Chapter III: Lago d’Iseo, August 14th (2)

In this mood of enlightened skepticism I responded but languidly to my hostess’s suggestion that I should go with her that evening to see Mrs. Amyot. The aunt who had translated Euripides was at home on Saturday evenings, and one met “thoughtful” people there, my hostess explained: it was one of the intellectual centres of Boston. My mood remained distinctly resentful of any connection between Mrs. Amyot and intellectuality, and I declined to go; but the next day I met Mrs. Amyot in the street.

She stopped me reproachfully. She had heard I was in Boston; why had I not come last night? She had been told that I was at her lecture, and it had frightened her--yes, really, almost as much as years ago in Hillbridge. She never _could_ get over that stupid shyness, and the whole business was as distasteful to her as ever; but what could she do? There was the baby--he was a big boy now, and boys were _so_ expensive! But did I really think she had improved the least little bit? And why wouldn’t I come home with her now, and see the boy, and tell her frankly what I had thought of the lecture? She had plenty of flattery--people were _so_ kind, and every one knew that she did it for the baby--but what she felt the need of was criticism, severe, discriminating criticism like mine--oh, she knew that I was dreadfully discriminating!

I went home with her and saw the boy. In the early heat of her Tennyson-worship Mrs. Amyot had christened him Lancelot, and he looked it. Perhaps, however, it was his black velvet dress and the exasperating length of his yellow curls, together with the fact of his having been taught to recite Browning to visitors, that raised to fever-heat the itching of my palms in his Infant-Samuel-like presence. I have since had reason to think that he would have preferred to be called Billy, and to hunt cats with the other boys in the block: his curls and his poetry were simply another outlet for Mrs. Amyot’s irrepressible coquetry.

But if Lancelot was not genuine, his mother’s love for him was. It justified everything--the lectures _were_ for the baby, after all. I had not been ten minutes in the room before I was pledged to help Mrs. Amyot carry out her triumphant fraud. If she wanted to lecture on Plato she should--Plato must take his chance like the rest of us! There was no use, of course, in being “discriminating.” I preserved sufficient reason to avoid that pitfall, but I suggested “subjects” and made lists of books for her with a fatuity that became more obvious as time attenuated the remembrance of her smile; I even remember thinking that some men might have cut the knot by marrying her, but I handed over Plato as a hostage and escaped by the afternoon train.

The next time I saw her was in New York, when she had become so fashionable that it was a part of the whole duty of woman to be seen at her lectures. The lady who suggested that of course I ought to go and hear Mrs. Amyot, was not very clear about anything except that she was perfectly lovely, and had had a horrid husband, and was doing it to support her boy. The subject of the discourse (I think it was on Ruskin) was clearly of minor importance, not only to my friend, but to the throng of well-dressed and absent-minded ladies who rustled in late, dropped their muffs and pocket-books, and undisguisedly lost themselves in the study of each other’s apparel. They received Mrs. Amyot with warmth, but she evidently represented a social obligation like going to church, rather than any more personal interest; in fact, I suspect that every one of the ladies would have remained away, had they been sure that none of the others were coming.

Whether Mrs. Amyot was disheartened by the lack of sympathy between herself and her hearers, or whether the sport of arousing it had become a task, she certainly imparted her platitudes with less convincing warmth than of old. Her voice had the same confidential inflections, but it was like a voice reproduced by a gramophone: the real woman seemed far away. She had grown stouter without losing her dewy freshness, and her smart gown might have been taken to show either the potentialities of a settled income, or a politic concession to the taste of her hearers. As I listened I reproached myself for ever having suspected her of self-deception in saying that she took no pleasure in her work. I was sure now that she did it only for Lancelot, and judging from the size of her audience and the price of the tickets I concluded that Lancelot must be receiving a liberal education.

I was living in New York that winter, and in the rotation of dinners I found myself one evening at Mrs. Amyot’s side. The dimple came out at my greeting as punctually as a cuckoo in a Swiss clock, and I detected the same automatic quality in the tone in which she made her usual pretty demand for advice. She was like a musical-box charged with popular airs. They succeeded one another with breathless rapidity, but there was a moment after each when the cylinders scraped and whizzed.

Mrs. Amyot, as I found when I called on her, was living in a sunny flat, with a sitting-room full of flowers and a tea-table that had the air of expecting visitors. She owned that she had been ridiculously successful. It was delightful, of course, on Lancelot’s account. Lancelot had been sent to the best school in the country, and if things went well and people didn’t tire of his silly mother he was to go to Harvard afterwards. During the next two or three years Mrs. Amyot kept her flat in New York, and radiated art and literature upon the suburbs. I saw her now and then, always stouter, better dressed, more successful and more automatic: she had become a lecturing-machine.

I went abroad for a year or two and when I came back she had disappeared. I asked several people about her, but life had closed over her. She had been last heard of as lecturing--still lecturing--but no one seemed to know when or where.

It was in Boston that I found her at last, forlornly swaying to the oscillations of an overhead strap in a crowded trolley-car. Her face had so changed that I lost myself in a startled reckoning of the time that had elapsed since our parting. She spoke to me shyly, as though aware of my hurried calculation, and conscious that in five years she ought not to have altered so much as to upset my notion of time. Then she seemed to set it down to her dress, for she nervously gathered her cloak over a gown that asked only to be concealed, and shrank into a seat behind the line of prehensile bipeds blocking the aisle of the car.

