Short Sequels to “Looking Backward”

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DEACON VAN WINKLE’S DREAM

BY THE REV. GEO. H. HUBBARD

NORTON, MASS.

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IN THE YEAR ’26

THE year 2025 was drawing to its close in a sweeping storm of wind and rain. In the hall of a noble house on the edge of the Contra Costa hills, a tall girl with a sad and somewhat lonely expression was taking off the wraps in which she had driven through the storm, and a sweet-faced woman, standingon tiptoe to do it, helped her, evidently anxious to lessen in every possible way the strangeness of the moment.

Juliana West had come from Boston on that afternoon’s train, to make her home with her mother’s cousin, Mrs. Roger Davenport. Mrs. West had been an only child, and Mr. West still more alone in the world, so that this cousin was the nearest relative left to the orphan daughter ; and as Irene Davenport had been brought up more like a sister than a cousin with the young girl’s mother, who had been but a few years the elder, it was natural that Juliana should come to her now.

No one could have been kinder than the Davenports had been. Mrs. Davenport had telegraphed for Juliana the instant she heard of her loss, begging the girl to come to her, and saying that Roger would go on to Boston and bring her ; and it had seemed more like home to the desolate girl than any place that was possible to her. It made it the more so that her cousin’s husband, instead of being a drawback to the sense of kinship and homelikeness, was already a favorite with Juliana. She had not seen him of

late years, as she had her cousin, who had made several long visits to Boston ; but she remembered him with the peculiarly pleasant memory children acquire in their early teens of those who are appreciatively kind and considerate with them. Roger Davenport was, moreover, a man of very high scientific standing, and a member of Congress for many years, and the whole family were proud of his reputation and the esteem in which he was held in public and in private. It had been a pleasure to Juliana, even in her sadness, to find that her childish memory of him had not been at fault; on the contrary, she saw that her older and more trained mind perceived new qualities to admire in him. As for his behavior to herself, no one would ever know what his perfect consideration and sympathy were to her during those first days of loneliness, when he had come on by the three-day train from San Francisco,—a journey that no improvements can make anything but arduous and fatiguing, — to be with her in time for the funeral.

They returned more comfortably and leisurely. The traveling was perfectly simple, and it was for pure kindness’s sake that the Davenports had not allowed Juliana to come alone ; but it would have been a sorrowful journey, and she appreciated the thought that had given her this grave, handsome, kind man to watch every detail of her comfort, and especially to divert her with unfailing tact from her sadness. Roger Davenport was at this time somewhat past forty, and looked old for his age, — early touched with gray in hair and mustache, and showing a certain effect of care or responsibility in the fine, clear features of his face. Juliana thought that if he had not been so kind, or if it were in the old days of evil-doers, one might be afraid of him. Yet, in fact, she soon became in a way less afraid of him than of anyone,— perhaps in another way more afraid of him than of anyone, for she was always conscious of a great desire to have his good opinion, and a sense that his standards must be very high, and that she was not very wise or superior; but she could say things to him easily that she could not say to any one else.

It was to him that she first found herself able to talk about her bereavement. “It seems to me strange, Cousin Roger,” she said, as the train made its way across the plains, and they had fallen into one of the talks that he saw diverted her mind, and that he liked to encourage for his own sake, too, for he could not be without interest in the simple unfolding of a sweet young girl’s thought, — ” it seems to me strange to find myself sorrowful and lonely in the midst of our happy era. If it were not for the talks I used to have with my mother, after my father died, it would shake my faith in the essential sweetness and happiness of life, and that would almost be shaking my faith in God. She told me that after she lost my father, it was at first a shock to her faith in our solutions of ‘the riddle of the painful earth ‘; and then she saw that she was really set apart from other people by the strange and unparalleled things in my father’s history,—you know,—that made him, and her as her life was bound up in his, rather the last of the nineteenth century people, than people of our own time ; that now right living and the advance of science made it almost impossible that men should die in the flower of their age, as he did; so her experience did not justify her first thought, that as long as death was unconquered all our conquests came to little. Somebody must now and then have to bear the last remnants of evil, bequeathed from the old times; and each one that does, can be comforted, thinking the account is that much nearer being cleared off, for the perfecting of the present almost perfect happiness of the world.”

Davenport listened with interest to all she said, but answered thoughtfully that he fancied in all eras the world had seemed without trouble to young hearts before they knew it in themselves. “When we first grieve, we think grief has entered into the world; when we first sin, that sin has come to man.” But when he saw her look puzzled and troubled, he said she was quite right in thinking premature death grew rarer; and added with a graciousness that took an especial value from the dignity and station of the man : “It is a good comfort to feel in sorrow that others are happier, — the comfort of sweet souls. You would not like to cheer yourself, as thousands of sad hearts have done, by the opposite reflection, that pain is the common lot, would you?”

“O, I am glad I did not live then!’, said Juliana, touched and pleased by the praise. But none the less, she thought over his first answer afterward a good many times.

After she had taken off her wraps in the Davenports’ warm and homelike hall, Mrs. Davenport made her rest on a lounge, and sat beside her, holding her hand, and venturing after a little to speak of Cousin Edith, and her own love for her. Edith’s few years of seniority, her amiable character, and her fair beauty,—”which it is a pleasure to me to see again in you, dear,” she said,— had made her quite an ideal to the younger and plainer cousin. Juliana felt the affection and the welcome, but the conversation was hard for her, and she was afraid that she was going to cry, when Roger Davenport came in. He stood a moment, appreciating the young girl’s beauty and instinctive grace of attitude, as she leaned back on the cushions. His wife turned to smile at his approach, which visibly gave her as much pleasure now as when she was a bride; and Juliana felt the dangerous point of tears past, as he sat down close by, and began to talk with Mrs. Davenport about the journey, including herself in the conversation by a look or reference now and then, but not addressing her directly. She lay in the ease and warmth, with her cousin’s hand closely clasping hers, and Davenport’s reassuring glance from time to time seeking her, and felt the sense of comfort and home-coming deepen in her.

From time to time in the weeks after, Davenport waked again in her that troubled surprise at some of his views that had stirred on the train. She spoke once of the equality of fortune in the modern world, comparing it with the cruel inequalities of a century and a half before.

“Do you say that of your own thought, my dear ?” said Davenport, “or do you repeat the current phrase of the time about it?”

Juliana stared, a little hurt, and more abashed. “I do not know that I h ave any own thought about it,” she said. “How should I? It is an accepted fact.”

“And you could scarcely be asked to have a more searching thought in your young head than the run of your seniors have,” he said. “But none the less, these current laudations of our own achievements will stand some modifications.”

“But people are all equal in property now,” insisted Juliana, as nineteen years will insist when a dogma it has been taught is questioned. Perhaps we are never so sure of a generalization of our own acquiring,—we have learned its shaky points.

