrook?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_510" id="Page_510">[p 510]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No," she answered, thankful to have this pretext
+for her emotion.</p>
+
+<p>"I have been telling him that he should not have left
+us so long without news&mdash;especially as he has been ill,
+and things have gone rather badly with him. But I
+hope we can help now. He has heard that Saint Christopher's
+is looking for a house-physician for the paying
+patients' wing, and as Mr. Langhope is away I have
+given him a line to Mrs. Ansell."</p>
+
+<p>"Extremely kind of you," Wyant murmured, passing
+his hand over his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>Justine stood silent. She wondered that her husband
+had not noticed that tremulous degraded hand.
+But he was always so blind to externals&mdash;and he had
+no medical experience to sharpen his perceptions.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she felt impelled to speak "I am sorry
+Dr. Wyant has been&mdash;unfortunate. Of course you
+will want to do everything to help him; but would it not
+be better to wait till Mr. Langhope comes back?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wyant thinks the delay might make him lose the
+place. It seems the board meets tomorrow. And Mrs.
+Ansell really knows much more about it. Isn't she the
+secretary of the ladies' committee?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not sure&mdash;I believe so. But surely Mr. Langhope
+should be consulted."</p>
+
+<p>She felt Wyant's face change: his eyes settled on her
+in a threatening stare.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_511" id="Page_511">[p 511]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Amherst looked at her also, and there was surprise
+in his glance. "I think I can answer for my father-in-law.
+He feels as strongly as I do how much we all
+owe to Dr. Wyant."</p>
+
+<p>He seldom spoke of Mr. Langhope as his father-in-law,
+and the chance designation seemed to mark a
+closer tie between them, to exclude Justine from what
+was after all a family affair. For a moment she felt
+tempted to accept the suggestion, and let the responsibility
+fall where it would. But it would fall on Amherst&mdash;and
+that was intolerable.</p>
+
+<p>"I think you ought to wait," she insisted.</p>
+
+<p>An embarrassed silence settled on the three.</p>
+
+<p>Wyant broke it by advancing toward Amherst. "I
+shall never forget your kindness," he said; "and I hope
+to prove to Mrs. Amherst that it's not misplaced."</p>
+
+<p>The words were well chosen, and well spoken;
+Justine saw that they produced a good effect. Amherst
+grasped the physician's hand with a smile. "My dear
+fellow, I wish I could do more. Be sure to call on me
+again if you want help."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you've put me on my feet," said Wyant gratefully.</p>
+
+<p>He bowed slightly to Justine and turned to go; but
+as he reached the threshold she moved after him.</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Wyant&mdash;you must give back that letter."</p>
+
+<p>He stopped short with a whitening face.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_512" id="Page_512">[p 512]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She felt Amherst's eyes on her again; and she said
+desperately, addressing him: "Dr. Wyant understands
+my reasons."</p>
+
+<p>Her husband's glance turned abruptly to Wyant.
+"Do you?" he asked after a pause.</p>
+
+<p>Wyant looked from one to the other. The moisture
+came out on his forehead, and he passed his hand over
+it again. "Yes," he said in a dry voice. "Mrs. Amherst
+wants me farther off&mdash;out of New York."</p>
+
+<p>"Out of New York? What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>Justine interposed hastily, before the answer could
+come. "It is because Dr. Wyant is not in condition&mdash;for
+such a place&mdash;just at present."</p>
+
+<p>"But he assures me he is quite well."</p>
+
+<p>There was another silence; and again Wyant broke
+in, this time with a slight laugh. "I can explain what
+Mrs. Amherst means; she intends to accuse me of the
+morphine habit. And I can explain her reason for
+doing so&mdash;she wants me out of the way."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst turned on the speaker; and, as she had foreseen,
+his look was terrible. "You haven't explained
+that yet," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;I can." Wyant waited another moment.
+"I know too much about her," he declared.</p>
+
+<p>There was a low exclamation from Justine, and Amherst
+strode toward Wyant. "You infernal blackguard!"
+he cried.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_513" id="Page_513">[p 513]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, gently&mdash;&mdash;" Wyant muttered, flinching back
+from his outstretched arm.</p>
+
+<p>"My wife's wish is sufficient. Give me back that
+letter."</p>
+
+<p>Wyant straightened himself. "No, by God, I won't!"
+he retorted furiously. "I didn't ask you for it till you
+offered to help me; but I won't let it be taken back
+without a word, like a thief that you'd caught with your
+umbrella. If your wife won't explain I will. She's,
+afraid I'll talk about what happened at Lynbrook."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's arm fell to his side. "At Lynbrook?"</p>
+
+<p>Behind him there was a sound of inarticulate appeal&mdash;but
+he took no notice.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. It's she who used morphia&mdash;but not on herself.
+She gives it to other people. She gave an overdose
+to Mrs. Amherst."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst looked at him confusedly. "An overdose?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;purposely, I mean. And I came into the
+room at the wrong time. I can prove that Mrs. Amherst
+died of morphia-poisoning."</p>
+
+<p>"John!" Justine gasped out, pressing between them.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst gently put aside the hand with which she
+had caught his arm. "Wait a moment: this can't rest
+here. You can't want it to," he said to her in an undertone.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you care...for what he says...when I
+don't?" she breathed back with trembling lips.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_514" id="Page_514">[p 514]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You can see I am not wanted here," Wyant threw
+in with a sneer.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst remained silent for a brief space; then he
+turned his eyes once more to his wife.</p>
+
+<p>Justine lifted her face: it looked small and spent,
+like an extinguished taper.</p>
+
+<p>"It's true," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"True?"</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>did</i> give...an overdose...intentionally, when
+I knew there was no hope, and when the surgeons said
+she might go on suffering. She was very strong...and
+I couldn't bear it...you couldn't have borne
+it...."</p>
+
+<p>There was another silence; then she went on in a
+stronger voice, looking straight at her husband: "And
+now will you send this man away?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst glanced at Wyant without moving. "Go,"
+he said curtly.</p>
+
+<p>Wyant, instead, moved a step nearer. "Just a
+minute, please. It's only fair to hear my side. Your
+wife says there was no hope; yet the day before she...gave
+the dose, Dr. Garford told her in my presence that
+Mrs. Amherst might live."</p>
+
+<p>Again Amherst's eyes addressed themselves slowly
+to Justine; and she forced her lips to articulate an
+answer.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_515" id="Page_515">[p 515]</a></span></p><p>"Dr. Garford said...one could never tell...but
+I know he didn't believe in the chance of recovery...no
+one did."</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Garford is dead," said Wyant grimly.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst strode up to him again. "You scoundrel&mdash;leave
+the house!" he commanded.</p>
+
+<p>But still Wyant sneeringly stood his ground. "Not
+till I've finished. I can't afford to let myself be kicked
+out like a dog because I happen to be in the way.
+Every doctor knows that in cases of spinal lesion recovery
+is becoming more and more frequent&mdash;if the
+patient survives the third week there's every reason to
+hope. Those are the facts as they would appear to
+any surgeon. If they're not true, why is Mrs. Amherst
+afraid of having them stated? Why has she been paying
+me for nearly a year to keep them quiet?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;&mdash;" Justine moaned.</p>
+
+<p>"I never thought of talking till luck went against
+me. Then I asked her for help&mdash;and reminded her of
+certain things. After that she kept me supplied pretty
+regularly." He thrust his shaking hand into an inner
+pocket. "Here are her envelopes...Quebec...Montreal...Saranac...I
+know just where you went
+on your honeymoon. She had to write often, because
+the sums were small. Why did she do it, if she wasn't
+afraid? And why did she go upstairs just now to fetch
+me something? If you don't believe me, ask her what
+she's got in her hand."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_516" id="Page_516">[p 516]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Amherst did not heed this injunction. He stood
+motionless, gripping the back of a chair, as if his next
+gesture might be to lift and hurl it at the speaker.</p>
+
+<p>"Ask her&mdash;&mdash;" Wyant repeated.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst turned his head slowly, and his dull gaze
+rested on his wife. His face looked years older&mdash;lips
+and eyes moved as heavily as an old man's.</p>
+
+<p>As he looked at her, Justine came forward without
+speaking, and laid the little morocco case in his hand.
+He held it there a moment, as if hardly understanding
+her action&mdash;then he tossed it on the table at his elbow,
+and walked up to Wyant.</p>
+
+<p>"You hound," he said&mdash;"now go!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXVI" id="XXXVI"></a>XXXVI</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">When</span> Wyant had left the room, and the house-door
+had closed on him, Amherst spoke to his
+wife.</p>
+
+<p>"Come upstairs," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Justine followed him, scarcely conscious where she
+went, but moving already with a lighter tread. Part
+of her weight of misery had been lifted with Wyant's
+going. She had suffered less from the fear of what her
+husband might think than from the shame of making
+her avowal in her defamer's presence. And her faith
+in Amherst's comprehension had begun to revive. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_517" id="Page_517">[p 517]</a></span>
+had dismissed Wyant with scorn and horror&mdash;did not
+that show that he was on her side already? And how
+many more arguments she had at her call! Her
+brain hummed with them as she followed him up the
+stairs.</p>
+
+<p>In her bedroom he closed the door and stood motionless,
+the same heavy half-paralyzed look on his face.
+It frightened her and she went up to him.</p>
+
+<p>"John!" she said timidly.</p>
+
+<p>He put his hand to his head. "Wait a moment&mdash;&mdash;"
+he returned; and she waited, her heart slowly sinking
+again.</p>
+
+<p>The moment over, he seemed to recover his power of
+movement. He crossed the room and threw himself
+into the armchair near the hearth.</p>
+
+<p>"Now tell me everything."</p>
+
+<p>He sat thrown back, his eyes fixed on the fire, and
+the vertical lines between his brows forming a deep
+scar in his white face.</p>
+
+<p>Justine moved nearer, and touched his arm beseechingly.
+"Won't you look at me?"</p>
+
+<p>He turned his head slowly, as if with an effort, and
+his eyes rested reluctantly on hers.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, not like that!" she exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed to make a stronger effort at self-control.
+"Please don't heed me&mdash;but say what there is to say,"
+he said in a level voice, his gaze on the fire.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_518" id="Page_518">[p 518]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She stood before him, her arms hanging down, her
+clasped fingers twisting restlessly.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know that there is much to say&mdash;beyond
+what I've told you."</p>
+
+<p>There was a slight sound in Amherst's throat, like
+the ghost of a derisive laugh. After another interval
+he said: "I wish to hear exactly what happened."</p>
+
+<p>She seated herself on the edge of a chair near by,
+bending forward, with hands interlocked and arms extended
+on her knees&mdash;every line reaching out to him,
+as though her whole slight body were an arrow winged
+with pleadings. It was a relief to speak at last, even
+face to face with the stony image that sat in her husband's
+place; and she told her story, detail by detail,
+omitting nothing, exaggerating nothing, speaking slowly,
+clearly, with precision, aware that the bare facts were
+her strongest argument.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst, as he listened, shifted his position once,
+raising his hand so that it screened his face; and in that
+attitude he remained when she had ended.</p>
+
+<p>As she waited for him to speak, Justine realized that
+her heart had been alive with tremulous hopes. All
+through her narrative she had counted on a murmur of
+perception, an exclamation of pity: she had felt sure of
+melting the stony image. But Amherst said no word.</p>
+
+<p>At length he spoke, still without turning his head.
+"You have not told me why you kept this from me."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_519" id="Page_519">[p 519]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A sob formed in her throat, and she had to wait to
+steady her voice.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;that was my wrong&mdash;my weakness. When I
+did it I never thought of being afraid to tell you&mdash;I had
+talked it over with you in my own mind...so often...before...."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then&mdash;- when you came back it was harder...though
+I was still sure you would approve me."</p>
+
+<p>"Why harder?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because at first&mdash;at Lynbrook&mdash;I <i>could not</i> tell it
+all over, in detail, as I have now...it was beyond
+human power...and without doing so, I couldn't
+make it all clear to you...and so should only have
+added to your pain. If you had been there you would
+have done as I did.... I felt sure of that from the first.
+But coming afterward, you couldn't judge...no one
+who was not there could judge...and I wanted to
+spare you...."</p>
+
+<p>"And afterward?"</p>
+
+<p>She had shrunk in advance from this question, and
+she could not answer it at once. To gain time she
+echoed it. "Afterward?"</p>
+
+<p>"Did it never occur to you, when we met later&mdash;when
+you first went to Mr. Langhope&mdash;&mdash;"?</p>
+
+<p>"To tell you then? No&mdash;because by that time I had
+come to see that I could never be quite sure of making<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_520" id="Page_520">[p 520]</a></span>
+you understand. No one who was not there at the
+time could know what it was to see her suffer."</p>
+
+<p>"You thought it all over, then&mdash;decided definitely
+against telling me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did not have to think long. I felt I had done right&mdash;I
+still feel so&mdash;and I was sure you would feel so, if you
+were in the same circumstances."</p>
+
+<p>There was another pause. Then Amherst said:
+"And last September&mdash;at Hanaford?"</p>
+
+<p>It was the word for which she had waited&mdash;the word
+of her inmost fears. She felt the blood mount to her
+face.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you see no difference&mdash;no special reason for
+telling me then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;&mdash;" she faltered.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet you said nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>Silence again. Her eyes strayed to the clock, and
+some dim association of ideas told her that Cicely would
+soon be coming in.</p>
+
+<p>"Why did you say nothing?"</p>
+
+<p>He lowered his hand and turned toward her as he
+spoke; and she looked up and faced him.</p>
+
+<p>"Because I regarded the question as settled. I had
+decided it in my own mind months before, and had
+never regretted my decision. I should have thought it
+morbid...unnatural...to go over the whole subject
+again...to let it affect a situation that had come about...so
+much later...so unexpectedly."
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_521" id="Page_521">[p 521]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>"Did you never feel that, later, if I came to know&mdash;if
+others came to know&mdash;it might be difficult&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; for I didn't care for the others&mdash;and I believed
+that, whatever your own feelings were, you would know
+I had done what I thought right."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke the words proudly, strongly, and for the
+first time the hard lines of his face relaxed, and a slight
+tremor crossed it.</p>
+
+<p>"If you believed this, why have you been letting that
+cur blackmail you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because when he began I saw for the first time that
+what I had done might be turned against me by&mdash;by
+those who disliked our marriage. And I was afraid
+for my happiness. That was my weakness...it is
+what I am suffering for now."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Suffering</i>!" he echoed ironically, as though she had
+presumed to apply to herself a word of which he had
+the grim monopoly. He rose and took a few aimless
+steps; then he halted before her.</p>
+
+<p>"That day&mdash;last month&mdash;when you asked me for
+money...was it...?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;&mdash;" she said, her head sinking.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed. "You couldn't tell me&mdash;but you could
+use my money to bribe that fellow to conspire with
+you!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_522" id="Page_522">[p 522]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I had none of my own."</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;nor I either! You used <i>her</i> money.&mdash;God!"
+he groaned, turning away with clenched hands.</p>
+
+<p>Justine had risen also, and she stood motionless,
+her hands clasped against her breast, in the drawn
+shrinking attitude of a fugitive overtaken by a blinding
+storm. He moved back to her with an appealing gesture.</p>
+
+<p>"And you didn't see&mdash;it didn't occur to you&mdash;that
+your doing...as you did...was an obstacle&mdash;an insurmountable
+obstacle&mdash;to our ever ...?"</p>
+
+<p>She cut him short with an indignant cry. "No!
+No! for it was <i>not</i>. How could it have anything to do
+with what...came after...with you or me? I did
+it only for Bessy&mdash;it concerned only Bessy!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, don't name her!" broke from him harshly, and
+she drew back, cut to the heart.</p>
+
+<p>There was another pause, during which he seemed
+to fall into a kind of dazed irresolution, his head on
+his breast, as though unconscious of her presence.
+Then he roused himself and went to the door.</p>
+
+<p>As he passed her she sprang after him. "John&mdash;John!
+Is that all you have to say?"</p>
+
+<p>"What more is there?"</p>
+
+<p>"What more? Everything!&mdash;What right have you
+to turn from me as if I were a murderess? I did nothing
+but what your own reason, your own arguments,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_523" id="Page_523">[p 523]</a></span>
+have justified a hundred times! I made a mistake in
+not telling you at once&mdash;but a mistake is not a crime.
+It can't be your real feeling that turns you from me&mdash;it
+must be the dread of what other people would think!
+But when have you cared for what other people thought?
+When have your own actions been governed by it?"</p>
+
+<p>He moved another step without speaking, and she
+caught him by the arm. "No! you sha'n't go&mdash;not
+like that!&mdash;Wait!"</p>
+
+<p>She turned and crossed the room. On the lower
+shelf of the little table by her bed a few books were
+ranged: she stooped and drew one hurriedly forth, opening
+it at the fly-leaf as she went back to Amherst.</p>
+
+<p>"There&mdash;read that. The book was at Lynbrook&mdash;in
+your room&mdash;and I came across it by chance the very
+day...."</p>
+
+<p>It was the little volume of Bacon which she was
+thrusting at him. He took it with a bewildered look,
+as if scarcely following what she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Read it&mdash;read it!" she commanded; and mechanically
+he read out the words he had written.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>La vraie morale se moque de la morale.... We perish
+because we follow other men's examples.... Socrates
+called the opinions of the many Lami&aelig;.</i>&mdash;Good God!"
+he exclaimed, flinging the book from him with a gesture
+of abhorrence.</p>
+
+<p>Justine watched him with panting lips, her knees<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_524" id="Page_524">[p 524]</a></span>
+trembling under her. "But you wrote it&mdash;you wrote
+it! I thought you meant it!" she cried, as the book
+spun across a table and dropped to the floor.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her coldly, almost apprehensively, as
+if she had grown suddenly dangerous and remote; then
+he turned and walked out of the room.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The striking of the clock roused her. She rose to her
+feet, rang the bell, and told the maid, through the door,
+that she had a headache, and was unable to see Miss
+Cicely. Then she turned back into the room, and
+darkness closed on her. She was not the kind to take
+grief passively&mdash;it drove her in anguished pacings up
+and down the floor. She walked and walked till her
+legs flagged under her; then she dropped stupidly into
+the chair where Amherst had sat....</p>
+
+<p>All her world had crumbled about her. It was as if
+some law of mental gravity had been mysteriously suspended,
+and every firmly-anchored conviction, every
+accepted process of reasoning, spun disconnectedly
+through space. Amherst had not understood her&mdash;worse
+still, he had judged her as the world might judge
+her! The core of her misery was there. With terrible
+clearness she saw the suspicion that had crossed his
+mind&mdash;the suspicion that she had kept silence in the
+beginning because she loved him, and feared to lose
+him if she spoke.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_525" id="Page_525">[p 525]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And what if it were true? What if her unconscious
+guilt went back even farther than his thought dared to
+track it? She could not now recall a time when she
+had not loved him. Every chance meeting with him,
+from their first brief talk at Hanaford, stood out embossed
+and glowing against the blur of lesser memories.
+Was it possible that she had loved him during
+Bessy's life&mdash;that she had even, sub-consciously, blindly,
+been urged by her feeling for him to perform the act?</p>
+
+<p>But she shook herself free from this morbid horror&mdash;the
+rebound of health was always prompt in her, and
+her mind instinctively rejected every form of moral
+poison. No! Her motive had been normal, sane and
+justifiable&mdash;completely justifiable. Her fault lay in
+having dared to rise above conventional restrictions,
+her mistake in believing that her husband could rise
+with her. These reflections steadied her but they did
+not bring much comfort. For her whole life was centred
+in Amherst, and she saw that he would never be
+able to free himself from the traditional view of her act.
+In looking back, and correcting her survey of his character
+in the revealing light of the last hours, she perceived
+that, like many men of emancipated thought,
+he had remained subject to the old conventions of feeling.
+And he had probably never given much thought
+to women till he met her&mdash;had always been content to
+deal with them in the accepted currency of sentiment.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_526" id="Page_526">[p 526]</a></span>
+After all, it was the currency they liked best, and for
+which they offered their prettiest wares!</p>
+
+<p>But what of the intellectual accord between himself
+and her? She had not been deceived in that! He
+and she had really been wedded in mind as well as in
+heart. But until now there had not arisen in their
+lives one of those searching questions which call into
+play emotions rooted far below reason and judgment, in
+the dark primal depths of inherited feeling. It is easy
+to judge impersonal problems intellectually, turning
+on them the full light of acquired knowledge; but too
+often one must still grope one's way through the personal
+difficulty by the dim taper carried in long-dead
+hands....</p>
+
+<p>But was there then no hope of lifting one's individual
+life to a clearer height of conduct? Must one be content
+to think for the race, and to feel only&mdash;feel blindly
+and incoherently&mdash;for one's self? And was it not from
+such natures as Amherst's&mdash;natures in which independence
+of judgment was blent with strong human sympathy&mdash;that
+the liberating impulse should come?</p>
+
+<p>Her mind grew weary of revolving in this vain circle
+of questions. The fact was that, in their particular
+case, Amherst had not risen above prejudice and emotion;
+that, though her act was one to which his intellectual
+sanction was given, he had turned from her with
+instinctive repugnance, had dishonoured her by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_527" id="Page_527">[p 527]</a></span>
+most wounding suspicions. The tie between them was
+forever stained and debased.</p>
+
+<p>Justine's long hospital-discipline made it impossible
+for her to lose consciousness of the lapse of time, or to
+let her misery thicken into mental stupor. She could
+not help thinking and moving; and she presently lifted
+herself to her feet, turned on the light, and began to
+prepare for dinner. It would be terrible to face her
+husband across Mr. Langhope's pretty dinner-table,
+and afterward in the charming drawing-room, with its
+delicate old ornaments and intimate luxurious furniture;
+but she could not continue to sit motionless in the dark:
+it was her innermost instinct to pick herself up and go
+on.</p>
+
+<p>While she dressed she listened anxiously for Amherst's
+step in the next room; but there was no sound,
+and when she dragged herself downstairs the drawing-room
+was empty, and the parlour-maid, after a decent
+delay, came to ask if dinner should be postponed.</p>
+
+<p>She said no, murmuring some vague pretext for her
+husband's absence, and sitting alone through the succession
+of courses which composed the brief but carefully-studied
+<i>menu</i>. When this ordeal was over she
+returned to the drawing-room and took up a book.
+It chanced to be a new volume on labour problems,
+which Amherst must have brought back with him from
+Westmore; and it carried her thoughts instantly to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_528" id="Page_528">[p 528]</a></span>
+mills. Would this disaster poison their work there
+as well as their personal relation? Would he think
+of her as carrying contamination even into the task their
+love had illumined?</p>
+
+<p>The hours went on without his returning, and at
+length it occurred to her that he might have taken the
+night train to Hanaford. Her heart contracted at the
+thought: she remembered&mdash;though every nerve shrank
+from the analogy&mdash;his sudden flight at another crisis
+in his life, and she felt obscurely that if he escaped from
+her now she would never recover her hold on him. But
+could he be so cruel&mdash;could he wish any one to suffer
+as she was suffering?</p>
+
+<p>At ten o'clock she could endure the drawing-room
+no longer, and went up to her room again. She undressed
+slowly, trying to prolong the process as much as
+possible, to put off the period of silence and inaction
+which would close in on her when she lay down on her
+bed. But at length the dreaded moment came&mdash;there
+was nothing more between her and the night. She
+crept into bed and put out the light; but as she slipped
+between the cold sheets a trembling seized her, and after
+a moment she drew on her dressing-gown again and
+groped her way to the lounge by the fire.</p>
+
+<p>She pushed the lounge closer to the hearth and lay
+down, still shivering, though she had drawn the quilted
+coverlet up to her chin. She lay there a long time,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_529" id="Page_529">[p 529]</a></span>
+with closed eyes, in a mental darkness torn by sudden
+flashes of memory. In one of these flashes a phrase of
+Amherst's stood out&mdash;a word spoken at Westmore, on
+the day of the opening of the Emergency Hospital, about
+a good-looking young man who had called to see her.
+She remembered Amherst's boyish burst of jealousy,
+his sudden relief at the thought that the visitor might
+have been Wyant. And no doubt it <i>was</i> Wyant&mdash;Wyant
+who had come to Hanaford to threaten her, and
+who, baffled by her non-arrival, or for some other unexplained
+reason, had left again without carrying out
+his purpose.</p>
+
+<p>It was dreadful to think by how slight a chance her
+first draught of happiness had escaped that drop of
+poison; yet, when she understood, her inward cry was:
+"If it had happened, my dearest need not have suffered!"...
+Already she was feeling Amherst's pain
+more than her own, understanding that it was harder
+to bear than hers because it was at war with all the
+reflective part of his nature.</p>
+
+<p>As she lay there, her face pressed into the cushions,
+she heard a sound through the silent house&mdash;the opening
+and closing of the outer door. She turned cold,
+and lay listening with strained ears.... Yes; now there
+was a step on the stairs&mdash;her husband's step! She
+heard him turn into his own room. The throbs of her
+heart almost deafened her&mdash;she only distinguished<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_530" id="Page_530">[p 530]</a></span>
+confusedly that he was moving about within, so close
+that it was as if she felt his touch. Then her door
+opened and he entered.</p>
+
+<p>He stumbled slightly in the darkness before he found
+the switch of the lamp; and as he bent over it she saw
+that his face was flushed, and that his eyes had an excited
+light which, in any one less abstemious, might
+almost have seemed like the effect of wine.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you awake?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>She started up against the cushions, her black hair
+streaming about her small ghostly face.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>He walked over to the lounge and dropped into the
+low chair beside it.</p>
+
+<p>"I've given that cur a lesson he won't forget," he
+exclaimed, breathing hard, the redness deepening in his
+face.</p>
+
+<p>She turned on him in joy and trembling. "John!&mdash;Oh,
+John! You didn't follow him? Oh, what happened?
+What have you done?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. I didn't follow him. But there are some
+things that even the powers above can't stand. And so
+they managed to let me run across him&mdash;by the merest
+accident&mdash;and I gave him something to remember."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke in a strong clear voice that had a brightness
+like the brightness in his eyes. She felt its heat
+in her veins&mdash;the primitive woman in her glowed at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_531" id="Page_531">[p 531]</a></span>
+contact with the primitive man. But reflection chilled
+her the next moment.</p>
+
+<p>"But why&mdash;why? Oh, how could you? Where
+did it happen&mdash;oh, not in the street?"</p>
+
+<p>As she questioned him, there rose before her the
+terrified vision of a crowd gathering&mdash;the police, newspapers,
+a hideous publicity. He must have been mad
+to do it&mdash;and yet he must have done it because he loved
+her!</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no. Don't be afraid. The powers looked
+after that too. There was no one about&mdash;and I don't
+think he'll talk much about it."</p>
+
+<p>She trembled, fearing yet adoring him. Nothing
+could have been more unlike the Amherst she fancied
+she knew than this act of irrational anger which had
+magically lifted the darkness from his spirit; yet, magically
+also, it gave him back to her, made them one flesh
+once more. And suddenly the pressure of opposed
+emotions became too strong, and she burst into tears.</p>
+
+<p>She wept painfully, violently, with the resistance of
+strong natures unused to emotional expression; till at
+length, through the tumult of her tears, she felt her
+husband's reassuring touch.</p>
+
+<p>"Justine," he said, speaking once more in his natural
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>She raised her face from her hands, and they looked
+at each other.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_532" id="Page_532">[p 532]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Justine&mdash;this afternoon&mdash;I said things I didn't
+mean to say."</p>
+
+<p>Her lips parted, but her throat was still full of sobs,
+and she could only look at him while the tears ran down.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe I understand now," he continued, in the
+same quiet tone.</p>
+
+<p>Her hand shrank from his clasp, and she began to
+tremble again. "Oh, if you only <i>believe</i>...if you're
+not sure...don't pretend to be!"</p>
+
+<p>He sat down beside her and drew her into his arms.
+"I am sure," he whispered, holding her close, and
+pressing his lips against her face and hair.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my husband&mdash;my husband! You've come
+back to me?"</p>
+
+<p>He answered her with more kisses, murmuring
+through them: "Poor child&mdash;poor child&mdash;poor Justine...."
+while he held her fast.</p>
+
+<p>With her face against him she yielded to the childish
+luxury of murmuring out unjustified fears. "I was
+afraid you had gone back to Hanaford&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Tonight? To Hanaford?"</p>
+
+<p>"To tell your mother."</p>
+
+<p>She felt a contraction of the arm embracing her, as
+though a throb of pain had stiffened it.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall never tell any one," he said abruptly; but
+as he felt in her a responsive shrinking he gathered
+her close again, whispering through the hair that fell<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_533" id="Page_533">[p 533]</a></span>
+about her cheek: "Don't talk, dear...let us never
+talk of it again...." And in the clasp of his arms her
+terror and anguish subsided, giving way, not to the deep
+peace of tranquillized thought, but to a confused well-being
+that lulled all thought to sleep.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXVII" id="XXXVII"></a>XXXVII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">But</span> thought could never be long silent between
+them; and Justine's triumph lasted but a day.</p>
+
+<p>With its end she saw what it had been made of: the
+ascendency of youth and sex over his subjugated judgment.
+Her first impulse was to try and maintain it&mdash;why
+not use the protective arts with which love inspired
+her? She who lived so keenly in the brain could live
+as intensely in her feelings; her quick imagination
+tutored her looks and words, taught her the spells to
+weave about shorn giants. And for a few days she and
+Amherst lost themselves in this self-evoked cloud of
+passion, both clinging fast to the visible, the palpable
+in their relation, as if conscious already that its finer
+essence had fled.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst made no allusion to what had passed, asked
+for no details, offered no reassurances&mdash;behaved as if
+the whole episode had been effaced from his mind.
+And from Wyant there came no sound: he seemed to
+have disappeared from life as he had from their talk.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_534" id="Page_534">[p 534]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Toward the end of the week Amherst announced
+that he must return to Hanaford; and Justine at once
+declared her intention of going with him.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed surprised, disconcerted almost; and for
+the first time the shadow of what had happened fell
+visibly between them.</p>
+
+<p>"But ought you to leave Cicely before Mr. Langhope
+comes back?" he suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"He will be here in two days."</p>
+
+<p>"But he will expect to find you."</p>
+
+<p>"It is almost the first of April. We are to have
+Cicely with us for the summer. There is no reason
+why I should not go back to my work at Westmore."</p>
+
+<p>There was in fact no reason that he could produce;
+and the next day they returned to Hanaford together.</p>
+
+<p>With her perceptions strung to the last pitch of sensitiveness,
+she felt a change in Amherst as soon as they
+re-entered Bessy's house. He was still scrupulously
+considerate, almost too scrupulously tender; but with
+a tinge of lassitude, like a man who tries to keep up
+under the stupefying approach of illness. And she began
+to hate the power by which she held him. It was
+not thus they had once walked together, free in mind
+though so linked in habit and feeling; when their love
+was not a deadening drug but a vivifying element that
+cleared thought instead of stifling it. There were
+moments when she felt that open alienation would be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_535" id="Page_535">[p 535]</a></span>
+easier, because it would be nearer the truth. And at
+such moments she longed to speak, to beg him to utter
+his mind, to go with her once for all into the depths of
+the subject they continued to avoid. But at the last
+her heart always failed her: she could not face the
+thought of losing him, of hearing him speak estranging
+words to her.</p>
+
+<p>They had been at Hanaford for about ten days when,
+one morning at breakfast, Amherst uttered a sudden
+exclamation over a letter he was reading.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" she asked in a tremor.</p>
+
+<p>He had grown very pale, and was pushing the hair
+from his forehead with the gesture habitual to him in
+moments of painful indecision.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" Justine repeated, her fear growing.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing&mdash;&mdash;" he began, thrusting the letter under
+the pile of envelopes by his plate; but she continued to
+look at him anxiously, till she drew his eyes to hers.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Langhope writes that they've appointed Wyant
+to Saint Christopher's," he said abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the letter&mdash;we forgot the letter!" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;we forgot the letter."</p>
+
+<p>"But how dare he&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst said nothing, but the long silence between
+them seemed full of ironic answers, till she brought
+out, hardly above her breath: "What shall you
+do?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_536" id="Page_536">[p 536]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Write at once&mdash;tell Mr. Langhope he's not fit for
+the place."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course&mdash;&mdash;" she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>He went on tearing open his other letters, and glancing
+at their contents. She leaned back in her chair,
+her cup of coffee untasted, listening to the recurrent
+crackle of torn paper as he tossed aside one letter after
+another.</p>
+
+<p>Presently he rose from his seat, and as she followed
+him from the dining-room she noticed that his breakfast
+had also remained untasted. He gathered up his
+letters and walked toward the smoking-room; and after
+a moment's hesitation she joined him.</p>
+
+<p>"John," she said from the threshold.</p>
+
+<p>He was just seating himself at his desk, but he turned
+to her with an obvious effort at kindness which made the
+set look of his face the more marked.</p>
+
+<p>She closed the door and went up to him.</p>
+
+<p>"If you write that to Mr. Langhope&mdash;Dr. Wyant
+will&mdash;will tell him," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;we must be prepared for that."</p>
+
+<p>She was silent, and Amherst flung himself down on
+the leather ottoman against the wall. She stood before
+him, clasping and unclasping her hands in speechless
+distress.</p>
+
+<p>"What would you have me do?" he asked at length,
+almost irritably.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_537" id="Page_537">[p 537]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I only thought...he told me he would keep
+straight...if he only had a chance," she faltered
+out.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst lifted his head slowly, and looked at her.
+"You mean&mdash;I am to do nothing? Is that it?"</p>
+
+<p>She moved nearer to him with beseeching eyes. "I
+can't bear it.... I can't bear that others should come
+between us," she broke out passionately.</p>
+
+<p>He made no answer, but she could see a look of suffering
+cross his face, and coming still closer, she sank
+down on the ottoman, laying her hand on his. "John...oh,
+John, spare me," she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment his hand lay quiet under hers; then
+he drew it out, and enclosed her trembling fingers.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well&mdash;I'll give him a chance&mdash;I'll do nothing,"
+he said, suddenly putting his other arm about her.</p>
+
+<p>The reaction caught her by the throat, forcing out a
+dry sob or two; and as she pressed her face against him
+he raised it up and gently kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>But even as their lips met she felt that they were sealing
+a treaty with dishonour. That his kiss should come
+to mean that to her! It was unbearable&mdash;worse than
+any personal pain&mdash;the thought of dragging him down
+to falsehood through her weakness.</p>
+
+<p>She drew back and rose to her feet, putting aside his
+detaining hand.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no! What am I saying? It can't be&mdash;you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_538" id="Page_538">[p 538]</a></span>
+must tell the truth." Her voice gathered strength as
+she spoke. "Oh, forget what I said&mdash;I didn't mean
+it!"</p>
+
+<p>But again he seemed sunk in inaction, like a man
+over whom some baneful lethargy is stealing.</p>
+
+<p>"John&mdash;John&mdash;forget!" she repeated urgently.</p>
+
+<p>He looked up at her. "You realize what it will
+mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;I realize.... But it must be.... And it will
+make no difference between us...will it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no. Why should it?" he answered apathetically.</p>
+
+<p>"Then write&mdash;tell Mr. Langhope not to give him the
+place. I want it over."</p>
+
+<p>He rose slowly to his feet, without looking at her
+again, and walked over to the desk. She sank down
+on the ottoman and watched him with burning eyes
+while he drew forth a sheet of note-paper and began
+to write.</p>
+
+<p>But after he had written a few words he laid down
+his pen, and swung his chair about so that he faced her.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't do it in this way," he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"How then? What do you mean?" she said, starting
+up.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her. "Do you want the story to come
+from Wyant?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;&mdash;" She looked back at him with sudden<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_539" id="Page_539">[p 539]</a></span>
+insight. "You mean to tell Mr. Langhope yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I mean to take the next train to town and
+tell him."</p>
+
+<p>Her trembling increased so much that she had to
+rest her hands against the edge of the ottoman to steady
+herself. "But if...if after all...Wyant should not
+speak?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;if he shouldn't? Could you bear to owe
+our safety to <i>him</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"Safety!"</p>
+
+<p>"It comes to that, doesn't it, if <i>we're</i> afraid to speak?"</p>
+
+<p>She sat silent, letting the bitter truth of this sink
+into her till it poured courage into her veins.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;it comes to that," she confessed.</p>
+
+<p>"Then you feel as I do?"</p>
+
+<p>"That you must go&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"That this is intolerable!"</p>
+
+<p>The words struck down her last illusion, and she rose
+and went over to the writing-table. "Yes&mdash;go," she
+said.</p>
+
+<p>He stood up also, and took both her hands, not in a
+caress, but gravely, almost severely.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen, Justine. You must understand exactly
+what this means&mdash;may mean. I am willing to go on
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_540" id="Page_540">[p 540]</a></span>as we are now...as long as we can...because I
+love you...because I would do anything to spare
+you pain. But if I speak I must say everything&mdash;I
+must follow this thing up to its uttermost consequences.
+That's what I want to make clear to you."</p>
+
+<p>Her heart sank with a foreboding of new peril.
+"What consequences?"</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you see for yourself&mdash;when you look about
+this house?"</p>
+
+<p>"This house&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>He dropped her hands and took an abrupt turn across
+the room.</p>
+
+<p>"I owe everything to her," he broke out, "all I am,
+all I have, all I have been able to give you&mdash;and I must
+go and tell her father that you...."</p>
+
+<p>"Stop&mdash;stop!" she cried, lifting her hands as if to
+keep off a blow.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;don't make me stop. We must face it," he
+said doggedly.</p>
+
+<p>"But this&mdash;this isn't the truth! You put it as if&mdash;almost
+as if&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;don't finish.&mdash;Has it occurred to you that <i>he</i>
+may think that?" Amherst asked with a terrible laugh.
+But at that she recovered her courage, as she always
+did when an extreme call was made on it.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;I don't believe it! If he <i>does</i>, it will be because
+you think it yourself...." Her voice sank, and
+she lifted her hands and pressed them to her temples.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_541" id="Page_541">[p 541]</a></span>"And if you think it, nothing matters...one way or
+the other...." She paused, and her voice regained its
+strength. "That is what I must face before you go:
+what <i>you</i> think, what <i>you</i> believe of me. You've never
+told me that."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst, at the challenge, remained silent, while a
+slow red crept to his cheek-bones.</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't I told you by&mdash;by what I've done?" he
+said slowly.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;what you've done has covered up what you
+thought; and I've helped you cover it&mdash;I'm to blame
+too! But it was not for this that we...that we had
+that half-year together...not to sink into connivance
+and evasion! I don't want another hour of sham happiness.
+I want the truth from you, whatever it is."</p>
+
+<p>He stood motionless, staring moodily at the floor.
+"Don't you see that's my misery&mdash;that I don't know
+myself?"</p>
+
+<p>"You don't know...what you think of me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good God, Justine, why do you try to strip life
+naked? I don't know what's been going on in me these
+last weeks&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You must know what you think of my motive...for
+doing what I did."</p>
+
+<p>She saw in his face how he shrank from the least allusion
+to the act about which their torment revolved.
+But he forced himself to raise his head and look at her.
+"I have never&mdash;for one moment&mdash;questioned your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_542" id="Page_542">[p 542]</a></span>
+motive&mdash;or failed to see that it was justified...under
+the circumstances...."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, John&mdash;John!" she broke out in the wild joy
+of hearing herself absolved; but the next instant her
+subtle perceptions felt the unconscious reserve behind
+his admission.</p>
+
+<p>"Your mind justifies me&mdash;not your heart; isn't <i>that</i>
+your misery?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her almost piteously, as if, in the last
+resort, it was from her that light must come to him.
+"On my soul, I don't know...I can't tell...it's all
+dark in me. I know you did what you thought best...if
+I had been there, I believe I should have asked you
+to do it...but I wish to God&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She interrupted him sobbingly. "Oh, I ought never
+to have let you love me! I ought to have seen that I
+was cut off from you forever. I have brought you
+wretchedness when I would have given my life for
+you! I don't deserve that you should forgive me
+for that."</p>
+
+<p>Her sudden outbreak seemed to restore his self-possession.
+He went up to her and took her hand with
+a quieting touch.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no question of forgiveness, Justine. Don't
+let us torture each other with vain repinings. Our
+business is to face the thing, and we shall be better for
+having talked it out. I shall be better, for my part,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_543" id="Page_543">[p 543]</a></span>
+for having told Mr. Langhope. But before I go I
+want to be sure that you understand the view he may
+take...and the effect it will probably have on our
+future."</p>
+
+<p>"Our future?" She started. "No, I don't understand."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst paused a moment, as if trying to choose the
+words least likely to pain her. "Mr. Langhope knows
+that my marriage was...unhappy; through my fault,
+he no doubt thinks. And if he chooses to infer that...that
+you and I may have cared for each other...before...and
+that it was <i>because</i> there was a chance of
+recovery that you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"We must face it," he repeated inflexibly. "And
+you must understand that, if there is the faintest hint
+of this kind, I shall give up everything here, as soon as
+it can be settled legally&mdash;God, how Tredegar will like
+the job!&mdash;and you and I will have to go and begin life
+over again...somewhere else."</p>
+
+<p>For an instant a mad hope swelled in her&mdash;the vision
+of escaping with him into new scenes, a new life, away
+from the coil of memories that bound them down as
+in a net. But the reaction of reason came at once&mdash;she
+saw him cut off from his chosen work, his career destroyed,
+his honour clouded, above all&mdash;ah, this was
+what wrung them both!&mdash;his task undone, his people<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_544" id="Page_544">[p 544]</a></span>
+flung back into the depths from which he had lifted
+them. And all through her doing&mdash;all because she
+had clutched at happiness with too rash a hand! The
+thought stung her to passionate activity of mind&mdash;made
+her resolve to risk anything, dare anything, before she
+involved him farther in her own ruin. She felt her
+brain clear gradually, and the thickness dissolve in her
+throat.</p>
+
+<p>"I understand," she said in a low voice, raising her
+eyes to his.</p>
+
+<p>"And you're ready to accept the consequences?
+Think again before it's too late."</p>
+
+<p>She paused. "That is what I should like...what
+I wanted to ask you...the time to think."</p>
+
+<p>She saw a slight shade cross his face, as if he had not
+expected this failure of courage in her; but he said
+quietly: "You don't want me to go today?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not today&mdash;give me one more day."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well."</p>
+
+<p>She laid a timid hand on his arm. "Please go out to
+Westmore as usual&mdash;as if nothing had happened. And
+tonight...when you come back...I shall have
+decided."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," he repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be gone all day?"</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at his watch. "Yes&mdash;I had meant to be;
+unless&mdash;&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_545" id="Page_545">[p 545]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No; I would rather be alone. Good-bye," she
+said, letting her hand slip softly along his coat-sleeve
+as he turned to the door.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXVIII" id="XXXVIII"></a>XXXVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">At</span> half-past six that afternoon, just as Amherst,
+on his return from the mills, put the key into his
+door at Hanaford, Mrs. Ansell, in New York, was
+being shown into Mr. Langhope's library.</p>
+
+<p>As she entered, her friend rose from his chair by the
+fire, and turned on her a face so disordered by emotion
+that she stopped short with an exclamation of alarm.</p>
+
+<p>"Henry&mdash;what has happened? Why did you send
+for me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I couldn't go to you. I couldn't trust
+myself in the streets&mdash;in the light of day."</p>
+
+<p>"But why? What is it?&mdash;Not Cicely&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>He struck both hands upward with a comprehensive
+gesture. "Cicely&mdash;everyone&mdash;the whole world!" His
+clenched fist came down on the table against which he
+was leaning. "Maria, my girl might have been saved!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell looked at him with growing perturbation.
+"Saved&mdash;Bessy's life? But how? By whom?"</p>
+
+<p>"She might have been allowed to live, I mean&mdash;to
+recover. She was killed, Maria; that woman killed
+her!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_546" id="Page_546">[p 546]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell, with another cry of bewilderment, let
+herself drop helplessly into the nearest chair. "In
+heaven's name, Henry&mdash;what woman?"</p>
+
+<p>He seated himself opposite to her, clutching at his
+stick, and leaning his weight heavily on it&mdash;a white
+dishevelled old man. "I wonder why you ask&mdash;just to
+spare me?"</p>
+
+<p>Their eyes met in a piercing exchange of question
+and answer, and Mrs. Ansell tried to bring out reasonably:
+"I ask in order to understand what you are
+saying."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, if you insist on keeping up appearances&mdash;my
+daughter-in-law killed my daughter. There you
+have it." He laughed silently, with a tear on his reddened
+eye-lids.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell groaned. "Henry, you are raving&mdash;I
+understand less and less."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see how I can speak more plainly. She
+told me so herself, in this room, not an hour ago."</p>
+
+<p>"She told you? Who told you?"</p>
+
+<p>"John Amherst's wife. Told me she'd killed my
+child. It's as easy as breathing&mdash;if you know how to
+use a morphia-needle."</p>
+
+<p>Light seemed at last to break on his hearer. "Oh,
+my poor Henry&mdash;you mean&mdash;she gave too much?
+There was some dreadful accident?"</p>
+
+<p>"There was no accident. She killed my child<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_547" id="Page_547">[p 547]</a></span>&mdash;killed
+her deliberately. Don't look at me as if I were
+a madman. She sat in that chair you're in when she
+told me."</p>
+
+<p>"Justine? Has she been here today?" Mrs. Ansell
+paused in a painful effort to readjust her thoughts.
+"But <i>why</i> did she tell you?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's simple enough. To prevent Wyant's doing
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;&mdash;" broke from his hearer, in a long sigh of
+fear and intelligence. Mr. Langhope looked at her
+with a smile of miserable exultation.</p>
+
+<p>"You knew&mdash;you suspected all along?&mdash;But now
+you must speak out!" he exclaimed with a sudden note
+of command.</p>
+
+<p>She sat motionless, as if trying to collect herself.
+"I know nothing&mdash;I only meant&mdash;why was this never
+known before?"</p>
+
+<p>He was upon her at once. "You think&mdash;because
+they understood each other? And now there's been
+a break between them? He wanted too big a share of
+the spoils? Oh, it's all so abysmally vile!"</p>
+
+<p>He covered his face with a shaking hand, and Mrs.
+Ansell remained silent, plunged in a speechless misery
+of conjecture. At length she regained some measure of
+her habitual composure, and leaning forward, with her
+eyes on his face, said in a quiet tone: "If I am to help
+you, you must try to tell me just what has happened."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_548" id="Page_548">[p 548]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He made an impatient gesture. "Haven't I told you?
+She found that her accomplice meant to speak, and
+rushed to town to forestall him."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell reflected. "But why&mdash;with his place
+at Saint Christopher's secured&mdash;did Dr. Wyant choose
+this time to threaten her&mdash;if, as you imagine, he's an
+accomplice?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because he's a drug-taker, and she didn't wish him
+to have the place."</p>
+
+<p>"She didn't wish it? But that does not look as if
+she were afraid. She had only to hold her tongue!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope laughed sardonically. "It's not quite
+so simple. Amherst was coming to town to tell me."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;<i>he</i> knows?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;and she preferred that I should have her
+version first."</p>
+
+<p>"And what is her version?"</p>
+
+<p>The furrows of misery deepened in Mr. Langhope's
+face. "Maria&mdash;don't ask too much of me! I can't
+go over it again. She says she wanted to spare my child&mdash;she
+says the doctors were keeping her alive, torturing
+her uselessly, as a...a sort of scientific experiment....
+She forced on me the hideous details...."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell waited a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Well! May it not be true?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wyant's version is different. <i>He</i> says Bessy would
+have recovered&mdash;he says Garford thought so too."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_549" id="Page_549">[p 549]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And what does she answer? She denies it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. She admits that Garford was in doubt. But
+she says the chance was too remote&mdash;the pain too bad...that's
+her cue, naturally!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell, leaning back in her chair, with hands
+meditatively stretched along its arms, gave herself up
+to silent consideration of the fragmentary statements
+cast before her. The long habit of ministering to her
+friends in moments of perplexity and distress had given
+her an almost judicial keenness in disentangling and
+coordinating facts incoherently presented, and in seizing
+on the thread of motive that connected them; but she
+had never before been confronted with a situation so
+poignant in itself, and bearing so intimately on her personal
+feelings; and she needed time to free her thoughts
+from the impending rush of emotion.</p>
+
+<p>At last she raised her head and said: "Why did Mr.
+Amherst let her come to you, instead of coming himself?"</p>
+
+<p>"He knows nothing of her being here. She persuaded
+him to wait a day, and as soon as he had gone
+to the mills this morning she took the first train to
+town."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;&mdash;" Mrs. Ansell murmured thoughtfully; and
+Mr. Langhope rejoined, with a conclusive gesture:
+"Do you want more proofs of panic-stricken guilt?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, guilt&mdash;" His friend revolved her large soft<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_550" id="Page_550">[p 550]</a></span>
+muff about a drooping hand. "There's so much still
+to understand."</p>
+
+<p>"Your mind does not, as a rule, work so slowly!"
+he said with some asperity; but she paid no heed to his
+tone.</p>
+
+<p>"Amherst, for instance&mdash;how long has he known
+of this?" she continued.</p>
+
+<p>"A week or two only&mdash;she made that clear."</p>
+
+<p>"And what is his attitude?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;that, I conjecture, is just what she means to
+keep us from knowing!"</p>
+
+<p>"You mean she's afraid&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope gathered his haggard brows in a
+frown. "She's afraid, of course&mdash;mortally&mdash;I never
+saw a woman more afraid. I only wonder she had the
+courage to face me."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;that's it! Why <i>did</i> she face you? To extenuate
+her act&mdash;to give you her version, because she
+feared his might be worse? Do you gather that that
+was her motive?"</p>
+
+<p>It was Mr. Langhope's turn to hesitate. He furrowed
+the thick Turkey rug with the point of his ebony
+stick, pausing once or twice to revolve it gimlet-like in
+a gap of the pile.</p>
+
+<p>"Not her avowed motive, naturally."</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;at least, then, let me have that."</p>
+
+<p>"Her avowed motive? Oh, she'd prepared one, of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_551" id="Page_551">[p 551]</a></span>
+course&mdash;trust her to have a dozen ready! The one she
+produced was&mdash;simply the desire to protect her husband."</p>
+
+<p>"Her husband? Does <i>he</i> too need protection?"</p>
+
+<p>"My God, if he takes her side&mdash;&mdash;! At any rate,
+her fear seemed to be that what she had done might
+ruin him; might cause him to feel&mdash;as well he may!&mdash;that
+the mere fact of being her husband makes his situation
+as Cicely's step-father, as my son-in-law, intolerable.
+And she came to clear him, as it were&mdash;to find
+out, in short, on what terms I should be willing to continue
+my present relations with him as though this hideous
+thing had not been known to me."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell raised her head quickly. "Well&mdash;and
+what were your terms?"</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated. "She spared me the pain of proposing
+any&mdash;I had only to accept hers."</p>
+
+<p>"Hers?"</p>
+
+<p>"That she should disappear altogether from my
+sight&mdash;and from the child's, naturally. Good heaven,
+I should like to include Amherst in that! But I'm
+tied hand and foot, as you see, by Cicely's interests;
+and I'm bound to say she exonerated him completely&mdash;completely!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell was again silent, but a swift flight of
+thoughts traversed her drooping face. "But if you are
+to remain on the old terms with her husband, how is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_552" id="Page_552">[p 552]</a></span>
+she to disappear out of your life without also disappearing
+out of his?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope gave a slight laugh. "I leave her
+to work out that problem."</p>
+
+<p>"And you think Amherst will consent to such conditions?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's not to know of them."</p>
+
+<p>The unexpectedness of the reply reduced Mrs. Ansell
+to a sound of inarticulate interrogation; and Mr.
+Langhope continued: "Not at first, that is. She had
+thought it all out&mdash;foreseen everything; and she wrung
+from me&mdash;I don't yet know how!&mdash;a promise that when
+I saw him I would make it appear that I cleared him
+completely, not only of any possible complicity, or
+whatever you choose to call it, but of any sort of connection
+with the matter in my thoughts of him. I am,
+in short, to let him feel that he and I are to continue
+on the old footing&mdash;and I agreed, on the condition of
+her effacing herself somehow&mdash;of course on some other
+pretext."</p>
+
+<p>"Some other pretext? But what conceivable pretext?
+My poor friend, he adores her!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "We
+haven't seen him since this became known to him.
+<i>She</i> has; and she let slip that he was horror-struck."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell looked up with a quick exclamation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_553" id="Page_553">[p 553]</a></span>
+"Let slip? Isn't it much more likely that she forced
+it on you&mdash;emphasized it to the last limit of credulity?"
+She sank her hands to the arms of the chair,
+and exclaimed, looking him straight in the eyes:
+"You say she was frightened? It strikes me she was
+dauntless!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope stared a moment; then he said, with
+an ironic shrug: "No doubt, then, she counted on its
+striking me too."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell breathed a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I
+understand your feeling as you do&mdash;I'm deep in the
+horror of it myself. But I can't help seeing that this
+woman might have saved herself&mdash;and that she's chosen
+to save her husband instead. What I don't see, from
+what I know of him," she musingly proceeded, "is
+how, on any imaginable pretext, she will induce him
+to accept the sacrifice."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope made a resentful movement. "If
+that's the only point your mind dwells on&mdash;&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell looked up. "It doesn't dwell anywhere
+as yet&mdash;except, my poor Henry," she murmured, rising
+to move toward him, and softly laying her hand on his
+bent shoulder&mdash;"except on your distress and misery&mdash;on
+the very part I can't yet talk of, can't question you
+about...."</p>
+
+<p>He let her hand rest there a moment; then he turned,
+and drawing it into his own tremulous fingers, pressed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_554" id="Page_554">[p 554]</a></span>
+it silently, with a clinging helpless grasp that drew the
+tears to her eyes.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Justine Brent, in her earliest girlhood, had gone
+through one of those emotional experiences that are the
+infantile diseases of the heart. She had fancied herself
+beloved of a youth of her own age; had secretly returned
+his devotion, and had seen it reft from her by
+another. Such an incident, as inevitable as the measles,
+sometimes, like that mild malady, leaves traces out of
+all proportion to its actual virulence. The blow fell on
+Justine with tragic suddenness, and she reeled under it,
+thinking darkly of death, and renouncing all hopes of
+future happiness. Her ready pen often beguiled her
+into recording her impressions, and she now found
+an escape from despair in writing the history of a
+damsel similarly wronged. In her tale, the heroine
+killed herself; but the author, saved by this vicarious
+sacrifice, lived, and in time even smiled over her
+manuscript.</p>
+
+<p>It was many years since Justine Amherst had recalled
+this youthful incident; but the memory of it recurred
+to her as she turned from Mr. Langhope's door. For
+a moment death seemed the easiest escape from what
+confronted her; but though she could no longer medicine
+her despair by turning it into fiction, she knew at
+once that she must somehow transpose it into terms of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_555" id="Page_555">[p 555]</a></span>
+action, that she must always escape from life into more
+life, and not into its negation.</p>
+
+<p>She had been carried into Mr. Langhope's presence
+by that expiatory passion which still burns so high, and
+draws its sustenance from so deep down, in the unsleeping
+hearts of women. Though she had never wavered
+in her conviction that her act had been justified
+her ideas staggered under the sudden comprehension of
+its consequences. Not till that morning had she seen
+those consequences in their terrible, unsuspected extent,
+had she understood how one stone rashly loosened
+from the laboriously erected structure of human society
+may produce remote fissures in that clumsy fabric.
+She saw that, having hazarded the loosening of the
+stone, she should have held herself apart from ordinary
+human ties, like some priestess set apart for the service
+of the temple. And instead, she had seized happiness
+with both hands, taken it as the gift of the very fate she
+had herself precipitated! She remembered some old
+Greek saying to the effect that the gods never forgive
+the mortal who presumes to love and suffer like a god.
+She had dared to do both, and the gods were bringing
+ruin on that deeper self which had its life in those about
+her.</p>
+
+<p>So much had become clear to her when she heard
+Amherst declare his intention of laying the facts before
+Mr. Langhope. His few broken words lit up the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_556" id="Page_556">[p 556]</a></span>
+farthest verge of their lives. She saw that his retrospective
+reverence for his wife's memory, which was far as
+possible removed from the strong passion of the mind
+and senses that bound him to herself, was indelibly
+stained and desecrated by the discovery that all he had
+received from the one woman had been won for him
+by the deliberate act of the other. This was what no
+reasoning, no appeal to the calmer judgment, could ever,
+in his inmost thoughts, undo or extenuate. It could
+find appeasement only in the renunciation of all that
+had come to him from Bessy; and this renunciation, so
+different from the mere sacrifice of material well-being,
+was bound up with consequences so far-reaching, so
+destructive to the cause which had inspired his whole
+life, that Justine felt the helpless terror of the mortal
+who has launched one of the heavenly bolts.</p>
+
+<p>She could think of no way of diverting it but the way
+she had chosen. She must see Mr. Langhope first,
+must clear Amherst of the least faint association with
+her act or her intention. And to do this she must exaggerate,
+not her own compunction&mdash;for she could not
+depart from the exact truth in reporting her feelings
+and convictions&mdash;but her husband's first instinctive
+movement of horror, the revulsion of feeling her confession
+had really produced in him. This was the most
+painful part of her task, and for this reason her excited
+imagination clothed it with a special expiatory value.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_557" id="Page_557">[p 557]</a></span>
+If she could purchase Amherst's peace of mind, and the
+security of his future, by confessing, and even over-emphasizing,
+the momentary estrangement between them
+there would be a bitter joy in such payment!</p>
+
+<p>Her hour with Mr. Langhope proved the correctness
+of her intuition. She could save Amherst only by
+effacing herself from his life: those about him would be
+only too ready to let her bear the full burden of obloquy.
+She could see that, for a dozen reasons, Mr. Langhope,
+even in the first shock of his dismay, unconsciously
+craved a way of exonerating Amherst, of preserving
+intact the relation on which so much of his comfort had
+come to depend. And she had the courage to make
+the most of his desire, to fortify it by isolating Amherst's
+point of view from hers; so that, when the hour
+was over, she had the solace of feeling that she had
+completely freed him from any conceivable consequence
+of her act.</p>
+
+<p>So far, the impetus of self-sacrifice had carried her
+straight to her goal; but, as frequently happens with such
+atoning impulses, it left her stranded just short of any
+subsequent plan of conduct. Her next step, indeed,
+was clear enough: she must return to Hanaford, explain
+to her husband that she had felt impelled to tell
+her own story to Mr. Langhope, and then take up her
+ordinary life till chance offered her a pretext for fulfilling
+her promise. But what pretext was likely to pre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_558" id="Page_558">[p 558]</a></span>sent
+itself? No symbolic horn would sound the hour
+of fulfillment; she must be her own judge, and hear the
+call in the depths of her own conscience.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXIX" id="XXXIX"></a>XXXIX</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">When</span> Amherst, returning late that afternoon
+from Westmore, learned of his wife's departure,
+and read the note she had left, he found it, for a time,
+impossible to bring order out of the confusion of feeling
+produced in him.</p>
+
+<p>His mind had been disturbed enough before. All
+day, through the routine of work at the mills, he had
+laboured inwardly with the difficulties confronting him;
+and his unrest had been increased by the fact that his
+situation bore an ironic likeness to that in which, from
+a far different cause, he had found himself at the other
+crisis of his life. Once more he was threatened with
+the possibility of having to give up Westmore, at a moment
+when concentration of purpose and persistency
+of will were at last beginning to declare themselves in
+tangible results. Before, he had only given up
+dreams; now it was their fruition that he was asked
+to surrender. And he was fixed in his resolve to
+withdraw absolutely from Westmore if the statement
+he had to make to Mr. Langhope was received with the
+least hint of an offensive mental reservation. All forms<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_559" id="Page_559">[p 559]</a></span>
+of moral compromise had always been difficult to Amherst,
+and like many men absorbed in large and complicated
+questions he craved above all clearness and
+peace in his household relation. The first months of
+his second marriage had brought him, as a part of
+richer and deeper joys, this enveloping sense of a clear
+moral medium, in which no subterfuge or equivocation
+could draw breath. He had felt that henceforth he
+could pour into his work all the combative energy, the
+powers of endurance, resistance, renovation, which had
+once been unprofitably dissipated in the vain attempt
+to bring some sort of harmony into life with Bessy.
+Between himself and Justine, apart from their love for
+each other, there was the wider passion for their kind,
+which gave back to them an enlarged and deepened reflection
+of their personal feeling. In such an air it had
+seemed that no petty egotism could hamper their growth,
+no misintelligence obscure their love; yet all the while
+this pure happiness had been unfolding against a sordid
+background of falsehood and intrigue from which
+his soul turned with loathing.</p>
+
+<p>Justine was right in assuming that Amherst had never
+thought much about women. He had vaguely regarded
+them as meant to people that hazy domain of feeling designed
+to offer the busy man an escape from thought.
+His second marriage, leading him to the blissful discovery
+that woman can think as well as feel, that there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_560" id="Page_560">[p 560]</a></span>
+are beings of the ornamental sex in whom brain and
+heart have so enlarged each other that their emotions
+are as clear as thought, their thoughts as warm as emotions&mdash;this
+discovery had had the effect of making him
+discard his former summary conception of woman as
+a bundle of inconsequent impulses, and admit her at a
+stroke to full mental equality with her lord. The result
+of this act of manumission was, that in judging
+Justine he could no longer allow for what was purely
+feminine in her conduct. It was incomprehensible to
+him that she, to whom truth had seemed the essential
+element of life, should have been able to draw breath,
+and find happiness, in an atmosphere of falsehood and
+dissimulation. His mind could assent&mdash;at least in the
+abstract&mdash;to the reasonableness of her act; but he was
+still unable to understand her having concealed it from
+him. He could enter far enough into her feelings to
+allow for her having kept silence on his first return to
+Lynbrook, when she was still under the strain of a prolonged
+and terrible trial; but that she should have continued
+to do so when he and she had discovered and
+confessed their love for each other, threw an intolerable
+doubt on her whole course.</p>
+
+<p>He stayed late at the mills, finding one pretext after
+another for delaying his return to Hanaford, and trying,
+while he gave one part of his mind to the methodical
+performance of his task, to adjust the other to some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_561" id="Page_561">[p 561]</a></span>
+definite view of the future. But all was darkened and
+confused by the sense that, between himself and Justine,
+complete communion of thought was no longer possible.
+It had, in fact, never existed; there had always been a
+locked chamber in her mind, and he knew not yet what
+other secrets might inhabit it.</p>
+
+<p>The shock of finding her gone when he reached home
+gave a new turn to his feelings. She had made no
+mystery of her destination, leaving word with the servants
+that she had gone to town to see Mr. Langhope;
+and Amherst found a note from her on his study
+table.</p>
+
+<p>"I feel," she wrote, "that I ought to see Mr. Langhope
+myself, and be the first to tell him what must be
+told. It was like you, dearest, to wish to spare me
+this, but it would have made me more unhappy; and
+Mr. Langhope might wish to hear the facts in my own
+words. I shall come back tomorrow, and after that it
+will be for you to decide what must be done."</p>
+
+<p>The brevity and simplicity of the note were characteristic;
+in moments of high tension Justine was always
+calm and direct. And it was like her, too, not to
+make any covert appeal to his sympathy, not to seek to
+entrap his judgment by caressing words and plaintive
+allusions. The quiet tone in which she stated her purpose
+matched the firmness and courage of the act, and
+for a moment Amherst was shaken by a revulsion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_562" id="Page_562">[p 562]</a></span>
+of feeling. Her heart was level with his, after all&mdash;if
+she had done wrong she would bear the brunt of it
+alone. It was so exactly what he himself would have
+felt and done in such a situation that faith in her flowed
+back through all the dried channels of his heart. But
+an instant later the current set the other way. The
+wretched years of his first marriage had left in him a
+residue of distrust, a tendency to dissociate every act
+from its ostensible motive. He had been too profoundly
+the dupe of his own enthusiasm not to retain
+this streak of scepticism, and it now moved him
+to ask if Justine's sudden departure had not been
+prompted by some other cause than the one she avowed.
+Had that alone actuated her, why not have told it to
+him, and asked his consent to her plan? Why let him
+leave the house without a hint of her purpose, and slip
+off by the first train as soon as he was safe at Westmore?
+Might it not be that she had special reasons for wishing
+Mr. Langhope to <i>hear her own version first</i>&mdash;that there
+were questions she wished to parry herself, explanations
+she could trust no one to make for her? The
+thought plunged Amherst into deeper misery. He
+knew not how to defend himself against these disintegrating
+suspicions&mdash;he felt only that, once the accord
+between two minds is broken, it is less easy to restore
+than the passion between two hearts. He dragged
+heavily through his solitary evening, and awaited with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_563" id="Page_563">[p 563]</a></span>
+dread and yet impatience a message announcing his
+wife's return.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It would have been easier&mdash;far easier&mdash;when she left
+Mr. Langhope's door, to go straight out into the darkness
+and let it close in on her for good.</p>
+
+<p>Justine felt herself yielding to the spell of that
+suggestion as she walked along the lamplit pavement,
+hardly conscious of the turn her steps were taking.
+The door of the house which a few weeks before had
+been virtually hers had closed on her without a question.
+She had been suffered to go out into the darkness
+without being asked whither she was going, or
+under what roof her night would be spent. The contrast
+between her past and present sounded through
+the tumult of her thoughts like the evil laughter of
+temptation. The house at Hanaford, to which she
+was returning, would look at her with the same alien
+face&mdash;nowhere on earth, at that moment, was a door
+which would open to her like the door of home.</p>
+
+<p>In her painful self-absorption she followed the side
+street toward Madison Avenue, and struck southward
+down that tranquil thoroughfare. There was a physical
+relief in rapid motion, and she walked on, still hardly
+aware of her direction, toward the clustered lights of
+Madison Square. Should she return to Hanaford, she
+had still several hours to dispose of before the de<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_564" id="Page_564">[p 564]</a></span>parture
+of the midnight train; and if she did not return,
+hours and dates no longer existed for her.</p>
+
+<p>It would be easier&mdash;infinitely easier&mdash;not to go back.
+To take up her life with Amherst would, under any
+circumstances, be painful enough; to take it up under
+the tacit restriction of her pledge to Mr. Langhope
+seemed more than human courage could face. As she
+approached the square she had almost reached the
+conclusion that such a temporary renewal was beyond
+her strength&mdash;beyond what any standard of duty exacted.
+The question of an alternative hardly troubled
+her. She would simply go on living, and find an escape
+in work and material hardship. It would not be hard
+for so inconspicuous a person to slip back into the obscure
+mass of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>She paused a moment on the edge of the square,
+vaguely seeking a direction for her feet that might permit
+the working of her thoughts to go on uninterrupted;
+and as she stood there, her eyes fell on the bench near
+the corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where she had sat
+with Amherst on the day of his flight from Lynbrook.
+He too had dreamed of escaping from insoluble problems
+into the clear air of hard work and simple duties;
+and she remembered the words with which she had turned
+him back. The cases, of course, were not identical,
+since he had been flying in anger and wounded pride
+from a situation for which he was in no wise to blame;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_565" id="Page_565">[p 565]</a></span>
+yet, if even at such a moment she had insisted on charity
+and forbearance, how could she now show less self-denial
+than she had exacted of him?</p>
+
+<p>"If you go away for a time, surely it ought to be in
+such a way that your going does not seem to cast any
+reflection on Bessy...." That was how she had put it
+to him, and how, with the mere change of a name, she
+must now, for reasons as cogent, put it to herself.
+It was just as much a part of the course she had
+planned to return to her husband now, and take up
+their daily life together, as it would, later on, be her
+duty to drop out of that life, when her doing so could
+no longer involve him in the penalty to be paid.</p>
+
+<p>She stood a little while looking at the bench on which
+they had sat, and giving thanks in her heart for the past
+strength which was now helping to build up her failing
+courage: such a patchwork business are our best
+endeavours, yet so faithfully does each weak upward
+impulse reach back a hand to the next.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Justine's explanation of her visit to Mr. Langhope
+was not wholly satisfying to her husband. She did not
+conceal from him that the scene had been painful, but
+she gave him to understand, as briefly as possible, that
+Mr. Langhope, after his first movement of uncontrollable
+distress, had seemed able to make allowances for
+the pressure under which she had acted, and that he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_566" id="Page_566">[p 566]</a></span>
+had, at any rate, given no sign of intending to let her
+confession make any change in the relation between the
+households. If she did not&mdash;as Amherst afterward recalled&mdash;put
+all this specifically into words, she contrived
+to convey it in her manner, in her allusions, above
+all in her recovered composure. She had the demeanour
+of one who has gone through a severe test of strength,
+but come out of it in complete control of the situation.
+There was something slightly unnatural in this prompt
+solution of so complicated a difficulty, and it had the
+effect of making Amherst ask himself what, to produce
+such a result, must have been the gist of her communication
+to Mr. Langhope. If the latter had shown
+any disposition to be cruel, or even unjust, Amherst's
+sympathies would have rushed instantly to his wife's
+defence; but the fact that there was apparently to be
+no call on them left his reason free to compare and
+discriminate, with the final result that the more he
+pondered on his father-in-law's attitude the less intelligible
+it became.</p>
+
+<p>A few days after Justine's return he was called to
+New York on business; and before leaving he told her
+that he should of course take the opportunity of having
+a talk with Mr. Langhope.</p>
+
+<p>She received the statement with the gentle composure
+from which she had not departed since her return from
+town; and he added tentatively, as if to provoke her to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_567" id="Page_567">[p 567]</a></span>
+a clearer expression of feeling: "I shall not be satisfied,
+of course, till I see for myself just how he feels&mdash;just
+how much, at bottom, this has affected him&mdash;since my
+own future relation to him will, as I have already told
+you, depend entirely on his treatment of you."</p>
+
+<p>She met this without any sign of disturbance. "His
+treatment of me was very kind," she said. "But would
+it not, on your part," she continued hesitatingly, "be
+kinder not to touch on the subject so soon again?"</p>
+
+<p>The line deepened between his brows. "Touch on
+it? I sha'n't rest till I've gone to the bottom of it! Till
+then, you must understand," he summed up with decision,
+"I feel myself only on sufferance here at Westmore."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;I understand," she assented; and as he bent
+over to kiss her for goodbye a tenuous impenetrable
+barrier seemed to lie between their lips.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It was Justine's turn to await with a passionate anxiety
+her husband's home-coming; and when, on the
+third day, he reappeared, her dearly acquired self-control
+gave way to a tremulous eagerness. This was,
+after all, the turning-point in their lives: everything depended
+on how Mr. Langhope had "played up" to his
+cue; had kept to his side of their bond.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's face showed signs of emotional havoc:
+when feeling once broke out in him it had full play,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_568" id="Page_568">[p 568]</a></span>
+and she could see that his hour with Mr. Langhope had
+struck to the roots of life. But the resultant expression
+was one of invigoration, not defeat; and she gathered
+at a glance that her partner had not betrayed her. She
+drew a tragic solace from the success of her achievement;
+yet it flung her into her husband's arms with a
+passion of longing to which, as she instantly felt, he
+did not as completely respond.</p>
+
+<p>There was still, then, something "between" them:
+somewhere the mechanism of her scheme had failed, or
+its action had not produced the result she had counted
+on.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as they were alone in the study she said, as
+quietly as she could: "You saw your father-in-law?
+You talked with him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;I spent the afternoon with him. Cicely sent
+you her love."</p>
+
+<p>She coloured at the mention of the child's name and
+murmured: "And Mr. Langhope?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is perfectly calm now&mdash;perfectly impartial.&mdash;This
+business has made me feel," Amherst added
+abruptly, "that I have never been quite fair to him. I
+never thought him a magnanimous man."</p>
+
+<p>"He has proved himself so," Justine murmured, her
+head bent low over a bit of needlework; and Amherst
+affirmed energetically: "He has been more than that&mdash;generous!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_569" id="Page_569">[p 569]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She looked up at him with a smile. "I am so glad,
+dear; so glad there is not to be the least shadow between
+you...."</p>
+
+<p>"No," Amherst said, his voice flagging slightly.
+There was a pause, and then he went on with renewed
+emphasis: "Of course I made my point clear to him."</p>
+
+<p>"Your point?"</p>
+
+<p>"That I stand or fall by his judgment of you."</p>
+
+<p>Oh, if he had but said it more tenderly! But he delivered
+it with the quiet resolution of a man who contends
+for an abstract principle of justice, and not for a
+passion grown into the fibres of his heart!</p>
+
+<p>"You are generous too," she faltered, her voice
+trembling a little.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst frowned; and she perceived that any hint,
+on her part, of recognizing the slightest change in their
+relations was still like pressure on a painful bruise.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no need for such words between us," he
+said impatiently; "and Mr. Langhope's attitude," he
+added, with an effort at a lighter tone, "has made it unnecessary,
+thank heaven, that we should ever revert to
+the subject again."</p>
+
+<p>He turned to his desk as he spoke, and plunged into
+perusal of the letters that had accumulated in his absence.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There was a temporary excess of work at Westmore,
+and during the days that followed he threw himself into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_570" id="Page_570">[p 570]</a></span>
+it with a zeal that showed Justine how eagerly he sought
+any pretext for avoiding confidential moments. The
+perception was painful enough, yet not as painful as
+another discovery that awaited her. She too had her
+tasks at Westmore: the supervision of the hospital, the
+day nursery, the mothers' club, and the various other
+organizations whereby she and Amherst were trying
+to put some sort of social unity into the lives of the mill-hands;
+and when, on the day after his return from New
+York, she presented herself, as usual, at the Westmore
+office, where she was in the habit of holding a brief consultation
+with him before starting on her rounds, she
+was at once aware of a new tinge of constraint in his
+manner. It hurt him, then, to see her at Westmore&mdash;hurt
+him more than to live with her, at Hanaford, under
+Bessy's roof! For it was there, at the mills, that his real
+life was led, the life with which Justine had been most
+identified, the life that had been made possible for both
+by the magnanimity of that other woman whose presence
+was now forever between them.</p>
+
+<p>Justine made no sign. She resumed her work as
+though unconscious of any change; but whereas in the
+past they had always found pretexts for seeking each
+other out, to discuss the order of the day's work, or
+merely to warm their hearts by a rapid word or two,
+now each went a separate way, sometimes not meeting
+till they regained the house at night-fall.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_571" id="Page_571">[p 571]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And as the weeks passed she began to understand
+that, by a strange inversion of probability, the relation
+between Amherst and herself was to be the means of
+holding her to her compact with Mr. Langhope&mdash;if
+indeed it were not nearer the truth to say that it had
+made such a compact unnecessary. Amherst had
+done his best to take up their life together as though
+there had been no break in it; but slowly the fact was
+being forced on her that by remaining with him she
+was subjecting him to intolerable suffering&mdash;was coming
+to be the personification of the very thoughts and
+associations from which he struggled to escape. Happily
+her promptness of action had preserved Westmore
+to him, and in Westmore she believed that he would in
+time find a refuge from even the memory of what he
+was now enduring. But meanwhile her presence kept
+the thought alive; and, had every other incentive lost
+its power, this would have been enough to sustain her.
+Fate had, ironically enough, furnished her with an unanswerable
+reason for leaving Amherst; the impossibility
+of their keeping up such a relation as now existed
+between them would soon become too patent to be denied.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, as summer approached, she knew that
+external conditions would also call upon her to act.
+The visible signal for her withdrawal would be Cicely's
+next visit to Westmore. The child's birthday fell in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_572" id="Page_572">[p 572]</a></span>
+early June; and Amherst, some months previously, had
+asked that she should be permitted to spend it at Hanaford,
+and that it should be chosen as the date for the
+opening of the first model cottages at Hopewood.</p>
+
+<p>It was Justine who had originated the idea of associating
+Cicely's anniversaries with some significant moment
+in the annals of the mill colony; and struck by the
+happy suggestion, he had at once applied himself to
+hastening on the work at Hopewood. The eagerness
+of both Amherst and Justine that Cicely should be
+identified with the developing life of Westmore had
+been one of the chief influences in reconciling Mr.
+Langhope to his son-in-law's second marriage. Husband
+and wife had always made it clear that they regarded
+themselves as the mere trustees of the Westmore
+revenues, and that Cicely's name should, as early
+as possible, be associated with every measure taken for
+the welfare of the people. But now, as Justine knew,
+the situation was changed; and Cicely would not be allowed
+to come to Hanaford until she herself had left it.
+The manifold threads of divination that she was perpetually
+throwing out in Amherst's presence told her,
+without word or sign on his part, that he also awaited
+Cicely's birthday as a determining date in their lives.
+He spoke confidently, and as a matter of course, of
+Mr. Langhope's bringing his grand-daughter at the
+promised time; but Justine could hear a note of chal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_573" id="Page_573">[p 573]</a></span>lenge
+in his voice, as though he felt that Mr. Langhope's
+sincerity had not yet been put to the test.</p>
+
+<p>As the time drew nearer it became more difficult for
+her to decide just how she should take the step she had
+determined on. She had no material anxiety for the
+future, for although she did not mean to accept a penny
+from her husband after she had left him, she knew it
+would be easy for her to take up her nursing again;
+and she knew also that her hospital connections would
+enable her to find work in a part of the country far
+enough distant to remove her entirely from his life.
+But she had not yet been able to invent a reason for
+leaving that should be convincing enough to satisfy him,
+without directing his suspicions to the truth. As she
+revolved the question she suddenly recalled an exclamation
+of Amherst's&mdash;a word spoken as they entered Mr.
+Langhope's door, on the fatal afternoon when she had
+found Wyant's letter awaiting her.</p>
+
+<p>"There's nothing you can't make people believe,
+you little Jesuit!"</p>
+
+<p>She had laughed in pure joy at his praise of her; for
+every bantering phrase had then been a caress. But
+now the words returned with a sinister meaning. She
+knew they were true as far as Amherst was concerned:
+in the arts of casuistry and equivocation a child could
+have outmatched him, and she had only to exert her
+will to dupe him as deeply as she pleased. Well!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_574" id="Page_574">[p 574]</a></span>
+the task was odious, but it was needful: it was the bitterest
+part of her expiation that she must deceive him once
+more to save him from the results of her former deception.
+This decision once reached, every nerve in her
+became alert for an opportunity to do the thing and have
+it over; so that, whenever they were alone together, she
+was in an attitude of perpetual tension, her whole mind
+drawn up for its final spring.</p>
+
+<p>The decisive word came, one evening toward the end
+of May, in the form of an allusion on Amherst's part
+to Cicely's approaching visit. Husband and wife were
+seated in the drawing-room after dinner, he with a book
+in hand, she bending, as usual, over the needlework
+which served at once as a pretext for lowered eyes, and
+as a means of disguising her fixed preoccupation.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you worked out a plan?" he asked, laying
+down his book. "It occurred to me that it would
+be rather a good idea if we began with a sort of festivity
+for the kids at the day nursery. You could take Cicely
+there early, and I could bring out Mr. Langhope after
+luncheon. The whole performance would probably
+tire him too much."</p>
+
+<p>Justine listened with suspended thread. "Yes&mdash;that
+seems a good plan."</p>
+
+<p>"Will you see about the details, then? You know
+it's only a week off."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know." She hesitated, and then took the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_575" id="Page_575">[p 575]</a></span>
+spring. "I ought to tell you John&mdash;that I&mdash;I think I
+may not be here...."</p>
+
+<p>He raised his head abruptly, and she saw the blood
+mount under his fair skin. "Not be here?" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>She met his look as steadily as she could. "I think
+of going away for awhile."</p>
+
+<p>"Going away? Where? What is the matter&mdash;are
+you not well?"</p>
+
+<p>There was her pretext&mdash;he had found it for her!
+Why should she not simply plead ill-health? Afterward
+she would find a way of elaborating the details
+and making them plausible. But suddenly, as she was
+about to speak, there came to her the feeling which, up
+to one fatal moment in their lives, had always ruled
+their intercourse&mdash;the feeling that there must be truth,
+and absolute truth, between them. Absolute, indeed, it
+could never be again, since he must never know of the
+condition exacted by Mr. Langhope; but that, at the
+moment, seemed almost a secondary motive compared
+to the deeper influences that were inexorably forcing
+them apart. At any rate, she would trump up no
+trivial excuse for the step she had resolved on; there
+should be truth, if not the whole truth, in this last decisive
+hour between them.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; I am quite well&mdash;at least my body is," she said
+quietly. "But I am tired, perhaps; my mind has been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_576" id="Page_576">[p 576]</a></span>
+going round too long in the same circle." She paused
+for a brief space, and then, raising her head, and
+looking him straight in the eyes: "Has it not been so
+with you?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>The question seemed to startle Amherst. He rose
+from his chair and took a few steps toward the hearth,
+where a small fire was crumbling into embers. He
+turned his back to it, resting an arm on the mantel-shelf;
+then he said, in a somewhat unsteady tone: "I
+thought we had agreed not to speak of all that again."</p>
+
+<p>Justine shook her head with a fugitive half-smile.
+"I made no such agreement. And besides, what is the
+use, when we can always hear each other's thoughts
+speak, and they speak of nothing else?"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's brows darkened. "It is not so with mine,"
+he began; but she raised her hand with a silencing
+gesture.</p>
+
+<p>"I know you have tried your best that it should not
+be so; and perhaps you have succeeded better than I.
+But I am tired, horribly tired&mdash;I want to get away from
+everything!"</p>
+
+<p>She saw a look of pain in his eyes. He continued
+to lean against the mantel-shelf, his head slightly lowered,
+his unseeing gaze fixed on a remote scroll in the
+pattern of the carpet; then he said in a low tone: "I
+can only repeat again what I have said before&mdash;that I
+understand why you did what you did."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_577" id="Page_577">[p 577]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," she answered, in the same tone.</p>
+
+<p>There was another pause, for she could not trust herself
+to go on speaking; and presently he asked, with a
+tinge of bitterness in his voice: "That does not satisfy
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>She hesitated. "It satisfies me as much as it does
+you&mdash;and no more," she replied at length.</p>
+
+<p>He looked up hastily. "What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just what I say. We can neither of us go on living
+on that understanding just at present." She rose as
+she spoke, and crossed over to the hearth. "I want to
+go back to my nursing&mdash;to go out to Michigan, to a
+town where I spent a few months the year before I first
+came to Hanaford. I have friends there, and can get
+work easily. And you can tell people that I was ill
+and needed a change."</p>
+
+<p>It had been easier to say than she had imagined, and
+her voice held its clear note till the end; but when she
+had ceased, the whole room began to reverberate with
+her words, and through the clashing they made in her
+brain she felt a sudden uncontrollable longing that they
+should provoke in him a cry of protest, of resistance.
+Oh, if he refused to let her go&mdash;if he caught her to him,
+and defied the world to part them&mdash;what then of her
+pledge to Mr. Langhope, what then of her resolve to
+pay the penalty alone?</p>
+
+<p>But in the space of a heart-beat she knew that peril<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_578" id="Page_578">[p 578]</a></span>&mdash;that
+longed-for peril!&mdash;was past. Her husband had
+remained silent&mdash;he neither moved toward her nor
+looked at her; and she felt in every slackening nerve that
+in the end he would let her go.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XL" id="XL"></a>XL</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mr. Langhope</span>, tossing down a note on Mrs.
+Ansell's drawing-room table, commanded imperiously:
+"Read that!"</p>
+
+<p>She set aside her tea-cup, and looked up, not at the
+note, but into his face, which was crossed by one of
+the waves of heat and tremulousness that she was
+beginning to fear for him. Mr. Langhope had changed
+greatly in the last three months; and as he stood there
+in the clear light of the June afternoon it came to her
+that he had at last suffered the sudden collapse which
+is the penalty of youth preserved beyond its time.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" she asked, still watching him as she
+put out her hand for the letter.</p>
+
+<p>"Amherst writes to remind me of my promise to
+take Cicely to Hanaford next week, for her birthday."</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;it was a promise, wasn't it?" she rejoined,
+running her eyes over the page.</p>
+
+<p>"A promise&mdash;yes; but made before.... Read the
+note&mdash;you'll see there's no reference to his wife. For
+all I know, she'll be there to receive us."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_579" id="Page_579">[p 579]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"But that was a promise too."</p>
+
+<p>"That neither Cicely nor I should ever set eyes on
+her? Yes. But why should she keep it? I was a
+fool that day&mdash;she fooled me as she's fooled us all!
+But you saw through it from the beginning&mdash;you said
+at once that she'd never leave him."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell reflected. "I said that before I knew all
+the circumstances. Now I think differently."</p>
+
+<p>"You think she still means to go?"</p>
+
+<p>She handed the letter back to him. "I think this is
+to tell you so."</p>
+
+<p>"This?" He groped for his glasses, dubiously scanning
+the letter again.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. And what's more, if you refuse to go she'll
+have every right to break her side of the agreement."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope sank into a chair, steadying himself
+painfully with his stick. "Upon my soul, I sometimes
+think you're on her side!" he ejaculated.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;but I like fair play," she returned, measuring
+his tea carefully into his favourite little porcelain tea-pot.</p>
+
+<p>"Fair play?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's offering to do her part. It's for you to do
+yours now&mdash;to take Cicely to Hanaford."</p>
+
+<p>"If I find her there, I never cross Amherst's threshold
+again!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell, without answering, rose and put his tea-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_580" id="Page_580">[p 580]</a></span>cup
+on the slender-legged table at his elbow; then,
+before returning to her seat, she found the enamelled
+match-box and laid it by the cup. It was becoming
+difficult for Mr. Langhope to guide his movements
+about her small encumbered room; and he had always
+liked being waited on.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell's prognostication proved correct. When
+Mr. Langhope and Cicely arrived at Hanaford they
+found Amherst alone to receive them. He explained
+briefly that his wife had been unwell, and had gone to
+seek rest and change at the house of an old friend in
+the west. Mr. Langhope expressed a decent amount
+of regret, and the subject was dropped as if by common
+consent. Cicely, however, was not so easily silenced.
+Poor Bessy's uncertain fits of tenderness had produced
+more bewilderment than pleasure in her sober-minded
+child; but the little girl's feelings and perceptions had
+developed rapidly in the equable atmosphere of her
+step-mother's affection. Cicely had reached the age
+when children put their questions with as much ingenuity
+as persistence, and both Mr. Langhope and
+Amherst longed for Mrs. Ansell's aid in parrying her
+incessant interrogations as to the cause and length of
+Justine's absence, what she had said before going,
+and what promise she had made about coming back.
+But Mrs. Ansell had not come to Hanaford. Though<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_581" id="Page_581">[p 581]</a></span>
+it had become a matter of habit to include her in the
+family pilgrimages to the mills she had firmly maintained
+the plea of more urgent engagements; and the
+two men, with only Cicely between them, had spent
+the long days and longer evenings in unaccustomed and
+unmitigated propinquity.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope, before leaving, thought it proper to
+touch tentatively on his promise of giving Cicely to
+Amherst for the summer; but to his surprise the latter,
+after a moment of hesitation, replied that he should
+probably go to Europe for two or three months.</p>
+
+<p>"To Europe? Alone?" escaped from Mr. Langhope
+before he had time to weigh his words.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst frowned slightly. "I have been made a
+delegate to the Berne conference on the housing of
+factory operatives," he said at length, without making
+a direct reply to the question; "and if there is
+nothing to keep me at Westmore, I shall probably
+go out in July." He waited a moment, and then
+added: "My wife has decided to spend the summer
+in Michigan."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope's answer was a vague murmur of
+assent, and Amherst turned the talk to other matters.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope returned to town with distinct views on
+the situation at Hanaford.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor devil&mdash;I'm sorry for him: he can hardly speak<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_582" id="Page_582">[p 582]</a></span>
+of her," he broke out at once to Mrs. Ansell, in the
+course of their first confidential hour together.</p>
+
+<p>"Because he cares too much&mdash;he's too unhappy?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because he loathes her!" Mr. Langhope brought
+out with emphasis.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sigh which made him add
+accusingly: "I believe you're actually sorry!"</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry?" She raised her eye-brows with a slight
+smile. "Should one not always be sorry to know
+there's a little less love and a little more hate in the
+world?"</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be asking <i>me</i> not to hate her next!"</p>
+
+<p>She still continued to smile on him. "It's the haters,
+not the hated, I'm sorry for," she said at length; and
+he flung back impatiently: "Oh, don't let's talk of her.
+I sometimes feel she takes up more place in our lives
+than when she was with us!"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Amherst went to the Berne conference in July, and
+spent six weeks afterward in rapid visits to various
+industrial centres and model factory villages. During
+his previous European pilgrimages his interest had by
+no means been restricted to sociological questions:
+the appeal of an old civilization, reaching him through
+its innumerable forms of tradition and beauty, had
+roused that side of his imagination which his work at
+home left untouched. But upon his present state of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_583" id="Page_583">[p 583]</a></span>
+deep moral commotion the spells of art and history were
+powerless to work. The foundations of his life had
+been shaken, and the fair exterior of the world was as
+vacant as a maniac's face. He could only take refuge
+in his special task, barricading himself against every
+expression of beauty and poetry as so many poignant
+reminders of a phase of life that he was vainly trying to
+cast off and forget.</p>
+
+<p>Even his work had been embittered to him, thrust
+out of its place in the ordered scheme of things. It
+had cost him a hard struggle to hold fast to his main
+purpose, to convince himself that his real duty lay, not
+in renouncing the Westmore money and its obligations,
+but in carrying out his projected task as if nothing
+had occurred to affect his personal relation to it. The
+mere fact that such a renunciation would have been
+a deliberate moral suicide, a severing once for all of
+every artery of action, made it take on, at first, the
+semblance of an obligation, a sort of higher duty to
+the abstract conception of what he owed himself. But
+Justine had not erred in her forecast. Once she had
+passed out of his life, it was easier for him to return
+to a dispassionate view of his situation, to see, and
+boldly confess to himself that he saw, the still higher
+duty of sticking to his task, instead of sacrificing it to
+any ideal of personal disinterestedness. It was this
+gradual process of adjustment that saved him from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_584" id="Page_584">[p 584]</a></span>
+desolating scepticism which falls on the active man
+when the sources of his activity are tainted. Having
+accepted his fate, having consented to see in himself
+merely the necessary agent of a good to be done, he
+could escape from self-questioning only by shutting
+himself up in the practical exigencies of his work,
+closing his eyes and his thoughts to everything which
+had formerly related it to a wider world, had given
+meaning and beauty to life as a whole.</p>
+
+<p>The return from Europe, and the taking up of the
+daily routine at Hanaford, were the most difficult
+phases in this process of moral adaptation.</p>
+
+<p>Justine's departure had at first brought relief. He
+had been too sincere with himself to oppose her wish to
+leave Hanaford for a time, since he believed that, for
+her as well as for himself, a temporary separation
+would be less painful than a continuance of their
+actual relation. But as the weeks passed into months
+he found he was no nearer to a clear view of his own
+case: the future was still dark and enigmatic. Justine's
+desire to leave him had revived his unformulated
+distrust of her. What could it mean but that there
+were thoughts within her which could not be at rest
+in his presence? He had given her every proof of his
+wish to forget the past, and Mr. Langhope had behaved
+with unequalled magnanimity. Yet Justine's
+unhappiness was evident: she could not conceal her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_585" id="Page_585">[p 585]</a></span>
+longing to escape from the conditions her act had
+created. Was it because, in reality, she was conscious
+of other motives than the one she acknowledged? She
+had insisted, almost unfeelingly as it might have
+seemed, on the abstract rightness of what she had
+done, on the fact that, ideally speaking, her act could
+not be made less right, less justifiable, by the special
+accidental consequences that had flowed from it. Because
+these consequences had caught her in a web
+of tragic fatality she would not be guilty of the weakness
+of tracing back the disaster to any intrinsic error
+in her original motive. Why, then, if this was her
+real, her proud attitude toward the past&mdash;and since
+those about her believed in her sincerity, and accepted
+her justification as valid from her point of view if not
+from theirs&mdash;why had she not been able to maintain
+her posture, to carry on life on the terms she had
+exacted from others?</p>
+
+<p>A special circumstance contributed to this feeling of
+distrust; the fact, namely, that Justine, a week after
+her departure from Hanaford, had written to say that
+she could not, from that moment till her return, consent
+to accept any money from Amherst. As her
+manner was, she put her reasons clearly and soberly,
+without evasion or ambiguity.</p>
+
+<p>"Since you and I," she wrote, "have always agreed
+in regarding the Westmore money as a kind of wage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_586" id="Page_586">[p 586]</a></span>
+for our services at the mills, I cannot be satisfied to
+go on drawing that wage while I am unable to do any
+work in return. I am sure you must feel as I do about
+this; and you need have no anxiety as to the practical
+side of the question, since I have enough to live on in
+some savings from my hospital days, which were invested
+for me two years ago by Harry Dressel, and
+are beginning to bring in a small return. This being
+the case, I feel I can afford to interpret in any way I
+choose the terms of the bargain between myself and
+Westmore."</p>
+
+<p>On reading this, Amherst's mind had gone through
+the strange dual process which now marked all his
+judgments of his wife. At first he had fancied he
+understood her, and had felt that he should have done
+as she did; then the usual reaction of distrust set in,
+and he asked himself why she, who had so little of the
+conventional attitude toward money, should now develop
+this unexpected susceptibility. And so the old
+question presented itself in another shape: if she had
+nothing to reproach herself for, why was it intolerable
+to her to live on Bessy's money? The fact that she
+was doing no actual service at Westmore did not account
+for her scruples&mdash;she would have been the last
+person to think that a sick servant should be docked
+of his pay. Her reluctance could come only from that
+hidden cause of compunction which had prompted her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_587" id="Page_587">[p 587]</a></span>
+departure, and which now forced her to sever even
+the merely material links between herself and her past.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst, on his return to Hanaford, had tried to
+find in these considerations a reason for his deep unrest.
+It was his wife's course which still cast a torturing
+doubt on what he had braced his will to accept
+and put behind him. And he now told himself that
+the perpetual galling sense of her absence was due to
+this uneasy consciousness of what it meant, of the dark
+secrets it enveloped and held back from him. In
+actual truth, every particle of his being missed her, he
+lacked her at every turn. She had been at once the
+partner of his task, and the <i>pays bleu</i> into which he
+escaped from it; the vivifying thought which gave
+meaning to the life he had chosen, yet never let him
+forget that there was a larger richer life outside, to
+which he was rooted by deeper and more intrinsic
+things than any abstract ideal of altruism. His love
+had preserved his identity, saved him from shrinking
+into the mere nameless unit which the social enthusiast
+is in danger of becoming unless the humanitarian passion
+is balanced, and a little overweighed, by a merely
+human one. And now this equilibrium was lost forever,
+and his deepest pain lay in realizing that he
+could not regain it, even by casting off Westmore and
+choosing the narrower but richer individual existence
+that her love might once have offered. His life was in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_588" id="Page_588">[p 588]</a></span>
+truth one indivisible organism, not two halves artificially
+united. Self and other-self were ingrown from
+the roots&mdash;whichever portion fate restricted him to
+would be but a mutilated half-live fragment of the
+whole.</p>
+
+<p>Happily for him, chance made this crisis of his life
+coincide with a strike at Westmore. Soon after his
+return to Hanaford he found himself compelled to
+grapple with the hardest problem of his industrial
+career, and he was carried through the ensuing three
+months on that tide of swift obligatory action that
+sweeps the ship-wrecked spirit over so many sunken
+reefs of fear and despair. The knowledge that he was
+better able to deal with the question than any one
+who might conceivably have taken his place&mdash;this conviction,
+which was presently confirmed by the peaceable
+adjustment of the strike, helped to make the sense of
+his immediate usefulness outbalance that other, disintegrating
+doubt as to the final value of such efforts.
+And so he tried to settle down into a kind of mechanical
+altruism, in which the reflexes of habit should take the
+place of that daily renewal of faith and enthusiasm
+which had been fed from the springs of his own joy.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The autumn came and passed into winter; and after
+Mr. Langhope's re-establishment in town Amherst
+began to resume his usual visits to his step-daughter.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_589" id="Page_589">[p 589]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His natural affection for the little girl had been
+deepened by the unforeseen manner in which her fate
+had been entrusted to him. The thought of Bessy,
+softened to compunction by the discovery that her love
+had persisted under their apparently hopeless estrangement&mdash;this
+feeling, intensified to the verge of morbidness
+by the circumstances attending her death, now
+sought expression in a passionate devotion to her child.
+Accident had, in short, created between Bessy and himself
+a retrospective sympathy which the resumption of
+life together would have dispelled in a week&mdash;one of the
+exhalations from the past that depress the vitality of
+those who linger too near the grave of dead experiences.</p>
+
+<p>Since Justine's departure Amherst had felt himself
+still more drawn to Cicely; but his relation to the
+child was complicated by the fact that she would not
+be satisfied as to the cause of her step-mother's absence.
+Whenever Amherst came to town, her first question was
+for Justine; and her memory had the precocious persistence
+sometimes developed in children too early deprived
+of their natural atmosphere of affection. Cicely
+had always been petted and adored, at odd times and
+by divers people; but some instinct seemed to tell her
+that, of all the tenderness bestowed on her, Justine's
+most resembled the all-pervading motherly element in
+which the child's heart expands without ever being
+conscious of its needs.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_590" id="Page_590">[p 590]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If it had been embarrassing to evade Cicely's questions
+in June it became doubly so as the months passed,
+and the pretext of Justine's ill-health grew more and
+more difficult to sustain. And in the following March
+Amherst was suddenly called from Hanaford by the
+news that the little girl herself was ill. Serious complications
+had developed from a protracted case of
+scarlet fever, and for two weeks the child's fate was
+uncertain. Then she began to recover, and in the joy
+of seeing life come back to her, Mr. Langhope and
+Amherst felt as though they must not only gratify every
+wish she expressed, but try to guess at those they saw
+floating below the surface of her clear vague eyes.</p>
+
+<p>It was noticeable to Mrs. Ansell, if not to the others,
+that one of these unexpressed wishes was the desire to
+see her stepmother. Cicely no longer asked for Justine;
+but something in her silence, or in the gesture
+with which she gently put from her other offers of
+diversion and companionship, suddenly struck Mrs.
+Ansell as more poignant than speech.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it the child wants?" she asked the governess,
+in the course of one of their whispered consultations;
+and the governess, after a moment's hesitation,
+replied: "She said something about a letter she wrote
+to Mrs. Amherst just before she was taken ill&mdash;about
+having had no answer, I think."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;she writes to Mrs. Amherst, does she?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_591" id="Page_591">[p 591]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The governess, evidently aware that she trod on
+delicate ground, tried at once to defend herself and her
+pupil.</p>
+
+<p>"It was my fault, perhaps. I suggested once that
+her little compositions should take the form of letters&mdash;it
+usually interests a child more&mdash;and she asked if
+they might be written to Mrs. Amherst."</p>
+
+<p>"Your fault? Why should not the child write to
+her step-mother?" Mrs. Ansell rejoined with studied
+surprise; and on the other's murmuring: "Of course&mdash;of
+course&mdash;&mdash;" she added haughtily: "I trust the
+letters were sent?"</p>
+
+<p>The governess floundered. "I couldn't say&mdash;but
+perhaps the nurse...."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>That evening Cicely was less well. There was a slight
+return of fever, and the doctor, hastily summoned,
+hinted at the possibility of too much excitement in the
+sick-room.</p>
+
+<p>"Excitement? There has been no excitement," Mr.
+Langhope protested, quivering with the sudden renewal
+of fear.</p>
+
+<p>"No? The child seemed nervous, uneasy. It's
+hard to say why, because she is unusually reserved for
+her age."</p>
+
+<p>The medical man took his departure, and Mr. Langhope
+and Mrs. Ansell faced each other in the disarray<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_592" id="Page_592">[p 592]</a></span>
+produced by a call to arms when all has seemed at
+peace.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall lose her&mdash;I shall lose her!" the grandfather
+broke out, sinking into his chair with a groan.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell, gathering up her furs for departure,
+turned on him abruptly from the threshold.</p>
+
+<p>"It's stupid, what you're doing&mdash;stupid!" she exclaimed
+with unwonted vehemence.</p>
+
+<p>He raised his head with a startled look. "What do
+you mean&mdash;what I'm doing?"</p>
+
+<p>"The child misses Justine. You ought to send for
+her."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope's hands dropped to the arms of his
+chair, and he straightened himself up with a pale flash
+of indignation. "You've had moments lately&mdash;&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>"I've had moments, yes; and so have you&mdash;when
+the child came back to us, and we stood there and wondered
+how we could keep her, tie her fast...and in
+those moments I saw...saw what she wanted...and
+so did you!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope turned away his head. "You're a
+sentimentalist!" he flung scornfully back.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, call me any bad names you please!"</p>
+
+<p>"I won't send for that woman!"</p>
+
+<p>"No." She fastened her furs slowly, with the gentle
+deliberate movements that no emotion ever hastened
+or disturbed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_593" id="Page_593">[p 593]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why do you say no?" he challenged her.</p>
+
+<p>"To make you contradict me, perhaps," she ventured,
+after looking at him again.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;&mdash;" He shifted his position, one elbow supporting
+his bowed head, his eyes fixed on the ground.
+Presently he brought out: "Could one ask her to
+come&mdash;and see the child&mdash;and go away again&mdash;for
+good?"</p>
+
+<p>"To break the compact at your pleasure, and enter
+into it again for the same reason?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no&mdash;I see." He paused, and then looked up
+at her suddenly. "But what if Amherst won't have
+her back himself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I ask him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you he can't bear to hear her name!"</p>
+
+<p>"But he doesn't know why she has left him."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Langhope gathered his brows in a frown. "Why&mdash;what
+on earth&mdash;what possible difference would that
+make?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell, from the doorway, shed a pitying glance
+on him. "Ah&mdash;if you don't see!" she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>He sank back into his seat with a groan. "Good
+heavens, Maria, how you torture me! I see enough
+as it is&mdash;I see too much of the cursed business!"</p>
+
+<p>She paused again, and then slowly moved a step or
+two nearer, laying her hand on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"There's one thing you've never seen yet, Henry:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_594" id="Page_594">[p 594]</a></span>
+what Bessy herself would do now&mdash;for the child&mdash;if she
+could."</p>
+
+<p>He sat motionless under her light touch, his eyes on
+hers, till their inmost thoughts felt for and found each
+other, as they still sometimes could, through the fog of
+years and selfishness and worldly habit; then he
+dropped his face into his hands, hiding it from her with
+the instinctive shrinking of an aged grief.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XLI" id="XLI"></a>XLI</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Amherst</span>, Cicely's convalescence once assured,
+had been obliged to go back to Hanaford; but
+some ten days later, on hearing from Mrs. Ansell that
+the little girl's progress was less rapid than had been
+hoped, he returned to his father-in-law's for a Sunday.</p>
+
+<p>He came two days after the talk recorded in the last
+chapter&mdash;a talk of which Mrs. Ansell's letter to him had
+been the direct result. She had promised Mr. Langhope
+that, in writing to Amherst, she would not go
+beyond the briefest statement of fact; and she had
+kept her word, trusting to circumstances to speak for
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell, during Cicely's illness, had formed the
+habit of dropping in on Mr. Langhope at the tea
+hour instead of awaiting him in her own drawing-room;
+and on the Sunday in question she found him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_595" id="Page_595">[p 595]</a></span>
+alone. Beneath his pleasure in seeing her, which had
+grown more marked as his dependence on her increased,
+she at once discerned traces of recent disturbance;
+and her first question was for Cicely.</p>
+
+<p>He met it with a discouraged gesture. "No great
+change&mdash;Amherst finds her less well than when he was
+here before."</p>
+
+<p>"He's upstairs with her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;she seems to want him."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell seated herself in silence behind the tea-tray,
+of which she was now recognized as the officiating
+priestess. As she drew off her long gloves, and mechanically
+straightened the row of delicate old cups,
+Mr. Langhope added with an effort: "I've spoken to
+him&mdash;told him what you said."</p>
+
+<p>She looked up quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"About the child's wish," he continued. "About
+her having written to his wife. It seems her last letters
+have not been answered."</p>
+
+<p>He paused, and Mrs. Ansell, with her usual calm
+precision, proceeded to measure the tea into the fluted
+Georgian tea-pot. She could be as reticent in approval
+as in reprehension, and not for the world would she
+have seemed to claim any share in the turn that events
+appeared to be taking. She even preferred the risk of
+leaving her old friend to add half-reproachfully: "I
+told Amherst what you and the nurse thought.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_596" id="Page_596">[p 596]</a></span>"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"That Cicely pines for his wife. I put it to him in
+black and white." The words came out on a deep
+strained breath, and Mrs. Ansell faltered: "Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;he doesn't know where she is himself."</p>
+
+<p>"Doesn't <i>know</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"They're separated&mdash;utterly separated. It's as I
+told you: he could hardly name her."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell had unconsciously ceased her ministrations,
+letting her hands fall on her knee while she
+brooded in blank wonder on her companion's face.</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder what reason she could have given him?"
+she murmured at length.</p>
+
+<p>"For going? He loathes her, I tell you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;but <i>how did she make him</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>He struck his hand violently on the arm of his chair.
+"Upon my soul, you seem to forget!"</p>
+
+<p>"No." She shook her head with a half smile. "I
+simply remember more than you do."</p>
+
+<p>"What more?" he began with a flush of anger; but
+she raised a quieting hand.</p>
+
+<p>"What does all that matter&mdash;if, now that we need
+her, we can't get her?"</p>
+
+<p>He made no answer, and she returned to the dispensing
+of his tea; but as she rose to put the cup in
+his hand he asked, half querulously: "You think it's
+going to be very bad for the child, then?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_597" id="Page_597">[p 597]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell smiled with the thin edge of her lips.
+"One can hardly set the police after her&mdash;&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>"No; we're powerless," he groaned in assent.</p>
+
+<p>As the cup passed between them she dropped her
+eyes to his with a quick flash of interrogation; but he
+sat staring moodily before him, and she moved back
+to the sofa without a word.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>On the way downstairs she met Amherst descending
+from Cicely's room.</p>
+
+<p>Since the early days of his first marriage there had
+always been, on Amherst's side, a sense of obscure antagonism
+toward Mrs. Ansell. She was almost the
+embodied spirit of the world he dreaded and disliked:
+her serenity, her tolerance, her adaptability, seemed to
+smile away and disintegrate all the high enthusiasms,
+the stubborn convictions, that he had tried to plant in
+the shifting sands of his married life. And now that
+Bessy's death had given her back the attributes with
+which his fancy had originally invested her, he had
+come to regard Mrs. Ansell as embodying the evil influences
+that had come between himself and his wife.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell was probably not unaware of the successive
+transitions of feeling which had led up to this
+unflattering view; but her life had been passed among
+petty rivalries and animosities, and she had the patience
+and adroitness of the spy in a hostile camp.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_598" id="Page_598">[p 598]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She and Amherst exchanged a few words about
+Cicely; then she exclaimed, with a glance through the
+panes of the hall door: "But I must be off&mdash;I'm on foot,
+and the crossings appal me after dark."</p>
+
+<p>He could do no less, at that, than offer to guide her
+across the perils of Fifth Avenue; and still talking of
+Cicely, she led him down the thronged thoroughfare till
+her own corner was reached, and then her own door;
+turning there to ask, as if by an afterthought: "Won't
+you come up? There's one thing more I want to say."</p>
+
+<p>A shade of reluctance crossed his face, which, as the
+vestibule light fell on it, looked hard and tired, like a
+face set obstinately against a winter gale; but he murmured
+a word of assent, and followed her into the
+shining steel cage of the lift.</p>
+
+<p>In her little drawing-room, among the shaded lamps
+and bowls of spring flowers, she pushed a chair forward,
+settled herself in her usual corner of the sofa, and said
+with a directness that seemed an echo of his own tone:
+"I asked you to come up because I want to talk to you
+about Mr. Langhope."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst looked at her in surprise. Though his
+father-in-law's health had been more or less unsatisfactory
+for the last year, all their concern, of late, had
+been for Cicely.</p>
+
+<p>"You think him less well?" he enquired.</p>
+
+<p>She waited to draw off and smooth her gloves, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_599" id="Page_599">[p 599]</a></span>
+one of the deliberate gestures that served to shade and
+supplement her speech.</p>
+
+<p>"I think him extremely unhappy."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst moved uneasily in his seat. He did not
+know where she meant the talk to lead them, but he
+guessed that it would be over painful places, and he
+saw no reason why he should be forced to follow her.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that he's still anxious about Cicely?"</p>
+
+<p>"Partly that&mdash;yes." She paused. "The child will
+get well, no doubt; but she is very lonely. She needs
+youth, heat, light. Mr. Langhope can't give her those,
+or even a semblance of them; and it's an art I've lost
+the secret of," she added with her shadowy smile.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's brows darkened. "I realize all she has
+lost&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell glanced up at him quickly. "She is
+twice motherless," she said.</p>
+
+<p>The blood rose to his neck and temples, and he
+tightened his hand on the arm of his chair. But it was
+a part of Mrs. Ansell's expertness to know when such
+danger signals must be heeded and when they might be
+ignored, and she went on quietly: "It's the question of
+the future that is troubling Mr. Langhope. After such
+an illness, the next months of Cicely's life should be
+all happiness. And money won't buy the kind she
+needs: one can't pick out the right companion for such
+a child as one can match a ribbon. What she wants is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_600" id="Page_600">[p 600]</a></span>
+spontaneous affection, not the most superlative manufactured
+article. She wants the sort of love that Justine
+gave her."</p>
+
+<p>It was the first time in months that Amherst had
+heard his wife's name spoken outside of his own house.
