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                             HERMIA SUYDAM

                       GERTRUDE FRANKLIN ATHERTON
                    AUTHOR OF “WHAT DREAMS MAY COME”

                  THE CURRENT LITERATURE PUBLISHING CO
               NEW YORK, SAN FRANCISCO, LONDON, AND PARIS

                            COPYRIGHT, 1889.

                 THE CURRENT LITERATURE PUBLISHING CO.

                        [_All rights reserved._]

                      Press of J. J. Little & Co.
                         Astor Place, New York.

                           Table of Contents

            CHAPTER I.—A SECOND AVENUE HOUSEHOLD.
            CHAPTER II.—JOHN SUYDAM GIVES HIS BLESSING.
            CHAPTER III.—BROOKLYN AND BABYLON.
            CHAPTER IV.—IN THE GREEN ROOM OF LITERATURE.
            CHAPTER V.—THE SWEETS OF SOLITUDE.
            CHAPTER VI.—SUYDAM’S LEGACY AND HERMIA’S WILL.
            CHAPTER VII.—A HEROINE IN TRAINING.
            CHAPTER VIII.—HERMIA DISCOVERS HERSELF.
            CHAPTER IX.—HELEN SIMMS.
            CHAPTER X.—A MENTAL PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY.
            CHAPTER XI.—A TAILOR-MADE FATE.
            CHAPTER XII.—THE CLUB OF FREE DISCUSSION.
            CHAPTER XIII.—OGDEN CRYDER.
            CHAPTER XIV.—IN A METROPOLITAN JUNGLE.
            CHAPTER XV.—A CLEVER TRIFLER.
            CHAPTER XVI.—A LITERARY DINNER.
            CHAPTER XVII.—AN ILLUSION DISPELLED.
            CHAPTER XVIII.—A BLOODLESS ENTHUSIAST.
            CHAPTER XIX.—TASTELESS FRUIT.
            CHAPTER XX.—A COMMONPLACE MEETING.
            CHAPTER XXI.—BACK TO THE PAST.
            CHAPTER XXII.—QUINTARD IS DISCUSSED.
            CHAPTER XXIII.—PLATONIC PROSPECTS.
            CHAPTER XXIV.—AN UNEXPECTED CONFESSION.
            CHAPTER XXV.—THE POWER OF PERSONALITY.
            CHAPTER XXVI.—HERMIA HEARS THE TRUTH.
            CHAPTER XXVII.—FIVE POINTS OF VIEW.
            CHAPTER XXVIII.—TWO HISTORIES ARE ALMOST FINISHED.
            CHAPTER XXIX.—AN EPOCH-MAKING DEPARTURE.
            CHAPTER XXX.—THROUGH THE SNOW.
            CHAPTER XXXI.—THE DYKMAN REPRIMAND.
            CHAPTER XXXII.—FUTURITY.
            CHAPTER XXXIII.—CHAOS.
            CHAPTER XXXIV.—LIFE FROM DEATH.
            CHAPTER XXXV.—IDEALS RESTORED.
            CHAPTER XXXVI.—AN AWAKENING.
            CHAPTER XXXVII.—THE DOCTRINE OF THE INEVITABLE.
            CHAPTER XXXVIII.—BETWEEN DAY AND NIGHT.
            CHAPTER XXXIX.—THE REALIZATION OF IDEALS.

            _FROM HERBERT SPENCER’S CHAPTER ON “THE WILL.”_

_To say that the performance of the action is the result of his free
will is to say that he determines the cohesion of the psychical states
which arouse the action; and as these psychical states constitute
himself at the moment, this is to say that these psychical states
determine their own cohesion, which is absurd. These cohesions have been
determined by experiences—the greater part of them, constituting what
we call his natural character, by the experiences of antecedent
organisms, and the rest by his own experiences. The changes which at
each moment take place in his consciousness are produced by this
infinitude of previous experiences registered in his nervous structure,
co-operating with the immediate impressions on his senses; the effects
of these combined factors being in every sense qualified by the
psychical state, general or local, of his organism._

                             HERMIA SUYDAM

                               CHAPTER I.

                       A SECOND AVENUE HOUSEHOLD.

When Crosby Suydam died and left exactly enough money to bury himself,
his widow returned to New York, and, taking her two little girls by the
hand, presented herself at the old Suydam mansion on Second Avenue. “You
must either take care of us or see us go to the poor-house,” she said to
her brother-in-law; “I am not strong enough to work, and my relatives
are as poor as myself.” And she sank into one of the library chairs with
that air of indifference and physical weakness which makes a man more
helpless than defiance or curse. Did John Suydam still, in his withered,
yellow frame, carry a shrunken remnant of that pliable organ called the
heart? His brother’s widow did not add this problem to the others of her
vexed existence—she had done with problems forever—but in his little
world the legend was whispered that, many years before, the last
fragment had dried and crumbled to dust. It must be either dust or a
fossil; and, if the latter, it would surely play a merry clack and
rattle with its housing skeleton every time the old man drew a long
breath or hobbled across the room.

John Suydam’s age was another problem. His neighbors said that the
little yellow old man was their parents’ contemporary. That he had ever
had any youth those parents denied. He was many years older than Crosby
Suydam, however, and the world had blamed him sharply for his treatment
of his younger brother. Crosby had been wealthy when he married, and a
great favorite. Some resentment was felt when he chose a New England
girl for his wife; but Mrs. Suydam entertained so charmingly that
society quickly forgave both, and filled their drawing-rooms whenever
bidden. For ten years these two young people were illuminating stars in
the firmament of New York society; then they swept down the horizon like
meteors on a summer’s night. Crosby had withdrawn his fortune from the
securities in which his father had left it, and blown bubbles up and
down Wall street for a year or so. At the end of that time he possessed
neither bubbles nor suds. He drifted to Brooklyn, and for ten years
more, struggled along, at one clerkship or another, his brother never
lending him a dollar, nor offering him the shelter of his roof. He
dropped out of life as he had dropped out of the world, which had long
since forgotten both him and his unhappy young wife.

But, if John Suydam had no heart, he had pride. New York, in his
opinion, should have been called Suydam, and the thought of one of his
name in the poor-house aroused a passion stronger than avarice. He told
his sister-in-law that she could stay, that he would give her food and
shelter and a hundred dollars a year on condition that she would take
care of her own rooms—he could not afford another servant.

It was a strange household. Mrs. Suydam sat up in her room all day with
her two little girls and in her passive, mechanical way, heard their
lessons, or helped them make their clothes. Her brother she met only at
the table. At those awful meals not a word was ever spoken. John, who
had atrocious table manners, crunched his food audibly for a half-hour
at breakfast, an hour and a half at dinner, and an hour at supper. Mrs.
Suydam, whose one desire was to die, accepted the hint he unconsciously
gave, and swallowed her food whole; if longevity and mastication were
correlatives, it was a poor rule that would not work both ways. She died
before the year was out; not of indigestion, however, but of relaxation
from the terrible strain to which her delicate constitution had been
subjected during the ten preceding years.

John Suydam had her put in the family vault, under St. Mark’s, as
economically as possible, then groaned in spirit as he thought of the
two children left on his hands. He soon discovered that they would give
him no trouble. Bessie Suydam was a motherly child, and adversity had
filled many of the little store-rooms in her brain with a fund of
common-sense, which, in happier conditions, might have been carried by.
She was sixteen and Hermia was nine. The day after the funeral she
slipped into her mother’s place, and her little sister never missed the
maternal care. Their life was monotonous. Bessie did not know her
neighbors, although her grandparents and theirs had played together.
When Mrs. Suydam had come to live under her brother-in-law’s roof, the
neighborhood had put its dislike of John Suydam aside and called at
once. It neither saw Mrs. Suydam, nor did its kindness ever receive the
slightest notice; and, with a sigh of relief, it forgot both her and her
children.

A few months after Mrs. Suydam’s death another slight change occurred in
the household. A fourth mendicant relative appeared and asked for help.
He was a distant cousin, and had been a schoolmate of John Suydam in
that boyhood in which no one but himself believed. He had spent his life
in the thankless treadmill of the teacher. Several years before, he had
been pushed out of the mill by younger propounders of more fashionable
methods, and after his savings were spent he had no resource but John
Suydam.

Suydam treated him better than might have been expected. These two
girls, whom a malignant fate had flung upon his protection, must be
educated, and he was unwilling to incur the expenses of a school or
governess. The advent of William Crosby laid the question at rest. John
told him that he would give him a home and a hundred dollars a year if
he would educate his nieces, and the old man was glad to consent.

The professor taught the girls conscientiously, and threw some sunshine
into their lives. He took them for a long walk every day, and showed
them all the libraries, the picture galleries, and the shops. In spite
of the meanness of her garb, Bessie attracted some attention during
these ramblings; she had the pretty American face, and the freshness of
morning was in it. Poor Hermia, who obediently trotted behind, passed
unnoticed. Nature, who had endowed the rest of her family so kindly—her
father and mother had been two of the old dame’s proudest works—had
passed her by in a fit of abstraction. Under her high, melancholy
forehead and black, heavy brows, stared solemnly a pair of unmistakably
green eyes—even that hypocrite Politeness would never name them gray.
Her dull, uninteresting hair was brushed severely back and braided in a
tight pig-tail; and her sallow cheeks were in painful contrast to the
pink and white of her sister’s delicate skin. Her eyelashes were thick
and black, and she had the small, admirably shaped hands and feet of the
Suydams, but the general effect was unattractive. She was a cold,
reserved child, and few people liked her.

The professor took the girls to the theater one night, and it was a
memorable night in their lives. Each was in a fever of excitement, and
each manifested it characteristically. Bessie’s cheeks were flushed to
her eyelashes, and she jerked the buttons off both gloves. Her gray eyes
shone and her pink lips were parted. People stared at her as she passed
and wondered who she was. But for once in her life she was blind to
admiration; she was going to see a play! Hermia was paler than ever and
almost rigid. Her lips were firmly compressed, but her hands, in her
little woolen gloves, were burning, and her eyes shone like a cat’s in
the dark. They sat in the gallery, but they were in the front row, and
as content as any jeweled dame in box or parquette.

The play was Monte Cristo, and what more was needed to perfect the
delight of two girls confronted with stage illusion for the first time?
Bessie laughed and wept, and rent her gloves to shreds with the
vehemence of her applause. Hermia sat on the extreme edge of the seat,
and neither laughed, wept, nor applauded. Her eyes, which never left the
stage, grew bigger and bigger, her face paler, and her nostrils more
tense.

After the play was over she did not utter a word until she got home; but
the moment she reached the bedroom which the sisters shared in common
she flung herself on the floor and shrieked for an hour. Bessie, who was
much alarmed, dashed water over her, shook her, and finally picked her
up and rocked her to sleep. The next morning Hermia was as calm as
usual, but she developed, soon after, a habit of dreaming over her books
which much perplexed her sister. Bessie dreamed a little too, but she
always heard when she was spoken to, and Hermia did not.

One night, about three months after the visit to the theater, the girls
were in their room preparing for bed. Hermia was sitting on the
hearth-rug taking off her shoes, and Bessie was brushing her long hair
before the glass and admiring the reflection of her pretty face.

“Bessie,” said Hermia, leaning back and clasping her hands about her
knee, “what is your ambition in life?”

Bessie turned and stared down at the child, then blushed rosily. “I
should like to have a nice, handsome husband and five beautiful
children, all dressed in white with blue sashes. And I should like to
have a pretty house on Fifth Avenue, and a carriage, and lots of novels.
And I should like to go to Europe and see all the picture-galleries and
churches.” She had been addressing herself in the glass, but she
suddenly turned and looked down at Hermia.

“What is your ambition?” she asked.

“To be the most beautiful woman in the world!” exclaimed the child
passionately.

Bessie sat down on a hassock. She felt but did not comprehend that
agonized longing for the gift which nature had denied, and which woman
holds most dear. She had always been pretty and was somewhat vain, but
she had known little of the power of beauty, and power and uncomeliness
alone teach a woman beauty’s value. But she was sympathetic, and she
felt a vague pity for her sister. She thought it better, however, to
improve the occasion.

“Beauty is nothing in itself,” she said, gently; “you must be good and
clever, and then people will think——”

“Bessie,” interrupted Hermia, as if she had not heard, “do you think I
will _ever_ be pretty?”

Bessie hesitated. She was very conscientious, but she was also very
tender-hearted. For a moment there was a private battle, then conscience
triumphed. “No,” she said, regretfully, “I am afraid you never will be,
dear.”

She was looking unusually lovely herself as she spoke. Her shoulders
were bare and her chemise had dropped low on her white bosom. Her eyes
looked black in the lamp’s narrow light, and her soft, heavy hair
tumbled about her flushed face and slender, shapely figure. Hermia gazed
at her for a moment, and then with a suppressed cry sprang forward and
tore her sharp nails across her sister’s cheek.

Bessie gave a shriek of pain and anger, and, catching the panting,
struggling child, slapped her until her arm ached. “There!” she
exclaimed, finally, shaking her sister until the child’s teeth clacked
together, “you little tiger cat! You sha’n’t have any supper for a
week.” Then she dropped Hermia suddenly and burst into tears. “Oh, it is
dreadfully wicked to lose one’s temper like that; but my poor face!” She
rubbed the tears from her eyes and, standing up, carefully examined her
wounds in the glass. She heaved a sigh of relief; they were not very
deep. She went to the washstand and bathed her face, then returned to
her sister. Hermia stood on the hearth-rug. She had not moved since
Bessie dropped her hands from her shoulders.