“Let me give you a bit of family history,” said Davenport, sitting down on the divan beside the low window on whose broad ledge she was sitting. “At the time of the revolution, early in the twentieth century, my great grandfather was an architect of real fame, — you know that?”

“O yes, I know that his work is among the models studied now. I was always taught that in art we often had to go back to more barbarous times for masterpieces that we prize still.”

“Very well. My great-grandfather was a prosperous and successful man in 1920. He had just married a woman of a great deal of family pride, who, like himself, had been an impoverished representative of a once distinguished line. They were at one in their ambition to re-make a great family. They bought a place on these hills, close to where we now are, and there built a family mansion, to which the heir had just been born, when the revolution deprived them of all title to it. The previous owner might have the first opportunity to rent it, if he wished. But the size and magnificence with which it was planned would have made its rent take a larger piece out of the government allowance he now had to live on than he could well afford. The allowances were small to begin with, you know; but for the great caution and shrewdness of the men who managed that transition time, it never could have been carried through at all. My ancestor had had a sufficient income to carry out his plans; he had suffered in early life every deprivation, had obtained his education at great cost of labor and self-denial, had been through a whole romance of courageous struggle, and after years of effort,—thoroughly honest effort, mind, in which he had more than once risked the whole success of his life to defy some fraudulent practice of thetime, and had never (so his manuscript journal tells me)elbowed another man unfairly, or made any one the poorer) — had achieved what in those days was called an honorable and deserved success. He had not enjoyed it as he went along, but had saved, so as to buy his estate and build his home without encroaching on his means for enjoyment afterward. He had just entered into the results of his labor, when it was all swept away, and, instead, he was given a stipend, comparatively small, and having no relation to his own exertions, by the new government. His estate was divided into smaller ones, and an idle and drunken workman, whom he had dismissed for worthlessness, was installed in the new house, with precisely the same income as the former owner.”

Juliana listened with a kind of pained fascination. Perhaps it made a difference to her that the loser by the great reform had been the ancestor of Roger Davenport.

“I never realized,” she said ; “it must have been very hard for many just at the time of the change.”

“He was a resolute man, and well accustomed to self-denial for an end in view. He felt the profoundest bitterness over the change, which he was yet too shrewd to try to resist. He said to his wife: ‘This leveling business can be defeated easily enough, after all; only we shall have to take another generation or two to do it’; and she answered, ‘I live for my baby,—I will make any sacrifices that are necessary.’ So the old journal says. You must catch their spirit about this, my dear; they were not to themselves conspirators, but honest people, defeating in the interest of their child a popular conspiracy, and sacrificing personal comfort for the rest of a life that had already been sacrificed so far,— and in vain, — in the same way. Well, my ancestor thereupon moved a little farther along the line of the hills,and took several acres of land, paying the government ground rent for it, — a comparatively small sum, as there was no house. He then secured through a test case concerning some one else, a decision that the person who had rented a piece of land should always have the first opportunity to re-rent it at the expiration of the lease. This was approved both by Congress and the courts, since it was evident that the making of homes would be greatly discouraged if there could be

no permanency of tenure, and in fact, as you know, most men, when they have thoroughly settled themselves in a house, expect to stay there year after year, and get to thinking of it as theirs, saying ‘my house,’ or ‘ my garden,’— I remember your grandfather Leete used to, ardent nationalist as he was. And he built a laboratory in his garden, you remember. He could not have done that had not my ancestor and many other persons brought before the very first congress the question whether the government should raise rents on tenants for improvements they had themselves made on their holdings, — should rackrent, in short. But you know about this from your history.”

“Yes, — Congress decided justly, of course, that what a man had bought himself and put on the soil was his own, and government had nothing to do with it; only if it was of such a nature that he could not take it with him when he went away, he could not claim any compensation from the nation. I learned that at school, but I never thought of connecting it with grandfather’s laboratory.”

“Well, on the strength of this decision, which he very well foresaw could never be upset without rousing endless resistance, my ancestor proceeded to lay out his acres with the greatest care and without sparing expense. He was at the time about forty years old, and was of course in the government service as an architect. He confined his services strictly to the hours required by law, although it had been his custom to work night and day. The consequence was that almost every moment of his working time was given to public buildings, to the disappointment of those who wished his designs for their own homes. Very soon he made a proposal to an old friend, a grower of fine trees, that if he would rent a small piece of land from the nation, and employ it in raising for him the trees that he wished, out of government hours, he would in turn, outside of his hours, make for him the plans he wished, which he could then put into the hands of the builders. Remember that a small service from him was accepted by his contemporaries as of much more value than a larger one from another, because of its quality.- The tree-grower thought he was lucky to get two hours of Davenport’s work in return for forty of his own. In like manner he paid the workmen who planted his trees and made his terraces. When a man did not care for his work in return, he sold it to some one else who had what the man did want, and gave him an order for the transfer. I have seen papers in his hand reading thus: ‘My dear Mr. Lyon: Please transfer to a\c of Patrick Mulhaney, who desires portrait, such and such portion of the credit due me for designs for garden studio. Yours, &c.’ The portrait was, of course, done out of hours, as all the artist’s work within hours was due to the government. Thus, very soon Davenport’s time was as full, earl}’ and late, as it had been in his most arduous days before the revolution. Where he wanted something not to be had except from the government, he used his own allowance of credit, or bought a portion of some one else’s—”

“But that is not allowed.” “Nominally not. But how much trouble was it to have his customer purchase the desired article and turn it over to him?”

Juliana caught her breath, for though as utterly untrained in business as most people of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, she had a quick little head, and the possibilities of this sort of transaction lengthened dimly out to her. “Some one else records that when first refused-a transfer of credit from another man’s card, my ancestor raised his eye-brows, shrugged his shoulders, and remarked: ‘My dear friend the nation, you are only compelling one more step in the transaction!’

“You know the regular method of house-building is to request the nation to build for you in such a location, and according to such and such plans, previously selected from among the work of the architects: the house is built without expense to the petitioner, according to his wishes, and the ownership remains with the nation. But did it ever occur to you to ask who would own a house built by a man at his own expense, with materials purchased by himself, from his own plans?”

“No. If he ever left the place, it would lapse to government,” said Juliana.

“Clearly. But as long as he paid his rent, no one could compel him to leave the place. And he was offering his descendants an irresistible inducement to continue to rent it. Living with strict economy, using all his credit, and all the large earnings of his outside hours,—and in a few years he reached the age of retirement, and had all his time for private earnings, — he was able before he died, at the age of seventy-eight,to create here an estate far more noble than his earlier ambition. My child, did you imagine that the combined credit of your cousin and myself could rent a place like this, and enable us to live in other respects as we do?”