+No one but his mother mentioned Justine to him now;
+and of late even his mother had dropped her enquiries
+and allusions, prudently acquiescing in the habit of
+silence which his own silence had created about him.
+To hear the name again&mdash;the two little syllables which
+had been the key of life to him, and now shook him as
+the turning of a rusted lock shakes a long-closed door&mdash;to
+hear her name spoken familiarly, affectionately, as
+one speaks of some one who may come into the room
+the next moment&mdash;gave him a shock that was half pain,
+and half furtive unacknowledged joy. Men whose conscious
+thoughts are mostly projected outward, on the
+world of external activities, may be more moved by
+such a touch on the feelings than those who are perpetually
+testing and tuning their emotional chords.
+Amherst had foreseen from the first that Mrs. Ansell
+might mean to speak of his wife; but though he
+had intended, if she did so, to cut their talk short,
+he now felt himself irresistibly constrained to hear
+her out.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell, having sped her shaft, followed its flight
+through lowered lashes, and saw that it had struck a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_601" id="Page_601">[p 601]</a></span>
+vulnerable point; but she was far from assuming that
+the day was won.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe," she continued, "that Mr. Langhope has
+said something of this to you already, and my only
+excuse for speaking is that I understood he had not been
+successful in his appeal."</p>
+
+<p>No one but Mrs. Ansell&mdash;and perhaps she knew it&mdash;could
+have pushed so far beyond the conventional limits
+of discretion without seeming to overstep them by a
+hair; and she had often said, when pressed for the
+secret of her art, that it consisted simply in knowing
+the pass-word. That word once spoken, she might have
+added, the next secret was to give the enemy no time for
+resistance; and though she saw the frown reappear between
+Amherst's eyes, she went on, without heeding it:
+"I entreat you, Mr. Amherst, to let Cicely see your wife."</p>
+
+<p>He reddened again, and pushed back his chair, as
+if to rise.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;don't break off like that! Let me say a word
+more. I know your answer to Mr. Langhope&mdash;that
+you and Justine are no longer together. But I thought
+of you as a man to sink your personal relations at such
+a moment as this."</p>
+
+<p>"To sink them?" he repeated vaguely: and she went
+on: "After all, what difference does it make?"</p>
+
+<p>"What difference?" He stared in unmitigated wonder,
+and then answered, with a touch of irony: "It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_602" id="Page_602">[p 602]</a></span>
+might at least make the difference of my being unwilling
+to ask a favour of her."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell, at this, raised her eyes and let them rest
+full on his. "Because she has done you so great a one
+already?"</p>
+
+<p>He stared again, sinking back automatically into his
+chair. "I don't understand you."</p>
+
+<p>"No." She smiled a little, as if to give herself time.
+"But I mean that you shall. If I were a man I suppose
+I couldn't, because a man's code of honour is such a
+clumsy cast-iron thing. But a woman's, luckily, can
+be cut over&mdash;if she's clever&mdash;to fit any new occasion;
+and in this case I should be willing to reduce mine to
+tatters if necessary."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst's look of bewilderment deepened. "What
+is it that I don't understand?" he asked at length, in
+a low voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;first of all, why Mr. Langhope had the right
+to ask you to send for your wife."</p>
+
+<p>"The right?"</p>
+
+<p>"You don't recognize such a right on his part?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;why should I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Supposing she had left you by his wish?"</p>
+
+<p>"His wish? <i>His&mdash;&mdash;?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>He was on his feet now, gazing at her blindly, while
+the solid world seemed to grow thin about him. Her
+next words reduced it to a mist.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_603" id="Page_603">[p 603]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"My poor Amherst&mdash;why else, on earth, should she
+have left you?"</p>
+
+<p>She brought it out clearly, in her small chiming tones;
+and as the sound travelled toward him it seemed to
+gather momentum, till her words rang through his brain
+as if every incomprehensible incident in the past had
+suddenly boomed forth the question. Why else, indeed,
+should she have left him? He stood motionless
+for a while; then he approached Mrs. Ansell and said:
+"Tell me."</p>
+
+<p>She drew farther back into her corner of the sofa,
+waving him to a seat beside her, as though to bring his
+inquisitory eyes on a level where her own could command
+them; but he stood where he was, unconscious
+of her gesture, and merely repeating: "Tell me."</p>
+
+<p>She may have said to herself that a woman would
+have needed no farther telling; but to him she only
+replied, slanting her head up to his: "To spare you and
+himself pain&mdash;to keep everything, between himself and
+you, as it had been before you married her."</p>
+
+<p>He dropped down beside her at that, grasping the
+back of the sofa as if he wanted something to clutch
+and throttle. The veins swelled in his temples, and as
+he pushed back his tossed hair Mrs. Ansell noticed for
+the first time how gray it had grown on the under side.</p>
+
+<p>"And he asked this of my wife&mdash;he accepted it?'"</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't <i>you</i> accepted it?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_604" id="Page_604">[p 604]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I? How could I guess her reasons&mdash;how could I
+imagine&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell raised her brows a hair's breadth at
+that. "I don't know. But as a fact, he didn't ask&mdash;it
+was she who offered, who forced it on him, even!"</p>
+
+<p>"Forced her going on him?"</p>
+
+<p>"In a sense, yes; by making it appear that <i>you</i> felt
+as he did about&mdash;about poor Bessy's death: that the
+thought of what had happened at that time was as
+abhorrent to you as to him&mdash;that <i>she</i> was as abhorrent
+to you. No doubt she foresaw that, had she permitted
+the least doubt on that point, there would have been
+no need of her leaving you, since the relation between
+yourself and Mr. Langhope would have been altered&mdash;destroyed...."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I expected that&mdash;I warned her of it. But
+how did she make him think&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"How can I tell? To begin with, I don't know
+your real feeling. For all I know she was telling the
+truth&mdash;and Mr. Langhope of course thought she was."</p>
+
+<p>"That I abhorred her? Oh&mdash;&mdash;" he broke out, on
+his feet in an instant.</p>
+
+<p>"Then why&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why did I let her leave me?" He strode across the
+room, as his habit was in moments of agitation, turning
+back to her again before he answered. "Because I
+<i>didn't</i> know&mdash;didn't know anything! And because her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_605" id="Page_605">[p 605]</a></span>
+insisting on going away like that, without any explanation,
+made me feel...imagine there was...something
+she didn't <i>want</i> me to know...something she
+was afraid of not being able to hide from me if we
+stayed together any longer."</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;there was: the extent to which she loved
+you."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell; her hands clasped on her knee, her gaze
+holding his with a kind of visionary fixity, seemed to
+reconstruct the history of his past, bit by bit, with the
+words she was dragging out of him.</p>
+
+<p>"I see it&mdash;I see it all now," she went on, with a repressed
+fervour that he had never divined in her. "It
+was the only solution for her, as well as for the rest of
+you. The more she showed her love, the more it would
+have cast a doubt on her motive...the greater distance
+she would have put between herself and you.
+And so she showed it in the only way that was safe for
+both of you, by taking herself away and hiding it in
+her heart; and before going, she secured your peace of
+mind, your future. If she ruined anything, she rebuilt
+the ruin. Oh, she paid&mdash;she paid in full!"</p>
+
+<p>Justine had paid, yes&mdash;paid to the utmost limit of
+whatever debt toward society she had contracted by
+overstepping its laws. And her resolve to discharge the
+debt had been taken in a flash, as soon as she had seen
+that man can commit no act alone, whether for good or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_606" id="Page_606">[p 606]</a></span>
+evil. The extent to which Amherst's fate was involved
+in hers had become clear to her with his first word of
+reassurance, of faith in her motive. And instantly a
+plan for releasing him had leapt full-formed into her
+mind, and had been carried out with swift unflinching
+resolution. As he forced himself, now, to look down
+the suddenly illuminated past to the weeks which had
+elapsed between her visit to Mr. Langhope and her departure
+from Hanaford, he wondered not so much at
+her swiftness of resolve as at her firmness in carrying
+out her plan&mdash;and he saw, with a blinding flash of insight,
+that it was in her love for him that she had found
+her strength.</p>
+
+<p>In all moments of strong mental tension he became
+totally unconscious of time and place, and he now remained
+silent so long, his hands clasped behind him,
+his eyes fixed on an indeterminate point in space, that
+Mrs. Ansell at length rose and laid a questioning touch
+on his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"It's not true that you don't know where she is?"
+His face contracted. "At this moment I don't.
+Lately she has preferred...not to write...."</p>
+
+<p>"But surely you must know how to find her?"</p>
+
+<p>He tossed back his hair with an energetic movement.
+"I should find her if I didn't know how!"</p>
+
+<p>They stood confronted in a gaze of silent intensity,
+each penetrating farther into the mind of the other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_607" id="Page_607">[p 607]</a></span>
+than would once have seemed possible to either one;
+then Amherst held out his hand abruptly. "Good-bye&mdash;and
+thank you," he said.</p>
+
+<p>She detained him a moment. "We shall see you
+soon again&mdash;see you both?"</p>
+
+<p>His face grew stern. "It's not to oblige Mr. Langhope
+that I am going to find my wife."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, now you are unjust to him!" she exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't let us speak of him!" he broke in.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? When it is from him the request comes&mdash;the
+entreaty&mdash;that everything in the past should be
+forgotten?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;when it suits his convenience!"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you imagine that&mdash;even judging him in that
+way&mdash;it has not cost him a struggle?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can only think of what it has cost her!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sighing breath. "Ah&mdash;but
+don't you see that she has gained her point, and
+that nothing else matters to her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Gained her point? Not if, by that, you mean
+that things here can ever go back to the old state&mdash;that
+she and I can remain at Westmore after
+this!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ansell dropped her eyes for a moment; then
+she lifted to his her sweet impenetrable face.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know what you have to do&mdash;both you and
+he? Exactly what she decides," she affirmed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_608" id="Page_608">[p 608]</a></span>.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XLII" id="XLII"></a>XLII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Justine's</span> answer to her husband's letter bore a
+New York address; and the surprise of finding
+her in the same town with himself, and not half an
+hour's walk from the room in which he sat, was so
+great that it seemed to demand some sudden and violent
+outlet of physical movement.</p>
+
+<p>He thrust the letter in his pocket, took up his hat,
+and leaving the house, strode up Fifth Avenue toward
+the Park in the early spring sunlight.</p>
+
+<p>The news had taken five days to reach him, for in
+order to reestablish communication with his wife he
+had been obliged to write to Michigan, with the request
+that his letter should be forwarded. He had never supposed
+that Justine would be hard to find, or that she
+had purposely enveloped her movements in mystery.
+When she ceased to write he had simply concluded
+that, like himself, she felt the mockery of trying to
+keep up a sort of distant, semi-fraternal relation,
+marked by the occasional interchange of inexpressive
+letters. The inextricable mingling of thought and sensation
+which made the peculiar closeness of their union
+could never, to such direct and passionate natures, be
+replaced by the pretense of a temperate friendship.
+Feeling thus himself, and instinctively assuming the
+same feeling in his wife, Amherst had respected her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_609" id="Page_609">[p 609]</a></span>
+silence, her wish to break definitely with their former
+life. She had written him, in the autumn, that she
+intended to leave Michigan for a few months, but that,
+in any emergency, a letter addressed to her friend's
+house would reach her; and he had taken this as meaning
+that, unless the emergency arose, she preferred that
+their correspondence should cease. Acquiescence was
+all the easier because it accorded with his own desire.
+It seemed to him, as he looked back, that the love he
+and Justine had felt for each other was like some rare
+organism which could maintain life only in its special
+element; and that element was neither passion nor
+sentiment, but truth. It was only on the heights that
+they could breathe.</p>
+
+<p>Some men, in his place, even while accepting the inevitableness
+of the moral rupture, would have felt concerned
+for the material side of the case. But it was
+characteristic of Amherst that this did not trouble him.
+He took it for granted that his wife would return to her
+nursing. From the first he had felt certain that it
+would be intolerable to her to accept aid from him, and
+that she would choose rather to support herself by the
+exercise of her regular profession; and, aside from such
+motives, he, who had always turned to hard work as
+the rarest refuge from personal misery, thought it natural
+that she should seek the same means of escape.</p>
+
+<p>He had therefore not been surprised, on opening her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_610" id="Page_610">[p 610]</a></span>
+letter that morning, to learn that she had taken up her
+hospital work; but in the amazement of finding her
+so near he hardly grasped her explanation of the coincidence.
+There was something about a Buffalo patient
+suddenly ordered to New York for special treatment,
+and refusing to go in with a new nurse&mdash;but these details
+made no impression on his mind, which had only
+room for the fact that chance had brought his wife
+back at the very moment when his whole being yearned
+for her.</p>
+
+<p>She wrote that, owing to her duties, she would be
+unable to see him till three that afternoon; and he had
+still six hours to consume before their meeting. But in
+spirit they had met already&mdash;they were one in an intensity
+of communion which, as he strode northward
+along the bright crowded thoroughfare, seemed to
+gather up the whole world into one throbbing point of
+life.</p>
+
+<p>He had a boyish wish to keep the secret of his happiness
+to himself, not to let Mr. Langhope or Mrs. Ansell
+know of his meeting with Justine till it was over;
+and after twice measuring the length of the Park he
+turned in at one of the little wooden restaurants which
+were beginning to unshutter themselves in anticipation
+of spring custom. If only he could have seen Justine
+that morning! If he could have brought her there,
+and they could have sat opposite each other, in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_611" id="Page_611">[p 611]</a></span>
+bare empty room, with sparrows bustling and twittering
+in the lilacs against the open window! The room
+was ugly enough&mdash;but how she would have delighted
+in the delicate green of the near slopes, and the purplish
+haze of the woods beyond! She took a childish
+pleasure in such small adventures, and had the knack
+of giving a touch of magic to their most commonplace
+details. Amherst, as he finished his cold beef and indifferent
+eggs, found himself boyishly planning to bring
+her back there the next day....</p>
+
+<p>Then, over the coffee, he re-read her letter.</p>
+
+<p>The address she gave was that of a small private hospital,
+and she explained that she would have to receive
+him in the public parlour, which at that hour was open
+to other visitors. As the time approached, the thought
+that they might not be alone when they met became
+insufferable; and he determined, if he found any one
+else, in possession of the parlour, to wait in the hall, and
+meet her as she came down the stairs.</p>
+
+<p>He continued to elaborate this plan as he walked
+back slowly through the Park, He had timed himself
+to reach the hospital a little before three; but though it
+lacked five minutes to the hour when he entered the
+parlour, two women were already seated in one of its
+windows. They looked around as he came in, evidently
+as much annoyed by his appearance as he had been to
+find them there. The older of the two showed a sallow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_612" id="Page_612">[p 612]</a></span>
+middle-aged face beneath her limp crape veil; the other
+was a slight tawdry creature, with nodding feathers,
+and innumerable chains and bracelets which she fingered
+ceaselessly as she talked.</p>
+
+<p>They eyed Amherst with resentment, and then turned
+away, continuing their talk in low murmurs, while he
+seated himself at the marble-topped table littered with
+torn magazines. Now and then the younger woman's
+voice rose in a shrill staccato, and a phrase or two
+floated over to him. "She'd simply worked herself to
+death&mdash;the nurse told me so.... She expects to go
+home in another week, though how she's going to stand
+the <i>fatigue</i>&mdash;&mdash;" and then, after an inaudible answer:
+"It's all <i>his</i> fault, and if I was her I wouldn't go back
+to him for anything!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Cora, he's real sorry now," the older woman
+protestingly murmured; but the other, unappeased, rejoined
+with ominously nodding plumes: "<i>You</i> see&mdash;if
+they do make it up, it'll never be the same between
+them!"</p>
+
+<p>Amherst started up nervously, and as he did so the
+clock struck three, and he opened the door and passed
+out into the hall. It was paved with black and white
+marble; the walls were washed in a dull yellowish tint,
+and the prevalent odour of antiseptics was mingled with
+a stale smell of cooking. At the back rose a straight
+staircase carpeted with brass-bound India-rubber, like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_613" id="Page_613">[p 613]</a></span>
+a ship's companion-way; and down that staircase she
+would come in a moment&mdash;he fancied he heard her step
+now....</p>
+
+<p>But the step was that of an elderly black-gowned
+woman in a cap&mdash;the matron probably.</p>
+
+<p>She glanced at Amherst in surprise, and asked: "Are
+you waiting for some one?"</p>
+
+<p>He made a motion of assent, and she opened the parlour
+door, saying: "Please walk in."</p>
+
+<p>"May I not wait out here?" he urged.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him more attentively. "Why, no,
+I'm afraid not. You'll find the papers and magazines
+in here."</p>
+
+<p>Mildly but firmly she drove him in before her, and
+closing the door, advanced to the two women in the
+window. Amherst's hopes leapt up: perhaps she had
+come to fetch the visitors upstairs! He strained his
+ears to catch what was being said, and while he was
+thus absorbed the door opened, and turning at the
+sound he found himself face to face with his wife.</p>
+
+<p>He had not reflected that Justine would be in her
+nurse's dress; and the sight of the dark blue uniform and
+small white cap, in which he had never seen her since
+their first meeting in the Hope Hospital, obliterated all
+bitter and unhappy memories, and gave him the illusion
+of passing back at once into the clear air of their early
+friendship. Then he looked at her and remembered.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_614" id="Page_614">[p 614]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He noticed that she had grown thinner than ever,
+or rather that her thinness, which had formerly had a
+healthy reed-like strength, now suggested fatigue and
+languor. And her face was spent, extinguished&mdash;the
+very eyes were lifeless. All her vitality seemed to have
+withdrawn itself into the arch of dense black hair which
+still clasped her forehead like the noble metal of some
+antique bust.</p>
+
+<p>The sight stirred him with a deeper pity, a more
+vehement compunction; but the impulse to snatch her
+to him, and seek his pardon on her lips, was paralyzed
+by the sense that the three women in the window had
+stopped talking and turned their heads toward the door.</p>
+
+<p>He held his hand out, and Justine's touched it for a
+moment; then he said in a low voice: "Is there no
+other place where I can see you?"</p>
+
+<p>She made a negative gesture. "I am afraid not to-day."</p>
+
+<p>Ah, her deep sweet voice&mdash;how completely his ear
+had lost the sound of it!</p>
+
+<p>She looked doubtfully about the room, and pointed
+to a sofa at the end farthest from the windows.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we sit there?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>He followed her in silence, and they sat down side by
+side. The matron had drawn up a chair and resumed
+her whispered conference with the women in the window.
+Between the two groups stretched the bare<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_615" id="Page_615">[p 615]</a></span>
+length of the room, broken only by a few arm-chairs
+of stained wood, and the marble-topped table covered
+with magazines.</p>
+
+<p>The impossibility of giving free rein to his feelings
+developed in Amherst an unwonted intensity of perception,
+as though a sixth sense had suddenly emerged
+to take the place of those he could not use. And with
+this new-made faculty he seemed to gather up, and
+absorb into himself, as he had never done in their
+hours of closest communion, every detail of his wife's
+person, of her face and hands and gestures. He noticed
+how her full upper lids, of the tint of yellowish
+ivory, had a slight bluish discolouration, and how little
+thread-like blue veins ran across her temples to the
+roots of her hair. The emaciation of her face, and the
+hollow shades beneath her cheek-bones, made her
+mouth seem redder and fuller, though a little line on
+each side, where it joined the cheek, gave it a tragic
+droop. And her hands! When her fingers met his
+he recalled having once picked up, in the winter woods,
+the little feather-light skeleton of a frozen bird&mdash;and
+that was what her touch was like.</p>
+
+<p>And it was he who had brought her to this by his
+cruelty, his obtuseness, his base readiness to believe the
+worst of her! He did not want to pour himself out in
+self-accusation&mdash;that seemed too easy a way of escape.
+He wanted simply to take her in his arms, to ask her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_616" id="Page_616">[p 616]</a></span>
+to give him one more chance&mdash;and then to show her!
+And all the while he was paralyzed by the group in the
+window.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't we go out? I must speak to you," he began
+again nervously.</p>
+
+<p>"Not this afternoon&mdash;the doctor is coming. Tomorrow&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't wait for tomorrow!"</p>
+
+<p>She made a faint, imperceptible gesture, which read
+to his eyes: "You've waited a whole year."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know," he returned, still constrained by the
+necessity of muffling his voice, of perpetually measuring
+the distance between themselves and the window. "I
+know what you might say&mdash;don't you suppose I've said
+it to myself a million times? But I didn't know&mdash;I
+couldn't imagine&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She interrupted him with a rapid movement. "What
+do you know now?"</p>
+
+<p>"What you promised Langhope&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She turned her startled eyes on him, and he saw the
+blood run flame-like under her skin. "But <i>he</i> promised
+not to speak!" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>"He hasn't&mdash;to me. But such things make themselves
+known. Should you have been content to go
+on in that way forever?"</p>
+
+<p>She raised her head and her eyes rested in his. "If
+you were," she answered simply.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_617" id="Page_617">[p 617]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Justine!"</p>
+
+<p>Again she checked him with a silencing motion.
+"Please tell me just what has happened."</p>
+
+<p>"Not now&mdash;there's too much else to say. And
+nothing matters except that I'm with you."</p>
+
+<p>"But Mr. Langhope&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He asks you to come. You're to see Cicely to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>Her lower lip trembled a little, and a tear flowed
+over and hung on her lashes.</p>
+
+<p>"But what does all that matter now? We're together
+after this horrible year," he insisted.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him again. "But what is really
+changed?"</p>
+
+<p>"Everything&mdash;everything! Not changed, I mean&mdash;just
+gone back."</p>
+
+<p>"To where...we were...before?" she whispered;
+and he whispered back: "To where we were
+before."</p>
+
+<p>There was a scraping of chairs on the floor, and
+with a sense of release Amherst saw that the colloquy
+in the window was over.</p>
+
+<p>The two visitors, gathering their wraps about them,
+moved slowly across the room, still talking to the
+matron in excited undertones, through which, as they
+neared the threshold, the younger woman's staccato
+again broke out.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_618" id="Page_618">[p 618]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I tell you, if she does go back to him, it'll never
+be the same between them!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Cora, I wouldn't say that," the other ineffectually
+wailed; then they moved toward the door, and a
+moment later it had closed on them.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst turned to his wife with outstretched arms.
+"Say you forgive me, Justine!"</p>
+
+<p>She held back a little from his entreating hands, not
+reproachfully, but as if with a last scruple for himself.</p>
+
+<p>"There's nothing left...of the horror?" she asked
+below her breath.</p>
+
+<p>"To be without you&mdash;that's the only horror!"</p>
+
+<p>"You're <i>sure</i>&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's just the same to you...just as it was...before?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just the same, Justine!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's not for myself, but you."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, for me&mdash;never speak of it!" he implored.</p>
+
+<p>"Because it's <i>not</i> the same, then?" leapt from her.</p>
+
+<p>"Because it's wiped out&mdash;because it's never been!"</p>
+
+<p>"Never?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never!"</p>
+
+<p>He felt her yield to him at that, and under his eyes, close
+under his lips, was her face at last. But as they kissed they
+heard the handle of the door turn, and drew apart quickly,
+her hand lingering in his under the fold of her dress.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_619" id="Page_619">[p 619]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A nurse looked in, dressed in the white uniform and
+pointed cap of the hospital. Amherst fancied that she
+smiled a little as she saw them.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Brent&mdash;the doctor wants you to come right
+up and give the morphine."</p>
+
+<p>The door shut again as Justine rose to her feet.
+Amherst remained seated&mdash;he had made no motion to
+retain her hand as it slipped from him.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm coming," she called out to the retreating nurse;
+then she turned slowly and saw her husband's face.</p>
+
+<p>"I must go," she said in a low tone.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes met his for a moment; but he looked away
+again as he stood up and reached for his hat.</p>
+
+<p>"Tomorrow, then&mdash;&mdash;" he said, without attempting
+to detain her.</p>
+
+<p>"Tomorrow?"</p>
+
+<p>"You must come away from here&mdash;you must come
+home," he repeated mechanically.</p>
+
+<p>She made no answer, and he held his hand out and
+took hers. "Tomorrow," he said, drawing her toward
+him; and their lips met again, but not in the same kiss.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XLIII" id="XLIII"></a>XLIII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">June</span> again at Hanaford&mdash;and Cicely's birthday.
+The anniversary was to coincide, this year, with
+the opening of the old house at Hopewood, as a kind of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_620" id="Page_620">[p 620]</a></span>
+pleasure-palace&mdash;gymnasium, concert-hall and museum&mdash;for
+the recreation of the mill-hands.</p>
+
+<p>The idea had first come to Amherst on the winter
+afternoon when Bessy Westmore had confessed her
+love for him under the snow-laden trees of Hopewood.
+Even then the sense that his personal happiness was
+enlarged and secured by its promise of happiness to
+others had made him wish that the scene associated
+with the opening of his new life should be made to
+commemorate a corresponding change in the fortunes
+of Westmore. But when the control of the mills passed
+into his hands other and more necessary improvements
+pressed upon him; and it was not till now that the
+financial condition of the company had permitted the
+execution of his plan.</p>
+
+<p>Justine, on her return to Hanaford, had found the
+work already in progress, and had been told by her
+husband that he was carrying out a projected scheme
+of Bessy's. She had felt a certain surprise, but had
+concluded that the plan in question dated back to the
+early days of his first marriage, when, in his wife's eyes,
+his connection with the mills still invested them with
+interest.</p>
+
+<p>Since Justine had come back to her husband, both
+had tacitly avoided all allusions to the past, and the
+recreation-house at Hopewood being, as she divined,
+in some sort an expiatory offering to Bessy's plaintive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_621" id="Page_621">[p 621]</a></span>
+shade, she had purposely refrained from questioning
+Amherst about its progress, and had simply approved
+the plans he submitted to her.</p>
+
+<p>Fourteen months had passed since her return, and
+now, as she sat beside her husband in the carriage which
+was conveying them to Hopewood, she said to herself
+that her life had at last fallen into what promised to be
+its final shape&mdash;that as things now were they would
+probably be to the end. And outwardly at least they
+were what she and Amherst had always dreamed of
+their being. Westmore prospered under the new rule.
+The seeds of life they had sown there were springing
+up in a promising growth of bodily health and mental
+activity, and above all in a dawning social consciousness.
+The mill-hands were beginning to understand
+the meaning of their work, in its relation to their own
+lives and to the larger economy. And outwardly, also,
+the new growth was showing itself in the humanized
+aspect of the place. Amherst's young maples were tall
+enough now to cast a shade on the grass-bordered
+streets; and the well-kept turf, the bright cottage gardens,
+the new central group of library, hospital and
+club-house, gave to the mill-village the hopeful air of a
+"rising" residential suburb.</p>
+
+<p>In the bright June light, behind their fresh green
+mantle of trees and creepers, even the factory buildings
+looked less stern and prison-like than formerly; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_622" id="Page_622">[p 622]</a></span>
+the turfing and planting of the adjoining river-banks
+had transformed a waste of foul mud and refuse into
+a little park where the operatives might refresh themselves
+at midday.</p>
+
+<p>Yes&mdash;Westmore was alive at last: the dead city of
+which Justine had once spoken had risen from its grave,
+and its blank face had taken on a meaning. As Justine
+glanced at her husband she saw that the same thought
+was in his mind. However achieved, at whatever cost
+of personal misery and error, the work of awakening and
+freeing Westmore was done, and that work had justified
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>She looked from Amherst to Cicely, who sat opposite,
+eager and rosy in her mourning frock&mdash;for Mr. Langhope
+had died some two months previously&mdash;and as
+intent as her step-parents on the scene before her.
+Cicely was old enough now to regard her connection
+with Westmore as something more than a nursery game.
+She was beginning to learn a great deal about the mills,
+and to understand, in simple, friendly ways, something
+of her own relation to them. The work and play of
+the children, the interests and relaxations provided for
+their elders, had been gradually explained to her by
+Justine, and she knew that this shining tenth birthday
+of hers was to throw its light as far as the clouds of
+factory-smoke extended.</p>
+
+<p>As they mounted the slope to Hopewood, the spacious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_623" id="Page_623">[p 623]</a></span>
+white building, with its enfolding colonnades, its broad
+terraces and tennis-courts, shone through the trees like
+some bright country-house adorned for its master's
+home-coming; and Amherst and his wife might have
+been driving up to the house which had been built to
+shelter their wedded happiness. The thought flashed
+across Justine as their carriage climbed the hill. She
+was as much absorbed as Amherst in the welfare of
+Westmore, it had become more and more, to both, the
+refuge in which their lives still met and mingled; but for
+a moment, as they paused before the flower-decked
+porch, and he turned to help her from the carriage, it occurred
+to her to wonder what her sensations would have
+been if he had been bringing her home&mdash;to a real home
+of their own&mdash;instead of accompanying her to another
+philanthropic celebration. But what need had they of
+a real home, when they no longer had any real life of
+their own? Nothing was left of that secret inner union
+which had so enriched and beautified their outward
+lives. Since Justine's return to Hanaford they had
+entered, tacitly, almost unconsciously, into a new relation
+to each other: a relation in which their personalities
+were more and more merged in their common work,
+so that, as it were, they met only by avoiding each
+other.</p>
+
+<p>From the first, Justine had accepted this as inevitable;
+just as she had understood, when Amherst had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_624" id="Page_624">[p 624]</a></span>
+sought her out in New York, that his remaining at
+Westmore, which had once been contingent on her
+leaving him, now depended on her willingness to return
+and take up their former life.</p>
+
+<p>She accepted the last condition as she had accepted
+the other, pledged to the perpetual expiation of an act
+for which, in the abstract, she still refused to hold herself
+to blame. But life is not a matter of abstract principles,
+but a succession of pitiful compromises with fate,
+of concessions to old tradition, old beliefs, old charities
+and frailties. That was what her act had taught her&mdash;that
+was the word of the gods to the mortal who had
+laid a hand on their bolts. And she had humbled herself
+to accept the lesson, seeing human relations at last
+as a tangled and deep-rooted growth, a dark forest
+through which the idealist cannot cut his straight path
+without hearing at each stroke the cry of the severed
+branch: "<i>Why woundest thou me?</i>"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The lawns leading up to the house were already
+sprinkled with holiday-makers, while along the avenue
+came the rolling of wheels, the throb of motor-cars;
+and Justine, with Cicely beside her, stood in the wide
+hall to receive the incoming throng, in which Hanaford
+society was indiscriminately mingled with the operatives
+in their Sunday best.</p>
+
+<p>While his wife welcomed the new arrivals, Amherst,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_625" id="Page_625">[p 625]</a></span>
+supported by some young Westmore cousins, was guiding
+them into the concert-hall, where he was to say a
+word on the uses of the building before declaring it
+open for inspection. And presently Justine and Cicely,
+summoned by Westy Gaines, made their way through
+the rows of seats to a corner near the platform. Her
+husband was there already, with Halford Gaines and
+a group of Hanaford dignitaries, and just below them
+sat Mrs. Gaines and her daughters, the Harry Dressels,
+and Amherst's radiant mother.</p>
+
+<p>As Justine passed between them, she wondered how
+much they knew of the events which had wrought so
+profound and permanent change in her life. She had
+never known how Hanaford explained her absence or
+what comments it had made on her return. But she
+saw to-day more clearly than ever that Amherst had
+become a power among his townsmen, and that if they
+were still blind to the inner meaning of his work, its
+practical results were beginning to impress them profoundly.
+Hanaford's sociological creed was largely
+based on commercial considerations, and Amherst had
+won Hanaford's esteem by the novel feat of defying its
+economic principles and snatching success out of his
+defiance.</p>
+
+<p>And now he had advanced a step or two in front of
+the "representative" semi-circle on the platform, and
+was beginning to speak.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_626" id="Page_626">[p 626]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Justine did not hear his first words. She was looking
+up at him, trying to see him with the eyes of the crowd,
+and wondering what manner of man he would have
+seemed to her if she had known as little as they did of
+his inner history.</p>
+
+<p>He held himself straight, the heavy locks thrown back
+from his forehead, one hand resting on the table beside
+him, the other grasping a folded blue-print which the
+architect of the building had just advanced to give him.
+As he stood there, Justine recalled her first sight of him
+in the Hope Hospital, five years earlier&mdash;was it only
+five years? They had dealt deep strokes to his face,
+hollowing the eye-sockets, accentuating the strong
+modelling of nose and chin, fixing the lines between the
+brows; but every touch had a meaning&mdash;it was not the
+languid hand of time which had remade his features,
+but the sharp chisel of thought and action.</p>
+
+<p>She roused herself suddenly to the consciousness of
+what he was saying.</p>
+
+<p>"For the idea of this building&mdash;of a building dedicated
+to the recreation of Westmore&mdash;is not new in my
+mind; but while it remained there as a mere idea, it
+had already, without my knowledge, taken definite
+shape in the thoughts of the owner of Westmore."</p>
+
+<p>There was a slight drop in his voice as he designated
+Bessy, and he waited a moment before continuing: "It
+was not till after the death of my first wife that I learned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_627" id="Page_627">[p 627]</a></span>
+of her intention&mdash;that I found by accident, among her
+papers, this carefully-studied plan for a pleasure-house
+at Hopewood."</p>
+
+<p>He paused again, and unrolling the blue-print, held
+it up before his audience.</p>
+
+<p>"You cannot, at this distance," he went on, "see all
+the admirable details of her plan; see how beautifully
+they were imagined, how carefully and intelligently
+elaborated. She who conceived them longed to see
+beauty everywhere&mdash;it was her dearest wish to bestow
+it on her people here. And her ardent imagination
+outran the bounds of practical possibility. We cannot
+give you, in its completeness, the beautiful thing she
+had imagined&mdash;the great terraces, the marble porches,
+the fountains, lily-tanks, and cloisters. But you will
+see that, wherever it was possible&mdash;though in humbler
+materials, and on a smaller scale&mdash;we have faithfully
+followed her design; and when presently you go through
+this building, and when, hereafter, you find health and
+refreshment and diversion here, I ask you to remember
+the beauty she dreamed of giving you, and to let the
+thought of it make her memory beautiful among you
+and among your children...."</p>
+
+<p>Justine had listened with deepening amazement. She
+was seated so close to her husband that she had recognized
+the blue-print the moment he unrolled it. There
+was no mistaking its origin&mdash;it was simply the plan of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_628" id="Page_628">[p 628]</a></span>
+the gymnasium which Bessy had intended to build at
+Lynbrook, and which she had been constrained to
+abandon owing to her husband's increased expenditure
+at the mills. But how was it possible that Amherst
+knew nothing of the original purpose of the plans, and
+by what mocking turn of events had a project devised
+in deliberate defiance of his wishes, and intended to
+declare his wife's open contempt for them, been transformed
+into a Utopian vision for the betterment of the
+Westmore operatives?</p>
+
+<p>A wave of anger swept over Justine at this last derisive
+stroke of fate. It was grotesque and pitiable that
+a man like Amherst should create out of his regrets
+a being who had never existed, and then ascribe to her
+feelings and actions of which the real woman had again
+and again proved herself incapable!</p>
+
+<p>Ah, no, Justine had suffered enough&mdash;but to have
+this imaginary Bessy called from the grave, dressed in
+a semblance of self-devotion and idealism, to see her
+petty impulses of vindictiveness disguised as the motions
+of a lofty spirit&mdash;it was as though her small malicious
+ghost had devised this way of punishing the wife
+who had taken her place!</p>
+
+<p>Justine had suffered enough&mdash;suffered deliberately
+and unstintingly, paying the full price of her error, not
+seeking to evade its least consequence. But no sane
+judgment could ask her to sit quiet under this last hal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_629" id="Page_629">[p 629]</a></span>lucination.
+What! This unreal woman, this phantom
+that Amherst's uneasy imagination had evoked, was to
+come between himself and her, to supplant her first as
+his wife, and then as his fellow-worker? Why should
+she not cry out the truth to him, defend herself against
+the dead who came back to rob her of such wedded
+peace as was hers? She had only to tell the true story
+of the plans to lay poor Bessy's ghost forever!</p>
+
+<p>The confused throbbing impulses within her were
+stifled under a long burst of applause&mdash;then she saw
+Westy Gaines at her side again, and understood that
+he had come to lead Cicely to the platform. For a
+moment she clung jealously to the child's hand, hardly
+aware of what she did, feeling only that she was being
+thrust farther and farther into the background of the
+life she had helped to call out of chaos. Then a contrary
+impulse moved her. She gently freed Cicely's
+hand, and a moment later, as she sat with bent head
+and throbbing breast, she heard the child's treble
+piping out above her:</p>
+
+<p>"In my mother's name, I give this house to Westmore."</p>
+
+<p>Applause again&mdash;and then Justine found herself enveloped
+in a general murmur of compliment and congratulation.
+Mr. Amherst had spoken admirably&mdash;a
+"beautiful tribute&mdash;" ah, he had done poor Bessy justice!
+And to think that till now Hanaford had never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_630" id="Page_630">[p 630]</a></span>
+fully known how she had the welfare of the mills at
+heart&mdash;how it was really only <i>her</i> work that he was
+carrying on there! Well, he had made that perfectly
+clear&mdash;and no doubt Cicely was being taught to follow
+in her mother's footsteps: everyone had noticed how
+her step-father was associating her with the work at
+the mills. And his little speech would, as it were, consecrate
+the child's relation to that work, make it appear
+to her as the continuance of a beautiful, a sacred
+tradition....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And now it was over. The building had been inspected,
+the operatives had dispersed, the Hanaford
+company had rolled off down the avenue, Cicely, among
+them, driving away tired and happy in Mrs. Dressel's
+victoria, and Amherst and his wife were alone.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst, after bidding good-bye to his last guests,
+had gone back to the empty concert-room to fetch
+the blue-print lying on the platform. He came back
+with it, between the uneven rows of empty chairs,
+and joined Justine, who stood waiting in the hall. His
+face was slightly flushed, and his eyes had the light
+which in happy moments burned through their veil of
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>He laid his hand on his wife's arm, and drawing her
+toward a table spread out the blueprint before her.</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't seen this, have you?" he said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_631" id="Page_631">[p 631]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She looked down at the plan without answering,
+reading in the left-hand corner the architect's conventional
+inscription: "Swimming-tank and gymnasium
+designed for Mrs. John Amherst."</p>
+
+<p>Amherst looked up, perhaps struck by her silence.</p>
+
+<p>"But perhaps you <i>have</i> seen it&mdash;at Lynbrook? It
+must have been done while you were there."</p>
+
+<p>The quickened throb of her blood rushed to her brain
+like a signal. "Speak&mdash;speak now!" the signal commanded.</p>
+
+<p>Justine continued to look fixedly at the plan. "Yes,
+I have seen it," she said at length.</p>
+
+<p>"At Lynbrook?"</p>
+
+<p>"At Lynbrook."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>She</i> showed it to you, I suppose&mdash;while I was
+away?"</p>
+
+<p>Justine hesitated again. "Yes, while you were away."</p>
+
+<p>"And did she tell you anything about it, go into
+details about her wishes, her intentions?"</p>
+
+<p>Now was the moment&mdash;now! As her lips parted she
+looked up at her husband. The illumination still lingered
+on his face&mdash;and it was the face she loved. He
+was waiting eagerly for her next word.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I heard no details. I merely saw the plan
+lying there."</p>
+
+<p>She saw his look of disappointment. "She never
+told you about it?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_632" id="Page_632">[p 632]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;she never told me."</p>
+
+<p>It was best so, after all. She understood that now.
+It was now at last that she was paying her full price.</p>
+
+<p>Amherst rolled up the plan with a sigh and pushed
+it into the drawer of the table. It struck her that he
+too had the look of one who has laid a ghost. He
+turned to her and drew her hand through his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"You're tired, dear. You ought to have driven back
+with the others," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I would rather stay with you."</p>
+
+<p>"You want to drain this good day to the dregs, as I
+do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she murmured, drawing her hand away.</p>
+
+<p>"It <i>is</i> a good day, isn't it?" he continued, looking
+about him at the white-panelled walls, the vista of
+large bright rooms seen through the folding doors.
+"I feel as if we had reached a height, somehow&mdash;a
+height where one might pause and draw breath for the
+next climb. Don't you feel that too, Justine?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;I feel it."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you remember once, long ago&mdash;one day when
+you and I and Cicely went on a picnic to hunt orchids&mdash;how
+we got talking of the one best moment in life&mdash;the
+moment when one wanted most to stop the clock?"</p>
+
+<p>The colour rose in her face while he spoke. It was
+a long time since he had referred to the early days of
+their friendship&mdash;the days <i>before</i>....<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_633" id="Page_633">[p 633]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I remember," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"And do you remember how we said that it was
+with most of us as it was with Faust? That the moment
+one wanted to hold fast to was not, in most lives,
+the moment of keenest personal happiness, but the
+other kind&mdash;the kind that would have seemed grey and
+colourless at first: the moment when the meaning of
+life began to come out from the mists&mdash;when one could
+look out at last over the marsh one had drained?"</p>
+
+<p>A tremor ran through Justine. "It was you who said
+that," she said, half-smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"But didn't you feel it with me? Don't you now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;I do now," she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>He came close to her, and taking her hands in his,
+kissed them one after the other.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear," he said, "let us go out and look at the marsh
+we have drained."</p>
+
+<p>He turned and led her through the open doorway
+to the terrace above the river. The sun was setting
+behind the wooded slopes of Hopewood, and the trees
+about the house stretched long blue shadows across the
+lawn. Beyond them rose the smoke of Westmore.<br /><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+
+<div class="tnote"><p>Transcriber's Note:</p>
+
+<p>Most inconsistencies in hyphenation and spelling have been left as in the
+original. Missing or wrong punctuation has been added or corrected,
+where it is obvious (missing punctuation is often a result of the
+scanning/OCR process). In one case, a missing letter has also been
+added, and the following misspellings have been corrected: involuntairly to
+involuntarily, sensastions to sensations, Wetsmore to Westmore, Cilfton
+to Clifton, It to If
+</p></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+
+<div class="bbox">
+<h3>BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON</h3>
+<h4>PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</h4>
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+<p class="center">
+[12 mo. $1.50]
+</p>
+<h2>The House of Mirth</h2>
+<h4><i>Illustrations by</i> <span class="smcap">A. B. Wenzell</span></h4>
+
+<p>
+"In my judgment 'The House of Mirth' is a story
+of such vitality, of such artistic and moral insight, that it
+will stand by itself in American fiction as a study of a
+certain kind of society. The title is a stroke of genius in
+irony, and gives the key to a novel of absorbing interest, as
+relentless as life itself in its judgment, but deeply and beautifully
+humanized at the end."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Hamilton W. Mabie.</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Wharton has done many good things. She has
+never done anything better than this."&mdash;<i>The Academy.</i></p>
+
+<p>"She is the first to make a really powerful and brilliant
+book out of the material offered by American fashion to
+the novelist.... A sterling piece of craftsmanship, a tale
+which interests the reader at the start and never lets him
+rest till the end is reached."&mdash;New York <i>Tribune</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"So accurate an account of the thoughts and deeds of
+a single human being has, we are certain, never hitherto
+been written."&mdash;Boston <i>Transcript</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a great American novel, intensely interesting,
+marvelous in its literary finish and powerful in its delineation
+of Lily Bart."&mdash;Philadelphia <i>Press</i>.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<p class="center">
+[12 mo. $1.00]</p>
+
+<h2>Madame de Treymes</h2>
+
+<h4><i>Illustrated in color by</i> <span class="smcap">A. B. Wenzell</span></h4>
+
+<p>"We know of no book in which the virtues of the short
+story are united with the virtues of the novel in a higher
+degree than in this instance."&mdash;New York <i>Sun</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="bbox"><h3>BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON</h3>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Sixth Edition</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">[<i>12mo</i>, $1.50]</p>
+
+<h2>The Greater Inclination</h2>
+
+<h4>CONTENTS</h4>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>The Muse's Tragedy</i><br />
+<i>A Journey</i><br />
+<i>The Pelican</i><br />
+<i>Souls Belated</i><br />
+<i>A Coward</i><br />
+<i>The Twilight of the Gods</i><br />
+<i>A Cup of Cold Water</i><br />
+<i>The Portrait</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"Between these stories and those of the ordinary entertaining
+sort there is a great gulf fixed."&mdash;<i>The Dial.</i></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<p class="center">[<i>12mo</i>, $1.50]</p>
+
+<h2>Crucial Instances</h2>
+
+<h4>CONTENTS</h4>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>The Duchess at Prayer</i><br />
+<i>The Angel at the Grave</i><br />
+<i>The Recovery</i><br />
+<i>"Copy": A Dialogue</i><br />
+<i>The Rembrandt</i><br />
+<i>The Moving Finger</i><br />
+<i>The Confessional</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"Tragedy and comedy, pathos and humor, are mingled in
+these pages of brilliant writing and splendid imagination."&mdash;Philadelphia <i>Press</i>.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<p class="center">[<i>12mo</i>, $1.50]</p>
+
+<h2>The Valley of Decision</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">25th Thousand</span></p>
+
+<p>"Coming in the midst of an epoch overcrowded with works
+of fiction, 'The Valley of Decision' stands out giant-like
+above its surroundings. It stands, indeed, almost without
+a rival in the modern literary world, and there can be little
+doubt that it places Mrs. Wharton at once side by side
+with the greatest novelists of the day."&mdash;Boston <i>Evening Transcript</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<div class="bbox"><h2>BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON</h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<p class="center">[<i>12mo, $1.25</i>]</p>
+
+<h2>Sanctuary</h2>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Illustrations by W. Appleton Clark</span></h4>
+
+<p>"This is a striking little book&mdash;striking in its simplicity
+and penetration, its passion and restraint."&mdash;London <i>Times</i>.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<p class="center">[<i>12mo, $1.25</i>]</p>
+
+<h2>The Touchstone</h2>
+
+<p>"Its characters are real, their motives and actions thoroughly
+human. And the author's art is sufficient to bring out the
+strength of every situation."&mdash;<i>The Argonaut.</i></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<p class="center">[<i>12mo</i>, $1.50]</p>
+
+<h2>The Descent of Man</h2>
+
+<h4>CONTENTS</h4>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>The Descent of Man</i><br />
+<i>The Mission of Jane</i><br />
+<i>The Other Two</i><br />
+<i>The Quicksand</i><br />
+<i>The Dilettante</i><br />
+<i>The Reckoning</i><br />
+<i>Expiation</i><br />
+<i>The Lady's Maid's Bell</i><br />
+<i>A Venetian Night's Entertainment</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"It is, of course, the extraordinary directness with which
+Mrs. Wharton's probe goes to the spot under inspection, the
+deftness with which she is able to bring to the light of day
+what we had hidden even from ourselves, that account for
+the admiration with which we regard her short stories."</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;London <i>Academy</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="bbox"><h2>BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON</h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<p class="center">[<i>8vo, $2.50 net.</i> Postage 17 cents]</p>
+
+<h2>Italian Backgrounds</h2>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Illustrated by Peixotto</span></h4>
+
+<h4>CONTENTS</h4>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>An Alpine Posting Inn</i><br />
+<i>A Midsummer Week's Dream</i><br />
+<i>The Sanctuaries of the Pennine</i><br />
+<i>Alps</i><br />
+<i>What the Hermits Saw</i><br />
+<i>A Tuscan Shrine</i><br />
+<i>Sub Umbra Liliorum</i><br />
+<i>March in Italy</i><br />
+<i>Picturesque Milan</i><br />
+<i>Italian Backgrounds</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"Belongs in that small class of books of observation which
+are also books of artistic and spiritual interpretation; which
+not only describe places and monuments, but convey an
+impression of peoples, a sense of society, with the elusive
+atmosphere in which everything of historical or artistic
+value is seen by those who have the gift of sight."&mdash;<i>The Outlook.</i></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+
+<p class="center">[<i>12mo, $1.25 net</i>]</p>
+
+<h2>The Joy of Living</h2>
+
+<p class="center">(<i>Es lebe das Leben</i>)</p>
+
+<p>A play in five acts, by <span class="smcap">Hermann Sudermann</span>. Translated
+from the German by <span class="smcap">Edith Wharton</span>.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<p class="center">[<i>Large 8vo, $2.50 net</i>]</p>
+
+<h2>The Decoration of Houses</h2>
+
+<p>
+With 56 full-page illustrations, by <span class="smcap">Edith Wharton</span> and
+<span class="smcap">Ogden Codman, Jr.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Fruit of the Tree
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+Illustrator: Alonzo Kimball
+
+Release Date: September 6, 2006 [EBook #19191]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRUIT OF THE TREE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Melissa Er-Raqabi
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FRUIT OF THE TREE
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured
+man.]
+
+
+
+
+THE FRUIT OF THE TREE
+BY
+EDITH WHARTON
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALONZO KIMBALL
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+MDCCCCVII
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+[Illustration: mark]
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+_He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured man_  _Frontispiece_
+_"No--I shall have to ask you to take my word for it"_     _Facing p. 82_
+_Half-way up the slope they met_                            130
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+
+
+THE FRUIT OF THE TREE
+
+I
+
+
+IN the surgical ward of the Hope Hospital at Hanaford, a nurse was
+bending over a young man whose bandaged right hand and arm lay stretched
+along the bed.
+
+His head stirred uneasily, and slipping her arm behind him she effected
+a professional readjustment of the pillows. "Is that better?"
+
+As she leaned over, he lifted his anxious bewildered eyes, deep-sunk
+under ridges of suffering. "I don't s'pose there's any kind of a show
+for me, is there?" he asked, pointing with his free hand--the stained
+seamed hand of the mechanic--to the inert bundle on the quilt.
+
+Her only immediate answer was to wipe the dampness from his forehead;
+then she said: "We'll talk about that to-morrow."
+
+"Why not now?"
+
+"Because Dr. Disbrow can't tell till the inflammation goes down."
+
+"Will it go down by to-morrow?"
+
+"It will begin to, if you don't excite yourself and keep up the fever."
+
+"Excite myself? I--there's four of 'em at home----"
+
+"Well, then there are four reasons for keeping quiet," she rejoined.
+
+She did not use, in speaking, the soothing inflection of her trade: she
+seemed to disdain to cajole or trick the sufferer. Her full young voice
+kept its cool note of authority, her sympathy revealing itself only in
+the expert touch of her hands and the constant vigilance of her dark
+steady eyes. This vigilance softened to pity as the patient turned his
+head away with a groan. His free left hand continued to travel the
+sheet, clasping and unclasping itself in contortions of feverish unrest.
+It was as though all the anguish of his mutilation found expression in
+that lonely hand, left without work in the world now that its mate was
+useless.
+
+The nurse felt a touch on her shoulder, and rose to face the matron, a
+sharp-featured woman with a soft intonation.
+
+"This is Mr. Amherst, Miss Brent. The assistant manager from the mills.
+He wishes to see Dillon."
+
+John Amherst's step was singularly noiseless. The nurse, sensitive by
+nature and training to all physical characteristics, was struck at once
+by the contrast between his alert face and figure and the silent way in
+which he moved. She noticed, too, that the same contrast was repeated in
+the face itself, its spare energetic outline, with the high nose and
+compressed lips of the mover of men, being curiously modified by the
+veiled inward gaze of the grey eyes he turned on her. It was one of the
+interests of Justine Brent's crowded yet lonely life to attempt a rapid
+mental classification of the persons she met; but the contradictions in
+Amherst's face baffled her, and she murmured inwardly "I don't know" as
+she drew aside to let him approach the bed. He stood by her in silence,
+his hands clasped behind him, his eyes on the injured man, who lay
+motionless, as if sunk in a lethargy. The matron, at the call of another
+nurse, had minced away down the ward, committing Amherst with a glance
+to Miss Brent; and the two remained alone by the bed.
+
+After a pause, Amherst moved toward the window beyond the empty cot
+adjoining Dillon's. One of the white screens used to isolate dying
+patients had been placed against this cot, which was the last at that
+end of the ward, and the space beyond formed a secluded corner, where a
+few words could be exchanged out of reach of the eyes in the other beds.
+
+"Is he asleep?" Amherst asked, as Miss Brent joined him.
+
+Miss Brent glanced at him again. His voice betokened not merely
+education, but something different and deeper--the familiar habit of
+gentle speech; and his shabby clothes--carefully brushed, but ill-cut
+and worn along the seams--sat on him easily, and with the same
+difference.
+
+"The morphine has made him drowsy," she answered. "The wounds were
+dressed about an hour ago, and the doctor gave him a hypodermic."
+
+"The wounds--how many are there?"
+
+"Besides the hand, his arm is badly torn up to the elbow."
+
+Amherst listened with bent head and frowning brow.
+
+"What do you think of the case?"
+
+She hesitated. "Dr. Disbrow hasn't said----"
+
+"And it's not your business to?" He smiled slightly. "I know hospital
+etiquette. But I have a particular reason for asking." He broke off and
+looked at her again, his veiled gaze sharpening to a glance of
+concentrated attention. "You're not one of the regular nurses, are you?
+Your dress seems to be of a different colour."
+
+She smiled at the "seems to be," which denoted a tardy and imperfect
+apprehension of the difference between dark-blue linen and white.
+
+"No: I happened to be staying at Hanaford, and hearing that they were in
+want of a surgical nurse, I offered my help."
+
+Amherst nodded. "So much the better. Is there any place where I can say
+two words to you?"
+
+"I could hardly leave the ward now, unless Mrs. Ogan comes back."
+
+"I don't care to have you call Mrs. Ogan," he interposed quickly. "When
+do you go off duty?"
+
+She looked at him in surprise. "If what you want to ask about
+is--anything connected with the management of things here--you know
+we're not supposed to talk of our patients outside of the hospital."
+
+"I know. But I am going to ask you to break through the rule--in that
+poor fellow's behalf."
+
+A protest wavered on her lip, but he held her eyes steadily, with a
+glint of good-humour behind his determination. "When do you go off
+duty?"
+
+"At six."
+
+"I'll wait at the corner of South Street and walk a little way with you.
+Let me put my case, and if you're not convinced you can refuse to
+answer."
+
+"Very well," she said, without farther hesitation; and Amherst, with a
+slight nod of farewell, passed through the door near which they had been
+standing.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+WHEN Justine Brent emerged from the Hope Hospital the October dusk had
+fallen and the wide suburban street was almost dark, except when the
+illuminated bulk of an electric car flashed by under the maples.
+
+She crossed the tracks and approached the narrower thoroughfare where
+Amherst awaited her. He hung back a moment, and she was amused to see
+that he failed to identify the uniformed nurse with the girl in her trim
+dark dress, soberly complete in all its accessories, who advanced to
+him, smiling under her little veil.
+
+"Thank you," he said as he turned and walked beside her. "Is this your
+way?"
+
+"I am staying in Oak Street. But it's just as short to go by Maplewood
+Avenue."
+
+"Yes; and quieter."
+
+For a few yards they walked on in silence, their long steps falling
+naturally into time, though Amherst was somewhat taller than his
+companion.
+
+At length he said: "I suppose you know nothing about the relation
+between Hope Hospital and the Westmore Mills."
+
+"Only that the hospital was endowed by one of the Westmore family."
+
+"Yes; an old Miss Hope, a great-aunt of Westmore's. But there is more
+than that between them--all kinds of subterranean passages." He paused,
+and began again: "For instance, Dr. Disbrow married the sister of our
+manager's wife."
+
+"Your chief at the mills?"
+
+"Yes," he said with a slight grimace. "So you see, if Truscomb--the
+manager--thinks one of the mill-hands is only slightly injured, it's
+natural that his brother-in-law, Dr. Disbrow, should take an optimistic
+view of the case."
+
+"Natural? I don't know----"
+
+"Don't you think it's natural that a man should be influenced by his
+wife?"
+
+"Not where his professional honour is concerned."
+
+Amherst smiled. "That sounds very young--if you'll excuse my saying so.
+Well, I won't go on to insinuate that, Truscomb being high in favour
+with the Westmores, and the Westmores having a lien on the hospital,
+Disbrow's position there is also bound up with his taking--more or
+less--the same view as Truscomb's."
+
+Miss Brent had paused abruptly on the deserted pavement.
+
+"No, don't go on--if you want me to think well of you," she flashed out.
+
+Amherst met the thrust composedly, perceiving, as she turned to face
+him, that what she resented was not so much his insinuation against his
+superiors as his allusion to the youthfulness of her sentiments. She
+was, in fact, as he now noticed, still young enough to dislike being
+excused for her youth. In her severe uniform of blue linen, her dusky
+skin darkened by the nurse's cap, and by the pale background of the
+hospital walls, she had seemed older, more competent and experienced;
+but he now saw how fresh was the pale curve of her cheek, and how
+smooth the brow clasped in close waves of hair.
+
+"I began at the wrong end," he acknowledged. "But let me put Dillon's
+case before you dismiss me."
+
+She softened. "It is only because of my interest in that poor fellow
+that I am here----"
+
+"Because you think he needs help--and that you can help him?"
+
+But she held back once more. "Please tell me about him first," she said,
+walking on.
+
+Amherst met the request with another question. "I wonder how much you
+know about factory life?"
+
+"Oh, next to nothing. Just what I've managed to pick up in these two
+days at the hospital."
+
+He glanced at her small determined profile under its dark roll of hair,
+and said, half to himself: "That might be a good deal."
+
+She took no notice of this, and he went on: "Well, I won't try to put
+the general situation before you, though Dillon's accident is really the
+result of it. He works in the carding room, and on the day of the
+accident his 'card' stopped suddenly, and he put his hand behind him to
+get a tool he needed out of his trouser-pocket. He reached back a little
+too far, and the card behind him caught his hand in its million of
+diamond-pointed wires. Truscomb and the overseer of the room maintain
+that the accident was due to his own carelessness; but the hands say
+that it was caused by the fact of the cards being too near together, and
+that just such an accident was bound to happen sooner or later."
+
+Miss Brent drew an eager breath. "And what do _you_ say?"
+
+"That they're right: the carding-room is shamefully overcrowded. Dillon
+hasn't been in it long--he worked his way up at the mills from being a
+bobbin-boy--and he hadn't yet learned how cautious a man must be in
+there. The cards are so close to each other that even the old hands run
+narrow risks, and it takes the cleverest operative some time to learn
+that he must calculate every movement to a fraction of an inch."
+
+"But why do they crowd the rooms in that way?"
+
+"To get the maximum of profit out of the minimum of floor-space. It
+costs more to increase the floor-space than to maim an operative now and
+then."
+
+"I see. Go on," she murmured.
+
+"That's the first point; here is the second. Dr. Disbrow told Truscomb
+this morning that Dillon's hand would certainly be saved, and that he
+might get back to work in a couple of months if the company would
+present him with an artificial finger or two."
+
+Miss Brent faced him with a flush of indignation. "Mr. Amherst--who gave
+you this version of Dr. Disbrow's report?"
+
+"The manager himself."
+
+"Verbally?"
+
+"No--he showed me Disbrow's letter."
+
+For a moment or two they walked on silently through the quiet street;
+then she said, in a voice still stirred with feeling: "As I told you
+this afternoon, Dr. Disbrow has said nothing in my hearing."
+
+"And Mrs. Ogan?"
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Ogan--" Her voice broke in a ripple of irony. "Mrs. Ogan
+'feels it to be such a beautiful dispensation, my dear, that, owing to a
+death that very morning in the surgical ward, we happened to have a bed
+ready for the poor man within three hours of the accident.'" She had
+exchanged her deep throat-tones for a high reedy note which perfectly
+simulated the matron's lady-like inflections.
+
+Amherst, at the change, turned on her with a boyish burst of laughter:
+she joined in it, and for a moment they were blent in that closest of
+unions, the discovery of a common fund of humour.
+
+She was the first to grow grave. "That three hours' delay didn't help
+matters--how is it there is no emergency hospital at the mills?"
+
+Amherst laughed again, but in a different key. "That's part of the
+larger question, which we haven't time for now." He waited a moment, and
+then added: "You've not yet given me your own impression of Dillon's
+case."
+
+"You shall have it, if you saw that letter. Dillon will certainly lose
+his hand--and probably the whole arm." She spoke with a thrilling of her
+slight frame that transformed the dispassionate professional into a girl
+shaken with indignant pity.
+
+Amherst stood still before her. "Good God! Never anything but useless
+lumber?"
+
+"Never----"
+
+"And he won't die?"
+
+"Alas!"
+
+"He has a consumptive wife and three children. She ruined her health
+swallowing cotton-dust at the factory," Amherst continued.
+
+"So she told me yesterday."
+
+He turned in surprise. "You've had a talk with her?"
+
+"I went out to Westmore last night. I was haunted by her face when she
+came to the hospital. She looks forty, but she told me she was only
+twenty-six." Miss Brent paused to steady her voice. "It's the curse of
+my trade that it's always tempting me to interfere in cases where I can
+do no possible good. The fact is, I'm not fit to be a nurse--I shall
+live and die a wretched sentimentalist!" she ended, with an angry dash
+at the tears on her veil.
+
+Her companion walked on in silence till she had regained her composure.
+Then he said: "What did you think of Westmore?"
+
+"I think it's one of the worst places I ever saw--and I am not unused to
+slums. It looks so dead. The slums of big cities are much more
+cheerful."
+
+He made no answer, and after a moment she asked: "Does the cotton-dust
+always affect the lungs?"
+
+"It's likely to, where there is the least phthisical tendency. But of
+course the harm could be immensely reduced by taking up the old rough
+floors which hold the dust, and by thorough cleanliness and
+ventilation."
+
+"What does the company do in such cases? Where an operative breaks down
+at twenty-five?"
+
+"The company says there was a phthisical tendency."
+
+"And will they give nothing in return for the two lives they have
+taken?"
+
+"They will probably pay for Dillon's care at the hospital, and they have
+taken the wife back as a scrubber."
+
+"To clean those uncleanable floors? She's not fit for it!"
+
+"She must work, fit for it or not; and there is less strain in scrubbing
+than in bending over the looms or cards. The pay is lower, of course,
+but she's very grateful for being taken back at all, now that she's no
+longer a first-class worker."
+
+Miss Brent's face glowed with a fine wrath. "She can't possibly stand
+more than two or three months of it without breaking down!"
+
+"Well, you see they've told her that in less than that time her husband
+will be at work again."
+
+"And what will the company do for them when the wife is a hopeless
+invalid, and the husband a cripple?"
+
+Amherst again uttered the dry laugh with which he had met her suggestion
+of an emergency hospital. "I know what I should do if I could get
+anywhere near Dillon--give him an overdose of morphine, and let the
+widow collect his life-insurance, and make a fresh start."
+
+She looked at him curiously. "Should you, I wonder?"
+
+"If I saw the suffering as you see it, and knew the circumstances as I
+know them, I believe I should feel justified--" He broke off. "In your
+work, don't you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?"
+
+She mused. "One might...but perhaps the professional instinct to save
+would always come first."
+
+"To save--what? When all the good of life is gone?"
+
+"I daresay," she sighed, "poor Dillon would do it himself if he
+could--when he realizes that all the good _is_ gone."
+
+"Yes, but he can't do it himself; and it's the irony of such cases that
+his employers, after ruining his life, will do all they can to patch up
+the ruins."
+
+"But that at least ought to count in their favour."
+
+"Perhaps; if--" He paused, as though reluctant to lay himself open once
+more to the charge of uncharitableness; and suddenly she exclaimed,
+looking about her: "I didn't notice we had walked so far down Maplewood
+Avenue!"
+
+They had turned a few minutes previously into the wide thoroughfare
+crowning the high ground which is covered by the residential quarter of
+Hanaford. Here the spacious houses, withdrawn behind shrubberies and
+lawns, revealed in their silhouettes every form of architectural
+experiment, from the symmetrical pre-Revolutionary structure, with its
+classic portico and clipped box-borders, to the latest outbreak in
+boulders and Moorish tiles.
+
+Amherst followed his companion's glance with surprise. "We _have_ gone a
+block or two out of our way. I always forget where I am when I'm talking
+about anything that interests me."
+
+Miss Brent looked at her watch. "My friends don't dine till seven, and I
+can get home in time by taking a Grove Street car," she said.
+
+"If you don't mind walking a little farther you can take a Liberty
+Street car instead. They run oftener, and you will get home just as
+soon."
+
+She made a gesture of assent, and as they walked on he continued: "I
+haven't yet explained why I am so anxious to get an unbiassed opinion of
+Dillon's case."
+
+She looked at him in surprise. "What you've told me about Dr. Disbrow
+and your manager is surely enough."
+
+"Well, hardly, considering that I am Truscomb's subordinate. I shouldn't
+have committed a breach of professional etiquette, or asked you to do
+so, if I hadn't a hope of bettering things; but I have, and that is why
+I've held on at Westmore for the last few months, instead of getting out
+of it altogether."
+
+"I'm glad of that," she said quickly.
+
+"The owner of the mills--young Richard Westmore--died last winter," he
+went on, "and my hope--it's no more--is that the new broom may sweep a
+little cleaner."
+
+"Who is the new broom?"
+
+"Westmore left everything to his widow, and she is coming here to-morrow
+to look into the management of the mills."
+
+"Coming? She doesn't live here, then?"
+
+"At Hanaford? Heaven forbid! It's an anomaly nowadays for the employer
+to live near the employed. The Westmores have always lived in New
+York--and I believe they have a big place on Long Island."
+
+"Well, at any rate she _is_ coming, and that ought to be a good sign.
+Did she never show any interest in the mills during her husband's life?"
+
+"Not as far as I know. I've been at Westmore three years, and she's not
+been seen there in my time. She is very young, and Westmore himself
+didn't care. It was a case of inherited money. He drew the dividends,
+and Truscomb did the rest."
+
+Miss Brent reflected. "I don't know much about the constitution of
+companies--but I suppose Mrs. Westmore doesn't unite all the offices in
+her own person. Is there no one to stand between Truscomb and the
+operatives?"
+
+"Oh, the company, on paper, shows the usual official hierarchy. Richard
+Westmore, of course, was president, and since his death the former
+treasurer--Halford Gaines--has replaced him, and his son, Westmore
+Gaines, has been appointed treasurer. You can see by the names that it's
+all in the family. Halford Gaines married a Miss Westmore, and
+represents the clan at Hanaford--leads society, and keeps up the social
+credit of the name. As treasurer, Mr. Halford Gaines kept strictly to
+his special business, and always refused to interfere between Truscomb
+and the operatives. As president he will probably follow the same
+policy, the more so as it fits in with his inherited respect for the
+_status quo_, and his blissful ignorance of economics."
+
+"And the new treasurer--young Gaines? Is there no hope of his breaking
+away from the family tradition?"
+
+"Westy Gaines has a better head than his father; but he hates Hanaford
+and the mills, and his chief object in life is to be taken for a New
+Yorker. So far he hasn't been here much, except for the quarterly
+meetings, and his routine work is done by another cousin--you perceive
+that Westmore is a nest of nepotism."
+
+Miss Brent's work among the poor had developed her interest in social
+problems, and she followed these details attentively.
+
+"Well, the outlook is not encouraging, but perhaps Mrs. Westmore's
+coming will make a change. I suppose she has more power than any one."
+
+"She might have, if she chose to exert it, for her husband was really
+the whole company. The official cousins hold only a few shares apiece."
+
+"Perhaps, then, her visit will open her eyes. Who knows but poor
+Dillon's case may help others--prove a beautiful dispensation, as Mrs.
+Ogan would say?"
+
+"It does come terribly pat as an illustration of some of the abuses I
+want to have remedied. The difficulty will be to get the lady's ear.
+That's her house we're coming to, by the way."
+
+An electric street-lamp irradiated the leafless trees and stone
+gate-posts of the building before them. Though gardens extended behind
+it, the house stood so near the pavement that only two short flights of
+steps intervened between the gate-posts and the portico. Light shone
+from every window of the pompous rusticated facade--in the turreted
+"Tuscan villa" style of the 'fifties--and as Miss Brent and Amherst
+approached, their advance was checked by a group of persons who were
+just descending from two carriages at the door.
+
+The lamp-light showed every detail of dress and countenance in the
+party, which consisted of two men, one slightly lame, with a long white
+moustache and a distinguished nose, the other short, lean and
+professional, and of two ladies and their laden attendants.
+
+"Why, that must be her party arriving!" Miss Brent exclaimed; and as she
+spoke the younger of the two ladies, turning back to her maid, exposed
+to the glare of the electric light a fair pale face shadowed by the
+projection of her widow's veil.
+
+"Is that Mrs. Westmore?" Miss Brent whispered; and as Amherst muttered:
+"I suppose so; I've never seen her----" she continued excitedly: "She
+looks so like--do you know what her name was before she married?"
+
+He drew his brows together in a hopeless effort of remembrance. "I don't
+know--I must have heard--but I never can recall people's names."
+
+"That's bad, for a leader of men!" she said mockingly, and he answered,
+as though touched on a sore point: "I mean people who don't count. I
+never forget an operative's name or face."
+
+"One can never tell who may be going to count," she rejoined
+sententiously.
+
+He dwelt on this in silence while they walked on catching as they
+passed a glimpse of the red-carpeted Westmore hall on which the glass
+doors were just being closed. At length he roused himself to ask: "Does
+Mrs. Westmore look like some one you know?"
+
+"I fancied so--a girl who was at the Sacred Heart in Paris with me. But
+isn't this my corner?" she exclaimed, as they turned into another
+street, down which a laden car was descending.
+
+Its approach left them time for no more than a hurried hand-clasp, and
+when Miss Brent had been absorbed into the packed interior her
+companion, as his habit was, stood for a while where she had left him,
+gazing at some indefinite point in space; then, waking to a sudden
+consciousness of his surroundings, he walked off toward the centre of
+the town.
+
+At the junction of two business streets he met an empty car marked
+"Westmore," and springing into it, seated himself in a corner and drew
+out a pocket Shakespeare. He read on, indifferent to his surroundings,
+till the car left the asphalt streets and illuminated shop-fronts for a
+grey intermediate region of mud and macadam. Then he pocketed his volume
+and sat looking out into the gloom.
+
+The houses grew less frequent, with darker gaps of night between; and
+the rare street-lamps shone on cracked pavements, crooked
+telegraph-poles, hoardings tapestried with patent-medicine posters, and
+all the mean desolation of an American industrial suburb. Farther on
+there came a weed-grown field or two, then a row of operatives' houses,
+the showy gables of the "Eldorado" road-house--the only building in
+Westmore on which fresh paint was freely lavished--then the company
+"store," the machine shops and other out-buildings, the vast forbidding
+bulk of the factories looming above the river-bend, and the sudden
+neatness of the manager's turf and privet hedges. The scene was so
+familiar to Amherst that he had lost the habit of comparison, and his
+absorption in the moral and material needs of the workers sometimes made
+him forget the outward setting of their lives. But to-night he recalled
+the nurse's comment--"it looks so dead"--and the phrase roused him to a
+fresh perception of the scene. With sudden disgust he saw the sordidness
+of it all--the poor monotonous houses, the trampled grass-banks, the
+lean dogs prowling in refuse-heaps, the reflection of a crooked gas-lamp
+in a stagnant loop of the river; and he asked himself how it was
+possible to put any sense of moral beauty into lives bounded forever by
+the low horizon of the factory. There is a fortuitous ugliness that has
+life and hope in it: the ugliness of overcrowded city streets, of the
+rush and drive of packed activities; but this out-spread meanness of the
+suburban working colony, uncircumscribed by any pressure of surrounding
+life, and sunk into blank acceptance of its isolation, its banishment
+from beauty and variety and surprise, seemed to Amherst the very
+negation of hope and life.
+
+"She's right," he mused--"it's dead--stone dead: there isn't a drop of
+wholesome blood left in it."
+
+The Moosuc River valley, in the hollow of which, for that river's sake,
+the Westmore mills had been planted, lingered in the memory of
+pre-industrial Hanaford as the pleasantest suburb of the town. Here,
+beyond a region of orchards and farm-houses, several "leading citizens"
+had placed, above the river-bank, their prim wood-cut "residences," with
+porticoes and terraced lawns; and from the chief of these, Hopewood,
+brought into the Westmore family by the Miss Hope who had married an
+earlier Westmore, the grim mill-village had been carved. The pillared
+"residences" had, after this, inevitably fallen to base uses; but the
+old house at Hopewood, in its wooded grounds, remained, neglected but
+intact, beyond the first bend of the river, deserted as a dwelling but
+"held" in anticipation of rising values, when the inevitable growth of
+Westmore should increase the demand for small building lots. Whenever
+Amherst's eyes were refreshed by the hanging foliage above the roofs of
+Westmore, he longed to convert the abandoned country-seat into a park
+and playground for the mill-hands; but he knew that the company counted
+on the gradual sale of Hopewood as a source of profit. No--the mill-town
+would not grow beautiful as it grew larger--rather, in obedience to the
+grim law of industrial prosperity, it would soon lose its one lingering
+grace and spread out in unmitigated ugliness, devouring green fields and
+shaded slopes like some insect-plague consuming the land. The conditions
+were familiar enough to Amherst; and their apparent inevitableness
+mocked the hopes he had based on Mrs. Westmore's arrival.
+
+"Where every stone is piled on another, through the whole stupid
+structure of selfishness and egotism, how can one be pulled out without
+making the whole thing topple? And whatever they're blind to, they
+always see that," he mused, reaching up for the strap of the car.
+
+He walked a few yards beyond the manager's house, and turned down a side
+street lined with scattered cottages. Approaching one of these by a
+gravelled path he pushed open the door, and entered a sitting-room where
+a green-shaded lamp shone pleasantly on bookshelves and a crowded
+writing-table.
+
+A brisk little woman in black, laying down the evening paper as she
+rose, lifted her hands to his tall shoulders.
+
+"Well, mother," he said, stooping to her kiss.
+
+"You're late, John," she smiled back at him, not reproachfully, but with
+affection.
+
+She was a wonderfully compact and active creature, with face so young
+and hair so white that she looked as unreal as a stage mother till a
+close view revealed the fine lines that experience had drawn about her
+mouth and eyes. The eyes themselves, brightly black and glancing, had
+none of the veiled depths of her son's gaze. Their look was outward, on
+a world which had dealt her hard blows and few favours, but in which her
+interest was still fresh, amused and unabated.
+
+Amherst glanced at his watch. "Never mind--Duplain will be later still.
+I had to go into Hanaford, and he is replacing me at the office."
+
+"So much the better, dear: we can have a minute to ourselves. Sit down
+and tell me what kept you."
+
+She picked up her knitting as she spoke, having the kind of hands that
+find repose in ceaseless small activities. Her son could not remember a
+time when he had not seen those small hands in motion--shaping garments,
+darning rents, repairing furniture, exploring the inner economy of
+clocks. "I make a sort of rag-carpet of the odd minutes," she had once
+explained to a friend who wondered at her turning to her needlework in
+the moment's interval between other tasks.
+
+Amherst threw himself wearily into a chair. "I was trying to find out
+something about Dillon's case," he said.
+
+His mother turned a quick glance toward the door, rose to close it, and
+reseated herself.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I managed to have a talk with his nurse when she went off duty this
+evening."
+
+"The nurse? I wonder you could get her to speak."
+
+"Luckily she's not the regular incumbent, but a volunteer who happened
+to be here on a visit. As it was, I had some difficulty in making her
+talk--till I told her of Disbrow's letter."
+
+Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright glance from the needles. "He's very bad,
+then?"
+
+"Hopelessly maimed!"
+
+She shivered and cast down her eyes. "Do you suppose she really knows?"
+
+"She struck me as quite competent to judge."
+
+"A volunteer, you say, here on a visit? What is her name?"
+
+He raised his head with a vague look. "I never thought of asking her."
+
+Mrs. Amherst laughed. "How like you! Did she say with whom she was
+staying?"
+
+"I think she said in Oak Street--but she didn't mention any name."
+
+Mrs. Amherst wrinkled her brows thoughtfully. "I wonder if she's not the
+thin dark girl I saw the other day with Mrs. Harry Dressel. Was she tall
+and rather handsome?"
+
+"I don't know," murmured Amherst indifferently. As a rule he was
+humorously resigned to his mother's habit of deserting the general for
+the particular, and following some irrelevant thread of association in
+utter disregard of the main issue. But to-night, preoccupied with his
+subject, and incapable of conceiving how anyone else could be unaffected
+by it, he resented her indifference as a sign of incurable frivolity.
+
+"How she can live close to such suffering and forget it!" was his
+thought; then, with a movement of self-reproach, he remembered that the
+work flying through her fingers was to take shape as a garment for one
+of the infant Dillons. "She takes her pity out in action, like that
+quiet nurse, who was as cool as a drum-major till she took off her
+uniform--and then!" His face softened at the recollection of the girl's
+outbreak. Much as he admired, in theory, the woman who kept a calm
+exterior in emergencies, he had all a man's desire to know that the
+springs of feeling lay close to the unruffled surface.
+
+Mrs. Amherst had risen and crossed over to his chair. She leaned on it a
+moment, pushing the tossed brown hair from his forehead.
+
+"John, have you considered what you mean to do next?"
+
+He threw back his head to meet her gaze.
+
+"About this Dillon case," she continued. "How are all these
+investigations going to help you?"
+
+Their eyes rested on each other for a moment; then he said coldly: "You
+are afraid I am going to lose my place."
+
+She flushed like a girl and murmured: "It's not the kind of place I ever
+wanted to see you in!"
+
+"I know it," he returned in a gentler tone, clasping one of the hands on
+his chair-back. "I ought to have followed a profession, like my
+grandfather; but my father's blood was too strong in me. I should never
+have been content as anything but a working-man."
+
+"How can you call your father a working-man? He had a genius for
+mechanics, and if he had lived he would have been as great in his way as
+any statesman or lawyer."
+
+Amherst smiled. "Greater, to my thinking; but he gave me his
+hard-working hands without the genius to create with them. I wish I had
+inherited more from him, or less; but I must make the best of what I am,
+rather than try to be somebody else." He laid her hand caressingly
+against his cheek. "It's hard on you, mother--but you must bear with
+me."
+
+"I have never complained, John; but now you've chosen your work, it's
+natural that I should want you to stick to it."
+
+He rose with an impatient gesture. "Never fear; I could easily get
+another job----"
+
+"What? If Truscomb black-listed you? Do you forget that Scotch overseer
+who was here when we came?"
+
+"And whom Truscomb hounded out of the trade? I remember him," said
+Amherst grimly; "but I have an idea I am going to do the hounding this
+time."
+
+His mother sighed, but her reply was cut short by the noisy opening of
+the outer door. Amherst seemed to hear the sound with relief. "There's
+Duplain," he said, going into the passage; but on the threshold he
+encountered, not the young Alsatian overseer who boarded with them, but
+a small boy who said breathlessly: "Mr. Truscomb wants you to come down
+bimeby."
+
+"This evening? To the office?"
+
+"No--he's sick a-bed."
+
+The blood rushed to Amherst's face, and he had to press his lips close
+to check an exclamation. "Say I'll come as soon as I've had supper," he
+said.
+
+The boy vanished, and Amherst turned back to the sitting-room.
+"Truscomb's ill--he has sent for me; and I saw Mrs. Westmore arriving
+tonight! Have supper, mother--we won't wait for Duplain." His face still
+glowed with excitement, and his eyes were dark with the concentration of
+his inward vision.
+
+"Oh, John, John!" Mrs. Amherst sighed, crossing the passage to the
+kitchen.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+AT the manager's door Amherst was met by Mrs. Truscomb, a large flushed
+woman in a soiled wrapper and diamond earrings.
+
+"Mr. Truscomb's very sick. He ought not to see you. The doctor thinks--"
+she began.
+
+Dr. Disbrow, at this point, emerged from the sitting-room. He was a pale
+man, with a beard of mixed grey-and-drab, and a voice of the same
+indeterminate quality.
+
+"Good evening, Mr. Amherst. Truscomb is pretty poorly--on the edge of
+pneumonia, I'm afraid. As he seems anxious to see you I think you'd
+better go up for two minutes--not more, please." He paused, and went on
+with a smile: "You won't excite him, of course--nothing unpleasant----"
+
+"He's worried himself sick over that wretched Dillon," Mrs. Truscomb
+interposed, draping her wrapper majestically about an indignant bosom.
+
+"That's it--puts too much heart into his work. But we'll have Dillon all
+right before long," the physician genially declared.
+
+Mrs. Truscomb, with a reluctant gesture, led Amherst up the handsomely
+carpeted stairs to the room where her husband lay, a prey to the cares
+of office. She ushered the young man in, and withdrew to the next room,
+where he heard her coughing at intervals, as if to remind him that he
+was under observation.
+
+The manager of the Westmore mills was not the type of man that Amherst's
+comments on his superior suggested. As he sat propped against the
+pillows, with a brick-red flush on his cheek-bones, he seemed at first
+glance to belong to the innumerable army of American business men--the
+sallow, undersized, lacklustre drudges who have never lifted their heads
+from the ledger. Even his eye, now bright with fever, was dull and
+non-committal in daily life; and perhaps only the ramifications of his
+wrinkles could have revealed what particular ambitions had seamed his
+soul.
+
+"Good evening, Amherst. I'm down with a confounded cold."
+
+"I'm sorry to hear it," the young man forced himself to say.
+
+"Can't get my breath--that's the trouble." Truscomb paused and gasped.
+"I've just heard that Mrs. Westmore is here--and I want you to go
+round--tomorrow morning--" He had to break off once more.
+
+"Yes, sir," said Amherst, his heart leaping.
+
+"Needn't see her--ask for her father, Mr. Langhope. Tell him what the
+doctor says--I'll be on my legs in a day or two--ask 'em to wait till I
+can take 'em over the mills."
+
+He shot one of his fugitive glances at his assistant, and held up a bony
+hand. "Wait a minute. On your way there, stop and notify Mr. Gaines. He
+was to meet them here. You understand?"
+
+"Yes, sir," said Amherst; and at that moment Mrs. Truscomb appeared on
+the threshold.
+
+"I must ask you to come now, Mr. Amherst," she began haughtily; but a
+glance from her husband reduced her to a heaving pink nonentity.
+
+"Hold on, Amherst. I hear you've been in to Hanaford. Did you go to the
+hospital?"
+
+"Ezra--" his wife murmured: he looked through her.
+
+"Yes," said Amherst.
+
+Truscomb's face seemed to grow smaller and dryer. He transferred his
+look from his wife to his assistant.
+
+"All right. You'll just bear in mind that it's Disbrow's business to
+report Dillon's case to Mrs. Westmore? You're to confine yourself to my
+message. Is that clear?"
+
+"Perfectly clear. Goodnight," Amherst answered, as he turned to follow
+Mrs. Truscomb.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That same evening, four persons were seated under the bronze chandelier
+in the red satin drawing-room of the Westmore mansion. One of the four,
+the young lady in widow's weeds whose face had arrested Miss Brent's
+attention that afternoon, rose from a massively upholstered sofa and
+drifted over to the fireplace near which her father sat.
+
+"Didn't I tell you it was awful, father?" she sighed, leaning
+despondently against the high carved mantelpiece surmounted by a bronze
+clock in the form of an obelisk.
+
+Mr. Langhope, who sat smoking, with one faultlessly-clad leg crossed on
+the other, and his ebony stick reposing against the arm of his chair,
+raised his clear ironical eyes to her face.
+
+"As an archaeologist," he said, with a comprehensive wave of his hand, "I
+find it positively interesting. I should really like to come here and
+dig."
+
+There were no lamps in the room, and the numerous gas-jets of the
+chandelier shed their lights impartially on ponderously framed canvases
+of the Bay of Naples and the Hudson in Autumn, on Carrara busts and
+bronze Indians on velvet pedestals.
+
+"All this," murmured Mr. Langhope, "is getting to be as rare as the
+giant sequoias. In another fifty years we shall have collectors fighting
+for that Bay of Naples."
+
+Bessy Westmore turned from him impatiently. When she felt deeply on any
+subject her father's flippancy annoyed her.
+
+"_You_ can see, Maria," she said, seating herself beside the other lady
+of the party, "why I couldn't possibly live here."
+
+Mrs. Eustace Ansell, immediately after dinner, had bent her slender back
+above the velvet-covered writing-table, where an inkstand of Vienna
+ormolu offered its empty cup to her pen. Being habitually charged with a
+voluminous correspondence, she had foreseen this contingency and met it
+by despatching her maid for her own writing-case, which was now
+outspread before her in all its complex neatness; but at Bessy's appeal
+she wiped her pen, and turned a sympathetic gaze on her companion.
+
+Mrs. Ansell's face drew all its charm from its adaptability. It was a
+different face to each speaker: now kindling with irony, now gently
+maternal, now charged with abstract meditation--and few paused to
+reflect that, in each case, it was merely the mirror held up to some one
+else's view of life.
+
+"It needs doing over," she admitted, following the widow's melancholy
+glance about the room. "But you are a spoilt child to complain. Think of
+having a house of your own to come to, instead of having to put up at
+the Hanaford hotel!"
+
+Mrs. Westmore's attention was arrested by the first part of the reply.
+
+"Doing over? Why in the world should I do it over? No one could expect
+me to come here _now_--could they, Mr. Tredegar?" she exclaimed,
+transferring her appeal to the fourth member of the party.
+
+Mr. Tredegar, the family lawyer, who had deemed it his duty to accompany
+the widow on her visit of inspection, was strolling up and down the room
+with short pompous steps, a cigar between his lips, and his arms behind
+him. He cocked his sparrow-like head, scanned the offending apartment,
+and terminated his survey by resting his eyes on Mrs. Westmore's
+charming petulant face.
+
+"It all depends," he replied axiomatically, "how large an income you
+require."
+
+Mr. Tredegar uttered this remark with the air of one who pronounces on
+an important point in law: his lightest observation seemed a decision
+handed down from the bench to which he had never ascended. He restored
+the cigar to his lips, and sought approval in Mrs. Ansell's expressive
+eye.
+
+"Ah, that's it, Bessy. You've that to remember," the older lady
+murmured, as if struck by the profundity of the remark.
+
+Mrs. Westmore made an impatient gesture. "We've always had money
+enough--Dick was perfectly satisfied." Her voice trembled a little on
+her husband's name. "And you don't know what the place is like by
+daylight--and the people who come to call!"
+
+"Of course you needn't see any one now, dear," Mrs. Ansell reminded her,
+"except the Halford Gaineses."
+
+"I am sure they're bad enough. Juliana Gaines will say: 'My dear, is
+that the way widows' veils are worn in New York this autumn?' and
+Halford will insist on our going to one of those awful family dinners,
+all Madeira and terrapin."
+
+"It's too early for terrapin," Mrs. Ansell smiled consolingly; but Bessy
+had reverted to her argument. "Besides, what difference would my coming
+here make? I shall never understand anything about business," she
+declared.
+
+Mr. Tredegar pondered, and once more removed his cigar. "The necessity
+has never arisen. But now that you find yourself in almost sole control
+of a large property----"
+
+Mr. Langhope laughed gently. "Apply yourself, Bessy. Bring your masterly
+intellect to bear on the industrial problem."
+
+Mrs. Ansell restored the innumerable implements to her writing-case, and
+laid her arm with a caressing gesture on Mrs. Westmore's shoulder.
+"Don't tease her. She's tired, and she misses the baby."
+
+"I shall get a telegram tomorrow morning," exclaimed the young mother,
+brightening.
+
+"Of course you will. 'Cicely has just eaten two boiled eggs and a bowl
+of porridge, and is bearing up wonderfully.'"
+
+She drew Mrs. Westmore persuasively to her feet, but the widow refused
+to relinquish her hold on her grievance.
+
+"You all think I'm extravagant and careless about money," she broke out,
+addressing the room in general from the shelter of Mrs. Ansell's
+embrace; "but I know one thing: If I had my way I should begin to
+economize by selling this horrible house, instead of leaving it shut up
+from one year's end to another."
+
+Her father looked up: proposals of retrenchment always struck him as
+business-like when they did not affect his own expenditure. "What do you
+think of that, eh, Tredegar?"
+
+The eminent lawyer drew in his thin lips. "From the point of view of
+policy, I think unfavourably of it," he pronounced.
+
+Bessy's face clouded, and Mrs. Ansell argued gently: "Really, it's too
+late to look so far into the future. Remember, my dear, that we are due
+at the mills tomorrow at ten."
+
+The reminder that she must rise early had the effect of hastening Mrs.
+Westmore's withdrawal, and the two ladies, after an exchange of
+goodnights, left the men to their cigars.
+
+Mr. Langhope was the first to speak.
+
+"Bessy's as hopelessly vague about business as I am, Tredegar. Why the
+deuce Westmore left her everything outright--but he was only a heedless
+boy himself."
+
+"Yes. The way he allowed things to go, it's a wonder there was anything
+to leave. This Truscomb must be an able fellow."
+
+"Devoted to Dick's interests, I've always understood."
+
+"He makes the mills pay well, at any rate, and that's not so easy
+nowadays. But on general principles it's as well he should see that we
+mean to look into everything thoroughly. Of course Halford Gaines will
+never be more than a good figure-head, but Truscomb must be made to
+understand that Mrs. Westmore intends to interest herself personally in
+the business."
+
+"Oh, by all means--of course--" Mr. Langhope assented, his light smile
+stiffening into a yawn at the mere suggestion.
+
+He rose with an effort, supporting himself on his stick. "I think I'll
+turn in myself. There's not a readable book in that God-forsaken
+library, and I believe Maria Ansell has gone off with my volume of
+Loti."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning, when Amherst presented himself at the Westmore door,
+he had decided to follow his chief's instructions to the letter, and ask
+for Mr. Langhope only. The decision had cost him a struggle, for his
+heart was big with its purpose; but though he knew that he must soon
+place himself in open opposition to Truscomb, he recognized the prudence
+of deferring the declaration of war as long as possible.
+
+On his round of the mills, that morning, he had paused in the room where
+Mrs. Dillon knelt beside her mop and pail, and had found her, to his
+surprise, comparatively reassured and cheerful. Dr. Disbrow, she told
+him, had been in the previous evening, and had told her to take heart
+about Jim, and left her enough money to get along for a week--and a
+wonderful new cough-mixture that he'd put up for her special. Amherst
+found it difficult to listen calmly, with the nurse's words still in his
+ears, and the sight before him of Mrs. Dillon's lean shoulder-blades
+travelling painfully up and down with the sweep of the mop.
+
+"I don't suppose that cost Truscomb ten dollars," he said to himself, as
+the lift lowered him to the factory door; but another voice argued that
+he had no right to accuse Disbrow of acting as his brother-in-law's
+agent, when the gift to Mrs. Dillon might have been prompted by his own
+kindness of heart.
+
+"And what prompted the lie about her husband? Well, perhaps he's an
+incurable optimist," he summed up, springing into the Hanaford car.
+
+By the time he reached Mrs. Westmore's door his wrath had subsided, and
+he felt that he had himself well in hand. He had taken unusual pains
+with his appearance that morning--or rather his mother, learning of the
+errand on which Truscomb had sent him, had laid out his
+carefully-brushed Sunday clothes, and adjusted his tie with skilful
+fingers. "You'd really be handsome, Johnny, if you were only a little
+vainer," she said, pushing him away to survey the result; and when he
+stared at her, repeating: "I never heard that vanity made a man
+better-looking," she responded gaily: "Oh, up to a certain point,
+because it teaches him how to use what he's got. So remember," she
+charged him, as he smiled and took up his hat, "that you're going to see
+a pretty young woman, and that you're not a hundred years old yourself."
+
+"I'll try to," he answered, humouring her, "but as I've been forbidden
+to ask for her, I am afraid your efforts will be wasted."
+
+The servant to whom he gave his message showed him into the library,
+with a request that he should wait; and there, to his surprise, he
+found, not the white-moustached gentleman whom he had guessed the night
+before to be Mr. Langhope, but a young lady in deep black, who turned on
+him a look of not unfriendly enquiry.
+
+It was not Bessy's habit to anticipate the clock; but her distaste for
+her surroundings, and the impatience to have done with the tedious
+duties awaiting her, had sent her downstairs before the rest of the
+party. Her life had been so free from tiresome obligations that she had
+but a small stock of patience to meet them with; and already, after a
+night at Hanaford, she was pining to get back to the comforts of her own
+country-house, the soft rut of her daily habits, the funny chatter of
+her little girl, the long stride of her Irish hunter across the
+Hempstead plains--to everything, in short, that made it conceivably
+worth while to get up in the morning.
+
+The servant who ushered in Amherst, thinking the room empty, had not
+mentioned his name; and for a moment he and his hostess examined each
+other in silence, Bessy puzzled at the unannounced appearance of a
+good-looking young man who might have been some one she had met and
+forgotten, while Amherst felt his self-possession slipping away into the
+depths of a pair of eyes so dark-lashed and deeply blue that his only
+thought was one of wonder at his previous indifference to women's eyes.
+
+"Mrs. Westmore?" he asked, restored to self-command by the perception
+that his longed-for opportunity was at hand; and Bessy, his voice
+confirming the inference she had drawn from his appearance, replied with
+a smile: "I am Mrs. Westmore. But if you have come to see me, I ought to
+tell you that in a moment I shall be obliged to go out to our mills. I
+have a business appointment with our manager, but if----"
+
+She broke off, gracefully waiting for him to insert his explanation.
+
+"I have come from the manager; I am John Amherst--your assistant
+manager," he added, as the mention of his name apparently conveyed no
+enlightenment.
+
+Mrs. Westmore's face changed, and she let slip a murmur of surprise
+that would certainly have flattered Amherst's mother if she could have
+heard it; but it had an opposite effect on the young man, who inwardly
+accused himself of having tried to disguise his trade by not putting on
+his everyday clothes.
+
+"How stupid of me! I took you for--I had no idea; I didn't expect Mr.
+Truscomb here," his employer faltered in embarrassment; then their eyes
+met and both smiled.
+
+"Mr. Truscomb sent me to tell you that he is ill, and will not be able
+to show you the mills today. I didn't mean to ask for you--I was told to
+give the message to Mr. Langhope," Amherst scrupulously explained,
+trying to repress the sudden note of joy in his voice.
+
+He was subject to the unobservant man's acute flashes of vision, and
+Mrs. Westmore's beauty was like a blinding light abruptly turned on eyes
+subdued to obscurity. As he spoke, his glance passed from her face to
+her hair, and remained caught in its meshes. He had never seen such
+hair--it did not seem to grow in the usual orderly way, but bubbled up
+all over her head in independent clusters of brightness, breaking, about
+the brow, the temples, the nape, into little irrelevant waves and eddies
+of light, with dusky hollows of softness where the hand might plunge. It
+takes but the throb of a nerve to carry such a complex impression from
+the eye to the mind, but the object of the throb had perhaps felt the
+electric flash of its passage, for her colour rose while Amherst spoke.
+
+"Ah, here is my father now," she said with a vague accent of relief, as
+Mr. Langhope's stick was heard tapping its way across the hall.
+
+When he entered, accompanied by Mrs. Ansell, his sharp glance of
+surprise at her visitor told her that he was as much misled as herself,
+and gave her a sense of being agreeably justified in her blunder. "If
+_father_ thinks you're a gentleman----" her shining eyes seemed to say,
+as she explained: "This is Mr. Amherst, father: Mr. Truscomb has sent
+him."
+
+"Mr. Amherst?" Langhope, with extended hand, echoed affably but vaguely;
+and it became clear that neither Mrs. Westmore nor her father had ever
+before heard the name of their assistant manager.
+
+The discovery stung Amherst to a somewhat unreasoning resentment; and
+while he was trying to subordinate this sentiment to the larger feelings
+with which he had entered the house, Mrs. Ansell, turning her eyes on
+him, said gently: "Your name is unusual. I had a friend named Lucy Warne
+who married a very clever man--a mechanical genius----"
+
+Amherst's face cleared. "My father _was_ a genius; and my mother is Lucy
+Warne," he said, won by the soft look and the persuasive voice.
+
+"What a delightful coincidence! We were girls together at Albany. You
+must remember Judge Warne?" she said, turning to Mr. Langhope, who,
+twirling his white moustache, murmured, a shade less cordially: "Of
+course--of course--delightful--most interesting."
+
+Amherst did not notice the difference. His perceptions were already
+enveloped in the caress that emanated from Mrs. Ansell's voice and
+smile; and he only asked himself vaguely if it were possible that this
+graceful woman, with her sunny autumnal air, could really be his
+mother's contemporary. But the question brought an instant reaction of
+bitterness.
+
+"Poverty is the only thing that makes people old nowadays," he
+reflected, painfully conscious of his own share in the hardships his
+mother had endured; and when Mrs. Ansell went on: "I must go and see
+her--you must let me take her by surprise," he said stiffly: "We live
+out at the mills, a long way from here."
+
+"Oh, we're going there this morning," she rejoined, unrebuffed by what
+she probably took for a mere social awkwardness, while Mrs. Westmore
+interposed: "But, Maria, Mr. Truscomb is ill, and has sent Mr. Amherst
+to say that we are not to come."
+
+"Yes: so Gaines has just telephoned. It's most unfortunate," Mr.
+Langhope grumbled. He too was already beginning to chafe at the
+uncongenial exile of Hanaford, and he shared his daughter's desire to
+despatch the tiresome business before them.
+
+Mr. Tredegar had meanwhile appeared, and when Amherst had been named to
+him, and had received his Olympian nod, Bessy anxiously imparted her
+difficulty.
+
+"But how ill is Mr. Truscomb? Do you think he can take us over the mills
+tomorrow?" she appealed to Amherst.
+
+"I'm afraid not; I am sure he can't. He has a touch of bronchitis."
+
+This announcement was met by a general outcry, in which sympathy for the
+manager was not the predominating note. Mrs. Ansell saved the situation
+by breathing feelingly: "Poor man!" and after a decent echo of the
+phrase, and a doubtful glance at her father, Mrs. Westmore said: "If
+it's bronchitis he may be ill for days, and what in the world are we to
+do?"
+
+"Pack up and come back later," suggested Mr. Langhope briskly; but while
+Bessy sighed "Oh, that dreadful journey!" Mr. Tredegar interposed with
+authority: "One moment, Langhope, please. Mr. Amherst, is Mrs. Westmore
+expected at the mills?"
+
+"Yes, I believe they know she is coming."
+
+"Then I think, my dear, that to go back to New York without showing
+yourself would, under the circumstances, be--er--an error in judgment."
+
+"Good Lord, Tredegar, you don't expect to keep us kicking our heels here
+for days?" her father ejaculated.
+
+"I can certainly not afford to employ mine in that manner for even a
+fraction of a day," rejoined the lawyer, always acutely resentful of the
+suggestion that he had a disengaged moment; "but meanwhile----"
+
+"Father," Bessy interposed, with an eagerly flushing cheek, "don't you
+see that the only thing for us to do is to go over the mills now--at
+once--with Mr. Amherst?"
+
+Mr. Langhope stared: he was always adventurously ready to unmake plans,
+but it flustered him to be called on to remake them. "Eh--what? Now--at
+once? But Gaines was to have gone with us, and how on earth are we to
+get at him? He telephoned me that, as the visit was given up, he should
+ride out to his farm."
+
+"Oh, never mind--or, at least, all the better!" his daughter urged. "We
+can see the mills just as well without him; and we shall get on so much
+more quickly."
+
+"Well--well--what do you say, Tredegar?" murmured Mr. Langhope, allured
+by her last argument; and Bessy, clasping her hands, summed up
+enthusiastically: "And I shall understand so much better without a lot
+of people trying to explain to me at once!"
+
+Her sudden enthusiasm surprised no one, for even Mrs. Ansell, expert as
+she was in the interpreting of tones, set it down to the natural desire
+to have done as quickly as might be with Hanaford.
+
+"Mrs. Westmore has left her little girl at home," she said to Amherst,
+with a smile intended to counteract the possible ill-effect of the
+impression.
+
+But Amherst suspected no slight in his employer's eagerness to visit
+Westmore. His overmastering thought was one of joy as the fulness of his
+opportunity broke on him. To show her the mills himself--to bring her
+face to face with her people, unhampered by Truscomb's jealous
+vigilance, and Truscomb's false explanations; to see the angel of pity
+stir the depths of those unfathomable eyes, when they rested, perhaps
+for the first time, on suffering that it was in their power to smile
+away as easily as they had smiled away his own distrust--all this the
+wonderful moment had brought him, and thoughts and arguments thronged so
+hot on his lips that he kept silence, fearing lest he should say too
+much.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+JOHN AMHERST was no one-sided idealist. He felt keenly the growing
+complexity of the relation between employer and worker, the seeming
+hopelessness of permanently harmonizing their claims, the recurring
+necessity of fresh compromises and adjustments. He hated rant, demagogy,
+the rash formulating of emotional theories; and his contempt for bad
+logic and subjective judgments led him to regard with distrust the
+panaceas offered for the cure of economic evils. But his heart ached
+for the bitter throes with which the human machine moves on. He felt the
+menace of industrial conditions when viewed collectively, their
+poignancy when studied in the individual lives of the toilers among whom
+his lot was cast; and clearly as he saw the need of a philosophic survey
+of the question, he was sure that only through sympathy with its
+personal, human side could a solution be reached. The disappearance of
+the old familiar contact between master and man seemed to him one of the
+great wrongs of the new industrial situation. That the breach must be
+farther widened by the ultimate substitution of the stock-company for
+the individual employer--a fact obvious to any student of economic
+tendencies--presented to Amherst's mind one of the most painful problems
+in the scheme of social readjustment. But it was characteristic of him
+to dwell rather on the removal of immediate difficulties than in the
+contemplation of those to come, and while the individual employer was
+still to be reckoned with, the main thing was to bring him closer to his
+workers. Till he entered personally into their hardships and
+aspirations--till he learned what they wanted and why they wanted
+it--Amherst believed that no mere law-making, however enlightened, could
+create a wholesome relation between the two.
+
+This feeling was uppermost as he sat with Mrs. Westmore in the carriage
+which was carrying them to the mills. He had meant to take the trolley
+back to Westmore, but at a murmured word from Mr. Tredegar Bessy had
+offered him a seat at her side, leaving others to follow. This
+culmination of his hopes--the unlooked-for chance of a half-hour alone
+with her--left Amherst oppressed with the swiftness of the minutes. He
+had so much to say--so much to prepare her for--yet how begin, while he
+was in utter ignorance of her character and her point of view, and while
+her lovely nearness left him so little chance of perceiving anything
+except itself?
+
+But he was not often the victim of his sensations, and presently there
+emerged, out of the very consciousness of her grace and her
+completeness, a clearer sense of the conditions which, in a measure, had
+gone to produce them. Her dress could not have hung in such subtle
+folds, her white chin have nestled in such rich depths of fur, the
+pearls in her ears have given back the light from such pure curves, if
+thin shoulders in shapeless gingham had not bent, day in, day out, above
+the bobbins and carders, and weary ears throbbed even at night with the
+tumult of the looms. Amherst, however, felt no sensational resentment at
+the contrast. He had lived too much with ugliness and want not to
+believe in human nature's abiding need of their opposite. He was glad
+there was room for such beauty in the world, and sure that its purpose
+was an ameliorating one, if only it could be used as a beautiful spirit
+would use it.
+
+The carriage had turned into one of the nondescript thoroughfares, half
+incipient street, half decaying lane, which dismally linked the
+mill-village to Hanaford. Bessy looked out on the ruts, the hoardings,
+the starved trees dangling their palsied leaves in the radiant October
+light; then she sighed: "What a good day for a gallop!"
+
+Amherst felt a momentary chill, but the naturalness of the exclamation
+disarmed him, and the words called up thrilling memories of his own
+college days, when he had ridden his grandfather's horses in the famous
+hunting valley not a hundred miles from Hanaford.
+
+Bessy met his smile with a glow of understanding. "You like riding too,
+I'm sure?"
+
+"I used to; but I haven't been in the saddle for years. Factory managers
+don't keep hunters," he said laughing.
+
+Her murmur of embarrassment showed that she took this as an apologetic
+allusion to his reduced condition, and in his haste to correct this
+impression he added: "If I regretted anything in my other life, it would
+certainly be a gallop on a day like this; but I chose my trade
+deliberately, and I've never been sorry for my choice."
+
+He had hardly spoken when he felt the inappropriateness of this avowal;
+but her prompt response showed him, a moment later, that it was, after
+all, the straightest way to his end.
+
+"You find the work interesting? I'm sure it must be. You'll think me
+very ignorant--my husband and I came here so seldom...I feel as if I
+ought to know so much more about it," she explained.
+
+At last the note for which he waited had been struck. "Won't you try
+to--now you're here? There's so much worth knowing," he broke out
+impetuously.
+
+Mrs. Westmore coloured, but rather with surprise than displeasure. "I'm
+very stupid--I've no head for business--but I will try to," she said.
+
+"It's not business that I mean; it's the personal relation--just the
+thing the business point of view leaves out. Financially, I don't
+suppose your mills could be better run; but there are over seven hundred
+women working in them, and there's so much to be done, just for them and
+their children."
+
+He caught a faint hint of withdrawal in her tone. "I have always
+understood that Mr. Truscomb did everything----"
+
+Amherst flushed; but he was beyond caring for the personal rebuff. "Do
+you leave it to your little girl's nurses to do everything for her?" he
+asked.
+
+Her surprise seemed about to verge on annoyance: he saw the preliminary
+ruffling of the woman who is put to the trouble of defending her
+dignity. "Really, I don't see--" she began with distant politeness; then
+her face changed and melted, and again her blood spoke for her before
+her lips.
+
+"I am glad you told me that, Mr. Amherst. Of course I want to do
+whatever I can. I should like you to point out everything----"
+
+Amherst's resolve had been taken while she spoke. He _would_ point out
+everything, would stretch his opportunity to its limit. All thoughts of
+personal prudence were flung to the winds--her blush and tone had routed
+the waiting policy. He would declare war on Truscomb at once, and take
+the chance of dismissal. At least, before he went he would have brought
+this exquisite creature face to face with the wrongs from which her
+luxuries were drawn, and set in motion the regenerating impulses of
+indignation and pity. He did not stop to weigh the permanent advantage
+of this course. His only feeling was that the chance would never again
+be given him--that if he let her go away, back to her usual life, with
+eyes unopened and heart untouched, there would be no hope of her ever
+returning. It was far better that he should leave for good, and that she
+should come back, as come back she must, more and more often, if once
+she could be made to feel the crying need of her presence.
+
+But where was he to begin? How give her even a glimpse of the packed and
+intricate situation?
+
+"Mrs. Westmore," he said, "there's no time to say much now, but before
+we get to the mills I want to ask you a favour. If, as you go through
+them, you see anything that seems to need explaining, will you let me
+come and tell you about it tonight? I say tonight," he added, meeting
+her look of enquiry, "because later--tomorrow even--I might not have the
+chance. There are some things--a good many--in the management of the
+mills that Mr. Truscomb doesn't see as I do. I don't mean business
+questions: wages and dividends and so on--those are out of my province.
+I speak merely in the line of my own work--my care of the hands, and
+what I believe they need and don't get under the present system.
+Naturally, if Mr. Truscomb were well, I shouldn't have had this chance
+of putting the case to you; but since it's come my way, I must seize it
+and take the consequences."
+
+Even as he spoke, by a swift reaction of thought, those consequences
+rose before him in all their seriousness. It was not only, or chiefly,
+that he feared to lose his place; though he knew his mother had not
+spoken lightly in instancing the case of the foreman whom Truscomb, to
+gratify a personal spite, had for months kept out of a job in his trade.
+And there were special reasons why Amherst should heed her warning. In
+adopting a manual trade, instead of one of the gentlemanly professions
+which the men of her family had always followed, he had not only
+disappointed her hopes, and to a great extent thrown away the benefits
+of the education she had pinched herself to give him, but had disturbed
+all the habits of her life by removing her from her normal surroundings
+to the depressing exile of a factory-settlement. However much he blamed
+himself for exacting this sacrifice, it had been made so cheerfully that
+the consciousness of it never clouded his life with his mother; but her
+self-effacement made him the more alive to his own obligations, and
+having placed her in a difficult situation he had always been careful
+not to increase its difficulties by any imprudence in his conduct toward
+his employers. Yet, grave as these considerations were, they were really
+less potent than his personal desire to remain at Westmore. Lightly as
+he had just resolved to risk the chance of dismissal, all his future was
+bound up in the hope of retaining his place. His heart was in the work
+at Westmore, and the fear of not being able to get other employment was
+a small factor in his intense desire to keep his post. What he really
+wanted was to speak out, and yet escape the consequences: by some
+miraculous reversal of probability to retain his position and yet effect
+Truscomb's removal. The idea was so fantastic that he felt it merely as
+a quickening of all his activities, a tremendous pressure of will along
+undetermined lines. He had no wish to take the manager's place; but his
+dream was to see Truscomb superseded by a man of the new school, in
+sympathy with the awakening social movement--a man sufficiently
+practical to "run" the mills successfully, yet imaginative enough to
+regard that task as the least of his duties. He saw the promise of such
+a man in Louis Duplain, the overseer who boarded with Mrs. Amherst: a
+young fellow of Alsatian extraction, a mill-hand from childhood, who had
+worked at his trade in Europe as well as in America, and who united with
+more manual skill, and a greater nearness to the workman's standpoint,
+all Amherst's enthusiasm for the experiments in social betterment that
+were making in some of the English and continental factories. His
+strongest wish was to see such a man as Duplain in control at Westmore
+before he himself turned to the larger work which he had begun to see
+before him as the sequel to his factory-training.
+
+All these thoughts swept through him in the instant's pause before Mrs.
+Westmore, responding to his last appeal, said with a graceful eagerness:
+"Yes, you must come tonight. I want to hear all you can tell me--and if
+there is anything wrong you must show me how I can make it better."
+
+"I'll show her, and Truscomb shan't turn me out for it," was the vow he
+passionately registered as the carriage drew up at the office-door of
+the main building.
