"From Mr. Arkwright?"

"No, ma'am; Mr. Craig."

"Craig?" ejaculated Margaret.

"Yes, Miss Rita."

"Craig," repeated Margaret, but in a very different tone—a tone of immense satisfaction and relief. She waved her hand with a smile of amused disdain. "Take them into the house, but not to my room. Put them in Miss Lucia's sitting-room."

Williams had just gone when into the walk rushed Grant and Craig. Their faces were so flurried, so full of tragic anxiety that Margaret, stopping short, laughed out loud. "You two look as if you had come to view the corpse."

"I passed Craig on his way here," explained Grant, "and took him into my machine."

"I was not on my way here," replied Josh loftily. "I was merely taking a walk. He asked me to get in and brought me here in spite of my protests."

"You were on the road that leads here," insisted Arkwright with much heat.

"I repeat I was simply taking a walk," insisted Craig. He had not once looked at Margaret.

"No matter," said Margaret in her calm, distant way. "You may take him away, Grant. And"—here she suddenly looked at Craig, a cold, haughty glance that seemed to tear open an abysmal gulf between them—"I do not wish to see you again. I am done with you. I have been on the verge of telling you so many times of late."

"Is THAT what you sent Grant after me to tell me?"

"No," answered she. "I sent him on an impulse to save the engagement. But while he was gone it suddenly came over me that you were right—entirely right. I accept your decision. You're afraid to marry me because of your political future. I'm afraid to marry you because of my stomach. You—nauseate me. I've been under some kind of hideous spell. I'm free of it now. I see you as you are. I am ashamed of myself."

"I thought so! I knew it would come!" exclaimed Arkwright triumphantly.

Craig, who had been standing like a stock, suddenly sprang into action. He seized Arkwright by the throat and bore him to the ground. "I've got to kill something," he yelled. "Why not you?"

This unexpected and vulgar happening completely upset Margaret's pride and demolished her dignified pose. She gazed in horror at the two men struggling, brute-like, upon the grass. Her refined education had made no provision for such an emergency. She rushed forward, seized Craig by the shoulders. "Get up!" she cried contemptuously, and she dragged him to his feet. She shook him fiercely. "Now get out of here; and don't you dare come back!"

Craig laughed loudly. A shrewd onlooker might have suspected from his expression that he had deliberately created a diversion of confusion, and was congratulating himself upon its success. "Get out?" cried he. "Not I. I go where I please and stay as long as I please."

Arkwright was seated upon the grass, readjusting his collar and tie. "What a rotten coward you are!" he said to Craig, "to take me off guard like that."

"It WAS a low trick," admitted Josh, looking down at him genially. "But I'm so crazy I don't know what I'm doing."

"Oh, yes, you do; you wanted to show off," answered Grant.

But Craig had turned to Margaret again. "Read that," he commanded, and thrust a newspaper clipping into her hand. It was from one of the newspapers of his home town—a paper of his own party, but unfriendly to him. It read:

"Josh Craig's many friends here will be glad to hear that he is catching on down East. With his Government job as a stepping-stone he has sprung into what he used to call plutocratic society in Washington, and is about to marry a young lady who is in the very front of the push. He will retire from politics, from head-hunting among the plutocrats, and will soon be a plutocrat and a palace- dweller himself. Success to you, Joshua. The 'pee-pul' have lost a friend—in the usual way. As for us, we've got the right to say, 'I told you so,' but we'll be good and refrain."

"The President handed me that last night," said Craig, when he saw that her glance was on the last line. "And he told me he had decided to ask Stillwater to stay on."

Margaret gave the clipping to Grant. "Give it to him," she said and started toward the house.

Craig sprang before her. "Margaret," he cried, "can you blame me?"

"No," said she, and there was no pose in her manner now; it was sincerely human. "I pity you." She waved him out of her path and, with head bent, he obeyed her.

The two men gazed after her. Arkwright was first to speak: "Well, you've got what you wanted."

Craig slowly lifted his circled, bloodshot eyes to Arkwright. "Yes," said he hoarsely, "I've got what I wanted."

"Not exactly in the way a gentleman would like to get it," pursued Grant. "But YOU don't mind a trifle of that sort."

"No," said Craig, "I don't mind a trifle of that sort. 'Bounder Josh'—that's what they call me, isn't it?"

"When they're frank they do."

Craig drew a long breath, shook himself like a man gathering himself together after a stunning blow. He reflected a moment. "Come along, Grant. I'm going back in your machine."

"The driver'll take you," replied Arkwright stiffly. "I prefer to walk."

"Then we'll walk back together."

"We will not!" said Arkwright violently. "And after this morning the less you say to me the better pleased I'll be, and the less you'll impose upon the obligation I'm under to you for having saved my life once."

"You treacherous hound," said Craig pleasantly. "Where did you get the nerve to put on airs with me? What would you have done to her in the same circumstances? Why, you'd have sneaked and lied out of it. And you dare to scorn me because I've been frank and direct! Come! I'll give you another chance. Will you take me back to town in your machine?"

A pause, Craig's fierce gaze upon Grant, Grant's upon the ground. Then Grant mumbled surlily: "Come on."

When they were passing the front windows of the house Craig assumed that Margaret was hiding somewhere there, peering out at them. But he was wrong. She was in her room, was face down upon her bed, sobbing as if her first illusion had fallen, had dashed to pieces, crushing her heart under it.



CHAPTER XVII

A NIGHT MARCH

Arkwright saw no one but his valet-masseur for several days; on the left side of his throat the marks of Craig's fingers showed even above the tallest of his extremely tall collars. From the newspapers he gathered that Margaret had gone to New York on a shopping trip—had gone for a stay of two or three weeks. When the adventure in the garden was more than a week into the past, as he was coming home from a dinner toward midnight he jumped from his electric brougham into Craig's arms.

"At last!" exclaimed Josh, leading the way up the Arkwright steps and ringing the bell. Grant muttered a curse under his breath. When the man had opened the door, "Come in," continued Josh loudly and cheerily, leading the way into the house.

"You'd think it was his house, by gad!" muttered Grant.

"I've been walking up and down before the entrance for an hour. The butler asked me in, but I hate walls and roof. The open for me—the wide, wide open!"

"Not so loud," growled Arkwright. "The family's in bed. Wait till we get to my part of the house."

When they were there, with doors closed and the lights on, Craig exhaled his breath as noisily as a blown swimmer. "What a day! What a day!" he half-shouted, dropping on the divan and thrusting his feet into the rich and rather light upholstery of a near-by chair.

Grant eyed the feet gloomily. He was proud of his furniture and as careful of it as any old maid.

"Go ahead, change your clothes," cried Josh. "I told your motorman not to go away."

"What do you mean?" Arkwright demanded, his temper boiling at the rim of the pot.

"I told him before you got out. You see, we're going to New York to-night—or rather this morning. Train starts at one o'clock. I met old Roebuck at the White House to-night—found he was going by special train—asked him to take us."

"Not I," said Arkwright. "No New York for me. I'm busy to-morrow. Besides, I don't want to go."

"Of course you don't," laughed Craig, and Arkwright now noted that he was in the kind of dizzy spirits that most men can get only by drinking a very great deal indeed. "Of course you don't. No more do I. But I've got to go—and so have you."

"What for?"

"To help me get married."

Grant could only gape at him.

"Don't you know Margaret has gone to New York?"

"I saw it in the paper, but—"

"Now, don't go back a week to ancient history."

"I don't believe it," foamed Grant, so distracted that he sprang up and paced the floor, making wild gestures with his arms and head.

Craig watched, seemed hugely amused. "You'll see, about noon to- morrow. You've got to put in the morning shopping for me. I haven't got—You know what sort of a wardrobe mine is. Wardrobe? Hand satchel! Carpet-bag! Rag-bag! If I took off my shoes you'd see half the toes of one foot and all the heel of the other. And only my necktie holds this collar in place. Both buttonholes are gone. As for my underclothes—but I'll spare you these."

"Yes, do," said Grant with a vicious sneer.

"Now, you've got to buy me a complete outfit." Craig drew a roll of bills from his pocket, counted off several, threw them on the table. "There's four hundred dollars, all I can afford to waste at present. Make it go as far as you can. Get a few first-class things, the rest decent and substantial, but not showy. I'll pay for the suits I've got to get. They'll have to be ready-made—and very good ready-made ones a man can buy nowadays. We'll go to the tailor's first thing—about seven o'clock in the morning, which'll give him plenty of time for alterations."

"I won't!" exploded Grant, stopping his restless pacing and slamming himself on to a chair.

"Oh, yes, you will," asserted Craig, with absolute confidence. "You're not going back on me."

"There's nothing in this—nothing! I've known Rita Severence nearly twenty years, and I know she's done with you."

Craig sprang to his feet, went over and laid his heavy hand heavily upon Arkwright's shoulder. "And," said he, "you know me. Did I ever say a thing that didn't prove to be true, no matter how improbable it seemed to you?"

Arkwright was silent.

"Grant," Craig went on, and his voice was gentle and moving, "I need you. I must have you. You won't fail me, will you, old pal?"

"Oh, hell!—I'll go," said Grant in a much-softened growl. "But I know it's a wild-goose chase. Still, you do need the clothes. You're a perfect disgrace."

Craig took away his hand and burst into his noisy, boyish laughter, so reminiscent of things rural and boorish, of the coarse, strong spirits of the happy-go-lucky, irresponsibles that work as field hands and wood-haulers. "By cracky, Grant, I just got sight of the remnants of that dig I gave you. It was a beauty, wasn't it?"

Arkwright moved uneasily, fumbled at his collar, tried to smile carelessly.

"I certainly am the luckiest devil," Craig went on. "Now, what a stroke pushing you over and throttling you was!" And he again laughed loudly.

