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Chapter I

S TEPHEN JANVIER enjoyed supremely those traits of character which, according to him, distinguished his elders. It did not occur to this lively young Kentuckian that he in his turn might be an out-and-out romantic, insular, colorful, tenacious and — lovable. On a June evening, the summer that Stephen was twenty-seven, he brought up on the threshold of his uncle’s parlor.

Parlor! It was this word occurring on his lips that checked him. Late comer as he was, he paused in the doorway and chuckled as, beaming amiably, he gazed about him at the couples and groups within the room* the girls in the all-too-scandalously brief draperies of the moment, the men in blue coats and white flannels.

One of Stephen’s generation on a time argued with an elder concerning this word.

“It isn’t said any more, parlor, you know; it’s obsolete like the thing it stood for.”

“But it is said; we say it.”

The older generation spoke according to its nature, expressive of its own individualities, and the point of view instinctive with it, it being nothing of its concern that any creatures else happen not to think with it. And this older stock has had its share in making the 3 state what it is to-day, for puissant and contumacious tenacity.

The room that Stephen so beamingly surveyed was liberal in its dimensions, ample in its width, and in length twice this width. What that the owner of the house, the uncle of Stephen, had done what he could to modernize this home of his forbears? What that the room rejoiced in shaded electroliers and hardwood floors? In the definitive term of this older stock, it not only was still a parlor, but a saloon parlor.

The affair this evening was of that nature called informal by the modern hostess as she gives her invitations over the telephone; an inclusive term in the opinion of these elders, covering all degrees of irregularities and laxities.

“Gross improprieties touching on lawlessness,” they were known to say, “which, did these occur at Weimar’s road house at the crossroads, would be accounted license by the county police.”

Weimar no longer ran this road house with its adjoining beer garden and dancing pavilion; these elders in justice to him would add this, claiming that the road house in his time was reputable enough ; that he merely owned the property nowadays, and was the lessor. To-day he was a brewer of beer, not a road house dispenser of the beverage, and lived with his two sons and his four daughters in his city home overlooking the park. A tapster by training when he, forty-five years ago and just arrived in America, took service at the road house, to-day he was rated at something over two millions; and his sister Ottille, a tailoress by trade, who came to America from Germany with her brother, to-day was the widow of a prosperous merchant tailor.

It was past eleven o’clock. Isaac Shelby Timmons, the colored butler, was refilling the punch bowl, which sat amid a mighty company of glasses on a table in the embrasure of a window. This saddle-colored person, portly and urbane, contributed both deportment and decorum to the occasion. The captious might claim that the two others of his race who were present did not. Yet just as Weimar, the brewer, has his part in the events yet to be set down, so the two youths about to be depicted have their place in this story.

Julius Buck and William McKinley Coffin, colored youths of the neighborhood, sat beside a victrola in the hall, plying the instruments of ragtime, snare drum, bass drum, and cymbal. A fiddle in its day, in the hands of some elderly and staid forbear of these youths, some great-mannered old darkey in a swallow-tailed coat, blue with brass buttons, was considered seemly and desirable in this parlor. Whereas canned music y punctuated by the tom-tom of drum and cymbal as wielded by Julius and William, was held by those whose memories went back to the former day and its fiddle, to outrage the sense of things decent and fitting. Again Stephen chuckled.

It was past eleven and he, arriving later than he intended, was the more briskly ready for a partner, being as untiring a dancer as any in the room.

An untiring dancer? The best stepper in the crowd if practice makes for perfect. He was pausing in the doorway as couple after couple went by, waiting for that response within himself which, pointing him to his fancy, would speed him to a break-in, and the capture of some other man’s choice.

He was a big, upstanding person, his alertness tempered by his easy poise. As standards in his community regarding masculine beauty went, he was no better looking than he should be, these standards being influenced by a Victorian past, and inclining still to the romantic; whereas the features of Stephen were large, and his cheekbones pronounced.