It was not unnatural that Juliana, ignorant of house building, should have imagined that good taste only had given the singular beauty to her cousin’s home: for the house, in the very best Davenport manner for home architecture, was built for lasting comfort, not for display. The beauty was inwrought in material and form so ineffaceably that centuries could scarcely mar it. Everything was done with reference to the least possible troublein caring for the house, in keeping up and renewing. The beautiful stones and marbles, wrought with hand labor to the utmost perfection, and only more beautiful for nearly a hundred years of exposure to sun and rain ; the choice woods, in the simplest possible surfaces, whose polish and grain the years only helped; the wonderful pavements of courts, and halls, and walks, the few stone and wood carvings, the deep, firm paint inside, where color had been called for, or the frescoes, every stroke from a famous hand,—all was easier to live in, without much service or anxiety, than most houses of a fraction the cost. The few acres of grounds, too, — enough to secure a sense of retirement and seclusion, but not enough to be a burdensome estate,—were planted from the first with reference to a beauty and luxuriance so much like that of nature as to require the minimum of a gardener’s care. The proud old man had builded and laid out with conscious power, and a quiet certainty that time would never make “the Davenport style ” antiquated.

“I pay the nation’s ground-rent on all this,” said his great-grandson; “raised to meet the greater value of land now, but not to cover any of the improvements. If I were charged on all this, at the regular government per cent of the cost, it would be simply impossible for me to pay it.

“Well, my ancestor died happy, having left practically secured to his descendants the value of nearly half a million dollars, including some of these almost priceless statues, carvings, and frescoes. Now what of my grandfather, brought up from his earliest years to see the building up of this store the object of life? It became the object of his also. He lived very modestly, and spent lavishly on the books that fill my libraries, — you have no idea how rare and valuable the collection is. He also used his extra hours and his years of retirement in private earnings. But my father, who was a physician, gave his for zeal and public spirit.”

Juliana drew a long breath, as one who recognizes a familiar tone among strange faces and ways.

“He had a sister, who inherited the place jointly with him. When she mar

ried and left it, he divided with her the movables, and furnished her in such commodities as she wished the equivalent annually of the interest on her half of the remaining property. Had she not died childless, this would have been an increasing tax from generation to generation, which would have had to be settled by some sort of quit-claim transaction.

“The accidents of marriage have helped a little, too. My grandmother was the inheritor of some superb old furniture; my mother’s family were devoted collectors of paintings and other works of art. Moreover, my grandfather left on the place a strain of fine horses, which we have always kept at trifling expense. So I could go on to enumerate many ways in which it has been the family habit to spend on permanent and transferable possessions, which when inherited set free the income of the heir to that extent for other pleasures, and make him a richer man than his neighbor. The things that my aunt took came back at her death.”

“It was merely the accident of your being an only descendant,” said the girl, using her sharpness again, “that made it’possible. The payment of commodities to your aunt must have been half as great as the government rent would have been. It would not take long at that rate for the estate to become impossible to carry, once the practice of illegal private earnings to make good the commuted payments was given up.”

Roger Davenport smiled, pleased at the quickness with which she grasped the new idea. “You are quite right, my child,” he said; “and tell me, how was that different under the old regime? If a rich man had many descendants, and divided his property among them, unless each one worked hard to make good the lessening, it was soon dissipated. Inheritance by primogeniture was necessary to stem the natural tendency of inequalities to break down, and that was a decaying custom even then. You may think of many forces tending to check my ancestor’s method of saving for descendants, and re-distribute; but if you will study the matter, not in your textbooks, but in nineteepth century law books, decisions, deeds, transfers, and family records,—in certain unpopular and little read modern authors, too, — you will see that most of them were also in operation then.

“But I should not have told you this family story as a quaint and curious exceptional instance. Do you think the same thing, in greater or less degree, could have been uncommon? Think how customary it was in the nineteenth century for parents to deny themselves for their children; how wrought into their very natures was the habit of enduring present scarcity for the sake of future plenty. Why, do you fancy that the Stanfords and Carnegies of the twentieth century had so suddenly lost their business genius, that such simple adjustments to the new regime as my grandfather’s, and far more complex ones, should never occur to them? They were merely thrown back on devices common before the elaborate banking and clearing house systems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grew up; private paper and securities, barter instead of purchase; they • only had to go back and reconstruct the system from its original materials. That always has been done, and always will be done, after a revolution. After the French revolution, men thought they had reconstructed the whole face of society, and they had gained a great deal. But they could only get to a certain distance from the social conceptions their generation had been living in. They came up with a wrench from a condition that represented the most belated minds of their time, to one that was up to the most radical ideals, and then slowly settled back to one between the two, and in accord with the average moral sense of

their people,—exactly as we are doing.” “You do not mean,” said the girl, slowly, “that this sort of thing is common now? Not an exceptional case, a survival of nineteenth century ideas and principles, now in the main extinct?”

“Let us face the truth, little girl,” said Roger Davenport. “It could not fail to be common. No law was ever yet carried out that assumed sudden changes in the ways and thoughts of a people. Why, look here.” He rose, and taking her hand lightly in his, led her into the next room, where Irene was assorting a number of pamphlets and faded and ancient papers, upon the shelves of the library, for she was her husband’s private secretary. “These are the material for a study of the working of prohibition laws in the nineteenth century. Here are cities of that date in which the sale of liquors was prohibited by vote of the people, and continued under the eyes of those voters, sometimes without pretense of concealment. Here are newspaper editorials, suggesting that it would be decent for the saloons to close on Sundays at least, in districts where, according to law, there are no saloons. I wish to present these points to Congress in connection with some of these very questions. You ask if private exchange is not now extinct. I should say it was rather on the increase, as the systems perfect themselves, and the reaction gets swing. I am now delving in records, private letters, and deeds, to see how general it is, and whether it has or has not been so all along. Look there,” and he opened a drawer, where a chaos of papers lay waiting for Irene’s assorting; “those are all specimens of private securities, bonds, and currencies of various sorts, which I have been collecting. Here are some dated in the year of the revolution, and here are some of last week. Do you see how much more systematic they become? This last one bears the name of what is practically a private ban king firm. That intimates an increase of demand for such things. A few months ago, I had an application to sublet half of these grounds, — the leaser to pay to me in this private credit paper the excess of rental value over the ground rent due to the improvements. That is often done, where improvements have been inherited. No one could have prevented your mother, for instance, from renting for some consideration of direct or indirect barter your grandfather’s laboratory when she inherited it.”

“She would not have thought of it!” said Juliana. “She let a young couple who were studyingchemistry at Harvard take it, — the ones who took the house when I came away, you know. It saved them just so much money for other things, —the trip they wanted to make to Heidelberg, and some very expensive experiments. They were very grateful, and afterward used often to insist on taking me on pleasure trips as their guest, and gave me some beautiful books and bric-a-brac,—” and then she flushed as she saw Davenport smile. “It was not private barter,” she cried. “It was an exchange of friendly services. It had no money or credit measurement.”

“Surely not!” he said. “But every one is not Edith or Juliana. Supposing it had been a pre-arranged exchange, how would government have distinguished between that and your friendly reciprocity?”