It was perhaps because she so obviously avoided me that I felt for the first time that I might be of use to her; and when she left the car I made no excuse for following her.

She said nothing of needing advice and did not ask me to walk home with her, concealing, as we talked, her transparent preoccupations under the guise of a sudden interest in all I had been doing since she had last seen me. Of what concerned her, I learned only that Lancelot was well and that for the present she was not lecturing--she was tired and her doctor had ordered her to rest. On the doorstep of a shabby house she paused and held out her hand. She had been so glad to see me and perhaps if I were in Boston again--the tired dimple, as it were, bowed me out and closed the door on the conclusion of the phrase.

Two or three weeks later, at my club in New York, I found a letter from her. In it she owned that she was troubled, that of late she had been unsuccessful, and that, if I chanced to be coming back to Boston, and could spare her a little of that invaluable advice which--. A few days later the advice was at her disposal. She told me frankly what had happened. Her public had grown tired of her. She had seen it coming on for some time, and was shrewd enough in detecting the causes. She had more rivals than formerly--younger women, she admitted, with a smile that could still afford to be generous--and then her audiences had grown more critical and consequently more exacting. Lecturing--as she understood it--used to be simple enough. You chose your topic--Raphael, Shakespeare, Gothic Architecture, or some such big familiar “subject”--and read up about it for a week or so at the Athenaeum or the Astor Library, and then told your audience what you had read. Now, it appeared, that simple process was no longer adequate. People had tired of familiar “subjects”; it was the fashion to be interested in things that one hadn’t always known about--natural selection, animal magnetism, sociology and comparative folk-lore; while, in literature, the demand had become equally difficult to meet, since Matthew Arnold had introduced the habit of studying the “influence” of one author on another. She had tried lecturing on influences, and had done very well as long as the public was satisfied with the tracing of such obvious influences as that of Turner on Ruskin, of Schiller on Goethe, of Shakespeare on English literature; but such investigations had soon lost all charm for her too-sophisticated audiences, who now demanded either that the influence or the influenced should be quite unknown, or that there should be no perceptible connection between the two. The zest of the performance lay in the measure of ingenuity with which the lecturer established a relation between two people who had probably never heard of each other, much less read each other’s works. A pretty Miss Williams with red hair had, for instance, been lecturing with great success on the influence of the Rosicrucians upon the poetry of Keats, while somebody else had given a “course” on the influence of St. Thomas Aquinas upon Professor Huxley.

Mrs. Amyot, warmed by my participation in her distress, went on to say that the growing demand for evolution was what most troubled her. Her grandfather had been a pillar of the Presbyterian ministry, and the idea of her lecturing on Darwin or Herbert Spencer was deeply shocking to her mother and aunts. In one sense the family had staked its literary as well as its spiritual hopes on the literal inspiration of Genesis: what became of “The Fall of Man” in the light of modern exegesis?

The upshot of it was that she had ceased to lecture because she could no longer sell tickets enough to pay for the hire of a lecture-hall; and as for the managers, they wouldn’t look at her. She had tried her luck all through the Eastern States and as far south as Washington; but it was of no use, and unless she could get hold of some new subjects--or, better still, of some new audiences--she must simply go out of the business. That would mean the failure of all she had worked for, since Lancelot would have to leave Harvard. She paused, and wept some of the unbecoming tears that spring from real grief. Lancelot, it appeared, was to be a genius. He had passed his opening examinations brilliantly; he had “literary gifts”; he had written beautiful poetry, much of which his mother had copied out, in reverentially slanting characters, in a velvet-bound volume which she drew from a locked drawer.

Lancelot’s verse struck me as nothing more alarming than growing-pains; but it was not to learn this that she had summoned me. What she wanted was to be assured that he was worth working for, an assurance which I managed to convey by the simple stratagem of remarking that the poems reminded me of Swinburne--and so they did, as well as of Browning, Tennyson, Rossetti, and all the other poets who supply young authors with original inspirations.

This point being established, it remained to be decided by what means his mother was, in the French phrase, to pay herself the luxury of a poet. It was clear that this indulgence could be bought only with counterfeit coin, and that the one way of helping Mrs. Amyot was to become a party to the circulation of such currency. My fetish of intellectual integrity went down like a ninepin before the appeal of a woman no longer young and distinctly foolish, but full of those dear contradictions and irrelevancies that will always make flesh and blood prevail against a syllogism. When I took leave of Mrs. Amyot I had promised her a dozen letters to Western universities and had half pledged myself to sketch out a lecture on the reconciliation of science and religion.

In the West she achieved a success which for a year or more embittered my perusal of the morning papers. The fascination that lures the murderer back to the scene of his crime drew my eye to every paragraph celebrating Mrs. Amyot’s last brilliant lecture on the influence of something upon somebody; and her own letters--she overwhelmed me with them--spared me no detail of the entertainment given in her honor by the Palimpsest Club of Omaha or of her reception at the University of Leadville. The college professors were especially kind: she assured me that she had never before met with such discriminating sympathy. I winced at the adjective, which cast a sudden light on the vast machinery of fraud that I had set in motion. All over my native land, men of hitherto unblemished integrity were conniving with me in urging their friends to go and hear Mrs. Amyot lecture on the reconciliation of science and religion! My only hope was that, somewhere among the number of my accomplices, Mrs. Amyot might find one who would marry her in the defense of his convictions.