"I don't follow you," said Grant sourly.

"What a vanity box you are! You can't take a joke. Now, they're always poking fun at me—pretty damn nasty! some of it—but don't I always look cheerful?"

"Oh—YOU!" exclaimed Grant in disgust.

"And do you know why?" demanded Craig, giving him a rousing slap on the knee. "When I find it hard to laugh I begin to think of the greatest joke of all—the joke I'll have on these merry boys when the cards are all played and I sweep the tables. I think of that, and, by gosh, I fairly roar!"

"Do you talk that way to convince yourself?"

Craig's eyes were suddenly shrewd. "Yes," said he, "and to convince you, and a lot of other weak-minded people who believe all they hear. You'll find out some day that the world thinks with its ears and its mouth, my boy. But, as I say, who but I could have tumbled into such luck as came quite accidentally out of that little 'rough-house' of mine at your expense?"

"Don't see it," said Grant.

"Why, can't you see that it puts you out of business with Margaret? She's not the sort of woman to take to the fellow that shows he's the weaker."

"Well, I'll be—damned!" gasped Arkwright. "You HAVE got your nerve! To say such a thing to a man you've just asked a favor of."

"Not at all," cried Craig airily. "Facts are facts. Why deny them?"

Arkwright shrugged his shoulders. "Well, let it pass....Whether it's settled me with her or not, it somehow—curiously enough— settled her with me. Do you know, Josh, I've had no use for her since. I can't explain it."

"Vanity," said Craig. "You are vain, like all people who don't talk about themselves. The whole human race is vain—individually and collectively. Now, if a man talks about himself as I do, why, his vanity froths away harmlessly. But you and your kind suffer from ingrowing vanity. You think of nothing but yourselves—how you look—how you feel—how you are impressing others—what you can get for yourself—self—self—self, day and night. You don't like Margaret any more because she saw you humiliated. Where would I be if I were like that? Why, I'd be dead or hiding in the brush; for I've had nothing but insults, humiliations, sneers, snubs, all my life. Crow's my steady diet, old pal. And I fatten and flourish on it."

Grant was laughing, with a choke in his throat. "Josh," said he, "you're either more or less than human."

"Both," said Craig. "Grant, we're wasting time. Walter!" That last in a stentorian shout.

The valet appeared. "Yes, Mr. Craig."

"Pack your friend Grant, here, for two days in New York. He's going to-night and—I guess you'd better come along."

Arkwright threw up his hands in a gesture of mock despair. "Do as he says, Walter. He's the boss."

"Now you're talking sense," said Craig. "Some day you'll stand before kings for this—or sit, as you please."

On their way out Josh fished from the darkness under the front stairs a tattered and battered suitcase and handed it to Walter. "It's my little all," he explained to Grant. "I've given up my rooms at the Wyandotte. They stored an old trunkful or so for me, and I've sent my books to the office."

"Look here, Josh," said Grant, when they were under way; "does Margaret know you're coming?"

"Does Margaret know I'm coming?" repeated Joshua mockingly. "Does Margaret know her own mind and me? ... Before I forget it here's a list I wrote out against a lamp-post while I was waiting for you to come home. It's the things I must have, so far as I know. The frills and froth you know about—I don't."



CHAPTER XVIII

PEACE AT ANY PRICE

Miss Severance, stepping out of a Waldorf elevator at the main floor, shrank back wide-eyed. "You?" she gasped.

Before her, serene and smiling and inflexible, was Craig. None of the suits he had bought at seven that morning was quite right for immediate use; so there he was in his old lounge suit, baggy at knees and elbows and liberally bestrewn with lint. Her glance fell from his mussy collar to his backwoodsman's hands, to his feet, so cheaply and shabbily shod; the shoes looked the worse for the elaborate gloss the ferry bootblack had put upon them. She advanced because she could not retreat; but never had she been so repelled.

She had come to New York to get away from him. When she entered the train she had flung him out of the window. "I WILL NOT think of him again," she had said to herself. But—Joshua Craig's was not the sort of personality that can be banished by an edict of will. She could think angrily of him, or disdainfully, or coldly, or pityingly—but think she must. And think she did. She told herself she despised him; and there came no echoing protest or denial from anywhere within her. She said she was done with him forever, and well done; her own answer to herself there was, that while she was probably the better off for having got out of the engagement, still it must be conceded that socially the manner of her getting out meant scandal, gossip, laughter at her. Her cheeks burned as her soul flamed.

"The vulgar boor!" she muttered.

Was ever woman so disgraced, and so unjustly? What had the gods against her, that they had thus abased her? How Washington would jeer! How her friends would sneer! What hope was there now of her ever getting a husband? She would be an object of pity and of scorn. It would take more courage than any of the men of her set had, to marry a woman rejected by such a creature—and in such circumstances!

"He has made everybody think I sought him. Now, he'll tell everybody that he had to break it off—that HE broke it off!"

She ground her teeth; she clenched her hands; she wept and moaned in the loneliness of her bed. She hated Craig; she hated the whole world; she loathed herself. And all the time she had to keep up appearances—for she had not dared tell her grandmother—had to listen while the old lady discussed the marriage as an event of the not remote future.

Why had she not told her grandmother? Lack of courage; hope that something would happen to reveal the truth without her telling. HOPE that something would happen? No, fear. She did not dare look at the newspapers. But, whatever her reason, it was not any idea that possibly the engagement might be resumed. No, not that. "Horrible as I feel," thought she, "I am better off than in those weeks when that man was whirling me from one nightmare to another. The peace of desolation is better than that torture of doubt and repulsion. Whatever was I thinking of to engage myself to such a man? to think seriously of passing my life with him? Poor fool that I was, to rail against monotony, to sigh for sensations! Well, I have got them."

Day and night, almost without ceasing, her thoughts had boiled and bubbled on and on, like a geyser ever struggling for outlet and ever falling vainly back upon itself.

Now—here he was, greeting her at the elevator car, smiling and confident, as if nothing had happened. She did not deign even to stare at him, but, with eyes that seemed to be simply looking without seeing any especial object, she walked straight on. "I'm in luck," cried he, beside her. "I had only been walking up and down there by the elevators about twenty minutes."

She made no reply. At the door she said to the carriage-caller:

"A cab, please—no, a hansom."

The hansom drove up; its doors opened. Craig pushed aside the carriage man, lifted her in with a powerful upward swing of his arm against her elbow and side—so powerful that she fell into the seat, knocking her hat awry and loosening her veil from the brim so that it hung down distressfully across her eyes and nose. "Drive up Fifth Avenue to the Park," said Craig, seating himself beside her. "Now, please don't cry," he said to her.

"Cry?" she exclaimed. Her dry, burning eyes blazed at him.

"Your eyes were so bright," laughed he, "that I thought they were full of tears."

"If you are a gentleman you will leave this hansom at once."

"Don't talk nonsense," said he. "You know perfectly well I'll not leave. You know perfectly well I'll say what I've got to say to you, and that no power on earth can prevent me. That's why you didn't give way to your impulse to make a scene when I followed you into this trap."

She was busy with her hat and veil.

"Can I help you?" said he with a great show of politeness that was ridiculously out of harmony with him in every way. That, and the absurdity of Josh Craig, of all men, helping a woman in the delicate task of adjusting a hat and veil, struck her as so ludicrous that she laughed hysterically; her effort to make the laughter appear an outburst of derisive, withering scorn was not exactly a triumph.

"Well," she presently said, "what is it you wish to say? I have very little time."

He eyed her sharply. "You think you dislike me, don't you?" said he.

"I do," replied she, her tone as cutting as her words were curt.

"How little that amounts to! All human beings—Grant, you, I, all of us, everybody—are brimful of vanity. It slops over a little one way and we call it like. It slops over the other way and we call it dislike—hate—loathing—according to the size of the slop. Now, I'm not here to deal with vanity, but with good sense. Has it occurred to you in the last few days that you and I have got to get married, whether we will or no?"

"It has not," she cried with frantic fury of human being cornered by an ugly truth.

"Oh, yes, it has. For you are a sensible woman—entirely too sensible for a woman, unless she marries an unusual man like me."

"Is that a jest?" she inquired in feeble attempt at sarcasm.

"Don't you know I have no sense of humor? Would I do the things I do and carry them through if I had?"

In spite of herself she admired this penetration of self-analysis. In spite of herself the personality beneath his surface, the personality that had a certain uncanny charm for her, was subtly reasserting its inexplicable fascination.

"Yes, we've got to marry," proceeded he. "I have to marry you because I can't afford to let you say you jilted me. That would make me the laughing-stock of my State; and I can't afford to tell the truth that I jilted you because the people would despise me as no gentleman. And, while I don't in the least mind being despised as no gentleman by fashionable noddle-heads or by those I trample on to rise, I do mind it when it would ruin me with the people."

Her eyes gleamed. So! She had him at her mercy!

"Not so fast, young lady," continued he in answer to that gleam. "It is equally true that you've got to marry me."

"But I shall not!" she cried. "Besides, it isn't true."

"It IS true," replied he. "You may refuse to marry me, just as a man may refuse to run when the dynamite blast is going off. Yes, you can refuse, but—you'd not be your grandmother's granddaughter if you did."

"Really!" She was so surcharged with rage that she was shaking with it, was tearing up her handkerchief in her lap.

"Yes, indeed," he assured her, tranquil as a lawyer arguing a commercial case before a logic-machine of a judge. "If you do not marry me all your friends will say I jilted you. I needn't tell you what it would mean in your set, what it would mean as to your matrimonial prospects, for you to have the reputation of having been turned down by me—need I?"

She was silent; her head down, her lips compressed, her fingers fiercely interlaced with the ruins of her handkerchief.