Bessie folded her arms magisterially and looked down upon the culprit,
her delicate brows drawn together, her eyes as severe as those of an
angel whose train has been stepped on. “Are you not sorry?” she demanded
sternly.

Hermia gazed at her steadily for a moment. “Yes,” she said, finally, “I
am sorry, and I’ll never get outside-mad again as long as I live. I’ve
made a fool of myself.” Then she marched to the other side of the room
and went to bed.

                              CHAPTER II.

                    JOHN SUYDAM GIVES HIS BLESSING.

One day a bank clerk came up to the quiet house with a message to John
Suydam. As he was leaving he met Bessie in the hall. Each did what wiser
heads had done before—they fell wildly and uncompromisingly in love at
first sight. How Frank Mordaunt managed to find an excuse for speaking
to her he never remembered, nor how he had been transported from the
hall into the dingy old drawing-room. At the end of an hour he was still
there, seated on a sofa of faded brocade, and looking into the softest
eyes in the world.

After that he came every evening. John Suydam knew nothing of it.
Bessie, from the parlor window, watched Mordaunt come down the street
and opened the front door herself; the old man, crouching over his
library fire, heard not an echo of the whispers on the other side of the
wall.

Poor Bessie! Frank Mordaunt was the first young man with whom she had
ever exchanged a half-dozen consecutive sentences. No wonder her heart
beat responsively to the first love and the first spoken admiration.
Mordaunt, as it chanced, was not a villain, and the rôle of victim was
not offered to Bessie. She was used to economy, he had a fair salary,
and they decided to be married at once. When they had agreed upon the
date, Bessie summoned up her courage and informed her uncle of her
plans. He made no objection; he was probably delighted to get rid of
her; and as a wedding-gift he presented her with—Hermia.

“I like her better than I do you,” he said, “for she has more brains in
her little finger than you have in your whole head; and she will never
be contented with a bank clerk. But I cannot be bothered with children.
I will pay you thirty dollars a quarter for her board, and William
Crosby can continue to teach her. I hope you will be happy, Elizabeth;
but marriage is always a failure. You can send Hermia to me every
Christmas morning, and I will give her twenty-five dollars with which to
clothe herself during the year. I shall not go to the wedding. I dislike
weddings and funerals. There should be no periods in life, only commas.
When a man dies he doesn’t mind the period; he can’t see it. But he need
not remind himself of it. You can go.”

Bessie was married in a pretty white gown, made from an old one of her
mother’s, and St. Mark’s had never held a daintier bride. No one was
present but Mordaunt’s parents, the professor, who was radiant, and
Hermia, who was the only bridesmaid. But it was a fair spring morning,
the birds were singing in an eager choir, and the altar had been
decorated with a few greens and flowers by the professor and Hermia. At
the conclusion of the service the clergyman patted Bessie on the head
and told her he was sure she would be happy, and the girl forgot her
uncle’s benediction.

“Bessie,” said Hermia an hour later, as they were walking toward their
new home, “I will never be married until I can have a dress covered with
stars like those Hans Andersen’s princesses carried about in a nutshell
when they were disguised as beggar-maids, and until I can be married in
a grand cathedral and have a great organ just pealing about me, and a
white-robed choir singing like seraphs, and roses to walk on——”

“Hermia,” said Bessie dreamily, “I wish you would not talk so much, and
you shouldn’t wish for things you can never have.”

“I will have them,” exclaimed the child under her breath. “I will! I
will!”

                              CHAPTER III.

                         BROOKLYN AND BABYLON.

Thirteen years passed. Bessie had three of her desired children and a
nice little flat in Brooklyn. Reverses and trials had come, but on the
whole Mordaunt was fairly prosperous, and they were happy. The children
did not wear white dresses and blue sashes; they were generally to be
seen in stout ginghams and woolen plaids, but they were chubby, healthy,
pretty things, and their mother was as proud of them as if they had
realized every detail of her youthful and ambitious dreams.

Bessie’s prettiness had gone with her first baby, as American prettiness
is apt to do, but the sweetness of her nature remained and shone through
her calm eyes and the lines of care about her mouth. She had long since
forgotten to sigh over the loss of her beauty, she had so little time;
but she still remembered to give a deft coil to her hair, and her plain
little gowns were never dowdy. She knew nothing about modern decorative
art, and had no interest in hard-wood floors or dados; but her house was
pretty and tasteful in the old-fashioned way, and in her odd moments she
worked at cross-stitch.

And Hermia? Poor girl! She had not found the beauty her sister had lost.
Her hair was still the same muddy blonde-brown, although with a latent
suggestion of color, and she still brushed it back with the severity of
her childhood. Nothing, she had long since concluded, could beautify
her, and she would waste no time in the attempt. She was a trifle above
medium height, and her thin figure bent a little from the waist. Her
skin was as sallow as of yore, and her eyes were dull. She had none of
Bessie’s sweetness of expression; her cold, intellectual face just
escaped being sullen. Her health was what might be expected of a girl
who exercised little and preferred thought to sleep. She had kept the
promise made the night she had scratched her sister’s face; during the
past fifteen years no one had seen her lose her self-control for a
moment. She was as cold as a polar night, and as impassive as an
Anglo-American. She was very kind to her sister, and did what she could
to help her. She taught the children; and, though with much private
rebellion, she frequently made their clothes and did the marketing.
Frank and Bessie regarded her with awe and distant admiration, but the
children liked her. The professor had taught her until he could teach
her no more, and then had earned his subsistence by reading aloud to
John Suydam. A year or two before, he had departed for less material
duties, with few regrets.

But, if Hermia no longer studied, she belonged to several free libraries
and read with unflagging vigor. Of late she had taken a deep interest in
art, and she spent many hours in the picture galleries of New York.
Moreover, she grasped any excuse which took her across the river. With
all the fervor of her silent soul she loved New York and hated Brooklyn.

She was sitting in the dining-room one evening, helping Lizzie, the
oldest child, with her lessons. Lizzie was sleepy, and was droning
through her multiplication table, when she happened to glance at her
aunt. “You are not paying attention,” she exclaimed, triumphantly; “I
don’t believe you’ve heard a word of that old table, and I’m not going
to say it over again.”

Hermia, whose eyes had been fixed vacantly on the fire, started and took
the book from Lizzie’s lap. “Go to bed,” she said; “you are tired, and
you know your tables very well.”

Lizzie, who was guiltily conscious that she had never known her tables
less well, accepted her release with alacrity, kissed her aunt
good-night, and ran out of the room.

Hermia went to the window and opened it. It looked upon walls and
fences, but lineaments were blotted out to-night under a heavy fall of
snow. Beyond the lower roofs loomed the tall walls of houses on the
neighboring street, momentarily discernible through the wind-parted
storm.

Hermia pushed the snow from the sill, then closed the window with a
sigh. The snow and the night were the two things in her life that she
loved. They were projected into her little circle from the grand whole
of which they were parts, and were in no way a result of her
environment.

She went into the sitting-room and sat down by the table. She took up a
book and stared at its unturned pages for a quarter of an hour. Then she
raised her eyes and looked about her. Mordaunt was sitting in an
easy-chair by the fire, smoking a pipe and reading a magazine story
aloud to his wife, who sat near him, sewing. Lizzie had climbed on his
lap, and with her head against his shoulder was fast asleep.

Hermia took up a pencil and made a calculation on the fly-leaf of her
book. It did not take long, but the result was a respectable sum—4,620.
Allowing for her sister’s brief illnesses and for several minor
interruptions, she had looked upon that same scene, varied in trifling
details, just about 4,620 times in the past thirteen years. She rose
suddenly and closed her book.

“Good-night,” she said, “I am tired. I am going to bed.”

Mordaunt muttered “good-night” without raising his eyes; but Bessie
turned her head with an anxious smile.

“Good-night,” she said; “I think you need a tonic. And would you mind
putting Lizzie to bed? I am so interested in this story. Frank, carry
her into the nursery.”

Hermia hesitated a moment, as if she were about to refuse, but she
turned and followed Frank into the next room.

She undressed the inert, protesting child and tucked her in bed. Then
she went to her room and locked the door. She lit the gas mechanically
and stood still for a moment. Then she threw herself on the bed, and
flung herself wildly about. After a time she clasped her hands tightly
about the top of her head and gazed fixedly at the ceiling. Her family
would not have recognized her in that moment. Her disheveled hair clung
about her flushed face, and through its tangle her eyes glittered like
those of a snake. For a few moments her limbs were as rigid as if the
life had gone out of them. Then she threw herself over on her face and
burst into a wild passion of weeping. The hard, inward sobs shook her
slender body as the screw shakes the steamer.

“How I hate it! How I hate it! How I hate it!” she reiterated, between
her paroxysms. “O God! is there nothing—nothing—nothing in life but
this? Nothing but hideous monotony—and endless days—and thousands and
thousands of hours that are as alike as grains of sand?”

She got up suddenly and filling a basin with water thrust her head into
it. The water was as cold as melting ice, and when she had dried her
hair she no longer felt as if her brain were trying to force its way
through the top of her skull.

Hermia, like many other women, lived a double life. On the night when,
under the dramatic illusion of Monte Cristo, her imagination had
awakened with a shock which rent the film of childhood from her brain,
she had found a dream-world of her own. The prosaic never suspected its
existence; the earth’s millions who dwelt in the same world cared
nothing for any kingdom in it but their own; she was sovereign of a vast
domain wrapped in the twilight mystery of dreamland, but peopled with
obedient subjects conceived and molded in her waking brain. She walked
stoically through the monotonous round of her daily life; she took a
grim and bitter pleasure in fulfilling every duty it developed, and she
never neglected the higher duty she owed her intellect; but when night
came, and the key was turned in her door, she sprang from the life she
abhorred into the world of her delight. She would fight sleep off for
hours, for sleep meant temporary death, and the morning a return to
material existence. A ray of light from the street-lamp struggled
through the window, and, fighting with the shadows, filled the ugly,
common little room with glamour and illusion. The walls swept afar and
rolled themselves into marble pillars that towered vaporously in the
gloom. Beyond, rooms of state and rooms of pleasure ceaselessly
multiplied. On the pictured floors lay rugs so deep that the echo of a
lover’s footfall would never go out into eternity. From the enameled
walls sprang a vaulted ceiling painted with forgotten art. Veils of
purple stuffs, gold-wrought, jewel-fringed, so dense that the roar of a
cannon could not have forced its way into the stillness of that room,
masked windows and doors. From beyond those pillars, from the far
perspective of those ever-doubling chambers came the plash of waters,
faint and sweet as the music of the bulbul. The bed, aloft on its dais,
was muffled in lace which might have fringed a mist. Hidden in the
curving leaves of pale-tinted lotus flowers were tiny flames of light,
and in an urn of agate burned perfumed woods. * * *

For this girl within her unseductive frame had all the instincts of a
beautiful woman, for the touch of whose lips men would dig the grave of
their life’s ambitions. That kiss it was the passionate cry of her heart
to give to lips as warm and imploring as her own. She would thrust
handfuls of violets between her blankets, and imagine herself lying by
the sea in a nest of fragrance. Her body longed for the softness of
cambric and for silk attire; her eye for all the beauty that the hand of
man had ever wrought.

When wandering among those brain-born shadows of hers, she was
beautiful, of course; and, equally inferable, those dreams had a hero.
This lover’s personality grew with her growth and changed with every
evolution of the mind that had given it birth; but, strangely enough,
the lover himself had retained his proportions and lineaments from the
day of his creation. Is it to be supposed that Hermia was wedded
peacefully to her ideal, and that together they reigned over a vast
dominion of loving and respectful subjects? Not at all. If there was one
word in the civilized vocabulary that Hermia hated it was that word
“marriage.” To her it was correlative with all that was commonplace;
with a prosaic grind that ate and corroded away life and soul and
imagination; with a dreary and infinite monotony. Bessie Mordaunt’s
peaceful married life was hideous to her sister. Year after
year,—neither change nor excitement, neither rapture nor anguish, nor
romance nor poetry, neither ambition nor achievement, nor recognition
nor power! Nothing of mystery, nothing of adventure; neither palpitation
of daring nor quiver of secrecy; nothing but kisses of calm affection,
babies, and tidies! 4,620 evenings of calm, domestic bliss; 4,620 days
of placid, housewifely duties! To Hermia such an existence was a tragedy
more appalling than relentless immortality. Bessie had her circle of
friends, and in each household the tragedy was repeated; unless, mayhap,
the couple were ill-mated, when the tragedy became a comedy, and a
vulgar one at that.

Hermia’s hatred of marriage sprang not from innate immorality, but from
a strongly romantic nature stimulated to abnormal extreme by the
constant, small-beer wave-beats of a humdrum, uniform, ever-persisting,
abhorred environment. If no marriage-bells rang over her cliffs and
waters and through her castle halls, her life was more ideally perfect
than any life within her ken which drowsed beneath the canopy of law and
church. Regarding the subject from the point of view to which her nature
and conditions had focused her mental vision, love needed the
exhilarating influence of liberty, the stimulation of danger, and the
enchantment of mystery.

Of men practically she knew little. There were young men in her sister’s
circle, and Mordaunt occasionally brought home his fellow clerks; but
Hermia had never given one of them a thought. They were limited and
commonplace, and her reputation for intellectuality had the effect of
making them appear at their worst upon those occasions when
circumstances compelled them to talk to her. And she had not the beauty
to win forgiveness for her brains. She appreciated this fact and it
embittered her, little as she cared for her brother’s uninteresting
friends, and sent her to the depths of her populous soul.