+
+How this impossible result was to be achieved he had no farther time to
+consider, for in another moment the rest of the party had entered the
+factory with them, and speech was followed up in the roar of the
+machinery.
+
+Amherst's zeal for his cause was always quickened by the sight of the
+mills in action. He loved the work itself as much as he hated the
+conditions under which it was done; and he longed to see on the
+operatives' faces something of the ardour that lit up his own when he
+entered the work-rooms. It was this passion for machinery that at school
+had turned him from his books, at college had drawn him to the courses
+least in the line of his destined profession; and it always seized on
+him afresh when he was face to face with the monstrous energies of the
+mills. It was not only the sense of power that thrilled him--he felt a
+beauty in the ordered activity of the whole intricate organism, in the
+rhythm of dancing bobbins and revolving cards, the swift continuous
+outpour of doublers and ribbon-laps, the steady ripple of the long
+ply-frames, the terrible gnashing play of the looms--all these varying
+subordinate motions, gathered up into the throb of the great engines
+which fed the giant's arteries, and were in turn ruled by the invisible
+action of quick thought and obedient hands, always produced in Amherst a
+responsive rush of life.
+
+He knew this sensation was too specialized to affect his companions; but
+he expected Mrs. Westmore to be all the more alive to the other
+side--the dark side of monotonous human toil, of the banquet of flesh
+and blood and brain perpetually served up to the monster whose
+insatiable jaws the looms so grimly typified. Truscomb, as he had told
+her, was a good manager from the profit-taking standpoint. Since it was
+profitable to keep the machinery in order, he maintained throughout the
+factory a high standard of mechanical supervision, except where one or
+two favoured overseers--for Truscomb was given to favoritism--shirked
+the duties of their departments. But it was of the essence of Truscomb's
+policy--and not the least of the qualities which made him a "paying"
+manager--that he saved money scrupulously where its outlay would not
+have resulted in larger earnings. To keep the floors scrubbed, the
+cotton-dust swept up, the rooms freshly whitewashed and well-ventilated,
+far from adding the smallest fraction to the quarterly dividends, would
+have deducted from them the slight cost of this additional labour; and
+Truscomb therefore economized on scrubbers, sweepers and window-washers,
+and on all expenses connected with improved ventilation and other
+hygienic precautions. Though the whole factory was over-crowded, the
+newest buildings were more carefully planned, and had the usual sanitary
+improvements; but the old mills had been left in their original state,
+and even those most recently built were fast lapsing into squalor. It
+was no wonder, therefore, that workers imprisoned within such walls
+should reflect their long hours of deadening toil in dull eyes and
+anaemic skins, and in the dreary lassitude with which they bent to their
+tasks.
+
+Surely, Amherst argued, Mrs. Westmore must feel this; must feel it all
+the more keenly, coming from an atmosphere so different, from a life
+where, as he instinctively divined, all was in harmony with her own
+graceful person. But a deep disappointment awaited him. He was still
+under the spell of their last moments in the carriage, when her face and
+voice had promised so much, when she had seemed so deeply, if vaguely,
+stirred by his appeal. But as they passed from one resounding room to
+the other--from the dull throb of the carding-room, the groan of the
+ply-frames, the long steady pound of the slashers, back to the angry
+shriek of the fierce unappeasable looms--the light faded from her eyes
+and she looked merely bewildered and stunned.
+
+Amherst, hardened to the din of the factory, could not measure its
+effect on nerves accustomed to the subdued sounds and spacious
+stillnesses which are the last refinement of luxury. Habit had made him
+unconscious of that malicious multiplication and subdivision of noise
+that kept every point of consciousness vibrating to a different note, so
+that while one set of nerves was torn as with pincers by the dominant
+scream of the looms, others were thrilled with a separate pain by the
+ceaseless accompaniment of drumming, hissing, grating and crashing that
+shook the great building. Amherst felt this tumult only as part of the
+atmosphere of the mills; and to ears trained like his own he could make
+his voice heard without difficulty. But his attempts at speech were
+unintelligible to Mrs. Westmore and her companions, and after vainly
+trying to communicate with him by signs they hurried on as if to escape
+as quickly as possible from the pursuing whirlwind.
+
+Amherst could not allow for the depressing effect of this enforced
+silence. He did not see that if Bessy could have questioned him the
+currents of sympathy might have remained open between them, whereas,
+compelled to walk in silence through interminable ranks of meaningless
+machines, to which the human workers seemed mere automatic appendages,
+she lost all perception of what the scene meant. He had forgotten, too,
+that the swift apprehension of suffering in others is as much the result
+of training as the immediate perception of beauty. Both perceptions may
+be inborn, but if they are not they can be developed only through the
+discipline of experience.
+
+"That girl in the hospital would have seen it all," he reflected, as the
+vision of Miss Brent's small incisive profile rose before him; but the
+next moment he caught the light on Mrs. Westmore's hair, as she bent
+above a card, and the paler image faded like a late moon in the sunrise.
+
+Meanwhile Mrs. Ansell, seeing that the detailed inspection of the
+buildings was as trying to Mr. Langhope's lameness as to his daughter's
+nerves, had proposed to turn back with him and drive to Mrs. Amherst's,
+where he might leave her to call while the others were completing their
+rounds. It was one of Mrs. Ansell's gifts to detect the first symptoms
+of _ennui_ in her companions, and produce a remedy as patly as old
+ladies whisk out a scent-bottle or a cough-lozenge; and Mr. Langhope's
+look of relief showed the timeliness of her suggestion.
+
+Amherst was too preoccupied to wonder how his mother would take this
+visit; but he welcomed Mr. Langhope's departure, hoping that the
+withdrawal of his ironic smile would leave his daughter open to gentler
+influences. Mr. Tredegar, meanwhile, was projecting his dry glance over
+the scene, trying to converse by signs with the overseers of the
+different rooms, and pausing now and then to contemplate, not so much
+the workers themselves as the special tasks which engaged them.
+
+How these spectators of the party's progress were affected by Mrs.
+Westmore's appearance, even Amherst, for all his sympathy with their
+views, could not detect. They knew that she was the new owner, that a
+disproportionate amount of the result of their toil would in future pass
+through her hands, spread carpets for her steps, and hang a setting of
+beauty about her eyes; but the knowledge seemed to produce no special
+interest in her personality. A change of employer was not likely to make
+any change in their lot: their welfare would probably continue to depend
+on Truscomb's favour. The men hardly raised their heads as Mrs. Westmore
+passed; the women stared, but with curiosity rather than interest; and
+Amherst could not tell whether their sullenness reacted on Mrs.
+Westmore, or whether they were unconsciously chilled by her
+indifference. The result was the same: the distance between them seemed
+to increase instead of diminishing; and he smiled ironically to think of
+the form his appeal had taken--"If you see anything that seems to need
+explaining." Why, she saw nothing--nothing but the greasy floor under
+her feet, the cotton-dust in her eyes, the dizzy incomprehensible
+whirring of innumerable belts and wheels! Once out of it all, she would
+make haste to forget the dreary scene without pausing to ask for any
+explanation of its dreariness.
+
+In the intensity of his disappointment he sought a pretext to cut short
+the tour of the buildings, that he might remove his eyes from the face
+he had so vainly watched for any sign of awakening. And then, as he
+despaired of it, the change came.
+
+They had entered the principal carding-room, and were half-way down its
+long central passage, when Mr. Tredegar, who led the procession, paused
+before one of the cards.
+
+"What's that?" he asked, pointing to a ragged strip of black cloth tied
+conspicuously to the frame of the card.
+
+The overseer of the room, a florid young man with dissipated eyes, who,
+at Amherst's signal, had attached himself to the party, stopped short
+and turned a furious glance on the surrounding operatives.
+
+"What in hell...? It's the first I seen of it," he exclaimed, making an
+ineffectual attempt to snatch the mourning emblem from its place.
+
+At the same instant the midday whistle boomed through the building, and
+at the signal the machinery stopped, and silence fell on the mills. The
+more distant workers at once left their posts to catch up the hats and
+coats heaped untidily in the corners; but those nearer by, attracted by
+the commotion around the card, stood spell-bound, fixing the visitors
+with a dull stare.
+
+Amherst had reddened to the roots of his hair. He knew in a flash what
+the token signified, and the sight stirred his pity; but it also jarred
+on his strong sense of discipline, and he turned sternly to the
+operatives.
+
+"What does this mean?"
+
+There was a short silence; then one of the hands, a thin bent man with
+mystic eyes, raised his head and spoke.
+
+"We done that for Dillon," he said.
+
+Amherst's glance swept the crowded faces. "But Dillon was not killed,"
+he exclaimed, while the overseer, drawing out his pen-knife, ripped off
+the cloth and tossed it contemptuously into a heap of cotton-refuse at
+his feet.
+
+"Might better ha' been," came from another hand; and a deep "That's so"
+of corroboration ran through the knot of workers.
+
+Amherst felt a touch on his arm, and met Mrs. Westmore's eyes. "What has
+happened? What do they mean?" she asked in a startled voice.
+
+"There was an accident here two days ago: a man got caught in the card
+behind him, and his right hand was badly crushed."
+
+Mr. Tredegar intervened with his dry note of command. "How serious is
+the accident? How did it happen?" he enquired.
+
+"Through the man's own carelessness--ask the manager," the overseer
+interposed before Amherst could answer.
+
+A deep murmur of dissent ran through the crowd, but Amherst, without
+noticing the overseer's reply, said to Mr. Tredegar: "He's at the Hope
+Hospital. He will lose his hand, and probably the whole arm."
+
+He had not meant to add this last phrase. However strongly his
+sympathies were aroused, it was against his rule, at such a time, to say
+anything which might inflame the quick passions of the workers: he had
+meant to make light of the accident, and dismiss the operatives with a
+sharp word of reproof. But Mrs. Westmore's face was close to his: he saw
+the pity in her eyes, and feared, if he checked its expression, that he
+might never again have the chance of calling it forth.
+
+"His right arm? How terrible! But then he will never be able to work
+again!" she exclaimed, in all the horror of a first confrontation with
+the inexorable fate of the poor.
+
+Her eyes turned from Amherst and rested on the faces pressing about her.
+There were many women's faces among them--the faces of fagged
+middle-age, and of sallow sedentary girlhood. For the first time Mrs.
+Westmore seemed to feel the bond of blood between herself and these dim
+creatures of the underworld: as Amherst watched her the lovely miracle
+was wrought. Her pallour gave way to a quick rush of colour, her eyes
+widened like a frightened child's, and two tears rose and rolled slowly
+down her face.
+
+"Oh, why wasn't I told? Is he married? Has he children? What does it
+matter whose fault it was?" she cried, her questions pouring out
+disconnectedly on a wave of anger and compassion.
+
+"It warn't his fault.... The cards are too close.... It'll happen
+again.... He's got three kids at home," broke from the operatives; and
+suddenly a voice exclaimed "Here's his wife now," and the crowd divided
+to make way for Mrs. Dillon, who, passing through the farther end of the
+room, had been waylaid and dragged toward the group.
+
+She hung back, shrinking from the murderous machine, which she beheld
+for the first time since her husband's accident; then she saw Amherst,
+guessed the identity of the lady at his side, and flushed up to her
+haggard forehead. Mrs. Dillon had been good-looking in her earlier
+youth, and sufficient prettiness lingered in her hollow-cheeked face to
+show how much more had been sacrificed to sickness and unwholesome toil.
+
+"Oh, ma'am, ma'am, it warn't Jim's fault--there ain't a steadier man
+living. The cards is too crowded," she sobbed out.
+
+Some of the other women began to cry: a wave of sympathy ran through
+the circle, and Mrs. Westmore moved forward with an answering
+exclamation. "You poor creature...you poor creature...." She opened her
+arms to Mrs. Dillon, and the scrubber's sobs were buried on her
+employer's breast.
+
+"I will go to the hospital--I will come and see you--I will see that
+everything is done," Bessy reiterated. "But why are you here? How is it
+that you have had to leave your children?" She freed herself to turn a
+reproachful glance on Amherst. "You don't mean to tell me that, at such
+a time, you keep the poor woman at work?"
+
+"Mrs. Dillon has not been working here lately," Amherst answered. "The
+manager took her back to-day at her own request, that she might earn
+something while her husband was in hospital."
+
+Mrs. Westmore's eyes shone indignantly. "Earn something? But surely----"
+
+She met a silencing look from Mr. Tredegar, who had stepped between Mrs.
+Dillon and herself.
+
+"My dear child, no one doubts--none of these good people doubt--that you
+will look into the case, and do all you can to alleviate it; but let me
+suggest that this is hardly the place----"
+
+She turned from him with an appealing glance at Amherst.
+
+"I think," the latter said, as their eyes met, "that you had better let
+me dismiss the hands: they have only an hour at midday."
+
+She signed her assent, and he turned to the operatives and said quietly:
+"You have heard Mrs. Westmore's promise; now take yourselves off, and
+give her a clear way to the stairs."
+
+They dropped back, and Mr. Tredegar drew Bessy's arm through his; but as
+he began to move away she turned and laid her hand on Mrs. Dillon's
+shoulder.
+
+"You must not stay here--you must go back to the children. I will make
+it right with Mr. Truscomb," she said in a reassuring whisper; then,
+through her tears, she smiled a farewell at the lingering knot of
+operatives, and followed her companions to the door.
+
+In silence they descended the many stairs and crossed the shabby
+unfenced grass-plot between the mills and the manager's office. It was
+not till they reached the carriage that Mrs. Westmore spoke.
+
+"But Maria is waiting for us--we must call for her!" she said, rousing
+herself; and as Amherst opened the carriage-door she added: "You will
+show us the way? You will drive with us?"
+
+During the drive Bessy remained silent, as if re-absorbed in the
+distress of the scene she had just witnessed; and Amherst found himself
+automatically answering Mr. Tredegar's questions, while his own mind
+had no room for anything but the sense of her tremulous lips and of her
+eyes enlarged by tears. He had been too much engrossed in the momentous
+issues of her visit to the mills to remember that she had promised to
+call at his mother's for Mrs. Ansell; but now that they were on their
+way thither he found himself wishing that the visit might have been
+avoided. He was too proud of his mother to feel any doubt of the
+impression she would produce; but what would Mrs. Westmore think of
+their way of living, of the cheap jauntiness of the cottage, and the
+smell of cooking penetrating all its thin partitions? Duplain, too,
+would be coming in for dinner; and Amherst, in spite of his liking for
+the young overseer, became conscious of a rather overbearing freedom in
+his manner, the kind of misplaced ease which the new-made American
+affects as the readiest sign of equality. All these trifles, usually
+non-existent or supremely indifferent to Amherst, now assumed a sudden
+importance, behind which he detected the uneasy desire that Mrs.
+Westmore should not regard him as less of her own class than his
+connections and his bringing-up entitled him to be thought. In a flash
+he saw what he had forfeited by his choice of a calling--equal contact
+with the little circle of people who gave life its crowning grace and
+facility; and the next moment he was blushing at this reversal of his
+standards, and wondering, almost contemptuously, what could be the
+nature of the woman whose mere presence could produce such a change.
+
+But there was no struggling against her influence; and as, the night
+before, he had looked at Westmore with the nurse's eyes, so he now found
+himself seeing his house as it must appear to Mrs. Westmore. He noticed
+the shabby yellow paint of the palings, the neglected garden of their
+neighbour, the week's wash flaunting itself indecently through the
+denuded shrubs about the kitchen porch; and as he admitted his
+companions to the narrow passage he was assailed by the expected whiff
+of "boiled dinner," with which the steam of wash-tubs was intimately
+mingled.
+
+Duplain was in the passage; he had just come out of the kitchen, and the
+fact that he had been washing his hands in the sink was made evident by
+his rolled-back shirt-sleeves, and by the shiny redness of the knuckles
+he was running through his stiff black hair.
+
+"Hallo, John," he said, in his aggressive voice, which rose abruptly at
+sight of Amherst's companions; and at the same moment the frowsy
+maid-of-all-work, crimson from stooping over the kitchen stove, thrust
+her head out to call after him: "See here, Mr. Duplain, don't you leave
+your cravat laying round in my dough."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+MRS. WESTMORE stayed just long enough not to break in too abruptly on
+the flow of her friend's reminiscences, and to impress herself on Mrs.
+Amherst's delighted eyes as an embodiment of tactfulness and
+grace--looking sympathetically about the little room, which, with its
+books, its casts, its photographs of memorable pictures, seemed, after
+all, a not incongruous setting to her charms; so that when she rose to
+go, saying, as her hand met Amherst's, "Tonight, then, you must tell me
+all about those poor Dillons," he had the sense of having penetrated so
+far into her intimacy that a new Westmore must inevitably result from
+their next meeting.
+
+"Say, John--the boss is a looker," Duplain commented across the
+dinner-table, with the slangy grossness he sometimes affected; but
+Amherst left it to his mother to look a quiet rebuke, feeling himself
+too aloof from such contacts to resent them.
+
+He had to rouse himself with an effort to take in the overseer's next
+observation. "There was another lady at the office this morning,"
+Duplain went on, while the two men lit their cigars in the porch.
+"Asking after you--tried to get me to show her over the mills when I
+said you were busy."
+
+"Asking after me? What did she look like?"
+
+"Well, her face was kinder white and small, with an awful lot of black
+hair fitting close to it. Said she came from Hope Hospital."
+
+Amherst looked up. "Did you show her over?" he asked with sudden
+interest.
+
+Duplain laughed slangily. "What? Me? And have Truscomb get on to it and
+turn me down? How'd I know she wasn't a yellow reporter?"
+
+Amherst uttered an impatient exclamation. "I wish to heaven a yellow
+reporter _would_ go through these mills, and show them up in head-lines
+a yard high!"
+
+He regretted not having seen the nurse again: he felt sure she would
+have been interested in the working of the mills, and quick to notice
+the signs of discouragement and ill-health in the workers' faces; but a
+moment later his regret was dispelled by the thought of his visit to
+Mrs. Westmore. The afternoon hours dragged slowly by in the office,
+where he was bound to his desk by Truscomb's continued absence; but at
+length the evening whistle blew, the clerks in the outer room caught
+their hats from the rack, Duplain presented himself with the day's
+report, and the two men were free to walk home.
+
+Two hours later Amherst was mounting Mrs. Westmore's steps; and his hand
+was on the bell when the door opened and Dr. Disbrow came out. The
+physician drew back, as if surprised and slightly disconcerted; but his
+smile promptly effaced all signs of vexation, and he held his hand out
+affably.
+
+"A fine evening, Mr. Amherst. I'm glad to say I have been able to bring
+Mrs. Westmore an excellent report of both patients--Mr. Truscomb, I
+mean, and poor Dillon. This mild weather is all in their favour, and I
+hope my brother-in-law will be about in a day or two." He passed on with
+a nod.
+
+Amherst was once more shown into the library where he had found Mrs.
+Westmore that morning; but on this occasion it was Mr. Tredegar who rose
+to meet him, and curtly waved him to a seat at a respectful distance
+from his own. Amherst at once felt a change of atmosphere, and it was
+easy to guess that the lowering of temperature was due to Dr. Disbrow's
+recent visit. The thought roused the young man's combative instincts,
+and caused him to say, as Mr. Tredegar continued to survey him in
+silence from the depths of a capacious easy-chair: "I understood from
+Mrs. Westmore that she wished to see me this evening."
+
+It was the wrong note, and he knew it; but he had been unable to conceal
+his sense of the vague current of opposition in the air.
+
+"Quite so: I believe she asked you to come," Mr. Tredegar assented,
+laying his hands together vertically, and surveying Amherst above the
+acute angle formed by his parched finger-tips. As he leaned back,
+small, dry, dictatorial, in the careless finish of his evening dress
+and pearl-studded shirt-front, his appearance put the finishing touch to
+Amherst's irritation. He felt the incongruousness of his rough clothes
+in this atmosphere of after-dinner ease, the mud on his walking-boots,
+the clinging cotton-dust which seemed to have entered into the very
+pores of the skin; and again his annoyance escaped in his voice.
+
+"Perhaps I have come too early--" he began; but Mr. Tredegar interposed
+with glacial amenity: "No, I believe you are exactly on time; but Mrs.
+Westmore is unexpectedly detained. The fact is, Mr. and Mrs. Halford
+Gaines are dining with her, and she has delegated to me the duty of
+hearing what you have to say."
+
+Amherst hesitated. His impulse was to exclaim: "There is no duty about
+it!" but a moment's thought showed the folly of thus throwing up the
+game. With the prospect of Truscomb's being about again in a day or two,
+it might well be that this was his last chance of reaching Mrs.
+Westmore's ear; and he was bound to put his case while he could,
+irrespective of personal feeling. But his disappointment was too keen to
+be denied, and after a pause he said: "Could I not speak with Mrs.
+Westmore later?"
+
+Mr. Tredegar's cool survey deepened to a frown. The young man's
+importunity was really out of proportion to what he signified. "Mrs.
+Westmore has asked me to replace her," he said, putting his previous
+statement more concisely.
+
+"Then I am not to see her at all?" Amherst exclaimed; and the lawyer
+replied indifferently: "I am afraid not, as she leaves tomorrow."
+
+Mr. Tredegar was in his element when refusing a favour. Not that he was
+by nature unkind; he was, indeed, capable of a cold beneficence; but to
+deny what it was in his power to accord was the readiest way of
+proclaiming his authority, that power of loosing and binding which made
+him regard himself as almost consecrated to his office.
+
+Having sacrificed to this principle, he felt free to add as a gratuitous
+concession to politeness: "You are perhaps not aware that I am Mrs.
+Westmore's lawyer, and one of the executors under her husband's will."
+
+He dropped this negligently, as though conscious of the absurdity of
+presenting his credentials to a subordinate; but his manner no longer
+incensed Amherst: it merely strengthened his resolve to sink all sense
+of affront in the supreme effort of obtaining a hearing.
+
+"With that stuffed canary to advise her," he reflected, "there's no hope
+for her unless I can assert myself now"; and the unconscious wording of
+his thought expressed his inward sense that Bessy Westmore stood in
+greater need of help than her work-people.
+
+Still he hesitated, hardly knowing how to begin. To Mr. Tredegar he was
+no more than an underling, without authority to speak in his superior's
+absence; and the lack of an official warrant, which he could have
+disregarded in appealing to Mrs. Westmore, made it hard for him to find
+a good opening in addressing her representative. He saw, too, from Mr.
+Tredegar's protracted silence, that the latter counted on the effect of
+this embarrassment, and was resolved not to minimize it by giving him a
+lead; and this had the effect of increasing his caution.
+
+He looked up and met the lawyer's eye. "Mrs. Westmore," he began, "asked
+me to let her know something about the condition of the people at the
+mills----"
+
+Mr. Tredegar raised his hand. "Excuse me," he said. "I understood from
+Mrs. Westmore that it was you who asked her permission to call this
+evening and set forth certain grievances on the part of the operatives."
+
+Amherst reddened. "I did ask her--yes. But I don't in any sense
+represent the operatives. I simply wanted to say a word for them."
+
+Mr. Tredegar folded his hands again, and crossed one lean little leg
+over the other, bringing into his line of vision the glossy tip of a
+patent-leather pump, which he studied for a moment in silence.
+
+"Does Mr. Truscomb know of your intention?" he then enquired.
+
+"No, sir," Amherst answered energetically, glad that he had forced the
+lawyer out of his passive tactics. "I am here on my own
+responsibility--and in direct opposition to my own interests," he
+continued with a slight smile. "I know that my proceeding is quite out
+of order, and that I have, personally, everything to lose by it, and in
+a larger way probably very little to gain; but I thought Mrs. Westmore's
+attention ought to be called to certain conditions at the mills, and no
+one else seemed likely to speak of them."
+
+"May I ask why you assume that Mr. Truscomb will not do so when he has
+the opportunity?"
+
+Amherst could not repress a smile. "Because it is owing to Mr. Truscomb
+that they exist."
+
+"The real object of your visit then," said Mr. Tredegar, speaking with
+deliberation, "is--er--an underhand attack on your manager's methods?"
+
+Amherst's face darkened, but he kept his temper. "I see nothing
+especially underhand in my course----"
+
+"Except," the other interposed ironically, "that you have waited to
+speak till Mr. Truscomb was not in a position to defend himself."
+
+"I never had the chance before. It was at Mrs. Westmore's own suggestion
+that I took her over the mills, and feeling as I do I should have
+thought it cowardly to shirk the chance of pointing out to her the
+conditions there."
+
+Mr. Tredegar mused, his eyes still bent on his gently-oscillating foot.
+Whenever a sufficient pressure from without parted the fog of
+self-complacency in which he moved, he had a shrewd enough outlook on
+men and motives; and it may be that the vigorous ring of Amherst's
+answer had effected this momentary clearing of the air.
+
+At any rate, his next words were spoken in a more accessible tone. "To
+what conditions do you refer?"
+
+"To the conditions under which the mill-hands work and live--to the
+whole management of the mills, in fact, in relation to the people
+employed."
+
+"That is a large question. Pardon my possible ignorance--" Mr. Tredegar
+paused to make sure that his hearer took in the full irony of this--"but
+surely in this state there are liability and inspection laws for the
+protection of the operatives?"
+
+"There are such laws, yes--but most of them are either a dead letter, or
+else so easily evaded that no employer thinks of conforming to them."
+
+"No employer? Then your specific charge against the Westmore mills is
+part of a general arraignment of all employers of labour?"
+
+"By no means, sir. I only meant that, where the hands are well treated,
+it is due rather to the personal good-will of the employer than to any
+fear of the law."
+
+"And in what respect do you think the Westmore hands unfairly treated?"
+
+Amherst paused to measure his words. "The question, as you say, is a
+large one," he rejoined. "It has its roots in the way the business is
+organized--in the traditional attitude of the company toward the
+operatives. I hoped that Mrs. Westmore might return to the mills--might
+visit some of the people in their houses. Seeing their way of living, it
+might have occurred to her to ask a reason for it--and one enquiry would
+have led to another. She spoke this morning of going to the hospital to
+see Dillon."
+
+"She did go to the hospital: I went with her. But as Dillon was
+sleeping, and as the matron told us he was much better--a piece of news
+which, I am happy to say, Dr. Disbrow has just confirmed--she did not go
+up to the ward."
+
+Amherst was silent, and Mr. Tredegar pursued: "I gather, from your
+bringing up Dillon's case, that for some reason you consider it typical
+of the defects you find in Mr. Truscomb's management. Suppose,
+therefore, we drop generalizations, and confine ourselves to the
+particular instance. What wrong, in your view, has been done the
+Dillons?"
+
+He turned, as he spoke, to extract a cigar from the box at his elbow.
+"Let me offer you one, Mr. Amherst: we shall talk more comfortably," he
+suggested with distant affability; but Amherst, with a gesture of
+refusal, plunged into his exposition of the Dillon case. He tried to put
+the facts succinctly, presenting them in their bare ugliness, without
+emotional drapery; setting forth Dillon's good record for sobriety and
+skill, dwelling on the fact that his wife's ill-health was the result of
+perfectly remediable conditions in the work-rooms, and giving his
+reasons for the belief that the accident had been caused, not by
+Dillon's carelessness, but by the over-crowding of the carding-room. Mr.
+Tredegar listened attentively, though the cloud of cigar-smoke between
+himself and Amherst masked from the latter his possible changes of
+expression. When he removed his cigar, his face looked smaller than
+ever, as though desiccated by the fumes of the tobacco.
+
+"Have you ever called Mr. Gaines's attention to these matters?"
+
+"No: that would have been useless. He has always refused to discuss the
+condition of the mills with any one but the manager."
+
+"H'm--that would seem to prove that Mr. Gaines, who lives here, sees as
+much reason for trusting Truscomb's judgment as Mr. Westmore, who
+delegated his authority from a distance."
+
+Amherst did not take this up, and after a pause Mr. Tredegar went on:
+"You know, of course, the answers I might make to such an indictment. As
+a lawyer, I might call your attention to the employe's waiver of risk,
+to the strong chances of contributory negligence, and so on; but happily
+in this case such arguments are superfluous. You are apparently not
+aware that Dillon's injury is much slighter than it ought to be to serve
+your purpose. Dr. Disbrow has just told us that he will probably get off
+with the loss of a finger; and I need hardly say that, whatever may have
+been Dillon's own share in causing the accident--and as to this, as you
+admit, opinions differ--Mrs. Westmore will assume all the expenses of
+his nursing, besides making a liberal gift to his wife." Mr. Tredegar
+laid down his cigar and drew forth a silver-mounted note-case. "Here, in
+fact," he continued, "is a cheque which she asks you to transmit, and
+which, as I think you will agree, ought to silence, on your part as well
+as Mrs. Dillon's, any criticism of Mrs. Westmore's dealings with her
+operatives."
+
+The blood rose to Amherst's forehead, and he just restrained himself
+from pushing back the cheque which Mr. Tredegar had laid on the table
+between them.
+
+"There is no question of criticizing Mrs. Westmore's dealings with her
+operatives--as far as I know, she has had none as yet," he rejoined,
+unable to control his voice as completely as his hand. "And the proof
+of it is the impunity with which her agents deceive her--in this case,
+for instance, of Dillon's injury. Dr. Disbrow, who is Mr. Truscomb's
+brother-in-law, and apt to be influenced by his views, assures you that
+the man will get off with the loss of a finger; but some one equally
+competent to speak told me last night that he would lose not only his
+hand but his arm."
+
+Amherst's voice had swelled to a deep note of anger, and with his tossed
+hair, and eyes darkening under furrowed brows, he presented an image of
+revolutionary violence which deepened the disdain on Mr. Tredegar's lip.
+
+"Some one equally competent to speak? Are you prepared to name this
+anonymous authority?"
+
+Amherst hesitated. "No--I shall have to ask you to take my word for it,"
+he returned with a shade of embarrassment.
+
+"Ah--" Mr. Tredegar murmured, giving to the expressive syllable its
+utmost measure of decent exultation.
+
+Amherst quivered under the thin lash, and broke out: "It is all you have
+required of Dr. Disbrow--" but at this point Mr. Tredegar rose to his
+feet.
+
+"My dear sir, your resorting to such arguments convinces me that nothing
+is to be gained by prolonging our talk. I will not even take up your
+insinuations against two of the most respected men in the
+community--such charges reflect only on those who make them."
+
+Amherst, whose flame of anger had subsided with the sudden sense of its
+futility, received this in silence, and the lawyer, reassured, continued
+with a touch of condescension: "My only specific charge from Mrs.
+Westmore was to hand you this cheque; but, in spite of what has passed,
+I take it upon myself to add, in her behalf, that your conduct of today
+will not be allowed to weigh against your record at the mills, and that
+the extraordinary charges you have seen fit to bring against your
+superiors will--if not repeated--simply be ignored."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When, the next morning at about ten, Mrs. Eustace Ansell joined herself
+to the two gentlemen who still lingered over a desultory breakfast in
+Mrs. Westmore's dining-room, she responded to their greeting with less
+than her usual vivacity.
+
+[Illustration: "No--I shall have to ask you to take my word for it."]
+
+It was one of Mrs. Ansell's arts to bring to the breakfast-table just
+the right shade of sprightliness, a warmth subdued by discretion as the
+early sunlight is tempered by the lingering coolness of night. She was,
+in short, as fresh, as temperate, as the hour, yet without the
+concomitant chill which too often marks its human atmosphere: rather her
+soft effulgence dissipated the morning frosts, opening pinched spirits
+to a promise of midday warmth. But on this occasion a mist of
+uncertainty hung on her smile, and veiled the glance which she turned
+on the contents of the heavy silver dishes successively presented to her
+notice. When, at the conclusion of this ceremony, the servants had
+withdrawn, she continued for a moment to stir her tea in silence, while
+her glance travelled from Mr. Tredegar, sunk in his morning mail, to Mr.
+Langhope, who leaned back resignedly in his chair, trying to solace
+himself with Hanaford Banner, till midday should bring him a sight of
+the metropolitan press.
+
+"I suppose you know," she said suddenly, "that Bessy has telegraphed for
+Cicely, and made her arrangements to stay here another week."
+
+Mr. Langhope's stick slipped to the floor with the sudden displacement
+of his whole lounging person, and Mr. Tredegar, removing his
+tortoise-shell reading-glasses, put them hastily into their case, as
+though to declare for instant departure.
+
+"My dear Maria--" Mr. Langhope gasped, while she rose and restored his
+stick.
+
+"She considers it, then, her duty to wait and see Truscomb?" the lawyer
+asked; and Mrs. Ansell, regaining her seat, murmured discreetly: "She
+puts it so--yes."
+
+"My dear Maria--" Mr. Langhope repeated helplessly, tossing aside his
+paper and drawing his chair up to the table.
+
+"But it would be perfectly easy to return: it is quite unnecessary to
+wait here for his recovery," Mr. Tredegar pursued, as though setting
+forth a fact which had not hitherto presented itself to the more limited
+intelligence of his hearers.
+
+Mr. Langhope emitted a short laugh, and Mrs. Ansell answered gently:
+"She says she detests the long journey."
+
+Mr. Tredegar rose and gathered up his letters with a gesture of
+annoyance. "In that case--if I had been notified earlier of this
+decision, I might have caught the morning train," he interrupted
+himself, glancing resentfully at his watch.
+
+"Oh, don't leave us, Tredegar," Mr. Langhope entreated. "We'll reason
+with her--we'll persuade her to go back by the three-forty."
+
+Mrs. Ansell smiled. "She telegraphed at seven. Cicely and the governess
+are already on their way."
+
+"At seven? But, my dear friend, why on earth didn't you tell us?"
+
+"I didn't know till a few minutes ago. Bessy called me in as I was
+coming down."
+
+"Ah--" Mr. Langhope murmured, meeting her eyes for a fraction of a
+second. In the encounter, she appeared to communicate something more
+than she had spoken, for as he stooped to pick up his paper he said,
+more easily: "My dear Tredegar, if we're in a box there's no reason why
+we should force you into it too. Ring for Ropes, and we'll look up a
+train for you."
+
+Mr. Tredegar appeared slightly ruffled at this prompt acquiescence in
+his threatened departure. "Of course, if I had been notified in advance,
+I might have arranged to postpone my engagements another day; but in any
+case, it is quite out of the question that I should return in a
+week--and quite unnecessary," he added, snapping his lips shut as though
+he were closing his last portmanteau.
+
+"Oh, quite--quite," Mr. Langhope assented. "It isn't, in fact, in the
+least necessary for any of us either to stay on now or to return.
+Truscomb could come to Long Island when he recovers, and answer any
+questions we may have to put; but if Bessy has sent for the child, we
+must of course put off going for today--at least I must," he added
+sighing, "and, though I know it's out of the question to exact such a
+sacrifice from you, I have a faint hope that our delightful friend here,
+with the altruistic spirit of her sex----"
+
+"Oh, I shall enjoy it--my maid is unpacking," Mrs. Ansell gaily
+affirmed; and Mr. Tredegar, shrugging his shoulders, said curtly: "In
+that case I will ring for the time-table."
+
+When he had withdrawn to consult it in the seclusion of the library, and
+Mrs. Ansell, affecting a sudden desire for a second cup of tea, had
+reseated herself to await the replenishment of the kettle, Mr. Langhope
+exchanged his own chair for a place at her side.
+
+"Now what on earth does this mean?" he asked, lighting a cigarette in
+response to her slight nod of consent.
+
+Mrs. Ansell's gaze lost itself in the depths of the empty tea-pot.
+
+"A number of things--or any one of them," she said at length, extending
+her arm toward the tea-caddy.
+
+"For instance--?" he rejoined, following appreciatively the movements of
+her long slim hands.
+
+She raised her head and met his eyes. "For instance: it may mean--don't
+resent the suggestion--that you and Mr. Tredegar were not quite
+well-advised in persuading her not to see Mr. Amherst yesterday
+evening."
+
+Mr. Langhope uttered an exclamation of surprise.
+
+"But, my dear Maria--in the name of reason...why, after the doctor's
+visit--after his coming here last night, at Truscomb's request, to put
+the actual facts before her--should she have gone over the whole
+business again with this interfering young fellow? How, in fact, could
+she have done so," he added, after vainly waiting for her reply,
+"without putting a sort of slight on Truscomb, who is, after all, the
+only person entitled to speak with authority?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell received his outburst in silence, and the butler,
+reappearing with the kettle and fresh toast, gave her the chance to
+prolong her pause for a full minute. When the door had closed on him,
+she said: "Judged by reason, your arguments are unanswerable; but when
+it comes to a question of feeling----"
+
+"Feeling? What kind of feeling? You don't mean to suggest anything so
+preposterous as that Bessy----?"
+
+She made a gesture of smiling protest. "I confess it is to be regretted
+that his mother is a lady, and that he looks--you must have noticed
+it?--so amazingly like the portraits of the young Schiller. But I only
+meant that Bessy forms all her opinions emotionally; and that she must
+have been very strongly affected by the scene Mr. Tredegar described to
+us."
+
+"Ah," Mr. Langhope interjected, replying first to her parenthesis, "how
+a woman of your good sense stumbled on that idea of hunting up the
+mother--!" but Mrs. Ansell answered, with a slight grimace: "My dear
+Henry, if you could see the house they live in you'd think I had been
+providentially guided there!" and, reverting to the main issue, he went
+on fretfully: "But why, after hearing the true version of the facts,
+should Bessy still be influenced by that sensational scene? Even if it
+was not, as Tredegar suspects, cooked up expressly to take her in, she
+must see that the hospital doctor is, after all, as likely as any one to
+know how the accident really happened, and how seriously the fellow is
+hurt."
+
+"There's the point. Why should Bessy believe Dr. Disbrow rather than Mr.
+Amherst?"
+
+"For the best of reasons--because Disbrow has nothing to gain by
+distorting the facts, whereas this young Amherst, as Tredegar pointed
+out, has the very obvious desire to give Truscomb a bad name and shove
+himself into his place."
+
+Mrs. Ansell contemplatively turned the rings upon her fingers. "From
+what I saw of Amherst I'm inclined to think that, if that is his object,
+he is too clever to have shown his hand so soon. But if you are right,
+was there not all the more reason for letting Bessy see him and find out
+as soon as possible what he was aiming at?"
+
+"If one could have trusted her to find out--but you credit my poor child
+with more penetration than I've ever seen in her."
+
+"Perhaps you've looked for it at the wrong time--and about the wrong
+things. Bessy has the penetration of the heart."
+
+"The heart! You make mine jump when you use such expressions."
+
+"Oh, I use this one in a general sense. But I want to help you to keep
+it from acquiring a more restricted significance."
+
+"Restricted--to the young man himself?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell's expressive hands seemed to commit the question to fate.
+"All I ask you to consider for the present is that Bessy is quite
+unoccupied and excessively bored."
+
+"Bored? Why, she has everything on earth she can want!"
+
+"The ideal state for producing boredom--the only atmosphere in which it
+really thrives. And besides--to be humanly inconsistent--there's just
+one thing she hasn't got."
+
+"Well?" Mr. Langhope groaned, fortifying himself with a second
+cigarette.
+
+"An occupation for that rudimentary little organ, the mention of which
+makes you jump."
+
+"There you go again! Good heavens, Maria, do you want to encourage her
+to fall in love?"
+
+"Not with a man, just at present, but with a hobby, an interest, by all
+means. If she doesn't, the man will take the place of the
+interest--there's a vacuum to be filled, and human nature abhors a
+vacuum."
+
+Mr. Langhope shrugged his shoulders. "I don't follow you. She adored her
+husband."
+
+His friend's fine smile was like a magnifying glass silently applied to
+the gross stupidity of his remark. "Oh, I don't say it was a great
+passion--but they got on perfectly," he corrected himself.
+
+"So perfectly that you must expect her to want a little storm and stress
+for a change. The mere fact that you and Mr. Tredegar objected to her
+seeing Mr. Amherst last night has roused the spirit of opposition in
+her. A year ago she hadn't any spirit of opposition."
+
+"There was nothing for her to oppose--poor Dick made her life so
+preposterously easy."
+
+"My ingenuous friend! Do you still think that's any reason? The fact is,
+Bessy wasn't awake, she wasn't even born, then.... She is now, and you
+know the infant's first conscious joy is to smash things."
+
+"It will be rather an expensive joy if the mills are the first thing she
+smashes."
+
+"Oh I imagine the mills are pretty substantial. I should, I own," Mrs.
+Ansell smiled, "not object to seeing her try her teeth on them."
+
+"Which, in terms of practical conduct, means----?"
+
+"That I advise you not to disapprove of her staying on, or of her
+investigating the young man's charges. You must remember that another
+peculiarity of the infant mind is to tire soonest of the toy that no one
+tries to take away from it."
+
+"_Que diable!_ But suppose Truscomb turns rusty at this very unusual
+form of procedure? Perhaps you don't quite know how completely he
+represents the prosperity of the mills."
+
+"All the more reason," Mrs. Ansell persisted, rising at the sound of Mr.
+Tredegar's approach. "For don't you perceive, my poor distracted friend,
+that if Truscomb turns rusty, as he undoubtedly will, the inevitable
+result will be his manager's dismissal--and that thereafter there will
+presumably be peace in Warsaw?"
+
+"Ah, you divinely wicked woman!" cried Mr. Langhope, snatching at an
+appreciative pressure of her hand as the lawyer reappeared in the
+doorway.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+BEFORE daylight that same morning Amherst, dressing by the gas-flame
+above his cheap wash-stand, strove to bring some order into his angry
+thoughts. It humbled him to feel his purpose tossing rudderless on
+unruly waves of emotion, yet strive as he would he could not regain a
+hold on it. The events of the last twenty-four hours had been too rapid
+and unexpected for him to preserve his usual clear feeling of mastery;
+and he had, besides, to reckon with the first complete surprise of his
+senses. His way of life had excluded him from all contact with the
+subtler feminine influences, and the primitive side of the relation left
+his imagination untouched. He was therefore the more assailable by those
+refined forms of the ancient spell that lurk in delicacy of feeling
+interpreted by loveliness of face. By his own choice he had cut himself
+off from all possibility of such communion; had accepted complete
+abstinence for that part of his nature which might have offered a
+refuge from the stern prose of his daily task. But his personal
+indifference to his surroundings--deliberately encouraged as a defiance
+to the attractions of the life he had renounced--proved no defence
+against this appeal; rather, the meanness of his surroundings combined
+with his inherited refinement of taste to deepen the effect of Bessy's
+charm.
+
+As he reviewed the incidents of the past hours, a reaction of
+self-derision came to his aid. What was this exquisite opportunity from
+which he had cut himself off? What, to reduce the question to a personal
+issue, had Mrs. Westmore said or done that, on the part of a plain
+woman, would have quickened his pulses by the least fraction of a
+second? Why, it was only the old story of the length of Cleopatra's
+nose! Because her eyes were a heavenly vehicle for sympathy, because her
+voice was pitched to thrill the tender chords, he had been deluded into
+thinking that she understood and responded to his appeal. And her own
+emotions had been wrought upon by means as cheap: it was only the
+obvious, theatrical side of the incident that had affected her. If
+Dillon's wife had been old and ugly, would she have been clasped to her
+employer's bosom? A more expert knowledge of the sex would have told
+Amherst that such ready sympathy is likely to be followed by as prompt a
+reaction of indifference. Luckily Mrs. Westmore's course had served as a
+corrective for his lack of experience; she had even, as it appeared,
+been at some pains to hasten the process of disillusionment. This timely
+discipline left him blushing at his own insincerity; for he now saw that
+he had risked his future not because of his zeal for the welfare of the
+mill-hands, but because Mrs. Westmore's look was like sunshine on his
+frozen senses, and because he was resolved, at any cost, to arrest her
+attention, to associate himself with her by the only means in his power.
+
+Well, he deserved to fail with such an end in view; and the futility of
+his scheme was matched by the vanity of his purpose. In the cold light
+of disenchantment it seemed as though he had tried to build an
+impregnable fortress out of nursery blocks. How could he have foreseen
+anything but failure for so preposterous an attempt? His breach of
+discipline would of course be reported at once to Mr. Gaines and
+Truscomb; and the manager, already jealous of his assistant's popularity
+with the hands, which was a tacit criticism of his own methods, would
+promptly seize the pretext to be rid of him. Amherst was aware that only
+his technical efficiency, and his knack of getting the maximum of work
+out of the operatives, had secured him from Truscomb's animosity. From
+the outset there had been small sympathy between the two; but the
+scarcity of competent and hard-working assistants had made Truscomb
+endure him for what he was worth to the mills. Now, however, his own
+folly had put the match to the manager's smouldering dislike, and he saw
+himself, in consequence, discharged and black-listed, and perhaps
+roaming for months in quest of a job. He knew the efficiency of that
+far-reaching system of defamation whereby the employers of labour pursue
+and punish the subordinate who incurs their displeasure. In the case of
+a mere operative this secret persecution often worked complete ruin; and
+even to a man of Amherst's worth it opened the dispiriting prospect of a
+long struggle for rehabilitation.
+
+Deep down, he suffered most at the thought that his blow for the
+operatives had failed; but on the surface it was the manner of his
+failure that exasperated him. For it seemed to prove him unfit for the
+very work to which he was drawn: that yearning to help the world forward
+that, in some natures, sets the measure to which the personal adventure
+must keep step. Amherst had hitherto felt himself secured by his insight
+and self-control from the emotional errors besetting the way of the
+enthusiast; and behold, he had stumbled into the first sentimental trap
+in his path, and tricked his eyes with a Christmas-chromo vision of
+lovely woman dispensing coals and blankets! Luckily, though such wounds
+to his self-confidence cut deep, he could apply to them the antiseptic
+of an unfailing humour; and before he had finished dressing, the
+picture of his wide schemes of social reform contracting to a blue-eyed
+philanthropy of cheques and groceries, had provoked a reaction of
+laughter. Perhaps the laughter came too soon, and rang too loud, to be
+true to the core; but at any rate it healed the edges of his hurt, and
+gave him a sound surface of composure.
+
+But he could not laugh away the thought of the trials to which his
+intemperance had probably exposed his mother; and when, at the
+breakfast-table, from which Duplain had already departed, she broke into
+praise of their visitor, it was like a burning irritant on his wound.
+
+"What a face, John! Of course I don't often see people of that kind
+now--" the words, falling from her too simply to be reproachful, wrung
+him, for that, all the more--"but I'm sure that kind of soft loveliness
+is rare everywhere; like a sweet summer morning with the mist on it. The
+Gaines girls, now, are my idea of the modern type; very handsome, of
+course, but you see just _how_ handsome the first minute. I like a story
+that keeps one wondering till the end. It was very kind of Maria
+Ansell," Mrs. Amherst wandered happily on, "to come and hunt me out
+yesterday, and I enjoyed our quiet talk about old times. But what I
+liked best was seeing Mrs. Westmore--and, oh, John, if she came to live
+here, what a benediction to the mills!"
+
+Amherst was silent, moved most of all by the unimpaired simplicity of
+heart with which his mother could take up past relations, and open her
+meagre life to the high visitations of grace and fashion, without a
+tinge of self-consciousness or apology. "I shall never be as genuine as
+that," he thought, remembering how he had wished to have Mrs. Westmore
+know that he was of her own class. How mixed our passions are, and how
+elastic must be the word that would cover any one of them! Amherst's, at
+that moment, were all stained with the deep wound to his self-love.
+
+The discolouration he carried in his eye made the mill-village seem more
+than commonly cheerless and ugly as he walked over to the office after
+breakfast. Beyond the grim roof-line of the factories a dazzle of rays
+sent upward from banked white clouds the promise of another brilliant
+day; and he reflected that Mrs. Westmore would soon be speeding home to
+the joy of a gallop over the plains.
+
+Far different was the task that awaited him--yet it gave him a pang to
+think that he might be performing it for the last time. In spite of Mr.
+Tredegar's assurances, he was certain that the report of his conduct
+must by this time have reached the President, and been transmitted to
+Truscomb; the latter was better that morning, and the next day he would
+doubtless call his rebellious assistant to account. Amherst, meanwhile,
+took up his routine with a dull heart. Even should his offense be
+condoned, his occupation presented, in itself, little future to a man
+without money or powerful connections. Money! He had spurned the thought
+of it in choosing his work, yet he now saw that, without its aid, he was
+powerless to accomplish the object to which his personal desires had
+been sacrificed. His love of his craft had gradually been merged in the
+larger love for his fellow-workers, and in the resulting desire to lift
+and widen their lot. He had once fancied that this end might be attained
+by an internal revolution in the management of the Westmore mills; that
+he might succeed in creating an industrial object-lesson conspicuous
+enough to point the way to wiser law-making and juster relations between
+the classes. But the last hours' experiences had shown him how vain it
+was to assault single-handed the strong barrier between money and
+labour, and how his own dash at the breach had only thrust him farther
+back into the obscure ranks of the stragglers. It was, after all, only
+through politics that he could return successfully to the attack; and
+financial independence was the needful preliminary to a political
+career. If he had stuck to the law he might, by this time, have been
+nearer his goal; but then the gold might not have mattered, since it was
+only by living among the workers that he had learned to care for their
+fate. And rather than have forfeited that poignant yet mighty vision of
+the onward groping of the mass, rather than have missed the widening of
+his own nature that had come through sharing their hopes and pains, he
+would still have turned from the easier way, have chosen the deeper
+initiation rather than the readier attainment.
+
+But this philosophic view of the situation was a mere thread of light on
+the farthest verge of his sky: much nearer were the clouds of immediate
+care, amid which his own folly, and his mother's possible suffering from
+it, loomed darkest; and these considerations made him resolve that, if
+his insubordination were overlooked, he would swallow the affront of a
+pardon, and continue for the present in the mechanical performance of
+his duties. He had just brought himself to this leaden state of
+acquiescence when one of the clerks in the outer office thrust his head
+in to say: "A lady asking for you--" and looking up, Amherst beheld
+Bessy Westmore.
+
+She came in alone, with an air of high self-possession in marked
+contrast to her timidity and indecision of the previous day. Amherst
+thought she looked taller, more majestic; so readily may the upward
+slant of a soft chin, the firmer line of yielding brows, add a cubit to
+the outward woman. Her aspect was so commanding that he fancied she had
+come to express her disapproval of his conduct, to rebuke him for lack
+of respect to Mr. Tredegar; but a moment later it became clear, even to
+his inexperienced perceptions, that it was not to himself that her
+challenge was directed.
+
+She advanced toward the seat he had moved forward, but in her absorption
+forgot to seat herself, and stood with her clasped hands resting on the
+back of the chair.
+
+"I have come back to talk to you," she began, in her sweet voice with
+its occasional quick lift of appeal. "I knew that, in Mr. Truscomb's
+absence, it would be hard for you to leave the mills, and there are one
+or two things I want you to explain before I go away--some of the
+things, for instance, that you spoke to Mr. Tredegar about last night."
+
+Amherst's feeling of constraint returned. "I'm afraid I expressed myself
+badly; I may have annoyed him--" he began.
+
+She smiled this away, as though irrelevant to the main issue. "Perhaps
+you don't quite understand each other--but I am sure you can make it
+clear to me." She sank into the chair, resting one arm on the edge of
+the desk behind which he had resumed his place. "That is the reason why
+I came alone," she continued. "I never can understand when a lot of
+people are trying to tell me a thing all at once. And I don't suppose I
+care as much as a man would--a lawyer especially--about the forms that
+ought to be observed. All I want is to find out what is wrong and how to
+remedy it."
+
+Her blue eyes met Amherst's in a look that flowed like warmth about his
+heart. How should he have doubted that her feelings were as exquisite as
+her means of expressing them? The iron bands of distrust were loosened
+from his spirit, and he blushed for his cheap scepticism of the morning.
+In a woman so evidently nurtured in dependence, whose views had been
+formed, and her actions directed, by the most conventional influences,
+the mere fact of coming alone to Westmore, in open defiance of her
+advisers, bespoke a persistence of purpose that put his doubts to shame.
+
+"It will make a great difference to the people here if you interest
+yourself in them," he rejoined. "I tried to explain to Mr. Tredegar that
+I had no wish to criticise the business management of the mills--even if
+there had been any excuse for my doing so--but that I was sure the
+condition of the operatives could be very much improved, without
+permanent harm to the business, by any one who felt a personal sympathy
+for them; and in the end I believe such sympathy produces better work,
+and so benefits the employer materially."
+
+She listened with her gentle look of trust, as though committing to him,
+with the good faith of a child, her ignorance, her credulity, her little
+rudimentary convictions and her little tentative aspirations, relying on
+him not to abuse or misdirect them in the boundless supremacy of his
+masculine understanding.
+
+"That is just what I want you to explain to me," she said. "But first I
+should like to know more about the poor man who was hurt. I meant to see
+his wife yesterday, but Mr. Gaines told me she would be at work till
+six, and it would have been difficult to go after that. I _did_ go to
+the hospital; but the man was sleeping--is Dillon his name?--and the
+matron told us he was much better. Dr. Disbrow came in the evening and
+said the same thing--told us it was all a false report about his having
+been so badly hurt, and that Mr. Truscomb was very much annoyed when he
+heard of your having said, before the operatives, that Dillon would lose
+his arm."
+
+Amherst smiled. "Ah--Mr. Truscomb heard that? Well, he's right to be
+annoyed: I ought not to have said it when I did. But unfortunately I am
+not the only one to be punished. The operative who tied on the black
+cloth was dismissed this morning."
+
+Mrs. Westmore flamed up. "Dismissed for that? Oh, how unjust--how
+cruel!"
+
+"You must look at both sides of the case," said Amherst, finding it much
+easier to remain temperate in the glow he had kindled than if he had had
+to force his own heat into frozen veins. "Of course any act of
+insubordination must be reprimanded--but I think a reprimand would have
+been enough."
+
+It gave him an undeniable throb of pleasure to find that she was not to
+be checked by such arguments. "But he shall be put back--I won't have
+any one discharged for such a reason! You must find him for me at
+once--you must tell him----"
+
+Once more Amherst gently restrained her. "If you'll forgive my saying
+so, I think it is better to let him go, and take his chance of getting
+work elsewhere. If he were taken back he might be made to suffer. As
+things are organized here, the hands are very much at the mercy of the
+overseers, and the overseer in that room would be likely to make it
+uncomfortable for a hand who had so openly defied him."
+
+With a heavy sigh she bent her puzzled brows on him. "How complicated it
+is! I wonder if I shall ever understand it all. _You_ don't think
+Dillon's accident was his own fault, then?"
+
+"Certainly not; there are too many cards in that room. I pointed out the
+fact to Mr. Truscomb when the new machines were set up three years ago.
+An operative may be ever so expert with his fingers, and yet not learn
+to measure his ordinary movements quite as accurately as if he were an
+automaton; and that is what a man must do to be safe in the
+carding-room."
+
+She sighed again. "The more you tell me, the more difficult it all
+seems. Why is the carding-room so over-crowded?"
+
+"To make it pay better," Amherst returned bluntly; and the colour
+flushed her sensitive skin.
+
+He thought she was about to punish him for his plain-speaking; but she
+went on after a pause: "What you say is dreadful. Each thing seems to
+lead back to another--and I feel so ignorant of it all." She hesitated
+again, and then said, turning her bluest glance on him: "I am going to
+be quite frank with you, Mr. Amherst. Mr. Tredegar repeated to me what
+you said to him last night, and I think he was annoyed that you were
+unwilling to give any proof of the charges you made."
+
+"Charges? Ah," Amherst exclaimed, with a start of recollection, "he
+means my refusing to say who told me that Dr. Disbrow was not telling
+the truth about Dillon?"
+
+"Yes. He said that was a very grave accusation to make, and that no one
+should have made it without being able to give proof."
+
+"That is quite true, theoretically. But in this case it would be easy
+for you or Mr. Tredegar to find out whether I was right."
+
+"But Mr. Tredegar said you refused to say who told you."
+
+"I was bound to, as it happened. But I am not bound to prevent your
+trying to get the same information."
+
+"Ah--" she murmured understandingly; and, a sudden thought striking him,
+he went on, with a glance at the clock: "If you really wish to judge for
+yourself, why not go to the hospital now? I shall be free in five
+minutes, and could go with you if you wish it."
+
+Amherst had remembered the nurse's cry of recognition when she saw Mrs.
+Westmore's face under the street-lamp; and it immediately occurred to
+him that, if the two women had really known each other, Mrs. Westmore
+would have no difficulty in obtaining the information she wanted; while,
+even if they met as strangers, the dark-eyed girl's perspicacity might
+still be trusted to come to their aid. It remained only to be seen how
+Mrs. Westmore would take his suggestion; but some instinct was already
+telling him that the highhanded method was the one she really preferred.
+
+"To the hospital--now? I should like it of all things," she exclaimed,
+rising with what seemed an almost childish zest in the adventure. "Of
+course that is the best way of finding out. I ought to have insisted on
+seeing Dillon yesterday--but I begin to think the matron didn't want me
+to."
+
+Amherst left this inference to work itself out in her mind, contenting
+himself, as they drove back to Hanaford, with answering her questions
+about Dillon's family, the ages of his children, and his wife's health.
+Her enquiries, he noticed, did not extend from the particular to the
+general: her curiosity, as yet, was too purely personal and emotional to
+lead to any larger consideration of the question. But this larger view
+might grow out of the investigation of Dillon's case; and meanwhile
+Amherst's own purposes were momentarily lost in the sweet confusion of
+feeling her near him--of seeing the exquisite grain of her skin, the way
+her lashes grew out of a dusky line on the edge of the white lids, the
+way her hair, stealing in spirals of light from brow to ear, wavered off
+into a fruity down on the edge of the cheek.
+
+At the hospital they were protestingly admitted by Mrs. Ogan, though the
+official "visitors' hour" was not till the afternoon; and beside the
+sufferer's bed, Amherst saw again that sudden flowering of compassion
+which seemed the key to his companion's beauty: as though her lips had
+been formed for consolation and her hands for tender offices. It was
+clear enough that Dillon, still sunk in a torpor broken by feverish
+tossings, was making no perceptible progress toward recovery; and Mrs.
+Ogan was reduced to murmuring some technical explanation about the state
+of the wound while Bessy hung above him with reassuring murmurs as to
+his wife's fate, and promises that the children should be cared for.
+
+Amherst had noticed, on entering, that a new nurse--a gaping young woman
+instantly lost in the study of Mrs. Westmore's toilet--had replaced the
+dark-eyed attendant of the day before; and supposing that the latter was
+temporarily off duty, he asked Mrs. Ogan if she might be seen.
+
+The matron's face was a picture of genteel perplexity. "The other nurse?
+Our regular surgical nurse, Miss Golden, is ill--Miss Hibbs, here, is
+replacing her for the present." She indicated the gaping damsel; then,
+as Amherst persisted: "Ah," she wondered negligently, "do you mean the
+young lady you saw here yesterday? Certainly--I had forgotten: Miss
+Brent was merely a--er--temporary substitute. I believe she was
+recommended to Dr. Disbrow by one of his patients; but we found her
+quite unsuitable--in fact, unfitted--and the doctor discharged her this
+morning."
+
+Mrs. Westmore had drawn near, and while the matron delivered her
+explanation, with an uneasy sorting and shifting of words, a quick
+signal of intelligence passed between her hearers. "You see?" Amherst's
+eyes exclaimed; "I see--they have sent her away because she told you,"
+Bessy's flashed back in wrath, and his answering look did not deny her
+inference.
+
+"Do you know where she has gone?" Amherst enquired; but Mrs. Ogan,
+permitting her brows a faint lift of surprise, replied that she had no
+idea of Miss Brent's movements, beyond having heard that she was to
+leave Hanaford immediately
+
+In the carriage Bessy exclaimed: "It was the nurse, of course--if we
+could only find her! Brent--did Mrs. Ogan say her name was Brent?"
+
+"Do you know the name?"
+
+"Yes--at least--but it couldn't, of course, be the girl I knew----"
+
+"Miss Brent saw you the night you arrived, and thought she recognized
+you. She said you and she had been at some school or convent together."
+
+"The Sacred Heart? Then it _is_ Justine Brent! I heard they had lost
+their money--I haven't seen her for years. But how strange that she
+should be a hospital nurse! And why is she at Hanaford, I wonder?"
+
+"She was here only on a visit; she didn't tell me where she lived. She
+said she heard that a surgical nurse was wanted at the hospital, and
+volunteered her services; I'm afraid she got small thanks for them."
+
+"Do you really think they sent her away for talking to you? How do you
+suppose they found out?"
+
+"I waited for her last night when she left the hospital, and I suppose
+Mrs. Ogan or one of the doctors saw us. It was thoughtless of me,"
+Amherst exclaimed with compunction.
+
+"I wish I had seen her--poor Justine! We were the greatest friends at
+the convent. She was the ringleader in all our mischief--I never saw any
+one so quick and clever. I suppose her fun is all gone now."
+
+For a moment Mrs. Westmore's mind continued to linger among her
+memories; then she reverted to the question of the Dillons, and of what
+might best be done for them if Miss Brent's fears should be realized.
+
+As the carriage neared her door she turned to her companion with
+extended hand. "Thank you so much, Mr. Amherst. I am glad you suggested
+that Mr. Truscomb should find some work for Dillon about the office. But
+I must talk to you about this again--can you come in this evening?"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+AMHERST could never afterward regain a detailed impression of the weeks
+that followed. They lived in his memory chiefly as exponents of the
+unforeseen, nothing he had looked for having come to pass in the way or
+at the time expected; while the whole movement of life was like the
+noon-day flow of a river, in which the separate ripples of brightness
+are all merged in one blinding glitter. His recurring conferences with
+Mrs. Westmore formed, as it were, the small surprising kernel of fact
+about which sensations gathered and grew with the swift ripening of a
+magician's fruit. That she should remain on at Hanaford to look into the
+condition of the mills did not, in itself, seem surprising to Amherst;
+for his short phase of doubt had been succeeded by an abundant inflow of
+faith in her intentions. It satisfied his inner craving for harmony that
+her face and spirit should, after all, so corroborate and complete each
+other; that it needed no moral sophistry to adjust her acts to her
+appearance, her words to the promise of her smile. But her immediate
+confidence in him, her resolve to support him in his avowed
+insubordination, to ignore, with the royal license of her sex, all that
+was irregular and inexpedient in asking his guidance while the whole
+official strength of the company darkened the background with a
+gathering storm of disapproval--this sense of being the glove flung by
+her hand in the face of convention, quickened astonishingly the flow of
+Amherst's sensations. It was as though a mountain-climber, braced to the
+strain of a hard ascent, should suddenly see the way break into roses,
+and level itself in a path for his feet.
+
+On his second visit he found the two ladies together, and Mrs. Ansell's
+smile of approval seemed to cast a social sanction on the episode, to
+classify it as comfortably usual and unimportant. He could see that her
+friend's manner put Bessy at ease, helping her to ask her own questions,
+and to reflect on his suggestions, with less bewilderment and more
+self-confidence. Mrs. Ansell had the faculty of restoring to her the
+belief in her reasoning powers that her father could dissolve in a
+monosyllable.
+
+The talk, on this occasion, had turned mainly on the future of the
+Dillon family, on the best means of compensating for the accident, and,
+incidentally, on the care of the young children of the mill-colony.
+Though Amherst did not believe in the extremer forms of industrial
+paternalism, he was yet of opinion that, where married women were
+employed, the employer should care for their children. He had been
+gradually, and somewhat reluctantly, brought to this conviction by the
+many instances of unavoidable neglect and suffering among the children
+of the women-workers at Westmore; and Mrs. Westmore took up the scheme
+with all the ardour of her young motherliness, quivering at the thought
+of hungry or ailing children while her Cicely, leaning a silken head
+against her, lifted puzzled eyes to her face.
+
+On the larger problems of the case it was less easy to fix Bessy's
+attention; but Amherst was far from being one of the extreme theorists
+who reject temporary remedies lest they defer the day of general
+renewal, and since he looked on every gain in the material condition of
+the mill-hands as a step in their moral growth, he was quite willing to
+hold back his fundamental plans while he discussed the establishment of
+a nursery, and of a night-school for the boys in the mills.
+
+The third time he called, he found Mr. Langhope and Mr. Halford Gaines
+of the company. The President of the Westmore mills was a trim
+middle-sized man, whose high pink varnish of good living would have
+turned to purple could he have known Mr. Langhope's opinion of his
+jewelled shirt-front and the padded shoulders of his evening-coat.
+Happily he had no inkling of these views, and was fortified in his
+command of the situation by an unimpaired confidence in his own
+appearance; while Mr. Langhope, discreetly withdrawn behind a veil of
+cigar-smoke, let his silence play like a fine criticism over the various
+phases of the discussion.
+
+It was a surprise to Amherst to find himself in Mr. Gaines's presence.
+The President, secluded in his high office, seldom visited the mills,
+and when there showed no consciousness of any presence lower than
+Truscomb's; and Amherst's first thought was that, in the manager's
+enforced absence, he was to be called to account by the head of the
+firm. But he was affably welcomed by Mr. Gaines, who made it clear that
+his ostensible purpose in coming was to hear Amherst's views as to the
+proposed night-schools and nursery. These were pointedly alluded to as
+Mrs. Westmore's projects, and the young man was made to feel that he was
+merely called in as a temporary adviser in Truscomb's absence. This was,
+in fact, the position Amherst preferred to take, and he scrupulously
+restricted himself to the answering of questions, letting Mrs. Westmore
+unfold his plans as though they had been her own. "It is much better,"
+he reflected, "that they should all think so, and she too, for Truscomb
+will be on his legs again in a day or two, and then my hours will be
+numbered."
+
+Meanwhile he was surprised to find Mr. Gaines oddly amenable to the
+proposed innovations, which he appeared to regard as new fashions in
+mill-management, to be adopted for the same cogent reasons as a new cut
+in coat-tails.
+
+"Of course we want to be up-to-date--there's no reason why the Westmore
+mills shouldn't do as well by their people as any mills in the country,"
+he affirmed, in the tone of the entertainer accustomed to say: "I want
+the thing done handsomely." But he seemed even less conscious than Mrs.
+Westmore that each particular wrong could be traced back to a radical
+vice in the system. He appeared to think that every murmur of assent to
+her proposals passed the sponge, once for all, over the difficulty
+propounded: as though a problem in algebra should be solved by wiping it
+off the blackboard.
+
+"My dear Bessy, we all owe you a debt of gratitude for coming here, and
+bringing, so to speak, a fresh eye to bear on the subject. If I've been,
+perhaps, a little too exclusively absorbed in making the mills
+profitable, my friend Langhope will, I believe, not be the first
+to--er--cast a stone at me." Mr. Gaines, who was the soul of delicacy,
+stumbled a little over the awkward associations connected with this
+figure, but, picking himself up, hastened on to affirm: "And in that
+respect, I think we can challenge comparison with any industry in the
+state; but I am the first to admit that there may be another side, a
+side that it takes a woman--a mother--to see. For instance," he threw in
+jocosely, "I flatter myself that I know how to order a good dinner; but
+I always leave the flowers to my wife. And if you'll permit me to say
+so," he went on, encouraged by the felicity of his image, "I believe it
+will produce a most pleasing effect--not only on the operatives
+themselves, but on the whole of Hanaford--on our own set of people
+especially--to have you come here and interest yourself in
+the--er--philanthropic side of the work."
+
+Bessy coloured a little. She blushed easily, and was perhaps not
+over-discriminating as to the quality of praise received; but under her
+ripple of pleasure a stronger feeling stirred, and she said hastily: "I
+am afraid I never should have thought of these things if Mr. Amherst had
+not pointed them out to me."
+
+Mr. Gaines met this blandly. "Very gratifying to Mr. Amherst to have you
+put it in that way; and I am sure we all appreciate his valuable hints.
+Truscomb himself could not have been more helpful, though his larger
+experience will no doubt be useful later on, in developing
+and--er--modifying your plans."
+
+It was difficult to reconcile this large view of the moral issue with
+the existence of abuses which made the management of the Westmore mills
+as unpleasantly notorious in one section of the community as it was
+agreeably notable in another. But Amherst was impartial enough to see
+that Mr. Gaines was unconscious of the incongruities of the situation.
+He left the reconciling of incompatibles to Truscomb with the simple
+faith of the believer committing a like task to his maker: it was in the
+manager's mind that the dark processes of adjustment took place. Mr.
+Gaines cultivated the convenient and popular idea that by ignoring
+wrongs one is not so much condoning as actually denying their existence;
+and in pursuance of this belief he devoutly abstained from studying the
+conditions at Westmore.
+
+A farther surprise awaited Amherst when Truscomb reappeared in the
+office. The manager was always a man of few words; and for the first
+days his intercourse with his assistant was restricted to asking
+questions and issuing orders. Soon afterward, it became known that
+Dillon's arm was to be amputated, and that afternoon Truscomb was
+summoned to see Mrs. Westmore. When he returned he sent for Amherst; and
+the young man felt sure that his hour had come.
+
+He was at dinner when the message reached him, and he knew from the
+tightening of his mother's lips that she too interpreted it in the same
+way. He was glad that Duplain's presence kept her from speaking her
+fears; and he thanked her inwardly for the smile with which she watched
+him go.
+
+That evening, when he returned, the smile was still at its post; but it
+dropped away wearily as he said, with his hands on her shoulders: "Don't
+worry, mother; I don't know exactly what's happening, but we're not
+blacklisted yet."
+
+Mrs. Amherst had immediately taken up her work, letting her nervous
+tension find its usual escape through her finger-tips. Her needles
+flagged as she lifted her eyes to his.
+
+"Something _is_ happening, then?" she murmured.
+
+"Oh, a number of things, evidently--but though I'm in the heart of them,
+I can't yet make out how they are going to affect me."
+
+His mother's glance twinkled in time with the flash of her needles.
+"There's always a safe place in the heart of a storm," she said
+shrewdly; and Amherst rejoined with a laugh: "Well, if it's Truscomb's
+heart, I don't know that it's particularly safe for me."
+
+"Tell me just what he said, John," she begged, making no attempt to
+carry the pleasantry farther, though its possibilities still seemed to
+flicker about her lip; and Amherst proceeded to recount his talk with
+the manager.
+
+Truscomb, it appeared, had made no allusion to Dillon; his avowed
+purpose in summoning his assistant had been to discuss with the latter
+the question of the proposed nursery and schools. Mrs. Westmore, at
+Amherst's suggestion, had presented these projects as her own; but the
+question of a site having come up, she had mentioned to Truscomb his
+assistant's proposal that the company should buy for the purpose the
+notorious Eldorado. The road-house in question had always been one of
+the most destructive influences in the mill-colony, and Amherst had made
+one or two indirect attempts to have the building converted to other
+uses; but the persistent opposition he encountered gave colour to the
+popular report that the manager took a high toll from the landlord.
+
+It therefore at once occurred to Amherst to suggest the purchase of the
+property to Mrs. Westmore; and he was not surprised to find that
+Truscomb's opposition to the scheme centred in the choice of the
+building. But even at this point the manager betrayed no open
+resistance; he seemed tacitly to admit Amherst's right to discuss the
+proposed plans, and even to be consulted concerning the choice of a
+site. He was ready with a dozen good reasons against the purchase of the
+road-house; but here also he proceeded with a discretion unexampled in
+his dealings with his subordinates. He acknowledged the harm done by the
+dance-hall, but objected that he could not conscientiously advise the
+company to pay the extortionate price at which it was held, and reminded
+Amherst that, if that particular source of offense were removed, others
+would inevitably spring up to replace it; marshalling the usual
+temporizing arguments of tolerance and expediency, with no marked change
+from his usual tone, till, just as the interview was ending, he asked,
+with a sudden drop to conciliation, if the assistant manager had
+anything to complain of in the treatment he received.
+
+This came as such a surprise to Amherst that before he had collected
+himself he found Truscomb ambiguously but unmistakably offering
+him--with the practised indirection of the man accustomed to cover his
+share in such transactions--a substantial "consideration" for dropping
+the matter of the road-house. It was incredible, yet it had really
+happened: the all-powerful Truscomb, who held Westmore in the hollow of
+his hand, had stooped to bribing his assistant because he was afraid to
+deal with him in a more summary manner. Amherst's leap of anger at the
+offer was curbed by the instant perception of its cause. He had no time
+to search for a reason; he could only rally himself to meet the
+unintelligible with a composure as abysmal as Truscomb's; and his voice
+still rang with the wonder of the incident as he retailed it to his
+mother.
+
+"Think of what it means, mother, for a young woman like Mrs. Westmore,
+without any experience or any habit of authority, to come here, and at
+the first glimpse of injustice, to be so revolted that she finds the
+courage and cleverness to put her little hand to the machine and
+reverse the engines--for it's nothing less that she's done! Oh, I know
+there'll be a reaction--the pendulum's sure to swing back: but you'll
+see it won't swing _as far_. Of course I shall go in the end--but
+Truscomb may go too: Jove, if I could pull him down on me, like
+what's-his-name and the pillars of the temple!"
+
+He had risen and was measuring the little sitting-room with his long
+strides, his head flung back and his eyes dark with the inward look his
+mother had not always cared to see there. But now her own glance seemed
+to have caught a ray from his, and the knitting flowed from her hands
+like the thread of fate, as she sat silent, letting him exhale his hopes
+and his wonder, and murmuring only, when he dropped again to the chair
+at her side: "You won't go, Johnny--you won't go."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Westmore lingered on for over two weeks, and during that time
+Amherst was able, in various directions, to develop her interest in the
+mill-workers. His own schemes involved a complete readjustment of the
+relation between the company and the hands: the suppression of the
+obsolete company "store" and tenements, which had so long sapped the
+thrift and ambition of the workers; the transformation of the Hopewood
+grounds into a park and athletic field, and the division of its
+remaining acres into building lots for the mill-hands; the establishing
+of a library, a dispensary and emergency hospital, and various other
+centres of humanizing influence; but he refrained from letting her see
+that his present suggestion was only a part of this larger plan, lest
+her growing sympathy should be checked. He had in his mother an example
+of the mind accessible only to concrete impressions: the mind which
+could die for the particular instance, yet remain serenely indifferent
+to its causes. To Mrs. Amherst, her son's work had been interesting
+simply because it _was_ his work: remove his presence from Westmore, and
+the whole industrial problem became to her as non-existent as star-dust
+to the naked eye. And in Bessy Westmore he divined a nature of the same
+quality--divined, but no longer criticized it. Was not that
+concentration on the personal issue just the compensating grace of her
+sex? Did it not offer a warm tint of human inconsistency to eyes chilled
+by contemplating life in the mass? It pleased Amherst for the moment to
+class himself with the impersonal student of social problems, though in
+truth his interest in them had its source in an imagination as open as
+Bessy's to the pathos of the personal appeal. But if he had the same
+sensitiveness, how inferior were his means of expressing it! Again and
+again, during their talks, he had the feeling which had come to him when
+she bent over Dillon's bed--that her exquisite lines were, in some
+mystical sense, the visible flowering of her nature, that they had taken
+shape in response to the inward motions of the heart.
+
+To a young man ruled by high enthusiasms there can be no more dazzling
+adventure than to work this miracle in the tender creature who yields
+her mind to his--to see, as it were, the blossoming of the spiritual
+seed in forms of heightened loveliness, the bluer beam of the eye, the
+richer curve of the lip, all the physical currents of life quickening
+under the breath of a kindled thought. It did not occur to him that any
+other emotion had effected the change he perceived. Bessy Westmore had
+in full measure that gift of unconscious hypocrisy which enables a woman
+to make the man in whom she is interested believe that she enters into
+all his thoughts. She had--more than this--the gift of self-deception,
+supreme happiness of the unreflecting nature, whereby she was able to
+believe herself solely engrossed in the subjects they discussed, to
+regard him as the mere spokesman of important ideas, thus saving their
+intercourse from present constraint, and from the awkward contemplation
+of future contingencies. So, in obedience to the ancient sorcery of
+life, these two groped for and found each other in regions seemingly so
+remote from the accredited domain of romance that it would have been as
+a great surprise to them to learn whither they had strayed as to see
+the arid streets of Westmore suddenly bursting into leaf.
+
+With Mrs. Westmore's departure Amherst, for the first time, became aware
+of a certain flatness in his life. His daily task seemed dull and
+purposeless, and he was galled by Truscomb's studied forbearance, under
+which he suspected a quickly accumulating store of animosity. He almost
+longed for some collision which would release the manager's pent-up
+resentment; yet he dreaded increasingly any accident that might make his
+stay at Westmore impossible.
+
+It was on Sundays, when he was freed from his weekly task, that he was
+most at the mercy of these opposing feelings. They drove him forth on
+long solitary walks beyond the town, walks ending most often in the
+deserted grounds of Hopewood, beautiful now in the ruined gold of
+October. As he sat under the beech-limbs above the river, watching its
+brown current sweep the willow-roots of the banks, he thought how this
+same current, within its next short reach, passed from wooded seclusion
+to the noise and pollution of the mills. So his own life seemed to have
+passed once more from the tranced flow of the last weeks into its old
+channel of unillumined labour. But other thoughts came to him too: the
+vision of converting that melancholy pleasure-ground into an outlet for
+the cramped lives of the mill-workers; and he pictured the weed-grown
+lawns and paths thronged with holiday-makers, and the slopes nearer the
+factories dotted with houses and gardens.
+
+An unexpected event revived these hopes. A few days before Christmas it
+became known to Hanaford that Mrs. Westmore would return for the
+holidays. Cicely was drooping in town air, and Bessy had persuaded Mr.
+Langhope that the bracing cold of Hanaford would be better for the child
+than the milder atmosphere of Long Island. They reappeared, and brought
+with them a breath of holiday cheerfulness such as Westmore had never
+known. It had always been the rule at the mills to let the operatives
+take their pleasure as they saw fit, and the Eldorado and the Hanaford
+saloons throve on this policy. But Mrs. Westmore arrived full of festal
+projects. There was to be a giant Christmas tree for the mill-children,
+a supper on the same scale for the operatives, and a bout of skating and
+coasting at Hopewood for the older lads--the "band" and "bobbin" boys in
+whom Amherst had always felt a special interest. The Gaines ladies,
+resolved to show themselves at home in the latest philanthropic
+fashions, actively seconded Bessy's endeavours, and for a week Westmore
+basked under a sudden heat-wave of beneficence.
+
+The time had passed when Amherst might have made light of such efforts.
+With Bessy Westmore smiling up, holly-laden, from the foot of the ladder
+on which she kept him perched, how could he question the efficacy of
+hanging the opening-room with Christmas wreaths, or the ultimate benefit
+of gorging the operatives with turkey and sheathing their offspring in
+red mittens? It was just like the end of a story-book with a pretty
+moral, and Amherst was in the mood to be as much taken by the tinsel as
+the youngest mill-baby held up to gape at the tree.
+
+At the New Year, when Mrs. Westmore left, the negotiations for the
+purchase of the Eldorado were well advanced, and it was understood that
+on their completion she was to return for the opening of the
+night-school and nursery. Suddenly, however, it became known that the
+proprietor of the road-house had decided not to sell. Amherst heard of
+the decision from Duplain, and at once foresaw the inevitable
+result--that Mrs. Westmore's plan would be given up owing to the
+difficulty of finding another site. Mr. Gaines and Truscomb had both
+discountenanced the erection of a special building for what was, after
+all, only a tentative enterprise. Among the purchasable houses in
+Westmore no other was suited to the purpose, and they had, therefore, a
+good excuse for advising Bessy to defer her experiment.
+
+Almost at the same time, however, another piece of news changed the
+aspect of affairs. A scandalous occurrence at the Eldorado, witnesses to
+which were unexpectedly forthcoming, put it in Amherst's power to
+threaten the landlord with exposure unless he should at once accept the
+company's offer and withdraw from Westmore. Amherst had no long time to
+consider the best means of putting this threat into effect. He knew it
+was not only idle to appeal to Truscomb, but essential to keep the facts
+from him till the deed was done; yet how obtain the authority to act
+without him? The seemingly insuperable difficulties of the situation
+whetted Amherst's craving for a struggle. He thought first of writing to
+Mrs. Westmore;, but now that the spell of her presence was withdrawn he
+felt how hard it would be to make her understand the need of prompt and
+secret action; and besides, was it likely that, at such short notice,
+she could command the needful funds? Prudence opposed the attempt, and
+on reflection he decided to appeal to Mr. Gaines, hoping that the
+flagrancy of the case would rouse the President from his usual attitude
+of indifference.
+
+Mr. Gaines was roused to the extent of showing a profound resentment
+against the cause of his disturbance. He relieved his sense of
+responsibility by some didactic remarks on the vicious tendencies of the
+working-classes, and concluded with the reflection that the more you did
+for them the less thanks you got. But when Amherst showed an
+unwillingness to let the matter rest on this time-honoured aphorism, the
+President retrenched himself behind ambiguities, suggestions that they
+should await Mrs. Westmore's return, and general considerations of a
+pessimistic nature, tapering off into a gloomy view of the weather.
+
+"By God, I'll write to her!" Amherst exclaimed, as the Gaines portals
+closed on him; and all the way back to Westmore he was busy marshalling
+his arguments and entreaties.
+
+He wrote the letter that night, but did not post it. Some unavowed
+distrust of her restrained him--a distrust not of her heart but of her
+intelligence. He felt that the whole future of Westmore was at stake,
+and decided to await the development of the next twenty-four hours. The
+letter was still in his pocket when, after dinner, he was summoned to
+the office by Truscomb.
+
+That evening, when he returned home, he entered the little sitting-room
+without speaking. His mother sat there alone, in her usual place--how
+many nights he had seen the lamplight slant at that particular angle
+across her fresh cheek and the fine wrinkles about her eyes! He was
+going to add another wrinkle to the number now--soon they would creep
+down and encroach upon the smoothness of the cheek.
+
+She looked up and saw that his glance was turned to the crowded
+bookshelves behind her.
+
+"There must be nearly a thousand of them," he said as their eyes met.
+
+"Books? Yes--with your father's. Why--were you thinking...?" She started
+up suddenly and crossed over to him.
+
+"Too many for wanderers," he continued, drawing her hands to his breast;
+then, as she clung to him, weeping and trembling a little: "It had to
+be, mother," he said, kissing her penitently where the fine wrinkles
+died into the cheek.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+AMHERST'S dismissal was not to take effect for a month; and in the
+interval he addressed himself steadily to his task.
+
+He went through the routine of the work numbly; but his intercourse with
+the hands tugged at deep fibres of feelings. He had always shared, as
+far as his duties allowed, in the cares and interests of their few free
+hours: the hours when the automatic appendages of the giant machine
+became men and women again, with desires and passions of their own.
+Under Amherst's influence the mixed elements of the mill-community had
+begun to crystallize into social groups: his books had served as an
+improvised lending-library, he had organized a club, a rudimentary
+orchestra, and various other means of binding together the better
+spirits of the community. With the older men, the attractions of the
+Eldorado, and kindred inducements, often worked against him; but among
+the younger hands, and especially the boys, he had gained a personal
+ascendency that it was bitter to relinquish.
+
+It was the severing of this tie that cost him most pain in the final
+days at Westmore; and after he had done what he could to console his
+mother, and to put himself in the way of getting work elsewhere, he
+tried to see what might be saved out of the ruins of the little polity
+he had built up. He hoped his influence might at least persist in the
+form of an awakened instinct of fellowship; and he gave every spare hour
+to strengthening the links he had tried to form. The boys, at any rate,
+would be honestly sorry to have him go: not, indeed, from the profounder
+reasons that affected him, but because he had not only stood
+persistently between the overseers and themselves, but had recognized
+their right to fun after work-hours as well as their right to protection
+while they worked.
+
+In the glow of Mrs. Westmore's Christmas visitation an athletic club had
+been formed, and leave obtained to use the Hopewood grounds for Saturday
+afternoon sports; and thither Amherst continued to conduct the boys
+after the mills closed at the week-end. His last Saturday had now come:
+a shining afternoon of late February, with a red sunset bending above
+frozen river and slopes of unruffled snow. For an hour or more he had
+led the usual sports, coasting down the steep descent from the house to
+the edge of the woods, and skating and playing hockey on the rough
+river-ice which eager hands kept clear after every snow-storm. He always
+felt the contagion of these sports: the glow of movement, the tumult of
+young voices, the sting of the winter air, roused all the boyhood in his
+blood. But today he had to force himself through his part in the
+performance. To the very last, as he now saw, he had hoped for a sign in
+the heavens: not the reversal of his own sentence--for, merely on
+disciplinary grounds, he perceived that to be impossible--but something
+pointing to a change in the management of the mills, some proof that
+Mrs. Westmore's intervention had betokened more than a passing impulse
+of compassion. Surely she would not accept without question the
+abandonment of her favourite scheme; and if she came back to put the
+question, the answer would lay bare the whole situation.... So Amherst's
+hopes had persuaded him; but the day before he had heard that she was to
+sail for Europe. The report, first announced in the papers, had been
+confirmed by his mother, who brought back from a visit to Hanaford the
+news that Mrs. Westmore was leaving at once for an indefinite period,
+and that the Hanaford house was to be closed. Irony would have been the
+readiest caustic for the wound inflicted; but Amherst, for that very
+reason, disdained it. He would not taint his disappointment with
+mockery, but would leave it among the unspoiled sadnesses of life....
+
+He flung himself into the boys' sports with his usual energy, meaning
+that their last Saturday with him should be their merriest; but he went
+through his part mechanically, and was glad when the sun began to dip
+toward the rim of the woods.
+
+He was standing on the ice, where the river widened just below the
+house, when a jingle of bells broke on the still air, and he saw a
+sleigh driven rapidly up the avenue. Amherst watched it in surprise.
+Who, at that hour, could be invading the winter solitude of Hopewood?
+The sleigh halted near the closed house, and a muffled figure, alighting
+alone, began to move down the snowy slope toward the skaters.
+
+In an instant he had torn off his skates and was bounding up the bank.
+He would have known the figure anywhere--known that lovely poise of the
+head, the mixture of hesitancy and quickness in the light tread which
+even the snow could not impede. Half-way up the slope to the house they
+met, and Mrs. Westmore held out her hand. Face and lips, as she stood
+above him, glowed with her swift passage through the evening air, and in
+the blaze of the sunset she seemed saturated with heavenly fires.
+
+"I drove out to find you--they told me you were here--I arrived this
+morning, quite suddenly...."
+
+She broke off, as though the encounter had checked her ardour instead of
+kindling it; but he drew no discouragement from her tone.
+
+"I hoped you would come before I left--I knew you would!" he exclaimed;
+and at his last words her face clouded anxiously.
+
+"I didn't know you were leaving Westmore till yesterday--the day
+before--I got a letter...." Again she wavered, perceptibly trusting her
+difficulty to him, in the sweet way he had been trying to forget; and he
+answered with recovered energy: "The great thing is that you should be
+here."
+
+She shook her head at his optimism. "What can I do if you go?"
+
+"You can give me a chance, before I go, to tell you a little about some
+of the loose ends I am leaving."
+
+"But why are you leaving them? I don't understand. Is it inevitable?"
+
+"Inevitable," he returned, with an odd glow of satisfaction in the word;
+and as her eyes besought him, he added, smiling: "I've been dismissed,
+you see; and from the manager's standpoint I think I deserved it. But
+the best part of my work needn't go with me--and that is what I should
+like to speak to you about. As assistant manager I can easily be
+replaced--have been, I understand, already; but among these boys here I
+should like to think that a little of me stayed--and it will, if
+you'll let me tell you what I've been doing."
+
+[Illustration: Half-way up the slope to the house they met.]
+
+She glanced away from him at the busy throng on the ice and at the other
+black cluster above the coasting-slide.
+
+"How they're enjoying it!" she murmured. "What a pity it was never done
+before! And who will keep it up when you're gone?"
+
+"You," he answered, meeting her eyes again; and as she coloured a little
+under his look he went on quickly: "Will you come over and look at the
+coasting? The time is almost up. One more slide and they'll be packing
+off to supper."
+
+She nodded "yes," and they walked in silence over the white lawn,
+criss-crossed with tramplings of happy feet, to the ridge from which the
+coasters started on their run. Amherst's object in turning the talk had
+been to gain a moment's respite. He could not bear to waste his perfect
+hour in futile explanations: he wanted to keep it undisturbed by any
+thought of the future. And the same feeling seemed to possess his
+companion, for she did not speak again till they reached the knoll where
+the boys were gathered.
+
+A sled packed with them hung on the brink: with a last shout it was off,
+dipping down the incline with the long curved flight of a swallow,
+flashing across the wide meadow at the base of the hill, and tossed
+upward again by its own impetus, till it vanished in the dark rim of
+wood on the opposite height. The lads waiting on the knoll sang out for
+joy, and Bessy clapped her hands and joined with them.
+
+"What fun! I wish I'd brought Cicely! I've not coasted for years," she
+laughed out, as the second detachment of boys heaped themselves on
+another sled and shot down. Amherst looked at her with a smile. He saw
+that every other feeling had vanished in the exhilaration of watching
+the flight of the sleds. She had forgotten why she had come--forgotten
+her distress at his dismissal--forgotten everything but the spell of the
+long white slope, and the tingle of cold in her veins.
+
+"Shall we go down? Should you like it?" he asked, feeling no resentment
+under the heightened glow of his pulses.
+
+"Oh, do take me--I shall love it!" Her eyes shone like a child's--she
+might have been a lovelier embodiment of the shouting boyhood about
+them.
+
+The first band of coasters, sled at heels, had by this time already
+covered a third of the homeward stretch; but Amherst was too impatient
+to wait. Plunging down to the meadow he caught up the sled-rope, and
+raced back with the pack of rejoicing youth in his wake. The sharp climb
+up the hill seemed to fill his lungs with flame: his whole body burned
+with a strange intensity of life. As he reached the top, a distant bell
+rang across the fields from Westmore, and the boys began to snatch up
+their coats and mufflers.
+
+"Be off with you--I'll look after the sleds," Amherst called to them as
+they dispersed; then he turned for a moment to see that the skaters
+below were also heeding the summons.
+
+A cold pallor lay on the river-banks and on the low meadow beneath the
+knoll; but the woodland opposite stood black against scarlet vapours
+that ravelled off in sheer light toward a sky hung with an icy moon.
+
+Amherst drew up the sled and held it steady while Bessy, seating
+herself, tucked her furs close with little breaks of laughter; then he
+placed himself in front.
+
+"Ready?" he cried over his shoulder, and "Ready!" she called back.
+
+Their craft quivered under them, hanging an instant over the long
+stretch of whiteness below; the level sun dazzled their eyes, and the
+first plunge seemed to dash them down into darkness. Amherst heard a cry
+of glee behind him; then all sounds were lost in the whistle of air
+humming by like the flight of a million arrows. They had dropped below
+the sunset and were tearing through the clear nether twilight of the
+descent; then, with a bound, the sled met the level, and shot away
+across the meadow toward the opposite height. It seemed to Amherst as
+though his body had been left behind, and only the spirit in him rode
+the wild blue currents of galloping air; but as the sled's rush began to
+slacken with the strain of the last ascent he was recalled to himself by
+the touch of the breathing warmth at his back. Bessy had put out a hand
+to steady herself, and as she leaned forward, gripping his arm, a flying
+end of her furs swept his face. There was a delicious pang in being thus
+caught back to life; and as the sled stopped, and he sprang to his feet,
+he still glowed with the sensation. Bessy too was under the spell. In
+the dusk of the beech-grove where they had landed, he could barely
+distinguish her features; but her eyes shone on him, and he heard her
+quick breathing as he stooped to help her to her feet.
+
+"Oh, how beautiful--it's the only thing better than a good gallop!"
+
+She leaned against a tree-bole, panting a little, and loosening her
+furs.
+
+"What a pity it's too dark to begin again!" she sighed, looking about
+her through the dim weaving of leafless boughs.
+
+"It's not so dark in the open--we might have one more," he proposed; but
+she shook her head, seized by a new whim.
+
+"It's so still and delicious in here--did you hear the snow fall when
+that squirrel jumped across to the pine?" She tilted her head, narrowing
+her lids as she peered upward. "There he is! One gets used to the
+light.... Look! See his little eyes shining down at us!"
+
+As Amherst looked where she pointed, the squirrel leapt to another tree,
+and they stole on after him through the hushed wood, guided by his grey
+flashes in the dimness. Here and there, in a break of the snow, they
+trod on a bed of wet leaves that gave out a breath of hidden life, or a
+hemlock twig dashed its spicy scent into their faces. As they grew used
+to the twilight their eyes began to distinguish countless delicate
+gradations of tint: cold mottlings of grey-black boles against the snow,
+wet russets of drifted beech-leaves, a distant network of mauve twigs
+melting into the woodland haze. And in the silence just such fine
+gradations of sound became audible: the soft drop of loosened
+snow-lumps, a stir of startled wings, the creak of a dead branch,
+somewhere far off in darkness.
+
+They walked on, still in silence, as though they had entered the glade
+of an enchanted forest and were powerless to turn back or to break the
+hush with a word. They made no pretense of following the squirrel any
+longer; he had flashed away to a high tree-top, from which his ironical
+chatter pattered down on their unheeding ears. Amherst's sensations were
+not of that highest order of happiness where mind and heart mingle their
+elements in the strong draught of life: it was a languid fume that stole
+through him from the cup at his lips. But after the sense of defeat and
+failure which the last weeks had brought, the reaction was too exquisite
+to be analyzed. All he asked of the moment was its immediate
+sweetness....
+
+They had reached the brink of a rocky glen where a little brook still
+sent its thread of sound through mufflings of ice and huddled branches.
+Bessy stood still a moment, bending her head to the sweet cold tinkle;
+then she moved away and said slowly: "We must go back."
+
+As they turned to retrace their steps a yellow line of light through the
+tree-trunks showed them that they had not, after all, gone very deep
+into the wood. A few minutes' walk would restore them to the lingering
+daylight, and on the farther side of the meadow stood the sleigh which
+was to carry Bessy back to Hanaford. A sudden sense of the evanescence
+of the moment roused Amherst from his absorption. Before the next change
+in the fading light he would be back again among the ugly realities of
+life. Did she, too, hate to return to them? Or why else did she walk so
+slowly--why did she seem as much afraid as himself to break the silence
+that held them in its magic circle?
+
+A dead pine-branch caught in the edge of her skirt, and she stood still
+while Amherst bent down to release her. As she turned to help him he
+looked up with a smile.
+
+"The wood doesn't want to let you go," he said.
+
+She made no reply, and he added, rising: "But you'll come back to
+it--you'll come back often, I hope."
+
+He could not see her face in the dimness, but her voice trembled a
+little as she answered: "I will do what you tell me--but I shall be
+alone--against all the others: they don't understand."
+
+The simplicity, the helplessness, of the avowal, appealed to him not as
+a weakness but as a grace. He understood what she was really saying:
+"How can you desert me? How can you put this great responsibility on me,
+and then leave me to bear it alone?" and in the light of her unuttered
+appeal his action seemed almost like cruelty. Why had he opened her eyes
+to wrongs she had no strength to redress without his aid?
+
+He could only answer, as he walked beside her toward the edge of the
+wood: "You will not be alone--in time you will make the others
+understand; in time they will be with you."
+
+"Ah, you don't believe that!" she exclaimed, pausing suddenly, and
+speaking with an intensity of reproach that amazed him.
+
+"I hope it, at any rate," he rejoined, pausing also. "And I'm sure that
+if you will come here oftener--if you'll really live among your
+people----"
+
+"How can you say that, when you're deserting them?" she broke in, with a
+feminine excess of inconsequence that fairly dashed the words from his
+lips.
+
+"Deserting them? Don't you understand----?"
+
+"I understand that you've made Mr. Gaines and Truscomb angry--yes; but
+if I should insist on your staying----"
+
+Amherst felt the blood rush to his forehead. "No--no, it's not
+possible!" he exclaimed, with a vehemence addressed more to himself than
+to her.
+
+"Then what will happen at the mills?"
+
+"Oh, some one else will be found--the new ideas are stirring everywhere.
+And if you'll only come back here, and help my successor----"
+
+"Do you think they are likely to choose any one else with your ideas?"
+she interposed with unexpected acuteness; and after a short silence he
+answered: "Not immediately, perhaps; but in time--in time there will be
+improvements."
+
+"As if the poor people could wait! Oh, it's cruel, cruel of you to go!"
+
+Her voice broke in a throb of entreaty that went to his inmost fibres.
+
+"You don't understand. It's impossible in the present state of things
+that I should do any good by staying."
+
+"Then you refuse? Even if I were to insist on their asking you to stay,
+you would still refuse?" she persisted.
+
+"Yes--I should still refuse."
+
+She made no answer, but moved a few steps nearer to the edge of the
+wood. The meadow was just below them now, and the sleigh in plain sight
+on the height beyond. Their steps made no sound on the sodden drifts
+underfoot, and in the silence he thought he heard a catch in her
+breathing. It was enough to make the brimming moment overflow. He stood
+still before her and bent his head to hers.
+
+"Bessy!" he said, with sudden vehemence.
+
+She did not speak or move, but in the quickened state of his perceptions
+he became aware that she was silently weeping. The gathering darkness
+under the trees enveloped them. It absorbed her outline into the shadowy
+background of the wood, from which her face emerged in a faint spot of
+pallor; and the same obscurity seemed to envelop his faculties, merging
+the hard facts of life in a blur of feeling in which the distinctest
+impression was the sweet sense of her tears.
+
+"Bessy!" he exclaimed again; and as he drew a step nearer he felt her
+yield to him, and bury her sobs against his arm.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+"BUT, Justine----"
+
+Mrs. Harry Dressel, seated in the June freshness of her Oak Street
+drawing-room, and harmonizing by her high lights and hard edges with the
+white-and-gold angularities of the best furniture, cast a rebuking eye
+on her friend Miss Brent, who stood arranging in a glass bowl the
+handful of roses she had just brought in from the garden.
+
+Mrs. Dressel's intonation made it clear that the entrance of Miss Brent
+had been the signal for renewing an argument which the latter had
+perhaps left the room to escape.
+
+"When you were here three years ago, Justine, I could understand your
+not wanting to go out, because you were in mourning for your mother--and
+besides, you'd volunteered for that bad surgical case in the Hope
+Hospital. But now that you've come back for a rest and a change I can't
+imagine why you persist in shutting yourself up--unless, of course," she
+concluded, in a higher key of reproach, "it's because you think so
+little of Hanaford society----"
+
+Justine Brent, putting the last rose in place, turned from her task with
+a protesting gesture.
+
+"My dear Effie, who am I to think little of any society, when I belong
+to none?" She passed a last light touch over the flowers, and crossing
+the room, brushed her friend's hand with the same caressing gesture.
+
+Mrs. Dressel met it with an unrelenting turn of her plump shoulder,
+murmuring: "Oh, if you take _that_ tone!" And on Miss Brent's gaily
+rejoining: "Isn't it better than to have other people take it for me?"
+she replied, with an air of affront that expressed itself in a ruffling
+of her whole pretty person: "If you'll excuse my saying so, Justine, the
+fact that you are staying with _me_ would be enough to make you welcome
+anywhere in Hanaford!"
+
+"I'm sure of it, dear; so sure that my horrid pride rather resents being
+floated in on the high tide of such overwhelming credentials."
+
+Mrs. Dressel glanced up doubtfully at the dark face laughing down on
+her. Though she was president of the Maplewood Avenue Book-club, and
+habitually figured in the society column of the "Banner" as one of the
+intellectual leaders of Hanaford, there were moments when her
+self-confidence trembled before Justine's light sallies. It was absurd,
+of course, given the relative situations of the two; and Mrs. Dressel,
+behind her friend's back, was quickly reassured by the thought that
+Justine was only a hospital nurse, who had to work for her living, and
+had really never "been anywhere"; but when Miss Brent's verbal arrows
+were flying, it seemed somehow of more immediate consequence that she
+was fairly well-connected, and lived in New York. No one placed a higher
+value on the abstract qualities of wit and irony than Mrs. Dressel; the
+difficulty was that she never quite knew when Justine's retorts were
+loaded, or when her own susceptibilities were the target aimed at; and
+between her desire to appear to take the joke, and the fear of being
+ridiculed without knowing it, her pretty face often presented an
+interesting study in perplexity. As usual, she now took refuge in
+bringing the talk back to a personal issue.
+
+"I can't imagine," she said, "why you won't go to the Gaines's
+garden-party. It's always the most brilliant affair of the season; and
+this year, with the John Amhersts here, and all their party--that
+fascinating Mrs. Eustace Ansell, and Mrs. Amherst's father, old Mr.
+Langhope, who is quite as quick and clever as _you_ are--you certainly
+can't accuse us of being dull and provincial!"
+
+Miss Brent smiled. "As far as I can remember, Effie, it is always you
+who accuse others of bringing that charge against Hanaford. For my part,
+I know too little of it to have formed any opinion; but whatever it may
+have to offer me, I am painfully conscious of having, at present,
+nothing but your kind commendation to give in return."
+
+Mrs. Dressel rose impatiently. "How absurdly you talk! You're a little
+thinner than usual, and I don't like those dark lines under your eyes;
+but Westy Gaines told me yesterday that he thought you handsomer than
+ever, and that it was intensely becoming to some women to look
+over-tired."
+
+"It's lucky I'm one of that kind," Miss Brent rejoined, between a sigh
+and a laugh, "and there's every promise of my getting handsomer every
+day if somebody doesn't soon arrest the geometrical progression of my
+good looks by giving me the chance to take a year's rest!"
+
+As she spoke, she stretched her arms above her head, with a gesture
+revealing the suppleness of her slim young frame, but also its tenuity
+of structure--the frailness of throat and shoulders, and the play of
+bones in the delicate neck. Justine Brent had one of those imponderable
+bodies that seem a mere pinch of matter shot through with light and
+colour. Though she did not flush easily, auroral lights ran under her
+clear skin, were lost in the shadows of her hair, and broke again in her
+eyes; and her voice seemed to shoot light too, as though her smile
+flashed back from her words as they fell--all her features being so
+fluid and changeful that the one solid thing about her was the massing
+of dense black hair which clasped her face like the noble metal of some
+antique bust.
+
+Mrs. Dressel's face softened at the note of weariness in the girl's
+voice. "Are you very tired, dear?" she asked drawing her down to a seat
+on the sofa.
+
+"Yes, and no--not so much bodily, perhaps, as in spirit." Justine Brent
+drew her brows together, and stared moodily at the thin brown hands
+interwoven between Mrs. Dressel's plump fingers. Seated thus, with
+hollowed shoulders and brooding head, she might have figured a young
+sibyl bowed above some mystery of fate; but the next moment her face,
+inclining toward her friend's, cast off its shadows and resumed the look
+of a plaintive child.
+
+"The worst of it is that I don't look forward with any interest to
+taking up the old drudgery again. Of course that loss of interest may be
+merely physical--I should call it so in a nervous patient, no doubt. But
+in myself it seems different--it seems to go to the roots of the world.
+You know it was always the imaginative side of my work that helped me
+over the ugly details--the pity and beauty that disinfected the physical
+horror; but now that feeling is lost, and only the mortal disgust
+remains. Oh, Effie, I don't want to be a ministering angel any more--I
+want to be uncertain, coy and hard to please. I want something dazzling
+and unaccountable to happen to me--something new and unlived and
+indescribable!"
+
+She snatched herself with a laugh from the bewildered Effie, and
+flinging up her arms again, spun on a light heel across the polished
+floor.
+
+"Well, then," murmured Mrs. Dressel with gentle obstinacy, "I can't see
+why in the world you won't go to the Gaines's garden-party!" And caught
+in the whirlwind of her friend's incomprehensible mirth, she still
+persisted, as she ducked her blonde head to it: "If you'll only let me
+lend you my dress with the Irish lace, you'll look smarter than anybody
+there...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before her toilet mirror, an hour later, Justine Brent seemed in a way
+to fulfill Mrs. Dressel's prediction. So mirror-like herself, she could
+no more help reflecting the happy effect of a bow or a feather than the
+subtler influence of word and look; and her face and figure were so new
+to the advantages of dress that, at four-and-twenty, she still produced
+the effect of a young girl in her first "good" frock. In Mrs. Dressel's
+festal raiment, which her dark tints subdued to a quiet elegance, she
+was like the golden core of a pale rose illuminating and scenting its
+petals.
+
+Three years of solitary life, following on a youth of confidential
+intimacy with the mother she had lost, had produced in her the quaint
+habit of half-loud soliloquy. "Fine feathers, Justine!" she laughed back
+at her laughing image. "You look like a phoenix risen from your ashes.
+But slip back into your own plumage, and you'll be no more than a little
+brown bird without a song!"
+
+The luxurious suggestions of her dress, and the way her warm youth
+became it, drew her back to memories of a childhood nestled in beauty
+and gentle ways, before her handsome prodigal father had died, and her
+mother's face had grown pinched in the long struggle with poverty. But
+those memories were after all less dear to Justine than the grey years
+following, when, growing up, she had helped to clear a space in the
+wilderness for their tiny hearth-fire, when her own efforts had fed the
+flame and roofed it in from the weather. A great heat, kindled at that
+hearth, had burned in her veins, making her devour her work, lighting
+and warming the long cold days, and reddening the horizon through dark
+passages of revolt and failure; and she felt all the more deeply the
+chill of reaction that set in with her mother's death.
+
+She thought she had chosen her work as a nurse in a spirit of high
+disinterestedness; but in the first hours of her bereavement it seemed
+as though only the personal aim had sustained her. For a while, after
+this, her sick people became to her mere bundles of disintegrating
+matter, and she shrank from physical pain with a distaste the deeper
+because, mechanically, she could not help working on to relieve it.
+Gradually her sound nature passed out of this morbid phase, and she took
+up her task with deeper pity if less exalted ardour; glad to do her part
+in the vast impersonal labour of easing the world's misery, but longing
+with all the warm instincts of youth for a special load to lift, a
+single hand to clasp.
+
+Ah, it was cruel to be alive, to be young, to bubble with springs of
+mirth and tenderness and folly, and to live in perpetual contact with
+decay and pain--to look persistently into the grey face of death without
+having lifted even a corner of life's veil! Now and then, when she felt
+her youth flame through the sheath of dullness which was gradually
+enclosing it, she rebelled at the conditions that tied a spirit like
+hers to its monotonous task, while others, without a quiver of wings on
+their dull shoulders, or a note of music in their hearts, had the whole
+wide world to range through, and saw in it no more than a frightful
+emptiness to be shut out with tight walls of habit....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A tap on the door announced Mrs. Dressel, garbed for conquest, and
+bestowing on her brilliant person the last anxious touches of the artist
+reluctant to part from a masterpiece.
+
+"My dear, how well you look! I _knew_ that dress would be becoming!" she
+exclaimed, generously transferring her self-approval to Justine; and
+adding, as the latter moved toward her: "I wish Westy Gaines could see
+you now!"
+
+"Well, he will presently," Miss Brent rejoined, ignoring the slight
+stress on the name.
+
+Mrs. Dressel continued to brood on her maternally. "Justine--I wish
+you'd tell me! You say you hate the life you're leading now--but isn't
+there somebody who might----?"
+
+"Give me another, with lace dresses in it?" Justine's slight shrug might
+have seemed theatrical, had it not been a part of the ceaseless dramatic
+play of her flexible person. "There might be, perhaps...only I'm not
+sure--" She broke off whimsically.
+
+"Not sure of what?"
+
+"That this kind of dress might not always be a little tight on the
+shoulders."
+
+"Tight on the shoulders? What do you mean, Justine? My clothes simply
+_hang_ on you!"
+
+"Oh, Effie dear, don't you remember the fable of the wings under the
+skin, that sprout when one meets a pair of kindred shoulders?" And, as
+Mrs. Dressel bent on her a brow of unenlightenment--"Well, it doesn't
+matter: I only meant that I've always been afraid good clothes might
+keep my wings from sprouting!" She turned back to the glass, giving
+herself a last light touch such as she had bestowed on the roses.
+
+"And that reminds me," she continued--"how about Mr. Amherst's wings?"
+
+"John Amherst?" Mrs. Dressel brightened into immediate attention. "Why,
+do you know him?"
+
+"Not as the owner of the Westmore Mills; but I came across him as their
+assistant manager three years ago, at the Hope Hospital, and he was
+starting a very promising pair then. I wonder if they're doing as well
+under his new coat."
+
+"I'm not sure that I understand you when you talk poetry," said Mrs.
+Dressel with less interest; "but personally I can't say I like John
+Amherst--and he is certainly not worthy of such a lovely woman as Mrs.
+Westmore. Of course she would never let any one see that she's not
+perfectly happy; but I'm told he has given them all a great deal of
+trouble by interfering in the management of the mills, and his manner is
+so cold and sarcastic--the truth is, I suppose he's never quite at ease
+in society. _Her_ family have never been really reconciled to the
+marriage; and Westy Gaines says----"
+
+"Ah, Westy Gaines _would_," Justine interposed lightly. "But if Mrs.
+Amherst is really the Bessy Langhope I used to know it must be rather a
+struggle for the wings!"
+
+Mrs. Dressel's flagging interest settled on the one glimpse of fact in
+this statement. "It's such a coincidence that you should have known her
+too! Was she always so perfectly fascinating? I wish I knew how she
+gives that look to her hair!"
+
+Justine gathered up the lace sunshade and long gloves which her friend
+had lent her. "There was not much more that was genuine about her
+character--that was her very own, I mean--than there is about my
+appearance at this moment. She was always the dearest little chameleon
+in the world, taking everybody's colour in the most flattering way, and
+giving back, I must say, a most charming reflection--if you'll excuse
+the mixed metaphor; but when one got her by herself, with no reflections
+to catch, one found she hadn't any particular colour of her own. One of
+the girls used to say she ought to wear a tag, because she was so easily
+mislaid---- Now then, I'm ready!"