None, apparently, resorted to such heroic measures; for about two years later I was startled by the announcement that Mrs. Amyot was lecturing in Trenton, New Jersey, on modern theosophy in the light of the Vedas. The following week she was at Newark, discussing Schopenhauer in the light of recent psychology. The week after that I was on the deck of an ocean steamer, reconsidering my share in Mrs. Amyot’s triumphs with the impartiality with which one views an episode that is being left behind at the rate of twenty knots an hour. After all, I had been helping a mother to educate her son.

The next ten years of my life were spent in Europe, and when I came home the recollection of Mrs. Amyot had become as inoffensive as one of those pathetic ghosts who are said to strive in vain to make themselves visible to the living. I did not even notice the fact that I no longer heard her spoken of; she had dropped like a dead leaf from the bough of memory.

A year or two after my return I was condemned to one of the worst punishments a worker can undergo--an enforced holiday. The doctors who pronounced the inhuman sentence decreed that it should be worked out in the South, and for a whole winter I carried my cough, my thermometer and my idleness from one fashionable orange-grove to another. In the vast and melancholy sea of my disoccupation I clutched like a drowning man at any human driftwood within reach. I took a critical and depreciatory interest in the coughs, the thermometers and the idleness of my fellow-sufferers; but to the healthy, the occupied, the transient I clung with undiscriminating enthusiasm.

In no other way can I explain, as I look back on it, the importance I attached to the leisurely confidences of a new arrival with a brown beard who, tilted back at my side on a hotel veranda hung with roses, imparted to me one afternoon the simple annals of his past. There was nothing in the tale to kindle the most inflammable imagination, and though the man had a pleasant frank face and a voice differing agreeably from the shrill inflections of our fellow-lodgers, it is probable that under different conditions his discursive history of successful business ventures in a Western city would have affected me somewhat in the manner of a lullaby.

Even at the tune I was not sure I liked his agreeable voice: it had a self-importance out of keeping with the humdrum nature of his story, as though a breeze engaged in shaking out a table-cloth should have fancied itself inflating a banner. But this criticism may have been a mere mark of my own fastidiousness, for the man seemed a simple fellow, satisfied with his middling fortunes, and already (he was not much past thirty) deep-sunk in conjugal content.

He had just started on an anecdote connected with the cutting of his eldest boy’s teeth, when a lady I knew, returning from her late drive, paused before us for a moment in the twilight, with the smile which is the feminine equivalent of beads to savages.

“Won’t you take a ticket?” she said sweetly.

Of course I would take a ticket--but for what? I ventured to inquire.

“Oh, that’s _so_ good of you--for the lecture this evening. You needn’t go, you know; we’re none of us going; most of us have been through it already at Aiken and at Saint Augustine and at Palm Beach. I’ve given away my tickets to some new people who’ve just come from the North, and some of us are going to send our maids, just to fill up the room.”

“And may I ask to whom you are going to pay this delicate attention?”

“Oh, I thought you knew--to poor Mrs. Amyot. She’s been lecturing all over the South this winter; she’s simply _haunted_ me ever since I left New York--and we had six weeks of her at Bar Harbor last summer! One has to take tickets, you know, because she’s a widow and does it for her son--to pay for his education. She’s so plucky and nice about it, and talks about him in such a touching unaffected way, that everybody is sorry for her, and we all simply ruin ourselves in tickets. I do hope that boy’s nearly educated!”

“Mrs. Amyot? Mrs. Amyot?” I repeated. “Is she _still_ educating her son?”

“Oh, do you know about her? Has she been at it long? There’s some comfort in that, for I suppose when the boy’s provided for the poor thing will be able to take a rest--and give us one!”

She laughed and held out her hand.

“Here’s your ticket. Did you say _tickets_--two? Oh, thanks. Of course you needn’t go.”

“But I mean to go. Mrs. Amyot is an old friend of mine.”

“Do you really? That’s awfully good of you. Perhaps I’ll go too if I can persuade Charlie and the others to come. And I wonder”--in a well-directed aside--“if your friend--?”

I telegraphed her under cover of the dusk that my friend was of too recent standing to be drawn into her charitable toils, and she masked her mistake under a rattle of friendly adjurations not to be late, and to be sure to keep a seat for her, as she had quite made up her mind to go even if Charlie and the others wouldn’t.

The flutter of her skirts subsided in the distance, and my neighbor, who had half turned away to light a cigar, made no effort to reopen the conversation. At length, fearing he might have overheard the allusion to himself, I ventured to ask if he were going to the lecture that evening.

“Much obliged--I have a ticket,” he said abruptly.

This struck me as in such bad taste that I made no answer; and it was he who spoke next.

“Did I understand you to say that you were an old friend of Mrs. Amyot’s?”

“I think I may claim to be, if it is the same Mrs. Amyot I had the pleasure of knowing many years ago. My Mrs. Amyot used to lecture too--”

“To pay for her son’s education?”

