"Mr. Graves is out there and wants to see you particular, Mr. Hart.
Shall I show him into your office?"

"Ask him to wait," the young architect ordered.

After he had smoked and stared for a few moments longer he turned to
Cook.

"What did we specify those I-beams for the Canostota?  Were they
forty-twos or sixties?"

Without raising his hand from the minute lines of the linen sheet, the
draughtsman grunted:--

"Don't remember just what.  Weren't forty-twos.  Nothing less than
sixties ever got out of this office, I guess.  May be eighties.  What's
the matter?"

"Um," the architect reflected, knocking his cigarette against the
table.  "It makes a difference in the sizes what make they are, doesn't
it?"

"It don't make any difference about the weights!"  And the draughtsman
turned to his linen sheet with a shrug of the shoulders that said, "You
ought to know that much by this time!"

The architect continued to stare out of the murky window.

"When is Harmon coming back?"

"Ed lives out his way, and he says it's a long-term typhoid.  You can't
tell when he'll be back."

"Has the old man wired anything new about his plans?"

"You'll have to ask Miss Bellows.  I haven't heard anything."

"He said he'd be here next Wednesday or Thursday at the latest, didn't
he?"

The draughtsman stared hard at Hart, wondering what was in the man's
mind.  But he made no answer to the last remark, and presently the
architect sauntered to the next window.

As Jackson well knew, Graves was waiting to close that arrangement
which he had proposed for building an apartment house.  The architect
had intended to look up the Canostota specifications before he went
further with Graves, but he had been distracted by other matters, and
had thought nothing more about the troublesome I-beams until this
morning.

Jackson Hart was not given to undue speculation over matters of
conduct.  He had a serviceable code of business morals, which hitherto
had met all the demands of his experience.  He called this code
"professional etiquette."  In this case he was not clear how the code
should be applied.  The Canostota was not his affair.  It was only by
the merest accident that he had been sent there that day to supervise
the electricians, and had seen that drill-hole, which had led him to
question the thickness of the I-beams, and he might very well have been
mistaken about them.  If there were anything wrong with them, at any
rate, it was Wright's business to see that the contractor was properly
watched when the steel work was being run through the mill.  And he did
not feel any special sense of obligation toward his employer, who had
never displayed any great confidence in him.

He wanted the contractor's commission now more than ever, with his
engagement to Helen freshly pricking him to look for bread and butter;
wanted it all the more because any thought of fighting his uncle's will
had gone when Helen had accepted him.  It was now clearly his business
to provide for his future as vigorously as he could....

When he rang for the stenographer and told her to show Graves into his
office, he had made up his mind.  Closing his door, he turned and
looked into the contractor's heavy face with an air of alert
determination.  He was about to play his own game for the first time,
and he felt the man's excitement of it!

The two remained shut up in the architect's cubby-hole for over an
hour.  When Cook had returned from the restaurant in the basement where
he lunched, and the other men had taken their hats and coats from the
lockers, Hart stepped out of his office and walked across the room to
Cook's table.  He spread before the draughtsman a fresh sepia sketch,
the water scarcely dried on it.  It was the front elevation for a
house, such a one as is described impressively in the newspapers as
"Mr. So-and-So's handsome country residence."

"Now, that's what I call a peach!" Cook whistled through his closed
teeth, squinting at the sketch admiringly.  "Nothing like that
residence has come out of this office for a good long time.  The old
man don't favor houses as a rule.  They're too fussy.  Is this for some
magnate?"

"This isn't done for the firm," Jackson answered quickly.

"Oh!"  Cook received the news with evident disappointment.  "Just a
fancy sketch?"

"Not for a minute!  This is my own business.  It's for a Mrs.
Phillips--her country house at Forest Park."

Cook looked again at the elevation of the large house with admiring
eyes.  If he had ever penetrated beyond the confines of Cook County in
the state of Illinois, he might have wondered less at Hart's creation.
But he was not familiar with the Loire châteaux, even in photographs,
for Wright's tastes happened to be early English.

"So you're going to shake us?" Cook asked regretfully.

"Just as soon as I can have a word with Mr. Wright.  This isn't the
only job I have on hand."

"Is that so?  Well, you're in luck, sure enough."

"Don't you want to come in?" Hart asked abruptly.  "I shall want a good
practical man.  How would you like to run the new office?"

Cook's manner froze unexpectedly into caution.

"Oh, I don't know.  It's pretty good up here looking after Wright's
business."

Hart picked up his sketch and turned away.

"I thought you might like the chance.  Some of the men I knew in Paris
may join me a little later, and I shan't have much trouble in making up
a good team."

Then he went out to his luncheon, and when he returned, he shut himself
up in his box, stalking by Cook's desk without a word.  When he came
forth again the day's work was over, and the office force had left.
Cook was still dawdling over his table.

"Say, Hart!" he called out to the architect.  "I don't want you to have
the wrong idea about my refusing that offer of yours.  I don't mind
letting you know that I ain't fixed like most of the boys.  I've got a
family to look after, my mother and sister and two kid brothers.  It
isn't easy for us to pull along on my pay, and I can't afford to take
any chances."

"Who's asking you to take chances, Cookie?" Hart answered, mollified at
once.  "Perhaps you might do pretty well by yourself."

"You see," Cook explained further, "my sister's being educated to
teach, but she's got two years more at the Normal.  And Will's just
begun high school.  Ed's the only earner besides myself in the whole
bunch, and what he gets don't count."

Thereupon the architect sat down on the edge of the draughting-table in
friendly fashion and talked freely of his plans.  He hinted at the work
for Graves and at his hopes of a large commission from some railroad.

"I have ten thousand dollars in the bank, anyway.  That will keep the
office going some time.  And I don't mind telling you that I have
something at stake, too," he added in a burst of confidence.  "I am
going to be married."

Cook grinned sympathetically over the news.  It pleased him vastly to
be told of Hart's engagement in this confidential way.  After some
further talk the matter of the new office was arranged between them
then and there.  Cook agreed to look into a building that had just
pushed its head among the skyscrapers near the Maramanoc, to see if
there was anything left in the top story that would answer their
purposes.  As they were leaving the office, Hart stopped, exclaiming
suddenly:--

"I've got to telephone!  Don't wait."

"That's always the way," the draughtsman replied.  "You'll be
telephoning most of the time, now, I expect!"

The architect did not telephone to Helen Spellman, however.  He called
up his cousin's office to tell Wheeler that he had concluded not to
contest the will.

"And, Everett," he said frankly, "I guess I have made rather an ass of
myself, telling you I was going to kick up a row.  I hope you won't say
anything about it."

The lawyer accepted the information without remark, and hung up his
telephone.  He may have wondered what had brought about this change of
heart in his cousin, but later, when the news of the engagement reached
him, he understood.  For he knew Helen in a way better than her lover
did,--knew her as one knows the desired and unattainable.

A few days later Wright reached the office, and Hart told him of his
plan to start for himself, asking for an early release because
important business was waiting for his entire attention.  Wright had
arrived only that morning; he was seated before his broad desk, which
was covered to the depth of several inches with blue prints,
type-written specifications, and unopened mail.  He had been wrestling
with contractors and clients every minute since he had entered the
office, and it was now late in the afternoon.

"So you are going to try it for yourself?" he commented, a new wrinkle
gathering on his clouded brow.  It occurred to him that Hart might be
merely hinting politely for an advance in salary, but he dismissed the
suspicion.  "Have you had enough experience?" he asked bluntly.

"I'll be likely to get some more before long!" Hart replied, irritated
by the remark.

"I mean of the actual conditions under which we have to build out
here,--the contractors, the labor market, and so on?  Of course you can
leave at once if you wish to.  I shouldn't want to stand in your light
in any way.  It is rather a bad time with Harmon home sick.  But we can
manage somehow, draw on the St. Paul office if necessary."

Jackson murmured his regret for the inconvenience of his departure at
this juncture, and Wright said nothing more for a few minutes.  He
remembered now that some one had told him that Hart was drawing plans
for Mrs. Phillips.  This job had probably made the young architect
ambitious to start for himself.  He felt that Hart should have asked
his consent before undertaking this outside work: at least it would
have been more delicate to do so.  But Wright was a kindly man, and
bore no malice.  In what he said next to the young architect he was
moved by pure good will.

"I don't want to discourage you, Hart, but I know what sort of luck
young fellows, the best of them, have these days when they start a new
office.  It's fierce work getting business, here especially."

"I suppose so," Hart admitted conventionally.

"The fine art side of the profession don't count much with client or
contractor.  It's just a tussle all the time!" he sighed, reflecting
how he had spent two hours of his morning in trying to convince a
wealthy client of the folly of cutting down construction cost from
fifty to thirty cents a cubic foot.

"You young fellows just over from the other side don't always realize
what it means to run an office.  If you succeed, you have no time to
think of your sketches, except after dinner or on the train, maybe.
And if you don't succeed, you have to grab at every little job to earn
enough to pay office expenses."

Hart's blank face did not commit him to this piece of wisdom.

"The only time I ever had any real fun was when I was working for the
old firm, in New York.  God!  I did some pretty good things then.  Old
man Post used to trim me down when I got out of sight of the clients,
but he let me have all the rope he could.  And now,--why it's you
fellows who have the fun!"

"And you who trim us down!" Hart retorted, with a grim little smile.

"Well, perhaps.  I have to keep an eye on all you Paris men.  You come
over here well trained, damned well trained,--we can't do anything like
it in this country,--but it takes a few years for you to forget that
you aren't in la belle France.  And some never get over their habit of
making everything French Renaissance.  You aren't flexible.  Some of
you aren't creative--I mean," he hastened to explain, getting warm on a
favorite topic, "you don't feel the situation here.  You copy.  You try
to express everything just as you were taught.  But, if you want to do
big work, you have got to feel things for yourself, by thunder!"

Jackson kept his immobile face.  It did not interest him to know what
Wright thought of the Beaux Arts men.  Yet he had no intention of
falling out with Wright, who was one of the leading architects of the
country, and whose connection might be valuable to him.

"I see you don't care to have me preach," the older man concluded
humorously.  "And you know your own business best."

He remembered that the Powers Jackson gift for a school would call
sooner or later for a large public building.  Probably the family
interests had arranged to put this important piece of work into Hart's
hands.  Wright hoped for the sake of his art that the trustees would
put off building until the young architect had developed more
independence and firmness of standard than he had yet shown.

"I think I understand a little better than I did two years ago what it
takes to succeed here in Chicago," Jackson remarked at last.

Wright shot a piercing glance at him out of his tired eyes.

"It means a good many different kinds of things," the older man said
slowly.  "Just as many in architecture as elsewhere.  It isn't the firm
that is putting up the most expensive buildings that is always making
the biggest success, by a long shot."

"I suppose not," Hart admitted.

And there the conversation lapsed.  The older man felt the real
impossibility of piercing the young architect's manner, his
imperturbability.  "He doesn't like me," he said to himself
reproachfully.

For he wanted to say something to the younger man out of his twenty
years of experience, something concerning the eternal conflict there is
in all the professions between a man's ideals of his work and the
practical possibilities in the world we have about us; something, too,
concerning the necessity of yielding to the brute facts of life and yet
not yielding everything.  But he had learned from years of contact with
men the great truth that talk never saves a man from his fate,
especially that kind of talk.  A man lives up to what there is in him,
and Jackson Hart would follow the rule.

So he dug his hands into the letters on his desk, and said by way of
conclusion:--

"Perhaps we can throw some things your way.  There's a little job,
now."  He held up a letter he had just glanced at.  "They want me to
recommend some one to build a club-house at Oak Hills.  There isn't
much in it.  They can't spend more than seven thousand dollars.  But I
had rather take that than do some other things."

"Thank you!" Hart replied with considerable animation.  "Of course I
want every chance I can get."

He took the letter from Wright's outstretched hand.

CHAPTER IX

After the few swift months of spring and summer they were to be
married, late in the fall.

Meanwhile above the lake at Forest Park, in a broad, open field, Mrs.
Phillips's great house was rapidly rising.  It was judged variously by
those who had seen it, but it altogether pleased the widow; and the
architect regarded it--the first independent work of his manhood--with
complacency and pride.  Helen had not seen it since the walls had
passed the first storey, when, one day late in September, she made the
little journey from the city with the architect, and walked over to the
house from the Shoreham station, up the lake road.

It was a still, soft fall day, with all the mild charm of late summer
that comes only in this region.  The leaves still clung in bronzed
masses to the little oaks; a stray maple leaf dipped down, now and
then, from a gaudy yellow tree, and sailed like a bird along their
path.  There was a benediction in the country, before the dissolution
of winter, and the girl's heart was filled with joy.

"If we could only live here in the country, Francis!"

"All the year?" he queried doubtfully.

"Yes, always!  Even the worst days I should not feel lonely.  I shall
never feel lonely again, anyway."

As he drew her hand close to his breast, he said contentedly, with a
large view of their future:--

"Perhaps we can manage it before long.  But land is very dear in this
place.  Then you have to keep horses and servants, if you want to live
comfortably in the country."

"Oh!  I didn't think of all that."