+
+Justine advanced to the door, and Mrs. Dressel followed her downstairs,
+reflecting with pardonable complacency that one of the disadvantages of
+being clever was that it tempted one to say sarcastic things of other
+women--than which she could imagine no more crying social error.
+
+During the drive to the garden-party, Justine's thoughts, drawn to the
+past by the mention of Bessy Langhope's name, reverted to the comic
+inconsequences of her own lot--to that persistent irrelevance of
+incident that had once made her compare herself to an actor always
+playing his part before the wrong stage-setting. Was there not, for
+instance, a mocking incongruity in the fact that a creature so leaping
+with life should have, for chief outlet, the narrow mental channel of
+the excellent couple between whom she was now being borne to the Gaines
+garden-party? All her friendships were the result of propinquity or of
+early association, and fate had held her imprisoned in a circle of
+well-to-do mediocrity, peopled by just such figures as those of the
+kindly and prosperous Dressels. Effie Dressel, the daughter of a cousin
+of Mrs. Brent's, had obscurely but safely allied herself with the heavy
+blond young man who was to succeed his father as President of the Union
+Bank, and who was already regarded by the "solid business interests" of
+Hanaford as possessing talents likely to carry him far in the
+development of the paternal fortunes. Harry Dressel's honest countenance
+gave no evidence of peculiar astuteness, and he was in fact rather the
+product of special conditions than of an irresistible bent. He had the
+sound Saxon love of games, and the most interesting game he had ever
+been taught was "business." He was a simple domestic being, and
+according to Hanaford standards the most obvious obligation of the
+husband and father was to make his family richer. If Harry Dressel had
+ever formulated his aims, he might have said that he wanted to be the
+man whom Hanaford most respected, and that was only another way of
+saying, the richest man in Hanaford. Effie embraced his creed with a
+zeal facilitated by such evidence of its soundness as a growing income
+and the early prospects of a carriage. Her mother-in-law, a kind old
+lady with a simple unquestioning love of money, had told her on her
+wedding day that Harry's one object would always be to make his family
+proud of him; and the recent purchase of the victoria in which Justine
+and the Dressels were now seated was regarded by the family as a
+striking fulfillment of this prophecy.
+
+In the course of her hospital work Justine had of necessity run across
+far different types; but from the connections thus offered she was often
+held back by the subtler shades of taste that civilize human
+intercourse. Her world, in short, had been chiefly peopled by the dull
+or the crude, and, hemmed in between the two, she had created for
+herself an inner kingdom where the fastidiousness she had to set aside
+in her outward relations recovered its full sway. There must be actual
+beings worthy of admission to this secret precinct, but hitherto they
+had not come her way; and the sense that they were somewhere just out of
+reach still gave an edge of youthful curiosity to each encounter with a
+new group of people.
+
+Certainly, Mrs. Gaines's garden-party seemed an unlikely field for the
+exercise of such curiosity: Justine's few glimpses of Hanaford society
+had revealed it as rather a dull thick body, with a surface stimulated
+only by ill-advised references to the life of larger capitals; and the
+concentrated essence of social Hanaford was of course to be found at the
+Gaines entertainments. It presented itself, however, in the rich June
+afternoon, on the long shadows of the well-kept lawn, and among the
+paths of the rose-garden, in its most amiable aspect; and to Justine,
+wearied by habitual contact with ugliness and suffering, there was pure
+delight in the verdant setting of the picture, and in the light
+harmonious tints of the figures peopling it. If the company was dull, it
+was at least decorative; and poverty, misery and dirt were shut out by
+the placid unconsciousness of the guests as securely as by the leafy
+barriers of the garden.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+"AH, Mrs. Dressel, we were on the lookout for you--waiting for the
+curtain to rise. Your friend Miss Brent? Juliana, Mrs. Dressel's friend
+Miss Brent----"
+
+Near the brilliantly-striped marquee that formed the axis of the Gaines
+garden-parties, Mr. Halford Gaines, a few paces from his wife and
+daughters, stood radiating a royal welcome on the stream of visitors
+pouring across the lawn. It was only to eyes perverted by a different
+social perspective that there could be any doubt as to the importance
+of the Gaines entertainments. To Hanaford itself they were epoch-making;
+and if any rebellious spirit had cherished a doubt of the fact, it would
+have been quelled by the official majesty of Mr. Gaines's frock-coat and
+the comprehensive cordiality of his manner.
+
+There were moments when New York hung like a disquieting cloud on the
+social horizon of Mrs. Gaines and her daughters; but to Halford Gaines
+Hanaford was all in all. As an exponent of the popular and patriotic
+"good-enough-for-me" theory he stood in high favour at the Hanaford
+Club, where a too-keen consciousness of the metropolis was alternately
+combated by easy allusion and studied omission, and where the unsettled
+fancies of youth were chastened and steadied by the reflection that, if
+Hanaford was good enough for Halford Gaines, it must offer opportunities
+commensurate with the largest ideas of life.
+
+Never did Mr. Gaines's manner bear richer witness to what could be
+extracted from Hanaford than when he was in the act of applying to it
+the powerful pressure of his hospitality. The resultant essence was so
+bubbling with social exhilaration that, to its producer at any rate, its
+somewhat mixed ingredients were lost in one highly flavoured draught.
+Under ordinary circumstances no one discriminated more keenly than Mr.
+Gaines between different shades of social importance; but any one who
+was entertained by him was momentarily ennobled by the fact, and not all
+the anxious telegraphy of his wife and daughters could, for instance,
+recall to him that the striking young woman in Mrs. Dressel's wake was
+only some obscure protegee, whom it was odd of Effie to have brought,
+and whose presence was quite unnecessary to emphasize.
+
+"Juliana, Miss Brent tells me she has never seen our roses. Oh, there
+are other roses in Hanaford, Miss Brent; I don't mean to imply that no
+one else attempts them; but unless you can afford to give _carte
+blanche_ to your man--and mine happens to be something of a
+specialist...well, if you'll come with me, I'll let them speak for
+themselves. I always say that if people want to know what we can do they
+must come and see--they'll never find out from _me_!"
+
+A more emphatic signal from his wife arrested Mr. Gaines as he was in
+the act of leading Miss Brent away.
+
+"Eh?--What? The Amhersts and Mrs. Ansell? You must excuse me then, I'm
+afraid--but Westy shall take you. Westy, my boy, it's an ill-wind.... I
+want you to show this young lady our roses." And Mr. Gaines, with
+mingled reluctance and satisfaction, turned away to receive the most
+important guests of the day.
+
+It had not needed his father's summons to draw the expert Westy to Miss
+Brent: he was already gravitating toward her, with the nonchalance bred
+of cosmopolitan successes, but with a directness of aim due also to his
+larger opportunities of comparison.
+
+"The roses will do," he explained, as he guided her through the
+increasing circle of guests about his mother; and in answer to Justine's
+glance of enquiry: "To get you away, I mean. They're not much in
+themselves, you know; but everything of the governor's always begins
+with a capital letter."
+
+"Oh, but these roses deserve to," Justine exclaimed, as they paused
+under the evergreen archway at the farther end of the lawn.
+
+"I don't know--not if you've been in England," Westy murmured, watching
+furtively for the impression produced, on one who had presumably not, by
+the great blush of colour massed against its dusky background of clipped
+evergreens.
+
+Justine smiled. "I _have_ been--but I've been in the slums since; in
+horrible places that the least of those flowers would have lighted up
+like a lamp."
+
+Westy's guarded glance imprudently softened. "It's the beastliest kind
+of a shame, your ever having had to do such work----"
+
+"Oh, _had_ to?" she flashed back at him disconcertingly. "It was my
+choice, you know: there was a time when I couldn't live without it.
+Philanthropy is one of the subtlest forms of self-indulgence."
+
+Westy met this with a vague laugh. If a chap who was as knowing as the
+devil _did_, once in a way, indulge himself in the luxury of talking
+recklessly to a girl with exceptional eyes, it was rather upsetting to
+discover in those eyes no consciousness of the risk he had taken!
+
+"But I _am_ rather tired of it now," she continued, and his look grew
+guarded again. After all, they were all the same--except in that
+particular matter of the eyes. At the thought, he risked another look,
+hung on the sharp edge of betrayal, and was snatched back, not by the
+manly instinct of self-preservation, but by some imp of mockery lurking
+in the depths that lured him.
+
+He recovered his balance and took refuge in a tone of worldly ease. "I
+saw a chap the other day who said he knew you when you were at Saint
+Elizabeth's--wasn't that the name of your hospital?"
+
+Justine assented. "One of the doctors, I suppose. Where did you meet
+him?"
+
+Ah, _now_ she should see! He summoned his utmost carelessness of tone.
+"Down on Long Island last week--I was spending Sunday with the
+Amhersts." He held up the glittering fact to her, and watched for the
+least little blink of awe; but her lids never trembled. It was a
+confession of social blindness which painfully negatived Mrs. Dressel's
+hint that she knew the Amhersts; if she had even known _of_ them, she
+could not so fatally have missed his point.
+
+"Long Island?" She drew her brows together in puzzled retrospection. "I
+wonder if it could have been Stephen Wyant? I heard he had taken over
+his uncle's practice somewhere near New York."
+
+"Wyant--that's the name. He's the doctor at Clifton, the nearest town to
+the Amhersts' place. Little Cicely had a cold--Cicely Westmore, you
+know--a small cousin of mine, by the way--" he switched a rose-branch
+loftily out of her path, explaining, as she moved on, that Cicely was
+the daughter of Mrs. Amherst's first marriage to Richard Westmore.
+"That's the way I happened to see this Dr. Wyant. Bessy--Mrs.
+Amherst--asked him to stop to luncheon, after he'd seen the kid. He
+seems rather a discontented sort of a chap--grumbling at not having a
+New York practice. I should have thought he had rather a snug berth,
+down there at Lynbrook, with all those swells to dose."
+
+Justine smiled. "Dr. Wyant is ambitious, and swells don't have as
+interesting diseases as poor people. One gets tired of giving them bread
+pills for imaginary ailments. But Dr. Wyant is not strong himself and I
+fancy a country practice is better for him than hard work in town."
+
+"You think him clever though, do you?" Westy enquired absently. He was
+already bored with the subject of the Long Island doctor, and vexed at
+the lack of perception that led his companion to show more concern in
+the fortunes of a country practitioner than in the fact of his own visit
+to the Amhersts; but the topic was a safe one, and it was agreeable to
+see how her face kindled when she was interested.
+
+Justine mused on his question. "I think he has very great promise--which
+he is almost certain not to fulfill," she answered with a sigh which
+seemed to Westy's anxious ear to betray a more than professional
+interest in the person referred to.
+
+"Oh, come now--why not? With the Amhersts to give him a start--I heard
+my cousin recommending him to a lot of people the other day----"
+
+"Oh, he may become a fashionable doctor," Justine assented
+indifferently; to which her companion rejoined, with a puzzled stare:
+"That's just what I mean--with Bessy backing him!"
+
+"Has Mrs. Amherst become such a power, then?" Justine asked, taking up
+the coveted theme just as he despaired of attracting her to it.
+
+"My cousin?" he stretched the two syllables to the cracking-point.
+"Well, she's awfully rich, you know; and there's nobody smarter. Don't
+you think so?"
+
+"I don't know; it's so long since I've seen her."
+
+He brightened. "You _did_ know her, then?" But the discovery made her
+obtuseness the more inexplicable!
+
+"Oh, centuries ago: in another world."
+
+"_Centuries_--I like that!" Westy gallantly protested, his ardour
+kindling as she swam once more within his social ken. "And Amherst? You
+know him too, I suppose? By Jove, here he is now----"
+
+He signalled a tall figure strolling slowly toward them with bent head
+and brooding gaze. Justine's eye had retained a vivid image of the man
+with whom, scarcely three years earlier, she had lived through a moment
+of such poignant intimacy, and she recognized at once his lean outline,
+and the keen spring of his features, still veiled by the same look of
+inward absorption. She noticed, as he raised his hat in response to
+Westy Gaines's greeting, that the vertical lines between his brows had
+deepened; and a moment later she was aware that this change was the
+visible token of others which went deeper than the fact of his good
+clothes and his general air of leisure and well-being--changes
+perceptible to her only in the startled sense of how prosperity had aged
+him.
+
+"Hallo, Amherst--trying to get under cover?" Westy jovially accosted
+him, with a significant gesture toward the crowded lawn from which the
+new-comer had evidently fled. "I was just telling Miss Brent that this
+is the safest place on these painful occasions--Oh, confound it, it's
+not as safe as I thought! Here's one of my sisters making for me!"
+
+There ensued a short conflict of words, before his feeble flutter of
+resistance was borne down by a resolute Miss Gaines who, as she swept
+him back to the marquee, cried out to Amherst that her mother was asking
+for him too; and then Justine had time to observe that her remaining
+companion had no intention of responding to his hostess's appeal.
+
+Westy, in naming her, had laid just enough stress on the name to let it
+serve as a reminder or an introduction, as circumstances might decide,
+and she saw that Amherst, roused from his abstraction by the proffered
+clue, was holding his hand out doubtfully.
+
+"I think we haven't met for some years," he said.
+
+Justine smiled. "I have a better reason than you for remembering the
+exact date;" and in response to his look of surprise she added: "You
+made me commit a professional breach of faith, and I've never known
+since whether to be glad or sorry."
+
+Amherst still bent on her the gaze which seemed to find in external
+details an obstacle rather than a help to recognition; but suddenly his
+face cleared. "It was you who told me the truth about poor Dillon! I
+couldn't imagine why I seemed to see you in such a different
+setting...."
+
+"Oh, I'm disguised as a lady this afternoon," she said smiling. "But I'm
+glad you saw through the disguise."
+
+He smiled back at her. "Are you? Why?"
+
+"It seems to make it--if it's so transparent--less of a sham, less of a
+dishonesty," she began impulsively, and then paused again, a little
+annoyed at the overemphasis of her words. Why was she explaining and
+excusing herself to this stranger? Did she propose to tell him next that
+she had borrowed her dress from Effie Dressel? To cover her confusion
+she went on with a slight laugh: "But you haven't told me."
+
+"What was I to tell you?"
+
+"Whether to be glad or sorry that I broke my vow and told the truth
+about Dillon."
+
+They were standing face to face in the solitude of the garden-walk,
+forgetful of everything but the sudden surprised sense of intimacy that
+had marked their former brief communion. Justine had raised her eyes
+half-laughingly to Amherst, but they dropped before the unexpected
+seriousness of his.
+
+"Why do you want to know?" he asked.
+
+She made an effort to sustain the note of pleasantry.
+
+"Well--it might, for instance, determine my future conduct. You see I'm
+still a nurse, and such problems are always likely to present
+themselves."
+
+"Ah, then don't!"
+
+"Don't?"
+
+"I mean--" He hesitated a moment, reaching up to break a rose from the
+branch that tapped his shoulder. "I was only thinking what risks we run
+when we scramble into the chariot of the gods and try to do the driving.
+Be passive--be passive, and you'll be happier!"
+
+"Oh, as to that--!" She swept it aside with one of her airy motions.
+"But Dillon, for instance--would _he_ have been happier if I'd been
+passive?"
+
+Amherst seemed to ponder. "There again--how can one tell?"
+
+"And the risk's not worth taking?"
+
+"No!"
+
+She paused, and they looked at each other again. "Do you mean that
+seriously, I wonder? Do you----"
+
+"Act on it myself? God forbid! The gods drive so badly. There's poor
+Dillon...he happened to be in their way...as we all are at times." He
+pulled himself up, and went on in a matter-of-fact tone: "In Dillon's
+case, however, my axioms don't apply. When my wife heard the truth she
+was, of course, immensely kind to him; and if it hadn't been for you she
+might never have known."
+
+Justine smiled. "I think you would have found out--I was only the humble
+instrument. But now--" she hesitated--"now you must be able to do so
+much--"
+
+Amherst lifted his head, and she saw the colour rise under his fair
+skin. "Out at Westmore? You've never been there since? Yes--my wife has
+made some changes; but it's all so problematic--and one would have to
+live here...."
+
+"You don't, then?"
+
+He answered by an imperceptible shrug. "Of course I'm here often; and
+she comes now and then. But the journey's tiresome, and it is not always
+easy for her to get away." He checked himself, and Justine saw that he,
+in turn, was suddenly conscious of the incongruity of explaining and
+extenuating his personal situation to a stranger. "But then we're _not_
+strangers!" a voice in her exulted, just as he added, with an
+embarrassed attempt to efface and yet justify his moment of expansion:
+"That reminds me--I think you know my wife. I heard her asking Mrs.
+Dressel about you. She wants so much to see you."
+
+The transition had been effected, at the expense of dramatic interest,
+but to the obvious triumph of social observances; and to Justine, after
+all, regaining at his side the group about the marquee, the interest was
+not so much diminished as shifted to the no less suggestive problem of
+studying the friend of her youth in the unexpected character of John
+Amherst's wife.
+
+Meanwhile, however, during the brief transit across the Gaines
+greensward, her thoughts were still busy with Amherst. She had seen at
+once that the peculiar sense of intimacy reawakened by their meeting had
+been chilled and deflected by her first allusion to the topic which had
+previously brought them together: Amherst had drawn back as soon as she
+named the mills. What could be the cause of his reluctance? When they
+had last met, the subject burned within him: her being in actual fact a
+stranger had not, then, been an obstacle to his confidences. Now that he
+was master at Westmore it was plain that another tone became him--that
+his situation necessitated a greater reserve; but her enquiry did not
+imply the least wish to overstep this restriction: it merely showed her
+remembrance of his frankly-avowed interest in the operatives. Justine
+was struck by the fact that so natural an allusion should put him on the
+defensive. She did not for a moment believe that he had lost his
+interest in the mills; and that his point of view should have shifted
+with the fact of ownership she rejected as an equally superficial
+reading of his character. The man with whom she had talked at Dillon's
+bedside was one in whom the ruling purposes had already shaped
+themselves, and to whom life, in whatever form it came, must henceforth
+take their mould. As she reached this point in her analysis, it occurred
+to her that his shrinking from the subject might well imply not
+indifference, but a deeper preoccupation: a preoccupation for some
+reason suppressed and almost disavowed, yet sustaining the more
+intensely its painful hidden life. From this inference it was but a leap
+of thought to the next--that the cause of the change must be sought
+outside of himself, in some external influence strong enough to modify
+the innate lines of his character. And where could such an influence be
+more obviously sought than in the marriage which had transformed the
+assistant manager of the Westmore Mills not, indeed, into their
+owner--that would rather have tended to simplify the problem--but into
+the husband of Mrs. Westmore? After all, the mills were Bessy's--and for
+a farther understanding of the case it remained to find out what manner
+of person Bessy had become.
+
+Justine's first impression, as her friend's charming arms received
+her--with an eagerness of welcome not lost on the suspended judgment of
+feminine Hanaford--the immediate impression was of a gain of emphasis,
+of individuality, as though the fluid creature she remembered had belied
+her prediction, and run at last into a definite mould. Yes--Bessy had
+acquired an outline: a graceful one, as became her early promise, though
+with, perhaps, a little more sharpness of edge than her youthful texture
+had promised. But the side she turned to her friend was still all
+softness--had in it a hint of the old pliancy, the impulse to lean and
+enlace, that at once woke in Justine the corresponding instinct of
+guidance and protection, so that their first kiss, before a word was
+spoken, carried the two back to the precise relation in which their
+school-days had left them. So easy a reversion to the past left no room
+for the sense of subsequent changes by which such reunions are sometimes
+embarrassed. Justine's sympathies had, instinctively, and almost at
+once, transferred themselves to Bessy's side--passing over at a leap
+the pained recognition that there _were_ sides already--and Bessy had
+gathered up Justine into the circle of gentle self-absorption which left
+her very dimly aware of any distinctive characteristic in her friends
+except that of their affection for herself--since she asked only, as she
+appealingly put it, that they should all be "dreadfully fond" of her.
+
+"And I've wanted you so often, Justine: you're the only clever person
+I'm not afraid of, because your cleverness always used to make things
+clear instead of confusing them. I've asked so many people about
+you--but I never heard a word till just the other day--wasn't it
+odd?--when our new doctor at Rushton happened to say that he knew you.
+I've been rather unwell lately--nervous and tired, and sleeping
+badly--and he told me I ought to keep perfectly quiet, and be under the
+care of a nurse who could make me do as she chose: just such a nurse as
+a wonderful Miss Brent he had known at St. Elizabeth's, whose patients
+obeyed her as if she'd been the colonel of a regiment. His description
+made me laugh, it reminded me so much of the way you used to make me do
+what you wanted at the convent--and then it suddenly occurred to me that
+I had heard of you having gone in for nursing, and we compared notes,
+and I found it was really you! Wasn't it odd that we should discover
+each other in that way? I daresay we might have passed in the street
+and never known it--I'm sure I must be horribly changed...."
+
+Thus Bessy discoursed, in the semi-isolation to which, under an
+overarching beech-tree, the discretion of their hostess had allowed the
+two friends to withdraw for the freer exchange of confidences. There
+was, at first sight, nothing in her aspect to bear out Mrs. Amherst's
+plaintive allusion to her health, but Justine, who knew that she had
+lost a baby a few months previously, assumed that the effect of this
+shock still lingered, though evidently mitigated by a reviving interest
+in pretty clothes and the other ornamental accessories of life.
+Certainly Bessy Amherst had grown into the full loveliness which her
+childhood promised. She had the kind of finished prettiness that
+declares itself early, holds its own through the awkward transitions of
+girlhood, and resists the strain of all later vicissitudes, as though
+miraculously preserved in some clear medium impenetrable to the wear and
+tear of living.
+
+"You absurd child! You've not changed a bit except to grow more so!"
+Justine laughed, paying amused tribute to the childish craving for "a
+compliment" that still betrayed itself in Bessy's eyes.
+
+"Well, _you_ have, then, Justine--you've grown extraordinarily
+handsome!"
+
+"That _is_ extraordinary of me, certainly," the other acknowledged
+gaily. "But then think what room for improvement there was--and how
+much time I've had to improve in!"
+
+"It is a long time, isn't it?" Bessy assented. "I feel so intimate,
+still, with the old Justine of the convent, and I don't know the new one
+a bit. Just think--I've a great girl of my own, almost as old as we were
+when we went to the Sacred Heart: But perhaps you don't know anything
+about me either. You see, I married again two years ago, and my poor
+baby died last March...so I have only Cicely. It was such a
+disappointment--I wanted a boy dreadfully, and I understand little
+babies so much better than a big girl like Cicely.... Oh, dear, here is
+Juliana Gaines bringing up some more tiresome people! It's such a bore,
+but John says I must know them all. Well, thank goodness we've only one
+more day in this dreadful place--and of course I shall see you, dear,
+before we go...."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+AFTER conducting Miss Brent to his wife, John Amherst, by the exercise
+of considerable strategic skill, had once more contrived to detach
+himself from the throng on the lawn, and, regaining a path in the
+shrubbery, had taken refuge on the verandah of the house.
+
+Here, under the shade of the awning, two ladies were seated in a
+seclusion agreeably tempered by the distant strains of the Hanaford
+band, and by the shifting prospect of the groups below them.
+
+"Ah, here he is now!" the younger of the two exclaimed, turning on
+Amherst the smile of intelligence that Mrs. Eustace Ansell was in the
+habit of substituting for the idle preliminaries of conversation. "We
+were not talking of you, though," she added as Amherst took the seat to
+which his mother beckoned him, "but of Bessy--which, I suppose, is
+almost as indiscreet."
+
+She added the last phrase after an imperceptible pause, and as if in
+deprecation of the hardly more perceptible frown which, at the mention
+of his wife's name, had deepened the lines between Amherst's brows.
+
+"Indiscreet of his own mother and his wife's friend?" Mrs. Amherst
+protested, laying her trimly-gloved hand on her son's arm; while the
+latter, with his eyes on her companion, said slowly: "Mrs. Ansell knows
+that indiscretion is the last fault of which her friends are likely to
+accuse her."
+
+"_Raison de plus_, you mean?" she laughed, meeting squarely the
+challenge that passed between them under Mrs. Amherst's puzzled gaze.
+"Well, if I take advantage of my reputation for discretion to meddle a
+little now and then, at least I do so in a good cause. I was just saying
+how much I wish that you would take Bessy to Europe; and I am so sure
+of my cause, in this case, that I am going to leave it to your mother to
+give you my reasons."
+
+She rose as she spoke, not with any sign of haste or embarrassment, but
+as if gracefully recognizing the desire of mother and son to be alone
+together; but Amherst, rising also, made a motion to detain her.
+
+"No one else will be able to put your reasons half so convincingly," he
+said with a slight smile, "and I am sure my mother would much rather be
+spared the attempt."
+
+Mrs. Ansell met the smile as freely as she had met the challenge. "My
+dear Lucy," she rejoined, laying, as she reseated herself, a light
+caress on Mrs. Amherst's hand, "I'm sorry to be flattered at your
+expense, but it's not in human nature to resist such an appeal. You
+see," she added, raising her eyes to Amherst, "how sure I am of
+myself--and of _you_, when you've heard me."
+
+"Oh, John is always ready to hear one," his mother murmured innocently.
+
+"Well, I don't know that I shall even ask him to do as much as that--I'm
+so sure, after all, that my suggestion carries its explanation with it."
+
+There was a moment's pause, during which Amherst let his eyes wander
+absently over the dissolving groups on the lawn.
+
+"The suggestion that I should take Bessy to Europe?" He paused again.
+"When--next autumn?"
+
+"No: now--at once. On a long honeymoon."
+
+He frowned slightly at the last word, passing it by to revert to the
+direct answer to his question.
+
+"At once? No--I can't see that the suggestion carries its explanation
+with it."
+
+Mrs. Ansell looked at him hesitatingly. She was conscious of the
+ill-chosen word that still reverberated between them, and the unwonted
+sense of having blundered made her, for the moment, less completely
+mistress of herself.
+
+"Ah, you'll see farther presently--" She rose again, unfurling her lace
+sunshade, as if to give a touch of definiteness to her action. "It's
+not, after all," she added, with a sweet frankness, "a case for
+argument, and still less for persuasion. My reasons are excellent--I
+should insist on putting them to you myself if they were not! But
+they're so good that I can leave you to find them out--and to back them
+up with your own, which will probably be a great deal better."
+
+She summed up with a light nod, which included both Amherst and his
+mother, and turning to descend the verandah steps, waved a signal to Mr.
+Langhope, who was limping disconsolately toward the house.
+
+"What has she been saying to you, mother?" Amherst asked, returning to
+his seat beside his mother.
+
+Mrs. Amherst replied by a shake of her head and a raised forefinger of
+reproval. "Now, Johnny, I won't answer a single question till you smooth
+out those lines between your eyes."
+
+Her son relaxed his frown to smile back at her. "Well, dear, there have
+to be some wrinkles in every family, and as you absolutely refuse to
+take your share--" His eyes rested affectionately on the frosty sparkle
+of her charming old face, which had, in its setting of recovered
+prosperity, the freshness of a sunny winter morning, when the very snow
+gives out a suggestion of warmth.
+
+He remembered how, on the evening of his dismissal from the mills, he
+had paused on the threshold of their sitting-room to watch her a moment
+in the lamplight, and had thought with bitter compunction of the fresh
+wrinkle he was about to add to the lines about her eyes. The three years
+which followed had effaced that wrinkle and veiled the others in a tardy
+bloom of well-being. From the moment of turning her back on Westmore,
+and establishing herself in the pretty little house at Hanaford which
+her son's wife had placed at her disposal, Mrs. Amherst had shed all
+traces of the difficult years; and the fact that his marriage had
+enabled him to set free, before it was too late, the pent-up springs of
+her youthfulness, sometimes seemed to Amherst the clearest gain in his
+life's confused total of profit and loss. It was, at any rate, the sense
+of Bessy's share in the change that softened his voice when he spoke of
+her to his mother.
+
+"Now, then, if I present a sufficiently unruffled surface, let us go
+back to Mrs. Ansell--for I confess that her mysterious reasons are not
+yet apparent to me."
+
+Mrs. Amherst looked deprecatingly at her son. "Maria Ansell is devoted
+to you too, John----"
+
+"Of course she is! It's her _role_ to be devoted to
+everybody--especially to her enemies."
+
+"Her enemies?"
+
+"Oh, I didn't intend any personal application. But why does she want me
+to take Bessy abroad?"
+
+"She and Mr. Langhope think that Bessy is not looking well."
+
+Amherst paused, and the frown showed itself for a moment. "What do _you_
+think, mother?"
+
+"I hadn't noticed it myself: Bessy seems to me prettier than ever. But
+perhaps she has less colour--and she complains of not sleeping. Maria
+thinks she still frets over the baby."
+
+Amherst made an impatient gesture. "Is Europe the only panacea?"
+
+"You should consider, John, that Bessy is used to change and amusement.
+I think you sometimes forget that other people haven't your faculty of
+absorbing themselves in a single interest. And Maria says that the new
+doctor at Clifton, whom they seem to think so clever, is very anxious
+that Bessy should go to Europe this summer."
+
+"No doubt; and so is every one else: I mean her father and old
+Tredegar--and your friend Mrs. Ansell not least."
+
+Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright black eyes to his. "Well, then--if they
+all think she needs it----"
+
+"Good heavens, if travel were what she needed!--Why, we've never stopped
+travelling since we married. We've been everywhere on the globe except
+at Hanaford--this is her second visit here in three years!" He rose and
+took a rapid turn across the deserted verandah. "It's not because her
+health requires it--it's to get me away from Westmore, to prevent things
+being done there that ought to be done!" he broke out vehemently,
+halting again before his mother.
+
+The aged pink faded from Mrs. Amherst's face, but her eyes retained
+their lively glitter. "To prevent things being done? What a strange
+thing to say!"
+
+"I shouldn't have said it if I hadn't seen you falling under Mrs.
+Ansell's spell."
+
+His mother had a gesture which showed from whom he had inherited his
+impulsive movements. "Really, my son--!" She folded her hands, and added
+after a pause of self-recovery: "If you mean that I have ever attempted
+to interfere----"
+
+"No, no: but when they pervert things so damnably----"
+
+"John!"
+
+He dropped into his chair again, and pushed the hair from his forehead
+with a groan.
+
+"Well, then--put it that they have as much right to their view as I
+have: I only want you to see what it is. Whenever I try to do anything
+at Westmore--to give a real start to the work that Bessy and I planned
+together--some pretext is found to stop it: to pack us off to the ends
+of the earth, to cry out against reducing her income, to encourage her
+in some new extravagance to which the work at the mills must be
+sacrificed!"
+
+Mrs. Amherst, growing pale under this outbreak, assured herself by a
+nervous backward glance that their privacy was still uninvaded; then her
+eyes returned to her son's face.
+
+"John--are you sure you're not sacrificing your wife to the mills?"
+
+He grew pale in turn, and they looked at each other for a moment without
+speaking.
+
+"You see it as they do, then?" he rejoined with a discouraged sigh.
+
+"I see it as any old woman would, who had my experiences to look back
+to."
+
+"Mother!" he exclaimed.
+
+She smiled composedly. "Do you think I mean that as a reproach? That's
+because men will never understand women--least of all, sons their
+mothers. No real mother wants to come first; she puts her son's career
+ahead of everything. But it's different with a wife--and a wife as much
+in love as Bessy."
+
+Amherst looked away. "I should have thought that was a reason----"
+
+"That would reconcile her to being set aside, to counting only second in
+your plans?"
+
+"They were _her_ plans when we married!"
+
+"Ah, my dear--!" She paused on that, letting her shrewd old glance, and
+all the delicate lines of experience in her face, supply what farther
+comment the ineptitude of his argument invited.
+
+He took the full measure of her meaning, receiving it in a baffled
+silence that continued as she rose and gathered her lace mantle about
+her, as if to signify that their confidences could not, on such an
+occasion, be farther prolonged without singularity. Then he stood up
+also and joined her, resting his hand on hers while she leaned on the
+verandah rail.
+
+"Poor mother! And I've kept you to myself all this time, and spoiled
+your good afternoon."
+
+"No, dear; I was a little tired, and had slipped away to be quiet." She
+paused, and then went on, persuasively giving back his pressure: "I know
+how you feel about doing your duty, John; but now that things are so
+comfortably settled, isn't it a pity to unsettle them?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst had intended, on leaving his mother, to rejoin Bessy, whom he
+could still discern, on the lawn, in absorbed communion with Miss Brent;
+but after what had passed it seemed impossible, for the moment, to
+recover the garden-party tone, and he made his escape through the house
+while a trio of Cuban singers, who formed the crowning number of the
+entertainment, gathered the company in a denser circle about their
+guitars.
+
+As he walked on aimlessly under the deep June shadows of Maplewood
+Avenue his mother's last words formed an ironical accompaniment to his
+thoughts. "Now that things are comfortably settled--" he knew so well
+what that elastic epithet covered! Himself, for instance, ensconced in
+the impenetrable prosperity of his wonderful marriage; herself too
+(unconsciously, dear soul!), so happily tucked away in a cranny of that
+new and spacious life, and no more able to conceive why existing
+conditions should be disturbed than the bird in the eaves understands
+why the house should be torn down. Well--he had learned at last what his
+experience with his poor, valiant, puzzled mother might have taught him:
+that one must never ask from women any view but the personal one, any
+measure of conduct but that of their own pains and pleasures. She,
+indeed, had borne undauntedly enough the brunt of their earlier trials;
+but that was merely because, as she said, the mother's instinct bade her
+heap all her private hopes on the great devouring altar of her son's
+ambition; it was not because she had ever, in the very least, understood
+or sympathized with his aims.
+
+And Bessy--? Perhaps if their little son had lived she might in turn
+have obeyed the world-old instinct of self-effacement--but now! He
+remembered with an intenser self-derision that, not even in the first
+surprise of his passion, had he deluded himself with the idea that Bessy
+Westmore was an exception to her sex. He had argued rather that, being
+only a lovelier product of the common mould, she would abound in the
+adaptabilities and pliancies which the lords of the earth have seen fit
+to cultivate in their companions. She would care for his aims because
+they were his. During their precipitate wooing, and through the first
+brief months of marriage, this profound and original theory had been
+gratifyingly confirmed; then its perfect surface had begun to show a
+flaw. Amherst had always conveniently supposed that the poet's line
+summed up the good woman's rule of ethics: _He for God only, she for God
+in him._ It was for the god in him, surely, that she had loved him: for
+that first glimpse of an "ampler ether, a diviner air" that he had
+brought into her cramped and curtained life. He could never, now, evoke
+that earlier delusion without feeling on its still-tender surface the
+keen edge of Mrs. Ansell's smile. She, no doubt, could have told him at
+any time why Bessy had married him: it was for his _beaux yeux_, as Mrs.
+Ansell would have put it--because he was young, handsome, persecuted, an
+ardent lover if not a subtle one--because Bessy had met him at the fatal
+moment, because her family had opposed the marriage--because, in brief,
+the gods, that day, may have been a little short of amusement. Well,
+they were having their laugh out now--there were moments when high
+heaven seemed to ring with it....
+
+With these thoughts at his heels Amherst strode on, overtaken now and
+again by the wheels of departing guests from the garden-party, and
+knowing, as they passed him, what was in their minds--envy of his
+success, admiration of his cleverness in achieving it, and a little
+half-contemptuous pity for his wife, who, with her wealth and looks,
+might have done so much better. Certainly, if the case could have been
+put to Hanaford--the Hanaford of the Gaines garden-party--it would have
+sided with Bessy to a voice. And how much justice was there in what he
+felt would have been the unanimous verdict of her class? Was his mother
+right in hinting that he was sacrificing Bessy to the mills? But the
+mills _were_ Bessy--at least he had thought so when he married her!
+They were her particular form of contact with life, the expression of
+her relation to her fellow-men, her pretext, her opportunity--unless
+they were merely a vast purse in which to plunge for her pin-money! He
+had fancied it would rest with him to determine from which of these
+stand-points she should view Westmore; and at the outset she had
+enthusiastically viewed it from his. In her eager adoption of his ideas
+she had made a pet of the mills, organizing the Mothers' Club, laying
+out a recreation-ground on the Hopewood property, and playing with
+pretty plans in water-colour for the Emergency Hospital and the building
+which was to contain the night-schools, library and gymnasium; but even
+these minor projects--which he had urged her to take up as a means of
+learning their essential dependence on his larger scheme--were soon to
+be set aside by obstacles of a material order. Bessy always wanted
+money--not a great deal, but, as she reasonably put it, "enough"--and
+who was to blame if her father and Mr. Tredegar, each in his different
+capacity, felt obliged to point out that every philanthropic outlay at
+Westmore must entail a corresponding reduction in her income? Perhaps if
+she could have been oftener at Hanaford these arguments would have been
+counteracted, for she was tender-hearted, and prompt to relieve such
+suffering as she saw about her; but her imagination was not active, and
+it was easy for her to forget painful sights when they were not under
+her eye. This was perhaps--half-consciously--one of the reasons why she
+avoided Hanaford; why, as Amherst exclaimed, they had been everywhere
+since their marriage but to the place where their obligations called
+them. There had, at any rate, always been some good excuse for not
+returning there, and consequently for postponing the work of improvement
+which, it was generally felt, her husband could not fitly begin till she
+_had_ returned and gone over the ground with him. After their marriage,
+and especially in view of the comment excited by that romantic incident,
+it was impossible not to yield to her wish that they should go abroad
+for a few months; then, before her confinement, the doctors had exacted
+that she should be spared all fatigue and worry; and after the baby's
+death Amherst had felt with her too tenderly to venture an immediate
+return to unwelcome questions.
+
+For by this time it had become clear to him that such questions were,
+and always would be, unwelcome to her. As the easiest means of escaping
+them, she had once more dismissed the whole problem to the vague and
+tiresome sphere of "business," whence he had succeeded in detaching it
+for a moment in the early days of their union. Her first husband--poor
+unappreciated Westmore!--had always spared her the boredom of
+"business," and Halford Gaines and Mr. Tredegar were ready to show her
+the same consideration; it was part of the modern code of chivalry that
+lovely woman should not be bothered about ways and means. But Bessy was
+too much the wife--and the wife in love--to consent that her husband's
+views on the management of the mills should be totally disregarded.
+Precisely because her advisers looked unfavourably on his intervention,
+she felt bound--if only in defense of her illusions--to maintain and
+emphasize it. The mills were, in fact, the official "platform" on which
+she had married: Amherst's devoted _role_ at Westmore had justified the
+unconventionality of the step. And so she was committed--the more
+helplessly for her dense misintelligence of both sides of the
+question--to the policy of conciliating the opposing influences which
+had so uncomfortably chosen to fight out their case on the field of her
+poor little existence: theoretically siding with her husband, but
+surreptitiously, as he well knew, giving aid and comfort to the enemy,
+who were really defending her own cause.
+
+All this Amherst saw with that cruel insight which had replaced his
+former blindness. He was, in truth, more ashamed of the insight than of
+the blindness: it seemed to him horribly cold-blooded to be thus
+analyzing, after two years of marriage, the source of his wife's
+inconsistencies. And, partly for this reason, he had put off from month
+to month the final question of the future management of the mills, and
+of the radical changes to be made there if his system were to prevail.
+But the time had come when, if Bessy had to turn to Westmore for the
+justification of her marriage, he had even more need of calling upon it
+for the same service. He had not, assuredly, married her because of
+Westmore; but he would scarcely have contemplated marriage with a rich
+woman unless the source of her wealth had offered him some such
+opportunity as Westmore presented. His special training, and the natural
+bent of his mind, qualified him, in what had once seemed a predestined
+manner, to help Bessy to use her power nobly, for her own uplifting as
+well as for that of Westmore; and so the mills became, incongruously
+enough, the plank of safety to which both clung in their sense of
+impending disaster.
+
+It was not that Amherst feared the temptation to idleness if this outlet
+for his activity were cut off. He had long since found that the luxury
+with which his wife surrounded him merely quickened his natural bent for
+hard work and hard fare. He recalled with a touch of bitterness how he
+had once regretted having separated himself from his mother's class, and
+how seductive for a moment, to both mind and senses, that other life had
+appeared. Well--he knew it now, and it had neither charm nor peril for
+him. Capua must have been a dull place to one who had once drunk the joy
+of battle. What he dreaded was not that he should learn to love the
+life of ease, but that he should grow to loathe it uncontrollably, as
+the symbol of his mental and spiritual bondage. And Westmore was his
+safety-valve, his refuge--if he were cut off from Westmore what remained
+to him? It was not only the work he had found to his hand, but the one
+work for which his hand was fitted. It was his life that he was fighting
+for in insisting that now at last, before the close of this
+long-deferred visit to Hanaford, the question of the mills should be
+faced and settled. He had made that clear to Bessy, in a scene he still
+shrank from recalling; for it was of the essence of his somewhat
+unbending integrity that he would not trick her into a confused
+surrender to the personal influence he still possessed over her, but
+must seek to convince her by the tedious process of argument and
+exposition, against which she knew no defense but tears and petulance.
+But he had, at any rate, gained her consent to his setting forth his
+views at the meeting of directors the next morning; and meanwhile he had
+meant to be extraordinarily patient and reasonable with her, till the
+hint of Mrs. Ansell's stratagem produced in him a fresh reaction of
+distrust.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+THAT evening when dinner ended, Mrs. Ansell, with a glance through the
+tall dining-room windows, had suggested to Bessy that it would be
+pleasanter to take coffee on the verandah; but Amherst detained his wife
+with a glance.
+
+"I should like Bessy to stay," he said.
+
+The dining-room being on the cool side the house, with a refreshing
+outlook on the garden, the men preferred to smoke there rather than in
+the stuffily-draped Oriental apartment destined to such rites; and Bessy
+Amherst, with a faint sigh, sank back into her seat, while Mrs. Ansell
+drifted out through one of the open windows.
+
+The men surrounding Richard Westmore's table were the same who nearly
+three years earlier had gathered in his house for the same purpose: the
+discussion of conditions at the mills. The only perceptible change in
+the relation to each other of the persons composing this group was that
+John Amherst was now the host of the other two, instead of being a
+subordinate called in for cross-examination; but he was so indifferent,
+or at least so heedless, a host--so forgetful, for instance, of Mr.
+Tredegar's preference for a "light" cigar, and of Mr. Langhope's
+feelings on the duty of making the Westmore madeira circulate with the
+sun--that the change was manifest only in his evening-dress, and in the
+fact of his sitting at the foot of the table.
+
+If Amherst was conscious of the contrast thus implied, it was only as a
+restriction on his freedom. As far as the welfare of Westmore was
+concerned he would rather have stood before his companions as the
+assistant manager of the mills than as the husband of their owner; and
+it seemed to him, as he looked back, that he had done very little with
+the opportunity which looked so great in the light of his present
+restrictions. What he _had_ done with it--the use to which, as
+unfriendly critics might insinuate, he had so adroitly put it--had
+landed him, ironically enough, in the ugly _impasse_ of a situation from
+which no issue seemed possible without some wasteful sacrifice of
+feeling.
+
+His wife's feelings, for example, were already revealing themselves in
+an impatient play of her fan that made her father presently lean forward
+to suggest: "If we men are to talk shop, is it necessary to keep Bessy
+in this hot room?"
+
+Amherst rose and opened the window behind his wife's chair.
+
+"There's a breeze from the west--the room will be cooler now," he said,
+returning to his seat.
+
+"Oh, I don't mind--" Bessy murmured, in a tone intended to give her
+companions the full measure of what she was being called on to endure.
+
+Mr. Tredegar coughed slightly. "May I trouble you for that other box of
+cigars, Amherst? No, _not_ the Cabanas." Bessy rose and handed him the
+box on which his glance significantly rested. "Ah, thank you, my dear. I
+was about to ask," he continued, looking about for the cigar-lighter,
+which flamed unheeded at Amherst's elbow, "what special purpose will be
+served by a preliminary review of the questions to be discussed
+tomorrow."
+
+"Ah--exactly," murmured Mr. Langhope. "The madeira, my dear John?
+No--ah--_please_--to the left!"
+
+Amherst impatiently reversed the direction in which he had set the
+precious vessel moving, and turned to Mr. Tredegar, who was
+conspicuously lighting his cigar with a match extracted from his
+waist-coat pocket.
+
+"The purpose is to define my position in the matter; and I prefer that
+Bessy should do this with your help rather than with mine."
+
+Mr. Tredegar surveyed his cigar through drooping lids, as though the
+question propounded by Amherst were perched on its tip.
+
+"Is not your position naturally involved in and defined by hers? You
+will excuse my saying that--technically speaking, of course--I cannot
+distinctly conceive of it as having any separate existence."
+
+Mr. Tredegar spoke with the deliberate mildness that was regarded as his
+most effective weapon at the bar, since it was likely to abash those
+who were too intelligent to be propitiated by it.
+
+"Certainly it is involved in hers," Amherst agreed; "but how far that
+defines it is just what I have waited till now to find out."
+
+Bessy at this point recalled her presence by a restless turn of her
+graceful person, and her father, with an affectionate glance at her,
+interposed amicably: "But surely--according to old-fashioned ideas--it
+implies identity of interests?"
+
+"Yes; but whose interests?" Amherst asked.
+
+"Why--your wife's, man! She owns the mills."
+
+Amherst hesitated. "I would rather talk of my wife's interest in the
+mills than of her interests there; but we'll keep to the plural if you
+prefer it. Personally, I believe the terms should be interchangeable in
+the conduct of such a business."
+
+"Ah--I'm glad to hear that," said Mr. Tredegar quickly, "since it's
+precisely the view we all take."
+
+Amherst's colour rose. "Definitions are ambiguous," he said. "Before you
+adopt mine, perhaps I had better develop it a little farther. What I
+mean is, that Bessy's interests in Westmore should be regulated by her
+interest in it--in its welfare as a social body, aside from its success
+as a commercial enterprise. If we agree on this definition, we are at
+one as to the other: namely that my relation to the matter is defined by
+hers."
+
+He paused a moment, as if to give his wife time to contribute some sign
+of assent and encouragement; but she maintained a puzzled silence and he
+went on: "There is nothing new in this. I have tried to make Bessy
+understand from the beginning what obligations I thought the ownership
+of Westmore entailed, and how I hoped to help her fulfill them; but ever
+since our marriage all definite discussion of the subject has been put
+off for one cause or another, and that is my reason for urging that it
+should be brought up at the directors' meeting tomorrow."
+
+There was another pause, during which Bessy glanced tentatively at Mr.
+Tredegar, and then said, with a lovely rise of colour: "But, John, I
+sometimes think you forget how much has been done at Westmore--the
+Mothers' Club, and the play-ground, and all--in the way of carrying out
+your ideas."
+
+Mr. Tredegar discreetly dropped his glance to his cigar, and Mr.
+Langhope sounded an irrepressible note of approval and encouragement.
+
+Amherst smiled. "No, I have not forgotten; and I am grateful to you for
+giving my ideas a trial. But what has been done hitherto is purely
+superficial." Bessy's eyes clouded, and he added hastily: "Don't think I
+undervalue it for that reason--heaven knows the surface of life needs
+improving! But it's like picking flowers and sticking them in the ground
+to make a garden--unless you transplant the flower with its roots, and
+prepare the soil to receive it, your garden will be faded tomorrow. No
+radical changes have yet been made at Westmore; and it is of radical
+changes that I want to speak."
+
+Bessy's look grew more pained, and Mr. Langhope exclaimed with unwonted
+irascibility: "Upon my soul, Amherst, the tone you take about what your
+wife has done doesn't strike me as the likeliest way of encouraging her
+to do more!"
+
+"I don't want to encourage her to do more on such a basis--the sooner
+she sees the futility of it the better for Westmore!"
+
+"The futility--?" Bessy broke out, with a flutter of tears in her voice;
+but before her father could intervene Mr. Tredegar had raised his hand
+with the gesture of one accustomed to wield the gavel.
+
+"My dear child, I see Amherst's point, and it is best, as he says, that
+you should see it too. What he desires, as I understand it, is the
+complete reconstruction of the present state of things at Westmore; and
+he is right in saying that all your good works there--night-schools, and
+nursery, and so forth--leave that issue untouched."
+
+A smile quivered under Mr. Langhope's moustache. He and Amherst both
+knew that Mr. Tredegar's feint of recognizing the justice of his
+adversary's claim was merely the first step to annihilating it; but
+Bessy could never be made to understand this, and always felt herself
+deserted and betrayed when any side but her own was given a hearing.
+
+"I'm sorry if all I have tried to do at Westmore is useless--but I
+suppose I shall never understand business," she murmured, vainly seeking
+consolation in her father's eye.
+
+"This is not business," Amherst broke in. "It's the question of your
+personal relation to the people there--the last thing that business
+considers."
+
+Mr. Langhope uttered an impatient exclamation. "I wish to heaven the
+owner of the mills had made it clear just what that relation was to be!"
+
+"I think he did, sir," Amherst answered steadily, "in leaving his wife
+the unrestricted control of the property."
+
+He had reddened under Mr. Langhope's thrust, but his voice betrayed no
+irritation, and Bessy rewarded him with an unexpected beam of sympathy:
+she was always up in arms at the least sign of his being treated as an
+intruder.
+
+"I am sure, papa," she said, a little tremulously, "that poor Richard,
+though he knew I was not clever, felt he could trust me to take the best
+advice----"
+
+"Ah, that's all we ask of you, my child!" her father sighed, while Mr.
+Tredegar drily interposed: "We are merely losing time by this
+digression. Let me suggest that Amherst should give us an idea of the
+changes he wishes to make at Westmore."
+
+Amherst, as he turned to answer, remembered with what ardent faith in
+his powers of persuasion he had responded to the same appeal three years
+earlier. He had thought then that all his cause needed was a hearing;
+now he knew that the practical man's readiness to let the idealist talk
+corresponds with the busy parent's permission to destructive infancy to
+"run out and play." They would let him state his case to the four
+corners of the earth--if only he did not expect them to act on it! It
+was their policy to let him exhaust himself in argument and exhortation,
+to listen to him so politely and patiently that if he failed to enforce
+his ideas it should not be for lack of opportunity to expound them....
+And the alternative struck him as hardly less to be feared. Supposing
+that the incredible happened, that his reasons prevailed with his wife,
+and, through her, with the others--at what cost would the victory be
+won? Would Bessy ever forgive him for winning it? And what would his
+situation be, if it left him in control of Westmore but estranged from
+his wife?
+
+He recalled suddenly a phrase he had used that afternoon to the
+dark-eyed girl at the garden-party: "What risks we run when we scramble
+into the chariot of the gods!" And at the same instant he heard her
+retort, and saw her fine gesture of defiance. How could he ever have
+doubted that the thing was worth doing at whatever cost? Something in
+him--some secret lurking element of weakness and evasion--shrank out of
+sight in the light of her question: "Do _you_ act on that?" and the "God
+forbid!" he had instantly flashed back to her. He turned to Mr. Tredegar
+with his answer.
+
+Amherst knew that any large theoretical exposition of the case would be
+as much wasted on the two men as on his wife. To gain his point he must
+take only one step at a time, and it seemed to him that the first thing
+needed at Westmore was that the hands should work and live under
+healthier conditions. To attain this, two important changes were
+necessary: the floor-space of the mills must be enlarged, and the
+company must cease to rent out tenements, and give the operatives the
+opportunity to buy land for themselves. Both these changes involved the
+upheaval of the existing order. Whenever the Westmore mills had been
+enlarged, it had been for the sole purpose of increasing the revenues of
+the company; and now Amherst asked that these revenues should be
+materially and permanently reduced. As to the suppression of the company
+tenement, such a measure struck at the roots of the baneful paternalism
+which was choking out every germ of initiative in the workman. Once the
+operatives had room to work in, and the hope of homes of their own to
+go to when work was over, Amherst was willing to trust to time for the
+satisfaction of their other needs. He believed that a sounder
+understanding of these needs would develop on both sides the moment the
+employers proved their good faith by the deliberate and permanent
+sacrifice of excessive gain to the well-being of the employed; and once
+the two had learned to regard each other not as antagonists but as
+collaborators, a long step would have been taken toward a readjustment
+of the whole industrial relation. In regard to general and distant
+results, Amherst tried not to be too sanguine, even in his own thoughts.
+His aim was to remedy the abuse nearest at hand, in the hope of thus
+getting gradually closer to the central evil; and, had his action been
+unhampered, he would still have preferred the longer and more circuitous
+path of practical experiment to the sweeping adoption of a new
+industrial system.
+
+But his demands, moderate as they were, assumed in his hearers the
+consciousness of a moral claim superior to the obligation of making
+one's business "pay"; and it was the futility of this assumption that
+chilled the arguments on his lips, since in the orthodox creed of the
+business world it was a weakness and not a strength to be content with
+five per cent where ten was obtainable. Business was one thing,
+philanthropy another; and the enthusiasts who tried combining them were
+usually reduced, after a brief flight, to paying fifty cents on the
+dollar, and handing over their stock to a promoter presumably unhampered
+by humanitarian ideals.
+
+Amherst knew that this was the answer with which his plea would be met;
+knew, moreover, that the plea was given a hearing simply because his
+judges deemed it so pitiably easy to refute. But the knowledge, once he
+had begun to speak, fanned his argument to a white heat of pleading,
+since, with failure so plainly ahead, small concessions and compromises
+were not worth making. Reason would be wasted on all; but eloquence
+might at least prevail with Bessy....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When, late that night, he went upstairs after long pacings of the
+garden, he was surprised to see a light in her room. She was not given
+to midnight study, and fearing that she might be ill he knocked at her
+door. There was no answer, and after a short pause he turned the handle
+and entered.
+
+In the great canopied Westmore couch, her arms flung upward and her
+hands clasped beneath her head, she lay staring fretfully at the globe
+of electric light which hung from the centre of the embossed and gilded
+ceiling. Seen thus, with the soft curves of throat and arms revealed,
+and her face childishly set in a cloud of loosened hair, she looked no
+older than Cicely--and, like Cicely, inaccessible to grown-up arguments
+and the stronger logic of experience.
+
+It was a trick of hers, in such moods, to ignore any attempt to attract
+her notice; and Amherst was prepared for her remaining motionless as he
+paused on the threshold and then advanced toward the middle of the room.
+There had been a time when he would have been exasperated by her
+pretense of not seeing him, but a deep weariness of spirit now dulled
+him to these surface pricks.
+
+"I was afraid you were not well when I saw the light burning," he began.
+
+"Thank you--I am quite well," she answered in a colourless voice,
+without turning her head.
+
+"Shall I put it out, then? You can't sleep with such a glare in your
+eyes."
+
+"I should not sleep at any rate; and I hate to lie awake in the dark."
+
+"Why shouldn't you sleep?" He moved nearer, looking down compassionately
+on her perturbed face and struggling lips.
+
+She lay silent a moment; then she faltered out: "B--because I'm so
+unhappy!"
+
+The pretense of indifference was swept away by a gush of childish sobs
+as she flung over on her side and buried her face in the embroidered
+pillows.
+
+Amherst, bending down, laid a quieting hand on her shoulder. "Bessy----"
+
+She sobbed on.
+
+He seated himself silently in the arm-chair beside the bed, and kept his
+soothing hold on her shoulder. The time had come when he went through
+all these accustomed acts of pacification as mechanically as a nurse
+soothing a fretful child. And once he had thought her weeping eloquent!
+He looked about him at the spacious room, with its heavy hangings of
+damask and the thick velvet carpet which stifled his steps. Everywhere
+were the graceful tokens of her presence--the vast lace-draped
+toilet-table strewn with silver and crystal, the embroidered muslin
+cushions heaped on the lounge, the little rose-lined slippers she had
+just put off, the lace wrapper, with a scent of violets in its folds,
+which he had pushed aside when he sat down beside her; and he remembered
+how full of a mysterious and intimate charm these things had once
+appeared to him. It was characteristic that the remembrance made him
+more patient with her now. Perhaps, after all, it was his failure that
+she was crying over....
+
+"Don't be unhappy. You decided as seemed best to you," he said.
+
+She pressed her handkerchief against her lips, still keeping her head
+averted. "But I hate all these arguments and disputes. Why should you
+unsettle everything?" she murmured.
+
+His mother's words! Involuntarily he removed his hand from her
+shoulder, though he still remained seated by the bed.
+
+"You are right. I see the uselessness of it," he assented, with an
+uncontrollable note of irony.
+
+She turned her head at the tone, and fixed her plaintive brimming eyes
+on him. "You _are_ angry with me!"
+
+"Was that troubling you?" He leaned forward again, with compassion in
+his face. _Sancta simplicitas!_ was the thought within him.
+
+"I am not angry," he went on; "be reasonable and try to sleep."
+
+She started upright, the light masses of her hair floating about her
+like silken sea-weed lifted on an invisible tide. "Don't talk like that!
+I can't endure to be humoured like a baby. I am unhappy because I can't
+see why all these wretched questions should be dragged into our life. I
+hate to have you always disagreeing with Mr. Tredegar, who is so clever
+and has so much experience; and yet I hate to see you give way to him,
+because that makes it appear as if...as if...."
+
+"He didn't care a straw for my ideas?" Amherst smiled. "Well, he
+doesn't--and I never dreamed of making him. So don't worry about that
+either."
+
+"You never dreamed of making him care for your ideas? But then why do
+you----"
+
+"Why do I go on setting them forth at such great length?" Amherst smiled
+again. "To convince you--that's my only ambition."
+
+She stared at him, shaking her head back to toss a loose lock from her
+puzzled eyes. A tear still shone on her lashes, but with the motion it
+fell and trembled down her cheek.
+
+"To convince _me_? But you know I am so ignorant of such things."
+
+"Most women are."
+
+"I never pretended to understand anything about--economics, or whatever
+you call it."
+
+"No."
+
+"Then how----"
+
+He turned and looked at her gently. "I thought you might have begun to
+understand something about _me_."
+
+"About you?" The colour flowered softly under her clear skin.
+
+"About what my ideas on such subjects were likely to be worth--judging
+from what you know of me in other respects." He paused and glanced away
+from her. "Well," he concluded deliberately, "I suppose I've had my
+answer tonight."
+
+"Oh, John----!"
+
+He rose and wandered across the room, pausing a moment to finger
+absently the trinkets on the dressing-table. The act recalled with a
+curious vividness certain dulled sensations of their first days
+together, when to handle and examine these frail little accessories of
+her toilet had been part of the wonder and amusement of his new
+existence. He could still hear her laugh as she leaned over him,
+watching his mystified look in the glass, till their reflected eyes met
+there and drew down her lips to his. He laid down the fragrant
+powder-puff he had been turning slowly between his fingers, and moved
+back toward the bed. In the interval he had reached a decision.
+
+"Well--isn't it natural that I should think so?" he began again, as he
+stood beside her. "When we married I never expected you to care or know
+much about economics. It isn't a quality a man usually chooses his wife
+for. But I had a fancy--perhaps it shows my conceit--that when we had
+lived together a year or two, and you'd found out what kind of a fellow
+I was in other ways--ways any woman can judge of--I had a fancy that you
+might take my opinions on faith when it came to my own special
+business--the thing I'm generally supposed to know about."
+
+He knew that he was touching a sensitive chord, for Bessy had to the
+full her sex's pride of possessorship. He was human and faulty till
+others criticized him--then he became a god. But in this case a
+conflicting influence restrained her from complete response to his
+appeal.
+
+"I _do_ feel sure you know--about the treatment of the hands and all
+that; but you said yourself once--the first time we ever talked about
+Westmore--that the business part was different----"
+
+Here it was again, the ancient ineradicable belief in the separable body
+and soul! Even an industrial organization was supposed to be subject to
+the old theological distinction, and Bessy was ready to co-operate with
+her husband in the emancipation of Westmore's spiritual part if only its
+body remained under the law.
+
+Amherst controlled his impatience, as it was always easy for him to do
+when he had fixed on a definite line of conduct.
+
+"It was my situation that was different; not what you call the business
+part. That is inextricably bound up with the treatment of the hands. If
+I am to have anything to do with the mills now I can deal with them only
+as your representative; and as such I am bound to take in the whole
+question."
+
+Bessy's face clouded: was he going into it all again? But he read her
+look and went on reassuringly: "That was what I meant by saying that I
+hoped you would take me on faith. If I want the welfare of Westmore it's
+above all, I believe, because I want Westmore to see you as _I_ do--as
+the dispenser of happiness, who could not endure to benefit by any wrong
+or injustice to others."
+
+"Of course, of course I don't want to do them injustice!"
+
+"Well, then----"
+
+He had seated himself beside her again, clasping in his the hand with
+which she was fretting the lace-edged sheet. He felt her restless
+fingers surrender slowly, and her eyes turned to him in appeal.
+
+"But I care for what people say of you too! And you know--it's horrid,
+but one must consider it--if they say you're spending my money
+imprudently...." The blood rose to her neck and face. "I don't mind for
+myself...even if I have to give up as many things as papa and Mr.
+Tredegar think...but there is Cicely...and if people said...."
+
+"If people said I was spending Cicely's money on improving the condition
+of the people to whose work she will some day owe all her wealth--"
+Amherst paused: "Well, I would rather hear that said of me than any
+other thing I can think of, except one."
+
+"Except what?"
+
+"That I was doing it with her mother's help and approval."
+
+She drew a long tremulous sigh: he knew it was always a relief to her to
+have him assert himself strongly. But a residue of resistance still
+clouded her mind.
+
+"I should always want to help you, of course; but if Mr. Tredegar and
+Halford Gaines think your plan unbusinesslike----"
+
+"Mr. Tredegar and Halford Gaines are certain to think it so. And that is
+why I said, just now, that it comes, in the end, to your choosing
+between us; taking them on experience or taking me on faith."
+
+She looked at him wistfully. "Of course I should expect to give up
+things.... You wouldn't want me to live here?"
+
+"I should not ask you to," he said, half-smiling.
+
+"I suppose there would be a good many things we couldn't do----"
+
+"You would certainly have less money for a number of years; after that,
+I believe you would have more rather than less; but I should not want
+you to think that, beyond a reasonable point, the prosperity of the
+mills was ever to be measured by your dividends."
+
+"No." She leaned back wearily among the pillows. "I suppose, for
+instance, we should have to give up Europe this summer----?"
+
+Here at last was the bottom of her thought! It was always on the
+immediate pleasure that her soul hung: she had not enough imagination to
+look beyond, even in the projecting of her own desires. And it was on
+his knowledge of this limitation that Amherst had deliberately built.
+
+"I don't see how you could go to Europe," he said.
+
+"The doctor thinks I need it," she faltered.
+
+"In that case, of course--" He stood up, not abruptly, or with any show
+of irritation, but as if accepting this as her final answer. "What you
+need most, in the meantime, is a little sleep," he said. "I will tell
+your maid not to disturb you in the morning." He had returned to his
+soothing way of speech, as though definitely resigned to the inutility
+of farther argument. "And I will say goodbye now," he continued,
+"because I shall probably take an early train, before you wake----"
+
+She sat up with a start. "An early train? Why, where are you going?"
+
+"I must go to Chicago some time this month, and as I shall not be wanted
+here tomorrow I might as well run out there at once, and join you next
+week at Lynbrook."
+
+Bessy had grown pale. "But I don't understand----"
+
+Their eyes met. "Can't you understand that I am human enough to prefer,
+under the circumstances, not being present at tomorrow's meeting?" he
+said with a dry laugh.
+
+She sank back with a moan of discouragement, turning her face away as he
+began to move toward his room.
+
+"Shall I put the light out?" he asked, pausing with his hand on the
+electric button.
+
+"Yes, please."
+
+He pushed in the button and walked on, guided through the obscurity by
+the line of light under his door. As he reached the threshold he heard a
+little choking cry.
+
+"John--oh, John!"
+
+He paused.
+
+"I can't _bear_ it!" The sobs increased.
+
+"Bear what?"
+
+"That you should hate me----"
+
+"Don't be foolish," he said, groping for his door-handle.
+
+"But you do hate me--and I deserve it!"
+
+"Nonsense, dear. Try to sleep."
+
+"I can't sleep till you've forgiven me. Say you don't hate me! I'll do
+anything...only say you don't hate me!"
+
+He stood still a moment, thinking; then he turned back, and made his way
+across the room to her side. As he sat down beside her, he felt her arms
+reach for his neck and her wet face press itself against his cheek.
+
+"I'll do anything..." she sobbed; and in the darkness he held her to him
+and hated his victory.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+MRS. ANSELL was engaged in what she called picking up threads. She had
+been abroad for the summer--had, in, fact, transferred herself but a few
+hours earlier from her returning steamer to the little station at
+Lynbrook--and was now, in the bright September afternoon, which left her
+in sole possession of the terrace of Lynbrook House, using that pleasant
+eminence as a point of observation from which to gather up some of the
+loose ends of history dropped at her departure.
+
+It might have been thought that the actual scene out-spread below
+her--the descending gardens, the tennis-courts, the farm-lands sloping
+away to the blue sea-like shimmer of the Hempstead plains--offered, at
+the moment, little material for her purpose; but that was to view them
+with a superficial eye. Mrs. Ansell's trained gaze was, for example,
+greatly enlightened by the fact that the tennis-courts were fringed by a
+group of people indolently watchful of the figures agitating themselves
+about the nets; and that, as she turned her head toward the entrance
+avenue, the receding view of a station omnibus, followed by a
+luggage-cart, announced that more guests were to be added to those who
+had almost taxed to its limits the expansibility of the luncheon-table.
+
+All this, to the initiated eye, was full of suggestion; but its
+significance was as nothing to that presented by the approach of two
+figures which, as Mrs. Ansell watched, detached themselves from the
+cluster about the tennis-ground and struck, obliquely and at a desultory
+pace, across the lawn toward the terrace. The figures--those of a slight
+young man with stooping shoulders, and of a lady equally youthful but
+slenderly erect--moved forward in absorbed communion, as if unconscious
+of their surroundings and indefinite as to their direction, till, on the
+brink of the wide grass terrace just below their observer's parapet,
+they paused a moment and faced each other in closer speech. This
+interchange of words, though brief in measure of time, lasted long
+enough to add a vivid strand to Mrs. Ansell's thickening skein; then, on
+a gesture of the lady's, and without signs of formal leave-taking, the
+young man struck into a path which regained the entrance avenue, while
+his companion, quickening her pace, crossed the grass terrace and
+mounted the wide stone steps sweeping up to the house.
+
+These brought her out on the upper terrace a few yards from Mrs.
+Ansell's post, and exposed her, unprepared, to the full beam of welcome
+which that lady's rapid advance threw like a searchlight across her
+path.
+
+"Dear Miss Brent! I was just wondering how it was that I hadn't seen you
+before." Mrs. Ansell, as she spoke, drew the girl's hand into a long
+soft clasp which served to keep them confronted while she delicately
+groped for whatever thread the encounter seemed to proffer.
+
+Justine made no attempt to evade the scrutiny to which she found herself
+exposed; she merely released her hand by a movement instinctively
+evasive of the mechanical endearment, explaining, with a smile that
+softened the gesture: "I was out with Cicely when you arrived. We've
+just come in."
+
+"The dear child! I haven't seen her either." Mrs. Ansell continued to
+bestow upon the speaker's clear dark face an intensity of attention in
+which, for the moment, Cicely had no perceptible share. "I hear you are
+teaching her botany, and all kinds of wonderful things."
+
+Justine smiled again. "I am trying to teach her to wonder: that is the
+hardest faculty to cultivate in the modern child."
+
+"Yes--I suppose so; in myself," Mrs. Ansell admitted with a responsive
+brightness, "I find it develops with age. The world is a remarkable
+place." She threw this off absently, as though leaving Miss Brent to
+apply it either to the inorganic phenomena with which Cicely was
+supposed to be occupied, or to those subtler manifestations that engaged
+her own attention.
+
+"It's a great thing," she continued, "for Bessy to have had your
+help--for Cicely, and for herself too. There is so much that I want you
+to tell me about her. As an old friend I want the benefit of your
+fresher eye."
+
+"About Bessy?" Justine hesitated, letting her glance drift to the
+distant group still anchored about the tennis-nets. "Don't you find her
+looking better?"
+
+"Than when I left? So much so that I was unduly disturbed, just now, by
+seeing that clever little doctor--it _was_ he, wasn't it, who came up
+the lawn with you?"
+
+"Dr. Wyant? Yes." Miss Brent hesitated again. "But he merely
+called--with a message."
+
+"Not professionally? _Tant mieux!_ The truth is, I was anxious about
+Bessy when I left--I thought she ought to have gone abroad for a change.
+But, as it turns out, her little excursion with you did as well."
+
+"I think she only needed rest. Perhaps her six weeks in the Adirondacks
+were better than Europe."
+
+"Ah, under _your_ care--that made them better!" Mrs. Ansell in turn
+hesitated, the lines of her face melting and changing as if a rapid
+stage-hand had shifted them. When she spoke again they were as open as a
+public square, but also as destitute of personal significance, as flat
+and smooth as the painted drop before the real scene it hides.
+
+"I have always thought that Bessy, for all her health and activity,
+needs as much care as Cicely--the kind of care a clever friend can give.
+She is so wasteful of her strength and her nerves, and so unwilling to
+listen to reason. Poor Dick Westmore watched over her as if she were a
+baby; but perhaps Mr. Amherst, who must have been used to such a
+different type of woman, doesn't realize...and then he's so little
+here...." The drop was lit up by a smile that seemed to make it more
+impenetrable. "As an old friend I can't help telling you how much I hope
+she is to have you with her for a long time--a long, long time."
+
+Miss Brent bent her head in slight acknowledgment of the tribute. "Oh,
+soon she will not need any care----"
+
+"My dear Miss Brent, she will always need it!" Mrs. Ansell made a
+movement inviting the young girl to share the bench from which, at the
+latter's approach, she had risen. "But perhaps there is not enough in
+such a life to satisfy your professional energies."
+
+She seated herself, and after an imperceptible pause Justine sank into
+the seat beside her. "I am very glad, just now, to give my energies a
+holiday," she said, leaning back with a little sigh of retrospective
+weariness.
+
+"You are tired too? Bessy wrote me you had been quite used up by a
+trying case after we saw you at Hanaford."
+
+Miss Brent smiled. "When a nurse is fit for work she calls a trying case
+a 'beautiful' one."
+
+"But meanwhile--?" Mrs. Ansell shone on her with elder-sisterly
+solicitude. "Meanwhile, why not stay on with Cicely--above all, with
+Bessy? Surely she's a 'beautiful' case too."
+
+"Isn't she?" Justine laughingly agreed.
+
+"And if you want to be tried--" Mrs. Ansell swept the scene with a
+slight lift of her philosophic shoulders--"you'll find there are trials
+enough everywhere."
+
+Her companion started up with a glance at the small watch on her breast.
+"One of them is that it's already after four, and that I must see that
+tea is sent down to the tennis-ground, and the new arrivals looked
+after."
+
+"I saw the omnibus on its way to the station. Are many more people
+coming?"
+
+"Five or six, I believe. The house is usually full for Sunday."
+
+Mrs. Ansell made a slight motion to detain her. "And when is Mr. Amherst
+expected?"
+
+Miss Brent's pale cheek seemed to take on a darker tone of ivory, and
+her glance dropped from her companion's face to the vivid stretch of
+gardens at their feet. "Bessy has not told me," she said.
+
+"Ah--" the older woman rejoined, looking also toward the gardens, as if
+to intercept Miss Brent's glance in its flight. The latter stood still a
+moment, with the appearance of not wishing to evade whatever else her
+companion might have to say; then she moved away, entering the house by
+one window just as Mr. Langhope emerged from it by another.
+
+The sound of his stick tapping across the bricks roused Mrs. Ansell from
+her musings, but she showed her sense of his presence simply by
+returning to the bench she had just left; and accepting this mute
+invitation, Mr. Langhope crossed the terrace and seated himself at her
+side.
+
+When he had done so they continued to look at each other without
+speaking, after the manner of old friends possessed of occult means of
+communication; and as the result of this inward colloquy Mr. Langhope at
+length said: "Well, what do you make of it?"
+
+"What do _you_?" she rejoined, turning full upon him a face so released
+from its usual defences and disguises that it looked at once older and
+more simple than the countenance she presented to the world.
+
+Mr. Langhope waved a deprecating hand. "I want your fresher
+impressions."
+
+"That's what I just now said to Miss Brent."
+
+"You've been talking to Miss Brent?"
+
+"Only a flying word--she had to go and look after the new arrivals."
+
+Mr. Langhope's attention deepened. "Well, what did you say to her?"
+
+"Wouldn't you rather hear what she said to _me_?"
+
+He smiled. "A good cross-examiner always gets the answers he wants. Let
+me hear your side, and I shall know hers."
+
+"I should say that applied only to stupid cross-examiners; or to those
+who have stupid subjects to deal with. And Miss Brent is not stupid, you
+know."
+
+"Far from it! What else do you make out?"
+
+"I make out that she's in possession."
+
+"Here?"
+
+"Don't look startled. Do you dislike her?"
+
+"Heaven forbid--with those eyes! She has a wit of her own, too--and she
+certainly makes things easier for Bessy."
+
+"She guards her carefully, at any rate. I could find out nothing."
+
+"About Bessy?"
+
+"About the general situation."
+
+"Including Miss Brent?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell smiled faintly. "I made one little discovery about her."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"She's intimate with the new doctor."
+
+"Wyant?" Mr. Langhope's interest dropped. "What of that? I believe she
+knew him before."
+
+"I daresay. It's of no special importance, except as giving us a
+possible clue to her character. She strikes me as interesting and
+mysterious."
+
+Mr. Langhope smiled. "The things your imagination does for you!"
+
+"It helps me to see that we may find Miss Brent useful as a friend."
+
+"A friend?"
+
+"An ally." She paused, as if searching for a word. "She may restore the
+equilibrium."
+
+Mr. Langhope's handsome face darkened. "Open Bessy's eyes to Amherst?
+Damn him!" he said quietly.
+
+Mrs. Ansell let the imprecation pass. "When was he last here?" she
+asked.
+
+"Five or six weeks ago--for one night. His only visit since she came
+back from the Adirondacks."
+
+"What do you think his motive is? He must know what he risks in losing
+his hold on Bessy."
+
+"His motive? With your eye for them, can you ask? A devouring ambition,
+that's all! Haven't you noticed that, in all except the biggest minds,
+ambition takes the form of wanting to command where one has had to obey?
+Amherst has been made to toe the line at Westmore, and now he wants
+Truscomb--yes, and Halford Gaines, too!--to do the same. That's the
+secret of his servant-of-the-people pose--gad, I believe it's the whole
+secret of his marriage! He's devouring my daughter's substance to pay
+off an old score against the mills. He'll never rest till he has
+Truscomb out, and some creature of his own in command--and then, _vogue
+la galere_! If it were women, now," Mr. Langhope summed up impatiently,
+"one could understand it, at his age, and with that damned romantic
+head--but to be put aside for a lot of low mongrelly socialist
+mill-hands--ah, my poor girl--my poor girl!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell mused. "You didn't write me that things were so bad. There's
+been no actual quarrel?" she asked.
+
+"How can there be, when the poor child does all he wants? He's simply
+too busy to come and thank her!"
+
+"Too busy at Hanaford?"
+
+"So he says. Introducing the golden age at Westmore--it's likely to be
+the age of copper at Lynbrook."
+
+Mrs. Ansell drew a meditative breath. "I was thinking of that. I
+understood that Bessy would have to retrench while the changes at
+Westmore were going on."
+
+"Well--didn't she give up Europe, and cable over to countermand her new
+motor?"
+
+"But the life here! This mob of people! Miss Brent tells me the house is
+full for every week-end."
+
+"Would you have my daughter cut off from all her friends?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell met this promptly. "From some of the new ones, at any rate!
+Have you heard who has just arrived?"
+
+Mr. Langhope's hesitation showed a tinge of embarrassment. "I'm not
+sure--some one has always just arrived."
+
+"Well, the Fenton Carburys, then!" Mrs. Ansell left it to her tone to
+annotate the announcement.
+
+Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "Are they likely to be an
+exceptionally costly pleasure?"
+
+"If you're trying to prove that I haven't kept to the point--I can
+assure you that I'm well within it!"
+
+"But since the good Blanche has got her divorce and married Carbury,
+wherein do they differ from other week-end automata?"
+
+"Because most divorced women marry again to be respectable."
+
+Mr. Langhope smiled faintly. "Yes--that's their punishment. But it would
+be too dull for Blanche."
+
+"Precisely. _She_ married again to see Ned Bowfort!"
+
+"Ah--that may yet be hers!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell sighed at his perversity. "Meanwhile, she's brought him
+here, and it is unnatural to see Bessy lending herself to such
+combinations."
+
+"You're corrupted by a glimpse of the old societies. Here Bowfort and
+Carbury are simply hands at bridge."
+
+"Old hands at it--yes! And the bridge is another point: Bessy never used
+to play for money."
+
+"Well, she may make something, and offset her husband's prodigalities."
+
+"There again--with this _train de vie_, how on earth are both ends to
+meet?"
+
+Mr. Langhope grown suddenly grave, struck his cane resoundingly on the
+terrace. "Westmore and Lynbrook? I don't want them to--I want them to
+get farther and farther apart!"
+
+She cast on him a look of startled divination. "You want Bessy to go on
+spending too much money?"
+
+"How can I help it if it costs?"
+
+"If what costs--?" She stopped, her eyes still wide; then their glances
+crossed, and she exclaimed: "If your scheme costs? It _is_ your scheme,
+then?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders again. "It's a passive attitude----"
+
+"Ah, the deepest plans are that!" Mr. Langhope uttered no protest, and
+she continued to piece her conjectures together. "But you expect it to
+lead up to something active. Do you want a rupture?"
+
+"I want him brought back to his senses."
+
+"Do you think that will bring him back to _her_?"
+
+"Where the devil else will he have to go?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell's eyes dropped toward the gardens, across which desultory
+knots of people were straggling back from the ended tennis-match. "Ah,
+here they all come," she said, rising with a half-sigh; and as she stood
+watching the advance of the brightly-tinted groups she added slowly:
+"It's ingenious--but you don't understand him."
+
+Mr. Langhope stroked his moustache. "Perhaps not," he assented
+thoughtfully. "But suppose we go in before they join us? I want to show
+you a set of Ming I picked up the other day for Bessy. I flatter myself
+I _do_ understand Ming."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+JUSTINE BRENT, her household duties discharged, had gone upstairs to her
+room, a little turret chamber projecting above the wide terrace below,
+from which the sounds of lively intercourse now rose increasingly to her
+window.
+
+Bessy, she knew, would have preferred to have her remain with the party
+from whom these evidences of gaiety proceeded. Mrs. Amherst had grown to
+depend on her friend's nearness. She liked to feel that Justine's quick
+hand and eye were always in waiting on her impulses, prompt to interpret
+and execute them without any exertion of her own. Bessy combined great
+zeal in the pursuit of sport--a tireless passion for the saddle, the
+golf-course, the tennis-court--with an almost oriental inertia within
+doors, an indolence of body and brain that made her shrink from the
+active obligations of hospitality, though she had grown to depend more
+and more on the distractions of a crowded house.
+
+But Justine, though grateful, and anxious to show her gratitude, was
+unwilling to add to her other duties that of joining in the amusements
+of the house-party. She made no pretense of effacing herself when she
+thought her presence might be useful--but, even if she had cared for the
+diversions in favour at Lynbrook, a certain unavowed pride would have
+kept her from participating in them on the same footing with Bessy's
+guests. She was not in the least ashamed of her position in the
+household, but she chose that every one else should be aware of it, that
+she should not for an instant be taken for one of the nomadic damsels
+who form the camp-followers of the great army of pleasure. Yet even on
+this point her sensitiveness was not exaggerated. Adversity has a deft
+hand at gathering loose strands of impulse into character, and Justine's
+early contact with different phases of experience had given her a fairly
+clear view of life in the round, what might be called a sound working
+topography of its relative heights and depths. She was not seriously
+afraid of being taken for anything but what she really was, and still
+less did she fear to become, by force of propinquity and suggestion, the
+kind of being for whom she might be temporarily taken.
+
+When, at Bessy's summons, she had joined the latter at her camp in the
+Adirondacks, the transition from a fatiguing "case" at Hanaford to a
+life in which sylvan freedom was artfully blent with the most studied
+personal luxury, had come as a delicious refreshment to body and brain.
+She was weary, for the moment, of ugliness, pain and hard work, and life
+seemed to recover its meaning under the aspect of a graceful leisure.
+Lynbrook also, whither she had been persuaded to go with Bessy at the
+end of their woodland cure, had at first amused and interested her. The
+big house on its spreading terraces, with windows looking over bright
+gardens to the hazy distances of the plains, seemed a haven of harmless
+ease and gaiety. Justine was sensitive to the finer graces of luxurious
+living, to the warm lights on old pictures and bronzes, the soft
+mingling of tints in faded rugs and panellings of time-warmed oak. And
+the existence to which this background formed a setting seemed at first
+to have the same decorative qualities. It was pleasant, for once, to be
+among people whose chief business was to look well and take life
+lightly, and Justine's own buoyancy of nature won her immediate access
+among the amiable persons who peopled Bessy's week-end parties. If they
+had only abounded a little more in their own line she might have
+succumbed to their spell. But it seemed to her that they missed the
+poetry of their situation, transacting their pleasures with the dreary
+method and shortness of view of a race tethered to the ledger. Even the
+verbal flexibility which had made her feel that she was in a world of
+freer ideas, soon revealed itself as a form of flight from them, in
+which the race was distinctly to the swift; and Justine's phase of
+passive enjoyment passed with the return of her physical and mental
+activity. She was a creature tingling with energy, a little fleeting
+particle of the power that moves the sun and the other stars, and the
+deadening influences of the life at Lynbrook roused these tendencies to
+greater intensity, as a suffocated person will suddenly develop abnormal
+strength in the struggle for air.
+
+She did not, indeed, regret having come. She was glad to be with Bessy,
+partly because of the childish friendship which had left such deep
+traces in her lonely heart, and partly because what she had seen of her
+friend's situation stirred in her all the impulses of sympathy and
+service; but the idea of continuing in such a life, of sinking into any
+of the positions of semi-dependence that an adroit and handsome girl may
+create for herself in a fashionable woman's train--this possibility
+never presented itself to Justine till Mrs. Ansell, that afternoon, had
+put it into words. And to hear it was to revolt from it with all the
+strength of her inmost nature. The thought of the future troubled her,
+not so much materially--for she had a light bird-like trust in the
+morrow's fare--but because her own tendencies seemed to have grown less
+clear, because she could not rest in them for guidance as she had once
+done. The renewal of bodily activity had not brought back her faith in
+her calling: her work had lost the light of consecration. She no longer
+felt herself predestined to nurse the sick for the rest of her life, and
+in her inexperience she reproached herself with this instability. Youth
+and womanhood were in fact crying out in her for their individual
+satisfaction; but instincts as deep-seated protected her from even a
+momentary illusion as to the nature of this demand. She wanted
+happiness, and a life of her own, as passionately as young
+flesh-and-blood had ever wanted them; but they must come bathed in the
+light of imagination and penetrated by the sense of larger affinities.
+She could not conceive of shutting herself into a little citadel of
+personal well-being while the great tides of existence rolled on
+unheeded outside. Whether they swept treasure to her feet, or strewed
+her life with wreckage, she felt, even now; that her place was there, on
+the banks, in sound and sight of the great current; and just in
+proportion as the scheme of life at Lynbrook succeeded in shutting out
+all sense of that vaster human consciousness, so did its voice speak
+more thrillingly within her.
+
+Somewhere, she felt--but, alas! still out of reach--was the life she
+longed for, a life in which high chances of doing should be mated with
+the finer forms of enjoying. But what title had she to a share in such
+an existence? Why, none but her sense of what it was worth--and what did
+that count for, in a world which used all its resources to barricade
+itself against all its opportunities? She knew there were girls who
+sought, by what is called a "good" marriage, an escape into the outer
+world, of doing and thinking--utilizing an empty brain and full pocket
+as the key to these envied fields. Some such chance the life at Lynbrook
+seemed likely enough to offer--one is not, at Justine's age and with her
+penetration, any more blind to the poise of one's head than to the turn
+of one's ideas; but here the subtler obstacles of taste and pride
+intervened. Not even Bessy's transparent manoeuvrings, her tender
+solicitude for her friend's happiness, could for a moment weaken
+Justine's resistance. If she must marry without love--and this was
+growing conceivable to her--she must at least merge her craving for
+personal happiness in some view of life in harmony with hers.
+
+A tap on her door interrupted these musings, to one aspect of which
+Bessy Amherst's entrance seemed suddenly to give visible expression.
+
+"Why did you run off, Justine? You promised to be down-stairs when I
+came back from tennis."
+
+"_Till_ you came back--wasn't it, dear?" Justine corrected with a smile,
+pushing her arm-chair forward as Bessy continued to linger irresolutely
+in the doorway. "I saw that there was a fresh supply of tea in the
+drawing-room, and I knew you would be there before the omnibus came from
+the station."
+
+"Oh, I was there--but everybody was asking for you----"
+
+"Everybody?" Justine gave a mocking lift to her dark eyebrows.
+
+"Well--Westy Gaines, at any rate; the moment he set foot in the house!"
+Bessy declared with a laugh as she dropped into the arm-chair.
+
+Justine echoed the laugh, but offered no comment on the statement which
+accompanied it, and for a moment both women were silent, Bessy tilting
+her pretty discontented head against the back of the chair, so that her
+eyes were on a level with those of her friend, who leaned near her in
+the embrasure of the window.
+
+"I can't understand you, Justine. You know well enough what he's come
+back for."
+
+"In order to dazzle Hanaford with the fact that he has been staying at
+Lynbrook!"
+
+"Nonsense--the novelty of that has worn off. He's been here three times
+since we came back."
+
+"You are admirably hospitable to your family----"
+
+Bessy let her pretty ringed hands fall with a discouraged gesture. "Why
+do you find him so much worse than--than other people?"
+
+Justine's eye-brows rose again. "In the same capacity? You speak as if I
+had boundless opportunities of comparison."
+
+"Well, you've Dr. Wyant!" Mrs. Amherst suddenly flung back at her.
+
+Justine coloured under the unexpected thrust, but met her friend's eyes
+steadily. "As an alternative to Westy? Well, if I were on a desert
+island--but I'm not!" she concluded with a careless laugh.
+
+Bessy frowned and sighed. "You can't mean that, of the two--?" She
+paused and then went on doubtfully: "It's because he's cleverer?"
+
+"Dr. Wyant?" Justine smiled. "It's not making an enormous claim for
+him!"
+
+"Oh, I know Westy's not brilliant; but stupid men are not always the
+hardest to live with." She sighed again, and turned on Justine a glance
+charged with conjugal experience.
+
+Justine had sunk into the window-seat, her thin hands clasping her knee,
+in the attitude habitual to her meditative moments. "Perhaps not," she
+assented; "but I don't know that I should care for a man who made life
+easy; I should want some one who made it interesting."
+
+Bessy met this with a pitying exclamation. "Don't imagine you invented
+that! Every girl thinks it. Afterwards she finds out that it's much
+pleasanter to be thought interesting herself."
+
+She spoke with a bitterness that issued strangely from her lips. It was
+this bitterness which gave her soft personality the sharp edge that
+Justine had felt in it on the day of their meeting at Hanaford.
+
+The girl, at first, had tried to defend herself from these
+scarcely-veiled confidences, distasteful enough in themselves, and
+placing her, if she listened, in an attitude of implied disloyalty to
+the man under whose roof they were spoken. But a precocious experience
+of life had taught her that emotions too strong for the nature
+containing them turn, by some law of spiritual chemistry, into a
+rankling poison; and she had therefore resigned herself to serving as a
+kind of outlet for Bessy's pent-up discontent. It was not that her
+friend's grievance appealed to her personal sympathies; she had learned
+enough of the situation to give her moral assent unreservedly to the
+other side. But it was characteristic of Justine that where she
+sympathized least she sometimes pitied most. Like all quick spirits she
+was often intolerant of dulness; yet when the intolerance passed it left
+a residue of compassion for the very incapacity at which she chafed. It
+seemed to her that the tragic crises in wedded life usually turned on
+the stupidity of one of the two concerned; and of the two victims of
+such a catastrophe she felt most for the one whose limitations had
+probably brought it about. After all, there could be no imprisonment as
+cruel as that of being bounded by a hard small nature. Not to be
+penetrable at all points to the shifting lights, the wandering music of
+the world--she could imagine no physical disability as cramping as that.
+How the little parched soul, in solitary confinement for life, must pine
+and dwindle in its blind cranny of self-love!
+
+To be one's self wide open to the currents of life does not always
+contribute to an understanding of narrower natures; but in Justine the
+personal emotions were enriched and deepened by a sense of participation
+in all that the world about her was doing, suffering and enjoying; and
+this sense found expression in the instinct of ministry and solace. She
+was by nature a redresser, a restorer; and in her work, as she had once
+told Amherst, the longing to help and direct, to hasten on by personal
+intervention time's slow and clumsy processes, had often been in
+conflict with the restrictions imposed by her profession. But she had no
+idle desire to probe the depths of other lives; and where there seemed
+no hope of serving she shrank from fruitless confidences. She was
+beginning to feel this to be the case with Bessy Amherst. To touch the
+rock was not enough, if there were but a few drops within it; yet in
+this barrenness lay the pathos of the situation--and after all, may not
+the scanty spring be fed from a fuller current?
+
+"I'm not sure about that," she said, answering her friend's last words
+after a deep pause of deliberation. "I mean about its being so pleasant
+to be found interesting. I'm sure the passive part is always the dull
+one: life has been a great deal more thrilling since we found out that
+we revolved about the sun, instead of sitting still and fancying that
+all the planets were dancing attendance on us. After all, they were
+_not_; and it's rather humiliating to think how the morning stars must
+have laughed together about it!"
+
+There was no self-complacency in Justine's eagerness to help. It was far
+easier for her to express it in action than in counsel, to grope for the
+path with her friend than to point the way to it; and when she had to
+speak she took refuge in figures to escape the pedantry of appearing to
+advise. But it was not only to Mrs. Dressel that her parables were dark,
+and the blank look in Bessy's eyes soon snatched her down from the
+height of metaphor.
+
+"I mean," she continued with a smile, "that, as human nature is
+constituted, it has got to find its real self--the self to be interested
+in--outside of what we conventionally call 'self': the particular
+Justine or Bessy who is clamouring for her particular morsel of life.
+You see, self isn't a thing one can keep in a box--bits of it keep
+escaping, and flying off to lodge in all sorts of unexpected crannies;
+we come across scraps of ourselves in the most unlikely places--as I
+believe you would in Westmore, if you'd only go back there and look for
+them!"
+
+Bessy's lip trembled and the colour sprang to her face; but she answered
+with a flash of irritation: "Why doesn't _he_ look for me there,
+then--if he still wants to find me?"
+
+"Ah--it's for him to look here--to find himself _here_," Justine
+murmured.
+
+"Well, he never comes here! That's his answer."
+
+"He will--he will! Only, when he does, let him find you."
+
+"Find me? I don't understand. How can he, when he never sees me? I'm no
+more to him than the carpet on the floor!"
+
+Justine smiled again. "Well--be that then! The thing is to _be_."
+
+"Under his feet? Thank you! Is that what you mean to marry for? It's not
+what husbands admire in one, you know!"
+
+"No." Justine stood up with a sense of stealing discouragement. "But I
+don't think I want to be admired----"
+
+"Ah, that's because you know you are!" broke from the depths of the
+other's bitterness.
+
+The tone smote Justine, and she dropped into the seat at her friend's
+side, silently laying a hand on Bessy's feverishly-clasped fingers.
+
+"Oh, don't let us talk about me," complained the latter, from whose lips
+the subject was never long absent. "And you mustn't think I _want_ you
+to marry, Justine; not for myself, I mean--I'd so much rather keep you
+here. I feel much less lonely when you're with me. But you say you won't
+stay--and it's too dreadful to think of your going back to that dreary
+hospital."
+
+"But you know the hospital's not dreary to me," Justine interposed;
+"it's the most interesting place I've ever known."
+
+Mrs. Amherst smiled indulgently on this extravagance. "A great many
+people go through the craze for philanthropy--" she began in the tone of
+mature experience; but Justine interrupted her with a laugh.
+
+"Philanthropy? I'm not philanthropic. I don't think I ever felt inclined
+to do good in the abstract--any more than to do ill! I can't remember
+that I ever planned out a course of conduct in my life. It's only," she
+went on, with a puzzled frown, as if honestly trying to analyze her
+motives, "it's only that I'm so fatally interested in people that before
+I know it I've slipped into their skins; and then, of course, if
+anything goes wrong with them, it's just as if it had gone wrong with
+me; and I can't help trying to rescue myself from _their_ troubles! I
+suppose it's what you'd call meddling--and so should I, if I could only
+remember that the other people were not myself!"
+
+Bessy received this with the mild tolerance of superior wisdom. Once
+safe on the tried ground of traditional authority, she always felt
+herself Justine's superior. "That's all very well now--you see the
+romantic side of it," she said, as if humouring her friend's vagaries.
+"But in time you'll want something else; you'll want a husband and
+children--a life of your own. And then you'll have to be more practical.
+It's ridiculous to pretend that comfort and money don't make a
+difference. And if you married a rich man, just think what a lot of good
+you could do! Westy will be very well off--and I'm sure he'd let you
+endow hospitals and things. Think how interesting it would be to build a
+ward in the very hospital where you'd been a nurse! I read something
+like that in a novel the other day--it was beautifully described. All
+the nurses and doctors that the heroine had worked with were there to
+receive her...and her little boy went about and gave toys to the
+crippled children...."
+
+If the speaker's concluding instance hardly produced the effect she had
+intended, it was perhaps only because Justine's attention had been
+arrested by the earlier part of the argument. It was strange to have
+marriage urged on her by a woman who had twice failed to find happiness
+in it--strange, and yet how vivid a sign that, even to a nature absorbed
+in its personal demands, not happiness but completeness is the inmost
+craving! "A life of your own"--that was what even Bessy, in her obscure
+way, felt to be best worth suffering for. And how was a spirit like
+Justine's, thrilling with youth and sympathy, to conceive of an isolated
+existence as the final answer to that craving? A life circumscribed by
+one's own poor personal consciousness would not be life at all--far
+better the "adventure of the diver" than the shivering alone on the
+bank! Bessy, reading encouragement in her silence, returned her
+hand-clasp with an affectionate pressure.
+
+"You _would_ like that, Justine?" she said, secretly proud of having hit
+on the convincing argument.
+
+"To endow hospitals with your cousin's money? No; I should want
+something much more exciting!"
+
+Bessy's face kindled. "You mean travelling abroad--and I suppose New
+York in winter?"
+
+Justine broke into a laugh. "I was thinking of your cousin himself when
+I spoke." And to Bessy's disappointed cry--"Then it _is_ Dr. Wyant,
+after all?" she answered lightly, and without resenting the challenge:
+"I don't know. Suppose we leave it to the oracle."
+
+"The oracle?"
+
+"Time. His question-and-answer department is generally the most reliable
+in the long run." She started up, gently drawing Bessy to her feet. "And
+just at present he reminds me that it's nearly six, and that you
+promised Cicely to go and see her before you dress for dinner."
+
+Bessy rose obediently. "Does he remind you of _your_ promises too? You
+said you'd come down to dinner tonight."
+
+"Did I?" Justine hesitated. "Well, I'm coming," she said, smiling and
+kissing her friend.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+WHEN the door closed on Mrs. Amherst a resolve which had taken shape in
+Justine's mind during their talk together made her seat herself at her
+writing-table, where, after a moment's musing over her suspended pen,
+she wrote and addressed a hurried note. This business despatched, she
+put on her hat and jacket, and letter in hand passed down the corridor
+from her room, and descended to the entrance-hall below. She might have
+consigned her missive to the post-box which conspicuously tendered its
+services from a table near the door; but to do so would delay the
+letter's despatch till morning, and she felt a sudden impatience to see
+it start.
+
+The tumult on the terrace had transferred itself within doors, and as
+Justine went down the stairs she heard the click of cues from the
+billiard-room, the talk and laughter of belated bridge-players, the
+movement of servants gathering up tea-cups and mending fires. She had
+hoped to find the hall empty, but the sight of Westy Gaines's figure
+looming watchfully on the threshold of the smoking-room gave her, at the
+last bend of the stairs, a little start of annoyance. He would want to
+know where she was going, he would offer to go with her, and it would
+take some time and not a little emphasis to make him understand that his
+society was not desired.
+
+This was the thought that flashed through Justine's mind as she reached
+the landing; but the next moment it gave way to a contradictory feeling.
+Westy Gaines was not alone in the hall. From under the stairway rose the
+voices of a group ensconced in that popular retreat about a chess-board;
+and as Justine reached the last turn of the stairs she perceived that
+Mason Winch, an earnest youth with advanced views on political economy,
+was engaged, to the diversion of a circle of spectators, in teaching the
+Telfer girls chess. The futility of trying to fix the spasmodic
+attention of this effervescent couple, and their instructor's grave
+unconsciousness of the fact, constituted, for the lookers-on, the
+peculiar diversion of the scene. It was of course inevitable that young
+Winch, on his arrival at Lynbrook, should have succumbed at once to the
+tumultuous charms of the Telfer manner, which was equally attractive to
+inarticulate youth and to tired and talked-out middle-age; but that he
+should have perceived no resistance in their minds to the deliberative
+processes of the game of chess, was, even to the Telfers themselves, a
+source of unmitigated gaiety. Nothing seemed to them funnier than that
+any one should credit them with any mental capacity; and they had
+inexhaustibly amusing ways of drawing out and showing off each other's
+ignorance.
+
+It was on this scene that Westy's appreciative eyes had been fixed till
+Justine's appearance drew them to herself. He pronounced her name
+joyfully, and moved forward to greet her; but as their hands met she
+understood that he did not mean to press his company upon her. Under the
+eye of the Lynbrook circle he was chary of marked demonstrations, and
+even Mrs. Amherst's approval could not, at such moments, bridge over the
+gap between himself and the object of his attentions. A Gaines was a
+Gaines in the last analysis, and apart from any pleasing accident of
+personality; but what was Miss Brent but the transient vehicle of those
+graces which Providence has provided for the delectation of the
+privileged sex?
+
+These influences were visible in the temperate warmth of Westy's manner,
+and in his way of keeping a backward eye on the mute interchange of
+comment about the chess-board. At another time his embarrassment would
+have amused Justine; but the feelings stirred by her talk with Bessy had
+not subsided, and she recognized with a sting of mortification the
+resemblance between her view of the Lynbrook set and its estimate of
+herself. If Bessy's friends were negligible to her she was almost
+non-existent to them; and, as against herself, they were overwhelmingly
+provided with tangible means of proving their case.
+
+Such considerations, at a given moment, may prevail decisively even with
+a nature armed against them by insight and irony; and the mere fact that
+Westy Gaines did not mean to join her, and that he was withheld from
+doing so by the invisible pressure of the Lynbrook standards, had the
+effect of precipitating Justine's floating intentions.
+
+If anything farther had been needed to hasten this result, it would have
+been accomplished by the sound of footsteps which, over-taking her a
+dozen yards from the house, announced her admirer's impetuous if tardy
+pursuit. The act of dismissing him, though it took but a word and was
+effected with a laugh, left her pride quivering with a hurt the more
+painful because she would not acknowledge it. That she should waste a
+moment's resentment on the conduct of a person so unimportant as poor
+Westy, showed her in a flash the intrinsic falseness of her position at
+Lynbrook. She saw that to disdain the life about her had not kept her
+intact from it; and the knowledge made her feel anew the need of some
+strong decentralizing influence, some purifying influx of emotion and
+activity.
+
+She had walked on quickly through the clear October twilight, which was
+still saturated with the after-glow of a vivid sunset; and a few minutes
+brought her to the village stretching along the turnpike beyond the
+Lynbrook gates. The new post-office dominated the row of shabby houses
+and "stores" set disjointedly under reddening maples, and its arched
+doorway formed the centre of Lynbrook's evening intercourse.
+
+Justine, hastening toward the knot of loungers on the threshold, had no
+consciousness of anything outside of her own thoughts; and as she
+mounted the steps she was surprised to see Dr. Wyant detach himself from
+the group and advance to meet her.
+
+"May I post your letter?" he asked, lifting his hat.
+
+His gesture uncovered the close-curling hair of a small
+delicately-finished head just saved from effeminacy by the vigorous jut
+of heavy eye-brows meeting above full grey eyes. The eyes again, at
+first sight, might have struck one as too expressive, or as expressing
+things too purely decorative for the purposes of a young country doctor
+with a growing practice; but this estimate was corrected by an
+unexpected abruptness in their owner's voice and manner. Perhaps the
+final impression produced on a close observer by Dr. Stephen Wyant would
+have been that the contradictory qualities of which he was compounded
+had not yet been brought into equilibrium by the hand of time.
+
+Justine, in reply to his question, had drawn back a step, slipping her
+letter into the breast of her jacket.
+
+"That is hardly worth while, since it was addressed to you," she
+answered with a slight smile as she turned to descend the post-office
+steps.
+
+Wyant, still carrying his hat, and walking with quick uneven steps,
+followed her in silence till they had passed beyond earshot of the
+loiterers on the threshold; then, in the shade of the maple boughs, he
+pulled up and faced her.
+
+"You've written to say that I may come tomorrow?"
+
+Justine hesitated. "Yes," she said at length.
+
+"Good God! You give royally!" he broke out, pushing his hand with a
+nervous gesture through the thin dark curls on his forehead.
+
+Justine laughed, with a trace of nervousness in her own tone. "And you
+talk--well, imperially! Aren't you afraid to bankrupt the language?"
+
+"What do you mean?" he said, staring.
+
+"What do _you_ mean? I have merely said that I would see you
+tomorrow----"
+
+"Well," he retorted, "that's enough for my happiness!"
+
+She sounded her light laugh again. "I'm glad to know you're so easily
+pleased."
+
+"I'm not! But you couldn't have done a cruel thing without a struggle;
+and since you're ready to give me my answer tomorrow, I know it can't
+be a cruel one."
+
+They had begun to walk onward as they talked, but at this she halted.
+"Please don't take that tone. I dislike sentimentality!" she exclaimed,
+with a tinge of imperiousness that was a surprise to her own ears.
+
+It was not the first time in the course of her friendship with Stephen
+Wyant that she had been startled by this intervention of something
+within her that resisted and almost resented his homage. When they were
+apart, she was conscious only of the community of interests and
+sympathies that had first drawn them together. Why was it then--since
+his looks were of the kind generally thought to stand a suitor in good
+stead--that whenever they had met of late she had been subject to these
+rushes of obscure hostility, the half-physical, half-moral shrinking
+from some indefinable element in his nature against which she was
+constrained to defend herself by perpetual pleasantry and evasion?
+
+To Wyant, at any rate, the answer was not far to seek. His pale face
+reflected the disdain in hers as he returned ironically: "A thousand
+pardons; I know I'm not always in the key."
+
+"The key?"
+
+"I haven't yet acquired the Lynbrook tone. You must make allowances for
+my lack of opportunity."
+
+The retort on Justine's lips dropped to silence, as though his words
+had in fact brought an answer to her inward questioning. Could it be
+that he was right--that her shrinking from him was the result of an
+increased sensitiveness to faults of taste that she would once have
+despised herself for noticing? When she had first known him, in her work
+at St. Elizabeth's some three years earlier, his excesses of manner had
+seemed to her merely the boyish tokens of a richness of nature not yet
+controlled by experience. Though Wyant was somewhat older than herself
+there had always been an element of protection in her feeling for him,
+and it was perhaps this element which formed the real ground of her
+liking. It was, at any rate, uppermost as she returned, with a softened
+gleam of mockery: "Since you are so sure of my answer I hardly know why
+I should see you tomorrow."
+
+"You mean me to take it now?" he exclaimed.
+
+"I don't mean you to take it at all till it's given--above all not to
+take it for granted!"
+
+His jutting brows drew together again. "Ah, I can't split hairs with
+you. Won't you put me out of my misery?"
+
+She smiled, but not unkindly. "Do you want an anaesthetic?"
+
+"No--a clean cut with the knife!"
+
+"You forget that we're not allowed to despatch hopeless cases--more's
+the pity!"
+
+He flushed to the roots of his thin hair. "Hopeless cases? That's it,
+then--that's my answer?"
+
+They had reached the point where, at the farther edge of the straggling
+settlement, the tiled roof of the railway-station fronted the
+post-office cupola; and the shriek of a whistle now reminded Justine
+that the spot was not propitious to private talk. She halted a moment
+before speaking.
+
+"I have no answer to give you now but the one in my note--that I'll see
+you tomorrow."
+
+"But if you're sure of knowing tomorrow you must know now!"
+
+Their eyes met, his eloquently pleading, hers kind but still
+impenetrable. "If I knew now, you should know too. Please be content
+with that," she rejoined.
+
+"How can I be, when a day may make such a difference? When I know that
+every influence about you is fighting against me?"
+
+The words flashed a refracted light far down into the causes of her own
+uncertainty.
+
+"Ah," she said, drawing a little away from him, "I'm not so sure that I
+don't like a fight!"
+
+"Is that why you won't give in?" He moved toward her with a despairing
+gesture. "If I let you go now, you're lost to me!"
+
+She stood her ground, facing him with a quick lift of the head. "If you
+don't let me go I certainly am," she said; and he drew back, as if
+conscious of the uselessness of the struggle. His submission, as usual,
+had a disarming effect on her irritation, and she held out her hand.
+"Come tomorrow at three," she said, her voice and manner suddenly
+seeming to give back the hope she had withheld from him.
+
+He seized on her hand with an inarticulate murmur; but at the same
+moment a louder whistle and the thunder of an approaching train reminded
+her of the impossibility of prolonging the scene. She was ordinarily
+careless of appearances, but while she was Mrs. Amherst's guest she did
+not care to be seen romantically loitering through the twilight with
+Stephen Wyant; and she freed herself with a quick goodbye.
+
+He gave her a last look, hesitating and imploring; then, in obedience to
+her gesture, he turned away and strode off in the opposite direction.
+
+As soon as he had left her she began to retrace her steps toward
+Lynbrook House; but instead of traversing the whole length of the
+village she passed through a turnstile in the park fencing, taking a
+more circuitous but quieter way home.
+
+She walked on slowly through the dusk, wishing to give herself time to
+think over her conversation with Wyant. Now that she was alone again, it
+seemed to her that the part she had played had been both inconsistent
+and undignified. When she had written to Wyant that she would see him on
+the morrow she had done so with the clear understanding that she was to
+give, at that meeting, a definite answer to his offer of marriage; and
+during her talk with Bessy she had suddenly, and, as it seemed to her,
+irrevocably, decided that the answer should be favourable. From the
+first days of her acquaintance with Wyant she had appreciated his
+intelligence and had been stimulated by his zeal for his work. He had
+remained only six months at Saint Elizabeth's, and though his feeling
+for her had even then been manifest, it had been kept from expression by
+the restraint of their professional relation, and by her absorption in
+her duties. It was only when they had met again at Lynbrook that she had
+begun to feel a personal interest in him. His youthful promise seemed
+nearer fulfillment than she had once thought possible, and the contrast
+he presented to the young men in Bessy's train was really all in his
+favour. He had gained in strength and steadiness without losing his high
+flashes of enthusiasm; and though, even now, she was not in love with
+him, she began to feel that the union of their common interests might
+create a life full and useful enough to preclude the possibility of
+vague repinings. It would, at any rate, take her out of the stagnant
+circle of her present existence, and restore her to contact with the
+fruitful energies of life.
+
+All this had seemed quite clear when she wrote her letter; why, then,
+had she not made use of their chance encounter to give her answer,
+instead of capriciously postponing it? The act might have been that of a
+self-conscious girl in her teens; but neither inexperience nor coquetry
+had prompted it. She had merely yielded to the spirit of resistance that
+Wyant's presence had of late aroused in her; and the possibility that
+this resistance might be due to some sense of his social defects, his
+lack of measure and facility, was so humiliating that for a moment she
+stood still in the path, half-meaning to turn back and overtake him----
+
+As she paused she was surprised to hear a man's step behind her; and the
+thought that it might be Wyant's brought about another revulsion of
+feeling. What right had he to pursue her in this way, to dog her steps
+even into the Lynbrook grounds? She was sure that his persistent
+attentions had already attracted the notice of Bessy's visitors; and
+that he should thus force himself on her after her dismissal seemed
+suddenly to make their whole relation ridiculous.
+
+She turned about to rebuke him, and found herself face to face with John
+Amherst.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+AMHERST, on leaving the train at Lynbrook, had paused in doubt on the
+empty platform. His return was unexpected, and no carriage awaited him;
+but he caught the signal of the village cab-driver's ready whip.
+Amherst, however, felt a sudden desire to postpone the moment of
+arrival, and consigning his luggage to the cab he walked away toward the
+turnstile through which Justine had passed. In thus taking the longest
+way home he was yielding another point to his reluctance. He knew that
+at that hour his wife's visitors might still be assembled in the
+drawing-room, and he wished to avoid making his unannounced entrance
+among them.
+
+It was not till now that he felt the embarrassment of such an arrival.
+For some time past he had known that he ought to go back to Lynbrook,
+but he had not known how to tell Bessy that he was coming. Lack of habit
+made him inexpert in the art of easy transitions, and his inability to
+bridge over awkward gaps had often put him at a disadvantage with his
+wife and her friends. He had not yet learned the importance of observing
+the forms which made up the daily ceremonial of their lives, and at
+present there was just enough soreness between himself and Bessy to make
+such observances more difficult than usual.
