mor.

imagine a connoisseur finding a patent rocker comfortable, and having the rare audacity to admit it, you can guess Walter Leaven's attitude to his sense of huHe sat in his rocker and looked at his masterpieces. At first it had been only another way of showing deliberate disrespect to life; but eventually he had come to like his rocker. . . . It was because he could see how absurd was Cordelia Wheaton's present theory of existence that he worried about her.

He had, all these last years, suspected that Cordelia was making a mystical fool of herself, but she had said little to him, on the rare occasions when he had seen her. Only at that last dinner she had shared with him had she let him have it straight-as straight as one could let you have any dim nonsense of the sort. He didn't know where she had got it: she didn't tell him. But of course there were always futile sophistications ready to the hand of the rich. There was religion in her impoverishing herself, but it was a religion with no æsthetic value. One of those queer things out of the East: bound up with charlatans and flatulent illiteracy. A state of mind that rejected the concrete; that would, if it consented to look at it, have deplored the Renaissance! Cordelia was by way of denying her body, and the humanist in him would have preferred cosmetics and masseuses. Life, wishing to make him squirm in his patent rocker, had shown him the woman he had loved turned-what was the ridiculous thing?-Buddhist. They did that sort of thing, he knew, in Boston; but they did it temporarily-they didn't burn their boats. It didn't go beyond vegetarianism and housing impostors in turbans. He could have stood it as a fad; but Cordelia had already disposed of her fortune; she was going to India, or Tibet, or Ceylon, or some such place, to finish her days contemplating the Infinite. At least, he supposed it was the Infinite: he had refused to listen to the jargon. Cordelia was sweet, was dignified, was reticent about it; but that was what it amounted to. She would grow fatter and fatter until she couldn't move, until she was just a mystic stare out of a heap of flesh. And all the time, if she could only have seen it that way, there was Rome: a

great hospital, equipped to receive any kind of case, even hers. That was all he knew, and he knew more than any one else. He was too sore to think of it as a brave gesture on her part; and he knew well that giving your life for a cause does not prove the worth of the cause. Cordelia would perish for something whose sole sense was to make an article in an encyclopædia. And he, enriched, must watch her perish: the woman who had been slim, sweet, and noble, and whom he had never asked to marry him for reasons she was perfectly aware of. Walter Leaven "believed" nothing; but he could have borne a bigotry that had been responsible for Fra Angelico. When he came to think of it, the absence of bigotry was the most disgusting thing about Cordelia's revelation.

His knowledge of her religion was sketchy, but his sense of it had become vivid. He saw it as something too vast and vaporous to be quite decent. It was a great mist reeking; in it moved gods. of prehistoric countenance, mopping and mowing with mile-wide grins. His own agnosticism had at least the cleanness of the void. Her revelation had nothing to say to humanity; it denied all passion, even the purest, all codes, even the noblest. There were in it none of those choices that justify the soul. Life, any life-snake or man-it held indecent, a thing to be got rid of. Their saints gazed at their own navels and were dumb. Ugh!

No wonder he had been unhappy when he left her house on that momentous evening. All Cordelia's life had been a tacit refusal of his unspoken offer of himself, but he had never felt really jilted until now. And it was too late to glorify another woman; too late, even, to fling himself ironically into ignoble adventures. His blood was thin, his ardors ran low; he wanted nothing, not even enough disgust to shock him back into his illusions. Only that morning he had signed a new lease for his two inconvenient rooms. He had walked past his tailor's three times before deciding to go in and order a suit he sorely needed. For two days he had been deliberating over having a telephone installed. He thought he might run to that, but he hesitated, in

spite of himself, to make so lavish a gesture. Perhaps Huntingdon's visit had tinged the air with venturesomeness. At all events, half an hour after Huntingdon had left him, Leaven got up, put on his overcoat, and started out for the office of the telephone company. At the same time he resolved inwardly to buy another book of meal-tickets at his dreary boarding-house. No one can say what Walter Leaven feared, or why; but he crept further into his familiar frugality as if menaced by deadly guns.