They walked slowly, very close together, neither one anxious to reach
the misty horizon, where in a bed of opalescent gray lay the beautiful
lake.  The sunshine and the fruity odors of the good earth, the
tranquil vistas of bronze oaks, set the woman brooding on her nesting
time, which was so close at hand.  And the man was thinking likewise,
in his way, of this coming event, anxiously, yet with confidence.  The
plans for the Graveland, the contractor's big apartment house, were
already nearly finished,--and largely paid for.  Very soon the office
would be idle unless new work came in, but he counted confidently on a
number of good things.  There were the Rainbows, who had moved to
Shoreham, having made a sudden fortune, and were talking of building.
Then Mrs. Phillips, he knew, was doing what she could for him with
Colonel Raymond.  The railroad man had promised to look over the new
house some day and meet the architect.  Buoyant, convinced of his own
ability, he saw the office crowded with commissions!

Suddenly the house shot up before their eyes, big and new in all the
rawness of fresh brick and stone.  It towered blusteringly above the
little oaks, a great red-brick château, with a row of little round
windows in its massive, thick-tiled red roof.

Helen involuntarily stood still and caught her breath.  So this was his!

"Oh!" she murmured.  "Isn't it big, Francis!"

"It's no three-room cottage," he answered, with a little asperity.

Then he led her to the front, where she could get the effect of the two
wings, the southerly terrace toward the lake, the sweeping drive, and
the classic entrance.

"I know I shall grow to like it, Francis," the girl said loyally.  "It
must be very pretty inside, with those lovely French windows; and this
court is attractive, too."

She felt that she was hurting her lover in his tenderest spot, and she
tried anxiously to find better words, to show him that it was only her
ignorance which limited her appreciation.  They strolled about among
the refuse heaps of the builders, viewing the place at every angle in
order to get all its effects.  Just as they were about to enter the
house, there came from the south road the sound of a puffing
automobile, and presently Mrs. Phillips arrived in a large touring car,
with some people who had been lunching with her at the Shoreham Club.
They came slowly up the driveway to the house, talking and joking in a
flutter of good-natured comment.  The architect recognized instantly
the burly form of Colonel Raymond.  He was speaking when the car
stopped:--

"Well, Louise, you will have to take us all in next season.  I didn't
know you were putting up a hotel like this."

"Hotel!  It is a perfect palace!" exclaimed a short, plump woman who
had some difficulty in dismounting.  "I hope you are going to have a
pergola.  They're so nice.  Every country house has a pergola nowadays."

"Why not an English garden and a yew hedge?" added a man who had on the
red coat of the Hunt Club.  "I hope you will have your stabling up to
this, Mrs. Phillips."

Then they recognized the architect and Helen.  Mrs. Phillips introduced
them to her friends, and they all went inside to make a tour of the
rooms.  The painters, who were rubbing the woodwork, looked curiously
at the invading party; then, with winks among themselves, turned
indifferently to their tasks.

The visitors burst into ripples of applause over the hall with its two
lofty stone fireplaces, the long drawing-room that occupied the south
wing of the house, the octagonal breakfast room and the dining-room in
the other wing.  The architect led them about, explaining the different
effects he had tried to get.  He showed his work modestly, touching
lightly on architectural points with a well-bred assumption that the
visitors knew all about such things.  The plump little woman followed
close at his heels, drinking in all that he said.  Helen wondered who
she might be, until, in an eddy of their progress, Hart found a chance
to whisper to her, "It's Mrs. Rainbow; she's getting points!"

He seemed very much excited about this, and the general good luck of
being able to show these people over the house he had made.  After the
first floor had been exhausted, the party drifted upstairs in
detachments.  Helen, who had loitered after the others, could hear her
lover's pleasant voice as he led the way from suite to suite above.
The voices finally centred in Mrs. Phillips's bathroom, where the
sunken bath and the walls of colored marble caused much joking and
laughter....

"Can you tell me if Mrs. Phillips is here?" a voice sounded from the
door.  Helen turned with a start.  The young girl who asked the
question was dressed in a riding habit.  Outside in the court a small
party of people were standing beside their horses.  The girl spoke
somewhat peremptorily, but before Helen had time to reply, she added
more cordially:--

"Aren't you Miss Spellman?  I am Venetia Phillips."

Then the two smiled at each other and shook hands in the way of women
who feel that they may be friends.

"I was off with my uncle the day you dined with mamma," she continued,
"so I missed seeing you.  Isn't this a great--barn, I was going to
say."  She laughed and caught herself.  "I didn't remember!  Mamma
likes it so much.  We have just been out with the hounds,--the first
run of the season.  But it was no fun, so we came on here.  It's too
early to have a real hunt yet.  Do you ride?"

They sat down on the great staircase and were at once absorbed in each
other.  In the meantime Mrs. Phillips's party had returned from the
upper storey by the rear stairs, and were penetrating the mysteries of
the service quarters.  Jackson was showing them proudly all the little
devices for which American architecture is famous,--the interior
telephone service, the laundry chutes, the electric dumb-waiters, the
latest driers.  These devices aroused Colonel Raymond's admiration, and
when the others came back to the hall he took the architect aside and
discussed driers earnestly for several minutes.  From that they got to
the heating system, which necessitated a visit to the basement.

Mrs. Phillips took this occasion to compliment Helen upon her lover's
success:--

"You can be proud of your young man, Miss Spellman.  He's done a very
successful piece of work.  Every one likes it, and it's all his, too,"
she added generously.

Helen found nothing to say in reply.  The widow was not an easy person
for her to talk to.  On the single other occasion when they had met, in
Mrs. Phillips's city house, the two women had looked into each other's
eyes, and both had remained cold.  The meeting of the two women had not
been all that the architect had hoped it might be; for apart from this
house which he was building, there were other of his many ambitions in
which Mrs. Phillips could be very helpful to them.  He did not intend
that Helen and he, when they were married, should sink into that dull,
retired manner of living that both his mother and Mrs. Spellman seemed
to prefer.  It would be good business for him to enlarge his
acquaintance among the rich as fast as possible.

So this time when Helen found nothing amiable on the tip of her tongue
to reply, Mrs. Phillips examined the younger woman critically, saying
to herself, "She's a cold piece.  She won't hold him long!" ...

At last the party gathered itself together and left the house.  The big
touring car puffed up to the door, and the visitors climbed in, making
little final comments of a flattering nature to please the architect,
who had charmed them all.  He was assiduous to the very end, laughing
again at Mrs. Rainbow's joke about the marble tub, which she repeated
for the benefit of those who had not been upstairs.

After Hart had helped her to mount the steps of the car, she leaned
over and gave him her hand.

"So glad to have met you, Mr. Hart," she said with plump
impressiveness.  "I am sure if we build, we must come to you.  It's
just lovely, everything."

"I shall have to give that away to Rainbow," the colonel joked.
"There's nothing so bad to eat up money as a good architect."

Then he shook hands cordially with Hart, lit a cigarette, and swung
himself to the seat beside Mrs. Phillips.  After the car had started,
the riders mounted.  Hart helped Venetia Phillips to her seat, and
slipped in a word about the hunt.  But the girl leaned over on the
other side toward Helen, with a sudden enthusiasm.

"I do so want to see you again, Miss Spellman!  But I suppose you are
very busy now."

"Oh, no," Helen protested, blushing at the girl's frank enthusiasm.

"But when you are married, can't I see a lot of you?"

Helen laughed.  "Come and see me whenever you will!" she said, and the
two held hands for a moment, while the man in the red coat talked with
the architect.

When they had all gone, Jackson turned to Helen, a happy smile of
triumph on his face.

"It seemed to take!"

There had not been one word of comment on the house itself, on the
building as a home for generations of people.  But Hart did not seem to
notice that.  He was flushed with the exhilaration of approval.

"Yes," Helen answered, throwing all the animation she could into the
words; "I think they all liked it."

She was silent, her thoughts full of vague impressions gathered from
the little incident of the afternoon.  There had been revealed to her
an unknown side of her lover, a worldly side, which accorded with his
alert air, his well-trimmed mustache, and careful attention to dress.
He had been very much at home with all these people, while she had felt
more or less out of her element.  He knew how to talk to them, how to
please them, just as he knew how to build a house after their taste for
luxury and display.  Although he was a poor, hardworking young
architect, he could talk hunters or motor cars or bridge whist, as the
occasion demanded.  Whether it was due to his previous experience or to
an instinct for luxury, he was, in fact, very much one of them!

She cast a timid look at the great façade above them, over which the
cold shadows of the autumn evening were fast stealing, leaving the
building in its nudity still more hard and new and raw.  She was glad
it was not to be her fate to live there in all its grandeur and stiff
luxury.

The architect had to speak to the superintendent of the building, and
Helen sat down on the stone balustrade of the terrace to wait for him.
The painters were leaving their job, putting on their coats as they
hurried from the house.  They scarcely cast a glance her way as they
passed out, disappearing into the road, fleeing from the luxurious
abode and the silent woods, which were not theirs, to the village and
the city.  The girl mused idly about them and their lives, and about
the other people who had come there this afternoon to look over the
house, and about the house itself.  She reflected how much more she
liked the sketch Jackson had made of a little club-house for the Oak
Hills Country Club.  It was a rough little affair, the suggestion of
which the architect had got from a kodak of a Sicilian farm-house he
had once taken.  But this great American château was so different from
what she had supposed her lover would build, this caravansary for the
rich, this toy where they could hide themselves in aristocratic
seclusion and take their pleasures.  And the thought stole into her
mind that he liked it, this existence of the rich and prosperous, their
sports and their luxuries,--and would want to earn with the work of his
life just their pleasures, their housing, their automobiles and
hunters.  It was all strange to her experience, to her dreams!

From the second floor there came to her the sound of voices:--

"I tells you, Muster Hart, you got to rip the whoal damn piping out
from roof to basement if you wants to have a good yob of it.  I tole
you that way back six weeks ago.  It waren't specified right from the
beginning."

"I'll speak to Rollings about it to-morrow and see what can be done."

"That's what you say every time, and he don't do nutting," the Swede
growled.

"See here, Anderson!  Who's running this job?" ...

The girl strolled away from the voices toward the bluff, where she
could see the gray bosom of the lake.  The twilight trees, the waveless
lake soothed her: they were real, her world,--she felt them in her
soul!  The house back there, the men and women of it, were shadows on
the marge.

"Nell!" her lover called.

"Coming, Francis."

When he came up to her she rested her head on his shoulder, looking at
him with vague longing, desiring to keep him from something not clearly
defined in her own mind.  Her lover drew her to him and kissed her,
once, twice, while her eyes searched his wistfully.  She seemed passive
and cold in his arms.  But suddenly she closed her longing eyes, and
her lips met his, hungrily, tensely, in the desire to adore, to love
abundantly, which was her whole life.

"We must hurry to get that train,--dear.  When we live out here we'll
have to sport a motor car, won't we?" he said buoyantly.

She answered slowly, "I don't know that I should want to live just
here, after all."

"Why, I thought you were crazy about the country!  And I've been
thinking it might be the very thing for us to do.  There's such a lot
of building in these places now since business has looked up.  Mrs.
Phillips has asked me several times why I didn't move out here on the
shore.  Just before she left to-day she said in a joking way that if I
wanted to build a lodge for her, I might take it for a year or so.  Of
course that's a joke.  But I know she's bought lately a lot more
property on the ravine, and she might be willing to let me have a small
bit on reasonable terms.  She's been so friendly all along!"

He was still in the flush of his triumph, and talked rapidly of all the
plans that opened out before his fervent ambition.  Suddenly he took
note of the girl's mood and said sharply, "Nell, I believe you don't
like her!"

"Why do you say that!" she exclaimed, surprised in her inner thoughts.
"I don't really know."

"Why, it's plain enough.  You never talk to her.  You are always so
cold!  Louise is a chatty person; she likes to have you make an effort
for her.  And you treated Mrs. Rainbow in the same way."

"Oh, Francis!  I didn't mean to be cold.  Ought I to like them if you
are to do work for them?"

Her lover laughed at her simplicity.  Nevertheless, he felt somewhat
disturbed at Helen's indifference to the social aspect of their
marriage venture.  He wished to make a proper stir in the puddle, and
he was beginning to suspect that Helen had little aptitude for this
distinctively woman's side of matrimony.

"Rich people always puzzle me," she continued apologetically.  "They
always have, except uncle Powers, and you never thought of him as rich!
I don't feel as if I knew what they liked.  They are so much
preoccupied with their own affairs.  That other time when I met Mrs.
Phillips she was very much worried over the breakfast room and the
underbutler's pantry!  What is an underbutler's pantry, Francis?"

This raillery over the needs of the rich sounded almost anarchistic to
the architect in his present mood, and they walked to the station
silently in the gathering darkness.  But after a time, on the train, he
returned to the events of the afternoon, remarking with no relevancy:--

"She can do anything she likes with Raymond.  It would be a big stroke
to get that railroad business!"

As Helen made no reply to this observation, they sank again into silent
thought.

The night before their marriage the architect told her exultantly that
Colonel Raymond had sent for him that afternoon to talk over work for
the railroad corporation.

"That's Mrs. Phillips's doing," he told Helen.  "You must remember to
say something to her about it to-morrow if you get the chance.  It's
likely to be the biggest wedding present we'll have!"

"I am glad!" Helen replied simply, without further comment.

He thought that she did not comprehend what this good fortune would
mean to them.  And he was quite mystified when she sent him away and
refused to see him again before the ceremony of the following day.  He
could not realize that in some matters--a few small matters--he had
bruised the woman's ideal of him; he could not understand why these
last hours, before she took him to her arms forever, she wished to
spend alone with her own soul in a kind of prayer....

