reversed his first impression of a narrow, anxious, housewifely spirit
in her, sufficient to the demands of young motherhood, but of few and
scanty general sympathies.

“When did you see them last?” she asked.

He told her, and she said, “Well, I am going right up there with Percy.”

“And bring back the scarlet fever to your child!” cried her mother. “You
shall neither of you go, as long as I have anything to say about it. Or,
if you do, you shall not come back to this house, and I shall keep the
baby here till there isn’t the least fear of danger; and I don’t know
how long that will be.”

All the grandmother rose in Mrs. Chapley; she lifted her voice, and in
the transport of her alarm and indignation she suddenly appealed to Mr.
Kane from the wilfulness she evidently feared in her daughter: “What do
you think, Mr. Kane?”

“I wouldn’t presume to decide such a question finally; it’s too
important,” Kane said, in his mellow murmur. “But I wish that for the
moment Mrs. Brandreth would let me be the bearer of her kind messages
and inquiries. If you haven’t been in the habit of calling there”--

“I have never been there at all, I’m sorry to say,” Mrs. Brandreth
frankly declared.

“Ah! Well, I don’t see what good could come of it, just at present; and
there might be some lingering infection.”

“It has been carried in clothes across the ocean months afterwards, and
in letters,” Mrs. Chapley triumphed.

Kane abandoned the point to her. “The situation might be very much worse
for the Hugheses, as I was saying to Henry before you came in. The
Powers are not commonly so considerate. It seems to me distinctly the
best thing that could have happened, at least as far as Denton is
concerned.”

“Surely,” said Mrs. Chapley, “you don’t approve of suicide?”

“Not in the case of sane and happy people,” Kane blandly replied. “The
suicide of such persons should be punished with the utmost rigor of the
law. But there seem to be extenuating circumstances in the present
instance; I hope the coroner’s jury will deal leniently with the
culprit. I must go and see if I can do anything for David. Probably I
can’t. It’s always a question in these cases whether you are not adding
to the sufferings of the mourners by your efforts to alleviate them; but
you can only solve it at their expense by trying.”

“And you will let us know,” said Mrs. Chapley, “whether _we_ can do
anything, Mr. Kane.”

Mrs. Brandreth did not openly persist in her determination to go to the
Hugheses. She said, “Yes, be sure you let us know,” and when Kane had
gone on an errand of mercy which he owned was distasteful to him, her
husband followed Ray down to the door.

“You see what splendid courage she has,” he whispered, with a backward
glance up the stairs. “I must confess that it surprised me, after all
I’ve seen her go through, that stand she took with her mother. But I
don’t altogether wonder at it; they were disagreeing about keeping up
the belladonna when I found them, upstairs, and I guess Mrs. Brandreth’s
opposition naturally carried over into this question about the Hugheses.
Of course Mrs. Chapley means well, but if Mrs. Brandreth could once be
got from under her influence she would be twice the woman she is. I
think she’s right about the effect of our connection with the family
before the public. They can’t make anything wrong out of it, no matter
how they twist it or turn it. I’m not afraid. After all, it isn’t as if
Mr. Hughes was one of those howling socialists. An old-time Brook
Farmer--it’s a kind of literary tradition; it’s like being an original
abolitionist. I’m going to see if I can’t get a glimpse of that book of
his without committing myself. Well, let me know how you get on. I
wouldn’t let that chance on _Every Evening_ slip. Better see the man.
Confound the papers! I hope they won’t drag us in!”

XXXV.

A few lines, with some misspelling of names, told the story of the
suicide and inquest in the afternoon papers, and it dwindled into still
smaller space and finer print the next morning. The publicity which
those least concerned had most dreaded was spared them. Ray himself
appeared in print as a witness named Bray; there was no search into the
past of Hughes and his family, or their present relations; none of the
rich sensations of the case were exploited; it was treated as one of
those every-day tragedies without significance or importance, which
abound in the history of great cities, and are forgotten as rapidly as
they occur. The earth closed over the hapless wretch for whom the dream
of duty tormenting us all, more or less, had turned to such a hideous
nightmare, and those whom his death threatened even more than his life
drew consciously or unconsciously a long breath of freedom.

Mr. Brandreth’s courage rose with his escape; there came a moment when
he was ready to face the worst; the moment did not come till the danger
of the worst was past. Then he showed himself even eager to retrieve the
effect of anxieties not compatible with a scrupulous self-respect.

“Why should we laugh at him?” Kane philosophized, in talking the matter
over with Ray. “The ideals of generosity and self-devotion are
preposterous in our circumstances. He was quite right to be cautious, to
be prudent, to protect his business and his bosom from the invasion of
others’ misfortunes, and to look anxiously out for the main chance. Who
would do it for him, if he neglected this first and most obvious duty?
He has behaved most thoughtfully and kindly toward Peace through it all,
and I can’t blame him for not thrusting himself forward to offer help
when nothing could really be done.”

Kane had himself remained discreetly in the background, and had not
cumbered his old acquaintance with offers of service. He kept away from
the funeral, but he afterwards visited Hughes frequently, though he
recognized nothing more than the obligation of the early kindness
between them. This had been affected by many years of separation and
wide divergence of opinion, and it was doubtful whether his visits were
altogether a pleasure to the invalid. They disputed a good deal, and
sometimes when Hughes lost his voice from excitement and exhaustion,
Kane’s deep pipe kept on in a cool smooth assumption of positions which
Hughes was physically unable to assail.

Mr. Chapley went out of town to his country place in Massachusetts, to
try and get back his strength after a touch of the grippe. The Sunday
conventicles had to be given up because Hughes could no longer lead
them, and could not suffer the leadership of others. He was left mainly
for society and consolation to the young fellow who did not let him feel
that he differed from him, and was always gently patient with him.

Ray had outlived the grudge he felt at Kane for delivering him over to
bonds which he shirked so lightly himself; but this was perhaps because
they were no longer a burden. It was not possible for him to refuse his
presence to the old man when he saw that it was his sole pleasure; he
had come to share the pleasure of these meetings himself. As the days
which must be fewer and fewer went by he tried to come every day, and
Peace usually found him sitting with her father when she reached home at
the end of the afternoon. Ray could get there first because his work on
the newspaper was of a more flexible and desultory sort; and he often
brought a bundle of books for review with him, and talked them over with
Hughes, for whom he was a perspective of the literary world, with its
affairs and events. Hughes took a vivid interest in the management of
Ray’s department of _Every Evening_, and gave him advice about it,
charging him not to allow it to be merely æsthetic, but to imbue it with
an ethical quality; he maintained that literature should be the handmaid
of reform; he regretted that he had not cast the material of _The World
Revisited_ in the form of fiction, which would have given it a charm
impossible to a merely polemical treatise.

“I’m convinced that if I had it in that shape it would readily find a
publisher, and I’m going to see what I can do to work it over as soon as
I’m about again.”

“I hope you’ll be luckier than I’ve been with fiction,” said Ray. “I
don’t know but it might be a good plan to turn _A Modern Romeo_ into a
polemical treatise. We might change about, Mr. Hughes.”

Hughes said, “Why don’t you bring your story up here and read it to me?”

“Wouldn’t that be taking an unfair advantage of you?” Ray asked. “Just
at present my chief’s looking over it, to see if it won’t do for the
_feuilleton_ we’re going to try. He won’t want it; but it affords a
little respite for you, Mr. Hughes, as long as he thinks he may.”

He knew that Peace must share his constraint in speaking of his book.
When they were alone for a little while before he went away that evening
he said to her, “You have never told me yet that you forgave me for my
bad behavior about my book the last time we talked about it.”

“Did you wish me to tell you?” she asked, gently. “I thought I needn’t.”

“Yes, do,” he urged. “You thought I was wrong?”

“Yes,” she assented.

“Then you ought to say, in so many words, ‘I forgive you.’”

He waited, but she would not speak.

“Why can’t you say that?”

She did not answer, but after a while she said, “I think what I did was
a good reason for”--

“My being in the wrong? Then why did you do it? Can’t you tell me
that?”

“Not--now.”

“Some time?”

“Perhaps,” she murmured.

“Then I may ask you again?”

She was silent, sitting by the window in the little back room, where her
head was dimly outlined against the late twilight. Between the rushing
trains at the front they could hear Mrs. Denton talking to her father,
joking and laughing. Our common notion of tragedy is that it alters the
nature of those involved, as if it were some spiritual chemistry
combining the elements of character anew. But it is merely an incident
of our being, and, for all we can perceive, is of no more vital effect
than many storms in the material world. What it does not destroy, it
leaves essentially unchanged. The light creature whom its forces had
beaten to the earth, rose again with the elasticity of light things,
when it had passed. She was meant to be what she was made, and even Ray,
with the severity of his young morality, and the paucity of his
experience, perceived that the frivolity which shocked him was comfort
and cheer to the sick old man. She sat with him, and babbled and jested;
and Ray saw with a generous resentment that she must always have been
his favorite. There was probably a responsive lightness in Hughes’s own
soul to which hers brought the balm of kinship and of perfect sympathy.
There was no apparent consciousness of his preference in the sisters;
each in her way accepted it as something just and fit. Peace looked
after the small housekeeping, and her sister had more and more the care
of their father.

Mrs. Denton’s buoyant temperament served a better purpose in the economy
of sorrow than a farther-sighted seriousness. In virtue of all that Ray
had ever read or fancied of such experiences, the deaths that had
bereaved her ought to have chastened and sobered her, and he could not
forgive her because she could not wear the black of a hushed and
spiritless behavior. It even shocked him that Peace did nothing to
restrain her, but took her from moment to moment as she showed herself,
and encouraged her cheerful talk, and smiled at her jokes. He could not
yet understand how the girl’s love was a solvent of all questions that
harass the helpless reason, and embitter us with the faults of others;
but from time to time he had a sense of quality in her that awed him
from all other sense of her. There is something in the heart of man that
puts a woman’s charm before all else, and that enables evil and foolish
women to find husbands, while good and wise women die unwed. But in the
soul of incontaminate youth there is often a passionate refusal to
accept this instinct as the highest. The ideal of womanhood is then
something too pure and hallowed even for the dreams of love. It was
something like this, a mystical reverence or a fantastic exaltation,
which removed Ray further from Peace, in what might have joined their
lives, than he was the first day they met, when he began to weave about
her the reveries which she had no more part in than if they had been the
dreams of his sleep. They were of the stuff of his literature, and like
the innumerably trooping, insubstantial fancies that followed each
other through his brain from nothing in his experience. When they ceased
to play, as they must after the little romance of that first meeting had
yielded to acquaintance, what had taken their place? At the end of the
half-year which had united them in the intimacy of those strange events
and experiences, he could not have made sure of anything but a sort of
indignant compassion that drew him near her, and the fantastic sentiment
that held him aloof. The resentment in his pity was toward himself as
much as her father; when he saw her in the isolation where the old man’s
preference for her sister left her, he blamed himself as much as them.

Peace blamed no one by word or look. He doubted if she saw it, till he
ventured one day to speak of her father’s fondness for her sister, and
then she answered that he would always rather have Jenny with him than
any one else. Ray returned some commonplaces, not too sincere, about the
compensation the care of her father must be to Mrs. Denton in her
bereavement, and Peace answered as frankly as before that they had got
each other back again. “Father didn’t want her to marry Ansel, and he
didn’t care for the children. He couldn’t help that; he was too old; and
after we were all shut up here together they fretted him.”

She sighed gently, in the way she had, and Ray said, with the fatuity of
comforters, “I suppose they are better off out of this world.”

“They were born into this world,” she answered.

“Yes,” he had to own.

He saw how truly and deeply she grieved for the little ones, and he
realized without umbrage that she mourned their wretched father too,
with an affection as simple and pure. There were times when he thought
how tragical it would be for her to have cared for Denton, in the way
his wife cared so little; and then his fancy created a situation in
whose unreality it ran riot. But all the time he knew that he was
feigning these things, and that there was no more truth in them than in
the supposition which he indulged at other times that he was himself in
love with Mrs. Denton, and always had been, and this was the reason why
he could not care for Peace. It was the effect in both cases of the
æsthetic temperament, which is as often the slave as the master of its
reveries.

It was in Mrs. Denton’s favor that she did not let the drift of their
father’s affections away from Peace carry her with them. The earthward
bodily decline of the invalid implied a lapse from the higher sympathies
to the lower, and she seemed to have some vague perception of this,
which she formulated in her own way, once, when she wished to account
for the sick man’s refusal of some service from Peace which he accepted
from herself.

“He has more use for me here, Peace, because I’m of the earth, earthy,
but he’ll want you somewhere else.”