“I believe so.”

“Well--see you later.”

He got up and walked into the house.

In the hotel drawing-room that evening there was but a meagre sprinkling of guests, among whom I saw my brown-bearded friend sitting alone on a sofa, with his head against the wall. It could not have been curiosity to see Mrs. Amyot that had impelled him to attend the performance, for it would have been impossible for him, without changing his place, to command the improvised platform at the end of the room. When I looked at him he seemed lost in contemplation of the chandelier.

The lady from whom I had bought my tickets fluttered in late, unattended by Charlie and the others, and assuring me that she would _scream_ if we had the lecture on Ibsen--she had heard it three times already that winter. A glance at the programme reassured her: it informed us (in the lecturer’s own slanting hand) that Mrs. Amyot was to lecture on the Cosmogony.

After a long pause, during which the small audience coughed and moved its chairs and showed signs of regretting that it had come, the door opened, and Mrs. Amyot stepped upon the platform. Ah, poor lady!

Some one said “Hush!”, the coughing and chair-shifting subsided, and she began.

It was like looking at one’s self early in the morning in a cracked mirror. I had no idea I had grown so old. As for Lancelot, he must have a beard. A beard? The word struck me, and without knowing why I glanced across the room at my bearded friend on the sofa. Oddly enough he was looking at me, with a half-defiant, half-sullen expression; and as our glances crossed, and his fell, the conviction came to me that _he was Lancelot_.

I don’t remember a word of the lecture; and yet there were enough of them to have filled a good-sized dictionary. The stream of Mrs. Amyot’s eloquence had become a flood: one had the despairing sense that she had sprung a leak, and that until the plumber came there was nothing to be done about it.

The plumber came at length, in the shape of a clock striking ten; my companion, with a sigh of relief, drifted away in search of Charlie and the others; the audience scattered with the precipitation of people who had discharged a duty; and, without surprise, I found the brown-bearded stranger at my elbow.

We stood alone in the bare-floored room, under the flaring chandelier.

“I think you told me this afternoon that you were an old friend of Mrs. Amyot’s?” he began awkwardly.

I assented.

“Will you come in and see her?”

“Now? I shall be very glad to, if--”

“She’s ready; she’s expecting you,” he interposed.

He offered no further explanation, and I followed him in silence. He led me down the long corridor, and pushed open the door of a sitting-room.

“Mother,” he said, closing the door after we had entered, “here’s the gentleman who says he used to know you.”

Mrs. Amyot, who sat in an easy-chair stirring a cup of bouillon, looked up with a start. She had evidently not seen me in the audience, and her son’s description had failed to convey my identity. I saw a frightened look in her eyes; then, like a frost flower on a window-pane, the dimple expanded on her wrinkled cheek, and she held out her hand.

“I’m so glad,” she said, “so glad!”

She turned to her son, who stood watching us. “You must have told Lancelot all about me--you’ve known me so long!”

“I haven’t had time to talk to your son--since I knew he was your son,” I explained.

Her brow cleared. “Then you haven’t had time to say anything very dreadful?” she said with a laugh.

“It is he who has been saying dreadful things,” I returned, trying to fall in with her tone.

I saw my mistake. “What things?” she faltered.

“Making me feel how old I am by telling me about his children.”

“My grandchildren!” she exclaimed with a blush.

“Well, if you choose to put it so.”

She laughed again, vaguely, and was silent. I hesitated a moment and then put out my hand.

“I see you are tired. I shouldn’t have ventured to come in at this hour if your son--”

The son stepped between us. “Yes, I asked him to come,” he said to his mother, in his clear self-assertive voice. “_I_ haven’t told him anything yet; but you’ve got to--now. That’s what I brought him for.”

His mother straightened herself, but I saw her eye waver.

“Lancelot--” she began.

“Mr. Amyot,” I said, turning to the young man, “if your mother will let me come back to-morrow, I shall be very glad--”

He struck his hand hard against the table on which he was leaning.

“No, sir! It won’t take long, but it’s got to be said now.”

He moved nearer to his mother, and I saw his lip twitch under his beard. After all, he was younger and less sure of himself than I had fancied.

“See here, mother,” he went on, “there’s something here that’s got to be cleared up, and as you say this gentleman is an old friend of yours it had better be cleared up in his presence. Maybe he can help explain it--and if he can’t, it’s got to be explained to _him.”_

Mrs. Amyot’s lips moved, but she made no sound. She glanced at me helplessly and sat down. My early inclination to thrash Lancelot was beginning to reassert itself. I took up my hat and moved toward the door.

“Mrs. Amyot is under no obligation to explain anything whatever to me,” I said curtly.

“Well! She’s under an obligation to me, then--to explain something in your presence.” He turned to her again. “Do you know what the people in this hotel are saying? Do you know what he thinks--what they all think? That you’re doing this lecturing to support me--to pay for my education! They say you go round telling them so. That’s what they buy the tickets for--they do it out of charity. Ask him if it isn’t what they say--ask him if they weren’t joking about it on the piazza before dinner. The others think I’m a little boy, but he’s known you for years, and he must have known how old I was. _He_ must have known it wasn’t to pay for my education!”

