Chapter I: Part 1

A Scarlet Poppy
and
Other Stories

BY
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD

NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1894

HARPER’S AMERICAN STORY-TELLERS.

_16mo, Cloth, Ornamental._

THE WATER GHOST, AND OTHERS. By JOHN KENDRICK BANGS. Illustrated. $1
25.

NOWADAYS, AND OTHER STORIES. By GEORGE A. HIBBARD. Illustrated by the
Author. $1 25.

THE STORY OF A STORY, AND OTHER STORIES. By BRANDER MATTHEWS.
Illustrated. $1 25.

THE PRIVATE LIFE. Three Stories. By HENRY JAMES. $1 00.

THE WHEEL OF TIME. Three Stories. By HENRY JAMES. $1 00.

PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.

_The above works are for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent by the publisher, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price._

Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._

CONTENTS

PAGE

A SCARLET POPPY 1

BEST-LAID SCHEMES 29

AN IDEAL 87

MRS. CLAXTON’S SKELETON 107

THE TRAGIC STORY OF BINNS 175

THE COMPOSITE WIFE 215

MR. VAN NORE’S DAUGHTER-IN-LAW 263

A SCARLET POPPY

A SCARLET POPPY

“It was only a quarter of a dollar, Mark.”

“Only a quarter of a dollar! It isn’t that quarter I complain of; it is its multiplication. Four of them make a dollar. How often have I told you, Helena, that the little foxes--”

“Oh, so often that I’d like to be in at the death of them all, and hang up the last brush on the wall!”

“Very likely. That’s quite in character. I fancy there’d be no wall to hang it on by that time, though. That’s all,” pushing back his coffee-cup.

“How perfectly absurd you are, Mark! Because I buy a scarlet paper poppy with a black curled paper heart, eight inches in diameter, to hang outside a lamp-shade, and pay twenty-five cents for it, you are brought to the verge of bankruptcy and I am to be reduced to beggary!”

“It isn’t the poppy at all. It’s--”

“It seems to me that I might commit that extravagance every day if I wished and not ruin you. Three hundred and sixty-five quarters--ninety-one dollars a year. How poor you must be if ninety-one dollars a year can put you into insolvency! But I don’t wish. I--”

“It isn’t the poppy at all”--his face growing purple.

“Oh no, it isn’t the poppy; it’s the twenty-five cents. It isn’t this poppy; it’s the next one,” clasping her pretty hands behind her head, as she leaned back in an insolence of attitude.

“It isn’t the poppy at all; it’s the principle,” cried the exasperated Mr. Dunmore at last, raising his voice so that it could be heard over his wife’s treble, and over the screaming of the wild March gale outside.

“Oh, of course,” said his wife then, “if you choose to talk to me in that tone, it’s the end of argument. I can’t roar, and the strong lungs have it. But it’s very ungentlemanly and unhandsome. It’s quite as mean as grudging me the original twenty-five cents for a decoration to my lamp-shade.”

“Helena, I can’t allow you to go on in this way.”

“You can’t allow me! As if I were going to ask you to allow me! I should suppose it was time you entered sufficiently into the spirit of the age, Mark, to know that wives nowadays are not slaves. They are not allowed or disallowed. And they can spend twenty-five cents without asking; especially if it’s their own,” added Mrs. Dunmore, with sharp emphasis, her great blue eyes sparkling in a way that great blue eyes can on occasion. “Go, lie down, Sauveur!” as the big St. Bernard, aware that something was wrong, came and laid his nose on her arm.

“Very well, then, Helena,” said Mr. Dunmore, with great severity; “since you drive me to it--when it _is_ your own.”

“Really?” said the young woman, with a severity quite as cold as his own. “How long since my own income ceased to be mine? I don’t think my poor father when he left me my little property ever had an idea that any one was going to deny its being my own. ‘Free from marital control,’ he said,” cried Mrs. Dunmore, triumphantly. “‘Free from marital control,’” she repeated, with force. “Does that mean that you, or that I, have the spending of it?”

“You, assuredly, Helena,” said Mr. Dunmore, with more calmness. “How many times this year have you had the spending of it already?”

“I must say, Mr. Dunmore, I fail to understand you.”

“I will enlighten you. When you made your Christmas presents on a scale entirely incommensurate with our means, and I remonstrated, you said you were going to pay for them all yourself out of your January dividends. But when your January dividends came in, the bill for your new cloak came also and took the whole sum.”

“Most men pay for their wives’ cloaks themselves,” said Mrs. Dunmore, with some bitterness.

“Not when their wives order four-hundred-dollar cloaks, and they can only afford one-hundred-dollar ones without running into debt.”

“You have brought me up here into this frigid zone of a climate, Mr. Dunmore, and I certainly expected before I came to be clothed sufficiently to meet the rigor of the weather.”

“You are,” said her husband. “And you were before you spent the whole of your January dividends to pay for a seal-skin cloak. However, that’s neither here nor there. It became necessary then, after the system of genteel beggary in our civilization, to make Laura Kerna a wedding present.”

“We didn’t have any wedding presents ourselves, I suppose!” said the wife, witheringly.

“And I thought one of the twelve ladles that were given to us would do.”

“The idea! So perfectly disgraceful! Some men haven’t any sentiment,” addressing the universe.