The old man clung to the world with a hope that admitted at least no
open question of his living. He said that as soon as the spring fairly
opened, and the weather would allow him to go out without taking more
cold, he should carry his manuscript about to the different publishers,
and offer it personally. He thought his plan carefully out, and talked
it over with Ray, whom he showed that his own failure with his novel was
from a want of address in these interviews. He proposed to do something
for Ray’s novel as soon as he secured a publisher for himself, and again
he bade him bring it and read it to him. Ray afterwards realized with
shame that he would have consented to this if Hughes had persisted. But
the invitation was probably a mere grace of civility with him, an effect
of the exuberant faith he had in his own success.

As the season advanced, and the heat within-doors increased, they had to
open the windows, and then the infernal uproar of the avenue filled the
room, so that they could not hear one another speak till the windows
were closed again. But the rush and clank of the elevated trains, the
perpetual passage of the surface cars, with the clatter of their horses’
hoofs, and the clash of the air-slitting bells, the grind and jolt of
the heavy trucks, the wild clatter of express carts across the rails or
up and down the tracks, the sound of feet and voices, the cries of the
fruit-venders, and the whiffs of laughter and blasphemy that floated up
from the turmoil below like filthy odors, seemed not so keenly to
afflict the sick man, or to rend his nerves with the anguish that forced
the others to shut it all out, and rather stifle in the heat. Yet, in
some sort, he felt it too, for once when Ray spoke of it, he said yes,
it was atrocious. “But,” he added, “I am glad I came and placed myself
where I could fully realize the hideousness of a competitive metropolis.
All these abominations of sight and sound, these horrible discords, that
offend every sense, physically express the spiritual principle
underlying the whole social framework. It has been immensely instructive
to me, and I have got some color of it into my book: not enough, of
course, but infinitely more than I could possibly have imagined. No one
can imagine the horror, the squalor, the cruel and senseless turpitude
which these things typify, except in their presence. I have merely
represented the facts in regard to them, and have left the imagination
free to deal with the ideal city as a contrast, with its peaceful
streets, cleanly and quiet, its stately ranks of beautiful dwellings,
its noble piles of civic and religious architecture, its shaded and
colonnaded avenues, its parks and gardens, and all planned and built,
not from the greed and the fraud of competition, but from the generous
and unselfish spirit of emulation, wherein men join to achieve the best
instead of separating to get the most. Think of a city operated by
science, as every city might be now, without one of the wretched animals
tamed by the savage man, and still perpetuated by the savage man for the
awkward and imperfect uses of a barbarous society! A city without a
horse, where electricity brought every man and everything silently to
the door. Jenny! Get me that manuscript, will you? The part I was
writing on to-day--in the desk--the middle drawer--I should like to
read”--

Mrs. Denton dropped her cat from her lap and ran to get the manuscript.
But when she brought it to her father, and he arranged the leaves with
fluttering fingers, he could not read. He gasped out a few syllables,
and in the paroxysm of coughing which began, he thrust the manuscript
toward Ray.

“He wants you to take it,” said Peace. “You can take it home with you.
You can give it to me in the morning.”

Ray took it, and stood by, looking on, not knowing how to come to their
help for the sick man’s relief, and anxious not to cumber them. When
they had got him quiet again, and Ray had once more thrown up the
window, and let in the mild night air which came laden with that
delirium of the frenzied city, Peace followed him into the little back
room, where they stood a moment.

“For Heaven’s sake,” he said, “why don’t you get him away from here,
where he could be a little more out of the noise? It’s enough to drive a
well man mad.”

“He doesn’t feel it as if he were well,” she answered. “We have tried to
get him to let us bring his bed out here. But he won’t. I think,” she
added, “that he believes it would be a bad omen to change.”

“Surely,” said Ray, “a man like your father couldn’t care for that
ridiculous superstition. What possible connection could his changing to
a quieter place have with his living or”--

“It isn’t a matter of reason with him. I can see how he’s gone back to
his early life in a great many things in these few days. He hasn’t been
so much like himself for a long time as he has to-night.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“He says to let him have his own way about it. He says that--the noise
can’t make any difference--now.”

They were in the dark; but he knew from her voice that tears were in her
eyes. He felt for her hand to say good-night. When he had found it, he
held it a moment, and then he kissed it. But no thrill or glow of the
heart justified him in what he had done. At the best he could excuse it
as an impulse of pity.

XXXVI.

The editor of _Every Evening_ gave Ray his manuscript back. He had
evidently no expectation that Ray could have any personal feeling about
it, or could view it apart from the interests of the paper. He himself
betrayed no personal feeling where the paper was concerned, and he
probably could have conceived of none in Ray.

“I don’t think it will do for us,” he said. “It is a good story, and I
read it all through, but I don’t believe it would succeed as a serial.
What do you think, yourself?”

“I?” said Ray. “How could I have an unprejudiced opinion?”

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t. You know what we want; we’ve talked it
over enough; and you ought to know whether this is the kind of thing.
Anyhow, it’s within your province to decide. I don’t think it will do,
but if you think it will, I’m satisfied. You must take the
responsibility. I leave it to you, and I mean business.”

Ray thought how old Kane would be amused if he could know of the
situation, how he would inspect and comment it from every side, and try
to get novel phrases for it. He believed himself that no author had
ever been quite in his place before; it was like something in Gilbert’s
operas; it was as if a prisoner were invited to try himself and
pronounce his own penalty. His chief seemed to see no joke in the
affair; he remained soberly and somewhat severely waiting for Ray’s
decision.

“I’m afraid you’re right,” said Ray. “I don’t think it would do for
_Every Evening_. Even if it would, I should doubt the taste of working
in something of my own on the reader at the beginning.”

“I shouldn’t care for that,” said the chief, “if it were the thing.”

Ray winced, but the chief did not see it. Now, as always, it was merely
and simply a question of the paper. He added carelessly:

“I should think such a story as that would succeed as a book.”

“I wish you would get some publisher to think so.”

The chief had nothing to say to that. He opened his desk and began to
write.

In spite of the rejected manuscript lying on the table before him, Ray
made out a very fair day’s work himself, and then he took it up town
with him. He did not go at once to his hotel, but pushed on as far as
Chapley’s, where he hoped to see Peace before she went home, and ask how
her father was getting on; he had not visited Hughes for several weeks;
he made himself this excuse. What he really wished was to confront the
girl and divine her thoughts concerning himself. He must do that, now;
but if it were not for the cruelty of forsaking the old man, it might
be the kindest and best thing never to go near any of them again.

He had the temporary relief of finding her gone home when he reached
Chapley’s. Mr. Brandreth was there, and he welcomed Ray with something
more than his usual cordiality.

“Look here,” he said, shutting the door of his little room. “Have you
got that story of yours where you could put your hand on it easily?”

“I can put my hand on it instantly,” said Ray, and he touched it.

“Oh!” Mr. Brandreth returned, a little daunted. “I didn’t know you
carried it around with you.”

“I don’t usually--or only when I’ve got it from some publisher who
doesn’t want it.”

“I thought it had been the rounds,” said Mr. Brandreth, still uneasily.

“Oh, it’s an editor, this time. It’s just been offered to me for serial
use in _Every Evening_, and I’ve declined it.”

“What do you mean?” Mr. Brandreth smiled in mystification.

“Exactly what I say.” Ray explained the affair as it had occurred. “It
makes me feel like Brutus and the son of Brutus rolled into one. I’m
going round to old Kane, to give the facts away to him. I think he’ll
enjoy them.”

“Well! Hold on! What did the chief say about it?”

“Oh, he liked it. Everybody likes it, but nobody wants it. He said he
thought it would succeed as a book. The editors all think that. The
publishers think it would succeed as a serial.”

Ray carried it off buoyantly, and enjoyed the sort of daze Mr. Brandreth
was in.

“See here,” said the publisher, “I want you to leave that manuscript
with me.”

“Again?”

“Yes. I’ve never read it myself yet, you know.”

“Take it and be happy!” Ray bestowed it upon him with dramatic effusion.

“No, seriously!” said Mr. Brandreth. “I want to talk with you. Sit down,
won’t you? You know the first time you were in here, I told you I was
anxious to get Chapley & Co. in line as a publishing house again; I
didn’t like the way we were dropping out and turning into mere jobbers.
You remember.”

Ray nodded.

“Well, sir, I’ve never lost sight of that idea, and I’ve been keeping
one eye out for a good novel, to start with, ever since. I haven’t found
it, I don’t mind telling you. You see, all the established reputations
are in the hands of other publishers, and you can’t get them away
without paying ridiculous money, and violating the comity of the trade
at the same time. If we are to start new, we must start with a new man.”

“I don’t know whether I’m a new man or not,” said Ray, “if you’re
working up to me. Sometimes I feel like a pretty old one. I think I
came to New York about the beginning of the Christian era. But _A Modern
Romeo_ is as fresh as ever. It has the dew of the morning on it
still--rubbed off in spots by the nose of the professional smeller.”

“Well,” said Mr. Brandreth, “it’s new enough for all practical purposes.
I want you to let me take it home with me.”

“Which of the leading orchestras would you like to have accompany you to
your door?” asked Ray.

“No, no! Don’t expect too much!” Mr. Brandreth entreated.

“I don’t expect anything,” Ray protested.

“Well, that’s right--that’s the only business basis. But if it _should_
happen to be the thing, I don’t believe you’d be personally any happier
about it than I should.”

“Oh, thank you!”

“I’m not a fatalist”--

“But it would look a good deal like fatalism.”

“Yes, it would. It would look as if it were really intended to be, if it
came back to us now, after it had been round to everybody else.”

“Yes; but if it was fated from the beginning, I don’t see why you didn’t
take it in the beginning. I should rather wonder what all the bother had
been for.”

“You might say that,” Mr. Brandreth admitted.

Ray went off on the wave of potential prosperity, and got Kane to come
out and dine with him. They decided upon Martin’s, where the dinner
cost twice as much as at Ray’s hotel, and had more the air of being a
fine dinner; and they got a table in the corner, and Ray ordered a
bottle of champagne.

“Yes,” said Kane, “that is the right drink for a man who wishes to spend
his money before he has got it. It’s the true gambler’s beverage.”

“You needn’t drink it,” said Ray. “You shall have the _vin ordinaire_
that’s included in the price of the dinner.”

“Oh, I don’t mind a glass of champagne now and then, after I’ve brought
my host under condemnation for ordering it,” said Kane.

“And I want to let my heart out to-night,” Ray pursued. “I may not have
the chance to-morrow. Besides, as to the gambling, it isn’t I betting on
my book; it’s Brandreth. I don’t understand yet why he wants to do it.
To be sure, it isn’t a great risk he’s taking.”

“I rather think he _has_ to take some risks just now,” said Kane,
significantly. He lowered his soft voice an octave as he went on. “I’m
afraid that poor Henry, in his pursuit of personal perfectability, has
let things get rather behindhand in his business. I don’t blame him--you
know I never blame people--for there is always a question as to which is
the cause and which is the effect in such matters. My dear old friend
may have begun to let his business go to the bad because he had got
interested in his soul, or he may have turned to his soul for refuge
because he knew his business had begun to go to the bad. At any rate,
he seems to have found the usual difficulty in serving God and Mammon;
only, in this case Mammon has got the worst of it, for once: I suppose
one ought to be glad of that. But the fact is that Henry has lost heart
in business; he doesn’t respect business; he has a bad conscience; he
wants to be out of it. I had a long talk with him before he went into
the country, and I couldn’t help pitying him. I don’t think his wife and
daughter even will ever get him back to New York. He knows it’s rather
selfish to condemn them to the dulness of a country life, and that it’s
rather selfish to leave young Brandreth to take the brunt of affairs
here alone. But what are you to do in a world like this, where a man
can’t get rid of one bad conscience without laying in another?”

In his pleasure with his paradox Kane suffered Ray to fill up his glass
a second time. Then he looked dissatisfied, and Ray divined the cause.
“Did you word that quite to your mind?”

“No, I didn’t. It’s too diffuse. Suppose we say that in our conditions
no man can do right without doing harm?”

“That’s more succinct,” said Ray. “Is it known at all that they’re in
difficulties?”

Kane smoothly ignored the question. “I fancy that the wrong is in
Henry’s desire to cut himself loose from the ties that bind us all
together here. Poor David has the right of that. We must stand or fall
together in the pass we’ve come to; and we cannot helpfully eschew the
world except by remaining in it.” He took up Ray’s question after a
moment’s pause. “No, it isn’t known that they’re in difficulties, and I
don’t say that it’s so. Their affairs have simply been allowed to run
down, and Henry has left Brandreth to gather them up single-handed. I
don’t know that Brandreth will complain. It leaves him unhampered, even
if he can do nothing with his hands but clutch at straws.”