He stood before her with his hands clenched, the veins beating in his temples. She had grown very pale, and her cheeks looked hollow. When she spoke her voice had an odd click in it.

“If--if these ladies and gentlemen have been coming to my lectures out of charity, I see nothing to be ashamed of in that--” she faltered.

“If they’ve been coming out of charity to _me_,” he retorted, “don’t you see you’ve been making me a party to a fraud? Isn’t there any shame in that?” His forehead reddened. “Mother! Can’t you see the shame of letting people think I was a d--beat, who sponged on you for my keep? Let alone making us both the laughing-stock of every place you go to!”

“I never did that, Lancelot!”

“Did what?”

“Made you a laughing-stock--”

He stepped close to her and caught her wrist.

“Will you look me in the face and swear you never told people you were doing this lecturing business to support me?”

There was a long silence. He dropped her wrist and she lifted a limp handkerchief to her frightened eyes. “I did do it--to support you--to educate you”--she sobbed.

“We’re not talking about what you did when I was a boy. Everybody who knows me knows I’ve been a grateful son. Have I ever taken a penny from you since I left college ten years ago?”

“I never said you had! How can you accuse your mother of such wickedness, Lancelot?”

“Have you never told anybody in this hotel--or anywhere else in the last ten years--that you were lecturing to support me? Answer me that!”

“How can you,” she wept, “before a stranger?”

“Haven’t you said such things about _me_ to strangers?” he retorted.

“Lancelot!”

“Well--answer me, then. Say you haven’t, mother!” His voice broke unexpectedly and he took her hand with a gentler touch. “I’ll believe anything you tell me,” he said almost humbly.

She mistook his tone and raised her head with a rash clutch at dignity.

“I think you’d better ask this gentleman to excuse you first.”

“No, by God, I won’t!” he cried. “This gentleman says he knows all about you and I mean him to know all about me too. I don’t mean that he or anybody else under this roof shall go on thinking for another twenty-four hours that a cent of their money has ever gone into my pockets since I was old enough to shift for myself. And he sha’n’t leave this room till you’ve made that clear to him.”

He stepped back as he spoke and put his shoulders against the door.

“My dear young gentleman,” I said politely, “I shall leave this room exactly when I see fit to do so--and that is now. I have already told you that Mrs. Amyot owes me no explanation of her conduct.”

“But I owe you an explanation of mine--you and every one who has bought a single one of her lecture tickets. Do you suppose a man who’s been through what I went through while that woman was talking to you in the porch before dinner is going to hold his tongue, and not attempt to justify himself? No decent man is going to sit down under that sort of thing. It’s enough to ruin his character. If you’re my mother’s friend, you owe it to me to hear what I’ve got to say.”

He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

“Good God, mother!” he burst out suddenly, “what did you do it for? Haven’t you had everything you wanted ever since I was able to pay for it? Haven’t I paid you back every cent you spent on me when I was in college? Have I ever gone back on you since I was big enough to work?” He turned to me with a laugh. “I thought she did it to amuse herself--and because there was such a demand for her lectures. _Such a demand!_ That’s what she always told me. When we asked her to come out and spend this winter with us in Minneapolis, she wrote back that she couldn’t because she had engagements all through the south, and her manager wouldn’t let her off. That’s the reason why I came all the way on here to see her. We thought she was the most popular lecturer in the United States, my wife and I did! We were awfully proud of it too, I can tell you.” He dropped into a chair, still laughing.

“How can you, Lancelot, how can you!” His mother, forgetful of my presence, was clinging to him with tentative caresses. “When you didn’t need the money any longer I spent it all on the children--you know I did.”

“Yes, on lace christening dresses and life-size rocking-horses with real manes! The kind of thing children can’t do without.”

“Oh, Lancelot, Lancelot--I loved them so! How can you believe such falsehoods about me?”

“What falsehoods about you?”

“That I ever told anybody such dreadful things?”

He put her back gently, keeping his eyes on hers. “Did you never tell anybody in this house that you were lecturing to support your son?”

Her hands dropped from his shoulders and she flashed round on me in sudden anger.

“I know what I think of people who call themselves friends and who come between a mother and her son!”

“Oh, mother, mother!” he groaned.

I went up to him and laid my hand on his shoulder.

“My dear man,” I said, “don’t you see the uselessness of prolonging this?”

“Yes, I do,” he answered abruptly; and before I could forestall his movement he rose and walked out of the room.

There was a long silence, measured by the lessening reverberations of his footsteps down the wooden floor of the corridor.

When they ceased I approached Mrs. Amyot, who had sunk into her chair. I held out my hand and she took it without a trace of resentment on her ravaged face.

“I sent his wife a seal-skin jacket at Christmas!” she said, with the tears running down her cheeks.

SOULS BELATED

Their railway-carriage had been full when the train left Bologna; but at the first station beyond Milan their only remaining companion--a courtly person who ate garlic out of a carpet-bag--had left his crumb-strewn seat with a bow.

Lydia’s eye regretfully followed the shiny broadcloth of his retreating back till it lost itself in the cloud of touts and cab-drivers hanging about the station; then she glanced across at Gannett and caught the same regret in his look. They were both sorry to be alone.