+
+There had been no open estrangement, but peace had been preserved at the
+cost of a slowly accumulated tale of grievances on both sides. Since
+Amherst had won his point about the mills, the danger he had foreseen
+had been realized: his victory at Westmore had been a defeat at
+Lynbrook. It would be too crude to say that his wife had made him pay
+for her public concession by the private disregard of his wishes; and if
+something of this sort had actually resulted, his sense of fairness told
+him that it was merely the natural reaction of a soft nature against the
+momentary strain of self-denial. At first he had been hardly aware of
+this consequence of his triumph. The joy of being able to work his will
+at Westmore obscured all lesser emotions; and his sentiment for Bessy
+had long since shrunk into one of those shallow pools of feeling which a
+sudden tide might fill, but which could never again be the deep
+perennial spring from which his life was fed.
+
+The need of remaining continuously at Hanaford while the first changes
+were making had increased the strain of the situation. He had never
+expected that Bessy would stay there with him--had perhaps, at heart,
+hardly wished it--and her plan of going to the Adirondacks with Miss
+Brent seemed to him a satisfactory alternative to the European trip she
+had renounced. He felt as relieved as though some one had taken off his
+hands the task of amusing a restless child, and he let his wife go
+without suspecting that the moment might be a decisive one between them.
+But it had not occurred to Bessy that any one could regard six weeks in
+the Adirondacks as an adequate substitute for a summer abroad. She felt
+that her sacrifice deserved recognition, and personal devotion was the
+only form of recognition which could satisfy her. She had expected
+Amherst to join her at the camp, but he did not come; and when she went
+back to Long Island she did not stop to see him, though Hanaford lay in
+her way. At the moment of her return the work at the mills made it
+impossible for him to go to Lynbrook; and thus the weeks drifted on
+without their meeting.
+
+At last, urged by his mother, he had gone down to Long Island for a
+night; but though, on that occasion, he had announced his coming, he
+found the house full, and the whole party except Mr. Langhope in the act
+of starting off to a dinner in the neighbourhood. He was of course
+expected to go too, and Bessy appeared hurt when he declared that he was
+too tired and preferred to remain with Mr. Langhope; but she did not
+suggest staying at home herself, and drove off in a mood of exuberant
+gaiety. Amherst had been too busy all his life to know what intricacies
+of perversion a sentimental grievance may develop in an unoccupied mind,
+and he saw in Bessy's act only a sign of indifference. The next day she
+complained to him of money difficulties, as though surprised that her
+income had been suddenly cut down; and when he reminded her that she had
+consented of her own will to this temporary reduction, she burst into
+tears and accused him of caring only for Westmore.
+
+He went away exasperated by her inconsequence, and bills from Lynbrook
+continued to pour in on him. In the first days of their marriage, Bessy
+had put him in charge of her exchequer, and she was too indolent--and at
+heart perhaps too sensitive--to ask him to renounce the charge. It was
+clear to him, therefore, how little she was observing the spirit of
+their compact, and his mind was tormented by the anticipation of
+financial embarrassments. He wrote her a letter of gentle expostulation,
+but in her answer she ignored his remonstrance; and after that silence
+fell between them.
+
+The only way to break this silence was to return to Lynbrook; but now
+that he had come back, he did not know what step to take next. Something
+in the atmosphere of his wife's existence seemed to paralyze his
+will-power. When all about her spoke a language so different from his
+own, how could he hope to make himself heard? He knew that her family
+and her immediate friends--Mr. Langhope, the Gaineses, Mrs. Ansell and
+Mr. Tredegar--far from being means of communication, were so many
+sentinels ready to raise the drawbridge and drop the portcullis at his
+approach. They were all in league to stifle the incipient feelings he
+had roused in Bessy, to push her back into the deadening routine of her
+former life, and the only voice that might conceivably speak for him was
+Miss Brent's.
+
+The "case" which, unexpectedly presented to her by one of the Hope
+Hospital physicians, had detained Justine at Hanaford during the month
+of June, was the means of establishing a friendship between herself and
+Amherst. They did not meet often, or get to know each other very well;
+but he saw her occasionally at his mother's and at Mrs. Dressel's, and
+once he took her out to Westmore, to consult her about the emergency
+hospital which was to be included among the first improvements there.
+The expedition had been memorable to both; and when, some two weeks
+later, Bessy wrote suggesting that she should take Miss Brent to the
+Adirondacks, it seemed to Amherst that there was no one whom he would
+rather have his wife choose as her companion.
+
+He was much too busy at the time to cultivate or analyze his feeling for
+Miss Brent; he rested vaguely in the thought of her, as of the "nicest"
+girl he had ever met, and was frankly pleased when accident brought them
+together; but the seeds left in both their minds by these chance
+encounters had not yet begun to germinate.
+
+So unperceived had been their gradual growth in intimacy that it was a
+surprise to Amherst to find himself suddenly thinking of her as a means
+of communication with his wife; but the thought gave him such
+encouragement that, when he saw Justine in the path before him he went
+toward her with unusual eagerness.
+
+Justine, on her part, felt an equal pleasure. She knew that Bessy did
+not expect her husband, and that his prolonged absence had already been
+the cause of malicious comment at Lynbrook; and she caught at the hope
+that this sudden return might betoken a more favourable turn of affairs.
+
+"Oh, I am so glad to see you!" she exclaimed; and her tone had the
+effect of completing his reassurance, his happy sense that she would
+understand and help him.
+
+"I wanted to see you too," he began confusedly; then, conscious of the
+intimacy of the phrase, he added with a slight laugh: "The fact is, I'm
+a culprit looking for a peace-maker."
+
+"A culprit?"
+
+"I've been so tied down at the mills that I didn't know, till yesterday,
+just when I could break away; and in the hurry of leaving--" He paused
+again, checked by the impossibility of uttering, to the girl before him,
+the little conventional falsehoods which formed the small currency of
+Bessy's circle. Not that any scruple of probity restrained him: in
+trifling matters he recognized the usefulness of such counters in the
+social game; but when he was with Justine he always felt the obscure
+need of letting his real self be seen.
+
+"I was stupid enough not to telegraph," he said, "and I am afraid my
+wife will think me negligent: she often has to reproach me for my sins
+of omission, and this time I know they are many."
+
+The girl received this in silence, less from embarrassment than from
+surprise; for she had already guessed that it was as difficult for
+Amherst to touch, even lightly, on his private affairs, as it was
+instinctive with his wife to pour her grievances into any willing ear.
+Justine's first thought was one of gratification that he should have
+spoken, and of eagerness to facilitate the saying of whatever he wished
+to say; but before she could answer he went on hastily: "The fact is,
+Bessy does not know how complicated the work at Westmore is; and when I
+caught sight of you just now I was thinking that you are the only one of
+her friends who has any technical understanding of what I am trying to
+do, and who might consequently help her to see how hard it is for me to
+take my hand from the plough."
+
+Justine listened gravely, longing to cry out her comprehension and
+sympathy, but restrained by the sense that the moment was a critical
+one, where impulse must not be trusted too far. It was quite possible
+that a reaction of pride might cause Amherst to repent even so guarded
+an avowal; and if that happened, he might never forgive her for having
+encouraged him to speak. She looked up at him with a smile.
+
+"Why not tell Bessy yourself? Your understanding of the case is a good
+deal clearer than mine or any one else's."
+
+"Oh, Bessy is tired of hearing about it from me; and besides--" She
+detected a shade of disappointment in his tone, and was sorry she had
+said anything which might seem meant to discourage his confidence. It
+occurred to her also that she had been insincere in not telling him at
+once that she had already been let into the secret of his domestic
+differences: she felt the same craving as Amherst for absolute openness
+between them.
+
+"I know," she said, almost timidly, "that Bessy has not been quite
+content of late to have you give so much time to Westmore, and perhaps
+she herself thinks it is because the work there does not interest her;
+but I believe it is for a different reason."
+
+"What reason?" he asked with a look of surprise.
+
+"Because Westmore takes you from her; because she thinks you are happier
+there than at Lynbrook."
+
+The day had faded so rapidly that it was no longer possible for the
+speakers to see each other's faces, and it was easier for both to
+communicate through the veil of deepening obscurity.
+
+"But, good heavens, she might be there with me--she's as much needed
+there as I am!" Amherst exclaimed.
+
+"Yes; but you must remember that it's against all her habits--and
+against the point of view of every one about her--that she should lead
+that kind of life; and meanwhile----"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Meanwhile, isn't it expedient that you should, a little more, lead
+hers?"
+
+Always the same answer to his restless questioning! His mother's answer,
+the answer of Bessy and her friends. He had somehow hoped that the girl
+at his side would find a different solution to the problem, and his
+disappointment escaped in a bitter exclamation.
+
+"But Westmore is my life--hers too, if she knew it! I can't desert it
+now without being as false to her as to myself!"
+
+As he spoke, he was overcome once more by the hopelessness of trying to
+put his case clearly. How could Justine, for all her quickness and
+sympathy, understand a situation of which the deeper elements were
+necessarily unknown to her? The advice she gave him was natural enough,
+and on her lips it seemed not the counsel of a shallow expediency, but
+the plea of compassion and understanding. But she knew nothing of the
+long struggle for mutual adjustment which had culminated in this crisis
+between himself and his wife, and she could therefore not see that, if
+he yielded his point, and gave up his work at Westmore, the concession
+would mean not renewal but destruction. He felt that he should hate
+Bessy if he won her back at that price; and the violence of his feeling
+frightened him. It was, in truth, as he had said, his own life that he
+was fighting for. If he gave up Westmore he could not fall back on the
+futile activities of Lynbrook, and fate might yet have some lower
+alternative to offer. He could trust to his own strength and
+self-command while his energies had a normal outlet; but idleness and
+self-indulgence might work in him like a dangerous drug.
+
+Justine kept steadily to her point. "Westmore must be foremost to both
+of you in time; I don't see how either of you can escape that. But the
+realization of it must come to Bessy through _you_, and for that reason
+I think that you ought to be more patient--that you ought even to put
+the question aside for a time and enter a little more into her life
+while she is learning to understand yours." As she ended, it seemed to
+her that what she had said was trite and ineffectual, and yet that it
+might have passed the measure of discretion; and, torn between two
+doubts, she added hastily: "But you have done just that in coming back
+now--that is the real solution of the problem."
+
+While she spoke they passed out of the wood-path they had been
+following, and rounding a mass of shrubbery emerged on the lawn below
+the terraces. The long bulk of the house lay above them, dark against
+the lingering gleam of the west, with brightly-lit windows marking its
+irregular outline; and the sight produced in Amherst and Justine a vague
+sense of helplessness and constraint. It was impossible to speak with
+the same freedom, confronted by that substantial symbol of the accepted
+order, which seemed to glare down on them in massive disdain of their
+puny efforts to deflect the course of events: and Amherst, without
+reverting to her last words, asked after a moment if his wife had many
+guests.
+
+He listened in silence while Justine ran over the list of names--the
+Telfer girls and their brother, Mason Winch and Westy Gaines, a cluster
+of young bridge-playing couples, and, among the last arrivals, the
+Fenton Carburys and Ned Bowfort. The names were all familiar to
+Amherst--he knew they represented the flower of week-end fashion; but he
+did not remember having seen the Carburys among his wife's guests, and
+his mind paused on the name, seeking to regain some lost impression
+connected with it. But it evoked, like the others, merely the confused
+sense of stridency and unrest which he had brought away from his last
+Lynbrook visit; and this reminiscence made him ask Miss Brent, when her
+list was ended, if she did not think that so continuous a succession of
+visitors was too tiring for Bessy.
+
+"I sometimes think it tires her more than she knows; but I hope she can
+be persuaded to take better care of herself now that Mrs. Ansell has
+come back."
+
+Amherst halted abruptly. "Is Mrs. Ansell here?"
+
+"She arrived from Europe today."
+
+"And Mr. Langhope too, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes. He came from Newport about ten days ago."
+
+Amherst checked himself, conscious that his questions betrayed the fact
+that he and his wife no longer wrote to each other. The same thought
+appeared to strike Justine, and they walked across the lawn in silence,
+hastening their steps involuntarily, as though to escape the oppressive
+weight of the words which had passed between them. But Justine was
+unwilling that this fruitless sense of oppression should be the final
+outcome of their talk; and when they reached the upper terrace she
+paused and turned impulsively to Amherst. As she did so, the light from
+an uncurtained window fell on her face, which glowed with the inner
+brightness kindled in it by moments of strong feeling.
+
+"I am sure of one thing--Bessy will be very, very glad that you have
+come," she exclaimed.
+
+"Thank you," he answered.
+
+Their hands met mechanically, and she turned away and entered the house.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+BESSY had not seen her little girl that day, and filled with compunction
+by Justine's reminder, she hastened directly to the school-room.
+
+Of late, in certain moods, her maternal tenderness had been clouded by a
+sense of uneasiness in the child's presence, for Cicely was the argument
+most effectually used by Mr. Langhope and Mr. Tredegar in their efforts
+to check the triumph of Amherst's ideas. Bessy, still unable to form an
+independent opinion on the harassing question of the mills, continued to
+oscillate between the views of the contending parties, now regarding
+Cicely as an innocent victim and herself as an unnatural mother,
+sacrificing her child's prospects to further Amherst's enterprise, and
+now conscious of a vague animosity against the little girl, as the chief
+cause of the dissensions which had so soon clouded the skies of her
+second marriage. Then again, there were moments when Cicely's rosy bloom
+reminded her bitterly of the child she had lost--the son on whom her
+ambitions had been fixed. It seemed to her now that if their boy had
+lived she might have kept Amherst's love and have played a more
+important part in his life; and brooding on the tragedy of the child's
+sickly existence she resented the contrast of Cicely's brightness and
+vigour. The result was that in her treatment of her daughter she
+alternated between moments of exaggerated devotion and days of neglect,
+never long happy away from the little girl, yet restless and
+self-tormenting in her presence.
+
+After her talk with Justine she felt more than usually disturbed, as she
+always did when her unprofitable impulses of self-exposure had subsided.
+Bessy's mind was not made for introspection, and chance had burdened it
+with unintelligible problems. She felt herself the victim of
+circumstances to which her imagination attributed the deliberate malice
+that children ascribe to the furniture they run against in playing. This
+helped her to cultivate a sense of helpless injury and to disdain in
+advance the advice she was perpetually seeking. How absurd it was, for
+instance, to suppose that a girl could understand the feelings of a
+married woman! Justine's suggestion that she should humble herself still
+farther to Amherst merely left in Bessy's mind a rankling sense of being
+misunderstood and undervalued by those to whom she turned in her
+extremity, and she said to herself, in a phrase that sounded well in her
+own ears, that sooner or later every woman must learn to fight her
+battles alone.
+
+In this mood she entered the room where Cicely was at supper with her
+governess, and enveloped the child in a whirl of passionate caresses.
+But Cicely had inherited the soberer Westmore temper, and her mother's
+spasmodic endearments always had a repressive effect on her. She
+dutifully returned a small fraction of Bessy's kisses, and then, with an
+air of relief, addressed herself once more to her bread and marmalade.
+
+"You don't seem a bit glad to see me!" Bessy exclaimed, while the little
+governess made a nervous pretence of being greatly amused at this
+prodigious paradox, and Cicely, setting down her silver mug, asked
+judicially: "Why should I be gladder than other days? It isn't a
+birthday."
+
+This Cordelia-like answer cut Bessy to the quick. "You horrid child to
+say such a cruel thing when you know I love you better and better every
+minute! But you don't care for me any longer because Justine has taken
+you away from me!"
+
+This last charge had sprung into her mind in the act of uttering it, but
+now that it was spoken it instantly assumed the proportions of a fact,
+and seemed to furnish another justification for her wretchedness. Bessy
+was not naturally jealous, but her imagination was thrall to the spoken
+word, and it gave her a sudden incomprehensible relief to associate
+Justine with the obscure causes of her suffering.
+
+"I know she's cleverer than I am, and more amusing, and can tell you
+about plants and animals and things...and I daresay she tells you how
+tiresome and stupid I am...."
+
+She sprang up suddenly, abashed by Cicely's astonished gaze, and by the
+governess's tremulous attempt to continue to treat the scene as one of
+"Mamma's" most successful pleasantries.
+
+"Don't mind me--my head aches horribly. I think I'll rush off for a
+gallop on Impulse before dinner. Miss Dill, Cicely's nails are a
+sight--I suppose that comes of grubbing up wild-flowers."
+
+And with this parting shot at Justine's pursuits she swept out of the
+school-room, leaving pupil and teacher plunged in a stricken silence
+from which Cicely at length emerged to say, with the candour that Miss
+Dill dreaded more than any punishable offense: "Mother's prettiest--but
+I do like Justine the best."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was nearly dark when Bessy mounted the horse which had been hastily
+saddled in response to her order; but it was her habit to ride out alone
+at all hours, and of late nothing but a hard gallop had availed to quiet
+her nerves. Her craving for occupation had increased as her life became
+more dispersed and agitated, and the need to fill every hour drove her
+to excesses of bodily exertion, since other forms of activity were
+unknown to her.
+
+As she cantered along under the twilight sky, with a strong sea-breeze
+in her face, the rush of air and the effort of steadying her nervous
+thoroughbred filled her with a glow of bodily energy from which her
+thoughts emerged somewhat cleansed of their bitterness.
+
+She had been odious to poor little Cicely, for whom she now felt a
+sudden remorseful yearning which almost made her turn her horse's head
+homeward, that she might dash upstairs and do penance beside the child's
+bed. And that she should have accused Justine of taking Cicely from her!
+It frightened her to find herself thinking evil of Justine. Bessy, whose
+perceptions were keen enough in certain directions, knew that her second
+marriage had changed her relation to all her former circle of friends.
+Though they still rallied about her, keeping up the convenient habit of
+familiar intercourse, she had begun to be aware that their view of her
+had in it an element of criticism and compassion. She had once fancied
+that Amherst's good looks, and the other qualities she had seen in him,
+would immediately make him free of the charmed circle in which she
+moved; but she was discouraged by his disregard of his opportunities,
+and above all by the fundamental differences in his view of life. He was
+never common or ridiculous, but she saw that he would never acquire the
+small social facilities. He was fond of exercise, but it bored him to
+talk of it. The men's smoking-room anecdotes did not amuse him, he was
+unmoved by the fluctuations of the stock-market, he could not tell one
+card from another, and his perfunctory attempts at billiards had once
+caused Mr. Langhope to murmur, in his daughter's hearing: "Ah, that's
+the test--I always said so!"
+
+Thus debarred from what seemed to Bessy the chief points of contact with
+life, how could Amherst hope to impose himself on minds versed in these
+larger relations? As the sense of his social insufficiency grew on her,
+Bessy became more sensitive to that latent criticism of her marriage
+which--intolerable thought!--involved a judgment on herself. She was
+increasingly eager for the approval and applause of her little audience,
+yet increasingly distrustful of their sincerity, and more miserably
+persuaded that she and her husband were the butt of some of their most
+effective stories. She knew also that rumours of the disagreement about
+Westmore were abroad, and the suspicion that Amherst's conduct was the
+subject of unfriendly comment provoked in her a reaction of loyalty to
+his ideas....
+
+From this turmoil of conflicting influences only her friendship with
+Justine Brent remained secure. Though Justine's adaptability made it
+easy for her to fit into the Lynbrook life, Bessy knew that she stood as
+much outside of it as Amherst. She could never, for instance, be
+influenced by what Maria Ansell and the Gaineses and the Telfers
+thought. She had her own criteria of conduct, unintelligible to Bessy,
+but giving her an independence of mind on which her friend leaned in a
+kind of blind security. And that even her faith in Justine should
+suddenly be poisoned by a jealous thought seemed to prove that the
+consequences of her marriage were gradually infecting her whole life.
+Bessy could conceive of masculine devotion only as subservient to its
+divinity's least wish, and she argued that if Amherst had really loved
+her he could not so lightly have disturbed the foundations of her world.
+And so her tormented thoughts, perpetually circling on themselves,
+reverted once more to their central grievance--the failure of her
+marriage. If her own love had died out it would have been much
+simpler--she was surrounded by examples of the mutual evasion of a
+troublesome tie. There was Blanche Carbury, for instance, with whom she
+had lately struck up an absorbing friendship...it was perfectly clear
+that Blanche Carbury wondered how much more she was going to stand! But
+it was the torment of Bessy's situation that it involved a radical
+contradiction, that she still loved Amherst though she could not forgive
+him for having married her.
+
+Perhaps what she most suffered from was his too-prompt acceptance of the
+semi-estrangement between them. After nearly three years of marriage she
+had still to learn that it was Amherst's way to wrestle with the angel
+till dawn, and then to go about his other business. Her own mind could
+revolve in the same grievance as interminably as a squirrel in its
+wheel, and her husband's habit of casting off the accepted fact seemed
+to betoken poverty of feeling. If only he had striven a little harder to
+keep her--if, even now, he would come back to her, and make her feel
+that she was more to him than those wretched mills!
+
+When she turned her mare toward Lynbrook, the longing to see Amherst was
+again uppermost. He had not written for weeks--she had been obliged to
+tell Maria Ansell that she knew nothing of his plans, and it mortified
+her to think that every one was aware of his neglect. Yet, even now, if
+on reaching the house she should find a telegram to say that he was
+coming, the weight of loneliness would be lifted, and everything in life
+would seem different....
+
+Her high-strung mare, scenting the homeward road, and excited by the
+fantastic play of wayside lights and shadows, swept her along at a wild
+gallop with which the fevered rush of her thoughts kept pace, and when
+she reached the house she dropped from the saddle with aching wrists and
+brain benumbed.
+
+She entered by a side door, to avoid meeting any one, and ran upstairs
+at once, knowing that she had barely time to dress for dinner. As she
+opened the door of her sitting-room some one rose from the chair by the
+fire, and she stood still, facing her husband....
+
+It was the moment both had desired, yet when it came it found them
+tongue-tied and helpless.
+
+Bessy was the first to speak. "When did you get here? You never wrote me
+you were coming!"
+
+Amherst advanced toward her, holding out his hand. "No; you must forgive
+me. I have been very busy," he said.
+
+Always the same excuse! The same thrusting at her of the hateful fact
+that Westmore came first, and that she must put up with whatever was
+left of his time and thoughts!
+
+"You are always too busy to let me hear from you," she said coldly, and
+the hand which had sprung toward his fell back to her side.
+
+Even then, if he had only said frankly: "It was too difficult--I didn't
+know how," the note of truth would have reached and moved her; but he
+had striven for the tone of ease and self-restraint that was habitual
+among her friends, and as usual his attempt had been a failure.
+
+"I am sorry--I'm a bad hand at writing," he rejoined; and his evil
+genius prompted him to add: "I hope my coming is not inconvenient?"
+
+The colour rose to Bessy's face. "Of course not. But it must seem rather
+odd to our visitors that I should know so little of your plans."
+
+At this he humbled himself still farther. "I know I don't think enough
+about appearances--I'll try to do better the next time."
+
+Appearances! He spoke as if she had been reproaching him for a breach of
+etiquette...it never occurred to him that the cry came from her
+humiliated heart! The tide of warmth that always enveloped her in his
+presence was receding, and in its place a chill fluid seemed to creep up
+slowly to her throat and lips.
+
+In Amherst, meanwhile, the opposite process was taking place. His wife
+was still to him the most beautiful woman in the world, or rather,
+perhaps, the only woman to whose beauty his eyes had been opened. That
+beauty could never again penetrate to his heart, but it still touched
+his senses, not with passion but with a caressing kindliness, such as
+one might feel for the bright movements of a bird or a kitten. It seemed
+to plead with him not to ask of her more than she could give--to be
+content with the outward grace and not seek in it an inner meaning. He
+moved toward her again, and took her passive hands in his.
+
+"You look tired. Why do you ride so late?"
+
+"Oh, I just wanted to give Impulse a gallop. I hadn't time to take her
+out earlier, and if I let the grooms exercise her they'll spoil her
+mouth."
+
+Amherst frowned. "You ought not to ride that mare alone at night. She
+shies at everything after dark."
+
+"She's the only horse I care for--the others are all cows," she
+murmured, releasing her hands impatiently.
+
+"Well, you must take me with you the next time you ride her."
+
+She softened a little, in spite of herself. Riding was the only
+amusement he cared to share with her, and the thought of a long gallop
+across the plains at his side brought back the warmth to her veins.
+
+"Yes, we'll go tomorrow. How long do you mean to stay?" she asked,
+looking up at him eagerly.
+
+He was pleased that she should wish to know, yet the question
+embarrassed him, for it was necessary that he should be back at Westmore
+within three days, and he could not put her off with an evasion.
+
+Bessy saw his hesitation, and her colour rose again. "I only asked," she
+explained, "because there is to be a fancy ball at the Hunt Club on the
+twentieth, and I thought of giving a big dinner here first."
+
+Amherst did not understand that she too had her inarticulate moments,
+and that the allusion to the fancy ball was improvised to hide an
+eagerness to which he had been too slow in responding. He thought she
+had enquired about his plans only that he might not again interfere with
+the arrangements of her dinner-table. If that was all she cared about,
+it became suddenly easy to tell her that he could not stay, and he
+answered lightly: "Fancy balls are a little out of my line; but at any
+rate I shall have to be back at the mills the day after tomorrow."
+
+The disappointment brought a rush of bitterness to her lips. "The day
+after tomorrow? It seems hardly worth while to have come so far for two
+days!"
+
+"Oh, I don't mind the journey--and there are one or two matters I must
+consult you about."
+
+There could hardly have been a more ill-advised answer, but Amherst was
+reckless now. If she cared for his coming only that he might fill a
+place at a fancy-dress dinner, he would let her see that he had come
+only because he had to go through the form of submitting to her certain
+measures to be taken at Westmore.
+
+Bessy was beginning to feel the physical reaction of her struggle with
+the mare. The fatigue which at first had deadened her nerves now woke
+them to acuter sensibility, and an appealing word from her husband would
+have drawn her to his arms. But his answer seemed to drive all the blood
+back to her heart.
+
+"I don't see why you still go through the form of consulting me about
+Westmore, when you have always done just as you pleased there, without
+regard to me or Cicely."
+
+Amherst made no answer, silenced by the discouragement of hearing the
+same old grievance on her lips; and she too seemed struck, after she had
+spoken, by the unprofitableness of such retorts.
+
+"It doesn't matter--of course I'll do whatever you wish," she went on
+listlessly. "But I could have sent my signature, if that is all you came
+for----"
+
+"Thanks," said Amherst coldly. "I shall remember that the next time."
+
+They stood silent for a moment, he with his eyes fixed on her, she with
+averted head, twisting her riding-whip between her fingers; then she
+said suddenly: "We shall be late for dinner," and passing into her
+dressing-room she closed the door.
+
+Amherst roused himself as she disappeared.
+
+"Bessy!" he exclaimed, moving toward her; but as he approached the door
+he heard her maid's voice within, and turning away he went to his own
+room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bessy came down late to dinner, with vivid cheeks and an air of
+improvised ease; and the manner of her entrance, combined with her
+husband's unannounced arrival, produced in their observant guests the
+sense of latent complications. Mr. Langhope, though evidently unaware of
+his son-in-law's return till they greeted each other in the
+drawing-room, was too good a card-player to betray surprise, and Mrs.
+Ansell outdid herself in the delicate art of taking everything for
+granted; but these very dissimulations sharpened the perception of the
+other guests, whom long practice had rendered expert in interpreting
+such signs.
+
+Of all this Justine Brent was aware; and conscious also that, by every
+one but herself, the suspected estrangement between the Amhersts was
+regarded as turning merely on the question of money. To the greater
+number of persons present there was, in fact, no other conceivable
+source of conjugal discord, since every known complication could be
+adjusted by means of the universal lubricant. It was this unanimity of
+view which bound together in the compactness of a new feudalism the
+members of Bessy Amherst's world; which supplied them with their
+pass-words and social tests, and defended them securely against the
+insidious attack of ideas.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Genius of History, capriciously directing the antics of its
+marionettes, sometimes lets the drama languish through a series of
+unrelated episodes, and then, suddenly quickening the pace, packs into
+one scene the stuff of a dozen. The chance meeting of Amherst and
+Justine, seemingly of no significance to either, contained the germ of
+developments of which both had begun to be aware before the evening was
+over. Their short talk--the first really intimate exchange of words
+between them--had the effect of creating a sense of solidarity that grew
+apace in the atmosphere of the Lynbrook dinner-table.
+
+Justine was always reluctant to take part in Bessy's week-end dinners,
+but as she descended the stairs that evening she did not regret having
+promised to be present. She frankly wanted to see Amherst again--his
+tone, his view of life, reinforced her own convictions, restored her
+faith in the reality and importance of all that Lynbrook ignored and
+excluded. Her extreme sensitiveness to surrounding vibrations of thought
+and feeling told her, as she glanced at him between the flowers and
+candles of the long dinner-table, that he too was obscurely aware of the
+same effect; and it flashed across her that they were unconsciously
+drawn together by the fact that they were the only two strangers in the
+room. Every one else had the same standpoint, spoke the same language,
+drew on the same stock of allusions, used the same weights and measures
+in estimating persons and actions. Between Mr. Langhope's indolent
+acuteness of mind and the rudimentary processes of the rosy Telfers
+there was a difference of degree but not of kind. If Mr. Langhope viewed
+the spectacle more objectively, it was not because he had outlived the
+sense of its importance, but because years of experience had
+familiarized him with its minutest details; and this familiarity with
+the world he lived in had bred a profound contempt for any other.
+
+In no way could the points of contact between Amherst and Justine Brent
+have been more vividly brought out than by their tacit exclusion from
+the currents of opinion about them. Amherst, seated in unsmiling
+endurance at the foot of the table, between Mrs. Ansell, with her
+carefully-distributed affabilities, and Blanche Carbury, with her
+reckless hurling of conversational pebbles, seemed to Justine as much of
+a stranger as herself among the people to whom his marriage had
+introduced him. So strongly did she feel the sense of their common
+isolation that it was no surprise to her, when the men reappeared in the
+drawing-room after dinner, to have her host thread his way, between the
+unfolding bridge-tables, straight to the corner where she sat. Amherst's
+methods in the drawing-room were still as direct as in the cotton-mill.
+He always went up at once to the person he sought, without preliminary
+waste of tactics; and on this occasion Justine, without knowing what had
+passed between himself and Bessy, suspected from the appearance of both
+that their talk had resulted in increasing Amherst's desire to be with
+some one to whom he could speak freely and naturally on the subject
+nearest his heart.
+
+She began at once to question him about Westmore, and the change in his
+face showed that his work was still a refuge from all that made life
+disheartening and unintelligible. Whatever convictions had been thwarted
+or impaired in him, his faith in the importance of his task remained
+unshaken; and the firmness with which he held to it filled Justine with
+a sense of his strength. The feeling kindled her own desire to escape
+again into the world of deeds, yet by a sudden reaction it checked the
+growing inclination for Stephen Wyant that had resulted from her revolt
+against Lynbrook. Here was a man as careless as Wyant of the minor
+forms, yet her appreciation of him was not affected by the lack of
+adaptability that she accused herself of criticizing in her suitor. She
+began to see that it was not the sense of Wyant's social deficiencies
+that had held her back; and the discovery at once set free her judgment
+of him, enabling her to penetrate to the real causes of her reluctance.
+She understood now that the flaw she felt was far deeper than any defect
+of manner. It was the sense in him of something unstable and
+incalculable, something at once weak and violent, that was brought to
+light by the contrast of Amherst's quiet resolution. Here was a man whom
+no gusts of chance could deflect from his purpose; while she felt that
+the career to which Wyant had so ardently given himself would always be
+at the mercy of his passing emotions.
+
+As the distinction grew clearer, Justine trembled to think that she had
+so nearly pledged herself, without the excuse of love, to a man whose
+failings she could judge so lucidly.... But had she ever really thought
+of marrying Wyant? While she continued to talk with Amherst such a
+possibility became more and more remote, till she began to feel it was
+no more than a haunting dream. But her promise to see Wyant the next
+day reminded her of the nearness of her peril. How could she have played
+with her fate so lightly--she, who held her life so dear because she
+felt in it such untried powers of action and emotion? She continued to
+listen to Amherst's account of his work, with enough outward
+self-possession to place the right comment and put the right question,
+yet conscious only of the quiet strength she was absorbing from his
+presence, of the way in which his words, his voice, his mere nearness
+were slowly steadying and clarifying her will.
+
+In the smoking-room, after the ladies had gone upstairs, Amherst
+continued to acquit himself mechanically of his duties, against the
+incongruous back-ground of his predecessor's remarkable
+sporting-prints--for it was characteristic of his relation to Lynbrook
+that his life there was carried on in the setting of foils and
+boxing-gloves, firearms and racing-trophies, which had expressed Dick
+Westmore's ideals. Never very keenly alive to his material surroundings,
+and quite unconscious of the irony of this proximity, Amherst had come
+to accept his wife's guests as unquestioningly as their background, and
+with the same sense of their being an inevitable part of his new life.
+Their talk was no more intelligible to him than the red and yellow
+hieroglyphics of the racing-prints, and he smoked in silence while Mr.
+Langhope discoursed to Westy Gaines on the recent sale of Chinese
+porcelains at which he had been lucky enough to pick up the set of Ming
+for his daughter, and Mason Winch expounded to a group of languid
+listeners the essential dependence of the labouring-man on the
+prosperity of Wall Street. In a retired corner, Ned Bowfort was
+imparting facts of a more personal nature to a chosen following who
+hailed with suppressed enjoyment the murmured mention of proper names;
+and now and then Amherst found himself obliged to say to Fenton Carbury,
+who with one accord had been left on his hands, "Yes, I understand the
+flat-tread tire is best," or, "There's a good deal to be said for the
+low tension magneto----"
+
+But all the while his conscious thoughts were absorbed in the
+remembrance of his talk with Justine Brent. He had left his wife's
+presence in that state of moral lassitude when the strongest hopes droop
+under the infection of indifference and hostility, and the effort of
+attainment seems out of all proportion to the end in view; but as he
+listened to Justine all his energies sprang to life again. Here at last
+was some one who felt the urgency of his task: her every word and look
+confirmed her comment of the afternoon: "Westmore must be foremost to
+you both in time--I don't see how either of you can escape it."
+
+She saw it, as he did, to be the special outlet offered for the
+expression of what he was worth to the world; and with the knowledge
+that one other person recognized his call, it sounded again loudly in
+his heart. Yes, he would go on, patiently and persistently, conquering
+obstacles, suffering delay, enduring criticism--hardest of all, bearing
+with his wife's deepening indifference and distrust. Justine had said
+"Westmore must be foremost to you both," and he would prove that she was
+right--spite of the powers leagued against him he would win over Bessy
+in the end!
+
+Those observers who had been struck by the length and animation of Miss
+Brent's talk with her host--and among whom Mrs. Ansell and Westy Gaines
+were foremost--would hardly have believed how small a part her personal
+charms had played in attracting him. Amherst was still under the power
+of the other kind of beauty--the soft graces personifying the first
+triumph of sex in his heart--and Justine's dark slenderness could not at
+once dispel the milder image. He watched her with pleasure while she
+talked, but her face interested him only as the vehicle of her
+ideas--she looked as a girl must look who felt and thought as she did.
+He was aware that everything about her was quick and fine and supple,
+and that the muscles of character lay close to the surface of feeling;
+but the interpenetration of spirit and flesh that made her body seem
+like the bright projection of her mind left him unconscious of anything
+but the oneness of their thoughts.
+
+So these two, in their hour of doubt, poured strength into each other's
+hearts, each unconscious of what they gave, and of its hidden power of
+renewing their own purposes.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+IF Mr. Langhope had ever stooped to such facile triumphs as that summed
+up in the convenient "I told you so," he would have loosed the phrase on
+Mrs. Ansell in the course of a colloquy which these two, the next
+afternoon, were at some pains to defend from the incursions of the
+Lynbrook house-party.
+
+Mrs. Ansell was the kind of woman who could encircle herself with
+privacy on an excursion-boat and create a nook in an hotel drawing-room,
+but it taxed even her ingenuity to segregate herself from the Telfers.
+When the feat was accomplished, and it became evident that Mr. Langhope
+could yield himself securely to the joys of confidential discourse, he
+paused on the brink of disclosure to say: "It's as well I saved that
+Ming from the ruins."
+
+"What ruins?" she exclaimed, her startled look giving him the full
+benefit of the effect he was seeking to produce.
+
+He addressed himself deliberately to the selecting and lighting of a
+cigarette. "Truscomb is down and out--resigned, 'the wise it call.' And
+the alterations at Westmore are going to cost a great deal more than my
+experienced son-in-law expected. This is Westy's morning budget--he and
+Amherst had it out last night. I tell my poor girl that at least she'll
+lose nothing when the _bibelots_ I've bought for her go up the spout."
+
+Mrs. Ansell received this with a troubled countenance. "What has become
+of Bessy? I've not seen her since luncheon."
+
+"No. She and Blanche Carbury have motored over to dine with the Nick
+Ledgers at Islip."
+
+"Did you see her before she left?"
+
+"For a moment, but she said very little. Westy tells me that Amherst
+hints at leasing the New York house. One can understand that she's left
+speechless."
+
+Mrs. Ansell, at this, sat bolt upright. "The New York house?" But she
+broke off to add, with seeming irrelevance: "If you knew how I detest
+Blanche Carbury!"
+
+Mr. Langhope made a gesture of semi-acquiescence. "She is not the friend
+I should have chosen for Bessy--but we know that Providence makes use of
+strange instruments."
+
+"Providence and Blanche Carbury?" She stared at him. "Ah, you are
+profoundly corrupt!"
+
+"I have the coarse masculine habit of looking facts in the face.
+Woman-like, you prefer to make use of them privately, and cut them when
+you meet in public."
+
+"Blanche is not the kind of fact I should care to make use of under any
+circumstances whatever!"
+
+"No one asks you to. Simply regard her as a force of nature--let her
+alone, and don't put up too many lightning-rods."
+
+She raised her eyes to his face. "Do you really mean that you want Bessy
+to get a divorce?"
+
+"Your style is elliptical, dear Maria; but divorce does not frighten me
+very much. It has grown almost as painless as modern dentistry."
+
+"It's our odious insensibility that makes it so!"
+
+Mr. Langhope received this with the mildness of suspended judgment. "How
+else, then, do you propose that Bessy shall save what is left of her
+money?"
+
+"I would rather see her save what is left of her happiness. Bessy will
+never be happy in the new way."
+
+"What do you call the new way?"
+
+"Launching one's boat over a human body--or several, as the case may
+be!"
+
+"But don't you see that, as an expedient to bring this madman to
+reason----"
+
+"I've told you that you don't understand him!"
+
+Mr. Langhope turned on her with what would have been a show of temper in
+any one less provided with shades of manner. "Well, then, explain him,
+for God's sake!"
+
+"I might explain him by saying that she's still in love with him."
+
+"Ah, if you're still imprisoned in the old formulas!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell confronted him with a grave face. "Isn't that precisely what
+Bessy is? Isn't she one of the most harrowing victims of the plan of
+bringing up our girls in the double bondage of expediency and unreality,
+corrupting their bodies with luxury and their brains with sentiment, and
+leaving them to reconcile the two as best they can, or lose their souls
+in the attempt?"
+
+Mr. Langhope smiled. "I may observe that, with my poor child so early
+left alone to me, I supposed I was doing my best in committing her
+guidance to some of the most admirable women I know."
+
+"Of whom I was one--and not the least lamentable example of the system!
+Of course the only thing that saves us from their vengeance," Mrs.
+Ansell added, "is that so few of them ever stop to think...."
+
+"And yet, as I make out, it's precisely what you would have Bessy do!"
+
+"It's what neither you nor I can help her doing. You've given her just
+acuteness enough to question, without consecutiveness enough to explain.
+But if she must perish in the struggle--and I see no hope for her--"
+cried Mrs. Ansell, starting suddenly and dramatically to her feet, "at
+least let her perish defending her ideals and not denying them--even if
+she has to sell the New York house and all your china pots into the
+bargain!"
+
+Mr. Langhope, rising also, deprecatingly lifted his hands, "If that's
+what you call saving me from her vengeance--sending the crockery
+crashing round my ears!" And, as she turned away without any pretense of
+capping his pleasantry, he added, with a gleam of friendly malice: "I
+suppose you're going to the Hunt ball as Cassandra?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst, that morning, had sought out his wife with the definite resolve
+to efface the unhappy impression of their previous talk. He blamed
+himself for having been too easily repelled by her impatience. As the
+stronger of the two, with the power of a fixed purpose to sustain him,
+he should have allowed for the instability of her impulses, and above
+all for the automatic influences of habit.
+
+Knowing that she did not keep early hours he delayed till ten o'clock to
+present himself at her sitting-room door, but the maid who answered his
+knock informed him that Mrs. Amherst was not yet up.
+
+His reply that he would wait did not appear to hasten the leisurely
+process of her toilet, and he had the room to himself for a full
+half-hour. Many months had passed since he had spent so long a time in
+it, and though habitually unobservant of external details, he now found
+an outlet for his restlessness in mechanically noting the intimate
+appurtenances of Bessy's life. He was at first merely conscious of a
+soothing harmony of line and colour, extending from the blurred tints of
+the rug to the subdued gleam of light on old picture-frames and on the
+slender flanks of porcelain vases; but gradually he began to notice how
+every chair and screen and cushion, and even every trifling utensil on
+the inlaid writing-desk, had been chosen with reference to the whole
+composition, and to the minutest requirements of a fastidious leisure. A
+few months ago this studied setting, if he had thought of it at all,
+would have justified itself as expressing the pretty woman's natural
+affinity with pretty toys; but now it was the cost of it that struck
+him. He was beginning to learn from Bessy's bills that no commodity is
+taxed as high as beauty, and the beauty about him filled him with sudden
+repugnance, as the disguise of the evil influences that were separating
+his wife's life from his.
+
+But with her entrance he dismissed the thought, and tried to meet her as
+if nothing stood in the way of their full communion. Her hair, still wet
+from the bath, broke from its dryad-like knot in dusky rings and spirals
+threaded with gold, and from her loose flexible draperies, and her whole
+person as she moved, there came a scent of youth and morning freshness.
+Her beauty touched him, and made it easier for him to humble himself.
+
+"I was stupid and disagreeable last night. I can never say what I want
+when I have to count the minutes, and I've come back now for a quiet
+talk," he began.
+
+A shade of distrust passed over Bessy's face. "About business?" she
+asked, pausing a few feet away from him.
+
+"Don't let us give it that name!" He went up to her and drew her two
+hands into his. "You used to call it our work--won't you go back to that
+way of looking at it?"
+
+Her hands resisted his pressure. "I didn't know, then, that it was going
+to be the only thing you cared for----"
+
+But for her own sake he would not let her go on. "Some day I shall make
+you see how much my caring for it means my caring for you. But
+meanwhile," he urged, "won't you overcome your aversion to the subject,
+and bear with it as my work, if you no longer care to think of it as
+yours?"
+
+Bessy, freeing herself, sat down on the edge of the straight-backed
+chair near the desk, as though to mark the parenthetical nature of the
+interview.
+
+"I know you think me stupid--but wives are not usually expected to go
+into all the details of their husband's business. I have told you to do
+whatever you wish at Westmore, and I can't see why that is not enough."
+
+Amherst looked at her in surprise. Something in her quick mechanical
+utterance suggested that not only the thought but the actual words she
+spoke had been inspired, and he fancied he heard in them an echo of
+Blanche Carbury's tones. Though Bessy's intimacy with Mrs. Carbury was
+of such recent date, fragments of unheeded smoking-room gossip now
+recurred to confirm the vague antipathy which Amherst had felt for her
+the previous evening.
+
+"I know that, among your friends, wives are not expected to interest
+themselves in their husbands' work, and if the mills were mine I should
+try to conform to the custom, though I should always think it a pity
+that the questions that fill a man's thoughts should be ruled out of his
+talk with his wife; but as it is, I am only your representative at
+Westmore, and I don't see how we can help having the subject come up
+between us."
+
+Bessy remained silent, not as if acquiescing in his plea, but as though
+her own small stock of arguments had temporarily failed her; and he went
+on, enlarging on his theme with a careful avoidance of technical terms,
+and with the constant effort to keep the human and personal side of the
+question before her.
+
+She listened without comment, her eyes fixed on a little jewelled
+letter-opener which she had picked up from the writing-table, and which
+she continued to turn in her fingers while he spoke.
+
+The full development of Amherst's plans at Westmore, besides resulting,
+as he had foreseen, in Truscomb's resignation, and in Halford Gaines's
+outspoken resistance to the new policy, had necessitated a larger
+immediate outlay of capital than the first estimates demanded, and
+Amherst, in putting his case to Bessy, was prepared to have her meet it
+on the old ground of the disapproval of all her advisers. But when he
+had ended she merely said, without looking up from the toy in her hand:
+"I always expected that you would need a great deal more money than you
+thought."
+
+The comment touched him at his most vulnerable point. "But you see why?
+You understand how the work has gone on growing--?"
+
+His wife lifted her head to glance at him for a moment. "I am not sure
+that I understand," she said indifferently; "but if another loan is
+necessary, of course I will sign the note for it."
+
+The words checked his reply by bringing up, before he was prepared to
+deal with it, the other and more embarrassing aspect of the question. He
+had hoped to reawaken in Bessy some feeling for the urgency of his task
+before having to take up the subject of its cost; but her cold
+anticipation of his demands as part of a disagreeable business to be
+despatched and put out of mind, doubled the difficulty of what he had
+left to say; and it occurred to him that she had perhaps foreseen and
+reckoned on this result.
+
+He met her eyes gravely. "Another loan _is_ necessary; but if any proper
+provision is to be made for paying it back, your expenses will have to
+be cut down a good deal for the next few months."
+
+The blood leapt to Bessy's face. "My expenses? You seem to forget how
+much I've had to cut them down already."
+
+"The household bills certainly don't show it. They are increasing
+steadily, and there have been some very heavy incidental payments
+lately."
+
+"What do you mean by incidental payments?"
+
+"Well, there was the pair of cobs you bought last month----"
+
+She returned to a resigned contemplation of the letter-opener. "With
+only one motor, one must have more horses, of course."
+
+"The stables seemed to me fairly full before. But if you required more
+horses, I don't see why, at this particular moment, it was also
+necessary to buy a set of Chinese vases for twenty-five hundred
+dollars."
+
+Bessy, at this, lifted her head with an air of decision that surprised
+him. Her blush had faded as quickly as it came, and he noticed that she
+was pale to the lips.
+
+"I know you don't care about such things; but I had an exceptional
+chance of securing the vases at a low price--they are really worth
+twice as much--and Dick always wanted a set of Ming for the drawing-room
+mantelpiece."
+
+Richard Westmore's name was always tacitly avoided between them, for in
+Amherst's case the disagreeable sense of dependence on a dead man's
+bounty increased that feeling of obscure constraint and repugnance which
+any reminder of the first husband's existence is wont to produce in his
+successor.
+
+He reddened at the reply, and Bessy, profiting by an embarrassment which
+she had perhaps consciously provoked, went on hastily, and as if by
+rote: "I have left you perfectly free to do as you think best at the
+mills, but this perpetual discussion of my personal expenses is very
+unpleasant to me, as I am sure it must be to you, and in future I think
+it would be much better for us to have separate accounts."
+
+"Separate accounts?" Amherst echoed in genuine astonishment.
+
+"I should like my personal expenses to be under my own control again--I
+have never been used to accounting for every penny I spend."
+
+The vertical lines deepened between Amherst's brows. "You are of course
+free to spend your money as you like--and I thought you were doing so
+when you authorized me, last spring, to begin the changes at Westmore."
+
+Her lip trembled. "Do you reproach me for that? I didn't
+understand...you took advantage...."
+
+"Oh!" he exclaimed.
+
+At his tone the blood rushed back to her face. "It was my fault, of
+course--I only wanted to please you----"
+
+Amherst was silent, confronted by the sudden sense of his own
+responsibility. What she said was true--he had known, when he exacted
+the sacrifice, that she made it only to please him, on an impulse of
+reawakened feeling, and not from any real recognition of a larger duty.
+The perception of this made him answer gently: "I am willing to take any
+blame you think I deserve; but it won't help us now to go back to the
+past. It is more important that we should come to an understanding about
+the future. If by keeping your personal account separate, you mean that
+you wish to resume control of your whole income, then you ought to
+understand that the improvements at the mills will have to be dropped at
+once, and things there go back to their old state."
+
+She started up with an impatient gesture. "Oh, I should like never to
+hear of the mills again!"
+
+He looked at her a moment in silence. "Am I to take that as your
+answer?"
+
+She walked toward her door without returning his look. "Of course," she
+murmured, "you will end by doing as you please."
+
+The retort moved him, for he heard in it the cry of her wounded pride.
+He longed to be able to cry out in return that Westmore was nothing to
+him, that all he asked was to see her happy.... But it was not true, and
+his manhood revolted from the deception. Besides, its effect would be
+only temporary--would wear no better than her vain efforts to simulate
+an interest in his work. Between them, forever, were the insurmountable
+barriers of character, of education, of habit--and yet it was not in him
+to believe that any barrier was insurmountable.
+
+"Bessy," he exclaimed, following her, "don't let us part in this
+way----"
+
+She paused with her hand on her dressing-room door. "It is time to dress
+for church," she objected, turning to glance at the little gilt clock on
+the chimney-piece.
+
+"For church?" Amherst stared, wondering that at such a crisis she should
+have remained detached enough to take note of the hour.
+
+"You forget," she replied, with an air of gentle reproof, "that before
+we married I was in the habit of going to church every Sunday."
+
+"Yes--to be sure. Would you not like me to go with you?" he rejoined
+gently, as if roused to the consciousness of another omission in the
+long list of his social shortcomings; for church-going, at Lynbrook, had
+always struck him as a purely social observance.
+
+But Bessy had opened the door of her dressing-room. "I much prefer that
+you should do what you like," she said as she passed from the room.
+
+Amherst made no farther attempt to detain her, and the door closed on
+her as though it were closing on a chapter in their lives.
+
+"That's the end of it!" he murmured, picking up the letter-opener she
+had been playing with, and twirling it absently in his fingers. But
+nothing in life ever ends, and the next moment a new question confronted
+him--how was the next chapter to open?
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+IT was late in October when Amherst returned to Lynbrook.
+
+He had begun to learn, in the interval, the lesson most difficult to his
+direct and trenchant nature: that compromise is the law of married life.
+On the afternoon of his talk with his wife he had sought her out,
+determined to make a final effort to clear up the situation between
+them; but he learned that, immediately after luncheon, she had gone off
+in the motor with Mrs. Carbury and two men of the party, leaving word
+that they would probably not be back till evening. It cost Amherst a
+struggle, when he had humbled himself to receive this information from
+the butler, not to pack his portmanteau and take the first train for
+Hanaford; but he was still under the influence of Justine Brent's words,
+and also of his own feeling that, at this juncture, a break between
+himself and Bessy would be final.
+
+He stayed on accordingly, enduring as best he might the mute observation
+of the household, and the gentle irony of Mr. Langhope's attentions; and
+before he left Lynbrook, two days later, a provisional understanding had
+been reached.
+
+His wife proved more firm than he had foreseen in her resolve to regain
+control of her income, and the talk between them ended in reciprocal
+concessions, Bessy consenting to let the town house for the winter and
+remain at Lynbrook, while Amherst agreed to restrict his improvements at
+Westmore to such alterations as had already been begun, and to reduce
+the expenditure on these as much as possible. It was virtually the
+defeat of his policy, and he had to suffer the decent triumph of the
+Gaineses, as well as the bitterer pang of his foiled aspirations. In
+spite of the opposition of the directors, he had taken advantage of
+Truscomb's resignation to put Duplain at the head of the mills; but the
+new manager's outspoken disgust at the company's change of plan made it
+clear that he would not remain long at Westmore, and it was one of the
+miseries of Amherst's situation that he could not give the reasons for
+his defection, but must bear to figure in Duplain's terse vocabulary as
+a "quitter." The difficulty of finding a new manager expert enough to
+satisfy the directors, yet in sympathy with his own social theories,
+made Amherst fear that Duplain's withdrawal would open the way for
+Truscomb's reinstatement, an outcome on which he suspected Halford
+Gaines had always counted; and this possibility loomed before him as the
+final defeat of his hopes.
+
+Meanwhile the issues ahead had at least the merit of keeping him busy.
+The task of modifying and retrenching his plans contrasted drearily with
+the hopeful activity of the past months, but he had an iron capacity for
+hard work under adverse conditions, and the fact of being too busy for
+thought helped him to wear through the days. This pressure of work
+relieved him, at first, from too close consideration of his relation to
+Bessy. He had yielded up his dearest hopes at her wish, and for the
+moment his renunciation had set a chasm between them; but gradually he
+saw that, as he was patching together the ruins of his Westmore plans,
+so he must presently apply himself to the reconstruction of his married
+life.
+
+Before leaving Lynbrook he had had a last word with Miss Brent; not a
+word of confidence--for the same sense of reserve kept both from any
+explicit renewal of their moment's intimacy--but one of those exchanges
+of commonplace phrase that circumstances may be left to charge with
+special meaning. Justine had merely asked if he were really leaving and,
+on his assenting, had exclaimed quickly: "But you will come back soon?"
+
+"I shall certainly come back," he answered; and after a pause he added:
+"I shall find you here? You will remain at Lynbrook?"
+
+On her part also there was a shade of hesitation; then she said with a
+smile: "Yes, I shall stay."
+
+His look brightened. "And you'll write me if anything--if Bessy should
+not be well?"
+
+"I will write you," she promised; and a few weeks after his return to
+Hanaford he had, in fact, received a short note from her. Its ostensible
+purpose was to reassure him as to Bessy's health, which had certainly
+grown stronger since Dr. Wyant had persuaded her, at the close of the
+last house-party, to accord herself a period of quiet; but (the writer
+added) now that Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell had also left, the quiet
+was perhaps too complete, and Bessy's nerves were beginning to suffer
+from the reaction.
+
+Amherst had no difficulty in interpreting this brief communication. "I
+have succeeded in dispersing the people who are always keeping you and
+your wife apart; now is your chance: come and take it." That was what
+Miss Brent's letter meant; and his answer was a telegram to Bessy,
+announcing his return to Long Island.
+
+The step was not an easy one; but decisive action, however hard, was
+always easier to Amherst than the ensuing interval of readjustment. To
+come to Lynbrook had required a strong effort of will; but the effort of
+remaining there called into play less disciplined faculties.
+
+Amherst had always been used to doing things; now he had to resign
+himself to enduring a state of things. The material facilities of the
+life about him, the way in which the machinery of the great empty house
+ran on like some complex apparatus working in the void, increased the
+exasperation of his nerves. Dr. Wyant's suggestion--which Amherst
+suspected Justine of having prompted--that Mrs. Amherst should cancel
+her autumn engagements, and give herself up to a quiet outdoor life with
+her husband, seemed to present the very opportunity these two distracted
+spirits needed to find and repossess each other. But, though Amherst was
+grateful to Bessy for having dismissed her visitors--partly to please
+him, as he guessed--yet he found the routine of the establishment more
+oppressive than when the house was full. If he could have been alone
+with her in a quiet corner--the despised cottage at Westmore, even!--he
+fancied they might still have been brought together by restricted space
+and the familiar exigencies of life. All the primitive necessities which
+bind together, through their recurring daily wants, natures fated to
+find no higher point of union, had been carefully eliminated from the
+life at Lynbrook, where material needs were not only provided for but
+anticipated by a hidden mechanism that filled the house with the
+perpetual sense of invisible attendance. Though Amherst knew that he and
+Bessy could never meet in the region of great issues, he thought he
+might have regained the way to her heart, and found relief from his own
+inaction, in the small ministrations of daily life; but the next moment
+he smiled to picture Bessy in surroundings where the clocks were not
+wound of themselves and the doors did not fly open at her approach.
+Those thick-crowding cares and drudgeries which serve as merciful
+screens between so many discordant natures would have been as
+intolerable to her as was to Amherst the great glare of leisure in which
+he and she were now confronted.
+
+He saw that Bessy was in the state of propitiatory eagerness which
+always followed on her gaining a point in their long duel; and he could
+guess that she was tremulously anxious not only to make up to him, by
+all the arts she knew, for the sacrifice she had exacted, but also to
+conceal from every one the fact that, as Mr. Langhope bluntly put it, he
+had been "brought to terms." Amherst was touched by her efforts, and
+half-ashamed of his own inability to respond to them. But his mind,
+released from its normal preoccupations, had become a dangerous
+instrument of analysis and disintegration, and conditions which, a few
+months before, he might have accepted with the wholesome tolerance of
+the busy man, now pressed on him unendurably. He saw that he and his
+wife were really face to face for the first time since their marriage.
+Hitherto something had always intervened between them--first the spell
+of her grace and beauty, and the brief joy of her participation in his
+work; then the sorrow of their child's death, and after that the
+temporary exhilaration of carrying out his ideas at Westmore--but now
+that the last of these veils had been torn away they faced each other as
+strangers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The habit of keeping factory hours always drove Amherst forth long
+before his wife's day began, and in the course of one of his early
+tramps he met Miss Brent and Cicely setting out for a distant swamp
+where rumour had it that a rare native orchid might be found. Justine's
+sylvan tastes had developed in the little girl a passion for such
+pillaging expeditions, and Cicely, who had discovered that her
+step-father knew almost as much about birds and squirrels as Miss Brent
+did about flowers, was not to be appeased till Amherst had scrambled
+into the pony-cart, wedging his long legs between a fern-box and a
+lunch-basket, and balancing a Scotch terrier's telescopic body across
+his knees.
+
+The season was so mild that only one or two light windless frosts had
+singed the foliage of oaks and beeches, and gilded the roadsides with a
+smooth carpeting of maple leaves. The morning haze rose like smoke from
+burnt-out pyres of sumach and sugar-maple; a silver bloom lay on the
+furrows of the ploughed fields; and now and then, as they drove on, the
+wooded road showed at its end a tarnished disk of light, where sea and
+sky were merged.
+
+At length they left the road for a winding track through scrub-oaks and
+glossy thickets of mountain-laurel; the track died out at the foot of a
+wooded knoll, and clambering along its base they came upon the swamp.
+There it lay in charmed solitude, shut in by a tawny growth of larch and
+swamp-maple, its edges burnt out to smouldering shades of russet,
+ember-red and ashen-grey, while the quaking centre still preserved a
+jewel-like green, where hidden lanes of moisture wound between islets
+tufted with swamp-cranberry and with the charred browns of fern and wild
+rose and bay. Sodden earth and decaying branches gave forth a strange
+sweet odour, as of the aromatic essences embalming a dead summer; and
+the air charged with this scent was so still that the snapping of
+witch-hazel pods, the drop of a nut, the leap of a startled frog,
+pricked the silence with separate points of sound.
+
+The pony made fast, the terrier released, and fern-box and lunch-basket
+slung over Amherst's shoulder, the three explorers set forth on their
+journey. Amherst, as became his sex, went first; but after a few
+absent-minded plunges into the sedgy depths between the islets, he was
+ordered to relinquish his command and fall to the rear, where he might
+perform the humbler service of occasionally lifting Cicely over
+unspannable gulfs of moisture.
+
+Justine, leading the way, guided them across the treacherous surface as
+fearlessly as a king-fisher, lighting instinctively on every
+grass-tussock and submerged tree-stump of the uncertain path. Now and
+then she paused, her feet drawn close on their narrow perch, and her
+slender body swaying over as she reached down for some rare growth
+detected among the withered reeds and grasses; then she would right
+herself again by a backward movement as natural as the upward spring of
+a branch--so free and flexible in all her motions that she seemed akin
+to the swaying reeds and curving brambles which caught at her as she
+passed.
+
+At length the explorers reached the mossy corner where the orchids grew,
+and Cicely, securely balanced on a fallen tree-trunk, was allowed to dig
+the coveted roots. When they had been packed away, it was felt that this
+culminating moment must be celebrated with immediate libations of jam
+and milk; and having climbed to a dry slope among the pepper-bushes, the
+party fell on the contents of the lunch-basket. It was just the hour
+when Bessy's maid was carrying her breakfast-tray, with its delicate
+service of old silver and porcelain, into the darkened bed-room at
+Lynbrook; but early rising and hard scrambling had whetted the appetites
+of the naturalists, and the nursery fare which Cicely spread before
+them seemed a sumptuous reward for their toil.
+
+"I do like this kind of picnic much better than the ones where mother
+takes all the footmen, and the mayonnaise has to be scraped off things
+before I can eat them," Cicely declared, lifting her foaming mouth from
+a beaker of milk.
+
+Amherst, lighting his pipe, stretched himself contentedly among the
+pepper-bushes, steeped in that unreflecting peace which is shed into
+some hearts by communion with trees and sky. He too was glad to get away
+from the footmen and the mayonnaise, and he imagined that his
+stepdaughter's exclamation summed up all the reasons for his happiness.
+The boyish wood-craft which he had cultivated in order to encourage the
+same taste in his factory lads came to life in this sudden return to
+nature, and he redeemed his clumsiness in crossing the swamp by spying a
+marsh-wren's nest that had escaped Justine, and detecting in a
+swiftly-flitting olive-brown bird a belated tanager in autumn incognito.
+
+Cicely sat rapt while he pictured the bird's winter pilgrimage, with
+glimpses of the seas and islands that fled beneath him till his long
+southern flight ended in the dim glades of the equatorial forests.
+
+"Oh, what a good life--how I should like to be a wander-bird, and look
+down people's chimneys twice a year!" Justine laughed, tilting her head
+back to catch a last glimpse of the tanager.
+
+The sun beamed full on their ledge from a sky of misty blue, and she had
+thrown aside her hat, uncovering her thick waves of hair, blue-black in
+the hollows, with warm rusty edges where they took the light. Cicely
+dragged down a plumy spray of traveller's joy and wound it above her
+friend's forehead; and thus wreathed, with her bright pallour relieved
+against the dusky autumn tints, Justine looked like a wood-spirit who
+had absorbed into herself the last golden juices of the year.
+
+She leaned back laughing against a tree-trunk, pelting Cicely with
+witch-hazel pods, making the terrier waltz for scraps of ginger-bread,
+and breaking off now and then to imitate, with her clear full notes, the
+call of some hidden marsh-bird, or the scolding chatter of a squirrel in
+the scrub-oaks.
+
+"Is that what you'd like most about the journey--looking down the
+chimneys?" Amherst asked with a smile.
+
+"Oh, I don't know--I should love it all! Think of the joy of skimming
+over half the earth--seeing it born again out of darkness every morning!
+Sometimes, when I've been up all night with a patient, and have seen the
+world _come back to me_ like that, I've been almost mad with its beauty;
+and then the thought that I've never seen more than a little corner of
+it makes me feel as if I were chained. But I think if I had wings I
+should choose to be a house-swallow; and then, after I'd had my fill of
+wonders, I should come back to my familiar corner, and my house full of
+busy humdrum people, and fly low to warn them of rain, and wheel up high
+to show them it was good haying weather, and know what was going on in
+every room in the house, and every house in the village; and all the
+while I should be hugging my wonderful big secret--the secret of
+snow-plains and burning deserts, and coral islands and buried
+cities--and should put it all into my chatter under the eaves, that the
+people in the house were always too busy to stop and listen to--and when
+winter came I'm sure I should hate to leave them, even to go back to my
+great Brazilian forests full of orchids and monkeys!"
+
+"But, Justine, in winter you could take care of the monkeys," the
+practical Cicely suggested.
+
+"Yes--and that would remind me of home!" Justine cried, swinging about
+to pinch the little girl's chin.
+
+She was in one of the buoyant moods when the spirit of life caught her
+in its grip, and shook and tossed her on its mighty waves as a sea-bird
+is tossed through the spray of flying rollers. At such moments all the
+light and music of the world seemed distilled into her veins, and forced
+up in bubbles of laughter to her lips and eyes. Amherst had never seen
+her thus, and he watched her with the sense of relaxation which the
+contact of limpid gaiety brings to a mind obscured by failure and
+self-distrust. The world was not so dark a place after all, if such
+springs of merriment could well up in a heart as sensitive as hers to
+the burden and toil of existence.
+
+"Isn't it strange," she went on with a sudden drop to gravity, "that the
+bird whose wings carry him farthest and show him the most wonderful
+things, is the one who always comes back to the eaves, and is happiest
+in the thick of everyday life?"
+
+Her eyes met Amherst's. "It seems to me," he said, "that you're like
+that yourself--loving long flights, yet happiest in the thick of life."
+
+She raised her dark brows laughingly. "So I imagine--but then you see
+I've never had the long flight!"
+
+Amherst smiled. "Ah, there it is--one never knows--one never says, _This
+is the moment_! because, however good it is, it always seems the door to
+a better one beyond. Faust never said it till the end, when he'd nothing
+left of all he began by thinking worth while; and then, with what a
+difference it was said!"
+
+She pondered. "Yes--but it _was_ the best, after all--the moment in
+which he had nothing left...."
+
+"Oh," Cicely broke in suddenly, "do look at the squirrel up there! See,
+father--he's off! Let's follow him!"
+
+As she crouched there, with head thrown back, and sparkling lips and
+eyes, her fair hair--of her mother's very hue--making a shining haze
+about her face, Amherst recalled the winter evening at Hopewood, when he
+and Bessy had tracked the grey squirrel under the snowy beeches.
+Scarcely three years ago--and how bitter memory had turned! A chilly
+cloud spread over his spirit, reducing everything once more to the
+leaden hue of reality....
+
+"It's too late for any more adventures--we must be going," he said.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+AMHERST'S morning excursions with his step-daughter and Miss Brent
+renewed themselves more than once. He welcomed any pretext for escaping
+from the unprofitable round of his thoughts, and these woodland
+explorations, with their gay rivalry of search for some rare plant or
+elusive bird, and the contact with the child's happy wonder, and with
+the morning brightness of Justine's mood, gave him his only moments of
+self-forgetfulness.
+
+But the first time that Cicely's chatter carried home an echo of their
+adventures, Amherst saw a cloud on his wife's face. Her resentment of
+Justine's influence over the child had long since subsided, and in the
+temporary absence of the governess she was glad to have Cicely amused;
+but she was never quite satisfied that those about her should have
+pursuits and diversions in which she did not share. Her jealousy did not
+concentrate itself on her husband and Miss Brent: Amherst had never
+shown any inclination for the society of other women, and if the
+possibility had been suggested to her, she would probably have said that
+Justine was not "in his style"--so unconscious is a pretty woman apt to
+be of the versatility of masculine tastes. But Amherst saw that she felt
+herself excluded from amusements in which she had no desire to join, and
+of which she consequently failed to see the purpose; and he gave up
+accompanying his stepdaughter.
+
+Bessy, as if in acknowledgment of his renunciation, rose earlier in
+order to prolong their rides together. Dr. Wyant had counselled her
+against the fatigue of following the hounds, and she instinctively
+turned their horses away from the course the hunt was likely to take;
+but now and then the cry of the pack, or the flash of red on a distant
+slope, sent the blood to her face and made her press her mare to a
+gallop. When they escaped such encounters she showed no great zest in
+the exercise, and their rides resolved themselves into a spiritless
+middle-aged jog along the autumn lanes. In the early days of their
+marriage the joy of a canter side by side had merged them in a community
+of sensation beyond need of speech; but now that the physical spell had
+passed they felt the burden of a silence that neither knew how to break.
+
+Once only, a moment's friction galvanized these lifeless rides. It was
+one morning when Bessy's wild mare Impulse, under-exercised and
+over-fed, suddenly broke from her control, and would have unseated her
+but for Amherst's grasp on the bridle.
+
+"The horse is not fit for you to ride," he exclaimed, as the hot
+creature, with shudders of defiance rippling her flanks, lapsed into
+sullen subjection.
+
+"It's only because I don't ride her enough," Bessy panted. "That new
+groom is ruining her mouth."
+
+"You must not ride her alone, then."
+
+"I shall not let that man ride her."
+
+"I say you must not ride her alone."
+
+"It's ridiculous to have a groom at one's heels!"
+
+"Nevertheless you must, if you ride Impulse."
+
+Their eyes met, and she quivered and yielded like the horse. "Oh, if you
+say so--" She always hugged his brief flashes of authority.
+
+"I do say so. You promise me?"
+
+"If you like----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst had made an attempt to occupy himself with the condition of
+Lynbrook, one of those slovenly villages, without individual character
+or the tradition of self-respect, which spring up in America on the
+skirts of the rich summer colonies. But Bessy had never given Lynbrook a
+thought, and he realized the futility of hoping to interest her in its
+mongrel population of day-labourers and publicans so soon after his
+glaring failure at Westmore. The sight of the village irritated him
+whenever he passed through the Lynbrook gates, but having perforce
+accepted the situation of prince consort, without voice in the
+government, he tried to put himself out of relation with all the
+questions which had hitherto engrossed him, and to see life simply as a
+spectator. He could even conceive that, under certain conditions, there
+might be compensations in the passive attitude; but unfortunately these
+conditions were not such as the life at Lynbrook presented.
+
+The temporary cessation of Bessy's week-end parties had naturally not
+closed her doors to occasional visitors, and glimpses of the autumnal
+animation of Long Island passed now and then across the Amhersts'
+horizon. Blanche Carbury had installed herself at Mapleside, a
+fashionable colony half-way between Lynbrook and Clifton, and even
+Amherst, unused as he was to noting the seemingly inconsecutive
+movements of idle people, could not but remark that her visits to his
+wife almost invariably coincided with Ned Bowfort's cantering over
+unannounced from the Hunt Club, where he had taken up his autumn
+quarters.
+
+There was something very likeable about Bowfort, to whom Amherst was
+attracted by the fact that he was one of the few men of Bessy's circle
+who knew what was going on in the outer world. Throughout an existence
+which one divined to have been both dependent and desultory, he had
+preserved a sense of wider relations and acquired a smattering of
+information to which he applied his only independent faculty, that of
+clear thought. He could talk intelligently and not too inaccurately of
+the larger questions which Lynbrook ignored, and a gay indifference to
+the importance of money seemed the crowning grace of his nature, till
+Amherst suddenly learned that this attitude of detachment was generally
+ascribed to the liberality of Mrs. Fenton Carbury. "Everybody knows she
+married Fenton to provide for Ned," some one let fall in the course of
+one of the smoking-room dissertations on which the host of Lynbrook had
+such difficulty in fixing his attention; and the speaker's
+matter-of-course tone, and the careless acquiescence of his hearers,
+were more offensive to Amherst than the fact itself. In the first flush
+of his disgust he classed the story as one of the lies bred in the
+malarious air of after-dinner gossip; but gradually he saw that, whether
+true or not, it had sufficient circulation to cast a shade of ambiguity
+on the persons concerned. Bessy alone seemed deaf to the rumours about
+her friend. There was something captivating to her in Mrs. Carbury's
+slang and noise, in her defiance of decorum and contempt of criticism.
+"I like Blanche because she doesn't pretend," was Bessy's vague
+justification of the lady; but in reality she was under the mysterious
+spell which such natures cast over the less venturesome imaginations of
+their own sex.
+
+Amherst at first tried to deaden himself to the situation, as part of
+the larger coil of miseries in which he found himself; but all his
+traditions were against such tolerance, and they were roused to revolt
+by the receipt of a newspaper clipping, sent by an anonymous hand,
+enlarging on the fact that the clandestine meetings of a fashionable
+couple were being facilitated by the connivance of a Long Island
+_chatelaine_. Amherst, hot from the perusal of this paragraph, sprang
+into the first train, and laid the clipping before his father-in-law,
+who chanced to be passing through town on his way from the Hudson to the
+Hot Springs.
+
+Mr. Langhope, ensconced in the cushioned privacy of the reading-room at
+the Amsterdam Club, where he had invited his son-in-law to meet him,
+perused the article with the cool eye of the collector to whom a new
+curiosity is offered.
+
+"I suppose," he mused, "that in the time of the Pharaohs the Morning
+Papyrus used to serve up this kind of thing"--and then, as the nervous
+tension of his hearer expressed itself in an abrupt movement, he added,
+handing back the clipping with a smile: "What do you propose to do? Kill
+the editor, and forbid Blanche and Bowfort the house?"
+
+"I mean to do something," Amherst began, suddenly chilled by the
+realization that his wrath had not yet shaped itself into a definite
+plan of action.
+
+"Well, it must be that or nothing," said Mr. Langhope, drawing his stick
+meditatively across his knee. "And, of course, if it's _that_, you'll
+land Bessy in a devil of a mess."
+
+Without giving his son-in-law time to protest, he touched rapidly but
+vividly on the inutility and embarrassment of libel suits, and on the
+devices whereby the legal means of vindication from such attacks may be
+turned against those who have recourse to them; and Amherst listened
+with a sickened sense of the incompatibility between abstract standards
+of honour and their practical application.
+
+"What should you do, then?" he murmured, as Mr. Langhope ended with his
+light shrug and a "See Tredegar, if you don't believe me"--; and his
+father-in-law replied with an evasive gesture: "Why, leave the
+responsibility where it belongs!"
+
+"Where it belongs?"
+
+"To Fenton Carbury, of course. Luckily it's nobody's business but his,
+and if he doesn't mind what is said about his wife I don't see how you
+can take up the cudgels for her without casting another shade on her
+somewhat chequered reputation."
+
+Amherst stared. "His wife? What do I care what's said of her? I'm
+thinking of mine!"
+
+"Well, if Carbury has no objection to his wife's meeting Bowfort, I
+don't see how you can object to her meeting him at your house. In such
+matters, as you know, it has mercifully been decided that the husband's
+attitude shall determine other people's; otherwise we should be deprived
+of the legitimate pleasure of slandering our neighbours." Mr. Langhope
+was always careful to temper his explanations with an "as you know": he
+would have thought it ill-bred to omit this parenthesis in elucidating
+the social code to his son-in-law.
+
+"Then you mean that I can do nothing?" Amherst exclaimed.
+
+Mr. Langhope smiled. "What applies to Carbury applies to you--by doing
+nothing you establish the fact that there's nothing to do; just as you
+create the difficulty by recognizing it." And he added, as Amherst sat
+silent: "Take Bessy away, and they'll have to see each other elsewhere."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst returned to Lynbrook with the echoes of this casuistry in his
+brain. It seemed to him but a part of the ingenious system of evasion
+whereby a society bent on the undisturbed pursuit of amusement had
+contrived to protect itself from the intrusion of the disagreeable: a
+policy summed up in Mr. Langhope's concluding advice that Amherst should
+take his wife away. Yes--that was wealth's contemptuous answer to every
+challenge of responsibility: duty, sorrow and disgrace were equally to
+be evaded by a change of residence, and nothing in life need be faced
+and fought out while one could pay for a passage to Europe!
+
+In a calmer mood Amherst's sense of humour would have preserved him from
+such a view of his father-in-law's advice; but just then it fell like a
+spark on his smouldering prejudices. He was clear-sighted enough to
+recognize the obstacles to legal retaliation; but this only made him the
+more resolved to assert his will in his own house. He no longer paused
+to consider the possible effect of such a course on his already strained
+relations with his wife: the man's will rose in him and spoke.
+
+The scene between Bessy and himself was short and sharp; and it ended in
+a way that left him more than ever perplexed at the ways of her sex.
+Impatient of preamble, he had opened the attack with his ultimatum: the
+suspected couple were to be denied the house. Bessy flamed into
+immediate defence of her friend; but to Amherst's surprise she no
+longer sounded the note of her own rights. Husband and wife were
+animated by emotions deeper-seated and more instinctive than had ever
+before confronted them; yet while Amherst's resistance was gathering
+strength from the conflict, Bessy unexpectedly collapsed in tears and
+submission. She would do as he wished, of course--give up seeing
+Blanche, dismiss Bowfort, wash her hands, in short, of the imprudent
+pair--in such matters a woman needed a man's guidance, a wife must of
+necessity see with her husband's eyes; and she looked up into his
+through a mist of penitence and admiration....
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+IN the first reaction from her brief delusion about Stephen Wyant,
+Justine accepted with a good grace the necessity of staying on at
+Lynbrook. Though she was now well enough to return to her regular work,
+her talk with Amherst had made her feel that, for the present, she could
+be of more use by remaining with Bessy; and she was not sorry to have a
+farther period of delay and reflection before taking the next step in
+her life. These at least were the reasons she gave herself for deciding
+not to leave; and if any less ostensible lurked beneath, they were not
+as yet visible even to her searching self-scrutiny.
+
+At first she was embarrassed by the obligation of meeting Dr. Wyant, on
+whom her definite refusal had produced an effect for which she could not
+hold herself blameless. She had not kept her promise of seeing him on
+the day after their encounter at the post-office, but had written,
+instead, in terms which obviously made such a meeting unnecessary. But
+all her efforts to soften the abruptness of her answer could not
+conceal, from either herself or her suitor, that it was not the one she
+had led him to expect; and she foresaw that if she remained at Lynbrook
+she could not escape a scene of recrimination.
+
+When the scene took place, Wyant's part in it went far toward justifying
+her decision; yet his vehement reproaches contained a sufficient core of
+truth to humble her pride. It was lucky for her somewhat exaggerated
+sense of fairness that he overshot the mark by charging her with a
+coquetry of which she knew herself innocent, and laying on her the
+responsibility for any follies to which her rejection might drive him.
+Such threats, as a rule, no longer move the feminine imagination; yet
+Justine's pity for all forms of weakness made her recognize, in the very
+heat of her contempt for Wyant, that his reproaches were not the mere
+cry of wounded vanity but the appeal of a nature conscious of its lack
+of recuperative power. It seemed to her as though she had done him
+irreparable harm, and the feeling might have betrayed her into too
+great a show of compassion had she not been restrained by a salutary
+fear of the result.
+
+The state of Bessy's nerves necessitated frequent visits from her
+physician, but Justine, on these occasions, could usually shelter
+herself behind the professional reserve which kept even Wyant from any
+open expression of feeling. One day, however, they chanced to find
+themselves alone before Bessy's return from her ride. The servant had
+ushered Wyant into the library where Justine was writing, and when she
+had replied to his enquiries about his patient they found themselves
+face to face with an awkward period of waiting. Justine was too proud to
+cut it short by leaving the room; but Wyant answered her commonplaces at
+random, stirring uneasily to and fro between window and fireside, and at
+length halting behind the table at which she sat.
+
+"May I ask how much longer you mean to stay here?" he said in a low
+voice, his eyes darkening under the sullen jut of the brows.
+
+As she glanced up in surprise she noticed for the first time an odd
+contraction of his pupils, and the discovery, familiar enough in her
+professional experience, made her disregard the abruptness of his
+question and softened the tone in which she answered. "I hardly know--I
+suppose as long as I am needed."
+
+Wyant laughed. "Needed by whom? By John Amherst?"
+
+A moment passed before Justine took in the full significance of the
+retort; then the blood rushed to her face. "Yes--I believe both Mr. and
+Mrs. Amherst need me," she answered, keeping her eyes on his; and Wyant
+laughed again.
+
+"You didn't think so till Amherst came back from Hanaford. His return
+seems to have changed your plans in several respects."
+
+She looked away from him, for even now his eyes moved her to pity and
+self-reproach. "Dr. Wyant, you are not well; why do you wait to see Mrs.
+Amherst?" she said.
+
+He stared at her and then his glance fell. "I'm much obliged--I'm as
+well as usual," he muttered, pushing the hair from his forehead with a
+shaking hand; and at that moment the sound of Bessy's voice gave Justine
+a pretext for escape.
+
+In her own room she sank for a moment under a rush of self-disgust; but
+it soon receded before the saner forces of her nature, leaving only a
+residue of pity for the poor creature whose secret she had surprised.
+She had never before suspected Wyant of taking a drug, nor did she now
+suppose that he did so habitually; but to see him even momentarily under
+such an influence explained her instinctive sense of his weakness. She
+felt now that what would have been an insult on other lips was only a
+cry of distress from his; and once more she blamed herself and forgave
+him.
+
+But if she had been inclined to any morbidness of self-reproach she
+would have been saved from it by other cares. For the moment she was
+more concerned with Bessy's fate than with her own--her poor friend
+seemed to have so much more at stake, and so much less strength to bring
+to the defence of her happiness. Justine was always saved from any
+excess of self-compassion by the sense, within herself, of abounding
+forces of growth and self-renewal, as though from every lopped
+aspiration a fresh shoot of energy must spring; but she felt that Bessy
+had no such sources of renovation, and that every disappointment left an
+arid spot in her soul.
+
+Even without her friend's confidences, Justine would have had no
+difficulty in following the successive stages of the Amhersts' inner
+history. She knew that Amherst had virtually resigned his rule at
+Westmore, and that his wife, in return for the sacrifice, was trying to
+conform to the way of life she thought he preferred; and the futility of
+both attempts was more visible to Justine than to either of the two
+concerned. She saw that the failure of the Amhersts' marriage lay not in
+any accident of outward circumstances but in the lack of all natural
+points of contact. As she put it to herself, they met neither underfoot
+nor overhead: practical necessities united them no more than imaginative
+joys.
+
+There were moments when Justine thought Amherst hard to Bessy, as she
+suspected that he had once been hard to his mother--as the leader of men
+must perhaps always be hard to the hampering sex. Yet she did justice to
+his efforts to accept the irretrievable, and to waken in his wife some
+capacity for sharing in his minor interests, since she had none of her
+own with which to fill their days.
+
+Amherst had always been a reader; not, like Justine herself, a
+flame-like devourer of the page, but a slow absorber of its essence; and
+in the early days of his marriage he had fancied it would be easy to
+make Bessy share this taste. Though his mother was not a bookish woman,
+he had breathed at her side an air rich in allusion and filled with the
+bright presences of romance; and he had always regarded this commerce of
+the imagination as one of the normal conditions of life. The discovery
+that there were no books at Lynbrook save a few morocco "sets"
+imprisoned behind the brass trellisings of the library had been one of
+the many surprises of his new state. But in his first months with Bessy
+there was no room for books, and if he thought of the matter it was only
+in a glancing vision of future evenings, when he and she, in the calm
+afterglow of happiness, should lean together over some cherished page.
+Her lack of response to any reference outside the small circle of daily
+facts had long since dispelled that vision; but now that his own mind
+felt the need of inner sustenance he began to ask himself whether he
+might not have done more to rouse her imagination. During the long
+evenings over the library fire he tried to lead the talk to books, with
+a parenthesis, now and again, from the page beneath his eye; and Bessy
+met the experiment with conciliatory eagerness. She showed, in especial,
+a hopeful but misleading preference for poetry, leaning back with
+dreaming lids and lovely parted lips while he rolled out the immortal
+measures; but her outward signs of attention never ripened into any
+expression of opinion, or any after-allusion to what she heard, and
+before long he discovered that Justine Brent was his only listener. It
+was to her that the words he read began to be unconsciously addressed;
+her comments directed him in his choice of subjects, and the ensuing
+discussions restored him to some semblance of mental activity.
+
+Bessy, true to her new role of acquiescence, shone silently on this
+interchange of ideas; Amherst even detected in her a vague admiration
+for his power of conversing on subjects which she regarded as abstruse;
+and this childlike approval, combined with her submission to his will,
+deluded him with a sense of recovered power over her. He could not but
+note that the new phase in their relations had coincided with his first
+assertion of mastery; and he rashly concluded that, with the removal of
+the influences tending to separate them, his wife might gradually be won
+back to her earlier sympathy with his views.
+
+To accept this theory was to apply it; for nothing could long divert
+Amherst from his main purpose, and all the thwarted strength of his will
+was only gathering to itself fresh stores of energy. He had never been a
+skilful lover, for no woman had as yet stirred in him those feelings
+which call the finer perceptions into play; and there was no instinct to
+tell him that Bessy's sudden conformity to his wishes was as unreasoning
+as her surrender to his first kiss. He fancied that he and she were at
+length reaching some semblance of that moral harmony which should grow
+out of the physical accord, and that, poor and incomplete as the
+understanding was, it must lift and strengthen their relation.
+
+He waited till early winter had brought solitude to Lynbrook, dispersing
+the hunting colony to various points of the compass, and sending Mr.
+Langhope to Egypt and the Riviera, while Mrs. Ansell, as usual, took up
+her annual tour of a social circuit whose extreme points were marked by
+Boston and Baltimore--and then he made his final appeal to his wife.
+
+His pretext for speaking was a letter from Duplain, definitely
+announcing his resolve not to remain at Westmore. A year earlier
+Amherst, deeply moved by the letter, would have given it to his wife in
+the hope of its producing the same effect on her. He knew better now--he
+had learned her instinct for detecting "business" under every serious
+call on her attention. His only hope, as always, was to reach her
+through the personal appeal; and he put before her the fact of Duplain's
+withdrawal as the open victory of his antagonists. But he saw at once
+that even this could not infuse new life into the question.
+
+"If I go back he'll stay--I can hold him, can gain time till things take
+a turn," he urged.
+
+"Another? I thought they were definitely settled," she objected
+languidly.
+
+"No--they're not; they can't be, on such a basis," Amherst broke out
+with sudden emphasis. He walked across the room, and came back to her
+side with a determined face. "It's a delusion, a deception," he
+exclaimed, "to think I can stand by any longer and see things going to
+ruin at Westmore! If I've made you think so, I've unconsciously deceived
+us both. As long as you're my wife we've only one honour between us, and
+that honour is mine to take care of."
+
+"Honour? What an odd expression!" she said with a forced laugh, and a
+little tinge of pink in her cheek. "You speak as if I had--had made
+myself talked about --when you know I've never even looked at another
+man!"
+
+"Another man?" Amherst looked at her in wonder. "Good God! Can't you
+conceive of any vow to be kept between husband and wife but the
+primitive one of bodily fidelity? Heaven knows I've never looked at
+another woman--but, by my reading of our compact, I shouldn't be keeping
+faith with you if I didn't help you to keep faith with better things.
+And you owe me the same help--the same chance to rise through you, and
+not sink by you--else we've betrayed each other more deeply than any
+adultery could make us!"
+
+She had drawn back, turning pale again, and shrinking a little at the
+sound of words which, except when heard in church, she vaguely
+associated with oaths, slammed doors, and other evidences of
+ill-breeding; but Amherst had been swept too far on the flood of his
+indignation to be checked by such small signs of disapproval.
+
+"You'll say that what I'm asking you is to give me back the free use of
+your money. Well! Why not? Is it so much for a wife to give? I know you
+all think that a man who marries a rich woman forfeits his self-respect
+if he spends a penny without her approval. But that's because money is
+so sacred to you all! It seems to me the least important thing that a
+woman entrusts to her husband. What of her dreams and her hopes, her
+belief in justice and goodness and decency? If he takes those and
+destroys them, he'd better have had a mill-stone about his neck. But
+nobody has a word to say till he touches her dividends--then he's a
+calculating brute who has married her for her fortune!"
+
+He had come close again, facing her with outstretched hands,
+half-commanding, half in appeal. "Don't you see that I can't go on in
+this way--that I've _no right_ to let you keep me from Westmore?"
+
+Bessy was looking at him coldly, under the half-dropped lids of
+indifference. "I hardly know what you mean--you use such peculiar words;
+but I don't see why you should expect me to give up all the ideas I was
+brought up in. Our standards _are_ different--but why should yours
+always be right?"
+
+"You believed they were right when you married me--have they changed
+since then?"
+
+"No; but----" Her face seemed to harden and contract into a small
+expressionless mask, in which he could no longer read anything but blank
+opposition to his will.
+
+"You trusted my judgment not long ago," he went on, "when I asked you to
+give up seeing Mrs. Carbury----"
+
+She flushed, but with anger, not compunction. "It seems to me that
+should be a reason for your not asking me to make other sacrifices! When
+I gave up Blanche I thought you would see that I wanted to please
+you--and that you would do something for me in return...."
+
+Amherst interrupted her with a laugh. "Thank you for telling me your
+real reasons. I was fool enough to think you acted from conviction--not
+that you were simply striking a bargain----"
+
+He broke off, and they looked at each other with a kind of fear, each
+hearing between them the echo of irreparable words. Amherst's only clear
+feeling was that he must not speak again till he had beaten down the
+horrible sensation in his breast--the rage of hate which had him in its
+grip, and which made him almost afraid, while it lasted, to let his eyes
+rest on the fair weak creature before him. Bessy, too, was in the clutch
+of a mute anger which slowly poured its benumbing current around her
+heart. Strong waves of passion did not quicken her vitality: she grew
+inert and cold under their shock. Only one little pulse of self-pity
+continued to beat in her, trembling out at last on the cry: "Ah, I know
+it's not because you care so much for Westmore--it's only because you
+want to get away from me!"
+
+Amherst stared as if her words had flashed a light into the darkest
+windings of his misery. "Yes--I want to get away..." he said; and he
+turned and walked out of the room.
+
+He went down to the smoking-room, and ringing for a servant, ordered
+his horse to be saddled. The foot-man who answered his summons brought
+the afternoon's mail, and Amherst, throwing himself down on the sofa,
+began to tear open his letters while he waited.
+
+He ran through the first few without knowing what he read; but presently
+his attention was arrested by the hand-writing of a man he had known well
+in college, and who had lately come into possession of a large cotton-mill
+in the South. He wrote now to ask if Amherst could recommend a good
+manager--"not one of your old routine men, but a young fellow with the new
+ideas. Things have been in pretty bad shape down here," the writer added,
+"and now that I'm in possession I want to see what can be done to civilize
+the place"; and he went on to urge that Amherst should come down himself
+to inspect the mills, and propose such improvements as his experience
+suggested. "We've all heard of the great things you're doing at Westmore,"
+the letter ended; and Amherst cast it from him with a groan....
+
+It was Duplain's chance, of course...that was his first thought. He took
+up the letter and read it over. He knew the man who wrote--no
+sentimentalist seeking emotional variety from vague philanthropic
+experiments, but a serious student of social conditions, now
+unexpectedly provided with the opportunity to apply his ideas. Yes, it
+was Duplain's chance--if indeed it might not be his own!... Amherst sat
+upright, dazzled by the thought. Why Duplain--why not himself? Bessy had
+spoken the illuminating word--what he wanted was to get away--to get
+away at any cost! Escape had become his one thought: escape from the
+bondage of Lynbrook, from the bitter memory of his failure at Westmore;
+and here was the chance to escape back into life--into independence,
+activity and usefulness! Every atrophied faculty in him suddenly started
+from its torpor, and his brain throbbed with the pain of the
+awakening.... The servant came to tell him that his horse waited, and he
+sprang up, took his riding-whip from the rack, stared a moment,
+absently, after the man's retreating back, and then dropped down again
+on the sofa....
+
+What was there to keep him from accepting? His wife's affection was
+dead--if her sentimental fancy for him had ever deserved the name! And
+his passing mastery over her was gone too--he smiled to remember that,
+hardly two hours earlier, he had been fatuous enough to think he could
+still regain it! Now he said to himself that she would sooner desert a
+friend to please him than sacrifice a fraction of her income; and the
+discovery cast a stain of sordidness on their whole relation. He could
+still imagine struggling to win her back from another man, or even to
+save her from some folly into which mistaken judgment or perverted
+enthusiasm might have hurried her; but to go on battling against the
+dull unimaginative subservience to personal luxury--the slavery to
+houses and servants and clothes--ah, no, while he had any fight left in
+him it was worth spending in a better cause than that!
+
+Through the open window he could hear, in the mild December stillness,
+his horse's feet coming and going on the gravel. _Her_ horse, led up and
+down by _her_ servant, at the door of _her_ house!... The sound
+symbolized his whole future...the situation his marriage had made for
+him, and to which he must henceforth bend, unless he broke with it then
+and there.... He tried to look ahead, to follow up, one by one, the
+consequences of such a break. That it would be final he had no doubt.
+There are natures which seem to be drawn closer by dissension, to
+depend, for the renewal of understanding, on the spark of generosity and
+compunction that anger strikes out of both; but Amherst knew that
+between himself and his wife no such clearing of the moral atmosphere
+was possible. The indignation which left him with tingling nerves and a
+burning need of some immediate escape into action, crystallized in Bessy
+into a hard kernel of obstinacy, into which, after each fresh collision,
+he felt that a little more of herself had been absorbed.... No, the
+break between them would be final--if he went now he would not come
+back. And it flashed across him that this solution might have been
+foreseen by his wife--might even have been deliberately planned and led
+up to by those about her. His father-in-law had never liked him--the
+disturbing waves of his activity had rippled even the sheltered surface
+of Mr. Langhope's existence. He must have been horribly in their way!
+Well--it was not too late to take himself out of it. In Bessy's circle
+the severing of such ties was regarded as an expensive but unhazardous
+piece of surgery--nobody bled to death of the wound.... The footman came
+back to remind him that his horse was waiting, and Amherst rose to his
+feet.
+
+"Send him back to the stable," he said with a glance at his watch, "and
+order a trap to take me to the next train."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+WHEN Amherst woke, the next morning, in the hotel to which he had gone
+up from Lynbrook, he was oppressed by the sense that the hardest step he
+had to take still lay before him. It had been almost easy to decide that
+the moment of separation had come, for circumstances seemed to have
+closed every other issue from his unhappy situation; but how tell his
+wife of his decision? Amherst, to whom action was the first necessity of
+being, became a weak procrastinator when he was confronted by the need
+of writing instead of speaking.
+
+To account for his abrupt departure from Lynbrook he had left word that
+he was called to town on business; but, since he did not mean to return,
+some farther explanation was now necessary, and he was paralyzed by the
+difficulty of writing. He had already telegraphed to his friend that he
+would be at the mills the next day; but the southern express did not
+leave till the afternoon, and he still had several hours in which to
+consider what he should say to his wife. To postpone the dreaded task,
+he invented the pretext of some business to be despatched, and taking
+the Subway to Wall Street consumed the morning in futile activities. But
+since the renunciation of his work at Westmore he had no active concern
+with the financial world, and by twelve o'clock he had exhausted his
+imaginary affairs and was journeying up town again. He left the train at
+Union Square, and walked along Fourth Avenue, now definitely resolved to
+go back to the hotel and write his letter before lunching.
+
+At Twenty-sixth Street he had struck into Madison Avenue, and was
+striding onward with the fixed eye and aimless haste of the man who has
+empty hours to fill, when a hansom drew up ahead of him and Justine
+Brent sprang out. She was trimly dressed, as if for travel, with a small
+bag in her hand; but at sight of him she paused with a cry of pleasure.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Amherst, I'm so glad! I was afraid I might not see you for
+goodbye."
+
+"For goodbye?" Amherst paused, embarrassed. How had she guessed that he
+did not mean to return to Lynbrook?
+
+"You know," she reminded him, "I'm going to some friends near
+Philadelphia for ten days"--and he remembered confusedly that a long
+time ago--probably yesterday morning--he had heard her speak of her
+projected visit.
+
+"I had no idea," she continued, "that you were coming up to town
+yesterday, or I should have tried to see you before you left. I wanted
+to ask you to send me a line if Bessy needs me--I'll come back at once
+if she does." Amherst continued to listen blankly, as if making a
+painful effort to regain some consciousness of what was being said to
+him, and she went on: "She seemed so nervous and poorly yesterday
+evening that I was sorry I had decided to go----"
+
+Her intent gaze reminded him that the emotions of the last twenty-four
+hours must still be visible in his face; and the thought of what she
+might detect helped to restore his self-possession. "You must not think
+of giving up your visit," he began hurriedly--he had meant to add "on
+account of Bessy," but he found himself unable to utter his wife's name.
+
+Justine was still looking at him. "Oh, I'm sure everything will be all
+right," she rejoined. "You go back this afternoon, I suppose? I've left
+you a little note, with my address, and I want you to promise----"
+
+She paused, for Amherst had made a motion as though to interrupt her.
+The old confused sense that there must always be truth between them was
+struggling in him with the strong restraints of habit and character; and
+suddenly, before he was conscious of having decided to speak, he heard
+himself say: "I ought to tell you that I am not going back."
+
+"Not going back?" A flash of apprehension crossed Justine's face. "Not
+till tomorrow, you mean?" she added, recovering herself.
+
+Amherst hesitated, glancing vaguely up and down the street. At that
+noonday hour it was nearly deserted, and Justine's driver dozed on his
+perch above the hansom. They could speak almost as openly as if they had
+been in one of the wood-paths at Lynbrook.
+
+"Nor tomorrow," Amherst said in a low voice. There was another pause
+before he added: "It may be some time before--" He broke off, and then
+continued with an effort: "The fact is, I am thinking of going back to
+my old work."
+
+She caught him up with an exclamation of surprise and sympathy. "Your
+old work? You mean at----"
+
+She was checked by the quick contraction of pain in his face. "Not that!
+I mean that I'm thinking of taking a new job--as manager of a Georgia
+mill.... It's the only thing I know how to do, and I've got to do
+something--" He forced a laugh. "The habit of work is incurable!"
+
+Justine's face had grown as grave as his. She hesitated a moment,
+looking down the street toward the angle of Madison Square, which was
+visible from the corner where they stood.
+
+"Will you walk back to the square with me? Then we can sit down a
+moment."
+
+She began to move as she spoke, and he walked beside her in silence till
+they had gained the seat she pointed out. Her hansom trailed after them,
+drawing up at the corner.
+
+As Amherst sat down beside her, Justine turned to him with an air of
+quiet resolution. "Mr. Amherst--will you let me ask you something? Is
+this a sudden decision?"
+
+"Yes. I decided yesterday."
+
+"And Bessy----?"
+
+His glance dropped for the first time, but Justine pressed her point.
+"Bessy approves?"
+
+"She--she will, I think--when she knows----"
+
+"When she knows?" Her emotion sprang into her face. "When she knows?
+Then she does not--yet?"
+
+"No. The offer came suddenly. I must go at once."
+
+"Without seeing her?" She cut him short with a quick commanding gesture.
+"Mr. Amherst, you can't do this--you won't do it! You will not go away
+without seeing Bessy!" she said.
+
+Her eyes sought his and drew them upward, constraining them to meet the
+full beam of her rebuking gaze.
+
+"I must do what seems best under the circumstances," he answered
+hesitatingly. "She will hear from me, of course; I shall write
+today--and later----"
+
+"Not later! _Now_--you will go back now to Lynbrook! Such things can't
+be told in writing--if they must be said at all, they must be spoken.
+Don't tell me that I don't understand--or that I'm meddling in what
+doesn't concern me. I don't care a fig for that! I've always meddled in
+what didn't concern me--I always shall, I suppose, till I die! And I
+understand enough to know that Bessy is very unhappy--and that you're
+the wiser and stronger of the two. I know what it's been to you to give
+up your work--to feel yourself useless," she interrupted herself, with
+softening eyes, "and I know how you've tried...I've watched you...but
+Bessy has tried too; and even if you've both failed--if you've come to
+the end of your resources--it's for you to face the fact, and help her
+face it--not to run away from it like this!"
+
+Amherst sat silent under the assault of her eloquence. He was conscious
+of no instinctive resentment, no sense that she was, as she confessed,
+meddling in matters which did not concern her. His ebbing spirit was
+revived by the shock of an ardour like his own. She had not shrunk from
+calling him a coward--and it did him good to hear her call him so! Her
+words put life back into its true perspective, restored their meaning to
+obsolete terms: to truth and manliness and courage. He had lived so long
+among equivocations that he had forgotten how to look a fact in the
+face; but here was a woman who judged life by his own standards--and by
+those standards she had found him wanting!
+
+Still, he could not forget the last bitter hours, or change his opinion
+as to the futility of attempting to remain at Lynbrook. He felt as
+strongly as ever the need of moral and mental liberation--the right to
+begin life again on his own terms. But Justine Brent had made him see
+that his first step toward self-assertion had been the inconsistent one
+of trying to evade its results.
+
+"You are right--I will go back," he said.
+
+She thanked him with her eyes, as she had thanked him on the terrace at
+Lynbrook, on the autumn evening which had witnessed their first broken
+exchange of confidences; and he was struck once more with the change
+that feeling produced in her. Emotions flashed across her face like the
+sweep of sun-rent clouds over a quiet landscape, bringing out the gleam
+of hidden waters, the fervour of smouldering colours, all the subtle
+delicacies of modelling that are lost under the light of an open sky.
+And it was extraordinary how she could infuse into a principle the
+warmth and colour of a passion! If conduct, to most people, seemed a
+cold matter of social prudence or inherited habit, to her it was always
+the newly-discovered question of her own relation to life--as most women
+see the great issues only through their own wants and prejudices, so she
+seemed always to see her personal desires in the light of the larger
+claims.
+
+"But I don't think," Amherst went on, "that anything can be said to
+convince me that I ought to alter my decision. These months of idleness
+have shown me that I'm one of the members of society who are a danger to
+the community if their noses are not kept to the grindstone----"
+
+Justine lowered her eyes musingly, and he saw she was undergoing the
+reaction of constraint which always followed on her bursts of
+unpremeditated frankness.
+
+"That is not for me to judge," she answered after a moment. "But if you
+decide to go away for a time--surely it ought to be in such a way that
+your going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy, or subject her
+to any unkind criticism."
+
+Amherst, reddening slightly, glanced at her in surprise. "I don't think
+you need fear that--I shall be the only one criticized," he said drily.
+
+"Are you sure--if you take such a position as you spoke of? So few
+people understand the love of hard work for its own sake. They will say
+that your quarrel with your wife has driven you to support yourself--and
+that will be cruel to Bessy."
+
+Amherst shrugged his shoulders. "They'll be more likely to say I tried
+to play the gentleman and failed, and wasn't happy till I got back to my
+own place in life--which is true enough," he added with a touch of
+irony.
+
+"They may say that too; but they will make Bessy suffer first--and it
+will be your fault if she is humiliated in that way. If you decide to
+take up your factory work for a time, can't you do so without--without
+accepting a salary? Oh, you see I stick at nothing," she broke in upon
+herself with a laugh, "and Bessy has said things which make me see that
+she would suffer horribly if--if you put such a slight on her." He
+remained silent, and she went on urgently: "From Bessy's standpoint it
+would mean a decisive break--the repudiating of your whole past. And it
+is a question on which you can afford to be generous, because I know...I
+think...it's less important in your eyes than hers...."
+
+Amherst glanced at her quickly. "That particular form of indebtedness,
+you mean?"
+
+She smiled. "The easiest to cancel, and therefore the least galling;
+isn't that the way you regard it?"
+
+"I used to--yes; but--" He was about to add: "No one at Lynbrook does,"
+but the flash of intelligence in her eyes restrained him, while at the
+same time it seemed to answer: "There's my point! To see their
+limitation is to allow for it, since every enlightenment brings a
+corresponding obligation."
+
+She made no attempt to put into words the argument her look conveyed,
+but rose from her seat with a rapid glance at her watch.
+
+"And now I must go, or I shall miss my train." She held out her hand,
+and as Amherst's met it, he said in a low tone, as if in reply to her
+unspoken appeal: "I shall remember all you have said."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a new experience for Amherst to be acting under the pressure of
+another will; but during his return journey to Lynbrook that afternoon
+it was pure relief to surrender himself to this pressure, and the
+surrender brought not a sense of weakness but of recovered energy. It
+was not in his nature to analyze his motives, or spend his strength in
+weighing closely balanced alternatives of conduct; and though, during
+the last purposeless months, he had grown to brood over every spring of
+action in himself and others, this tendency disappeared at once in
+contact with the deed to be done. It was as though a tributary stream,
+gathering its crystal speed among the hills, had been suddenly poured
+into the stagnant waters of his will; and he saw now how thick and
+turbid those waters had become--how full of the slime-bred life that
+chokes the springs of courage.
+
+His whole desire now was to be generous to his wife: to bear the full
+brunt of whatever pain their parting brought. Justine had said that
+Bessy seemed nervous and unhappy: it was clear, therefore, that she also
+had suffered from the wounds they had dealt each other, though she kept
+her unmoved front to the last. Poor child! Perhaps that insensible
+exterior was the only way she knew of expressing courage! It seemed to
+Amherst that all means of manifesting the finer impulses must slowly
+wither in the Lynbrook air. As he approached his destination, his
+thoughts of her were all pitiful: nothing remained of the personal
+resentment which had debased their parting. He had telephoned from town
+to announce the hour of his return, and when he emerged from the station
+he half-expected to find her seated in the brougham whose lamps
+signalled him through the early dusk. It would be like her to undergo
+such a reaction of feeling, and to express it, not in words, but by
+taking up their relation as if there had been no break in it. He had
+once condemned this facility of renewal as a sign of lightness, a
+result of that continual evasion of serious issues which made the life
+of Bessy's world a thin crust of custom above a void of thought. But he
+now saw that, if she was the product of her environment, that
+constituted but another claim on his charity, and made the more precious
+any impulses of natural feeling that had survived the unifying pressure
+of her life. As he approached the brougham, he murmured mentally: "What
+if I were to try once more?"
+
+Bessy had not come to meet him; but he said to himself that he should
+find her alone at the house, and that he would make his confession at
+once. As the carriage passed between the lights on the tall stone
+gate-posts, and rolled through the bare shrubberies of the avenue, he
+felt a momentary tightening of the heart--a sense of stepping back into
+the trap from which he had just wrenched himself free--a premonition of
+the way in which the smooth systematized routine of his wife's existence
+might draw him back into its revolutions as he had once seen a careless
+factory hand seized and dragged into a flying belt....
+
+But it was only for a moment; then his thoughts reverted to Bessy. It
+was she who was to be considered--this time he must be strong enough for
+both.
+
+The butler met him on the threshold, flanked by the usual array of
+footmen; and as he saw his portmanteau ceremoniously passed from hand
+to hand, Amherst once more felt the steel of the springe on his neck.
+
+"Is Mrs. Amherst in the drawing-room, Knowles?" he asked.
+
+"No, sir," said Knowles, who had too high a sense of fitness to
+volunteer any information beyond the immediate fact required of him.
+
+"She has gone up to her sitting-room, then?" Amherst continued, turning
+toward the broad sweep of the stairway.
+
+"No, sir," said the butler slowly; "Mrs. Amherst has gone away."
+
+"Gone away?" Amherst stopped short, staring blankly at the man's smooth
+official mask.
+
+"This afternoon, sir; to Mapleside."
+
+"To Mapleside?"
+
+"Yes, sir, by motor--to stay with Mrs. Carbury."
+
+There was a moment's silence. It had all happened so quickly that
+Amherst, with the dual vision which comes at such moments, noticed that
+the third footman--or was it the fourth?--was just passing his
+portmanteau on to a shirt-sleeved arm behind the door which led to the
+servant's wing....
+
+He roused himself to look at the tall clock. It was just six. He had
+telephoned from town at two.
+
+"At what time did Mrs. Amherst leave?"
+
+The butler meditated. "Sharp at four, sir. The maid took the three-forty
+with the luggage."
+
+With the luggage! So it was not a mere one-night visit. The blood rose
+slowly to Amherst's face. The footmen had disappeared, but presently the
+door at the back of the hall reopened, and one of them came out,
+carrying an elaborately-appointed tea-tray toward the smoking-room. The
+routine of the house was going on as if nothing had happened.... The
+butler looked at Amherst with respectful--too respectful--interrogation,
+and he was suddenly conscious that he was standing motionless in the
+middle of the hall, with one last intolerable question on his lips.
+
+Well--it had to be spoken! "Did Mrs. Amherst receive my telephone
+message?"
+
+"Yes, sir. I gave it to her myself."
+
+It occurred confusedly to Amherst that a well-bred man--as Lynbrook
+understood the phrase--would, at this point, have made some tardy feint
+of being in his wife's confidence, of having, on second thoughts, no
+reason to be surprised at her departure. It was humiliating, he
+supposed, to be thus laying bare his discomfiture to his dependents--he
+could see that even Knowles was affected by the manifest impropriety of
+the situation--but no pretext presented itself to his mind, and after
+another interval of silence he turned slowly toward the door of the
+smoking-room.
+
+"My letters are here, I suppose?" he paused on the threshold to enquire;
+and on the butler's answering in the affirmative, he said to himself,
+with a last effort to suspend his judgment: "She has left a line--there
+will be some explanation----"
+
+But there was nothing--neither word nor message; nothing but the
+reverberating retort of her departure in the face of his return--her
+flight to Blanche Carbury as the final answer to his final appeal.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+JUSTINE was coming back to Lynbrook. She had been, after all, unable to
+stay out the ten days of her visit: the undefinable sense of being
+needed, so often the determining motive of her actions, drew her back to
+Long Island at the end of the week. She had received no word from
+Amherst or Bessy; only Cicely had told her, in a big round hand, that
+mother had been away three days, and that it had been very lonely, and
+that the housekeeper's cat had kittens, and she was to have one; and
+were kittens christened, or how did they get their names?--because she
+wanted to call hers Justine; and she had found in her book a bird like
+the one father had shown them in the swamp; and they were not alone now,
+because the Telfers were there, and they had all been out sleighing;
+but it would be much nicer when Justine came back....
+
+It was as difficult to extract any sequence of facts from Cicely's
+letter as from an early chronicle. She made no reference to Amherst's
+return, which was odd, since she was fond of her step-father, yet not
+significant, since the fact of his arrival might have been crowded out
+by the birth of the kittens, or some incident equally prominent in her
+perspectiveless grouping of events; nor did she name the date of her
+mother's departure, so that Justine could not guess whether it had been
+contingent on Amherst's return, or wholly unconnected with it. What
+puzzled her most was Bessy's own silence--yet that too, in a sense, was
+reassuring, for Bessy thought of others chiefly when it was painful to
+think of herself, and her not writing implied that she had felt no
+present need of her friend's sympathy.
