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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Fennel and Rue, by William Dean Howells
+
+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: Fennel and Rue
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Last Updated: February 25, 2009
+Release Date: August 21, 2006 [EBook #3363]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FENNEL AND RUE ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+FENNEL AND RUE
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+The success of Verrian did not come early, and it did not come easily.
+He had been trying a long time to get his work into the best magazines,
+and when he had won the favor of the editors, whose interest he had
+perhaps had from the beginning, it might be said that they began to
+accept his work from their consciences, because in its way it was so
+good that they could not justly refuse it. The particular editor who
+took Verrian’s serial, after it had come back to the author from the
+editors of the other leading periodicals, was in fact moved mainly by
+the belief that the story would please the better sort of his readers.
+These, if they were not so numerous as the worse, he felt had now and
+then the right to have their pleasure studied.
+
+It was a serious story, and it was somewhat bitter, as Verrian himself
+was, after his struggle to reach the public with work which he knew
+merited recognition. But the world which does not like people to take
+themselves too seriously also likes them to take themselves seriously,
+and the bitterness in Verrian’s story proved agreeable to a number of
+readers unexpectedly great. It intimated a romantic personality in the
+author, and the world still likes to imagine romantic things of authors.
+It likes especially to imagine them of novelists, now that there are no
+longer poets; and when it began to like Verrian’s serial, it began to
+write him all sorts of letters, directly, in care of the editor, and
+indirectly to the editor, whom they asked about Verrian more than about
+his story.
+
+It was a man’s story rather than a woman’s story, as these may be
+distinguished; but quite for that reason women seemed peculiarly taken
+with it. Perhaps the women had more leisure or more courage to write to
+the author and the editor; at any rate, most of the letters were from
+women; some of the letters were silly and fatuous enough, but others
+were of an intelligence which was none the less penetrating for being
+emotional rather than critical. These maids or matrons, whoever or
+whichever they were, knew wonderfully well what the author would be
+at, and their interest in his story implied a constant if not a single
+devotion. Now and then Verrian was tempted to answer one of them, and
+under favor of his mother, who had been his confidant at every point
+of his literary career, he yielded to the temptation; but one day there
+came a letter asking an answer, which neither he nor his mother felt
+competent to deal with. They both perceived that they must refer it to
+the editor of the magazine, and it seemed to them so important that they
+decided Verrian must go with it in person to the editor. Then he must
+be so far ruled by him, if necessary, as to give him the letter and
+put himself, as the author, beyond an appeal which he found peculiarly
+poignant.
+
+The letter, which had overcome the tacit misgivings of his mother as
+they read it and read it again together, was from a girl who had perhaps
+no need to confess herself young, or to own her inexperience of the
+world where stories were written and printed. She excused herself with
+a delicacy which Verrian’s correspondents by no means always showed for
+intruding upon him, and then pleaded the power his story had over her as
+the only shadow of right she had in addressing him. Its fascination,
+she said, had begun with the first number, the first chapter, almost the
+first paragraph. It was not for the plot that she cared; she had read
+too many stories to care for the plot; it was the problem involved. It
+was one which she had so often pondered in her own mind that she felt,
+in a way she hoped he would not think conceited, almost as if the story
+was written for her. She had never been able to solve the problem; how
+he would solve it she did not see how she could wait to know; and here
+she made him a confidence without which, she said, she should not have
+the courage to go on. She was an invalid, and her doctor had told her
+that, though she might live for months, there were chances that she
+might die at any moment suddenly. He would think it strange, and it
+was strange that she should tell him this, and stranger still that she
+should dare to ask him what she was going to ask. The story had yet four
+months to run, and she had begun to have a morbid foreboding that she
+should not live to read it in the ordinary course. She was so ignorant
+about writers that she did not know whether such a thing was ever done,
+or could be done; but if he could tell her how the story was to come out
+he would be doing more for her than anything else that could be done for
+her on earth. She had read that sometimes authors began to print their
+serial stories before they had written them to the end, and he might not
+be sure of the end himself; but if he had finished this story of his,
+and could let her see the last pages in print, she would owe him the
+gratitude she could never express.
+
+The letter was written in an educated hand, and there were no foibles
+of form or excesses of fashion in the stationery to mar the character
+of sincerity the simple wording conveyed. The postal address, with the
+date, was fully given, and the name signed at the end was evidently
+genuine.
+
+Verrian himself had no question of the genuineness of the letter in
+any respect; his mother, after her first misgivings, which were perhaps
+sensations, thought as he did about it. She said the story dealt so
+profoundly with the deepest things that it was no wonder a person,
+standing like that girl between life and death, should wish to know how
+the author solved its problem. Then she read the letter carefully over
+again, and again Verrian read it, with an effect not different from that
+which its first perusal had made with him. His faith in his work was so
+great, so entire, that the notion of any other feeling about it was not
+admissible.
+
+“Of course,” he said, with a sigh of satisfaction, “I must show the
+letter to Armiger at once.”
+
+“Of course,” his mother replied. “He is the editor, and you must not do
+anything without his approval.”
+
+The faith in the writer of the letter, which was primary with him, was
+secondary with her, but perhaps for that reason, she was all the more
+firmly grounded in it.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+There was nothing to cloud the editor’s judgment, when Verrian came to
+him, except the fact that he was a poet as well as an editor. He read in
+a silence as great as the author’s the letter which Verrian submitted.
+Then he remained pondering it for as long a space before he said, “That
+is very touching.”
+
+Verrian jumped to his question. “Do you mean that we ought to send her
+the proofs of the story?”
+
+“No,” the editor faltered, but even in this decision he did not deny the
+author his sympathy. “You’ve touched bottom in that story, Verrian. You
+may go higher, but you can never go deeper.”
+
+Verrian flushed a little. “Oh, thank you!”
+
+“I’m not surprised the girl wants to know how you manage your
+problem--such a girl, standing in the shadow of the other world,
+which is always eclipsing this, and seeing how you’ve caught its awful
+outline.”
+
+Verrian made a grateful murmur at the praise. “That is what my mother
+felt. Then you have no doubt of the good faith--”
+
+“No,” the editor returned, with the same quantity, if not the same
+quality, of reluctance as before. “You see, it would be too daring.”
+
+“Then why not let her have the proofs?”
+
+“The thing is so unprecedented--”
+
+“Our doing it needn’t form a precedent.”
+
+“No.”
+
+“And if you’ve no doubt of its being a true case--”
+
+“We must prove that it is, or, rather, we must make her prove it. I
+quite feel with you about it. If I were to act upon my own impulse, my
+own convictions, I should send her the rest of the story and take the
+chances. But she may be an enterprising journalist in disguise it’s
+astonishing what women will do when they take to newspaper work--and we
+have no right to risk anything, for the magazine’s sake, if not yours
+and mine. Will you leave this letter with me?”
+
+“I expected to leave the whole affair in your hands. Do you mind telling
+me what you propose to do? Of course, it won’t be anything--abrupt--”
+
+“Oh no; and I don’t mind telling you what has occurred to me. If this is
+a true case, as you say, and I’ve no question but it is, the writer will
+be on confidential terms with her pastor as well as her doctor and I
+propose asking her to get him to certify, in any sort of general terms,
+to her identity. I will treat the matter delicately--Or, if you prefer
+to write to her yourself--”
+
+“Oh no, it’s much better for you to do it; you can do it
+authoritatively.”
+
+“Yes, and if she isn’t the real thing, but merely a woman journalist
+trying to work us for a ‘story’ in her Sunday edition, we shall hear no
+more from her.”
+
+“I don’t see anything to object to in your plan,” Verrian said, upon
+reflection. “She certainly can’t complain of our being cautious.”
+
+“No, and she won’t. I shall have to refer the matter to the house--”
+
+“Oh, will you?”
+
+“Why, certainly! I couldn’t take a step like that without the approval
+of the house.”
+
+“No,” Verrian assented, and he made a note of the writer’s address from
+the letter. Then, after a moment spent in looking hard at the letter, he
+gave it back to the editor and went abruptly away.
+
+He had proof, the next morning, that the editor had acted promptly, at
+least so far as regarded the house. The house had approved his plan, if
+one could trust the romantic paragraph which Verrian found in his paper
+at breakfast, exploiting the fact concerned as one of the interesting
+evidences of the hold his serial had got with the magazine readers. He
+recognized in the paragraph the touch of the good fellow who prepared
+the weekly bulletins of the house, and offered the press literary
+intelligence in a form ready for immediate use. The case was fairly
+stated, but the privacy of the author’s correspondent was perfectly
+guarded; it was not even made known that she was a woman. Yet Verrian
+felt, in reading the paragraph, a shock of guilty dismay, as if he had
+betrayed a confidence reposed in him, and he handed the paper across the
+table to his mother with rather a sick look.
+
+After his return from the magazine office the day before, there had
+been a good deal of talk between them about that girl. Mrs. Verrian had
+agreed with him that no more interesting event could have happened to an
+author, but she had tried to keep him from taking it too personally, and
+from making himself mischievous illusions from it. She had since slept
+upon her anxieties, with the effect of finding them more vivid at
+waking, and she had been casting about for an opening to penetrate him
+with them, when fortune put this paragraph in her way.
+
+“Isn’t it disgusting?” he asked. “I don’t see how Armiger could let them
+do it. I hope to heaven she’ll never see it!”
+
+His mother looked up from the paragraph and asked,
+
+“Why?”
+
+“What would she think of me?”
+
+“I don’t know. She might have expected something of the kind.”
+
+“How expect something of the kind? Am I one of the self-advertisers?”
+
+“Well, she must have realized that she was doing rather a bold thing.”
+
+“Bold?”
+
+“Venturesome,” Mrs. Verrian compromised to the kindling anger in her
+son’s eyes.
+
+“I don’t understand you, mother. I thought you agreed with me about the
+writer of that letter--her sincerity, simplicity.”
+
+“Sincerity, yes. But simplicity--Philip, a thoroughly single-minded
+girl never wrote that letter. You can’t feel such a thing as I do. A
+man couldn’t. You can paint the character of women, and you do it
+wonderfully--but, after all, you can’t know them as a woman does.”
+
+“You talk,” he answered, a little sulkily, “as if you knew some harm of
+the girl.”
+
+“No, my son, I know nothing about her, except that she is not
+single-minded, and there is no harm in not being single-minded. A great
+many single-minded women are fools, and some double-minded women are
+good.”
+
+“Well, single-minded or double-minded, if she is what she says she is,
+what motive on earth could she have in writing to me except the motive
+she gives? You don’t deny that she tells the truth about herself?”
+
+“Don’t I say that she is sincere? But a girl doesn’t always know her own
+motives, or all of them. She may have written to you because she would
+like to begin a correspondence with an author. Or she may have done it
+out of the love of excitement. Or for the sake of distraction, to get
+away from herself and her gloomy forebodings.”
+
+“And should you blame her for that?”
+
+“No, I shouldn’t. I should pity her for it. But, all the same, I
+shouldn’t want you to be taken in by her.”
+
+“You think, then, she doesn’t care anything about the story?”
+
+“I think, very probably, she cares a great deal about it. She is a
+serious person, intellectually at least, and it is a serious story. No
+wonder she would like to know, at first hand, something about the man
+who wrote it.”
+
+This flattered Verrian, but he would not allow its reasonableness. He
+took a gulp of coffee before saying, uncandidly, “I can’t make out what
+you’re driving at, mother. But, fortunately, there’s no hurry about your
+meaning. The thing’s in the only shape we could possibly give it, and
+I am satisfied to leave it in Armiger’s hands. I’m certain he will deal
+wisely with it-and kindly.”
+
+“Yes, I’m sure he’ll deal kindly. I should be very unhappy if he didn’t.
+He could easily deal more wisely, though, than she has.”
+
+Verrian chose not to follow his mother in this. “All is,” he said, with
+finality, “I hope she’ll never see that loathsome paragraph.”
+
+“Oh, very likely she won’t,” his mother consoled him.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+Only four days after he had seen Armiger, Verrian received an envelope
+covering a brief note to himself from the editor, a copy of the letter
+he had written to Verrian’s unknown correspondent, and her answer in the
+original. Verrian was alone when the postman brought him this envelope,
+and he could indulge a certain passion for method by which he read its
+contents in the order named; if his mother had been by, she would have
+made him read the girl’s reply first of all. Armiger wrote:
+
+“MY DEAR VERRIAN,--I enclose two exhibits which will possess you of all
+the facts in the case of the young lady who feared she might die before
+she read the end of your story, but who, you will be glad to find,
+is likely to live through the year. As the story ends in our October
+number, she need not be supplied with advance sheets. I am sorry the
+house hurried out a paragraph concerning the matter, but it will not be
+followed by another. Perhaps you will feel, as I do, that the incident
+is closed. I have not replied to the writer, and you need not return her
+letter. Yours ever,
+
+                    “M. ARMIGER.”
+
+The editor’s letter to the young lady read:
+
+“DEAR MADAM,--Mr. P. S. Verrian has handed me your letter of the 4th,
+and I need not tell you that it has interested us both.
+
+“I am almost as much gratified as he by the testimony your request bears
+to the importance of his work, and if I could have acted upon my instant
+feeling I should have had no hesitation in granting it, though it is so
+very unusual as to be, in my experience as an editor, unprecedented. I
+am sure that you would not have made it so frankly if you had not been
+prepared to guard in return any confidence placed in you; but you will
+realize that as you are quite unknown to us, we should not be justified
+in taking a step so unusual as you propose without having some guarantee
+besides that which Mr. Verrian and I both feel from the character of
+your letter. Simply, then, for purposes of identification, as the phrase
+is, I must beg you to ask the pastor of your church, or, better still,
+your family physician, to write you a line saying that he knows you, as
+a sort of letter of introduction to me. Then I will send you the advance
+proofs of Mr. Verrian’s story. You may like to address me personally in
+the care of the magazine, and not as the editor.
+
+               “Yours very respectfully,
+
+                         “M. ARMIGER.”
+
+The editor’s letter was dated the 6th of the month; the answer, dated
+the 8th, betrayed the anxious haste of the writer in replying, and
+it was not her fault if what she wrote came to Verrian when he was no
+longer able to do justice to her confession. Under the address given
+in her first letter she now began, in, a hand into which a kindlier eye
+might have read a pathetic perturbation:
+
+“DEAR SIR,--I have something awful to tell you. I might write pages
+without making you think better of me, and I will let you think the
+worst at once. I am not what I pretended to be. I wrote to Mr. Verrian
+saying what I did, and asking to see the rest of his story on the
+impulse of the moment. I had been reading it, for I think it is
+perfectly fascinating; and a friend of mine, another girl, and I got
+together trying to guess how he would end it, and we began to dare each
+other to write to him and ask. At first we did not dream of doing such
+a thing, but we went on, and just for the fun of it we drew lots to
+see which should write to him. The lot fell to me; but we composed
+that letter together, and we put in about my dying for a joke. We never
+intended to send it; but then one thing led to another, and I signed
+it with my real name and we sent it. We did not really expect to hear
+anything from it, for we supposed he must get lots of letters about his
+story and never paid any attention to them. We did not realize what we
+had done till I got your letter yesterday. Then we saw it all, and ever
+since we have been trying to think what to do, and I do not believe
+either of us has slept a moment. We have come to the conclusion that
+there was only one thing we could do, and that was to tell you just
+exactly how it happened and take the consequences. But there is no
+reason why more than one person should be brought into it, and so I will
+not let my friend sign this letter with me, but I will put my own name
+alone to it. You may not think it is my real name, but it is; you can
+find out by writing to the postmaster here. I do not know whether you
+will publish it as a fraud for the warning of others, but I shall not
+blame you if you do. I deserve anything.
+
+                  “Yours truly,
+
+                     “JERUSHA PEREGRINE BROWN.”
+
+
+If Verrian had been an older man life might have supplied him with the
+means of judging the writer of this letter. But his experience as an
+author had not been very great, and such as it was it had hardened and
+sharpened him. There was nothing wild or whirling in his mood, but in
+the deadly hurt which had been inflicted upon his vanity he coldly and
+carefully studied what deadlier hurt he might inflict again. He was of
+the crueller intent because he had not known how much of personal vanity
+there was in the seriousness with which he took himself and his work. He
+had supposed that he was respecting his ethics and aesthetics, his ideal
+of conduct and of art, but now it was brought home to him that he was
+swollen with the conceit of his own performance, and that, however well
+others thought of it, his own thought of it far outran their will to
+honor it. He wished to revenge himself for this consciousness as well
+as the offence offered him; of the two the consciousness was the more
+disagreeable.
+
+His mother, dressed for the street, came in where he sat quiet at his
+desk, with the editor’s letters and the girl’s before him, and he mutely
+referred them to her with a hand lifted over his shoulder. She read
+them, and then she said, “This is hard to bear, Philip. I wish I could
+bear it for you, or at least with you; but I’m late for my engagement
+with Mrs. Alfred, as it is--No, I will telephone her I’m detained and
+we’ll talk it over--”
+
+“No, no! Not on any account! I’d rather think it out for myself. You
+couldn’t help me. After all, it hasn’t done me any harm--”
+
+“And you’ve had a great escape! And I won’t say a word more now, but
+I’ll be back soon, and then we--Oh, I’m so sorry I’m going.”
+
+Verrian gave a laugh. “You couldn’t do anything if you stayed, mother.
+Do go!”
+
+“Well--” She looked at him, smoothing her muff with her hand a moment,
+and then she dropped a fond kiss on his cheek and obeyed him.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Verrian still sat at his desk, thinking, with his burning face in his
+hands. It was covered with shame for what had happened to him, but his
+humiliation had no quality of pity in it. He must write to that girl,
+and write at once, and his sole hesitation was as to the form he should
+give his reply. He could not address her as Dear Miss Brown or as Dear
+Madam. Even Madam was not sharp and forbidding enough; besides, Madam,
+alone or with the senseless prefix, was archaic, and Verrian wished to
+be very modern with this most offensive instance of the latest girl. He
+decided upon dealing with her in the third person, and trusting to his
+literary skill to keep the form from clumsiness.
+
+He tried it in that form, and it was simply disgusting, the attitude
+stiff and swelling, and the diction affected and unnatural. With a quick
+reversion to the impossible first type, he recast his letter in what was
+now the only possible shape.
+
+   “MY DEAR MISS BROWN,--The editor of the American Miscellany has
+   sent me a copy of his recent letter to you and your own reply, and
+   has remanded to me an affair which resulted from my going to him
+   with your request to see the close of my story now publishing in his
+   magazine.
+
+   “After giving the matter my best thought, I have concluded that it
+   will be well to enclose all the exhibits to you, and I now do this
+   in the hope that a serious study of them will enable you to share my
+   surprise at the moral and social conditions in which the business
+   could originate. I willingly leave with you the question which is
+   the more trustworthy, your letter to me or your letter to him, or
+   which the more truly represents the interesting diversity of your
+   nature. I confess that the first moved me more than the second,
+   and I do not see why I should not tell you that as soon as I had
+   your request I went with it to Mr. Armiger and did what I could to
+   prompt his compliance with it. In putting these papers out of my
+   hands, I ought to acknowledge that they have formed a temptation to
+   make literary use of the affair which I shall now be the better
+   fitted to resist. You will, of course, be amused by the ease with
+   which you could abuse my reliance on your good faith, and I am sure
+   you will not allow any shame for your trick to qualify your pleasure
+   in its success.
+
+   “It will not be necessary for you to acknowledge this letter and its
+   enclosures. I will register the package, so that it will not fail
+   to reach you, and I will return any answer of yours unopened, or, if
+   not recognizably addressed, then unread.
+
+               “Yours sincerely,
+
+                       “P. S. VERRIAN.”
+
+
+He read and read again these lines, with only the sense of their
+insufficiency in doing the effect of the bitterness in his heart. If the
+letter was insulting, it was by no means as insulting as he would have
+liked to make it. Whether it would be wounding enough was something that
+depended upon the person whom he wished to wound. All that was proud
+and vain and cruel in him surged up at the thought of the trick that had
+been played upon him, and all that was sweet and kind and gentle in him,
+when he believed the trick was a genuine appeal, turned to their counter
+qualities. Yet, feeble and inadequate as his letter was, he knew that
+he could not do more or worse by trying, and he so much feared that by
+waiting he might do less and better that he hurried it into the post at
+once. If his mother had been at hand he would have shown it her, though
+he might not have been ruled by her judgment of it. He was glad that
+she was not with him, for either she would have had her opinion of what
+would be more telling, or she would have insisted upon his delaying
+any sort of reply, and he could not endure the thought of difference or
+delay.
+
+He asked himself whether he should let her see the rough first draft of
+his letter or not, and he decided that he would not. But when she came
+into his study on her return he showed it her.
+
+She read it in silence, and then she seemed to temporize in asking,
+“Where are her two letters?”
+
+“I’ve sent them back with the answer.”
+
+His mother let the paper drop from her hands. “Philip! You haven’t sent
+this!”
+
+“Yes, I have. It wasn’t what I wanted to make it, but I wished to get
+the detestable experience out of my mind, and it was the best I could do
+at the moment. Don’t you like it?”
+
+“Oh--” She seemed beginning to say something, but without saying
+anything she took the fallen leaf up and read it again.
+
+“Well!” he demanded, with impatience.
+
+“Oh, you may have been right. I hope you’ve not been wrong.”
+
+“Mother!”
+
+“She deserved the severest things you could say; and yet--”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Perhaps she was punished enough already.”
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“I don’t like your being-vindictive.”
+
+“Vindictive?”
+
+“Being so terribly just, then.” She added, at his blank stare, “This is
+killing, Philip.”
+
+He gave a bitter laugh. “I don’t think it will kill her. She isn’t that
+kind.”
+
+“She’s a girl,” his mother said, with a kind of sad absence.
+
+“But not a single-minded girl, you warned me. I wish I could have taken
+your warning. It would have saved me from playing the fool before myself
+and giving myself away to Armiger, and letting him give himself away. I
+don’t think Miss Brown will suffer much before she dies. She will ‘get
+together,’ as she calls it, with that other girl and have ‘a real good
+time’ over it. You know the village type and the village conditions,
+where the vulgar ignorance of any larger world is so thick you could cut
+it with a knife. Don’t be troubled by my vindictiveness or my justice,
+mother! I begin to think I have done justice and not fallen short of it,
+as I was afraid.”