There were only a few people present at the marriage in the little
Maple Street house the next day.  Many of their more fashionable
friends still lingered away from the city although it was late in
October.  Mrs. Phillips had made a point of coming to the wedding, even
putting off a projected trip to New York, and after much urging she had
been made to bring Venetia, who was strangely bent on going to this
wedding.  Pemberton, an old friend of the Spellmans, who had recently
been asked to join the Powers Jackson trustees, was there, and also
little Cook, who was the backbone of the new office.  Everett Wheeler
was the best man.  He and Hollister had put off their yearly fishing
trip to do honor to Jackson Hart, who had won their approval, because
the young man had swallowed his disappointment about the will and was
going to marry a poor girl.  Hollister and Pemberton had brought Judge
Phillips with them, because he was in town and liked weddings and ought
to send the pair a goodly gift.  Of the presence of all these and some
others the young architect was agreeably conscious that October day.

Only that morning, on the way to the house, Everett had referred to the
great school building, a monumental affair, which the trustees would
have to build some day.  He said nothing that might commit the trustees
in any way.  Nevertheless, it was in the aroma of this new prospect,
and of all the other good fortune which had come to him since he had
taken up his burden of poverty, that Jackson Hart was married.

But Helen walked up to him to be married, in a dream, unconscious of
the whole world, with a mystery of love in her heart.  When the
ceremony was over, she looked up into her husband's resolute face,
which was slightly flushed with excitement.  Venetia, standing by her
uncle's side a few steps away, could see tears in the bride's eyes, and
the girl wondered in her heart what it meant.

Did the woman know now that the man who stood there face to face with
her, her husband, was yet a stranger to her soul?  She raised her lips
swiftly to him, as if to complete the sacrament, and there before all
he bowed his head to kiss her.

PART II

THE STRUGGLE

CHAPTER X

The Lady Venetia de Phillips, as the young woman used to call herself
in the doll age, had never set foot in a common street car, or, indeed,
in anything more public than a day coach on the suburban train; and in
that only because the railroad had not found it profitable to provide
as yet in that service a special coach for her class.  For Mrs.
Phillips, who had known what it was to ride in an Ottumwa buggy,
comfortably cushioned by the stout arm of an Ottumwa swain, understood
intuitively the cardinal principle of class evolution, which is
separation.  Therefore she had carefully educated her children
according to that principle.

So it happened shortly before Mrs. Phillips had taken possession of her
new home that Miss Phillips, wishing to pay a visit to her new friend
who lived on the North Side of the city, was driving in her mother's
victoria, in dignity, according to her estate.  Beside her sat her
favorite terrier, Pete, scanning the landscape of the dirty streets
through which they were obliged to pass from the South to the North
Side.  Suddenly, as the carriage turned a corner, Pete spied a long,
lank wharf rat, of a kind that did not inhabit his own more cleanly
neighborhood.  The terrier took one impulsive leap between the wheels
of the victoria, and was off up Illinois Street after the rat.  It was
a good race; the Lady Venetia's sporting blood rose, and she ordered
the coachman to follow.  Suddenly there dashed from an alley a light
baker's wagon, driven by a reckless youth.  Pete, unmindful of the
clattering wagon, intent upon his loping prey, was struck full in the
middle of his body: two wheels passed diagonally across him, squeezing
him to the pavement like an india-rubber ball.  For a moment he lay
there stretched in the street, and then he dragged himself to the
sidewalk, filling the air with hideous howls.  The passers-by stopped,
but the reckless youth in the baker's wagon, having leaned out to see
what damage had been done, grinned, shook his reins, and was off.

Before the coachman had brought the victoria to a full stop Venetia was
out and across the street.  Pete had crawled into an alley, where he
lay in a little heap, moaning.  When his mistress tried to gather him
into her skirt he whimpered and showed his teeth.  Something was
radically wrong!  The small boys who had gathered advised throwing Pete
into the river, and offered to do the deed.  But Venetia, the tears
falling from her eyes, turned back into the street to take counsel with
the coachman.  A young man who was hurrying by, swinging a little
satchel and whistling to himself, stopped.

"What's up?" he asked, ceasing to whistle at sight of the girl's tears.

Venetia pointed to the dog, and the stranger, pushing the small boys
aside, leaned over Pete.

"Gee! he's pretty well mashed, ain't he?  Here, Miss, I'll give him a
smell of this and send him to by-by."

He opened his little satchel and hunted for a bottle.  Venetia timidly
touched his arm.

"Please don't kill him!"

"That's just what I'm going to do, sure thing!"  He paused, with the
little vial in his hand, and looked coolly at the girl.  "You don't
want the pup to suffer like that?"

"But can't he be saved?"

The stranger looked again at Pete, then back at Venetia.  Finally he
tied a handkerchief over the dog's mouth, and began to examine him
carefully.

"Let's see what there's left of you after the mix-up, Mr. Doggie.
We'll give you the benefit of our best attention and skill,--more'n
most folks ever get in this world,--because you are the pet of a nice
young lady.  If you were just an alley-cat, you wouldn't even get the
chloroform.  Well, Miss, he'd have about one chance in a hundred, after
he had that hind leg cut off."

"Are you a doctor?  Do you think that you could cure him?  Mamma will
be very glad to pay you for your services."

"Is that so?" the stranger remarked.  "How do you know that my services
don't come too high for your mother's purse?  Well, come on, pup!
We'll see what can be done for you."

Drawing the improvised muzzle tighter, he gathered Pete up in a little
bundle.  Then he strode down the street to the west.  The coachman drew
up beside the curb and touched his hat.

"Won't you get in?" Venetia asked.

"It's only a step or so to my place," he answered gruffly.  "You can
follow me in the carriage."

But she kept one hand on Pete, and walked beside the stranger until he
stopped at an old, one-story, wooden cottage.  Above the door was
painted in large black letters, "S. COBURN, M.D., PHYSICIAN AND
SURGEON."

"May I come in?" the girl asked timidly.

"Sure!  Why would I keep you sitting on the door-step?"

Inside there was a little front hall apparently used as a waiting-room
for patients.  Back of this was a large bare room, occupying the
remaining floor space of the cottage, into which the doctor led the
way.  A wooden bench extended the entire length of this room underneath
a row of rough windows, which had been cut in the wall to light the
bench.  Over in one corner was a cot, with the bedclothes negligently
dragging on the floor.  Near by was an iron sink.  On a table in the
centre of the room, carefully guarded by a glass case, was a complex
piece of mechanism which looked to the girl like one of the tiresome
machines her teacher of physics was wont to exhibit.

"My laboratory," the doctor explained somewhat grandly.

Venetia stepped gingerly across the cluttered floor, glancing about
with curiosity.  The doctor placed the dog on the table and turned on
several electric lights.

"You'll have to help at this performance," he remarked, taking off his
coat.

Together they gave Pete an opiate and removed the muzzle.  The doctor
then turned him over and poked him here and there.

"Well," he pronounced, "Pete has a full bill.  Compound fracture,
broken rib, and mashed toes.  And I don't know what all on the inside.
He has a slim chance of limping around on three legs.  Shall I give him
some more dope?  What do you say?"

"Pete was a gamy dog," Venetia replied thoughtfully.  "I think he would
like to have all his chances."

"Good!"  The doctor tossed aside the sponge that he had held ready to
give Pete his farewell whiff.  He told the girl how to hold the dog,
and how to touch the sponge to his nose from time to time.  They were
absorbed in the operation when the coachman pushed his way into the
room.

"What shall I do, Miss, about the horses?  Mis' Phillips gave particler
instructions I wasn't to stay out after five-thurty.  It's most that
now."

"Tell him to go home," the doctor ordered.  "We'll be an hour more."

"But how shall I get home then?" the girl asked, perplexed.

"On your feet, I guess, same as most folks," the doctor answered,
testing a knife on his finger.  "And the cars ain't stopped running on
the South Side, have they?"

"I don't know.  I never use them," Venetia replied helplessly.

The doctor put the knife down beside Pete and looked at the girl from
her head to her feet, a teasing smile creeping over his swarthy face.

"Well, it's just about time for you to find out what they're good for.
I'll take you home myself just to see how you like them.  You won't get
hurt, not a bit.  You may go, Thomas!"  He waved his hand ironically to
the coachman.  "And when you go out, be good enough to slip the latch.
We have a little business to attend to in here, and don't want to be
interrupted."

When the coachman had left, Venetia turned to the doctor with a red
face, and copying her mother's most impressive tones, asked:--

"What would you like me to do now, Dr. Coburn?"

"Nothing special.  Turn your back if you don't like to see me take a
chop out of doggie."

He laughed at her dignity; therefore she kept her face turned
resolutely on poor Pete.  She could not help being interested in the
man as she watched his swift movements.  The doctor was stocky and
short, black-haired, with a short black mustache that did not disguise
the perpetual sardonic smile of his lips.  She noticed that his
trousers were very baggy and streaked at the bottoms with mud.  They
were the trousers of a man who, according to her experience, was not a
gentleman.  The frayed cravat, which showed its cotton filling,
belonged to the same category as the trousers.  But there was something
in the fierce black eyes, the heavy jaw, the nervous grip of the lips
when the man was thinking, that awed the girl.  The more Venetia looked
at him, the more she was afraid of him; not afraid that he would do any
harm to her, but vaguely afraid of his strength, his force.  His bare
arms were thick and hairy, although the fingers were supple, and he
touched things lightly.  Altogether he was a strange person in her
little world, and somewhat terrifying.

The doctor talked all the time, while he worked swiftly over the dog,
describing to the girl just what he was doing.  Venetia watched him
without flinching, though the tears would roll down her face.  She put
one hand under Pete's limp head to hold it, as she would have liked to
have her head held under the same circumstances.  At last the doctor
straightened himself and exclaimed:--

"Correct!  He's done up in first-class style."  He went to the sink and
washed his arms and hands.  "Yes, Peter is as well patched as if the
great Dr. Cutem had done it himself and charged you ten thousand
dollars for the job.  I donno' but it's better done.  And he would have
charged you all right!"  He gave a loud, ironical laugh and swashed the
water over his bare arms.  Then he came back to the operating table,
wiping his hands and arms on a roller towel that was none too clean.

"You can quit that sponge now, Miss, and I guess doggie won't
appreciate the little attention of holding his head yet awhile.  He
hasn't got to the flower-and-fruit stage yet, have you, eh, purp?"

Venetia stood like a little girl, awkwardly waiting for orders.

"What's your name?" the doctor demanded abruptly.

"Venetia--Venetia Phillips."

"Well, Miss Venetia, you seem fond of animals.  Would you like to see
my collection?"

Without waiting for an answer he strode to the farther end of the room
and opened a trap-door.

"Come over here!"

The girl peeped through the trap-door into the cellar.  There, in a
number of pens, were huddled a small menagerie of animals,--dogs, cats,
guinea-pigs, rabbits.

"What do you do with all of them?" the girl asked, her heart sinking
with foreboding.

"Cut 'em up!"

"Cut them up?"

"Sure!  And dose 'em.  This is an experimental laboratory."  The doctor
waved his hand rather grandly over the dirty room.  "There are not many
like it in the city of Chicago, I can tell you.  I am conducting
investigations, and I use these little fellers."

"It's horrid!" the girl exclaimed, looking apprehensively at Pete.

"Not a bit of it!"  The doctor reached down his hand and pulled up a
rabbit, a little mangy object, which tottered a few steps and then fell
down as if dizzy.  "Jack's had fifteen drops of the solution of
hydrochlorate of manganese this morning.  He looks kind of dopy, don't
he?  He'll be as smart as a trivet to-morrow.  But I guess he's about
reached his limit of hydrochlorate, eh, Jack?"

In spite of herself the girl's curiosity was aroused, and when the
doctor had returned Jack to his pen, she asked, "What's that queer
machine over there?"

"That's to pump things into your body, to squirt medicines into you,
instead of dropping them into your tummy loose, as doctors usually do.
See?  When I stick this long needle into you and work this handle, a
little stream of the thing I want to give you is pumped into your body
at the right spot.  Have you got anything the matter with your liver?
I am working on livers just now.  Would you like to have me try it on
you?  No!  I thought not.  That's why Jack has to take his dose every
morning."

He went into his explanation more thoroughly, and they talked of many
things that were as wonderful to Venetia, brought up in the modern city
of Chicago, as if she had come out of Thibet.

"I suppose I shall have to leave Pete here," she said at last.  "May I
come to see him sometimes?"

"Sure!  As often as you like.  I'm generally in afternoons.  I'll
telephone if the patient's pulse gets feeble or his temperature goes
up."

"You needn't make fun of me!  And I think I can find my way home
alone," she added, as the doctor took his hat from the table and jammed
it on his head.

"I said I'd go home with you.  I am not going to miss seeing you take
that first ride on the cable, not much!  Perhaps you won't mind walking
across the bridge and up the avenue to the cable line?  It's a pretty
evening, and it will do you good to take the air along the river."

So the two started for the city and crossed the busy thoroughfare of
the Rush Street Bridge just as the twilight was touching the murky
waters of the river.  The girl was uncomfortably conscious that the man
by her side was a very shabbily dressed escort.  She was glad that the
uncertain light would hide her from any of her acquaintances that might
be driving across the bridge at this hour.  The doctor seemed to be in
no hurry; he paused on the bridge to watch a tug push a fat grain boat
up the river, until they were almost caught by the turning draw.