“Do you mean, cousin Roger,” said the girl, sitting down on the fine old sixteenth century oak chair by his writing table, “that government could not prevent all this? Why were not these illegal transactions forbidden from the very outset?”

“They were not illegal. They were perfectly legal and strictly honorable, according to the old laws of generations, — and remember that though these had been swept away, and deprived of all compulsory force, they had not been superseded by others. On the contrary,

it was the very note of the new regime that it was to meddle as little as possible in the private arrangements of citizens. It was on that condition that it held its existence. A little drawing of the reins too tight would have made it a rule of force instead of consent, and that could not have stood. The government itself was very willing to escape the endless burden of inspection, wrangling, and devising of punishments. It had indeed no provision for punishments, I may almost say no powers. The records of the first congresses contain instances of complaints against evasions, but they are among such a curious medley of wild suggestions, grotesque misunderstandings, and a general outpouring from a class who used then to be called ‘ cranks,’ that it is no wonder all alike were ignored. There was no secret and no display about these evasions of the intent of the revolution. No one’s jealousy was likely to be aroused toward one who was living more poorly than himself for the sake of a future when both would be dead. It struck no one as improper that men should exchange such voluntary services as the nation had no claim on,— the transaction was in essence the same as when two schoolboys swap knives. I find some evidence that there were men who saw danger of a re-institution of individualism in all this, but the men at the head of affairs were too thorough enthusiasts for their idea to wish to know that it was in one of its main points consistently set aside. If instances were forced on their attention, they said these were disappearing survivals. And Congress had its hands too full with far more trying matters to wish to add to its burdens. I must not pass over, either, the unquestionable and dark fact that members of Congress were elected expressly to wink at such things. This my great-grandfather, who had been a stanch civil service reformer, — you know what that is.”

“By a bare mention in history,—yes.”

“This he did not do. But do you think the trained founders of trusts, lobbyists, political organizers, and shrewd manipulators of every sort, went out of existence in 1920? Their hand was in at the business, and a little adjustment to new conditions was all that was necessary. But I am not going to talk politics to you. I am only going to talk of inequality. Now let us look at the other side.

“Over there in that now- somewhat seedy house on the other slope, — my great-grandfather’s first house, — lived Jim Farrish, a drunken and worthless laborer. His first idea was that the revolution had made him a lord, and all he had to do was to lie back and smoke and drink. He was soon disabused of this idea, for the government was rigid on the point that every man should work, and public feeling was overwhelmingly with it there. Accordingly, Jim learned after a good many experiments, exactly what was the least and worst work with which he could get off without actually going to the guardhouse. You know the law reads, — it used to be a favorite theme with your grandfather,—that each man shall do his best. But who was to say what was the best of such a fellow as Jim was no easy question for any inspector. Who could tell how much was stupidity, native inefficiency, shiftlessness, and indifference, and how much sheer shirking? Jim had shirked and scamped work when bread and butter depended on it; it was the sentiment of the time to believe that this proved that it was a sort of disease of his nature, which he could not help. Very likely it was.

“He soon learned, too, that the discipline was too merciful for floggings or any severe punishments, and that his superiors had really no defense against insolences and insubordinations. He could not be dismissed the service; if he chose to go off on a drunk and be unfit for work for days, his allowance went on

just the same, and work was ready for him when he wanted it again. Whatever compunction about the ‘old woman’ and babies had kept him in bounds before, now was at an end; each of them had a separate maintenance. Jim soon had his system down to a fine point; he drank up the whole of his allowance and lived on Katie and the children. They gave up the fine house and took a cheap one. He had learned the trick of private exchange of services very soon, and when the government shops did not supply him sufficiently potent stuff, he found the illicit low saloons, where an elaborate system of exchanges soon grew up, based on such commodities as fighting cocks, tickets to slogging matches, and all the means of the lower vices—” he glanced at the girl and saw that the phrase conveyed no meaning to her mind. “In these places Jim found opportunities to keep himself provided with his lawless indulgences till the end of the year and the next credit-card. Much that he wanted was not to be had from the regular government sources, but it was easily paid for by an indirect use of his card. Katie bore to him eleven children. They were not especially weakly in health, but showed vicious inheritance in a sort of native inefficiency, and a profound dislike of work, especially mental. They were all sent to school until they were twenty-one. While they were little, the mere physical power of the teacher kept them up to some sort of work, but after fifteen they became practically unmanageable. The subjects had gone beyond their mental grasp; they had plenty of money, and were beginning, boys and girls alike, to be absorbed in such pleasures as appealed to their natures; and they knew that whatever they did, no one could set them at work until they were of age, nor expel them from the school. The numbers of such young people in the schools had by this time led to the establishment of many technical classes, where they might perhaps be stimulated to an ambition that could not be touched by purely intellectual studies; and undoubtedly many were thus reached : but these Farrishes simply laughed, and asked why they should learn a trade, when the government was bound to find them work and support them in any case. They came to no good, and at twenty-one were as unfit in every way to be of any service to the public as possible. My ancestor kept a record of their history in his journal, and a recent sociologist has used this with researches of his own to trace out the result of the stock. There are over four hundred of them in the same generation that in my case is represented by my single self; and not one has ever received the value of five dollars by bequest. As a rule, they are worthless creatures, though some have shown the effect of the education offered them. The death-rate has been high among them, but as they have never suffered want, not as high as it would have been in a similar stock in old times.

“Now where is the equality, even in wealth, between the Farrishes of my generation and me?”

“My father and grandfather —” began Juliana, and stopped.

“Your father did not live long enough among us to have defined his ideas, and in any event he had never been a business man, or a man given to watching social movements. I have heard him regret that himself. Your grandfather was a quiet physician, and like all the Leetes, very incredulous of flaws in any order or creed he had given his faith to. Irene here has letters among her family papers from a Doctor Leete of 1888, in which he refers with indignation to the charge that votes had been bought by his party, saying that he believes that to be an almost unknown crime under a free government, although it may be done in England. Your text books have probably told you some things about the election of 1888.”

“Roger,” said Irene, putting her fingers lightly over his lips. “You shall not trouble the child any longer with your pessimisms? She is a Leete, too — don’t try to break her of her cheerful beliefs.”

“She is a brave girl, who wishes to know the truth. She would rather be a meliorist than an optimist—I know her,” said the senator; and Juliana looked up to his face, and the praise comforted her a little for the dismaying things that had gone before.

A few days later she had occasion to go into Oakland, and Roger Davenport was also going, to see one of his colleagues; so he suggested that instead of faking the rapid transit cars, they should drive in, as it was a clear and beautiful March day. Irene stood on the terrace, and waved her hand with her sweet, affectionate smile as they drove away, —a striking pair, the man’s noble presence, and the girl’s perfect figure wrapped in handsome furs, (like her mother, she spent much on beautiful dress,—a Bartlett, not a Leete trait; Irene dressed plainly,) making passers turn and comment as they saw them. “Senator Davenport,—a noticeable face. A very hard-working and publicspirited man.”