III

BESSIE JOHN sat on a step-ladder, mocking her florid husband. "You are as glad as I am, you know you are. Haven't we always wanted to be civilized? And aren't we doing it discreetly? Aren't we hanging our own pictures? If I had been the offspring of frivolity and extravagance that you think me, wouldn't I have paid the people from Crantz's to do it all? Am I not throwing sops all the time to Cerberus? Have I urged you to give up your work? Did I set up a butler when I was sore tempted? Have I even yet been to a good dressmaker? Did I not say to you in an Old Testament voice: 'Philip, Philip, they must be real antiques, against the day when we may have to sell them'? Did I not curb my taste for Louis Quinze and Chinese Chippendale, and sally into lone and dangerous farmhouses, buying the four-post bed from under the hired man and the decrepit mahogany from under the boiled dinner? Have I not been as clever as a mendicant and as shrinking as a criminal? Colonial I have forced myself to be though it's not worthy of me; but Braun photographs upon my walls I will not have. There is a point beyond which rolling in the mud is not Christian humility but sheer swinishness. And, above all, Philip of my heart, have I ever for one moment, since luck came, gone back on my manners? 'The Lord our God is a jealous God'; and I have every day tried to prove to Him that luck is good for my soul. I haven't wrestled in prayer-it isn't my way-but I have meant to show that adversity isn't the best and only teacher. Adversity, you

know, always spoke Greek, as far as I was concerned. I was getting near the point of collapse. I didn't so much mind eating off fumed oak and sitting in Mission chairs-though they were very uncomfortable-as I did pretending to a lot of people that I liked fumed oak and Mission chairs, and chafing-dishes, and the brassware of Russian Jews. Yet I could never say, even to the Orpingtons, that I hated it all. I somehow couldn't. It's one thing you don't do. Yes, I was in revolt. I wouldn't even be cheerful, and go in for wicker. That would have been to accept our fate, finally; worse still, to pronounce ourselves optimists.

"No, Philip dear, I have behaved very well. I have been very grave about it— almost as grave as you. I haven't danced up and down, and I have made more concessions to your conscience and your gloom than you will ever know about. If I can't help thanking God that I shall never again have to sleep in a white enamelled bed, do you blame me? And you can't say I have gone in for anything chic. I don't particularly like Colonial furniture: I have a soul above it. But I realize that it's respectable, that one needn't be ashamed of it, that it's not ostentatious; and you can't say that our drawing-room mightn't have been a New England sea-captain's front parlor. It's built round Miss Wheaton's chessmen. That was why I asked for them instead of something more valuable. Given the chessmen, I could reconstruct. Did you know that old Miss Bean lugged off the what-not? Do you think I ought to have wrested it from her, and built round that?"

Philip John, fair, handsome, his grave boy's face verging on heaviness, looked up at his wife.

"I know you hated it all," he said simply. "I don't blame you. I've no vocation for knock-down furniture, myself. I'm glad, too-of course I am. I suppose it's superstitious of me, but I somehow thought we'd better go slow. The price of the engravings nearly knocked me over. We can afford them, but ought we to? Isn't it sinking too much of our principal in personal property?"

"But after this we can live on our

Philip John sat down in a comfortable wing-chair and gazed upward at his wife. "Is it all going just for food and clothes and things?"

Bessie John leaned her chin in her hand and spoke in a deep, low, chanting voice. "He wants to give to the poor; he wants to take a pew in church; he wants to insure his life; he wants to chip bits off his salary and run by stealth to the savingsbank with them; he wants to work overtime at the office, and to put antimacassars on all the chairs; he wants never, never, never to take a taxi, but always to ride in the subway!" She sang the last phrase softly, ending on a minor third.

"My dear girl, you know perfectly well what I mean. And it wouldn't hurt us to give something to the poor."

Bessie John came down from the stepladder and stood by the chimneypiece, with folded arms.

I've

"Pilly-Winky, it would hurt me. done all I care to do for the poor. I've been poor. You can't do more for them than to live as they do. Even settlementworkers get a day off now and then. It's many a year since I've had a day off. No, Pilly-Winky, not the poor. It all goes into administration expenses, anyhow. I'm always willing to give candy to a baby, but I draw the line at subscriptions to anything. Any personal charity I feel like expending is going to be expended, for a long time to come, on you. Understand? You're the most deserving person I know."