+
+Mrs. Verrian sighed, and again she gave his letter back to her son.
+“Perhaps you are right, Philip. She is probably so tough as not to feel
+it very painfully.”
+
+“She’s not so tough but she’ll be very glad to get out of it so lightly.
+She has had a useful scare, and I’ve done her a favor in making the
+scare a sharp one. I suppose,” Verrian mused, “that she thinks I’ve kept
+copies of her letters.”
+
+“Yes. Why didn’t you?” his mother asked.
+
+Verrian laughed, only a little less bitterly than before. “I shall begin
+to believe you’re all alike, mother.”
+
+I didn’t keep copies of her letters because I wanted to get her and her
+letters out of my mind, finally and forever. Besides, I didn’t choose.
+to emulate her duplicity by any sort of dissimulation.
+
+“I see what you mean,” his mother said. “And, of course, you have taken
+the only honorable way.”
+
+Then they were both silent for a time, thinking their several thoughts.
+
+Verrian broke the silence to say, “I wish I knew what sort of ‘other
+girl’ it was that she ‘got together with.’”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Because she wrote a more cultivated letter than this magnanimous
+creature who takes all the blame to herself.”
+
+“Then you don’t believe they’re both the same?”
+
+“They are both the same in stationery and chirography, but not in
+literature.”
+
+“I hope you won’t get to thinking about her, then,” his mother
+entreated, intelligibly but not definitely.
+
+“Not seriously,” Verrian reassured her. “I’ve had my medicine.”
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Continuity is so much the lesson of experience that in the course of a
+life by no means long it becomes the instinctive expectation. The event
+that has happened will happen again; it will prolong itself in a series
+of recurrences by which each one’s episode shares in the unending
+history of all. The sense of this is so pervasive that humanity refuses
+to accept death itself as final. In the agonized affections, the
+shattered hopes, of those who remain, the severed life keeps on
+unbrokenly, and when time and reason prevail, at least as to the life
+here, the defeated faith appeals for fulfilment to another world, and
+the belief of immortality holds against the myriad years in which none
+of the numberless dead have made an indisputable sign in witness of it.
+The lost limb still reports its sensations to the brain; the fixed
+habit mechanically attempts its repetition when the conditions render it
+impossible.
+
+Verrian was aware how deeply and absorbingly he had brooded upon the
+incident which he had done his utmost to close, when he found himself
+expecting an answer of some sort from his unknown correspondent. He
+perceived, then, without owning the fact, that he had really hoped for
+some protest, some excuse, some extenuation, which in the end would
+suffer him to be more merciful. Though he had wished to crush her into
+silence, and to forbid her all hope of his forgiveness, he had, in a
+manner, not meant to do it. He had kept a secret place in his soul where
+the sinner against him could find refuge from his justice, and when this
+sanctuary remained unattempted he found himself with a regret that he
+had barred the way to it so effectually. The regret was so vague, so
+formless, however, that he could tacitly deny it to himself at all
+times, and explicitly deny it to his mother at such times as her touch
+taught him that it was tangible.
+
+One day, after ten or twelve days had gone by, she asked him, “You
+haven’t heard anything more from that girl?”
+
+“What girl?” he returned, as if he did not know; and he frowned. “You
+mean the girl that wrote me about my story?”
+
+He continued to frown rather more darkly. “I don’t see how you could
+expect me to hear from her, after what I wrote. But, to be categorical,
+I haven’t, mother.”
+
+“Oh, of course not. Did you think she would be so easily silenced?”
+
+“I did what I could to crush her into silence.”
+
+“Yes, and you did quite right; I am more and more convinced of that. But
+such a very tough young person might have refused to stay crushed. She
+might very naturally have got herself into shape again and smoothed out
+the creases, at least so far to try some further defence.”
+
+“It seems that she hasn’t,” Verrian said, still darkly, but not so
+frowningly.
+
+“I should have fancied,” his mother suggested, “that if she had wanted
+to open a correspondence with you--if that was her original object--she
+would not have let it drop so easily.”
+
+“Has she let it drop easily? I thought I had left her no possible chance
+of resuming it.”
+
+“That is true,” his mother said, and for the time she said no more about
+the matter.
+
+Not long after this he came home from the magazine office and reported
+to her from Armiger that the story was catching on more and more with
+the best class of readers. The editor had shown Verrian some references
+to it in newspapers of good standing and several letters about it.
+
+“I thought you might like to look at the letters,” Verrian said, and
+he took some letters from his pocket and handed them to her across the
+lunch-table. She did not immediately look at them, because he went on
+to add something that they both felt to be more important. “Armiger says
+there has been some increase of the sales, which I can attribute to my
+story if I have the cheek.”
+
+“That is good.”
+
+“And the house wants to publish the book. They think, down there, that
+it will have a very pretty success--not be a big seller, of course, but
+something comfortable.”
+
+Mrs. Verrian’s eyes were suffused with pride and fondness. “And you
+can always think, Philip, that this has come to you without the least
+lowering of your standard, without forsaking your ideal for a moment.”
+
+“That is certainly a satisfaction.”
+
+She kept her proud and tender gaze upon him. “No one will ever know as
+I do how faithful you have been to your art. Did any of the newspapers
+recognize that--or surmise it, or suspect it?”
+
+“No, that isn’t the turn they take. They speak of the strong love
+interest involved in the problem. And the abundance of incident. I
+looked out to keep something happening, you know. I’m sorry I didn’t ask
+Armiger to let me bring the notices home to you. I’m not sure that I did
+wisely not to subscribe to that press-clippings bureau.”
+
+His mother smiled. “You mustn’t let prosperity corrupt you, Philip.
+Wouldn’t seeing what the press is saying of it distract you from the
+real aim you had in your story?”
+
+“We’re all weak, of course. It might, if the story were not finished;
+but as it is, I think I could be proof against the stupidest praise.”
+
+“Well, for my part, I’m glad you didn’t subscribe to the clippings
+bureau. It would have been a disturbing element.” She now looked down
+at the letters as if she were going to take them up, and he followed the
+direction of her eyes. As if reminded of the fact by this, he said:
+
+“Armiger asked me if I had ever heard anything more from that girl.”
+
+“Has he?” his mother eagerly asked, transferring her glance from the
+letters to her son’s face.
+
+“Not a word. I think I silenced her thoroughly.”
+
+“Yes,” his mother said. “There could have been no good object in
+prolonging the affair and letting her confirm herself in the notion
+that she was of sufficient importance either to you or to him for you to
+continue the correspondence with her. She couldn’t learn too distinctly
+that she had done--a very wrong thing in trying to play such a trick on
+you.”
+
+“That was the way I looked at it,” Verrian said, but he drew a light
+sigh, rather wearily.
+
+“I hope,” his mother said, with a recurrent glance at the letters, “that
+there is nothing of that silly kind among these.”
+
+“No, these are blameless enough, unless they are to be blamed for being
+too flattering. That girl seems to be sole of her kind, unless the girl
+that she ‘got together with’ was really like her.”
+
+“I don’t believe there was any other girl. I never thought there was
+more than one.”
+
+“There seemed to be two styles and two grades of culture, such as they
+were.”
+
+“Oh, she could easily imitate two manners. She must have been a
+clever girl,” Mrs. Verrian said, with that admiration for any sort of
+cleverness in her sex which even very good women cannot help feeling.
+
+“Well, perhaps she was punished enough for both the characters she
+assumed,” Verrian said, with a smile that was not gay.
+
+“Don’t think about her!” his mother returned, with a perception of his
+mood. “I’m only thankful that she’s out of our lives in every sort of
+way.”
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Verrian said nothing, but he reflected with a sort of gloomy amusement
+how impossible it was for any woman, even a woman so wide-minded and
+high-principled as his mother, to escape the personal view of all things
+and all persons which women take. He tacitly noted the fact, as the
+novelist notes whatever happens or appears to him, but he let the
+occasion drop out of his mind as soon as he could after it had dropped
+out of his talk.
+
+The night when the last number of his story came to them in the
+magazine, and was already announced as a book, he sat up with his mother
+celebrating, as he said, and exulting in the future as well as the past.
+They had a little supper, which she cooked for him in a chafing-dish, in
+the dining-room of the tiny apartment where they lived together, and
+she made some coffee afterwards, to carry off the effect of the Newburg
+lobster. Perhaps because there was nothing to carry off the effect of
+the coffee, he heard her, through the partition of their rooms, stirring
+restlessly after he had gone to bed, and a little later she came to his
+door, which she set ajar, to ask, “Are you awake, Philip?”
+
+“You seem to be, mother,” he answered, with an amusement at her question
+which seemed not to have imparted itself to her when she came in and
+stood beside his bed in her dressing-gown.
+
+“You don’t think we have judged her too harshly, Philip?”
+
+“Do you, mother?”
+
+“No, I think we couldn’t be too severe in a thing like that. She
+probably thought you were like some of the other story-writers; she
+couldn’t feel differences, shades. She pretended to be taken with the
+circumstances of your work, but she had to do that if she wanted to fool
+you. Well, she has got her come-uppings, as she would probably say.”
+
+Verrian replied, thoughtfully, “She didn’t strike me as a country
+person--at least, in her first letter.”
+
+“Then you still think she didn’t write both?”
+
+“If she did, she was trying her hand in a personality she had invented.”
+
+“Girls are very strange,” his mother sighed. “They like excitement,
+adventure. It’s very dull in those little places. I shouldn’t wish you
+to think any harm of the poor thing.”
+
+“Poor thing? Why this magnanimous compassion, mother?”
+
+“Oh, nothing. But I know how I was myself when I was a girl. I used
+almost to die of hunger for something to happen. Can you remember just
+what you said in your letter?”
+
+Verrian laughed. “NO, I can’t. But I don’t believe I said half enough.
+You’re nervous, mother.”
+
+“Yes, I am. But don’t you get to worrying. I merely got to thinking how
+I should hate to have anybody’s unhappiness mixed up with this happiness
+of ours. I do so want your pleasure in your success to be pure, not
+tainted with the pain of any human creature.”
+
+Verrian answered with light cynicism: “It will be tainted with the pain
+of the fellows who don’t like me, or who haven’t succeeded, and they’ll
+take care to let me share their pain if ever they can. But if you mean
+that merry maiden up country, she’s probably thinking, if she thinks
+about it at all, that she’s the luckiest girl in the United States to
+have got out of an awful scrape so easily. At the worst, I only had fun
+with her in my letter. Probably she sees that she has nothing to grieve
+for but her own break.”
+
+“No, and you did just as you should have done; and I am glad you don’t
+feel bitterly about it. You don’t, do you?”
+
+“Not the least.”
+
+His mother stooped over and kissed him where he lay smiling. “Well,
+that’s good. After all, it’s you I cared for. Now I can say good-night.”
+ But she lingered to tuck him in a little, from the persistence of the
+mother habit. “I wish you may never do anything that you will be sorry
+for.”
+
+“Well, I won’t--if it’s a good action.”
+
+They laughed together, and she left the room, still looking back to see
+if there was anything more she could do for him, while he lay smiling,
+intelligently for what she was thinking, and patiently for what she was
+doing.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+Even in the time which was then coming and which now is, when successful
+authors are almost as many as millionaires, Verrian’s book brought him
+a pretty celebrity; and this celebrity was in a way specific. It
+related to the quality of his work, which was quietly artistic and
+psychological, whatever liveliness of incident it uttered on the
+surface. He belonged to the good school which is of no fashion and of
+every time, far both from actuality and unreality; and his recognition
+came from people whose recognition was worth having. With this came
+the wider notice which was not worth having, like the notice of Mrs.
+Westangle, since so well known to society reporters as a society woman,
+which could not be called recognition of him, because it did not involve
+any knowledge of his book, not even its title. She did not read any sort
+of books, and she assimilated him by a sort of atmospheric sense. She
+was sure of nothing but the attention paid him in a certain very
+goodish house, by people whom she heard talking in unintelligible but
+unmistakable praise, when she said, casually, with a liquid glitter
+of her sweet, small eyes, “I wish you would come down to my place, Mr.
+Verrian. I’m asking a few young people for Christmas week. Will you?”
+
+“Why, thank you--thank you very much,” Verrian said, waiting to hear
+more in explanation of the hospitality launched at him. He had never
+seen Mrs. Westangle till then, or heard of her, and he had not the least
+notion where she lived. But she seemed to have social authority, though
+Verrian, in looking round at his hostess and her daughter, who stood
+near, letting people take leave, learned nothing from their common
+smile. Mrs. Westangle had glided close to him, in the way she had of
+getting very near without apparently having advanced by steps, and she
+stood gleaming and twittering up at him.
+
+“I shall send you a little note; I won’t let you forget,” she said. Then
+she suddenly shook hands with the ladies of the house and was flashingly
+gone.
+
+Verrian thought he might ask the daughter of the house, “And if I don’t
+forget, am I engaged to spend Christmas week with her?”
+
+The girl laughed. “If she doesn’t forget, you are. But you’ll have a
+good time. She’ll know how to manage that.” Other guests kept coming up
+to take leave, and Verrian, who did not want to go just yet, was retired
+to the background, where the girl’s voice, thrown over her shoulder at
+him, reached him in the words, as gay as if they were the best of the
+joke, “It’s on the Sound.”
+
+The inference was that Mrs. Westangle’s place was on the Sound; and
+that was all Verrian knew about it till he got her little note. Mrs.
+Westangle knew how to write in a formless hand, but she did not know
+how to spell, and she had thought it best to have a secretary who
+could write well and spell correctly. Though, as far as literacy was
+concerned, she was such an almost incomparably ignorant woman, she had
+all the knowledge the best society wants, or, if she found herself out
+of any, she went and bought some; she was able to buy almost anything.
+
+Verrian thanked the secretary for remembering him, in the belief that he
+was directly thanking Mrs. Westangle, whose widespread consciousness his
+happiness in accepting did not immediately reach; and in the very large
+house party, which he duly joined under her roof, he was aware of losing
+distinctiveness almost to the point of losing identity. This did not
+quite happen on the way to Belford, for, when he went to take his seat
+in the drawing-room car, a girl in the chair fronting him put out her
+hand with the laugh of Miss Macroyd.
+
+“She did remember you!” she cried out. “How delightful! I don’t see how
+she ever got onto you”--she made the slang her own--“in the first place,
+and she must have worked hard to be sure of you since.”
+
+Verrian hung up his coat and put his suit-case behind his chair, the
+porter having put it where he could not wheel himself vis-a-vis with
+the girl. “She took all the time there was,” he answered. “I got my
+invitation only the day before yesterday, and if I had been in more
+demand, or had a worse conscience--”
+
+“Oh, do say worse conscience! It’s so much more interesting,” the girl
+broke in.
+
+“--I shouldn’t have the pleasure of going to Seasands with you now,”
+ he concluded, and she gave her laugh. “Do I understand that simply my
+growing fame wouldn’t have prevailed with her?”
+
+Anything seemed to make Miss Macroyd laugh. “She couldn’t have cared
+about that, and she wouldn’t have known. You may be sure that it was a
+social question with her after the personal question was settled. She
+must have liked your looks!” Again Miss Macroyd laughed.
+
+“On that side I’m invulnerable. It’s only a literary vanity to be
+soothed or to be wounded that I have,” Verrian said.
+
+“Oh, there wouldn’t be anything personal in her liking your looks. It
+would be merely deciding that personally you would do,” Miss Macroyd
+laughed, as always, and Verrian put on a mock seriousness in asking:
+
+“Then I needn’t be serious if there should happen to be anything so
+Westangular as a Mr. Westangle?”
+
+“Not the least in the world.”
+
+“But there is something?”
+
+“Oh, I believe so. But not probably at Seasands.”
+
+“Is that her house?”
+
+“Yes. Every other name had been used, and she couldn’t say Soundsands.”
+
+“Then where would the Mr. Westangular part more probably be found?”
+
+“Oh, in Montana or Mesopotamia, or any of those places. Don’t you
+know about him? How ignorant literary people can be! Why, he was the
+Amalgamated Clothespin. You haven’t heard of that?”
+
+She went on to tell him, with gay digressions, about the invention which
+enabled Westangle to buy up the other clothes-pins and merge them in
+his own--to become a commercial octopus, clutching the throats of other
+clothespin inventors in the tentacles of the Westangle pin. “But he
+isn’t in clothespins now. He’s in mines, and banks, and steamboats, and
+railroads, and I don’t know what all; and Mrs. Westangle, the second of
+her name, never was in clothespins.”
+
+Miss Macroyd laughed all through her talk, and she was in a final burst
+of laughing when the train slowed into Stamford. There a girl came
+into the car trailing her skirts with a sort of vivid debility and
+overturning some minor pieces of hand-baggage which her draperies swept
+out of their shelter beside the chairs. She had to take one of the seats
+which back against the wall of the state-room, where she must face the
+whole length of the car. She sat weakly fallen back in the chair and
+motionless, as if almost unconscious; but after the train had begun to
+stir she started up, and with a quick flinging of her veil aside turned
+to look out of the window. In the flying instant Verrian saw a colorless
+face with pinched and sunken eyes under a worn-looking forehead, and a
+withered mouth whose lips parted feebly.
+
+On her part, Miss Macroyd had doubtless already noted that the girl
+was, with no show of expensiveness, authoritatively well gowned and
+personally hatted. She stared at her, and said, “What a very hunted and
+escaping effect.”
+
+“She does look rather-fugitive,” Verrian agreed, staring too.
+
+“One might almost fancy--an asylum.”
+
+“Yes, or a hospital.”
+
+They continued both to stare at her, helpless for what ever different
+reasons to take their eyes away, and they were still interested in
+her when they heard her asking the conductor, “Must I change and take
+another train before we get to Belford? My friends thought--”
+
+“No, this train stops at Southfield,” the conductor answered, absently
+biting several holes into her drawing-room ticket.
+
+“Can she be one of us?” Miss Macroyd demanded, in a dramatic whisper.
+
+“She might be anything,” Verrian returned, trying instantly, with a whir
+of his inventive machinery, to phrase her. He made a sort of luxurious
+failure of it, and rested content with her face, which showed itself
+now in profile and now fronted him in full, and now was restless and
+now subsided in a look of delicate exhaustion. He would have said, if
+he would have said anything absolute, that she was a person who had
+something on her mind; at instants she had that hunted air, passing at
+other instants into that air of escape. He discussed these appearances
+with Miss Macroyd, but found her too frankly disputatious; and she
+laughed too much and too loud.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+At Southfield, where they all descended, Miss Macroyd promptly possessed
+herself of a groom, who came forward tentatively, touching his hat.
+“Miss Macroyd?” she suggested.
+
+“Yes, miss,” the man said, and led the way round the station to the
+victoria which, when Miss Macroyd’s maid had mounted to the place beside
+her, had no room; for any one else.
+
+Verrian accounted for her activity upon the theory of her quite
+justifiable wish not to arrive at Seasands with a young man whom she
+might then have the effect of having voluntarily come all the way with;
+and after one or two circuits of the station it was apparent to him that
+he was not to have been sent for from Mrs. Westangle’s, but to have been
+left to the chances of the local drivers and their vehicles. These were
+reduced to a single carryall and a frowsy horse whose rough winter coat
+recalled the aspect of his species in the period following the glacial
+epoch. The mud, as of a world-thaw, encrusted the wheels and curtains of
+the carryall.
+
+Verrian seized upon it and then went into the waiting-room, where he had
+left his suit-case. He found the stranger there in parley with the young
+woman in the ticket-office about a conveyance to Mrs. Westangle’s. It
+proved that he had secured not only the only thing of the sort, but
+the only present hope of any other, and in the hard case he could not
+hesitate with distress so interesting. It would have been brutal to
+drive off and leave that girl there, and it would have been a vulgar
+flourish to put the entire vehicle at her service. Besides, and perhaps
+above all, Verrian had no idea of depriving himself of such a chance as
+heaven seemed to offer him.
+
+He advanced with the delicacy of the highest-bred hero he could imagine,
+and said, “I am going to Mrs. Westangle’s, and I’m afraid I’ve got the
+only conveyance--such as it is. If you would let me offer you half
+of it? Mr. Verrian,” he added, at the light of acceptance instantly
+kindling in her face, which flushed thinly, as with an afterglow of
+invalidism.
+
+“Why, thank you; I’m afraid I must, Mr. Merriam,” and Verrian was aware
+of being vexed at her failure to catch his name; the name of Verrian
+ought to have been unmistakable. “The young lady in the office says
+there won’t be another, and I’m expected promptly.” She added, with a
+little tremor of the lip, “I don’t understand why Mrs. Westangle--” But
+then she stopped.
+
+Verrian interpreted for her: “The sea-horses must have given out at
+Seasands. Or probably there’s some mistake,” and he reflected bitterly
+upon the selfishness of Miss Macroyd in grabbing that victoria for
+herself and her maid, not considering that she could not know, and has
+no business to ask, whether this girl was going to Mrs. Westangle’s,
+too. “Have you a check?” he asked. “I think our driver could find room
+for something besides my valise. Or I could have it come--”
+
+“Not at all,” the girl said. “I sent my trunk ahead by express.”
+
+A frowsy man, to match the frowsy horse, looked in impatiently. “Any
+other baggage?”
+
+“No,” Verrian answered, and he led the way out after the vanishing
+driver. “Our chariot is back here in hiding, Miss--”
+
+“Shirley,” she said, and trailed before him through the door he opened.
+
+He felt that he did not do it as a man of the world would have done it,
+and in putting her into the ramshackle carryall he knew that he had not
+the grace of the sort of man who does nothing else. But Miss Shirley
+seemed to have grace enough, of a feeble and broken sort, for both, and
+he resolved to supply his own lack with sincerity. He therefore set
+his jaw firmly and made its upper angles jut sharply through his
+clean-shaven cheeks. It was well that Miss Shirley had some beauty
+to spare, too, for Verrian had scarcely enough for himself. Such
+distinction as he had was from a sort of intellectual tenseness which
+showed rather in the gaunt forms of his face than in the gray eyes,
+heavily lashed above and below, and looking serious but dull with their
+rank, black brows. He was chewing a cud of bitterness in the accusal he
+made himself of having forced Miss Shirley to give her name; but with
+that interesting personality at his side, under the same tattered and
+ill-scented Japanese goat-skin, he could not refuse to be glad, with all
+his self-blame.