This young man with the chestnut hair, and eyes of hazel flecked with gray, would have been deemed homely here in his native habitat but for his size, a bodily attribute in the male which in Kentucky frankly is worshiped; his nonflickering gaze, no mean thing itself in his state, and his smile which was ardent, indeed luminous, and according to where bestowed, caressing. Women, certainly Stephen’s own womenkind, spoiled him because of this smile.

Charlie, the son of the house and the cousin of Stephen, came by guiding Evelyn, his young wife of a year, the two signaling with eyes and heads to Stephen as they passed, their dumb show at once a welcome, and a reminder to proceed to duty. It was Evelyn who by telephone, had summoned these young people who were here to-night, from town, and the near and far country places.

’Genie Harrison passed, a little person in a blue silk dress, with a rosebud mouth and entirely knowing eyes, dipping and pausing with abruptness in the recovery, as she went by with Bennie Harlan, her partner. ’Genie avowed herself modern; defined the term for you if asked so to do; and said she rejoiced in what she was.

Bennie, who was the son of the Presbyterian minister at Ashe, twelve miles across country, stood amazing high on his thin legs. He only lately, since his new job as reporter on an afternoon paper in the city, had taken his place with the crowd, this probably being the first time the youngster had had any money for himself. He only recently, too, had been thrown with ’Genie, and it was clear to him who runs that the boy quite tremendously had fallen for her. From his stiltlike eminence above her auburn head, he never took his eyes off her. ’Genie’s mother was a Colonial Dame, and her father was a member of The Society of The Cincinnati, a pair who in their persons, as in the performance of their obligations, private and public, carried their credentials.

And their only child, the rejoicing and modern Eugenia? There was no back that one could see to the waist of this person’s dress, there was very little front beyond shoulder straps of rosebuds that matched her mouth, and there was nothing to speak of in the way of sides to her skirt. She wore blue silk stockings of high-reaching length, nor dared the fancy surmise how little else. Blunt and plain-spoken young ’un, six years the junior of Stephen!

Emily Gwynne and McHenry Stuart passed. Emily was a beauty of long reign, a contemporary of Stephen. Her frock lacked the rosebuds with which ’Genie eked out the absence of a waist, but her lips were made up like a poppy which better suited her. Dress and lips screamed their modern note, and belied Emily, who was a hark-back. She wasn’t clever, and she was faithful. McHenry was up to date, and should pick a flapper such as ’Genie, who was on to him!

These girls and these men here to-night, were Stephen’s crowd, his set, his associates, and not a few of them, his kindred. Sally Clarke was a cousin, Bettie Craig was another.

And this night in question? His gaze went across the room to an open window. It was June, and it was Kentucky. The night just left behind him, and the world of varied landscape rolling and extended, were drenched with the scent of the one, and magical beneath a high-riding moon, through the beauty of the other.

His gaze came back from the window and fell upon a girl. She was dancing with Rowan Hart, a youth from out in the state, who had come this past winter to the city to attend the law school.

The girl danced extremely well. There was a composure about her way of doing it, together with an air of entire propriety, which, taking the performance on its achieved results, lent rather than detracted charm. Dancing to a snare drum and cymbal may be lifted, then, to an art?

This amiably beaming Stephen now regarding her, scion of those colorful and puissant sires, was secretly and unalterably fastidious, and knew it. As fastidious in his exacting soul as he in his outward habit was catholic, in general playing so many favorites there was no favorite. This fastidiousness leaped now in exultation to his lips. The American experiment then produces daughters, children of the line, in themselves at once its vindication and its promise? Pearls of price in the shell of its past?

He swore softly at himself for a cad, and forgot it. This girl dancing with young Hart gave him instant joy. For one so young, and the lines of her body were youthfully thin, she was exceedingly distinguished, straight and elegant, her head well-carried, her nose a trifle high-bridged, and her slight shoulders sloping into slight and lovely arms. And for one who, in carriage and manner, was so composed, she had an amazing brilliancy of pulsing color, the crimson that came and went upon her cheeks being as rich and flawless as it was unusual, a crimson that more often is seen on the firm facial contours of some glowing and proudly handsome child.