“_Par-ten-za!_” shouted the guard. The train vibrated to a sudden slamming of doors; a waiter ran along the platform with a tray of fossilized sandwiches; a belated porter flung a bundle of shawls and band-boxes into a third-class carriage; the guard snapped out a brief _Partensa!_ which indicated the purely ornamental nature of his first shout; and the train swung out of the station.

The direction of the road had changed, and a shaft of sunlight struck across the dusty red velvet seats into Lydia’s corner. Gannett did not notice it. He had returned to his _Revue de Paris,_ and she had to rise and lower the shade of the farther window. Against the vast horizon of their leisure such incidents stood out sharply.

Having lowered the shade, Lydia sat down, leaving the length of the carriage between herself and Gannett. At length he missed her and looked up.

“I moved out of the sun,” she hastily explained.

He looked at her curiously: the sun was beating on her through the shade.

“Very well,” he said pleasantly; adding, “You don’t mind?” as he drew a cigarette-case from his pocket.

It was a refreshing touch, relieving the tension of her spirit with the suggestion that, after all, if he could _smoke_--! The relief was only momentary. Her experience of smokers was limited (her husband had disapproved of the use of tobacco) but she knew from hearsay that men sometimes smoked to get away from things; that a cigar might be the masculine equivalent of darkened windows and a headache. Gannett, after a puff or two, returned to his review.

It was just as she had foreseen; he feared to speak as much as she did. It was one of the misfortunes of their situation that they were never busy enough to necessitate, or even to justify, the postponement of unpleasant discussions. If they avoided a question it was obviously, unconcealably because the question was disagreeable. They had unlimited leisure and an accumulation of mental energy to devote to any subject that presented itself; new topics were in fact at a premium. Lydia sometimes had premonitions of a famine-stricken period when there would be nothing left to talk about, and she had already caught herself doling out piecemeal what, in the first prodigality of their confidences, she would have flung to him in a breath. Their silence therefore might simply mean that they had nothing to say; but it was another disadvantage of their position that it allowed infinite opportunity for the classification of minute differences. Lydia had learned to distinguish between real and factitious silences; and under Gannett’s she now detected a hum of speech to which her own thoughts made breathless answer.

How could it be otherwise, with that thing between them? She glanced up at the rack overhead. The _thing_ was there, in her dressing-bag, symbolically suspended over her head and his. He was thinking of it now, just as she was; they had been thinking of it in unison ever since they had entered the train. While the carriage had held other travellers they had screened her from his thoughts; but now that he and she were alone she knew exactly what was passing through his mind; she could almost hear him asking himself what he should say to her....

* * * * *

The thing had come that morning, brought up to her in an innocent-looking envelope with the rest of their letters, as they were leaving the hotel at Bologna. As she tore it open, she and Gannett were laughing over some ineptitude of the local guide-book--they had been driven, of late, to make the most of such incidental humors of travel. Even when she had unfolded the document she took it for some unimportant business paper sent abroad for her signature, and her eye travelled inattentively over the curly _Whereases_ of the preamble until a word arrested her:--Divorce. There it stood, an impassable barrier, between her husband’s name and hers.

She had been prepared for it, of course, as healthy people are said to be prepared for death, in the sense of knowing it must come without in the least expecting that it will. She had known from the first that Tillotson meant to divorce her--but what did it matter? Nothing mattered, in those first days of supreme deliverance, but the fact that she was free; and not so much (she had begun to be aware) that freedom had released her from Tillotson as that it had given her to Gannett. This discovery had not been agreeable to her self-esteem. She had preferred to think that Tillotson had himself embodied all her reasons for leaving him; and those he represented had seemed cogent enough to stand in no need of reinforcement. Yet she had not left him till she met Gannett. It was her love for Gannett that had made life with Tillotson so poor and incomplete a business. If she had never, from the first, regarded her marriage as a full cancelling of her claims upon life, she had at least, for a number of years, accepted it as a provisional compensation,--she had made it “do.” Existence in the commodious Tillotson mansion in Fifth Avenue--with Mrs. Tillotson senior commanding the approaches from the second-story front windows--had been reduced to a series of purely automatic acts. The moral atmosphere of the Tillotson interior was as carefully screened and curtained as the house itself: Mrs. Tillotson senior dreaded ideas as much as a draught in her back. Prudent people liked an even temperature; and to do anything unexpected was as foolish as going out in the rain. One of the chief advantages of being rich was that one need not be exposed to unforeseen contingencies: by the use of ordinary firmness and common sense one could make sure of doing exactly the same thing every day at the same hour. These doctrines, reverentially imbibed with his mother’s milk, Tillotson (a model son who had never given his parents an hour’s anxiety) complacently expounded to his wife, testifying to his sense of their importance by the regularity with which he wore goloshes on damp days, his punctuality at meals, and his elaborate precautions against burglars and contagious diseases. Lydia, coming from a smaller town, and entering New York life through the portals of the Tillotson mansion, had mechanically accepted this point of view as inseparable from having a front pew in church and a parterre box at the opera. All the people who came to the house revolved in the same small circle of prejudices. It was the kind of society in which, after dinner, the ladies compared the exorbitant charges of their children’s teachers, and agreed that, even with the new duties on French clothes, it was cheaper in the end to get everything from Worth; while the husbands, over their cigars, lamented municipal corruption, and decided that the men to start a reform were those who had no private interests at stake.