+
+Justine did not expect to find Amherst at Lynbrook. She had felt
+convinced, when they parted, that he would persist in his plan of going
+south; and the fact that the Telfer girls were again in possession made
+it seem probable that he had already left. Under the circumstances,
+Justine thought the separation advisable; but she was eager to be
+assured that it had been effected amicably, and without open affront to
+Bessy's pride.
+
+She arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and when she entered the house the
+sound of voices from the drawing-room, and the prevailing sense of
+bustle and movement amid which her own coming was evidently an
+unconsidered detail, showed that the normal life of Lynbrook had resumed
+its course. The Telfers, as usual, had brought a lively throng in their
+train; and amid the bursts of merriment about the drawing-room tea-table
+she caught Westy Gaines's impressive accents, and the screaming laughter
+of Blanche Carbury....
+
+So Blanche Carbury was back at Lynbrook! The discovery gave Justine
+fresh cause for conjecture. Whatever reciprocal concessions might have
+resulted from Amherst's return to his wife, it seemed hardly probable
+that they included a renewal of relations with Mrs. Carbury. Had his
+mission failed then--had he and Bessy parted in anger, and was Mrs.
+Carbury's presence at Lynbrook Bessy's retort to his assertion of
+independence?
+
+In the school-room, where Justine was received with the eager outpouring
+of Cicely's minutest experiences, she dared not put the question that
+would have solved these doubts; and she left to dress for dinner without
+knowing whether Amherst had returned to Lynbrook. Yet in her heart she
+never questioned that he had done so; all her fears revolved about what
+had since taken place.
+
+She saw Bessy first in the drawing-room, surrounded by her guests; and
+their brief embrace told her nothing, except that she had never beheld
+her friend more brilliant, more triumphantly in possession of recovered
+spirits and health.
+
+That Amherst was absent was now made evident by Bessy's requesting Westy
+Gaines to lead the way to the dining-room with Mrs. Ansell, who was one
+of the reassembled visitors; and the only one, as Justine presently
+observed, not in key with the prevailing gaiety. Mrs. Ansell, usually so
+tinged with the colours of her environment, preserved on this occasion a
+grey neutrality of tone which was the only break in the general
+brightness. It was not in her graceful person to express anything as
+gross as disapproval, yet that sentiment was manifest, to the nice
+observer, in a delicate aloofness which made the waves of laughter fall
+back from her, and spread a circle of cloudy calm about her end of the
+table. Justine had never been greatly drawn to Mrs. Ansell. Her own
+adaptability was not in the least akin to the older woman's studied
+self-effacement; and the independence of judgment which Justine
+preserved in spite of her perception of divergent standpoints made her a
+little contemptuous of an excess of charity that seemed to have been
+acquired at the cost of all individual convictions. To-night for the
+first time she felt in Mrs. Ansell a secret sympathy with her own
+fears; and a sense of this tacit understanding made her examine with
+sudden interest the face of her unexpected ally.... After all, what did
+she know of Mrs. Ansell's history--of the hidden processes which had
+gradually subdued her own passions and desires, making of her, as it
+were, a mere decorative background, a connecting link between other
+personalities? Perhaps, for a woman alone in the world, without the
+power and opportunity that money gives, there was no alternative between
+letting one's individuality harden into a small dry nucleus of egoism,
+or diffuse itself thus in the interstices of other lives--and there fell
+upon Justine the chill thought that just such a future might await her
+if she missed the liberating gift of personal happiness....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Neither that night nor the next day had she a private word with
+Bessy--and it became evident, as the hours passed, that Mrs. Amherst was
+deliberately postponing the moment when they should find themselves
+alone. But the Lynbrook party was to disperse on the Monday; and Bessy,
+who hated early rising, and all the details of housekeeping, tapped at
+Justine's door late on Sunday night to ask her to speed the departing
+visitors.
+
+She pleaded this necessity as an excuse for her intrusion, and the
+playful haste of her manner showed a nervous shrinking from any renewal
+of confidence; but as she leaned in the doorway, fingering the diamond
+chain about her neck, while one satin-tipped foot emerged restlessly
+from the edge of her lace gown, her face lost the bloom of animation
+which talk and laughter always produced in it, and she looked so pale
+and weary that Justine needed no better pretext for drawing her into the
+room.
+
+It was not in Bessy to resist a soothing touch in her moments of nervous
+reaction. She sank into the chair by the fire and let her head rest
+wearily against the cushion which Justine slipped behind it.
+
+Justine dropped into the low seat beside her, and laid a hand on hers.
+"You don't look as well as when I went away, Bessy. Are you sure you've
+done wisely in beginning your house-parties so soon?"
+
+It always alarmed Bessy to be told that she was not looking her best,
+and she sat upright, a wave of pink rising under her sensitive skin.
+
+"I am quite well, on the contrary; but I was dying of inanition in this
+big empty house, and I suppose I haven't got the boredom out of my
+system yet!"
+
+Justine recognized the echo of Mrs. Carbury's manner.
+
+"Even if you _were_ bored," she rejoined, "the inanition was probably
+good for you. What does Dr. Wyant say to your breaking away from his
+regime?" She named Wyant purposely, knowing that Bessy had that respect
+for the medical verdict which is the last trace of reverence for
+authority in the mind of the modern woman. But Mrs. Amherst laughed with
+gentle malice.
+
+"Oh, I haven't seen Dr. Wyant lately. His interest in me died out the
+day you left."
+
+Justine forced a laugh to hide her annoyance. She had not yet recovered
+from the shrinking disgust of her last scene with Wyant.
+
+"Don't be a goose, Bessy. If he hasn't come, it must be because you've
+told him not to--because you're afraid of letting him see that you're
+disobeying him."
+
+Bessy laughed again. "My dear, I'm afraid of nothing--nothing! Not even
+of your big eyes when they glare at me like coals. I suppose you must
+have looked at poor Wyant like that to frighten him away! And yet the
+last time we talked of him you seemed to like him--you even hinted that
+it was because of him that Westy had no chance."
+
+Justine uttered an impatient exclamation. "If neither of them existed it
+wouldn't affect the other's chances in the least. Their only merit is
+that they both enhance the charms of celibacy!"
+
+Bessy's smile dropped, and she turned a grave glance on her friend. "Ah,
+most men do that--you're so clever to have found it out!"
+
+It was Justine's turn to smile. "Oh, but I haven't--as a
+generalization. I mean to marry as soon as I get the chance!"
+
+"The chance----?"
+
+"To meet the right man. I'm gambler enough to believe in my luck yet!"
+
+Mrs. Amherst sighed compassionately. "There _is_ no right man! As
+Blanche says, matrimony's as uncomfortable as a ready-made shoe. How can
+one and the same institution fit every individual case? And why should
+we all have to go lame because marriage was once invented to suit an
+imaginary case?"
+
+Justine gave a slight shrug. "You talk of walking lame--how else do we
+all walk? It seems to me that life's the tight boot, and marriage the
+crutch that may help one to hobble along!" She drew Bessy's hand into
+hers with a caressing pressure. "When you philosophize I always know
+you're tired. No one who feels well stops to generalize about symptoms.
+If you won't let your doctor prescribe for you, your nurse is going to
+carry out his orders. What you want is quiet. Be reasonable and send
+away everybody before Mr. Amherst comes back!"
+
+She dropped the last phrase carelessly, glancing away as she spoke; but
+the stiffening of the fingers in her clasp sent a little tremor through
+her hand.
+
+"Thanks for your advice. It would be excellent but for one thing--my
+husband is not coming back!"
+
+The mockery in Bessy's voice seemed to pass into her features, hardening
+and contracting them as frost shrivels a flower. Justine's face, on the
+contrary, was suddenly illuminated by compassion, as though a light had
+struck up into it from the cold glitter of her friend's unhappiness.
+
+"Bessy! What do you mean by not coming back?"
+
+"I mean he's had the tact to see that we shall be more comfortable
+apart--without putting me to the unpleasant necessity of telling him
+so."
+
+Again the piteous echo of Blanche Carbury's phrases! The laboured
+mimicry of her ideas!
+
+Justine looked anxiously at her friend. It seemed horribly false not to
+mention her own talk with Amherst, yet she felt it wiser to feign
+ignorance, since Bessy could never be trusted to interpret rightly any
+departure from the conventional.
+
+"Please tell me what has happened," she said at length.
+
+Bessy, with a smile, released her hand. "John has gone back to the life
+he prefers--which I take to be a hint to me to do the same."
+
+Justine hesitated again; then the pressure of truth overcame every
+barrier of expediency. "Bessy--I ought to tell you that I saw Mr.
+Amherst in town the day I went to Philadelphia. He spoke of going away
+for a time...he seemed unhappy...but he told me he was coming back to
+see you first--" She broke off, her clear eyes on her friend's; and she
+saw at once that Bessy was too self-engrossed to feel any surprise at
+her avowal. "Surely he came back?" she went on.
+
+"Oh, yes--he came back!" Bessy sank into the cushions, watching the
+firelight play on her diamond chain as she repeated the restless gesture
+of lifting it up and letting it slip through her fingers.
+
+"Well--and then?"
+
+"Then--nothing! I was not here when he came."
+
+"You were not here? What had happened?"
+
+"I had gone over to Blanche Carbury's for a day or two. I was just
+leaving when I heard he was coming back, and I couldn't throw her over
+at the last moment."
+
+Justine tried to catch the glance that fluttered evasively under Bessy's
+lashes. "You knew he was coming--and you chose that time to go to Mrs.
+Carbury's?"
+
+"I didn't choose, my dear--it just happened! And it really happened for
+the best. I suppose he was annoyed at my going--you know he has a
+ridiculous prejudice against Blanche--and so the next morning he rushed
+off to his cotton mill."
+
+There was a pause, while the diamonds continued to flow in threads of
+fire through Mrs. Amherst's fingers.
+
+At length Justine said: "Did Mr. Amherst know that you knew he was
+coming back before you left for Mrs. Carbury's?"
+
+Bessy feigned to meditate the question. "Did he know that I knew that he
+knew?" she mocked. "Yes--I suppose so--he must have known." She stifled
+a slight yawn as she drew herself languidly to her feet.
+
+"Then he took that as your answer?"
+
+"My answer----?"
+
+"To his coming back----"
+
+"So it appears. I told you he had shown unusual tact." Bessy stretched
+her softly tapering arms above her head and then dropped them along her
+sides with another yawn. "But it's almost morning--it's wicked of me to
+have kept you so late, when you must be up to look after all those
+people!"
+
+She flung her arms with a light gesture about Justine's shoulders, and
+laid a dry kiss on her cheek.
+
+"Don't look at me with those big eyes--they've eaten up the whole of
+your face! And you needn't think I'm sorry for what I've done," she
+declared. "I'm _not_--the--least--little--atom--of a bit!"
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+JUSTINE was pacing the long library at Lynbrook, between the caged sets
+of standard authors.
+
+She felt as much caged as they: as much a part of a conventional
+stage-setting totally unrelated to the action going on before it. Two
+weeks had passed since her return from Philadelphia; and during that
+time she had learned that her usefulness at Lynbrook was over. Though
+not unwelcome, she might almost call herself unwanted; life swept by,
+leaving her tethered to the stake of inaction; a bitter lot for one who
+chose to measure existence by deeds instead of days. She had found Bessy
+ostensibly busy with a succession of guests; no one in the house needed
+her but Cicely, and even Cicely, at times, was caught up into the whirl
+of her mother's life, swept off on sleighing parties and motor-trips, or
+carried to town for a dancing-class or an opera matinee.
+
+Mrs. Fenton Carbury was not among the visitors who left Lynbrook on the
+Monday after Justine's return.
+
+Mr. Carbury, with the other bread-winners of the party, had hastened
+back to his treadmill in Wall Street after a Sunday spent in silently
+studying the files of the Financial Record; but his wife stayed on,
+somewhat aggressively in possession, criticizing and rearranging the
+furniture, ringing for the servants, making sudden demands on the
+stable, telegraphing, telephoning, ordering fires lighted or windows
+opened, and leaving everywhere in her wake a trail of cigarette ashes
+and cocktail glasses.
+
+Ned Bowfort had not been included in the house-party; but on the day of
+its dispersal he rode over unannounced for luncheon, put up his horse in
+the stable, threaded his way familiarly among the dozing dogs in the
+hall, greeted Mrs. Ansell and Justine with just the right shade of quiet
+deference, produced from his pocket a new puzzle-game for Cicely, and
+sat down beside her mother with the quiet urbanity of the family friend
+who knows his privileges but is too discreet to abuse them.
+
+After that he came every day, sometimes riding home late to the Hunt
+Club, sometimes accompanying Bessy and Mrs. Carbury to town for dinner
+and the theatre; but always with his deprecating air of having dropped
+in by accident, and modestly hoping that his intrusion was not
+unwelcome.
+
+The following Sunday brought another influx of visitors, and Bessy
+seemed to fling herself with renewed enthusiasm into the cares of
+hospitality. She had avoided Justine since their midnight talk,
+contriving to see her in Cicely's presence, or pleading haste when they
+found themselves alone. The winter was unusually open, and she spent
+long hours in the saddle when her time was not taken up with her
+visitors. For a while she took Cicely on her daily rides; but she soon
+wearied of adapting her hunter's stride to the pace of the little girl's
+pony, and Cicely was once more given over to the coachman's care.
+
+Then came snow and a long frost, and Bessy grew restless at her
+imprisonment, and grumbled that there was no way of keeping well in a
+winter climate which made regular exercise impossible.
+
+"Why not build a squash-court?" Blanche Carbury proposed; and the two
+fell instantly to making plans under the guidance of Ned Bowfort and
+Westy Gaines. As the scheme developed, various advisers suggested that
+it was a pity not to add a bowling-alley, a swimming-tank and a
+gymnasium; a fashionable architect was summoned from town, measurements
+were taken, sites discussed, sketches compared, and engineers consulted
+as to the cost of artesian wells and the best system for heating the
+tank.
+
+Bessy seemed filled with a feverish desire to carry out the plan as
+quickly as possible, and on as large a scale as even the architect's
+invention soared to; but it was finally decided that, before signing the
+contracts, she should run over to New Jersey to see a building of the
+same kind on which a sporting friend of Mrs. Carbury's had recently
+lavished a fortune.
+
+It was on this errand that the two ladies, in company with Westy Gaines
+and Bowfort, had departed on the day which found Justine restlessly
+measuring the length of the library. She and Mrs. Ansell had the house
+to themselves; and it was hardly a surprise to her when, in the course
+of the afternoon, Mrs. Ansell, after a discreet pause on the threshold,
+advanced toward her down the long room.
+
+Since the night of her return Justine had felt sure that Mrs. Ansell
+would speak; but the elder lady was given to hawk-like circlings about
+her subject, to hanging over it and contemplating it before her wings
+dropped for the descent.
+
+Now, however, it was plain that she had resolved to strike; and Justine
+had a sense of relief at the thought. She had been too long isolated in
+her anxiety, her powerlessness to help; and she had a vague hope that
+Mrs. Ansell's worldly wisdom might accomplish what her inexperience had
+failed to achieve.
+
+"Shall we sit by the fire? I am glad to find you alone," Mrs. Ansell
+began, with the pleasant abruptness that was one of the subtlest
+instruments of her indirection; and as Justine acquiesced, she added,
+yielding her slight lines to the luxurious depths of an arm-chair: "I
+have been rather suddenly asked by an invalid cousin to go to Europe
+with her next week, and I can't go contentedly without being at peace
+about our friends."
+
+She paused, but Justine made no answer. In spite of her growing sympathy
+for Mrs. Ansell she could not overcome an inherent distrust, not of her
+methods, but of her ultimate object. What, for instance, was her
+conception of being at peace about the Amhersts? Justine's own
+conviction was that, as far as their final welfare was concerned, any
+terms were better between them than the external harmony which had
+prevailed during Amherst's stay at Lynbrook.
+
+The subtle emanation of her distrust may have been felt by Mrs. Ansell;
+for the latter presently continued, with a certain nobleness: "I am the
+more concerned because I believe I must hold myself, in a small degree,
+responsible for Bessy's marriage--" and, as Justine looked at her in
+surprise, she added: "I thought she could never be happy unless her
+affections were satisfied--and even now I believe so."
+
+"I believe so too," Justine said, surprised into assent by the
+simplicity of Mrs. Ansell's declaration.
+
+"Well, then--since we are agreed in our diagnosis," the older woman went
+on, smiling, "what remedy do you suggest? Or rather, how can we
+administer it?"
+
+"What remedy?" Justine hesitated.
+
+"Oh, I believe we are agreed on that too. Mr. Amherst must be brought
+back--but how to bring him?" She paused, and then added, with a singular
+effect of appealing frankness: "I ask you, because I believe you to be
+the only one of Bessy's friends who is in the least in her husband's
+confidence."
+
+Justine's embarrassment increased. Would it not be disloyal both to
+Bessy and Amherst to acknowledge to a third person a fact of which Bessy
+herself was unaware? Yet to betray embarrassment under Mrs. Ansell's
+eyes was to risk giving it a dangerous significance.
+
+"Bessy has spoken to me once or twice--but I know very little of Mr.
+Amherst's point of view; except," Justine added, after another moment's
+weighing of alternatives, "that I believe he suffers most from being cut
+off from his work at Westmore."
+
+"Yes--so I think; but that is a difficulty that time and expediency must
+adjust. All _we_ can do--their friends, I mean--is to get them together
+again before the breach is too wide."
+
+Justine pondered. She was perhaps more ignorant of the situation than
+Mrs. Ansell imagined, for since her talk with Bessy the latter had not
+again alluded to Amherst's absence, and Justine could merely conjecture
+that he had carried out his plan of taking the management of the mill he
+had spoken of. What she most wished to know was whether he had listened
+to her entreaty, and taken the position temporarily, without binding
+himself by the acceptance of a salary; or whether, wounded by the
+outrage of Bessy's flight, he had freed himself from financial
+dependence by engaging himself definitely as manager.
+
+"I really know very little of the present situation," Justine said,
+looking at Mrs. Ansell. "Bessy merely told me that Mr. Amherst had taken
+up his old work in a cotton mill in the south."
+
+As her eyes met Mrs. Ansell's it flashed across her that the latter did
+not believe what she said, and the perception made her instantly shrink
+back into herself. But there was nothing in Mrs. Ansell's tone to
+confirm the doubt which her look betrayed.
+
+"Ah--I hoped you knew more," she said simply; "for, like you, I have
+only heard from Bessy that her husband went away suddenly to help a
+friend who is reorganizing some mills in Georgia. Of course, under the
+circumstances, such a temporary break is natural enough--perhaps
+inevitable--only he must not stay away too long."
+
+Justine was silent. Mrs. Ansell's momentary self-betrayal had checked
+all farther possibility of frank communion, and the discerning lady had
+seen her error too late to remedy it.
+
+But her hearer's heart gave a leap of joy. It was clear from what Mrs.
+Ansell said that Amherst had not bound himself definitely, since he
+would not have done so without informing his wife. And with a secret
+thrill of happiness Justine recalled his last word to her: "I will
+remember all you have said."
+
+He had kept that word and acted on it; in spite of Bessy's last assault
+on his pride he had borne with her, and deferred the day of final
+rupture; and the sense that she had had a part in his decision filled
+Justine with a glow of hope. The consciousness of Mrs. Ansell's
+suspicions faded to insignificance--Mrs. Ansell and her kind might think
+what they chose, since all that mattered now was that she herself
+should act bravely and circumspectly in her last attempt to save her
+friends.
+
+"I am not sure," Mrs. Ansell continued, gently scrutinizing her
+companion, "that I think it unwise of him to have gone; but if he stays
+too long Bessy may listen to bad advice--advice disastrous to her
+happiness." She paused, and turned her eyes meditatively toward the
+fire. "As far as I know," she said, with the same air of serious
+candour, "you are the only person who can tell him this."
+
+"I?" exclaimed Justine, with a leap of colour to her pale cheeks.
+
+Mrs. Ansell's eyes continued to avoid her. "My dear Miss Brent, Bessy
+has told me something of the wise counsels you have given her. Mr.
+Amherst is also your friend. As I said just now, you are the only person
+who might act as a link between them--surely you will not renounce the
+role."
+
+Justine controlled herself. "My only role, as you call it, has been to
+urge Bessy to--to try to allow for her husband's views----"
+
+"And have you not given the same advice to Mr. Amherst?"
+
+The eyes of the two women met. "Yes," said Justine, after a moment.
+
+"Then why refuse your help now? The moment is crucial."
+
+Justine's thoughts had flown beyond the stage of resenting Mrs. Ansell's
+gentle pertinacity. All her faculties were absorbed in the question as
+to how she could most effectually use whatever influence she possessed.
+
+"I put it to you as one old friend to another--will you write to Mr.
+Amherst to come back?" Mrs. Ansell urged her.
+
+Justine was past considering even the strangeness of this request, and
+its oblique reflection on the kind of power ascribed to her. Through the
+confused beatings of her heart she merely struggled for a clearer sense
+of guidance.
+
+"No," she said slowly. "I cannot."
+
+"You cannot? With a friend's happiness in extremity?" Mrs. Ansell paused
+a moment before she added. "Unless you believe that Bessy would be
+happier divorced?"
+
+"Divorced--? Oh, no," Justine shuddered.
+
+"That is what it will come to."
+
+"No, no! In time----"
+
+"Time is what I am most afraid of, when Blanche Carbury disposes of it."
+
+Justine breathed a deep sigh.
+
+"You'll write?" Mrs. Ansell murmured, laying a soft touch on her hand.
+
+"I have not the influence you think----"
+
+"Can you do any harm by trying?"
+
+"I might--" Justine faltered, losing her exact sense of the words she
+used.
+
+"Ah," the other flashed back, "then you _have_ influence! Why will you
+not use it?"
+
+Justine waited a moment; then her resolve gathered itself into words.
+"If I have any influence, I am not sure it would be well to use it as
+you suggest."
+
+"Not to urge Mr. Amherst's return?"
+
+"No--not now."
+
+She caught the same veiled gleam of incredulity under Mrs. Ansell's
+lids--caught and disregarded it.
+
+"It must be now or never," Mrs. Ansell insisted.
+
+"I can't think so," Justine held out.
+
+"Nevertheless--will you try?"
+
+"No--no! It might be fatal."
+
+"To whom?"
+
+"To both." She considered. "If he came back now I know he would not
+stay."
+
+Mrs. Ansell was upon her abruptly. "You _know_? Then you speak with
+authority?"
+
+"No--what authority? I speak as I feel," Justine faltered.
+
+The older woman drew herself to her feet. "Ah--then you shoulder a great
+responsibility!" She moved nearer to Justine, and once more laid a
+fugitive touch upon her. "You won't write to him?"
+
+"No--no," the girl flung back; and the voices of the returning party in
+the hall made Mrs. Ansell, with an almost imperceptible gesture of
+warning, turn musingly away toward the fire.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bessy came back brimming with the wonders she had seen. A glazed
+"sun-room," mosaic pavements, a marble fountain to feed the marble
+tank--and outside a water-garden, descending in successive terraces, to
+take up and utilize--one could see how practically!--the overflow from
+the tank. If one did the thing at all, why not do it decently? She had
+given up her new motor, had let her town house, had pinched and stinted
+herself in a hundred ways--if ever woman was entitled to a little
+compensating pleasure, surely she was that woman!
+
+The days were crowded with consultations. Architect, contractors,
+engineers, a landscape gardener, and a dozen minor craftsmen, came and
+went, unrolled plans, moistened pencils, sketched, figured, argued,
+persuaded, and filled Bessy with the dread of appearing, under Blanche
+Carbury's eyes, subject to any restraining influences of economy. What!
+She was a young woman, with an independent fortune, and she was always
+wavering, considering, secretly referring back to the mute criticism of
+an invisible judge--of the husband who had been first to shake himself
+free of any mutual subjection? The accomplished Blanche did not have to
+say this--she conveyed it by the raising of painted brows, by a smile of
+mocking interrogation, a judiciously placed silence or a resigned glance
+at the architect. So the estimates poured in, were studied,
+resisted--then yielded to and signed; then the hour of advance payments
+struck, and an imperious appeal was despatched to Mr. Tredegar, to whom
+the management of Bessy's affairs had been transferred.
+
+Mr. Tredegar, to his client's surprise, answered the appeal in person.
+He had not been lately to Lynbrook, dreading the cold and damp of the
+country in winter; and his sudden arrival had therefore an ominous
+significance.
+
+He came for an evening in mid-week, when even Blanche Carbury was
+absent, and Bessy and Justine had the house to themselves. Mrs. Ansell
+had sailed the week before with her invalid cousin. No farther words had
+passed between herself and Justine--but the latter was conscious that
+their talk had increased instead of lessened the distance between them.
+Justine herself meant to leave soon. Her hope of regaining Bessy's
+confidence had been deceived, and seeing herself definitely superseded,
+she chafed anew at her purposeless inactivity. She had already written
+to one or two doctors in New York, and to the matron of Saint
+Elizabeth's. She had made herself a name in surgical cases, and it could
+not be long before a summons came....
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Tredegar arrived, and the three dined together, the two
+women bending meekly to his discourse, which was never more oracular and
+authoritative than when delivered to the gentler sex alone. Amherst's
+absence, in particular, seemed to loose the thin current of Mr.
+Tredegar's eloquence. He was never quite at ease in the presence of an
+independent mind, and Justine often reflected that, even had the two men
+known nothing of each other's views, there would have been between them
+an instinctive and irreducible hostility--they would have disliked each
+other if they had merely jostled elbows in the street.
+
+Yet even freed from Amherst's presence Mr. Tredegar showed a darkling
+brow, and as Justine slipped away after dinner she felt that she left
+Bessy to something more serious than the usual business conference.
+
+How serious, she was to learn that very night, when, in the small hours,
+her friend burst in on her tearfully. Bessy was ruined--ruined--that was
+what Mr. Tredegar had come to tell her! She might have known he would
+not have travelled to Lynbrook for a trifle.... She had expected to find
+herself cramped, restricted--to be warned that she must "manage,"
+hateful word!... But this! This was incredible! Unendurable! There was
+no money to build the gymnasium--none at all! And all because it had
+been swallowed up at Westmore--because the ridiculous changes there,
+the changes that nobody wanted, nobody approved of--that Truscomb and
+all the other experts had opposed and derided from the first--these
+changes, even modified and arrested, had already involved so much of her
+income, that it might be years--yes, he said _years_!--before she would
+feel herself free again--free of her own fortune, of Cicely's
+fortune...of the money poor Dick Westmore had meant his wife and child
+to enjoy!
+
+Justine listened anxiously to this confused outpouring of resentments.
+Bessy's born incapacity for figures made it indeed possible that the
+facts came on her as a surprise--that she had quite forgotten the
+temporary reduction of her income, and had begun to imagine that what
+she had saved in one direction was hers to spend in another. All this
+was conceivable. But why had Mr. Tredegar drawn so dark a picture of the
+future? Or was it only that, thwarted of her immediate desire, Bessy's
+disappointment blackened the farthest verge of her horizon? Justine,
+though aware of her friend's lack of perspective, suspected that a
+conniving hand had helped to throw the prospect out of drawing....
+
+Could it be possible, then, that Mr. Tredegar was among those who
+desired a divorce? That the influences at which Mrs. Ansell had hinted
+proceeded not only from Blanche Carbury and her group? Helpless amid
+this rush of forebodings, Justine could do no more than soothe and
+restrain--to reason would have been idle. She had never till now
+realized how completely she had lost ground with Bessy.
+
+"The humiliation--before my friends! Oh, I was warned...my father, every
+one...for Cicely's sake I was warned...but I wouldn't listen--and _now_!
+From the first it was all he cared for--in Europe, even, he was always
+dragging me to factories. _Me?_--I was only the owner of Westmore! He
+wanted power--power, that's all--when he lost it he left me...oh, I'm
+glad now my baby is dead! Glad there's nothing between us--nothing,
+nothing in the world to tie us together any longer!"
+
+The disproportion between this violent grief and its trivial cause would
+have struck Justine as simply grotesque, had she not understood that the
+incident of the gymnasium, which followed with cumulative pressure on a
+series of similar episodes, seemed to Bessy like the reaching out of a
+retaliatory hand--a mocking reminder that she was still imprisoned in
+the consequences of her unhappy marriage.
+
+Such folly seemed past weeping for--it froze Justine's compassion into
+disdain, till she remembered that the sources of our sorrow are
+sometimes nobler than their means of expression, and that a baffled
+unappeased love was perhaps the real cause of Bessy's anger against her
+husband.
+
+At any rate, the moment was a critical one, and Justine remembered with
+a pang that Mrs. Ansell had foreseen such a contingency, and implored
+her to take measures against it. She had refused, from a sincere dread
+of precipitating a definite estrangement--but had she been right in
+judging the situation so logically? With a creature of Bessy's emotional
+uncertainties the result of contending influences was really
+incalculable--it might still be that, at this juncture, Amherst's return
+would bring about a reaction of better feelings....
+
+Justine sat and mused on these things after leaving her friend exhausted
+upon a tearful pillow. She felt that she had perhaps taken too large a
+survey of the situation--that the question whether there could ever be
+happiness between this tormented pair was not one to concern those who
+struggled for their welfare. Most marriages are a patch-work of jarring
+tastes and ill-assorted ambitions--if here and there, for a moment, two
+colours blend, two textures are the same, so much the better for the
+pattern! Justine, certainly, could foresee in reunion no positive
+happiness for either of her friends; but she saw positive disaster for
+Bessy in separation from her husband....
+
+Suddenly she rose from her chair by the falling fire, and crossed over
+to the writing-table. She would write to Amherst herself--she would tell
+him to come. The decision once reached, hope flowed back to her
+heart--the joy of action so often deceived her into immediate faith in
+its results!
+
+"Dear Mr. Amherst," she wrote, "the last time I saw you, you told me you
+would remember what I said. I ask you to do so now--to remember that I
+urged you not to be away too long. I believe you ought to come back now,
+though I know Bessy will not ask you to. I am writing without her
+knowledge, but with the conviction that she needs you, though perhaps
+without knowing it herself...."
+
+She paused, and laid down her pen. Why did it make her so happy to write
+to him? Was it merely the sense of recovered helpfulness, or something
+warmer, more personal, that made it a joy to trace his name, and to
+remind him of their last intimate exchange of words? Well--perhaps it
+was that too. There were moments when she was so mortally lonely that
+any sympathetic contact with another life sent a glow into her
+veins--that she was thankful to warm herself at any fire.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+BESSY, languidly glancing through her midday mail some five days later,
+uttered a slight exclamation as she withdrew her finger-tip from the
+flap of the envelope she had begun to open.
+
+It was a black sleety day, with an east wind bowing the trees beyond the
+drenched window-panes, and the two friends, after luncheon, had
+withdrawn to the library, where Justine sat writing notes for Bessy,
+while the latter lay back in her arm-chair, in the state of dreamy
+listlessness into which she always sank when not under the stimulus of
+amusement or exercise.
+
+She sat suddenly upright as her eyes fell on the letter.
+
+"I beg your pardon! I thought it was for me," she said, holding it out
+to Justine.
+
+The latter reddened as she glanced at the superscription. It had not
+occurred to her that Amherst would reply to her appeal: she had pictured
+him springing on the first north-bound train, perhaps not even pausing
+to announce his return to his wife.... And to receive his letter under
+Bessy's eye was undeniably embarrassing, since Justine felt the
+necessity of keeping her intervention secret.
+
+But under Bessy's eye she certainly was--it continued to rest on her
+curiously, speculatively, with an under-gleam of malicious significance.
+
+"So stupid of me--I can't imagine why I should have expected my husband
+to write to me!" Bessy went on, leaning back in lazy contemplation of
+her other letters, but still obliquely including Justine in her angle of
+vision.
+
+The latter, after a moment's pause, broke the seal and read.
+
+
+     "Millfield, Georgia.
+     "My dear Miss Brent,
+
+     "Your letter reached me yesterday and I have thought it over
+     carefully. I appreciate the feeling that prompted it--but I don't
+     know that any friend, however kind and discerning, can give the
+     final advice in such matters. You tell me you are sure my wife will
+     not ask me to return--well, under present conditions that seems to
+     me a sufficient reason for staying away.
+
+     "Meanwhile, I assure you that I have remembered all you said to me
+     that day. I have made no binding arrangement here--nothing to
+     involve my future action--and I have done this solely because you
+     asked it. This will tell you better than words how much I value
+     your advice, and what strong reasons I must have for not following
+     it now.
+
+     "I suppose there are no more exploring parties in this weather. I
+     wish I could show Cicely some of the birds down here.
+
+     "Yours faithfully,
+     "John Amherst.
+
+     "Please don't let my wife ride Impulse."
+
+
+Latent under Justine's acute consciousness of what this letter meant,
+was the sense of Bessy's inferences and conjectures. She could feel them
+actually piercing the page in her hand like some hypersensitive visual
+organ to which matter offers no obstruction. Or rather, baffled in their
+endeavour, they were evoking out of the unseen, heaven knew what
+fantastic structure of intrigue--scrawling over the innocent page with
+burning evidences of perfidy and collusion....
+
+One thing became instantly clear to her: she must show the letter to
+Bessy. She ran her eyes over it again, trying to disentangle the
+consequences. There was the allusion to their talk in town--well, she
+had told Bessy of that! But the careless reference to their woodland
+excursions--what might not Bessy, in her present mood, make of it?
+Justine's uppermost thought was of distress at the failure of her plan.
+Perhaps she might still have induced Amherst to come back, had it not
+been for this accident; but now that hope was destroyed.
+
+She raised her eyes and met Bessy's. "Will you read it?" she said,
+holding out the letter.
+
+Bessy received it with lifted brows, and a protesting murmur--but as she
+read, Justine saw the blood mount under her clear skin, invade the
+temples, the nape, even the little flower-like ears; then it receded as
+suddenly, ebbing at last from the very lips, so that the smile with
+which she looked up from her reading was as white as if she had been
+under the stress of physical pain.
+
+"So you have written my husband to come back?"
+
+"As you see."
+
+Bessy looked her straight in the eyes. "I am very much obliged to
+you--extremely obliged!"
+
+Justine met the look quietly. "Which means that you resent my
+interference----"
+
+"Oh, I leave you to call it that!" Bessy mocked, tossing the letter down
+on the table at her side.
+
+"Bessy! Don't take it in that way. If I made a mistake I did so with the
+hope of helping you. How can I stand by, after all these months
+together, and see you deliberately destroying your life without trying
+to stop you?"
+
+The smile withered on Bessy's lips. "It is very dear and good of you--I
+know you're never happy unless you're helping people--but in this case I
+can only repeat what my husband says. He and I don't often look at
+things in the same light--but I quite agree with him that the management
+of such matters is best left to--to the persons concerned."
+
+Justine hesitated. "I might answer that, if you take that view, it was
+inconsistent of you to talk with me so openly. You've certainly made me
+feel that you wanted help--you've turned to me for it. But perhaps that
+does not justify my writing to Mr. Amherst without your knowing it."
+
+Bessy laughed. "Ah, my dear, you knew that if you asked me the letter
+would never be sent!"
+
+"Perhaps I did," said Justine simply. "I was trying to help you against
+your will."
+
+"Well, you see the result." Bessy laid a derisive touch on the letter.
+"Do you understand now whose fault it is if I am alone?"
+
+Justine faced her steadily. "There is nothing in Mr. Amherst's letter to
+make me change my opinion. I still think it lies with you to bring him
+back."
+
+Bessy raised a glittering face to her--all hardness and laughter. "Such
+modesty, my dear! As if I had a chance of succeeding where you failed!"
+
+She sprang up, brushing the curls from her temples with a petulant
+gesture. "Don't mind me if I'm cross--but I've had a dose of preaching
+from Maria Ansell, and I don't know why my friends should treat me like
+a puppet without any preferences of my own, and press me upon a man who
+has done his best to show that he doesn't want me. As a matter of fact,
+he and I are luckily agreed on that point too--and I'm afraid all the
+good advice in the world won't persuade us to change our opinion!"
+
+Justine held her ground. "If I believed that of either of you, I
+shouldn't have written--I should not be pleading with you now--And Mr.
+Amherst doesn't believe it either," she added, after a pause, conscious
+of the risk she was taking, but thinking the words might act like a blow
+in the face of a person sinking under a deadly narcotic.
+
+Bessy's smile deepened to a sneer. "I see you've talked me over
+thoroughly--and on _his_ views I ought perhaps not to have risked an
+opinion----"
+
+"We have not talked you over," Justine exclaimed. "Mr. Amherst could
+never talk of you...in the way you think...." And under the light
+staccato of Bessy's laugh she found resolution to add: "It is not in
+that way that I know what he feels."
+
+"Ah? I should be curious to hear, then----"
+
+Justine turned to the letter, which still lay between them. "Will you
+read the last sentence again? The postscript, I mean."
+
+Bessy, after a surprised glance at her, took the letter up with the
+deprecating murmur of one who acts under compulsion rather than dispute
+about a trifle.
+
+"The postscript? Let me see...'Don't let my wife ride Impulse.'--_Et
+puis?_" she murmured, dropping the page again.
+
+"Well, does it tell you nothing? It's a cold letter--at first I thought
+so--the letter of a man who believes himself deeply hurt--so deeply that
+he will make no advance, no sign of relenting. That's what I thought
+when I first read it...but the postscript undoes it all."
+
+Justine, as she spoke, had drawn near Bessy, laying a hand on her arm,
+and shedding on her the radiance of a face all charity and sweet
+compassion. It was her rare gift, at such moments, to forget her own
+relation to the person for whose fate she was concerned, to cast aside
+all consciousness of criticism and distrust in the heart she strove to
+reach, as pitiful people forget their physical timidity in the attempt
+to help a wounded animal.
+
+For a moment Bessy seemed to waver. The colour flickered faintly up her
+cheek, her long lashes drooped--she had the tenderest lids!--and all her
+face seemed melting under the beams of Justine's ardour. But the letter
+was still in her hand--her eyes, in sinking, fell upon it, and she
+sounded beneath her breath the fatal phrase: "'I have done this solely
+because you asked it.'
+
+"After such a tribute to your influence I don't wonder you feel
+competent to set everybody's affairs in order! But take my advice, my
+dear--_don't_ ask me not to ride Impulse!"
+
+The pity froze on Justine's lip: she shrank back cut to the quick. For a
+moment the silence between the two women rang with the flight of arrowy,
+wounding thoughts; then Bessy's anger flagged, she gave one of her
+embarrassed half-laughs, and turning back, laid a deprecating touch on
+her friend's arm.
+
+"I didn't mean that, Justine...but let us not talk now--I can't!"
+
+Justine did not move: the reaction could not come as quickly in her
+case. But she turned on Bessy two eyes full of pardon, full of
+speechless pity...and Bessy received the look silently before she moved
+to the door and went out.
+
+"Oh, poor thing--poor thing!" Justine gasped as the door closed.
+
+She had already forgotten her own hurt--she was alone again with Bessy's
+sterile pain. She stood staring before her for a moment--then her eyes
+fell on Amherst's letter, which had fluttered to the floor between them.
+The fatal letter! If it had not come at that unlucky moment perhaps she
+might still have gained her end.... She picked it up and re-read it.
+Yes--there were phrases in it that a wounded suspicious heart might
+misconstrue.... Yet Bessy's last words had absolved her.... Why had she
+not answered them? Why had she stood there dumb? The blow to her pride
+had been too deep, had been dealt too unexpectedly--for one miserable
+moment she had thought first of herself! Ah, that importunate,
+irrepressible self--the _moi haissable_ of the Christian--if only one
+could tear it from one's breast! She had missed an opportunity--her last
+opportunity perhaps! By this time, even, a hundred hostile influences,
+cold whispers of vanity, of selfishness, of worldly pride, might have
+drawn their freezing ring about Bessy's heart....
+
+Justine started up to follow her...then paused, recalling her last
+words. "Let us not talk now--I can't!" She had no right to intrude on
+that bleeding privacy--if the chance had been hers she had lost it. She
+dropped back into her seat at the desk, hiding her face in her hands.
+
+Presently she heard the clock strike, and true to her tireless instinct
+of activity, she lifted her head, took up her pen, and went on with the
+correspondence she had dropped.... It was hard at first to collect her
+thoughts, or even to summon to her pen the conventional phrases that
+sufficed for most of the notes. Groping for a word, she pushed aside her
+writing and stared out at the sallow frozen landscape framed by the
+window at which she sat. The sleet had ceased, and hollows of sunless
+blue showed through the driving wind-clouds. A hard sky and a hard
+ground--frost-bound ringing earth under rigid ice-mailed trees.
+
+As Justine looked out, shivering a little, she saw a woman's figure
+riding down the avenue toward the gate. The figure disappeared behind a
+clump of evergreens--showed again farther down, through the boughs of a
+skeleton beech--and revealed itself in the next open space as
+Bessy--Bessy in the saddle on a day of glaring frost, when no horse
+could keep his footing out of a walk!
+
+Justine went to the window and strained her eyes for a confirming
+glimpse. Yes--it was Bessy! There was no mistaking that light flexible
+figure, every line swaying true to the beat of the horse's stride. But
+Justine remembered that Bessy had not meant to ride--had countermanded
+her horse because of the bad going.... Well, she was a perfect
+horsewoman and had no doubt chosen her surest-footed mount...probably
+the brown cob, Tony Lumpkin.
+
+But when did Tony's sides shine so bright through the leafless branches?
+And when did he sweep his rider on with such long free play of the
+hind-quarters? Horse and rider shot into sight again, rounding the curve
+of the avenue near the gates, and in a break of sunlight Justine saw the
+glitter of chestnut flanks--and remembered that Impulse was the only
+chestnut in the stables....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She went back to her seat and continued writing. Bessy had left a
+formidable heap of bills and letters; and when this was demolished,
+Justine had her own correspondence to despatch. She had heard that
+morning from the matron of Saint Elizabeth's: an interesting "case" was
+offered her, but she must come within two days. For the first few hours
+she had wavered, loath to leave Lynbrook without some definite light on
+her friend's future; but now Amherst's letter had shed that light--or
+rather, had deepened the obscurity--and she had no pretext for lingering
+on where her uselessness had been so amply demonstrated.
+
+She wrote to the matron accepting the engagement; and the acceptance
+involved the writing of other letters, the general reorganizing of that
+minute polity, the life of Justine Brent. She smiled a little to think
+how easily she could be displaced and transplanted--how slender were her
+material impedimenta, how few her invisible bonds! She was as light and
+detachable as a dead leaf on the autumn breeze--yet she was in the
+season of sap and flower, when there is life and song in the trees!
+
+But she did not think long of herself, for an undefinable anxiety ran
+through her thoughts like a black thread. It found expression, now and
+then, in the long glances she threw through the window--in her rising to
+consult the clock and compare her watch with it--in a nervous snatch of
+humming as she paced the room once or twice before going back to her
+desk....
+
+Why was Bessy so late? Dusk was falling already--the early end of the
+cold slate-hued day. But Bessy always rode late--there was always a
+rational answer to Justine's irrational conjectures.... It was the sight
+of those chestnut flanks that tormented her--she knew of Bessy's
+previous struggles with the mare. But the indulging of idle
+apprehensions was not in her nature, and when the tea-tray came, and
+with it Cicely, sparkling from a gusty walk, and coral-pink in her cloud
+of crinkled hair, Justine sprang up and cast off her cares.
+
+It cost her a pang, again, to see the lamps lit and the curtains
+drawn--shutting in the warmth and brightness of the house from that
+wind-swept frozen twilight through which Bessy rode alone. But the icy
+touch of the thought slipped from Justine's mind as she bent above the
+tea-tray, gravely measuring Cicely's milk into a "grown-up" teacup,
+hearing the confidential details of the child's day, and capping them
+with banter and fantastic narrative.
+
+She was not sorry to go--ah, no! The house had become a prison to her,
+with ghosts walking its dreary floors. But to lose Cicely would be
+bitter--she had not felt how bitter till the child pressed against her
+in the firelight, insisting raptly, with little sharp elbows stabbing
+her knee: "And _then_ what happened, Justine?"
+
+The door opened, and some one came in to look at the fire. Justine,
+through the mazes of her fairy-tale, was dimly conscious that it was
+Knowles, and not one of the footmen...the proud Knowles, who never
+mended the fires himself.... As he passed out again, hovering slowly
+down the long room, she rose, leaving Cicely on the hearth-rug, and
+followed him to the door.
+
+"Has Mrs. Amherst not come in?" she asked, not knowing why she wished to
+ask it out of the child's hearing.
+
+"No, miss. I looked in myself to see--thinking she might have come by
+the side-door."
+
+"She may have gone to her sitting-room."
+
+"She's not upstairs."
+
+They both paused. Then Justine said: "What horse was she riding?"
+
+"Impulse, Miss." The butler looked at his large responsible watch. "It's
+not late--" he said, more to himself than to her.
+
+"No. Has she been riding Impulse lately?"
+
+"No, Miss. Not since that day the mare nearly had her off. I understood
+Mr. Amherst did not wish it."
+
+Justine went back to Cicely and the fairy-tale.--As she took up the
+thread of the Princess's adventures, she asked herself why she had ever
+had any hope of helping Bessy. The seeds of disaster were in the poor
+creature's soul.... Even when she appeared to be moved, lifted out of
+herself, her escaping impulses were always dragged back to the magnetic
+centre of hard distrust and resistance that sometimes forms the core of
+soft-fibred natures. As she had answered her husband's previous appeal
+by her flight to the woman he disliked, so she answered this one by
+riding the horse he feared.... Justine's last illusions crumbled. The
+distance between two such natures was unspannable. Amherst had done well
+to remain away...and with a tidal rush her sympathies swept back to his
+side....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The governess came to claim Cicely. One of the footmen came to put
+another log on the fire. Then the rite of removing the tea-table was
+majestically performed--the ceremonial that had so often jarred on
+Amherst's nerves. As she watched it, Justine had a vague sense of the
+immutability of the household routine--a queer awed feeling that,
+whatever happened, a machine so perfectly adjusted would work on
+inexorably, like a natural law....
+
+She rose to look out of the window, staring vainly into blackness
+between the parted curtains. As she turned back, passing the
+writing-table, she noticed that Cicely's irruption had made her forget
+to post her letters--an unusual oversight. A glance at the clock told
+her that she was not too late for the mail--reminding her, at the same
+time, that it was scarcely three hours since Bessy had started on her
+ride.... She saw the foolishness of her fears. Even in winter, Bessy
+often rode for more than three hours; and now that the days were growing
+longer----
+
+Suddenly reassured, Justine went out into the hall, intending to carry
+her batch of letters to the red pillar-box by the door. As she did so, a
+cold blast struck her. Could it be that for once the faultless routine
+of the house had been relaxed, that one of the servants had left the
+outer door ajar? She walked over to the vestibule--yes, both doors were
+wide. The night rushed in on a vicious wind. As she pushed the vestibule
+door shut, she heard the dogs sniffing and whining on the threshold. She
+crossed the vestibule, and heard voices and the tramping of feet in the
+darkness--then saw a lantern gleam. Suddenly Knowles shot out of the
+night--the lantern struck on his bleached face.
+
+Justine, stepping back, pressed the electric button in the wall, and the
+wide door-step was abruptly illuminated, with its huddled, pushing,
+heavily-breathing group...black figures writhing out of darkness,
+strange faces distorted in the glare.
+
+"Bessy!" she cried, and sprang forward; but suddenly Wyant was before
+her, his hand on her arm; and as the dreadful group struggled by into
+the hall, he froze her to him with a whisper: "The spine----"
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+WITHIN Justine there was a moment's darkness; then, like terror-struck
+workers rallying to their tasks, every faculty was again at its post,
+receiving and transmitting signals, taking observations, anticipating
+orders, making her brain ring with the hum of a controlled activity.
+
+She had known the sensation before--the transmuting of terror and pity
+into this miraculous lucidity of thought and action; but never had it
+snatched her from such depths. Oh, thank heaven for her knowledge
+now--for the trained mind that could take command of her senses and bend
+them firmly to its service!
+
+Wyant seconded her well, after a moment's ague-fit of fear. She pitied
+and pardoned the moment, aware of its cause, and respecting him for the
+way in which he rose above it into the clear air of professional
+self-command. Through the first hours they worked shoulder to shoulder,
+conscious of each other only as of kindred will-powers, stretched to the
+utmost tension of discernment and activity, and hardly needing speech or
+look to further their swift co-operation. It was thus that she had known
+him in the hospital, in the heat of his youthful zeal: the doctor she
+liked best to work with, because no other so tempered ardour with
+judgment.
+
+The great surgeon, arriving from town at midnight, confirmed his
+diagnosis: there was undoubted injury to the spine. Other consultants
+were summoned in haste, and in the winter dawn the verdict was
+pronounced--a fractured vertebra, and possibly lesion of the cord....
+
+Justine got a moment alone when the surgeons returned to the sick-room.
+Other nurses were there now, capped, aproned, quickly and silently
+unpacking their appliances.... She must call a halt, clear her brain
+again, decide rapidly what was to be done next.... Oh, if only the
+crawling hours could bring Amherst! It was strange that there was no
+telegram yet--no, not strange, after all, since it was barely six in the
+morning, and her message had not been despatched till seven the night
+before. It was not unlikely that, in that little southern settlement,
+the telegraph office closed at six.
+
+She stood in Bessy's sitting-room, her forehead pressed to the
+window-pane, her eyes straining out into the thin February darkness,
+through which the morning star swam white. As soon as she had yielded
+her place to the other nurses her nervous tension relaxed, and she hung
+again above the deeps of anguish, terrified and weak. In a moment the
+necessity for action would snatch her back to a firm footing--her
+thoughts would clear, her will affirm itself, all the wheels of the
+complex machine resume their functions. But now she felt only the
+horror....
+
+She knew so well what was going on in the next room. Dr. Garford, the
+great surgeon, who had known her at Saint Elizabeth's, had evidently
+expected her to take command of the nurses he had brought from town;
+but there were enough without her, and there were other cares which, for
+the moment, she only could assume--the despatching of messages to the
+scattered family, the incessant telephoning and telegraphing to town,
+the general guidance of the household swinging rudderless in the tide of
+disaster. Cicely, above all, must be watched over and guarded from
+alarm. The little governess, reduced to a twittering heap of fears, had
+been quarantined in a distant room till reason returned to her; and the
+child, meanwhile, slept quietly in the old nurse's care.
+
+Cicely would wake presently, and Justine must go up to her with a bright
+face; other duties would press thick on the heels of this; their feet
+were already on the threshold. But meanwhile she could only follow in
+imagination what was going on in the other room....
+
+She had often thought with dread of such a contingency. She always
+sympathized too much with her patients--she knew it was the joint in her
+armour. Her quick-gushing pity lay too near that professional exterior
+which she had managed to endue with such a bright glaze of insensibility
+that some sentimental patients--without much the matter--had been known
+to call her "a little hard." How, then, should she steel herself if it
+fell to her lot to witness a cruel accident to some one she loved, and
+to have to perform a nurse's duties, steadily, expertly, unflinchingly,
+while every fibre was torn with inward anguish?
+
+She knew the horror of it now--and she knew also that her self-enforced
+exile from the sick-room was a hundred times worse. To stand there,
+knowing, with each tick of the clock, what was being said and done
+within--how the great luxurious room, with its pale draperies and
+scented cushions, and the hundred pretty trifles strewing the lace
+toilet-table and the delicate old furniture, was being swept bare,
+cleared for action like a ship's deck, drearily garnished with rows of
+instruments, rolls of medicated cotton, oiled silk, bottles, bandages,
+water-pillows--all the grim paraphernalia of the awful rites of pain: to
+know this, and to be able to call up with torturing vividness that poor
+pale face on the pillows, vague-eyed, expressionless, perhaps, as she
+had last seen it, or--worse yet--stirred already with the first creeping
+pangs of consciousness: to have these images slowly, deliberately burn
+themselves into her brain, and to be aware, at the same time, of that
+underlying moral disaster, of which the accident seemed the monstrous
+outward symbol--ah, this was worse than anything she had ever dreamed!
+
+She knew that the final verdict could not be pronounced till the
+operation which was about to take place should reveal the extent of
+injury to the spine. Bessy, in falling, must have struck on the back of
+her head and shoulders, and it was but too probable that the fractured
+vertebra had caused a bruise if not a lesion of the spinal cord. In that
+case paralysis was certain--and a slow crawling death the almost
+inevitable outcome. There had been cases, of course--Justine's
+professional memory evoked them--cases of so-called "recovery," where
+actual death was kept at bay, a semblance of life preserved for years in
+the poor petrified body.... But the mind shrank from such a fate for
+Bessy. And it might still be that the injury to the spine was not
+grave--though, here again, the fracturing of the fourth vertebra was
+ominous.
+
+The door opened and some one came from the inner room--Wyant, in search
+of an instrument-case. Justine turned and they looked at each other.
+
+"It will be now?"
+
+"Yes. Dr. Garford asked if there was no one you could send for."
+
+"No one but Mr. Tredegar and the Halford Gaineses. They'll be here this
+evening, I suppose."
+
+They exchanged a discouraged glance, knowing how little difference the
+presence of the Halford Gaineses would make.
+
+"He wanted to know if there was no telegram from Amherst."
+
+"No."
+
+"Then they mean to begin."
+
+A nursemaid appeared in the doorway. "Miss Cicely--" she said; and
+Justine bounded upstairs.
+
+The day's work had begun. From Cicely to the governess--from the
+governess to the housekeeper--from the telephone to the
+writing-table--Justine vibrated back and forth, quick, noiseless,
+self-possessed--sobering, guiding, controlling her confused and
+panic-stricken world. It seemed to her that half the day had elapsed
+before the telegraph office at Lynbrook opened--she was at the telephone
+at the stroke of the hour. No telegram? Only one--a message from Halford
+Gaines--"Arrive at eight tonight." Amherst was still silent! Was there a
+difference of time to be allowed for? She tried to remember, to
+calculate, but her brain was too crowded with other thoughts.... She
+turned away from the instrument discouraged.
+
+Whenever she had time to think, she was overwhelmed by the weight of her
+solitude. Mr. Langhope was in Egypt, accessible only through a London
+banker--Mrs. Ansell presumably wandering on the continent. Her cables
+might not reach them for days. And among the throng of Lynbrook
+habitues, she knew not to whom to turn. To loose the Telfer tribe and
+Mrs. Carbury upon that stricken house--her thought revolted from it, and
+she was thankful to know that February had dispersed their migratory
+flock to southern shores. But if only Amherst would come!
+
+Cicely and the tranquillized governess had been despatched on a walk
+with the dogs, and Justine was returning upstairs when she met one of
+the servants with a telegram. She tore it open with a great throb of
+relief. It was her own message to Amherst--_address unknown_....
+
+Had she misdirected it, then? In that first blinding moment her mind
+might so easily have failed her. But no--there was the name of the town
+before her...Millfield, Georgia...the same name as in his letter.... She
+had made no mistake, but he was gone! Gone--and without leaving an
+address.... For a moment her tired mind refused to work; then she roused
+herself, ran down the stairs again, and rang up the telegraph-office.
+The thing to do, of course, was to telegraph to the owner of the
+mills--of whose very name she was ignorant!--enquiring where Amherst
+was, and asking him to forward the message. Precious hours must be lost
+meanwhile--but, after all, they were waiting for no one upstairs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The verdict had been pronounced: dislocation and fracture of the fourth
+vertebra, with consequent injury to the spinal cord. Dr. Garford and
+Wyant came out alone to tell her. The surgeon ran over the technical
+details, her brain instantly at attention as he developed his diagnosis
+and issued his orders. She asked no questions as to the future--she
+knew it was impossible to tell. But there were no immediate signs of a
+fatal ending: the patient had rallied well, and the general conditions
+were not unfavourable.
+
+"You have heard from Mr. Amherst?" Dr. Garford concluded.
+
+"Not yet...he may be travelling," Justine faltered, unwilling to say
+that her telegram had been returned. As she spoke there was a tap on the
+door, and a folded paper was handed in--a telegram telephoned from the
+village.
+
+"Amherst gone South America to study possibilities cotton growing have
+cabled our correspondent Buenos Ayres."
+
+Concealment was no longer possible. Justine handed the message to the
+surgeon.
+
+"Ah--and there would be no chance of finding his address among Mrs.
+Amherst's papers?"
+
+"I think not--no."
+
+"Well--we must keep her alive, Wyant."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At dusk, Justine sat in the library, waiting for Cicely to be brought to
+her. A lull had descended on the house--a new order developed out of the
+morning's chaos. With soundless steps, with lowered voices, the
+machinery of life was carried on. And Justine, caught in one of the
+pauses of inaction which she had fought off since morning, was reliving,
+for the hundredth time, her few moments at Bessy's bedside....
+
+She had been summoned in the course of the afternoon, and stealing into
+the darkened room, had bent over the bed while the nurses noiselessly
+withdrew. There lay the white face which had been burnt into her inward
+vision--the motionless body, and the head stirring ceaselessly, as
+though to release the agitation of the imprisoned limbs. Bessy's eyes
+turned to her, drawing her down.
+
+"Am I going to die, Justine?"
+
+"No."
+
+"The pain is...so awful...."
+
+"It will pass...you will sleep...."
+
+"Cicely----"
+
+"She has gone for a walk. You'll see her presently."
+
+The eyes faded, releasing Justine. She stole away, and the nurses came
+back.
+
+Bessy had spoken of Cicely--but not a word of her husband! Perhaps her
+poor dazed mind groped for him, or perhaps it shrank from his name....
+Justine was thankful for her silence. For the moment her heart was
+bitter against Amherst. Why, so soon after her appeal and his answer,
+had he been false to the spirit of their agreement? This unannounced,
+unexplained departure was nothing less than a breach of his tacit
+pledge--the pledge not to break definitely with Lynbrook. And why had he
+gone to South America? She drew her aching brows together, trying to
+retrace a vague memory of some allusion to the cotton-growing
+capabilities of the region.... Yes, he had spoken of it once in talking
+of the world's area of cotton production. But what impulse had sent him
+off on such an exploration? Mere unrest, perhaps--the intolerable burden
+of his useless life? The questions spun round and round in her head,
+weary, profitless, yet persistent....
+
+It was a relief when Cicely came--a relief to measure out the cambric
+tea, to make the terrier beg for ginger-bread, even to take up the
+thread of the interrupted fairy-tale--though through it all she was
+wrung by the thought that, just twenty-four hours earlier, she and the
+child had sat in the same place, listening for the trot of Bessy's
+horse....
+
+The day passed: the hands of the clocks moved, food was cooked and
+served, blinds were drawn up or down, lamps lit and fires renewed...all
+these tokens of the passage of time took place before her, while her
+real consciousness seemed to hang in some dim central void, where
+nothing happened, nothing would ever happen....
+
+And now Cicely was in bed, the last "long-distance" call was answered,
+the last orders to kitchen and stable had been despatched, Wyant had
+stolen down to her with his hourly report--"no change"--and she was
+waiting in the library for the Gaineses.
+
+Carriage-wheels on the gravel: they were there at last. Justine started up
+and went into the hall. As she passed out of the library the outer door
+opened, and the gusty night swooped in--as, at the same hour the day
+before, it had swooped in ahead of the dreadful procession--preceding now
+the carriageful of Hanaford relations: Mr. Gaines, red-glazed, brief and
+interrogatory; Westy, small, nervous, ill at ease with his grief; and Mrs.
+Gaines, supreme in the possession of a consolatory yet funereal manner,
+and sinking on Justine's breast with the solemn whisper: "Have you sent
+for the clergyman?"
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+THE house was empty again.
+
+A week had passed since Bessy's accident, and friends and relations had
+dispersed. The household had fallen into its routine, the routine of
+sickness and silence, and once more the perfectly-adjusted machine was
+working on steadily, inexorably, like a natural law....
+
+So at least it seemed to Justine's nerves, intolerably stretched, at
+times, on the rack of solitude, of suspense, of forebodings. She had
+been thankful when the Gaineses left--doubly thankful when a telegram
+from Bermuda declared Mrs. Carbury to be "in despair" at her inability
+to fly to Bessy's side--thankful even that Mr. Tredegar's professional
+engagements made it impossible for him to do more than come down, every
+second or third day, for a few hours; yet, though in some ways it was a
+relief to be again in sole command, there were moments when the weight
+of responsibility, and the inability to cry out her fears and her
+uncertainties, seemed almost unendurable.
+
+Wyant was her chief reliance. He had risen so gallantly above his
+weakness, become again so completely the indefatigable worker of former
+days, that she accused herself of injustice in ascribing to physical
+causes the vague eye and tremulous hand which might merely have
+betokened a passing access of nervous sensibility. Now, at any rate, he
+had his nerves so well under control, and had shown such a grasp of the
+case, and such marked executive capacity, that on the third day after
+the accident Dr. Garford, withdrawing his own assistant, had left him in
+control at Lynbrook.
+
+At the same time Justine had taken up her attendance in the sick-room,
+replacing one of the subordinate nurses who had been suddenly called
+away. She had done this the more willingly because Bessy, who was now
+conscious for the greater part of the time, had asked for her once or
+twice, and had seemed easier when she was in the room. But she still
+gave only occasional aid, relieving the other nurses when they dined or
+rested, but keeping herself partly free in order to have an eye on the
+household, and give a few hours daily to Cicely.
+
+All this had become part of a system that already seemed as old as
+memory. She could hardly recall what life had been before the
+accident--the seven dreadful days seemed as long as the days of
+creation. Every morning she rose to the same report--"no change"--and
+every day passed without a word from Amherst. Minor news, of course, had
+come: poor Mr. Langhope, at length overtaken at Wady Halfa, was
+hastening back as fast as ship and rail could carry him; Mrs. Ansell,
+anchored at Algiers with her invalid, cabled anxious enquiries; but
+still no word from Amherst. The correspondent at Buenos Ayres had simply
+cabled "Not here. Will enquire"--and since then, silence.
+
+Justine had taken to sitting in a small room beyond Amherst's bedroom,
+near enough to Bessy to be within call, yet accessible to the rest of
+the household. The walls were hung with old prints, and with two or
+three photographs of early Italian pictures; and in a low bookcase
+Amherst had put the books he had brought from Hanaford--the English
+poets, the Greek dramatists, some text-books of biology and kindred
+subjects, and a few stray well-worn volumes: Lecky's European Morals,
+Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm Meister, Seneca, Epictetus, a German
+grammar, a pocket Bacon.
+
+It was unlike any other room at Lynbrook--even through her benumbing
+misery, Justine felt the relief of escaping there from the rest of the
+great soulless house. Sometimes she took up one of the books and read a
+page or two, letting the beat of the verse lull her throbbing brain, or
+the strong words of stoic wisdom sink into her heart. And even when
+there was no time for these brief flights from reality, it soothed her
+to feel herself in the presence of great thoughts--to know that in this
+room, among these books, another restless baffled mind had sought escape
+from the "dusty answer" of life. Her hours there made her think less
+bitterly of Amherst--but also, alas, made her see more clearly the
+irreconcilable difference between the two natures she had striven to
+reunite. That which was the essence of life to one was a meaningless
+shadow to the other; and the gulf between them was too wide for the
+imagination of either to bridge.
+
+As she sat there on the seventh afternoon there was a knock on the door
+and Wyant entered. She had only time to notice that he was very
+pale--she had been struck once or twice with his look of sudden
+exhaustion, which passed as quickly as it came--then she saw that he
+carried a telegram, and her mind flew back to its central anxiety. She
+grew pale herself as she read the message.
+
+"He has been found--at Corrientes. It will take him at least a month to
+get here."
+
+"A month--good God!"
+
+"And it may take Mr. Langhope longer." Their eyes met. "It's too
+long----?" she asked.
+
+"I don't know--I don't know." He shivered slightly, turning away into
+the window.
+
+Justine sat down to dash off messages to Mr. Tredegar and the Gaineses:
+Amherst's return must be made known at once. When she glanced up, Wyant
+was standing near her. His air of intense weariness had passed, and he
+looked calm and ready for action.
+
+"Shall I take these down?"
+
+"No. Ring, please. I want to ask you a few questions."
+
+The servant who answered the bell brought in a tea-tray, and Justine,
+having despatched the telegrams, seated herself and began to pour out
+her tea. Food had been repugnant to her during the first anguished
+unsettled days, but with the resumption of the nurse's systematic habits
+the nurse's punctual appetite returned. Every drop of energy must be
+husbanded now, and only sleep and nourishment could fill the empty
+cisterns.
+
+She held out a cup to Wyant, but he drew back with a gesture of
+aversion.
+
+"Thanks; I'm not hungry."
+
+"You ought to eat more."
+
+"No, no. I'm very well."
+
+She lifted her head, revived by the warm draught. The mechanical act of
+nourishment performed, her mind leapt back to the prospect of Amherst's
+return. A whole month before he reached Lynbrook! He had instructed her
+where news might find him on the way ... but a whole month to wait!
+
+She looked at Wyant, and they read each other's thoughts.
+
+"It's a long time," he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But Garford can do wonders--and she's very strong."
+
+Justine shuddered. Just so a skilled agent of the Inquisition might have
+spoken, calculating how much longer the power of suffering might be
+artificially preserved in a body broken on the wheel....
+
+"How does she seem to you today?"
+
+"The general conditions are about the same. The heart keeps up
+wonderfully, but there is a little more oppression of the diaphragm."
+
+"Yes--her breathing is harder. Last night she suffered horribly at
+times."
+
+"Oh--she'll suffer," Wyant murmured. "Of course the hypodermics can be
+increased."
+
+"Just what did Dr. Garford say this morning?"
+
+"He is astonished at her strength."
+
+"But there's no hope?--I don't know why I ask!"
+
+"Hope?" Wyant looked at her. "You mean of what's called recovery--of
+deferring death indefinitely?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"How can Garford tell--or any one? We all know there have been cases
+where such injury to the cord has not caused death. This may be one of
+those cases; but the biggest man couldn't say now."
+
+Justine hid her eyes. "What a fate!"
+
+"Recovery? Yes. Keeping people alive in such cases is one of the
+refinements of cruelty that it was left for Christianity to invent."
+
+"And yet--?"
+
+"And yet--it's got to be! Science herself says so--not for the patient,
+of course; but for herself--for unborn generations, rather. Queer, isn't
+it? The two creeds are at one."
+
+Justine murmured through her clasped hands: "I wish she were not so
+strong----"
+
+"Yes; it's wonderful what those frail petted bodies can stand. The fight
+is going to be a hard one."
+
+She rose with a shiver. "I must go to Cicely----" The rector of Saint
+Anne's had called again. Justine, in obedience to Mrs. Gaines's
+suggestion, had summoned him from Clifton the day after the accident;
+but, supported by the surgeons and Wyant, she had resisted his admission
+to the sick-room. Bessy's religious practices had been purely
+mechanical: her faith had never been associated with the graver moments
+of her life, and the apparition of a clerical figure at her bedside
+would portend not consolation but calamity. Since it was all-important
+that her nervous strength should be sustained, and the gravity of the
+situation kept from her, Mrs. Gaines yielded to the medical commands,
+consoled by the ready acquiescence of the rector. But before she left
+she extracted a promise that he would call frequently at Lynbrook, and
+wait his opportunity to say an uplifting word to Mrs. Amherst.
+
+The Reverend Ernest Lynde, who was a young man, with more zeal than
+experience, deemed it his duty to obey this injunction to the letter;
+but hitherto he had had to content himself with a talk with the
+housekeeper, or a brief word on the doorstep from Wyant. Today, however,
+he had asked somewhat insistently for Miss Brent; and Justine, who was
+free at the moment, felt that she could not refuse to go down. She had
+seen him only in the pulpit, when once or twice, in Bessy's absence, she
+had taken Cicely to church: he struck her as a grave young man, with a
+fine voice but halting speech. His sermons were earnest but ineffective.
+
+As he rose to meet her, she felt that she should like him better out of
+church. His glance was clear and honest, and there was sweetness in his
+hesitating smile.
+
+"I am sorry to seem persistent--but I heard you had news of Mr.
+Langhope, and I was anxious to know the particulars," he explained.
+
+Justine replied that her message had overtaken Mr. Langhope at Wady
+Haifa, and that he hoped to reach Alexandria in time to catch a steamer
+to Brindisi at the end of the week.
+
+"Not till then? So it will be almost three weeks--?"
+
+"As nearly as I can calculate, a month."
+
+The rector hesitated. "And Mr. Amherst?"
+
+"He is coming back too."
+
+"Ah, you have heard? I'm glad of that. He will be here soon?"
+
+"No. He is in South America--at Buenos Ayres. There will be no steamer
+for some days, and he may not get here till after Mr. Langhope."
+
+Mr. Lynde looked at her kindly, with grave eyes that proffered help.
+"This is terrible for you, Miss Brent."
+
+"Yes," Justine answered simply.
+
+"And Mrs. Amherst's condition----?"
+
+"It is about the same."
+
+"The doctors are hopeful?"
+
+"They have not lost hope."
+
+"She seems to keep her strength wonderfully."
+
+"Yes, wonderfully."
+
+Mr. Lynde paused, looking downward, and awkwardly turning his soft
+clerical hat in his large kind-looking hands. "One might almost see in
+it a dispensation--_we_ should see one, Miss Brent."
+
+"_We?_" She glanced up apologetically, not quite sure that her tired
+mind had followed his meaning.
+
+"We, I mean, who believe...that not one sparrow falls to the ground...."
+He flushed, and went on in a more mundane tone: "I am glad you have the
+hope of Mr. Langhope's arrival to keep you up. Modern science--thank
+heaven!--can do such wonders in sustaining and prolonging life that,
+even if there is little chance of recovery, the faint spark may be
+nursed until...."
+
+He paused again, conscious that the dusky-browed young woman, slenderly
+erect in her dark blue linen and nurse's cap, was examining him with an
+intentness which contrasted curiously with the absent-minded glance she
+had dropped on him in entering.
+
+"In such cases," she said in a low tone, "there is practically no chance
+of recovery."
+
+"So I understand."
+
+"Even if there were, it would probably be death-in-life: complete
+paralysis of the lower body."
+
+He shuddered. "A dreadful fate! She was so gay and active----"
+
+"Yes--and the struggle with death, for the next few weeks, must involve
+incessant suffering...frightful suffering...perhaps vainly...."
+
+"I feared so," he murmured, his kind face paling.
+
+"Then why do you thank heaven that modern science has found such
+wonderful ways of prolonging life?"
+
+He raised his head with a start and their eyes met. He saw that the
+nurse's face was pale and calm--almost judicial in its composure--and
+his self-possession returned to him.
+
+"As a Christian," he answered, with his slow smile, "I can hardly do
+otherwise."
+
+Justine continued to consider him thoughtfully. "The men of the older
+generation--clergymen, I mean," she went on in a low controlled voice,
+"would of course take that view--must take it. But the conditions are so
+changed--so many undreamed-of means of prolonging life--prolonging
+suffering--have been discovered and applied in the last few years, that
+I wondered...in my profession one often wonders...."
+
+"I understand," he rejoined sympathetically, forgetting his youth and
+his inexperience in the simple desire to bring solace to a troubled
+mind. "I understand your feeling--but you need have no doubt. Human
+life is sacred, and the fact that, even in this materialistic age,
+science is continually struggling to preserve and prolong it,
+shows--very beautifully, I think--how all things work together to
+fulfill the divine will."
+
+"Then you believe that the divine will delights in mere pain--mere
+meaningless animal suffering--for its own sake?"
+
+"Surely not; but for the sake of the spiritual life that may be
+mysteriously wrung out of it."
+
+Justine bent her puzzled brows on him. "I could understand that view of
+moral suffering--or even of physical pain moderate enough to leave the
+mind clear, and to call forth qualities of endurance and renunciation.
+But where the body has been crushed to a pulp, and the mind is no more
+than a machine for the registering of sense-impressions of physical
+anguish, of what use can such suffering be to its owner--or to the
+divine will?"
+
+The young rector looked at her sadly, almost severely. "There, Miss
+Brent, we touch on inscrutable things, and human reason must leave the
+answer to faith."
+
+Justine pondered. "So that--one may say--Christianity recognizes no
+exceptions--?"
+
+"None--none," its authorized exponent pronounced emphatically.
+
+"Then Christianity and science are agreed." She rose, and the young
+rector, with visible reluctance, stood up also.
+
+"That, again, is one of the most striking evidences--" he began; and
+then, as the necessity of taking leave was forced upon him, he added
+appealingly: "I understand your uncertainties, your questionings, and I
+wish I could have made my point clearer----"
+
+"Thank you; it is quite clear. The reasons, of course, are different;
+but the result is exactly the same."
+
+She held out her hand, smiling sadly on him, and with a sudden return of
+youth and self-consciousness, he murmured shyly: "I feel for you"--the
+man in him yearning over her loneliness, though the pastor dared not
+press his help....
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+THAT evening, when Justine took her place at the bedside, and the other
+two nurses had gone down to supper, Bessy turned her head slightly,
+resting her eyes on her friend.
+
+The rose-shaded lamp cast a tint of life on her face, and the dark
+circles of pain made her eyes look deeper and brighter. Justine was
+almost deceived by the delusive semblance of vitality, and a hope that
+was half anguish stirred in her. She sat down by the bed, clasping the
+hand on the sheet.
+
+"You feel better tonight?"
+
+"I breathe...better...." The words came brokenly, between long pauses,
+but without the hard agonized gasps of the previous night.
+
+"That's a good sign." Justine paused, and then, letting her fingers
+glide once or twice over the back of Bessy's hand--"You know, dear, Mr.
+Amherst is coming," she leaned down to say.
+
+Bessy's eyes moved again, slowly, inscrutably. She had never asked for
+her husband.
+
+"Soon?" she whispered.
+
+"He had started on a long journey--to out-of-the-way places--to study
+something about cotton growing--my message has just overtaken him,"
+Justine explained.
+
+Bessy lay still, her breast straining for breath. She remained so long
+without speaking that Justine began to think she was falling back into
+the somnolent state that intervened between her moments of complete
+consciousness. But at length she lifted her lids again, and her lips
+stirred.
+
+"He will be...long...coming?"
+
+"Some days."
+
+"How...many?"
+
+"We can't tell yet."
+
+Silence again. Bessy's features seemed to shrink into a kind of waxen
+quietude--as though her face were seen under clear water, a long way
+down. And then, as she lay thus, without sound or movement, two tears
+forced themselves through her lashes and rolled down her cheeks.
+
+Justine, bending close, wiped them away. "Bessy--"
+
+The wet lashes were raised--an anguished look met her gaze.
+
+"I--I can't bear it...."
+
+"What, dear?"
+
+"The pain.... Shan't I die...before?"
+
+"You may get well, Bessy."
+
+Justine felt her hand quiver. "Walk again...?"
+
+"Perhaps...not that."
+
+"_This?_ I can't bear it...." Her head drooped sideways, turning away
+toward the wall.
+
+Justine, that night, kept her vigil with an aching heart. The news of
+Amherst's return had produced no sign of happiness in his wife--- the
+tears had been forced from her merely by the dread of being kept alive
+during the long days of pain before he came. The medical explanation
+might have been that repeated crises of intense physical anguish, and
+the deep lassitude succeeding them, had so overlaid all other feelings,
+or at least so benumbed their expression, that it was impossible to
+conjecture how Bessy's little half-smothered spark of soul had really
+been affected by the news. But Justine did not believe in this argument.
+Her experience among the sick had convinced her, on the contrary, that
+the shafts of grief or joy will find a crack in the heaviest armour of
+physical pain, that the tiniest gleam of hope will light up depths of
+mental inanition, and somehow send a ray to the surface.... It was true
+that Bessy had never known how to bear pain, and that her own sensations
+had always formed the centre of her universe--yet, for that very reason,
+if the thought of seeing Amherst had made her happier it would have
+lifted, at least momentarily, the weight of death from her body.
+
+Justine, at first, had almost feared the contrary effect--feared that
+the moral depression might show itself in a lowering of physical
+resistance. But the body kept up its obstinate struggle against death,
+drawing strength from sources of vitality unsuspected in that frail
+envelope. The surgeon's report the next day was more favourable, and
+every day won from death pointed now to a faint chance of recovery.
+
+Such at least was Wyant's view. Dr. Garford and the consulting surgeons
+had not yet declared themselves; but the young doctor, strung to the
+highest point of watchfulness, and constantly in attendance on the
+patient, was tending toward a hopeful prognosis. The growing conviction
+spurred him to fresh efforts; at Dr. Garford's request, he had
+temporarily handed over his Clifton practice to a young New York doctor
+in need of change, and having installed himself at Lynbrook he gave up
+his days and nights to Mrs. Amherst's case.
+
+"If any one can save her, Wyant will," Dr. Garford had declared to
+Justine, when, on the tenth day after the accident, the surgeons held
+their third consultation. Dr. Garford reserved his own judgment. He had
+seen cases--they had all seen cases...but just at present the signs
+might point either way.... Meanwhile Wyant's confidence was an
+invaluable asset toward the patient's chances of recovery. Hopefulness
+in the physician was almost as necessary as in the patient--contact with
+such faith had been known to work miracles.
+
+Justine listened in silence, wishing that she too could hope. But
+whichever way the prognosis pointed, she felt only a dull despair. She
+believed no more than Dr. Garford in the chance of recovery--that
+conviction seemed to her a mirage of Wyant's imagination, of his boyish
+ambition to achieve the impossible--and every hopeful symptom pointed,
+in her mind, only to a longer period of useless suffering.
+
+Her hours at Bessy's side deepened her revolt against the energy spent
+in the fight with death. Since Bessy had learned that her husband was
+returning she had never, by sign or word, reverted to the fact. Except
+for a gleam of tenderness, now and then, when Cicely was brought to
+her, she seemed to have sunk back into herself, as though her poor
+little flicker of consciousness were wholly centred in the contemplation
+of its pain. It was not that her mind was clouded--only that it was
+immersed, absorbed, in that dread mystery of disproportionate anguish
+which a capricious fate had laid on it.... And what if she recovered, as
+they called it? If the flood-tide of pain should ebb, leaving her
+stranded, a helpless wreck on the desert shores of inactivity? What
+would life be to Bessy without movement? Thought would never set her
+blood flowing--motion, in her, could only take the form of the physical
+processes. Her love for Amherst was dead--even if it flickered into life
+again, it could but put the spark to smouldering discords and
+resentments; and would her one uncontaminated sentiment--her affection
+for Cicely--suffice to reconcile her to the desolate half-life which was
+the utmost that science could hold out?
+
+Here again, Justine's experience answered no. She did not believe in
+Bessy's powers of moral recuperation--her body seemed less near death
+than her spirit. Life had been poured out to her in generous measure,
+and she had spilled the precious draught--the few drops remaining in the
+cup could no longer renew her strength.
+
+Pity, not condemnation--profound illimitable pity--flowed from this
+conclusion of Justine's. To a compassionate heart there could be no
+sadder instance of the wastefulness of life than this struggle of the
+small half-formed soul with a destiny too heavy for its strength. If
+Bessy had had any moral hope to fight for, every pang of suffering would
+have been worth enduring; but it was intolerable to witness the
+spectacle of her useless pain.
+
+Incessant commerce with such thoughts made Justine, as the days passed,
+crave any escape from solitude, any contact with other ideas. Even the
+reappearance of Westy Gaines, bringing a breath of common-place
+conventional grief into the haunted silence of the house, was a respite
+from her questionings. If it was hard to talk to him, to answer his
+enquiries, to assent to his platitudes, it was harder, a thousand times,
+to go on talking to herself....
+
+Mr. Tredegar's coming was a distinct relief. His dryness was like
+cautery to her wound. Mr. Tredegar undoubtedly grieved for Bessy; but
+his grief struck inward, exuding only now and then, through the fissures
+of his hard manner, in a touch of extra solemnity, the more laboured
+rounding of a period. Yet, on the whole, it was to his feeling that
+Justine felt her own to be most akin. If his stoic acceptance of the
+inevitable proceeded from the resolve to spare himself pain, that at
+least was a form of strength, an indication of character. She had never
+cared for the fluencies of invertebrate sentiment.
+
+Now, on the evening of the day after her talk with Bessy, it was more
+than ever a solace to escape from the torment of her thoughts into the
+rarefied air of Mr. Tredegar's presence. The day had been a bad one for
+the patient, and Justine's distress had been increased by the receipt of
+a cable from Mr. Langhope, announcing that, owing to delay in reaching
+Brindisi, he had missed the fast steamer from Cherbourg, and would not
+arrive till four or five days later than he had expected. Mr. Tredegar,
+in response to her report, had announced his intention of coming down by
+a late train, and now he and Justine and Dr. Wyant, after dining
+together, were seated before the fire in the smoking-room.
+
+"I take it, then," Mr. Tredegar said, turning to Wyant, "that the
+chances of her living to see her father are very slight."
+
+The young doctor raised his head eagerly. "Not in my opinion, sir.
+Unless unforeseen complications arise, I can almost promise to keep her
+alive for another month--I'm not afraid to call it six weeks!"
+
+"H'm--Garford doesn't say so."
+
+"No; Dr. Garford argues from precedent."
+
+"And you?" Mr. Tredegar's thin lips were visited by the ghost of a
+smile.
+
+"Oh, I don't argue--I just feel my way," said Wyant imperturbably.
+
+"And yet you don't hesitate to predict----"
+
+"No, I don't, sir; because the case, as I see it, presents certain
+definite indications." He began to enumerate them, cleverly avoiding the
+use of technicalities and trying to make his point clear by the use of
+simple illustration and analogy. It sickened Justine to listen to his
+passionate exposition--she had heard it so often, she believed in it so
+little.
+
+Mr. Tredegar turned a probing glance on him as he ended. "Then, today
+even, you believe not only in the possibility of prolonging life, but of
+ultimate recovery?"
+
+Wyant hesitated. "I won't call it recovery--today. Say--life
+indefinitely prolonged."
+
+"And the paralysis?"
+
+"It might disappear--after a few months--or a few years."
+
+"Such an outcome would be unusual?"
+
+"Exceptional. But then there _are_ exceptions. And I'm straining every
+nerve to make this one!"
+
+"And the suffering--such as today's, for instance--is unavoidable?"
+
+"Unhappily."
+
+"And bound to increase?"
+
+"Well--as the anaesthetics lose their effect...."
+
+There was a tap on the door, and one of the nurses entered to report to
+Wyant. He went out with her, and Justine was left with Mr. Tredegar.
+
+He turned to her thoughtfully. "That young fellow seems sure of himself.
+You believe in him?"
+
+Justine hesitated. "Not in his expectation of recovery--no one does."
+
+"But you think they can keep the poor child alive till Langhope and her
+husband get back?"
+
+There was a moment's pause; then Justine murmured: "It can be done...I
+think...."
+
+"Yes--it's horrible," said Mr. Tredegar suddenly, as if in answer to her
+thought.
+
+She looked up in surprise, and saw his eye resting on her with what
+seemed like a mist of sympathy on its vitreous surface. Her lips
+trembled, parting as if for speech--but she looked away without
+answering.
+
+"These new devices for keeping people alive," Mr. Tredegar continued;
+"they increase the suffering besides prolonging it?"
+
+"Yes--in some cases."
+
+"In this case?"
+
+"I am afraid so."
+
+The lawyer drew out his fine cambric handkerchief, and furtively wiped a
+slight dampness from his forehead. "I wish to God she had been killed!"
+he said.
+
+Justine lifted her head again, with an answering exclamation. "Oh, yes!"
+
+"It's infernal--the time they can make it last."
+
+"It's useless!" Justine broke out.
+
+"Useless?" He turned his critical glance on her. "Well, that's beside
+the point--since it's inevitable."
+
+She wavered a moment--but his words had loosened the bonds about her
+heart, and she could not check herself so suddenly. "Why inevitable?"
+
+Mr. Tredegar looked at her in surprise, as though wondering at so
+unprofessional an utterance from one who, under ordinary circumstances,
+showed the absolute self-control and submission of the well-disciplined
+nurse.
+
+"Human life is sacred," he said sententiously.
+
+"Ah, that must have been decreed by some one who had never suffered!"
+Justine exclaimed.
+
+Mr. Tredegar smiled compassionately: he evidently knew how to make
+allowances for the fact that she was overwrought by the sight of her
+friend's suffering: "Society decreed it--not one person," he corrected.
+
+"Society--science--religion!" she murmured, as if to herself.
+
+"Precisely. It's the universal consensus--the result of the world's
+accumulated experience. Cruel in individual instances--necessary for the
+general welfare. Of course your training has taught you all this; but I
+can understand that at such a time...."
+
+"Yes," she said, rising wearily as Wyant came in.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her worst misery, now, was to have to discuss Bessy's condition with
+Wyant. To the young physician Bessy was no longer a suffering,
+agonizing creature: she was a case--a beautiful case. As the problem
+developed new intricacies, becoming more and more of a challenge to his
+faculties of observation and inference, Justine saw the abstract
+scientific passion supersede his personal feeling of pity. Though his
+professional skill made him exquisitely tender to the patient under his
+hands, he seemed hardly conscious that she was a woman who had
+befriended him, and whom he had so lately seen in the brightness of
+health and enjoyment. This view was normal enough--it was, as Justine
+knew, the ideal state of mind for the successful physician, in whom
+sympathy for the patient as an individual must often impede swift choice
+and unfaltering action. But what she shrank from was his resolve to save
+Bessy's life--a resolve fortified to the point of exasperation by the
+scepticism of the consulting surgeons, who saw in it only the
+youngster's natural desire to distinguish himself by performing a feat
+which his elders deemed impossible.
+
+As the days dragged on, and Bessy's sufferings increased, Justine longed
+for a protesting word from Dr. Garford or one of his colleagues. In her
+hospital experience she had encountered cases where the useless agonies
+of death were mercifully shortened by the physician; why was not this a
+case for such treatment? The answer was simple enough--in the first
+place, it was the duty of the surgeons to keep their patient alive till
+her husband and her father could reach her; and secondly, there was that
+faint illusive hope of so-called recovery, in which none of them
+believed, yet which they could not ignore in their treatment. The
+evening after Mr. Tredegar's departure Wyant was setting this forth at
+great length to Justine. Bessy had had a bad morning: the bronchial
+symptoms which had developed a day or two before had greatly increased
+her distress, and there had been, at dawn, a moment of weakness when it
+seemed that some pitiful power was about to defeat the relentless
+efforts of science. But Wyant had fought off the peril. By the prompt
+and audacious use of stimulants--by a rapid marshalling of resources, a
+display of self-reliance and authority, which Justine could not but
+admire as she mechanically seconded his efforts--the spark of life had
+been revived, and Bessy won back for fresh suffering.
+
+"Yes--I say it can be done: tonight I say it more than ever," Wyant
+exclaimed, pushing the disordered hair from his forehead, and leaning
+toward Justine across the table on which their brief evening meal had
+been served. "I say the way the heart has rallied proves that we've got
+more strength to draw on than any of them have been willing to admit.
+The breathing's better too. If we can fight off the degenerative
+processes--and, by George, I believe we can!" He looked up suddenly at
+Justine. "With you to work with, I believe I could do anything. How you
+do back a man up! You think with your hands--with every individual
+finger!"
+
+Justine turned her eyes away: she felt a shudder of repulsion steal over
+her tired body. It was not that she detected any note of personal
+admiration in his praise--he had commended her as the surgeon might
+commend a fine instrument fashioned for his use. But that she should be
+the instrument to serve such a purpose--that her skill, her promptness,
+her gift of divining and interpreting the will she worked with, should
+be at the service of this implacable scientific passion! Ah, no--she
+could be silent no longer....
+
+She looked up at Wyant, and their eyes met.
+
+"Why do you do it?" she asked.
+
+He stared, as if thinking that she referred to some special point in his
+treatment. "Do what?"
+
+"It's so useless...you all know she must die."
+
+"I know nothing of the kind...and even the others are not so sure
+today." He began to go over it all again--repeating his arguments,
+developing new theories, trying to force into her reluctant mind his own
+faith in the possibility of success.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Justine sat resting her chin on her clasped hands, her eyes gazing
+straight before her under dark tormented brows. When he paused she
+remained silent.
+
+"Well--don't you believe me?" he broke out with sudden asperity.
+
+"I don't know...I can't tell...."
+
+"But as long as there's a doubt, even--a doubt my way--and I'll show you
+there is, if you'll give me time----"
+
+"How much time?" she murmured, without shifting her gaze.
+
+"Ah--that depends on ourselves: on you and me chiefly. That's what
+Garford admits. _They_ can't do much now--they've got to leave the game
+to us. It's a question of incessant vigilance...of utilizing every hour,
+every moment.... Time's all I ask, and _you_ can give it to me, if any
+one can!"
+
+Under the challenge of his tone Justine rose to her feet with a low
+murmur of fear. "Ah, don't ask me!"
+
+"Don't ask you----?"
+
+"I can't--I can't."
+
+Wyant stood up also, turning on her an astonished glance.
+
+"You can't what--?"
+
+Their eyes met, and she thought she read in his a sudden divination of
+her inmost thoughts. The discovery electrified her flagging strength,
+restoring her to immediate clearness of brain. She saw the gulf of
+self-betrayal over which she had hung, and the nearness of the peril
+nerved her to a last effort of dissimulation.
+
+"I can't...talk of it...any longer," she faltered, letting her tears
+flow, and turning on him a face of pure womanly weakness.
+
+Wyant looked at her without answering. Did he distrust even these plain
+physical evidences of exhaustion, or was he merely disappointed in her,
+as in one whom he had believed to be above the emotional failings of her
+sex?
+
+"You're over-tired," he said coldly. "Take tonight to rest. Miss Mace
+can replace you for the next few hours--and I may need you more
+tomorrow."
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+FOUR more days had passed. Bessy seldom spoke when Justine was with her.
+She was wrapped in a thickening cloud of opiates--morphia by day,
+bromides, sulphonal, chloral hydrate at night. When the cloud broke and
+consciousness emerged, it was centred in the one acute point of bodily
+anguish. Darting throes of neuralgia, agonized oppression of the breath,
+the diffused misery of the whole helpless body--these were reducing
+their victim to a mere instrument on which pain played its incessant
+deadly variations. Once or twice she turned her dull eyes on Justine,
+breathing out: "I want to die," as some inevitable lifting or
+readjusting thrilled her body with fresh pangs; but there were no signs
+of contact with the outer world--she had ceased even to ask for
+Cicely....
+
+And yet, according to the doctors, the patient held her own. Certain
+alarming symptoms had diminished, and while others persisted, the
+strength to fight them persisted too. With such strength to call on,
+what fresh agonies were reserved for the poor body when the narcotics
+had lost their power?
+
+That was the question always before Justine. She never again betrayed
+her fears to Wyant--she carried out his orders with morbid precision,
+trembling lest any failure in efficiency should revive his suspicions.
+She hardly knew what she feared his suspecting--she only had a confused
+sense that they were enemies, and that she was the weaker of the two.
+
+And then the anaesthetics began to fail. It was the sixteenth day since
+the accident, and the resources of alleviation were almost exhausted. It
+was not sure, even now, that Bessy was going to die--and she was
+certainly going to suffer a long time. Wyant seemed hardly conscious of
+the increase of pain--his whole mind was fixed on the prognosis. What
+matter if the patient suffered, as long as he proved his case? That, of
+course, was not his way of putting it. In reality, he did all he could
+to allay the pain, surpassed himself in new devices and experiments. But
+death confronted him implacably, claiming his due: so many hours robbed
+from him, so much tribute to pay; and Wyant, setting his teeth, fought
+on--and Bessy paid.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Justine had begun to notice that it was hard for her to get a word alone
+with Dr. Garford. The other nurses were not in the way--it was Wyant who
+always contrived to be there. Perhaps she was unreasonable in seeing a
+special intention in his presence: it was natural enough that the two
+persons in charge of the case should confer together with their chief.
+But his persistence annoyed her, and she was glad when, one afternoon,
+the surgeon asked him to telephone an important message to town.
+
+As soon as the door had closed, Justine said to Dr. Garford: "She is
+beginning to suffer terribly."
+
+He answered with the large impersonal gesture of the man to whom
+physical suffering has become a painful general fact of life, no longer
+divisible into individual cases. "We are doing all we can."
+
+"Yes." She paused, and then raised her eyes to his dry kind face. "Is
+there any hope?"
+
+Another gesture--the fatalistic sweep of the lifted palms. "The next ten
+days will tell--the fight is on, as Wyant says. And if any one can do
+it, that young fellow can. There's stuff in him--and infernal
+ambition."
+
+"Yes: but do _you_ believe she can live--?"
+
+Dr. Garford smiled indulgently on such unprofessional insistence; but
+she was past wondering what they must all think of her.
+
+"My dear Miss Brent," he said, "I have reached the age when one always
+leaves a door open to the unexpected."
+
+As he spoke, a slight sound at her back made her turn. Wyant was behind
+her--he must have entered as she put her question. And he certainly
+could not have had time to descend the stairs, walk the length of the
+house, ring up New York, and deliver Dr Garford's message.... The same
+thought seemed to strike the surgeon. "Hello, Wyant?" he said.
+
+"Line busy," said Wyant curtly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About this time, Justine gave up her night vigils. She could no longer
+face the struggle of the dawn hour, when life ebbs lowest; and since her
+duties extended beyond the sick-room she could fairly plead that she was
+more needed about the house by day. But Wyant protested: he wanted her
+most at the difficult hour.
+
+"You know you're taking a chance from her," he said, almost sternly.
+
+"Oh, no----"
+
+He looked at her searchingly. "You don't feel up to it?"
+
+"No."
+
+He turned away with a slight shrug; but she knew he resented her
+defection.
+
+The day watches were miserable enough. It was the nineteenth day now;
+and Justine lay on the sofa in Amherst's sitting-room, trying to nerve
+herself for the nurse's summons. A page torn out of the calendar lay
+before her--she had been calculating again how many days must elapse
+before Mr. Langhope could arrive. Ten days--ten days and ten nights! And
+the length of the nights was double.... As for Amherst, it was
+impossible to set a date for his coming, for his steamer from Buenos
+Ayres called at various ports on the way northward, and the length of
+her stay at each was dependent on the delivery of freight, and on the
+dilatoriness of the South American official.
+
+She threw down the calendar and leaned back, pressing her hands to her
+temples. Oh, for a word with Amherst--he alone would have understood
+what she was undergoing! Mr. Langhope's coming would make no
+difference--or rather, it would only increase the difficulty of the
+situation. Instinctively Justine felt that, though his heart would be
+wrung by the sight of Bessy's pain, his cry would be the familiar one,
+the traditional one: _Keep her alive!_ Under his surface originality,
+his verbal audacities and ironies, Mr. Langhope was the creature of
+accepted forms, inherited opinions: he had never really thought for
+himself on any of the pressing problems of life.
+
+But Amherst was different. Close contact with many forms of wretchedness
+had freed him from the bondage of accepted opinion. He looked at life
+through no eyes but his own; and what he saw, he confessed to seeing. He
+never tried to evade the consequences of his discoveries.
+
+Justine's remembrance flew back to their first meeting at Hanaford, when
+his confidence in his own powers was still unshaken, his trust in others
+unimpaired. And, gradually, she began to relive each detail of their
+talk at Dillon's bedside--her first impression of him, as he walked down
+the ward; the first sound of his voice; her surprised sense of his
+authority; her almost involuntary submission to his will.... Then her
+thoughts passed on to their walk home from the hospital--she recalled
+his sober yet unsparing summary of the situation at Westmore, and the
+note of insight with which he touched on the hardships of the
+workers.... Then, word by word, their talk about Dillon came
+back...Amherst's indignation and pity...his shudder of revolt at the
+man's doom.
+
+"_In your work, don't you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?_"
+And then, after her conventional murmur of protest: "_To save what,
+when all the good of life is gone?_"
+
+To distract her thoughts she stretched her hand toward the book-case,
+taking out the first volume in reach--the little copy of Bacon. She
+leaned back, fluttering its pages aimlessly--so wrapped in her own
+misery that the meaning of the words could not reach her. It was useless
+to try to read: every perception of the outer world was lost in the hum
+of inner activity that made her mind like a forge throbbing with heat
+and noise. But suddenly her glance fell on some pencilled sentences on
+the fly-leaf. They were in Amherst's hand, and the sight arrested her as
+though she had heard him speak.
+
+_La vraie morale se moque de la morale...._
+
+_We perish because we follow other men's examples...._
+
+_Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of
+Lamiae--bugbears to frighten children...._
+
+A rush of air seemed to have been let into her stifled mind. Were they
+his own thoughts? No--her memory recalled some confused association with
+great names. But at least they must represent his beliefs--must embody
+deeply-felt convictions--or he would scarcely have taken the trouble to
+record them.
+
+She murmured over the last sentence once or twice: _The opinions of the
+many--bugbears to frighten children...._ Yes, she had often heard him
+speak of current judgments in that way...she had never known a mind so
+free from the spell of the Lamiae.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some one knocked, and she put aside the book and rose to her feet. It
+was a maid bringing a note from Wyant.
+
+"There has been a motor accident beyond Clifton, and I have been sent
+for. I think I can safely be away for two or three hours, but ring me up
+at Clifton if you want me. Miss Mace has instructions, and Garford's
+assistant will be down at seven."
+
+She looked at the clock: it was just three, the hour at which she was to
+relieve Miss Mace. She smoothed the hair from her forehead, straightened
+her cap, tied on the apron she had laid aside....
+
+As she entered Bessy's sitting-room the nurse came out, memoranda in
+hand. The two moved to the window for a moment's conference, and as the
+wintry light fell on Miss Mace's face, Justine saw that it was white
+with fatigue.
+
+"You're ill!" she exclaimed.
+
+The nurse shook her head. "No--but it's awful...this afternoon...." Her
+glance turned to the sick-room.
+
+"Go and rest--I'll stay till bedtime," Justine said.
+
+"Miss Safford's down with another headache."
+
+"I know: it doesn't matter. I'm quite fresh."
+
+"You _do_ look rested!" the other exclaimed, her eyes lingering
+enviously on Justine's face.
+
+She stole away, and Justine entered the room. It was true that she felt
+fresh--a new spring of hope had welled up in her. She had her nerves in
+hand again, she had regained her steady vision of life....
+
+But in the room, as the nurse had said, it was awful. The time had come
+when the effect of the anaesthetics must be carefully husbanded, when
+long intervals of pain must purchase the diminishing moments of relief.
+Yet from Wyant's standpoint it was a good day--things were looking well,
+as he would have phrased it. And each day now was a fresh victory.
+
+Justine went through her task mechanically. The glow of strength and
+courage remained, steeling her to bear what had broken down Miss Mace's
+professional fortitude. But when she sat down by the bed Bessy's moaning
+began to wear on her. It was no longer the utterance of human pain, but
+the monotonous whimper of an animal--the kind of sound that a
+compassionate hand would instinctively crush into silence. But her hand
+had other duties; she must keep watch on pulse and heart, must reinforce
+their action with the tremendous stimulants which Wyant was now using,
+and, having revived fresh sensibility to pain, must presently try to
+allay it by the cautious use of narcotics.
+
+It was all simple enough--but suppose she should not do it? Suppose she
+left the stimulants untouched? Wyant was absent, one nurse exhausted
+with fatigue, the other laid low by headache. Justine had the field to
+herself. For three hours at least no one was likely to cross the
+threshold of the sick-room.... Ah, if no more time were needed! But
+there was too much life in Bessy--her youth was fighting too hard for
+her! She would not sink out of life in three hours...and Justine could
+not count on more than that.
+
+She looked at the little travelling-clock on the dressing-table, and saw
+that its hands marked four. An hour had passed already.... She rose and
+administered the prescribed restorative; then she took the pulse, and
+listened to the beat of the heart. Strong still--too strong!
+
+As she lifted her head, the vague animal wailing ceased, and she heard
+her name: "Justine----"
+
+She bent down eagerly. "Yes?"
+
+No answer: the wailing had begun again. But the one word showed her that
+the mind still lived in its torture-house, that the poor powerless body
+before her was not yet a mere bundle of senseless reflexes, but her
+friend Bessy Amherst, dying, and feeling herself die....
+
+Justine reseated herself, and the vigil began again. The second hour
+ebbed slowly--ah, no, it was flying now! Her eyes were on the hands of
+the clock and they seemed leagued against her to devour the precious
+minutes. And now she could see by certain spasmodic symptoms that
+another crisis of pain was approaching--one of the struggles that Wyant,
+at times, had almost seemed to court and exult in.
+
+Bessy's eyes turned on her again. "_Justine_----"
+
+She knew what that meant: it was an appeal for the hypodermic needle.
+The little instrument lay at hand, beside a newly-filled bottle of
+morphia. But she must wait--must let the pain grow more severe. Yet she
+could not turn her gaze from Bessy, and Bessy's eyes entreated her
+again--_Justine_! There was really no word now--the whimperings were
+uninterrupted. But Justine heard an inner voice, and its pleading shook
+her heart. She rose and filled the syringe--and returning with it, bent
+above the bed....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She lifted her head and looked at the clock. The second hour had passed.
+As she looked, she heard a step in the sitting-room. Who could it be?
+Not Dr. Garford's assistant--he was not due till seven. She listened
+again.... One of the nurses? No, not a woman's step----
+
+The door opened, and Wyant came in. Justine stood by the bed without
+moving toward him. He paused also, as if surprised to see her there
+motionless. In the intense silence she fancied for a moment that she
+heard Bessy's violent agonized breathing. She tried to speak, to drown
+the sound of the breathing; but her lips trembled too much, and she
+remained silent.
+
+Wyant seemed to hear nothing. He stood so still that she felt she must
+move forward. As she did so, she picked up from the table by the bed the
+memoranda that it was her duty to submit to him.
+
+"Well?" he said, in the familiar sick-room whisper.
+
+"She is dead."
+
+He fell back a step, glaring at her, white and incredulous.
+
+"_Dead?_--When----?"
+
+"A few minutes ago...."
+
+"_Dead--?_ It's not possible!"
+
+He swept past her, shouldering her aside, pushing in an electric button
+as he sprang to the bed. She perceived then that the room had been
+almost in darkness. She recovered command of herself, and followed him.
+He was going through the usual rapid examination--pulse, heart,
+breath--hanging over the bed like some angry animal balked of its prey.
+Then he lifted the lids and bent close above the eyes.
+
+"Take the shade off that lamp!" he commanded.
+
+Justine obeyed him.
+
+He stooped down again to examine the eyes...he remained stooping a long
+time. Suddenly he stood up and faced her.
+
+"Had she been in great pain?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Worse than usual?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What had you done?"
+
+"Nothing--there was no time."
+
+"No time?" He broke off to sweep the room again with his excited
+incredulous glance. "Where are the others? Why were you here alone?" he
+demanded.
+
+"It came suddenly. I was going to call----"
+
+Their eyes met for a moment. Her face was perfectly calm--she could feel
+that her lips no longer trembled. She was not in the least afraid of
+Wyant's scrutiny.
+
+As he continued to look at her, his expression slowly passed from
+incredulous wrath to something softer--more human--she could not tell
+what....
+
+"This has been too much for you--go and send one of the others.... It's
+all over," he said.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+ON a September day, somewhat more than a year and a half after Bessy
+Amherst's death, her husband and his mother sat at luncheon in the
+dining-room of the Westmore house at Hanaford.
+
+The house was John Amherst's now, and shortly after the loss of his wife
+he had established himself there with his mother. By a will made some
+six months before her death, Bessy had divided her estate between her
+husband and daughter, placing Cicely's share in trust, and appointing
+Mr. Langhope and Amherst as her guardians. As the latter was also her
+trustee, the whole management of the estate devolved on him, while his
+control of the Westmore mills was ensured by his receiving a slightly
+larger proportion of the stock than his step-daughter.
+
+The will had come as a surprise, not only to Amherst himself, but to his
+wife's family, and more especially to her legal adviser. Mr. Tredegar
+had in fact had nothing to do with the drawing of the instrument; but as
+it had been drawn in due form, and by a firm of excellent standing, he
+was obliged, in spite of his private views, and Mr. Langhope's open
+adjurations that he should "do something," to declare that there was no
+pretext for questioning the validity of the document.
+
+To Amherst the will was something more than a proof of his wife's
+confidence: it came as a reconciling word from her grave. For the date
+showed that it had been made at a moment when he supposed himself to
+have lost all influence over her--on the morrow of the day when she had
+stipulated that he should give up the management of the Westmore mills,
+and yield the care of her property to Mr. Tredegar.
+
+While she smote him with one hand, she sued for pardon with the other;
+and the contradiction was so characteristic, it explained and excused in
+so touching a way the inconsistencies of her impulsive heart and
+hesitating mind, that he was filled with that tender compunction, that
+searching sense of his own shortcomings, which generous natures feel
+when they find they have underrated the generosity of others. But
+Amherst's was not an introspective mind, and his sound moral sense told
+him, when the first pang of self-reproach had subsided, that he had done
+his best by his wife, and was in no way to blame if her recognition of
+the fact had come too late. The self-reproach subsided; and, instead of
+the bitterness of the past, it left a softened memory which made him
+take up his task with the sense that he was now working with Bessy and
+not against her.
+
+Yet perhaps, after all, it was chiefly the work itself which had healed
+old wounds, and quelled the tendency to vain regrets. Amherst was only
+thirty-four; and in the prime of his energies the task he was made for
+had been given back to him. To a sound nature, which finds its outlet in
+fruitful action, nothing so simplifies the complexities of life, so
+tends to a large acceptance of its vicissitudes and mysteries, as the
+sense of doing something each day toward clearing one's own bit of the
+wilderness. And this was the joy at last conceded to Amherst. The mills
+were virtually his; and the fact that he ruled them not only in his own
+right but as Cicely's representative, made him doubly eager to justify
+his wife's trust in him.
+
+Mrs. Amherst, looking up from a telegram which the parlour-maid had
+handed her, smiled across the table at her son.
+
+"From Maria Ansell--they are all coming tomorrow."
+
+"Ah--that's good," Amherst rejoined. "I should have been sorry if Cicely
+had not been here."
+
+"Mr. Langhope is coming too," his mother continued. "I'm glad of that,
+John."
+
+"Yes," Amherst again assented.
+
+The morrow was to be a great day at Westmore. The Emergency Hospital,
+planned in the first months of his marriage, and abandoned in the
+general reduction of expenditure at the mills, had now been completed on
+a larger and more elaborate scale, as a memorial to Bessy. The strict
+retrenchment of all personal expenses, and the leasing of Lynbrook and
+the town house, had enabled Amherst, in eighteen months, to lay by
+enough income to carry out this plan, which he was impatient to see
+executed as a visible commemoration of his wife's generosity to
+Westmore. For Amherst persisted in regarding the gift of her fortune as
+a gift not to himself but to the mills: he looked on himself merely as
+the agent of her beneficent intentions. He was anxious that Westmore and
+Hanaford should take the same view; and the opening of the Westmore
+Memorial Hospital was therefore to be performed with an unwonted degree
+of ceremony.
+
+"I am glad Mr. Langhope is coming," Mrs. Amherst repeated, as they rose
+from the table. "It shows, dear--doesn't it?--that he's really
+gratified--that he appreciates your motive...."
+
+She raised a proud glance to her tall son, whose head seemed to tower
+higher than ever above her small proportions. Renewed self-confidence,
+and the habit of command, had in fact restored the erectness to
+Amherst's shoulders and the clearness to his eyes. The cleft between the
+brows was gone, and his veiled inward gaze had given place to a glance
+almost as outward-looking and unspeculative as his mother's.
+
+"It shows--well, yes--what you say!" he rejoined with a slight laugh,
+and a tap on her shoulder as she passed.
+
+He was under no illusions as to his father-in-law's attitude: he knew
+that Mr. Langhope would willingly have broken the will which deprived
+his grand-daughter of half her inheritance, and that his subsequent show
+of friendliness was merely a concession to expediency. But in his
+present mood Amherst almost believed that time and closer relations
+might turn such sentiments into honest liking. He was very fond of his
+little step-daughter, and deeply sensible of his obligations toward her;
+and he hoped that, as Mr. Langhope came to recognize this, it might
+bring about a better understanding between them.
+
+His mother detained him. "You're going back to the mills at once? I
+wanted to consult you about the rooms. Miss Brent had better be next to
+Cicely?"
+
+"I suppose so--yes. I'll see you before I go." He nodded affectionately
+and passed on, his hands full of papers, into the Oriental smoking-room,
+now dedicated to the unexpected uses of an office and study.
+
+Mrs. Amherst, as she turned away, found the parlour-maid in the act of
+opening the front door to the highly-tinted and well-dressed figure of
+Mrs. Harry Dressel.
+
+"I'm so delighted to hear that you're expecting Justine," began Mrs.
+Dressel as the two ladies passed into the drawing-room.
+
+"Ah, you've heard too?" Mrs. Amherst rejoined, enthroning her visitor in
+one of the monumental plush armchairs beneath the threatening weight of
+the Bay of Naples.
+
+"I hadn't till this moment; in fact I flew in to ask for news, and on
+the door-step there was such a striking-looking young man enquiring for
+her, and I heard the parlour-maid say she was arriving tomorrow."
+
+"A young man? Some one you didn't know?" Striking apparitions of the
+male sex were of infrequent occurrence at Hanaford, and Mrs. Amherst's
+unabated interest in the movement of life caused her to dwell on this
+statement.
+
+"Oh, no--I'm sure he was a stranger. Extremely slight and pale, with
+remarkable eyes. He was so disappointed--he seemed sure of finding her."
+
+"Well, no doubt he'll come back tomorrow.--You know we're expecting the
+whole party," added Mrs. Amherst, to whom the imparting of good news was
+always an irresistible temptation.
+
+Mrs. Dressel's interest deepened at once. "Really? Mr. Langhope too?"