“And you insisted on nothing less than a gold-mounted vinaigrette.”

“Dear knows she’ll need it, if all husbands are alike.”

“And you would pay for it out of your January dividends,” said her husband, not noticing her interpolations. “But close upon that came my birthday, and you wished me to make myself a present of a new watch; and when I said it was impossible, you said you would pay for it out of your dividend.”

“If I ever heard of such unparalleled meanness!”

“A little later, when we were getting a fresh carpet for the drawing-room, and I thought Brussels would do, and you declared for Wilton, you assured me that you were to pay for that out of your dividend.”

“Well, if I couldn’t carpet my own house, I wouldn’t twit my wife for doing it.”

“You said the same about the India rug you ordered home without consultation, at two hundred and fifty dollars. It is a beauty, of course; I admit your taste; it is soft as velvet, and colored with sunbeams. But I knew if I paid for that I must go without paying for something else; and you said you would pay for it yourself with your dividend.”

“Pshaw!”

“You must remember that you wanted some moonstones, when they came into fashion; for luck, you said; and about the same time a tall piano-lamp; and, not long after, a big Limoges vase; and in spite of my reluctance--”

“Reluctance!”

“You got them all, and charged them to your dividend again.”

“But, Mark--”

“Pardon me! The next thing that arose was the necessity of educating that young lad in art; and as I didn’t have that money to spare, you drew the money from the house-keeping fund, and said you would replace it from your dividend. Then you started to go down to the city and attend the Friday afternoon concerts, for which your ticket cost thirty-five dollars, and that of a companion thirty-five more; and when you were snowed in on the train, in just such a storm as this, if there ever was such a storm before, and obliged to have a doctor, and a set of bills--ever so little ashamed, perhaps, that your folly had brought about such unlooked-for expense--you said you could settle all that with your dividend. How many times do you think you have used up your dividend money already? Do you think, this March morning, there is twenty-five dollars or twenty-five cents of it left? And don’t you know that my one wish in life is to keep out of debt, that if I am called off suddenly there may be something to take care of you with?--you who spend recklessly many times your own income every year, and would mine if you could get at it! I shall make a will the next time I go to town, Helena,” said Mr. Dunmore solemnly, “in which I shall put every dollar of my property in trust; for you are not fit to be charged with a bank-note. Money melts out of your hands like morning dew, and you may be the most beautiful and winning woman in the world, but in money matters you are a child. You never go into a shop without telling the dealer how cheap his goods are, and asking him if he can’t take a little more.”

“I won’t listen to another word you say,” cried Mrs. Helena, springing to her feet. “I knew you were so careful as to be canny. I never knew a person with Scotch blood in him that wasn’t. So proud of your Scotch blood as you are! But I didn’t suppose you looked askance at your own wife’s doctor’s bills. I’ll pay them myself out of my very next dividend, that I will! I never imagined you wanted me to stay stived up in a prison-house, going without pleasure or society. If it costs you so much more than you can afford to keep me, I can go to my aunt Potter’s. And I will go, this very day.”

“Hardly,” said Mr. Dunmore, looking out of the window at the storm, whose clouds of flying snow hid even the great mountain shapes from view.

“I don’t know why the storm should stop me. It isn’t any colder than my husband’s heart,” said Mrs. Dunmore. “And I’d as lief hear it now as hear you. It will be April and spring to-morrow, and no storm to be seen, but it will always be winter in your heart. You can leave your money, that you treasure so much more than you do my happiness, where you please. I don’t want any of it, or anything else that belongs to you. I wish I was dead and out of your way! You can keep it for your second wife to spend, if she can get hold of it, which is more than I can do. I never want to look upon your face again! If there’s anything in the world detestable to me it’s meanness and stinginess and parsimony and miserliness and--” And here, words failing her and tears coming in their stead, Mrs. Dunmore rushed from the room and sought the seclusion of her bedchamber, where she hid her head in the pillows and cried herself into hysterics. And Mr. Dunmore, feeling that the house was far too hot to hold him, strode into the hall, and put on his great fur overcoat, and buckled the hood about his ears, and slammed the door behind him, refusing to wait for the stout cob that usually bore him, and going out afoot into a storm that was no fiercer than the one raging within him at that moment.

A pretty sort of a home he had! his thoughts ran. The hospitality of the tempest was gentleness beside it. A shrew and a vixen and a spendthrift for a wife, who cared nothing for him but what she could get out of him, and made no acknowledgment of that; who scorned and flouted and fleered him, had no regard for his feelings, called him--called him names! What a fool he was to submit to it! Why didn’t he send her--_why_ didn’t he send her back to her aunt Potter’s, and sell out, and clear out himself? This life he lived was--it was no use saying what it was! It was the life to come, and he had been damned into it! He wished he had never seen her face! What an idiot a man was to give up his peace, his liberty, his pleasure, his everything, for the sake of companionship with a woman who thwarted him at every turn, in his feelings, his wishes, his will, till there was no peace in the house, and a struggle with the wildest storm that ever blew was rest, was relief from home and her! And in a white heat of angry commotion he plunged along, he hardly knew and hardly cared whither, although really bound for the upper fields, in order to give some directions to the shepherds of the great sheep farm he carried on. And the wind roared above him and about him unheeded as, with head bent forward and hands clenched in his pockets, he labored on; and the snow whirled and fell and rose again, and built up its fantastic drifts on either side, and, occupied in his bitter musings, he saw and heard none of it.