+
+“I’m afraid it’s rather a long drive-for you, Miss Shirley,” he
+ventured, with a glance at her face, which looked very little under her
+hat. “The driver says it’s five miles round through the marshes.”
+
+“Oh, I shall not mind,” she said, courageously, if not cheerfully, and
+he did not feel authorized further to recognize the fact that she was an
+invalid, or at best a convalescent.
+
+“These wintry tree-forms are fine, though,” he found himself obliged
+to conclude his apology, rather irrelevantly, as the wheels of the
+rattling, and tilting carry all crunched the surface of the road in the
+succession of jerks responding to the alternate walk and gallop of the
+horse.
+
+“Yes, they are,” Miss Shirley answered, looking around with a certain
+surprise, as if seeing them now for the first time. “So much variety of
+color; and that burnished look that some of them have.” The trees, far
+and near, were giving their tones and lustres in the low December sun.
+
+“Yes,” he said, “it’s decidedly more refined than the autumnal coloring
+we brag of.”
+
+“It is,” she approved, as with novel conviction. “The landscape is
+really beautiful. So nice and flat,” she added.
+
+He took her intention, and he said, as he craned his neck out of the
+carryall to include the nearer roadside stretches, with their low bushes
+lifting into remoter trees, “It’s restful in a way that neither the
+mountains nor the sea, quite manage.”
+
+“Oh yes,” she sighed, with a kind of weariness which explained itself in
+what she added: “It’s the kind of thing you’d like to have keep on and
+on.” She seemed to say that more to herself than to him, and his eyes
+questioned her. She smiled slightly in explaining: “I suppose I find it
+all the more beautiful because this is my first real look into the world
+after six months indoors.”
+
+“Oh!” he said, and there was no doubt a prompting in his tone.
+
+She smiled still. “Sick people are terribly, egotistical, and I suppose
+it’s my conceit of having been the centre of the universe so lately that
+makes me mention it.” And here she laughed a little at herself, showing
+a charming little peculiarity in the catch of her upper lip on her
+teeth. “But this is divine--this air and this sight.” She put her head
+out of her side of the carryall, and drank them in with her lungs and
+eyes.
+
+When she leaned back again on the seat she said, “I can’t get enough of
+it.”
+
+“But isn’t this old rattletrap rather too rough for you?” he asked.
+
+“Oh no,” she said, visiting him with a furtive turn of her eyes. “It’s
+quite ideally what invalids in easy circumstances are advised to take
+carriage exercise.”
+
+“Yes, it’s certainly carriage exercise,” Verrian admitted in the same
+spirit, if it was a drolling spirit. He could not help being amused
+by the situation in which they had been brought together, through the
+vigorous promptitude of Miss Macroyd in making the victoria her own, and
+the easy indifference of Mrs. Westangle as to how they should get to
+her house. If he had been alone he might have felt the indifference as
+a slight, but as it was he felt it rather a favor. If Miss Shirley was
+feeling it a slight, she was too secret or too sweet to let it be
+known, and he thought that was nice of her. Still, he believed he might
+recognize the fact without deepening a possible hurt of hers, and he
+added, with no apparent relevance, “If Mrs. Westangle was not looking
+for us on this train, she will find that it is the unexpected which
+happens.”
+
+“We are certainly going to happen,” the girl said, with an acceptance of
+the plural which deepened the intimacy of the situation, and which was
+not displeasing to Verrian when she added, “If our friend’s vehicle
+holds out.” Then she turned her face full upon him, with what affected
+him as austere resolution, in continuing, “But I can’t let you suppose
+that you’re conveying a society person, or something of that sort, to
+Mrs. Westangle’s.” His own face expressed his mystification, and she
+concluded, “I’m simply going there to begin my work.”
+
+He smiled provisionally in temporizing with the riddle. “You women are
+wonderful, nowadays, for the work you do.”
+
+“Oh, but,” she protested, nervously, anxiously, “it isn’t good work that
+I’m going to do--I understand what you mean--it’s work for a living.
+I’ve no business to be arriving with an invited guest, but it seemed to
+be a question of arriving or not at the time when I was due.”
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Verrian stared at her now from a visage that was an entire blank, though
+behind it conjecture was busy, and he was asking himself whether his
+companion was some new kind of hair-dresser, or uncommonly cultivated
+manicure, or a nursery governess obeying a hurry call to take a place in
+Mrs. Westangle’s household, or some sort of amateur housekeeper arriving
+to supplant a professional. But he said nothing.
+
+Miss Shirley said, with a distress which was genuine, though he
+perceived a trace of amusement in it, too, “I see that I will have to go
+on.”
+
+“Oh, do!” he made out to utter.
+
+“I am going to Mrs. Westangle’s as a sort of mistress of the revels.
+The business is so new that it hasn’t got its name yet, but if I fail it
+won’t need any. I invented it on a hint I got from a girl who undertakes
+the floral decorations for parties. I didn’t see why some one shouldn’t
+furnish suggestions for amusements, as well as flowers. I was always
+rather lucky at that in my own fam--at my father’s--” She pulled herself
+sharply up, as if danger lay that way. “I got an introduction to Mrs.
+Westangle, and she’s to let me try. I am going to her simply as part of
+the catering, and I’m not to have any recognition in the hospitalities.
+So it wasn’t necessary for her to send for me at the station, except as
+a means of having me on the ground in good season. I have to thank you
+for that, and--I thank you.” She ended in a sigh.
+
+“It’s very interesting,” Verrian said, and he hoped he was not saying it
+in any ignoble way.
+
+He was very presently to learn. Round a turn of the road there came
+a lively clacking of horses’ shoes on the hard track, with the muted
+rumble of rubber-tired wheels, and Mrs. Westangle’s victoria dashed
+into view. The coachman had made a signal to Verrian’s driver, and the
+vehicles stopped side by side. The footman instantly came to the door of
+the carryall, touching his hat to Verrian.
+
+“Going to Mrs. Westangle’s, sir?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Mrs. Westangle’s carriage. Going to the station for you, sir.”
+
+“Miss Shirley,” Verrian said, “will you change?”
+
+“Oh no,” she answered, quickly, “it’s better for me to go on as I am.
+But the carriage was sent for you. You must--”
+
+Verrian interrupted to ask the footman, “How far is it yet to Mrs.
+Westangle’s?”
+
+“About a mile, sir.”
+
+“I think I won’t change for such a short distance. I’ll keep on as I
+am,” Verrian said, and he let the goatskin, which he had half lifted to
+free Miss Shirley for dismounting, fall back again. “Go ahead, driver.”
+
+She had been making several gasping efforts at speech, accompanied with
+entreating and protesting glances at Verrian in the course of his brief
+colloquy with the footman. Now, as the carryall lurched forward again,
+and the victoria wheeled and passed them on its way back, she caught her
+handkerchief to her face, and to Verrian’s dismay sobbed into it. He let
+her cry, as he must, in the distressful silence which he could not be
+the first to break. Besides, he did not know how she was taking it all
+till she suddenly with threw her handkerchief and pulled down her veil.
+Then she spoke three heart-broken words, “How could you!” and he divined
+that he must have done wrong.
+
+“What ought I to have done?” he asked, with sullen humility.
+
+“You ought to have taken the victoria.”
+
+“How could I?”
+
+“You ought to have done it.”
+
+“I think you ought to have done it yourself, Miss Shirley,” Verrian
+said, feeling like the worm that turns. He added, less resentfully, “We
+ought both to have taken it.”
+
+“No, Mrs. Westangle might have felt, very properly, that it was
+presumptuous in me, whether I came alone in it or with you. Now we shall
+arrive together in this thing, and she will be mortified for you and
+vexed with me. She will blame me for it, and she will be right, for
+it would have been very well for me to drive up in a shabby station
+carryall; but an invited guest--”
+
+“No, indeed, she shall not blame you, Miss Shirley. I will make a point
+of taking the whole responsibility. I will tell her--”
+
+“Mr. Merriam!” she cried, in anguish. “Will you please do nothing of the
+kind? Do you want to make bad worse? Leave the explaining altogether to
+me, please. Will you promise that?”
+
+“I will promise that--or anything--if you insist,” Verrian sulked.
+
+She instantly relented a little. “You mustn’t think me unreasonable. But
+I was determined to carry my undertaking through on business principles,
+and you have spoiled my chance--I know you meant it kindly or, if
+not spoiled, made it more difficult. Don’t think me ungrateful. Mr.
+Merriam--”
+
+“My name isn’t Merriam,” he resented, at last, a misnomer which had
+annoyed him from the first.
+
+“Oh, I am so glad! Don’t tell me what it is!” she said, giving a laugh
+which had to go on a little before he recognized the hysterical quality
+in it. When she could check it she explained: “Now we are not even
+acquainted, and I can thank a stranger for the kindness you have shown
+me. I am truly grateful. Will you do me another favor?”
+
+“Yes,” Verrian assented; but he thought he had a right to ask, as though
+he had not promised, “What is it?”
+
+“Not to speak of me to Mrs. Westangle unless she speaks of me first.”
+
+“That’s simple. I don’t know that I should have any right to speak of
+you.”
+
+“Oh yes, you would. She will expect you, perhaps, to laugh about the
+little adventure, and I would rather she began the laughing you have
+been so good.”
+
+“All right. But wouldn’t my silence make it rather more awkward?”
+
+“I will take care of the awkwardness, thank you. And you promise?”
+
+“Yes, I promise.”
+
+“That is very good of you.” She put her hand impulsively across the
+goat-skin, and gave his, with which he took it in some surprise, a quick
+clasp. Then they were both silent, and they got out of the carryall
+under Mrs. Westangle’s porte-cochere without having exchanged another
+word. Miss Shirley did not bow to him or look at him in parting.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+Verrian kept seeing before his inner eyes the thin face of the girl,
+dimmed rather than lighted with her sick yes. When she should be
+stronger, there might be a pale flush in it, like sunset on snow, but
+Verrian had to imagine that. He did not find it difficult to imagine
+many things about the girl, whom, in another mood, a more judicial mood,
+he might have accused of provoking him to imagine them. As it was, he
+could not help noting to that second self which we all have about us,
+that her confidences, such as they were, had perhaps been too voluntary;
+certainly they had not been quite obligatory, and they could not be
+quite accounted for, except upon the theory of nerves not yet perfectly
+under her control. To be sure, girls said all sorts of things to one,
+ignorantly and innocently; but she did not seem the kind of girl who,
+in different circumstances, would have said anything that she did not
+choose or that she did not mean to say. She had been surprisingly frank,
+and yet, at heart, Verrian would have thought she was a very reticent
+person or a secret person--that is, mentally frank and sentimentally
+secret; possibly she was like most women in that. What he was sure of
+was that the visual impression of her which he had received must have
+been very vivid to last so long in his consciousness; all through
+his preparations for going down to afternoon tea her face remained
+subjectively before him, and when he went down and found himself part of
+a laughing and chattering company in the library he still found it, in
+his inner sense, here, there, and yonder.
+
+He was aware of suffering a little disappointment in Mrs. Westangle’s
+entire failure to mention Miss Shirley, though he was aware that his
+disappointment was altogether unreasonable, and he more reasonably
+decided that if she knew anything of his arrival, or the form of it, she
+had too much of the making of a grande dame to be recognizant of it.
+He did not know from her whether she had meant to send for him at the
+station or not, or whether she had sent her carriage back for him when
+he did not arrive in it at first. Nothing was left in her manner of such
+slight specialization as she had thrown into it when, at the Macroyds’,
+she asked him down to her house party; she seemed, if there were any
+difference, to have acquired an additional ignorance of who and what he
+was, though she twittered and flittered up close to his elbow, after
+his impersonal welcome, and asked him if she might introduce him to the
+young lady who was pouring tea for her, and who, after the brief drama
+necessary for possessing him of a cup of it, appeared to have no more
+use for him than Mrs. Westangle herself had. There were more young men
+than young women in the room, but he imagined the usual superabundance
+of girlhood temporarily absent for repair of the fatigues of the
+journey. Every girl in the room had at least one man talking to her, and
+the girl who was pouring tea had one on each side of her and was trying
+to fix them both with an eye lifted towards each, while she struggled to
+keep her united gaze watchfully upon the tea-urn and those who came up
+with cups to be filled or refilled.
+
+Verrian thought his fellow-guests were all amiable enough looking,
+though he made his reflection that they did not look, any of them, as if
+they would set the Sound on fire; and again he missed the companion of
+his arrival.
+
+After he had got his cup of tea, he stood sipping it with a homeless air
+which he tried to conceal, and cast a furtive eye round the room till
+it rested upon the laughing face of Miss Macroyd. A young man was taking
+away her teacup, and Verrian at once went up and seized his place.
+
+“How did you get here?” she asked, rather shamelessly, since she had
+kept him from coming in the victoria, but amusingly, since she seemed to
+see it as a joke, if she saw it at all.
+
+“I walked,” he answered.
+
+“Truly?”
+
+“No, not truly.”
+
+“But, truly, how did you? Because I sent the carriage back for you.”
+
+“That was very thoughtful of you. But I found a delightful public
+vehicle behind the station, and I came in that. I’m so glad to know that
+it wasn’t Mrs. Westangle who had the trouble of sending the carriage
+back for me.”
+
+Miss Macroyd laughed and laughed at his resentment. “But surely you met
+it on the way? I gave the man a description of you. Didn’t he stop for
+you?”
+
+“Oh yes, but I was too proud to change by that time. Or perhaps I hated
+the trouble.”
+
+Miss Macroyd laughed the more; then she purposely darkened her
+countenance so as to suit it to her lugubrious whisper, “How did she get
+here?”
+
+“What she?”
+
+“The mysterious fugitive. Wasn’t she coming here, after all?”
+
+“After all your trouble in supposing so?” Verrian reflected a moment,
+and then he said, deliberately, “I don’t know.”
+
+Miss Macroyd was not going to let him off like that. “You don’t know how
+she came, or you don’t know whether she was coming?”
+
+“I didn’t say.”
+
+Her laugh resounded again. “Now you are trying to be wicked, and that is
+very wrong for a novelist.”
+
+“But what object could I have in concealing the fact from you, Miss
+Macroyd?” he entreated, with mock earnestness.
+
+“That is what I want to find out.”
+
+“What are you two laughing so about?” the voice of Mrs. Westangle
+twittered at Verrian’s elbow, and, looking down, he found her almost
+touching it. She had a very long, narrow neck, and, since it was long
+and narrow, she had the good sense not to palliate the fact or try to
+dress the effect of it out of sight. She took her neck in both hands, as
+it were, and put it more on show, so that you had really to like it. Now
+it lifted her face, though she was not a tall person, well towards the
+level of his; to be sure, he was himself only of the middle height of
+men, though an aquiline profile helped him up.
+
+He stirred the tea which he had ceased to drink, and said, “I wasn’t
+‘laughing so about,’ Mrs. Westangle. It was Miss Macroyd.”
+
+“And I was laughing so about a mysterious stranger that came up on the
+train with us and got out at your station.”
+
+“And I was trying to make out what was so funny in a mysterious
+stranger, or even in her getting out at your station.”
+
+Mrs. Westangle was not interested in the case, or else she failed
+to seize the joke. At any rate, she turned from them without further
+question and went away to another part of the room, where she
+semi-attached herself in like manner to another couple, and again left
+it for still another. This was possibly her idea of looking after her
+guests; but when she had looked after them a little longer in that way
+she left the room and let them look after themselves till dinner.
+
+“Come, Mr. Verrian,” Miss Macroyd resumed, “what is the secret? I’ll
+never tell if you tell me.”
+
+“You won’t if I don’t.”
+
+“Now you are becoming merely trivial. You are ceasing even to be
+provoking.” Miss Macroyd, in token of her displeasure, laughed no
+longer.
+
+“Am I?” he questioned; thoughtfully. “Well, then, I am tempted to act
+upon impulse.”
+
+“Oh, do act upon impulse for once,” she urged. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy
+it.”
+
+“Do you mean that I’m never impulsive?”
+
+“I don’t think you look it.”
+
+“If you had seen me an hour ago you would have said I was very
+impulsive. I think I may have exhausted myself in that direction,
+however. I feel the impulse failing me now.”
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+His impulse really had failed him. It had been to tell Miss Macroyd
+about his adventure and frankly trust her with it. He had liked her at
+several former meetings rather increasingly, because she had seemed open
+and honest beyond the most of women, but her piggish behavior at the
+station had been rather too open and honest, and the sense of this now
+opportunely intervened between him and the folly he was about to commit.
+Besides, he had no right to give Miss Shirley’s part in his adventure
+away, and, since the affair was more vitally hers than his, to take it
+at all out of her hands. The early-falling dusk had favored an unnoticed
+advent for them, and there were other chances that had helped keep
+unknown their arrival together at Mrs. Westangle’s in that squalid
+carryall, such as Miss Shirley’s having managed instantly to slip
+indoors before the man came out for Verrian’s suit-case, and of her
+having got to her own appointed place long before there was any descent
+of the company to the afternoon tea.
+
+It was not for him now to undo all that and begin the laughing at the
+affair, which she had pathetically intimated that she would rather some
+one else should begin. He recoiled from his imprudence with a shock, but
+he had the pleasure of having mystified Miss Macroyd. He felt dismissal
+in the roving eye which she cast from him round the room, and he
+willingly let another young man replace him at her side.
+
+Yet he was not altogether satisfied. A certain meaner self that there
+was in him was not pleased with his relegation even merely in his own
+consciousness to the championship of a girl who was going to make her
+living in a sort of menial way. It had better be owned for him that, in
+his visions of literary glory, he had figured in social triumphs which,
+though vague, were resplendent with the glitter of smart circles. He had
+been so ignorant of such circles as to suppose they would have some use
+for him as a brilliant young author; and though he was outwearing this
+illusion, he still would not have liked a girl like Julia Macroyd, whose
+family, if not smart, was at least chic, to know that he had come to
+the house with a professional mistress of the revels, until Miss Shirley
+should have approved herself chic, too. The notion of such an employment
+as hers was in itself chic, but the girl was merely a paid part of the
+entertainment, as yet, and had not risen above the hireling status. If
+she had sunk to that level from a higher rank it would be all right,
+but there was no evidence that she had ever been smart. Verrian
+would, therefore, rather not be mixed up with her--at any rate, in the
+imagination of a girl like Julia Macroyd; and as he left her side he
+drew a long breath of relief and went and put down his teacup where he
+had got it.
+
+By this time the girl who was “pouring” had exhausted one of the two
+original guards on whom she had been dividing her vision, and Verrian
+made a pretence, which she favored, that he had come up to push the man
+away. The man gracefully submitted to be dislodged, and Verrian remained
+in the enjoyment of one of the girl’s distorted eyes till, yet another
+man coming up, she abruptly got rid of Verrian by presenting him to yet
+another girl. In such manoeuvres the hour of afternoon tea will pass;
+and the time really wore on till it was time to dress for dinner.
+
+By the time that the guests came down to dinner they were all able to
+participate in the exchange of the discovery which each had made, that
+it was snowing outdoors, and they kept this going till one girl had the
+good-luck to say, “I don’t see anything so astonishing in that at this
+time of year. Now, if it was snowing indoors, it would be different.”
+
+This relieved the tension in a general laugh, and a young man tried
+to contribute further to the gayety by declaring that it would not be
+surprising to have it snow in-doors. He had once seen the thing done
+in a crowded hall, one night, when somebody put up a window, and the
+freezing current of air congealed the respiration of the crowd, which
+came down in a light fall of snow-flakes. He owned that it was in
+Boston.
+
+“Oh, that excuses it, then,” Miss Macroyd said. But she lost the laugh
+which was her due in the rush which some of the others made to open a
+window and see whether it could be made to snow in-doors there.
+
+“Oh, it isn’t crowded enough here,” the young man explained who had
+alleged the scientific marvel.
+
+“And it isn’t Boston,” Miss Macroyd tried again on the same string, and
+this time she got her laugh.
+
+The girl who had first spoken remained, at the risk of pneumonia, with
+her arm prettily lifted against the open sash, for a moment peering out,
+and then reported, in dashing it down with a shiver, “It seems to be a
+very soft snow.”
+
+“Then it will be rain by morning,” another predicted, and the girl tried
+hard to think of something to say in support of the hit she had made
+already. But she could not, and was silent almost through the whole
+first course at dinner.
+
+In spite of its being a soft snow, it continued to fall as snow and not
+as rain. It lent the charm of stormy cold without to the brightness and
+warmth within. Much later, when between waltzes some of the dancers went
+out on the verandas for a breath of air, they came back reporting that
+the wind was rising and the snow was drifting.
+
+Upon the whole, the snow was a great success, and her guests
+congratulated Mrs. Westangle on having thought to have it. The
+felicitations included recognition of the originality of her whole
+scheme. She had downed the hoary superstition that people had too much
+of a good time on Christmas to want any good time at all in the week
+following; and in acting upon the well-known fact that you never wanted
+a holiday so much as the day after you had one, she had made a movement
+of the highest social importance. These were the ideas which Verrian and
+the young man of the in-doors snow-storm urged upon her; his name was
+Bushwick, and he and Verrian found that they were very good-fellows
+after they had rather supposed the contrary.
+
+Mrs. Westangle received their ideas with the twittering reticence that
+deceived so many people when they supposed she knew what they were
+talking about.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+At breakfast, where the guests were reasonably punctual, they were all
+able to observe, in the rapid succession in which they descended
+from their rooms, that it had stopped snowing and the sun was shining
+brilliantly.
+
+“There isn’t enough for sleighing,” Mrs. Westangle proclaimed from the
+head of the table in her high twitter, “and there isn’t any coasting
+here in this flat country for miles.”