“Cousin Roger,” said Juliana, shyly, “I want to ask you something.”

“You want to ask me,” said the senator, quietly, “how I feel, as a matter of ethics, about keeping my inherited wealth.”

“Cousin Roger!” cried the girl, astonished.

He laughed. “Our minds are cast in like mold, though there is no common blood. You are more kin to me than to Irene. — Well, let us see. Whom do I defraud? No stone of that house, no stick of the grounds, represents anything taken from any one. It represents production that would not have been without the extra stimulus my ancestor applied. It is as clearly my inheritance as that beautiful fur you are wearing is yours, and its inheritance has set me free to use money for other purposes no more truly than your inheritance of your mother’s furs, laces, and jewels has set you free to get that superfluous bonnet you are going to look for today.”

“Yes, I see, though it is a new thought to me, that there must be some inequality. But the illegal — or I suppose you would tell me to call it extra-legal— way in which it was got?”

“You mean,” said Davenport again, with the quiet tone of assertion, not question, that always surprises young people when older ones use it, divining their transparent young thougjit, “that though no one was defrauded at any step, some one was harmed, — the public, by the help he gave to undermine a righteous institution. You mean, too, that the best people recognize their whole service as due the world, and we have no business to stop at barely what is required, and use the rest of our powers for our own benefit. And you think that one should be loyal to a government that means well by us, carrying out in spirit as well as letter its demands.”

“That is it,” said Juliana, relieved to have her thought phrased. “Loyal is what I meant.”

“I understand you. But now, my little girl, let us see. In the first place, we must not surrender our own reason to any government. You do not think it wrong to use our surplus of time and strength for our own pleasure, the purpose it is avowedly given for by the nation: is it any more than a mere conventional habit to feel that it may not be used for our future pleasure, or for storing up pleasure for our children? Always, remember, by means of the honest creation of new good for others, which the nation has not provided for. Loyalty must not be slavishness of thought.

“But put that one side ; for myself, it is only a speculation, — my own time

is given, up to my full strength, to public service.”

“O, I know !” said Juliana, quickly.

“But what am I to do with this result of my ancestor’s different reasoning? There is but one thing, — keep it, or give it away. I might say that perhaps some filial loyalty is due from me to that brave and patient old man, who in his own toil laid the foundations of the beauty and unusual pleasure of my surroundings; that in surrendering the house, I should surrender not merely the wealth, but the traditions and memories of generations, letting them go where they would have only a commercial value, —”

“Yes,” sighed the girl, quick to catch the sentiment of the situation.

“But put that aside, too. I have been over all this ground, Juliana,” he said, speaking to her seriously, as if she had a right to be accounted to for his action ; and the young girl flushed with a keen sense of the honor. “And this is the common sense of it. The house is not fit for any public purposes; the old architect builded too shrewdly for that. It is a home to the very heart of its rafters. And no one can afford to carry it as a home, save one to whom it belongs in absolute property. I can no more rid myself of this inequality than a man could rid himself of the inequality of having been born,—perhaps through unjust advantages held by his ancestors, — with better brains and temper than others, except that I could transfer it to some other single person. Much of its equipment I could strip and give the public, it is true, but the public does not desire it; the pictures, and statues, and plans that it chooses by popular vote, the artists it elects to the government employ by the same authority, are more to its taste. If the best old standards of art are not preserved in private homes, there is no certainty that they will be preserved at all.”

“There were many who did not agree with my grandfather in thinking that a good provision,” murmured Juliana.

“Do you acquit me now ?” he went on, smiling down at her.

“O Cousin Roger! I did not — You are very good to explain to me so patiently— If I seemed to criticize—”

“You did not, child. Your prompt feeling of the ethical question in the matter was a pleasure to me. And do you not realize that it is a question about which it is not merely your right, but your duty, to have your mind clear? Do you not know that it will all be yours some day? . . . Whose else?” he said, smiling, as the young girl looked at him in startled amazement. “Who else is as near and as dear to us?”

II.

Juliana had resumed her studies ; she had always been fond of them, and her pleasure in them revived the sooner now for Roger Davenport’s interest. Busy as his life was, he always found time to keep track of her work, demanding of her every night a report of the day’s salient points. He had always managed, in his busy senatorial life, to keep more or less in touch with his former scholarly occupations; and to renew his college memories now through the experience of this beautiful young creature, was a keen pleasure to him. Juliana, on her side, came to count on the twilight hour when the three sat and talked over her day as one of her precious possessions. Sometimes Irene’s interest flagged, when the talk ceased to concern her cousin’s immediate experience, and ran into general topics; and then she would leave them and write letters, or arrange her husband’s papers for the evening’s work; and at such times Juliana often found herself expressing her thoughts and feelings more freely than when any one besides Davenport was present.

In these talks, he rarely repeated the criticisms on the social state that had

troubled Juliana. Whatever he did say of the sort she thought over afterward, and somehow fitted into her’ own faith in the natural goodness of people and things. The intimation Davenport had made of a traffic still existent in base services, of a nether world in modern society, where such people as the Farrishes lived by choice, had passed by her, only very vaguely comprehended. She had always known there were hospitals and asylums, where wretched transgressors were confined; she classed the Farrishes now as similar abnormal cases, not quite enough developed for the asylums.

And after a little reflection, it became to her clear that even if incomes were not equal, as she had supposed, it really did not matter much: for though some, by the forethought of their ancestors or the sacrifice of their own leisure, might be richer, none were poorer. Cousin Roger had showed quite plainly that this betterment of themselves was only the correlative of betterment to others, by extra service,—there was surely nothing selfish in that, nothing of the ancient competitive struggle to snatch away the limited good of the world from each other, but a creating of two new goods. And then a still more cheerful thought struck her : had not much of the ancient commercial system been the same thing? — an effort to prosper by doing each other good, not by robbing each other. Why, people were really working for each other all the time, then, after all as now! Then even more truly than she had been taught, human nature had always been right, and life essentially good.

The economical orthodoxy of the time was, in fact, not what she cared for, but its ethical optimism: so after making all her adjustments to save this, she felt as if she had, on the whole, found a new treasure, at but slight cost to the old one. She even became up to a certain point a convert, and an apologist of the nineteenth century, delving in Davenport’s books for proofs of unsuspected compensations in its life, and virtues in its humanity, and producing her discoveries in arguments with the other young women at college.

When she repeated these discussions and conclusions to Davenport, he sometimes took her seriously, and gave her suggestions, or directed her researches, and sometimes listened, smiled, and sighed. Now and then he took issue with her.