The books she read had their influence upon that soul-population. The
American novel had much the same effect upon her as the married life of
her sister and her sister’s friends. She cared for but little of the
literature of France, and the best of it deified love and scorned the
conventions. She reveled in mediæval and ancient history and loved the
English poets, and both poets and history held aloft, on pillars of
fragrant and indestructible wood, her own sad ideality.

                              CHAPTER IV.

                    IN THE GREEN ROOM OF LITERATURE.

Hermia’s imagination in its turn demanded a safety-valve; she found it
necessary, occasionally, to put her dreams into substance and sequence.
In other words she wrote. Not prose. She had neither the patience nor
the desire. Nor did she write poetry. She believed that no woman, save
perhaps time-enveloped Sappho, ever did, and she had no idea of adding
her pseudonym to the list of failures. When her brain became
overcharged, she dashed off verses, wildly romantic, and with a pen
heated white. There was a wail and an hysterical passion in what she
wrote that took the hearts of a large class of readers by storm, and her
verses found prompt acceptance by the daily and weekly papers. She had
as yet aspired to nothing higher. She was distinctly aware that her
versification was crude and her methods faulty. To get her verses into
the magazines they must be fairly correct and almost proper, and both
attainments demanded an amount of labor distasteful to her impatient
nature. Of late, scarcely a week had passed without the appearance of
several metrical contributions over the signature “Quirus;” and the wail
and the passion were growing more piercing and tumultuous. The readers
were moved, interested, or amused, according to their respective
natures.

The morning after the little arithmetical problem, Hermia arose early
and sat down at her desk. She drew out a package of MS. and read it over
twice, then determined to have a flirtation with the magazines. These
verses were more skillful from a literary point of view than any of her
previous work, because, for the sake of variety, she had plagiarized
some good work of an English poet. The story was a charming one,
dramatic, somewhat fragmentary, and a trifle less caloric than her other
effusions. She revised it carefully, and mailed it, later in the day, to
one of the leading New York magazines.

Two weeks passed and no answer came. Then, snatching at anything which
offered its minimum of distraction, she determined to call on the
editor. She had never presented herself to an editor before, fearing his
betrayal of her identity; so well had she managed that not even Bessie
knew she wrote; but she regarded the magazine editor from afar as an
exalted being, and was willing to put her trust in him. She felt shy
about acknowledging herself the apostle of beauty and the priestess of
passion, but ennui conquered diffidence, and one morning she presented
herself at the door of her editor’s den.

The editor, who was glancing over proofs, raised his eyes as she
entered, and did not look overjoyed to see her. Nevertheless, he
politely asked her to be seated. Poor Hermia by this time was cold with
fright; her knees were shaking. She was used to self-control, however,
and in a moment managed to remark that she had come to inquire about the
fate of her poem. The editor bowed, extracted a MS. from a pigeon-hole
behind him, and handed it to her.

“I cannot use it,” he said, “but I am greatly obliged to you,
nevertheless. We are always grateful for contributions.”

He had a pleasant way of looking upon the matter as settled, but an
ounce or two of Hermia’s courage had returned, and she was determined to
get something more out of the interview than a glimpse of an editor.

“I am sorry,” she said, “but of course I expected it. Would you mind
telling me what is the matter with it?”

Editors will not take the trouble to write a criticism of a returned
manuscript, but they are more willing to air their views verbally than
people imagine. It gives them an opportunity to lecture and generalize,
and they enjoy doing both.

“Certainly not,” said the editor in question. “Your principal fault is
that you are too highly emotional. Your verses would be unhealthy
reading for my patrons. This is a family magazine, and has always borne
the reputation of incorruptible morality. It would not do for us to
print matter which a father might not wish his daughter to read. The
American young girl should be the conscientious American editor’s first
consideration.”

This interview was among the anguished memories of Hermia’s life. After
her return home she thought of so many good things she might have said.
This was one which she uttered in the seclusion of her bed-chamber that
evening:

(“You are perfectly right,” with imperturbability. “‘Protect the
American young girl lest she protect not herself’ should be the motto
and the mission of the American editor!”)

When she was at one with the opportunity, she asked: “And my other
faults?”

“Your other faults?” replied the unconscious victim of lagging wit.
“There is a strain of philosophy in your mind which unfits you for
magazine work. A magazine should be light and not too original. People
pick it up after the work of the day; they want to be amused and
entertained, they do not want to think. Anything new, anything out of
the beaten track, anything which does not suggest old and familiar
favorites, anything which requires a mental effort to grasp, annoys them
and affects the popularity of the magazine. Of course we like
originality and imagination—do not misunderstand me; what we do not
want is the complex, the radically original, or the deep. We have
catered to a large circle of readers for a great many years; we know
exactly what they want, and they know exactly what to expect. When they
see the name of a new writer in our pages they feel sure that whatever
may be the freshness and breeziness of the newcomer, he (or she) will
not call upon them to witness the tunneling of unhewn rock—so to speak.
Do you grasp my meaning?”

(Hermia at home in her bed-chamber: “I see. Your distinctions are
admirable. You want originality with the sting extracted, soup instead
of blood, an exquisite etching rather than the bold sweep and color of
brush and oils. Your contributors must say an old thing in a new way, or
a new thing in so old a way that the shock will be broken, that the
reader will never know he has harbored a new-born babe. Your little
lecture has been of infinite value to me. I shall ponder over it until I
evolve something worthy of the wary parent and the American Young
Girl.”)

Hermia in the editor’s den: “Oh, yes; thank you very much. But I am
afraid I shall never do anything you will care for. Good-morning.”

The next day she sent the manuscript to another magazine, and, before
she could reasonably expect a reply, again invaded the sanctity of
editorial seclusion. The genus editor amused her; she resolved to keep
her courage by the throat and study the arbiters of literary destinies.
It is probable that, if her second editor had not been young and very
gracious, her courage would again have flown off on deriding wings; as
it was, it did not even threaten desertion.

She found the editor engaged in nothing more depressing than the perusal
of a letter. He smiled most promisingly when she announced herself as
the mysterious “Quirus,” but folded his hands deprecatingly.

“I am sorry I cannot use that poem,” he said, “but I am afraid it is
impossible. It has decided merit, and, in view of the awful stuff we are
obliged to publish, it would be a welcome addition to our pages. I don’t
mind the strength of the poem or the plot; you have made your meaning
artistically obscure. But there is one word in it which would make it
too strong meat for the readers of this magazine. I refer to the word
‘naked.’ It is quite true that the adjective ‘naked’ is used in
conjunction with the noun ‘skies;’ but the word itself is highly
objectionable. I have been trying to find a way out of the difficulty. I
substituted the word ‘nude,’ but that spoils the meter, you see. Then I
sought the dictionary.” He opened a dictionary that stood on a revolving
stand beside him, and read aloud: “‘Naked—uncovered; unclothed; nude;
bare; open; defenseless; plain; mere.’ None of these will answer the
purpose, you see. They are either too short or too long; and ‘open’ does
not convey the idea. I am really afraid that nothing can be done.
Suppose you try something else and be more careful with your vocabulary.
I trust you catch my idea, because I am really quite interested in your
work. It is like the fresh breeze of spring when it is not”—here he
laughed—“the torrid breath of the simoon. I have read some of your
other verse, you see.”

“I think I understand you,” said Hermia, leaning forward and gazing
reflectively at him. “Manner is everything. Matter is a creature whose
limbs may be of wood, whose joints may be sapless; so long as he is
covered by a first-class tailor he is a being to strut proudly down to
posterity. Or, for the sake of variety, which has its value, the
creature may change his sex and become a pink-cheeked, flax-haired,
blue-eyed doll. Hang upon her garments cut by an unconventional hand,
looped eccentrically and draped artistically, and the poor little doll
knows not herself from her clothes. Have I gazed understandingly upon
the works of the literary clock?”

The editor threw back his head and laughed aloud. “You are very clever,”
he exclaimed, “but I am afraid your estimate of us is as correct as it
is flattering. We are a set of cowards, but we should be bankrupt if we
were not.”

Hermia took the manuscript he had extracted from a drawer, and rose. “At
all events you were charitable to read my verses,” she said, “and more
than good to attempt their re-form.”

The editor stood up also. “Oh, do not mention it,” he said, “and write
me something else—something equally impassioned but quite
irreproachable. Aside from the defect I mentioned, there were one or two
verses which I should have been obliged to omit.”

Hermia shrugged her shoulders. She might repeatedly work the lovers up
to the verge of disaster, then, just before the fatal moment, wrench
them apart and substitute asterisks for curses. The school-girls would
palpitate, the old maids thrill, the married women smile, and the men
grin. No harm would be done, maidens and maids would lay it down with a
long-drawn sigh—of relief?—or regret?

Hermia kept these reflections to herself and departed, thinking her
editor a charming man.

When she reached the sidewalk she stood irresolute for a moment, then
walked rapidly for many blocks. The Mecca of her pilgrimage was another
publishing-house. She stepped briskly upstairs and asked for the editor
with a confidence born of excitement and encouragement. After a short
delay she was shown into his office, and began the attack without
preliminary.

“I have brought you some verses,” she said, “which have been declined by
two of your esteemed contemporaries on the ground of
unconventionality—of being too highly seasoned for the gentle palates
to which they cater. I bring them to you because I believe you have more
courage than the majority of your tribe. You wrote two books in which
you broke out wildly once or twice. Now I want you to read this while I
am here. It will take but a few moments.”

The editor, who had a highly non-committal air, smiled slightly, and
held out his hand for the verses. He read them through, then looked up.

“I rather like them,” he said. “They have a certain virility, although I
do not mistake the strength of passion for creative force. But they are
pretty tropical, and the versification is crude. I—am
afraid—they—will hardly—do.”

He looked out of the window, then smiled outright. It rather pleased him
to dare that before which his brethren faltered. He made a number of
marks on the manuscript.

“That rectifies the crudeness a little,” he said, “and the poem
certainly has intellectuality and merit. You can leave it. I will let
you know in a day or two. Your address is on the copy, I suppose. I
think you may count upon the availability of your verses.”

Hermia accepted her dismissal and went home much elated. The verses were
printed in the next issue of the magazine, and there was a mild storm on
the literary lake. The course of the magazine, in sending up a stream of
red-hot lava in place of the usual shower-bath of lemonade and
claret-cup, was severely criticised, but there were those who said that
this deliberately audacious editor enjoyed the little cyclone he had
provoked.

This was the most exciting episode Hermia could recall since Bessie’s
marriage.

                               CHAPTER V.

                        THE SWEETS OF SOLITUDE.

A few weeks later Frank made an announcement which gave Hermia a genuine
thrill of delight. A fellow bank-clerk was obliged to spend some months
in California, and had offered Mordaunt his house in Jersey for the
summer. Hermia would not consent to go with them, in spite of their
entreaties. As far back as she could remember, way down through the long
perspective of her childhood, she had never been quite alone except at
night, nor could she remember the time when she had not longed for
solitude. And now! To be alone for four months! No more evenings of
domestic bliss, no more piles of stockings to darn, no more dinners to
concoct, no more discussions upon economy, no more daily tasks carefully
planned by Bessie’s methodical mind, no more lessons to teach, no more
_anything_ which had been her daily portion for the last thirteen years.
Bridget would go with the family. She would do her own cooking, and not
eat at all if she did not wish. Her clothes could fall into rags, and
her hands look through every finger of her gloves. She would read and
dream and forget that the material world existed.

It was a beautiful spring morning when Hermia found herself alone. She
had gone with the family to Jersey, and had remained until they were
settled. Now the world was her own. When she returned to the flat, she
threw her things on the floor, pushed the parlor furniture awry, turned
the framed photographs to the wall, and hid the worsted tidies under the
sofa.

For two months she was well content. She reveled in her loneliness, in
the voiceless rooms, the deserted table, the aimless hours, the
forgotten past, the will-painted present. She regarded the post-man as
her natural enemy, and gave him orders not to ring her bell. Once a week
she took her letters from the box and devoted a half-hour to
correspondence. She had a hammock swung in one of the rooms, and dreamed
half the night through that she was in the hanging gardens of Semiramis.
The darkness alone was between her and the heavens thick with starry
gods; and below was the heavy perfume of oranges and lotus flowers.
There was music—soft—crashing—wooing her to a scene of bewildering
light and mad carousal. There was rapture of power and ecstasy of love.
She had but to fling aside the curtains—to fly down the corridor—

It is not to be supposed that Hermia’s imagination was faithful to the
Orient. Her nature had great sensuous breadth and wells of passion which
penetrated far down into the deep, hard substratum of New England rock;
but her dreams were apt to be inspired by what she had read last. She
loved the barbarous, sensuous, Oriental past, but she equally loved the
lore which told of the rugged strength and brutal sincerity of mediæval
days, when man turned his thoughts to love and war and naught besides;
when the strongest won the woman he wanted by murder and force, and the
woman loved him the better for doing it. Hermia would have gloried in
the breathless uncertainty of those days, when death and love went
hand-in-hand, and every kiss was bought with the swing of a battle-axe.
She would have liked to be locked in her tower by her feudal father, and
to have thrown down a rope-ladder to her lover at night. Other periods
of history at times demanded her, and she had a great many famous
lovers: Bolingbroke and Mirabeau, Napoleon and Aaron Burr, Skobeleff and
Cavour, a motley throng who bore a strong racial resemblance to one
another when roasting in the furnace of her super-heated imagination.