"That's a fine sight!" he remarked.

"Yes, the sunset is beautiful," she replied conventionally.

"No!  I mean that big vessel loaded with grain.  That's what you live
on: it's what you are,--that and a lot of dirty cattle over in the pens
of the stock yard.  That's you, Miss Venetia,--black hair, pink cheeks,
and all!"

"What a very materialistic way of looking at life!" Venetia replied
severely.

"Lord, child!" the doctor exclaimed ironically.  "Who taught you that
horrid word?"  Then he proceeded to give her a little lecture on the
beauties of physiology, which occupied her attention all the way to the
cable car, so that she forgot her snobbish anxieties.

The car was crowded, and no one of the tired men who were reading their
newspapers was gallant enough to offer her a seat.  So she was obliged
to stand crowded in a corner, swaying from a strap overhead, while the
persistent doctor told her all about the car, the motive power, the
operatives, the number of passengers carried daily, the dispute over
the renewal of the franchise for the road, and kindred matters of
common concern.

"Now, it's likely enough some of your folks own a block of watered
stock in this concern," he concluded in his clear, high voice, that
made itself felt above the rattle of the car.  "And you are helping to
pay them their dividends.  Some day, though, maybe the rest of us won't
want to go on paying them five cents to ride in their old cars.  Then
the water will dry up, the stock will go down, and perhaps you'll have
one or two dresses less every year.  You'll remember then I told you
the reason why!"

Venetia had heard enough about stocks and bonds to know that a good
deal of the Phillips money was invested in the City Railway.  But she
had also learned from her earliest youth that it was very vulgar for a
man to discuss money matters with a girl.  Furthermore, peering about
the crowded conveyance, she had caught sight of Porter Howe, one of her
brother Stanwood's friends.  He was looking at her and the doctor, and
she began to feel uncomfortable again.  It had never occurred to her
that the young men of her class were in the habit of using the street
cars, at least until they had reached those assured positions at the
head of industry which always awaited them.

So the novelty of the ride in the public car had something of torture
in it, and she was glad enough to escape through the front door at
Eighteenth Street.

"Won't you come in?" she asked the doctor politely when they came to
the formidable pile of red brick where she lived.

"Thanks!  I guess not to-day.  I don't believe your folks will want me
to stay to supper, and I am getting hungry.  Hope you enjoyed your
ride.  Some day I'll come and take you for a trolley ride somewhere
else."

He shook her hand vigorously and laughed.  Then he started briskly for
the city, his hands thrust in his trousers pockets, his black felt hat
drawn forward over his brows.  But Venetia had barely mounted the first
bank of steps before she heard her name called in a loud voice from the
street.

"Say, Miss Venetia!"

The doctor was shouting back to her, one hand at the side of his mouth.

"Don't you worry about that pup!  I think I can bring him round all
right."

She nodded nervously and stepped into the vestibule with a sense of
relief from her companion.  She knew that Dr. Coburn was what her
brother called a "mucker," and her mother spoke of as a "fellow."  Yet
she felt that there was something in the man to be respected, and this
insight, it may be said, distinguished Miss Venetia from her mother and
her brother.

CHAPTER XI

Pete was a very sick dog, but as Dr. Coburn boasted, no pampered
patient in a private hospital ever had better care.  Ultimately he
recovered from his operation and went about gayly on three legs, but
not until Venetia had made a good many visits to the squalid
"laboratory" and had come to feel very much at home among the animals
and scientific apparatus that the eccentric young doctor had gathered
about him.  Mrs. Phillips, naturally, had not consented to these visits
to the "dog doctor," as she persisted in calling Pete's saviour, until
Venetia had enlisted the services of Helen as chaperon.  Then, being
very much occupied these days with furnishing the new house, she paid
little attention to Venetia's long afternoons spent in the company of
the architect's wife.

These visits were, perhaps, the most educational experiences that the
girl had ever had.  One day she and Helen had watched the doctor take
apart the queer-looking pump that occupied the post of honor in the
laboratory, examined the delicate valves of the machine, and learned
the theory of its use.  Once they got courage to witness voluntarily
its application on a rabbit.  Venetia winced nervously when she saw the
long gold needle sink into the tender breast of the small beast, the
muscles relax, the heart stop beating altogether; but she worked one of
the valves of the pump steadily as the doctor directed.

"Ain't that quick work!" he shouted enthusiastically.  "It didn't take
the stuff thirty seconds to strike the right spot."

Venetia nodded her head gravely, as he proceeded step by step in his
demonstration.  When he finished she asked with a gravity that made
Helen smile:--

"Aren't you a very celebrated man?"

Even her world paid some respect to notable achievements in science,
and she had heard Judge Phillips speak admiringly of certain recent
discoveries by a famous physiologist.  The doctor, however, roared with
ironic laughter.

"Not celebrated exactly!  At the medical societies they call me the
crazy fakir.  I don't believe there's a first-class doctor in the city
who would take the time to look at this machine.  They'd want to know
first what some feller in Vienna thought about it.  I might starve for
all the help I've ever had here!  Doctors don't want any one to do
things on his own hook: they're jealous, just as jealous as women.  But
I guess I'm going to show 'em a thing or two not in the books.  Let me
tell you on the quiet, Miss Venetia,--I'm going over to Paris with this
pump of mine and show it off in one of their hospitals.  Then you'll
see something!"

The girl tried to look intelligent.

"If I can convince some Frenchman or German that I am on to a big idea,
why the whole pack of pill-sellers over here will fall into line so
quick you can't see 'em."

"Perhaps we shall go over to Paris this summer, too.  How I should like
to be there when you are, and see you show the pump!"

In her experience there was nothing remarkable in going to Europe: one
went to hear an opera, to order a few gowns, to fill out an idle
vacation.

"Well, I may have to go steerage, but I'll get there somehow."

While they had been discussing the machine, a small, white-faced man,
who looked as if he might be a waiter or some kind of skilled mechanic,
had come into the laboratory and nodding to the doctor took a chair at
the farther end of the room with the manner of one who was quite at
ease in the place.  His face, which was aged by illness or care,
interested Helen greatly.  She watched him while the others talked,
wondering what his relation to the doctor could be, whether that of
patient or friend.  He sat huddled up on his chair, one worn-out boot
thrust forward from a ragged trouser leg, curiously scanning the young
girl, who seemed in her fresh beauty and rich clothes decidedly out of
harmony with the dingy room.  When Venetia spoke of going abroad as
casually as she might have mentioned going to the country, a sarcastic
smile crept over his face.  He seemed to possess the full power of
patience, as if a varied experience with a buffeting world had taught
him to accept rather than to resist.  His business there, whatever it
might be, could wait, had always waited.

"Hussey, here, is the only feller that I ever found besides myself who
has any faith in the old pump," Coburn remarked presently by way of
introduction, half turning toward the silent man, and smiling as if he
thoroughly enjoyed the joke of having this one convert.  "He's always
after me to try it on him,--he says he's got something the matter with
his lungs,--but I guess it's purely a scientific interest that makes
him offer to be the first victim.  Gee!  Wouldn't I like to take him at
his word!"

He worked one of the delicate valves of the machine, squirting through
the needle a thin stream of water in the direction of Hussey.

"Why don't you do it then?" the man asked in an indifferent tone.  "I'm
ready any time you say."

"Ain't he got nerve, now?" the doctor appealed to Venetia, his eyes
twinkling sardonically.  "Any doctor would tell him for nothing that it
was just plain murder to stick that needle into his lungs.  If I am
wrong, you know, he'd be a goner, bleed to death."

"I guess I ain't built very different from that guinea-pig," the man
observed placidly.  "And I have seen you put it into one of them often
enough."

"Why don't you try it, if he's willing?" Venetia asked the doctor
breathlessly.

Helen and Coburn laughed, and even the silent Hussey smiled grimly.

"Maybe, young lady, you wouldn't mind if I tried it on you!  Can't you
get up a real good heart trouble now?" the doctor quizzed.

"Would it make any particular difference if I hadn't anything the
matter with me?" Venetia asked quickly.  "You can put it into me and
see what it does, anyway."

"Good nerve!" Coburn laughed admiringly.  "See, Mrs. Hart, I've got two
converts now.  Don't you want to make a third?"

Then bursting into his loud laugh, which seemed to be directed at
himself, Coburn walked to the rear of the room, raised a trap-door, and
whistled for Pete.  He thrust his hand down, caught the dog by the
neck, and placed him on the laboratory table for exhibition.

"Nothing worse than a good aristocratic limp, Peter," the doctor
pronounced with complacency.  "Just come here and look at that ear,
Venetia!  What do you think of that?  It isn't quite the right shade,
but I couldn't lay my hands on a terrier that was as dark as Pete."

"What have you done to his ear?" the girl demanded.

"He hadn't much of an ear left, when I came to look him over.  So I
grafted a new piece on.  And I cropped it, too, so it would look like
its mate.  Pretty neat job?"

"That's why you wouldn't let me see his head when you were changing the
bandages!"

"Sure!  This ear was to be a real Christmas surprise for a good little
girl."

"Poor old Pete!"

"What's the matter with Pete?  Don't drop your tears that way.  He's
forgotten by this time he ever had another leg.  Say!" he added
abruptly, "what do you think the job's worth?"

"I don't know," Venetia replied a little haughtily.  "Please send your
bill to mamma."

"And suppose I make it half what Dr. Cutem would charge for doing the
same job on you, what would mamma say?  Pete's worth half, ain't he,
Mrs. Hart?"

"Not to me," Helen answered lightly.

"Well, you'd have thought he was the way she went on about him that
afternoon I found them out in the street.  But that's the luck of a
poor doctor.  You do your best, and, the patient cured, the bill seems
large!"

The doctor's joke evidently distressed Venetia, who had been taught
that it was low to discuss bills.  The silent man still smiling to
himself over the girl, rose and spoke to the doctor in a low tone.
Coburn nodded.

"The same thing?  Yes, I'll be over pretty soon."

Then Hussey left the laboratory with a slight nod of his head in the
direction of the women.  When he had gone and the outer door had banged
behind him, the doctor remarked thoughtfully:--

"I guess it isn't just pure interest in science that makes him ready to
try the pump."

"Tell me about him," Helen asked quickly.

"He lost his little girl two months ago,--malnutrition, that is to say
slow starvation, and I guess his wife's not got long to live.  That's
why he came in this afternoon.  But I can't do anything for her now,
nor anybody else.  She's just beat out.  They came from somewhere in
Pennsylvania, a little country place.  He's a bookbinder by
trade,--does fancy work,--and work gave out in the country, so he tried
New York.  He had some kind of trouble there with the union and came on
here.  But he might as well have stayed where he was,--there ain't
anything in this town for him, and the union is after him again.  He's
been up against it pretty much ever since he started.  That's his
story."

"Poor woman!" Helen exclaimed, with a quick sense of her own new
happiness.  "Do you suppose she would like to have me call on her?"

"I don't know.  Perhaps she might.  But he's rather sour on folks in
general," the doctor answered indifferently.

"Where do they live?"

"Out west here a ways on Arizona Avenue."

"I know that district.  The River settlement is over there on Arizona
Avenue.  But I didn't know any Americans lived there.  They are mostly
Poles or Germans, I thought," Helen added.

"I guess people like the Husseys live most anywhere they can find a
hole to crawl into," Coburn answered brusquely.  "So you are one of
those settlement cranks?"

"I had classes there for a time before I was married," Helen admitted.

"Got sick of it?  Found you couldn't scrub up the world in a few weeks,
or even a small piece of it?  I took you for a woman of too much sense
to mix in that foolishness.  It might do Venetia here some good, teach
her a thing or two.  She never rode in a street car till I showed her
how."

"I only gave it up when I was going to marry, and my husband thought I
was not strong enough," Helen protested stoutly.  "But it's the most
interesting--"

"See here!  Look at this floor.  Would it clean it any to pour a
spoonful of water here and there?  Well, that's what your social
settlements with all their statistics and their investigations are
doing.  I tell you I know because I have been one of them, one of the
'masses.'  I have been dirt poor all my life.  I lived once for six
months in a tenement room with five other men.  'Understanding and
sympathy'?  Rot!  You can't really know anything about folks until you
earn your bread as they do, because you have to or starve; and live and
eat and marry as they do because you have to.  Do you suppose those
English know anything about their Hindoos?  Well, these settlement
folks know just about as much of what the people around them really are
as the English know about those darkies they boss."

"But they're trying to understand, to help."

"What's the good of their help?  What men need is a chance to help
themselves at the pot.  And the only way they'll ever get that is to
fight for it.  Fight the hoggish ones who want the whole loaf.  Let 'em
get out and fight, same as the people always have had to when they
weren't content to starve.  Then you'd see what this settlement
'sympathy and understanding' amounts to."

"Fighting never helps."

"Don't it now?  What does your science or history tell you?  Men have
fought in one way or another for pretty nearly everything they've got!"

"Perhaps that is the trouble."

"Not much," he retorted, as if he were trying to convince himself as
much as her.  "The real fact is, most of the world isn't worth the
bother of saving it from its fate.  They are refuse junk.  Just junk,
so many tons of flesh and bone, with not wit enough to hold their
appetites.  That's why the worst robbers get on top and ride, every
time.  They always will because they are the best fighters.  No, young
woman, the ruck of people aren't worth bothering about.  Life is the
cheapest thing on this planet; pious folks with all their blart can't
alter that fact.  It's cheap, and mean, and can't fight."