And none of it did Mrs. Helena hear or see, with her head buried in her pillows, crying now partly with pity of her own wretchedness, partly in the subsidence of her anger at she hardly knew what, and partly with the unspent force of her nervous agitation. Occasionally she sat up and twisted the long coil of her fallen hair, and enjoyed a sensation as if she were in some manner wringing her hands and tearing her hair. She called herself the most miserable woman under the sun, condemned to a living prison, bound to a man who detested her, and whom she--yes, whom she detested! A man? A brute! Oh, why had she ever given herself up to such a fate? What was there she had seen in him in the first place? Why hadn’t she divined his sordid and tyrannical nature then? Why had she let herself be overcome by his false promises, his smile, his face that used to seem to her like the face of a god, and now was that of a satyr--yes, of a satyr! A great bluff wind-blown satyr! How infamously he had talked to her about her dividend! He grudged her the clothes she put on; she was a burden to him, and he made her feel it, and, quite unconscious of the uncommonly congenial feeling in this regard, she wished she had never laid eyes on him. It was a shame for a man to treat his wife so! And there was more crying and wringing of hands; and then the great shoulder of the gale came pushing against the house so it startled her and made her shudder, and she lay back silent a moment, and then bunched the pillow about her ears, and in five minutes, worn out with her temper and her tantrum, was fast asleep.

And Mr. Dunmore, with the gale whistling about his ears, ploughed his way along the hillside to the upper farms, more to satisfy himself that the sheep were all folded than for anything else, now and then shaking the snow from his shoulders as a shaggy dog shakes off water-drops, and again bending his head and working onward, the new snow already ankle-deep and drifting wildly with the wind that at every gust seemed to blow more fiercely. At last he reached the little house of the shepherds, all glowing with his successful struggle with the storm, and half forgetful of the rage with which he at first dashed into it; quite forgetful before his business with the shepherds was entirely finished, having disburdened his mind of all that had been weighing on it, feeling in a somewhat forgiving mood towards his irate little wife, who, after all, was not so much to blame, he said to himself; only a pretty woman a little spoiled, who liked to have pretty things about her. He would go into town himself to-morrow, and get her that Royal Worcester she had been longing for, the poor child! Perhaps he had been too severe: it was the coffee--strong coffee always did fire up his nerves. A man was a wretch to talk so to a woman, anyway. And thus rambling on in his thoughts, he took the path down the hill, hardly remembering the tempest that hurtled round him, until all at once he felt as if it were making him its rallying-point, and found that it was all he could do, by summoning his strength, to stand up against it, while it sifted its fine icy particles under his coat and in about his neck and shoulders and ears in a way to make him eager to get out of its reach. No matter; a storm on the last day of March couldn’t amount to much, even up in these New Hampshire hills. It would soon blow over. He would leave the exposed and winding highway, take the short-cut across the fields and down through the sheltered piece of wood, and so get home in time for lunch. He rather pictured Helena to himself, as forgiving as he was, dressed in her pretty tea-gown of green plush and white and gold, waiting for him at the head of a lunch-table set with especial nicety.

But Mr. Dunmore made a mistake when he left the open road. Let it wind about as it would, it had its protected sides and places, and at the end arrived. But these pathless wastes of the open pastures, snowed over and utterly unprotected, arrived nowhere. Turning his back once or twice on some broader pressure of the blast, he failed to orient himself; he could not see a rod before him for the driving snow; he ought by this time to be near the end, but there was nothing of the little piece of wood to be seen or guessed; he attempted to go back and recover the main road; he paused at length, a mere atom in all the wide whirl and bluster of the storm, uncertain if the way led to left or right, before him or behind. He began to feel some slight apprehension then. He remembered all the dreadful stories he had read of Highland shepherds and their sheep in mountain snow-storms; and all at once he saw that he, too, in the bitterest blowing gale of the winter, had lost his way upon the hill. Very cold and very tired, half-desperate too, he thought a moment of sitting down to rest. But that would never do, and he took heart of grace and plodded and struggled on, only succeeding in making sure that he was going down the hill and not up, but not at all sure that he was not skirting the hill to arrive at the stream and the houseless banks of the other side of the mountain; not at all sure either that in the dizzy blindness of the snow the next step might not lead him over some precipitous rock and out into nothingness. He paused to thrill at the thought, and then he lurched on again. At any rate, his only salvation lay in keeping in motion; it was of no use to halloo; although he tried it once or twice, the gale blew his voice back down his throat and made him feel a more powerless mote than before, and he plunged along conscious that he must have wandered wide of the mark, and that the day must be drawing to a close. Helena, in her pretty gown at that pretty luncheon-table, began to fade out of his mental view. She had waited for him, doubtless, hoping he would come back in better humor. She had forgiven him. She would be thinking he was still in a rage with her. She--she might never know that he had forgiven her.