"It is necessary that you marry," said he summing up. "It is wisest and easiest to marry me, since I am willing. To refuse would be to inflict an irreparable injury upon yourself in order to justify a paltry whim for injuring me."

She laughed harshly. "You are frank," said she.

"I am paying you the compliment of frankness. I am appealing to your intelligence, where a less intelligent man and one that knew you less would try to gain his point by chicane, flattery, deception."

"Yes—it is a compliment," she answered. "It was stupid of me to sneer at your frankness."

A long silence. He lighted a cigarette, smoked it with deliberation foreign to his usual self but characteristic of him when he was closely and intensely engaged; for he was like a thoroughbred that is all fret and champ and pawing and caper until the race is on, when he at once settles down into a calm, steady stride, with all the surplus nervous energy applied directly and intelligently to the work in hand. She was not looking at him, but she was feeling him in every atom of her body, was feeling the power, the inevitableness of the man. He angered her, made her feel weak, a helpless thing, at his mercy. True, it was his logic that was convincing her, not his magnetic and masterful will; but somehow the two seemed one. Never had he been so repellent, never had she felt so hostile to him.

"I will marry you," she finally said. "But I must tell you that I do not love you—or even like you. The reverse."

His face, of the large, hewn features, with their somehow pathetic traces of the struggles and sorrows of his rise, grew strange, almost terrible. "Do you mean that?" he said, turning slowly toward her.

She quickly shifted her eyes, in which her dislike was showing, shifted them before he could possibly have seen. And she tried in vain to force past her lips the words which she believed to be the truth, the words his pathetic, powerful face told her would end everything. Yes, she knew he would not marry her if she told him the truth about her feelings.

"Do you mean that?" he repeated, stern and sharp, yet sad, wistfully sad, too.

"I don't know what I mean," she cried, desperately afraid of him, afraid of the visions the idea of not marrying him conjured. "I don't know what I mean," she repeated. "You fill me with a kind of—of—horror. You draw me into your grasp in spite of myself— like a whirlpool—and rouse all my instinct to try and save myself. Sometimes that desire becomes a positive frenzy."

He laughed complacently. "That is love," said he.

She did not resent his tone or dispute his verdict externally. "If it is love," replied she evenly, "then never did love wear so strange, so dreadful a disguise."

He laid his talon-hand, hardened and misshapen by manual labor, but if ugly, then ugly with the majesty of the twisted, tempest- defying oak, over hers. "Believe me, Margaret, you love me. You have loved me all along....And I you."

"Don't deceive yourself," she felt bound to say, "I certainly do not love you if love has any of its generally accepted meanings."

"I am not the general sort of person," said he. "It is not strange that I should arouse extraordinary feelings, is it? Driver"—he had the trap in the roof up and was thrusting through it a slip of paper—"take us to that street and number."

She gasped with a tightening at the heart. "I must return to the hotel at once," she said hurriedly.

He fixed his gaze upon her. "We are going to the preacher's," said he.

"The preacher's?" she murmured, shrinking in terror.

"Grant is waiting for us there"—he glanced at his watch—"or, rather, will be there in about ten minutes. We are a little earlier than I anticipated."

She flushed crimson, paled, felt she would certainly suffocate with rage.

"Before you speak," continued he, "listen to me. You don't want to go back into that torment of doubt in which we've both been hopping about for a month, like a pair of damned souls being used as tennis balls by fiends. Let's settle the business now, and for good and all. Let us have peace—for God's sake, peace! I know you've been miserable. I know I've been on the rack. And it's got to stop. Am I not right?"

She leaned back in her corner of the cab, shut her eyes, said no more—and all but ceased to think. What was there to say? What was there to think? When Fate ceases to tolerate our pleasant delusion of free will, when it openly and firmly seizes us and hurries us along, we do not discuss or comment. We close our minds, relax and submit.

At the parsonage he sprang out, stood by to help her descend, half-dragged her from the cab when she hesitated. He shouted at the driver: "How much do I owe you, friend?"

"Six dollars, sir."

"Not on your life!" shouted Craig furiously. He turned to Margaret, standing beside him in a daze. "What do you think of THAT! This fellow imagines because I've got a well-dressed woman along I'll submit. But I'm not that big a snob." He was looking up at the cabman again. "You miserable thief!" he exclaimed. "I'll give you three dollars, and that's too much by a dollar."

"Don't you call me names!" yelled the cabman, shaking his fist with the whip in it.

"The man's drunk," cried Josh to the little crowd of people that had assembled. Margaret, overwhelmed with mortification, tugged at his sleeve. "The man's not overcharging much—if any," she said in an undertone.

"You're saying that because you hate scenes," replied Josh loudly. "You go on into the house. I'll take care of this hound."

Margaret retreated within the parsonage gate; her very soul was sick. She longed for the ground to open and swallow her forever. It would be bad enough for a man to make such an exhibition at any time; but to make it when he was about to be married!—and in such circumstances!—to squabble and scream over a paltry dollar or so!

"Here's a policeman!" cried Craig. "Now, you thief, we'll see!"

The cabman sprang down from his seat. "You damn jay!" he bellowed. "You don't know New York cabfares. Was you ever to town before— eh?"

Craig beckoned the policeman with vast, excited gestures. Margaret fled up the walk toward the parsonage door, but not before she heard Craig say to the policeman:

"I am Joshua Craig, assistant to the Attorney-General of the United States. This thief here—" And so on until he had told the whole story. Margaret kept her back to the street, but she could hear the two fiercely-angry voices, the laughter of the crowd. At last Craig joined her—panting, flushed, triumphant. "I knew he was a thief. Four dollars was the right amount, but I gave him five, as the policeman said it was best to quiet him."

He gave a jerk at the knob of parsonage street bell as if he were determined to pull it out; the bell within rang loudly, angrily, like the infuriate voice of a sleeper who has been roused with a thundering kick. "This affair of ours," continued Craig, "is going to cost money. And I've been spending it to-day like a drunken sailor. The more careful I am, the less careful I will have to be, my dear."

The door opened—a maid, scowling, appeared.

"Come on," cried Joshua to Margaret. And he led the way, brushing the maid aside as she stood her ground, attitude belligerent, but expression perplexed. To her, as he passed, Craig said: "Tell Doctor Scones that Mr. Craig and the lady are here. Has Mr. Arkwright come?"

By this time he was in the parlor; a glance around and he burst out:

"Late, by jiminy! And I told him to be here ahead of time."

He darted to the window. "Ah! There he comes!" He wheeled upon Margaret just as she dropped, half-fainting, into a chair. "What's the matter, dear?" He leaped to her side. "No false emotions, please. If you could weather the real ones what's the use of getting up ladylike excitement over—"

"For God's sake!" exclaimed Margaret, "sit down and shut up! If you don't I shall scream—scream—SCREAM!"

The maid gaped first at one, then at the other, left them reluctantly to admit Arkwright. As she opened the door she had to draw back a little. There was Craig immediately behind her. He swept her aside, flung the door wide. "Come on! Hurry!" he cried to Grant. "We're waiting." And he seized him by the arm and thrust him into the parlor. At the same instant the preacher entered by another door. Craig's excitement, far from diminishing, grew wilder and wilder. The preacher thought him insane or drunk. Grant and Margaret tried in vain to calm him. Nothing would do but the ceremony instantly—and he had his way. Never was there a more undignified wedding. When the responses were all said and the marriage was a fact accomplished, so far as preacher could accomplish it, Craig seemed suddenly to subside.

"I should like to go into the next room for a moment," said the pallid and trembling Margaret.

"Certainly," said Doctor Scones sympathetically, and, with a fierce scowl at the groom, he accompanied the bride from the room.

"What a mess you have made!" exclaimed Arkwright indignantly. "You've been acting like a lunatic."

"It wasn't acting—altogether," laughed Josh, giving Grant one of those tremendous slaps on the back. "You see, it was wise to give her something else to think about so she couldn't possibly hesitate or bolt. So I just gave way to my natural feelings. It's a way I have in difficult situations."

Grant's expression as he looked at him was a mingling of admiration, fear and scorn. "You are full of those petty tricks," said he.

"Why petty? Is it petty to meet the requirements of a situation? The situation was petty—the trick had to be. Besides, I tell you, it wasn't a trick. If I hadn't given my nerves an outlet I might have balked or bolted myself. I didn't want to have to think any more than she."

"You mustn't say those things to me," objected his friend.

"Why not? What do I care what you or any one else thinks of ME? And what could you do except simply think? Old pal, you ought to learn not to judge me by the rules of your little puddle. It's a ridiculous habit." He leaped at the door where Margaret had disappeared and rapped on it fiercely.

"Yes—yes—I'm coming," responded a nervous, pleading, agitated voice; and the door opened and Margaret appeared.

"What shall we do now?" she said to Craig. Grant saw, with an amazement he could scarcely conceal, that for the time, at least, she was quite subdued, would meekly submit to anything.

"Go to your grandmother," said Craig promptly. "You attend to the preacher, Grant. Twenty-five's enough to give him."

Margaret's cheeks flamed, her head bowed. Grant flushed in sympathy with her agony before this vulgarity. And a moment later he saw Margaret standing, drooping and resigned, at the curb, while Craig excitedly hailed a cab. "Poor girl!" he muttered, "living with that nightmare-in-breeches will surely kill her—so delicate, so refined, so sensitive!"