"What's the good of that machine, if it's only fit to mend such bad
flesh?"

"You think you've got me," he laughed back.  "Now I'll tell you why.  I
want to show every stupid doctor in this town that I've got a trick
worth two of his.  All the high-toned doctors have turned me down,
every one I ever got at.  But I can fight.  See?  That's why I starve
myself and live in this chicken-coop.  I could make money enough
gassing patients and selling them a lot of wind.  Don't you think I
could eat well and dress well and be as sleek and fine as the young men
Venetia thinks are the right thing?  I guess I could.  Do you know Dr.
Parks on the North Side?  Two years ago he offered to take me into his
office if I would quit fooling with these experiments and devote myself
to private practice.  Parks is earning a good twenty thousand a year.
The pickings in that office would be considerable, I guess."

"But you wanted something better than money!"

"Better?  I don't know about that.  I want Parks and all the other
big-mouths in the profession just salaming there before me for one
thing."

"No,--that isn't much better than wanting money.  You don't want to
help.  To want to help, to care about helping, that's the best thing in
men and women,--caring to help others whether what they do succeeds in
the end or fails.  Nobody can know that."

The doctor's face lost its ironical grin; he looked at Helen very
gravely.

"That feeling you talk about must be a kind of extra sense which I
haven't got.  It's like the color nerve or the sound nerve.  I've
always been color-blind.  In the same way I haven't that other feeling
you talk about.  And I guess most folks in this world are like me.  If
they felt like you, why it wouldn't be the same old world we know."

"It must be a cruel world of murder and hate, if you haven't that."

"Well, I guess it's pretty much the same world that old Michael Angelo
saw when he got up in the morning, or Julius Cæsar, or any of the rest
of them.  It's a mighty lively sort of place, too, if you know how to
forage for yourself."

Venetia, who had been listening to the discussion wide-eyed, burst out
explosively:--

"What are you two scrapping about, anyway?  Aren't you going to see
that sick woman?"

"Right you are," Dr. Coburn laughed.  "I'll have to trot over there
pretty soon."

"And I am going to see her, too, if you'll give me the address," Helen
added.  "By the way, Dr. Coburn, you know my husband, don't you?"

A peculiar look passed over the doctor's face as he replied: "Yes, in a
way.  I used to be chore-boy in the chemical lab when he was in
college.  But I wasn't his sort."

Helen recollected Jackson's exclamation when she had told him of her
first visit with Venetia to the doctor's office.  "That scrub!" Jackson
had commented, simply and finally.

There was an awkward pause, which Venetia broke by saying, "I can take
Pete, can't I?"

"I suppose he's well enough," Coburn answered reluctantly.  It was
plain that he would like to have some excuse to put off Pete's
departure.  The bit of friendship with the two women, which fate had
tossed him, was too precious to part with easily.  He picked the dog up
brusquely, saying: "Pete, you are getting skinny.  I guess it's time
for you to go back to the good living you're used to.  Don't you be
getting into another mix-up, though, or there won't be enough dog left
to patch."

Pete licked his hand in a puppyish way, as Coburn carried him to the
carriage and placed him carefully on the seat between Venetia and Helen.

"Won't you come to see us?" Helen asked, as they shook hands.  The
queer look came back to the doctor's face.

"No," he said brusquely, "I guess not.  I hope to see you again,
though."

"Why do you suppose he said that?" Venetia inquired quickly when they
had started.

Helen blushed, as she answered slowly, "Perhaps he doesn't like my
husband."

"Don't you think he's the most interesting man you ever saw?" the girl
exclaimed breathlessly.  "At first he frightened me; he said such queer
things--things people don't say, just think them.  But I like it now.
I mean to see a lot more of him somehow."

"Will you get your mother to ask him to Forest Park?" Helen asked
mischievously.

"Just imagine it!  Wouldn't Mrs. Phillips be nice to him?  They'd have
a fight the first thing, if she even looked at him.  But I am sure he's
the most interesting man I ever met.  He's lots nicer than Stanwood's
friends.  They are always trying to hold your hand and wanting to kiss
you.  It makes up for conversation."

"Venetia!" the older woman protested.

"Well, they do!  And when I told mamma once, she said that a girl could
always manage men if she wanted to."

As-the carriage stopped at the apartment house where the Harts lived,
the girl impulsively kissed the older woman.

"I'm so glad I know you--and the doctor, too!"

That evening when Helen sat down to dinner with her husband in their
little apartment, she recounted the events of her day, among them the
visit to Dr. Coburn's office.  Jackson, who had brought home with him a
roll of plans to work at in the evening, remarked casually: "Isn't
Venetia going there a good deal?  Her mother won't like that sort of
intimacy."

"I don't think there is any harm in it.  Dr. Coburn interests her,
opens her eyes to things she never realized before.  I think he must
have a good deal of ability, though he is boastful and rough."

"That kind usually are conceited," the architect replied indifferently.
"He had better show a little of his ability in getting some paying
patients.  He can't be doing much, judging by the boots and hat he had
on the last time I saw him."

"No, he is very poor," Helen admitted.  She disliked to have her
husband judge any man by his "boots and hat."  These necessary articles
of clothing seemed to her rather accidental aspects of humanity in the
confusing fortunes of life.

"Would you mind very much," she ventured after a time, "calling on him?
I want to ask him to dine with us some Sunday.  I want to have Venetia,
and Pete, too."

Jackson looked at his wife in surprise.

"If you wish it, of course.  I don't see much point to it.  Why do you
want him?  He isn't our kind."

She was becoming gradually conscious that her husband liked only the
society of his kind--those people who had the same tastes and habits,
whose views and pleasures he shared.  When she thought of it, she
realized that they had rapidly severed themselves from any other kind
during the first few months of their married life.  She had given up
going to the River settlement before her marriage, partly because
Jackson disapproved of settlements.  They were "socialistic" and
"cranky," and business men told him that they helped to stir up that
discontent among the laboring classes which was so rife in Chicago.
They encouraged the unions, and with people of his class trade-unionism
was considered to be the next worst thing to anarchy.  So in the desire
to have no shadow of difference between them, Helen had given up her
classes in the settlement and rarely returned to the friends she had
made in that part of the city.

There was growing in her, however, something almost of revolt against
this attitude on the part of her husband.  There came back to her these
days with singular insistence some earnest words which once had
thrilled her: "We are bound to one another inseparably in this life of
ours; we make a society that is a composite.  Whatever we may do to
weaken the sense of that common bond disintegrates society.  Whatever
we can do to deepen the sense of that bond makes life stronger, better
for all!"  This idea fed an inner hunger of spirit which her husband
had not appeased.  For she had in large measure that rare instinct for
democracy, the love of being like others in joy and sorrow.

Jackson believed in charitable effort, and had urged her to accept an
invitation to join the committee of women who managed St. Isidore's
hospital.  It was almost a fashionable club, this committee, and it was
a flattering thing for a young married woman to be made a member of it.
The hospital was under the special patronage of the Crawfords and the
Fosters and other well-known people in the city.  And when after a
visit to the bookbinder's sickly wife, she wished to do something for
Hussey, Jackson interested himself in her effort to get together a
class of young married women to learn the art of bookbinding, which
happened to be a part of the current enthusiasm over craftsmanship.
This class met at various houses once a week and spent a morning trying
to bind paper-covered literature under Hussey's direction.  Jackson,
who was a bit of a dilettante by nature, was much interested in the
work of the class.  He would like to have Helen try her hand in
metal-work or design jewellery or wall-paper or model.  Once he talked
to the class on the minor arts, talked with great enthusiasm and charm,
exhorting these young women of the leisure class to cultivate
intensively some one artistic interest in life.

But Helen, who hoped soon to have a child, found these things more or
less trivial.

CHAPTER XII

After a winter in the city the Harts went to live at Shoreham, taking
rooms for the season in a cottage near the club.  The new station which
the railroad was building at Eversley Heights, and the Rainbows'
cottage on the ridge just west of the club, had brought the architect
considerable reputation.  His acquaintance was growing rapidly among
the men who rode to and fro each day on the suburban trains of the C.
R. and N.  It was the kind of acquaintance which he realized might be
very valuable to him in his profession.

Between Chicago and Shoreham there was a long line of prosperous
suburbs, which exhibited a considerable variety of American society.
As the train got away from the sprawling outskirts of the city, every
stop marked a pause in social progress.  Each little town gathered to
itself its own class, which differed subtly, but positively, from that
attracted by its neighbor.  Shoreham was the home of the hunting set,
its society centring in the large club.  At Popover Plains there was a
large summer hotel, and therefore the society of Popover Plains was
considered by her neighbors as more or less "mixed."  Eversley Heights
was still undeveloped, the home of a number of young people, who were
considered very pleasant, even incipiently smart.  But of all the more
distant and desirable settlements Forest Park had the greatest pride in
itself, being comparatively old, and having large places and
old-fashioned ugly houses in which lived some people of permanent
wealth.  At these latter stations many fashionable traps were drawn up
at the platforms to meet the incoming afternoon trains, and the
coachmen, recognizing their masters, touched their hats properly with
their whips.  Farther down the line there were more runabouts, and they
were driven by wives freshly dressed, who were expecting package-laden
husbands.  Still nearer the city, the men who tumbled out of the cars
to the platform found no waiting carriages, and only occasionally a
young woman in starched calico awaited her returning lord.

Nevertheless, all these suburban towns had one common characteristic:
they were the homes of the prosperous, who had emerged from the close
struggle in the city with ideals of rest and refreshment and an
instinct for the society of their own kind.  Except for a street of
shops near the stations, to which was relegated the service element of
life, the inhabitants of these suburbs got exclusively the society of
their kind.

The architect went to the city by one of the earlier trains and came
back very late.  He had all the labor of supervising the construction
of his buildings, for the work in the office did not warrant engaging a
superintendent.  He emerged from the city, after a day spent in running
about here and there, with a kind of speechless listlessness, which the
wife of a man in business soon becomes accustomed to.  But the dinner
in the lively dining-room of the club-house, with the chatter about
sport and the gossip, the cigar afterward on the veranda overlooking
the green, turfy valley golden in the afterglow of sunset, refreshed
him quickly.  He was always eager to accept any invitation, to go
wherever they were asked, to have himself and his wife in the eyes of
their little public as much as possible.  His agreeable manners, his
keen desire to please, his instinct for the conventional, the suitable,
made him much more popular than his wife, who was considered shy, if
not positively countrified.  As the season progressed, Jackson was sure
that they had made a wise choice of a place to settle in, and they
began to look for a house for the winter.

These were the happiest months the architect had ever known.  He was
having the exquisite pleasure that a robust nature feels in the first
successful bout with life.  Then blows, even, are sweet, and the whole
brutal surge of the struggle.  The very step of him these days as he
turned in at his club for a hurried luncheon, his air of polite haste,
a quick, hearty manner of greeting the men he knew, proclaimed him as
one who had taken his part in the game.  The song of the great city
sang in his ears all the day, with a sweeter, minor note of his love
that was awaiting him.

Yet there were grave risks, anxieties, that pressed as the months
passed.  In spite of all the apparent prosperity which the little
office enjoyed from the start, the profit for the first year was
startlingly small.  The commission from the Phillips house had long
since been eaten; also as much of the fee from Graves as that close
contractor could be induced to pay over before the building had been
finished.  The insatiable office was now devouring the profits from the
railroad business.  Such commissions as he had got in Forest Park and
Shoreham were well-earned: the work was fussy, exacting, and paid very
little.  When Cook saw the figures, he spoke to the point: "It's just
self-indulgence to build houses.  We must quit it."  If they were to
succeed, they must do a larger business,--factories, mills,
hotels,--work that could be handled on a large scale, roughly and
rapidly.

The Harts were living beyond their means, not extravagantly, but with a
constant deficit which from the earliest weeks of their marriage had
troubled Helen.  Reared in the tradition of thrift, she held it to be a
crime to spend money not actually earned.  But she found that her
husband had another theory of domestic economy.  To attract money, he
said, one must spend it.  He insisted on her dressing as well as the
other women who used the club, although they were for the most part
wives and daughters of men who had many times his income.  At the close
of the first ten months of their marriage Helen spoke authoritatively:--

"At this rate we shall run behind at least two thousand dollars for the
year.  We must go back to the city to live at once!"

They had been talking of renting the Loring place in Forest Park for
the coming year.  But she knew that in the city she could control the
expenditure, the manner of living.  The architect laughed at her
scruples, however.

"I'll see Bushfield to-day and find out when they are to get at the
Popover station."

She still looked grave, having in mind a precept that young married
people, barring sickness, should save a fifth of their income.

"And if that isn't enough," her husband added, "why, we must pull out
something else.  There's lots doing."

He laughed again and kissed her before going downstairs to take the
club 'bus.  His light-hearted philosophy did not reassure her.  If
one's income was not enough for one's wants, he said--why, expand the
income!  This hopeful, gambling American spirit was natural to him.  He
was too young to realize that the point of expansion for professional
men is definitely limited.  A lawyer, a doctor, an architect, has but
his one brain, his one pair of hands, his own eyes--and the scope of
these organs is fixed by nature.