“I am glad to think,” she said one night, “that the past has been happier than I was taught to believe, and people never so barbarous as orators make out to heighten the contrast with today; but some things make me very thankful to live now. Our professor referred us to Storiot —”

“Did he?” said Davenport. “That old fellow had a great run at one time, chiefly because of his tone of enthusiastic patriotism. Twenty-five years ago it was quite a note with respectable and patriotic elderly gentlemen to have him in their libraries, and quote him with great reverence. At the time he wrote, probably no more judicial estimate of the nineteenth century would have been accepted : many elderly people, who had lived in that century, resented its descriptions, but they were out of court; the professional critics and teachers were all under middle age, and were carried away with the book. It is effectively written, and has some good chapters. But he collected material very inadequately, depending largely on newspapers and agitators’ books; and he had a most imperfect understanding of the industrial system.”

“The chapters we read are the two that open the last section, — ‘ The Election of ’88 and its Consequences,’ and “Political Corruption in the Last Decades of the Century.’ The picture is perfectly sickening. The girls brandished it at me.”

“Yes,”said Davenport, thoughtfully, “there were some appalling things in the politics of that date. In a way, those chapters are not unjust, though the analysis of the causes is of no value. Storiot is at his best on these political points, because there his favorite authorities, the newspapers, are the best sources of information. But, Juliana, you will have some bitter disappointments if you think all that is done away with. Recall what you have seen already, that private transactions are not abolished by abolishing money, and you will see that if human nature remains the same, as you insist that it does, direct bribery is as practicable as ever in politics. Men may grow rich in fast horses, and fine wines, and luxurious rooms, and whatever attracts the politician’s cupidity, as easily as if they used a token in coin for the transfer of these things. And if it is competition that creates all cruelty, and greed, and dishonor, why is not the same human nature to be as easily degraded by the competition for fame as for money? I am not sure but history shows blacker deeds done for lust of fame than for lust of wealth. Indeed, wealth was sought largely to buy place and fame with. And there is the greatest facility for intrigue offered by this system of promotions passionately competed for, proceeding down ward from officers elected by constituencies that are constantly recruited from the subordinates of these very officers, and linked with the nonelectors by family and local ties of all sorts.’

Juliana did not follow this comment with any clearness. The concrete story of the elder Davenport and the Farrishes had made its point, but “intrigue ” meant nothing to her.

“But fame is to be had only by doing the most good,” she said, catching at the sentence that she did understand. “So it makes men better, and is next best as a motive to pure benevolence.”

Davenport laughed a little, and as he passed her to leave the room, brushed his hand lightly over the curly tips of her hair. “And false benefactors could not exist,” he said. “The public knows unerringly its saviours, and never passes them by in favor of blatant pretenders. No one could have any temptation to curry favor by trickery, or to flinch from doing the unpopular right.”

There was a moment’s silence,— puzzled, indignant, grieved on the young girl’s part, and under cover of the dusk the tears started to her eyes, as she sat still on a cushion at Mrs. Davenport’s feet, leaning against her knee. Then the elder woman bent forward from the divan where she sat by the open window, through which came the smell of newmown fields and the riotous roses of May, and the noises of birds nestling down to sleep, with many last little murmurs and interrogative calls, among the burdened rose trellises and ancient trees. “Dear,” she said softly, her sweet, middle-aged face close to the beautiful young head, “Roger is in a position to know and to have to battle with whatever evil still exists among us. Congress, you know, has the hardest part of all our system, because though it passes few laws, it has charge of inspecting all the work of the nation, and enforcing good work, and seeing that all promotions are justly made, and a great many such things. So sometimes, when workmen are lazy and shiftless, or politicians are tricky, he is pessimistic, and takes low views of human nature. But I have an argument for the real loftiness of human nature and its fitness to be happy that he is the last person to appreciate. Though there are doubtless some bad people, and some lingering abuses, an.d difficulty in making things quite perfect, my argument is — himself, Juliana.”

Juliana turned around, rose to her knees, and kissed her cousin gratefully.

She fell in soon with some one else to whom Mrs. Davenport’s argument was

conclusive. This was a frank and ardent young man in his early thirties, an editor by profession, and devoted to Davenport as a political leader. He told Juliana a good deal of Davenport’s public life, and called him “incorruptible” and “public-spirited,” in a way that rather surprised her, instead of taking such qualities as a matter of course. He assured her that to many men who doubted the adequacy of the present organization, and felt that it was breaking down in its vital point, the regulating and inspecting omnipotence of Congress, Davenport was the reassuring thought; his character and record held young men to an ideal of human nature that might otherwise have crumbled.

“Between you and me,” said Dick Gerry, “a fellow that is in newspaper and political work sees lots of things that make him shaky sometimes; but I pin to Davenport. If he were to go back on people’s faith, I guess there ‘d be a pretty widespread smash-up of confidence in human-nature stock,” — a phrase that was making its way in connection with some of the private commercial transactions then becoming resystematized.

Gerry’s wife was some years older than himself. She was an old neighbor of the Davenport family, and had still a pretty cottage close to them. She had just returned from a long sojourn in Washington, and had brought her husband from his rooms in the city to the cottage at the foot of the Contra Costa hills; hitherto Juliana had seen little of him.

Davenport frowned when he heard they were coming to the cottage.

“Roger does not like Sybil,” said Irene to Juliana privately. “I do not know why,—for some reason earlier than my acquaintance with him. But I always feel sorry for her. She is discontented with her husband; and though Mr. Gerry is so good and bright, there is something unusual about Sybil, you know, that seems to make them mismated.”

“Discontented with — I do not understand,” said the girl, growing a little pale.

“Do not understand what, dear?”

“In old times,” said Juliana, slowly, “women used to have to marry people they did not like, and so there must have been horrible unhappiness. But now—I do not understand. What could make her marry some one she did not — did not care for?”

“We cannot judge, my dear. We do not know what motives guide other people. She might marry some one and become discontented with him afterward.”

“I do not understand at all,” said the girl, turning and walking slowly away. Irene looked after her, smiling and sighing a little. Not for worlds would the gentle wife have told any human being her own conjecture why Sybil was discontented with her good husband. Suppose she had been Roger’s neighbor, and after all he had gone across the continent and married some one else?

Juliana went to her room, and letting her jEschylus lie open on the table before her, thought for a long time, in the strange, white confusion of a young maid’s mind. When people married, it was because some feeling had fallen between them,— something very holy, and great, and unchangeable,—that set them forever apart to each other. She could not, of course, know what its nature was, and it was not meet for her to try to imagine; but it was a bond that once joined could never be broken. How was it then with this poor Sybil Gerry? Had she for some mysterious reason married without that feeling that could never be broken? Or was there something abnormal in her, which had allowed her to change after marriage? She thought of her,— the woman who was discontented with her husband, — with a mixture of fascination and

horror. Her cousin Roger knew all about it, and did not like her. Yet Juliana could see a liking struggling with dislike in Davenport’s behavior to their neighbor, and she herself felt toward her a mixture of attraction and repulsion.