“Such straws as the _Modern Romeo_?” Ray asked. “It seems to me that _I_
have a case of conscience here. Is it right for me to let Mr. Brandreth
bet his money on my book when there are so many chances of his losing?”

“Let us hope he won’t finally bet,” Kane suggested, and he smiled at the
refusal which instantly came into Ray’s eyes. “But if he does, we must
leave the end with God. People,” he mused on, “used to leave the end
with God a great deal oftener than they do now. I remember that I did,
myself, once. It was easier. I think I will go back to it. There is
something very curious in our relation to the divine. God is where we
believe He is, and He is a daily Providence or not, as we choose. People
used to see His hand in a corner, or a deal, which prospered them,
though it ruined others. They may be ashamed to do that now. But we
might get back to faith by taking a wider sweep and seeing God in our
personal disadvantages--finding Him not only in luck but in bad luck.
Chance may be a larger law, with an orbit far transcending the range of
the little statutes by which fire always burns, and water always finds
its level.”

“That is a better Hard Saying than the other,” Ray mocked. “‘I’ faith an
excellent song.’ Have some more champagne. Now go on; but let us talk of
_A Modern Romeo_.”

“We will drink to it,” said Kane, with an air of piety.

XXXVII.

“Well, sir,” said Mr. Brandreth when he found Ray waiting for him in his
little room the next morning, “I haven’t slept a wink all night.”

Ray had not slept a wink himself, and he had not been able to keep away
from Chapley’s in his fear and his hope concerning his book. He hoped
Mr. Brandreth might have looked at it; he feared he had not. His heart
began to go down, but he paused in his despair at the smiles that Mr.
Brandreth broke into.

“It was that book of yours. I thought I would just dip into it after
dinner, and try a chapter or two on Mrs. Brandreth; but I read on till
eleven o’clock, and then she went to bed, and I kept at it till I
finished it, about three this morning. Then the baby took up the strain
for about half an hour and finished _me_.”

Ray did not know what to say. He gasped out, “I’m proud to have been
associated with young Mr. Brandreth in destroying his father’s rest.”

The publisher did not heed this poor attempt at nonchalance. “I left the
manuscript for Mrs. Brandreth--she called me back to make sure, before I
got out of doors--and if she likes it as well to the end--But I know she
will! She likes you, Ray.”

“Does she?” Ray faintly questioned back.

“Yes; she thinks you’re all kinds of a nice fellow, and that you’ve been
rather sacrificed in some ways. She thinks you behaved splendidly in
that Denton business.”

Ray remained mutely astonished at the flattering opinions of Mrs.
Brandreth; he had suspected them so little. Her husband went on,
smiling:

“She wasn’t long making out the original of your hero.” Ray blushed
consciously, but made no attempt to disown the self-portraiture. “Of
course,” said Mr. Brandreth, “we’re all in the dark about the heroine.
But Mrs. Brandreth doesn’t care so much for her.”

Now that he was launched upon the characters of the story, Mr. Brandreth
discussed them all, and went over the incidents with the author, whose
brain reeled with the ecstacy of beholding them objectively in the
flattering light of another’s appreciation.

“Well,” said Mr. Brandreth, at last, when Ray found strength to rise
from this debauch of praise, “you’ll hear from me, now, very soon. I’ve
made up my mind about the story, and unless Mrs. Brandreth should hate
it very much before she gets through with it--Curious about women, isn’t
it, how they always take the personal view? I believe the main reason
why my wife dislikes your heroine is because she got her mixed up with
the girl that took the part of Juliet away from her in our out-door
theatricals. I tell her that you and I are not only the two Percys,
we’re the two Romeos, too. She thinks your heroine is rather weak; of
course you meant her to be so.”

Ray had not, but he said that he had, and he made a noisy pretence of
thinking the two Romeos a prodigious joke. His complaisance brought its
punishment.

“Oh!” said Mr. Brandreth, “I must tell you a singular thing that
happened. Just as I got to that place where he shoots himself, you know,
and she starts up out of her hypnotic trance, our baby gave a frightful
scream, and Mrs. Brandreth woke and thought the house was on fire. I
suppose the little fellow had a bad dream; it’s strange what dreams
babies _do_ have! But wasn’t it odd, happening when I was wrought up so?
Looks like telepathy, doesn’t it? Of course my mind’s always on the
child. By-the-way, if this thing goes, you must try a telepathic story.
It hasn’t been done yet.”

“Magnificent!” said Ray. “I’ll do it!”

They got away from each other, and Ray went down to his work at the
_Every Evening_ office. He enslaved himself to it by an effort twice as
costly as that of writing when he was in the deepest and darkest of his
despair; his hope danced before him, and there was a tumult in his
pulses which he could quiet a little only by convincing himself that as
yet he had no promise from Mr. Brandreth, and that if the baby had given
Mrs. Brandreth a bad day, it was quite within the range of possibility
that the publisher might, after all, have perfectly good reasons for
rejecting his book. He insisted with himself upon this view of the
case; it was the only one that he could steady his nerves with; and
besides, he somehow felt that if he could feign it strenuously enough,
the fates would be propitiated, and the reverse would happen.

It is uncertain whether it was his pretence that produced the result
intended, but in the evening Mr. Brandreth came down to Ray’s hotel to
say that he had made up his mind to take the book.

“We talked it over at dinner, and my wife made me come right down and
tell you. She said you had been kept in suspense long enough, and she
wasn’t going to let you go overnight. It’s the first book _we’ve_ ever
taken, and I guess she feels a little romantic about the new departure.
By-the-way, we found out what ailed the baby. It was a pin that had got
loose, and stuck up through the sheet in his crib. You can’t trust those
nurses a moment. But I believe that telepathic idea is a good one.”

“Yes, yes; it is,” said Ray. Now that the certainty of acceptance had
come, he was sobered by it, and he could not rejoice openly, though he
was afraid he was disappointing Mr. Brandreth. He could only say, “It’s
awfully kind of Mrs. Brandreth to think of me.”

“That’s her way,” said Mr. Brandreth, and he added briskly, “Well, now,
let’s come down to business. How do you want to publish? Want to make
your own plates?”

“No,” Ray faltered; “I can’t afford to do that; I had one such offer”--

“I supposed you wouldn’t,” Mr. Brandreth cut in, “but I thought I’d
ask. Well, then, we’ll make the plates ourselves, and we’ll pay you ten
per cent. on the retail price of the book. That is the classic
arrangement with authors, and I think it’s fair.” When he said this he
swallowed, as if there were something in his throat, and added, “Up to a
certain point. And as we take all the risk, I think we ought to
have--You see, on one side it’s a perfect lottery, and on the other side
it’s a dead certainty. You can’t count on the public, but you can count
on the landlord, the salesman, the bookkeeper, the printer, and the
paper-maker. We’re at all the expense--rent, clerk-hire, plates,
printing, binding, and advertising, and the author takes no risk
whatever.”

It occurred to Ray afterwards that an author took the risk of losing his
labor if his book failed; but the public estimates the artist’s time at
the same pecuniary value as the sitting hen’s, and the artist insensibly
accepts the estimate. Ray did not think of his point in season to urge
it, but it would hardly have availed if he had. He was tremulously eager
to close with Mr. Brandreth on any terms, and after they had agreed, he
was afraid he had taken advantage of him.

When the thing was done it was like everything else. He had dwelt so
long and intensely upon it in a thousand reveries that he had perhaps
exhausted his possibilities of emotion concerning it. At any rate he
found himself curiously cold; he wrote to his father about it, and he
wrote to Sanderson, who would be sure to make a paragraph for the
_Echo_, and unless Hanks Brothers killed his paragraph, would electrify
Midland with the news. Ray forecast the matter and the manner of the
paragraph, but it did not excite him.

“What is the trouble with me?” he asked Kane, whom he hastened to tell
his news. “I ought to be in a transport; I’m not in anything of the
kind.”

“Ah! That is very interesting. No doubt you’ll come to it. I had a
friend once who was accepted in marriage by the object of his
affections. His first state was apathy, mixed, as nearly as I could
understand, with dismay. He became more enthusiastic later on, and lived
ever after in the belief that he was one of the most fortunate of men.
But I think we are the victims of conventional acceptations in regard to
most of the great affairs of life. We are taught that we shall feel so
and so about such and such things: about success in love or in
literature; about the birth of our first-born; about death. But probably
no man feels as he expected to feel about these things. He finds them of
exactly the same quality as all other experiences; there may be a little
more or a little less about them, but there isn’t any essential
difference. Perhaps when we come to die ourselves, it will be as simply
and naturally as--as”--

“As having a book accepted by a publisher,” Ray suggested.

“Exactly!” said Kane, and he breathed out his deep, soft laugh.

“Well, you needn’t go on. I’m sufficiently accounted for.” Ray rose,
and Kane asked him what his hurry was, and where he was going.

“I’m going up to tell the Hugheses.”

“Ah! then I won’t offer to go with you,” said Kane. “I approve of your
constancy, but I have my own philosophy of such things. I think David
would have done much better to stay where he was; I do not wish to
punish him for coming to meet the world, and reform it on its own
ground; but I could have told him he would get beaten. He is a thinker,
or a dreamer, if you please, and in his community he had just the right
sort of distance. He could pose the world just as he wished, and turn it
in this light and in that. But here he sees the exceptions to his rules,
and when I am with him I find myself the prey of a desire to dwell on
the exceptions, and I know that I afflict him. I always did, and I feel
it the part of humanity to keep away from him. I am glad that I do, for
I dislike very much being with sick people. Of course I shall go as
often as decency requires. For Decency,” Kane concluded, with the effect
of producing a Hard Saying, “transcends Humanity. So many reformers
forget that,” he added.

The days were now getting so long that they had just lighted the lamps
in Hughes’s room when Ray came in, a little after seven. He had a few
words with Peace in the family room first, and she told him that her
father had passed a bad day, and she did not know whether he was asleep
or not.

“Then I’ll go away again,” said Ray.

“No, no; if he is awake, he will like to see you. He always does. And
now he can’t see you much oftener.”

“Oh, Peace! Do you really think so?”

“The doctor says so. There is no hope any more.” There was no faltering
in her voice, and its steadiness strengthened Ray, standing so close to
one who stood so close to death.

“Does he--your father--know?”

“I can’t tell. He is always so hopeful. And Jenny won’t hear of giving
up. She is with him more than I am, and she says he has a great deal of
strength yet. He can still work at his book a little. He has every part
of it in mind so clearly that he can tell her what to do when he has the
strength to speak. The worst is, when his voice fails him--he gets
impatient. That was what brought on his hemorrhage to-day.”

“Peace! I am ashamed to think why I came to-night. But I hoped it might
interest him.”

“About your book? Oh yes. Mr. Brandreth spoke to me about it. I thought
you would like to tell him.”

“Thank you,” said Ray. He was silent for a moment. She stood against the
pale light of one of the windows, a shadowy outline, and he felt as if
they were two translated spirits meeting there exterior to the world and
all its interests; he made a mental note of his impression for use some
time. But now he said: “I thought I should like to tell him, too. But
after all, I’m not so sure. I’m not like you, Peace. And I suppose I’m
punished for my egotism in the very hour of my triumph. It isn’t like a
triumph; it’s like--nothing. I’ve looked forward to this so long--I’ve
counted on it so much--I’ve expected it to be like having the world in
my hand. But if I shut my hand, it’s empty.”

He knew that he was appealing to her for comfort, and he expected her to
respond as she did.

“That’s because you don’t realize it yet. When you do, it will seem the
great thing that it is.”

“Do you think it’s a great thing?”

“As great as any success can be.”

“Do you think it will succeed?”

“Mr. Brandreth thinks it will. He’s very hopeful about it.”

“Sometimes I wish it would fail. I don’t believe it deserves to succeed.
I’m ashamed of it in places. Have I any right to let him foist it on the
public if I don’t perfectly respect it? You wouldn’t if it were yours.”

He wished her to deny that it was bad in any part, but she did not. She
merely said: “I suppose that’s the way our work always seems to us when
it’s done. There must be a time when we ought to leave what we’ve done
to others; it’s for them, not for ourselves; why shouldn’t they judge
it?”

“Yes; that is true! How generous you are! How can you endure to talk to
me of my book? But I suppose you think that if I can stand it, you can.”

“I will go in, now,” said Peace, ignoring the drift of his words, “and
see if father is awake.” She returned in a moment, and murmured softly,
“Come!”

“Here is Mr. Ray, father,” said Mrs. Denton. She had to lift her voice
to make the sick man hear, for the window was open, and the maniacal
clamor of the street flooded the chamber. Hughes lay at his thin
full-length in his bed, like one already dead.