To Lydia this view of life had become a matter of course, just as lumbering about in her mother-in-law’s landau had come to seem the only possible means of locomotion, and listening every Sunday to a fashionable Presbyterian divine the inevitable atonement for having thought oneself bored on the other six days of the week. Before she met Gannett her life had seemed merely dull: his coming made it appear like one of those dismal Cruikshank prints in which the people are all ugly and all engaged in occupations that are either vulgar or stupid.

It was natural that Tillotson should be the chief sufferer from this readjustment of focus. Gannett’s nearness had made her husband ridiculous, and a part of the ridicule had been reflected on herself. Her tolerance laid her open to a suspicion of obtuseness from which she must, at all costs, clear herself in Gannett’s eyes.

She did not understand this until afterwards. At the time she fancied that she had merely reached the limits of endurance. In so large a charter of liberties as the mere act of leaving Tillotson seemed to confer, the small question of divorce or no divorce did not count. It was when she saw that she had left her husband only to be with Gannett that she perceived the significance of anything affecting their relations. Her husband, in casting her off, had virtually flung her at Gannett: it was thus that the world viewed it. The measure of alacrity with which Gannett would receive her would be the subject of curious speculation over afternoon-tea tables and in club corners. She knew what would be said--she had heard it so often of others! The recollection bathed her in misery. The men would probably back Gannett to “do the decent thing”; but the ladies’ eye-brows would emphasize the worthlessness of such enforced fidelity; and after all, they would be right. She had put herself in a position where Gannett “owed” her something; where, as a gentleman, he was bound to “stand the damage.” The idea of accepting such compensation had never crossed her mind; the so-called rehabilitation of such a marriage had always seemed to her the only real disgrace. What she dreaded was the necessity of having to explain herself; of having to combat his arguments; of calculating, in spite of herself, the exact measure of insistence with which he pressed them. She knew not whether she most shrank from his insisting too much or too little. In such a case the nicest sense of proportion might be at fault; and how easy to fall into the error of taking her resistance for a test of his sincerity! Whichever way she turned, an ironical implication confronted her: she had the exasperated sense of having walked into the trap of some stupid practical joke.

Beneath all these preoccupations lurked the dread of what he was thinking. Sooner or later, of course, he would have to speak; but that, in the meantime, he should think, even for a moment, that there was any use in speaking, seemed to her simply unendurable. Her sensitiveness on this point was aggravated by another fear, as yet barely on the level of consciousness; the fear of unwillingly involving Gannett in the trammels of her dependence. To look upon him as the instrument of her liberation; to resist in herself the least tendency to a wifely taking possession of his future; had seemed to Lydia the one way of maintaining the dignity of their relation. Her view had not changed, but she was aware of a growing inability to keep her thoughts fixed on the essential point--the point of parting with Gannett. It was easy to face as long as she kept it sufficiently far off: but what was this act of mental postponement but a gradual encroachment on his future? What was needful was the courage to recognize the moment when, by some word or look, their voluntary fellowship should be transformed into a bondage the more wearing that it was based on none of those common obligations which make the most imperfect marriage in some sort a centre of gravity.

When the porter, at the next station, threw the door open, Lydia drew back, making way for the hoped-for intruder; but none came, and the train took up its leisurely progress through the spring wheat-fields and budding copses. She now began to hope that Gannett would speak before the next station. She watched him furtively, half-disposed to return to the seat opposite his, but there was an artificiality about his absorption that restrained her. She had never before seen him read with so conspicuous an air of warding off interruption. What could he be thinking of? Why should he be afraid to speak? Or was it her answer that he dreaded?

The train paused for the passing of an express, and he put down his book and leaned out of the window. Presently he turned to her with a smile. “There’s a jolly old villa out here,” he said.

His easy tone relieved her, and she smiled back at him as she crossed over to his corner.

Beyond the embankment, through the opening in a mossy wall, she caught sight of the villa, with its broken balustrades, its stagnant fountains, and the stone satyr closing the perspective of a dusky grass-walk.

“How should you like to live there?” he asked as the train moved on.

“There?”

“In some such place, I mean. One might do worse, don’t you think so? There must be at least two centuries of solitude under those yew-trees. Shouldn’t you like it?”

“I--I don’t know,” she faltered. She knew now that he meant to speak.

He lit another cigarette. “We shall have to live somewhere, you know,” he said as he bent above the match.

Lydia tried to speak carelessly. “_Je n’en vois pas la nécessité!_ Why not live everywhere, as we have been doing?”

“But we can’t travel forever, can we?”

“Oh, forever’s a long word,” she objected, picking up the review he had thrown aside.

“For the rest of our lives then,” he said, moving nearer.

She made a slight gesture which caused his hand to slip from hers.

“Why should we make plans? I thought you agreed with me that it’s pleasanter to drift.”

He looked at her hesitatingly. “It’s been pleasant, certainly; but I suppose I shall have to get at my work again some day. You know I haven’t written a line since--all this time,” he hastily emended.