+
+“Then what are we going to do with it?” one of the young ladies
+humorously pouted.
+
+“That’s what I was going to suggest,” Mrs. Westangle replied. She
+pronounced it ‘sujjest’, but no one felt that it mattered. “And, of
+course,” she continued, “you needn’t any of you do it if you don’t
+like.”
+
+“We’ll all do it, Mrs. Westangle,” Bushwick said. “We are unanimous in
+that.”
+
+“Perhaps you’ll think it rather funny--odd,” she said.
+
+“The odder the better, I think,” Verrian ventured, and another man
+declared that nothing Mrs. Westangle would do was odd, though everything
+was original.
+
+“Well, there is such a thing as being too original,” she returned. Then
+she turned her head aside and looked down at something beside her plate
+and said, without lifting her eyes, “You know that in the Middle Ages
+there used to be flower-fights among the young nobility in Italy. The
+women held a tower, and the men attacked it with roses and flowers
+generally.”
+
+“Why, is this a speech?” Miss Macroyd interrupted.
+
+“A speech from the throne, yes,” Bushwick solemnly corrected her. “And
+she’s got it written down, like a queen--haven’t you, Mrs. Westangle?”
+
+“Yes, I thought it would be more respectful.”
+
+“She coming out,” Bushwick said to Verrian across the table.
+
+“And if I got mixed up I could go back and straighten it,” the hostess
+declared, with a good--humored candor that took the general fancy, “and
+you could understand without so much explaining. We haven’t got flowers
+enough at this season,” she went on, looking down again at the paper
+beside her plate, “but we happen to have plenty of snowballs, and the
+notion is to have the women occupy a snow tower and the men attack them
+with snowballs.”
+
+“Why,” Bushwick said, “this is the snow-fort business of our boyhood!
+Let’s go out and fortify the ladies at once.” He appealed to Verrian
+and made a feint of pushing his chair back. “May we use water-soaked
+snowballs, or must they all be soft and harmless?” he asked of Mrs.
+Westangle, who was now the centre of a storm of applause and question
+from the whole table.
+
+She kept her head and referred again to her paper. “The missiles of the
+assailants are to be very soft snowballs, hardly more than mere clots,
+so that nobody can be hurt in the assault, but the defenders may repel
+the assailants with harder snowballs.”
+
+“Oh,” Miss Macroyd protested, “this is consulting the weakness of our
+sex.”
+
+“In the fury of the onset we’ll forget it,” Verrian reassured her.
+
+“Do you think you really will, Mr. Verrian?” she asked. “What is all our
+athletic training to go for if you do?”
+
+Mrs. Westangle read on:
+
+“The terms of capitulation can be arranged on the ground, whether the
+castle is carried or the assailing party are made prisoners by its
+defenders.”
+
+“Hopeless captivity in either case!” Bushwick lamented.
+
+“Isn’t it rather academic?” Miss Macroyd asked of Verrian, in a low
+voice.
+
+“I’m afraid, rather,” he owned.
+
+“But why are you so serious?” she pursued.
+
+“Am I serious?” he retorted, with a trace of exasperation; and she
+laughed.
+
+Their parley was quite lost in the clamor which raged up and down the
+table till Mrs. Westangle ended it by saying, “There’s no obligation
+on any one to take part in the hostilities. There won’t be any
+conscription; it’s a free fight that will be open to everybody.” She
+folded the paper she had been reading from and put it in her lap, in
+default of a pocket. She went on impromptu:
+
+“You needn’t trouble about building the fort, Mr. Bushwick. I’ve had the
+farmer and his men working at the castle since daybreak, and the ladies
+will find it all ready for them, when they’re ready to defend it, down
+in the meadow beyond the edge of the birch-lot. The battle won’t begin
+till eleven o’clock.”
+
+She rose, and the clamor rose again with her, and her guests crushed
+about her, demanding to be allowed at least to go and look at the castle
+immediately.
+
+One of the men’s voices asked, “May I be one of the defenders, Mrs.
+Westangle? I want to be on the winning side, sure.”
+
+“Oh, is this going to be a circus chariot-race?” another lamented.
+
+“No, indeed,” a girl cried, “it’s to be the real thing.”
+
+It fell to Verrian, in the assortment of couples in which Mrs.
+Westangle’s guests sallied out to view the proposed scene of action, to
+find himself, not too willingly, at Miss Macroyd’s side. In his heart
+and in his mind he was defending the amusement which he instantly
+divined as no invention of Mrs. Westangle’s, and both his heart and
+his mind misgave him about this first essay of Miss Shirley in her new
+enterprise. It was, as Miss Macroyd had suggested, academic, and at
+the same time it had a danger in it of being tomboyish. Golf, tennis,
+riding, boating, swimming--all the vigorous sports in which women now
+excel--were boldly athletic, and yet you could not feel quite that they
+were tomboyish. Was it because the bent of Miss Shirley was so academic
+that she was periling upon tomboyishness without knowing it in this
+primal inspiration of hers? Inwardly he resented the word academic,
+although outwardly he had assented to it when Miss Macroyd proposed it.
+To be academic would be even more fatal to Miss Shirley’s ambition than
+to be tomboyish, and he thought with pathos of that touch about the
+Italian nobility in the Middle Ages, and how little it could have moved
+the tough fancies of that crowd of well-groomed young people at the
+breakfast-table when Mrs. Westangle brought it out with her ignorant
+acceptance of it as a social force. After all, Miss Macroyd was about
+the only one who could have felt it in the way it was meant, and she
+had chosen to smile at it. He wondered if possibly she could feel the
+secondary pathos of it as he did. But to make talk with her he merely
+asked:
+
+“Do you intend to take part in the fray?”
+
+“Not unless I can be one of the reserve corps that won’t need to be
+brought up till it’s all over. I’ve no idea of getting my hair down.”
+
+“Ah,” he sighed, “you think it’s going to be rude:”
+
+“That is one of the chances. But you seem to be suffering about it, Mr.
+Verrian!” she said, and, of course, she laughed.
+
+“Who? I?” he returned, in the temptation to deny it. But he resisted. “I
+always suffer when there’s anything silly happening, as if I were doing
+it myself. Don’t you?”
+
+“No, thank you, I believe not. But perhaps you are doing this? One can’t
+suppose Mrs. Westangle imagined it.”
+
+“No, I can’t plead guilty. But why isn’t it predicable of Mrs.
+Westangle?”
+
+“You mustn’t ask too much of me, Mr. Verrian. Somehow, I won’t say how,
+it’s been imagined for her. She’s heard of its being done somewhere. It
+can’t be supposed she’s read of it, anywhere.”
+
+“No, I dare say not.”
+
+Miss Macroyd came out with her laugh. “I should like to know what she
+makes of you, Mr. Verrian, when she is alone with herself. She must have
+looked you up and authenticated you in her own way, but it would be as
+far from your way as--well, say--the Milky Way.”
+
+“You don’t think she asked me because she met me at your house?”
+
+“No, that wouldn’t be enough, from her point of view. She means to go
+much further than we’ve ever got.”
+
+“Then a year from now she wouldn’t ask me?”
+
+“It depends upon who asks you in the mean time.”
+
+“You might get to be a fad, and then she would feel that she would have
+to have you.”
+
+“You’re not flattering me?”
+
+“Do you find it flattering?”
+
+“It isn’t exactly my idea of the reward I’ve been working for. What
+shall I do to be a fad?”
+
+“Well, rather degrading stunts, if you mean in the smart set. Jump about
+on all fours and pick up a woman’s umbrella with your teeth, and bark.
+Anything else would be easier for you among chic people, where your
+brilliancy would count.”
+
+“Brilliancy? Oh, thank you! Go on.”
+
+“Now, a girl--if you were a girl--”
+
+“Oh yes, if I were a girl! That will be so much more interesting.”
+
+“A girl,” Miss Macroyd continued, “might do it by posing effectively
+for amateur photography. Or doing something original in dramatics or
+pantomimics or recitation--but very original, because chic people are
+critical. Or if she had a gift for getting up things that would show
+other girls off; or suggesting amusements; but that would be rather in
+the line of swell people, who are not good at getting up things and are
+glad of help.”
+
+“I see, I see!” Verrian said, eagerly. But he walked along looking down
+at the snow, and not meeting the laughing glance that Miss Macroyd cast
+at his face. “Well?”
+
+“I believe that’s all,” she said, sharply. She added, less sharply: “She
+couldn’t afford to fail, though, at any point. The fad that fails is
+extinguished forever. Will these simple facts do for fiction? Or is it
+for somebody in real life you’re asking, Mr. Verrian?”
+
+“Oh, for fiction. And thank you very much. Oh, that’s rather pretty!”
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+They had come into the meadow where the snow battle was to be, and on
+its slope, against the dark weft of the young birch-trees, there was a
+mimic castle outlined in the masonry of white blocks quarried from the
+drifts and built up in courses like rough blocks of marble. A decoration
+of green from the pines that mixed with the birches had been suggested
+rather than executed, and was perhaps the more effective for its
+sketchiness.
+
+“Yes, it’s really beautiful,” Miss Macroyd owned, and though she did not
+join her cries to those of the other girls, who stood scattered about
+admiring it, and laughing and chattering with the men whose applause,
+of course, took the jocose form, there was no doubt but she admired it.
+“What I can’t understand is how Mrs. Westangle got the notion of this.
+There’s the soprano note in it, and some woman must have given it to
+her.”
+
+“Not contralto, possibly?” Verrian asked.
+
+“I insist upon the soprano,” she said.
+
+But he did not notice what she said. His eyes were following a figure
+which seemed to be escaping up through the birches behind the snow
+castle and ploughing its way through the drifts; in front of the
+structure they had been levelled to make an easier battle-field. He
+knew that it was Miss Shirley, and he inferred that she had been in the
+castle directing the farm--hands building it, and now, being caught by
+the premature arrival of the contesting forces, had fled before them
+and left her subordinates to finish the work. He felt, with a throe of
+helpless sympathy, that she was undertaking too much. It was hazardous
+enough to attempt the practice of her novel profession under the best of
+circumstances, but to keep herself in abeyance so far as not to be known
+at all in it, and, at the same time, to give way to her interest in it
+to the extent of coming out, with her infirmly established health, into
+that wintry weather, and superintending the preparations for the first
+folly she had planned, was a risk altogether too great for her.
+
+“Who in the world,” Miss Macroyd suddenly demanded, “is the person
+floundering about in the birch woods?”
+
+“Perhaps the soprano,” Verrian returned, hardily.
+
+Bushwick detached himself from a group of girls near by and intercepted
+any response from Miss Macroyd to Verrian by calling to her before he
+came up, “Are you going to be one of the enemy, Miss Macroyd?”
+
+“No, I think I will be neutral.” She added, “Is there going to be any
+such thing as an umpire?”
+
+“We hadn’t thought of that. There could be. The office could be created;
+but, you know, it’s the post of danger.”
+
+Verrian joined the group that Bushwick has left. He found a great
+scepticism as to the combat, mixed with some admiration for the castle,
+and he set himself to contest the prevalent feeling. What was the matter
+with a snow-fight? he demanded. It would be great fun. Decidedly he was
+going in for it. He revived the drooping sentiment in its favor, and
+then, flown with his success, he went from group to group and couple
+to couple, and animated all with his zeal, which came, he hardly knew
+whence; what he pretended to the others was that they were rather bound
+not to let Mrs. Westangle’s scheme fall through. Their doubts vanished
+before him, and the terms of the battle were quickly arranged. He said
+he had read of one of those mediaeval flower-fights, and he could tell
+them how that was done. Where it would not fit into the snow-fight,
+they could trust to inspiration; every real battle was the effect of
+inspiration.
+
+He came out, and some of the young women and most of the young men,
+who had dimly known of him as a sort of celebrity, and suspected him of
+being a prig, were reconciled, and accepted him for a nice fellow, and
+became of his opinion as to the details of the amusement before them.
+
+It was not very Homeric, when it came off, or very mediaeval, but it
+was really lots of fun, or far more fun than one would have thought. The
+storming of the castle was very sincere, and the fortress was honestly
+defended. Miss Macroyd was made umpire, as she wished, and provided with
+a large snowball to sit on at a safe distance; as she was chosen by
+the men, the girls wanted to have an umpire of their own, who would be
+really fair, and they voted Verrian into the office. But he refused,
+partly because he did not care about being paired off with Miss Macroyd
+so conspicuously, and partly because he wished to help the fight along.
+
+Attacks were made and repelled, and there were feats of individual and
+collective daring on the side of the defenders which were none the less
+daring because the assailants stopped to cheer them, and to disable
+themselves by laughing at the fury of the foe. A detachment of the
+young men at last stormed the castle and so weakened its walls that they
+toppled inward; then the defenders, to save themselves from being buried
+under the avalanche, swarmed out into the open and made the entire force
+of the enemy prisoners.
+
+The men pretended that this was what might have been expected from the
+beginning, but by this time the Berserker madness had possessed Miss
+Macroyd, too; she left her throne of snow and came forward shouting that
+it had been perfectly fair, and that the men had been really beaten,
+and they had no right to pretend that they had given themselves up
+purposely. The sex-partisanship, which is such a droll fact in women
+when there is any question of their general opposition to men, possessed
+them all, and they stood as, one girl for the reality of their triumph.
+This did not prevent them from declaring that the men had behaved with
+outrageous unfairness, and that the only one who fought with absolute
+sincerity from first to last was Mr. Verrian.
+
+Neither their unity of conviction concerning the general fact nor the
+surprising deduction from it in Verrian’s case operated to make them
+refuse the help of their captives in getting home. When they had bound
+up their tumbled hair, in some cases, and repaired the ravages of
+war among their feathers and furs and draperies, in other cases, they
+accepted the hands of the late enemy at difficult points of the path.
+But they ran forward when they neared the house, and they were prompt to
+scream upon Mrs. Westangle that there never had been such a success or
+such fun, and that they were almost dead, and soon as they had something
+to eat they were going to bed and never going to get up again.
+
+In the details which they were able to give at luncheon, they did
+justice to Verrian’s noble part in the whole affair, which had saved the
+day, not only in keeping them up to the work when they had got thinking
+it couldn’t be carried through, but in giving the combat a validity
+which it would not have had without him. They had to thank him, next
+to Mrs. Westangle herself, whom they praised beyond any articulate
+expression, for thinking up such a delightful thing. They wondered how
+she could ever have thought of it--such a simple thing too; and they
+were sure that when people heard of it they would all be wanting to have
+snow battles.
+
+Mrs. Westangle took her praises as passively, if not as modestly, as
+Verrian received his. She made no show of disclaiming them, but she had
+the art, invaluable in a woman who meant to go far in the line she had
+chosen, of not seeming to have done anything, or of not caring whether
+people liked it or not. Verrian asked himself, as he watched her
+twittering back at those girls, and shedding equally their thanks and
+praises from her impermeable plumage, how she would have behaved if Miss
+Shirley’s attempt had been an entire failure. He decided that she would
+have ignored the failure with the same impersonality as that with which
+she now ignored the success. It appeared that in one point he did her
+injustice, for when he went up to dress for dinner after the long stroll
+he took towards night he found a note under his door, by which he must
+infer that Mrs. Westangle had not kept the real facts of her triumph
+from the mistress of the revels.
+
+     “DEAR MR. VERRIAN, I am not likely to see you, but I must
+     thank you.
+                    “M. SHIRLEY.
+
+     “P. S. Don’t try to answer, please.”
+
+Verrian liked, the note, he even liked the impulse which had dictated
+it, and he understood the impulse; but he did not like getting the note.
+If Miss Shirley meant business in taking up the line of life she had
+professed to have entered upon seriously, she had better, in the case
+of a young man whose acquaintance she had chanced to make, let her
+gratitude wait. But when did a woman ever mean business, except in the
+one great business?
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+To have got that sillily superfluous note to Verrian without any one’s
+knowing besides, Miss Shirley must have stolen to his door herself and
+slipped it under. In order to do this unsuspected and unseen, she must
+have found out in some sort that would not give her away which his room
+was, and then watched her chance. It all argued a pervasiveness in her,
+after such a brief sojourn in the house, and a mastery of finesse that
+he did not like, though, he reflected, he was not authorized to like or
+dislike anything about her. He was thirty-seven years old, and he had
+not lived through that time, with his mother at his elbow to suggest
+inferences from facts, without being versed in wiles which, even when
+they were honest, were always wiles, and in lures which, when they were
+of the most gossamer tenuity, were yet of texture close enough to make
+the man who blundered through them aware that they had been thrown
+across his path. He understood, of course, that they were sometimes
+helplessly thrown across it, and were mere expressions of abstract woman
+with relation to abstract man, but that did not change their nature. He
+did not abhor them, but he believed he knew them, and he believed now
+that he detected one of them in Miss Shirley’s note. Of course, one
+could take another view of it. One could say to one’s self that she was
+really so fervently grateful that she could not trust some accident
+to bring them together in a place where she was merely a part of the
+catering, as she said, and he was a guest, and that she was excusable,
+or at least mercifully explicable, in her wish to have him know that she
+appreciated his goodness. Verrian had been very good, he knew that;
+he had saved the day for the poor thing when it was in danger of the
+dreariest kind of slump. She was a poor thing, as any woman was who had
+to make her own way, and she had been sick and was charming. Besides,
+she had found out his name and had probably recognized a quality of
+celebrity in it, unknown to the other young people with whom he found
+himself so strangely assorted under Mrs. Westangle’s roof.
+
+In the end, and upon the whole, Verrian would rather have liked, if the
+thing could have been made to happen, meeting Miss Shirley long enough
+to disclaim meriting her thanks, and to ascribe to the intrinsic value
+of her scheme the brilliant success it had achieved. This would not have
+been true, but it would have been encouraging to her; and in the revery
+which followed upon his conditional desire he had a long imaginary
+conversation with her, and discussed all her other plans for the revels
+of the week. These had not the trouble of defining themselves very
+distinctly in the conversation in order to win his applause, and their
+consideration did not carry him with Miss Shirley beyond the strictly
+professional ground on which they met.
+
+She had apparently invented nothing for that evening, and the house
+party was left to its own resources in dancing and sitting out dances,
+which apparently fully sufficed it. They were all tired, and broke up
+early. The women took their candles and went off to bed, and the men
+went to the billiard-room to smoke. On the way down from his room,
+where he had gone to put on his smoking-jacket, Verrian met Miss Macroyd
+coming up, candle in hand, and received from her a tacit intimation that
+he might stop her for a joking good-night.
+
+“I hope you’ll sleep well on your laurels as umpire,” he said.
+
+“Oh, thank you,” she returned, “and I hope your laurels won’t keep you
+awake. It must seem to you as if it was blowing a perfect gale in them.”
+
+“What do you mean? I did nothing.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t mean your promotion of the snow battle. But haven’t you
+heard?” He stared. “You’ve been found out!”
+
+“Found out?” Verrian’s soul was filled with the joy of literary fame.
+
+“Yes. You can’t conceal yourself now. You’re Verrian the actor.”
+
+“The actor?” Verrian frowned blackly in his disgust, so blackly that
+Miss Macroyd laughed aloud.
+
+“Yes, the coming matinee idol. One of the girls recognized you as soon
+as you came into the house, and the name settled it, though, of course,
+you’re supposed to be here incognito.”
+
+The mention of that name which he enjoyed in common with the actor made
+Verrian furious, for when the actor first appeared with it in New York
+Verrian had been at the pains to find out that it was not his real name,
+and that he had merely taken it because of the weak quality of romance
+in it, which Verrian himself had always disliked. But, of course, he
+could not vent his fury on Miss Macroyd. All he could do was to ask,
+“Then they have got my photograph on their dressing-tables, with candles
+burning before it?”
+
+“No, I don’t believe I can give you that comfort. The fact is, your
+acting is not much admired among the girls here, but they think you are
+unexpectedly nice as a private person.”
+
+“That’s something. And does Mrs. Westangle think I’m the actor, too?”
+
+“How should Mrs. Westangle know what she thinks? And if she doesn’t, how
+should I?”
+
+“That’s true. And are you going to give me away?”
+
+“I haven’t done it yet. But isn’t it best to be honest?”
+
+“It mightn’t be a success.”
+
+“The honesty?”
+
+“My literary celebrity.”
+
+“There’s that,” Miss Macroyd rejoiced. “Well, so far I’ve merely said
+I was sure you were not Verrian the actor. I’ll think the other part
+over.” She went on up-stairs, with the sound of her laugh following her,
+and Verrian went gloomily back to the billiard-room, where he found
+most of the smokers conspicuously yawning. He lighted a fresh cigar,
+and while he smoked they dropped away one by one till only Bushwick was
+left.
+
+“Some of the fellows are going Thursday,” he said. “Are you going to
+stick it out to the bitter end?”
+
+Till then it had not occurred to Verrian that he was not going to stay
+through the week, but now he said, “I don’t know but I may go Thursday.
+Shall you?”
+
+“I might as well stay on. I don’t find much doing in real estate at
+Christmas. Do you?”
+
+This was fishing, but it was better than openly taking him for that
+actor, and Verrian answered, unresentfully, “I don’t know. I’m not in
+that line exactly.”
+
+“Oh, I beg your pardon,” Bushwick said. “I thought I had seen your name
+with that of a West Side concern.”
+
+“No, I have a sort of outside connection with the publishing business.”
+
+“Oh,” Bushwick returned, politely, and it would have been reassuringly
+if Verrian had wished not to be known as an author. The secret in which
+he lived in that regard was apparently safe from that young, amiable,
+good-looking real-estate broker. He inferred, from the absence of any
+allusion to the superstition of the women as to his profession, that it
+had not spread to Bushwick at least, and this inclined him the more
+to like him. They sat up talking pleasantly together about impersonal
+affairs till Bushwick finished his cigar. Then he started for bed,
+saying, “Well, good-night. I hope Mrs. Westangle won’t have anything so
+active on the tapis for tomorrow.”
+
+“Try and sleep it off. Good-night.”
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+Verrian remained to finish his cigar, but at the end he was not yet
+sleepy, and he thought he would get a book from the library, if
+that part of the house were still lighted, and he looked out to see.