She crossed to him and put her hands on his shoulders, gripping him hard. Her voice matched her gesture. "Nor yet a pew in church, my dear. I praise God in my own way. I'm not going to set up as a churchgoer just because I can have clothes that the usher would be polite to. When I think of it, the thing I admired most about Miss Wheaton was her absence of cant. She wasn't dying to support religion. She preferred to support individuals that she pitied, liked, or respected. She disposed of her money quietly, decently. If she had wanted it used for indiscriminate charity, she would

have given it that way, wouldn't she? Or if she had wanted to hold up the hands of the church? She preferred to give you and me a chance to be almost as nice as we really are. And I honor her for it."

"So do I, my dear." His gravity matched her soft vehemence. "But she at least didn't think it right to use all her wealth in pampering herself. She parted with it. She gave it-you may say-to us.'

"And that is where it is going to stay." Bessie John gave him a last little shake, then sat down facing him. She crossed her slim hands behind her head and swung her left foot.

"Pilly-Winky, I honestly wouldn't criticise if you really had a passionate desire to support some particular good work. Tuberculosis hospitals, vacations for working girls, lost dogs, or a Keeley cure for hoboes. What I object to is your uncomfortable sense that because you have something, you must part with it; because you have a little more, you must straightway have a little less. That's mere atavism. Your ancestors got in the way of making themselves uncomfortable for the glory of God. Then, in the sixties, they made my ancestors uncomfortable for the glory of God. They were horrid people, your ancestors, from the start. Comes of reading Hebrew instead of Greek, I shouldn't wonder. But I am not going to squat on Plymouth Rock because I married you, darling. If Colonial furniture is going to remind you of your ancestors at every turn, I'll sell it to-morrow and be chic. Really chic. I could do it beautifully, and you'd mind it awfully. So be good."

"I'll be good. But

She threw up her hands, then passed them with a firm, rhythmic gesture over her sleek, dark hair.

"But-nothing. I do think we might. leave the ducks and drakes to other people. Miss Wheaton's money is going to go in very queer ways. Let us be conventional and decent and charming. Let us soberly show ourselves quiet, civilized, old-fashioned people. In the end, I fancy we shall show up better than any of the others."

"Can you be old-fashioned?" he laughed.

"Can I not? Look at this room." "Oh, that!"

"It's important. I made it with my eyes open. It's of the last bourgeoisie; and I am going to be bourgeoise with the best. I am going to do my duty in that state of life, etc. I am going to be exactly what I should have been if I had grown up in the house just as it stands. I am going to be a good citizeness. And I am going to practise the fine archaic virtue of not attempting either to shock the world or to reform it. I've given my wild imaginings a hypodermic. I am going to be a nice little vertebra in the backbone of the nation; a happy country with no history; a fine old Sheffield teapot; a traditional American according to the Indiana school of novelists."

"And I?"

"You were all those things in the beginning. I have made a moral choice. Therefore I am more to be admired than you."

"Oh, granted. But will you get the admiration?"

"Irony sits ill on you, Philip. No, I shall not get it. I shall only sit at home and deserve it in vain. But in the long run I shall be seen not to have lost my head-like some of the others."

"What others?"

"Some of the dear old madwoman's beneficiaries. Most of them, of course, we don't know; but the few we do seem to have lost their heads already. Do you know what Julie Fort did? Spent hundreds of dollars on clothes and sailed for Europe there to pursue her career." "She paints, doesn't she?"

"There used always to be paint on her fingers, so I suppose she does. The last time I saw her all the paint was on her face. Yes, she paints. . . . But I don't think art is going to be her career."

"What do you mean?" Philip John looked shocked.

"I mean that Julie Fort has read and talked nothing but poison for five years. I think, Philip of my soul, that she is destined to queer adventures. In fact, I think she has gone to look for them. Now you can't say my idea isn't better than that."

"Oh, come, Bess."

heard Julie talk. And I have seen some of her crowd. She's the adventuress type, that's all. Some very queer people, I fancy, will share her fortune with her." "Couldn't you have talked to her?"