+
+"Yes. It's a great pleasure to my son."
+
+"It must be! I'm so glad. I suppose in a way it will be rather sad for
+Mr. Langhope--seeing everything here so unchanged----"
+
+Mrs. Amherst straightened herself a little. "I think he will prefer to
+find it so," she said, with a barely perceptible change of tone.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. They were never very fond of this house."
+
+There was an added note of authority in Mrs. Dressel's accent. In the
+last few months she had been to Europe and had had nervous prostration,
+and these incontestable evidences of growing prosperity could not always
+be kept out of her voice and bearing. At any rate, they justified her in
+thinking that her opinion on almost any subject within the range of
+human experience was a valuable addition to the sum-total of wisdom; and
+unabashed by the silence with which her comment was received, she
+continued her critical survey of the drawing-room.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Amherst--you know I can't help saying what I think--and I've
+so often wondered why you don't do this room over. With these high
+ceilings you could do something lovely in Louis Seize."
+
+A faint pink rose to Mrs. Amherst's cheeks. "I don't think my son would
+ever care to make any changes here," she said.
+
+"Oh, I understand his feeling; but when he begins to entertain--and you
+know poor Bessy always _hated_ this furniture."
+
+Mrs. Amherst smiled slightly. "Perhaps if he marries again--" she said,
+seizing at random on a pretext for changing the subject.
+
+Mrs. Dressel dropped the hands with which she was absent-mindedly
+assuring herself of the continuance of unbroken relations between her
+hat and her hair.
+
+"_Marries again?_ Why--you don't mean--? He doesn't think of it?"
+
+"Not in the least--I spoke figuratively," her hostess rejoined with a
+laugh.
+
+"Oh, of course--I see. He really _couldn't_ marry, could he? I mean, it
+would be so wrong to Cicely--under the circumstances."
+
+Mrs. Amherst's black eye-brows gathered in a slight frown. She had
+already noticed, on the part of the Hanaford clan, a disposition to
+regard Amherst as imprisoned in the conditions of his trust, and
+committed to the obligation of handing on unimpaired to Cicely the
+fortune his wife's caprice had bestowed on him; and this open expression
+of the family view was singularly displeasing to her.
+
+"I had not thought of it in that light--but it's really of no
+consequence how one looks at a thing that is not going to happen," she
+said carelessly.
+
+"No--naturally; I see you were only joking. He's so devoted to Cicely,
+isn't he?" Mrs. Dressel rejoined, with her bright obtuseness.
+
+A step on the threshold announced Amherst's approach.
+
+"I'm afraid I must be off, mother--" he began, halting in the doorway
+with the instinctive masculine recoil from the afternoon caller.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Amherst, how d'you do? I suppose you're very busy about
+tomorrow? I just flew in to find out if Justine was really coming," Mrs.
+Dressel explained, a little fluttered by the effort of recalling what
+she had been saying when he entered.
+
+"I believe my mother expects the whole party," Amherst replied, shaking
+hands with the false _bonhomie_ of the man entrapped.
+
+"How delightful! And it's so nice to think that Mr. Langhope's
+arrangement with Justine still works so well," Mrs. Dressel hastened on,
+nervously hoping that her volubility would smother any recollection of
+what he had chanced to overhear.
+
+"Mr. Langhope is lucky in having persuaded Miss Brent to take charge of
+Cicely," Mrs. Amherst quietly interposed.
+
+"Yes--and it was so lucky for Justine too! When she came back from
+Europe with us last autumn, I could see she simply hated the idea of
+taking up her nursing again."
+
+Amherst's face darkened at the allusion, and his mother said hurriedly:
+"Ah, she was tired, poor child; but I'm only afraid that, after the
+summer's rest, she may want some more active occupation than looking
+after a little girl."
+
+"Oh, I think not--she's so fond of Cicely. And of course it's everything
+to her to have a comfortable home."
+
+Mrs. Amherst smiled. "At her age, it's not always everything."
+
+Mrs. Dressel stared slightly. "Oh, Justine's twenty-seven, you know;
+she's not likely to marry now," she said, with the mild finality of the
+early-wedded.
+
+She rose as she spoke, extending cordial hands of farewell. "You must be
+so busy preparing for the great day...if only it doesn't rain!... No,
+_please_, Mr. Amherst!... It's a mere step--I'm walking...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That afternoon, as Amherst walked out toward Westmore for a survey of
+the final preparations, he found that, among the pleasant thoughts
+accompanying him, one of the pleasantest was the anticipation of seeing
+Justine Brent.
+
+Among the little group who were to surround him on the morrow, she was
+the only one discerning enough to understand what the day meant to him,
+or with sufficient knowledge to judge of the use he had made of his
+great opportunity. Even now that the opportunity had come, and all
+obstacles were levelled, sympathy with his work was as much lacking as
+ever; and only Duplain, at length reinstated as manager, really
+understood and shared in his aims. But Justine Brent's sympathy was of a
+different kind from the manager's. If less logical, it was warmer, more
+penetrating--like some fine imponderable fluid, so subtle that it could
+always find a way through the clumsy processes of human intercourse.
+Amherst had thought very often of this quality in her during the weeks
+which followed his abrupt departure for Georgia; and in trying to define
+it he had said to himself that she felt with her brain.
+
+And now, aside from the instinctive understanding between them, she was
+set apart in his thoughts by her association with his wife's last days.
+On his arrival from the south he had gathered on all sides evidences of
+her tender devotion to Bessy: even Mr. Tredegar's chary praise swelled
+the general commendation. From the surgeons he heard how her unwearied
+skill had helped them in their fruitless efforts; poor Cicely, awed by
+her loss, clung to her mother's friend with childish tenacity; and the
+young rector of Saint Anne's, shyly acquitting himself of his visit of
+condolence, dwelt chiefly on the consolatory thought of Miss Brent's
+presence at the death-bed.
+
+The knowledge that Justine had been with his wife till the end had, in
+fact, done more than anything else to soften Amherst's regrets; and he
+had tried to express something of this in the course of his first talk
+with her. Justine had given him a clear and self-possessed report of the
+dreadful weeks at Lynbrook; but at his first allusion to her own part in
+them, she shrank into a state of distress which seemed to plead with him
+to refrain from even the tenderest touch on her feelings. It was a
+peculiarity of their friendship that silence and absence had always
+mysteriously fostered its growth; and he now felt that her reticence
+deepened the understanding between them as the freest confidences might
+not have done.
+
+Soon afterward, an opportune attack of nervous prostration had sent Mrs.
+Harry Dressel abroad; and Justine was selected as her companion. They
+remained in Europe for six months; and on their return Amherst learned
+with pleasure that Mr. Langhope had asked Miss Brent to take charge of
+Cicely.
+
+Mr. Langhope's sorrow for his daughter had been aggravated by futile
+wrath at her unaccountable will; and the mixed sentiment thus engendered
+had found expression in a jealous outpouring of affection toward Cicely.
+He took immediate possession of the child, and in the first stages of
+his affliction her companionship had been really consoling. But as time
+passed, and the pleasant habits of years reasserted themselves, her
+presence became, in small unacknowledged ways, a source of domestic
+irritation. Nursery hours disturbed the easy routine of his household;
+the elderly parlour-maid who had long ruled it resented the intervention
+of Cicely's nurse; the little governess, involved in the dispute, broke
+down and had to be shipped home to Germany; a successor was hard to
+find, and in the interval Mr. Langhope's privacy was invaded by a stream
+of visiting teachers, who were always wanting to consult him about
+Cicely's lessons, and lay before him their tiresome complaints and
+perplexities. Poor Mr. Langhope found himself in the position of the
+mourner who, in the first fervour of bereavement, has undertaken the
+construction of an imposing monument without having counted the cost. He
+had meant that his devotion to Cicely should be a monument to his
+paternal grief; but the foundations were scarcely laid when he found
+that the funds of time and patience were almost exhausted.
+
+Pride forbade his consigning Cicely to her step-father, though Mrs.
+Amherst would gladly have undertaken her care; Mrs. Ansell's migratory
+habits made it impossible for her to do more than intermittently hover
+and advise; and a new hope rose before Mr. Langhope when it occurred to
+him to appeal to Miss Brent.
+
+The experiment had proved a success, and when Amherst met Justine again
+she had been for some months in charge of the little girl, and change
+and congenial occupation had restored her to a normal view of life.
+There was no trace in her now of the dumb misery which had haunted him
+at their parting; she was again the vivid creature who seemed more
+charged with life than any one he had ever known. The crisis through
+which she had passed showed itself only in a smoothing of the brow and
+deepening of the eyes, as though a bloom of experience had veiled
+without deadening the first brilliancy of youth.
+
+As he lingered on the image thus evoked, he recalled Mrs. Dressel's
+words: "Justine is twenty-seven--she's not likely to marry now."
+
+Oddly enough, he had never thought of her marrying--but now that he
+heard the possibility questioned, he felt a disagreeable conviction of
+its inevitableness. Mrs. Dressel's view was of course absurd. In spite
+of Justine's feminine graces, he had formerly felt in her a kind of
+elfin immaturity, as of a flitting Ariel with untouched heart and
+senses: it was only of late that she had developed the subtle quality
+which calls up thoughts of love. Not marry? Why, the vagrant fire had
+just lighted on her--and the fact that she was poor and unattached, with
+her own way to make, and no setting of pleasure and elegance to
+embellish her--these disadvantages seemed as nothing to Amherst against
+the warmth of personality in which she moved. And besides, she would
+never be drawn to the kind of man who needed fine clothes and luxury to
+point him to the charm of sex. She was always finished and graceful in
+appearance, with the pretty woman's art of wearing her few plain dresses
+as if they were many and varied; yet no one could think of her as
+attaching much importance to the upholstery of life.... No, the man who
+won her would be of a different type, have other inducements to
+offer...and Amherst found himself wondering just what those inducements
+would be.
+
+Suddenly he remembered something his mother had said as he left the
+house--something about a distinguished-looking young man who had called
+to ask for Miss Brent. Mrs. Amherst, innocently inquisitive in small
+matters, had followed her son into the hall to ask the parlour-maid if
+the gentleman had left his name; and the parlour-maid had answered in
+the negative. The young man was evidently not indigenous: all the social
+units of Hanaford were intimately known to each other. He was a
+stranger, therefore, presumably drawn there by the hope of seeing Miss
+Brent. But if he knew that she was coming he must be intimately
+acquainted with her movements.... The thought came to Amherst as an
+unpleasant surprise. It showed him for the first time how little he knew
+of Justine's personal life, of the ties she might have formed outside
+the Lynbrook circle. After all, he had seen her chiefly not among her
+own friends but among his wife's. Was it reasonable to suppose that a
+creature of her keen individuality would be content to subsist on the
+fringe of other existences? Somewhere, of course, she must have a centre
+of her own, must be subject to influences of which he was wholly
+ignorant. And since her departure from Lynbrook he had known even less
+of her life. She had spent the previous winter with Mr. Langhope in New
+York, where Amherst had seen her only on his rare visits to Cicely; and
+Mr. Langhope, on going abroad for the summer, had established his
+grand-daughter in a Bar Harbour cottage, where, save for two flying
+visits from Mrs. Ansell, Miss Brent had reigned alone till his return in
+September.
+
+Very likely, Amherst reflected, the mysterious visitor was a Bar Harbour
+acquaintance--no, more than an acquaintance: a friend. And as Mr.
+Langhope's party had left Mount Desert but three days previously, the
+arrival of the unknown at Hanaford showed a singular impatience to
+rejoin Miss Brent.
+
+As he reached this point in his meditations, Amherst found himself at
+the street-corner where it was his habit to pick up the Westmore
+trolley. Just as it bore down on him, and he sprang to the platform,
+another car, coming in from the mills, stopped to discharge its
+passengers. Among them Amherst noticed a slender undersized man in
+shabby clothes, about whose retreating back, as he crossed the street to
+signal a Station Avenue car, there was something dimly familiar, and
+suggestive of troubled memories. Amherst leaned out and looked again:
+yes, the back was certainly like Dr. Wyant's--but what could Wyant be
+doing at Hanaford, and in a Westmore car?
+
+Amherst's first impulse was to spring out and overtake him. He knew how
+admirably the young physician had borne himself at Lynbrook; he even
+recalled Dr. Garford's saying, with his kindly sceptical smile: "Poor
+Wyant believed to the end that we could save her"--and felt again his
+own inward movement of thankfulness that the cruel miracle had not been
+worked.
+
+He owed a great deal to Wyant, and had tried to express his sense of the
+fact by warm words and a liberal fee; but since Bessy's death he had
+never returned to Lynbrook, and had consequently lost sight of the young
+doctor.
+
+Now he felt that he ought to try to rejoin him, to find out why he was
+at Hanaford, and make some proffer of hospitality; but if the stranger
+were really Wyant, his choice of the Station Avenue car made it appear
+that he was on his way to catch the New York express; and in any case
+Amherst's engagements at Westmore made immediate pursuit impossible.
+
+He consoled himself with the thought that if the physician was not
+leaving Hanaford he would be certain to call at the house; and then his
+mind flew back to Justine Brent. But the pleasure of looking forward to
+her arrival was disturbed by new feelings. A sense of reserve and
+embarrassment had sprung up in his mind, checking that free mental
+communion which, as he now perceived, had been one of the unconscious
+promoters of their friendship. It was as though his thoughts faced a
+stranger instead of the familiar presence which had so long dwelt in
+them; and he began to see that the feeling of intelligence existing
+between Justine and himself was not the result of actual intimacy, but
+merely of the charm she knew how to throw over casual intercourse.
+
+When he had left his house, his mind was like a summer sky, all open
+blue and sunlit rolling clouds; but gradually the clouds had darkened
+and massed themselves, till they drew an impenetrable veil over the
+upper light and stretched threateningly across his whole horizon.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+THE celebrations at Westmore were over. Hanaford society, mustering for
+the event, had streamed through the hospital, inspected the clinic,
+complimented Amherst, recalled itself to Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell,
+and streamed out again to regain its carriages and motors.
+
+The chief actors in the ceremony were also taking leave. Mr. Langhope,
+somewhat pale and nervous after the ordeal, had been helped into the
+Gaines landau with Mrs. Ansell and Cicely; Mrs. Amherst had accepted a
+seat in the Dressel victoria; and Westy Gaines, with an _empressement_
+slightly tinged by condescension, was in the act of placing his electric
+phaeton at Miss Brent's disposal.
+
+She stood in the pretty white porch of the hospital, looking out across
+its squares of flower-edged turf at the long street of Westmore. In the
+warm gold-powdered light of September the factory town still seemed a
+blot on the face of nature; yet here and there, on all sides, Justine's
+eye saw signs of humanizing change. The rough banks along the street had
+been levelled and sodded; young maples, set in rows, already made a long
+festoon of gold against the dingy house-fronts; and the houses
+themselves--once so irreclaimably outlawed and degraded--showed, in
+their white-curtained windows, their flowery white-railed yards, a
+growing approach to civilized human dwellings.
+
+Glancing the other way, one still met the grim pile of factories cutting
+the sky with their harsh roof-lines and blackened chimneys; but here
+also were signs of improvement. One of the mills had already been
+enlarged, another was scaffolded for the same purpose, and young trees
+and neatly-fenced turf replaced the surrounding desert of trampled
+earth.
+
+As Amherst came out of the hospital, he heard Miss Brent declining a
+seat in Westy's phaeton.
+
+"Thank you so much; but there's some one here I want to see first--one
+of the operatives--and I can easily take a Hanaford car." She held out
+her hand with the smile that ran like colour over her whole face; and
+Westy, nettled by this unaccountable disregard of her privileges,
+mounted his chariot alone.
+
+As he glided mournfully away, Amherst turned to Justine. "You wanted to
+see the Dillons?" he asked.
+
+Their eyes met, and she smiled again. He had never seen her so
+sunned-over, so luminous, since the distant November day when they had
+picnicked with Cicely beside the swamp. He wondered vaguely if she were
+more elaborately dressed than usual, or if the festal impression she
+produced were simply a reflection of her mood.
+
+"I do want to see the Dillons--how did you guess?" she rejoined; and
+Amherst felt a sudden impulse to reply: "For the same reason that made
+you think of them."
+
+The fact of her remembering the Dillons made him absurdly happy; it
+re-established between them the mental communion that had been checked
+by his thoughts of the previous day.
+
+"I suppose I'm rather self-conscious about the Dillons, because they're
+one of my object lessons--they illustrate the text," he said laughing,
+as they went down the steps.
+
+Westmore had been given a half-holiday for the opening of the hospital,
+and as Amherst and Justine turned into the street, parties of workers
+were dispersing toward their houses. They were still a dull-eyed stunted
+throng, to whom air and movement seemed to have been too long denied;
+but there was more animation in the groups, more light in individual
+faces; many of the younger men returned Amherst's good-day with a look
+of friendliness, and the women to whom he spoke met him with a
+volubility that showed the habit of frequent intercourse.
+
+"How much you have done!" Justine exclaimed, as he rejoined her after
+one of these asides; but the next moment he saw a shade of embarrassment
+cross her face, as though she feared to have suggested comparisons she
+had meant to avoid.
+
+He answered quite naturally: "Yes--I'm beginning to see my way now; and
+it's wonderful how they respond--" and they walked on without a shadow
+of constraint between them, while he described to her what was already
+done, and what direction his projected experiments were taking.
+
+The Dillons had been placed in charge of one of the old factory
+tenements, now transformed into a lodging-house for unmarried
+operatives. Even its harsh brick exterior, hung with creepers and
+brightened by flower-borders, had taken on a friendly air; and indoors
+it had a clean sunny kitchen, a big dining-room with cheerful-coloured
+walls, and a room where the men could lounge and smoke about a table
+covered with papers.
+
+The creation of these model lodging-houses had always been a favourite
+scheme of Amherst's, and the Dillons, incapacitated for factory work,
+had shown themselves admirably adapted to their new duties. In Mrs.
+Dillon's small hot sitting-room, among the starched sofa-tidies and pink
+shells that testified to the family prosperity, Justine shone with
+enjoyment and sympathy. She had always taken an interest in the lives
+and thoughts of working-people: not so much the constructive interest of
+the sociological mind as the vivid imaginative concern of a heart open
+to every human appeal. She liked to hear about their hard struggles and
+small pathetic successes: the children's sicknesses, the father's lucky
+job, the little sum they had been able to put by, the plans they had
+formed for Tommy's advancement, and how Sue's good marks at school were
+still ahead of Mrs. Hagan's Mary's.
+
+"What I really like is to gossip with them, and give them advice about
+the baby's cough, and the cheapest way to do their marketing," she said
+laughing, as she and Amherst emerged once more into the street. "It's
+the same kind of interest I used to feel in my dolls and guinea pigs--a
+managing, interfering old maid's interest. I don't believe I should care
+a straw for them if I couldn't dose them and order them about."
+
+Amherst laughed too: he recalled the time when he had dreamed that just
+such warm personal sympathy was her sex's destined contribution to the
+broad work of human beneficence. Well, it had not been a dream: here was
+a woman whose deeds spoke for her. And suddenly the thought came to him:
+what might they not do at Westmore together! The brightness of it was
+blinding--like the dazzle of sunlight which faced them as they walked
+toward the mills. But it left him speechless, confused--glad to have a
+pretext for routing Duplain out of the office, introducing him to Miss
+Brent, and asking him for the keys of the buildings....
+
+It was wonderful, again, how she grasped what he was doing in the mills,
+and saw how his whole scheme hung together, harmonizing the work and
+leisure of the operatives, instead of treating them as half machine,
+half man, and neglecting the man for the machine. Nor was she content
+with Utopian generalities: she wanted to know the how and why of each
+case, to hear what conclusions he drew from his results, to what
+solutions his experiments pointed.
+
+In explaining the mill work he forgot his constraint and returned to the
+free comradery of mind that had always marked their relation. He turned
+the key reluctantly in the last door, and paused a moment on the
+threshold.
+
+"Anything more?" he said, with a laugh meant to hide his desire to
+prolong their tour.
+
+She glanced up at the sun, which still swung free of the tall factory
+roofs.
+
+"As much as you've time for. Cicely doesn't need me this afternoon, and
+I can't tell when I shall see Westmore again."
+
+Her words fell on him with a chill. His smile faded, and he looked away
+for a moment.
+
+"But I hope Cicely will be here often," he said.
+
+"Oh, I hope so too," she rejoined, with seeming unconsciousness of any
+connection between the wish and her previous words.
+
+Amherst hesitated. He had meant to propose a visit to the old Eldorado
+building, which now at last housed the long-desired night-schools and
+nursery; but since she had spoken he felt a sudden indifference to
+showing her anything more. What was the use, if she meant to leave
+Cicely, and drift out of his reach? He could get on well enough without
+sympathy and comprehension, but his momentary indulgence in them made
+the ordinary taste of life a little flat.
+
+"There must be more to see?" she continued, as they turned back toward
+the village; and he answered absently: "Oh, yes--if you like."
+
+He heard the change in his own voice, and knew by her quick side-glance
+that she had heard it too.
+
+"Please let me see everything that is compatible with my getting a car
+to Hanaford by six."
+
+"Well, then--the night-school next," he said with an effort at
+lightness; and to shake off the importunity of his own thoughts he added
+carelessly, as they walked on: "By the way--it seems improbable--but I
+think I saw Dr. Wyant yesterday in a Westmore car."
+
+She echoed the name in surprise. "Dr. Wyant? Really! Are you sure?"
+
+"Not quite; but if it wasn't he it was his ghost. You haven't heard of
+his being at Hanaford?"
+
+"No. I've heard nothing of him for ages."
+
+Something in her tone made him return her side-glance; but her voice, on
+closer analysis, denoted only indifference, and her profile seemed to
+express the same negative sentiment. He remembered a vague Lynbrook
+rumour to the effect that the young doctor had been attracted to Miss
+Brent. Such floating seeds of gossip seldom rooted themselves in his
+mind, but now the fact acquired a new significance, and he wondered how
+he could have thought so little of it at the time. Probably her somewhat
+exaggerated air of indifference simply meant that she had been bored by
+Wyant's attentions, and that the reminder of them still roused a slight
+self-consciousness.
+
+Amherst was relieved by this conclusion, and murmuring: "Oh, I suppose
+it can't have been he," led her rapidly on to the Eldorado. But the old
+sense of free communion was again obstructed, and her interest in the
+details of the schools and nursery now seemed to him only a part of her
+wonderful art of absorbing herself in other people's affairs. He was a
+fool to have been duped by it--to have fancied it was anything more
+personal than a grace of manner.
+
+As she turned away from inspecting the blackboards in one of the empty
+school-rooms he paused before her and said suddenly: "You spoke of not
+seeing Westmore again. Are you thinking of leaving Cicely?"
+
+The words were almost the opposite of those he had intended to speak; it
+was as if some irrepressible inner conviction flung defiance at his
+surface distrust of her.
+
+She stood still also, and he saw a thought move across her face. "Not
+immediately--but perhaps when Mr. Langhope can make some other
+arrangement----"
+
+Owing to the half-holiday they had the school-building to themselves,
+and the fact of being alone with her, without fear of interruption, woke
+in Amherst an uncontrollable longing to taste for once the joy of
+unguarded utterance.
+
+"Why do you go?" he asked, moving close to the platform on which she
+stood.
+
+She hesitated, resting her hand on the teacher's desk. Her eyes were
+kind, but he thought her tone was cold.
+
+"This easy life is rather out of my line," she said at length, with a
+smile that draped her words in vagueness.
+
+Amherst looked at her again--she seemed to be growing remote and
+inaccessible. "You mean that you don't want to stay?"
+
+His tone was so abrupt that it called forth one of her rare blushes.
+"No--not that. I have been very happy with Cicely--but soon I shall have
+to be doing something else."
+
+Why was she blushing? And what did her last phrase mean? "Something
+else--?" The blood hummed in his ears--he began to hope she would not
+answer too quickly.
+
+She had sunk into the seat behind the desk, propping her elbows on its
+lid, and letting her interlaced hands support her chin. A little bunch
+of violets which had been thrust into the folds of her dress detached
+itself and fell to the floor.
+
+"What I mean is," she said in a low voice, raising her eyes to
+Amherst's, "that I've had a great desire lately to get back to real
+work--my special work.... I've been too idle for the last year--I want
+to do some hard nursing; I want to help people who are miserable."
+
+She spoke earnestly, almost passionately, and as he listened his
+undefined fear was lifted. He had never before seen her in this mood,
+with brooding brows, and the darkness of the world's pain in her eyes.
+All her glow had faded--she was a dun thrush-like creature, clothed in
+semi-tints; yet she seemed much nearer than when her smile shot light on
+him.
+
+He stood motionless, his eyes absently fixed on the bunch of violets at
+her feet. Suddenly he raised his head, and broke out with a boyish
+blush: "Could it have been Wyant who was trying to see you?"
+
+"Dr. Wyant--trying to see me?" She lowered her hands to the desk, and
+sat looking at him with open wonder.
+
+He saw the irrelevance of his question, and burst, in spite of himself,
+into youthful laughter.
+
+"I mean--It's only that an unknown visitor called at the house
+yesterday, and insisted that you must have arrived. He seemed so annoyed
+at not finding you, that I thought...I imagined...it must be some one
+who knew you very well...and who had followed you here...for some
+special reason...."
+
+Her colour rose again, as if caught from his; but her eyes still
+declared her ignorance. "Some special reason----?"
+
+"And just now," he blurted out, "when you said you might not stay much
+longer with Cicely--I thought of the visit--and wondered if there was
+some one you meant to marry...."
+
+A silence fell between them. Justine rose slowly, her eyes screened
+under the veil she had lowered. "No--I don't mean to marry," she said,
+half-smiling, as she came down from the platform.
+
+Restored to his level, her small shadowy head just in a line with his
+eyes, she seemed closer, more approachable and feminine--yet Amherst did
+not dare to speak.
+
+She took a few steps toward the window, looking out into the deserted
+street. "It's growing dark--I must go home," she said.
+
+"Yes," he assented absently as he followed her. He had no idea what she
+was saying. The inner voices in which they habitually spoke were growing
+louder than outward words. Or was it only the voice of his own desires
+that he heard--the cry of new hopes and unguessed capacities of living?
+All within him was flood-tide: this was the top of life, surely--to feel
+her alike in his brain and his pulses, to steep sight and hearing in the
+joy of her nearness, while all the while thought spoke clear: "This is
+the mate of my mind."
+
+He began again abruptly. "Wouldn't you marry, if it gave you the chance
+to do what you say--if it offered you hard work, and the opportunity to
+make things better...for a great many people...as no one but yourself
+could do it?"
+
+It was a strange way of putting his case: he was aware of it before he
+ended. But it had not occurred to him to tell her that she was lovely
+and desirable--in his humility he thought that what he had to give would
+plead for him better than what he was.
+
+The effect produced on her by his question, though undecipherable, was
+extraordinary. She stiffened a little, remaining quite motionless, her
+eyes on the street.
+
+"_You!_" she just breathed; and he saw that she was beginning to
+tremble.
+
+His wooing had been harsh and clumsy--he was afraid it had offended her,
+and his hand trembled too as it sought hers.
+
+"I only thought--it would be a dull business to most women--and I'm tied
+to it for life...but I thought...I've seen so often how you pity
+suffering...how you long to relieve it...."
+
+She turned away from him with a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I _hate_
+suffering!" she broke out, raising her hands to her face.
+
+Amherst was frightened. How senseless of him to go on reiterating the
+old plea! He ought to have pleaded for himself--to have let the man in
+him seek her and take his defeat, instead of beating about the flimsy
+bush of philanthropy.
+
+"I only meant--I was trying to make my work recommend me..." he said
+with a half-laugh, as she remained silent, her eyes still turned away.
+
+The silence continued for a long time--it stretched between them like a
+narrowing interminable road, down which, with a leaden heart, he seemed
+to watch her gradually disappearing. And then, unexpectedly, as she
+shrank to a tiny speck at the dip of the road, the perspective was
+mysteriously reversed, and he felt her growing nearer again, felt her
+close to him--felt her hand in his.
+
+"I'm really just like other women, you know--I shall like it because
+it's your work," she said.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+EVERY one agreed that, on the whole, Mr. Langhope had behaved extremely
+well.
+
+He was just beginning to regain his equanimity in the matter of the
+will--to perceive that, in the eyes of the public, something important
+and distinguished was being done at Westmore, and that the venture,
+while reducing Cicely's income during her minority, might, in some
+incredible way, actually make for its ultimate increase. So much Mr.
+Langhope, always eager to take the easiest view of the inevitable, had
+begun to let fall in his confidential comments on Amherst; when his
+newly-regained balance was rudely shaken by the news of his son-in-law's
+marriage.
+
+The free expression of his anger was baffled by the fact that, even by
+the farthest stretch of self-extenuating logic, he could find no one to
+blame for the event but himself.
+
+"Why on earth don't you say so--don't you call me a triple-dyed fool for
+bringing them together?" he challenged Mrs. Ansell, as they had the
+matter out together in the small intimate drawing-room of her New York
+apartment.
+
+Mrs. Ansell, stirring her tea with a pensive hand, met the challenge
+composedly.
+
+"At present you're doing it for me," she reminded him; "and after all,
+I'm not so disposed to agree with you."
+
+"Not agree with me? But you told me not to engage Miss Brent! Didn't you
+tell me not to engage her?"
+
+She made a hesitating motion of assent.
+
+"But, good Lord, how was I to help myself? No man was ever in such a
+quandary!" he broke off, leaping back to the other side of the argument.
+
+"No," she said, looking up at him suddenly. "I believe that, for the
+only time in your life, you were sorry then that you hadn't married me."
+
+She held his eyes for a moment with a look of gentle malice; then he
+laughed, and drew forth his cigarette-case.
+
+"Oh, come--you've inverted the formula," he said, reaching out for the
+enamelled match-box at his elbow. She let the pleasantry pass with a
+slight smile, and he went on reverting to his grievance: "Why _didn't_
+you want me to engage Miss Brent?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know...some instinct."
+
+"You won't tell me?"
+
+"I couldn't if I tried; and now, after all----"
+
+"After all--what?"
+
+She reflected. "You'll have Cicely off your mind, I mean."
+
+"Cicely off my mind?" Mr. Langhope was beginning to find his charming
+friend less consolatory than usual. After all, the most magnanimous
+woman has her circuitous way of saying _I told you so_. "As if any good
+governess couldn't have done that for me!" he grumbled.
+
+"Ah--the present care for her. But I was looking ahead," she rejoined.
+
+"To what--if I may ask?"
+
+"The next few years--when Mrs. Amherst may have children of her own."
+
+"Children of her own?" He bounded up, furious at the suggestion.
+
+"Had it never occurred to you?"
+
+"Hardly as a source of consolation!"
+
+"I think a philosophic mind might find it so."
+
+"I should really be interested to know how!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell put down her cup, and again turned her gentle tolerant eyes
+upon him.
+
+"Mr. Amherst, as a father, will take a more conservative view of his
+duties. Every one agrees that, in spite of his theories, he has a good
+head for business; and whatever he does at Westmore for the advantage of
+his children will naturally be for Cicely's advantage too."
+
+Mr. Langhope returned her gaze thoughtfully. "There's something in what
+you say," he admitted after a pause. "But it doesn't alter the fact
+that, with Amherst unmarried, the whole of the Westmore fortune would
+have gone back to Cicely--where it belongs."
+
+"Possibly. But it was so unlikely that he would remain unmarried."
+
+"I don't see why! A man of honour would have felt bound to keep the
+money for Cicely."
+
+"But you must remember that, from Mr. Amherst's standpoint, the money
+belongs rather to Westmore than to Cicely."
+
+"He's no better than a socialist, then!"
+
+"Well--supposing he isn't: the birth of a son and heir will cure that."
+
+Mr. Langhope winced, but she persisted gently: "It's really safer for
+Cicely as it is--" and before the end of the conference he found himself
+confessing, half against his will: "Well, since he hadn't the decency
+to remain single, I'm thankful he hasn't inflicted a stranger on us; and
+I shall never forget what Miss Brent did for my poor Bessy...."
+
+It was the view she had wished to bring him to, and the view which, in
+due course, with all his accustomed grace and adaptability, he presented
+to the searching gaze of a society profoundly moved by the incident of
+Amherst's marriage. "Of course, if Mr. Langhope approves--" society
+reluctantly murmured; and that Mr. Langhope did approve was presently
+made manifest by every outward show of consideration toward the
+newly-wedded couple.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst and Justine had been married in September; and after a holiday
+in Canada and the Adirondacks they returned to Hanaford for the winter.
+Amherst had proposed a short flight to Europe; but his wife preferred to
+settle down at once to her new duties.
+
+The announcement of her marriage had been met by Mrs. Dressel with a
+comment which often afterward returned to her memory. "It's splendid for
+you, of course, dear, _in one way_," her friend had murmured, between
+disparagement and envy--"that is, if you can stand talking about the
+Westmore mill-hands all the rest of your life."
+
+"Oh, but I couldn't--I should hate it!" Justine had energetically
+rejoined; meeting Mrs. Dressel's admonitory "Well, then?" with the
+laughing assurance that _she_ meant to lead the conversation.
+
+She knew well enough what the admonition meant. To Amherst, so long
+thwarted in his chosen work, the subject of Westmore was becoming an
+_idee fixe_; and it was natural that Hanaford should class him as a man
+of one topic. But Justine had guessed at his other side; a side as long
+thwarted, and far less articulate, which she intended to wake into life.
+She had felt it in him from the first, though their talks had so
+uniformly turned on the subject which palled on Hanaford; and it had
+been revealed to her during the silent hours among his books, when she
+had grown into such close intimacy with his mind.
+
+She did not, assuredly, mean to spend the rest of her days talking about
+the Westmore mill-hands; but in the arrogance of her joy she wished to
+begin her married life in the setting of its habitual duties, and to
+achieve the victory of evoking the secret unsuspected Amherst out of the
+preoccupied business man chained to his task. Dull lovers might have to
+call on romantic scenes to wake romantic feelings; but Justine's
+glancing imagination leapt to the challenge of extracting poetry from
+the prose of routine.
+
+And this was precisely the triumph that the first months brought her. To
+mortal eye, Amherst and Justine seemed to be living at Hanaford: in
+reality they were voyaging on unmapped seas of adventure. The seas were
+limitless, and studded with happy islands: every fresh discovery they
+made about each other, every new agreement of ideas and feelings,
+offered itself to these intrepid explorers as a friendly coast where
+they might beach their keel and take their bearings. Thus, in the
+thronging hum of metaphor, Justine sometimes pictured their relation;
+seeing it, again, as a journey through crowded populous cities, where
+every face she met was Amherst's; or, contrarily, as a multiplication of
+points of perception, so that one became, for the world's contact, a
+surface so multitudinously alive that the old myth of hearing the grass
+grow and walking the rainbow explained itself as the heightening of
+personality to the utmost pitch of sympathy.
+
+In reality, the work at Westmore became an almost necessary sedative
+after these flights into the blue. She felt sometimes that they would
+have been bankrupted of sensations if daily hours of drudgery had not
+provided a reservoir in which fresh powers of enjoyment could slowly
+gather. And their duties had the rarer quality of constituting,
+precisely, the deepest, finest bond between them, the clarifying element
+which saved their happiness from stagnation, and kept it in the strong
+mid-current of human feeling.
+
+It was this element in their affection which, in the last days of
+November, was unexpectedly put on trial. Mr. Langhope, since his return
+from his annual visit to Europe, showed signs of diminishing strength
+and elasticity. He had had to give up his nightly dinner parties, to
+desert his stall at the Opera: to take, in short, as he plaintively put
+it, his social pleasures homoeopathically. Certain of his friends
+explained the change by saying that he had never been "quite the same"
+since his daughter's death; while others found its determining cause in
+the shock of Amherst's second marriage. But this insinuation Mr.
+Langhope in due time discredited by writing to ask the Amhersts if they
+would not pity his loneliness and spend the winter in town with him. The
+proposal came in a letter to Justine, which she handed to her husband
+one afternoon on his return from the mills.
+
+She sat behind the tea-table in the Westmore drawing-room, now at last
+transformed, not into Mrs. Dressel's vision of "something lovely in
+Louis Seize," but into a warm yet sober setting for books, for scattered
+flowers, for deep chairs and shaded lamps in pleasant nearness to each
+other.
+
+Amherst raised his eyes from the letter, thinking as he did so how well
+her bright head, with its flame-like play of meanings, fitted into the
+background she had made for it. Still unobservant of external details,
+he was beginning to feel a vague well-being of the eye wherever her
+touch had passed.
+
+"Well, we must do it," he said simply.
+
+"Oh, must we?" she murmured, holding out his cup.
+
+He smiled at her note of dejection. "Unnatural woman! New York _versus_
+Hanaford--do you really dislike it so much?"
+
+She tried to bring a tone of consent into her voice. "I shall be very
+glad to be with Cicely again--and that, of course," she reflected, "is
+the reason why Mr. Langhope wants us."
+
+"Well--if it is, it's a good reason."
+
+"Yes. But how much shall you be with us?"
+
+"If you say so, I'll arrange to get away for a month or two."
+
+"Oh, no: I don't want that!" she said, with a smile that triumphed a
+little. "But why should not Cicely come here?"
+
+"If Mr. Langhope is cut off from his usual amusements, I'm afraid that
+would only make him more lonely."
+
+"Yes, I suppose so." She put aside her untasted cup, resting her elbows
+on her knees, and her chin on her clasped hands, in the attitude
+habitual to her in moments of inward debate.
+
+Amherst rose and seated himself on the sofa beside her. "Dear! What is
+it?" he said, drawing her hands down, so that she had to turn her face
+to his.
+
+"Nothing...I don't know...a superstition. I've been so happy here!"
+
+"Is our happiness too perishable to be transplanted?"
+
+She smiled and answered by another question. "You don't mind doing it,
+then?"
+
+Amherst hesitated. "Shall I tell you? I feel that it's a sort of ring of
+Polycrates. It may buy off the jealous gods."
+
+A faint shrinking from some importunate suggestion seemed to press her
+closer to him. "Then you feel they _are_ jealous?" she breathed, in a
+half-laugh.
+
+"I pity them if they're not!"
+
+"Yes," she agreed, rallying to his tone. "I only had a fancy that they
+might overlook such a dull place as Hanaford."
+
+Amherst drew her to him. "Isn't it, on the contrary, in the ash-heaps
+that the rag-pickers prowl?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no disguising it: she was growing afraid of her happiness. Her
+husband's analogy of the ring expressed her fear. She seemed to herself
+to carry a blazing jewel on her breast--something that singled her out
+for human envy and divine pursuit. She had a preposterous longing to
+dress plainly and shabbily, to subdue her voice and gestures, to try to
+slip through life unnoticed; yet all the while she knew that her jewel
+would shoot its rays through every disguise. And from the depths of
+ancient atavistic instincts came the hope that Amherst was right--that
+by sacrificing their precious solitude to Mr. Langhope's convenience
+they might still deceive the gods.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once pledged to her new task, Justine, as usual, espoused it with
+ardour. It was pleasant, even among greater joys, to see her husband
+again frankly welcomed by Mr. Langhope; to see Cicely bloom into
+happiness at their coming; and to overhear Mr. Langhope exclaim, in a
+confidential aside to his son-in-law: "It's wonderful, the _bien-etre_
+that wife of yours diffuses about her!"
+
+The element of _bien-etre_ was the only one in which Mr. Langhope could
+draw breath; and to those who kept him immersed in it he was prodigal of
+delicate attentions. The experiment, in short, was a complete success;
+and even Amherst's necessary weeks at Hanaford had the merit of giving a
+finer flavour to his brief appearances.
+
+Of all this Justine was thinking as she drove down Fifth Avenue one
+January afternoon to meet her husband at the Grand Central station. She
+had tamed her happiness at last: the quality of fear had left it, and it
+nestled in her heart like some wild creature subdued to human ways.
+And, as her inward bliss became more and more a quiet habit of the mind,
+the longing to help and minister returned, absorbing her more deeply in
+her husband's work.
+
+She dismissed the carriage at the station, and when his train had
+arrived they emerged together into the cold winter twilight and turned
+up Madison Avenue. These walks home from the station gave them a little
+more time to themselves than if they had driven; and there was always so
+much to tell on both sides. This time the news was all good: the work at
+Westmore was prospering, and on Justine's side there was a more cheerful
+report of Mr. Langhope's health, and--best of all--his promise to give
+them Cicely for the summer. Amherst and Justine were both anxious that
+the child should spend more time at Hanaford, that her young
+associations should begin to gather about Westmore; and Justine exulted
+in the fact that the suggestion had come from Mr. Langhope himself,
+while she and Amherst were still planning how to lead him up to it.
+
+They reached the house while this triumph was still engaging them; and
+in the doorway Amherst turned to her with a smile.
+
+"And of course--dear man!--he believes the idea is all his. There's
+nothing you can't make people believe, you little Jesuit!"
+
+"I don't think there is!" she boasted, falling gaily into his tone; and
+then, as the door opened, and she entered the hall, her eyes fell on a
+blotted envelope which lay among the letters on the table.
+
+The parlour-maid proffered it with a word of explanation. "A gentleman
+left it for you, madam; he asked to see you, and said he'd call for the
+answer in a day or two."
+
+"Another begging letter, I suppose," said Amherst, turning into the
+drawing-room, where Mr. Langhope and Cicely awaited them; and Justine,
+carelessly pushing the envelope into her muff, murmured "I suppose so"
+as she followed him.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+OVER the tea-table Justine forgot the note in her muff; but when she
+went upstairs to dress it fell to the floor, and she picked it up and
+laid it on her dressing-table.
+
+She had already recognized the hand as Wyant's, for it was not the first
+letter she had received from him.
+
+Three times since her marriage he had appealed to her for help, excusing
+himself on the plea of difficulties and ill-health. The first time he
+wrote, he alluded vaguely to having married, and to being compelled,
+through illness, to give up his practice at Clifton. On receiving this
+letter she made enquiries, and learned that, a month or two after her
+departure from Lynbrook, Wyant had married a Clifton girl--a pretty
+piece of flaunting innocence, whom she remembered about the lanes,
+generally with a young man in a buggy. There had evidently been
+something obscure and precipitate about the marriage, which was a
+strange one for the ambitious young doctor. Justine conjectured that it
+might have been the cause of his leaving Clifton--or or perhaps he had
+already succumbed to the fatal habit she had suspected in him. At any
+rate he seemed, in some mysterious way, to have dropped in two years
+from promise to failure; yet she could not believe that, with his
+talents, and the name he had begun to make, such a lapse could be more
+than temporary. She had often heard Dr. Garford prophesy great things
+for him; but Dr. Garford had died suddenly during the previous summer,
+and the loss of this powerful friend was mentioned by Wyant among his
+misfortunes.
+
+Justine was anxious to help him, but her marriage to a rich man had not
+given her the command of much money. She and Amherst, choosing to regard
+themselves as pensioners on the Westmore fortune, were scrupulous in
+restricting their personal expenditure; and her work among the
+mill-hands brought many demands on the modest allowance which her
+husband had insisted on her accepting. In reply to Wyant's first appeal,
+which reached her soon after her marriage, she had sent him a hundred
+dollars; but when the second came, some two months later--with a fresh
+tale of ill-luck and ill-health--she had not been able to muster more
+than half the amount. Finally a third letter had arrived, a short time
+before their leaving for New York. It told the same story of persistent
+misfortune, but on this occasion Wyant, instead of making a direct
+appeal for money, suggested that, through her hospital connections, she
+should help him to establish a New York practice. His tone was
+half-whining, half-peremptory, his once precise writing smeared and
+illegible; and these indications, combined with her former suspicions,
+convinced her that, for the moment, he was unfit for medical work. At
+any rate, she could not assume the responsibility of recommending him;
+and in answering she advised him to apply to some of the physicians he
+had worked with at Lynbrook, softening her refusal by the enclosure of a
+small sum of money. To this letter she received no answer. Wyant
+doubtless found the money insufficient, and resented her unwillingness
+to help him by the use of her influence; and she felt sure that the note
+before her contained a renewal of his former request.
+
+An obscure reluctance made her begin to undress before opening it. She
+felt slightly tired and indolently happy, and she did not wish any
+jarring impression to break in on the sense of completeness which her
+husband's coming always put into her life. Her happiness was making her
+timid and luxurious: she was beginning to shrink from even trivial
+annoyances.
+
+But when at length, in her dressing-gown, her loosened hair about her
+shoulders, she seated herself before the toilet-mirror, Wyant's note
+once more confronted her. It was absurd to put off reading it--if he
+asked for money again, she would simply confide the whole business to
+Amherst.
+
+She had never spoken to her husband of her correspondence with Wyant.
+The mere fact that the latter had appealed to her, instead of addressing
+himself to Amherst, made her suspect that he had a weakness to hide, and
+counted on her professional discretion. But his continued importunities
+would certainly release her from any such supposed obligation; and she
+thought with relief of casting the weight of her difficulty on her
+husband's shoulders.
+
+She opened the note and read.
+
+"I did not acknowledge your last letter because I was ashamed to tell
+you that the money was not enough to be of any use. But I am past shame
+now. My wife was confined three weeks ago, and has been desperately ill
+ever since. She is in no state to move, but we shall be put out of these
+rooms unless I can get money or work at once. A word from you would have
+given me a start in New York--and I'd be willing to begin again as an
+interne or a doctor's assistant.
+
+"I have never reminded you of what you owe me, and I should not do so
+now if I hadn't been to hell and back since I saw you. But I suppose you
+would rather have me remind you than apply to Mr. Amherst. You can tell
+me when to call for my answer."
+
+Justine laid down the letter and looked up. Her eyes rested on her own
+reflection in the glass, and it frightened her. She sat motionless, with
+a thickly-beating heart, one hand clenched on the letter.
+
+_"I suppose you would rather have me remind you than apply to Mr.
+Amherst."_
+
+That was what his importunity meant, then! She had been paying blackmail
+all this time.... Somewhere, from the first, in an obscure fold of
+consciousness, she had felt the stir of an unnamed, unacknowledged fear;
+and now the fear raised its head and looked at her. Well! She would look
+back at it, then: look it straight in the malignant eye. What was it,
+after all, but a "bugbear to scare children"--the ghost of the opinion
+of the many? She had suspected from the first that Wyant knew of her
+having shortened the term of Bessy Amherst's sufferings--returning to
+the room when he did, it was almost impossible that he should not have
+guessed what had happened; and his silence had made her believe that he
+understood her motive and approved it. But, supposing she had been
+mistaken, she still had nothing to fear, since she had done nothing that
+her own conscience condemned. If the act were to do again she would do
+it--she had never known a moment's regret!
+
+Suddenly she heard Amherst's step in the passage--heard him laughing and
+talking as he chased Cicely up the stairs to the nursery.
+
+_If she was not afraid, why had she never told Amherst?_
+
+Why, the answer to that was simple enough! She had not told him _because
+she was not afraid_. From the first she had retained sufficient
+detachment to view her act impartially, to find it completely justified
+by circumstances, and to decide that, since those circumstances could be
+but partly and indirectly known to her husband, she not only had the
+right to keep her own counsel, but was actually under a kind of
+obligation not to force on him the knowledge of a fact that he could not
+alter and could not completely judge.... Was there any flaw in this line
+of reasoning? Did it not show a deliberate weighing of conditions, a
+perfect rectitude of intention? And, after all, she had had Amherst's
+virtual consent to her act! She knew his feelings on such matters--his
+independence of traditional judgments, his horror of inflicting needless
+pain--she was as sure of his intellectual assent as of her own. She was
+even sure that, when she told him, he would appreciate her reasons for
+not telling him before....
+
+For now of course he must know everything--this horrible letter made it
+inevitable. She regretted that she had decided, though for the best of
+reasons, not to speak to him of her own accord; for it was intolerable
+that he should think of any external pressure as having brought her to
+avowal. But no! he would not think that. The understanding between them
+was so complete that no deceptive array of circumstances could ever make
+her motives obscure to him. She let herself rest a moment in the
+thought....
+
+Presently she heard him moving in the next room--he had come back to
+dress for dinner. She would go to him now, at once--she could not bear
+this weight on her mind the whole evening. She pushed back her chair,
+crumpling the letter in her hand; but as she did so, her eyes again fell
+on her reflection. She could not go to her husband with such a face! If
+she was not afraid, why did she look like that?
+
+Well--she was afraid! It would be easier and simpler to admit it. She
+was afraid--afraid for the first time--afraid for her own happiness! She
+had had just eight months of happiness--it was horrible to think of
+losing it so soon.... Losing it? But why should she lose it? The letter
+must have affected her brain...all her thoughts were in a blur of
+fear.... Fear of what? Of the man who understood her as no one else
+understood her? The man to whose wisdom and mercy she trusted as the
+believer trusts in God? This was a kind of abominable nightmare--even
+Amherst's image had been distorted in her mind! The only way to clear
+her brain, to recover the normal sense of things, was to go to him now,
+at once, to feel his arms about her, to let his kiss dispel her
+fears.... She rose with a long breath of relief.
+
+She had to cross the length of the room to reach his door, and when she
+had gone half-way she heard him knock.
+
+"May I come in?"
+
+She was close to the fire-place, and a bright fire burned on the hearth.
+
+"Come in!" she answered; and as she did so, she turned and dropped
+Wyant's letter into the fire. Her hand had crushed it into a little
+ball, and she saw the flames spring up and swallow it before her husband
+entered.
+
+It was not that she had changed her mind--she still meant to tell him
+everything. But to hold the letter was like holding a venomous
+snake--she wanted to exterminate it, to forget that she had ever seen
+the blotted repulsive characters. And she could not bear to have
+Amherst's eyes rest on it, to have him know that any man had dared to
+write to her in that tone. What vile meanings might not be read between
+Wyant's phrases? She had a right to tell the story in her own way--the
+true way....
+
+As Amherst approached, in his evening clothes, the heavy locks smoothed
+from his forehead, a flower of Cicely's giving in his button-hole, she
+thought she had never seen him look so kind and handsome.
+
+"Not dressed? Do you know that it's ten minutes to eight?" he said,
+coming up to her with a smile.
+
+She roused herself, putting her hands to her hair. "Yes, I know--I
+forgot," she murmured, longing to feel his arms about her, but standing
+rooted to the ground, unable to move an inch nearer.
+
+It was he who came close, drawing her lifted hands into his. "You look
+worried--I hope it was nothing troublesome that made you forget?"
+
+The divine kindness in his voice, his eyes! Yes--it would be easy, quite
+easy, to tell him....
+
+"No--yes--I was a little troubled...." she said, feeling the warmth of
+his touch flow through her hands reassuringly.
+
+"Dear! What about?"
+
+She drew a deep breath. "The letter----"
+
+He looked puzzled. "What letter?"
+
+"Downstairs...when we came in...it was not an ordinary begging-letter."
+
+"No? What then?" he asked, his face clouding.
+
+She noticed the change, and it frightened her. Was he angry? Was he
+going to be angry? But how absurd! He was only distressed at her
+distress.
+
+"What then?" he repeated, more gently.
+
+She looked up into his eyes for an instant. "It was a horrible
+letter----" she whispered, as she pressed her clasped hands against him.
+
+His grasp tightened on her wrists, and again the stern look crossed his
+face. "Horrible? What do you mean?"
+
+She had never seen him angry--but she felt suddenly that, to the guilty
+creature, his anger would be terrible. He would crush Wyant--she must be
+careful how she spoke.
+
+"I didn't mean that--only painful...."
+
+"Where is the letter? Let me see it."
+
+"Oh, no" she exclaimed, shrinking away.
+
+"Justine, what has happened? What ails you?"
+
+On a blind impulse she had backed toward the hearth, propping her arms
+against the mantel-piece while she stole a secret glance at the embers.
+Nothing remained of it--no, nothing.
+
+But suppose it was against herself that his anger turned? The idea was
+preposterous, yet she trembled at it. It was clear that she must say
+_something_ at once--must somehow account for her agitation. But the
+sense that she was unnerved--no longer in control of her face, her
+voice--made her feel that she would tell her story badly if she told it
+now.... Had she not the right to gain a respite, to choose her own hour?
+Weakness--weakness again! Every delay would only increase the phantom
+terror. Now, _now_--with her head on his breast!
+
+She turned toward him and began to speak impulsively.
+
+"I can't show you the letter, because it's not--not my secret----"
+
+"Ah?" he murmured, perceptibly relieved.
+
+"It's from some one--unlucky--whom I've known about...."
+
+"And whose troubles have been troubling you? But can't we help?"
+
+She shone on him through gleaming lashes. "Some one poor and ill--who
+needs money, I mean----" She tried to laugh away her tears. "And I
+haven't any! That's _my_ trouble!"
+
+"Foolish child! And to beg you are ashamed? And so you're letting your
+tears cool Mr. Langhope's soup?" He had her in his arms now, his kisses
+drying her cheek; and she turned her head so that their lips met in a
+long pressure.
+
+"Will a hundred dollars do?" he asked with a smile as he released her.
+
+_A hundred dollars!_ No--she was almost sure they would not. But she
+tried to shape a murmur of gratitude. "Thank you--thank you! I hated to
+ask...."
+
+"I'll write the cheque at once."
+
+"No--no," she protested, "there's no hurry."
+
+But he went back to his room, and she turned again to the toilet-table.
+Her face was painful to look at still--but a light was breaking through
+its fear. She felt the touch of a narcotic in her veins. How calm and
+peaceful the room was--and how delicious to think that her life would go
+on in it, safely and peacefully, in the old familiar way!
+
+As she swept up her hair, passing the comb through it, and flinging it
+dexterously over her lifted wrist, she heard Amherst cross the floor
+behind her, and pause to lay something on her writing-table.
+
+"Thank you," she murmured again, lowering her head as he passed.
+
+When the door had closed on him she thrust the last pin into her hair,
+dashed some drops of Cologne on her face, and went over to the
+writing-table. As she picked up the cheque she saw it was for three
+hundred dollars.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+ONCE or twice, in the days that followed, Justine found herself thinking
+that she had never known happiness before. The old state of secure
+well-being seemed now like a dreamless sleep; but this new bliss, on its
+sharp pinnacle ringed with fire--this thrilling conscious joy, daily
+and hourly snatched from fear--this was living, not sleeping!
+
+Wyant acknowledged her gift with profuse, almost servile thanks. She had
+sent it without a word--saying to herself that pity for his situation
+made it possible to ignore his baseness. And the days went on as before.
+She was not conscious of any change, save in the heightened, almost
+artificial quality of her happiness, till one day in March, when Mr.
+Langhope announced that he was going for two or three weeks to a
+friend's shooting-box in the south. The anniversary of Bessy's death was
+approaching, and Justine knew that at that time he always absented
+himself.
+
+"Supposing you and Amherst were to carry off Cicely till I come back?
+Perhaps you could persuade him to break away from work for once--or, if
+that's impossible, you could take her with you to Hanaford. She looks a
+little pale, and the change would be good for her."
+
+This was a great concession on Mr. Langhope's part, and Justine saw the
+pleasure in her husband's face. It was the first time that his
+father-in-law had suggested Cicely's going to Hanaford.
+
+"I'm afraid I can't break away just now, sir," Amherst said, "but it
+will be delightful for Justine if you'll give us Cicely while you're
+away."
+
+"Take her by all means, my dear fellow: I always sleep on both ears when
+she's with your wife."
+
+It was nearly three months since Justine had left Hanaford--and now she
+was to return there alone with her husband! There would be hours, of
+course, when the child's presence was between them--or when, again, his
+work would keep him at the mills. But in the evenings, when Cicely was
+in bed--when he and she sat alone, together in the Westmore
+drawing-room--in Bessy's drawing-room!... No--she must find some excuse
+for remaining away till she had again grown used to the idea of being
+alone with Amherst. Every day she was growing a little more used to it;
+but it would take time--time, and the full assurance that Wyant was
+silenced. Till then she could not go back to Hanaford.
+
+She found a pretext in her own health. She pleaded that she was a little
+tired, below par...and to return to Hanaford meant returning to hard
+work; with the best will in the world she could not be idle there. Might
+she not, she suggested, take Cicely to Tuxedo or Lakewood, and thus get
+quite away from household cares and good works? The pretext rang
+hollow--it was so unlike her! She saw Amherst's eyes rest anxiously on
+her as Mr. Langhope uttered his prompt assent. Certainly she did look
+tired--Mr. Langhope himself had noticed it. Had he perhaps over-taxed
+her energies, left the household too entirely on her shoulders? Oh,
+no--it was only the New York air...like Cicely, she pined for a breath
+of the woods.... And so, the day Mr. Langhope left, she and Cicely were
+packed off to Lakewood.
+
+They stayed there a week: then a fit of restlessness drove Justine back
+to town. She found an excuse in the constant rain--it was really
+useless, as she wrote Mr. Langhope, to keep the child imprisoned in an
+over-heated hotel while they could get no benefit from the outdoor life.
+In reality, she found the long lonely hours unendurable. She pined for a
+sight of her husband, and thought of committing Cicely to Mrs. Ansell's
+care, and making a sudden dash for Hanaford. But the vision of the long
+evenings in the Westmore drawing-room again restrained her. No--she
+would simply go back to New York, dine out occasionally, go to a concert
+or two, trust to the usual demands of town life to crowd her hours with
+small activities.... And in another week Mr. Langhope would be back and
+the days would resume their normal course.
+
+On arriving, she looked feverishly through the letters in the hall. None
+from Wyant--that fear was allayed! Every day added to her reassurance. By
+this time, no doubt, he was on his feet again, and ashamed--unutterably
+ashamed--of the threat that despair had wrung from him. She felt almost
+sure that his shame would keep him from ever attempting to see her, or
+even from writing again.
+
+"A gentleman called to see you yesterday, madam--he would give no name,"
+the parlour-maid said. And there was the sick fear back on her again!
+She could hardly control the trembling of her lips as she asked: "Did he
+leave no message?"
+
+"No, madam: he only wanted to know when you'd be back."
+
+She longed to return: "And did you tell him?" but restrained herself,
+and passed into the drawing-room. After all, the parlour-maid had not
+described the caller--why jump to the conclusion that it was Wyant?
+
+Three days passed, and no letter came--no sign. She struggled with the
+temptation to describe Wyant to the servants, and to forbid his
+admission. But it would not do. They were nearly all old servants, in
+whose eyes she was still the intruder, the upstart sick-nurse--she could
+not wholly trust them. And each day she felt a little easier, a little
+more convinced that the unknown visitor had not been Wyant.
+
+On the fourth day she received a letter from Amherst. He hoped to be
+back on the morrow, but as his plans were still uncertain he would
+telegraph in the morning--and meanwhile she must keep well, and rest,
+and amuse herself....
+
+Amuse herself! That evening, as it happened, she was going to the
+theatre with Mrs. Ansell. She and Mrs. Ansell, though outwardly on
+perfect terms, had not greatly advanced in intimacy. The agitated,
+decentralized life of the older woman seemed futile and trivial to
+Justine; but on Mr. Langhope's account she wished to keep up an
+appearance of friendship with his friend, and the same motive doubtless
+inspired Mrs. Ansell. Just now, at any rate, Justine was grateful for
+her attentions, and glad to go about with her. Anything--anything to get
+away from her own thoughts! That was the pass she had come to.
+
+At the theatre, in a proscenium box, the publicity, the light and
+movement, the action of the play, all helped to distract and quiet her.
+At such moments she grew ashamed of her fears. Why was she tormenting
+herself? If anything happened she had only to ask her husband for more
+money. She never spoke to him of her good works, and there would be
+nothing to excite suspicion in her asking help again for the friend
+whose secret she was pledged to keep.... But nothing was going to
+happen. As the play progressed, and the stimulus of talk and laughter
+flowed through her veins, she felt a complete return of confidence. And
+then suddenly she glanced across the house, and saw Wyant looking at
+her.
+
+He sat rather far back, in one of the side rows just beneath the
+balcony, so that his face was partly shaded. But even in the shadow it
+frightened her. She had been prepared for a change, but not for this
+ghastly deterioration. And he continued to look at her.
+
+She began to be afraid that he would do something conspicuous--point at
+her, or stand up in his seat. She thought he looked half-mad--or was it
+her own hallucination that made him appear so? She and Mrs. Ansell were
+alone in the box for the moment, and she started up, pushing back her
+chair....
+
+Mrs. Ansell leaned forward. "What is it?"
+
+"Nothing--the heat--I'll sit back for a moment." But as she withdrew
+into the back of the box, she was seized by a new fear. If he was still
+watching, might he not come to the door and try to speak to her? Her
+only safety lay in remaining in full view of the audience; and she
+returned to Mrs. Ansell's side.
+
+The other members of the party came back--the bell rang, the foot-lights
+blazed, the curtain rose. She lost herself in the mazes of the play. She
+sat so motionless, her face so intently turned toward the stage, that
+the muscles at the back of her neck began to stiffen. And then, quite
+suddenly, toward the middle of the act, she felt an undefinable sense of
+relief. She could not tell what caused it--but slowly, cautiously, while
+the eyes of the others were intent upon the stage, she turned her head
+and looked toward Wyant's seat. It was empty.
+
+Her first thought was that he had gone to wait for her outside. But
+no--there were two more acts: why should he stand at the door for half
+the evening?
+
+At last the act ended; the entr'acte elapsed; the play went on
+again--and still the seat was empty. Gradually she persuaded herself
+that she had been mistaken in thinking that the man who had occupied it
+was Wyant. Her self-command returned, she began to think and talk
+naturally, to follow the dialogue on the stage--and when the evening was
+over, and Mrs. Ansell set her down at her door, she had almost forgotten
+her fears.
+
+The next morning she felt calmer than for many days. She was sure now
+that if Wyant had wished to speak to her he would have waited at the
+door of the theatre; and the recollection of his miserable face made
+apprehension yield to pity. She began to feel that she had treated him
+coldly, uncharitably. They had been friends once, as well as
+fellow-workers; but she had been false even to the comradeship of the
+hospital. She should have sought him out and given him sympathy as well
+as money; had she shown some sign of human kindness his last letter
+might never have been written.
+
+In the course of the morning Amherst telegraphed that he hoped to settle
+his business in time to catch the two o'clock express, but that his
+plans were still uncertain. Justine and Cicely lunched alone, and after
+luncheon the little girl was despatched to her dancing-class. Justine
+herself meant to go out when the brougham returned. She went up to her
+room to dress, planning to drive in the park, and to drop in on Mrs.
+Ansell before she called for Cicely; but on the way downstairs she saw
+the servant opening the door to a visitor. It was too late to draw back;
+and descending the last steps she found herself face to face with Wyant.
+
+They looked at each other a moment in silence; then Justine murmured a
+word of greeting and led the way to the drawing-room.
+
+It was a snowy afternoon, and in the raw ash-coloured light she thought
+he looked more changed than at the theatre. She remarked, too, that his
+clothes were worn and untidy, his gloveless hands soiled and tremulous.
+None of the degrading signs of his infirmity were lacking; and she saw
+at once that, while in the early days of the habit he had probably mixed
+his drugs, so that the conflicting symptoms neutralized each other, he
+had now sunk into open morphia-taking. She felt profoundly sorry for
+him; yet as he followed her into the room physical repulsion again
+mastered the sense of pity.
+
+But where action was possible she was always self-controlled, and she
+turned to him quietly as they seated themselves.
+
+"I have been wishing to see you," she said, looking at him. "I have felt
+that I ought to have done so sooner--to have told you how sorry I am for
+your bad luck."
+
+He returned her glance with surprise: they were evidently the last words
+he had expected.
+
+"You're very kind," he said in a low embarrassed voice. He had kept on
+his shabby over-coat, and he twirled his hat in his hands as he spoke.
+
+"I have felt," Justine continued, "that perhaps a talk with you might be
+of more use----"
+
+He raised his head, fixing her with bright narrowed eyes. "I have felt
+so too: that's my reason for coming. You sent me a generous present some
+weeks ago--but I don't want to go on living on charity."
+
+"I understand that," she answered. "But why have you had to do so? Won't
+you tell me just what has happened?"
+
+She felt the words to be almost a mockery; yet she could not say "I read
+your history at a glance"; and she hoped that her question might draw
+out his wretched secret, and thus give her the chance to speak frankly.
+
+He gave a nervous laugh. "Just what has happened? It's a long story--and
+some of the details are not particularly pretty." He broke off, moving
+his hat more rapidly through his trembling hands.
+
+"Never mind: tell me."
+
+"Well--after you all left Lynbrook I had rather a bad break-down--the
+strain of Mrs. Amherst's case, I suppose. You remember Bramble, the
+Clifton grocer? Miss Bramble nursed me--I daresay you remember her too.
+When I recovered I married her--and after that things didn't go well."
+
+He paused, breathing quickly, and looking about the room with odd,
+furtive glances. "I was only half-well, anyhow--I couldn't attend to my
+patients properly--and after a few months we decided to leave Clifton,
+and I bought a practice in New Jersey. But my wife was ill there, and
+things went wrong again--damnably. I suppose you've guessed that my
+marriage was a mistake. She had an idea that we should do better in New
+York--so we came here a few months ago, and we've done decidedly worse."
+
+Justine listened with a sense of discouragement. She saw now that he did
+not mean to acknowledge his failing, and knowing the secretiveness of
+the drug-taker she decided that he was deluded enough to think he could
+still deceive her.
+
+"Well," he began again, with an attempt at jauntiness, "I've found out
+that in my profession it's a hard struggle to get on your feet again,
+after illness or--or any bad set-back. That's the reason I asked you to
+say a word for me. It's not only the money, though I need that badly--I
+want to get back my self-respect. With my record I oughtn't to be where
+I am--and you can speak for me better than any one."
+
+"Why better than the doctors you've worked with?" Justine put the
+question abruptly, looking him straight in the eyes.
+
+His glance dropped, and an unpleasant flush rose to his thin cheeks.
+
+"Well--as it happens, you're better situated than any one to help me to
+the particular thing I want."
+
+"The particular thing----?"
+
+"Yes. I understand that Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell are both interested
+in the new wing for paying patients at Saint Christopher's. I want the
+position of house-physician there, and I know you can get it for me."
+
+His tone changed as he spoke, till with the last words it became rough
+and almost menacing.
+
+Justine felt her colour rise, and her heart began to beat confusedly.
+Here was the truth, then: she could no longer be the dupe of her own
+compassion. The man knew his power and meant to use it. But at the
+thought her courage was in arms.
+
+"I'm sorry--but it's impossible," she said.
+
+"Impossible--why?"
+
+She continued to look at him steadily. "You said just now that you
+wished to regain your self-respect. Well, you must regain it before you
+can ask me--or any one else--to recommend you to a position of trust."
+
+Wyant half-rose, with an angry murmur. "My self-respect? What do you
+mean? _I_ meant that I'd lost courage--through ill-luck----"
+
+"Yes; and your ill-luck has come through your own fault. Till you cure
+yourself you're not fit to cure others."
+
+He sank back into his seat, glowering at her under sullen brows; then
+his expression gradually changed to half-sneering admiration. "You're a
+plucky one!" he said.
+
+Justine repressed a movement of disgust. "I am very sorry for you," she
+said gravely. "I saw this trouble coming on you long ago--and if there
+is any other way in which I can help you----"
+
+"Thanks," he returned, still sneering. "Your sympathy is very
+precious--there was a time when I would have given my soul for it. But
+that's over, and I'm here to talk business. You say you saw my trouble
+coming on--did it ever occur to you that you were the cause of it?"
+
+Justine glanced at him with frank contempt. "No--for I was not," she
+replied.
+
+"That's an easy way out of it. But you took everything from me--first my
+hope of marrying you; then my chance of a big success in my career; and
+I was desperate--weak, if you like--and tried to deaden my feelings in
+order to keep up my pluck."
+
+Justine rose to her feet with a movement of impatience. "Every word you
+say proves how unfit you are to assume any responsibility--to do
+anything but try to recover your health. If I can help you to that, I am
+still willing to do so."
+
+Wyant rose also, moving a step nearer. "Well, get me that place,
+then--I'll see to the rest: I'll keep straight."
+
+"No--it's impossible."
+
+"You won't?"
+
+"I can't," she repeated firmly.
+
+"And you expect to put me off with that answer?"
+
+She hesitated. "Yes--if there's no other help you'll accept."
+
+He laughed again--his feeble sneering laugh was disgusting. "Oh, I don't
+say that. I'd like to earn my living honestly--funny preference--but if
+you cut me off from that, I suppose it's only fair to let you make up
+for it. My wife and child have got to live."
+
+"You choose a strange way of helping them; but I will do what I can if
+you will go for a while to some institution----"
+
+He broke in furiously. "Institution be damned! You can't shuffle me out
+of the way like that. I'm all right--good food is what I need. You
+think I've got morphia in me--why, it's hunger!"
+
+Justine heard him with a renewal of pity. "Oh, I'm sorry for you--very
+sorry! Why do you try to deceive me?"
+
+"Why do you deceive _me_? You know what I want and you know you've got
+to let me have it. If you won't give me a line to one of your friends at
+Saint Christopher's you'll have to give me another cheque--that's the
+size of it."
+
+As they faced each other in silence Justine's pity gave way to a sudden
+hatred for the poor creature who stood shivering and sneering before
+her.
+
+"You choose the wrong tone--and I think our talk has lasted long
+enough," she said, stretching her hand to the bell.
+
+Wyant did not move. "Don't ring--unless you want me to write to your
+husband," he rejoined.
+
+A sick feeling of helplessness overcame her; but she turned on him
+firmly. "I pardoned you once for that threat!"
+
+"Yes--and you sent me some money the next day."
+
+"I was mistaken enough to think that, in your distress, you had not
+realized what you wrote. But if you're a systematic blackmailer----"
+
+"Gently--gently. Bad names don't frighten me--it's hunger and debt I'm
+afraid of."
+
+Justine felt a last tremor of compassion. He was abominable--but he was
+pitiable too.
+
+"I will really help you--I will see your wife and do what I can--but I
+can give you no money today."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because I have none. I am not as rich as you think."
+
+He smiled incredulously. "Give me a line to Mr. Langhope, then."
+
+"No."
+
+He sat down once more, leaning back with a weak assumption of ease.
+"Perhaps Mr. Amherst will think differently."
+
+She whitened, but said steadily: "Mr. Amherst is away."
+
+"Very well--I can write."
+
+For the last five minutes Justine had foreseen this threat, and had
+tried to force her mind to face dispassionately the chances it involved.
+After all, why not let him write to Amherst? The very vileness of the
+deed must rouse an indignation which would be all in her favour, would
+inevitably dispose her husband to readier sympathy with the motive of
+her act, as contrasted with the base insinuations of her slanderer. It
+seemed impossible that Amherst should condemn her when his condemnation
+involved the fulfilling of Wyant's calculations: a reaction of scorn
+would throw him into unhesitating championship of her conduct. All this
+was so clear that, had she been advising any one else, her confidence in
+the course to be taken might have strengthened the feeblest will; but
+with the question lying between herself and Amherst--with the vision of
+those soiled hands literally laid on the spotless fabric of her
+happiness, judgment wavered, foresight was obscured--she felt
+tremulously unable to face the steps between exposure and vindication.
+Her final conclusion was that she must, at any rate, gain time: buy off
+Wyant till she had been able to tell her story in her own way, and at
+her own hour, and then defy him when he returned to the assault. The
+idea that whatever concession she made would be only provisional, helped
+to excuse the weakness of making it, and enabled her at last, without
+too painful a sense of falling below her own standards, to reply in a
+low voice: "If you'll go now, I will send you something next week."
+
+But Wyant did not respond as readily as she had expected. He merely
+asked, without altering his insolently easy attitude: "How much? Unless
+it's a good deal, I prefer the letter."
+
+Oh, why could she not cry out: "Leave the house at once--your vulgar
+threats are nothing to me"--Why could she not even say in her own heart:
+_I will tell my husband tonight?_
+
+"You're afraid," said Wyant, as if answering her thought. "What's the
+use of being afraid when you can make yourself comfortable so easily?
+You called me a systematic blackmailer--well, I'm not that yet. Give me
+a thousand and you'll see the last of me--on what used to be my honour."
+
+Justine's heart sank. She had reached the point of being ready to appeal
+again to Amherst--but on what pretext could she ask for such a sum?
+
+In a lifeless voice she said: "I could not possibly get more than one or
+two hundred."
+
+Wyant scrutinized her a moment: her despair must have rung true to him.
+"Well, you must have something of your own--I saw your jewelry last
+night at the theatre," he said.
+
+So it had been he--and he had sat there appraising her value like a
+murderer!
+
+"Jewelry--?" she faltered.
+
+"You had a thumping big sapphire--wasn't it?--with diamonds round it."
+
+It was her only jewel--Amherst's marriage gift. She would have preferred
+a less valuable present, but his mother had persuaded her to accept it,
+saying that it was the bride's duty to adorn herself for the bridegroom.
+
+"I will give you nothing--" she was about to exclaim; when suddenly her
+eyes fell on the clock. If Amherst had caught the two o'clock express he
+would be at the house within the hour; and the only thing that seemed
+of consequence now, was that he should not meet Wyant. Supposing she
+still found courage to refuse--there was no knowing how long the
+humiliating scene might be prolonged: and she must be rid of the
+creature at any cost. After all, she seldom wore the sapphire--months
+might pass without its absence being noted by Amherst's careless eye;
+and if Wyant should pawn it, she might somehow save money to buy it back
+before it was missed. She went through these calculations with feverish
+rapidity; then she turned again to Wyant.
+
+"You won't come back--ever?"
+
+"I swear I won't," he said.
+
+He moved away toward the window, as if to spare her; and she turned and
+slowly left the room.
+
+She never forgot the moments that followed. Once outside the door she
+was in such haste that she stumbled on the stairs, and had to pause on
+the landing to regain her breath. In her room she found one of the
+housemaids busy, and at first could think of no pretext for dismissing
+her. Then she bade the woman go down and send the brougham away, telling
+the coachman to call for Miss Cicely at six.
+
+Left alone, she bolted the door, and as if with a thief's hand, opened
+her wardrobe, unlocked her jewel-box, and drew out the sapphire in its
+flat morocco case. She restored the box to its place, the key to its
+ring--then she opened the case and looked at the sapphire. As she did
+so, a little tremor ran over her neck and throat, and closing her eyes
+she felt her husband's kiss, and the touch of his hands as he fastened
+on the jewel.
+
+She unbolted the door, listened intently on the landing, and then went
+slowly down the stairs. None of the servants were in sight, yet as she
+reached the lower hall she was conscious that the air had grown suddenly
+colder, as though the outer door had just been opened. She paused, and
+listened again. There was a sound of talking in the drawing-room. Could
+it be that in her absence a visitor had been admitted? The possibility
+frightened her at first--then she welcomed it as an unexpected means of
+ridding herself of her tormentor.
+
+She opened the drawing-room door, and saw her husband talking with
+Wyant.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+AMHERST, his back to the threshold, sat at a table writing: Wyant stood
+a few feet away, staring down at the fire.
+
+Neither had heard the door open; and before they were aware of her
+entrance Justine had calculated that she must have been away for at
+least five minutes, and that in that space of time almost anything
+might have passed between them.
+
+For a moment the power of connected thought left her; then her heart
+gave a bound of relief. She said to herself that Wyant had doubtless
+made some allusion to his situation, and that her husband, conscious
+only of a great debt of gratitude, had at once sat down to draw a cheque
+for him. The idea was so reassuring that it restored all her clearness
+of thought.
+
+Wyant was the first to see her. He made an abrupt movement, and Amherst,
+rising, turned and put an envelope in his hand.
+
+"There, my dear fellow----"
+
+As he turned he caught sight of his wife.
+
+"I caught the twelve o'clock train after all--you got my second wire?"
+he asked.
+
+"No," she faltered, pressing her left hand, with the little case in it,
+close to the folds of her dress.
+
+"I was afraid not. There was a bad storm at Hanaford, and they said
+there might be a delay."
+
+At the same moment she found Wyant advancing with extended hand, and
+understood that he had concealed the fact of having already seen her.
+She accepted the cue, and shook his hand, murmuring: "How do you do?"
+
+Amherst looked at her, perhaps struck by her manner.
+
+"You have not seen Dr. Wyant since Lynbrook?"
+
+"No," she answered, thankful to have this pretext for her emotion.
+
+"I have been telling him that he should not have left us so long without
+news--especially as he has been ill, and things have gone rather badly
+with him. But I hope we can help now. He has heard that Saint
+Christopher's is looking for a house-physician for the paying patients'
+wing, and as Mr. Langhope is away I have given him a line to Mrs.
+Ansell."
+
+"Extremely kind of you," Wyant murmured, passing his hand over his
+forehead.
+
+Justine stood silent. She wondered that her husband had not noticed that
+tremulous degraded hand. But he was always so blind to externals--and he
+had no medical experience to sharpen his perceptions.
+
+Suddenly she felt impelled to speak "I am sorry Dr. Wyant has
+been--unfortunate. Of course you will want to do everything to help him;
+but would it not be better to wait till Mr. Langhope comes back?"
+
+"Wyant thinks the delay might make him lose the place. It seems the
+board meets tomorrow. And Mrs. Ansell really knows much more about it.
+Isn't she the secretary of the ladies' committee?"
+
+"I'm not sure--I believe so. But surely Mr. Langhope should be
+consulted."
+
+She felt Wyant's face change: his eyes settled on her in a threatening
+stare.
+
+Amherst looked at her also, and there was surprise in his glance. "I
+think I can answer for my father-in-law. He feels as strongly as I do
+how much we all owe to Dr. Wyant."
+
+He seldom spoke of Mr. Langhope as his father-in-law, and the chance
+designation seemed to mark a closer tie between them, to exclude Justine
+from what was after all a family affair. For a moment she felt tempted
+to accept the suggestion, and let the responsibility fall where it
+would. But it would fall on Amherst--and that was intolerable.
+
+"I think you ought to wait," she insisted.
+
+An embarrassed silence settled on the three.
+
+Wyant broke it by advancing toward Amherst. "I shall never forget your
+kindness," he said; "and I hope to prove to Mrs. Amherst that it's not
+misplaced."
+
+The words were well chosen, and well spoken; Justine saw that they
+produced a good effect. Amherst grasped the physician's hand with a
+smile. "My dear fellow, I wish I could do more. Be sure to call on me
+again if you want help."
+
+"Oh, you've put me on my feet," said Wyant gratefully.
+
+He bowed slightly to Justine and turned to go; but as he reached the
+threshold she moved after him.
+
+"Dr. Wyant--you must give back that letter."
+
+He stopped short with a whitening face.
+
+She felt Amherst's eyes on her again; and she said desperately,
+addressing him: "Dr. Wyant understands my reasons."
+
+Her husband's glance turned abruptly to Wyant. "Do you?" he asked after
+a pause.
+
+Wyant looked from one to the other. The moisture came out on his
+forehead, and he passed his hand over it again. "Yes," he said in a dry
+voice. "Mrs. Amherst wants me farther off--out of New York."
+
+"Out of New York? What do you mean?"
+
+Justine interposed hastily, before the answer could come. "It is because
+Dr. Wyant is not in condition--for such a place--just at present."
+
+"But he assures me he is quite well."
+
+There was another silence; and again Wyant broke in, this time with a
+slight laugh. "I can explain what Mrs. Amherst means; she intends to
+accuse me of the morphine habit. And I can explain her reason for doing
+so--she wants me out of the way."
+
+Amherst turned on the speaker; and, as she had foreseen, his look was
+terrible. "You haven't explained that yet," he said.
+
+"Well--I can." Wyant waited another moment. "I know too much about her,"
+he declared.
+
+There was a low exclamation from Justine, and Amherst strode toward
+Wyant. "You infernal blackguard!" he cried.
+
+"Oh, gently----" Wyant muttered, flinching back from his outstretched
+arm.
+
+"My wife's wish is sufficient. Give me back that letter."
+
+Wyant straightened himself. "No, by God, I won't!" he retorted
+furiously. "I didn't ask you for it till you offered to help me; but I
+won't let it be taken back without a word, like a thief that you'd
+caught with your umbrella. If your wife won't explain I will. She's,
+afraid I'll talk about what happened at Lynbrook."
+
+Amherst's arm fell to his side. "At Lynbrook?"
+
+Behind him there was a sound of inarticulate appeal--but he took no
+notice.
+
+"Yes. It's she who used morphia--but not on herself. She gives it to
+other people. She gave an overdose to Mrs. Amherst."
+
+Amherst looked at him confusedly. "An overdose?"
+
+"Yes--purposely, I mean. And I came into the room at the wrong time. I
+can prove that Mrs. Amherst died of morphia-poisoning."
+
+"John!" Justine gasped out, pressing between them.
+
+Amherst gently put aside the hand with which she had caught his arm.
+"Wait a moment: this can't rest here. You can't want it to," he said to
+her in an undertone.
+
+"Why do you care...for what he says...when I don't?" she breathed back
+with trembling lips.
+
+"You can see I am not wanted here," Wyant threw in with a sneer.
+
+Amherst remained silent for a brief space; then he turned his eyes once
+more to his wife.
+
+Justine lifted her face: it looked small and spent, like an extinguished
+taper.
+
+"It's true," she said.
+
+"True?"
+
+"I _did_ give...an overdose...intentionally, when I knew there was no
+hope, and when the surgeons said she might go on suffering. She was very
+strong...and I couldn't bear it...you couldn't have borne it...."
+
+There was another silence; then she went on in a stronger voice, looking
+straight at her husband: "And now will you send this man away?"
+
+Amherst glanced at Wyant without moving. "Go," he said curtly.
+
+Wyant, instead, moved a step nearer. "Just a minute, please. It's only
+fair to hear my side. Your wife says there was no hope; yet the day
+before she...gave the dose, Dr. Garford told her in my presence that
+Mrs. Amherst might live."
+
+Again Amherst's eyes addressed themselves slowly to Justine; and she
+forced her lips to articulate an answer.
+
+"Dr. Garford said...one could never tell...but I know he didn't believe
+in the chance of recovery...no one did."
+
+"Dr. Garford is dead," said Wyant grimly.
+
+Amherst strode up to him again. "You scoundrel--leave the house!" he
+commanded.
+
+But still Wyant sneeringly stood his ground. "Not till I've finished. I
+can't afford to let myself be kicked out like a dog because I happen to
+be in the way. Every doctor knows that in cases of spinal lesion
+recovery is becoming more and more frequent--if the patient survives the
+third week there's every reason to hope. Those are the facts as they
+would appear to any surgeon. If they're not true, why is Mrs. Amherst
+afraid of having them stated? Why has she been paying me for nearly a
+year to keep them quiet?"
+
+"Oh----" Justine moaned.
+
+"I never thought of talking till luck went against me. Then I asked her
+for help--and reminded her of certain things. After that she kept me
+supplied pretty regularly." He thrust his shaking hand into an inner
+pocket. "Here are her envelopes...Quebec...Montreal...Saranac...I know
+just where you went on your honeymoon. She had to write often, because
+the sums were small. Why did she do it, if she wasn't afraid? And why
+did she go upstairs just now to fetch me something? If you don't believe
+me, ask her what she's got in her hand."
+
+Amherst did not heed this injunction. He stood motionless, gripping the
+back of a chair, as if his next gesture might be to lift and hurl it at
+the speaker.
+
+"Ask her----" Wyant repeated.
+
+Amherst turned his head slowly, and his dull gaze rested on his wife.
+His face looked years older--lips and eyes moved as heavily as an old
+man's.
+
+As he looked at her, Justine came forward without speaking, and laid the
+little morocco case in his hand. He held it there a moment, as if hardly
+understanding her action--then he tossed it on the table at his elbow,
+and walked up to Wyant.
+
+"You hound," he said--"now go!"
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+WHEN Wyant had left the room, and the house-door had closed on him,
+Amherst spoke to his wife.
+
+"Come upstairs," he said.
+
+Justine followed him, scarcely conscious where she went, but moving
+already with a lighter tread. Part of her weight of misery had been
+lifted with Wyant's going. She had suffered less from the fear of what
+her husband might think than from the shame of making her avowal in her
+defamer's presence. And her faith in Amherst's comprehension had begun
+to revive. He had dismissed Wyant with scorn and horror--did not that
+show that he was on her side already? And how many more arguments she
+had at her call! Her brain hummed with them as she followed him up the
+stairs.
+
+In her bedroom he closed the door and stood motionless, the same heavy
+half-paralyzed look on his face. It frightened her and she went up to
+him.
+
+"John!" she said timidly.
+
+He put his hand to his head. "Wait a moment----" he returned; and she
+waited, her heart slowly sinking again.
+
+The moment over, he seemed to recover his power of movement. He crossed
+the room and threw himself into the armchair near the hearth.
+
+"Now tell me everything."
+
+He sat thrown back, his eyes fixed on the fire, and the vertical lines
+between his brows forming a deep scar in his white face.
+
+Justine moved nearer, and touched his arm beseechingly. "Won't you look
+at me?"
+
+He turned his head slowly, as if with an effort, and his eyes rested
+reluctantly on hers.
+
+"Oh, not like that!" she exclaimed.
+
+He seemed to make a stronger effort at self-control. "Please don't heed
+me--but say what there is to say," he said in a level voice, his gaze on
+the fire.
+
+She stood before him, her arms hanging down, her clasped fingers
+twisting restlessly.
+
+"I don't know that there is much to say--beyond what I've told you."
+
+There was a slight sound in Amherst's throat, like the ghost of a
+derisive laugh. After another interval he said: "I wish to hear exactly
+what happened."
+
+She seated herself on the edge of a chair near by, bending forward, with
+hands interlocked and arms extended on her knees--every line reaching
+out to him, as though her whole slight body were an arrow winged with
+pleadings. It was a relief to speak at last, even face to face with the
+stony image that sat in her husband's place; and she told her story,
+detail by detail, omitting nothing, exaggerating nothing, speaking
+slowly, clearly, with precision, aware that the bare facts were her
+strongest argument.
+
+Amherst, as he listened, shifted his position once, raising his hand so
+that it screened his face; and in that attitude he remained when she had
+ended.
+
+As she waited for him to speak, Justine realized that her heart had been
+alive with tremulous hopes. All through her narrative she had counted on
+a murmur of perception, an exclamation of pity: she had felt sure of
+melting the stony image. But Amherst said no word.
+
+At length he spoke, still without turning his head. "You have not told
+me why you kept this from me."
+
+A sob formed in her throat, and she had to wait to steady her voice.
+
+"No--that was my wrong--my weakness. When I did it I never thought of
+being afraid to tell you--I had talked it over with you in my own
+mind...so often...before...."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Then--- when you came back it was harder...though I was still sure you
+would approve me."
+
+"Why harder?"
+
+"Because at first--at Lynbrook--I _could not_ tell it all over, in
+detail, as I have now...it was beyond human power...and without doing
+so, I couldn't make it all clear to you...and so should only have added
+to your pain. If you had been there you would have done as I did.... I
+felt sure of that from the first. But coming afterward, you couldn't
+judge...no one who was not there could judge...and I wanted to spare
+you...."
+
+"And afterward?"
+
+She had shrunk in advance from this question, and she could not answer
+it at once. To gain time she echoed it. "Afterward?"
+
+"Did it never occur to you, when we met later--when you first went to
+Mr. Langhope----"?
+
+"To tell you then? No--because by that time I had come to see that I
+could never be quite sure of making you understand. No one who was not
+there at the time could know what it was to see her suffer."
+
+"You thought it all over, then--decided definitely against telling me?"
+
+"I did not have to think long. I felt I had done right--I still feel
+so--and I was sure you would feel so, if you were in the same
+circumstances."
+
+There was another pause. Then Amherst said: "And last September--at
+Hanaford?"
+
+It was the word for which she had waited--the word of her inmost fears.
+She felt the blood mount to her face.
+
+"Did you see no difference--no special reason for telling me then?"
+
+"Yes----" she faltered.
+
+"Yet you said nothing."
+
+"No."
+
+Silence again. Her eyes strayed to the clock, and some dim association
+of ideas told her that Cicely would soon be coming in.
+
+"Why did you say nothing?"
+
+He lowered his hand and turned toward her as he spoke; and she looked up
+and faced him.
+
+"Because I regarded the question as settled. I had decided it in my own
+mind months before, and had never regretted my decision. I should have
+thought it morbid...unnatural...to go over the whole subject again...to
+let it affect a situation that had come about...so much later...so
+unexpectedly."
+
+"Did you never feel that, later, if I came to know--if others came to
+know--it might be difficult----?"
+
+"No; for I didn't care for the others--and I believed that, whatever
+your own feelings were, you would know I had done what I thought right."
+
+She spoke the words proudly, strongly, and for the first time the hard
+lines of his face relaxed, and a slight tremor crossed it.
+
+"If you believed this, why have you been letting that cur blackmail
+you?"
+
+"Because when he began I saw for the first time that what I had done
+might be turned against me by--by those who disliked our marriage. And I
+was afraid for my happiness. That was my weakness...it is what I am
+suffering for now."
+
+"_Suffering_!" he echoed ironically, as though she had presumed to apply
+to herself a word of which he had the grim monopoly. He rose and took a
+few aimless steps; then he halted before her.
+
+"That day--last month--when you asked me for money...was it...?"
+
+"Yes----" she said, her head sinking.
+
+He laughed. "You couldn't tell me--but you could use my money to bribe
+that fellow to conspire with you!"
+
+"I had none of my own."
+
+"No--nor I either! You used _her_ money.--God!" he groaned, turning away
+with clenched hands.
+
+Justine had risen also, and she stood motionless, her hands clasped
+against her breast, in the drawn shrinking attitude of a fugitive
+overtaken by a blinding storm. He moved back to her with an appealing
+gesture.
+
+"And you didn't see--it didn't occur to you--that your doing...as you
+did...was an obstacle--an insurmountable obstacle--to our ever ...?"
+
+She cut him short with an indignant cry. "No! No! for it was _not_. How
+could it have anything to do with what...came after...with you or me? I
+did it only for Bessy--it concerned only Bessy!"
+
+"Ah, don't name her!" broke from him harshly, and she drew back, cut to
+the heart.
+
+There was another pause, during which he seemed to fall into a kind of
+dazed irresolution, his head on his breast, as though unconscious of her
+presence. Then he roused himself and went to the door.
+
+As he passed her she sprang after him. "John--John! Is that all you have
+to say?"
+
+"What more is there?"
+
+"What more? Everything!--What right have you to turn from me as if I
+were a murderess? I did nothing but what your own reason, your own
+arguments, have justified a hundred times! I made a mistake in not
+telling you at once--but a mistake is not a crime. It can't be your real
+feeling that turns you from me--it must be the dread of what other
+people would think! But when have you cared for what other people
+thought? When have your own actions been governed by it?"
+
+He moved another step without speaking, and she caught him by the arm.
+"No! you sha'n't go--not like that!--Wait!"
+
+She turned and crossed the room. On the lower shelf of the little table
+by her bed a few books were ranged: she stooped and drew one hurriedly
+forth, opening it at the fly-leaf as she went back to Amherst.
+
+"There--read that. The book was at Lynbrook--in your room--and I came
+across it by chance the very day...."
+
+It was the little volume of Bacon which she was thrusting at him. He
+took it with a bewildered look, as if scarcely following what she said.
+
+"Read it--read it!" she commanded; and mechanically he read out the
+words he had written.
+
+"_La vraie morale se moque de la morale.... We perish because we follow
+other men's examples.... Socrates called the opinions of the many
+Lamiae._--Good God!" he exclaimed, flinging the book from him with a
+gesture of abhorrence.
+
+Justine watched him with panting lips, her knees trembling under her.
+"But you wrote it--you wrote it! I thought you meant it!" she cried, as
+the book spun across a table and dropped to the floor.
+
+He looked at her coldly, almost apprehensively, as if she had grown
+suddenly dangerous and remote; then he turned and walked out of the
+room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The striking of the clock roused her. She rose to her feet, rang the
+bell, and told the maid, through the door, that she had a headache, and
+was unable to see Miss Cicely. Then she turned back into the room, and
+darkness closed on her. She was not the kind to take grief passively--it
+drove her in anguished pacings up and down the floor. She walked and
+walked till her legs flagged under her; then she dropped stupidly into
+the chair where Amherst had sat....
+
+All her world had crumbled about her. It was as if some law of mental
+gravity had been mysteriously suspended, and every firmly-anchored
+conviction, every accepted process of reasoning, spun disconnectedly
+through space. Amherst had not understood her--worse still, he had
+judged her as the world might judge her! The core of her misery was
+there. With terrible clearness she saw the suspicion that had crossed
+his mind--the suspicion that she had kept silence in the beginning
+because she loved him, and feared to lose him if she spoke.
+
+And what if it were true? What if her unconscious guilt went back even
+farther than his thought dared to track it? She could not now recall a
+time when she had not loved him. Every chance meeting with him, from
+their first brief talk at Hanaford, stood out embossed and glowing
+against the blur of lesser memories. Was it possible that she had loved
+him during Bessy's life--that she had even, sub-consciously, blindly,
+been urged by her feeling for him to perform the act?
+
+But she shook herself free from this morbid horror--the rebound of
+health was always prompt in her, and her mind instinctively rejected
+every form of moral poison. No! Her motive had been normal, sane and
+justifiable--completely justifiable. Her fault lay in having dared to
+rise above conventional restrictions, her mistake in believing that her
+husband could rise with her. These reflections steadied her but they did
+not bring much comfort. For her whole life was centred in Amherst, and
+she saw that he would never be able to free himself from the traditional
+view of her act. In looking back, and correcting her survey of his
+character in the revealing light of the last hours, she perceived that,
+like many men of emancipated thought, he had remained subject to the old
+conventions of feeling. And he had probably never given much thought to
+women till he met her--had always been content to deal with them in the
+accepted currency of sentiment. After all, it was the currency they
+liked best, and for which they offered their prettiest wares!
+
+But what of the intellectual accord between himself and her? She had not
+been deceived in that! He and she had really been wedded in mind as well
+as in heart. But until now there had not arisen in their lives one of
+those searching questions which call into play emotions rooted far below
+reason and judgment, in the dark primal depths of inherited feeling. It
+is easy to judge impersonal problems intellectually, turning on them the
+full light of acquired knowledge; but too often one must still grope
+one's way through the personal difficulty by the dim taper carried in
+long-dead hands....
+
+But was there then no hope of lifting one's individual life to a clearer
+height of conduct? Must one be content to think for the race, and to
+feel only--feel blindly and incoherently--for one's self? And was it not
+from such natures as Amherst's--natures in which independence of
+judgment was blent with strong human sympathy--that the liberating
+impulse should come?
+
+Her mind grew weary of revolving in this vain circle of questions. The
+fact was that, in their particular case, Amherst had not risen above
+prejudice and emotion; that, though her act was one to which his
+intellectual sanction was given, he had turned from her with instinctive
+repugnance, had dishonoured her by the most wounding suspicions. The
+tie between them was forever stained and debased.
+
+Justine's long hospital-discipline made it impossible for her to lose
+consciousness of the lapse of time, or to let her misery thicken into
+mental stupor. She could not help thinking and moving; and she presently
+lifted herself to her feet, turned on the light, and began to prepare
+for dinner. It would be terrible to face her husband across Mr.
+Langhope's pretty dinner-table, and afterward in the charming
+drawing-room, with its delicate old ornaments and intimate luxurious
+furniture; but she could not continue to sit motionless in the dark: it
+was her innermost instinct to pick herself up and go on.
+
+While she dressed she listened anxiously for Amherst's step in the next
+room; but there was no sound, and when she dragged herself downstairs
+the drawing-room was empty, and the parlour-maid, after a decent delay,
+came to ask if dinner should be postponed.
+
+She said no, murmuring some vague pretext for her husband's absence, and
+sitting alone through the succession of courses which composed the brief
+but carefully-studied _menu_. When this ordeal was over she returned to
+the drawing-room and took up a book. It chanced to be a new volume on
+labour problems, which Amherst must have brought back with him from
+Westmore; and it carried her thoughts instantly to the mills. Would
+this disaster poison their work there as well as their personal
+relation? Would he think of her as carrying contamination even into the
+task their love had illumined?
+
+The hours went on without his returning, and at length it occurred to
+her that he might have taken the night train to Hanaford. Her heart
+contracted at the thought: she remembered--though every nerve shrank
+from the analogy--his sudden flight at another crisis in his life, and
+she felt obscurely that if he escaped from her now she would never
+recover her hold on him. But could he be so cruel--could he wish any one
+to suffer as she was suffering?
+
+At ten o'clock she could endure the drawing-room no longer, and went up
+to her room again. She undressed slowly, trying to prolong the process
+as much as possible, to put off the period of silence and inaction which
+would close in on her when she lay down on her bed. But at length the
+dreaded moment came--there was nothing more between her and the night.
+She crept into bed and put out the light; but as she slipped between the
+cold sheets a trembling seized her, and after a moment she drew on her
+dressing-gown again and groped her way to the lounge by the fire.
+
+She pushed the lounge closer to the hearth and lay down, still
+shivering, though she had drawn the quilted coverlet up to her chin. She
+lay there a long time, with closed eyes, in a mental darkness torn by
+sudden flashes of memory. In one of these flashes a phrase of Amherst's
+stood out--a word spoken at Westmore, on the day of the opening of the
+Emergency Hospital, about a good-looking young man who had called to see
+her. She remembered Amherst's boyish burst of jealousy, his sudden
+relief at the thought that the visitor might have been Wyant. And no
+doubt it _was_ Wyant--Wyant who had come to Hanaford to threaten her,
+and who, baffled by her non-arrival, or for some other unexplained
+reason, had left again without carrying out his purpose.
+
+It was dreadful to think by how slight a chance her first draught of
+happiness had escaped that drop of poison; yet, when she understood, her
+inward cry was: "If it had happened, my dearest need not have
+suffered!"... Already she was feeling Amherst's pain more than her own,
+understanding that it was harder to bear than hers because it was at war
+with all the reflective part of his nature.
+
+As she lay there, her face pressed into the cushions, she heard a sound
+through the silent house--the opening and closing of the outer door. She
+turned cold, and lay listening with strained ears.... Yes; now there was
+a step on the stairs--her husband's step! She heard him turn into his
+own room. The throbs of her heart almost deafened her--she only
+distinguished confusedly that he was moving about within, so close that
+it was as if she felt his touch. Then her door opened and he entered.
+
+He stumbled slightly in the darkness before he found the switch of the
+lamp; and as he bent over it she saw that his face was flushed, and that
+his eyes had an excited light which, in any one less abstemious, might
+almost have seemed like the effect of wine.
+
+"Are you awake?" he asked.
+
+She started up against the cushions, her black hair streaming about her
+small ghostly face.
+
+"Yes."
+
+He walked over to the lounge and dropped into the low chair beside it.
+
+"I've given that cur a lesson he won't forget," he exclaimed, breathing
+hard, the redness deepening in his face.
+
+She turned on him in joy and trembling. "John!--Oh, John! You didn't
+follow him? Oh, what happened? What have you done?"
+
+"No. I didn't follow him. But there are some things that even the powers
+above can't stand. And so they managed to let me run across him--by the
+merest accident--and I gave him something to remember."
+
+He spoke in a strong clear voice that had a brightness like the
+brightness in his eyes. She felt its heat in her veins--the primitive
+woman in her glowed at contact with the primitive man. But reflection
+chilled her the next moment.
+
+"But why--why? Oh, how could you? Where did it happen--oh, not in the
+street?"
+
+As she questioned him, there rose before her the terrified vision of a
+crowd gathering--the police, newspapers, a hideous publicity. He must
+have been mad to do it--and yet he must have done it because he loved
+her!
+
+"No--no. Don't be afraid. The powers looked after that too. There was no
+one about--and I don't think he'll talk much about it."
+
+She trembled, fearing yet adoring him. Nothing could have been more
+unlike the Amherst she fancied she knew than this act of irrational
+anger which had magically lifted the darkness from his spirit; yet,
+magically also, it gave him back to her, made them one flesh once more.
+And suddenly the pressure of opposed emotions became too strong, and she
+burst into tears.
+
+She wept painfully, violently, with the resistance of strong natures
+unused to emotional expression; till at length, through the tumult of
+her tears, she felt her husband's reassuring touch.
+
+"Justine," he said, speaking once more in his natural voice.
+
+She raised her face from her hands, and they looked at each other.
+
+"Justine--this afternoon--I said things I didn't mean to say."
+
+Her lips parted, but her throat was still full of sobs, and she could
+only look at him while the tears ran down.
+
+"I believe I understand now," he continued, in the same quiet tone.
+
+Her hand shrank from his clasp, and she began to tremble again. "Oh, if
+you only _believe_...if you're not sure...don't pretend to be!"
+
+He sat down beside her and drew her into his arms. "I am sure," he
+whispered, holding her close, and pressing his lips against her face and
+hair.
+
+"Oh, my husband--my husband! You've come back to me?"
+
+He answered her with more kisses, murmuring through them: "Poor
+child--poor child--poor Justine...." while he held her fast.
+
+With her face against him she yielded to the childish luxury of
+murmuring out unjustified fears. "I was afraid you had gone back to
+Hanaford----"
+
+"Tonight? To Hanaford?"
+
+"To tell your mother."
+
+She felt a contraction of the arm embracing her, as though a throb of
+pain had stiffened it.
+
+"I shall never tell any one," he said abruptly; but as he felt in her a
+responsive shrinking he gathered her close again, whispering through the
+hair that fell about her cheek: "Don't talk, dear...let us never talk
+of it again...." And in the clasp of his arms her terror and anguish
+subsided, giving way, not to the deep peace of tranquillized thought,
+but to a confused well-being that lulled all thought to sleep.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+
+BUT thought could never be long silent between them; and Justine's
+triumph lasted but a day.
+
+With its end she saw what it had been made of: the ascendency of youth
+and sex over his subjugated judgment. Her first impulse was to try and
+maintain it--why not use the protective arts with which love inspired
+her? She who lived so keenly in the brain could live as intensely in her
+feelings; her quick imagination tutored her looks and words, taught her
+the spells to weave about shorn giants. And for a few days she and
+Amherst lost themselves in this self-evoked cloud of passion, both
+clinging fast to the visible, the palpable in their relation, as if
+conscious already that its finer essence had fled.
+
+Amherst made no allusion to what had passed, asked for no details,
+offered no reassurances--behaved as if the whole episode had been
+effaced from his mind. And from Wyant there came no sound: he seemed to
+have disappeared from life as he had from their talk.
+
+Toward the end of the week Amherst announced that he must return to
+Hanaford; and Justine at once declared her intention of going with him.
+
+He seemed surprised, disconcerted almost; and for the first time the
+shadow of what had happened fell visibly between them.
+
+"But ought you to leave Cicely before Mr. Langhope comes back?" he
+suggested.
+
+"He will be here in two days."
+
+"But he will expect to find you."
+
+"It is almost the first of April. We are to have Cicely with us for the
+summer. There is no reason why I should not go back to my work at
+Westmore."
+
+There was in fact no reason that he could produce; and the next day they
+returned to Hanaford together.
+
+With her perceptions strung to the last pitch of sensitiveness, she felt
+a change in Amherst as soon as they re-entered Bessy's house. He was
+still scrupulously considerate, almost too scrupulously tender; but with
+a tinge of lassitude, like a man who tries to keep up under the
+stupefying approach of illness. And she began to hate the power by which
+she held him. It was not thus they had once walked together, free in
+mind though so linked in habit and feeling; when their love was not a
+deadening drug but a vivifying element that cleared thought instead of
+stifling it. There were moments when she felt that open alienation would
+be easier, because it would be nearer the truth. And at such moments
+she longed to speak, to beg him to utter his mind, to go with her once
+for all into the depths of the subject they continued to avoid. But at
+the last her heart always failed her: she could not face the thought of
+losing him, of hearing him speak estranging words to her.
+
+They had been at Hanaford for about ten days when, one morning at
+breakfast, Amherst uttered a sudden exclamation over a letter he was
+reading.
+
+"What is it?" she asked in a tremor.
+
+He had grown very pale, and was pushing the hair from his forehead with
+the gesture habitual to him in moments of painful indecision.
+
+"What is it?" Justine repeated, her fear growing.
+
+"Nothing----" he began, thrusting the letter under the pile of envelopes
+by his plate; but she continued to look at him anxiously, till she drew
+his eyes to hers.
+
+"Mr. Langhope writes that they've appointed Wyant to Saint
+Christopher's," he said abruptly.
+
+"Oh, the letter--we forgot the letter!" she cried.
+
+"Yes--we forgot the letter."
+
+"But how dare he----?"
+
+Amherst said nothing, but the long silence between them seemed full of
+ironic answers, till she brought out, hardly above her breath: "What
+shall you do?"
+
+"Write at once--tell Mr. Langhope he's not fit for the place."
+
+"Of course----" she murmured.
+
+He went on tearing open his other letters, and glancing at their
+contents. She leaned back in her chair, her cup of coffee untasted,
+listening to the recurrent crackle of torn paper as he tossed aside one
+letter after another.
+
+Presently he rose from his seat, and as she followed him from the
+dining-room she noticed that his breakfast had also remained untasted.
+He gathered up his letters and walked toward the smoking-room; and after
+a moment's hesitation she joined him.
+
+"John," she said from the threshold.
+
+He was just seating himself at his desk, but he turned to her with an
+obvious effort at kindness which made the set look of his face the more
+marked.
+
+She closed the door and went up to him.
+
+"If you write that to Mr. Langhope--Dr. Wyant will--will tell him," she
+said.
+
+"Yes--we must be prepared for that."
+
+She was silent, and Amherst flung himself down on the leather ottoman
+against the wall. She stood before him, clasping and unclasping her
+hands in speechless distress.
+
+"What would you have me do?" he asked at length, almost irritably.
+
+"I only thought...he told me he would keep straight...if he only had a
+chance," she faltered out.
+
+Amherst lifted his head slowly, and looked at her. "You mean--I am to do
+nothing? Is that it?"
+
+She moved nearer to him with beseeching eyes. "I can't bear it.... I
+can't bear that others should come between us," she broke out
+passionately.
+
+He made no answer, but she could see a look of suffering cross his face,
+and coming still closer, she sank down on the ottoman, laying her hand
+on his. "John...oh, John, spare me," she whispered.
+
+For a moment his hand lay quiet under hers; then he drew it out, and
+enclosed her trembling fingers.
+
+"Very well--I'll give him a chance--I'll do nothing," he said, suddenly
+putting his other arm about her.
+
+The reaction caught her by the throat, forcing out a dry sob or two; and
+as she pressed her face against him he raised it up and gently kissed
+her.
+
+But even as their lips met she felt that they were sealing a treaty with
+dishonour. That his kiss should come to mean that to her! It was
+unbearable--worse than any personal pain--the thought of dragging him
+down to falsehood through her weakness.
+
+She drew back and rose to her feet, putting aside his detaining hand.
+
+"No--no! What am I saying? It can't be--you must tell the truth." Her
+voice gathered strength as she spoke. "Oh, forget what I said--I didn't
+mean it!"
+
+But again he seemed sunk in inaction, like a man over whom some baneful
+lethargy is stealing.
+
+"John--John--forget!" she repeated urgently.
+
+He looked up at her. "You realize what it will mean?"
+
+"Yes--I realize.... But it must be.... And it will make no difference
+between us...will it?"
+
+"No--no. Why should it?" he answered apathetically.
+
+"Then write--tell Mr. Langhope not to give him the place. I want it
+over."
+
+He rose slowly to his feet, without looking at her again, and walked
+over to the desk. She sank down on the ottoman and watched him with
+burning eyes while he drew forth a sheet of note-paper and began to
+write.
+
+But after he had written a few words he laid down his pen, and swung his
+chair about so that he faced her.
+
+"I can't do it in this way," he exclaimed.
+
+"How then? What do you mean?" she said, starting up.
+
+He looked at her. "Do you want the story to come from Wyant?"
+
+"Oh----" She looked back at him with sudden insight. "You mean to tell
+Mr. Langhope yourself?"
+
+"Yes. I mean to take the next train to town and tell him."
+
+Her trembling increased so much that she had to rest her hands against
+the edge of the ottoman to steady herself. "But if...if after
+all...Wyant should not speak?"
+
+"Well--if he shouldn't? Could you bear to owe our safety to _him_?"
+
+"Safety!"
+
+"It comes to that, doesn't it, if _we're_ afraid to speak?"
+
+She sat silent, letting the bitter truth of this sink into her till it
+poured courage into her veins.
+
+"Yes--it comes to that," she confessed.
+
+"Then you feel as I do?"
+
+"That you must go----?"
+
+"That this is intolerable!"
+
+The words struck down her last illusion, and she rose and went over to
+the writing-table. "Yes--go," she said.
+
+He stood up also, and took both her hands, not in a caress, but gravely,
+almost severely.
+
+"Listen, Justine. You must understand exactly what this means--may mean.
+I am willing to go on as we are now...as long as we can...because I
+love you...because I would do anything to spare you pain. But if I speak
+I must say everything--I must follow this thing up to its uttermost
+consequences. That's what I want to make clear to you."
+
+Her heart sank with a foreboding of new peril. "What consequences?"
+
+"Can't you see for yourself--when you look about this house?"
+
+"This house----?"
+
+He dropped her hands and took an abrupt turn across the room.
+
+"I owe everything to her," he broke out, "all I am, all I have, all I
+have been able to give you--and I must go and tell her father that
+you...."
+
+"Stop--stop!" she cried, lifting her hands as if to keep off a blow.
+
+"No--don't make me stop. We must face it," he said doggedly.
+
+"But this--this isn't the truth! You put it as if--almost as if----"
+
+"Yes--don't finish.--Has it occurred to you that _he_ may think that?"