Again, there were times when love played but a small part in her
visions. She was one of the queens of that world to which she had been
born, a world whose mountains were of cold brown stone, and in whose few
and narrow currents drifted stately maidens in stiff, white collars and
tailor-made gowns. She should be one of that select band. It was her
birthright; and each instinct of power and fastidiousness, caste and
exclusiveness, flourished as greenly within her as if those currents had
swept their roots during every year of her life’s twenty-four. When
ambition sank down, gasping for breath, love would come forward eager
and warm, a halo enveloped the brown-stone front, and through the
plate-glass and silken curtains shone the sun of paradise.

For a few weeks the charm of solitude retained its edge. Then,
gradually, the restlessness of Hermia’s nature awoke after its sleep and
clamored for recognition. She grew to hate the monotony of her own
society as she had that of her little circle. She came to dread the
silence of the house; it seemed to close down upon her, oppressing,
stifling, until she would put her hand to her throat and gasp for
breath. Sometimes she would scream at every noise; her nerves became so
unstrung that sleep was a visitor who rarely remembered her. Once,
thinking she needed change of scene, she went to Jersey. She returned
the next morning. The interruption of the habit of years, the absolute
change of the past few months made it impossible to take up again the
strings of her old life. They had snapped forever, and the tension had
been too tight to permit a knot. She could go down to the river, but not
back to the existence of the past thirteen years.

For a week after her return from Jersey she felt as if she were going
mad. Life seemed to have stopped; the future was a blank sheet. Try to
write on it as she would, the characters took neither form nor color. To
go and live alone would mean no more than the change from her sister’s
flat to a bare-walled room; to remain in her present conditions was
unthinkable. She had neither the money nor the beauty to accumulate
interests in life. Books ceased to interest her, imagination failed her.
She tried to write, but passion was dead, and the blood throbbed in her
head and drowned words and ideas. She had come to the edge of life, and
at her feet swept the river—in its depths were peace and
oblivion—eternal rest—a long, cool night—the things which crawl in
the deep would suck the blood from her head—a claw with muscles of
steel would wrench the brain from her skull and carry it far, far, where
she could feel it throb and jump and ache no more—

And then, one day, John Suydam died and left her a million dollars.

                              CHAPTER VI.

                   SUYDAM’S LEGACY AND HERMIA’S WILL.

Hermia attended her uncle’s funeral because Frank came over and insisted
upon it; and she and her brother-in-law were the only mourners. But few
people were in the church, a circumstance which Hermia remembered later
with gratitude. The Suydams had lived on Second Avenue since Second
Avenue had boasted a brick or brownstone front, but no one cared to
assume a respect he did not feel. Among the tablets which graced the
interior of St. Mark’s was one erected to the dead man’s father, who had
left many shekels to the diocese; but John Suydam was lowered into the
family vault with nothing to perpetuate his memory but his name and the
dates of his birth and death engraved on the silver plate of his coffin.

Hermia took no interest in her uncle’s death; she was even past the
regret that she would be the poorer by twenty-five dollars a year. When
she received the letter from Suydam’s lawyer, informing her that she was
heiress to a million dollars, her hands shook for an hour.

At first she was too excited to think connectedly. She went out and took
a long walk, and physical fatigue conquered her nerves. She returned
home and sat down on the edge of her bed and thought it all out. The
world was under her feet at last. With such a fortune she could
materialize every dream of her life. She would claim her place in
society here, then go abroad, and in the old world forget the Nineteenth
Century. She would have a house, each of whose rooms should be the
embodiment of one of that strange medley of castles she had built in the
land of her dreams. And men would love her—she was free to love in fact
instead of in fancy—free to go forth and in the crowded drawing-rooms
of that world not a bird’s flight away find the lover whose glance would
be recognition.

She sprang to her feet and threw her arms above her head. New life
seemed to have been poured into her veins, and it coursed through them
like quicksilver; she felt _young_ for the first time in the twenty-four
centuries of her life. She dropped her arms and closed her hand slowly;
the world was in the palm. She smiled and let her head drop back. She
moved it slowly on the pivot of her throat. Her eyes met the glass.

The cry of horror which burst from her lips rang through the room. For
this girl had lived so long and so consistently in her imagination that
it was rarely she remembered she was not a beautiful woman. During the
past hours she had slowly grasped the fact that, as with the stroke of a
magician’s wand, her dream-estates had been hardened from shadow into
substance; it had not occurred to her that the gift most coveted was the
one gift withheld.

She sank in a heap on the bed, all spirit and hope gone out of her. For
many minutes she remained motionless. Then she slowly straightened
herself until she was erect once more, and in her face grew a look of
hope fighting down doubt. In a moment hope triumphed, then gave way to
determination, which in turn yielded to defiance. She sprang forward and
with her clenched hand shattered her mirror into a star with a thousand
points.

“I _will_ be beautiful!” she cried aloud, “and I will never look into a
glass again until I am.”

                              CHAPTER VII.

                         A HEROINE IN TRAINING.

The thirty or forty thousand dollars over John Suydam’s million had been
left to Bessie. She immediately bought a charming house on St. Mark’s
Avenue—it did not occur to her to leave her beloved Brooklyn—and
Hermia furnished it for her and told her that she would educate the
children. Hermia did not divide her fortune with her sister. She kept
her hundred thousands, not because gold had made her niggardly, but
because she wanted the power that a fortune gives.

The old Suydam house was one of the largest of its kind in New York.
Exteriorly it was of red brick with brown-stone trimmings, and about the
lower window was a heavy iron balcony. Beneath the window was a square
of lawn the size of a small kitchen table, which was carefully protected
by a high, spiked iron railing.

Hermia put the house at once in the hands of a famous designer and
decorator, but allowed him no license. Her orders were to be followed to
the letter. The large, single drawing-room was to be Babylonian. The
library just behind, and the dining-room in the extension were to look
like the rooms of a feudal castle. The large hall should suggest a
cathedral. Above, her boudoir and bed-room was to be a scene from the
Arabian Nights. A conservatory, to be built at the back of the house,
would be a jungle of India.

The house was to be as nearly finished as possible by the beginning of
winter. She wrote to her mother’s sister, Miss Huldah Starbruck, a lady
who had passed fifty peaceful years in Nantucket, and asked her to come
and live with her. Miss Starbruck promised to come early in December,
and then, all other points settled, Hermia gave her attention to the
momentous question of her undeveloped beauty.

She went to a fashionable physician and had a long interview with him.
The next day he sent her a trained and athletic nurse, a pleasant,
placid-looking young woman, named Mary Newton. Miss Newton, who had
received orders to put Hermia into a perfect state of health, and who
was given carte blanche, telegraphed for a cottage on the south shore of
Long Island. She had a room fitted up as a gymnasium, and for the next
four months Hermia obeyed her lightest mandate upon all questions of
diet and exercise. Once a week Hermia went to town and divided the day
between the house-decorators and a hairdresser who had engaged to
develop the color in her lusterless locks.

On the first of December, Miss Newton told her that no girl had ever
been in more superb condition; and Hermia, who had kept her vow and not
yet looked in a mirror, was content to take her word, and both returned
to town.

                             CHAPTER VIII.

                       HERMIA DISCOVERS HERSELF.

Had Hermia been a bride on her wedding-night she could not have felt
more trepidation than when she stood on the threshold of her first
interview with her new self. She was to meet a strange, potent being,
who would unlock for her those doors against which, with fierce, futile
longing, she had been wont to cast herself, since woman’s instinct had
burst its germ.

She entered her bedroom and locked the door. But she did not go to the
mirror at once; she was loath to relinquish pleasurable uncertainty. She
sank on a rug before the hearth and locked her hands about her knee in
the attitude which had been a habit from childhood. For a few moments
she sat enjoying the beauty of the room, the successful embodiment of
one of her dearest dreams. The inlaid floor was thick with rugs that had
been woven in the looms of the Orient. The walls were hung with cloth of
gold, and the ceiling was a splendid picture of Nautch girls dancing in
the pleasure palace of an Indian prince. The bed, enameled to represent
ivory, stood on a dais over which trailed a wonderful Hindoo shawl. Over
the couches and divans were flung rich stuffs, feathered rugs, and odd
strips of Indian conceits. The sleeping-room was separated from the
boudoir by a row of pillars, and from the unseen apartment came the
smell of burning incense.

Hermia leaned back against a pile of cushions, and, clasping her hands
behind her head, gazed about her with half-closed eyes. There was a
sense of familiarity about it all that cast a shadow over her content.
It was a remarkably close reproduction of an ideal, considering that the
ideal had been filtered through the practical brain of a nineteenth
century decorator—but therein lay the sting. She had dreamed of this
room, lived in it; it was as familiar as Bessie’s parlor in Brooklyn,
with its tidies and what-nots; it wanted the charm of novelty. She had a
protesting sense of being defrauded; it was all very well to realize
one’s imaginings, but how much sweeter if some foreign hand had
cunningly woven details within and glamour above, of which she had never
dreamed. The supreme delight of atmospheric architecture is the vague,
abiding sense that high on the pinnacle we have reared, and which has
shot above vision’s range, is a luminous apex, divine in color, wondrous
in form, a will-o’-the-wisp fluttering in the clouds of imagination.

Hermia sighed, but shrugged her shoulders. Had not life taught her
philosophy?

Where the gold-stuffs parted on the wall opposite the pillars, a mirror,
ivory-framed, reached from floor to ceiling. Hermia rose and walked a
few steps toward the glass without daring to raise her eyes. Then with a
little cry she ran to the lamps and turned them out. She flung off her
clothes, threw the lace thing she called her night-gown over her head,
and jumped into bed. She pulled the covers over her face, and for ten
minutes lay and reviled herself. Then, with an impatient and audible
exclamation at her cowardice, she got up and lit every lamp in the room.

She walked over to the mirror and looked long at herself, fearfully at
first, then gravely, at last smilingly. She was beautiful, because she
was unique. Her victory was the more assured because her beauty would be
the subject of many a dispute. She had not the delicate features and
conventional coloring that women admire, but a certain stormy, reckless
originality which would appeal swiftly and directly to variety-loving
man. Her eyes, clear and brilliant as they had once been dull and cold,
were deep and green as the sea. Her hair, which lay in a wiry cloud
about her head and swept her brows, was a shining mass of brazen
threads. Her complexion had acquired the clear tint of ivory and was
stained with the rich hue of health. The very expression of her face had
changed; the hard, dogged, indifferent look had fled. With hope and
health and wishes gratified had come the lifting and banishment of the
old mask—that crystallization of her spirit’s discontent. Yes, she was
a beautiful woman. She might not have a correct profile or a soft
roundness of face, but she was a beautiful woman.

She pinched her cheek; it was firm and elastic. She put her hands about
her throat; it rose from its lace nest, round and polished as an ivory
pillar. She slipped the night-gown from her shoulders; the line of the
back of her head and neck was beautiful to see, and a crisp, waved
strand of shorter hair that had fallen from its place looked like a
piece of gold filigree on an Indian vase. Her shoulders did not slope,
but they might have been covered with thickest satin. She raised one arm
and curved it slowly, then let it hang straight at her side. She must
always have had a well-shaped arm, for it tapered from shoulder to
wrist; but health and care alone could give the transparent brilliancy
and flawless surface.

Hermia gazed long at herself. She swayed her beautiful body until it
looked like a reed in an Indian swamp, blown by a midnight breeze. It
was as lithe and limber as young bamboo. She drew the pins from her
hair. It fell about her like a million infinitesimal tongues of living
flame, and through them her green eyes shone and her white skin gleamed.

Tossing her hair back she sprang forward and kissed her reflection in
the glass, a long, greeting, grateful kiss, and her eyes blazed with
passionate rapture. Then she slowly raised her arms above her head,
every pulse throbbing with delicious exultation, every nerve leaping
with triumph and hope, every artery a river of tumultuous, victorious,
springing life.

                              CHAPTER IX.

                              HELEN SIMMS.

A year later Hermia was sitting by her library fire one afternoon when
the butler threw back the tapestry that hung over the door and announced
Helen Simms. Hermia rose to greet her visitor with an exclamation of
pleasure that had in it an accent of relief. She had adopted Helen Simms
as the friend of her new self; as yet, but one knew the old Hermia.
Helen was so essentially modern and practical that restless longings and
romantic imaginings fled at her approach.

Miss Simms, as she entered the room, her cheeks flushed by the wind, and
a snow-flake on her turban, was a charming specimen of her kind. She had
a tall, trim, slender figure, clad in sleek cloth, and carried with
soldierly uprightness. Her small head was loftily and unaffectedly
poised, her brown hair was drawn up under her quiet little hat with
smoothness and precision, and a light, severe fluff adorned her
forehead. She had no beauty, but she had the clean, clear, smooth,
red-and-ivory complexion of the New York girl, and her teeth were
perfect. She looked like a thoroughbred, splendidly-groomed young
greyhound, and was a glowing sample of the virtues of exercise,
luxurious living, and the refinement of two or three generations.

“What do you mean by moping here all by yourself?” she exclaimed, with a
swift smile which gave a momentary flash of teeth. “You were to have met
me at Madame Lefarge’s, to have tried on your new gown. I waited for you
a half-hour, and in a beastly cold room at that.”

“I beg your pardon,” replied Hermia, with sudden contrition, “but I
forgot all about it—I may as well tell the bald truth. But I am glad to
see you. I am blue.”