CHAPTER XIX

MADAM BOWKER'S BLESSING

"If you like I'll go up and tell your grandmother," said Craig, breaking the silence as they neared the hotel. But Margaret's brain had resumed its normal function, was making up for the time it had lost. With the shaking off of the daze had come amazement at finding herself married. In the same circumstances a man would have been incapacitated for action; Craig, who had been so reckless, so headlong a few minutes before, was now timid, irresolute, prey to alarms. But women, beneath the pose which man's resolute apotheosis of woman as the embodiment of unreasoning imagination has enforced upon them, are rarely so imaginative that the practical is wholly obscured. Margaret was accepting the situation, was planning soberly to turn it to the best advantage. Obviously, much hung upon this unconventional, this vulgarly-sensational marriage being diplomatically announced to the person from whom she expected to get an income of her own. "No," said she to Joshua, in response to his nervously-made offer. "You must wait down in the office while I tell her. At the proper time I'll send for you."

She spoke friendlily enough, with an inviting suggestion of their common interests. But Craig found it uncomfortable even to look at her. Now that the crisis was over his weaknesses were returning; he could not believe he had dared bear off this "delicate, refined creature," this woman whom "any one can see at a glance is a patrician of patricians." That kind of nervousness as quickly spreads through every part, moral, mental and physical, of a man not sure of himself as a fire through a haystack. He could not conceal his awe of her. She saw that something was wrong with him; being herself in no "patrician" mood, but, on the contrary, in a mood that was most humanly plebeian, she quite missed the cause of his clumsy embarrassment and constraint; she suspected a sudden physical ailment. "It'll be some time, I expect," said she. "Don't bother to hang around. I'll send a note to the desk, and you can inquire—say, in half an hour or so."

"Half an hour!" he cried in dismay. Whatever should he do with himself, alone with these returned terrors, and with no Margaret there to make him ashamed not to give braver battle to them.

"An hour, then."

She nodded, shook hands with a blush and a smile, not without its gleam of appreciation of the queerness of the situation. He lifted his hat, made a nervous, formal bow and turned away, though no car was there. As the elevator was starting up with her he came hurrying back.

"One moment," he said. "I quite forgot."

She joined him and they stood aside, in the shelter of a great wrap-rack. "You can tell your grandmother—it may help to smooth things over—that my appointment as Attorney-General will be announced day after to-morrow."

"Oh!" exclaimed she, her eyes lighting up.

He went on to explain. "As you know, the President didn't want to give it to me. But I succeeded in drawing him into a position where he either had to give it to me or seem to be retiring me because I had so vigorously attacked the big rascals he's suspected of being privately more than half in sympathy with."

"She'll be delighted!" exclaimed Margaret.

"And you?" he asked with awkward wistfulness.

"I?" said she blushing and dropping her glance. "Is it necessary for you to ask?"

She went back to the elevator still more out of humor with herself. She had begun their married life with what was very nearly a—well, it certainly was an evasion; for she cared nothing about his political career, so soon to end. However, she was glad of the appointment, because the news of it would be useful in calming and reconciling her grandmother. Just as her spirits began to rise it flashed into her mind: "Why, that's how it happens I'm married! If he hadn't been successful in getting the office he wouldn't have come....He maneuvered the President into a position where he had to give him what he wanted. Then he came here and maneuvered me into a position where I had to give him what he wanted. Always his 'game!' No sincerity or directness anywhere in him, and very little real courage." Here she stopped short in the full swing of pharisaism, smiled at herself in dismal self- mockery. "And what am I doing? Playing MY 'game.' I'm on my way now to maneuver my grandmother. We are well suited—he and I. In another walk of life we might have been a pair of swindlers, playing into each other's hands....And yet I don't believe we're worse than most people. Why, most people do these things without a thought of their being—unprincipled. And, after all, I'm not harming anybody, am I? That is, anybody but myself."

She had her campaign carefully laid out; she had mapped it in the cab between the parsonage and the hotel. "Grandmother," she began as the old lady looked up with a frown because of her long, unexpected absence, "I must tell you that just before we left Washington Craig broke the engagement."

Madam Bowker half-started from her chair. "Broke the engagement!" she cried in dismay.

"Abruptly and, apparently, finally. I—I didn't dare tell you before."

She so longed for sympathy that she half-hoped the old lady would show signs of being touched by the plight which that situation meant. But no sign came. Instead, Madam Bowker pierced her with wrathful eyes and said in a furious voice: "This is frightful! And you have done nothing?" She struck the floor violently with her staff. "He must be brought to a sense of honor—of decency! He must! Do you hear? It was your fault, I am sure. If he does not marry you are ruined!"

"He came over this morning," pursued Margaret. "He wanted to marry me at once."

"You should have given him no chance to change his mind again," cried Madam Bowker. "What a trifler you are! No seriousness! Your intelligence all in the abstract; only folly and fritter for your own affairs. You should have given him no chance to change!"

Margaret closed in and struck home. "I didn't," said she tersely. "I married him."

The old lady stared. Then, as she realized how cleverly Margaret had trapped her, she smiled a grim smile of appreciation and forgiveness. "Come and kiss me," said she. "You will do something, now that you have a chance. No woman has a chance—no LADY—until she is a Mrs. It's the struggle to round that point that wrecks so many of them."

Margaret kissed her. "And," she went on, "he has been made Attorney-General."

Never, never had Margaret seen such unconcealed satisfaction in her grandmother's face. The stern, piercing eyes softened and beamed affection upon the girl; all the affection she had deemed it wise to show theretofore always was tempered with sternness. "What a pity he hasn't money," said she. "Still, it can be managed, after a fashion."

"We MUST have money," pursued the girl. "Life with him, without it, would be intolerable. Poor people are thrown so closely together. He is too much for my nerves—often."

"He's your property now," Madam Bowker reminded her. "You must not disparage your own property. Always remember that your husband is your property. Then your silly nerves will soon quiet down."

"We must have money," repeated Margaret. "A great deal of money."

"You know I can't give you a great deal," said the old lady apologetically. "I'll do my best.... Would you like to live with me?"

There was something so fantastic in the idea of Joshua Craig and Madam Bowker living under the same roof, and herself trying to live with them, that Margaret burst out laughing. The old lady frowned; then, appreciating the joke, she joined in. "You'll have to make up your mind to live very quietly. Politics doesn't pay well—not Craig's branch of it, except in honor. He will be very famous."

"Where?" retorted Margaret disdainfully. "Why, with a lot of people who aren't worth considering. No, I am going to take Joshua out of politics."

The old lady looked interest and inquiry.

"He has had several flattering offers to be counsel to big corporations. The things he has done against them have made them respect and want him. I'm going to get him to leave politics and practice law in New York. Lawyers there—the shrewd ones, like him—make fortunes. He can still speak occasionally and get all the applause he wants. Joshua loves applause."

The old lady was watching her narrowly.

"Don't you think I'm right, Grandma? I'm telling you because I want your opinion."

"Will he do it?"

Margaret laughed easily. "He's afraid of me. If I manage him well he'll do whatever I wish. I can make him realize he has no right to deprive myself and him of the advantages of my station."

"Um—um," said the old lady, half to herself. "Yes—yes—perhaps. Um—um—"

"He will be much more content once he's settled in the new line. Politics as an end is silly—what becomes of the men who stick to it? But politics as a means is sensible, and Joshua has got out of it about all he can get—about all he needs."

"He hopes to be President."

"So do thousands of other men. And even if he should get it how would we live—how would I live—while we were waiting—and after it was over? I detest politics—all those vulgar people." Margaret made a disdainful mouth. "It isn't for our sort of people—except, perhaps, the diplomatic posts, and they, of course, go by 'pull' or purchase. I like the life I've led—the life you've led. You've made me luxurious and lazy, Grandma....Rather than President I'd prefer him to be ambassador to England, after a while, when we could afford it. We could have a great social career."

"You think you can manage him?" repeated Madam Bowker.

She had been simply listening, her thoughts not showing at the surface. Her tone was neither discouraging nor encouraging, merely interrogative. But Margaret scented a doubt. "Don't you think so?" she said a little less confidently.

"I don't know....I don't know....It will do no harm to try."

Margaret's expression was suddenly like a real face from which a mask has dropped. "I must do it, Grandma. If I don't I shall—I shall HATE him! I will not be his servant! When I think of the humiliations he has put upon me I—I almost hate him now!"

Madam Bowker was alarmed, but was too wise to show it. She laughed. "How seriously you take yourself, child," said she. "All that is very young and very theatrical. What do birth and breeding mean if not that one has the high courage to bear what is, after all, the lot of most women, and the high intelligence to use one's circumstances, whatever they may be, to accomplish one's ambitions? A lady cannot afford to despise her husband. A lady is, first of all, serene. You talk like a Craig rather than like a Severance. If he can taint you this soon how long will it be before you are at his level? How can you hope to bring him up to yours?"

Margaret's head was hanging.

"Never again let me hear you speak disrespectfully of your husband, my child," the old lady went on impressively. "And if you are wise you will no more permit yourself to harbor a disrespectful thought of him than you would permit yourself to wear unclean underclothes."

Margaret dropped down at her grandmother's knee, buried her face in her lap. "I don't believe I can ever love him," she murmured.

"So long as you believe that, you never can," said Madam Bowker; "and your married life will be a failure—as great a failure as mine was—as your mother's was. If I had only known what I know now—what I am telling you—" Madam Bowker paused, and there was a long silence in the room. "Your married life, my dear," she went on, "will be what you choose to make of it. You have a husband. Never let yourself indulge in silly repinings or ruinous longings. Make the best of what you have. Study your husband, not ungenerously and superciliously, but with eyes determined to see the virtues that can be developed, the faults that can be cured, and with eyes that will not linger on the faults that can't be cured. Make him your constant thought and care. Never forget that you belong to the superior sex."

"I don't feel that I do," said Margaret. "I can't help feeling women are inferior and wishing I'd been a man."