He stirred a little at the sound of his daughter’s voice; and when he
had taken in the fact of Ray’s presence, he signed to her to shut the
window. The smells of the street, and the sick, hot whiffs from the
passing trains were excluded; the powerful odors of the useless drugs
burdened the air; by the light of the lamp shaded from Hughes’s eyes Ray
could see the red blotches on his sheet and pillow.

He no longer spoke, but he could write with a pencil on the little
memorandum-block which lay on the stand by his bed. When Peace said,
“Father, Mr. Ray has come to tell you that his book has been accepted;
Chapley & Co. are going to publish it,” the old man’s face lighted up.
He waved his hand toward the stand, and Mrs. Denton put the block and
pencil in it, and held the lamp for him to see.

Ray took the block, and read, faintly scribbled on it: “Good! You must
get them to take my _World Revisited_.”

The sick man smiled as Ray turned his eyes toward him from the paper.

“What is it?” demanded Mrs. Denton, after a moment. “Some secret? What
is it, father?” she pursued, with the lightness that evidently pleased
him, for he smiled again, and an inner light shone through his glassy
eyes. “Tell us, Mr. Ray!”

Hughes shook his head weakly, still smiling, and Ray put the leaf in his
pocket. Then he took up the old man’s long hand where it lay inert on
the bed.

“I will do my very best, Mr. Hughes. I will do everything that I
possibly can.”

XXXVIII.

A purpose had instantly formed itself in Ray’s mind which he instantly
set himself to carry out. It was none the less a burden because he tried
to think it heroic and knew it to be fantastic; and it was in a mood of
equally blended devotion and resentment that he disciplined himself to
fulfil it. It was shocking to criticise the dying man’s prayer from any
such point of view, but he could not help doing so, and censuring it for
a want of taste, for a want of consideration. He did not account for the
hope of good to the world which Hughes must have had in urging him to
befriend his book; he could only regard it as a piece of literature, and
judge the author’s motives by his own, which he was fully aware were
primarily selfish.

But he went direct to Mr. Brandreth and laid the matter before him.

“Now I’m going to suggest something,” he hurried on, “which may strike
you as ridiculous, but I’m thoroughly in earnest about it. I’ve read Mr.
Hughes’s book, first and last, all through, and it’s good literature, I
can assure you of that. I don’t know about the principles in it, but I
know it’s very original and from a perfectly new stand-point, and I
believe it would make a great hit.”

Mr. Brandreth listened, evidently shaken. “I couldn’t do it, now. I’m
making a venture with your book.”

“That’s just what I’m coming to. Don’t make your venture with my book;
make it with his! I solemnly believe that his would be the safest
venture of the two; I believe it would stand two chances to one of
mine.”

“Well, I’ll look at it for the fall.”

“It will be too late, then, as far as Hughes is concerned. It’s now or
never, with him! You want to come out with a book that will draw
attention to your house, as well as succeed. I believe that Hughes’s
book will be an immense success. It has a taking name, and it’s a novel
and taking conception. It’ll make no end of talk.”

“It’s too late,” said Mr. Brandreth. “I couldn’t take such a book as
that without passing it round among all our readers, and you know what
that means. Besides, I’ve begun to make my plans for getting out your
book at once. There isn’t any time to lose. I’ve sent out a lot of
literary notes, and you’ll see them in every leading paper to-morrow
morning. I’ll have Mr. Hughes’s book faithfully examined, and if I can
see my way to it--I tell you, I believe I shall make a success of the
_Modern Romeo_. I like the title better and better. I think you’ll be
pleased with the way I’ve primed the press. I’ve tried to avoid all
vulgar claptrap, and yet I believe I’ve contrived to pique the public
curiosity.”

He went on to tell Ray some of the things he had said in his paragraphs,
and Ray listened with that mingled shame and pleasure which the artist
must feel whenever the commercial side of his life presents itself.

“I kept Miss Hughes pretty late this afternoon, working the things into
shape, so as to get them to the papers at once. I just give her the main
points, and she has such a neat touch.”

Ray left his publisher with a light heart, and a pious sense of the
divine favor. He had conceived of a difficult duty, and he had
discharged it with unflinching courage. He had kept his word to Hughes;
he had done all that he could for him, even to offering his own chance
of fame and fortune a sacrifice to him. Now he could do no more, and if
he could not help being glad that the sacrifice had not been accepted of
him, he was not to be blamed. He was very much to be praised, and he
rewarded himself with a full recognition of his virtue; he imagined some
words, few but rare, from Peace, expressing her sense of his
magnanimity, when she came to know of it. He hoped that a fact so
creditable to him, and so characteristic, would not escape the notice of
his biographer. He wished that Hughes could know what he had done, and
in his revery he contrived that his generous endeavor should be brought
to the old man’s knowledge; he had Hughes say that such an action was
more to him than the publication of his book.

Throughout his transport of self-satisfaction there ran a nether torment
of question whether Peace Hughes could possibly suppose that he was
privy to that paragraphing about his book, and this finally worked to
the surface, and become his whole mood. After his joyful riot it was
this that kept him awake till morning, that poisoned all his pleasure in
his escape from self-sacrifice. He could only pacify himself and get
some sleep at last by promising to stop at the publisher’s on his way
down to the _Every Evening_ office in the morning, and beseech her to
believe that he had nothing to do with priming the press, and that he
wished Mr. Brandreth had not told him of it. Nothing less than this was
due him in the character that he desired to appear in hereafter.

He reached the publisher’s office before Mr. Brandreth came down, and
when he said he would like to see Miss Hughes, the clerk answered that
Miss Hughes had sent word that her father was not so well, and she would
not be down that day.

“He’s pretty low, I believe,” the clerk volunteered.

“I’m afraid so,” said Ray.

He asked if the clerk would call a messenger to take a note from him to
his office, and when he had despatched it he went up to see Hughes.

“Did you get our message?” Peace asked him the first thing.

“No,” said Ray. “What message?”

“That we sent to your office. He has been wanting to see you ever since
he woke this morning. I knew you would come!”

“O yes. I went to inquire of you about him at Chapley’s, and when I
heard that he was worse, of course I came. Is he much worse?”

“He can’t live at all. The doctor says it’s no use. He wants to see you.
Will you come in?”

“Peace!” Ray hesitated. “Tell me! Is it about his book?”

“Yes, something about that. He wishes to speak with you.”

“Oh, Peace! I’ve done all I could about that. I went straight to Mr.
Brandreth and tried to get him to take it. But I couldn’t. What shall I
tell your father, if he asks me?”

“You must tell him the truth,” said the girl, sadly.

“Is that Mr. Ray?” Mrs. Denton called from the sick-room. “Come in, Mr.
Ray. Father wants you.”

“In a moment. Come here, Mrs. Denton,” Ray called back.

She came out, and he told her what he had told Peace. She did not seem
to see its bearing at once. When she realized it all, and had spent her
quick wrath in denunciation of Mr. Brandreth’s heartlessness, she said
desperately: “Well, you must come now. Perhaps it isn’t his book;
perhaps it’s something else. But he wants you.”

She had to rouse her father from the kind of torpor in which he lay like
one dead. She made him understand who was there, and then he smiled, and
turned his eyes appealingly toward Ray. “Put your ear as close to his
lips as you can. He can’t write any more. He wants to say something to
you.”

Ray stooped over and put his ear to the drawn lips. A few whiffs of
inarticulate breath mocked the dying man’s endeavor to speak. “I’m
sorry; I can’t catch a syllable,” said Ray.

A mute despair showed itself in the old man’s eyes.

“Look at me father!” cried Mrs. Denton. “Is it about your book?”

The faintest smile came over his face.

“Did you wish to ask Mr. Ray if he would speak to Mr. Brandreth about
it?”

The smile dimly dawned again.

“Well, he has spoken to him. He went to see him last night, and he’s
come to tell you”--Ray shuddered and held his breath--“to tell you that
Mr. Brandreth will take your book, and he’s going to publish it right
away!”

A beatific joy lit up Hughes’s face; and Ray drew a long breath.

Peace looked at her sister.

“I don’t care!” said Mrs. Denton, passionately, dropping her voice. “You
have your light, and I have mine.”

XXXIX.

Ray followed Hughes to his grave in the place where Denton and his
children were already laid. It did not seem as if the old man were more
related to them in death than he had been in life by their propinquity;
but it satisfied a belated maternal and conjugal sentiment in Mrs.
Denton. She did not relinquish the leading place in the family affairs
which she had taken in her father’s last days. She decided against
staying in their present apartment after their month was out, and found
a tiny flat of three rooms in a better neighborhood down-town, where she
had their scanty possessions established, including the cat.

Kane did not go to the funeral because of a prejudice which he said he
had against such events; David Hughes, he said, would have been the
first to applaud his sincerity in staying away. But he divined that
there might be need of help of another kind in the emergency, and he
gave it generously and delicately. He would not suffer Mr. Brandreth to
render any part of this relief; he insisted that it was his exclusive
privilege as Hughes’s old friend. Now that David was gone, he professed
a singularly vivid sense of his presence; and he owned that he had
something like the pleasure of carrying a point against him in
defraying his funeral expenses.

Hughes’s daughters accepted his help frankly, each after her kind: Mrs.
Denton as a gift which it must long continue to be; Peace as a loan
which must some day be repaid. The girl went back to her work in due
time, and whenever Ray visited his publisher he saw her at her desk.

He did not always go to speak to her, for he had a shamefaced fear that
she was more or less always engaged in working up hints from Mr.
Brandreth into paragraphs about a _A Modern Romeo_. His consciousness
exaggerated the publisher’s activity in this sort; and at first he
shunned all these specious evidences of public interest in the
forthcoming novel. Then he began jealously to look for them, and in his
mind he arraigned the journals where they did not appear for envy and
personal spite. It would have been difficult for him to prove why there
should have been either in his case, unless it was because their
literary notes were controlled by people whose books had been ignored or
censured by _Every Evening_, and this theory could not hold with all.
Most of the papers, however, published the paragraphs, with that
munificence which journalism shows towards literature. The author found
the inspired announcements everywhere; sometimes they were varied by the
office touch, but generally they were printed exactly as Mr. Brandreth
framed them; however he found them, they gave Ray an insensate joy. Even
the paragraphs in the trade journals, purely perfunctory as they were,
had a flavor of sincere appreciation; the very advertisements which
accompanied them there affected him like favorable expressions of
opinion. His hunger for them was inappeasable; in his heart he accused
Mr. Brandreth of a stinted proclamation.

The publisher was hurrying the book forward for the summer trade, and
was aiming it especially at the reader going into the country, or
already there. He had an idea that the summer resorts had never been
fully worked in behalf of the better sort of light literature, and he
intended to make any sacrifice to get the book pushed by the news
companies. He offered them rates ruinously special, and he persuaded Ray
to take five per cent. on such sales if they could be made. He pressed
forward the printing, and the author got his proofs in huge batches,
with a demand for their prompt return. The nice revision which he had
fancied himself giving the work in type was impossible; it went from his
hand with crudities that glared in his tormented sense, till a new
instalment eclipsed the last. He balanced the merits and defects against
one another, and tried to believe that the merits would distract the
attention of criticism from the defects. He always knew that the story
was very weak in places; he conceived how it could be attacked in these;
he attacked it himself with pitiless ridicule in a helpless
impersonation of different reviewers; and he gasped in his
self-inflicted anguish. When the last proof left his hands the feeblest
links were the strength of the whole chain, which fell to pieces from
his grasp like a rope of sand.

There was some question at different times whether the book had not
better be published under a pseudonym, and Ray faithfully submitted it
to the editor of _Every Evening_, as something he was concerned in. It
was to be considered whether it was advisable for a critic to appear as
an author, and whether the possible failure of the book would not react
unfavorably upon the criticisms of the journal. The chief decided that
it would make no difference to him, and at the worst it could do no more
than range Ray with the other critics who had failed as authors. With
the publisher it was a more serious matter, and he debated much whether
the book, as a stroke of business, had not better go to the public
anonymously. They agreed that P. B. S. Ray on the title-page would be
rather formidable from the number of the initials which the reader would
have to master in speaking of the author. Shelley Ray, on the other
hand, would be taken for a sentimental pseudonym. They decided that
anonymity was the only thing for it.

“But then, it will be losing the interest of your money, if the book
goes,” Mr. Brandreth mused. “You have a right to the cumulative
reputation from it, so that if you should write another”--

“Oh, don’t be afraid of there ever being another!” said Ray, with his
distracted head between his hands. He suddenly lifted it. “What is the
matter with the Spartan severity of S. Ray?”

“S. Ray might do,” Mr. Brandreth assented, thoughtfully. “Should you
mind my asking Mrs. Brandreth how it strikes her?”