Helen took an upright chair opposite Hermia’s, and lightly leaned upon
her umbrella as if it were a staff. “I should think you would be blue in
this ‘gray ancestral room,’” she said. “It looks as if unnumbered state
conspiracies and intrigues against unhappy Duncans had been concocted in
it. I do not deny that it is all very charming, but I never come into it
without a shiver and a side-glance at the dark corners.”

She looked about her with a smile which had little fear in it.

“These stern gray walls and that vaulted ceiling carry you out of Second
Avenue, I admit; and those stained-glass windows and all that tapestry
and antique furniture waft me back to the days of my struggles with
somebody or other’s history of England. But, _Hermia mia_, I think it
would be good for you to have a modern drawing-room in your house, and
to sit in it occasionally. It is this semblance of past romance which
makes you discontented with the world as you find it.”

Hermia gave a sigh. “I know,” she said, “but I can’t help it. I am tired
of everything. I dread the thought of another winter exactly like last.
The same men, same receptions, same compliments, same everything.”

“My dear, you are blasé. I have been expecting it. It follows on the
heels of the first season, as delicate eyes follow scarlet fever. The
eyes get well, and so will you. Five years from now you will not be as
blasé as you are this moment. Look at me. I have been out four years. I
was blasé three years ago, but to-day I could not live without society
and its thousand little excitements. See what you have to look forward
to!”

Hermia smiled. “You certainly are a shining example of patience and
fortitude, but I fear you have something in you which I lack. I shall
grow more and more bored and discontented. Three years of this would
kill me. I wish I could go to Europe, but Aunt Frances cannot go yet,
and I don’t care to go alone the first time, for I want to see the
society of the different capitals. After that I shall go to Europe by
myself. But in the mean time what am I to do?”

“Have a desperate flirtation; I mean, of course, a prolonged one. Heaven
knows you are the most fearful flirt in New York—while it lasts. Only
it never lasts more than a week and a day.”

“I am not a flirt,” said Hermia. “I have not the first essential of a
flirt—patience. I have been simply trying with all my might to fall in
love. And I cannot have a prolonged flirtation with a man who
disappoints me.”

“My dear, as a veteran, let me advise you. So long as you keep up this
hunt for the ideal you will be bored by everything and everybody in
actual life. All this sentiment and romance and imagination of yours are
very charming, and when I recall the occasions wherein you have kept me
awake until two in the morning, I forgive you, because I found you quite
as entertaining as a novel. But it is only spoiling you for the real
pleasures of life. You must be more philosophical. If you can’t find
your ideal, make up your mind to be satisfied with the best you can get.
There are dozens of charming men in New York, and you meet them every
week. They may not be romantic, they may look better in evening clothes
than in a tin hat and leather legs, but they are quite too fascinating
for all that. Just put your imagination to some practical use, and fancy
yourself in love with one of them for a month. After that it will be
quite easy.”

“I can’t!” exclaimed Hermia emphatically, as she turned to pour out the
tea the butler had brought in. “I get everything they know out of them
in three interviews, and then we’ve nothing left to talk about.”

Helen removed her glove from her white hand with its flashing rings,
and, changing her seat to one nearer the table, took up a thin slice of
bread-and-butter. “Is it five o’clock already?” she said, “I must run. I
have a dinner to-night, the opera, and two balls.” She nibbled her bread
and sipped her tea as if the resolution to run had satisfied her
conscience. “Shall I have the pleasure of seeing you have twice as many
partners as myself?”

“No; I am not going out to-night. You know I draw the line at three
times a week, and I have already touched the limit.”

“Quite right. You will be beautiful as long as you live. Between Miss
Newton, three nights’ sleep a week, and a large waist, you will be
quoted to your grandchildren as a nineteenth-century Ninon de l’Enclos.
But, to return to the truffles we were discussing before the tea came
in—another trouble is that you are too appallingly clever for the
‘infants.’ Why do you not go into the literary set and find an author?
All I have ever known are fearful bores, but they might suit you.” She
put down her tea-cup. “I have it!” she exclaimed; “Ogden Cryder has just
come back from Europe, and I am positive that he is the man you have
been waiting for. You must meet him. I met him two or three years ago,
and really, for a literary man, he was quite charming. Awfully
good-looking, too.”

“He is one of the dialect fiends, is he not?” asked Hermia, languidly.
“It is rather awkward meeting an author whose books you haven’t read,
and I simply cannot read dialect.”

“Oh! get one or two and skim them. The thread of the story is all you
want; then you can discuss the heroine with him, and insist that she
ought to have done the thing he did not make her do. That will flatter
him and give you a subject to start off with. An author scares me to
death, and, upon the rare occasions when I meet one, I always fly at him
with some reproach about the cruel way in which he treated the heroine,
or ask him breathlessly to _please_ tell me whether she and the hero are
ever going to get out of their difficulties or are to remain _planté là_
for the rest of their lives. This works off the embarrassment, you see,
and after that we talk about Mrs. Blank’s best young man.”

Hermia smiled. It was difficult to imagine Miss Simms frightened,
breathless, or embarrassed. She looked as if emotion had not stirred her
since the days when she had shrieked in baby wrath because she could not
get her chubby toes into her toothless mouth.

“Ogden Cryder might at least have something to talk about,” Hermia
answered. “Perhaps it would be worth while.”

“It would, my dear. I am convinced that he is the man, and I know where
you can meet him. Papa has tickets for the next meeting of the Club of
Free Discussion, and I will tell him to take you. He knows Mr. Cryder,
and shall have strict orders to introduce you. What is more, you will
have the pleasure of hearing the lion roar for an hour before you meet
him. He is to give the lecture of the evening.”

“Well,” said Hermia, “I shall be glad to go, if your father will be good
enough to take me. Which of Cryder’s books shall I read up?”

“‘Cornfield Yarns’ and ‘How Uncle Zebediah sowed dat Cotton Field’ are
the ones everybody talks about most. Some of the yarns are quite sweet,
and the papers say—I always read the criticisms, they give the outline
of the plot, and it saves an awful lot of trouble—that Uncle Zebediah
is the most superb African of modern fiction. Uncle Tom has hidden his
diminished head. ‘Unc. Zeb.,’ as he is familiarly called, rolls forth an
amount of dialect to the square inch which none but a Cryder could
manipulate. It is awful work pulling through it, but we all have to work
for success in this life.”

She drew on her long, loose, tan-colored glove, pushed her bangles over
it, then carefully tucked the top under her cuff. “Well, _addio, Hermia
mia_,” she said, rising; “I will send you a note to-morrow morning and
let you know if anything can possibly happen to prevent papa going on
Wednesday evening. In the mean time, make up your mind to be vanquished
by Ogden Cryder. He really is enchanting.”

                               CHAPTER X.

                      A MENTAL PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY.

After Helen left, Hermia went up to her room. There she did what she
never failed to do the moment she entered her bedroom—walked over to
the glass and looked at herself. She had not even yet got used to the
idea of her beauty, and sometimes approached the mirror with dread lest
her new self should prove a dream. She saw nothing to alarm her. A
year’s dissipation had not impaired her looks. Excitement and good
living agreed with her, and Miss Newton tyrannized over her like the
hygienic duenna that she was.

She sank down on the floor before the long glass, resting her elbow on a
cushion. Her crouching attitude reminded her of the women whose lines
had fallen in days of barbaric splendor. It is not to be supposed for a
moment that this effect was accidental. Hermia had determined, before
she burst upon New York, that her peculiar individuality should be the
suggestion of the untrammeled barbarian held in straining leash by the
requirements of civilization. Her green eyes and tawny hair were the
first requisites, and she managed her pliant body with a lithe grace
which completed the semblance.

She wore to-day a tea-gown of Louis XIV. brocade and lace, and she
watched herself with an amused smile. A year and a half ago her wardrobe
had consisted of coarse serges and gingham aprons.

She put her head on the cushion, nestled her body into the feather rug,
and in a vague, indolent way let her memory rove through the little
photograph gallery in her brain set apart for the accumulations of the
past twelve months. There were a great many photographs in that gallery,
and their shapes and dimensions were as diverse as their subjects. Some
were so large that they swept from floor to ceiling, although their
surface might reflect but one impression; others were too small to catch
the eye of the casual observer, and the imprint on them was like one
touch of a water-colorist’s brush. Many pasteboards of medium size were
there whose surfaces were crowded like an ant-hill at sundown; and
pushed into corners or lying under a dust-heap were negatives,
undeveloped and fading. At one end of the gallery was a great square
plate, and on it there was no impression of any sort, nor ever had been.

Hermia pushed up her loose sleeve and pressed her face into the warm
bend of her arm. On the whole, the past year had been almost
satisfactory. A clever brain, an iron will, and a million dollars can do
much, and that much Hermia’s combined gifts had accomplished.

She opened the windows of her photograph gallery and dusted out the
cobwebs, then, beginning at the top, sauntered slowly down. She looked
at her first appearance in the world of fashion. It is after the
completion of her winter’s wardrobe by a bevy of famous tailors, and she
wears a gown of light-gray cloth and a tiny bonnet of silvery birds. The
début is in St. Mark’s; and as she walks up the center aisle to the
Suydam pew, her form as straight as a young sapling, her head haughtily
yet nonchalantly poised, every curve of her glove-fitting gown
proclaiming the hand that cut it, Second Avenue catches its breath,
raises its eyebrows, and exchanges glances of well-bred, aristocratic
surprise. Late that week it calls, and this time is not repulsed, but
goes away enchanted. It does not take long for the unseen town crier to
flit from Second Avenue to Fifth, and one day his budget of news sends a
ripple over the central stream. John Suydam’s heiress, a beautiful girl
of twenty, with a style all her own, yet not violating a law of good
form! The old red-brick house transformed into an enchanted palace, with
a remarkably wide-awake princess, and a sacrifice to modern proprieties
in the shape of a New England aunt! How unusual and romantic! yet all as
it should be. We begin to remember poor Crosby Suydam and his charming
young wife. We recall the magnificence of their entertainments in the
house on lower Fifth Avenue—now resplendent with a milliner’s sign.
Both dead? How sad! And to think that John Suydam had a million all the
time! The old wretch! But how enchanting that he had the decency to
leave it to this beautiful girl! We will call.

They do call; and a distant relative of Hermia’s father, Mrs. Cotton
Dykman, comes forward with stately tread and gracious welcome and offers
her services as social sponsor. Hermia accepts the offer with gratitude,
and places her brougham at Mrs. Dykman’s disposal.

Mrs. Dykman is a widow approaching fifty, with lagging steps yet haughty
mien. Her husband omitted to leave her more than a competence; but she
lives in Washington Square in a house which was her husband’s
grandfather’s, and holds her head so high and wears so much old lace and
so many family diamonds (which she hid in the wall during the late
Cotton’s lifetime) that the Four Hundred have long since got into the
habit of forgetting her bank account. To her alone does Hermia confide
the secret of her past external self and the methods of reconstruction,
and Mrs. Dykman respects her ever after.

In a photograph near the head of the gallery Hermia and Mrs. Dykman are
seated by the library fire, and Hermia is discoursing upon a question
which has given her a good deal of thought.

“I want to be a New York society woman to my finger-tips,” she exclaims,
sitting forward in her chair; “that is, I want to be _au fait_ in every
particular. I would not for the world be looked upon as an alien; but at
the same time I want to be a distinctive figure in it. I want to be
aggressively _myself_. The New York girl is of so marked a type, Aunt
Frances, that you would know one if you met her in a Greek bandit’s
cave. She is unlike anything else on the face of the earth. You cross
the river to Brooklyn, you travel an hour and a half to Philadelphia,
you do not see a woman who faintly resembles her unless she has been
imported direct. The New York girl was never included in the scheme of
creation. When the combined forces of a new civilization and the
seven-leagued stride of democracy made her a necessity, Nature fashioned
a mold differing in shape and tint from all others in her storehouse,
and cast her in it. It is locked up in a chest and kept for her
exclusive use. The mold is made of ivory, and the shape is long and
straight and exceeding slim. There is a slight roundness about the bust,
and a general neatness and trimness which are independent of attire. And
each looks carefully fed and thoroughly groomed. Each has brightness in
her eye and elasticity in her step. And through the cheek of each the
blood flows in exactly the same red current about a little white island.
Now all this is very charming, but then she lacks—just a
little—individuality. And I _must_ have my distinctive personality.
There seems nothing left but to be eccentric. Tell me what line to
take.”

Mrs. Dykman, who has been listening with a slight frown on her brow and
a smile on her lips, replies in her low, measured accents, which a
cataclysm could not accelerate nor sharpen: “My dear, before I answer
your amusing tirade, let me once more endeavor to impress you with the
importance of repose. You may be as beautiful and as original as your
brains and will can make you, but without repose of manner you will be
like an unfinished impressionist daub. Few American women have it unless
they have lived in England; but I want you to take coals to Newcastle
when you make your début in London society.