"That is because you do not think," replied Madam Bowker indulgently. "Children are the center of life—its purpose, its fulfillment. All normal men and women want children above everything else. Our only title to be here is as ancestors—to replace ourselves with wiser and better than we. That makes woman the superior of man; she alone has the power to give birth. Man instinctively knows this, and it is his fear of subjection to woman that makes him sneer at and fight against every effort to develop her intelligence and her independence. If you are a true woman, worthy of your race and of your breeding, you will never forget your superiority—or the duties it imposes on you—what you owe to your husband and to your children. You are a married woman now. Therefore you are free. Show that you deserve freedom and know how to use it."

Margaret listened to the old woman with a new respect for her—and for herself. "I'll try, Grandmother," she said soberly. "But—it won't be easy." A reflective silence, and she repeated, "No, not easy."

"Easier than to resist and repine and rage and hunt another man who, on close acquaintance, would prove even less satisfactory," replied her grandmother. "Easy—if you honestly try." She looked down at the girl with the sympathy that goes out to inexperience from those who have lived long and thoughtfully and have seen many a vast and fearful bogy loom and, on nearer view, fade into a mist of fancy. "Above all, child, don't waste your strength on imaginary griefs and woes—you'll have none left for the real trials."

Margaret had listened attentively; she would remember what the old lady had said—indeed, it would have been hard to forget words so direct and so impressively uttered. But at the moment they made small impression upon her. She thought her grandmother kindly but cold. In fact, the old lady was giving her as deep commiseration as her broader experience permitted in the circumstances, some such commiseration as one gives a child who sees measureless calamity in a rainy sky on a long-anticipated picnic morning.



CHAPTER XX

MR. CRAIG KISSES THE IDOL'S FOOT

Grant Arkwright reached the Waldorf a little less than an hour after he had seen the bride and groom drive away from Doctor Scones'. He found Craig pacing up and down before the desk, his agitation so obvious that the people about were all intensely and frankly interested. "You look as if you were going to draw a couple of guns in a minute or so and shoot up the house," said he, putting himself squarely before Josh and halting him.

"For God's sake, Grant," cried Joshua, "see how I'm sweating! Go upstairs—up to their suite, and find out what's the matter."

"Go yourself," retorted Grant.

Craig shook his head. He couldn't confess to Arkwright what was really agitating him, why he did not disregard Margaret's injunction.

"What're you afraid of?"

Josh scowled as Grant thus unconsciously scuffed the sore spot. "I'm not afraid!" he cried aggressively. "It's better that you should go. Don't haggle—go!"

As Grant could think of no reason why he shouldn't, and as he had the keenest curiosity to see how the "old tartar" was taking it, he went. Margaret's voice came in response to his knock. "Oh, it's you," said she in a tone of relief.

Her face was swollen and her eyes red. She looked anything but lovely. Grant, however, was instantly so moved that he did not notice her homeliness. Also, he was one of those unobservant people who, having once formed an impression of a person, do not revise it except under compulsion; his last observation of Margaret had resulted in an impression of good looks, exceptional charm. He bent upon her a look in which understanding sympathy was heavily alloyed with the longing of the covetous man in presence of his neighbor's desirable possessions. But he discreetly decided that he would not put into words—at least, not just yet—his sympathy with her for her dreadful, her tragic mistake. No, it would be more tactful as well as more discreet to pretend belief that her tears had been caused by her grandmother. He glanced round.

"Where's Madam Bowker?" inquired he. "Did she blow up and bolt?"

"Oh, no," answered Margaret, seating herself with a dreary sigh. "She's gone to her sitting-room to write with her own hand the announcement that's to be given out. She says the exact wording is very important."

"So it is," said Grant. "All that's said will take its color from the first news."

"No doubt." Margaret's tone was indifferent, absent.

Arkwright hesitated to introduce the painful subject, the husband; yet he had a certain malicious pleasure in doing it, too. "Josh wants to come up," said he. "He's down at the desk, champing and tramping and pawing holes in the floor." And he looked at her, to note the impression of this vivid, adroitly-reminiscent picture.

"Not yet," said Margaret curtly and coldly. All of a sudden she buried her face in her hands and burst into tears.

"Rita—dear Rita!" exclaimed Grant, his own eyes wet, "I know just how you feel. Am I not suffering, too? I thought I didn't care, but I did—I do. Rita, it isn't too late yet—"

She straightened; dried her eyes. "Stop that, Grant!" she said peremptorily. "Stop it!"

His eyes sank. "I can't bear to see you suffer."

"You don't mean a word of what you've just said," she went on. "You are all upset, as I am. You are his friend and mine." Defiantly: "And I love him, and you know I do."

It was the tone of one giving another something that must be repeated by rote. "That's it," said he, somewhat sullenly, but with no hint of protest. "I'm all unstrung, like you, and like him."

"And you will forget that you saw me crying."

"I'll never think of it again." "Now go and bring him, please."

He went quickly toward the door.

"Grant!" she cried. As he turned she rose, advanced with a friendly smile and put out her hand for his. "Thank you," she said. "You have shown yourself OUR best friend."

"I meant to be," he answered earnestly, as he pressed her hand. "When I pull myself together I think you'll realize I'm some decenter than I've seemed of late."

Madam Bowker came just as he returned with Craig. So all attention was concentrated upon the meeting of the two impossibilities. The old lady took her new relative's hand with a gracious, queenly smile—a smile that had the effect both of making him grateful and of keeping him "in his place." Said she, "I have been writing out the announcement."

"Thank you," was Joshua's eager, respectful reply.

She gave him the sheet of notepaper she was carrying in her left hand. It was her own private paper, heavy, quiet, rich, engraved with aristocratic simplicity, most elegant; and most elegant was the handwriting. "This," said she, "is to be given out in addition to the formal notice which Grant will send to the newspapers."

Craig read:

"Mrs. Bowker announces the marriage of her grand-daughter, Margaret Severence, and Joshua Craig, of Wayne, Minnesota, and Washington, by the Reverend Doctor Scones, at the Waldorf, this morning. Only a few relatives and Mr. Craig's friend, Mr. Grant Arkwright, were present. The marriage occurred sooner than was expected, out of consideration for Mrs. Bowker, as she is very old, and wished it to take place before she left for her summer abroad."

Craig lifted to the old lady the admiring glance of a satisfied expert in public opinion. Their eyes met on an equality; for an instant he forgot that she figured in his imagination as anything more than a human being. "Splendid!" cried he, with hearty enthusiasm. "You have covered the case exactly. Grant, telephone for an Associated Press reporter and give him this."

"I'll copy it off for him," said Grant.

Madam Bowker and Craig exchanged amused glances. "You'll give it to him in Madam Bowker's handwriting," ordered Craig. "You told Scones to keep his mouth shut, when you paid him?"

The other three looked conscious, and Margaret reddened slightly at this coarse brusqueness of phrase. "Yes," said Grant. "He'll refuse to be interviewed. I'll go and attend to this."

"We're having a gala lunch, at once—in the apartment," said the old lady. "So, come back quickly."

When he was gone she said to the two: "And now what are your plans?"

"We have none," said Craig.

"I had thought—" began Margaret. She hesitated, colored, went on: "Grandmother, couldn't you get the Millicans' camp in the Adirondacks? I heard Mrs. Millican say yesterday they had got it all ready and had suddenly decided to go abroad instead."

"Certainly," said the old lady. "I'll telephone about it at once, and I'll ask the Millicans to lunch with us to-day."

She left them alone. Craig, eyeing his bride covertly, had a sense of her remoteness, her unattainability. He was like a man who, in an hour of rashness and vanity, has boasted that he can attain a certain mountain peak, and finds himself stalled at its very base. He decided that he must assert himself; he tried to nerve himself to seize her in his old precipitate, boisterous fashion. He found that he had neither the desire to do so nor the ability. He had never thought her so full of the lady's charm. That was just the trouble—the lady's charm, not the human being's; not the charm feminine for the male.

"I hope you'll be very patient with me," said she, with a wan smile. "I am far from well. I've been debating for several days whether or not to give up and send for the doctor."

He did not see her real motive in thus paving the way for the formation of the habit of separate lives; he eagerly believed her, was grateful to her, was glad she was ill. So quaint is the interweaving of thought, there flashed into his mind at that moment: "After all, I needn't have blown in so much money on trousseau. Maybe I can get 'em to take back those two suits of twenty-dollar pajamas. Grant went in too deep." This, because the money question was bothering him greatly, the situation that would arise when his savings should be gone; for now it seemed to him he would never have the courage to discuss money with her. If she could have looked in upon his thoughts she would have been well content; there was every indication of easy sailing for her scheme to reconstruct his career.

"When do you think of starting for the Adirondacks?" he asked, with a timidity of preliminary swallowing and blushing that made her turn away her face to hide her smile. How completely hers was the situation! She felt the first triumphant thrill of her new estate.

"To-night," she replied. "We can't put it off."

"No, we can't put it off," assented he, hesitation in his voice, gloom upon his brow. "Though," he added, "you don't look at all well." With an effort: "Margaret, are you glad—or sorry?"

"Glad," she answered in a firm, resolute tone. It became a little hard in its practicality as she added: "You were quite right. We took the only course."

"You asked me to be a little patient with you," he went on.

She trembled; her glance fluttered down.

"Well—I—I—you'll have to be a little patient with me, too." He was red with embarrassment. She looked so still and cold and repelling that he could hardly muster voice to go on: "You can't but know, in a general sort of way, that I'm uncouth, unaccustomed to the sort of thing you've had all your life. I'm going to do my best, Margaret. And if you'll help me, and be a little forbearing, I think—I hope—you'll soon find I'm—I'm—oh, you understand."