+Apparently it was as brilliantly illuminated as when the company had
+separated there for the night, and he pushed across the foyer hall
+that separated the billiard-room from the drawing-zoom and library. He
+entered the drawing-room, and in the depths of the library, relieved
+against the rows of books in their glass cases, he startled Miss Shirley
+from a pose which she seemed to be taking there alone.
+
+At the instant of their mutual recognition she gave a little muted
+shriek, and then gasped out, “I beg your pardon,” while he was saying,
+too, “I beg your pardon.”
+
+After a tacit exchange of forgiveness, he said, “I am afraid I startled
+you. I was just coming for a book to read myself asleep with. I--”
+
+“Not at all,” she returned. “I was just--” Then she did not say what,
+and he asked:
+
+“Making some studies?”
+
+“Yes,” she owned, with reluctant promptness.
+
+“I mustn’t ask what,” he suggested, and he made an effort to smile away
+what seemed a painful perturbation in her as he went forward to look at
+the book-shelves, from which, till then, she had not slipped aside.
+
+“I’m in your way,” she said, and he answered, “Not at all.” He added to
+the other sentence he had spoken, “If it’s going to be as good as what
+you gave us today--”
+
+“You are very kind.” She hesitated, and then she said, abruptly: “What
+I did to-day owed everything to you, Mr. Verrian,” and while he desisted
+from searching the book-shelves, she stood looking anxiously at him,
+with the pulse in her neck visibly throbbing. Her agitation was really
+painful, but Verrian did not attribute it to her finding herself there
+alone with him at midnight; for though the other guests had all gone to
+bed, the house was awake in some of the servants, and an elderly woman
+came in presently bringing a breadth of silvery gauze, which she held
+up, asking if it was that.
+
+“Not exactly, but it will do nicely, Mrs. Stager. Would you mind getting
+me the very pale-blue piece that electric blue?”
+
+“I’m looking for something good and dull,” Verrian said, when the woman
+was gone.
+
+“Travels are good, or narratives, for sleeping on,” she said, with a
+breathless effort for calm. “I found,” she panted, “in my own insomnia,
+that merely the broken-up look of a page of dialogue in a novel racked
+my nerves so that I couldn’t sleep. But narratives were beautifully
+soothing.”
+
+“Thank you,” he responded; “that’s a good idea.” And stooping, with his
+hands on his knees, he ranged back and forth along the shelves. “But
+Mrs. Westangle’s library doesn’t seem to be very rich in narrative.”
+
+He had not his mind on the search perhaps, and perhaps she knew it. She
+presently said, “I wish I dared ask you a favor--I mean your advice, Mr.
+Verrian.”
+
+He lifted himself from his stooping posture and looked at her, smiling.
+“Would that take much courage?” His smile was a little mocking; he
+was thinking that a girl who would hurry that note to him, and would
+personally see that it did not fail to reach him, would have the courage
+for much more.
+
+She did not reply directly. “I should have to explain, but I know you
+won’t tell. This is going to be my piece de resistance, my grand stunt.
+I’m going to bring it off the last night.” She stopped long enough for
+Verrian to revise his resolution of going away with the fellows who were
+leaving the middle of the week, and to decide on staying to the end. “I
+am going to call it Seeing Ghosts.”
+
+“That’s good,” Verrian said, provisionally.
+
+“Yes, I might say I was surprised at my thinking it up.”
+
+“That would be one form of modesty.”
+
+“Yes,” she said, with a wan smile she had, “and then again it mightn’t
+be another.” She went on, abruptly, “As many as like can take part
+in the performance. It’s to be given out, and distinctly understood
+beforehand, that the ghost isn’t a veridical phantom, but just an
+honest, made-up, every-day spook. It may change its pose from time to
+time, or its drapery, but the setting is to be always the same, and the
+people who take their turns in seeing it are to be explicitly reassured,
+one after another, that there’s nothing in it, you know. The fun will be
+in seeing how each one takes it, after they know what it really is.”
+
+“Then you’re going to give us a study of temperaments.”
+
+“Yes,” she assented. And after a moment, given to letting the notion get
+quite home with her, she asked, vividly, “Would you let me use it?”
+
+“The phrase? Why, certainly. But wouldn’t it be rather too
+psychological? I think just Seeing Ghosts would be better.”
+
+“Better than Seeing Ghosts: A Study of Temperaments? Perhaps it would.
+It would be simpler.”
+
+“And in this house you need all the simplicity you can get,” he
+suggested.
+
+She smiled, intelligently but reticently. “My idea is that every one
+somehow really believes in ghosts--I know I do--and so fully expects to
+see one that any sort of make-up will affect them for the moment just as
+if they did see one. I thought--that perhaps--I don’t know how to say it
+without seeming to make use of you--”
+
+“Oh, do make use of me, Miss Shirley!”
+
+“That you could give me some hints about the setting, with your
+knowledge of the stage--” She stopped, having rushed forward to that
+point, while he continued to look steadily at her without answering her.
+She faced him courageously, but not convincingly.
+
+“Did you think that I was an actor?” he asked, finally.
+
+“Mrs. Westangle seemed to think you were.”
+
+“But did you?”
+
+“I’m sure I didn’t mean--I beg your pardon--”
+
+“It’s all right. If I were an actor I shouldn’t be ashamed of it. But
+I was merely curious to know whether you shared the prevalent
+superstition. I’m afraid I can’t help you from a knowledge of the stage,
+but if I can be of use, from a sort of amateur interest in psychology,
+with an affair like this I shall be only too glad.”
+
+“Thank you,” she said, somewhat faintly, with an effect of dismay
+disproportionate to the occasion.
+
+She sank into a chair before which she had been standing, and she looked
+as if she were going to swoon.
+
+He started towards her with an alarmed “Miss Shirley.”
+
+She put out a hand weakly to stay him. “Don’t!” she entreated. “I’m a
+little--I shall be all right in a moment.”
+
+“Can’t I get you something--call some one?”
+
+“Not for the world!” she commanded, and she pulled herself together and
+stood up. “But I think I’ll stop for to-night. I’m glad my idea strikes
+you favorably. It’s merely--Oh, you found it, Mrs. Stager!” She broke
+off to address the woman who had now come back and was holding up the
+trailing breadths of the electric-blue gauze. “Isn’t it lovely?” She
+gave herself time to adore the drapery, with its changes of meteoric
+lucence, before she rose and took it. She went with it to the background
+in the library, where, against the glass door of the cases, she involved
+herself in it and stood shimmering. A thrill pierced to Verrian’s heart;
+she was indeed wraithlike, so that he hated to have her call, “How will
+that do?”
+
+Mrs. Stager modestly referred the question to him by her silence. “I
+will answer for its doing, if it does for the others as it’s done for
+me.”
+
+She laughed. “And you doubly knew what it was. Yes, I think it will go.”
+ She took another pose, and then another. “What do you think of it, Mrs.
+Stager?” she called to the woman standing respectfully abeyant at one
+side.
+
+“It’s awful. I don’t know but I’ll be afraid to go to my room.”
+
+“Sit down, and I’ll go to your room with you when I’m through. I won’t
+be long, now.”
+
+She tried different gauzes, which she had lying on one of the chairs,
+and crowned herself with triumph in the applauses of her two spectators,
+rejoicing with a glee that Verrian found childlike and winning. “If
+they’re all like you, it will be the greatest success!”
+
+“They’ll all be like me, and more,” he said, “I’m really very severe.”
+
+“Are you a severe person?” she asked, coming forward to him. “Ought
+people to be afraid of you?”
+
+“Yes, people with bad consciences. I’m rattier afraid of myself for that
+reason.”
+
+“Have you got a bad conscience?” she asked, letting her eyes rest on
+his.
+
+“Yes. I can’t make my conduct square with my ideal of conduct.”
+
+“I know what that is!” she sighed. “Do you expect to be punished for
+it?”
+
+“I expect to be got even with.”
+
+“Yes, one is. I’ve noticed that myself. But I didn’t suppose
+that actors--Oh, I forgot! I beg your pardon again, Mr. Verrian.
+Oh--Goodnight!” She faced him evanescently in going out, with the woman
+after her, but, whether she did so more in fear or more in defiance, she
+left him standing motionless in his doubt, and she did nothing to solve
+his doubt when she came quickly back alone, before he was aware of
+having moved, to say, “Mr. Verrian, I want to--I have to--tell you
+that--I didn’t think you were the actor.” Then she was finally gone,
+and Verrian had nothing for it but to go up to his room with the book he
+found he had in his hand and must have had there all the time.
+
+If he had read it, the book would not have eased him off to sleep, but
+he did not even try, to read it. He had no wish to sleep. The waking
+dream in which he lost himself was more interesting than any vision
+of slumber could have been, and he had no desire to end it. In that he
+could still be talking with the girl whose mystery appealed to him so
+pleasingly. It was none the less pleasing because, at what might
+be called her first blushes, she did not strike him as altogether
+ingenuous, but only able to discipline herself into a final sincerity
+from a consciousness which had been taught wisdom by experience.
+
+She was still a scarcely recovered invalid, and it was pathetic that
+she should be commencing the struggle of life with strength so little
+proportioned to the demand upon it; and the calling she had taken up was
+of a fantasticality in some aspects which was equally pathetic. But
+all the undertakings of women, he mused, were piteous, not only because
+women were unequal to the struggle at the best, but because they were
+hampered always with themselves, with their sex, their femininity, and
+the necessity of getting it out of the way before they could really
+begin to fight. Whatever they attempted it must be in relation to the
+man’s world in which livings were made; but the immemorial conditions
+were almost wholly unchanged. A woman approached this world as a woman,
+with the inborn instinct of tempting it as a woman, to win it to love
+her and make her a wife and mother; and although she might stoically
+overcome the temptation at last, it might recur at any moment and
+overcome her. This was perpetually weakening and imperilling her, and
+she must feel it at the encounter with each man she met. She must feel
+the tacit and even unconscious irony of his attitude towards her in her
+enterprise, and the finer her make the crueller and the more humiliating
+and disheartening this must be.
+
+Of course, this Miss Shirley felt Verrian’s irony, which he had guarded
+from any expression with genuine compassion for her. She must feel that
+to his knowledge of life she and her experiment had an absurdity which
+would not pass, whatever their success might be. If she meant business,
+and business only, they ought to have met as two men would have met, but
+he knew that they had not done so, and she must have known it. All that
+was plain sailing enough, but beyond this lay a sea of conjecture in
+which he found himself without helm or compass. Why, should she have
+acted a fib about his being an actor, and why, after the end, should
+she have added an end, in which she returned to own that she had been
+fibbing? For that was what it came to; and though Verrian tasted a
+delicious pleasure in the womanish feat by which she overcame her
+womanishness, he could not puzzle out her motive. He was not sure that
+he wished to puzzle it out. To remain with illimitable guesses at his
+choice was more agreeable, for the present at least, and he was not
+aware of having lapsed from them when he woke so late as to be one of
+the breakfasters whose plates were kept for them after the others were
+gone.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+It was the first time that Verrian had come down late, and it was his
+novel experience to find himself in charge of Mrs. Stager at breakfast,
+instead of the butler and the butler’s man, who had hitherto served him
+at the earlier hour. There were others, somewhat remote from him, at
+table, who were ending when he was beginning, and when they had joked
+themselves out of the room and away from Mrs. Stager’s ministrations
+he was left alone to her. He had instantly appreciated a quality of
+motherliness in her attitude towards him, and now he was sensible of a
+kindly intimacy to which he rather helplessly addressed himself.
+
+“Well, Mrs. Stager, did you see a ghost on your way to bed?”
+
+“I don’t know as I really expected to,” she said. “Won’t you have a few
+more of the buckwheats?”
+
+“Do you think I’d better? I believe I won’t. They’re very tempting. Miss
+Shirley makes a very good ghost,” he suggested.
+
+Mrs. Stager would not at first commit herself further than to say in
+bringing him the butter, “She’s just up from a long fit of sickness.”
+ She impulsively added, “She ain’t hardly strong enough to be doing what
+she is, I tell her.”
+
+“I understood she had been ill,” Verrian said. “We drove over from the
+station together, the other day.”
+
+“Yes,” Mrs. Stager admitted. “Kind of a nervous breakdown, I believe.
+But she’s got an awful spirit. Mrs. Westangle don’t want her to do all
+she is doing.”
+
+Verrian looked at her in surprise. He had not expected that of the
+India-rubber nature he had attributed to Mrs. Westangle. In view of Mrs.
+Stager’s privity to the unimagined kindliness of his hostess, he relaxed
+himself in a further interest in Miss Shirley, as if it would now be
+safe. “She’s done splendidly, so far,” he said, meaning the girl. “I’m
+glad Mrs. Westangle appreciates her work.”
+
+“I guess,” Mrs. Stager said, “that if it hadn’t been for you at the
+snow-fight--She got back from getting ready for it, that morning, almost
+down sick, she was afraid so it was going to fail.”
+
+“I didn’t do anything,” Verrian said, putting the praise from him.
+
+Mrs. Stager lowered her voice in an octave of deeper confidentiability.
+“You got the note? I put it under, and I didn’t know.”
+
+“Oh yes, I got it,” Verrian said, sensible of a relief, which he would
+not assign to any definite reason, in knowing that Miss Shirley had not
+herself put it under his door. But he now had to take up another burden
+in the question whether Miss Shirley were of an origin so much above
+that of her confidant that she could have a patrician fearlessness in
+making use of her, or were so near Mrs. Stager’s level of life that she
+would naturally turn to her for counsel and help. Miss Shirley had the
+accent, the manners, and the frank courage of a lady; but those things
+could be learned; they were got up for the stage every day.
+
+Verrian was roused from the muse he found he had fallen into by hearing
+Mrs. Stager ask, “Won’t you have some more coffee?”
+
+“No, thank you,” he said. And now he rose from the table, on which he
+dreamily dropped his napkin, and got his hat and coat and went out for a
+walk. He had not studied the art of fiction so long, in the many private
+failures that had preceded his one public success, without being made
+to observe that life sometimes dealt in the accidents and coincidences
+which his criticism condemned as too habitually the resource of the
+novelist. Hitherto he had disdained them for this reason; but since his
+serial story was off his hands, and he was beginning to look about him
+for fresh material, he had doubted more than once whether his severity
+was not the effect of an unjustifiable prejudice.
+
+It struck him now, in turning the corner of the woodlot above the meadow
+where the snow-battle had taken place, and suddenly finding himself face
+to face with Miss Shirley, that nature was in one of her uninventive
+moods and was helping herself out from the old stock-in-trade of
+fiction. All the same, he felt a glow of pleasure, which was also a glow
+of pity; for while Miss Shirley looked, as always, interesting, she look
+tired, too, with a sort of desperate air which did not otherwise account
+for itself. She had given, at sight of him, a little start, and a little
+“Oh!” dropped from her lips, as if it had been jostled from them. She
+made haste to go on, with something like the voluntary hardiness of the
+courage that plucks itself from the primary emotion of fear, “You are
+going down to try the skating?”
+
+“Do I look it, without skates?”
+
+“You may be going to try the sliding,” she returned. “I’m afraid there
+won’t be much of either for long. This soft air is going to make havoc
+of my plans for to-morrow.”
+
+“That’s too bad of it. Why not hope for a hard freeze to-night? You
+might as well. The weather has been known to change its mind. You might
+even change your plans.”
+
+“No, I can’t do that. I can’t think of anything else. It’s to bridge
+over the day that’s left before Seeing Ghosts. If it does freeze, you’ll
+come to Mrs. Westangle’s afternoon tea on the pond?”
+
+“I certainly shall. How is it to be worked?”
+
+“She’s to have her table on a platform, with runners, in a bower of
+evergreen boughs, and be pushed about, and the people are to skate up
+for the tea. There are to be tea and chocolate, and two girls to pour,
+just as in real life. It isn’t a very dazzling idea, but I thought it
+might do; and Mrs. Westangle is so good-natured. Now, if the thermometer
+will do its part!”
+
+“I am sure it will,” Verrian said, but a glance at the gray sky did not
+confirm him in his prophetic venture. The snow was sodden under foot; a
+breath from the south stirred the pines to an Aeolian response and moved
+the stiff, dry leaves of the scrub-oaks. A sapsucker was marking an
+accurate circle of dots round the throat of a tall young maple,
+and enjoying his work in a low, guttural soliloquy, seemingly, yet,
+dismayingly, suggestive of spring.
+
+“It’s lovely, anyway,” she said, following his glance with an upward
+turn of her face.
+
+“Yes, it’s beautiful. I think this sort of winter day is about the best
+the whole year can do. But I will sacrifice the chance of another like
+it to your skating-tea, Miss Shirley.”
+
+He did not know why he should have made this speech to her, but
+apparently she did, and she said, “You’re always coming to my help, Mr.
+Verrian.”
+
+“Don’t mention it!”
+
+“I won’t, then,” she said, with a smile that showed her thin face at its
+thinnest and left her lip caught on her teeth till she brought it down
+voluntarily. It was a small but full lip and pretty, and this trick of
+it had a fascination. She added, gravely, “I don’t believe you will like
+my ice-tea.”
+
+“I haven’t any active hostility to it. You can’t always be striking
+twelve--twelve midnight--as you will be in Seeing Ghosts. But your
+ice-tea will do very well for striking five. I’m rather elaborate!”
+
+“Not too elaborate to hide your real opinion. I wonder what you do think
+of my own elaboration--I mean of my scheme.”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+They had moved on, at his turning to walk with her, so as not to keep
+her standing in the snow, and now she said, looking over her shoulder at
+him, “I’ve decided that it won’t do to let the ghost have all the glory.
+I don’t think it will be fair to let the people merely be scared, even
+when they’ve been warned that they’re to see a ghost and told it isn’t
+real.”
+
+She seemed to refer the point to him, and he said, provisionally, “I
+don’t know what more they can ask.”
+
+“They can ask questions. I’m going to let each person speak to the
+ghost, if not scared dumb, and ask it just what they please; and I’m
+going to answer their questions if I can.”
+
+“Won’t it be something of an intellectual strain?”
+
+“Yes, it will. But it will be fun, too, a little, and it will help the
+thing to go off. What do you think?”
+
+“I think it’s fine. Are you going to give it out, so that they can be
+studying up their questions?”
+
+“No, their questions have got to be impromptu. Or, at least, the first
+one has. Of course, after the scheme has once been given away, the
+ghost-seers will be more or less prepared, and the ghost will have to
+stand it.”
+
+“I think it’s great. Are you going to let me have a chance with a
+question?”
+
+“Are you going to see a ghost?”
+
+“To be sure I am. May I really ask it what I please?”
+
+“If you’re honest.”
+
+“Oh, I shall be honest--”
+
+He stopped breathlessly, but she did not seem called upon to supply any
+meaning for his abruptness. “I’m awfully glad you like the idea,” she
+said, “I have had to think the whole thing out for myself, and I haven’t
+been quite certain that the question-asking wasn’t rather silly, or, at
+least, sillier than the rest. Thank you so much, Mr. Verrian.”
+
+“I’ve thought of my question,” he began again, as abruptly as he had
+stopped before. “May I ask it now?”
+
+Cries of laughter came up from the meadow below, and the voices seemed
+coming nearer.
+
+“Oh, I mustn’t be seen!” Miss Shirley lamented. “Oh, dear! If I’m seen
+the whole thing is given away. What shall I do?” She whirled about and
+ran down the road towards a path that entered the wood.
+
+He ran after her. “My question is, May I come to see you when you get
+back to town?”
+
+“Yes, certainly. But don’t come now! You mustn’t be seen with me! I’m
+not supposed to be in the house at all.”
+
+If Verrian’s present mood had been more analytic, it might have occurred
+to him that the element of mystery which Miss Shirley seemed to
+cherish in regard to herself personally was something that she could
+dramatically apply with peculiar advantage to the phantasmal part she
+was to take in her projected entertainment. But he was reduced from the
+exercise of his analytic powers to a passivity in which he was chiefly
+conscious of her pathetic fascination. This seemed to emanate from her
+frail prettiness no less than from the sort of fearful daring with which
+she was pushing her whole enterprise through; it came as much from her
+undecided blondness--from her dust-colored hair, for instance--as
+from the entreating look of her pinched eyes, only just lighting their
+convalescent fires, and from the weakness that showed, with the grace,
+in her run through the wintry woods, where he watched her till the
+underbrush thickened behind her and hid her from him. Altogether his
+impression was very complex, but he did not get so far even as the
+realization of this, in his mental turmoil, as he turned with a deep
+sigh and walked meditatively homeward through the incipient thaw.
+
+It did not rain at night, as it seemed so likely to do, and by morning
+the cloudiness of the sky had so far thinned that the sun looked mildly
+through it without more than softening the frozen surface of the pond,
+so that Mrs. Westangle’s ice-tea (as everybody called it, by a common
+inspiration, or by whatever circuitous adoption of Verrian’s phrase)
+came off with great success. People from other houses were there, and
+they all said that they wondered how she came to have such a brilliant
+idea, and they kept her there till nearly dark. Then the retarded rain
+began, in a fine drizzle, and her house guests were forced homeward, but
+not too soon to get a good, long rest before dressing for dinner.
+She was praised for her understanding with the weather, and for her
+meteorological forecast as much as for her invention in imagining such a
+delightful and original thing as an ice-tea, which no one else had ever
+thought of. Some of the women appealed to Verrian to say if he had
+ever heard of anything like it; and they felt that Mrs. Westangle was
+certainly arriving, and by no beaten track.
+
+None of the others put it in these terms, of course; it was merely a
+consensus of feeling with them, and what was more articulate was dropped
+among the ironies with which Miss Macroyd more confidentially celebrated
+the event. Out of hearing of the others, in slowly following them with
+Verrian, she recurred to their talk. “Yes, it’s only a question of money
+enough for Newport, after this. She’s chic now, and after a season
+there she will be smart. But oh, dear! How came she to be chic? Can you
+imagine?”