For Mr. Dunmore was now acknowledging to himself what he had only dimly and unconsciously felt before, that it was doubtful if the night did not overtake him up here in this pathless wilderness of snow and wind and fury, and bring death to him upon its wings. But not if he could help it. His heart beat up strongly with his determination, and he swung his arms and shook his shoulders, and still waded downward through the drifts. It was hard to move one foot before the other in the heavy snow-fall; hard to breathe in the force of the gale; impossible to hear anything but the resonance of the great gusts through the thick sky; impossible to see before him, the light growing less, not with the gale alone now, but with the declining day. Night was coming on, and he was lost in all the tumult of the tempestuous elements.

Still he labored along. They were bitter thoughts now in Mr. Dunmore’s mind. He must keep going. Helena would never know--Helena would always think--and he so young, so well, so strong, to die like a dog of the cold--like a beast on the plains. If he could only find himself on level ground once more; if only the storm would cease roaring; if a friendly light would shine out anywhere! How trivial here seemed all the concerns about which he had vexed himself! What mere dust and ashes! It wasn’t possible he was the man that had those undignified, those cruel, words with his wife this morning! This morning? Oh, it seemed a year ago! If he ever reached home again, it would be another man; he would not suffer the winds of heaven to visit her too roughly. Then the beads of cold sweat broke out on him an instant to think that possibly now he should never reach it. His knees trembled; his feet were like balls of ice; he moved them as if they belonged to somebody else. Every few steps he stumbled--he fell--and every time it was harder to rise. At last, utterly helpless, he lay there, numb, freezing, breathless, hardly conscious, the storm whistling and screaming over him, the drift covering him. A dull red light swam across his sight; yes, he thought vaguely, the glow before his eyes of the blood bursting upon his brain. And yet, he thought again presently, life reviving within him, was that the way death by freezing came? This red glow, was it not possibly some lantern, some lamp, with its little blaze magnified by the driving of the snow? If he could halloo and make any one hear him--He tried again and again, and yet again; but his voice fainted, and he fell back, slowly losing consciousness of all things but that red glow, as it shone and broke and formed again under the shifting clouds of flying flakes. How soft and rich its ruby warmth, like the heart of some great flower--of some great poppy! And then the truth smote the wretched man, smote him with a crueler blow than any smiting of the storm. He was doomed, he was dying, he was freezing to death, two rods from his own door!

* * * * *

Tired out with her temper and her tears, Mrs. Helena slept for several hours the sleep of those whose cause is just, her head buried in the down, deaf to all the noises of the outside world. When she woke at last it was some stronger thrust of the turmoil of the tempest that made her suddenly sit up on the bed and shiver with an indefinable terror. She hurriedly bathed her face and smoothed her hair, and ran down-stairs where the maids were, and the cats, and the great St. Bernard dog, a need of some sort of companionship overpowering her in this war of the elements.

But the maids were busy, and Sauveur was asleep, and the cat sat on the window-sill watching the eddying snow in an uncanny way, and the only thing to reassure her was the portrait of her husband over the fireplace, the handsome, smiling, loving face, the eager, tender eyes that seemed to follow her. She looked away angrily, and then she looked back in spite of herself, and then she fell into her own low chair, and covered her face with her hands, and tears began to trickle through her fingers--tears of lonesomeness, of down-heartedness, of--yes, of repentance, repentance that she could ever have said what she had said that morning to her husband. How kind he had always been to her! how indulgent! how fond! And just because he had felt a little captious and irritated she had insulted and outraged him, and abused him in her thoughts afterwards, and had let him go off in the storm, thinking she never wanted to see his face again. She had said--yes, she had said--she never wanted to see his face again. Oh, what if Fate took her at her word, and she never did? What sort of a thing would life be to her without him? What-- But she could not let herself think such a thought. She ran up-stairs and put on her pretty green gown, and brushed a fresh curl into her yellow locks, and picked some of her geraniums to lay on the luncheon-table, and had the fire brightened, and went to the piano and began to play his favorite love-songs, and when she ceased the luncheon-time had long passed, and yet her husband had not come.

It was later than she had thought; it was wearing into the afternoon; the gale was increasing. If it was like this up here among the hills, what must it be down on the sea-coast, with the sailors clinging to the icy shrouds? Ah, what must it be here to any one out on the hills alone in these blowing clouds of sleet and snow? Her heart stood still with the thought. Was Mark out yet? No; he had only gone off in a pet; he had stayed out just to frighten her. Was it possible that he could do so? For a pause her anger flashed up again; and then with a wild, stifled cry she began to walk the floor like a wild woman. No; it was not possible. Mark had always tried to save her from all worriment and vexation. He would have come back if he had not been hindered. He never stayed angry an hour. He had gone up the mountain to the shepherds, and he had become bewildered and had lost his way.

In a heart-beat now, Mrs. Dunmore had the house alarmed, and the servants sent out in all directions, only to return reporting that it was out of the question to catch the breath in the wind and snow, and that Mr. Dunmore must long since have taken shelter somewhere, for no man alive could undertake to weather such a gale as this. No man alive, Mrs. Dunmore kept repeating then. Perhaps he was not alive; perhaps he had gone down under the stress of the mighty blast, and the drifts had deepened over him--her husband, her darling, her Mark! She sat a little while looking into the fire stupidly, while a thousand scenes of their younger days started up before her eyes--summer mornings in the boat upon the narrow, shadowy river; winter evenings in each other’s arms; long, slow drives about the flowery country lanes; strolls on starry nights; the love, the hope, the joy, in those days when they were all in all to one another, and wanted nothing more; and then she started and ran to the window and searched the storm, so thick and white as to be impenetrable; and suddenly now so gray, so dark, in the quick falling of the night, as to be full of horror.