She had given a stealthy sigh of relief when she discovered that he was not making the protest she had feared. "Yes, I understand," replied she, her manner a gentle graciousness, which in some moods would have sent his pride flaring against the very heavens in angry scorn. But he thought her most sweet and considerate, and she softened toward him with pity. It was very, pleasant thus to be looked up to, and, being human, she felt anything but a lessened esteem for her qualities of delicateness and refinement, of patrician breeding, when she saw him thus on his knees before them. He had invited her to look down on him, and she was accepting an invitation which it is not in human nature to decline.

There was one subject she had always avoided with him—the subject of his family. He had not exactly avoided it, indeed, had spoken occasionally of his brothers and sisters, their wives and husbands, their children. But his reference to these humble persons, so far removed from the station to which he had ascended, had impressed her as being dragged in by the ears, as if he were forcing himself to pretend to himself and to her that he was not ashamed of them, when in reality he could not but be ashamed. She felt that now was the time to bring up this subject and dispose of it.

Said she graciously: "I'm sorry your father and mother aren't living. I'd like to have known them."

He grew red. He was seeing a tiny, unkempt cottage in the outskirts of Wayne, poor, even for that modest little town. He was seeing a bent, gaunt old laborer in jeans, smoking a pipe on the doorsill; he was seeing, in the kitchen-dining-room-sitting-room- parlor, disclosed by the open door, a stout, aggressive-looking laborer's wife in faded calico, doing the few thick china dishes in dented dishpan on rickety old table. "Yes," said he, with not a trace of sincerity in his ashamed, constrained voice, "I wish so, too."

She understood; she felt sorry for him, proud of herself. Was it not fine and noble of her thus to condescend? "But there are your brothers and sisters," she went graciously on. "I must meet them some time." "Yes, some time," said he, laboriously pumping a thin, watery pretense of enthusiasm into his voice.

She had done her duty by his dreadful, impossible family. She passed glibly to other subjects. He was glad she had had the ladylike tact not to look at him during the episode; he wouldn't have liked any human being to see the look he knew his face was wearing.

In the press of agitating events, both forgot the incident—for the time.



CHAPTER XXI

A SWOOP AND A SCRATCH

When Molly Stillwater heard that Margaret and her "wild man" had gone into the woods for their honeymoon she said: "Rita's got to tame him and train him for human society. So she's taken him where there are no neighbors to hear him scream as—as—" Molly cast about in her stock of slang for a phrase that was vigorous enough —"as she 'puts the boots' to him."

It was a shrewd guess; Margaret had decided that she could do more toward "civilizing" him in those few first weeks and in solitude than in years of teaching at odd times. In China, at the marriage feast, the bride and the groom each struggle to be first to sit on the robe of the other; the idea is that the winner will thenceforth rule. As the Chinese have been many ages at the business of living, the custom should not be dismissed too summarily as mere vain and heathenish superstition. At any rate, Margaret had reasoned it out that she must get the advantage in the impending initial grapple and tussle of their individualities, or choose between slavery and divorce. With him handicapped by awe of her, by almost groveling respect for her ideas and feelings in all man and woman matters, domestic and social, it seemed to her that she could be worsted only by a miracle of stupidity on her part.

Never had he been so nearly "like an ordinary man—like a gentleman"—as when they set out for the Adirondacks. She could scarcely believe her own eyes, and she warmed to him and felt that she had been greatly overestimating her task. He had on one of the suits he had bought ready made that morning. It was of rough blue cloth—dark blue—most becoming and well draped to show to advantage his lithe, powerful frame, its sinews so much more manly-looking than the muscularity of artificially got protuberances usually seen in the prosperous classes in our Eastern cities. Grant had selected the suit, had selected all the suits, and had superintended the fittings. Grant had also selected the negligee shirt and the fashionable collar, and the bright, yet not gaudy, tie, and Grant had selected the shoes that made his feet look like feet; and Grant had conducted him to a proper barber, who had reduced the mop of hair to proportion and order, and had restored its natural color and look of vitality by a thorough shampooing. In brief, Grant had taken a gloomy pleasure in putting his successful rival through the machine of civilization and bringing him out a city man, agreeable to sight, smell and touch.

"Now," said he, when the process was finished, "for Heaven's sake try to keep yourself up to the mark. Take a cold bath every morning and a warm bath before dinner."

"I have been taking a cold bath every day since I got my private bathroom," said Joshua, with honest pride.

"Then you're just as dirty as the average Englishman. He takes a cold bath and fancies he's clean, when in fact he's only clean- looking. Cold water merely stimulates. It takes warm water and soap to keep a man clean."

"I'll bear that in mind," said Craig, with a docility that flattered Grant as kindly attentions from a fierce-looking dog flatter the timid stranger.

"And you must take care of your clothes, too," proceeded the arbiter elegantiarum. "Fold your trousers when you take them off, and have them pressed. Get your hair cut once a week—have a regular day for it. Trim your nails twice a week. I've got you a safety razor. Shave at least once a day—first thing after you get out of bed is the best time. And change your linen every day. Don't think because a shirt isn't downright dirty that you can pass it off for fresh."

"Just write those things down," said Josh. "And any others of the same kind you happen to think of. I hate to think what a state I'd be in if I hadn't you. Don't imagine I'm not appreciating the self-sacrifice."

Grant looked sheepish. But he felt that his shame was unwarranted, that he really deserved Craig's tactless praise. So he observed virtuously: "That's where we men are beyond the women. Now, if it were one woman fixing up another, the chances are a thousand to one she'd play the cat, and get clothes and give suggestions that'd mean ruin."

It may not speak well for Arkwright's capacity for emotion, but it certainly speaks well for his amiability and philanthropy that doing these things for Craig had so far enlisted him that he was almost as anxious as the fluttered and flustered bridegroom himself for the success of the adventure. He wished he could go along, in disguise, as a sort of valet and prime minister—to be ever near Josh to coach and advise and guide him. For it seemed to him that success or failure in this honeymooning hung upon the success or failure of Craig in practising the precepts that for Grant and his kind take precedence of the moral code. He spent an earnest and exhausting hour in neatly and carefully writing out the instructions, as Craig had requested. He performed this service with a gravity that would move some people to the same sort of laughter and wonder that is excited by the human doings of a trained chimpanzee. But Craig—the wild man, the arch foe of effeteness, the apostle of the simple life of yarn sock and tallowed boot and homespun pants and hairy jaw—Craig accepted the service with heartfelt thanks in his shaking voice and moist eye.

Thus the opening of the honeymoon was most auspicious. Craig, too much in awe of Margaret to bother her, and busy about matters that concerned himself alone, was a model of caution, restraint and civility. Margaret, apparently calm, aloof and ladylike, was really watching his discreet conduct as a hawk watches a sheltered hen; she began to indulge in pleasant hopes that Joshua's wild days had come to an abrupt end. Why, he was even restrained in conversation; he did not interrupt her often, instantly apologized and forebore when he did; he poured out none of his wonted sophomoric diatribes, sometimes sensible, more often inane, as the prattle of a great man in his hour of relaxation is apt to be. She had to do most of the talking—and you may be sure that she directed her conversation to conveying under an appearance of lightness many valuable lessons in the true wisdom of life as it is revealed only to the fashionable idle. She was careful not to overdo, not to provoke, above all not to put him at his ease.

Her fiction of ill health, of threatened nervous prostration, also served to free her from an overdose of his society during the long and difficult days in that eventless solitude. He was all for arduous tramps through the woods, for excursions in canoe under the fierce sun. She insisted on his enjoying himself—"but I don't feel equal to any such exertion. I simply must rest and take care of myself." She was somewhat surprised at his simplicity in believing her health was anything but robust, when her appearance gave the lie direct to her hints and regrets. While he was off with one of the guides she stayed at camp, reading, working at herself with the aid of Selina, revolving and maturing her plans.

When she saw him she saw him at his best. He showed up especially well at swimming. She was a notable figure herself in bathing suit, and could swim in a nice, ladylike way; but he was a water creature—indeed, seemed more at home in the water than on land. She liked to watch his long, strong, narrow body cut the surface of the transparent lake with no loss of energy in splashing or display—as easy and swift as a fish. She began to fear she had made a mistake in selecting a place for her school for a husband, "He's in his element—this wilderness," thought she, "not mine. I'll take him back with everything still to be done."

And, worst of all, she found herself losing her sense of proportion, her respect for her fashionable idols. Those vast woods, that infinite summer sky—they were giving her a new and far from practical point of view—especially upon the petty trickeries and posturings of the ludicrously self-important human specks that crawl about upon the earth and hastily begin to act queer and absurd as soon as they come in sight of each other. She found herself rapidly developing that latent "sentimentality" which her grandmother had so often rebuked and warned her against —which Lucia had insisted was her real self. Her imagination beat the bars of the cage of convention in which she had imprisoned it, and cried out for free, large, natural emotions—those that make the blood leap and the flesh tingle, that put music in the voice and softness in the glance and the intense joy of life in the heart. And she began to revolve him before eyes that searched hopefully for possibilities of his giving her precisely what her nerves craved.

"It would be queer, wouldn't it," she mused—she was watching him swim—"if it should turn out that I had come up here to learn, instead of to teach?"

And he—In large presences he was always at his best—in the large situations of affairs, in these large, tranquillizing horizons of nature. He, too, began to forget that she was a refined, delicate, sensitive lady, with nerves that writhed under breaks in manners and could in no wise endure a slip in grammar, unless, of course, it was one of those indorsed by fashionable usage. His health came flooding and roaring back in its fullness; and day by day the difficulty of restraining himself from loud laughter and strong, plebeian action became more appalling to him. He would leave the camp, set off at a run as soon as he got safely out of sight; and, when he was sure of seclusion in distance, he would "cut loose"— yell and laugh and caper like a true madman; tear off his superfluous clothes, splash and thresh in some lonely lake like a baby whale that has not yet had the primary lessons in how to behave. When he returned to camp, subdued in manner, like a bad boy after recess, he was, in fact, not one bit subdued beneath the surface, but the more fractious for his outburst. Each day his animal spirits surged higher; each day her sway of awe and respect grew more precarious. She thought his increasing silence, his really ridiculous formality of politeness, his stammering and red- cheeked dread of intrusion meant a deepening of the sense of the social gulf that rolled between them. She recalled their conversation about his relatives. "Poor fellow!" thought she. "I suppose it's quite impossible for people of my sort to realize what a man of his birth and bringing up feels in circumstances like these." Little did she dream, in her exaltation of self- complacence and superiority, that the "poor fellow's" clumsy formalities were the thin cover for a tempest of wild-man's wild emotion.