“In regard to the other question,” she continues, “experience and
observation and thirty years of that treadmill we call society have
taught me a good many things. One of these things is that eccentricity
is the tacit acknowledgment of lack of individuality. A person with
native originality does not feel the necessity of forcing it down
people’s throats. The world finds it out soon enough, and likes it in
spite of its own even pace and sharply defined creeds. That is, always
provided the originality wears a certain conventional garb: if you would
conquer the world, you must blind and humor it by donning its own
portable envelope. Do you understand what I mean, my dear? You must not
startle people by doing eccentric things; you must not get the
reputation of being a _poseuse_—it is vulgar and tiresome. You must
simply be quietly different from everybody else. There is a fine but
decided line, my dear girl, between eccentricity and individuality, and
you must keep your lorgnette upon it. Otherwise, people will laugh at
you, just as they will be afraid of you if they discover that you are
clever. By the way, you must not forget that last point. The average
American woman is shallow, with an appearance of cleverness. You must be
clever, with an appearance of shallowness. To the ordinary observer the
effect is precisely the same.”

She rises to her feet and adjusts her bonnet. “It is growing late and I
must go. Think over what I have said. You have individuality enough; you
need not fear that people will fail to find it out; and you assuredly do
not look like any one else in New York.”

Hermia stands up and gives Mrs. Dykman’s tournure a little twist. “You
are a jewel, Aunt Frances. What should I do without you?”

Whereupon Mrs. Dykman looks pleased and goes home in Hermia’s brougham.

Hermia is fairly launched in society about the first of January, and
goes “everywhere” until the end of the season. It gets to be somewhat
monotonous toward the end, but, on the whole, she rather likes it. She
is what is called a success; that is to say, she becomes a professional
beauty, and is much written about in the society papers. She receives a
great many flowers, constant and assiduous attention at balls, and her
dancing is much admired. She gets plenty of compliments, and is much
stared upon at the opera and when driving in the park. Her reception
days and evenings are always crowded, and her entertainments—supervised
by Mrs. Dykman and a valuable young man named Richard Winston—are
pronounced without flaw, and receive special mention in the dailies.

And yet—Hermia rubbed her fingers thoughtfully up and down several of
the pictures as if to make their figures clearer—in her heart she did
not deem herself an unqualified success. Men ran after her—but because
she was the fashion, not because they loved her.

During that first winter and the ensuing season at Newport, she had a
great many proposals, but with two or three exceptions she believed them
to have been more or less interested. She did not seem to “take” with
men. This had angered her somewhat; she had expected to conquer the
world, and she did not like obstacles.

She had an odd and voluptuous beauty, she had brain and all the
advantages of unique and charming surroundings, and she flattered men
when she remembered that it was the thing to do. Was it because the men
felt rather than knew that they did not understand her? Or was it
because she did not understand them? She was keenly aware of her lack of
experience, and that her knowledge of men was chiefly derived from
books. And wherein she was right and wherein wrong she could not tell.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose experience will come with time,”
she thought, “and I certainly have not much to wish for—if—only—”

She clasped her hands behind her head and turned her mental eyeglass
upon the unused plate at the head of the gallery.

When the news of her good fortune had come, her heart’s first leap had
been toward the lover who awaited her in the world thrown at her feet.
That lover, that hero of her dream-world, she had not found.
Occasionally she had detected a minor characteristic in some man, and by
it been momentarily attracted. In no case had the characteristic been
supplemented by others; and after a long and eager search she had
resigned herself to the painful probability that ideals belonged to the
realm of the immaterial.

But, if she had sighed farewell to the faithful and much-enduring hero
of her years of adversity, she had by no means relinquished the idea of
loving. Few women had ever tried more determinedly and more persistently
to love, and few had met with less success. She had imagined that in a
world of men a woman’s only problem must be whom to choose. It had not
taken her a year to discover that it is easier to scratch the earth from
its molten heart than to love.

She sprang to her feet and walked up and down the room with swift,
impatient steps. Was she never to be happy? never to know the delights
of love, the warmth of a man’s caress, the sudden, tumultuous bursting
from their underground fastness of the mighty forces within her? Was she
to go through life without living her romance, without knowing the
sweet, keen joy of hidden love? Would she end by marrying a club-room
epigram flavored with absinthe, and settle down to a light or lurid
variation on Bessie’s simple little theme? She laughed aloud. Perhaps it
need not be stated that a year of fashionable life had increased her
contempt for matrimony.

Was Ogden Cryder the man? An author, yet a man of the world; a man of
intellect, yet with fascination and experience of women. It sounded
like! It sounded like! Oh! if he were! He might have flaws. He might be
the polaric opposite of her ideal. Let him! If he had brain and passion,
skill and sympathy, she would love him with every fiber of her being,
and thank him on her knees for compelling her so to do.

                              CHAPTER XI.

                          A TAILOR-MADE FATE.

Helen Simms was a young woman who had cantered gracefully under the
flick of society’s whip since the night of her début. Occasionally she
broke into a trot, and anon into a run. The speedier locomotion took
place on unworn by-paths; when on the broad highway she was a most
sedate representative of her riding-school. At times she had been
known—to a select few—to kick; and the kick had invariably occurred at
the crossing of the highway and the by-path, and just before she had
made up her mind to forsake the road for the hedges.

She had all the virtues of her kind. On Sunday mornings she attended St.
Thomas’s, and after service was over walked home with her favorite
youth, whom she patronizingly spoke of as her “infant.” In the afternoon
she entertained another “infant” or read a French novel. Nor was her
life entirely given over to frivolity. She belonged to the sewing-class
of her church, and like its other members fulfilled her mission as a
quotable example, if she pricked her fingers seldom; and once a week she
attended a Shakespeare “propounding.” She took a great deal of exercise,
skimmed through all the light literature of the day, including the
magazines, and even knew a little science, just enough to make the
occasional clever man she met think her a prodigy as she smiled up into
his face and murmured something about “the great body of force” or a
late experiment in telepathy.

She had a bright way of saying nothing, a cool, shrewd head, and an
endless stock of small-talk. Both sexes approved of her as a clever,
charming, well-regulated young woman—all of which she indisputably was.

Enthusiasm had long since been drilled out of her, but she had for
Hermia an attachment very sincere as far as it went—it may be added
that, if there had been more of Miss Simms, there would have been more
attachment. It is possible that Hermia, without her brilliant position,
would not have attracted the attention of Miss Simms, but it is only
just to Helen to say that the conditions affected her not a whit; she
was quite free from snobbery.

She liked Hermia because she could not understand her—much as she was
influenced by the sea in a storm, or by mountains with lightning darting
about their crests. Whenever she entered Hermia’s presence she always
felt as if the air had become suddenly fresher; and she liked new
sensations. She did not in the least resent the fact that she could not
understand Hermia, that her chosen friend was intellectually a
hemisphere beyond her, and in character infinitely more complex. She was
pleased at her own good taste, and quite generous enough to admire where
she could not emulate.

She was constantly amused at Hermia’s abiding and aggressive desire to
fall in love, but she was by no means unsympathetic. She would have
regarded an emotional tumult in her own being as a bore, but for Hermia
she thought it quite the most appropriate and advisable thing. Once in a
while, in a half-blind way, she came into momentary contact with the
supreme loneliness and craving of Hermia’s nature, and she invariably
responded with a sympathetic throb and a wish that the coming man would
not tarry so long.

She was so glad she had thought of Cryder. She honestly believed him to
be the one man of all men who could make the happiness of her friend;
and she entered the ranks of the Fates with the pleasurable suspicion
that she was the author of Hermia’s infinite good.

She surprised her father, the morning after her last interview with
Hermia, by coming down to breakfast. She was careful to let him finish
his roll to the last crumb and to read his paper to the acrid end. Then
she went over and put her finger-tips under his chin.

He glanced up with a groan. “What do you want now?” he demanded, looking
at her over his eye-glasses. His periodical pettings had made him
cynical.

“Nothing—for myself. Did you not say that some one had sent you tickets
for the next meeting of the Free Discussion?”

“Yes; but you can’t have them to give to some girl who would only go to
show herself, or to some boy whose thimbleful of gray matter would be
addled before the lecture was half over. I am going to hear that lecture
myself.”

“How perfectly enchanting! That is what I wished, yet dared not hope
for. And you are not only going yourself, but you are going to take
Hermia Suydam with you.”

“Oh!” Mr. Simms raised his eyebrows. “I am? Very well. I am sure I have
no objection. Miss Suydam is the finest girl in New York.”

“Of course she is, and she will make a sensation at the club; you will
be the envied of all men. And there is one thing else you are to do. As
soon as the exercises are over I want you to present Ogden Cryder to
her. I have particular reasons for wishing them to meet.”

“What are the reasons?”

“Never mind. You do as you are told, and ask no questions”—this in a
tone which extracted the sting, and was supplemented by a light kiss on
Mr. Simms’ smooth forehead.

“Very well, very well,” said her father, obediently, “she shall meet
him; remind me of it just before I leave. And now I must run. I have a
case in court at ten o’clock.”

He stood up and gave one of his handsome, iron-gray side-whiskers an
absent caress. He was not a particularly good-looking man, but he had a
keen, dark eye, and a square, heavy jaw, in both of which features lay
the secret of his great success in his profession. He was devoted to
Helen, and had allowed her, with only an occasional protest, to bring
him up. He could be brusque and severe in court, but in Helen’s hands he
was a wax ball into which she delighted to poke her dainty fingers.

Helen wrote a note to Hermia, and he took it with him to send by an
unwinged Mercury.

On Friday morning Helen went over to Second Avenue to make sure that her
friend had not changed her mind. She found Hermia in her boudoir, with
one of Cryder’s books in her hand and another on a table beside her.

“What do you think of him?” demanded Miss Simms, somewhat anxiously, as
she adjusted her steel-bound self in a pile of cushions—straight-backed
chairs in this room there were none.

Hermia shrugged her shoulders: “A decorous seasoning of passion; a
clear, delicate gravy of sentiment; a pinch of pathos; a garnish of
analysis; and a solid roast of dialect. Woe is me!—I have read two
whole volumes; and I pray that I may like the author better than his
books. But he is clever; there is no denying that!”

“Oh, horribly clever! What are you going to wear, to-night?”

“That dark-green velvet I showed you the other day.”

“Lovely! And it will match your eyes to a shade. You will look, as
usual, as if you had just stepped out of an old picture. Mr. Cryder will
put you in a book.”

“If he does I shall be a modern picture, not an old one. That man could
not write a tale of fifty years ago.”

“So much the better for you! What you want is to fall in love with a
modern man, and let him teach you that the mediæval was a great animal,
who thought of nothing but what he ate and drank. I do not claim that
the species is extinct; but, at least, in these days we have a choice.”

                              CHAPTER XII.

                      THE CLUB OF FREE DISCUSSION.

Hermia looked at her reflection that evening with a smile. The shadowed
emerald of her velvet gown made her hair glow like vibrant flame. The
color wandered through her cheeks and emptied itself into her lips. Her
eyes were as green as the limpid floor of ocean-hollowed caverns. Across
her ivory-white shoulder swept a curving blue vein, thin as an infant’s
lash, and on the rise of her right breast were three little moles, each
marking the corner of a tiny triangle.

Mr. Simms called for her promptly, and when they arrived at the
club-rooms they strolled about looking at the pictures and the people
until the exercises began. There were many literary and artistic
celebrities present, all of whom looked much like ordinary and well-bred
people; but to Hermia there was a luminous halo about each. It was her
first experience in the literary world, and she felt as if she had
entered the atmosphere of a dream. It was one of her few satisfactory
experiments. She was much stared at; everybody knew her by reputation if
not by sight; and a number of men asked to be presented.

Among them was Mr. Overton, the editor who had published her poem in his
magazine. She changed color as he came up, but his manner at once
assured her that she was not recognized: he would have vindicated his
fraternity, indeed, had he been keen-sighted enough to recognize in this
triumphant, radiant creature the plain, ill-dressed, stooping girl with
whom he had talked for half an hour at the close of a winter’s day two
years before. Hermia, of course, no longer wrote; life offered her too
many other distractions.

Mr. Overton suggested that they should go into the lecture-room and
secure good seats. He found them chairs and took one beside Hermia.

“Ogden Cryder gives the address to-night,” he said, after he had
satisfied Hermia’s curiosity in regard to the names of a half-dozen
people. “Do you like his books?”

“Fairly. Do you?”

Mr. Overton laughed. “That is rather a direct question, considering that
I print one of his stories about every six months.”

“Oh, you might not like them. You might publish them out of tender
regard for the demands of your readers.”

Mr. Overton had a characteristic American face, thin, nervous, shrewd,
pleasant. He gave Hermia a smile of unwonted frankness. “I will confide
to you, Miss Suydam, that such is the case with about two-thirds I
publish. I thank Heaven that I do not have to read a magazine as well as
publish it. I have an associate editor who sits with his finger on the
pulse of the public, and relieves me of much vexation of spirit.”

“But tell me what you think of Mr. Cryder.”

Mr. Overton raised his eyebrows. “He is indisputably the best dialect
writer we have, and he is a charming exponent of surface passions.
Whether he would drown if he plunged below the surface is a question; at
all events he might become improper, and morality pays in this magazine
era. There he is now; no doubt we shall have a delightful address.”

Hermia turned her head quickly, but Cryder had taken a chair at the foot
of the rostrum, and there were many heads between her own and his. A
moment later, however, the president of the club made the preliminary
remarks, and then gave place to Cryder.

Hermia watched him breathlessly as he ascended the steps and stood
beside the table, waiting for the hearty welcome to subside. Was it _he_
at last? He was certainly good to look at; she had never seen more
charming eyes—clear golden-hazel, half melancholy, wholly intelligent.
His small, well-shaped head was thickly covered with short, soft,
gold-brown hair; the delicate, aristocratic features were as finely cut
as those on an intaglio; and the thin, curved lips were shaded by a
small mustache. His figure, tall, light, graceful, had a certain
vibrating activity even in repose. His hand was white and tapering as
that of a woman, and his auditors were given opportunity to appreciate
it.