+
+Verrian did not feel bound to a categorical answer, and in his private
+reflections he dealt with another question. This was how far Miss
+Shirley was culpable in the fraud she was letting Mrs. Westangle
+practise on her innocent guests. It was a distasteful question, and he
+did not find it much more agreeable when it subdivided itself into the
+question of necessity on her part, and of a not very clearly realized
+situation on Mrs. Westangle’s. The girl had a right to sell her ideas,
+and perhaps the woman thought they were her own when she had paid for
+them. There could be that view of it all. The furtive nature of Miss
+Shirley’s presence in the house might very well be a condition of that
+grand event she was preparing. It was all very mysterious.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+It rained throughout the evening, with a wailing of the wind in the
+gables, and a weeping and a sobbing of the water from the eaves that
+Mrs. Westangle’s guests, securely housed from the storm, made the most
+of for weirdness. There had been a little dancing, which gave way to
+so much sitting-out that the volunteer music abruptly ceased as if in
+dudgeon, and there was nothing left but weirdness to bring young hearts
+together. Weirdness can do a good deal with girls lounging in low
+chairs, and young men on rugs round a glowing hearth at their feet; and
+every one told some strange thing that had happened at first hand, or
+second or third hand, either to himself or herself, or to their fathers
+or brothers or grandmothers or old servants. They were stimulated
+in eking out these experiences not only by the wildness of the rain
+without, but by the mystery of being shut off from the library into the
+drawing-room and hall while the preparations for the following night
+were beginning. But weirdness is not inexhaustible, even when shared on
+such propitious terms between a group of young people rapidly advanced
+in intimacy by a week’s stay under the same roof, and at the first yawn
+a gay dispersion of the votaries ended it all.
+
+The yawn came from Bushwick, who boldly owned, when his guilt was
+brought home to him, that he was sleepy, and then as he expected to be
+scared out of a year’s growth the next night, and not be able to sleep
+for a week afterwards, he was now going to bed. He shook hands with Mrs.
+Westangle for good-night. The latest to follow him was Verrian, who,
+strangely alert, and as far from drowsiness as he had ever known
+himself, was yet more roused by realizing that Mrs. Westangle was not
+letting his hand go at once, but, unless it was mere absent-mindedness,
+was conveying through it the wish to keep him. She fluttered a little
+more closely up to him, and twittered out, “Miss Shirley wants me to
+let you know that she has told me about your coming together, and
+everything.”
+
+“Oh, I’m very glad,” Verrian said, not sure that it was the right thing.
+
+“I don’t know why she feels so, but she has a right to do as she pleases
+about it. She’s not a guest.”
+
+“No,” Verrian assented.
+
+“It happens very well, though, for the ghost-seeing that people don’t
+know she’s here. After that I shall tell them. In fact, she wants me to,
+for she must be on the lookout for other engagements. I am going to do
+everything I can for her, and if you hear of anything--”
+
+Verrian bowed, with a sense of something offensive in her words which he
+could not logically feel, since it was a matter of business and was
+put squarely on a business basis. “I should be very glad,” he said,
+noncommittally.
+
+“She was sure from the first,” Mrs. Westangle went on, as if there were
+some relation between the fact and her request, “that you were not the
+actor. She knew you were a writer.”
+
+“Oh, indeed!” Verrian said.
+
+“I thought that if you were writing for the newspapers you might know
+how to help her-”
+
+“I’m not a newspaper writer,” Verrian answered, with a resentment which
+she seemed to feel, for she said, with a sort of apology in her tone:
+
+“Oh! Well, I don’t suppose it matters. She doesn’t know I’m speaking to
+you about that; it just came into my head. I like to help in a worthy
+object, you know. I hope you’ll have a good night’s rest.”
+
+She turned and looked round with the air of distraction which she had
+after speaking to any one, and which Verrian fancied came as much from
+a paucity as from a multiplicity of suggestion in her brain, and so left
+him standing. But she came back to say, “Of course, it’s all between
+ourselves till after to-morrow night, Mr. Verrian.”
+
+“Oh, certainly,” he replied, and went vaguely off in the direction of
+the billiard-room. It was light and warm there, though the place was
+empty, and he decided upon a cigar as a proximate or immediate solution.
+He sat smoking before the fire till the tobacco’s substance had half
+turned into a wraith of ash, and not really thinking of anything very
+definitely, except the question whether he should be able to sleep after
+he went to bed, when he heard a creeping step on the floor. He turned
+quickly, with a certain expectance in his nerves, and saw nothing more
+ghostly than Bushwick standing at the corner of the table and apparently
+hesitating how to speak to him.
+
+He said, “Hello!” and at this Bushwick said:
+
+“Look here!”
+
+“Well?” Verrian asked, looking at him.
+
+“How does it happen you’re up so late, after everybody else is wrapped
+in slumber?”
+
+“I might ask the same of you.”
+
+“Well, I found I wasn’t making it a case of sleep, exactly, and so I got
+up.”
+
+“Well, I hadn’t gone to bed for much the same reason. Why couldn’t you
+sleep? A real-estate broker ought to have a clean conscience.”
+
+“So ought a publisher, for that matter. What do you think of this
+ghost-dance, anyway?”
+
+“It might be amusing--if it fails.” Verrian was tempted to add the
+condition by the opportunity for a cynicism which he did not feel. It is
+one of the privileges of youth to be cynical, whether or no.
+
+Bushwick sat down before the fire and rubbed his shins with his two
+hands unrestfully, drawing in a long breath between his teeth. “These
+things get on to my nerves sometimes. I shouldn’t want the ghost-dance
+to fail.”
+
+“On Mrs. Westangle’s account?”
+
+“I guess Mrs. Westangle could stand it. Look here!” It was rather a
+customary phrase of his, Verrian noted. As he now used it he looked
+alertly round at Verrian, with his hands still on his shins. “What’s the
+use of our beating round the bush?”
+
+Verrian delayed his answer long enough to decide against the aimless pun
+of asking, “What Bushwick?” and merely asked, “What bush?”
+
+“The bush where the milk in the cocoanut grows. You don’t pretend that
+you believe Mrs. Westangle has been getting up all these fairy stunts?”
+
+Verrian returned to his cigar, from which the ashen wraith dropped into
+his lap. “I guess you’ll have to be a little clearer.” But as Bushwick
+continued silently looking at him, the thing could not be left at this
+point, and he was obliged to ask of his own initiative, “How much do you
+know?”
+
+Bushwick leaned back in his chair, with his eyes still on Verrian’s
+profile. “As much as Miss Macroyd could tell me.”
+
+“Ah, I’m still in the dark,” Verrian politely regretted, but not with a
+tacit wish to wring Miss Macroyd’s neck, which he would not have known
+how to account for.
+
+“Well, she says that Mrs. Westangle has a professional assistant who’s
+doing the whole job for her, and that she came down on the same train
+with herself and you.”
+
+“Did she say that she grabbed the whole victoria for herself and maid at
+the station?” Verrian demanded, in a burst of rage, “and left us to get
+here the best way we could?”
+
+Bushwick grinned. “She supposed there were other carriages, and when she
+found there weren’t she hurried the victoria back for you.”
+
+“You think she believes all that? I’m glad she has the decency to be
+ashamed of her behavior.”
+
+“I’m not defending her. Miss Macroyd knows how to take care of herself.”
+
+The matter rather dropped for the moment, in which Bushwick filled a
+pipe he took from his pocket and lighted it. After the first few whiffs
+he took it from his mouth, and, with a droll look across at Verrian,
+said, “Who was your fair friend?”
+
+If Verrian was going to talk of this thing, he was not going to do it
+with the burden of any sort of reserve or contrivance on his soul. “This
+afternoon?” Bushwick nodded; and Verrian added, “That was she.” Then he
+went on, wrathfully: “She’s a girl who has to make her living, and she’s
+doing it in a new way that she’s invented for herself. She has supposed
+that the stupid rich, or the lazy rich, who want to entertain people may
+be willing to pay for ideas, and she proposes to supply the ideas for a
+money consideration. She’s not a guest in the house, and she won’t take
+herself on a society basis at all. I don’t know what her history is, and
+I don’t care. She’s a lady by training, and, if she had the accent, I
+should say she was from the South, for she has the enterprise of
+the South that comes North and tries to make its living. It’s all
+inexpressibly none of my business, but I happen to be knowing to so much
+of the case, and if you’re knowing to anything else, Mr. Bushwick,
+I want you to get it straight. That’s why I’m talking of it, and not
+because I think you’ve any right to know anything about it.”
+
+“Thank you,” Bushwick returned, unruffled. “It’s about what Miss Macroyd
+told me. That’s the reason I don’t want the ghost-dance to fail.”
+
+Verrian did not notice him. He found it more important to say: “She’s
+so loyal to Mrs. Westangle that she wouldn’t have wished, in Mrs.
+Westangle’s interest, to have her presence, or her agency in what is
+going on, known; but, of course, if Mrs. Westangle chooses to, tell it,
+that’s her affair.”
+
+“She would have had to tell it, sooner or later, Mrs. Westangle would;
+and she only told it to Miss Macroyd this afternoon on compulsion, after
+Miss Macroyd and I had seen you in the wood-road, and Mrs. Westangle
+had to account for the young lady’s presence there in your company.
+Then Miss Macroyd had to tell me; but I assure you, my dear fellow, the
+matter hasn’t gone any further.”
+
+“Oh, it’s quite indifferent to me,” Verrian retorted. “I’m nothing but a
+dispassionate witness of the situation.”
+
+“Of course,” Bushwick assented, and then he added, with a bonhomie
+really so amiable that a man with even an unreasonable grudge could
+hardly resist it, “If you call it dispassionate.”
+
+Verrian could not help laughing. “Well, passionate, then. I don’t know
+why it should be so confoundedly vexatious. But somehow I would have
+chosen Miss Macroyd--Is she specially dear to you?”
+
+“Not the least!”
+
+“I would have chosen her as the last person to have the business, which
+is so inexpressibly none of my business--”
+
+“Or mine, as I think you remarked,” Bushwick interposed.
+
+“Come out through,” Verrian concluded, accepting his interposition with
+a bow.
+
+“I see what you mean,” Bushwick said, after a moment’s thought. “But,
+really, I don’t think it’s likely to go further. If you want to know,
+I believe Miss Macroyd feels the distinction of being in the secret
+so much that she’ll prefer to hint round till Mrs. Westangle gives the
+thing away. She had to tell me, because I was there with her when she
+saw you with the young lady, to keep me from going with my curiosity to
+you. Come, I do think she’s honest about it.”
+
+“Don’t you think they’re rather more dangerous when they’re honest?”
+
+“Well, only when they’re obliged to be. Cheer up! I don’t believe Miss
+Macroyd is one to spoil sport.”
+
+“Oh, I think I shall live through it,” Verrian said, rather stiffening
+again. But he relaxed, in rising from his chair, and said, “Well,
+good-night, old fellow. I believe I shall go to bed now.”
+
+“You won’t wait for me till my pipe’s out?”
+
+“No, I think not. I seem to be just making it, and if I waited I might
+lose my grip.” He offered Bushwick a friendly hand.
+
+“Do you suppose it’s been my soothing conversation? I’m like the actor
+that the doctor advised to go and see himself act. I can’t talk myself
+sleepy.”
+
+“You might try it,” Verrian said, going out.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+The men who had talked of going away on Thursday seemed to have found
+it practicable to stay. At any rate, they were all there on the Saturday
+night for the ghost-seeing, and, of course, none of the women had gone.
+What was more remarkable, in a house rather full of girls, nobody was
+sick; or, at least, everybody was well enough to be at dinner, and,
+after dinner, at the dance, which impatiently, if a little ironically,
+preceded the supernatural part of the evening’s amusement. It was the
+decorum of a woman who might have been expected not to have it that Mrs.
+Westangle had arranged that the evening’s amusement should not pass the
+bound between Saturday night and Sunday morning. The supper was to be
+later, but that was like other eating and drinking on the Sabbath; and
+it was to be a cold supper.
+
+At half-past ten the dancing stopped in the foyer and the drawing-room,
+and by eleven the guests were all seated fronting the closed doors of
+the library. There were not so many of them but that in the handsome
+space there was interval enough to lend a desired distance to the
+apparitions; and when the doors were slid aside it was applausively
+found that there was a veil of gauze falling from the roof to the floor,
+which promised its aid in heightening the coming mystery. This was again
+heightened by the universal ignorance as to how the apparitions were to
+make their advents and on what terms.
+
+It was with an access of a certain nervous anxiety that Verrian found
+himself next Miss Macroyd, whose frank good-fellowship first expressed
+itself in a pleasure at the chance which he did not share, and then
+extended to a confidential sympathy for the success of the enterprise
+which he did not believe she felt. She laughed, but ‘sotto voce’, in
+bending her head close to his and whispering, “I hope she’ll be equal
+to her ‘mise en scene’. It’s really very nice. So simple.” Besides the
+gauze veil, there was no preparation except in the stretch of black
+drapery which hid the book-shelves at the farther wall of the library.
+
+“Mrs. Westangle’s note is always simplicity,” Verrian returned.
+
+“Oh yes, indeed! And you wish to keep up the Westangle convention?”
+
+“I don’t see any reason for dropping it.”
+
+“Oh, none in the world,” she mocked.
+
+He determined to push her, since she had tried to push him, and he
+asked, “What reason could there be?”
+
+“Now, Mr. Verrian, asking a woman for a reason! I shall begin to think
+some one else wrote your book, too! Perhaps she’ll take up supplying
+ideas to authors as well as hostesses. Of course, I mean Mrs.
+Westangle.”
+
+Verrian wished he had not tried to push Miss Macroyd, and he was still
+grinding his teeth in a vain endeavor to get out some fit retort between
+them, when he saw Bushwick shuffling to his feet, in the front row of
+the spectators, and heard him beginning a sort of speech.
+
+“Ladies and gentlemen: Mrs. Westangle has chosen me, because a
+real-estate broker is sometimes an auctioneer, and may be supposed to
+have the gift of oratory, to make known the conditions on which you may
+interview the ghosts which you are going to see. Anybody may do it who
+will comply with the conditions. In the first place, you have got to be
+serious, and to think up something that you would really like to know
+about your past, present, or future. Remember, this is no joking matter,
+and the only difference between the ghost that you will see here and a
+real materialization under professional auspices is that the ghost won’t
+charge you anything. Of course, if any lady or gentleman--especially
+lady--wishes to contribute to any charitable object, after a
+satisfactory interview with the ghost, a hat will be found at the
+hall-door for the purpose, and Mrs. Westangle will choose the object:
+I have put in a special plea for my own firm, at a season when the
+real-estate business is not at its best.” By this time Bushwick had his
+audience laughing, perhaps the more easily because they were all more
+or less in a hysterical mood, which, whether we own it or not, is always
+induced by an approximation to the supernatural. He frowned and said,
+“NO laughing!” and then they laughed the more. When he had waited for
+them to be quiet he went on gravely, “The conditions are simply these:
+Each person who chooses may interview the ghost, keeping a respectful
+distance, but not so far off but that the ghost can distinctly hear a
+stage whisper. The question put must be seriously meant, and it must be
+the question which the questioner would prefer to have answered above
+everything else at the time being. Certain questions will be absolutely
+ruled out, such as, ‘Does Maria love me?’ or, ‘Has Reuben ever been
+engaged before?’ The laughter interrupted the speaker again, and Verrian
+hung his head in rage and shame; this stupid ass was spoiling the hope
+of anything beautiful in the spectacle and turning it into a gross
+burlesque. Somehow he felt that the girl who had invented it had meant,
+in the last analysis, something serious, and it was in her behalf that
+he would have liked to choke Bushwick. All the time he believed that
+Miss Macroyd, whose laugh sounded above the others, was somehow enjoying
+his indignation and divining its reason.
+
+“Other questions, touching intemperance or divorce, the questioner will
+feel must not be asked; though it isn’t necessary to more than suggest
+this, I hope; it will be left entirely to the good taste and good
+feeling of the--party. We all know what the temptations of South Dakota
+and the rum fiend are, and that to err is human, and forgive divine.”
+ He paused, having failed to get a laugh, but got it by asking,
+confidentially, “Where was I? Oh!”--he caught himself up--“I remember.
+Those of you who are in the habit of seeing ghosts need not be told that
+a ghost never speaks first; and those who have never met an apparition
+before, but are in the habit of going to the theatre, will recall the
+fact that in W. Shakespeare’s beautiful play of ‘Hamlet’ the play could
+not have gone on after the first scene if Horatio had not spoken to the
+ghost of Hamlet’s father and taken the chances of being snubbed. Here
+there are no chances of that kind; the chances are that you’ll wish the
+ghost had not been entreated: I think that is the phrase.”
+
+In the laugh that followed a girl on Miss Macroyd’s other hand audibly
+asked her, “Oh, isn’t he too funny?”
+
+“Delicious!” Miss Macroyd agreed. Verrian felt she said it to vex him.
+
+“Now, there’s just one other point,” Bushwick resumed, “and then I
+have done. Only one question can be allowed to each person, but if the
+questioner is a lady she can ask a question and a half, provided she is
+not satisfied with the answer. In this case, however, she will only get
+half an answer. Now I have done, and if my arguments have convinced any
+one within the sound of my voice that our ghost really means business,
+I shall feel fully repaid for the pains and expense of getting up these
+few impromptu remarks, to which I have endeavored to give a humorous
+character, in order that you may all laugh your laugh out, and no
+unseemly mirth may interrupt the subsequent proceedings. We will now
+have a little music, and those who can recall my words will be allowed
+to sing them.”
+
+In the giggling and chatter which ensued the chords softly played passed
+into ears that might as well have been deaf; but at last there was
+a general quiescence of expectation, in which every one’s eyes were
+strained to pierce through the gauze curtain to the sombre drapery
+beyond. The wait was so long that the tension relaxed and a whispering
+began, and Verrian felt a sickness of pity for the girl who was probably
+going to make a failure of it. He asked himself what could have happened
+to her. Had she lost courage? Or had her physical strength, not yet
+fully renewed, given way under the stress? Or had she, in sheer disgust
+for the turn the affair had been given by that brute Bushwick, thrown
+up the whole business? He looked round for Mrs. Westangle; she was not
+there; he conjectured--he could only conjecture--that she was absent
+conferring with Miss Shirley and trying to save the day.
+
+A long, deeply sighed “Oh-h-h-h!” shuddering from many lips made him
+turn abruptly, and he saw, glimmering against the pall at the bottom of
+the darkened library, a figure vaguely white, in which he recognized a
+pose, a gesture familiar to him. For the others the figure was It, but
+for him it was preciously She. It was she, and she was going to carry it
+through; she was going to triumph, and not fail. A lump came into his 96
+throat, and a mist blurred his eyes, which, when it cleared again, left
+him staring at nothing.
+
+A girl’s young voice uttered the common feeling, “Why, is that all?”
+
+“It is, till some one asks the ghost a question; then it will reappear,”
+ Bushwick rose to say. “Will Miss Andrews kindly step forward and ask the
+question nearest her heart?”
+
+“Oh no!” the girl answered, with a sincerity that left no one quite free
+to laugh.
+
+“Some other lady, then?” Bushwick suggested. No one moved, and he added,
+“This is a difficulty which had been foreseen. Some gentleman will step
+forward and put the question next his heart.” Again no one offered to
+go forward, and there was some muted laughter, which Bushwick checked.
+“This difficulty had been foreseen, too. I see that I shall have to make
+the first move, and all that I shall require of the audience is that I
+shall not be supposed to be in collusion with the illusion. I hope that
+after my experience, whatever it is, some young woman of courage will
+follow.”
+
+He passed into the foyer, and from that came into the library, where he
+showed against the dark background in an attitude of entreaty slightly
+burlesqued. The ghost reappeared.
+
+“Shall I marry the woman I am thinking of?” he asked.
+
+The phantom seemed to hesitate; it wavered like a pale reflection cast
+against the pall. Then, in the tones which Verrian knew, the answer
+came:
+
+“Ask her. She will tell you.”
+
+The phantom had scored a hit, and the applause was silenced with
+difficulty; but Verrian felt that Miss Shirley had lost ground. It could
+not have been for the easy cleverness of such a retort that she had
+planned the affair. Yet, why not? He was taking it too seriously. It was
+merely business with her.
+
+“And I haven’t even the right to half a question more!” Bushwick
+lamented, in a dramatized dejection, and crossed slowly back from the
+library to his place.
+
+“Why, haven’t you got enough?” one of the men asked, amidst the gay
+clamor of the women.
+
+The ghost was gone again, and its evanescence was discussed with ready
+wonder. Another of the men went round to tempt his fate, and the phantom
+suddenly reappeared so near him that he got a laugh by his start of
+dismay. “I forgot what I was going to ask, he faltered.
+
+“I know what it was,” the apparition answered. “You had better sell.”
+
+“But they say it will go to a hundred!” the man protested.
+
+“No back--talk, Rogers!” Bushwick interposed. “That was the
+understanding.
+
+“But we didn’t understand,” one of the girls said, coming to the rescue,
+“that the ghost was going to answer questions that were not asked. That
+would give us all away.”
+
+“Then the only thing is for you to go and ask before it gets a chance to
+answer,” Bushwick said.
+
+“Well, I will,” the girl returned. And she swept round into the library,
+where she encountered the phantom with a little whoop as it started
+into sight before her. “I’m not going to be scared out of it!” she said,
+defiantly. “It’s simply this: Did the person I suspect really take the
+ring.”
+
+The answer came, “Look on the floor under your dressing-table!”
+
+“Well, if I find it there,” the girl addressed the company, “I’m a
+spiritualist from this time forth.” And she came back to her place,
+where she remained for some time explaining to those near how she had
+lately lost her ring and suspected her maid, whom she had dismissed.
+
+Upon the whole, the effect was serious. The women, having once started,
+needed no more urging. One after another they confronted and questioned
+the oracle with increasing sincerity.
+
+Miss Macroyd asked Verrian, “Hadn’t you better take your chance and stop
+this flow of fatuity, Mr. Verrian?”
+
+“I’m afraid I should be fatuous, too,” he said. “But you?”