"And we give to others so little!" she protested in her heart that
morning.  Her mother had given to their church and to certain charities
always a tenth of their small income.  That might be a mechanical,
old-fashioned method of estimating one's dues to mankind, but it was
better than the careless way of giving when it occurred to one, or when
some friend who could not be denied demanded help....

The architect, as he rode to the early morning train in the club 'bus,
was talking to Stephen Lane, a rich bachelor, who had a large house and
was the chief promoter of the Hunt Club.  Lane grumbled rather
ostentatiously because he was obliged to take the early train, having
had news that a mill he was interested in had burned down overnight.

"You are going to rebuild?" the architect asked.

"Begin as soon as we can get the plans done," Lane replied laconically.

It shot into the architect's mind that here was the opportunity which
would go far to wipe out the deficit he and Helen had been talking
about.  With this idea in view he got into the smoking car with Lane,
and the two men talked all the way to town.  Hart did not like Stephen
Lane; few at the club cared for the rich bachelor, whose manners
carried a self-consciousness of wealth.  But this morning the architect
looked at him from a different angle, and condoned his tone of
patronage.  Yet the mill would mean only a few hundred dollars, a mere
pot-boiling job, that in his student days he would have scorned,
something that Cook or a new draughtsman might bite his teeth on!  As
the train neared the tangled network of the city terminal, he ventured
to say, "What architects do your work, Lane?"

He hated the sound of his voice as he said it, though he tried to make
it impersonal and indifferent.  Lane's voice seemed to change its tone,
something of suspicion creeping in, as he replied:--

"I have always had the Stearns brothers.  They do that sort of thing
pretty well."

As they mounted the station stairs, Lane asked casually: "Do you ever
do that kind of work?  It isn't much in your line."

"I've never tried it, but of course I should like the chance."

Then Lane, one hand on the door of a waiting cab, remarked slowly:
"Well, we'll talk it over perhaps.  Where do you lunch?" and gave the
architect two fingers of his gloved hand.

He was thinking that Mrs. Hart was a pleasant woman, who always
listened to him with a certain deference, and that these Harts must be
hard put to it, without old Jackson's pile.

Hart went his way on foot, a taste of something little agreeable in his
mouth.  That same morning he had to stop at the railroad offices to see
the purchasing agent.  The railroad did its own contracting, naturally,
and it was through this man Bushfield that the specifications for the
buildings had to pass.  The architect had had many dealings with the
purchasing agent, and had found him always friendly.  This morning
Bushfield was already in his office, perspiring from the August heat,
his coat off, a stenographer at his elbow.  When Hart came in he looked
up slowly, and nodded.  After he had finished with the stenographer, he
asked:--

"Why do you specify Star cement at Eversley, Hart?"

"Oh, it's about the best.  We always specify Star for outside work."

"How's it any better than the Climax?" the purchasing agent asked
insistently.

"I don't know anything about the Climax.  What's the matter with Star?"

Bushfield scratched his chin thoughtfully for a moment.

"I haven't got anything against Star.  What I want to know is what you
have got against Climax?"

The smooth, guttural tones of the purchasing agent gave the architect
no cause for suspicion, and he was dull enough not to see what was in
the air.

"It would take time to try a new cement properly," he answered.

The purchasing agent picked up his morning cigar, rolled it around in
his mouth, and puffed before he replied:--

"I don't mind telling you that it means something to me to have Climax
used at Eversley.  It's just as good as any cement on the market.  I
give you my word for that.  I take it you're a good friend of mine.  I
wish you would see if you can't use the Climax."

Then they talked of other matters.  When Hart got back to the office he
looked up the Climax cement in a trade catalogue.  There were hundreds
of brands on the market, and the Climax was one of the newest.  Horace
Bushfield, he reflected, was Colonel Raymond's son-in-law.  If he
wished to do the Popover station, he should remain on good terms with
the purchasing agent of the road.  Some time that day he got out the
type-written specifications for the railroad work, and in the section
on the cement work he inserted neatly in ink the words, "Or a cement of
equal quality approved by the architect."

He had scarcely time to digest this when not many days later the
purchasing agent telephoned to him:--

"Say, Hart, the Buckeye Hardware people have just had a man in here
seeing me about the hardware for that building.  I see you have
specified the Forrest makes.  Aren't the Buckeye people first-class?"

The architect, who knew what was coming this time, waited a moment
before replying.  Then he answered coolly, "I think they are,
Bushfield."

"Well, the Buckeye people have always done our business, and they
couldn't understand why they were shut out by your specifying the
Forrest makes.  You'll make that all right?  So long."

As Hart hung up his receiver, he would have liked to write Raymond, the
general manager, that he wanted nothing more to do with the railroad
business.  Some weeks later when he happened to glance over the Buckeye
Company's memoranda of sales for the Eversley station, and saw what the
railroad had paid for its hardware, he knew that Horace Bushfield was a
thief.  But the purchasing agent was Colonel Raymond's son-in-law, and
the railroad was about to start the Popover station!

Something similar had been his experience with the contractor Graves.

"Put me up a good, showy building," the contractor had said, when they
first discussed the design.  "That's the kind that will take in that
park neighborhood.  People nowadays want a stylish home with elevator
boys in uniform....  That court you've got there between the wings, and
the little fountain, and the grand entrance,--all just right.  But they
don't want to pay nothin' for their style.  Flats don't rent for
anything near what they do in New York.  Out here they want the earth
for fifty, sixty dollars a month; and we've got to give 'em the nearest
thing to it for their money."

So when it came to the structure of the building, the contractor
ordered the architect to save expense in every line of the details.
The woodwork was cut to the thinnest veneer; partitions, even
bearing-walls, were made of the cheapest studding the market offered;
the large floors were hung from thin outside walls, without the brick
bearing-walls advised by the architect.  When Hart murmured, Graves
said frankly:--

"This ain't any investment proposition, my boy.  I calculate to fill
the Graveland in two months, and then I'll trade it off to some
countryman who is looking for an investment.  Put all the style you
want into the finish.  Have some of the flats Flemish, and others
Colonial, and so on.  Make 'em smart."

The architect tried to swallow his disgust at being hired to put
together such a flimsy shell of plaster and lath.  But Cook, who had
been trained in Wright's office, where work of this grade was never
accepted, was in open revolt.

"If it gets known around that this is the style of work we do in this
office, it'll put us in a class, and it ain't a pleasant one,
either....  Say, Jack, how's this office to be run--first-class or the
other class?"

"You know, man," the architect replied, wincing at the frank speech,
"how I am fixed with Graves.  I don't like this business any better
than you do, but we'll be through with it before long; and I shan't get
into it again, I can tell you."

He growled in his turn to the contractor, who received his protest with
contemptuous good humor.

"You'd better take a look at what other men are doing, if you think I
am making the Graveland such an awful cheap building.  I tell you,
there ain't money in the other kind.  Why, I worked for a man once who
put up a first-class flat building, slow-burning construction, heavy
woodwork, and all that.  It's old-fashioned by this--and its rents are
way down.  And I saw by the paper the other day that it was sold at the
sheriff's sale for not more than what my bill came to!  What have you
got to say to that?"

Therefore the architect dismissed the Graveland from his mind as much
as he could, and saw little of it while it was under construction, for
the contractor did his own superintending.  One day, however, he had
occasion to go to the building, and took his wife with him.  They drove
down the vast waste of Grand Boulevard; after passing through that
wilderness of painful fancies, the lines of the Graveland made a very
pleasant impression.

Hart had induced Graves to sacrifice part of his precious land to an
interior court, around which he had thrown his building like a
miniature château, thus shutting out the sandy lots, the ragged street,
which looked like a jaw with teeth knocked out at irregular intervals.
A heavy wall joined the two wings on the street side, and through the
iron gates the Park could be seen, just across the street.

"Lovely!" Helen exclaimed.  "I'm so glad you did it!  I like it so--so
much more than the Phillips house."

They studied it carefully from the carriage, and Hart pointed out all
the little triumphs of design.  It was, as Helen felt, much more
genuine than the Phillips house.  It was no bungling copy, but an
honest answer to a modern problem--an answer, to be sure, in the only
language that the architect knew.

Helen wanted to see the interior, although Jackson displayed no
enthusiasm over that part of the structure.  And in the inside came the
disaster!  The evidences of the contractor's false, flimsy building
darkened the architect's brow.

"The scamp!" he muttered, emerging from the basement.  "He's propped
the whole business on a dozen or so 'two-by-fours.'  And I guess he's
put in the rottenest plumbing underground that I ever saw.  I don't
believe it ever had an inspection."

"Show me what you mean," Helen demanded.

He pointed out to her some of the devices used to skimp the building.

"Even the men at work here know it.  You can see it by the way they
look at me.  Why, the thing is a paper box!"

In some of the apartments the rough work was scarcely completed, in
others the plasterers were at work; but the story was the same
everywhere.

"I can't see how he escaped the Building Department.  He's violated the
ordinances again and again.  But I suppose he knows how to keep the
inspectors quiet."

He remembered the Canostota: he had no manner of doubt, now, about
those I-beams in the Canostota.

"Francis!" Helen exclaimed with sudden passion; "you won't stand it?
You won't let him do this kind of thing?"

The architect shrugged his shoulders.

"It's his building.  He bought the plans and paid for them."

She was silent, troubled in her mind by this business distinction, but
convinced that wrong was being done.  A thing like this, a fraud upon
the public, should be prevented in some way.

"Can't you tell him that you will report him to the Building
Department?" she asked finally.

Hart smiled at her impetuous unpractically.

"That would hardly do, would it, to go back on a client like that?
It's none of my business, really.  Only one hates to feel that his
ideas are wasted on such stuff as this is made of.  The city should
look after it.  And it's no worse than most of these flat buildings.
Look at that one across the street.  It's the same cheap thing.  I was
in there the other day....  No, it's the condition of things in this
city,--the worst place for good building in the country.  Every one
says so.  But God help the poor devils who come to live here, if a fire
once gets started in this plaster-and-lath shell!"

He turned to the entrance and kicked open the door in disgust.  Helen's
face was pale and set, as if she could not dismiss the matter thus
lightly.

"I never thought of fire!" she murmured.  "Francis, if anything like
that should happen!  To think that you had drawn the plans!"

"Oh! it may last out its time," he replied reassuringly.  "And it
doesn't affect the appearance of the building at present.  It's real
smart, as Mrs. Rainbow would say.  Don't you think so, Nell?"

She was standing with her back to the pleasant façade of the Graveland,
and was staring into the Park across the street.  Turning around at his
words she cast a swift, scrutinizing glance over the building.

"It isn't right!  I see fraud looking out of every window.  It's just a
skeleton covered with cloth."

The architect laughed at her solemnity.  He was disgusted with it
himself; it offended his workman's conscience.  But he was too modern,
too practical, to allow merely ideal considerations to upset him.  And,
after all, in his art, as in most arts, the effect of the work was
two-thirds the game.  With her it was altogether different.  Through
all outward aspect, or cover, of things pierced their inner being, from
which one could not escape by illusion.

As they were leaving the place the contractor drove up to the building
for his daily inspection.  He came over to the architect, a most
affable smile on his bearded face.

"Mrs. Hart, I presume," he said, raising his hat.  "Looking over your
husband's work?  It's fine, fine, I tell you!  Between ourselves, it
beats Wright all out."

Helen's stiffness of manner did not encourage cordiality, and Graves,
thinking her merely snobbish, bowed to them and went into the building.

"You'll never do anything for him again, will you, Francis?  Promise
me."

And he promised lightly enough, for he thought it highly improbable
that the contractor ever would return to him, or that he should feel
obliged to take his work if he offered it.

Nevertheless, the contractor did return to the office, and not long
afterward.  It was toward the end of the summer, when the architect and
his wife were still debating the question of taking a house in the
country for the winter.  One afternoon Jackson came back from his
luncheon to find Graves waiting for him in the outer office.  The
stenographer and Cook were hard at work in the room beyond, with an air
of having nothing to say to the contractor.  As Graves followed Hart
into his private office, Cook looked up with a curl on his thin lips
that expressed the fulness of his heart.

"Say," Graves called out as soon as Hart had closed the door to the
outer room, "I sold that Graveland three weeks ago, almost before the
plaster was dry.  A man from Detroit came in to see me one morning, and
we made the deal that day."

"Is that so?" Hart remarked coolly.

"It was a pretty building.  I knew I shouldn't have any trouble with
it.  Now I have something new in mind."

The architect listened in a non-committal manner.

"Part of that trade with the Detroit feller was for a big block of land
out west here a couple of miles.  I am thinking of putting up some tidy
little houses to sell on the instalment plan."

"What do you mean to put into them?" Jackson asked bluntly.

"Well, they'd ought to sell for not more than eight thousand dollars."

"And cost as much less as you can make them hold together for?  I don't
believe I can do anything for you, Mr. Graves," Jackson replied firmly.

"Is that so?  Well, you are the first man I ever saw who was too busy
to take on a paying piece of business."

He settled himself more comfortably in the chair opposite Hart's desk,
and began to describe his scheme.  There was to be a double row of
houses, three stories and basement, each one different in style, in a
different kind of brick or terra cotta, with a distinguishing "feature"
worked in somewhere in the design.  They were to be bait for the
thrifty clerk, who wanted to buy a permanent home on the instalment
plan rather than pay rent.  There were many similar building schemes in
different parts of the city, the advertisements of which one might read
in the street cars.