The subject of the lecture was “The Dialect Element in American
Fiction,” and Mr. Cryder did it justice in a clear, ringing, musical
voice. He very properly remarked that it was the proud boast of America
that no other country, ancient or modern, could present such an array of
famous dialects, consequently no other country had ever had such
infinite variety in her literature. He would say nothing of the several
hundred dialects as yet awaiting the Columbus-pen of genius; he would
merely speak of those nine already discovered and immortalized—the
Negro, the Yankee, the Southern, the Creole, the Tennessee Mountain, the
Cow-boy, the Bret Harte Miner, the Hoosier, and the Chinese. Each of
these, although springing from one bosom, namely, that of the Great
American People, had as distinct an individuality as if the product of
an isolated planet. Such a feature was unique in the history of any
country or any time. The various _patois_ of the French, the
provincialisms of the English, the barbarisms of the Scotch, the brogue
of the Irish, were but so many bad and inconsequent variations upon an
original theme. Reflect, therefore, upon the immense importance of
photographing and preserving American neologies for the benefit of
posterity! In the course of time would inevitably come the homogeneity
of the human race; the negro, for instance, would pervade every corner
of the civilized earth, and his identity become hopelessly entangled
with that of his equally de-individualized blonde brother. His dialect
would be a forgotten art! Contemporaries would have no knowledge of it
save through the painstaking artists of their ancestors’ time. Reflect,
then, upon the heavy responsibility which lay upon the shoulders of the
author of to-day. Picture what must be the condition of his conscience
at the end of his record if he has failed to do his duty by the negro
dialect! Picture the reproaches of future generations if they should be
left ignorant of the unique vernacular of their grandfathers’ serfs!
(Applause.) He did not lay such stress upon the superior importance of
the negro dialect because he had enrolled himself among its faulty
exponents; he had taken his place in its ranks _because_ of that
superior importance. Nevertheless, he was by no means blind to the
virtues of those other eight delightful strings in the Great National
Instrument. No one enjoyed more than he the liquid and incomprehensible
softness of the Creole, the penetrating, nasonic strength of the Yankee,
the delicious independence of the Hoosier, the pine-sweet, redwood-calm
transcriptions of the prose-laureate of the West. He loved them all, and
he gloried in the literary monument of which they were the separate
stones.

To do Mr. Cryder’s oration justice would be a feat which no modest
novelist would attempt. Those who would read that memorable speech in
its entirety and its purity will find it in the archives of the club, in
the sixth volume of the Sessional Records. After reading brief and pithy
extracts from the nine most famous dialect stories of the day, he sat
down with the applause of approval in his ears.

Hermia turned to Mr. Overton: “He was guying, I suppose,” she said.

Mr. Overton stared. “Certainly not,” he said, severely. “The value of
precisely rendered dialect is incalculable.”

Hermia, quite snubbed, said no more; and in a few moments, Mr. Duncan, a
shrewd, humorous-looking little Scotchman, rose to reply.

“I have nothing whatever to say in contradiction to Mr. Cryder’s remarks
regarding the value of dialect,” he said, looking about with a bland,
deprecating smile. “On the contrary, I have yet another word to add in
its favor. I hold that the value of dialect to the American author has
never yet been estimated. When a story has a lot of dialect, you never
discover that it hasn’t anything else. (Laughter, and a surprised frown
from Cryder.) Furthermore, as America is too young to have an
imagination, the dialect is an admirable and original substitute for
plot and situations.” (Laughter and mutterings; also a scowl from
Cryder.) “Again, there is nothing so difficult as the handling of modern
English: it is a far speedier and easier road to fame to manipulate a
dialect familiar to only an insignificant section of our glorious sixty
millions.” (“Hear, hear!” from a pair of feminine lips, and many
sympathetic glances at Cryder’s flashing eyes.) “Yet again, the common
fault found with our (I wish it understood that I speak always from the
standpoint of the country which I have adopted)—with our writers is
lack of passion. Now, nobody can be expected to be passionate when
groaning in the iron stays of dialect. Dialect is bit and curb to the
emotions, and it is only an American who is sharp enough to perceive the
fact and make the most of it. What is more, pathos sounds much better in
dialect than in cold, bald English, just as impropriety sounds better in
French, and love-making in Spanish. Contrast, for instance, the relative
pathos of such sentences as these—the throbbing sadness of the one, the
harsh bathos of the other: ‘I done lubbed you, Sally!’ ‘I loved you,
Maria.’” (Laughter from one side of the house; ominous silence from the
other.) “Truly, ’tis in the setting the jewel shines. I would like to
say, in conclusion,” he went on, imperturbably, “that Mr. Cryder, in his
enumeration of American neologics has omitted one as important and
distinctive as any in his category, namely, that of fashionable society.
In the virility, the variety, and the amplitude of her slang, America is
England’s most formidable rival.”

He left the platform amidst limited applause, and then Mr. Cryder’s
pent-up wrath burst forth, and he denounced in scathing terms and
stinging epigrams the foreigner who had proved himself incapable of
appreciating one of his country’s most remarkable developments, and
attempted to satirize it from his petty point of view.

The auditors were relieved when the exercises were over and the club’s
disruption postponed, and, betaking themselves to the supper-room,
dismissed both lecture and reply from their minds.

Hermia was standing by one of the tables talking to three or four men,
when Mr. Simms brought up Cryder and introduced him. Cryder looked
absent and somewhat annoyed. He was evidently not in a mood to be
impressed by feminine loveliness. At the end of a few moments Hermia
wisely let him go, although with a renewed sense of the general flatness
of life. At the same time she was somewhat amused, and sensible enough
to know that it could not have been otherwise.

                             CHAPTER XIII.

                             OGDEN CRYDER.

Only the nineteenth century could have evolved Cryder. The infancy of a
democratic civilization produces giants. The giants build hot-houses,
and a flower, delicate, beautiful, exquisitely perfumed, but fragile,
light as bubbles of blown glass, is the result. America is now doing the
best she can with her hot-house flora. She has no great men, but the
flora is wondrous fine. Outside the forcing-houses is a wilderness of
weeds in which lies her future’s hope.

Cryder would have taken the medal at an orchid show. He was light as a
summer breeze, yet as stimulating and fresh. He was daintily humorous,
yet seldom witty enough to excite envy. His conversation was like the
song of a lark, clear, brilliant, trilling, with never a bass note to
disturb the harmony. In a quick, keen, flashing way, he had an exact
knowledge of the salient world. He was artistic to his finger-tips, and
preferred an aquarelle to an oil. He had loved many times and hoped to
love as many more, and his love was always that of an æsthete. For
coarse passions he had a cold contempt. He had broken many roses from
their stems, but more because he thought an herbarium looked better when
filled than because he enjoyed the plucking of the flower. Probably it
is needless to observe that he never drank more than a pint bottle of
champagne, and that he never over-ate.

The day after his address at the club he was walking down the avenue
when he met Helen Simms. He turned back with her, and finished the
afternoon in her drawing-room.

Helen did not give him so much of her time without an object. She cared
little for Cryder, and few of her doings were unprompted by motive; life
was too brief.

“You met Miss Suydam last night, did you not?” she asked, when Cryder
was comfortably established in an easy-chair near the fire.

“Yes, for a moment. I was a little put out by Duncan’s attack on me, and
only stayed for a few words. I needed the solace of a cigarette.”

“I read the account of the affair in this morning’s papers. Mr. Duncan’s
remarks were purely foolish, as he must have realized when he saw them
in print. However, you have the consolation of knowing that after your
reply he will not be likely to attack you again. But I am glad you met
Miss Suydam. She will interest you as a study. She is all the rage at
present. Every other man in town is in love with her.”

Cryder turned to her with some interest in his eyes. “Is she so very
fascinating? She is certainly handsome—yes—stylishly handsome.”

“Oh, she is a beauty! Such a unique type! And she is quite as different
from other people herself. That is her great trouble. She is called a
terrible flirt, but it is the men’s fault, not hers. She is always
looking for something, and can never find it.”

“Sad and strange! Is she a young woman with yearnings?”

“Not at all. She is the most sensible woman I know. She is merely
unusually clever, consequently she is very lonely. I do not believe any
man will ever satisfy her. She is like the sleeping princess in the
enchanted castle. She shuts herself up in that wonderful house of hers
and dreams of the lover who never comes.”

“You touch my fancy; and what do you mean by her wonderful house?”

“That house would delight your author’s soul. Every room is the
materialization of a dream, as Hermia would say;” and she gave him an
account of her friend’s inartistic but original abode.

Cryder listened with much interest. Romance was a dead-letter to him,
but he was alive to the picturesque. He concluded that it would be quite
enchanting to make love to a woman in a feudal library or an Indian
jungle, and more than satisfactory to awaken the sleeping beauty. It
would be a charming episode for his present brief stay in New York,
altogether quite the choicest specimen in his herbarium. What she was
waiting for was a combination of brain and skill.

“You have made me want to know her,” he said, “but, of course, she did
not ask me to call.”

“I will take you to see her some time.”

“That is very good of you. Some afternoon when you have nothing better
to do.”

“Come on Monday. That is her day. You won’t have much chance to talk to
her, but then you can go again as soon as you like.”

Cryder took out his note-book and penciled a memorandum, “On Monday,
then.”

Helen concluded that if she had been born a man she would have elected
diplomacy as a career.

                              CHAPTER XIV.

                       IN A METROPOLITAN JUNGLE.

Cryder called on Hermia Monday afternoon. Although the room was full he
had a few words with her, and she thought him very charming.

“I want to talk to you,” he said. “I have wanted to talk to you ever
since I met you, but I was in such a bad humor the other night that I
would not inflict you. Are you ever alone? Cannot I have an hour or two
some evening?”

Hermia smiled. “Come on Thursday evening. I have not another evening
until late next week.”

“I have an engagement, but I will break it. And will you think me
impertinent if I ask you to show me all over this wonderful house? There
is nothing like it in Europe.”

“I shall be delighted,” said Hermia, enthusiastically. “So few people
appreciate it.”

“It is good of you to think I can. But in thought I always dwell in the
past (he hated the past), and although my work is realistic, because
realism is of more value to literature, yet my nature is essentially a
romantic one. Only, one so seldom acknowledges romance, one is so afraid
of being laughed at.”

He watched her as he spoke, and saw a sudden gleam come into her eyes. A
year’s training and her own native cleverness had taught Hermia not to
believe all that men said to her, but Cryder had struck a well-loved
chord. And she had no wish to be skeptical.

On Thursday evening Hermia arrayed herself with great care. After much
deliberation she donned a gown which as yet she had never worn. It was
of tan-gold velvet, with irregular appliqués of dark-brown plush. Down
the front was a curious design of gold braid and deep-green brilliants.

She received Cryder in the conservatory. It had but recently been
completed, and looked enough like a jungle to deceive the most
suspicious of tigers. The green tiles of the floor were painted with a
rank growth of grasses and ferns. Through the palms and tropical shrubs
that crowded the conservatory glared the wild beasts of far-off jungles,
marvelously stuffed and poised. The walls were forgotten behind a
tapestry of reeds and birds of the Orient. In one corner was a fountain,
simulating a pool, and on its surface floated the pink, fragrant lilies
that lie on eastern lakes. Few people had seen this jungle—before its
completion, Hermia had learned that it was dangerous to test her city’s
patience too far.

Hermia sat down on a bank and waited for the curtain to rise. She felt
the humor of the situation, but she knew that the effect was good. A few
moments later Cryder came in and was charmed. He had the same remote
yearning for the barbaric that the small, blonde actor has for the part
of the heavy villain. As he walked down the jungle toward Hermia, he
felt that he gave this Eastern ideal its completing touch.

Hermia held up her hand. “I would not have dared do this for any one but
you,” she said, “but you will understand.”

“For Heaven’s sake do not apologize!” exclaimed Cryder. He raised her
hand to his lips and sat down on the bank beside her. “There was never
anything so enchanting in real life. And you—you are Cleopatra in your
tiger-hood.”

“I was Semiramis before,” said Hermia, indifferently. She turned her
head and gave him a meditative glance. “Do you know,” she said, with an
instinct of coquetry rare to her, “I cannot understand your being a
realistic author.”

He was somewhat taken aback, but he replied promptly: “That is a mere
accident. To tell you the truth, I care no more for realism than I do
for idealism, and dialect is a frightful bore. I will tell you what I
have told no one else. Now that my position is established, my name
made, I am going to leave dialect to those who can do no better, and
write a great romantic novel.”

Hermia thought his last remark a trifle conceited, but she forgave it
for the sake of its sentiment. “I shall like that,” she said, “and be
romantic without sensationalism. Tell me the plot of your book.”

“It is too vague to formulate, but you and your house are to be its
inspiration. I have wanted to meet a woman like you; the study will be
an education. Tell me of your life. You have not always been as you are
now?”

Hermia gave him a startled glance. “What do you mean?” she demanded.

“I mean that you have two personalities, an actual and an assumed. You
are playing a part.”

Hermia gave him a fierce glance from beneath her black brows. “You know
that until a year ago I was poor and obscure, and you are rude enough to
remind me that I play the part of _grande dame_ very badly,” she
exclaimed.