Sybil was in the house a great deal, coming in familiarly at all hours. She was a beautiful creature, and however one felt away from her, every one succumbed to her in her actual presence. There was an undernote of a soft melancholy in her, dashed with a sort of wicked recklessness. Gerry idolized her, and it was not possible to think that he perceived in her the discontent with him that others saw. He did not seem to be the less pleased with her for the little distance at which she kept him; possibly it increased his sense that she was a superior being. She was not especially clever, and had not much conversation, though many men talked their best to her. But every one felt the unusualness in her that Irene spoke of. It did not seem so much to consist in her beauty as to be expressed by her beauty,—her low, broad forehead under a cloud of dusky hair, her sweet, full, mocking lips, eyes of latent passion, and profile like a cameo. When she spoke, her voice had a cadence that haunted people after she was still.

While the Gerrys were at the cottage the home life of the three in the Davenport house was broken up. The first evening, as they sat in the warm twilight, there had been a soft movement at the doorway, and a graceful shadow, pausing a moment, had come swiftly in almost before Irene could start up exclaiming, “Sibyl!”

“No, do not touch the light,” said the soft, haunting voice. “Keep your easychair, Roger ; I will sit down here by the little cousin,—it is the little cousin, of course. Now, go on just as you were talking, and let me sit and listen.”

After that Davenport dropped out of the habit of sitting with the women at twilight. With the beginning of the vacation season in July, however, the Gerrys went away, and Juliana’s life seemed natural again. For about a week Davenport remainedabstracted and cold, then suddenly shook it off, and said to her that he felt as if an evil spell had been taken from the house now that that woman was gone.

One night Juliana came down from her room, where she had been writing letters, to put them into the box for the early mail, and going into Irene’s little sitting room, found that Irene had gone to bed, but Davenport was still at work in the library adjoining. He came in to her when he heard her step,and reproved her for sitting up so late ; then took her letters and put them into the box in the library for her, and came back. Meanwhile she sat down by the table to turn over the leaves of a new magazine there, and he lingered talking with her.

“There is an article here, Cousin Roger,—’Individual Happiness, Ancient and Modern,’ ” she said ; “andit begins, ‘We may lay it down as an accepted premise that human nature is the same in all times ; and all apparent modifications come from differences in the conditions surrounding it.'”

“If he had said that real — not apparent — modifications come from conditions, I do not know that I should have quarreled with him,” said Davenport, pacing up and down the room. “But it is the fallacy of all our popular preaching and poetry to utterly ignore the extent to which human nature makes its own conditions. If there was badness and suffering in the nineteenth century, it was because human beings made it for themselves out of their own natures ; and with those same natures, they would wrest any system to nearly as much evil. — Give up the dream, child, — our age has dreamed as other ages have dreamed, and it must awake as other ages have awakened. Wherever we have planned to re-make human nature, as by our

educational systems, we have gained ground; wherever we have tried to do new things with an old human nature, we have got only hollow shams. You were taught to attribute all old evils to financial maladjustments. It was not the financial question that made human nature,—it was human nature that made the financial question. But put that aside,—I will not talk economics to you; I will not ask you how long this equal government allowance is to be poured out to a populace recklessly increasing in its most stupid and least productive classes, and overcrowding the departments of unskilled labor beyond any use the nation can put them to; I will not ask you a dozen more questions such as are breaking Congress down now. But suppose all financial questions were settled. Do you think that would do away with all sorrow and all sin? Do you fancy, white spirit, that there is no sin but for money, no sorrow but poverty? Why, it is one of the least of sorrows!” He turned and walked back from the farther side of the room toward her. He had touched the key, and set a soft, wild melody to playing, —some folk-song, — which crept through the talk without interrupting it.

“Suppose,” he said, “that this world in this twenty-first century were exactly as your father and mother believed i t. Would that mean happiness? What of lovers, for instance, who see love going from them to some one else,— or do you think that our economics has found some adjustment by which love shall never miss its mark? What are the luxury, the ease, the freedom, of the modern ideal to such a broken heart? What are they worth to us two, — you and I? Would we keep them one moment if we could change them for a humble and anxious place in some old century where we two, in danger and pain, in good and evil, might belong to each other?”

The wild music went softly crying and calling in the silence of the room. They

looked at each other across the little space that separated them,—the man pale and reckless, the girl startled, appalled, feeling the world reel, and the solid ground sink and dissolve under her feet, and yet suddenly filled and shaken with an awful joy. All in a moment, out of the quiet and peace of the mellow little room, lit more by the great harvest moon outside than by the low light within, out of the security of simple and frank affection, it had descended upon them. Whether the man had known it before, or whether for both it sprang into being in the moment of speaking it.there it was, never to be reckoned without again in the life of either one. Even to the girl, who had tried a few weeks before, in that white confusion of thoughts, to understand how a woman could be discontented with her husband, it had become in a breath the one reasonable thing, the one thing to be understood in all the universe, that she and Roger Davenport should love each other. He stood still. With the luring music andtheunmanningmoonlightabouthim, perhaps nothing in the world would have kept him from crossing the little space, and drawing her from her seat to his arms, except the absolute trust in her eyes that he would not do it. Confessing, adoring, they none the less looked to him with simple confidence to know what to do with this sweet and terrible thing that had befallen. As the music whispered itself away, he turned, shook his manhood free now the evil was done, and crossed the room to shut away the new chords just beginning. When he came back, Juliana had grown white, and the long, long anguish had begun in her eyes. As they met his, she whispered helplessly, “Irene!” He looked away from her. “Go to bed, now, my child,” he said gently; and she rose and moved toward the door without a word; yet as? she passed him, she looked up to his face again, and then he bent and kissed her, and let her go.

“Irene!” Before the gray of the early August dawn cleared to the girl’s sleepless eyes the beautiful century-old coloring and laurel wainscots of her room, and the dark tree-tops on the sky outside, this had become the burden of her tossing, wretched, guiltily happy thoughts. Not for one moment did it enter her mind to think that there was any other way than that they both should guard as faithfully as possible what was left to his sweet wife. “O, poor Irene!” she cried to herself, “O, poor Irene!” with a growing passion of pity and sense of her cousin’s wrong, that almost drowned the other, dearer name out of her consciousness. Through the wild sobbing and crying of her young, undisciplined pain and excitement, pierced swift pangs of joy and tenderness; and “O, I know by this,” she cried in broken moans and’murmurs as she buried her face in the pillows, “I know by this how Irene cares, and what I have taken from her!”

She clung to her cousin in the days that followed, and for a time Roger Davenport let her. But one day he intercepted her under the great walnut trees, and made her sit down with him on an old stone seat that was there.

“Juliana,” he said, almost sternly, “it is nonsense for us to fight fate. You believe God meant happiness for human beings. If he meant you and me to stand apart, what becomes of your creed?”

She looked at him in dismay: she had not doubted that he would be stronger and juster than she. “And did he not mean happiness to Irene?” she said. “And she is the only one who has a right, — not I nor you.”