Stephen took a breath, a long and oddly deep breath, like a runner stooped and about to leap to his course. He searched his brain as to who this girl might be. Somewhere in his past he knew this cool face, this small, high nose! Ever after he declared that he at this moment, was conscious of a sense of impending happening, of impelling fate, imperative and urging.

There had been affairs in Stephen’s time. He was twenty-seven, and preeminently human. Infatuations and episodes characteristic not only of so buoyant a nature, but of youth and nature wherever found, not alone in Jefferson County, Kentucky, but in Kentucky at large, and the round world as well.

These episodes must have scattered from his memory as mists before the morning, since he was saying to himself that here, in the person of this girl, was the apotheosis of proud and lovely woman at last, as he had dreamed of her.

Having avowed this, straightening as he did so, he felt upon him the eyes, accusing and reproachful, of a lady; of his own great-great-grandmother. She who, not so long since renovated and restored with the rest of the old interior about her, looked down out of her carved and gilded frame from above a marble-topped pier-table. A young woman she, with flowing chestnut hair, wearing the bodice, fichu, and long sleeves, associated in the modern mind with the person of Madame Roland.

A chatain beauty was this great-great-grandmother of Stephen; her eyes chestnut brown like her hair, which fell, loosely curling, upon her white neck and bosom, with heavy and lustrous undulations; her countenance a little round; an angel face in which sweetness near to poignancy, was allied to mischief; with lips on which laughter played archly and easily; and a glance which sparkled with life and intelligence.

The daughter of a well-to-do avocat of Marseilles, a refugee from the Paris of the revolution to the young republic of America, she was the first mistress of this house, the early arbiter of the destinies of this room, and the lady for whom her own great-great-grandson in the tender years of his boyhood, cherished a secret and burningly romantic passion.

Stealing into this room, it was his grandfather’s house in those days, and sitting huddled, hands clasping his boyish ankles, on the thick pile of the gayly flowered Victorian carpet, amid Victorian rosewood furniture, a little lad in knickerbockers, belted jacket, and broad, round linen collar, he gazed up at his great-great-grandmother, filled with a worshiping ardor, and the glamour of the traditions surrounding her.

Not willingly does the past surrender us, if indeed it ever does ! Already it was astir, alert to measure its strength with this cool girl of Stephen Janvier’s own day, who in fancy already had intrigued him.

A hand fell on the young man’s shoulder, and a voice making itself heard above the beat of the drum and cymbal addressed him.

“Well, Stevie!”

Chapter II

S TEPHEN faced about in the doorway to confront the long nose, and the spare person of Colonel Tecumseh Craig. Behind this tall, lean figure stood the Colonel’s host, Mr. Stephen Janvier, the uncle of Stephen.

“Well, my boy, here at last, are you?”

The greeting this time came from Stephen’s uncle, his voice pitched to surmount the din. The nephew gathered the two were come from the library across the hall, that conceded retreat for the men of the Janvier household; a room so-called from the force of custom and long habit. The Janviers, past and present, were not students, or great readers.

The Colonel who for three score, ten, and six years, had felicitated himself that he was a Kentuckian, wore a suit of white linen which flapped loosely and, as it were, belligerently on his person, and — a highly characteristic touch — a rose adorned his buttonhole.

Mr. Janvier, less a bristling personality than the older man, by comparison was short, and inclined to portliness. Smooth-shaven, his clipped black hair touched on the temples with gray, and wearing white flannels and white shoes, he radiated content and well-being.

Two other voices addressing Stephen, this time feminine voices, lifted themselves.

“Well, Stevie, good evening.”

ii

“Well, my son.”

The young man swept about, facing the parlor again, this time to greet his aunt and his mother who, by a succession of tackings from point to point about the room, following a margin of safety close to the walls, had reached this momentary haven.

Mrs. Stephen Janvier, a dark-eyed and vivacious matron, wore a brown tulle evening dress come through the season past the worse for wear, and in consequence easy to the mind and body alike, as she would tell you. Her bare shoulders were youthful-looking beneath a tulle scarf, the same frankly worn to conceal certain wreckage in the body of the dress, and her face was delicately irregular, with fine dark brows, one slightly and quizzically higher than the other. She was a Mississippi, born in Vicksburg during Farragut’s bombardment of that city, and was fifty-one years old or young, as one took it, and her.