“Not at all. Very glad to have you. It’s short, and unpretentious, and
non-committal. I think it might do.”

Mrs. Brandreth thought so too, and in that form the author’s name
appeared on the title-page. Even in that form it did not escape question
and censure. One reviewer devoted his criticism of the story to inquiry
into the meaning of the author’s initial; another surmised it a mask.
But, upon the whole, its simplicity piqued curiosity, and probably
promoted the fortune of the book, as far as that went.

There was no immediate clamor over it. In fact, it was received so
passively by the public and the press that the author might well have
doubted whether there was any sort of expectation of it, in spite of the
publisher’s careful preparation of the critic’s or the reader’s mind.
There came back at once from obscure quarters a few echoes, more or less
imperfect, of the synopsis of the book’s attractions sent out with the
editorial copies, but the influential journals remained
heart-sickeningly silent concerning _A Modern Romeo_. There was a
boisterous and fatuous eulogy of the book in the Midland _Echo_, which
Ray knew for the expression of Sanderson’s friendship; but eager as he
was for recognition, he could not let this count; and it was followed by
some brief depreciatory paragraphs in which he perceived the willingness
of Hanks Brothers to compensate themselves for having so handsomely let
Sanderson have his swing. He got some letters of acknowledgment from
people whom he had sent the book; he read them with hungry zest, but he
could not make himself believe that they constituted impartial opinion;
not even the letter of the young lady who had detected him in the
panoply of his hero, and who now wrote to congratulate him on a success
which she too readily took for granted. One of his sisters replied on
behalf of his father and mother, and said they had all been sitting up
reading the story aloud together, and that their father liked it as much
as any of them; now they were anxious to see what the papers would say;
had he read the long review in the _Echo_, and did not he think it
rather cool and grudging for a paper that he had been connected with? He
hardly knew whether this outburst of family pride gave him more or less
pain than an anonymous letter which he got from his native village, and
which betrayed the touch of the local apothecary; his correspondent, who
also dealt in books, and was a man of literary opinions, heaped the
novel with ridicule and abuse, and promised the author a coat of tar and
feathers on the part of his betters whom he had caricatured, if ever he
should return to the place. Ray ventured to offer a copy to the lady who
had made herself his social sponsor in New York, and he hoped for some
intelligent praise from her. She asked him where in the world he had got
together such a lot of queer people, like nothing on earth but those one
used to meet in the old days when one took country board; she mocked at
the sufferings of his hero, and said what a vulgar little piece his
heroine was; but she supposed he meant them to be what they were, and
she complimented him on his success in handling them. She confessed,
though, that she never read American novels, or indeed any but French
ones, and that she did not know exactly where to rank his work; she
burlesqued a profound impression of the honor she ought to feel in
knowing a distinguished novelist. “You’ll be putting us all into your
next book, I suppose. Mind you give me golden hair, not yet streaked
with silver.”

In the absence of any other tokens of public acceptance, Ray kept an
eager eye out for such signs of it as might be detected in the
booksellers’ windows and on their sign-boards. The placards of other
novels flamed from their door-jambs, but they seemed to know nothing of
_A Modern Romeo_. He sought his book in vain among those which formed
the attractions of their casements; he found it with difficulty on their
counters, two or three rows back, and in remote corners. It was like a
conspiracy to keep it out of sight; it was not to be seen on the
news-stands of the great hotels or the elevated stations, and Ray
visited the principal railway depots without detecting a copy.

He blamed Mr. Brandreth for a lack of business energy in all this; he
would like to see him fulfil some of those boasts of push which, when he
first heard them, made him creep with shame. Mr. Brandreth had once
proposed a file of sandwich men appealing with successive bill-boards:

                                  I.
                             HAVE YOU READ

                                  II.
                           “A MODERN ROMEO?”

                                 III.
                         EVERY ONE IS READING

                                  IV.
                           “A MODERN ROMEO.”

                                  V.
                                 WHY?

                                  VI.
                                BECAUSE

                                 VII.
                          “A MODERN ROMEO” IS

                                 VIII.
                       THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL.

Ray had absolutely forbidden this procession, but now he would have
taken off his hat to it, and stood uncovered, if he could have met it in
Union Square or in Twenty-third Street.

XL.

In this time of suspense Ray kept away from old Kane, whose peculiar
touch he could not bear. But he knew perfectly well what his own
feelings were, and he did not care to have them analyzed. He could not
help sending Kane the book, and for a while he dreaded his
acknowledgments; then he resented his failure to make any.

In the frequent visits he paid to his publisher, he fancied that his
welcome from Mr. Brandreth was growing cooler, and he did not go so
often. He kept doggedly at his work in the _Every Evening_ office; but
here the absolute silence of his chief concerning his book was as hard
to bear as Mr. Brandreth’s fancied coolness; he could not make out
whether it meant compassion or dissatisfaction, or how it was to effect
his relation to the paper. The worst of it was that his adversity, or
his delayed prosperity, which ever it was, began to corrupt him. In his
self-pity he wrote so leniently of some rather worthless books that he
had no defence to make when his chief called his attention to the wide
divergence between his opinions and those of some other critics. At
times when he resented the hardship of his fate he scored the books
before him with a severity that was as unjust as the weak commiseration
in his praises. He felt sure that if the situation prolonged itself his
failure as an author must involve his failure as a critic.

It was not only the coolness in Mr. Brandreth’s welcome which kept him
aloof; he had a sense of responsibility, which was almost a sense of
guilt, in the publisher’s presence, for he was the author of a book
which had been published contrary to the counsel of all his literary
advisers. It was true that he had not finally asked Mr. Brandreth to
publish it, but he had been eagerly ready to have him do it; he had kept
his absurd faith in it, and his steadfastness must have imparted a
favorable conviction to Mr. Brandreth; he knew that there had certainly
been ever so much personal kindness for him mixed up with its
acceptance. The publisher, however civil outwardly--and Mr. Brandreth,
with all his foibles, was never less than a gentleman--must inwardly
blame him for his unlucky venture. The thought of this became
intolerable, and at the end of a Saturday morning, when the book was
three or four weeks old, he dropped in at Chapley’s to have it out with
Mr. Brandreth. The work on the Saturday edition of the paper was always
very heavy, and Ray’s nerves were fretted from the anxieties of getting
it together, as well as from the intense labor of writing. He was going
to humble himself to the publisher, and declare their failure to be all
his own fault; but he had in reserve the potentiality of a bitter
quarrel with him if he did not take it in the right way.

He pushed on to Mr. Brandreth’s room, tense with his purpose, and stood
scowling and silent when he found Kane there with him. Perhaps the old
fellow divined the danger in Ray’s mood; perhaps he pitied him; perhaps
he was really interested in the thing which he was talking of with the
publisher, and which he referred to Ray without any preliminary ironies.

“It’s about the career of a book; how it begins to go, and why, and
when.”

“Apropos of _A Modern Romeo_?” Ray asked, harshly.

“If you please, _A Modern Romeo_.” Ray took the chair which Mr.
Brandreth signed a clerk to bring him from without. Kane went on: “It’s
very curious, the history of these things, and I’ve looked into it
somewhat. Ordinarily a book makes its fortune, or it doesn’t, at once. I
should say this was always the case with a story that had already been
published serially; but with a book that first appears as a book, the
chances seem to be rather more capricious. The first great success with
us was _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, and that was assured before the story was
finished in the old _National Era_, where it was printed. But that had
an immense motive power behind it--a vital question that affected the
whole nation.”

“I seem to have come too late for the vital questions,” said Ray.

“Oh no! oh no! There are always plenty of them left. There is the
industrial slavery, which exists on a much more universal scale than the
chattel slavery; that is still waiting its novelist.”

“Or its Trust of novelists,” Ray scornfully suggested.

“Very good; very excellent good; nothing less than a syndicate perhaps
could grapple with a theme of such vast dimensions.”

“It would antagonize a large part of the reading public,” Mr. Brandreth
said; but he had the air of making a mental memorandum to keep an eye
out for MSS. dealing with industrial slavery.

“So much the better! So much the better!” said Kane. “_Robert Elsmere_
antagonized much more than half its readers by its religious positions.
But that wasn’t what I was trying to get at. I was thinking about how
some of the phenomenally successful books hung fire at first.”

“Ah, that interests me as the author of a phenomenally successful book
that is still hanging fire,” sighed Ray.

Kane smiled approval of his attempt to play with his pain, and went on:
“You know that _Gates Ajar_, which sold up into the hundred thousands,
was three months selling the first fifteen hundred.”

“Is that so?” Ray asked. “_A Modern Romeo_ has been three weeks selling
the first fifteen.” He laughed, and Mr. Brandreth with him; but the fact
encouraged him, and he could see that it encouraged the publisher.

“We won’t speak of _Mr. Barnes of New York_”--

“Oh no! Don’t!” cried Ray.

“You might be very glad to have written it on some accounts, my dear
boy,” said Kane.

“Have you read it?”

“That’s neither here nor there. I haven’t seen _Little Lord Fauntleroy_.
But I wanted to speak of _Looking Backward_. Four months after that was
published, the first modest edition was still unsold.”

Kane rose. “I just dropped in to impart these facts to your publisher,
in case you and he might be getting a little impatient of the triumph
which seems to be rather behind time. I suppose you’ve noticed it? These
little disappointments are not suffered in a corner.”

“Then your inference is that at the end of three or four months _A
Modern Romeo_ will be selling at the rate of five hundred a day? I’m
glad for Brandreth here, but I shall be dead by that time.”

“Oh no! Oh no!” Kane softly entreated, while he took Ray’s hand between
his two hands. “One doesn’t really die of disappointed literature any
more than one dies of disappointed love. That is one of the pathetic
superstitions which we like to cherish in a world where we get well of
nearly all our hurts, and live on to a hale old imbecility. Depend upon
it, my dear boy, you will survive your book at least fifty years.” Kane
wrung Ray’s hand, and got himself quickly away.

“There is a good deal of truth in what he says”--Mr. Brandreth began
cheerfully.

“About my outliving my book?” Ray asked. “Thank you. There’s all the
truth in the world in it.”

“I don’t mean that, of course. I mean the chances that it will pick up
any time within three months, and make its fortune.”

“You’re counting on a lucky accident.”

“Yes, I am. I’ve done everything I can to push the book, and now we must
trust to luck. You have to trust to luck in the book business, in every
business. Business is buying on the chance of selling at a profit. The
political economists talk about the laws of business; but there are no
laws of business. There is nothing but chances, and no amount of wisdom
can forecast them or control them. You had better be prudent, but if you
are always prudent you will die poor. ‘Be bold; be bold; be not too
bold.’ That’s about all there is of it. And I’m going to be cheerful
too. I’m still betting on _A Modern Romeo_.” The young publisher leaned
forward and put his hand on Ray’s shoulder, in a kindly way, and shook
him a little. “Come! What will you bet that it doesn’t begin to go
within the next fortnight? I don’t ask you to put up any money. Will you
risk the copyright on the first thousand?”

“No, I won’t bet,” said Ray, more spiritlessly than he felt, for the
proposition to relinquish a part of his copyright realized it to him.
Still he found it safest not to allow himself any revival of his hopes;
if he did it would be tempting fate to dash them again. In that way he
had often got the better of fate; there was no other way to do it, at
least for him.

XLI.

After a silent and solitary dinner, Ray went to see Mrs. Denton and
Peace in their new lodging. It was the upper floor of a little house in
Greenwich Village, which was sublet to them by a machinist occupying the
lower floors; Ray vaguely recalled something in his face at his first
visit, and then recognized one of the attendants at Hughes’s Sunday
ministrations. He was disposed to fellowship Ray in Hughes’s doctrine,
and in the supposition of a community of interest in Hughes’s daughters.
They could not have been in better or kindlier keeping than that of the
machinist’s friendly wife, who must have fully shared his notion of
Ray’s relation to them. She always received him like one of the family,
and with an increasing intimacy and cordiality.

That evening when she opened the street door to him she said, “Go right
along up; I guess you’ll find them there all right,” and Ray mounted
obediently. Half-way up he met Mrs. Denton coming down, with her cat in
her arms. “Oh, well!” she said. “You’ll find Peace at home; I’ll be back
in a moment.”

He suspected that Mrs. Denton fostered the belief of the machinist and
his wife that there was a tacit if not an explicit understanding between
himself and Peace, and he thought that she would now very probably talk
the matter over with them. But he kept on up to the little apartment at
the top of the house, and tapped on the door standing wide open. The
girl was sitting at one of the windows, with her head and bust sharply
defined against the glassy clear evening light of the early summer. She
had her face turned toward the street, and remained as if she did not
hear him at first, so that there was a moment when it went through his
mind that he would go away. Then she looked round, and greeted him; and
he advanced into the room, and took the seat fronting her on the other
side of the window. There was a small, irregular square below, and above
the tops of its trees the swallows were weaving their swift flight and
twittering song; the street noises came up slightly muted through the
foliage; it was almost like a sylvan withdrawal from the city’s worst;
and they talked of the country, and how lovely it must be looking now.