“I beg your pardon,” said Cryder, quickly, “I knew nothing of the kind.
You might have spent the last ten years in a fashionable boarding-school
for all I have heard to the contrary. But I repeat what I said. I
received two impressions the night we met. One was that you were at war
with something or somebody; the other that you had a double personality,
and that of one the world had no suspicion. It is either that you have a
past, or that you are at present in conditions entirely new and
consequently unfamiliar. I believe it is the latter. You do not look
like a woman who has _lived_. There is just one thing wanting to make
your face the most remarkable I have seen; but until it gets that it
will be like a grand painting whose central figure has been left as the
last work of the artist.”

Hermia leaned her elbow on her knee and covered her face with her hand.
She experienced the most pleasurable sensation she had ever known. This
was the first man who had shown the faintest insight into her
contradictory personality and complicated nature. For the moment she
forgot where she was, and she gave a little sigh which brought the blood
to her face. To love would not be so difficult as she had imagined.

“What is it?” asked Cryder, gently. He had been watching her covertly.
“I want to amend something I said a moment ago. You have not lived in
fact but you have in imagination, and the men your fancy has created
have made those of actual, prosaic life appear tame and colorless.”

Hermia’s heart gave a bound. She turned to him with shining eyes. “How
do you know that?” she murmured.

“Is it not true?”

“Yes,” she said, helplessly, “it is true.”

“Then I will tell you how I know. Because I have lived half my natural
life with the population of my brain, and dream-people know one another.
Ours have met and shaken hands while we have been exchanging
platitudes.”

“That is very pretty,” said Hermia; “I hope their estates border upon
each other, and that their chosen landscape is the same, for
dream-people may have their antipathies, like the inhabitants of the
visible world. Because we have taken out our title-deeds in dream-land,
it does not follow that our tenants live in harmony.”

“It would not—except that we both instinctively know that there has not
been even border warfare. There have been marriage and inter-marriage;
the princes of my reigning house have demanded in state——”

Hermia interrupted him harshly: “There is no marriage or giving in
marriage in my kingdom. I hate the word! Are you very much shocked?”

Cryder smiled. “No,” he said, “one is surprised sometimes to hear one’s
own dearest theories in the mouth of another, but not shocked. It only
needed that to make you the one woman I have wanted to know. You have
that rarest gift among women—a catholic mind. And it does not spring
from immorality or vulgar love of excitement—you are simply brave and
original.”

Hermia leaned forward, her pupils dilating until her eyes looked like
rings of marsh about lakes of ink. “You know that—you understand that?”
she whispered, breathlessly.

Cryder looked her full in the eyes. “Yes,” he said, “and no one ever did
before.”

His audacity had the desired effect. Men were always a little afraid of
Hermia. She looked at him without speaking—a long gaze which he
returned. He was certainly most attractive, although in quite a
different way from any man born of her imaginings. Perhaps, however,
that gave him the charm of novelty. He was almost magnetic; he almost
thrilled her—not quite, but that would come later. She had received so
many impressions this evening that no one could master her. Yes, she was
sure she was going to love him.

“No,” she said, at last, “no one ever did.”

“You have been loved in a great many ways,” Cryder went on; “for your
beauty, which appeals to the senses of men, yet which at the same time
frightens them, because of the tragic element which is as apparent as
the passionate; for your romantic surroundings, which appeal to their
sentiment; for the glamour which envelops you as one of the most
sought-after women in New York; for your intellect; and for your
incomprehensibility to the average mind, which has the fascination of
mystery. But I doubt if any man has ever known or cared whether you have
a psychic side. If I fall in love with you, I shall love your soul,
primarily. Passion is merely the expression of spiritual exaltation.
Independently of the latter it is base. A woman of your strong psychical
nature could never forget the soul for the body—not for a moment.”

“That is very beautiful,” murmured Hermia, dreamily. “Can it be? And are
you sure that I have any spirituality?”

“If you do not know it, it is because you have never loved and never
been loved in the right way.” He sprang suddenly to his feet, and then,
before she could answer, he was gone.

She sank her elbow into a cushion and leaned her cheek on her palm.
Cryder had touched her sensuous nature by the artistic novelty of his
wooing—her ideal had been brutal and direct. She had always imagined
she should like that best, but this was a new idea and very charming. It
appealed to the poetic element in her. The poetic vase tossed aloft the
spray of refined passion and rode contemptuously over the undertow of
sensuality. That was as it should be.

She went up-stairs, and, after she was in bed, thought for a long time.
She slept until late the next day, and in the afternoon paid a number of
calls. In the temporary seclusion of her carriage she took pleasure in
assuring herself that Cryder was uppermost in her mind.

                              CHAPTER XV.

                           A CLEVER TRIFLER.

The next afternoon Cryder came again. Hermia received him this time in
the hall which, with its Gothic roof, its pictured windows, its walls
ribbed and dark, and its organ, looked like a cathedral. As she came
down the broad staircase, in a gown that made her look as if she had
stepped from some old French canvas, Cryder stood gazing at her for a
moment, then without a word sat down before the organ and began to play.
The organ needs only a skillful hand; its own rich, sonorous tones pour
soul through cold, calm fingers. Cryder played Tristan’s Death Song, and
Hermia sank into a chair and felt that naught existed but glory of color
and surge of sound.

Cryder played but a short time—he never did anything too long—then
went over and sat beside her. He made her talk about herself, and
managed to extract much of her past. He learned nothing, however, of her
former lack of beauty. Then he entertained her brilliantly for an hour
with accounts of celebrated people he had met.

After he had gone she felt a vague sense of disappointment; he had not
touched upon co-personal topics for a moment. The sense of
disappointment grew and deepened, and then she gave a sudden start and
smiled. She could not feel disappointment were she not deeply
interested. Was this the suffering, the restlessness, which were said to
be a part of love? Surely! She was pained that he could talk lightly
upon indifferent subjects, and apparently quite forget the sympathy
which existed between them. The pain and the chagrin might not be very
acute, but they were forewarnings of intenser suffering to come. Of
course she wanted to suffer. All women do until the suffering comes.
After that they do not go out of their way to look for it.

She went up-stairs and sat down before the fire in her boudoir. It was
very delightful to fall in love with a man as mentally agreeable as
Cryder. He would always entertain her. She would never be bored! The
intervals between love-making would never drag; she had heard that they
were sometimes trying. And then the pictures between those framing
intervals—when the fierce, hot tide of passion within her would leap
like a tidal wave, lashed into might by the convulsion at its heart. And
Cryder! To see the tiger in the man fling off its shackles and look
through the calm brown of his eyes! (Like all girls, Hermia believed
that every man had a tiger chained up inside him, no matter how cold he
might be exteriorly.) What a triumph to break down that cool
self-control!

Her maid brought her a cup of tea and she drank it; then, resting her
elbows on her knees leaned her chin on her locked fingers. There were
some things she did not like about Cryder. He lacked literary
conscience, and she doubted if he had much of any sort. Her high ideals
still clung to her; but perhaps this was her mission in life—to remold
Cryder. A man is always much under the influence of the woman who gives
him his happiness; she would have a grand opportunity to make him
better. When the end came, as of course it would—she was no longer such
a fool as to imagine that love lasted forever—he should have much to
thank her for.

When a woman thinks she loves a man, she dreams of making him better.
When she really loves him, she would have him share his virtues with the
saints. She loves his faults and encourages them; she glories in the
thought that his personality is strong enough to make her indifferent to
defects. This lesson, however, Hermia had yet to learn; but she was
pleased with the idea of putting the spirituality of which Cryder had
accused her to some practical use. She had not a very clear idea what
spirituality meant, but she thought she was learning.

                              CHAPTER XVI.

                           A LITERARY DINNER.

A few weeks later Hermia gave a dinner to Cryder. The other guests were
Mr. Overton, Mr. Simms, Alan Emmet, a young author who combined the
literary and the sensational in a manner which gave him much notoriety,
Mr. Langley, Cryder’s publisher, and Ralph Embury, a noted young
journalist. Helen Simms was there to chatter serious thought to ambush,
and Miss Starbruck, primly alert, and waiting to be shocked.

Poor Miss Starbruck! She drifted like a gray shadow through Hermia’s
rooms, and longed for her modest cottage at Nantucket. She had been an
active member of sewing-circles and reading-clubs, and the farther down
her past’s perspective did this unexciting environment retreat, the
oftener did she sigh as she contrasted its cool shadows with the hot
glare into which fate’s caprice had suddenly cast her. But Hermia was
considerate—if Miss Starbruck appeared at her niece’s dinners and
receptions, and drove with her occasionally, she could sit up in her
room and dream of Nantucket and bewail duty as much as she pleased. Mrs.
Dykman was chaperon-in-chief.

Hermia wore a gown of white velvet, simply made, and fitting in
wrinkleless perfection the free lines and curves of her full, lithe
figure. About her throat hung a silver chain of Roman workmanship, and
around her waist a girdle of similar but heavier links. The wiry maze of
her hair outshone the diamond pins that confined it.

Miss Simms wore a dinner-gown of black tulle and a profusion of
chrysanthemums. Her hair was as sleek as a mole.

The conversation was naturally more or less literary, and Hermia drew
out her ambitious guests with a good deal of skill. It was hard to curb
them when they were started, but she managed to make each feel that he
had had an opportunity to shine. Some day, when her personal interest in
life had ceased, she intended to have a _salon_, and this was a pleasant
foretaste. She even let Mr. Simms tell a few anecdotes, but after the
third gently suppressed him.

It is not easy to check the anecdotal impulse, and both Mr. Langley and
Mr. Overton were reminiscent. The former told a tale of a young man who
had brought him a manuscript ten years before, and never returned to ask
its destiny.

“He looked delicate, and I imagine he died of consumption,” said the
great publisher, placidly, as he discussed his pâté. “At all events I
have never heard from him since. Our readers unanimously advised us not
to publish the manuscript. It was entirely out of our line, and would
have involved great risk. We put it aside and forgot all about it. The
other day I happened to meet one of the readers through whose hands it
passed—he has not been with us for some years—and he asked me why I
did not publish the rejected book. ‘That sort of thing has become
fashionable now,’ he said, ‘and you would make money out of it.’ I
merely mention this as an illustration of how fashion changes in
literature as in everything else.”

“You publishers are awful cowards,” said Emmet, in his drawling tones;
“you are so afraid of anything new that all authors you introduce are
branded Prophets of the Commonplace.”

Mr. Langley’s blonde, pleasant little face took a warmer hue, and he
answered somewhat testily: “The publisher was brave, indeed, who
presented you to the public, Mr. Emmet.”

In spite of the general laugh, Emmet replied imperturbably: “The best
advertisement I had, and the only one which I myself inserted, was that
‘Mrs. Bleeker’ had been refused by every conservative house in New York.
My reward is that I have the reputation instead of the firm.”

“No; the firm hasn’t any left—that’s a fact,” retorted Mr. Langley; and
Emmet turned to Helen with a pout on his boyish face.

“Do my books shock you?” he asked her.

Helen smiled. “No, they do not,” she said, briefly. “I quite adore them.
I don’t always acknowledge having read them, but I don’t mind telling
you, considering that you are the author.”

“Oh, some women assure me that nothing would induce them to read my
books. I am glad you have the courage of your opinions. I scorn women
who have not, and I will not talk to a girl unless I can do so as freely
as to a man.”

“Oh, I am not a prude,” said Helen, lightly. “I only draw the line at
positive indecency, and you are quite vague enough. But do you always
talk to men on improper subjects?”

“Oh—no; I merely meant that I like to feel the same lack of restraint
with women as with men. It is a bore to call up every thought for
inspection before you utter it.”

“Yes,” said Helen; “you wouldn’t talk at all, you would only inspect.”

“Speaking of mysterious disappearances,” broke in Embury’s voice, “what
has become of that girl who used to give us such bucketfuls of soulful
lava?—the one who signed herself ‘Quirus’?”

Mr. Overton laughed, and much to Hermia’s relief every one turned to
him. “She brought me that poem I published, herself, and I came near
laughing outright once or twice. I have seen few plainer women; there
was such a general dinginess about her. At the same time there was a
certain magnetism which, I imagine, would have been pronounced had she
been a stronger woman. But I should not be surprised to hear that she
had died of consumption.”

“Is it possible?” said Embury. “Her work was strong, however. Why didn’t
you take her in hand and bring her up in the way she should go?”

“My dear Embury, life is too short. That girl was all wrong. She worked
her syllogisms backward, so to speak. Her intellect was molten with the
heat of her imagination, and stunted with the narrowness of her
experience. She reasoned from effect to cause. Her characters, instead
of being the carefully considered products of environment and heredity,
were always altered or distorted to suit some dramatic event. Intellect
without experience of the heart and of life is responsible for more
errors than innate viciousness which is controlled by worldly wisdom, or
natural folly which is clothed in the gown of accumulated knowledge. I
have seen so many clever writers go to pieces,” he added, regarding his
empty plate with a sigh; “they lie so. They have no conscience whatever,
and they are too clever to see it.”

“Then how can they help themselves?” asked Hermia, with a puzzled look.

“They had better wait until they can.”

Hermia did not care to pursue the subject, and saw, moreover, that
Embury was waiting to be heard. “What would journalism do if no one knew
how to lie?” she asked him, with a smile, and was somewhat surprised
when every man at the table except Embury laughed aloud.

Embury colored, but replied promptly: “It would probably die for want of
patronage.”

“You are right, Embury,” said Cryder. “You could not have found a more
appreciative field for your talents.”

Embury looked at him reproachfully, and Cryder continued: “I never could