Helen Janvier, the widowed mother of Stephen, was fair-haired and comely, her gown of mauve chiffon as free from reproach as that of her sister-in-law was shabby. She was a Virginian, and a kinswoman of Colonel Craig.

Julius Buck and William Coffin who, in view of an approaching and triumphant climax, to their drums and cymbal had added bones and a triangle, here ceased so suddenly as to leave the eardrums aching with the silence. A glance toward these youths seated in the hall near the stairway showed them wiping their faces and mopping the backs of their necks. Julius was saddle-colored, and William was a rich shade of brown.

Mrs. Stephen Janvier took advantage of the lull to address Colonel Craig.

“Well, Colonel Te, I’ve secured what I told you at dinner I meant to have before the evening was over. Mrs. Wing’s granddaughter has agreed to serve with me the day after to-morrow as my assistant at the polls in the school commission primary.”

Stephen stared at Anne Janvier. He had the information now that he desired.

“Thank you ever so much,” he murmured beneath his breath, turning as he did so, and in the light of his aunt’s remark, viewing again the girl with young Hart.

The dancers, brought to a halt by the defection of Julius and William, were refusing to abide by it, breaking into a storm of handclaps, jeers, and excitations; not a few feet, these feminine more often than masculine, clacking and tapping upon the polished floor.

Stephen sought, found, and with yet keener interest gazed at the granddaughter of old Mrs. Lucy Wing. To be sure he knew this profile, clean-cut, and almost too self-sufficient. Something like fourteen years rolled back:

A small girl in a velvet bonnet and velvet cloak gazed at him from large black eyes, an immense doll held close to her person behind a muff of white fur. She must have been about six years old. Impeccable from her boots of white kid to her curls, shining and irreproachable, and enthroned in a certain austere but familiar room, upon a straight chair, its wooden seat hard and unrelenting, the boy of fourteen at whom she gazed had laughed in spite of himself, at the cool little creature, and her haughty small nose.

He saw her eight years later. Returning home from college for the Christmas vacation, he was taken by his mother to call on Mrs. Wing, who was spending the winter in town. Young persons in his city, and by inheritance of a certain social standing, on reaching a suitable age, invariably were taken to call on this person.

During the visit, the granddaughter had burst into the room, a school girl in her teens, suggesting as she came toward the group some glowingly painted figure which seems to rush forward from the canvas ; a young creature with radiantly crimson cheeks, and ebon hair, shoulder-long, and loose about her neck. At sight of the callers, and succeeding a brief presentation of herself to the visitors by her grandmother, she had retreated with great propriety, she and her haughty nose.

This nose had challenged from the start. Stephen swore softly to himself that it had. The reference just made by his aunt to the polls and the primary, suggesting as it did that the granddaughter of Mrs. Wing might be brainy and fussed with ideas, might be possessed of that too possible blight to human felicity, an intellect; this reference with its attendant alarms was lost sight of in the superior challenge of the nose.

The clamor of jeers and excitations within the parlor grew. Julius and William, exponents to the limits of their abilities of a people’s soul expressed in noise, put away their handkerchiefs, and prepared to resume their activities. Grapevine intelligence conveying this fact from the hall to the parlor, the clamor of dissatisfaction ceased, an ecstatic hooting of approval replacing it, the while the dancers made ready, the flushed Corybants of the one sex, already stepped within the arms of the other.

Julius and William burst forth with vigor, offering this time a one-step, “Dance with Everybody but Your Wife,” played with undiminished fervor and ticklish variations which got next to you, certain of the Corybants in the parlor, snapping their fingers, and swayi5 ing with their hips as they and their partners moved off.

A jubilant male, catching fire from the other sex, lifted a tenor voice in a high and sweet falsetto as he stepped out, carrying above the orchestration, the air and words of this evidently favorite gem, other voices taking up the suggestion, and supporting the singer with a wordless and droning accompaniment.