"Do you imagine I care what Julie does? I am interested only in proving to you that I'm not the least decent of that miserable company which hung on Miss Wheaton's words. No, not excluding old Mrs. Williston, whom I used to call 'Aunt Blanche,' and never will again." "Why not?"

"Because she has enough real nieces to domineer over, now."

"Aren't you hard on her? I thought she was rather a poor dear."

"She is not poor dear; she is a rich dear. For years she has lived with a married niece and the married niece's large family. Now the married niece is living with her. It's the same house, the same large family; but Mrs. Williston controls them all. 'Aunt Blanche' used to have a hall bedroom on the third floor; 'Mrs. Williston' has the second-story front, and the nephew-in-law goes out of an evening-to the Y. M. C. A., I suppose. I don't think she would let him set up a club."

"Aren't you uncharitable?"

"I am not. I went there yesterday to pay her my last call. She was magnificent in bugles and real lace, and as I entered the throne-room I heard her ask a quite good-looking great-nephew if he couldn't give up cigarettes for Christ. I heard him say he would-but he also said 'damn' in the hall. 'Damn' is no word for a boy of sixteen to use, and I slipped him a dollar as I went in.

that they have to play games with the old horror and cheat themselves so as to let her win. No, I don't regret the dollar. If I managed to give any one in that household any happiness that that old hypocrite can't blight, it was all to the good. Next best to that was making her miserable. That wasn't easy-she's so puffed up with prideful godliness-but I did my modest best. I think we shall cut each other hereafter."

"Was that in your newly adopted tradition?"

"Oh, my dear, I have to give my ancestors some show. Otherwise, I'd break down. This woman is a mighty influence for evil. She radiates unclean piety. After I had made it quite clear that I wouldn't subscribe to any of her funds for putting strait-jackets on the wrong people, she turned to vilifying Miss Wheaton. Said she had taken to some outlandish religion-was no better than a heathen. I suggested to Mrs. Williston that she use some of Miss Wheaton's money for a special missionary to reconvert Miss Wheaton. But I honestly think she prefers to consider her irre-. claimable. I even asked if she wouldn't find the sempstress-Miss Bean, you know-an invaluable coadjutor in her good works, now that the old thing is a leisured woman."

"You seem to have done the thing up brown. What did she do?"

"My dear"-Bessie John's voice shook -"Mrs. Williston is a snob, I fear. And I regret to say that old Miss Bean has joined the Holy Rollers-if you know what they are. It didn't go at all. So I did. And now the step-ladder must be removed, and we must dress for dinner." The two got up simultaneously; Mrs. John's account had brought laughter into the air, yet Philip John's laughter was

nervous and quickly spent. His wife, seeing it, came over to him and rested her hand on his shoulder.

"You don't trust me to turn into the right kind of person?"

He put his arm round her, but did not meet her eyes. "You've always been precisely the right kind of person, Bess. I suppose it's all right."

"You may be sure it's all right." She laid her cheek against his arm and looked steadily away from him at a dark old highboy. "Nothing can be wrong while I admire you as I do. And for the first time in my life I am permitting myself to hope-to hope, do you understand, Philip?-that we may have sons in your likeness. That is another difference that Miss Wheaton is going to make."

Philip John stood tongue-tied an instant in the twilight. Then he crushed his wife to him, looming above her, enfolding her, her slim form vanishing utterly in his embrace. Still tongue-tied, he let her go, caught up the step-ladder like a negligible thing, and carried it out of the room.

Bessie John walked to the big window and looked out into the gloom. "I might have known I needn't worry," she whispered to herself. "I had the ace of trumps all the time. I might panel the nursery with teak, so long as it was a nursery. There's not a man in the world, I believe, who won't fall for that. And it's not a defeat for me, either"-her words came so low that she could scarcely hear them herself-“for I chose Colonial, and it goes, heaven knows, with that!"

Like any other verbalist, Bessie John felt better when she had summed a thing up, even under her breath and in solitude. She passed quickly out of the room by another door, and up-stairs.