Oh, to think that she, with her sharp tongue, her evil temper, had shut her husband out into such a wild night as this! How wicked! how infamous! If he did not come soon her heart would break. If she could only put her arms round him once again and beg him to forgive her!

Sauveur came and stood with her, gazing as wistfully into the storm, and whining softly. And the maid lighted the lamp with the red poppy shade upon it; and then she could see nothing but the flakes sweeping by the pane, like sparks of fire; and she sank on her knees by the window, the dog beside her, and knew and felt nothing but blackness.

Suddenly she felt the dog trembling through all his great shaggy frame; he sat up, his ears pricked and alert, and then all at once he sprang to the door with a single bound and a sharp cry; and she sprang after him, calling the maids and the man, and threw wide the door and rushed out, regardless of all things but the one, the others behind her, floundering, falling, without breath, up again, on, till the dog’s glad cry told the story, and among them they had Mr. Dunmore’s shoulders up, and they dragged him inside the gate and the porch, and shut hard the door against the storm, and felt ready and willing to faint, but knew there was no time to do it in.

Mr. Dunmore had his breakfast in bed the next morning, languid, but uninjured by so much as a serious frost-bite, and feeling supremely blest among his pillows, with the fire crackling on the hearth, the flowers blooming in the window, and the storm still roaring on outside, while his wife fed him with daintiest morsels, and Sauveur now and then laid a caressing nose on the coverlid.

“To think,” she said, “that I ever could have spoken so to you, my darling! I must have been out of my head. Oh, I will never spend a cent again without consulting you first, Mark dear!”

“You never spent a cent too much in all your life, my precious!” he exclaimed. “Did I say you did? Some evil spirit took possession of me. It was never I--”

“Just think what you have suffered--oh, just think of it, dearest! And all for the sake of a red paper poppy! I will go and throw it into the fire this moment.”

“You will do nothing of the kind,” he cried. “I never in all the world saw anything so beautiful as that red paper poppy. It was a lucky day you bought it; it was my preserver and benefactor; it gave me strength to halloo and be heard. I mean to treasure it all my life, and have it buried with me at last.”

“And with me too,” she cried, falling on his neck, to the danger of the breakfast things; “for we will be buried in one grave.”

BEST-LAID SCHEMES

BEST-LAID SCHEMES

Certainly it was a charming home, that in which Mr. Pearmain had installed his young wife: a stone cottage with mullioned windows from floor to ceiling, with pointed gables and divers roofs and vanes, and with an infinitude of prairie-roses and Virginia-creepers planted beside the walls, to grow in the future till the house should be a bower. And inside it was what all good house-keepers called fairy-land. Here Mr. and Mrs. Pearmain had given full scope to their notions, whose name was legion; not a bit of paint in the house to be cleaned, no carpets to secrete poison, but hard-wood, inlaid floors and rugs, and then a conservatory and grapery on a tiny scale, and closets without counting; while as for the kitchen, the conveniences there were simply miraculous. And when all this was done and inspected and occupied and enjoyed, it was no wonder that Mr. and Mrs. Pearmain looked about for something else on which to expend their whims and vagaries. Their way of life was so good that it would have been selfishness not to wish others to share it. Little Harry Pearmain was exactly three years old when they had fully decided to convert to that way their next neighbor, but lately arrived, a school-mate of Mrs. Pearmain’s who had married a dear old friend of Mr. Pearmain’s--little Mrs. Morley, whose black eyes had a strange sharp snap in them when things displeased her. And it was one morning when Mrs. Morley had come over to profit by her friend’s experience in the matter of dainty needle-work that the campaign began.

“I always meant, when I could have things as I chose,” said Mrs. Pearmain, as they sat and sewed, “to order my table so that not one ounce of flesh should ever sully it. I don’t proselyte my neighbors; because I believe in individual liberty; but since you inquire, I will say that I’ve tried it long enough to feel sure, and as there never has been a piece of meat cooked in my house, so there never shall be!” and she nodded her pretty head like a piece of mechanism.

“But what does Mr. Pearmain say?” asked the other.

“Oh, he agrees about it, fortunately, so there is no difficulty there. In fact, it was Mr. Pearmain’s remarks, before we married, that first led me to think seriously of the subject. He always used to call it cannibalism whenever the beef was cut and the blood followed the knife. And I thought so much of his opinion I began to turn the matter over.”

“Well, I declare! I don’t believe I shall ever think so much of any man’s opinion,” said Mrs. Morley. “And did Mr. Pearmain’s conviction really affect your appetite? What an idea! And you ceased eating meat in consequence of Mr. Pearmain’s conviction?”

“Well, in consequence of my own conviction,” said the priestess. “It grew disgusting to me. We boarded together, you know, and when my plate came, and I began to help myself to salt, Mr. Pearmain would glance at it, and say, ‘Dead flesh.’”

“I should think _that_ would have been disgusting.”

“I did feel vexed a little at first, but presently I was saying the words to myself. And presently I couldn’t taste it at all.”

“The idea!” said Mrs. Morley, hunting for her lost needle.