Bennie Harlan and Rowan Hart had exchanged partners, Rowan appropriating ’Genie, and Bennie moving off with his arm about the granddaughter of Mrs. Wing. The cheek of the cub on his stiltlike high legs, with his yellow hair slicked back from an ingenuous brow, the nerve of his arm, moving off with her!

Colonel Tecumseh Craig was addressing Stephen. But what of that, since Stephen, despite his bodily conjunction, in intent and spirit was elsewhere?

It was Colonel Te’s characteristic to be talking; to talk on ; and still on ; dwelling upon a day when the sun shone brighter than in this second decade of the twentieth century; when the women of his state, and of his section of the republic, were more beautiful, more womanly, more admirable, and more seemly; and the men unashamedly, and by creed and custom, were courtly and chivalric.

Stephen took delight in these idiosyncrasies of his elders. But not at this moment. Right now he was the stern and absorbed spectator, silent and intent, of Bennie Harlan and his movements; permitting this youth who had guided his lady out upon the floor, to slip into the alternate swing and halt of the measure; then himself departing in the middle of a peroration from the Colonel, striding boldly out between the couples, and making his way across the room.

The group left behind thus abruptly, startled by the

1 6 impetuosity of the young man’s plunge, showed amusement as they watched him. A ship in full career he suggested, according to Mrs. Stephen Janvier, sails filled, and pennants streaming.

Bearing down he touched Bennie Harlan on his serge-clad shoulder. As this person turned his head to discover the source of the interruption, his limpidly blue young eyes interrogative beneath the correspondingly youthful brow, Stephen halted, and opened his arms.

The four elders, watching from the doorway, ever after were ready to take oath that he did this thing. Opened his arms to the girl, as the neophite his lips to the milk and honey, the gifts of God’s grace, as Colonel Te phrased it later. And that old Lucy Wing’s granddaughter, after a look into his face, came into them.

******

Mrs. Stephen Janvier (dryly ). — Stephen generally knows what he wants. I didn’t suppose he’d had time since he came into the house, ten minutes ago, to discover her.

Mr. Stephen Janvier. — Stephen always knows what he wants. He knew what he wanted when he defied the family precedents, Washington and Lee, and the University of Virginia, and announced that for him it was Harvard.

Mrs. Stephen Janvier. — He knew from the start that he meant to follow the family calling, and enter the family law firm with you and Charlie. Helen, speak up. This family paragon after all, is your cygnet, not mine and Stephen’s.

Helen Janvier (smiling ). — Why should I, so long as others will ?

i7

Colonel Craig (addressing the head of the family law firm). — How’s he doing?

Mr. Stephen Janvier. — I’m satisfied. So is Charlie. Stephen thinks clearly, and is a hard worker. I left him at the office to-night, finishing some papers promised for to-morrow morning. Weimar, the brewer, is incorporating his various enterprises under one management, looking to his withdrawal as the active head. Stephen with some suggestions from Charlie, and occasional counsel with me, has handled the matter.

Colonel Te (severely). — Sound?

Mrs. Stephen Janvier (smiling ). — In these days of changing winds within the parties, Colonel, what does even so fierce a democrat as you mean by sound?

Mr. Stephen Janvier (himself commonly associated in the public mind with that small group of men who standing behind the machine , controlled the state ). — I think I may say so. What I may define as Stephen’s devouring curiosity, inclines him at times to take up with questionable associates, and to run after strange gods.

Julius and William here came again to a triumphant close, stopping with a finality which this time carried conviction to the parlor, the young people coming to a halt, and with feminine chatter and feminine laughter, trooping out to the porch, some by way of the long open windows, others through the doorway, past the older people.

’Genie, the modernist, came by with young Hart. Eugenia loved the Colonel. Nevertheless as she reached her old friend, she gave a dip with her knee, i8 and a flirt of her body, with an eye for the effect of this upon him, whereby her emphatically modern skirt, slashed as this was on each side, parted. Heavens, what a show of modern leg! After which she tripped on, with a backward gleeful glance as she went, giving a frank if prudent hitch to her rosebud straps, which persistently threatened to slip from her shoulders.