He said: “Yes, I wonder we can ever leave it. This is the first
spring-time that I have ever been where I couldn’t feel my way with
Nature at every step she took. It’s like a great loss out of my life. I
think sometimes I am a fool to have staid here; I can never get it back.
I could have gone home, and been the richer by the experience of another
spring. Why didn’t I do it?”

“Perhaps you couldn’t have done your work there,” she suggested.

“Oh, my work! That is what people are always sacrificing the good of
life to--their work! Is it worth so much? If I couldn’t do my
newspaper-work there, I could do something else. I could write another
unsuccessful novel.”

“Is your novel a failure?” she asked.

“Don’t you know it is? It’s been out three weeks, and nobody seems to
know it. That’s my grief, now; it may one day be my consolation. I don’t
complain. Mr. Brandreth still keeps his heroic faith in it, and even old
Kane was trying to rise on the wings of favorable prophecy when I saw
him just before dinner. But I haven’t the least hope any more. I think I
could stand it better if I respected the book itself more. But to fail
in a bad cause--that’s bitter.” He stopped, knowing as well as if he had
put his prayer in words, that he had asked her to encourage him, and if
possible, flatter him.

“I’ve been reading it all through again, since it came out,” she said.

“Oh, have you?” he palpitated.

“And I have lent it to the people in the house here, and they have read
it. They are very intelligent in a kind of way”--

“Yes?”

“And they have been talking to me about it; they have been discussing
the characters in it. They like it because they say they can understand
just how every one felt. They like the hero, and Mrs. Simpson cried over
the last scene. She thinks you have managed the heroine’s character
beautifully. Mr. Simpson wondered whether you really believe in
hypnotism. They both said they felt as if they were living it.”

Ray listened with a curious mixture of pleasure and of pain. He knew
very well that it was not possible for such people as the Simpsons to
judge his story with as fine artistic perception as that old society
woman who thought he meant to make his characters cheap and ridiculous,
and in the light of this knowledge their praise galled him. But then
came the question whether they could not judge better of its truth and
reality. If he had made a book which appealed to the feeling and
knowledge of the great, simply-conditioned, sound-hearted,
common-schooled American mass whom the Simpsons represented, he had made
his fortune. He put aside that other question, which from time to time
presses upon every artist, whether he would rather please the few who
despise the judgment of the many, or the many who have no taste, but
somehow have in their keeping the touchstone by which a work of art
proves itself a human interest, and not merely a polite pleasure. Ray
could not make this choice. He said dreamily: “If Mr. Brandreth could
only find out how to reach all the Simpsons with it! I believe a
twenty-five-cent paper edition would be the thing after all. I wish you
could tell me just what Mr. and Mrs. Simpson said of the book; and if
you can remember what they disliked as well as what they liked in it.”

Peace laughed a little. “Oh, they disliked the wicked people. They
thought the hard old father of the heroine was terrible, and was justly
punished by his daughter’s death. At the same time they thought you
ought to have had her revive in time to seize the hero’s hand, when he
is going to shoot himself, and keep him from giving himself a mortal
wound. The cousin ought to get well, too; or else confess before he dies
that he intended to throw the hero over the cliff, so that it could be
made out a case of self-defence. Mr. Simpson says that could be done to
the satisfaction of any jury.”

Ray laughed too. “Yes. It would have been more popular if it had ended
well.”

“Perhaps not,” Peace suggested. “Isn’t it the great thing to make people
talk about a book? If it ended well they wouldn’t have half so much to
say as they will now about it.”

“Perhaps,” Ray assented with meek hopefulness. “But, Peace, what do
_you_ say about it? You’ve never told me that yet. Do you really despise
it so much?”

“I’ve never said that I despised it.”

“You’ve never said you didn’t, and by everything that you’ve done,
you’ve left me to think that you do. I know,” said the young man, “that
I’m bringing up associations and recollections that must be painful to
you; they’re painful and humiliating to me. But it seems to me that you
owe me that much.”

“I owe you much more than that,” said the girl. “Do you think that I
forget--can forget--anything--all that you’ve been to us?”

“Oh, don’t speak of it!” said Ray. “I didn’t mean that. And you needn’t
tell me now what you think of my book. But sometime you will, won’t
you?” He drew forward a little nearer to her, where they sat in the
light which had begun to wane. “Until then--until then--I want you to
let me be the best friend you have in the world--the best friend I can
be to any one.”

He stopped for some answer from her, and she said: “No one could be a
truer friend to us than you have been, from the very first. And we have
mixed you up so in our trouble!”

“Oh, no! But if it’s given me any sort of right to keep on coming to see
Mrs. Denton and you, just as I used?”

“Why not?” she returned.

XLII.

Ray went home ill at ease with himself. He spent a bad night, and he
seemed to have sunk away only a moment from his troubles, when a knock
at his door brought him up again into the midst of them. He realized
them before he realized the knock sufficiently to call out, “Who’s
there?”

“Oh!” said Mr. Brandreth’s voice without; “you’re not up yet! Can I come
in?”

“Certainly,” said Ray, and he leaned forward and slid back the bolt of
his door: it was one advantage of a room so small that he could do this
without getting out of bed.

Mr. Brandreth seemed to beam with one radiance from his silk hat, his
collar, his boots, his scarf, his shining eyes and smooth-shaven
friendly face, as he entered.

“Of course,” he said, “you haven’t seen the _Metropolis_ yet?”

“No; what is the matter with the _Metropolis_?”

Mr. Brandreth, with his perfectly fitted gloves on, and his natty cane
dangling from his wrist, unfolded the supplement of the newspaper, and
accurately folded it again to the lines of the first three columns of
the page. Then he handed it to Ray, and delicately turned away and
looked out of the window.

Ray glanced at the space defined, and saw that it was occupied by a
review of _A Modern Romeo_. There were lengths of large open type for
the reviewer’s introduction and comments and conclusion, and embedded
among these, in closer and finer print, extracts from the novel, where
Ray saw his own language transfigured and glorified.

The critic struck in the beginning a note which he sounded throughout; a
cry of relief, of exultation, at what was apparently the beginning of a
new order of things in fiction. He hailed the unknown writer of _A
Modern Romeo_ as the champion of the imaginative and the ideal against
the photographic and the commonplace, and he expressed a pious joy in
the novel as a bold advance in the path that was to lead forever away
from the slough of realism. But he put on a philosophic air in making
the reader observe that it was not absolutely a new departure, a break,
a schism; it was a natural and scientific evolution, it was a
development of the spiritual from the material; the essential part of
realism was there, but freed from the grossness, the dulness of realism
as we had hitherto known it, and imbued with a fresh life. He called
attention to the firmness and fineness with which the situation was
portrayed and the characters studied before the imagination began to
deal with them; and then he asked the reader to notice how, when this
foundation had once been laid, it was made to serve as a
“star-ypointing pyramid” from which the author’s fancy took its bold
flight through realms untravelled by the photographic and the
commonplace. He praised the style of the book, which he said
corresponded to the dual nature of the conception, and recalled
Thackeray in the treatment of persons and things, and Hawthorne in the
handling of motives and ideas. There was, in fact, so much subtlety in
the author’s dealing with these, that one might almost suspect a
feminine touch, but for the free and virile strength shown in the
passages of passion and action.

The reviewer quoted several of such passages, and Ray followed with a
novel intensity of interest the words he already knew by heart. The
whole episode of throwing the cousin over the cliff was reprinted; but
the parts which the reviewer gave the largest room and the loudest
praise were those embodying the incidents of the hypnotic trance and the
tragical close of the story. Here, he said, was a piece of the most
palpitant actuality, and he applauded it as an instance of how the
imagination might deal with actuality. Nothing in the whole range of
commonplace, photographic, realistic fiction was of such striking effect
as this employment of a scientific discovery in the region of the ideal.
He contended that whatever lingering doubt people might have of the
usefulness of hypnotism as a remedial agent, there could be no question
of the splendid success with which the writer of this remarkable novel
had turned it to account in poetic fiction of a very high grade. He did
not say the highest grade; the book had many obvious faults. It was
evidently the first book of a young writer, whose experience of life had
apparently been limited to a narrow and comparatively obscure field. It
was in a certain sense provincial, even parochial; but perhaps the very
want of an extended horizon had concentrated the author’s thoughts the
more penetratingly on the life immediately at hand. What was important
was that he had seen this life with the vision of an idealist, and had
discerned its poetic uses with the sense of the born artist, and had set
it in

    “The light that never was on sea or land.”

Much more followed to like effect, and the reviewer closed with a
promise to look with interest for the future performance of a writer who
had already given much more than the promise of mastery; who had given
proofs of it. His novel might not be the great American novel which we
had so long been expecting, but it was a most notable achievement in the
right direction. The author was the prophet of better things; he was a
Moses, who, if we followed him, would lead us up from the flesh-pots of
Realism toward the promised land of the Ideal.

From time to time Ray made a little apologetic show of not meaning to do
more than glance the review over, but Mr. Brandreth insisted upon his
taking his time and reading it all; he wanted to talk to him about it.
He began to talk before Ray finished; in fact he agonized him with
question and comment, all through; and when Ray laid the paper down at
last, he came and sat on the edge of his bed.

“Now, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I don’t believe in working on
Sunday, and that sort of thing; but I believe this is providential. My
wife does, too; she says it’s a reward for the faith we’ve had in the
book; and that it would be a sin to lose a moment’s time. If there is to
be any catch-on at all, it must be instantaneous; we mustn’t let the
effect of this review get cold, and I’m going to strike while it’s
red-hot.” The word seem to suggest the magnitude of the purpose which
Mr. Brandreth expressed with seriousness that befitted the day. “I’m
simply going to paint the universe red. You’ll see.”

“Well, well,” said Ray, “you’d better not tell me how. I guess I’ve got
as much as I can stand, now.”

“If that book doesn’t succeed,” said Mr. Brandreth, as solemnly as if
registering a vow, “it won’t be my fault.”

He went away, and Ray passed into a trance such as wraps a fortunate
lover from the outer world. But nothing was further from his thoughts
than love. The passion that possessed him was egotism flattered to an
intensity in which he had no life but in the sense of himself. No
experience could be more unwholesome while it lasted, but a condition so
intense could not endure. His first impulse was to keep away from every
one who could keep him from the voluptuous sense of his own success. He
knew very well that the review in the _Metropolis_ overrated his book,
but he liked it to be overrated; he wilfully renewed his delirium from
it by reading it again and again, over his breakfast, on the train to
the Park, and in the lonely places which he sought out there apart from
all who could know him or distract him from himself. At first it seemed
impossible; at last it became unintelligible. He threw the paper into
some bushes; then after he had got a long way off, he went back and
recovered it, and read the review once more. The sense had returned, the
praises had relumed their fires; again he bathed his spirit in their
splendor. It was he, he, he, of whom those things were said. He tried to
realize it. Who was he? The question scared him; perhaps he was going
out of his mind. At any rate he must get away from himself now; that was
his only safety. He thought whom he should turn to for refuge. There
were still people of his society acquaintance in town, and he could have
had a cup of tea poured for him by a charming girl at any one of a dozen
friendly houses. There were young men, more than enough of them, who
would have welcomed him to their bachelor quarters. There was old Kane.
But they would have all begun to talk to him about that review; Peace
herself would have done so. He ended by going home, and setting to work
on some notices for the next day’s _Every Evening_. The performance was
a play of double consciousness in which he struggled with himself as if
with some alien personality. But the next day he could take the time to
pay Mr. Brandreth a visit without wronging the work he had carried so
far.

On the way he bought the leading morning papers, and saw that the
publisher had reprinted long extracts from the _Metropolis_ review as
advertisements in the type of the editorial page; in the _Metropolis_
itself he reprinted the whole review. “This sort of thing will be in the
principal Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis
papers just as soon as the mail can carry them my copy. I _had_ thought
of telegraphing the advertisement, but it will cost money enough as it
is,” said Mr. Brandreth.

“Are you sure you’re not throwing your money away?” Ray asked, somewhat
aghast.

“I’m sure I’m not throwing my chance away,” the publisher retorted with
gay courage. He developed the plan of campaign as he had conceived it,
and Ray listened with a kind of nerveless avidity. He looked over at Mr.
Chapley’s room, where he knew that Peace was busily writing, and he
hoped that she did not know that he was there. His last talk with her
had mixed itself up with the intense experience that had followed, and
seemed of one frantic quality with it. He walked out to the street door
with Mr. Brandreth beside him, and did not turn for a glimpse of her.

