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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Fennel and Rue, by W. D. Howells
+#09 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: Fennel and Rue
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3363]
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+
+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 birchlot.  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 shy 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.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT 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. . . . . . . . . . 
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Fennel and Rue,
+by William Dean Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Fennel and Rue, by W. D. Howells
+#10 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: Fennel and Rue
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3363]
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+Edition: 11
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+Language: English
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Fennel and Rue, by W. D. Howells
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+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks at the end of this file
+for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making
+an entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+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 birchlot.  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.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT 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
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Fennel and Rue,
+by William Dean Howells
+
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