+
+“Oh, thank you, I don’t believe in ghosts, though this seems to be a
+very pretty one--very graceful, I mean. I suppose a graceful woman would
+be graceful even when a disembodied spirit. I should think she would be
+getting a little tried with all this questioning; but perhaps we’re only
+reading the fatigue into her. The ghost may be merely overdone.”
+
+“It might easily be that,” Verrian assented.
+
+“Oh, may I ask it something now?” a girl’s voice appealed to Bushwick.
+It was the voice of that Miss Andrews who had spoken first, and first
+refused to question the ghost. She was the youngest of Mrs. Westangle’s
+guests, and Verrian had liked her, with a sense of something precious in
+the prolongation of a child’s unconsciousness into the consciousness of
+girlhood which he found in her. She was always likelier than not to
+say the thing she thought and felt, whether it was silly and absurd, or
+whether, as also happened, there was a touch of inspired significance in
+it, as there is apt to be in the talk of children. She was laughed at,
+but she was liked, and the freshness of her soul was pleasant to the
+girls who were putting on the world as hard as they could. She could be
+trusted to do and say the unexpected. But she was considered a little
+morbid, and certainly she had an exaltation of the nerves that was at
+times almost beyond her control.
+
+“Oh, dear!” Miss Macroyd whispered. “What is that strange simpleton
+going to do, I wonder?”
+
+Verrian did not feel obliged to answer a question not addressed to him,
+but he, too, wondered and doubted.
+
+The girl, having got her courage together, fluttered with it from her
+place round to the ghost’s in a haste that expressed a fear that it
+might escape her if she delayed to put it to the test. The phantom was
+already there, as if it had waited her in the curiosity that followed
+her. They were taking each other seriously, the girl and the ghost,
+and if the ghost had been a veridical phantom, in which she could have
+believed with her whole soul, the girl could not have entreated it more
+earnestly, more simply.
+
+She bent forward, in her slim, tall figure, with her hands outstretched,
+and with her tender voice breaking at times in her entreaty. “Oh, I
+don’t know how to begin,” she said, quite as if she and the phantom were
+alone together, and she had forgotten its supernatural awfulness in a
+sense of its human quality. “But you will understand, won’t you! You’ll
+think it very strange, and it is very unlike the others; but if I’m
+going to be serious--”
+
+The white figure stood motionless; but Verrian interpreted its quiet
+as a kindly intelligence, and the girl made a fresh start in a note
+a little more piteous than before. “It’s about the--the truth. Do you
+think if sometimes we don’t tell it exactly, but we wish we had very,
+very much, it will come round somehow the same as if we had told it?”
+
+“I don’t understand,” the phantom answered. “Say it again--or
+differently.”
+
+“Can our repentance undo it, or make the falsehood over into the truth?”
+
+“Never!” the ghost answered, with a passion that thrilled to Verrian’s
+heart.
+
+“Oh, dear!” the girl said; and then, as if she had been going to
+continue, she stopped.
+
+“You’ve still got your half-question, Miss Andrews,” Bushwick
+interposed.
+
+“Even if we didn’t mean it to deceive harmfully?” the girl pursued.
+“If it was just on impulse, something we couldn’t seem to help, and we
+didn’t see it in its true light at the time--”
+
+The ghost made no answer. It stood motionless.
+
+“It is offended,” Bushwick said, without knowing the Shakespearian
+words. “You’ve asked it three times half a question, Miss Andrews.
+Now, Mr. Verrian, it’s your turn. You can ask it just one-quarter of a
+question. Miss Andrews has used up the rest of your share.”
+
+Verrian rose awkwardly and stood a long moment before his chair. Then
+he dropped back again, saying, dryly, “I don’t think I want to ask it
+anything.”
+
+The phantom sank straight down as if sinking through the floor, but lay
+there like a white shawl trailed along the bottom of the dark curtain.
+
+“And is that all?” Miss Macroyd asked Verrian. “I was just getting up my
+courage to go forward. But now, I suppose--”
+
+“Oh, dear!” Miss Andrews called out. “Perhaps it’s fainted. Hadn’t we
+better--”
+
+There were formless cries from the women, and the men made a crooked
+rush forward, in which Verrian did not join. He remained where he had
+risen, with Miss Macroyd beside him.
+
+“Perhaps it’s only a coup de theatre!” she said, with her laugh. “Better
+wait.”
+
+Bushwick was gathering the prostrate figure up. “She has fainted!” he
+called. “Get some water, somebody!”
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+The early Monday morning train which brought Verrian up to town was so
+very early that he could sit down to breakfast with his mother only a
+little later than their usual hour.
+
+She had called joyfully to him from her room, when she heard the
+rattling of his key as he let himself into the apartment, and, after
+an exchange of greetings, shouted back and forth before they saw each
+other, they could come at once to the history of his absence over their
+coffee. “You must have had a very good time, to stay so long. After
+you wrote that you would not be back Thursday, I expected it would
+be Saturday till I got your telegram. But I’m glad you stayed. You
+certainly needed the rest.”
+
+“Yes, if those things are ever a rest.” He looked down at his cup while
+he stirred the coffee in it, and she studied his attitude, since she
+could not see his face fully, for the secret of any vital change that
+might have come upon him. It could be that in the interval since she
+had seen him he had seen the woman who was to take him from her. She was
+always preparing herself for that, knowing that it must come almost as
+certainly as death, and knowing that with all her preparation she should
+not be ready for it. “I’ve got rather a long story to tell you and
+rather a strange story,” he said, lifting his head and looking round,
+but not so impersonally that his mother did not know well enough to say
+to the Swedish serving-woman:
+
+“You needn’t stay, Margit. I’ll give Mr. Philip his breakfast. Well!”
+ she added, when they were alone.
+
+“Well,” he returned, with a smile that she knew he was forcing, “I have
+seen the girl that wrote that letter.”
+
+“Not Jerusha Brown?”
+
+“Not Jerusha Brown, but the girl all the same.”
+
+“Now go on, Philip, and don’t miss a single word!” she commanded
+him, with an imperious breathlessness. “You know I won’t hurry you or
+interrupt you, but you must--you really must-tell me everything. Don’t
+leave out the slightest detail.”
+
+“I won’t,” he said. But she was aware, from time to time, that she
+was keeping her word better than he was keeping his, in his account of
+meeting Miss Shirley and all the following events.
+
+“You can imagine,” he said, “what a sensation the swooning made, and the
+commotion that followed it.”
+
+“Yes, I can imagine that,” she answered. But she was yet so faithful
+that she would not ask him to go on.
+
+He continued, unasked, “I don’t know just how, now, to account for
+its coming into my head that it was Miss Andrews who was my unknown
+correspondent. I suppose I’ve always unconsciously expected to meet
+that girl, and Miss Andrews’s hypothetical case was psychologically so
+parallel--”
+
+“Yes, yes!”
+
+“And I’ve sometimes been afraid that I judged it too harshly--that it
+was a mere girlish freak without any sort of serious import.”
+
+“I was sometimes afraid so, Philip. But--”
+
+“And I don’t believe now that the hypothetical case brought any
+intolerable stress of conscience upon Miss Shirley, or that she fainted
+from any cause but exhaustion from the general ordeal. She was still
+weak from the sickness she had been through--too weak to bear the strain
+of the work she had taken up. Of course, the catastrophe gave the whole
+surface situation away, and I must say that those rather banal young
+people behaved very humanely about it. There was nothing but interest
+of the nicest kind, and, if she is going on with her career, it will be
+easy enough for her to find engagements after this.”
+
+“Why shouldn’t she go on?” his mother asked, with a suspicion which she
+kept well out of sight.
+
+“Well, as well as she could explain afterwards, the catastrophe took
+her work out of the category of business and made her acceptance in it a
+matter of sentiment.”
+
+“She explained it to you herself?”
+
+“Yes, the general sympathy had penetrated to Mrs. Westangle, though I
+don’t say that she had been more than negatively indifferent to Miss
+Shirley’s claim on her before. As it was, she sent for me to her room
+the next morning, and I found Miss Shirley alone there. She said Mrs.
+Westangle would be down in a moment.”
+
+Now, indeed, Mrs. Verrian could not govern herself from saying, “I don’t
+like it, Philip.”
+
+“I knew you wouldn’t. It was what I said to myself at the time. You
+were so present with me that I seemed to have you there chaperoning the
+interview.” His mother shrugged, and he went on: “She said she wished
+to tell me something first, and then she said, ‘I want to do it while I
+have the courage, if it’s courage; perhaps it’s just desperation. I am
+Jerusha Brown.’”
+
+His mother began, “But you said--” and then stopped herself.
+
+“I know that I said she wasn’t, but she explained, while I sat there
+rather mum, that there was really another girl, and that the other
+girl’s name was really Jerusha Brown. She was the daughter of the
+postmaster in the village where Miss Shirley was passing the summer.
+In fact, Miss Shirley was boarding in the postmaster’s family, and the
+girls had become very friendly. They were reading my story together, and
+talking about it, and trying to guess how it would come out, just as the
+letter said, and they simultaneously hit upon the notion of writing to
+me. It seemed to them that it would be a good joke--I’m not defending
+it, mother, and I must say Miss Shirley didn’t defend it, either--to
+work upon my feelings in the way they tried, and they didn’t realize
+what they had done till Armiger’s letter came. It almost drove them
+wild, she said; but they had a lucid interval, and they took the letter
+to the girl’s father and told him what they had done. He was awfully
+severe with them for their foolishness, and said they must write to
+Armiger at once and confess the fact. Then they said they had written
+already, and showed him the second letter, and explained they had
+decided to let Miss Brawn write it in her person alone for the reason
+she gave in it. But Miss Shirley told him she was ready to take her full
+share of the blame, and, if anything came of it, she authorized him to
+put the whole blame on her.”
+
+Verrian made a pause which his mother took for invitation or permission
+to ask, “And was he satisfied with that?”
+
+“I don’t know. I wasn’t, and it’s only just to Miss Shirley to say that
+she wasn’t, either. She didn’t try to justify it to me; she merely said
+she was so frightened that she couldn’t have done anything. She may have
+realized more than the Brown girl what they had done.”
+
+“The postmaster, did he regard it as anything worse than foolishness?”
+
+“I don’t believe he did. At any rate, he was satisfied with what his
+daughter had done in owning up.”
+
+“Well, I always liked that girl’s letter. And did they show him your
+letter?”
+
+“It seems that they did.”
+
+“And what did he say about that?”
+
+“I suppose, what I deserved. Miss Shirley wouldn’t say, explicitly.
+He wanted to answer it, but they wouldn’t let him. I don’t know but I
+should feel better if he had. I haven’t been proud of that letter
+of mine as time has gone on, mother; I think I behaved very
+narrow-mindedly, very personally in it.”
+
+“You behaved justly.”
+
+“Justly? I thought you had your doubts of that. At any rate, I had when
+it came to hearing the girl accusing herself as if she had been guilty
+of some monstrous wickedness, and I realized that I had made her feel
+so.”
+
+“She threw herself on your pity!”
+
+“No, she didn’t, mother. Don’t make it impossible for me to tell you
+just how it was.”
+
+“I won’t. Go on.”
+
+“I don’t say she was manly about it; that couldn’t be, but she was
+certainly not throwing herself on my pity, unless--unless--”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Unless you call it so for her to say that she wanted to own up to me,
+because she could have no rest till she had done so; she couldn’t put it
+behind her till she had acknowledged it; she couldn’t work; she couldn’t
+get well.”
+
+He saw his mother trying to consider it fairly, and in response he
+renewed his own resolution not to make himself the girl’s advocate with
+her, but to continue the dispassionate historian of the case. At the
+same time his memory was filled with the vision of how she had done and
+said the things he was telling, with what pathos, with what grace, with
+what beauty in her appeal. He saw the tears that came into her eyes
+at times and that she indignantly repressed as she hurried on in the
+confession which she was voluntarily making, for there was no outward
+stress upon her to say anything. He felt again the charm of the
+situation, the sort of warmth and intimacy, but he resolved not to let
+that feeling offset the impartiality of his story.
+
+“No, I don’t say she threw herself on your mercy,” his mother said,
+finally. “She needn’t have told you anything.”
+
+“Except for the reason she gave--that she couldn’t make a start for
+herself till she had done so. And she has got her own way to make; she
+is poor. Of course, you may say her motive was an obsession, and not a
+reason.”
+
+“There’s reality in it, whatever it is; it’s a genuine motive,” Mrs.
+Verrian conceded.
+
+“I think so,” Verrian said, in a voice which he tried to keep from
+sounding too grateful.
+
+Apparently his mother did not find it so. She asked, “What had been the
+matter with her, did she say?”
+
+“In her long sickness? Oh! A nervous fever of some sort.”
+
+“From worrying about that experience?”
+
+Verrian reluctantly admitted, “She said it made her want to die. I don’t
+suppose we can quite realize--”
+
+“We needn’t believe everything she said to realize that she suffered.
+But girls exaggerate their sufferings. I suppose you told her not to
+think of it any more?”
+
+Verrian gave an odd laugh. “Well, not unconditionally. I tried to give
+her my point of view. And I stipulated that she should tell Jerusha
+Brown all about it, and keep her from having a nervous fever, too.”
+
+“That was right. You must see that even cowardice couldn’t excuse her
+selfishness in letting that girl take all the chances.”
+
+“And I’m afraid I was not very unselfish myself in my stipulations,”
+ Verrian said, with another laugh. “I think that I wanted to stand well
+with the postmaster.”
+
+There was a note of cynical ease in this which Mrs. Verrian found
+morally some octaves lower than the pitch of her son’s habitual
+seriousness in what concerned himself, but she could not make it a
+censure to him. “And you were able to reassure her, so that she needn’t
+think of it any more?”
+
+“What would you have wished me to do?” he returned, dryly. “Don’t you
+think she had suffered enough?”
+
+“Oh, in this sort of thing it doesn’t seem the question of suffering. If
+there’s wrong done the penalty doesn’t right it.”
+
+The notion struck Verrian’s artistic sense. “That’s true. That would
+make the ‘donnee’ of a strong story. Or a play. It’s a drama of fate.
+It’s Greek. But I thought we lived under another dispensation.”
+
+“Will she try to get more of the kind of thing she was doing for Mrs.
+Westangle at once? Or has she some people?”
+
+“No; only friends, as I understand.”
+
+“Where is she from? Up country?”
+
+“No, she’s from the South.”
+
+“I don’t like Southerners!”
+
+“I know you don’t, mother. But you must honor the way they work and get
+on when they come North and begin doing for themselves. Besides, Miss
+Shirley’s family went South after the war--”
+
+“Oh, not even a REAL Southerner!”
+
+“Mother!”
+
+“I know! I’m not fair. I ought to beg her pardon. And I ought to be glad
+it’s all over. Shall you see her again?”
+
+“It might happen. But I don’t know how or when. We parted friends,
+but we parted strangers, so far as any prevision of the future is
+concerned,” Verrian said.
+
+His mother drew a long breath, which she tried to render inaudible. “And
+the girl that asked her the strange questions, did you see her again?”
+
+“Oh yes. She had a curious fascination. I should like to tell you about
+her. Do you think there’s such a thing as a girl’s being too innocent?”
+
+“It isn’t so common as not being innocent enough.”
+
+“But it’s more difficult?”
+
+“I hope you’ll never find it so, my son,” Mrs. Verrian said. And for the
+first time she was intentionally personal. “Go on.”
+
+“About Miss Andrews?”
+
+“Whichever you please.”
+
+“She waylaid me in the afternoon, as I was coming home from a walk, and
+wanted to talk with me about Miss Shirley.”
+
+“I suppose Miss Shirley was the day’s heroine after what had happened?”
+
+“The half-day’s, or quarter-day’s heroine, perhaps. She left on the
+church train for town yesterday morning soon after I saw her. Miss
+Andrews seemed to think I was an authority on the subject, and she
+approached me with a large-eyed awe that was very amusing, though it was
+affecting, too. I suppose that girls must have many worships for
+other girls before they have any worship for a man. This girl couldn’t
+separate Miss Shirley, on the lookout for another engagement, from the
+psychical part she had played. She raved about her; she thought she was
+beautiful, and she wanted to know all about her and how she could help
+her. Miss Andrews’s parents are rich but respectable, I understand, and
+she’s an only child. I came in for a share of her awe; she had found
+out that I was not only not Verrian the actor, but an author of the same
+name, and she had read my story with passionate interest, but apparently
+in that unliterary way of many people without noticing who wrote it; she
+seemed to have thought it was Harding Davis or Henry James; she wasn’t
+clear which. But it was a good deal to have had her read it at all in
+that house; I don’t believe anybody else had, except Miss Shirley and
+Miss Macroyd.”
+
+Mrs. Verrian deferred a matter that would ordinarily have interested
+her supremely to an immediate curiosity. “And how came she to think you
+would know so much about Miss Shirley?”
+
+Verrian frowned. “I think from Miss Macroyd. Miss Macroyd seems to have
+taken a grandmotherly concern in my affairs through the whole week.
+Perhaps she resented having behaved so piggishly at the station the day
+we came, and meant to take it out of Miss Shirley and myself. She had
+seen us together in the woods, one day, and she must have told it about.
+Mrs. Westangle wouldn’t have spoken of us together, because she never
+speaks of anything unless it is going to count; and there was no one
+else who knew of our acquaintance.”
+
+“Why, my son, if you went walking in the woods with the girl, any one
+might have seen you.”
+
+“I didn’t. It was quite by accident that we met there. Miss Shirley was
+anxious to keep her presence in the house a secret from everybody.”
+
+Mrs. Verrian would not take any but the open way, with this. She
+would not deal indirectly, with it, or in any wise covertly or
+surreptitiously. “It seems to me that Miss Shirley has rather a fondness
+for secrecy,” she said.
+
+“I think she has,” Verrian admitted. “Though, in this case, it was
+essential to the success of her final scheme. But she is a curious
+study. I suppose that timidity is at the bottom of all fondness for
+secrecy, isn’t it?”
+
+“I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to be timid in everything.”
+
+“Say it out, mother!” Verrian challenged her with a smile. “You’re not
+timid, anyway!”
+
+“She had the courage to join in that letter, but not the courage to own
+her part in it. She was brave enough to confess that she had been sick
+of a nervous fever from the answer you wrote to the Brown girl, but she
+wouldn’t have been brave enough to confess anything at all if she had
+believed she would be physically or morally strong enough to keep it.”
+
+“Perhaps nobody--nobody but you, mother--is brave in the right time and
+place.”
+
+She knew that this was not meant in irony. “I am glad you say that,
+Philip.”
+
+“It’s only your due. But aren’t you a little too hard upon cowards, at
+times? For the sort of person she is, if you infer the sort from the
+worst appearance she has made in the whole business, I think she has
+done pretty well.”
+
+“Why had she left the Brown girl to take all your resentment alone for
+the last six or eight months?”
+
+“She may have thought that she was getting her share of the punishment
+in the fever my resentment brought on?”
+
+“Philip, do you really believe that her fever, if she had one, came from
+that?”
+
+“I think she believes it, and there’s no doubt but she was badly
+scared.”
+
+“Oh, there’s no doubt of that!”
+
+“But come, mother, why should we take her at the worst? Of course, she
+has a complex nature. I see that as clearly as you do. I don’t believe
+we look at her diversely, in the smallest particular. But why shouldn’t
+a complex nature be credited with the same impulses towards the truth as
+a single nature? Why shouldn’t we allow that Miss Shirley had the same
+wish to set herself right with me as Miss Andrews would have had in her
+place?”
+
+“I dare say she wished to set herself right with you, but not from the
+same wish that Miss Andrews would have had. Miss Andrews would not have
+wished you to know the truth for her own sake. Her motive would have
+been direct-straight.”
+
+“Yes; and we will describe her as a straight line, and Miss Shirley as a
+waving line. Why shouldn’t the waving line, at its highest points, touch
+the same altitude as the straight line?”
+
+“It wouldn’t touch it all the time, and in character, or nature, as you
+call it, that is the great thing. It’s at the lowest points that the
+waving line is dangerous.”
+
+“Well, I don’t deny that. But I’m anxious to be just to a person who
+hasn’t experienced a great deal of mercy for what, after all, wasn’t
+such a very heinous thing as I used to think it. You must allow that she
+wasn’t obliged to tell me anything about herself.”
+
+“Yes, she was, Philip. As I said before, she hadn’t the physical or
+moral strength to keep it from you when she was brought face to face
+with you. Besides--” Mrs. Verrian hesitated.
+
+“Out with it, mother! We, at least, won’t have any concealments.”
+
+“She may have thought, she could clinch it in that way.”
+
+“Clinch what?”
+
+“You know. Is she pretty?”
+
+“She’s--interesting.”
+
+“That can always be managed. Is she tall?”
+
+“NO, I think she’s rather out of style there; she’s rather petite.”
+
+“And what’s her face like?”
+
+“Well, she has no particular complexion, but it’s not thick. Her eyes
+are the best of her, though there isn’t much of them. They’re the
+‘waters on a starry night’ sort, very sweet and glimmering. She has a
+kind of ground-colored hair and a nice little chin. Her mouth helps her
+eyes out; it looks best when she speaks; it’s pathetic in the play of
+the lips.”
+
+“I see,” Mrs. Verrian said.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+The following week Verrian and his mother were at a show of paintings,
+in the gallery at the rear of a dealer’s shop, and while they were
+bending together to look at a picture he heard himself called to in a
+girlish voice, “Oh, Mr. Verrian!” as if his being there was the greatest
+wonder in the world.
+
+His mother and he lifted themselves to encounter a tall, slim girl, who
+was stretching her hand towards him, and who now cried out, joyously,
+“Oh, Mr. Verrian, I thought it must be you, but I was afraid it wasn’t
+as soon as I spoke. Oh, I’m so glad to see you; I want so much to have
+you know my mother--Mr. Verrian,” she said, presenting him.
+
+“And I you mine,” Verrian responded, in a violent ellipse, and
+introduced his own mother, who took in the fact of Miss Andrews’s tall
+thinness, topped with a wide, white hat and waving white plumes, and her
+little face, irregular and somewhat gaunt, but with a charm in the lips
+and eyes which took the elder woman’s heart with pathos. She made talk
+with Mrs. Andrews, who affected one as having the materials of social
+severity in her costume and manner.