“Oh, if you just run the matter over yourself, you won’t be so scornful, Teresa. If you remember every time you take a bit of mutton that you are eating death and corruption--”

“Well, I never!” said Mrs. Morley, catching her breath.

“Why, only think of it!” said Mrs. Pearmain, warming at her work. “How can you expect anybody to be good that is constantly fed and nourished and kept alive on a lower form of life?”

“But, bless my heart,” cried Mrs. Morley, struggling up from under the avalanche of words, “vegetables are a lower form of life, and one must live on something.”

“Vegetables are innocent life, at any rate, with no vile propensities or impure parts. And, moreover, we are half vegetables ourselves.”

“We? Oh, what in the world do you mean, Emily?” exclaimed Mrs. Morley, in a terrified manner, as if she had just received a revelation as to how fearfully she was made.

“Certainly. Didn’t you know that?” said Mrs. Pearmain, with a superior air. “The movements of our bodies that are voluntary are animal; those that are involuntary are vegetable, such as the circulation, and all the processes that go on while we sleep.”

“Isn’t it dreadful?” gasped Mrs. Morley.

“Dreadful? I think it’s beautiful. It’s a sort of union in ourselves of the three kingdoms--vegetable, animal, and spiritual; for when the nerves come in and control the great brute muscles--”

“But, really, Emily--”

“Now don’t be silly, Teresa. A woman of your power of mind has only to look at the thing rationally to feel just as I do. For, as I was saying, how can those people be good who receive all their increase from a lower animal form, from brutal instincts and actions--how can they help receiving those instincts and being tempted to those actions, and becoming, under the guise of men and women, a baser sort of animals themselves?”

“I don’t know--perhaps so,” said Mrs. Morley, a little moved, it may be, by the reference to her power of mind.

“There must be an inherent principle in man that will rise whether or no, or else we never should have gotten along as far as we have. But it would be so much faster, so much further, if it wasn’t for this food on which we sustain our growth. And while we eat it, I don’t see how the great perfect race can ever come at all. It never will come, Teresa,” said Mrs. Pearmain, resting on her elbow and looking through her friend as if to the far-distant future--“it never will come till people cease to eat flesh, and live on the things that nature provides without pain or slaughter. To think, every time you sit down to table, that some creature which enjoyed life has had to give it up for your appetite! _That_ makes _me_ sick!” said Mrs. Pearmain.

“Well, it’s very wonderful. I never thought of it before. I really will look it all over. But I don’t see what there is to live on--I should starve on bread and butter.”

“Butter! We only allow butter as a rarity.”

“Well, milk, then.”

“Milk, indeed! Do you suppose that, while cows are kept in the unnatural condition in which the milker keeps them, we should drink their milk? Oh no, indeed, seldom milk, seldom cream, do we touch.”

“My goodness! Then you’ve nothing left but eggs.”

“Well, once in a while an egg; but rarely. I never can get over feeling that to break an egg is the murder of an innocent.”

“Why, then, you can’t have cake, or--”

“What do you want that for?--unhealthy, indigestible, poisonous--no, we never have it.”

“Nor doughnuts?”

“Doughnuts!” with ineffable scorn.

“And you can’t have pies?”

“Never. But we have delicious sauces--apple, cranberry, grape, and all those.”

“But what in wonder do you do when you have company?”

“Oh, you have no idea of how many delicious ways there are in which the grains can be cooked, or of how many delicious forms of bread there are. You can get up a perfectly harmonious dinner of the various vegetables that really leaves you nothing to desire; mushrooms are as good as steaks; beans can be made to imitate roast beef; and with fruits and sauces, as I said, there is enough of everything, and those who want meat needn’t come to us.”

“I should die!”

“Not after you were used to it,” said Mrs. Pearmain, seriously. “You would learn to like the new way and detest the old.”

“It would set free a great deal of money, to be sure, to be used on other things,” mused Mrs. Morley.

“Oh, a great deal! And then you would be twice as healthy and strong, and your children would be an improvement on you. In fact, it is for the sake of Harry chiefly that we are so strenuous about following up the matter. It may not make a mighty difference with me, beginning after twenty, but I expect to see Harry--I can’t help seeing Harry--a very different person from other people’s boys. And if he could only find and marry, when he grows up, a woman who had been nourished on the same sort of food--just think, Teresa, what we might expect of _their_ children! It would be the beginning of a race that would conquer the world, the beginning of that great perfect race which will do such wonderful things as pass our comprehension.”

“What makes you talk so ecstatically of that great perfect race, Emily? How do you know anything about it?”

“Why, don’t geology and those things show us that race after race of animals has passed away, and only left its bones behind it? And should we suppose that man would be an exception to the general fate? But as each race passes, something takes its place a little superior to it, sprung from it, perhaps; and this great perfect race is to take the place of man, sprung from man and woman, but from the first man and woman that ceased to eat death and corruption. Oh, Teresa,” said Mrs. Pearmain, her cheeks and her eyes glowing, “if it should be your child and mine!”

The last stroke did the work. Mrs. Morley, it might be said, threw up the sponge; she was a convert from that moment to Mrs. Pearmain’s theories. She went through the house that very day; she inquired into everything; she took notes of everything; she learned how to do everything; and she went home at night all prepared to convert Mr. Morley, and to give her Louise to be married to Harry--if it happened to be Louise.