+Amherst asked with a terrible laugh. But at that she recovered her
+courage, as she always did when an extreme call was made on it.
+
+"No--I don't believe it! If he _does_, it will be because you think it
+yourself...." Her voice sank, and she lifted her hands and pressed them
+to her temples. "And if you think it, nothing matters...one way or the
+other...." She paused, and her voice regained its strength. "That is
+what I must face before you go: what _you_ think, what _you_ believe of
+me. You've never told me that."
+
+Amherst, at the challenge, remained silent, while a slow red crept to
+his cheek-bones.
+
+"Haven't I told you by--by what I've done?" he said slowly.
+
+"No--what you've done has covered up what you thought; and I've helped
+you cover it--I'm to blame too! But it was not for this that we...that
+we had that half-year together...not to sink into connivance and
+evasion! I don't want another hour of sham happiness. I want the truth
+from you, whatever it is."
+
+He stood motionless, staring moodily at the floor. "Don't you see that's
+my misery--that I don't know myself?"
+
+"You don't know...what you think of me?"
+
+"Good God, Justine, why do you try to strip life naked? I don't know
+what's been going on in me these last weeks----"
+
+"You must know what you think of my motive...for doing what I did."
+
+She saw in his face how he shrank from the least allusion to the act
+about which their torment revolved. But he forced himself to raise his
+head and look at her. "I have never--for one moment--questioned your
+motive--or failed to see that it was justified...under the
+circumstances...."
+
+"Oh, John--John!" she broke out in the wild joy of hearing herself
+absolved; but the next instant her subtle perceptions felt the
+unconscious reserve behind his admission.
+
+"Your mind justifies me--not your heart; isn't _that_ your misery?" she
+said.
+
+He looked at her almost piteously, as if, in the last resort, it was
+from her that light must come to him. "On my soul, I don't know...I
+can't tell...it's all dark in me. I know you did what you thought
+best...if I had been there, I believe I should have asked you to do
+it...but I wish to God----"
+
+She interrupted him sobbingly. "Oh, I ought never to have let you love
+me! I ought to have seen that I was cut off from you forever. I have
+brought you wretchedness when I would have given my life for you! I
+don't deserve that you should forgive me for that."
+
+Her sudden outbreak seemed to restore his self-possession. He went up to
+her and took her hand with a quieting touch.
+
+"There is no question of forgiveness, Justine. Don't let us torture each
+other with vain repinings. Our business is to face the thing, and we
+shall be better for having talked it out. I shall be better, for my
+part, for having told Mr. Langhope. But before I go I want to be sure
+that you understand the view he may take...and the effect it will
+probably have on our future."
+
+"Our future?" She started. "No, I don't understand."
+
+Amherst paused a moment, as if trying to choose the words least likely
+to pain her. "Mr. Langhope knows that my marriage was...unhappy; through
+my fault, he no doubt thinks. And if he chooses to infer that...that you
+and I may have cared for each other...before...and that it was _because_
+there was a chance of recovery that you----"
+
+"Oh----"
+
+"We must face it," he repeated inflexibly. "And you must understand
+that, if there is the faintest hint of this kind, I shall give up
+everything here, as soon as it can be settled legally--God, how Tredegar
+will like the job!--and you and I will have to go and begin life over
+again...somewhere else."
+
+For an instant a mad hope swelled in her--the vision of escaping with
+him into new scenes, a new life, away from the coil of memories that
+bound them down as in a net. But the reaction of reason came at
+once--she saw him cut off from his chosen work, his career destroyed,
+his honour clouded, above all--ah, this was what wrung them both!--his
+task undone, his people flung back into the depths from which he had
+lifted them. And all through her doing--all because she had clutched at
+happiness with too rash a hand! The thought stung her to passionate
+activity of mind--made her resolve to risk anything, dare anything,
+before she involved him farther in her own ruin. She felt her brain
+clear gradually, and the thickness dissolve in her throat.
+
+"I understand," she said in a low voice, raising her eyes to his.
+
+"And you're ready to accept the consequences? Think again before it's
+too late."
+
+She paused. "That is what I should like...what I wanted to ask you...the
+time to think."
+
+She saw a slight shade cross his face, as if he had not expected this
+failure of courage in her; but he said quietly: "You don't want me to go
+today?"
+
+"Not today--give me one more day."
+
+"Very well."
+
+She laid a timid hand on his arm. "Please go out to Westmore as
+usual--as if nothing had happened. And tonight...when you come back...I
+shall have decided."
+
+"Very well," he repeated.
+
+"You'll be gone all day?"
+
+He glanced at his watch. "Yes--I had meant to be; unless----"
+
+"No; I would rather be alone. Good-bye," she said, letting her hand slip
+softly along his coat-sleeve as he turned to the door.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+
+AT half-past six that afternoon, just as Amherst, on his return from the
+mills, put the key into his door at Hanaford, Mrs. Ansell, in New York,
+was being shown into Mr. Langhope's library.
+
+As she entered, her friend rose from his chair by the fire, and turned
+on her a face so disordered by emotion that she stopped short with an
+exclamation of alarm.
+
+"Henry--what has happened? Why did you send for me?"
+
+"Because I couldn't go to you. I couldn't trust myself in the
+streets--in the light of day."
+
+"But why? What is it?--Not Cicely----?"
+
+He struck both hands upward with a comprehensive gesture.
+"Cicely--everyone--the whole world!" His clenched fist came down on the
+table against which he was leaning. "Maria, my girl might have been
+saved!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell looked at him with growing perturbation. "Saved--Bessy's
+life? But how? By whom?"
+
+"She might have been allowed to live, I mean--to recover. She was
+killed, Maria; that woman killed her!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell, with another cry of bewilderment, let herself drop
+helplessly into the nearest chair. "In heaven's name, Henry--what
+woman?"
+
+He seated himself opposite to her, clutching at his stick, and leaning
+his weight heavily on it--a white dishevelled old man. "I wonder why you
+ask--just to spare me?"
+
+Their eyes met in a piercing exchange of question and answer, and Mrs.
+Ansell tried to bring out reasonably: "I ask in order to understand what
+you are saying."
+
+"Well, then, if you insist on keeping up appearances--my daughter-in-law
+killed my daughter. There you have it." He laughed silently, with a tear
+on his reddened eye-lids.
+
+Mrs. Ansell groaned. "Henry, you are raving--I understand less and
+less."
+
+"I don't see how I can speak more plainly. She told me so herself, in
+this room, not an hour ago."
+
+"She told you? Who told you?"
+
+"John Amherst's wife. Told me she'd killed my child. It's as easy as
+breathing--if you know how to use a morphia-needle."
+
+Light seemed at last to break on his hearer. "Oh, my poor Henry--you
+mean--she gave too much? There was some dreadful accident?"
+
+"There was no accident. She killed my child--killed her deliberately.
+Don't look at me as if I were a madman. She sat in that chair you're in
+when she told me."
+
+"Justine? Has she been here today?" Mrs. Ansell paused in a painful
+effort to readjust her thoughts. "But _why_ did she tell you?"
+
+"That's simple enough. To prevent Wyant's doing it."
+
+"Oh----" broke from his hearer, in a long sigh of fear and intelligence.
+Mr. Langhope looked at her with a smile of miserable exultation.
+
+"You knew--you suspected all along?--But now you must speak out!" he
+exclaimed with a sudden note of command.
+
+She sat motionless, as if trying to collect herself. "I know nothing--I
+only meant--why was this never known before?"
+
+He was upon her at once. "You think--because they understood each other?
+And now there's been a break between them? He wanted too big a share of
+the spoils? Oh, it's all so abysmally vile!"
+
+He covered his face with a shaking hand, and Mrs. Ansell remained
+silent, plunged in a speechless misery of conjecture. At length she
+regained some measure of her habitual composure, and leaning forward,
+with her eyes on his face, said in a quiet tone: "If I am to help you,
+you must try to tell me just what has happened."
+
+He made an impatient gesture. "Haven't I told you? She found that her
+accomplice meant to speak, and rushed to town to forestall him."
+
+Mrs. Ansell reflected. "But why--with his place at Saint Christopher's
+secured--did Dr. Wyant choose this time to threaten her--if, as you
+imagine, he's an accomplice?"
+
+"Because he's a drug-taker, and she didn't wish him to have the place."
+
+"She didn't wish it? But that does not look as if she were afraid. She
+had only to hold her tongue!"
+
+Mr. Langhope laughed sardonically. "It's not quite so simple. Amherst
+was coming to town to tell me."
+
+"Ah--_he_ knows?"
+
+"Yes--and she preferred that I should have her version first."
+
+"And what is her version?"
+
+The furrows of misery deepened in Mr. Langhope's face. "Maria--don't ask
+too much of me! I can't go over it again. She says she wanted to spare
+my child--she says the doctors were keeping her alive, torturing her
+uselessly, as a...a sort of scientific experiment.... She forced on me
+the hideous details...."
+
+Mrs. Ansell waited a moment.
+
+"Well! May it not be true?"
+
+"Wyant's version is different. _He_ says Bessy would have recovered--he
+says Garford thought so too."
+
+"And what does she answer? She denies it?"
+
+"No. She admits that Garford was in doubt. But she says the chance was
+too remote--the pain too bad...that's her cue, naturally!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell, leaning back in her chair, with hands meditatively
+stretched along its arms, gave herself up to silent consideration of the
+fragmentary statements cast before her. The long habit of ministering to
+her friends in moments of perplexity and distress had given her an
+almost judicial keenness in disentangling and coordinating facts
+incoherently presented, and in seizing on the thread of motive that
+connected them; but she had never before been confronted with a
+situation so poignant in itself, and bearing so intimately on her
+personal feelings; and she needed time to free her thoughts from the
+impending rush of emotion.
+
+At last she raised her head and said: "Why did Mr. Amherst let her come
+to you, instead of coming himself?"
+
+"He knows nothing of her being here. She persuaded him to wait a day,
+and as soon as he had gone to the mills this morning she took the first
+train to town."
+
+"Ah----" Mrs. Ansell murmured thoughtfully; and Mr. Langhope rejoined,
+with a conclusive gesture: "Do you want more proofs of panic-stricken
+guilt?"
+
+"Oh, guilt--" His friend revolved her large soft muff about a drooping
+hand. "There's so much still to understand."
+
+"Your mind does not, as a rule, work so slowly!" he said with some
+asperity; but she paid no heed to his tone.
+
+"Amherst, for instance--how long has he known of this?" she continued.
+
+"A week or two only--she made that clear."
+
+"And what is his attitude?"
+
+"Ah--that, I conjecture, is just what she means to keep us from
+knowing!"
+
+"You mean she's afraid----?"
+
+Mr. Langhope gathered his haggard brows in a frown. "She's afraid, of
+course--mortally--I never saw a woman more afraid. I only wonder she had
+the courage to face me."
+
+"Ah--that's it! Why _did_ she face you? To extenuate her act--to give
+you her version, because she feared his might be worse? Do you gather
+that that was her motive?"
+
+It was Mr. Langhope's turn to hesitate. He furrowed the thick Turkey rug
+with the point of his ebony stick, pausing once or twice to revolve it
+gimlet-like in a gap of the pile.
+
+"Not her avowed motive, naturally."
+
+"Well--at least, then, let me have that."
+
+"Her avowed motive? Oh, she'd prepared one, of course--trust her to
+have a dozen ready! The one she produced was--simply the desire to
+protect her husband."
+
+"Her husband? Does _he_ too need protection?"
+
+"My God, if he takes her side----! At any rate, her fear seemed to be
+that what she had done might ruin him; might cause him to feel--as well
+he may!--that the mere fact of being her husband makes his situation as
+Cicely's step-father, as my son-in-law, intolerable. And she came to
+clear him, as it were--to find out, in short, on what terms I should be
+willing to continue my present relations with him as though this hideous
+thing had not been known to me."
+
+Mrs. Ansell raised her head quickly. "Well--and what were your terms?"
+
+He hesitated. "She spared me the pain of proposing any--I had only to
+accept hers."
+
+"Hers?"
+
+"That she should disappear altogether from my sight--and from the
+child's, naturally. Good heaven, I should like to include Amherst in
+that! But I'm tied hand and foot, as you see, by Cicely's interests; and
+I'm bound to say she exonerated him completely--completely!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell was again silent, but a swift flight of thoughts traversed
+her drooping face. "But if you are to remain on the old terms with her
+husband, how is she to disappear out of your life without also
+disappearing out of his?"
+
+Mr. Langhope gave a slight laugh. "I leave her to work out that
+problem."
+
+"And you think Amherst will consent to such conditions?"
+
+"He's not to know of them."
+
+The unexpectedness of the reply reduced Mrs. Ansell to a sound of
+inarticulate interrogation; and Mr. Langhope continued: "Not at first,
+that is. She had thought it all out--foreseen everything; and she wrung
+from me--I don't yet know how!--a promise that when I saw him I would
+make it appear that I cleared him completely, not only of any possible
+complicity, or whatever you choose to call it, but of any sort of
+connection with the matter in my thoughts of him. I am, in short, to let
+him feel that he and I are to continue on the old footing--and I agreed,
+on the condition of her effacing herself somehow--of course on some
+other pretext."
+
+"Some other pretext? But what conceivable pretext? My poor friend, he
+adores her!"
+
+Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "We haven't seen him since
+this became known to him. _She_ has; and she let slip that he was
+horror-struck."
+
+Mrs. Ansell looked up with a quick exclamation. "Let slip? Isn't it
+much more likely that she forced it on you--emphasized it to the last
+limit of credulity?" She sank her hands to the arms of the chair, and
+exclaimed, looking him straight in the eyes: "You say she was
+frightened? It strikes me she was dauntless!"
+
+Mr. Langhope stared a moment; then he said, with an ironic shrug: "No
+doubt, then, she counted on its striking me too."
+
+Mrs. Ansell breathed a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I understand your feeling
+as you do--I'm deep in the horror of it myself. But I can't help seeing
+that this woman might have saved herself--and that she's chosen to save
+her husband instead. What I don't see, from what I know of him," she
+musingly proceeded, "is how, on any imaginable pretext, she will induce
+him to accept the sacrifice."
+
+Mr. Langhope made a resentful movement. "If that's the only point your
+mind dwells on----!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell looked up. "It doesn't dwell anywhere as yet--except, my
+poor Henry," she murmured, rising to move toward him, and softly laying
+her hand on his bent shoulder--"except on your distress and misery--on
+the very part I can't yet talk of, can't question you about...."
+
+He let her hand rest there a moment; then he turned, and drawing it into
+his own tremulous fingers, pressed it silently, with a clinging
+helpless grasp that drew the tears to her eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Justine Brent, in her earliest girlhood, had gone through one of those
+emotional experiences that are the infantile diseases of the heart. She
+had fancied herself beloved of a youth of her own age; had secretly
+returned his devotion, and had seen it reft from her by another. Such an
+incident, as inevitable as the measles, sometimes, like that mild
+malady, leaves traces out of all proportion to its actual virulence. The
+blow fell on Justine with tragic suddenness, and she reeled under it,
+thinking darkly of death, and renouncing all hopes of future happiness.
+Her ready pen often beguiled her into recording her impressions, and she
+now found an escape from despair in writing the history of a damsel
+similarly wronged. In her tale, the heroine killed herself; but the
+author, saved by this vicarious sacrifice, lived, and in time even
+smiled over her manuscript.
+
+It was many years since Justine Amherst had recalled this youthful
+incident; but the memory of it recurred to her as she turned from Mr.
+Langhope's door. For a moment death seemed the easiest escape from what
+confronted her; but though she could no longer medicine her despair by
+turning it into fiction, she knew at once that she must somehow
+transpose it into terms of action, that she must always escape from
+life into more life, and not into its negation.
+
+She had been carried into Mr. Langhope's presence by that expiatory
+passion which still burns so high, and draws its sustenance from so deep
+down, in the unsleeping hearts of women. Though she had never wavered in
+her conviction that her act had been justified her ideas staggered under
+the sudden comprehension of its consequences. Not till that morning had
+she seen those consequences in their terrible, unsuspected extent, had
+she understood how one stone rashly loosened from the laboriously
+erected structure of human society may produce remote fissures in that
+clumsy fabric. She saw that, having hazarded the loosening of the stone,
+she should have held herself apart from ordinary human ties, like some
+priestess set apart for the service of the temple. And instead, she had
+seized happiness with both hands, taken it as the gift of the very fate
+she had herself precipitated! She remembered some old Greek saying to
+the effect that the gods never forgive the mortal who presumes to love
+and suffer like a god. She had dared to do both, and the gods were
+bringing ruin on that deeper self which had its life in those about her.
+
+So much had become clear to her when she heard Amherst declare his
+intention of laying the facts before Mr. Langhope. His few broken words
+lit up the farthest verge of their lives. She saw that his
+retrospective reverence for his wife's memory, which was far as possible
+removed from the strong passion of the mind and senses that bound him to
+herself, was indelibly stained and desecrated by the discovery that all
+he had received from the one woman had been won for him by the
+deliberate act of the other. This was what no reasoning, no appeal to
+the calmer judgment, could ever, in his inmost thoughts, undo or
+extenuate. It could find appeasement only in the renunciation of all
+that had come to him from Bessy; and this renunciation, so different
+from the mere sacrifice of material well-being, was bound up with
+consequences so far-reaching, so destructive to the cause which had
+inspired his whole life, that Justine felt the helpless terror of the
+mortal who has launched one of the heavenly bolts.
+
+She could think of no way of diverting it but the way she had chosen.
+She must see Mr. Langhope first, must clear Amherst of the least faint
+association with her act or her intention. And to do this she must
+exaggerate, not her own compunction--for she could not depart from the
+exact truth in reporting her feelings and convictions--but her husband's
+first instinctive movement of horror, the revulsion of feeling her
+confession had really produced in him. This was the most painful part of
+her task, and for this reason her excited imagination clothed it with a
+special expiatory value. If she could purchase Amherst's peace of mind,
+and the security of his future, by confessing, and even
+over-emphasizing, the momentary estrangement between them there would be
+a bitter joy in such payment!
+
+Her hour with Mr. Langhope proved the correctness of her intuition. She
+could save Amherst only by effacing herself from his life: those about
+him would be only too ready to let her bear the full burden of obloquy.
+She could see that, for a dozen reasons, Mr. Langhope, even in the first
+shock of his dismay, unconsciously craved a way of exonerating Amherst,
+of preserving intact the relation on which so much of his comfort had
+come to depend. And she had the courage to make the most of his desire,
+to fortify it by isolating Amherst's point of view from hers; so that,
+when the hour was over, she had the solace of feeling that she had
+completely freed him from any conceivable consequence of her act.
+
+So far, the impetus of self-sacrifice had carried her straight to her
+goal; but, as frequently happens with such atoning impulses, it left her
+stranded just short of any subsequent plan of conduct. Her next step,
+indeed, was clear enough: she must return to Hanaford, explain to her
+husband that she had felt impelled to tell her own story to Mr.
+Langhope, and then take up her ordinary life till chance offered her a
+pretext for fulfilling her promise. But what pretext was likely to
+present itself? No symbolic horn would sound the hour of fulfillment;
+she must be her own judge, and hear the call in the depths of her own
+conscience.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+
+WHEN Amherst, returning late that afternoon from Westmore, learned of
+his wife's departure, and read the note she had left, he found it, for a
+time, impossible to bring order out of the confusion of feeling produced
+in him.
+
+His mind had been disturbed enough before. All day, through the routine
+of work at the mills, he had laboured inwardly with the difficulties
+confronting him; and his unrest had been increased by the fact that his
+situation bore an ironic likeness to that in which, from a far different
+cause, he had found himself at the other crisis of his life. Once more
+he was threatened with the possibility of having to give up Westmore, at
+a moment when concentration of purpose and persistency of will were at
+last beginning to declare themselves in tangible results. Before, he had
+only given up dreams; now it was their fruition that he was asked to
+surrender. And he was fixed in his resolve to withdraw absolutely from
+Westmore if the statement he had to make to Mr. Langhope was received
+with the least hint of an offensive mental reservation. All forms of
+moral compromise had always been difficult to Amherst, and like many men
+absorbed in large and complicated questions he craved above all
+clearness and peace in his household relation. The first months of his
+second marriage had brought him, as a part of richer and deeper joys,
+this enveloping sense of a clear moral medium, in which no subterfuge or
+equivocation could draw breath. He had felt that henceforth he could
+pour into his work all the combative energy, the powers of endurance,
+resistance, renovation, which had once been unprofitably dissipated in
+the vain attempt to bring some sort of harmony into life with Bessy.
+Between himself and Justine, apart from their love for each other, there
+was the wider passion for their kind, which gave back to them an
+enlarged and deepened reflection of their personal feeling. In such an
+air it had seemed that no petty egotism could hamper their growth, no
+misintelligence obscure their love; yet all the while this pure
+happiness had been unfolding against a sordid background of falsehood
+and intrigue from which his soul turned with loathing.
+
+Justine was right in assuming that Amherst had never thought much about
+women. He had vaguely regarded them as meant to people that hazy domain
+of feeling designed to offer the busy man an escape from thought. His
+second marriage, leading him to the blissful discovery that woman can
+think as well as feel, that there are beings of the ornamental sex in
+whom brain and heart have so enlarged each other that their emotions are
+as clear as thought, their thoughts as warm as emotions--this discovery
+had had the effect of making him discard his former summary conception
+of woman as a bundle of inconsequent impulses, and admit her at a stroke
+to full mental equality with her lord. The result of this act of
+manumission was, that in judging Justine he could no longer allow for
+what was purely feminine in her conduct. It was incomprehensible to him
+that she, to whom truth had seemed the essential element of life, should
+have been able to draw breath, and find happiness, in an atmosphere of
+falsehood and dissimulation. His mind could assent--at least in the
+abstract--to the reasonableness of her act; but he was still unable to
+understand her having concealed it from him. He could enter far enough
+into her feelings to allow for her having kept silence on his first
+return to Lynbrook, when she was still under the strain of a prolonged
+and terrible trial; but that she should have continued to do so when he
+and she had discovered and confessed their love for each other, threw an
+intolerable doubt on her whole course.
+
+He stayed late at the mills, finding one pretext after another for
+delaying his return to Hanaford, and trying, while he gave one part of
+his mind to the methodical performance of his task, to adjust the other
+to some definite view of the future. But all was darkened and confused
+by the sense that, between himself and Justine, complete communion of
+thought was no longer possible. It had, in fact, never existed; there
+had always been a locked chamber in her mind, and he knew not yet what
+other secrets might inhabit it.
+
+The shock of finding her gone when he reached home gave a new turn to
+his feelings. She had made no mystery of her destination, leaving word
+with the servants that she had gone to town to see Mr. Langhope; and
+Amherst found a note from her on his study table.
+
+"I feel," she wrote, "that I ought to see Mr. Langhope myself, and be
+the first to tell him what must be told. It was like you, dearest, to
+wish to spare me this, but it would have made me more unhappy; and Mr.
+Langhope might wish to hear the facts in my own words. I shall come back
+tomorrow, and after that it will be for you to decide what must be
+done."
+
+The brevity and simplicity of the note were characteristic; in moments
+of high tension Justine was always calm and direct. And it was like her,
+too, not to make any covert appeal to his sympathy, not to seek to
+entrap his judgment by caressing words and plaintive allusions. The
+quiet tone in which she stated her purpose matched the firmness and
+courage of the act, and for a moment Amherst was shaken by a revulsion
+of feeling. Her heart was level with his, after all--if she had done
+wrong she would bear the brunt of it alone. It was so exactly what he
+himself would have felt and done in such a situation that faith in her
+flowed back through all the dried channels of his heart. But an instant
+later the current set the other way. The wretched years of his first
+marriage had left in him a residue of distrust, a tendency to dissociate
+every act from its ostensible motive. He had been too profoundly the
+dupe of his own enthusiasm not to retain this streak of scepticism, and
+it now moved him to ask if Justine's sudden departure had not been
+prompted by some other cause than the one she avowed. Had that alone
+actuated her, why not have told it to him, and asked his consent to her
+plan? Why let him leave the house without a hint of her purpose, and
+slip off by the first train as soon as he was safe at Westmore? Might it
+not be that she had special reasons for wishing Mr. Langhope to _hear
+her own version first_--that there were questions she wished to parry
+herself, explanations she could trust no one to make for her? The
+thought plunged Amherst into deeper misery. He knew not how to defend
+himself against these disintegrating suspicions--he felt only that, once
+the accord between two minds is broken, it is less easy to restore than
+the passion between two hearts. He dragged heavily through his solitary
+evening, and awaited with dread and yet impatience a message announcing
+his wife's return.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It would have been easier--far easier--when she left Mr. Langhope's
+door, to go straight out into the darkness and let it close in on her
+for good.
+
+Justine felt herself yielding to the spell of that suggestion as she
+walked along the lamplit pavement, hardly conscious of the turn her
+steps were taking. The door of the house which a few weeks before had
+been virtually hers had closed on her without a question. She had been
+suffered to go out into the darkness without being asked whither she was
+going, or under what roof her night would be spent. The contrast between
+her past and present sounded through the tumult of her thoughts like the
+evil laughter of temptation. The house at Hanaford, to which she was
+returning, would look at her with the same alien face--nowhere on earth,
+at that moment, was a door which would open to her like the door of
+home.
+
+In her painful self-absorption she followed the side street toward
+Madison Avenue, and struck southward down that tranquil thoroughfare.
+There was a physical relief in rapid motion, and she walked on, still
+hardly aware of her direction, toward the clustered lights of Madison
+Square. Should she return to Hanaford, she had still several hours to
+dispose of before the departure of the midnight train; and if she did
+not return, hours and dates no longer existed for her.
+
+It would be easier--infinitely easier--not to go back. To take up her
+life with Amherst would, under any circumstances, be painful enough; to
+take it up under the tacit restriction of her pledge to Mr. Langhope
+seemed more than human courage could face. As she approached the square
+she had almost reached the conclusion that such a temporary renewal was
+beyond her strength--beyond what any standard of duty exacted. The
+question of an alternative hardly troubled her. She would simply go on
+living, and find an escape in work and material hardship. It would not
+be hard for so inconspicuous a person to slip back into the obscure mass
+of humanity.
+
+She paused a moment on the edge of the square, vaguely seeking a
+direction for her feet that might permit the working of her thoughts to
+go on uninterrupted; and as she stood there, her eyes fell on the bench
+near the corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where she had sat with Amherst
+on the day of his flight from Lynbrook. He too had dreamed of escaping
+from insoluble problems into the clear air of hard work and simple
+duties; and she remembered the words with which she had turned him back.
+The cases, of course, were not identical, since he had been flying in
+anger and wounded pride from a situation for which he was in no wise to
+blame; yet, if even at such a moment she had insisted on charity and
+forbearance, how could she now show less self-denial than she had
+exacted of him?
+
+"If you go away for a time, surely it ought to be in such a way that
+your going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy...." That was
+how she had put it to him, and how, with the mere change of a name, she
+must now, for reasons as cogent, put it to herself. It was just as much
+a part of the course she had planned to return to her husband now, and
+take up their daily life together, as it would, later on, be her duty to
+drop out of that life, when her doing so could no longer involve him in
+the penalty to be paid.
+
+She stood a little while looking at the bench on which they had sat, and
+giving thanks in her heart for the past strength which was now helping
+to build up her failing courage: such a patchwork business are our best
+endeavours, yet so faithfully does each weak upward impulse reach back a
+hand to the next.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Justine's explanation of her visit to Mr. Langhope was not wholly
+satisfying to her husband. She did not conceal from him that the scene
+had been painful, but she gave him to understand, as briefly as
+possible, that Mr. Langhope, after his first movement of uncontrollable
+distress, had seemed able to make allowances for the pressure under
+which she had acted, and that he had, at any rate, given no sign of
+intending to let her confession make any change in the relation between
+the households. If she did not--as Amherst afterward recalled--put all
+this specifically into words, she contrived to convey it in her manner,
+in her allusions, above all in her recovered composure. She had the
+demeanour of one who has gone through a severe test of strength, but
+come out of it in complete control of the situation. There was something
+slightly unnatural in this prompt solution of so complicated a
+difficulty, and it had the effect of making Amherst ask himself what, to
+produce such a result, must have been the gist of her communication to
+Mr. Langhope. If the latter had shown any disposition to be cruel, or
+even unjust, Amherst's sympathies would have rushed instantly to his
+wife's defence; but the fact that there was apparently to be no call on
+them left his reason free to compare and discriminate, with the final
+result that the more he pondered on his father-in-law's attitude the
+less intelligible it became.
+
+A few days after Justine's return he was called to New York on business;
+and before leaving he told her that he should of course take the
+opportunity of having a talk with Mr. Langhope.
+
+She received the statement with the gentle composure from which she had
+not departed since her return from town; and he added tentatively, as if
+to provoke her to a clearer expression of feeling: "I shall not be
+satisfied, of course, till I see for myself just how he feels--just how
+much, at bottom, this has affected him--since my own future relation to
+him will, as I have already told you, depend entirely on his treatment
+of you."
+
+She met this without any sign of disturbance. "His treatment of me was
+very kind," she said. "But would it not, on your part," she continued
+hesitatingly, "be kinder not to touch on the subject so soon again?"
+
+The line deepened between his brows. "Touch on it? I sha'n't rest till
+I've gone to the bottom of it! Till then, you must understand," he
+summed up with decision, "I feel myself only on sufferance here at
+Westmore."
+
+"Yes--I understand," she assented; and as he bent over to kiss her for
+goodbye a tenuous impenetrable barrier seemed to lie between their lips.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was Justine's turn to await with a passionate anxiety her husband's
+home-coming; and when, on the third day, he reappeared, her dearly
+acquired self-control gave way to a tremulous eagerness. This was, after
+all, the turning-point in their lives: everything depended on how Mr.
+Langhope had "played up" to his cue; had kept to his side of their bond.
+
+Amherst's face showed signs of emotional havoc: when feeling once broke
+out in him it had full play, and she could see that his hour with Mr.
+Langhope had struck to the roots of life. But the resultant expression
+was one of invigoration, not defeat; and she gathered at a glance that
+her partner had not betrayed her. She drew a tragic solace from the
+success of her achievement; yet it flung her into her husband's arms
+with a passion of longing to which, as she instantly felt, he did not as
+completely respond.
+
+There was still, then, something "between" them: somewhere the mechanism
+of her scheme had failed, or its action had not produced the result she
+had counted on.
+
+As soon as they were alone in the study she said, as quietly as she
+could: "You saw your father-in-law? You talked with him?"
+
+"Yes--I spent the afternoon with him. Cicely sent you her love."
+
+She coloured at the mention of the child's name and murmured: "And Mr.
+Langhope?"
+
+"He is perfectly calm now--perfectly impartial.--This business has made
+me feel," Amherst added abruptly, "that I have never been quite fair to
+him. I never thought him a magnanimous man."
+
+"He has proved himself so," Justine murmured, her head bent low over a
+bit of needlework; and Amherst affirmed energetically: "He has been more
+than that--generous!"
+
+She looked up at him with a smile. "I am so glad, dear; so glad there is
+not to be the least shadow between you...."
+
+"No," Amherst said, his voice flagging slightly. There was a pause, and
+then he went on with renewed emphasis: "Of course I made my point clear
+to him."
+
+"Your point?"
+
+"That I stand or fall by his judgment of you."
+
+Oh, if he had but said it more tenderly! But he delivered it with the
+quiet resolution of a man who contends for an abstract principle of
+justice, and not for a passion grown into the fibres of his heart!
+
+"You are generous too," she faltered, her voice trembling a little.
+
+Amherst frowned; and she perceived that any hint, on her part, of
+recognizing the slightest change in their relations was still like
+pressure on a painful bruise.
+
+"There is no need for such words between us," he said impatiently; "and
+Mr. Langhope's attitude," he added, with an effort at a lighter tone,
+"has made it unnecessary, thank heaven, that we should ever revert to
+the subject again."
+
+He turned to his desk as he spoke, and plunged into perusal of the
+letters that had accumulated in his absence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a temporary excess of work at Westmore, and during the days
+that followed he threw himself into it with a zeal that showed Justine
+how eagerly he sought any pretext for avoiding confidential moments. The
+perception was painful enough, yet not as painful as another discovery
+that awaited her. She too had her tasks at Westmore: the supervision of
+the hospital, the day nursery, the mothers' club, and the various other
+organizations whereby she and Amherst were trying to put some sort of
+social unity into the lives of the mill-hands; and when, on the day
+after his return from New York, she presented herself, as usual, at the
+Westmore office, where she was in the habit of holding a brief
+consultation with him before starting on her rounds, she was at once
+aware of a new tinge of constraint in his manner. It hurt him, then, to
+see her at Westmore--hurt him more than to live with her, at Hanaford,
+under Bessy's roof! For it was there, at the mills, that his real life
+was led, the life with which Justine had been most identified, the life
+that had been made possible for both by the magnanimity of that other
+woman whose presence was now forever between them.
+
+Justine made no sign. She resumed her work as though unconscious of any
+change; but whereas in the past they had always found pretexts for
+seeking each other out, to discuss the order of the day's work, or
+merely to warm their hearts by a rapid word or two, now each went a
+separate way, sometimes not meeting till they regained the house at
+night-fall.
+
+And as the weeks passed she began to understand that, by a strange
+inversion of probability, the relation between Amherst and herself was
+to be the means of holding her to her compact with Mr. Langhope--if
+indeed it were not nearer the truth to say that it had made such a
+compact unnecessary. Amherst had done his best to take up their life
+together as though there had been no break in it; but slowly the fact
+was being forced on her that by remaining with him she was subjecting
+him to intolerable suffering--was coming to be the personification of
+the very thoughts and associations from which he struggled to escape.
+Happily her promptness of action had preserved Westmore to him, and in
+Westmore she believed that he would in time find a refuge from even the
+memory of what he was now enduring. But meanwhile her presence kept the
+thought alive; and, had every other incentive lost its power, this would
+have been enough to sustain her. Fate had, ironically enough, furnished
+her with an unanswerable reason for leaving Amherst; the impossibility
+of their keeping up such a relation as now existed between them would
+soon become too patent to be denied.
+
+Meanwhile, as summer approached, she knew that external conditions would
+also call upon her to act. The visible signal for her withdrawal would
+be Cicely's next visit to Westmore. The child's birthday fell in early
+June; and Amherst, some months previously, had asked that she should be
+permitted to spend it at Hanaford, and that it should be chosen as the
+date for the opening of the first model cottages at Hopewood.
+
+It was Justine who had originated the idea of associating Cicely's
+anniversaries with some significant moment in the annals of the mill
+colony; and struck by the happy suggestion, he had at once applied
+himself to hastening on the work at Hopewood. The eagerness of both
+Amherst and Justine that Cicely should be identified with the developing
+life of Westmore had been one of the chief influences in reconciling Mr.
+Langhope to his son-in-law's second marriage. Husband and wife had
+always made it clear that they regarded themselves as the mere trustees
+of the Westmore revenues, and that Cicely's name should, as early as
+possible, be associated with every measure taken for the welfare of the
+people. But now, as Justine knew, the situation was changed; and Cicely
+would not be allowed to come to Hanaford until she herself had left it.
+The manifold threads of divination that she was perpetually throwing out
+in Amherst's presence told her, without word or sign on his part, that
+he also awaited Cicely's birthday as a determining date in their lives.
+He spoke confidently, and as a matter of course, of Mr. Langhope's
+bringing his grand-daughter at the promised time; but Justine could hear
+a note of challenge in his voice, as though he felt that Mr. Langhope's
+sincerity had not yet been put to the test.
+
+As the time drew nearer it became more difficult for her to decide just
+how she should take the step she had determined on. She had no material
+anxiety for the future, for although she did not mean to accept a penny
+from her husband after she had left him, she knew it would be easy for
+her to take up her nursing again; and she knew also that her hospital
+connections would enable her to find work in a part of the country far
+enough distant to remove her entirely from his life. But she had not yet
+been able to invent a reason for leaving that should be convincing
+enough to satisfy him, without directing his suspicions to the truth. As
+she revolved the question she suddenly recalled an exclamation of
+Amherst's--a word spoken as they entered Mr. Langhope's door, on the
+fatal afternoon when she had found Wyant's letter awaiting her.
+
+"There's nothing you can't make people believe, you little Jesuit!"
+
+She had laughed in pure joy at his praise of her; for every bantering
+phrase had then been a caress. But now the words returned with a
+sinister meaning. She knew they were true as far as Amherst was
+concerned: in the arts of casuistry and equivocation a child could have
+outmatched him, and she had only to exert her will to dupe him as deeply
+as she pleased. Well! the task was odious, but it was needful: it was
+the bitterest part of her expiation that she must deceive him once more
+to save him from the results of her former deception. This decision once
+reached, every nerve in her became alert for an opportunity to do the
+thing and have it over; so that, whenever they were alone together, she
+was in an attitude of perpetual tension, her whole mind drawn up for its
+final spring.
+
+The decisive word came, one evening toward the end of May, in the form
+of an allusion on Amherst's part to Cicely's approaching visit. Husband
+and wife were seated in the drawing-room after dinner, he with a book in
+hand, she bending, as usual, over the needlework which served at once as
+a pretext for lowered eyes, and as a means of disguising her fixed
+preoccupation.
+
+"Have you worked out a plan?" he asked, laying down his book. "It
+occurred to me that it would be rather a good idea if we began with a
+sort of festivity for the kids at the day nursery. You could take Cicely
+there early, and I could bring out Mr. Langhope after luncheon. The
+whole performance would probably tire him too much."
+
+Justine listened with suspended thread. "Yes--that seems a good plan."
+
+"Will you see about the details, then? You know it's only a week off."
+
+"Yes, I know." She hesitated, and then took the spring. "I ought to
+tell you John--that I--I think I may not be here...."
+
+He raised his head abruptly, and she saw the blood mount under his fair
+skin. "Not be here?" he exclaimed.
+
+She met his look as steadily as she could. "I think of going away for
+awhile."
+
+"Going away? Where? What is the matter--are you not well?"
+
+There was her pretext--he had found it for her! Why should she not
+simply plead ill-health? Afterward she would find a way of elaborating
+the details and making them plausible. But suddenly, as she was about to
+speak, there came to her the feeling which, up to one fatal moment in
+their lives, had always ruled their intercourse--the feeling that there
+must be truth, and absolute truth, between them. Absolute, indeed, it
+could never be again, since he must never know of the condition exacted
+by Mr. Langhope; but that, at the moment, seemed almost a secondary
+motive compared to the deeper influences that were inexorably forcing
+them apart. At any rate, she would trump up no trivial excuse for the
+step she had resolved on; there should be truth, if not the whole truth,
+in this last decisive hour between them.
+
+"Yes; I am quite well--at least my body is," she said quietly. "But I am
+tired, perhaps; my mind has been going round too long in the same
+circle." She paused for a brief space, and then, raising her head, and
+looking him straight in the eyes: "Has it not been so with you?" she
+asked.
+
+The question seemed to startle Amherst. He rose from his chair and took
+a few steps toward the hearth, where a small fire was crumbling into
+embers. He turned his back to it, resting an arm on the mantel-shelf;
+then he said, in a somewhat unsteady tone: "I thought we had agreed not
+to speak of all that again."
+
+Justine shook her head with a fugitive half-smile. "I made no such
+agreement. And besides, what is the use, when we can always hear each
+other's thoughts speak, and they speak of nothing else?"
+
+Amherst's brows darkened. "It is not so with mine," he began; but she
+raised her hand with a silencing gesture.
+
+"I know you have tried your best that it should not be so; and perhaps
+you have succeeded better than I. But I am tired, horribly tired--I want
+to get away from everything!"
+
+She saw a look of pain in his eyes. He continued to lean against the
+mantel-shelf, his head slightly lowered, his unseeing gaze fixed on a
+remote scroll in the pattern of the carpet; then he said in a low tone:
+"I can only repeat again what I have said before--that I understand why
+you did what you did."
+
+"Thank you," she answered, in the same tone.
+
+There was another pause, for she could not trust herself to go on
+speaking; and presently he asked, with a tinge of bitterness in his
+voice: "That does not satisfy you?"
+
+She hesitated. "It satisfies me as much as it does you--and no more,"
+she replied at length.
+
+He looked up hastily. "What do you mean?"
+
+"Just what I say. We can neither of us go on living on that
+understanding just at present." She rose as she spoke, and crossed over
+to the hearth. "I want to go back to my nursing--to go out to Michigan,
+to a town where I spent a few months the year before I first came to
+Hanaford. I have friends there, and can get work easily. And you can
+tell people that I was ill and needed a change."
+
+It had been easier to say than she had imagined, and her voice held its
+clear note till the end; but when she had ceased, the whole room began
+to reverberate with her words, and through the clashing they made in her
+brain she felt a sudden uncontrollable longing that they should provoke
+in him a cry of protest, of resistance. Oh, if he refused to let her
+go--if he caught her to him, and defied the world to part them--what
+then of her pledge to Mr. Langhope, what then of her resolve to pay the
+penalty alone?
+
+But in the space of a heart-beat she knew that peril--that longed-for
+peril!--was past. Her husband had remained silent--he neither moved
+toward her nor looked at her; and she felt in every slackening nerve
+that in the end he would let her go.
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+
+MR. LANGHOPE, tossing down a note on Mrs. Ansell's drawing-room table,
+commanded imperiously: "Read that!"
+
+She set aside her tea-cup, and looked up, not at the note, but into his
+face, which was crossed by one of the waves of heat and tremulousness
+that she was beginning to fear for him. Mr. Langhope had changed greatly
+in the last three months; and as he stood there in the clear light of
+the June afternoon it came to her that he had at last suffered the
+sudden collapse which is the penalty of youth preserved beyond its time.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, still watching him as she put out her hand for
+the letter.
+
+"Amherst writes to remind me of my promise to take Cicely to Hanaford
+next week, for her birthday."
+
+"Well--it was a promise, wasn't it?" she rejoined, running her eyes over
+the page.
+
+"A promise--yes; but made before.... Read the note--you'll see there's
+no reference to his wife. For all I know, she'll be there to receive
+us."
+
+"But that was a promise too."
+
+"That neither Cicely nor I should ever set eyes on her? Yes. But why
+should she keep it? I was a fool that day--she fooled me as she's fooled
+us all! But you saw through it from the beginning--you said at once that
+she'd never leave him."
+
+Mrs. Ansell reflected. "I said that before I knew all the circumstances.
+Now I think differently."
+
+"You think she still means to go?"
+
+She handed the letter back to him. "I think this is to tell you so."
+
+"This?" He groped for his glasses, dubiously scanning the letter again.
+
+"Yes. And what's more, if you refuse to go she'll have every right to
+break her side of the agreement."
+
+Mr. Langhope sank into a chair, steadying himself painfully with his
+stick. "Upon my soul, I sometimes think you're on her side!" he
+ejaculated.
+
+"No--but I like fair play," she returned, measuring his tea carefully
+into his favourite little porcelain tea-pot.
+
+"Fair play?"
+
+"She's offering to do her part. It's for you to do yours now--to take
+Cicely to Hanaford."
+
+"If I find her there, I never cross Amherst's threshold again!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell, without answering, rose and put his tea-cup on the
+slender-legged table at his elbow; then, before returning to her seat,
+she found the enamelled match-box and laid it by the cup. It was
+becoming difficult for Mr. Langhope to guide his movements about her
+small encumbered room; and he had always liked being waited on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Ansell's prognostication proved correct. When Mr. Langhope and
+Cicely arrived at Hanaford they found Amherst alone to receive them. He
+explained briefly that his wife had been unwell, and had gone to seek
+rest and change at the house of an old friend in the west. Mr. Langhope
+expressed a decent amount of regret, and the subject was dropped as if
+by common consent. Cicely, however, was not so easily silenced. Poor
+Bessy's uncertain fits of tenderness had produced more bewilderment than
+pleasure in her sober-minded child; but the little girl's feelings and
+perceptions had developed rapidly in the equable atmosphere of her
+step-mother's affection. Cicely had reached the age when children put
+their questions with as much ingenuity as persistence, and both Mr.
+Langhope and Amherst longed for Mrs. Ansell's aid in parrying her
+incessant interrogations as to the cause and length of Justine's
+absence, what she had said before going, and what promise she had made
+about coming back. But Mrs. Ansell had not come to Hanaford. Though it
+had become a matter of habit to include her in the family pilgrimages to
+the mills she had firmly maintained the plea of more urgent engagements;
+and the two men, with only Cicely between them, had spent the long days
+and longer evenings in unaccustomed and unmitigated propinquity.
+
+Mr. Langhope, before leaving, thought it proper to touch tentatively on
+his promise of giving Cicely to Amherst for the summer; but to his
+surprise the latter, after a moment of hesitation, replied that he
+should probably go to Europe for two or three months.
+
+"To Europe? Alone?" escaped from Mr. Langhope before he had time to
+weigh his words.
+
+Amherst frowned slightly. "I have been made a delegate to the Berne
+conference on the housing of factory operatives," he said at length,
+without making a direct reply to the question; "and if there is nothing
+to keep me at Westmore, I shall probably go out in July." He waited a
+moment, and then added: "My wife has decided to spend the summer in
+Michigan."
+
+Mr. Langhope's answer was a vague murmur of assent, and Amherst turned
+the talk to other matters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Langhope returned to town with distinct views on the situation at
+Hanaford.
+
+"Poor devil--I'm sorry for him: he can hardly speak of her," he broke
+out at once to Mrs. Ansell, in the course of their first confidential
+hour together.
+
+"Because he cares too much--he's too unhappy?"
+
+"Because he loathes her!" Mr. Langhope brought out with emphasis.
+
+Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sigh which made him add accusingly: "I believe
+you're actually sorry!"
+
+"Sorry?" She raised her eye-brows with a slight smile. "Should one not
+always be sorry to know there's a little less love and a little more
+hate in the world?"
+
+"You'll be asking _me_ not to hate her next!"
+
+She still continued to smile on him. "It's the haters, not the hated,
+I'm sorry for," she said at length; and he flung back impatiently: "Oh,
+don't let's talk of her. I sometimes feel she takes up more place in our
+lives than when she was with us!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amherst went to the Berne conference in July, and spent six weeks
+afterward in rapid visits to various industrial centres and model
+factory villages. During his previous European pilgrimages his interest
+had by no means been restricted to sociological questions: the appeal of
+an old civilization, reaching him through its innumerable forms of
+tradition and beauty, had roused that side of his imagination which his
+work at home left untouched. But upon his present state of deep moral
+commotion the spells of art and history were powerless to work. The
+foundations of his life had been shaken, and the fair exterior of the
+world was as vacant as a maniac's face. He could only take refuge in his
+special task, barricading himself against every expression of beauty and
+poetry as so many poignant reminders of a phase of life that he was
+vainly trying to cast off and forget.
+
+Even his work had been embittered to him, thrust out of its place in the
+ordered scheme of things. It had cost him a hard struggle to hold fast
+to his main purpose, to convince himself that his real duty lay, not in
+renouncing the Westmore money and its obligations, but in carrying out
+his projected task as if nothing had occurred to affect his personal
+relation to it. The mere fact that such a renunciation would have been a
+deliberate moral suicide, a severing once for all of every artery of
+action, made it take on, at first, the semblance of an obligation, a
+sort of higher duty to the abstract conception of what he owed himself.
+But Justine had not erred in her forecast. Once she had passed out of
+his life, it was easier for him to return to a dispassionate view of his
+situation, to see, and boldly confess to himself that he saw, the still
+higher duty of sticking to his task, instead of sacrificing it to any
+ideal of personal disinterestedness. It was this gradual process of
+adjustment that saved him from the desolating scepticism which falls on
+the active man when the sources of his activity are tainted. Having
+accepted his fate, having consented to see in himself merely the
+necessary agent of a good to be done, he could escape from
+self-questioning only by shutting himself up in the practical exigencies
+of his work, closing his eyes and his thoughts to everything which had
+formerly related it to a wider world, had given meaning and beauty to
+life as a whole.
+
+The return from Europe, and the taking up of the daily routine at
+Hanaford, were the most difficult phases in this process of moral
+adaptation.
+
+Justine's departure had at first brought relief. He had been too sincere
+with himself to oppose her wish to leave Hanaford for a time, since he
+believed that, for her as well as for himself, a temporary separation
+would be less painful than a continuance of their actual relation. But
+as the weeks passed into months he found he was no nearer to a clear
+view of his own case: the future was still dark and enigmatic. Justine's
+desire to leave him had revived his unformulated distrust of her. What
+could it mean but that there were thoughts within her which could not be
+at rest in his presence? He had given her every proof of his wish to
+forget the past, and Mr. Langhope had behaved with unequalled
+magnanimity. Yet Justine's unhappiness was evident: she could not
+conceal her longing to escape from the conditions her act had created.
+Was it because, in reality, she was conscious of other motives than the
+one she acknowledged? She had insisted, almost unfeelingly as it might
+have seemed, on the abstract rightness of what she had done, on the fact
+that, ideally speaking, her act could not be made less right, less
+justifiable, by the special accidental consequences that had flowed from
+it. Because these consequences had caught her in a web of tragic
+fatality she would not be guilty of the weakness of tracing back the
+disaster to any intrinsic error in her original motive. Why, then, if
+this was her real, her proud attitude toward the past--and since those
+about her believed in her sincerity, and accepted her justification as
+valid from her point of view if not from theirs--why had she not been
+able to maintain her posture, to carry on life on the terms she had
+exacted from others?
+
+A special circumstance contributed to this feeling of distrust; the
+fact, namely, that Justine, a week after her departure from Hanaford,
+had written to say that she could not, from that moment till her return,
+consent to accept any money from Amherst. As her manner was, she put her
+reasons clearly and soberly, without evasion or ambiguity.
+
+"Since you and I," she wrote, "have always agreed in regarding the
+Westmore money as a kind of wage for our services at the mills, I
+cannot be satisfied to go on drawing that wage while I am unable to do
+any work in return. I am sure you must feel as I do about this; and you
+need have no anxiety as to the practical side of the question, since I
+have enough to live on in some savings from my hospital days, which were
+invested for me two years ago by Harry Dressel, and are beginning to
+bring in a small return. This being the case, I feel I can afford to
+interpret in any way I choose the terms of the bargain between myself
+and Westmore."
+
+On reading this, Amherst's mind had gone through the strange dual
+process which now marked all his judgments of his wife. At first he had
+fancied he understood her, and had felt that he should have done as she
+did; then the usual reaction of distrust set in, and he asked himself
+why she, who had so little of the conventional attitude toward money,
+should now develop this unexpected susceptibility. And so the old
+question presented itself in another shape: if she had nothing to
+reproach herself for, why was it intolerable to her to live on Bessy's
+money? The fact that she was doing no actual service at Westmore did not
+account for her scruples--she would have been the last person to think
+that a sick servant should be docked of his pay. Her reluctance could
+come only from that hidden cause of compunction which had prompted her
+departure, and which now forced her to sever even the merely material
+links between herself and her past.
+
+Amherst, on his return to Hanaford, had tried to find in these
+considerations a reason for his deep unrest. It was his wife's course
+which still cast a torturing doubt on what he had braced his will to
+accept and put behind him. And he now told himself that the perpetual
+galling sense of her absence was due to this uneasy consciousness of
+what it meant, of the dark secrets it enveloped and held back from him.
+In actual truth, every particle of his being missed her, he lacked her
+at every turn. She had been at once the partner of his task, and the
+_pays bleu_ into which he escaped from it; the vivifying thought which
+gave meaning to the life he had chosen, yet never let him forget that
+there was a larger richer life outside, to which he was rooted by deeper
+and more intrinsic things than any abstract ideal of altruism. His love
+had preserved his identity, saved him from shrinking into the mere
+nameless unit which the social enthusiast is in danger of becoming
+unless the humanitarian passion is balanced, and a little overweighed,
+by a merely human one. And now this equilibrium was lost forever, and
+his deepest pain lay in realizing that he could not regain it, even by
+casting off Westmore and choosing the narrower but richer individual
+existence that her love might once have offered. His life was in truth
+one indivisible organism, not two halves artificially united. Self and
+other-self were ingrown from the roots--whichever portion fate
+restricted him to would be but a mutilated half-live fragment of the
+whole.
+
+Happily for him, chance made this crisis of his life coincide with a
+strike at Westmore. Soon after his return to Hanaford he found himself
+compelled to grapple with the hardest problem of his industrial career,
+and he was carried through the ensuing three months on that tide of
+swift obligatory action that sweeps the ship-wrecked spirit over so many
+sunken reefs of fear and despair. The knowledge that he was better able
+to deal with the question than any one who might conceivably have taken
+his place--this conviction, which was presently confirmed by the
+peaceable adjustment of the strike, helped to make the sense of his
+immediate usefulness outbalance that other, disintegrating doubt as to
+the final value of such efforts. And so he tried to settle down into a
+kind of mechanical altruism, in which the reflexes of habit should take
+the place of that daily renewal of faith and enthusiasm which had been
+fed from the springs of his own joy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The autumn came and passed into winter; and after Mr. Langhope's
+re-establishment in town Amherst began to resume his usual visits to his
+step-daughter.
+
+His natural affection for the little girl had been deepened by the
+unforeseen manner in which her fate had been entrusted to him. The
+thought of Bessy, softened to compunction by the discovery that her love
+had persisted under their apparently hopeless estrangement--this
+feeling, intensified to the verge of morbidness by the circumstances
+attending her death, now sought expression in a passionate devotion to
+her child. Accident had, in short, created between Bessy and himself a
+retrospective sympathy which the resumption of life together would have
+dispelled in a week--one of the exhalations from the past that depress
+the vitality of those who linger too near the grave of dead experiences.
+
+Since Justine's departure Amherst had felt himself still more drawn to
+Cicely; but his relation to the child was complicated by the fact that
+she would not be satisfied as to the cause of her step-mother's absence.
+Whenever Amherst came to town, her first question was for Justine; and
+her memory had the precocious persistence sometimes developed in
+children too early deprived of their natural atmosphere of affection.
+Cicely had always been petted and adored, at odd times and by divers
+people; but some instinct seemed to tell her that, of all the tenderness
+bestowed on her, Justine's most resembled the all-pervading motherly
+element in which the child's heart expands without ever being conscious
+of its needs.
+
+If it had been embarrassing to evade Cicely's questions in June it
+became doubly so as the months passed, and the pretext of Justine's
+ill-health grew more and more difficult to sustain. And in the following
+March Amherst was suddenly called from Hanaford by the news that the
+little girl herself was ill. Serious complications had developed from a
+protracted case of scarlet fever, and for two weeks the child's fate was
+uncertain. Then she began to recover, and in the joy of seeing life come
+back to her, Mr. Langhope and Amherst felt as though they must not only
+gratify every wish she expressed, but try to guess at those they saw
+floating below the surface of her clear vague eyes.
+
+It was noticeable to Mrs. Ansell, if not to the others, that one of
+these unexpressed wishes was the desire to see her stepmother. Cicely no
+longer asked for Justine; but something in her silence, or in the
+gesture with which she gently put from her other offers of diversion and
+companionship, suddenly struck Mrs. Ansell as more poignant than speech.
+
+"What is it the child wants?" she asked the governess, in the course of
+one of their whispered consultations; and the governess, after a
+moment's hesitation, replied: "She said something about a letter she
+wrote to Mrs. Amherst just before she was taken ill--about having had no
+answer, I think."
+
+"Ah--she writes to Mrs. Amherst, does she?"
+
+The governess, evidently aware that she trod on delicate ground, tried
+at once to defend herself and her pupil.
+
+"It was my fault, perhaps. I suggested once that her little compositions
+should take the form of letters--it usually interests a child more--and
+she asked if they might be written to Mrs. Amherst."
+
+"Your fault? Why should not the child write to her step-mother?" Mrs.
+Ansell rejoined with studied surprise; and on the other's murmuring: "Of
+course--of course----" she added haughtily: "I trust the letters were
+sent?"
+
+The governess floundered. "I couldn't say--but perhaps the nurse...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That evening Cicely was less well. There was a slight return of fever,
+and the doctor, hastily summoned, hinted at the possibility of too much
+excitement in the sick-room.
+
+"Excitement? There has been no excitement," Mr. Langhope protested,
+quivering with the sudden renewal of fear.
+
+"No? The child seemed nervous, uneasy. It's hard to say why, because she
+is unusually reserved for her age."
+
+The medical man took his departure, and Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell
+faced each other in the disarray produced by a call to arms when all
+has seemed at peace.
+
+"I shall lose her--I shall lose her!" the grandfather broke out, sinking
+into his chair with a groan.
+
+Mrs. Ansell, gathering up her furs for departure, turned on him abruptly
+from the threshold.
+
+"It's stupid, what you're doing--stupid!" she exclaimed with unwonted
+vehemence.
+
+He raised his head with a startled look. "What do you mean--what I'm
+doing?"
+
+"The child misses Justine. You ought to send for her."
+
+Mr. Langhope's hands dropped to the arms of his chair, and he
+straightened himself up with a pale flash of indignation. "You've had
+moments lately----!"
+
+"I've had moments, yes; and so have you--when the child came back to us,
+and we stood there and wondered how we could keep her, tie her
+fast...and in those moments I saw...saw what she wanted...and so did
+you!"
+
+Mr. Langhope turned away his head. "You're a sentimentalist!" he flung
+scornfully back.
+
+"Oh, call me any bad names you please!"
+
+"I won't send for that woman!"
+
+"No." She fastened her furs slowly, with the gentle deliberate movements
+that no emotion ever hastened or disturbed.
+
+"Why do you say no?" he challenged her.
+
+"To make you contradict me, perhaps," she ventured, after looking at him
+again.
+
+"Ah----" He shifted his position, one elbow supporting his bowed head,
+his eyes fixed on the ground. Presently he brought out: "Could one ask
+her to come--and see the child--and go away again--for good?"
+
+"To break the compact at your pleasure, and enter into it again for the
+same reason?"
+
+"No--no--I see." He paused, and then looked up at her suddenly. "But
+what if Amherst won't have her back himself?"
+
+"Shall I ask him?"
+
+"I tell you he can't bear to hear her name!"
+
+"But he doesn't know why she has left him."
+
+Mr. Langhope gathered his brows in a frown. "Why--what on earth--what
+possible difference would that make?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell, from the doorway, shed a pitying glance on him. "Ah--if you
+don't see!" she murmured.
+
+He sank back into his seat with a groan. "Good heavens, Maria, how you
+torture me! I see enough as it is--I see too much of the cursed
+business!"
+
+She paused again, and then slowly moved a step or two nearer, laying her
+hand on his shoulder.
+
+"There's one thing you've never seen yet, Henry: what Bessy herself
+would do now--for the child--if she could."
+
+He sat motionless under her light touch, his eyes on hers, till their
+inmost thoughts felt for and found each other, as they still sometimes
+could, through the fog of years and selfishness and worldly habit; then
+he dropped his face into his hands, hiding it from her with the
+instinctive shrinking of an aged grief.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+
+AMHERST, Cicely's convalescence once assured, had been obliged to go
+back to Hanaford; but some ten days later, on hearing from Mrs. Ansell
+that the little girl's progress was less rapid than had been hoped, he
+returned to his father-in-law's for a Sunday.
+
+He came two days after the talk recorded in the last chapter--a talk of
+which Mrs. Ansell's letter to him had been the direct result. She had
+promised Mr. Langhope that, in writing to Amherst, she would not go
+beyond the briefest statement of fact; and she had kept her word,
+trusting to circumstances to speak for her.
+
+Mrs. Ansell, during Cicely's illness, had formed the habit of dropping
+in on Mr. Langhope at the tea hour instead of awaiting him in her own
+drawing-room; and on the Sunday in question she found him alone.
+Beneath his pleasure in seeing her, which had grown more marked as his
+dependence on her increased, she at once discerned traces of recent
+disturbance; and her first question was for Cicely.
+
+He met it with a discouraged gesture. "No great change--Amherst finds
+her less well than when he was here before."
+
+"He's upstairs with her?"
+
+"Yes--she seems to want him."
+
+Mrs. Ansell seated herself in silence behind the tea-tray, of which she
+was now recognized as the officiating priestess. As she drew off her
+long gloves, and mechanically straightened the row of delicate old cups,
+Mr. Langhope added with an effort: "I've spoken to him--told him what
+you said."
+
+She looked up quickly.
+
+"About the child's wish," he continued. "About her having written to his
+wife. It seems her last letters have not been answered."
+
+He paused, and Mrs. Ansell, with her usual calm precision, proceeded to
+measure the tea into the fluted Georgian tea-pot. She could be as
+reticent in approval as in reprehension, and not for the world would she
+have seemed to claim any share in the turn that events appeared to be
+taking. She even preferred the risk of leaving her old friend to add
+half-reproachfully: "I told Amherst what you and the nurse thought."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"That Cicely pines for his wife. I put it to him in black and white."
+The words came out on a deep strained breath, and Mrs. Ansell faltered:
+"Well?"
+
+"Well--he doesn't know where she is himself."
+
+"Doesn't _know_?"
+
+"They're separated--utterly separated. It's as I told you: he could
+hardly name her."
+
+Mrs. Ansell had unconsciously ceased her ministrations, letting her
+hands fall on her knee while she brooded in blank wonder on her
+companion's face.
+
+"I wonder what reason she could have given him?" she murmured at length.
+
+"For going? He loathes her, I tell you!"
+
+"Yes--but _how did she make him_?"
+
+He struck his hand violently on the arm of his chair. "Upon my soul, you
+seem to forget!"
+
+"No." She shook her head with a half smile. "I simply remember more than
+you do."
+
+"What more?" he began with a flush of anger; but she raised a quieting
+hand.
+
+"What does all that matter--if, now that we need her, we can't get her?"
+
+He made no answer, and she returned to the dispensing of his tea; but as
+she rose to put the cup in his hand he asked, half querulously: "You
+think it's going to be very bad for the child, then?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell smiled with the thin edge of her lips. "One can hardly set
+the police after her----!"
+
+"No; we're powerless," he groaned in assent.
+
+As the cup passed between them she dropped her eyes to his with a quick
+flash of interrogation; but he sat staring moodily before him, and she
+moved back to the sofa without a word.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the way downstairs she met Amherst descending from Cicely's room.
+
+Since the early days of his first marriage there had always been, on
+Amherst's side, a sense of obscure antagonism toward Mrs. Ansell. She
+was almost the embodied spirit of the world he dreaded and disliked: her
+serenity, her tolerance, her adaptability, seemed to smile away and
+disintegrate all the high enthusiasms, the stubborn convictions, that he
+had tried to plant in the shifting sands of his married life. And now
+that Bessy's death had given her back the attributes with which his
+fancy had originally invested her, he had come to regard Mrs. Ansell as
+embodying the evil influences that had come between himself and his
+wife.
+
+Mrs. Ansell was probably not unaware of the successive transitions of
+feeling which had led up to this unflattering view; but her life had
+been passed among petty rivalries and animosities, and she had the
+patience and adroitness of the spy in a hostile camp.
+
+She and Amherst exchanged a few words about Cicely; then she exclaimed,
+with a glance through the panes of the hall door: "But I must be
+off--I'm on foot, and the crossings appal me after dark."
+
+He could do no less, at that, than offer to guide her across the perils
+of Fifth Avenue; and still talking of Cicely, she led him down the
+thronged thoroughfare till her own corner was reached, and then her own
+door; turning there to ask, as if by an afterthought: "Won't you come
+up? There's one thing more I want to say."
+
+A shade of reluctance crossed his face, which, as the vestibule light
+fell on it, looked hard and tired, like a face set obstinately against a
+winter gale; but he murmured a word of assent, and followed her into the
+shining steel cage of the lift.
+
+In her little drawing-room, among the shaded lamps and bowls of spring
+flowers, she pushed a chair forward, settled herself in her usual corner
+of the sofa, and said with a directness that seemed an echo of his own
+tone: "I asked you to come up because I want to talk to you about Mr.
+Langhope."
+
+Amherst looked at her in surprise. Though his father-in-law's health had
+been more or less unsatisfactory for the last year, all their concern,
+of late, had been for Cicely.
+
+"You think him less well?" he enquired.
+
+She waited to draw off and smooth her gloves, with one of the
+deliberate gestures that served to shade and supplement her speech.
+
+"I think him extremely unhappy."
+
+Amherst moved uneasily in his seat. He did not know where she meant the
+talk to lead them, but he guessed that it would be over painful places,
+and he saw no reason why he should be forced to follow her.
+
+"You mean that he's still anxious about Cicely?"
+
+"Partly that--yes." She paused. "The child will get well, no doubt; but
+she is very lonely. She needs youth, heat, light. Mr. Langhope can't
+give her those, or even a semblance of them; and it's an art I've lost
+the secret of," she added with her shadowy smile.
+
+Amherst's brows darkened. "I realize all she has lost----"
+
+Mrs. Ansell glanced up at him quickly. "She is twice motherless," she
+said.
+
+The blood rose to his neck and temples, and he tightened his hand on the
+arm of his chair. But it was a part of Mrs. Ansell's expertness to know
+when such danger signals must be heeded and when they might be ignored,
+and she went on quietly: "It's the question of the future that is
+troubling Mr. Langhope. After such an illness, the next months of
+Cicely's life should be all happiness. And money won't buy the kind she
+needs: one can't pick out the right companion for such a child as one
+can match a ribbon. What she wants is spontaneous affection, not the
+most superlative manufactured article. She wants the sort of love that
+Justine gave her."
+
+It was the first time in months that Amherst had heard his wife's name
+spoken outside of his own house. No one but his mother mentioned Justine
+to him now; and of late even his mother had dropped her enquiries and
+allusions, prudently acquiescing in the habit of silence which his own
+silence had created about him. To hear the name again--the two little
+syllables which had been the key of life to him, and now shook him as
+the turning of a rusted lock shakes a long-closed door--to hear her name
+spoken familiarly, affectionately, as one speaks of some one who may
+come into the room the next moment--gave him a shock that was half pain,
+and half furtive unacknowledged joy. Men whose conscious thoughts are
+mostly projected outward, on the world of external activities, may be
+more moved by such a touch on the feelings than those who are
+perpetually testing and tuning their emotional chords. Amherst had
+foreseen from the first that Mrs. Ansell might mean to speak of his
+wife; but though he had intended, if she did so, to cut their talk
+short, he now felt himself irresistibly constrained to hear her out.
+
+Mrs. Ansell, having sped her shaft, followed its flight through lowered
+lashes, and saw that it had struck a vulnerable point; but she was far
+from assuming that the day was won.
+
+"I believe," she continued, "that Mr. Langhope has said something of
+this to you already, and my only excuse for speaking is that I
+understood he had not been successful in his appeal."
+
+No one but Mrs. Ansell--and perhaps she knew it--could have pushed so
+far beyond the conventional limits of discretion without seeming to
+overstep them by a hair; and she had often said, when pressed for the
+secret of her art, that it consisted simply in knowing the pass-word.
+That word once spoken, she might have added, the next secret was to give
+the enemy no time for resistance; and though she saw the frown reappear
+between Amherst's eyes, she went on, without heeding it: "I entreat you,
+Mr. Amherst, to let Cicely see your wife."
+
+He reddened again, and pushed back his chair, as if to rise.
+
+"No--don't break off like that! Let me say a word more. I know your
+answer to Mr. Langhope--that you and Justine are no longer together. But
+I thought of you as a man to sink your personal relations at such a
+moment as this."
+
+"To sink them?" he repeated vaguely: and she went on: "After all, what
+difference does it make?"
+
+"What difference?" He stared in unmitigated wonder, and then answered,
+with a touch of irony: "It might at least make the difference of my
+being unwilling to ask a favour of her."
+
+Mrs. Ansell, at this, raised her eyes and let them rest full on his.
+"Because she has done you so great a one already?"
+
+He stared again, sinking back automatically into his chair. "I don't
+understand you."
+
+"No." She smiled a little, as if to give herself time. "But I mean that
+you shall. If I were a man I suppose I couldn't, because a man's code of
+honour is such a clumsy cast-iron thing. But a woman's, luckily, can be
+cut over--if she's clever--to fit any new occasion; and in this case I
+should be willing to reduce mine to tatters if necessary."
+
+Amherst's look of bewilderment deepened. "What is it that I don't
+understand?" he asked at length, in a low voice.
+
+"Well--first of all, why Mr. Langhope had the right to ask you to send
+for your wife."
+
+"The right?"
+
+"You don't recognize such a right on his part?"
+
+"No--why should I?"
+
+"Supposing she had left you by his wish?"
+
+"His wish? _His----?_"
+
+He was on his feet now, gazing at her blindly, while the solid world
+seemed to grow thin about him. Her next words reduced it to a mist.
+
+"My poor Amherst--why else, on earth, should she have left you?"
+
+She brought it out clearly, in her small chiming tones; and as the sound
+travelled toward him it seemed to gather momentum, till her words rang
+through his brain as if every incomprehensible incident in the past had
+suddenly boomed forth the question. Why else, indeed, should she have
+left him? He stood motionless for a while; then he approached Mrs.
+Ansell and said: "Tell me."
+
+She drew farther back into her corner of the sofa, waving him to a seat
+beside her, as though to bring his inquisitory eyes on a level where her
+own could command them; but he stood where he was, unconscious of her
+gesture, and merely repeating: "Tell me."
+
+She may have said to herself that a woman would have needed no farther
+telling; but to him she only replied, slanting her head up to his: "To
+spare you and himself pain--to keep everything, between himself and you,
+as it had been before you married her."
+
+He dropped down beside her at that, grasping the back of the sofa as if
+he wanted something to clutch and throttle. The veins swelled in his
+temples, and as he pushed back his tossed hair Mrs. Ansell noticed for
+the first time how gray it had grown on the under side.
+
+"And he asked this of my wife--he accepted it?'"
+
+"Haven't _you_ accepted it?"
+
+"I? How could I guess her reasons--how could I imagine----?"
+
+Mrs. Ansell raised her brows a hair's breadth at that. "I don't know.
+But as a fact, he didn't ask--it was she who offered, who forced it on
+him, even!"
+
+"Forced her going on him?"
+
+"In a sense, yes; by making it appear that _you_ felt as he did
+about--about poor Bessy's death: that the thought of what had happened
+at that time was as abhorrent to you as to him--that _she_ was as
+abhorrent to you. No doubt she foresaw that, had she permitted the least
+doubt on that point, there would have been no need of her leaving you,
+since the relation between yourself and Mr. Langhope would have been
+altered--destroyed...."
+
+"Yes. I expected that--I warned her of it. But how did she make him
+think----?"
+
+"How can I tell? To begin with, I don't know your real feeling. For all
+I know she was telling the truth--and Mr. Langhope of course thought she
+was."
+
+"That I abhorred her? Oh----" he broke out, on his feet in an instant.
+
+"Then why----?"
+
+"Why did I let her leave me?" He strode across the room, as his habit
+was in moments of agitation, turning back to her again before he
+answered. "Because I _didn't_ know--didn't know anything! And because
+her insisting on going away like that, without any explanation, made me
+feel...imagine there was...something she didn't _want_ me to
+know...something she was afraid of not being able to hide from me if we
+stayed together any longer."
+
+"Well--there was: the extent to which she loved you."
+
+Mrs. Ansell; her hands clasped on her knee, her gaze holding his with a
+kind of visionary fixity, seemed to reconstruct the history of his past,
+bit by bit, with the words she was dragging out of him.
+
+"I see it--I see it all now," she went on, with a repressed fervour that
+he had never divined in her. "It was the only solution for her, as well
+as for the rest of you. The more she showed her love, the more it would
+have cast a doubt on her motive...the greater distance she would have
+put between herself and you. And so she showed it in the only way that
+was safe for both of you, by taking herself away and hiding it in her
+heart; and before going, she secured your peace of mind, your future. If
+she ruined anything, she rebuilt the ruin. Oh, she paid--she paid in
+full!"
+
+Justine had paid, yes--paid to the utmost limit of whatever debt toward
+society she had contracted by overstepping its laws. And her resolve to
+discharge the debt had been taken in a flash, as soon as she had seen
+that man can commit no act alone, whether for good or evil. The extent
+to which Amherst's fate was involved in hers had become clear to her
+with his first word of reassurance, of faith in her motive. And
+instantly a plan for releasing him had leapt full-formed into her mind,
+and had been carried out with swift unflinching resolution. As he forced
+himself, now, to look down the suddenly illuminated past to the weeks
+which had elapsed between her visit to Mr. Langhope and her departure
+from Hanaford, he wondered not so much at her swiftness of resolve as at
+her firmness in carrying out her plan--and he saw, with a blinding flash
+of insight, that it was in her love for him that she had found her
+strength.
+
+In all moments of strong mental tension he became totally unconscious of
+time and place, and he now remained silent so long, his hands clasped
+behind him, his eyes fixed on an indeterminate point in space, that Mrs.
+Ansell at length rose and laid a questioning touch on his arm.
+
+"It's not true that you don't know where she is?" His face contracted.
+"At this moment I don't. Lately she has preferred...not to write...."
+
+"But surely you must know how to find her?"
+
+He tossed back his hair with an energetic movement. "I should find her
+if I didn't know how!"
+
+They stood confronted in a gaze of silent intensity, each penetrating
+farther into the mind of the other than would once have seemed possible
+to either one; then Amherst held out his hand abruptly. "Good-bye--and
+thank you," he said.
+
+She detained him a moment. "We shall see you soon again--see you both?"
+
+His face grew stern. "It's not to oblige Mr. Langhope that I am going to
+find my wife."
+
+"Ah, now you are unjust to him!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Don't let us speak of him!" he broke in.
+
+"Why not? When it is from him the request comes--the entreaty--that
+everything in the past should be forgotten?"
+
+"Yes--when it suits his convenience!"
+
+"Do you imagine that--even judging him in that way--it has not cost him
+a struggle?"
+
+"I can only think of what it has cost her!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sighing breath. "Ah--but don't you see that she
+has gained her point, and that nothing else matters to her?"
+
+"Gained her point? Not if, by that, you mean that things here can ever
+go back to the old state--that she and I can remain at Westmore after
+this!"
+
+Mrs. Ansell dropped her eyes for a moment; then she lifted to his her
+sweet impenetrable face.
+
+"Do you know what you have to do--both you and he? Exactly what she
+decides," she affirmed.
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+
+JUSTINE'S answer to her husband's letter bore a New York address; and
+the surprise of finding her in the same town with himself, and not half
+an hour's walk from the room in which he sat, was so great that it
+seemed to demand some sudden and violent outlet of physical movement.
+
+He thrust the letter in his pocket, took up his hat, and leaving the
+house, strode up Fifth Avenue toward the Park in the early spring
+sunlight.
+
+The news had taken five days to reach him, for in order to reestablish
+communication with his wife he had been obliged to write to Michigan,
+with the request that his letter should be forwarded. He had never
+supposed that Justine would be hard to find, or that she had purposely
+enveloped her movements in mystery. When she ceased to write he had
+simply concluded that, like himself, she felt the mockery of trying to
+keep up a sort of distant, semi-fraternal relation, marked by the
+occasional interchange of inexpressive letters. The inextricable
+mingling of thought and sensation which made the peculiar closeness of
+their union could never, to such direct and passionate natures, be
+replaced by the pretense of a temperate friendship. Feeling thus
+himself, and instinctively assuming the same feeling in his wife,
+Amherst had respected her silence, her wish to break definitely with
+their former life. She had written him, in the autumn, that she intended
+to leave Michigan for a few months, but that, in any emergency, a letter
+addressed to her friend's house would reach her; and he had taken this
+as meaning that, unless the emergency arose, she preferred that their
+correspondence should cease. Acquiescence was all the easier because it
+accorded with his own desire. It seemed to him, as he looked back, that
+the love he and Justine had felt for each other was like some rare
+organism which could maintain life only in its special element; and that
+element was neither passion nor sentiment, but truth. It was only on the
+heights that they could breathe.
+
+Some men, in his place, even while accepting the inevitableness of the
+moral rupture, would have felt concerned for the material side of the
+case. But it was characteristic of Amherst that this did not trouble
+him. He took it for granted that his wife would return to her nursing.
+From the first he had felt certain that it would be intolerable to her
+to accept aid from him, and that she would choose rather to support
+herself by the exercise of her regular profession; and, aside from such
+motives, he, who had always turned to hard work as the rarest refuge
+from personal misery, thought it natural that she should seek the same
+means of escape.
+
+He had therefore not been surprised, on opening her letter that
+morning, to learn that she had taken up her hospital work; but in the
+amazement of finding her so near he hardly grasped her explanation of
+the coincidence. There was something about a Buffalo patient suddenly
+ordered to New York for special treatment, and refusing to go in with a
+new nurse--but these details made no impression on his mind, which had
+only room for the fact that chance had brought his wife back at the very
+moment when his whole being yearned for her.
+
+She wrote that, owing to her duties, she would be unable to see him till
+three that afternoon; and he had still six hours to consume before their
+meeting. But in spirit they had met already--they were one in an
+intensity of communion which, as he strode northward along the bright
+crowded thoroughfare, seemed to gather up the whole world into one
+throbbing point of life.
+
+He had a boyish wish to keep the secret of his happiness to himself, not
+to let Mr. Langhope or Mrs. Ansell know of his meeting with Justine till
+it was over; and after twice measuring the length of the Park he turned
+in at one of the little wooden restaurants which were beginning to
+unshutter themselves in anticipation of spring custom. If only he could
+have seen Justine that morning! If he could have brought her there, and
+they could have sat opposite each other, in the bare empty room, with
+sparrows bustling and twittering in the lilacs against the open window!
+The room was ugly enough--but how she would have delighted in the
+delicate green of the near slopes, and the purplish haze of the woods
+beyond! She took a childish pleasure in such small adventures, and had
+the knack of giving a touch of magic to their most commonplace details.
+Amherst, as he finished his cold beef and indifferent eggs, found
+himself boyishly planning to bring her back there the next day....
+
+Then, over the coffee, he re-read her letter.
+
+The address she gave was that of a small private hospital, and she
+explained that she would have to receive him in the public parlour,
+which at that hour was open to other visitors. As the time approached,
+the thought that they might not be alone when they met became
+insufferable; and he determined, if he found any one else, in possession
+of the parlour, to wait in the hall, and meet her as she came down the
+stairs.
+
+He continued to elaborate this plan as he walked back slowly through the
+Park, He had timed himself to reach the hospital a little before three;
+but though it lacked five minutes to the hour when he entered the
+parlour, two women were already seated in one of its windows. They
+looked around as he came in, evidently as much annoyed by his appearance
+as he had been to find them there. The older of the two showed a sallow
+middle-aged face beneath her limp crape veil; the other was a slight
+tawdry creature, with nodding feathers, and innumerable chains and
+bracelets which she fingered ceaselessly as she talked.
+
+They eyed Amherst with resentment, and then turned away, continuing
+their talk in low murmurs, while he seated himself at the marble-topped
+table littered with torn magazines. Now and then the younger woman's
+voice rose in a shrill staccato, and a phrase or two floated over to
+him. "She'd simply worked herself to death--the nurse told me so.... She
+expects to go home in another week, though how she's going to stand the
+_fatigue_----" and then, after an inaudible answer: "It's all _his_
+fault, and if I was her I wouldn't go back to him for anything!"
+
+"Oh, Cora, he's real sorry now," the older woman protestingly murmured;
+but the other, unappeased, rejoined with ominously nodding plumes:
+"_You_ see--if they do make it up, it'll never be the same between
+them!"
+
+Amherst started up nervously, and as he did so the clock struck three,
+and he opened the door and passed out into the hall. It was paved with
+black and white marble; the walls were washed in a dull yellowish tint,
+and the prevalent odour of antiseptics was mingled with a stale smell of
+cooking. At the back rose a straight staircase carpeted with brass-bound
+India-rubber, like a ship's companion-way; and down that staircase she
+would come in a moment--he fancied he heard her step now....
+
+But the step was that of an elderly black-gowned woman in a cap--the
+matron probably.
+
+She glanced at Amherst in surprise, and asked: "Are you waiting for some
+one?"
+
+He made a motion of assent, and she opened the parlour door, saying:
+"Please walk in."
+
+"May I not wait out here?" he urged.
+
+She looked at him more attentively. "Why, no, I'm afraid not. You'll
+find the papers and magazines in here."
+
+Mildly but firmly she drove him in before her, and closing the door,
+advanced to the two women in the window. Amherst's hopes leapt up:
+perhaps she had come to fetch the visitors upstairs! He strained his
+ears to catch what was being said, and while he was thus absorbed the
+door opened, and turning at the sound he found himself face to face with
+his wife.
+
+He had not reflected that Justine would be in her nurse's dress; and the
+sight of the dark blue uniform and small white cap, in which he had
+never seen her since their first meeting in the Hope Hospital,
+obliterated all bitter and unhappy memories, and gave him the illusion
+of passing back at once into the clear air of their early friendship.
+Then he looked at her and remembered.
+
+He noticed that she had grown thinner than ever, or rather that her
+thinness, which had formerly had a healthy reed-like strength, now
+suggested fatigue and languor. And her face was spent, extinguished--the
+very eyes were lifeless. All her vitality seemed to have withdrawn
+itself into the arch of dense black hair which still clasped her
+forehead like the noble metal of some antique bust.
+
+The sight stirred him with a deeper pity, a more vehement compunction;
+but the impulse to snatch her to him, and seek his pardon on her lips,
+was paralyzed by the sense that the three women in the window had
+stopped talking and turned their heads toward the door.
+
+He held his hand out, and Justine's touched it for a moment; then he
+said in a low voice: "Is there no other place where I can see you?"
+
+She made a negative gesture. "I am afraid not to-day."
+
+Ah, her deep sweet voice--how completely his ear had lost the sound of
+it!
+
+She looked doubtfully about the room, and pointed to a sofa at the end
+farthest from the windows.
+
+"Shall we sit there?" she said.
+
+He followed her in silence, and they sat down side by side. The matron
+had drawn up a chair and resumed her whispered conference with the women
+in the window. Between the two groups stretched the bare length of the
+room, broken only by a few arm-chairs of stained wood, and the
+marble-topped table covered with magazines.
+
+The impossibility of giving free rein to his feelings developed in
+Amherst an unwonted intensity of perception, as though a sixth sense had
+suddenly emerged to take the place of those he could not use. And with
+this new-made faculty he seemed to gather up, and absorb into himself,
+as he had never done in their hours of closest communion, every detail
+of his wife's person, of her face and hands and gestures. He noticed how
+her full upper lids, of the tint of yellowish ivory, had a slight bluish
+discolouration, and how little thread-like blue veins ran across her
+temples to the roots of her hair. The emaciation of her face, and the
+hollow shades beneath her cheek-bones, made her mouth seem redder and
+fuller, though a little line on each side, where it joined the cheek,
+gave it a tragic droop. And her hands! When her fingers met his he
+recalled having once picked up, in the winter woods, the little
+feather-light skeleton of a frozen bird--and that was what her touch was
+like.
+
+And it was he who had brought her to this by his cruelty, his
+obtuseness, his base readiness to believe the worst of her! He did not
+want to pour himself out in self-accusation--that seemed too easy a way
+of escape. He wanted simply to take her in his arms, to ask her to give
+him one more chance--and then to show her! And all the while he was
+paralyzed by the group in the window.
+
+"Can't we go out? I must speak to you," he began again nervously.
+
+"Not this afternoon--the doctor is coming. Tomorrow----"
+
+"I can't wait for tomorrow!"
+
+She made a faint, imperceptible gesture, which read to his eyes: "You've
+waited a whole year."
+
+"Yes, I know," he returned, still constrained by the necessity of
+muffling his voice, of perpetually measuring the distance between
+themselves and the window. "I know what you might say--don't you suppose
+I've said it to myself a million times? But I didn't know--I couldn't
+imagine----"
+
+She interrupted him with a rapid movement. "What do you know now?"
+
+"What you promised Langhope----"
+
+She turned her startled eyes on him, and he saw the blood run flame-like
+under her skin. "But _he_ promised not to speak!" she cried.
+
+"He hasn't--to me. But such things make themselves known. Should you
+have been content to go on in that way forever?"
+
+She raised her head and her eyes rested in his. "If you were," she
+answered simply.
+
+"Justine!"
+
+Again she checked him with a silencing motion. "Please tell me just what
+has happened."
+
+"Not now--there's too much else to say. And nothing matters except that
+I'm with you."
+
+"But Mr. Langhope----"
+
+"He asks you to come. You're to see Cicely to-morrow."
+
+Her lower lip trembled a little, and a tear flowed over and hung on her
+lashes.
+
+"But what does all that matter now? We're together after this horrible
+year," he insisted.
+
+She looked at him again. "But what is really changed?"
+
+"Everything--everything! Not changed, I mean--just gone back."
+
+"To where...we were...before?" she whispered; and he whispered back: "To
+where we were before."
+
+There was a scraping of chairs on the floor, and with a sense of release
+Amherst saw that the colloquy in the window was over.
+
+The two visitors, gathering their wraps about them, moved slowly across
+the room, still talking to the matron in excited undertones, through
+which, as they neared the threshold, the younger woman's staccato again
+broke out.
+
+"I tell you, if she does go back to him, it'll never be the same between
+them!"
+
+"Oh, Cora, I wouldn't say that," the other ineffectually wailed; then
+they moved toward the door, and a moment later it had closed on them.
+
+Amherst turned to his wife with outstretched arms. "Say you forgive me,
+Justine!"
+
+She held back a little from his entreating hands, not reproachfully, but
+as if with a last scruple for himself.
+
+"There's nothing left...of the horror?" she asked below her breath.
+
+"To be without you--that's the only horror!"
+
+"You're _sure_----?"
+
+"Sure!"
+
+"It's just the same to you...just as it was...before?"
+
+"Just the same, Justine!"
+
+"It's not for myself, but you."
+
+"Then, for me--never speak of it!" he implored.
+
+"Because it's _not_ the same, then?" leapt from her.
+
+"Because it's wiped out--because it's never been!"
+
+"Never?"
+
+"Never!"
+
+He felt her yield to him at that, and under his eyes, close under his
+lips, was her face at last. But as they kissed they heard the handle of
+the door turn, and drew apart quickly, her hand lingering in his under
+the fold of her dress.
+
+A nurse looked in, dressed in the white uniform and pointed cap of the
+hospital. Amherst fancied that she smiled a little as she saw them.
+
+"Miss Brent--the doctor wants you to come right up and give the
+morphine."
+
+The door shut again as Justine rose to her feet. Amherst remained
+seated--he had made no motion to retain her hand as it slipped from him.
+
+"I'm coming," she called out to the retreating nurse; then she turned
+slowly and saw her husband's face.
+
+"I must go," she said in a low tone.
+
+Her eyes met his for a moment; but he looked away again as he stood up
+and reached for his hat.
+
+"Tomorrow, then----" he said, without attempting to detain her.
+
+"Tomorrow?"
+
+"You must come away from here--you must come home," he repeated
+mechanically.
+
+She made no answer, and he held his hand out and took hers. "Tomorrow,"
+he said, drawing her toward him; and their lips met again, but not in
+the same kiss.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII
+
+
+JUNE again at Hanaford--and Cicely's birthday. The anniversary was to
+coincide, this year, with the opening of the old house at Hopewood, as a
+kind of pleasure-palace--gymnasium, concert-hall and museum--for the
+recreation of the mill-hands.
+
+The idea had first come to Amherst on the winter afternoon when Bessy
+Westmore had confessed her love for him under the snow-laden trees of
+Hopewood. Even then the sense that his personal happiness was enlarged
+and secured by its promise of happiness to others had made him wish that
+the scene associated with the opening of his new life should be made to
+commemorate a corresponding change in the fortunes of Westmore. But when
+the control of the mills passed into his hands other and more necessary
+improvements pressed upon him; and it was not till now that the
+financial condition of the company had permitted the execution of his
+plan.
+
+Justine, on her return to Hanaford, had found the work already in
+progress, and had been told by her husband that he was carrying out a
+projected scheme of Bessy's. She had felt a certain surprise, but had
+concluded that the plan in question dated back to the early days of his
+first marriage, when, in his wife's eyes, his connection with the mills
+still invested them with interest.
+
+Since Justine had come back to her husband, both had tacitly avoided all
+allusions to the past, and the recreation-house at Hopewood being, as
+she divined, in some sort an expiatory offering to Bessy's plaintive
+shade, she had purposely refrained from questioning Amherst about its
+progress, and had simply approved the plans he submitted to her.
+
+Fourteen months had passed since her return, and now, as she sat beside
+her husband in the carriage which was conveying them to Hopewood, she
+said to herself that her life had at last fallen into what promised to
+be its final shape--that as things now were they would probably be to
+the end. And outwardly at least they were what she and Amherst had
+always dreamed of their being. Westmore prospered under the new rule.
+The seeds of life they had sown there were springing up in a promising
+growth of bodily health and mental activity, and above all in a dawning
+social consciousness. The mill-hands were beginning to understand the
+meaning of their work, in its relation to their own lives and to the
+larger economy. And outwardly, also, the new growth was showing itself
+in the humanized aspect of the place. Amherst's young maples were tall
+enough now to cast a shade on the grass-bordered streets; and the
+well-kept turf, the bright cottage gardens, the new central group of
+library, hospital and club-house, gave to the mill-village the hopeful
+air of a "rising" residential suburb.
+
+In the bright June light, behind their fresh green mantle of trees and
+creepers, even the factory buildings looked less stern and prison-like
+than formerly; and the turfing and planting of the adjoining
+river-banks had transformed a waste of foul mud and refuse into a little
+park where the operatives might refresh themselves at midday.
+
+Yes--Westmore was alive at last: the dead city of which Justine had once
+spoken had risen from its grave, and its blank face had taken on a
+meaning. As Justine glanced at her husband she saw that the same thought
+was in his mind. However achieved, at whatever cost of personal misery
+and error, the work of awakening and freeing Westmore was done, and that
+work had justified itself.
+
+She looked from Amherst to Cicely, who sat opposite, eager and rosy in
+her mourning frock--for Mr. Langhope had died some two months
+previously--and as intent as her step-parents on the scene before her.
+Cicely was old enough now to regard her connection with Westmore as
+something more than a nursery game. She was beginning to learn a great
+deal about the mills, and to understand, in simple, friendly ways,
+something of her own relation to them. The work and play of the
+children, the interests and relaxations provided for their elders, had
+been gradually explained to her by Justine, and she knew that this
+shining tenth birthday of hers was to throw its light as far as the
+clouds of factory-smoke extended.
+
+As they mounted the slope to Hopewood, the spacious white building,
+with its enfolding colonnades, its broad terraces and tennis-courts,
+shone through the trees like some bright country-house adorned for its
+master's home-coming; and Amherst and his wife might have been driving
+up to the house which had been built to shelter their wedded happiness.
+The thought flashed across Justine as their carriage climbed the hill.
+She was as much absorbed as Amherst in the welfare of Westmore, it had
+become more and more, to both, the refuge in which their lives still met
+and mingled; but for a moment, as they paused before the flower-decked
+porch, and he turned to help her from the carriage, it occurred to her
+to wonder what her sensations would have been if he had been bringing
+her home--to a real home of their own--instead of accompanying her to
+another philanthropic celebration. But what need had they of a real
+home, when they no longer had any real life of their own? Nothing was
+left of that secret inner union which had so enriched and beautified
+their outward lives. Since Justine's return to Hanaford they had
+entered, tacitly, almost unconsciously, into a new relation to each
+other: a relation in which their personalities were more and more merged
+in their common work, so that, as it were, they met only by avoiding
+each other.
+
+From the first, Justine had accepted this as inevitable; just as she had
+understood, when Amherst had sought her out in New York, that his
+remaining at Westmore, which had once been contingent on her leaving
+him, now depended on her willingness to return and take up their former
+life.
+
+She accepted the last condition as she had accepted the other, pledged
+to the perpetual expiation of an act for which, in the abstract, she
+still refused to hold herself to blame. But life is not a matter of
+abstract principles, but a succession of pitiful compromises with fate,
+of concessions to old tradition, old beliefs, old charities and
+frailties. That was what her act had taught her--that was the word of
+the gods to the mortal who had laid a hand on their bolts. And she had
+humbled herself to accept the lesson, seeing human relations at last as
+a tangled and deep-rooted growth, a dark forest through which the
+idealist cannot cut his straight path without hearing at each stroke the
+cry of the severed branch: "_Why woundest thou me?_"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The lawns leading up to the house were already sprinkled with
+holiday-makers, while along the avenue came the rolling of wheels, the
+throb of motor-cars; and Justine, with Cicely beside her, stood in the
+wide hall to receive the incoming throng, in which Hanaford society was
+indiscriminately mingled with the operatives in their Sunday best.
+
+While his wife welcomed the new arrivals, Amherst, supported by some
+young Westmore cousins, was guiding them into the concert-hall, where he
+was to say a word on the uses of the building before declaring it open
+for inspection. And presently Justine and Cicely, summoned by Westy
+Gaines, made their way through the rows of seats to a corner near the
+platform. Her husband was there already, with Halford Gaines and a group
+of Hanaford dignitaries, and just below them sat Mrs. Gaines and her
+daughters, the Harry Dressels, and Amherst's radiant mother.
+
+As Justine passed between them, she wondered how much they knew of the
+events which had wrought so profound and permanent change in her life.
+She had never known how Hanaford explained her absence or what comments
+it had made on her return. But she saw to-day more clearly than ever
+that Amherst had become a power among his townsmen, and that if they
+were still blind to the inner meaning of his work, its practical results
+were beginning to impress them profoundly. Hanaford's sociological creed
+was largely based on commercial considerations, and Amherst had won
+Hanaford's esteem by the novel feat of defying its economic principles
+and snatching success out of his defiance.
+
+And now he had advanced a step or two in front of the "representative"
+semi-circle on the platform, and was beginning to speak.
+
+Justine did not hear his first words. She was looking up at him, trying
+to see him with the eyes of the crowd, and wondering what manner of man
+he would have seemed to her if she had known as little as they did of
+his inner history.
+
+He held himself straight, the heavy locks thrown back from his forehead,
+one hand resting on the table beside him, the other grasping a folded
+blue-print which the architect of the building had just advanced to give
+him. As he stood there, Justine recalled her first sight of him in the
+Hope Hospital, five years earlier--was it only five years? They had
+dealt deep strokes to his face, hollowing the eye-sockets, accentuating
+the strong modelling of nose and chin, fixing the lines between the
+brows; but every touch had a meaning--it was not the languid hand of
+time which had remade his features, but the sharp chisel of thought and
+action.
+
+She roused herself suddenly to the consciousness of what he was saying.
+
+"For the idea of this building--of a building dedicated to the
+recreation of Westmore--is not new in my mind; but while it remained
+there as a mere idea, it had already, without my knowledge, taken
+definite shape in the thoughts of the owner of Westmore."
+
+There was a slight drop in his voice as he designated Bessy, and he
+waited a moment before continuing: "It was not till after the death of
+my first wife that I learned of her intention--that I found by
+accident, among her papers, this carefully-studied plan for a
+pleasure-house at Hopewood."
+
+He paused again, and unrolling the blue-print, held it up before his
+audience.
+
+"You cannot, at this distance," he went on, "see all the admirable
+details of her plan; see how beautifully they were imagined, how
+carefully and intelligently elaborated. She who conceived them longed to
+see beauty everywhere--it was her dearest wish to bestow it on her
+people here. And her ardent imagination outran the bounds of practical
+possibility. We cannot give you, in its completeness, the beautiful
+thing she had imagined--the great terraces, the marble porches, the
+fountains, lily-tanks, and cloisters. But you will see that, wherever it
+was possible--though in humbler materials, and on a smaller scale--we
+have faithfully followed her design; and when presently you go through
+this building, and when, hereafter, you find health and refreshment and
+diversion here, I ask you to remember the beauty she dreamed of giving
+you, and to let the thought of it make her memory beautiful among you
+and among your children...."
+
+Justine had listened with deepening amazement. She was seated so close
+to her husband that she had recognized the blue-print the moment he
+unrolled it. There was no mistaking its origin--it was simply the plan
+of the gymnasium which Bessy had intended to build at Lynbrook, and
+which she had been constrained to abandon owing to her husband's
+increased expenditure at the mills. But how was it possible that Amherst
+knew nothing of the original purpose of the plans, and by what mocking
+turn of events had a project devised in deliberate defiance of his
+wishes, and intended to declare his wife's open contempt for them, been
+transformed into a Utopian vision for the betterment of the Westmore
+operatives?
+
+A wave of anger swept over Justine at this last derisive stroke of fate.
+It was grotesque and pitiable that a man like Amherst should create out
+of his regrets a being who had never existed, and then ascribe to her
+feelings and actions of which the real woman had again and again proved
+herself incapable!
+
+Ah, no, Justine had suffered enough--but to have this imaginary Bessy
+called from the grave, dressed in a semblance of self-devotion and
+idealism, to see her petty impulses of vindictiveness disguised as the
+motions of a lofty spirit--it was as though her small malicious ghost
+had devised this way of punishing the wife who had taken her place!
+
+Justine had suffered enough--suffered deliberately and unstintingly,
+paying the full price of her error, not seeking to evade its least
+consequence. But no sane judgment could ask her to sit quiet under this
+last hallucination. What! This unreal woman, this phantom that
+Amherst's uneasy imagination had evoked, was to come between himself and
+her, to supplant her first as his wife, and then as his fellow-worker?
+Why should she not cry out the truth to him, defend herself against the
+dead who came back to rob her of such wedded peace as was hers? She had
+only to tell the true story of the plans to lay poor Bessy's ghost
+forever!
+
+The confused throbbing impulses within her were stifled under a long
+burst of applause--then she saw Westy Gaines at her side again, and
+understood that he had come to lead Cicely to the platform. For a moment
+she clung jealously to the child's hand, hardly aware of what she did,
+feeling only that she was being thrust farther and farther into the
+background of the life she had helped to call out of chaos. Then a
+contrary impulse moved her. She gently freed Cicely's hand, and a moment
+later, as she sat with bent head and throbbing breast, she heard the
+child's treble piping out above her:
+
+"In my mother's name, I give this house to Westmore."
+
+Applause again--and then Justine found herself enveloped in a general
+murmur of compliment and congratulation. Mr. Amherst had spoken
+admirably--a "beautiful tribute--" ah, he had done poor Bessy justice!
+And to think that till now Hanaford had never fully known how she had
+the welfare of the mills at heart--how it was really only _her_ work
+that he was carrying on there! Well, he had made that perfectly
+clear--and no doubt Cicely was being taught to follow in her mother's
+footsteps: everyone had noticed how her step-father was associating her
+with the work at the mills. And his little speech would, as it were,
+consecrate the child's relation to that work, make it appear to her as
+the continuance of a beautiful, a sacred tradition....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now it was over. The building had been inspected, the operatives had
+dispersed, the Hanaford company had rolled off down the avenue, Cicely,
+among them, driving away tired and happy in Mrs. Dressel's victoria, and
+Amherst and his wife were alone.
+
+Amherst, after bidding good-bye to his last guests, had gone back to the
+empty concert-room to fetch the blue-print lying on the platform. He
+came back with it, between the uneven rows of empty chairs, and joined
+Justine, who stood waiting in the hall. His face was slightly flushed,
+and his eyes had the light which in happy moments burned through their
+veil of thought.
+
+He laid his hand on his wife's arm, and drawing her toward a table
+spread out the blueprint before her.
+
+"You haven't seen this, have you?" he said.
+
+She looked down at the plan without answering, reading in the left-hand
+corner the architect's conventional inscription: "Swimming-tank and
+gymnasium designed for Mrs. John Amherst."
+
+Amherst looked up, perhaps struck by her silence.
+
+"But perhaps you _have_ seen it--at Lynbrook? It must have been done
+while you were there."
+
+The quickened throb of her blood rushed to her brain like a signal.
+"Speak--speak now!" the signal commanded.
+
+Justine continued to look fixedly at the plan. "Yes, I have seen it,"
+she said at length.
+
+"At Lynbrook?"
+
+"At Lynbrook."
+
+"_She_ showed it to you, I suppose--while I was away?"
+
+Justine hesitated again. "Yes, while you were away."
+
+"And did she tell you anything about it, go into details about her
+wishes, her intentions?"
+
+Now was the moment--now! As her lips parted she looked up at her
+husband. The illumination still lingered on his face--and it was the
+face she loved. He was waiting eagerly for her next word.
+
+"No, I heard no details. I merely saw the plan lying there."
+
+She saw his look of disappointment. "She never told you about it?"
+
+"No--she never told me."
+
+It was best so, after all. She understood that now. It was now at last
+that she was paying her full price.
+
+Amherst rolled up the plan with a sigh and pushed it into the drawer of
+the table. It struck her that he too had the look of one who has laid a
+ghost. He turned to her and drew her hand through his arm.
+
+"You're tired, dear. You ought to have driven back with the others," he
+said.
+
+"No, I would rather stay with you."
+
+"You want to drain this good day to the dregs, as I do?"
+
+"Yes," she murmured, drawing her hand away.
+
+"It _is_ a good day, isn't it?" he continued, looking about him at the
+white-panelled walls, the vista of large bright rooms seen through the
+folding doors. "I feel as if we had reached a height, somehow--a height
+where one might pause and draw breath for the next climb. Don't you feel
+that too, Justine?"
+
+"Yes--I feel it."
+
+"Do you remember once, long ago--one day when you and I and Cicely went
+on a picnic to hunt orchids--how we got talking of the one best moment
+in life--the moment when one wanted most to stop the clock?"
+
+The colour rose in her face while he spoke. It was a long time since he
+had referred to the early days of their friendship--the days
+_before_....
+
+"Yes, I remember," she said.
+
+"And do you remember how we said that it was with most of us as it was
+with Faust? That the moment one wanted to hold fast to was not, in most
+lives, the moment of keenest personal happiness, but the other kind--the
+kind that would have seemed grey and colourless at first: the moment
+when the meaning of life began to come out from the mists--when one
+could look out at last over the marsh one had drained?"
+
+A tremor ran through Justine. "It was you who said that," she said,
+half-smiling.
+
+"But didn't you feel it with me? Don't you now?"
+
+"Yes--I do now," she murmured.
+
+He came close to her, and taking her hands in his, kissed them one after
+the other.
+
+"Dear," he said, "let us go out and look at the marsh we have drained."
+
+He turned and led her through the open doorway to the terrace above the
+river. The sun was setting behind the wooded slopes of Hopewood, and the
+trees about the house stretched long blue shadows across the lawn.
+Beyond them rose the smoke of Westmore.
+
+
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                    BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON                    |
+|                                                              |
+|             PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS             |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                        [12 mo. $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                      The House of Mirth                      |
+|                                                              |
+|               _Illustrations by_ A. B. WENZELL               |
+|                                                              |
+|   "In my judgment 'The House of Mirth' is a story of such    |
+|  vitality, of such artistic and moral insight, that it will  |
+| stand by itself in American fiction as a study of a certain  |
+|  kind of society. The title is a stroke of genius in irony,  |
+|    and gives the key to a novel of absorbing interest, as    |
+|  relentless as life itself in its judgment, but deeply and   |
+|    beautifully humanized at the end."--HAMILTON W. MABIE.    |
+|                                                              |
+| "Mrs. Wharton has done many good things. She has never done  |
+|         anything better than this."--_The Academy._          |
+|                                                              |
+|  "She is the first to make a really powerful and brilliant   |
+| book out of the material offered by American fashion to the  |
+| novelist.... A sterling piece of craftsmanship, a tale which |
+|  interests the reader at the start and never lets him rest   |
+|        till the end is reached."--New York _Tribune_.        |
+|                                                              |
+|    "So accurate an account of the thoughts and deeds of a    |
+| single human being has, we are certain, never hitherto been  |
+|               written."--Boston _Transcript_.                |
+|                                                              |
+|    "It is a great American novel, intensely interesting,     |
+|     marvelous in its literary finish and powerful in its     |
+|      delineation of Lily Bart."--Philadelphia _Press_.       |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                        [12 mo. $1.00]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                      Madame de Treymes                       |
+|                                                              |
+|           _Illustrated in color by_ A. B. WENZELL            |
+|                                                              |
+| "We know of no book in which the virtues of the short story  |
+| are united with the virtues of the novel in a higher degree  |
+|           than in this instance."--New York _Sun_.           |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                    BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON                    |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                        SIXTH EDITION                         |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo_, $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                   The Greater Inclination                    |
+|                                                              |
+|                           CONTENTS                           |
+|                                                              |
+|                     _The Muse's Tragedy_                     |
+|                         _A Journey_                          |
+|                        _The Pelican_                         |
+|                       _Souls Belated_                        |
+|                          _A Coward_                          |
+|                  _The Twilight of the Gods_                  |
+|                    _A Cup of Cold Water_                     |
+|                        _The Portrait_                        |
+|                                                              |
+|       "Between these stories and those of the ordinary       |
+| entertaining sort there is a great gulf fixed."--_The Dial._ |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo_, $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                      Crucial Instances                       |
+|                                                              |
+|                           CONTENTS                           |
+|                                                              |
+|                   _The Duchess at Prayer_                    |
+|                   _The Angel at the Grave_                   |
+|                        _The Recovery_                        |
+|                     _"Copy": A Dialogue_                     |
+|                       _The Rembrandt_                        |
+|                     _The Moving Finger_                      |
+|                      _The Confessional_                      |
+|                                                              |
+| "Tragedy and comedy, pathos and humor, are mingled in these  |
+|           pages of brilliant writing and splendid            |
+|             imagination."--Philadelphia _Press_.             |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo_, $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                    The Valley of Decision                    |
+|                                                              |
+|                        25TH THOUSAND                         |
+|                                                              |
+|  "Coming in the midst of an epoch overcrowded with works of  |
+|   fiction, 'The Valley of Decision' stands out giant-like    |
+| above its surroundings. It stands, indeed, almost without a  |
+| rival in the modern literary world, and there can be little  |
+| doubt that it places Mrs. Wharton at once side by side with  |
+|     the greatest novelists of the day."--Boston _Evening     |
+|                         Transcript_.                         |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                    BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON                    |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo, $1.25_]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                          Sanctuary                           |
+|                                                              |
+|              ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. APPLETON CLARK              |
+|                                                              |
+| "This is a striking little book--striking in its simplicity  |
+|     and penetration, its passion and restraint."--London     |
+|                           _Times_.                           |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo, $1.25_]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                        The Touchstone                        |
+|                                                              |
+|     "Its characters are real, their motives and actions      |
+|   thoroughly human. And the author's art is sufficient to    |
+| bring out the strength of every situation."--_The Argonaut._ |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                       [_12mo_, $1.50]                        |
+|                                                              |
+|                      The Descent of Man                      |
+|                                                              |
+|                           CONTENTS                           |
+|                                                              |
+|                     _The Descent of Man_                     |
+|                    _The Mission of Jane_                     |
+|                       _The Other Two_                        |
+|                       _The Quicksand_                        |
+|                       _The Dilettante_                       |
+|                       _The Reckoning_                        |
+|                         _Expiation_                          |
+|                   _The Lady's Maid's Bell_                   |
+|              _A Venetian Night's Entertainment_              |
+|                                                              |
+|  "It is, of course, the extraordinary directness with which  |
+| Mrs. Wharton's probe goes to the spot under inspection, the  |
+| deftness with which she is able to bring to the light of day |
+| what we had hidden even from ourselves, that account for the |
+| admiration with which we regard her short stories."--London  |
+|                          _Academy_.                          |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                    BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON                    |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|             [_8vo, $2.50 net._ Postage 17 cents]             |
+|                                                              |
+|                     Italian Backgrounds                      |
+|                                                              |
+|                   ILLUSTRATED BY PEIXOTTO                    |
+|                                                              |
+|                           CONTENTS                           |
+|                                                              |
+|                   _An Alpine Posting Inn_                    |
+|                  _A Midsummer Week's Dream_                  |
+|               _The Sanctuaries of the Pennine_               |
+|                            _Alps_                            |
+|                    _What the Hermits Saw_                    |
+|                      _A Tuscan Shrine_                       |
+|                     _Sub Umbra Liliorum_                     |
+|                       _March in Italy_                       |
+|                     _Picturesque Milan_                      |
+|                    _Italian Backgrounds_                     |
+|                                                              |
+|  "Belongs in that small class of books of observation which  |
+|   are also books of artistic and spiritual interpretation;   |
+| which not only describe places and monuments, but convey an  |
+| impression of peoples, a sense of society, with the elusive  |
+|   atmosphere in which everything of historical or artistic   |
+|  value is seen by those who have the gift of sight."--_The   |
+|                          Outlook._                           |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                     [_12mo, $1.25 net_]                      |
+|                                                              |
+|                      The Joy of Living                       |
+|                                                              |
+|                    (_Es lebe das Leben_)                     |
+|                                                              |
+|  A play in five acts, by HERMANN SUDERMANN. Translated from  |
+|                 the German by EDITH WHARTON.                 |
+|                                                              |
+|              *       *       *       *       *               |
+|                                                              |
+|                   [_Large 8vo, $2.50 net_]                   |
+|                                                              |
+|                   The Decoration of Houses                   |
+|                                                              |
+| With 56 full-page illustrations, by EDITH WHARTON and OGDEN  |
+|                         CODMAN, JR.                          |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+Most inconsistencies in hyphenation and spelling have been left as in the
+original. Missing or wrong punctuation has been added or corrected,
+where it is obvious (missing punctuation is often a result of the
+scanning/OCR process). In one case, a missing letter has also been
+added, and the following misspellings have been corrected: involuntairly to
+involuntarily, sensastions to sensations, Wetsmore to Westmore, Cilfton
+to Clifton, It to If
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRUIT OF THE TREE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 19191.txt or 19191.zip *****
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