“Right!” said Davenport. “Who talks of rights and duties nowadays? What preacher or what teacher ever told you and me, as they told our ancestors, that life meant not happiness, but pitiless, self-slaying duty? Why, we have even put a stop to parents’ thinking, and planning, and denying themselves for their children : tender-hearted society cannot bear that any one should have to suffer that much sternness in life. Whatever ability to put away present desire the ages had disciplined into us we threw away. Who ever taught you and me that the human nature in us was to be feared? No, human nature was an innocent, maligned thing, that need be no trouble to anybody, if only government would keep the harmless creature fed and amused! Ancient ways linger long in a woman’s veins, and the impulse to ‘bear hardness as a good soldier’ may be in yours still. I, lifelong skeptic of our easy faith, am yet bred in its school. To give time and strength to public service, — that is an easy virtue; men have always done it, good men and bad. But wait till the life and death clinch comes between duty and desire, and see what human nature is.”

Juliana was still a moment after his deep, resolute voice ceased. “I do not understand all that,” she said. “I see as well as you do that it has all been a dream to think human nature safe, and life easy. I do not know if God means life to be so terrible, and us to be so weak, — I do not know any longer if there is God at all, or if he cares. I do not know if there is right or wrong, or if love is not more than they. I am not standing for right, nor duty, nor honor; I am standing for Irene. I know that if I were Irene, it would be cruel wrong to me that this should pass between you and another woman.”

She said it gently, tremulously; she looked up as if she deprecated his displeasure. He thought he held her will in his hand. He spoke low, and with the full power of a man’s tenderness over the woman that loves him.

“Your love for Irene is a dam of straw to your love for me. Sweet soul, we are helpless in the clutch of a mightier force than our complacent century has any weapon against. We belong to each Vol. xv.—42.

other: that is reality, that is truth, and nature; and no fiction, however well meant, can stand against it. Our lives will be one long falsehood till we surrender to it.” He put out his hand and took hers, as it lay on the stone seat between them, in a soft and firm clasp, as if he quietly possessed himself of her forever.

The girl grew white. She had no thought of answering but one thing, — there was no struggle in her mind as to that. The thing that whitened her very lips, the thing that seemed to her beyond mortal power to do, was not to put away all the future, but to draw her hand that moment from the clasp to which every atom in her responded. She sprang up from the seat and freed herself.

“You do not understand,” she said. “I know the truth you speak of, — but there is another truth. I know my love for Irene is a shadow,— a forgotten old song,— to my love for you. It is strange you do not see that every word you say to make me realize how I love you argues against itself! By every longing of mine for you, I know hers; by the impossibility to me of giving you up, it becomes impossible to me to take you from her. Don’t you see ?—O, cannot a man see ?—that I cannot do this to her? that everything that draws me to you pushes me away at the same time just as hard.”

No, he did not see; but he knew he had not reached her. A few days later he told the two women that he was going on to Washington with the Gerrys.

Sibyl Gerry came out to spend a few days with the Davenports before she left the coast. To Juliana’s eyes, cleared to the knowledge of good and evil, there was no doubt now whither Sibyl’s restlessness tended,— and her first jealousy ached in her breast as she watched Davenport, apparently in a sort of recklessness, no longer shunning what he had called the “evil spell,” but letting Sibyl seek him as she would.

Sibyl herself was intent, quietly eager and resolute. She was more heedless of Juliana’s presence now when she said daring things ; perhaps she had quickly discerned about all there was to know. “They do these things better in France,” she said once, on some slight apropos, in her musical, dangerous voice. “There they are not such fools as to think that when they have arranged to make everybody comfortable, with soup-pot and parlor chairs, they have made everybody happy. A nation of Philistines! There, from the time the Nationalist state was established, love had its rights, without having to hide and hang its head; as long as people love, they are husband and wife ; when one changes, he is free. ‘M. Maire, I wish to wed’; and he weds you. ‘M. Maire, I wish to unwed,’—he unweds you. It is no one’s business ivhy you wish it.”

“And the one that is deserted,” said Juliana,—”is her happiness secured, too, by that method?”

“My dear,” said Sibyl, looking at her with a smile that stirred a swift repulsion in her, “if we cannot hold love, let us lose it. Let the best one win.”

Just before he went Roger Davenport tried once more to plead with Juliana, but she had not changed. “I am on Irene’s side,” she said. “I will not hear things I would not have her know.” He said a good deal, however, and much of it was enigmatical to her. Later, it was all clear.

That was the last day of the year. His absence had extended on and on through the fall and winter. Irene was a little worried about him. She said things must be unusually trying at Washington, for his letters and brief telephone chats were forced and unnatural. Gerry had come back to San Francisco, but his wife was spending the winter again in Washington. There were always whispers of some sort about Mrs. Gerry, wherever she stayed long, but these did not reach the quiet women at Davenport

House. And so the end of the year came on,— not in a sweeping storm this time, but in a transcendent winter sunshine, and a mild, “star-clear” evening, as the Germans say. Juliana came home late from an ” old year out ” party, where she had dragged herself sadly enough; for love, and loneliness, and remorse preyed no less on her sore young heart for the months that had passed. She went to her room, and saw on the table, laid there by Irene as a pleasant New Year surprise, a letter from Washington.

He had hardly ever written to her directly, and she permitted herself to bend her head and touch the writing with her lips before she read. But after she read, she started up from the chair, with a face that grew haggard, for all her fresh young beauty. O, foolish child, that she had imagined she knew what life’s torture chambers were! O, foolish child, that she had thought her feet had already broken through the thin bridge on which life walked over hidden fire!

It was no consecutive letter,— only a few incoherent sentences. “The papers will tell you, — there is nothing for me to say,— only one word :—Sweet, I love you, — not her. If I had not loved you and lost you, I should have kept away from her wicked spell, — I told you so before I came away. I have been under it before,—but she was young then, and had other plans, and did not care to hold me. Forget me, child,— and comfort Irene, if you can.”

She had bought a paper as she came, a midnight edition. She tore it open with shaking hands, — not Gerry’s paper,— Gerry would never print another paper. She caught dizzily fragments of what she had hoped against hope not to see: “— to France, with the well-known beauty, Mrs. Gerry— “, “— a man very widely trusted—”, “—disastrous stimulus to a growing reaction against not only the ethical standards of our time, but against all such standards —”

She dropped the paper. Her brain cleared from the horrible stunned moment to the more horrible realization. How should she tell Irene? How should she bear it herself? And under and over all, a torture of mad jealousy and hate, a horror of doubt of everything human or superhuman. She stood in the middle of the room, shivering and looking blindly about her as if for some respite or refuge from this utter disaster, utter pain. “God?” She laughed.

“He thinks, like her, ‘Let the best one win.’ She is more after his heart than Irene and I,—hers is the side God is on.” She turned and threw herself with a broken cry across her bed. “Yet, in all the world’s long, long, unended agony that may come my way, whether it is God’s side or not,—whether he pities or laughs at the victims,—God keep me on the side of the betrayed, not the betrayers! keep me with the tortured, not the torturers!”

Pauline Carsten Curtis.