Poor Mr. Morley! He loved his juicy steak; he rolled under his tongue the sweet morsel of the oyster out of a side bone; he considered pepper-pot a dish fit for the gods; he was fond of broiled liver and a rasher of bacon; a cold pickled shoulder of pork he thought good enough to invite the king to partake. In fact, he was a murderous cannibal, pure and simple, according to Mrs. Pearmain’s lights, who enjoyed his dinner without being, as he thought himself--and as we think, so we are--either exactly an epicure or a glutton.

But it was of no use. When Mrs. Morley unmasked her batteries that night, and went over Mrs. Pearmain’s plan of campaign, with a whole added troop of exclamation and emphasis and entreaty and embracing, he knew he must surrender. He made a faint resistance, but on the whole he didn’t believe it was to be a permanent affair with his little Teresa; he didn’t like to deny her anything just now either; it was probably only an incidental whim that would pass, and so he yielded handsomely, and promised that she should have her own way. And then the idea of marrying his girl to Pearmain’s boy was a pleasant one: Pearmain was rich and generous and good, the friend of years. Yes, he would promise.

“Kiss the book!” cried Mrs. Morley.

“No, I won’t do that,” said he. “I’ll promise, and my word’s as good as my bond.”

“Well, then, George, you’ve as good as taken an oath, and I expect you to keep it.”

“I mean to keep it,” he replied--“at least, till you release me.”

“That will be forever, then.” And she plumed herself like Victory just lit upon a banner.

But it was a dismal breakfast to Mr. Morley next day, when dry toast preceded oatmeal, and butterless baked potato without salt brought up the rear; a dismal dinner, when watery squash and lumpy turnip were the only variation of a table gorgeous with carrots and beets and silver. “I’ll give my whole mind to it,” said Mrs. Morley, cheerfully. “Mrs. Pearmain will lend me all her experience, and we shall have it very palatable yet.” But he hankered after the fleshpots.

It was shortly after the beginning of the new régime that Miss Louise Morley came into the world, and there was much rejoicing at the christening, although the christening-cake consisted of a sort of sweet bread with raisins in it, of which Mr. Morley partook so eagerly that he made himself ill, and became presently so prostrate that the doctor, being summoned, ordered--perhaps at his whispered suggestion--a course of beef-tea.

Mr. Morley attended to that beef-tea himself. He was not going to be put off with slops and dissolved Liebig; he had pounds of the thick red steaks laid before him on the slab in the kitchen, where he went, and fairly gloated over its preparation. But his rapture was of short duration. Mrs. Pearmain, running over one day on an errand, saw him whetting his knife, and flourishing it like a savage, and tiptoed away to find Mrs. Morley. “Oh, my dear,” she said, “you never can see the evil effects to better advantage. Look at him! That is the very way the primitive butchering people whetted their knives over a victim’s throat. Oh, it is dreadful! it makes me shudder. It is like a mania for blood; it is certainly near insanity; he will be murdering you in your bed.”

“I am ashamed of you, Emily!” said Mrs. Morley, tartly. “My George, indeed! Why, the doctor ordered it.”

“But the doctor didn’t order it forever. The very ferocity shows he has had enough of it. I should take it away and put him on cream-of-tartar water directly. Don’t be offended, Teresa; I am speaking for his good--and the children’s. These men--they have to be managed; Mr. Pearmain is a singular exception.”

Mrs. Morley did not allow her displeasure to overcome her principles; and when Mrs. Pearmain brought her visit to a close, Mrs. Morley brought the administration of beef-tea to a close too. For Mr. Morley’s intention being to be as good as his word, it needed only a little argument and some tears to convince him that the beef-tea was a breach of contract.

It would be hard to tell what Mr. Morley suffered in going about his business in town from day to day for many a month thereafter. The sight of the wild-duck, hanging, with his wide wings and brilliant breast, at a poulterer’s door, almost broke his heart; the men who came up out of the victuallers’ cellars, wiping their mouths, excited in him a feeling akin to hate; and he had to skip by the kitchens of the Revere House and the Tremont so rapidly, in order to escape the tempting smells which they cast forth, that finally he altogether eschewed Bullfinch Street, and every other that commanded a restaurant kitchen. For Mr. Morley’s particular vanity, as you know, was that he was a man of his word.

Every once in a while Mr. Morley made a feeble remonstrance, futile as feeble; for Mrs. Morley had the whole thing pat now, and was, moreover, a woman with whom it was idle to argue, for when obliged to abandon her position logically, she always did physically also, and either banged out of the room, or else came round where he sat, put an arm about his neck, and if kisses wouldn’t stop his mouth, stopped it, to the accompaniment of much laughing and teasing meanwhile, with his handkerchief.

“A devilish pretty breakfast!” said Mr. Morley once, pushing back his plate in a pet. “Pea-nuts!”

“I don’t complain of pea-nuts, George,” said Mrs. Morley. “On the contrary, I am thankful for them. They’re sweet and sound and well-baked; there are plenty of them. I am sure they are a very poetical food; and then they’re a national one; we can always think, you know, when we eat pea-nuts, that we are encouraging the poor freedmen down in North Carolina.”

“Oh, hang the freedmen!” groaned Mr. Morley. “How do you expect me to go in and out of the city every day on such food as this? I’ll have no strength left in a year--living on husks.”