“Oh by-the-way,” said the publisher at parting, “if you’d been here a
little sooner, I could have made you acquainted with your reviewer. He
dropped in a little while ago to ask who S. Ray was, and I did my best
to make him believe it was a real name. I don’t think he was more than
half convinced.”

“I don’t more than half believe in him,” said Ray, lightly, to cover his
disappointment. “Who is he?”

“Well, their regular man is off on sick leave, and this young
fellow--Worrell is his name--is a sort of under study. He was telling me
how he happened to go in for your book--those things are always
interesting. He meant to take another book up to his house with him, and
he found he had yours when he got home, and some things about hypnotism.
He went through them, and then he thought he would just glance at yours,
anyway, and he opened on the hypnotic trance scene, just when his mind
was full of the subject, and he couldn’t let go. He went back to the
beginning and read it all through, and then he gave you the benefit of
the other fellow’s chance. He wanted to see you, when I told him about
you. Curious how these things fall out, half the time?”

“Very,” said Ray, rather blankly.

“I knew you’d enjoy it.”

“Oh, I do.”

XLIII.

Whether the boom for _A Modern Romeo_ which began with the appearance of
the _Metropolis_ review was an effect of that review or not, no one
acquainted with the caprices of the book trade would undertake to say.
There had been enthusiastic reviews of other books in the _Metropolis_
which had resulted in no boom whatever, as Kane pointed out in
ironically inviting the author to believe that the success of the book
was due wholly to its merit.

“And what was its long failure due to?” Ray asked, tasting the bitter of
the suggestion, but feigning unconsciousness.

“To its demerit.”

Mr. Brandreth was at first inclined to ascribe the boom to the review;
afterwards he held that it was owing to his own wise and bold use of the
review in advertising. There, he contended, was the true chance, which,
in moments of grateful piety, he claimed that he was inspired to seize.
What is certain is that other friendly reviews began to appear in other
influential journals, in New York and throughout the country. Ray began
to see the book on the news-stands now; he found it in the booksellers’
windows; once he heard people in an elevated car talking of it; somehow
it was in the air. But how it got in the air, no one could exactly say;
he, least of all. He could put his hand on certain causes, gross,
palpable, like the advertising activities of Mr. Brandreth; but these
had been in effectless operation long before. He could not define the
peculiar attraction that the novel seemed to have, even when frankly
invited to do so by a vivid young girl who wrote New York letters for a
Southern paper, and who came to interview him about it. The most that he
could say was that it had struck a popular mood. She was very grateful
for that idea, and she made much of it in her next letter; but she did
not succeed in analyzing this mood, except as a general readiness for
psychological fiction on the part of a reading public wearied and
disgusted with the realism of the photographic, commonplace school. She
was much more precise in her personal account of Ray; the young novelist
appeared there as a type of manly beauty, as to his face and head, but
of a regrettably low stature, which, however, you did not observe while
he remained seated. It was specially confided to lady readers that his
slightly wavy dark hair was parted in the middle over a forehead as
smooth and pure as a girl’s. The processed reproduction of Ray’s
photograph did not perfectly bear out her encomium; but it was as much
like him as it was like her account of him. His picture began to appear
in many places, with romanced biographies, which made much of the
obscurity of his origin and the struggles of his early life. When it
came to be said that he sprang from the lower classes, it brought him a
letter of indignant protest from his mother, who reminded him that his
father was a physician, and his people had always been educated and
respectable on both sides. She thought that he ought to write to the
papers and stop the injurious paragraph; and he did not wholly convince
her that this was impossible. He could not have made her understand how
in the sudden invasion of publicity his personality had quite passed out
of his own keeping. The interviewers were upon him everywhere: at his
hotel, whose quaintness and foreign picturesqueness they made go far in
their studies of him; at the _Every Evening_ office, where their visits
subjected him to the mockery of his associates on the paper. His chief
was too simple and serious of purpose to take the comic view of Ray’s
celebrity; when he realized it through the frequency of the interviews,
he took occasion to say: “I like your work and I want to keep you. As it
is only a question of time when you will ask an increase of salary, I
prefer to anticipate, and you’ll find it put up in your next check to
the figure which I think the paper ought to stand.” He did not otherwise
recognize the fact of the book’s success, or speak of it; as compared
with his paper, Ray’s book was of no importance to him whatever.

The interviews were always flattering to Ray’s vanity, in a certain way,
but it was rather wounding to find that most of the interviewers had not
read his book; though they had just got it, or they were going to get it
and read it. In some cases they came to him with poetic preoccupations
from previous interviews with Mr. Brandreth, and he could not disabuse
them of the notion that his literary career had been full of facts much
stranger than fiction.

“Mr. Brandreth says that if the truth could be told about that book,”
one young lady journalist stated, keeping her blue eyes fixed winningly
upon the author’s, “it would form one of the most dramatic chapters in
the whole history of literature. _Won’t_ you tell _me_ the truth about
it, Mr. Ray?”

“Why, I don’t know the truth about it myself,” Ray said.

“Oh, how delightful!” cried the young lady. “I’m going to put _that_ in,
at any rate;” and she continued to work the young author with her
appealing eyes and her unusually intelligent flatteries, until she had
got a great deal more out of him concerning the periculations of his
novel in manuscript than he could have believed himself capable of
telling.

He went to Mr. Brandreth smarting with a sense of having made a fool of
himself, and, “See here, Brandreth,” he said, “what is so very
remarkably dramatic in the history of a novel kicking about for six
months among the trade?”

Mr. Brandreth stared at him, and then said, with a flash of
recollection, “Oh! _That_ girl! Well, she was determined to have
_something_ exclusive about the book, and I just threw out the remark. I
wasn’t thinking of your side of the business entirely. Ray, you’re a
good fellow, and I don’t mind telling you that when I chanced it on
this book of yours, it had got to a point with us where we had to chance
it on something. Mr. Chapley had let the publishing interests of the
house go till there was hardly anything of them left; and when he went
up into the country, this spring, he was strongly opposed to my trying
anything in the publishing line. But my wife and I talked it over, and
she saw as well as I did that I should either have to go actively into
the business, or else go out of it. As it stood, it wouldn’t support two
families. So I made up my mind to risk your book. If it had failed it
would have embarrassed me awfully; I don’t say but what I could have
pulled through, but it would have been rough sledding.”

“That _is_ interesting,” said Ray. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t begin to
pose as your preserver.”

“Well, it wasn’t quite so bad as that,” Mr. Brandreth gayly protested.
“And at the last moment it might have been some one else. There’s no
reason why I shouldn’t tell you that the night you came and wanted me to
take old Hughes’s book, I talked it very seriously over with my wife,
and we determined that we would look at it in the morning, and perhaps
postpone your novel. We woke the baby up with our talk, and then he woke
us up the rest of the night, and in the morning we were not fit to
grapple with the question, and I took that for a sign and let them go on
with your book. I suppose these things were in my mind when I told that
girl what she repeated to you.”

“Well, the incidents are dramatic enough,” said Ray, musingly. “Even
tragical.”

“Yes,” sighed Mr. Brandreth. “I always dreaded to ask you how you made
it right with Mr. Hughes.”

“Oh, Mrs. Denton made it right with _him_,” Ray scoffed. “I told her how
I failed with you, and she went right to him and said that you had taken
his book and would bring it out at once.”

Mr. Brandreth looked pained. “Well, I don’t know what to say about that.
But I’m satisfied now that I acted for the best in keeping on with your
book. I’m going to have Mr. Hughes’s carefully examined, though. I
believe there’s the making of another hit in it. By-the-way,” he ended,
cheerily, “you’ll be glad to know that _A Modern Romeo_ has come of age;
we’ve just printed the twenty-first thousand of him.”

“Is it possible!” said Ray, with well-simulated rapture. With all the
talk there had been about the book, he supposed it had certainly gone to
fifty thousand by this time.

The sale never really reached that figure. It went to forty two or three
thousand, and there it stopped, and nothing could carry it farther. The
author talked the strange arrest over with the publisher, but they could
arrive at no solution of the mystery. There was no reason why a book
which had been so widely talked about and written about should not keep
on selling indefinitely; there was every reason why it should; but it
did not. Had it, by some process of natural selection, reached exactly
those people who cared for a psychological novel of its peculiar make,
and were there really no more of them than had given it just that vogue?
He sought a law for the fact in vain, in the more philosophical
discussions he held with old Kane, as well as in his inquiries with Mr.
Brandreth.

Finally, Kane said: “Why do we always seek a law for things? Is there a
law for ourselves? We think so, but it’s out of sight for the most part,
and generally we act from mere caprice, from impulse. I’ve lived a good
many years, but I couldn’t honestly say that I’ve seen the cause
overtaken by the consequence more than two or three times; then it
struck me as rather theatrical. Consequences I’ve seen a plenty, but not
causes. Perhaps this is merely a sphere of ultimations. We used to
flatter ourselves, in the simple old days, when we thought we were all
miserable sinners, that we were preparing tremendous effects, to follow
elsewhere, by what we said and did here. But what if the things that
happen here are effects initiated elsewhere?”

“It’s a very pretty conjecture,” said Ray, “but it doesn’t seem to have
a very direct bearing on the falling off in the sale of _A Modern
Romeo_.”

“Everything in the universe is related to that book, if you could only
see it properly. If it has stopped selling, it is probably because the
influence of some favorable star, extinguished thousands of years ago,
has just ceased to reach this planet.”

Kane had the air of making a mental note after he said this, and Ray
began to laugh. “There ought to be money in that,” he said.

“No, there is no money in Hard Sayings,” Kane returned, sadly; “there is
only--wisdom.”

Ray was by no means discouraged with his failures to divine the reason
for the arrested sale of his book. At heart he was richly satisfied with
its success, and he left the public without grudging, to their belief
that it had sold a hundred and fifty thousand. Mr. Brandreth was
satisfied, too. He believed that the sale would pick up again in the
fall after people got back from the country; he had discovered that the
book had enduring qualities; but now the question was, what was Ray
going to write next? “You ought to strike while the iron’s hot, you
know.”

“Of course, I’ve been thinking about that,” the young fellow admitted,
“and I believe I’ve got a pretty good scheme for a novel.”

“Could you give me some notion of it?”

“No, I couldn’t. It hasn’t quite crystallized in my mind yet. And I
don’t believe it will, somehow, till I get a name for it.”

“Have you thought of a name?”

“Yes--half-a-dozen that won’t do.”

“There’s everything in a name,” said the publisher. “I believe it made
the _Modern Romeo’s_ fortune.”

Ray mused a moment. “How would _A Rose by any other Name_ do?”

“That’s rather attractive,” said Mr. Brandreth. “Well, anyway, remember
that we are to have the book.”

Ray hesitated. “Well--not on those old ten-percent. terms, Brandreth.”

“Oh, I think we can arrange the terms all right,” said Mr. Brandreth.

“Because I can do much better, you know.”

“Oh, they’ve been after you, have they?”

The young fellow held up the fingers of one hand.

“Well,” said Mr. Brandreth, “your next book belongs to Chapley & Co. You
want to keep your books together. One will help sell the other. _A Rose
by any other Name_ will wake up _A Modern Romeo_ when it comes out.”

XLIV.

For Peace Hughes and her sister, the summer passed uneventfully. The
girl made up for the time she had lost earlier in the year by doing
double duty at the increased business of the publishing house. The
prosperity of _A Modern Romeo_ had itself added to her work, and the new
enterprises which its success had inspired Mr. Brandreth to consider
meant more letter-writing and more formulation of the ideas which he
struck shapelessly if boldly out. He trusted her advice as well as her
skill, and she had now become one of the regular readers for Chapley &
Co.

Ray inferred this from the number of manuscripts which he saw on her
table at home, and he could not help knowing the other things through
his own acquaintance, which was almost an intimacy, with Mr. Brandreth’s
affairs. The publisher was always praising her. “Talk about men!” he
broke out one day. “That girl has a better business head than half the
business men in New York. If she were not a woman, it would be only a
question of time when we should have to offer her a partnership, or run
the risk of losing her. But there’s only one kind of partnership you can
offer a woman.” Ray flushed, but he did not say anything, and Mr.
Brandreth asked, apparently from some association in his mind, “Do you
see much of them at their new place?”

“Yes; I go there every week or so.”

“How are they getting on?”