"Why do you want me to do the job for you?" Hart asked at last.  "Any
boy just out of school could do what you are after."

"No, he couldn't!  He hasn't the knack of giving a fresh face to each
house.  But it won't be hard work for you!"

This, the architect knew, was true.  It would be very easy to have Cook
hunt up photographs from French and English architectural journals,
which with a little arrangement would serve for the different houses.
With a few hours' work he could turn out that individual façade which
Graves prized commercially.  Here was the large job that could be done
easily and roughly, opportunely offering itself.

"I don't like to have such work go through the office.  That's all
there is about it!" he exclaimed at last.

"Is that so?  Too tony already.  Well, we won't fight over that.
Suppose you make the sketches and let another feller prepare the
details?"

There were many objections to this mode of operation, but the
contractor met every one.  Hart himself thought of Meyer, a clever,
dissipated German, to whom he had given work now and then when the
office was busy.  Meyer would do what he was told and say nothing about
it.

It was late when Graves left the office.  Cook and the stenographer had
already gone.  Hart went down into the street with the contractor, and
they nodded to each other when they parted, in the manner of men who
have reached an understanding.  On the way to the train, Jackson
dropped into his club for a drink.  He stood staring into the street
while he sipped his gin and bitters.  The roar of the city as it came
through the murky windows seemed to him more than commonly harsh and
grating.  The gray light of the summer evening filtered mournfully into
the dingy room....  He was not a weak man; he had no qualms of
conscience for what he had made up his mind that afternoon to do.  It
was disagreeable, but he had weighed it against other disagreeable
alternatives which might happen if he could not get the money he
needed.  His child would be born in a few months, and his wife must
have the necessary comforts during her illness.  He had too much pride
to accept Helen's plan of going to her mother's house for her
confinement.  By the time he had reached Shoreham he had entirely
adjusted his mind to Graves, and he met his wife, who had walked over
to the station, with his usual buoyant smile.  And that evening he
remarked:--

"I guess we had better take the Loring place.  It's the only fit one
for rent.  We'll have to keep a horse--that's all."

They had been debating this matter of the Loring place for several
weeks.  It was a pleasant old house, near the lake, not far from Mrs.
Phillips's in Forest Park.  It was Mrs. Phillips who had first called
the architect's attention to it.  But, unfortunately, it was too far
from either station of the railroad to be within walking distance.  And
it was a large establishment for two young persons to maintain, who
were contemplating the advent of a baby and a nurse.

All this Helen had pointed out to her husband, and lately they had felt
too poor to consider the Loring place.

"What has happened, Francis?" she asked.

"A lot more business has come in,--a block of houses.  They will be
very profitable," he answered vaguely, remembering Helen's antipathy to
the contractor.  "Did you lunch with Venetia?  I saw her this morning
at the station.  She is growing up fast, isn't she?"

CHAPTER XIII

Two years passed and they were still living in the Loring place, which
the architect had remodelled comfortably to suit his modern taste.
Occasionally he talked of building, and they looked at land here and
there.  But it was clearly out of the question at present, for each
year the family budget went leaping upward, and the income came tagging
after.

"Jack," so Everett Wheeler expressed the situation in the raw phrase of
the ordinary man, "Jack's got a champagne appetite.  But he's a pretty
good provider."

The architect was a good provider: he enjoyed heartily the luxury that
his money brought him, and he wanted his wife to enjoy it with him.  He
worked at high pressure and needed his bread and meat well seasoned
with excitement.  Once, early in their married life, Mrs. Phillips had
volunteered to explain to Helen the philosophy of this masculine
temperament.

"Some men need more food than others.  They'd mope and grow thin if
they dined at home on a chop and went to bed at ten every night.  They
must have something to make steam.  Your young man was born to be a
spender."

The second winter the Phillipses had gone to Europe, where the widow
was still adding to her collection for the new house,--Forest Manor as
she had dubbed it.  Leaving Venetia in Paris with some friends, she had
descended upon Italy, the rage for buying in her soul.  There she
gathered up the flotsam of the dealers,--marbles, furniture, stuffs,--a
gold service in Naples, a vast bed in Milan, battered pictures in
Florence.  Mrs. Phillips was not a discriminating amateur; she troubled
her soul little over the authenticity of her spoil.  To San Giorgio,
Simonetti, Richetti, and their brethren in the craft she came like a
rich harvest, and they put up many a prayer for her return another
season.

In March of that year, Jackson Hart, struggling with building strikes
in Chicago, had a cablegram from the widow.  "Am buying wonderful
marbles in Florence.  Can you come over?"  The architect laughed as he
handed the message to his wife, saying lightly, "Some one ought to head
her off, or she'll be sending over a shipload of fakes."  Helen,
mindful of the widow's utterances about Jackson, and thinking that he
needed the vacation after two years of hard work, urged him generously
to accept the invitation and get a few weeks in Italy.  But there was
no time just then for vacation: he was in the grip of business, and
another child was coming to them.

From time to time Mrs. Phillips's purchases arrived at Forest Park and
were stored in the great hall of her house.  Then late in the spring
the widow telephoned the architect.

"Yes, I am back," came her brisk, metallic tones from the receiver.
"Glad to be home, of course, with all the dirt and the rest of it.  How
are you getting on?  I hear you are doing lots of things.  Maida
Rainbow told me over there in Paris that you were building the
Bushfields an immense house.  I am so glad for you--I hope you are
coining money."

"Not quite that," he laughed back.

"I want you to see all the treasures I have bought.  I've ruined myself
and the children!  However, you'll think it's worth it, I'm sure.  You
must tell me what to do with them.  Come over Sunday, can't you?  How
is Mrs. Hart?  Bring her over, too, of course."

Thus she gathered him up on her return with that dexterous turn of the
wrist which exasperated her righteous brother-in-law.  On the Sunday
Jackson went to see the "treasures," but without Helen, who made an
excuse of her mother's weekly visit.  He found the widow in the stable,
directing the efforts of two men servants in unpacking some cases.

"Ah, it's you!  How are you?"

She extended a strong, flexible hand to Hart, and with the other
motioned toward a marble that was slowly emerging from the packing
straw.

"Old copy of a Venus, the Syracuse one.  It will be great in the hall,
won't it?"

"It's ripping!" he exclaimed warmly.  "But where did you get that
picture?"

"You don't like it?"

"Looks to be pure fake."

"And Simonetti swore he knew the very room where it's hung for over a
hundred years."

"Oh, he probably put it there himself!"

"Come into the house and see the other things.  I have some splendid
chairs."

For an hour they examined the articles she had bought, and the
architect was sufficiently approving to satisfy Mrs. Phillips.  Neither
one had a pure, reticent taste.  Both were of the modern barbarian type
that admires hungrily and ravishes greedily from the treasure house of
the Old World what it can get, what is left to get, piling the spoil
helter-skelter into an up-to-date American house.  Mediæval,
Renaissance, Italian, French, Flemish--it was all one!  Between them
they would turn Forest Manor into one of those bizarre, corrupt,
baroque museums that our lavish plunderers love,--electric-lighted and
telephoned, with gilded marble fireplaces, massive bronze candelabra,
Persian rugs, Gothic choir stalls, French bronzes--a house of barbarian
spoil!

A servant brought in a tray of liquors and cigarettes; they sat in the
midst of pictures and stuffs, and sipped and smoked.

"Now," Mrs. Phillips announced briskly, "I want to hear all about you!"

"It's only the old story,--more jobs and more strikes,--the chase for
the nimble dollar," he answered lightly.  "You have to run faster for
it all the time."

"But you are making money?" she questioned directly.

"I'm spending it."

He found it not difficult to tell her the state of his case.  She
nodded comprehendingly, while he let her see that his situation, after
two years of hard work, was not altogether as prosperous as it appeared
on the surface.  Payments on buildings under construction were delayed
on account of the strikes; office expenses crept upward; and personal
expenses mounted too.  And there was that constant pressure in
business--the fear of a cessation in orders.

"We may have to move back to town after all.  That Loring place is
pretty large to swing, and in town you can be poor in obscurity."

"Nonsense!  You must not go back.  People will know then that you
haven't money.  You are going to get bigger things to do when the
strikes are over.  And you are so young.  My! not thirty-five."

Her sharp eyes examined the man frankly, sympathetically, approving him
swiftly.  His clay was like hers; he would succeed, she judged--in the
end.

"Come!  I have an idea.  Why shouldn't you build here, on my land?
Something pretty and artistic; it would help you, of course, to have
your own house.  I know the very spot, just the other side of the
ravine--in the hickories.  Do you remember it?"

In her enthusiasm she proposed to go at once to examine the site.
Pinning a big hat on her head, she gathered up her long skirt, and they
set forth, following a neat wood-path that led from the north terrace
into the ravine, across a little brook, and up the other bank.

"Now, here!"  She pointed to a patch of hazel bushes.  "See the lake
over there.  And my house is almost hidden.  You would be quite by
yourselves."

He hinted that to build even on this charming spot a certain amount of
capital would be needed.  She frowned and settled herself on the stump
of a tree.

"Why don't you try that Harris man?  You know him.  He made a heap of
money for me once,--corn, I think.  He knew just what was going to
happen.  He's awfully smart, and he's gone in with Rainbow, you know.
I am sure he could make some money for you."

"Or lose it?"

She laughed scornfully at the idea of losing.

"Of course you have got to risk something.  I wouldn't give a penny for
a man who wouldn't trust his luck.  You take my advice and see Harris.
Tell him I sent you."

She laughed again, with the conviction of a successful gambler; it
became her to laugh, for it softened the lines of her mouth.

She was now forty-one years old, and she appeared to Jackson to be
younger than when he had first gone to see her after his uncle's death.
She had come back from Europe thinner than she had been for several
years.  Her hair was perfectly black, still undulled by age, and her
features had not begun to sharpen noticeably.  She had another ten
years of active, selfish woman's life before her, and she knew it.
Meantime he had grown older rapidly, so that they were much nearer
together.  She treated him quite as her equal in experience, and that
flattered him.

"Yes," she continued, in love with her project, "there isn't a nicer
spot all along the shore.  And you would be next door, so to say.  You
could pay for the land when you got ready, of course."

She gave him her arm to help her in descending the steep bank of the
ravine, and she leaned heavily on him.  Beneath the bluff the lake
lapped at the sandy shore in a summer drowse, and the June sun lay
warmly about the big house as they returned to it.  The shrubbery had
grown rankly around the terrace, doing its best in its summer verdancy
to soften the naked walls.  The architect looked at the house he had
built with renewed pride.  It was pretentious and ambitious, mixed in
motive like this woman, like himself.  He would have fitted into the
place like a glove, if his uncle had done the right thing.  Somewhat
the same thought was in the widow's mind.

"It was a shame that old Powers treated you so shabbily!  They haven't
done anything yet about that school, have they?"

"No; I thought I should be drawing the plans before this.  Rather
counted on it."

They stood for a moment on the terrace, looking at the house.  Yes, it
was like them both!  They loved equally the comforts and the luxuries
and the powers of this our little life.  And they were bold to snatch
what they wanted from the general feast.

"You must make Harris do something for you," she mused.  "You can't
bury yourself in a stuffy flat."  Then in a few moments she added:
"How's that handsome wife of yours?  I hear she's going to have another
child."  She continued with maternal, or, perhaps, Parisian,
directness: "Two babies, and not on your feet yet!  You mustn't have
any more.  These days children are no unmixed blessing, I can tell
you....  Venetia?  I left her in the East with some friends she made
over there.  She's too much for me already.  She needs a husband who
can use the curb." ...

When Jackson reported to his wife the widow's offer, Helen said very
quickly, "I had rather go back to the city to live, Francis, than do
that."

"Why?" he asked with some irritation.

"Because, because--"

She put her arms about his neck in her desire to make him feel what she
could not say.  But he was thinking of Mrs. Phillips's advice to see
the broker, and merely kissed her in reply to her caress.  The widow
had spoken wisely; it would be foolish to retreat now, to hide himself
in the city.  Instead, he would venture on with the others.  It was the
year of the great bull market, when it seemed as if wealth hung low on
every bough, and all that a bold man had to do to win a fortune was to
pick his stock and make his stake.

Forest Park was very gay that summer.  There were perpetual dinners and
house parties and much polo at the Shoreham Club.  The architect, who
was very popular, went about more than ever, sometimes with his wife,
and often alone, as her health did not permit much effort.
Occasionally he played polo, taking the place of one of the regular
team, and usually when there was a match he stopped at the club on his
way from the city.

One of these polo Wednesdays, late in August, Helen strolled along the
shore-path in the direction of the Phillipses' place, with an idea of
calling on Venetia Phillips, if her strength held out.  The path
followed the curves of the bluff in full view of the lake, from which
rose a pleasant coolness like a strong odor.  Back from the edge of the
bluff, in the quiet of well-spaced trees, stood the houses.  They
seemed deserted on this midsummer afternoon, for those people who had
the energy to stir had gone to the polo grounds.  The Phillips house,
also, was apparently asleep in the windless heat, as Helen crossed the
lawn that stretched from the edge of the bluff to the terrace; but when
she reached the stone steps she caught a glimpse of Mrs. Phillips
seated in the farther corner of the terrace, where luxuriant vines
curtained a sheltered nook.  Beyond was the outline of a man's form,
and little rings of blue cigar smoke curled upward.  The widow was
leaning forward, her elbows resting comfortably on her knees, and in
the animation of her talk she had put one hand on her companion's arm
to emphasize her words.  It lay there, while she looked into the man's
face with her eager, flashing eyes.