“Look at those oxen, George, dragging that immense load after them. There’s strength--and it all comes from husks.”

“I’m not an ox!” roared Mr. Morley.

“No? Anybody’d say you were a Bull of Bashan.”

“Mrs. Morley, can’t you apply a little reason--”

“Not a scrap. Not now. You know this is a subject on which I don’t want conversation before Louise,” as that little damsel demanded her groats, and looked with wondering eyes from one to the other. “I don’t want her ever to hear her diet called in question.”

“Me likes me’s bwekus,” said Miss Louie, with some comprehension of the coil.

“It’s more than I do,” muttered her father.

“Take some of Louie’s groats, then. Like them, precious?”

“Berry mush,” said Louie, with some point, and pushing the dish towards her father, with a dim idea that her mother was abusing him.

“I really can’t understand what the difference is between eating these oats and eating the flesh of the animal that is made out of these oats.”

“A horse’s flesh, for instance. But you wouldn’t eat that if it was set before you.”

“I don’t know that I shouldn’t,” said Mr. Morley, grimly. “People who are starving eat anything. People wrecked and on a raft eat each other,” said he, looking at his wife as if it were not impossible he should eat her. “Sometimes,” said Mr. Morley, “I feel dangerous.”

“A depraved nature,” said Mrs. Morley. “See what flesh has done for you,” while he gave a glance at Louie that might have made a weaker woman shudder.

“She’s fat, isn’t she?” said Mr. Morley, whose mind really seemed now to run on morbid things, and with the air of one who smacks his lips. And then, as he caught the chubby hand and carried it to his lips, Mrs. Morley found herself watching him with a breathless scrutiny--for it really crossed her mind that Mrs. Pearmain might be right, and Mr. Morley’s wits might be a little wandering--until he had kissed the little dimpled fist and laid it down again. “For my part,” said he, “if I were to have a plate of roast veal set before me (and I used to despise it)--roast veal, brown, and swimming in gravy--swimming in gravy,” he repeated, unctuously--“I don’t think I should eat it like a civilized being--I’ve left off being a civilized being, eating nuts and prunes and things that don’t require any civilization: a savage never needed to reach the boiling-point to eat them--I should put my face down and wallow in it, and eat it like a dog.”

And then Mrs. Morley snatched Louie, and ran out of the room in virtuous wrath.

Unhappy Mrs. Morley! The path of virtue was a thorny one, but she persevered in it even with bleeding feet. And if she was not ready with an answer, she always had what her husband called her knock-down argument of leaving the room. And she had one last resort, better than the others, which she used at such times as those when Mr. Morley, recurring to the charge, wanted her to see that you might scatter pulverized marble over a soil forever and do it no good; but if you scattered the pulverized bones of beasts there the harvest became trebled, plainly showing that matter which had passed through a form of organized life was superior to that which hadn’t, and that inasmuch as animals were higher in the scale of organized life than vegetables, the grain that was converted into beef was nobler food than the grain that had never known that higher form, and so--Then Mrs. Morley had ready the best answer of all, and it consisted in simply maintaining silence so rigorously that nothing short of thumbscrews could extract a syllable from her, while she looked the serene embodiment of pretty scorn.

But Nature will take her revenges, and in her own way. One night Mr. Morley did not return from town. Mrs. Morley sent the carriage to every train; it came back with nothing but the Skye sitting up on the seat erect as a shako. Mrs. Morley sent one servant up to the Pearmains’, and another over to the Farwells’--they knew nothing of Mr. Morley. She could learn nothing from the train hands; the gentlemen going up and down every day had not seen Mr. Morley. She telegraphed to the town station with no better result; she telegraphed to the counting-room, and received no reply at all. It had never happened before. She was wild with alarm; lights were dancing about the house till cock-crow; she walked the floors all night. Mr. Morley had fallen unnoticed in the dark between the cars, she was sure, and train after train had rolled over his mangled remains, and her mind could not fix him in any single spot, so great an extent of surface was he covering. Or else he had been delayed in the counting-room till dusk, and had been garroted on his way to the station, and robbed and murdered and tossed up an alleyway. Or perhaps he had fallen and broken a leg, and, tortured with pain, lay in the black street at the mercy of passing wheels. Could it be possible that Mr. Morley had tired of her and her whims, and had left for parts unknown? Had Mr. Morley’s fancy ever strayed from little Louie’s mother? She could not say; for the man that hankered after butcher’s meat as he did was proof against no temptation. And yet--her George--as he did hanker, how she had made him suffer! If she only had him there, she would cook the reddest beef in the servants’ larder for him with her own hands! In a wild whirl her fears and fancies, her indignation and affection, chased each other up and down in her mind till day broke. And then, by the common accident of ill-luck, there was an informal conclave of the neighbors at the front gate, and Mr. Pearmain, going in, volunteered a journey to town in search of Mr. Morley, and was welcomed by the wretched wife with bursting tears. “If I only knew,” she sobbed, “whether he is dead or alive, I could endure it.”

“There is no need of any alarm of that sort, Teresa,” said Mrs. Pearmain, who had come down early. “Anybody without much moral force is sure to be a backslider. Mr. Morley has merely been eating meat, and is ashamed to face you.”