+
+“Oh, I didn’t believe I should ever see you again,” the girl broke
+out impulsively upon Verrian. “Oh, I wanted to ask you so about Miss
+Shirley. Have you seen her since you got back?”
+
+“No,” Verrian said, “I haven’t seen her.”
+
+“Oh, I thought perhaps you had. I’ve been to the address that Mrs.
+Westangle gave me, but she isn’t there any more; she’s gone up into
+Harlem somewhere, and I haven’t been able to call again. Oh, I do feel
+so anxious about her. Oh, I do hope she isn’t ill. Do you think she is?”
+
+“I don’t believe so,” Verrian began. But she swept over his prostrate
+remark.
+
+“Oh, Mr. Verrian, don’t you think she’s wonderful? I’ve been telling
+mother about it, and I don’t feel at all the way she does. Do you?”
+
+“How does she feel? I must know that before I say.”
+
+“Why, of course! I hadn’t told you! She thinks it was a make-up between
+Miss Shirley and that Mr. Bushwick. But I say it couldn’t have been. Do
+you think it could?”
+
+Verrian found the suggestion so distasteful, for a reason which he did
+not quite seize himself, that he answered, resentfully, “It could have
+been, but I don’t think it was.”
+
+“I will tell her what you say. Oh, may I tell her what you say?”
+
+“I don’t see why you shouldn’t. It isn’t very important, either way, is
+it?”
+
+“Oh, don’t you think so? Not if it involved pretending what wasn’t
+true?”
+
+She bent towards him in such anxious demand that he could not help
+smiling.
+
+“The whole thing was a pretence, wasn’t it?” he suggested.
+
+“Yes, but that would have been a pretence that we didn’t know of.”
+
+“It would be incriminating to that extent, certainly,” Verrian owned,
+ironically. He found the question of Miss Shirley’s blame for the
+collusion as distasteful as the supposition of the collusion, but there
+was a fascination in the innocence before him, and he could not help
+playing with it.
+
+Sometimes Miss Andrews apparently knew that he was playing with her
+innocence, and sometimes she did not. But in either case she seemed
+to like being his jest, from which she snatched a fearful joy. She was
+willing to prolong the experience, and she drifted with him from picture
+to picture, and kept the talk recurrently to Miss Shirley and the
+phenomena of Seeing Ghosts.
+
+Her mother and Mrs. Verrian evidently got on together better than either
+of them at first expected. When it came to their parting, through Mrs.
+Andrews’s saying that she must be going, she shook hands with Mrs.
+Verrian and said to Philip, “I am so glad to have met you, Mr. Verrian.
+Will you come and see us?”
+
+“Yes, thank you,” he answered, taking the hand she now offered him,
+and then taking Miss Andrews’s hand, while the girl’s eyes glowed with
+pleasure. “I shall be very glad.”
+
+“Oh, shall you?” she said, with her transparent sincerity. “And you
+won’t forget Thursdays! But any day at five we have tea.”
+
+“Thank you,” Verrian said. “I might forget the Thursdays, but I couldn’t
+forget all the days of the week.”
+
+Miss Andrews laughed and blushed at once. “Then we shall expect you
+every day.”
+
+“Well, every day but Thursday,” he promised.
+
+When the mother and daughter had gone Mrs. Verrian said, “She is a great
+admirer of yours, Philip. She’s read your story, and I suspect she wants
+an opportunity to talk with you about it.”
+
+“You mean Mrs. Andrews?”
+
+“Yes. I suppose the daughter hasn’t waited for an opportunity. The
+mother had read that publisher’s paragraph about your invalid, and
+wanted to know if you had ever heard from her again. Women are personal
+in their literary interests.”
+
+Philip asked, in dismay, “You didn’t give it away did you, mother?”
+
+“Certainly not, my dear. You have brought me up too carefully.”
+
+“Of course. I didn’t imagine you had.”
+
+Then, as they could not pretend to look at the pictures any longer, they
+went away, too. Their issue into the open air seemed fraught with novel
+emotion for Mrs. Verrian. “Well, now,” she said, “I have seen the woman
+I would be willing my son should marry.”
+
+“Child, you mean,” Philip said, not pretending that he did not know she
+meant Miss Andrews.
+
+“That girl,” his mother returned, “is innocence itself. Oh, Philip,
+dear, do marry her!”
+
+“Well, I don’t know. If her mother is behaving as sagely with her as you
+are with me the chances are that she won’t let me. Besides, I don’t know
+that I want to marry quite so much innocence.”
+
+“She is conscience incarnate,” his mother uttered, perfervidly. “You
+could put your very soul in her keeping.”
+
+“Then you would be out of a job, mother.”
+
+“Oh, I am not worthy of the job, my dear. I have always felt that. I am
+too complex, and sometimes I can’t see the right alone, as she could.”
+
+Philip was silent a moment while he lost the personal point of view. “I
+suspect we don’t see the right when we see it alone. We ought to see the
+wrong, too.”
+
+“Ah, Philip, don’t let your fancy go after that girl!”
+
+“Miss Andrews? I thought--”
+
+“Don’t you be complex, my dear. You know I mean Miss Shirley. What has
+become of her, I wonder. I heard Miss Andrews asking you.”
+
+“I wasn’t able to tell her. Do you want me to try telling you?”
+
+“I would rather you never could.”
+
+Philip laughed sardonically. “Now, I shall forget Thursdays and all the
+other days, too. You are a very unwise parent, mother.”
+
+They laughed with each other at each other, and treated her enthusiasm
+for Miss Andrews as the joke it partly was. Mrs. Verrian did not follow
+him up about her idol, and a week or so later she was able to affect a
+decent surprise when he came in at the end of an afternoon and declined
+the cup of tea she proposed on the ground that he had been taking a cup
+of tea with the Andrewses. “You have really been there?”
+
+“Didn’t you expect me to keep my promise?”
+
+“But I was afraid I had put a stumbling-block in the way.”
+
+“Oh, I found I could turn the consciousness you created in me into
+literary material, and so I was rather eager to go. I have got a point
+for my new story out of it. I shall have my fellow suffer all I didn’t
+suffer in meeting the girl he knows his mother wants him to marry. I got
+on very well with those ladies. Mrs. Andrews is the mother of innocence,
+but she isn’t innocence. She managed to talk of my story without asking
+about the person who wanted to anticipate the conclusion. That was what
+you call complex. She was insincere; it was the only thing she wanted to
+talk about.”
+
+“I don’t believe it, Philip. But what did Miss Andrews talk about?”
+
+“Well, she is rather an optimistic conscience. She talked about books
+and plays that some people do not think are quite proper. I have
+a notion that, where the point involved isn’t a fact of her own
+experience, she is not very severe about it. You think that would be
+quite safe for me?”
+
+“Philip, I don’t like your making fun of her!”
+
+“Oh, she wasn’t insipid; she was only limpid. I really like her, and, as
+for reverencing her, of course I feel that in a way she is sacred.” He
+added, after a breath, “Too sacred. We none of us can expect to marry
+Eve before the Fall now; perhaps we have got over wanting to.”
+
+“You are very perverse, my dear. But you will get over that.”
+
+“Don’t take away my last defence, mother.”
+
+Verrian began to go rather regularly to the Andrews house, or, at least,
+he was accused of doing it by Miss Macroyd when, very irregularly, he
+went one day to see her. “How did you know it?” he asked.
+
+“I didn’t say I knew it. I only wished to know it. Now I am satisfied.
+I met another friend of yours on Sunday.” She paused for him to ask
+who; but he did not ask. “I see you are dying to know what friend: Mr.
+Bushwick.”
+
+“Oh, he’s a good-fellow. I wonder I don’t run across him.”
+
+“Perhaps that’s because you never call on Miss Shirley.” Miss Macroyd
+waited for this to take effect, but he kept a glacial surface towards
+her, and she went on:
+
+“They were walking together in the park at noon. I suppose they had been
+to church together.”
+
+Verrian manifested no more than a polite interest in the fact. He
+managed so well that he confirmed Miss Macroyd in a tacit conjecture.
+She went on: “Miss Shirley was looking quite blooming for her. But so
+was he, for that matter. Why don’t you ask if they inquired for you?”
+
+“I thought you would tell me without.”
+
+“I will tell you if he did. He was very cordial in his inquiries; and I
+had to pretend, to gratify him, that you were very well. I implied that
+you came here every Tuesday, but your Thursdays were dedicated to Miss
+Andrews.”
+
+“You are a clever woman, Miss Macroyd. I should never have thought of so
+much to say on such an uninteresting subject. And Miss Shirley showed no
+curiosity?”
+
+“Ah, she is a clever woman, too. She showed the prettiest kind of
+curiosity--so perfectly managed. She has a studio--I don’t know just how
+she puts it to use--with a painter girl in one of those studio apartment
+houses on the West Side: The Veronese, I believe. You must go and see
+her; I’ll let you have next Tuesday off; Tuesday’s her day, too.”
+
+“You are generosity itself, Miss Macroyd.”
+
+“Yes, there’s nothing mean about me,” she returned, in slang rather
+older than she ordinarily used. “If you’re not here next Tuesday I shall
+know where you are.”
+
+“Then I must take a good many Tuesdays off, unless I want to give myself
+away.”
+
+“Oh, don’t do that, Mr. Verrian! Please! Or else I can’t let you have
+any Tuesday off.”
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+Upon the whole, Verrian thought he would go to see Miss Shirley the next
+Tuesday, but he did not say so to Miss Macroyd. Now that he knew where
+the girl was, all the peculiar interest she had inspired in him renewed
+itself. It was so vivid that he could not pay his usual Thursday call at
+Miss Andrews’s, and it filled his mind to the exclusion of the new story
+he had begun to write. He loafed his mornings away at his club, and
+he lunched there, leaving his mother to lunch alone, and was dreamily
+preoccupied in the evenings which he spent at home, sitting at his desk,
+with the paper before him, unable to coax the thoughts from his brain to
+its alluring blank, but restive under any attempts of hers to talk with
+him.
+
+In his desperation he would have gone to the theatre, but the fact that
+the ass who rightfully called himself Verrian was playing at one of them
+blocked his way, through his indignation, to all of them. By Saturday
+afternoon the tedious time had to be done something with, and he decided
+to go and see what the ass was like.
+
+He went early, and found himself in the end seat of a long row of many
+rows of women, who were prolonging the time of keeping their hats on
+till custom obliged them to take them off. He gave so much notice to the
+woman next him as to see that she was deeply veiled as well as widely
+hatted, and then he lapsed into a dreary muse, which was broken by the
+first strains of the overture. Then he diverted himself by looking round
+at all those ranks of women lifting their arms to take out them hat-pins
+and dropping them to pin their hats to the seat-backs in front of them,
+or to secure them somehow in their laps. Upon the whole, he thought the
+manoeuvre graceful and pleasing; he imagined a consolation in it for
+the women, who, if they were forced by public opinion to put off their
+charming hats, would know how charmingly they did it. Each turned a
+little, either her body or her head, and looked in any case out of the
+corner of her eyes; and he was phrasing it all for a scene in his story,
+when he looked round at his neighbor to see how she had managed, or was
+managing, with her veil. At the same moment she looked at him, and their
+eyes met.
+
+“Mr. Verrian!”
+
+“Miss Shirley!”
+
+The stress of their voices fell upon different parts of the sentences
+they uttered, but did not commit either of them to a special role.
+
+“How very strange we should meet here!” she said, with pleasure in her
+voice. “Do you know, I have been wanting to come all winter to see this
+man, on account of his name? And to think that I should meet the other
+Mr. Verrian as soon as I yielded to the temptation.”
+
+“I have just yielded myself,” Verrian said. “I hope you don’t feel
+punished for yielding.”
+
+“Oh, dear, no! It seems a reward.”
+
+She did not say why it seemed so, and he suggested, “The privilege of
+comparing the histrionic and the literary Verrian?”
+
+“Could there be any comparison?” she came back, gayly.
+
+“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the histrionic Verrian yet.”
+
+They were laughing when the curtain rose, and the histrionic Verrian had
+his innings for a long, long first act. When the curtain fell she turned
+to the literary Verrian and said, “Well?”
+
+“He lasted a good while,” Verrian returned.
+
+“Yes. Didn’t he?” She looked at the little watch in her wristlet. “A
+whole hour! Do you know, Mr. Verrian, I am going to seem very rude. I am
+going to leave you to settle this question of superiority; I know
+you’ll be impartial. I have an appointment--with the dressmaker, to
+be specific--at half-past four, and it’s half-past three now, and
+I couldn’t well leave in the middle of the next act. So I will say
+good-bye now--”
+
+“Don’t!” he entreated. “I couldn’t bear to be left alone with this
+dreadful double of mine. Let me go out with you.”
+
+“Can I accept such self-sacrifice? Well!”
+
+She had put on her hat and risen, and he now stepped out of his place to
+let her pass and then followed her. At the street entrance he suggested,
+“A hansom, or a simple trolley?”
+
+“I don’t know,” she murmured, meditatively, looking up the street as if
+that would settle it. “If it’s only half-past three now, I should have
+time to get home more naturally.”
+
+“Oh! And will you let me walk with you?”
+
+“Why, if you’re going that way.”
+
+“I will say when I know which way it is.”
+
+They started on their walk so blithely that they did not sadden in the
+retrospect of their joint experiences at Mrs. Westangle’s. By the
+time they reached the park gate at Columbus Circle they had come so
+distinctly to the end of their retrospect that she made an offer of
+letting him leave her, a very tacit offer, but unmistakable, if he chose
+to take it. He interpreted her hesitation as he chose. “No,” he said,
+“it won’t be any longer if we go up through the park.”
+
+She drew in her breath softly, smoothing down her muff with her
+right hand while she kept her left in it. “And it will certainly be
+pleasanter.” When they were well up the path, in that part of it where
+it deflects from the drive without approaching the street too closely,
+and achieves something of seclusion, she said:
+
+“Your speaking of him just now makes me want to tell you something, Mr.
+Verrian. You would hear of it very soon, anyway, and I feel that it is
+always best to be very frank with you; but you’ll regard it as a secret
+till it comes out.”
+
+The currents that had been playing so warmly in and out of Verrian’s
+heart turned suddenly cold. He said, with joyless mocking, “You know,
+I’m used to keeping your secrets. I--shall feel honored, I’m sure, if
+you trust me with another.”
+
+“Yes,” she returned, pathetically, “you have always been faithful--even
+in your wounds.” It was their joint tribute to the painful past, and
+they had paid no other. She was looking away from him, but he knew she
+was aware of his hanging his head. “That’s all over now,” she uttered,
+passionately. “What I wanted to say--to tell you--is that I am engaged
+to Mr. Bushwick.”
+
+He could have answered that she had no need to tell him. The cold
+currents in and out of his heart stiffened frozenly and ceased to flow;
+his heart itself stood still for an eternal instant. It was in this
+instant that he said, “He is a fine fellow.” Afterwards, amid the wild
+bounding of his recovered pulse, he could add, “I congratulate him; I
+congratulate you both.”
+
+“Thank you,” she said. “No one knows as I do how good he is--has been,
+all through.” Probably she had not meant to convey any reproach to
+Verrian by Bushwick’s praise, but he felt reproach in it. “It only
+happened last week. You do wish me happy, don’t you? No one knows what a
+winter I have had till now. Everything seeming to fail--”
+
+She choked, and did not say more. He said, aimlessly, “I am sorry--”
+
+“Let me sit down a moment,” she begged. And she dropped upon the bench
+at which she faltered, and rested there, as if from the exhaustion
+of running. When she could get her breath she began again: “There is
+something else I want to tell you.”
+
+She stopped. And he asked, to prompt her, “Yes?”
+
+“Thank you,” she answered, piteously. And she added, with superficial
+inconsequence, “I shall always think you were very cruel.”
+
+He did not pretend not to know what she meant, and he said, “I shall
+always think so, too. I tried to revenge myself for the hurt your
+harmless hoax did my vanity. Of course, I made believe at the time that
+I was doing an act of justice, but I never was able to brave it out
+afterwards.”
+
+“But you were--you were doing an act of justice. I deserved what you
+said, but I didn’t deserve what has followed. I meant no harm--it was a
+silly prank, and I have suffered for it as if it were a crime, and the
+consequences are not ended yet. I should think that, if there is a moral
+government of the universe, the Judge of all the earth would know when
+to hold his hand. And now the worst of it is to come yet.” She caught
+Verrian’s arm, as if for help.
+
+“Don’t--don’t!” he besought her. “What will people think?”
+
+
+“Yes, Yes!” she owned, releasing him and withdrawing to the other end of
+the seat.
+
+“But it almost drives me wild. What shall I do? You ought to know. It is
+your fault. You have frightened me out of daring to tell the truth.”
+
+Had he, indeed, done that? Verrian asked himself, and it seemed to him
+that he had done something like it. If it was so, he must help her over
+her fear now. He answered, bluntly, harshly: “You must tell him all
+about it--”
+
+“But if he won’t believe me? Do you think he will believe me? Would you
+believe me?”
+
+“You have nothing to do with that. There is nothing for you but to tell
+him the whole story. You mustn’t share such a secret with any one but
+your husband. When you tell him it will cease to be my secret.”
+
+“Yes, yes.”
+
+“Well, then, you must tell him, unless--”
+
+“Yes,” she prompted.
+
+Then they were both silent, looking intensely into each other’s eyes. In
+that moment all else of life seemed to melt and swim away from Verrian
+and leave him stranded upon an awful eminence confronting her.
+
+“Hello, hello!” a gay voice called, as if calling to them both. “What
+are you two conspiring?” Bushwick, as suddenly as if he had fallen from
+the sky or started up from the earth, stood before them, and gave a hand
+to each--his right to Verrian, his left to Miss Shirley. “How are you,
+Verrian? How are you, Miss Shirley?” He mocked her in the formality of
+his address. “I’ve been shadowing you ever since you came into the park,
+but I thought I wouldn’t interrupt till you seemed to have got through
+your conversation. May I ask what it was all about? It seemed very
+absorbing, from a respectful distance.”
+
+“Very absorbing, indeed,” Miss Shirley said, making room for him between
+them. “Sit down and let me tell you. You’re to be a partner in the
+secret.”
+
+“Silent partner,” Bushwick suggested.
+
+“I hope you’ll always be silent,” the girl shared in his drolling.
+She began and told the whole story to the last detail, sparing neither
+herself nor Verrian, who listened as if he were some one else not
+concerned, and kept saying to himself, “what courage!” Bushwick listened
+as mutely, with a face that, to Verrian’s eye, seemed to harden from
+its light jocosity into a severity he had not seen in it before. “It
+was something,” she ended towards Bushwick, with a catch in her breath,
+“that you had to know.”
+
+“Yes,” he answered, tonelessly.
+
+“And now”--she attempted a little forlorn playfulness--“don’t you think
+he gave me what I deserved?”
+
+Bushwick rose up and took her hand under his arm, keeping his left hand
+upon hers.
+
+“He! Who?”
+
+“Mr. Verrian.”
+
+“I don’t know any Mr. Verrian. Come, you’ll take cold here.”
+
+He turned his back on Verrian, who fancied a tremor in her hat, as if
+she would look round at him; but then, as if she divined Bushwick’s
+intention, she did not look round, and together they left him.
+
+It was days before Verrian could confess himself of the fact to his
+mother, who listened with the justice instinctive in her. She still had
+not spoken when he ended, and he said, “I have thought it all over, and
+I feel that he did right. He did the only thing that a man in love with
+her could do. And I don’t wonder he’s in love with her. Yes”--he stayed
+his mother, imperatively--“and such a man as he, though he ground me in
+the dirt and stamped on me, I will say, it, is worthy of any woman. He
+can believe in a woman, and that’s the first thing that’s needed to
+make a woman like her, true. I don’t envy his job.” He was speaking
+self-contradictorily, irrelevantly, illogically, as a man thinks. He
+went on in that way, getting himself all out. “She isn’t single-hearted,
+but she’s faithful. She’ll never betray him now. She’s never given him
+any reason to distrust her. She’s the kind that can keep on straight
+with any one she’s begun straight with. She told him all that before me
+be cause she wanted me to know--to realize--that she had told him. It
+took courage.”
+
+Mrs. Verrian had thought of generalizing, but she seized a single point.
+“Perhaps not so much courage as you think. You mustn’t let such bravado
+impose upon you, Philip. I’ve no doubt she knew her ground.”
+
+“She took the chance of his casting her off.”
+
+“She knew he wouldn’t. She knew him, and she knew you. She knew that if
+he cast her off--”
+
+“Mother! Don’t say it! I can’t bear it!”
+
+His mother did not say it, or anything more, then. Late at night she
+came to him. “Are you asleep, Philip?”
+
+“Asleep? I!”
+
+“I didn’t suppose you were. But I have had a note to-day which I must
+answer. Mrs. Andrews has asked us to dinner on Saturday. Philip, if you
+could see that sweet girl as I do, in all her goodness and sincerity--”
+
+“I think I do, mother. And I wouldn’t be guilty of her unhappiness for
+the world. You must decline.”
+
+“Well, perhaps you are right.” Mrs. Verrian went away, softly, sighing.
+As she sealed her reply to Mrs. Andrews, she sighed again, and made the
+reflection which a mother seldom makes with regard to her son, before
+his marriage, that men do not love women for their goodness.
+
+
+
+PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
+
+   Almost incomparably ignorant woman
+   Almost to die of hunger for something to happen
+   Belief of immortality--without one jot of evidence
+   Brave in the right time and place
+   Continuity becomes the instinctive expectation
+   Found her too frankly disputatious
+   Girls who were putting on the world as hard as they could
+   If there’s wrong done the penalty doesn’t right it
+   Never wanted a holiday so much as the day after you had one
+   Personal view of all things and all persons which women take
+   Proof against the stupidest praise
+   Read too many stories to care for the plot
+   She laughed too much and too loud
+   Sick people are terribly, egotistical
+   The fad that fails is extinguished forever
+   Timidity is at the bottom of all fondness for secrecy
+
+
+
+
+
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