Before Helen could take another step Mrs. Phillips turned her head, as
if disturbed unconsciously by the presence of an intruder.

"Oh, is that you, Mrs. Hart?" the older woman asked after a moment of
scrutiny.  "Did you walk in all this heat?  Come over here."

"Helen!" Jackson exclaimed, rising, a trace of annoyance in his tone,
as though he had been interrupted in some important business matter.

"Don't get up, Mrs. Phillips," Helen said quickly, and the coldness of
her voice surprised her.  "I am looking for Venetia."

And without further words she opened the terrace door and stepped into
the hall.

"You'll find her about somewhere.  Ask John!" Mrs. Phillips called
after her coolly.

While the servant departed in search of Venetia, Helen moved restlessly
about the long drawing-room, which oppressed her with its close array
of dominating furniture, thinking of the two outside upon the terrace.
She had no suspicion of wrong between them, or, indeed, any jealousy of
this woman, who she well knew liked men--all men.  Yet an unfamiliar
pain gripped her heart.  Slowly, for many months, she had felt some
mysterious and hostile force entering her field, and now she seemed to
see it pictured, dramatized here before her in this little scene,--a
man and a woman with chairs pulled close together, their faces aglow
with eager thoughts.  The other part of her husband, that grosser side
of him which she dimly felt and put forth from her mind with dread, was
on intimate terms with this woman, who fed his ambitions.  And the
wife, suddenly, instinctively, hated her for it.

There was nothing evil, however, between those two on the terrace.  The
architect had come from town by an early train to see the polo, and
there Mrs. Phillips had found him, and had brought him home in her
automobile.  She had just learned a piece of news that concerned the
architect closely, and they were discussing it in the shade and quiet
of the north terrace.

"I know they're going to start soon.  The judge let it out at dinner
last night.  He's no friend of yours, of course, because I like you.
But he won't take the trouble to fight you.  You must get hold of your
cousin and the other trustees."

It was here that Mrs. Phillips, in her eagerness for his success, laid
her hand on the young man's arm.  Jackson murmured his thanks, thinking
less of the widow than of the trustees of the Powers Jackson bequest.

"It'll be the biggest thing of its kind we have had in this city for
years.  It's only right that you should have it, too.  Can't your wife
win over the judge?  He's always talking about her," she resumed after
Helen's departure.

It was not strange that in the end the man should take the woman's
hand, and hold it while he expressed his gratitude for all her good
offices to him.  It was a pleasant hand to hold, and the woman was an
agreeable woman to have in one's confidence.  Naturally, he could not
know that she considered all men base,--emotionally treacherous and
false-hearted, and would take her amusement wherever she could get it.

Venetia found Helen in the drawing-room, very white, her lips
trembling, and beads of perspiration on her forehead.

"What's the matter?" Venetia demanded quickly.  "Have you seen a ghost
anywhere?"

"It's nothing," the older woman protested.  "I shouldn't have walked so
far.  And now I must go back at once,--yes, really I must.  I'm so
sorry."

"Let me call Mr. Hart," Venetia said, troubled by the woman's white
face.  "I saw him come in with mamma a little while ago."

"No, no, I prefer not, please.  It would worry him."

Then Venetia insisted on driving her home, and left her calmer, more
herself, but still cold.  She kissed her, with a girl's
demonstrativeness, and the older woman burst into tears.

"I am so weak and so silly.  I see things queerly," she explained,
endeavoring to smile.

After the girl had gone, Helen tried to recover her ordinary calm.  She
played with the little Francis, who was beginning to venture about the
walls and chairs of his nursery, testing the power in his sturdy legs.
This naïve manifestation of his masculine quality touched the mother
strangely.  She saw in this mark of manhood the future of the boy.
What other of man's instincts would he have?  Would he, too, hunger and
fight for his share in the spoil of the world?

The terrible hour of her woman's agony was fast approaching, when she
should put forth another being into the struggle with its mates.  She
did not shrink from the pain before her, although she began to wonder
if it might not end her own life, having that dark foreboding common to
sensitive women at this crisis.  If death came now, what had she done
with her life?  She would leave it like a meal scarce tasted, a task
merely played with--something seen but not comprehended.  What had she
done for the man she loved?  This afternoon when she saw her husband,
so remote from her, travelling another road, a bitter sense of the
fruitlessness of all living had entered her heart.  This husband whom
she had so passionately loved!

An hour later, as the architect was taking his leave of Mrs. Phillips,
a servant brought him a telephone message from his house.  His wife was
suddenly taken ill.  He raced home through the leafy avenues in the big
touring car, which fortunately stood ready before the door.  He found
Helen white and exhausted, her eyes searching the vacant horizon of her
bedroom.

"Why, Nell!  Poor girl!" he exclaimed, leaning over her, trying to kiss
her.  "The walk was too much for you in all this heat.  Why didn't you
let me know?"

Her lips were cold and scarcely closed to his caress.  She pushed him
gently from her, wishing to be alone in her trial.  But shortly
afterward, purging her heart of any suspicion or jealousy,--still
haunted by that fear of death,--she drew him to her and whispered:--

"You were talking with Mrs. Phillips.  I didn't want to--it's all
right, Francis.  I love you, dear!  Oh!  I love you!"

CHAPTER XIV

Rumor had it that the Powers Jackson trust was about to be fulfilled.
It had become known among the friends of the trustees that during these
prosperous times the fund for the educational project had grown apace,
and was now estimated to be from five to six millions of dollars.  It
was understood that some of the trustees were in favor of handing over
this munificent bequest to a large local university, with the
stipulation that a part of the money should be devoted to maintaining a
school on the West Side where some form of manual training or
technology should be taught.

One morning, not long after Helen's confinement, Jackson read aloud
from the newspaper an item to the effect that negotiations were under
way with the university.

"So that's their game!" he exclaimed to Helen gloomily, seeing in this
move an unexpected check to his ambition.

"How can they even think of it!" she responded warmly, unwontedly
stirred at the thought that the old man's design had already become
thus blurred in the minds of his nearest friends.  "That wasn't in the
least what uncle meant should be done.  I wish I could see Everett, or
Judge Phillips, and find out the truth in all this talk."

"Yes," Jackson assented.  "I should like to know what they mean to do."

Then he went to the train, trying to recall the names of the
influential trustees of the university, and wondering whether after all
there would be any monumental building erected with his uncle's money.
Fate seemed disposed to keep from his touch the smallest morsel of the
coveted millions!

It was not long before Helen had the opportunity she desired of finding
out from the trustees what was the truth beneath the newspaper gossip.
Judge Phillips with Mr. Pemberton took the seat behind her in the car
of the Chicago train one morning, and the judge leaning forward
inquired about the children.  Before he settled back into his
newspaper, Helen ventured to mention the current report about the
Powers Jackson bequest.

"I hope it isn't true," she protested warmly.  "Mr. Jackson was not
interested in universities, I know,--at least especially.  He didn't
believe very much in theoretical education; I don't think he would have
wanted his money used that way."

"What is that?" Pemberton asked with interest.

The judge, who preferred to talk babies or shrubs with a pleasant young
woman, answered briefly:--

"Well, we haven't settled anything yet.  Mr. Hollister seems to be
against the university plan, and I don't know that I favor it.  But
you'll have to talk to Pemberton here.  It was his idea."

"Why do you think Mr. Jackson would have objected?" Pemberton inquired
gravely.

"We often used to discuss college education," Helen replied quickly,
turning to the younger trustee.  "And he had very positive ideas about
what was needed nowadays.  He thought that colleges educated the
leaders, the masters, and that there would always be enough left for
that kind of institution.  So many people are interested in colleges.
But he wanted to do something with his money for the people."

"Yes, of course, it must be a free technical school," Pemberton replied
literally, "and it must be out there on the West Side."

"But planned for the people, the working people," she insisted.

"Naturally.  But we are all the 'people,' aren't we, Mrs. Hart?  I
haven't much sympathy with this talk nowadays about the 'people' as
opposed to any other class."

"That's the unions," the judge nodded sagely.  "We are all the
'people.'  There is no class distinction in educational matters.  We
want to offer the best kind of education for the poor boy or the rich
boy.  What was Powers himself?  His school must be a place to help boys
such as he was, of course."

They were both completely at sea as to the donor's real intentions,
Helen felt sure, and she was eager to have them see the matter as she
saw it.  Suddenly ideas came to her, things she wished to say, things
that seemed to her very important to say.  She remembered talks that
she had had with the old man, and certain remarks about college
education which had dropped from him like sizzling metal.

"But a technological school like the one in Boston,"--Pemberton had
instanced this famous school as an example they should follow,--"that's
a place to educate boys out of their class, to make them ambitious, to
push them ahead of their mates into some higher class."

"Well?" asked Pemberton.  "What's the matter with that idea?  Doesn't
all education do just that for those who are fitted for it?"

"Uncle wanted something so different!  He wanted to make boys good
workmen, to give them something to be contented with when they had just
labor before them, daily labor, in the factories and mills."

The judge's face puckered in puzzle over this speech.  He was of an
older generation, and he could see life only in the light of
competition.  Free competition in all the avenues of life--that was his
ideal.  And the constant labor disputes in Chicago had thickened his
prejudices against the working people as a class.  He believed, in
common with his associates, that their one aim was to get somebody's
money without working for it.

But the other man, who was younger and less prejudiced, was more
responsive.  He felt that this woman had an idea, that she knew perhaps
what the benefactor really wanted, and so they talked of the school
until the train reached Chicago.  As they rose to leave the cars,
Pemberton said warmly:--

"I am glad we have had this talk, Mrs. Hart.  I think I see what you
mean, although I am not at all clear how to attain the objects that you
describe as the donor's intention.  But you have modified my ideas very
materially.  May I call on you some day and continue this discussion?"

"If you would!" Helen exclaimed, glowing with an enthusiasm unfelt for
a long time.

"Well," the judge concluded, "I hope we can get the thing settled
pretty soon and start on the building.  I want to see something done
before I die."

"Yes," Helen assented, "I should think you would want to see the school
go up.  And I hope Jackson will have the building of it."

She expressed this wish very simply, without considering how it might
strike the trustees.  It was merely a bit of sentiment with her that
her husband, who had got his education from Powers Jackson, might, as a
pure labor of love, in gratitude, build this monument to the old man.
It did not then enter her mind that there would be a very large profit
in the undertaking.  She assumed that the architect would do the work
without pay!

It was not until Pemberton's thin lips closed coldly and the judge
stared at her in surprise that she realized what she had said.  Then
her face turned crimson with the thought of her indelicacy, as Judge
Phillips replied shortly:--

"We haven't got that far yet, Mrs. Hart.  It's probable that if we
build we shall have a competition of designs."

The two men raised their hats and disappeared into the black flood
pouring across the bridge, while she got into an omnibus.  That remark
of hers, she felt, might have undone all the good of the talk they had
had about the old man's plan.  Her cheeks burned again as she thought
of hinting for business favors to her husband.  It seemed a mean,
personal seeking, when she had been thinking solely of something noble
and pure.

This idea distressed her more and more until she was ingulfed in that
mammoth caravansary where one-half of Chicago shops and, incidentally,
meets its acquaintances and gossips.  She hurried hither and thither
about this place in the nervous perturbation of buying.  Finally, she
had to mount to the third floor to have a correction made in her
account.  There, in the centre of the building, nearly an acre of floor
space was railed off for the office force,--the bookkeepers and tally
clerks and cashiers.  Near the main aisle thirty or forty girls were
engaged in stamping little yellow slips.  Each had a computation
machine before her and a pile of slips.  Now and then some girl would
glance up listlessly from her work, let her eyes wander vacantly over
the vast floor, and perhaps settle her gaze for a moment on the face of
the lady who was waiting before the cashier's window.  This store
boasted of the excellent character of its employees.  They were of a
neater, more intelligent, more American class than those employed in
other large retail stores.  Even here, however, they had the
characteristic marks of dull, wholesale labor.

Helen was hypnotized by the constant punch, click, and clatter of the
computation machines, the repeated movements of the girls' arms as they
stretched out for fresh slips, inserted them in the machines, laid them
aside.  This was the labor of the great industrial world,--constant,
rhythmic as a machine is rhythmic, deadening to soul and body.
Standing there beside the railing, she could hear the vast clatter of
our complex life, which is carried on by just such automata as these
girls.  What was the best education to offer them, and their brothers
and fathers and lovers?  What would give their lives a little more
sanity, more joy and human interest?--that was the one great question
of education.  Not what would make them and their fellows into
department managers or proprietors.

The receipted bill came presently, with a polite bow.  She stuffed the
change into her purse and hurried away, conscious that the girl nearest
the railing was looking languidly at the back of her gown.

On her way to the Auditorium to meet some women who were to lunch with
her there, and afterward go to the afternoon concert, she stopped at
her husband's office.  The architect had moved lately to the top story
of a large new building on Michigan Avenue, where his office had
expanded.  He had taken a partner, a pleasant, smooth-faced young man,
Fred Stewart, who had excellent connections in the city, which were
expected to bring business to the firm.  Cook was still the head
draughtsman, but there were three men and a stenographer under him now.