Mrs. Stephen Janvier was no better than she should be. She sought to rally Colonel Tecumseh. Mr. Janvier dropped his eyeglasses on their ribbon. He had been regarding the granddaughter of Mrs. Wing, who at this moment, in the company of his nephew, was disappearing through a long window of the parlor, on to the porch.

“Too bad of ’Genie, now admit it, Colonel Te. She intended to shock us, of course. Even so, it cannot but make the judicious grieve.” This from Anne Janvier, who never was judicious in her life !

Colonel Craig exploded. Kentuckians of his day and type, those to the manner born, have a habit of mind, a manner of spirit, a deportment of soul, as of person. With these there is a fashion of greeting a friend, of acknowledging an acquaintance, of surveying an enemy; a manner of wearing a coat, of entering the club, of coming into church, of proceeding down the aisle at the theater. With such as he, there is a proscribed phraseology, an accepted violence of expression, as vent to indignation.

“ ‘Grieve,’ did you say, Anne? Grieve? It is so repugnant to my soul to see Kentucky’s daughters as I behold them here to-night, as I see them elsewhere as I go about, tricked out like courtesans and Delilahs, I could wish my time were come to turn my back upon my world, and go. They jig, they amble, as the poet says, i9 and nickname God’s creature, woman, and make their wantonness her shame. Little Eugenia Harrison who just passed us is the scion of a god-fearing grandmother, and of a grandfather whose political faith I never had cause to question. And now, egad, yes, I’ll say it, a family reputation a century good, damned with the granddaughter’s every mincing dip.”

His groan was very real. “By gad, Anne, and you, Helen, is that stamp and hall-mark which to the world meant ‘Southern,’ to vanish from the earth? Is that South to be no more, which has performed the functions of 'an aristocracy, a class and grade as necessary to society as a proletariat? That South which, throughout its history, has maintained standards, and insisted on values, producing gentlemen and gentlewomen, rather than men and women? I ask you, whose sex is responsible for these things in our country, since women here in America determine the social habit? What has brought about this collapse in taste? What has conduced to this lowering of our standards? If the South, through the laxity of you women, has lost these things, it has lost that through which it, as- an asset, was most of value to the republic.”

He turned abruptly, and started for the stairway. Emily Gwynne was coming down the steps, and he went to meet her. Motherless since her childhood, living with her father, Grayson Gwynne, always a bit from hand to mouth, now at a hotel, and again boarding, Colonel Tecumseh, from her earliest years, had been to her that institutional person, the bachelor family friend. As she stepped to the floor, he took her hand and drew it through his arm. He was fond of Emily, fiercely fond if it came as he now believed it, to a crisis.

McHenry Stuart was tiring of his affair with Emily.

These things are regrettable, but will happen. Colonel Te looked to Emily to release McHenry. He winced for her that she already had not done so. He spoke to her now tenderly.

“What does one say to his lady at a tom-tom ball, my dear? A ragtime dans ant? Does one talk conventions suited to the nature of the performance, and suggest that, in the words of the music-hall ditty, * another little drink won’t do us any harm’? Or may Age follow its own phraseology, and propose that we sample Isaac’s bowl of punch?”

The perfectly chiseled nostrils of the girl on the arm of the Colonel quivered. She was piteously simple, and she at no time, was vocal. She wanted to say that in substance to her old friend, which she did not know how to say in words.

She wanted to tell Colonel Te, that his creed, according to himself, was to believe in the ladies ; a tenet in these articles of his faith being the exaltation of woman. She wanted to tell him more.

She probably never heard the term, sex-solidarity, and would not have understood it if she had. Feminism, the word of the hour, for her had little meaning. But she was of her day.

The enormity of her offending was that McHenry had asked for her affection; and she had given it. Whatever her times of piteous suffering since, however imprudent she was, and at times desperate, she was conscious that in this measuring of wills, hers against his, these girls here to-night, the most of whom were her juniors, were with her. She was aware that in her t these younger girls saw, not the struggle of one woman against one man, but the struggle of Woman!