“Very well, I believe.” Ray mused a moment, and then he said: “If it
were not contrary to all our preconceptions of a sort of duty in people
who have been through what they have been through, I should say they
were both happier than I ever saw them before. I don’t think Mrs. Denton
cared a great deal for her children or husband, but in her father’s last
days he wouldn’t have anybody else about him. She strikes one like a
person who would get married again.”

Mr. Brandreth listened with the air of one trying to feel shocked; but
he smiled.

“I don’t blame her,” Ray continued. “Perhaps old Kane’s habit of not
blaming people is infectious. She once accounted for herself on the
ground that she didn’t make herself; I suppose it might be rather
dangerous ground if people began to take it generally. But Miss Hughes
did care for those poor little souls and for that wretched creature, and
now the care’s gone, and the relief has come. They both miss their
father; but he was doomed; he _had_ to die; and besides, his fatherhood
struck me as being rather thin, at times, from having been spread out
over a community so long. I can’t express it exactly, but it seems to me
that the children of a man who is trying to bring about a millennium of
any kind do not have a good time. Still, I suppose we must have the
millenniums.”

“You said that just like old Kane,” Mr. Brandreth observed.

“Did I? I just owned he was infectious. If I’ve caught his habit of
mind, I dare say I’ve caught his accent. I don’t particularly admire
either. But what I mean is that Miss Hughes and her sister are getting
on very comfortably and sweetly. Their place is as homelike as any I
know in New York.”

“As soon as we get back in the fall, Mrs. Brandreth is going to call on
them. Now that Mr. Chapley and Mr. Hughes are out of the way, there’s no
reason why we shouldn’t show them some attention. Miss Hughes, at least,
is a perfect lady. I’m going to see that she doesn’t overwork; the
success of _A Modern Romeo_ has killed us nearly all; I’m going to give
her a three weeks’ vacation toward the end of August.”

Ray called upon Peace one evening in the beginning of her vacation, and
found her with the manuscript of a book before her; Mrs. Denton was
sitting with the Simpsons on their front steps, and sent him on up to
Peace when he declined to join her there.

He said, “I supposed I should find you reading up the Adirondack
guide-books, or trying to decide between Newport and Saratoga. I don’t
see how your outing differs very much from your inning.”

“This was only a book I brought home because I had got interested in
it,” the girl explained in self-defence. “We’re not going away
anywhere.”

“I think I would stay myself,” said Ray, “if it were not for wanting to
see my family. My vacation begins to-morrow.”

“Does it?”

“Yes; and I should be very willing to spend my fortnight excursioning
around New York. But I’m off at once to-night; I came in to say good-by.
I hope you’ll miss me.”

“We shall miss you very much,” she said; and she added, “I suppose most
of our fashionable friends have gone out of town.”

“Have they?”

“I should think you would know. We had them at second-hand from you.”

“Oh! Those?” said Ray. “Yes. They’re gone, and I’m going. I hate to
leave you behind. Have you any message for the country?”

“Only my love.” She faced the manuscript down on the table before her,
and rocked softly to and fro a moment. “It does make me a little
homesick to think of it,” she said, with touching patience.

He felt the forlornness in her accent, and a sense of her isolation
possessed him. When Mrs. Denton should marry again, Peace would be alone
in the world. He looked at her, and she seemed very little and slight,
to make her way single-handed.

“Peace!” he said, and the intensity of his voice startled him. “There is
something I wanted to say to you--to ask you,” and he was aware of her
listening as intensely as he spoke, though no change of attitude or
demeanor betrayed the fact; he had to go on in a lighter strain if he
went on at all. “You know, I suppose, what a rich man I am going to be
when I get the copyright on my book. It’s almost incredible, but I’m
going to be worth five or six thousand dollars; to be as rich as most
millionaires. Well--I asked you to let me be your friend once, because I
didn’t think a man who was turning out a failure had the right to ask to
be more. Or, no! That _isn’t_ it!” he broke off, shocked by the false
ring of his words. “I don’t know how to say it. I was in love once--very
much in love; the kind of love that I’ve put into my book; and
this--this worship that I have for you, for I do worship you!--it isn’t
the same, Peace. It’s everything that honors you, and once it _was_ like
that; but now I’m not sure. But I couldn’t go away without offering you
my worship, for you to accept for all our lives; or reject, if it wasn’t
enough. Do you understand?”

“I do understand,” the girl returned, and she nervously pressed the hand
which she allowed to gather hers into it.

“I couldn’t leave you,” he went on, “without telling you that there is
no one in the world that I honor so much as you. I had it in my heart to
say this long ago; but it seems such a strange thing to stop with. If I
didn’t think you so wise and so good, I don’t believe I could say it to
you. I know that now whatever you decide will be right, and the best for
us both. I couldn’t bear to have you suppose I would keep coming to see
you without--I would have told you this long ago, but I always expected
to tell you more. But I’m twenty-six now, and perhaps I shall never
feel in that old way again. I _know_ our lives would be united in the
highest things; and you would save me from living for myself alone. What
do you say, Peace?”

He waited for her to break the silence which he did not know how to
interpret. At last she said “No!” and she drew back from him and took
her hand away. “It wouldn’t be right. I shouldn’t be afraid to trust
you”----

“Then why”----

“For I know how faithful you are. But I’m afraid--I _know_--I don’t love
you! And without that it would be a sacrilege. That isn’t enough of
itself, but everything else would be nothing without it.” As if she felt
the wound her words must have dealt to his self-love, she hurried on: “I
did love you once. Yes! I did. And when Mr. Brandreth wanted me to read
your book that time, I wouldn’t, because I was afraid of myself. But
afterwards it--went.”

“Was it my fault?” Ray asked.

“It wasn’t any one’s fault,” said the girl. “If I had not been so
unhappy, it might have been different.”

“Oh, Peace!”

“But I had no heart for it. And now my life must go on just as it is. I
have thought it all out. I thought that some time you might tell
me--what you have--or different--and I tried to think what I ought to
do. I shall never care for any one else; I shall never get married.
Don’t think I shall be unhappy! I can take good care of myself, and
Jenny and I will not be lonesome together. Even if we don’t always live
together--still, I can always make myself a home. I’m not afraid to be
an old maid. There is work in the world for me to do, and I can do it.
Is it so strange I should be saying this?”

“No, no. It’s right.”

“I suppose that most of the girls you know wouldn’t do it. But I have
been brought up differently. In the Family they did not think that
marriage was always the best thing; and when I saw how Jenny and
Ansel--I don’t mean that it would ever have been like that! But I don’t
wish you to think that life will be hard or unhappy for me. And you--you
will find somebody that you can feel towards as you did towards that
first girl.”

“Never! I shall never care for any one again!” he cried. At the bottom
of his heart there was a relief which he tried to ignore, though he
could not deny himself a sense of the unique literary value of the
situation. It was from a consciousness of this relief that he asked,
“And what do you think of me, Peace? Do you blame me?”

“Blame you? How? For my having changed?”

“I feel to blame,” said the young man. “How shall we do, now? Shall I
come to see you when I return?”

“Yes. But we won’t speak of this again.”

“Shall you tell Mrs. Denton?”

“Of course.”

“She will blame me.”

“She will blame _me_,” said Peace. “But--I shall not be troubled, and
you mustn’t,” she said, and she lightly touched him. “This is just as I
wish it to be. I’ve been afraid that if this ever happened, I shouldn’t
have the courage to tell you what I have. But you helped me, and I am so
glad you did! I was afraid you would say something that would blind me,
and keep me from going on in the right way; but now--Good-night.”

“Good-night,” said Ray, vaguely. “May I--dream of you, Peace?”

“If you’ll stop at daybreak.”

“Ah, then I shall begin to think of you.”

XLV.

They had certainly come to an understanding, and for Ray at least there
was release from the obscure sense of culpability which had so long
harassed him. He knew that unless he was sure of his love for Peace, he
was to blame for letting her trust it; but now that he had spoken, and
spoken frankly, it had freed them both to go on and be friends without
fear for each other. Her confession that there had been a time when she
loved him flattered his vanity out of the pain of knowing that she did
not love him now; it consoled him, it justified him; for the offence
which he had accused himself of was of no other kind than hers. How
wisely, how generously she had taken the whole matter!

The question whether she had not taken it more generously than he
merited began to ask itself. She might have chosen to feign a parity
with him in this. He had read of women who sacrificed their love to
their love; and consented to a life-long silence, or practised a
life-long deceit, that the men they loved might never know they loved
them. He had never personally known of such a case, but the books were
full of such cases. This might be one of them. Or it might much more
simply and probably be that she had received his strange declaration as
she did in order to spare his feelings. If that were true she had
already told her sister, and Mrs. Denton had turned the absurd side of
it to the light, and had made Peace laugh it over with her.

A cold perspiration broke out over him at the notion, which he rejected
upon a moment’s reflection as unworthy of Peace. He got back to his
compassionate admiration of her, as he walked down to the ferry and
began his homeward journey. He looked about the boat, and fancied it the
same he had crossed to New York in, when he came to the city nearly a
year before. The old negro who whistled, limped silently through the
long saloon; he glanced from right to left on the passengers, but he
must have thought them too few, or not in the mood for his music. Ray
wondered if he whistled only for the incoming passengers. He recalled
every circumstance of his acquaintance with Peace, from the moment she
caught his notice when Mrs. Denton made her outcry about the
pocket-book. He saw how once it had seemed to deepen to love, and then
had ceased to do so, but he did not see how. There had been everything
in it to make them more to each other, but after a certain time they had
grown less. It was not so strange to him that he had changed; he had
often changed; but we suppose a constancy in others as to all passions
which we cannot exact of ourselves. He tried to think what he had done
to alienate the love which she confessed she once had for him, and he
could not remember anything unless it was his cruelty to her when he
found that she was the friend who would not look at his story a second
time. She said she had forgiven him that; but perhaps she had not;
perhaps she had divined a potential brutality in him, which made her
afraid to trust him. But after that their lives had been united in the
most intimate anxieties, and she had shown absolute trust in him. He
reviewed his conduct toward her throughout, and he could find no blame
in it except for that one thing. He could truly feel that he had been
her faithful friend, and the friend of her whole uncomfortable family,
in spite of all his prejudices and principles against people of that
kind. In the recognition of this fact he enjoyed a moment’s sense of
injury, which was heightened when he reflected that he had even been
willing to sacrifice his pride, after his brilliant literary success, so
far as to offer himself to a girl who worked for her living; it had
always galled him that she held a place little better than a
type-writer’s. No, he had nothing to accuse himself of, after a scrutiny
of his behavior repeated in every detail, and applied in complex, again
and again, with helpless iteration. Still he had a remote feeling of
self-reproach, which he tried to verify, but which forever eluded him.
It was mixed up with that sense of escape, which made him ashamed.

He lay awake in the sleeping-car the greater part of the night, and
turned from side to side, seeking for the reason of a thing that can
never have any reason, and trying to find some parity between his
expectations and experiences of himself in such an affair. It went
through his mind that it would be a good thing to write a story with
some such situation in it; only the reader would not stand it. People
expected love to begin mysteriously, but they did not like it to end so;
though life itself began mysteriously and ended so. He believed that he
should really try it; a story that opened with an engagement ought to be
as interesting as one that closed with an engagement; and it would be
very original. He must study his own affair very closely when he got a
little further away from it. There was no doubt but that when the
chances that favored love were so many and so recognizable, the chance
that undid it could at last be recognized. It was merely a chance, and
that ought to be shown.

He began to wonder if life had not all been a chance with him. Nothing,
not even the success of his book, in the light he now looked at it in,
was the result of reasoned cause. That success had happened; it had not
followed; and he didn’t deserve any praise for what had merely happened.
If this apparent fatality were confined to the economic world alone, he
would have been willing to censure civilization, and take his chance
dumbly, blindly, with the rest. He had not found it so. On the contrary,
he had found the same caprice, the same rule of mere casualty, in the
world which we suppose to be ordered by law--the world of thinking, the
world of feeling. Who knew why or how this or that thought came, this or
that feeling? Then, in that world where we lived in the spirit, was
wrong always punished, was right always rewarded? We must own that we
often saw the good unhappy, and the wicked enjoying themselves. This was
not just; yet somehow we felt, we knew, that justice ruled the universe.
Nothing, then, that seemed chance was really chance. It was the
operation of a law so large that we caught a glimpse of its vast orbit
once or twice in a lifetime. It was Providence.

The car rushed on through the night with its succession of smooth
impulses. The thought of the old friends he should soon meet began to
dispossess the cares and questions that had ridden him; the notion of
certain girls at Midland haunted him sweetly, warmly. He told that one
who first read his story all about Peace Hughes, and she said they had
never really been in love, for love was eternal. After a while he
drowsed, and then he heard her saying that he had got that notion of the
larger law from old Kane. Then it was not he, and not she. It was
nothing.