Curiously, she "got on" his nerves before he on hers. It was through her habit of rising late and taking hours to dress. Part of his code of conduct—an interpolation of his own into the Arkwright manual for a honeymooning gentleman—was that he ought to wait until she was ready to breakfast, before breakfasting himself. Several mornings she heard tempestuous sounds round the camp for two hours before she emerged from her room. She knew these sounds came from him, though all was quiet as soon as she appeared; and she very soon thought out the reason for his uproar. Next, his anger could not subdue itself beyond surliness on her appearing, and the surliness lasted through the first part of breakfast. Finally, one morning she heard him calling her when she was about half-way through her leisurely toilette: "Margaret! MARGARET!"

"Yes—what is it?"

"Do come out. You're missing the best part of the day."

"All right—in a minute."

She continued with, if anything, a slackening of her exertions; she appeared about an hour after she had said "in a minute." He was ready to speak, and speak sharply. But one glance at her, at the exquisite toilette—of the woods, yet of the civilization that dwells in palaces and reposes languidly upon the exertions of menials—at her cooling, subduing eyes, so graciously haughty—and he shut his lips together and subsided.

The next morning it was a knock at her door just as she was waking—or had it waked her? "Yes—what is it?"

"Do come out! I'm half starved."

The voice was pleading, not at all commanding, not at all the aggressive, dictatorial voice of the Josh Craig of less than a month before. But it was distinctly reminiscent of that Craig; it was plainly the first faint murmur, not of rebellion, but of the spirit of rebellion. Margaret retorted with an icily polite, "Please don't wait for me."

"Yes, I'll wait. But be as quick as you can."

Margaret neither hastened nor dallied. She came forth at the end of an hour and a half. Josh, to her surprise, greeted her as if she had not kept him waiting an instant; not a glance of sullenness, no suppressed irritation in his voice. Next morning the knock was a summons.

"Margaret! I say, Margaret!" came in tones made bold and fierce by hunger. "I've been waiting nearly two hours."

"For what?" inquired she frigidly from the other side of the door.

"For breakfast."

"Oh! Go ahead with it. I'm not even up yet."

"You've been shut in there ten hours."

"What of it?" retorted she sharply. "Go away, and don't bother me."

He had put her into such an ill humor that when she came out, two hours later, her stormy brow, her gleaming hazel eyes showed she was "looking for trouble." He was still breakfastless—he well knew how to manipulate his weaknesses so that his purposes could cow them, could even use them. He answered her lowering glance with a flash of his blue-green eyes like lightning from the dark head of a thunder-cloud. "Do you know it is nine o'clock?" demanded he.

"So early? I try to get up late so that the days won't seem so long."

He abandoned the field to her, and she thought him permanently beaten. She had yet to learn the depths of his sagacity that never gave battle until the time was auspicious.

Two mornings later he returned to the attack.

"I see your light burning every night until midnight," said he—at breakfast with her, after the usual wait.

"I read myself to sleep," explained she.

"Do you think that's good for you?"

"I don't notice any ill effects."

"You say your health doesn't improve as rapidly as you hoped."

Check! She reddened with guilt and exasperation. "What a sly trick!" thought she. She answered him with a cold: "I always have read myself to sleep, and I fancy I always shall."

"If you went to sleep earlier," observed he, his air unmistakably that of the victor conscious of victory, "you'd not keep me raging round two or three hours for breakfast."

"How often I've asked you not to wait for me! I prefer to breakfast alone, anyhow. It's the dreadful habit of breakfasting together that causes people to get on together so badly."

"I'd not feel right," said he, moderately, but firmly, "if I didn't see you at breakfast."

She sat silent—thinking. He felt what she was thinking—how common this was, how "middle class," how "bourgeois," she was calling it. "Bourgeois" was her favorite word for all that she objected to in him, for all she was trying to train out of him by what she regarded as most artistically indirect lessons. He felt that their talk about his family, what he had said, had shown he felt, was recurring to her. He grew red, burned with shame from head to foot.

"What a fool, what a pup I was!" he said to himself. "If she had been a real lady—no, by gad—a real WOMAN—she'd have shown that she despised me."

Again and again that incident had come back to him. It had been, perhaps, the most powerful factor in his patience with her airs and condescensions. He felt that it, the lowest dip of his degradation in snobism, had given her the right to keep him in his place. It seemed to him one of those frightful crimes against self-respect which can never be atoned, and, bad as he thought it from the standpoint of good sense as to the way to get on with her, he suffered far more because it was such a stinging, scoffing denial of all his pretenses of personal pride. "Her sensibilities have been too blunted by association with those Washington vulgarians," he reasoned, "for her to realize the enormity of my offense, but she realizes enough to look down at me more contemptuously every time she recalls it." However, the greater the blunder the greater the necessity of repairing. He resolutely thrust his self-abasing thoughts to the background of his mind, and began afresh.

"I'm sure," said he, "you'd not mind, once you got used to it."

She was startled out of her abstraction. "Used to—what?" she inquired.

"To getting up early."

"Oh!" She gave a relieved laugh. "Still harping on that. How persistent you are!"

"You could accomplish twice as much if you got up early and made a right start."

She frowned slightly. "Couldn't think of it," said she, in the tone of one whose forbearance is about at an end. "I hate the early morning."

"We usually hate what's best for us. But, if we're sensible, we do it until it becomes a habit that we don't mind—or positively like."

This philosophy of the indisputable and the sensible brimmed the measure. "What would you think of me," said she, in her pleasantest, most deliberately irritating way in the world, "if I were to insist that you get up late and breakfast late? You should learn to let live as well as to live. You are too fond of trying to compel everybody to do as you wish."

"I make 'em see that what I wish is what they ought. That's not compelling."

"It's even more unpopular."

"I'm not looking for popularity, but for success."

"Well, please don't annoy me in the mornings hereafter."

"You don't seem to realize you've renounced your foolish idlers and all their ways, and have joined the working classes." His good humor had come back with breakfast; he had finished two large trout, much bread and marmalade and coffee—and it had given her a pleasure that somehow seemed vulgar and forbidden to see him eat so vastly, with such obvious delight. As he made his jest about her entry into the working classes—she who suggested a queen bee, to employ the labors of a whole army of willing toilers, while she herself toiled not—he was tilted back at his ease, smoking a cigarette and watching the sunbeams sparkle in the waves of her black hair like jewels showered there. "You're surely quite well again," he went on, the trend of his thought so hidden that he did not see it himself.

"I don't feel especially well," said she, instantly on guard.

He laughed. "You'd not dare say that to yourself in the mirror. You have wonderful color. Your eyes—there never was anything so clear. You were always straight—that was one of the things I admired about you. But now, you seem to be straight without the slightest effort—the natural straightness of a sapling."

This was most agreeable, for she loved compliments, liked to discover that the charms which she herself saw in herself were really there. But encouraging such talk was not compatible with the course she had laid out for herself with him. She continued silent and cold.

"If you'd only go to sleep early, and get up early, and drop all that the railway train carried us away from, you'd be as happy as the birds and the deer and the fish."

"I shall not change my habits," said she tartly. "I hope you'll drop the subject."

He leaned across the table toward her, the same charm now in his face and in his voice that had drawn her when she first heard him in public speech. "Let's suppose I'm a woodchopper, and you are my wife. We've never been anywhere but just here. We're going to live here all our lives—just you and I—and no one else—and we don't want any one else. And we love each other—"

It was very alluring, but there was duty frowning upon her yielding senses. "Please don't let that smoke drift into my face," said she crossly. "It's choking me."

He flung away the cigarette. "Beg pardon," he muttered, between anger and humility. "Thought you didn't mind smoking."

She was ashamed of herself, and grew still angrier. "If you'd only think about some one beside yourself once in a while," said she. "You quite wear people out, with your everlasting thinking and talking about yourself."

"You'd better stop that midnight reading," flared he. "Your temper is going to the devil."

She rose with great dignity; with an expression that seemed to send him tumbling and her soaring she went into the house.

In some moods he would have lain where he fell for quite a while. But his mood of delight in her charms as a woman had completely eclipsed his deference for her charms as a lady. He hesitated only a second, then followed her, overtook her at the entrance to her room. She, hearing him coming, did not face about and put him back in his place with one haughty look. Instead, she in impulsive, most ill-timed panic, quickened her step. When the woman flees, the man, if there be any manhood in him, pursues. He caught her, held her fast.

"Let me go!" she cried, not with the compelling force of offended dignity, but with the hysterical ineffectiveness of terror. "You are rough. You hurt."

He laughed, turned her about in his arms until she was facing him. "The odor of those pines, out there," he said, "makes me drunk, and the odor of your hair makes me insane." And he was kissing her—those fierce, strong caresses that at once repelled and compelled her.

"I hate you!" she panted. "I hate you!"

"Oh, no, you don't," retorted he. "That isn't what's in your eyes." And he held her so tightly that she was almost crying out with pain.