She flamed with sympathy and self-reproach. “Oh, if you mean _that_--if you want to write--of course we must settle down. How stupid of me not to have thought of it sooner! Where shall we go? Where do you think you could work best? We oughtn’t to lose any more time.”

He hesitated again. “I had thought of a villa in these parts. It’s quiet; we shouldn’t be bothered. Should you like it?”

“Of course I should like it.” She paused and looked away. “But I thought--I remember your telling me once that your best work had been done in a crowd--in big cities. Why should you shut yourself up in a desert?”

Gannett, for a moment, made no reply. At length he said, avoiding her eye as carefully as she avoided his: “It might be different now; I can’t tell, of course, till I try. A writer ought not to be dependent on his _milieu_; it’s a mistake to humor oneself in that way; and I thought that just at first you might prefer to be--”

She faced him. “To be what?”

“Well--quiet. I mean--”

“What do you mean by ‘at first’?” she interrupted.

He paused again. “I mean after we are married.”

She thrust up her chin and turned toward the window. “Thank you!” she tossed back at him.

“Lydia!” he exclaimed blankly; and she felt in every fibre of her averted person that he had made the inconceivable, the unpardonable mistake of anticipating her acquiescence.

The train rattled on and he groped for a third cigarette. Lydia remained silent.

“I haven’t offended you?” he ventured at length, in the tone of a man who feels his way.

She shook her head with a sigh. “I thought you understood,” she moaned. Their eyes met and she moved back to his side.

“Do you want to know how not to offend me? By taking it for granted, once for all, that you’ve said your say on this odious question and that I’ve said mine, and that we stand just where we did this morning before that--that hateful paper came to spoil everything between us!”

“To spoil everything between us? What on earth do you mean? Aren’t you glad to be free?”

“I was free before.”

“Not to marry me,” he suggested.

“But I don’t _want_ to marry you!” she cried.

She saw that he turned pale. “I’m obtuse, I suppose,” he said slowly. “I confess I don’t see what you’re driving at. Are you tired of the whole business? Or was _I_ simply a--an excuse for getting away? Perhaps you didn’t care to travel alone? Was that it? And now you want to chuck me?” His voice had grown harsh. “You owe me a straight answer, you know; don’t be tender-hearted!”

Her eyes swam as she leaned to him. “Don’t you see it’s because I care--because I care so much? Oh, Ralph! Can’t you see how it would humiliate me? Try to feel it as a woman would! Don’t you see the misery of being made your wife in this way? If I’d known you as a girl--that would have been a real marriage! But now--this vulgar fraud upon society--and upon a society we despised and laughed at--this sneaking back into a position that we’ve voluntarily forfeited: don’t you see what a cheap compromise it is? We neither of us believe in the abstract ‘sacredness’ of marriage; we both know that no ceremony is needed to consecrate our love for each other; what object can we have in marrying, except the secret fear of each that the other may escape, or the secret longing to work our way back gradually--oh, very gradually--into the esteem of the people whose conventional morality we have always ridiculed and hated? And the very fact that, after a decent interval, these same people would come and dine with us--the women who talk about the indissolubility of marriage, and who would let me die in a gutter to-day because I am ‘leading a life of sin’--doesn’t that disgust you more than their turning their backs on us now? I can stand being cut by them, but I couldn’t stand their coming to call and asking what I meant to do about visiting that unfortunate Mrs. So-and-so!”

She paused, and Gannett maintained a perplexed silence.

“You judge things too theoretically,” he said at length, slowly. “Life is made up of compromises.”

“The life we ran away from--yes! If we had been willing to accept them”--she flushed--“we might have gone on meeting each other at Mrs. Tillotson’s dinners.”

He smiled slightly. “I didn’t know that we ran away to found a new system of ethics. I supposed it was because we loved each other.”

“Life is complex, of course; isn’t it the very recognition of that fact that separates us from the people who see it _tout d’une pièce?_ If _they_ are right--if marriage is sacred in itself and the individual must always be sacrificed to the family--then there can be no real marriage between us, since our--our being together is a protest against the sacrifice of the individual to the family.” She interrupted herself with a laugh. “You’ll say now that I’m giving you a lecture on sociology! Of course one acts as one can--as one must, perhaps--pulled by all sorts of invisible threads; but at least one needn’t pretend, for social advantages, to subscribe to a creed that ignores the complexity of human motives--that classifies people by arbitrary signs, and puts it in everybody’s reach to be on Mrs. Tillotson’s visiting-list. It may be necessary that the world should be ruled by conventions--but if we believed in them, why did we break through them? And if we don’t believe in them, is it honest to take advantage of the protection they afford?”

Gannett hesitated. “One may believe in them or not; but as long as they do rule the world it is only by taking advantage of their protection that one can find a _modus vivendi.”_

“Do outlaws need a _modus vivendi?”_

He looked at her hopelessly. Nothing is more perplexing to man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.

She thought she had scored a point and followed it up passionately. “You do understand, don’t you? You see how the very thought of the thing humiliates me! We are together to-day because we choose to be--don’t let us look any farther than that!” She caught his hands. “_Promise_ me you’ll never speak of it again; promise me you’ll never _think_ of it even,” she implored, with a tearful prodigality of italics.