"Please—please!" she gasped. And she wrenched to free herself. One of his hands slipped, his nail tore a long gash in her neck; the blood spurted out, she gave a loud cry, an exaggerated cry— for the pain, somehow, had a certain pleasure in it. He released her, stared vacantly at the wound he had made. She rushed into her room, slammed the door and locked it.

"Margaret!" he implored.

She did not answer; he knew she would not. He sat miserably at her door for an hour, then wandered out into the woods, and stayed there until dinner-time.

When he came in she was sitting by the lake, reading a French novel. To him, who knew only his own language, there was something peculiarly refined and elegant about her ability at French; he thought, as did she, that she spoke French like a native, though, in fact, her accent was almost British, and her understanding of it was just about what can be expected in a person who has never made a thorough study of any language. As he advanced toward her she seemed unconscious of his presence. But she was seeing him distinctly, and so ludicrous a figure of shy and sheepish contrition was he making that she with difficulty restrained her laughter. He glanced guiltily at the long, red scratch on the pallid whiteness of her throat.

"I'm ashamed of myself," said he humbly. "I'm not fit to touch a person like you. I—I—"

She was not so mean as she had thought she would be. "It was nothing," said she pleasantly, if distantly. "Is dinner ready?"

Once more she had him where she wished—abject, apologetic, conscious of the high honor of merely being permitted to associate with her. She could relax and unbend again; she was safe from his cyclones.



CHAPTER XXII

GETTING ACQUAINTED

Her opportunity definitely to begin her campaign to lift him up out of politics finally came. She had been doing something in that direction almost every day. She must be careful not to alarm his vanity of being absolute master of his own destiny. The idea of leaving politics and practising law in New York, must seem to originate and to grow in his own brain; she would seem to be merely assenting. Also, it was a delicate matter because the basic reason for the change was money; and it was her cue as a lady, refined and sensitive and wholly free from sordidness, so to act that he would think her loftily indifferent to money. She had learned from dealing with her grandmother that the way to get the most money was by seeming ignorant of money values, a cover behind which she could shame Madam Bowker into giving a great deal more than she would have given on direct and specific demand. For instance, she could get more from the old lady than could her mother, who explained just what she wanted the money for and acted as if the giving were a great favor. No, she must never get with him on a footing where he could discuss money matters frankly with her; she must simply make him realize how attractive luxury was, how necessary it was to her, how confidently she looked to him to provide it, how blindly, in her ignorance of money and all sordid matters, she trusted to him to maintain her as a wife such as she must be maintained. She knew she did not understand him thoroughly—"we've been so differently brought up." But she felt that the kind of life that pleased her and dazzled him must be the kind he really wished to lead—and would see he wished to lead, once he extricated himself, with her adroit assistance, from the kind of life to which his vociferous pretenses had committed him.

Whether her subtleties in furtherance of creating a sane state of mind in him had penetrated to him, she could not tell. In the earliest step of their acquaintance she had studied him as a matrimonial possibility, after the habit of young women with each unattached man they add to their list of acquaintances. And she had then discovered that whenever he was seriously revolving any matter he never spoke of it; he would be voluble about everything and anything else under the sun, would seem to be unbosoming himself of his bottommost secret of thought and action, but would not let escape so much as the smallest hint of what was really engaging his whole mind. It was this discovery that had set her to disregarding his seeming of colossal, of fatuous egotism, and had started her toward an estimate of him wholly different from the current estimate. Now, was he thinking of their future, or was it some other matter that occupied his real mind while he talked on and on, usually of himself? She could not tell; she hoped it was, but she dared not try to find out.

They were at their mail, which one of the guides had just brought. He interrupted his reading to burst out: "How they do tempt a man! Now, there's"—and he struck the open letter in his hand with a flourishing, egotistic gesture—"an offer from the General Steel Company. They want me as their chief counsel at fifty thousand a year and the privilege of doing other work that doesn't conflict."

Fifty thousand a year! Margaret discreetly veiled her glistening eyes.

"It's the fourth offer of the same sort," he went on, "since we've been up here—since it was given out that I'd be Attorney-General as soon as old Stillwater retires. The people pay me seventy-five hundred a year. They take all my time. They make it impossible for me to do anything outside. They watch and suspect and grumble. And I could be making my two hundred thousand a year or more."

He was rattling on complacently, patting himself on the back, and, in his effort to pose as a marvel of patriotic self-sacrifice, carefully avoiding any suggestion that mere money seemed to him a very poor thing beside the honor of high office, the direction of great affairs, the flattering columns of newspaper praise and censure, the general agitation of eighty millions over him. "Sometimes I'm almost tempted to drop politics," he went on, "and go in for the spoils. What do you think?"

She was taken completely off guard. She hadn't the faintest notion that this was his way of getting at her real mind. But she was too feminine to walk straight into the trap. "I don't know," said she, with well-simulated indifference, as if her mind were more than half on her own letter. "I haven't given the matter any thought." Carelessly: "Where would we live if you accepted this offer?"

"New York, of course. You prefer Washington, don't you?"

"No, I believe I'd like New York better. I've a great many friends there. While there isn't such a variety of people, the really nice New Yorkers are the most attractive people in America. And one can live so well in New York."

"I'd sink into a forgotten obscurity," pursued the crafty Joshua. "I'd be nothing but a corporation lawyer, a well-paid fetch-and- carry for the rich thieves that huddle together there."

"Oh, you'd be famous wherever you are, I'm sure," replied she with judicious enthusiasm. "Besides, you'd have fame with the real people."

His head reared significantly. But, to draw her on, he said: "That's true. That's true," as if reflecting favorably.

"Yes, I think I'd like New York," continued she, all unsuspicious. "I don't care much for politics. I hate to think of a man of your abilities at the mercy of the mob. In New York you could make a really great career."

"Get rich—be right in the social swim—and you too," suggested he.

"It certainly is very satisfactory to feel one is of the best people. And I'm sure you'd not care to have me mix up with all sorts, as politicians' wives have to do."

He laughed at her—the loud, coarse Josh Craig outburst. "You're stark mad on the subject of class distinctions, aren't you?" said he. "You'll learn some day to look on that sort of thing as you would on an attempt to shovel highways and set up sign-posts in the open sea. Your kind of people are like the children that build forts out of sand at the seashore. Along comes a wave and washes it all away....You'd be willing for me to abandon my career and become a rich nonentity in New York?"

His tone was distinctly offensive. "I don't look at it in that way," said she coldly. "Really, I care nothing about it." And she resumed the reading of her letter.

"Do you expect me to believe," demanded he, excited and angry—"do you expect me to believe you've not given the subject of our future a thought?"

She continued reading. Such a question in such a tone called for the rebuke of an ignoring silence. Also, deep down in her nature, down where the rock foundations of courage should have been but were not, there had begun an ominous trembling.

"You know what my salary is?"

"You just mentioned it."

"You know it's to be only five hundred dollars a year more after January?"

"I knew the Cabinet people got eight thousand." She was gazing dreamily out toward the purple horizon, seemed as far as its mountains from worldliness.

"Hadn't you thought out how we were to live on that sum? You are aware I've practically nothing but my salary."

"I suppose I ought to think of those things—ought to have thought of them," replied she with a vague, faint smile. "But really— well, we've been brought up rather carelessly—I suppose some people would call it badly—and—"

"You take me for a fool, don't you?" he interrupted roughly.

She elevated her eyebrows.

"I wish I had a quarter for every row between your people and your grandmother on the subject of money. I wish I had a dollar for every row you and she have had about it."

He again vented his boisterous laugh; her nerves had not been so rasped since her wedding day. "Come, Margaret," he went on, "I know you've been brought up differently from me. I know I seem vulgar to you in many ways. But because I show you I appreciate those differences, don't imagine I'm an utter ass. And I certainly should be if I didn't know that your people are human beings."

She looked guilty as well as angry now. She felt she had gone just the one short step too far in her aristocratic assumptions.

He went on in the tone of one who confidently expects that there will be no more nonsense: "When you married me you had some sort of idea how we'd live."

"I assumed you had thought out those things or you'd not have married me," cried she hotly. In spite of her warnings to herself she couldn't keep cool. His manner, his words were so inflammatory that she could not hold herself from jumping into the mud to do battle with him. She abandoned her one advantage—high ground; she descended to his level. "You knew the sort of woman I was," she pursued. "You undertook the responsibility. I assume you are man enough to fulfill it."

He felt quite at home with her now. "And you?" rasped he. "What responsibility did YOU undertake?"

She caught her breath, flamed scarlet.

"Now let us hear what wife means in the dictionary of a lady. Come, let's hear it!"

She was silent.

"I'm not criticising," he went on; "I'm simply inquiring. What do you think it means to be a wife?"

Still she could think of no answer.

"It must mean something," urged he. "Tell me. I've got to learn some time, haven't I?"

"I think," said she, with a tranquil haughtiness which she hoped would carry off the weakness of the only reply she could get together on such short notice, "among our sort of people the wife is expected to attend to the social part of the life."

He waited for more—waited with an expression that suggested thirst. But no more came. "Is that all?" he inquired, and waited again—in vain. "Yes? ...Well, tell me, where in thunder does the husband come in? He puts up the cash for the wife to spend in dressing and amusing herself—is that all?"

"It is generally assumed," said she, since she had to say something or let the case go against her by default, "that the social side of life can be very useful in furthering a man."

He vented a scornful sound that was like a hoot. "In furthering a lick-spittle—yes. But not a MAN!"

"Our ideas on some subjects are hopelessly apart."

She suddenly realized that this whole conversation had been deliberately planned by him; that he had, indeed, been debating within himself their future life, and that he had decided that the time was ripe for a frank talk with her. It angered her that she had not realized this sooner, that she had been drawn from her position, had been forced to discuss with him on his own terms and at his own time and in his own manner. She felt all the fiery indignation of the schemer who has been outwitted.