Chapter XXII…

Chapter XXII

One would have thought that this terrific blow would have given Eugene pause in a way, and it did. It frightened him. Mrs. Dale had gone to Colfax in order to persuade him to use his influence to make Eugene behave himself, and, having done so much, she was actually prepared to go further. She was considering some scheme whereby she could blacken Eugene, have his true character become known without in any way involving Suzanne. Having been relentlessly pursued and harried by Eugene, she was now as relentless in her own attitude. She wanted him to let go now, entirely, if she could, not to see Suzanne any more and she went, first to Winfield, and then back to Lenox with the hope of preventing any further communication, or at least action on Suzanne's part, or Eugene's possible presence there.

In so far as her visit to Winfield was concerned, it did not amount to so much morally or emotionally in that quarter, for Winfield did not feel that he was called upon to act in the matter. He was not Eugene's guardian, nor yet a public censor of morals. He waived the whole question grandly to one side, though in a way he was glad to know of it, for it gave him an advantage over Eugene. He was sorry for him a little--what man would not be? Nevertheless, in his thoughts of reorganizing the Blue Sea Corporation, he did not feel so bad over what might become of Eugene's interests. When the latter approached him, as he did some time afterward, with the idea that he might be able to dispose of his holdings, he saw no way to do it. The company was really not in good shape. More money would have to be put in. All the treasury stock would have to be quickly disposed of, or a reorganization would have to be effected. The best that could be promised under these circumstances was that Eugene's holdings might be exchanged for a fraction of their value in a new issue by a new group of directors. So Eugene saw the end of his dreams in that direction looming up quite clearly.

When he saw what Mrs. Dale had done, he saw also that it was necessary to communicate the situation clearly to Suzanne. The whole thing pulled him up short, and he began to wonder what was to become of him. With his twenty-five thousand a year in salary cut off, his prospect of an independent fortune in Blue Sea annihilated, the old life closed to him for want of cash, for who can go about in society without money? he saw that he was in danger of complete social and commercial extinction. If by any chance a discussion of the moral relation between him and Suzanne arose, his unconscionable attitude toward Angela, if White heard of it for instance, what would become of him? The latter would spread the fact far and wide. It would be the talk of the town, in the publishing world at least. It would close every publishing house in the city to him. He did not believe Colfax would talk. He fancied that Mrs. Dale had not, after all, spoken to Winfield, but if she had, how much further would it go? Would White hear of it through Colfax? Would he keep it a secret if he knew? Never! The folly of what he had been doing began to dawn upon him dimly. What was it that he had been doing? He felt like a man who had been cast into a deep sleep by a powerful opiate and was now slowly waking to a dim wondering sense of where he was. He was in New York. He had no position. He had little ready money--perhaps five or six thousand all told. He had the love of Suzanne, but her mother was still fighting him, and he had Angela on his hands, undivorced. How was he to arrange things now? How could he think of going back to her? Never!

He sat down and composed the following letter to Suzanne, which he thought would make clear to her just how things stood and give her an opportunity to retract if she wished, for he thought he owed that much to her now:

"Flower Face:

I had a talk with Mr. Colfax this morning and what I feared might happen has happened. Your mother, instead of going to Boston as you thought, came to New York and saw him and, I fancy, my friend Winfield, too. She cannot do me any harm in that direction, for my relationship with that company does not depend on a salary, or a fixed income of any kind, but she has done me infinite harm here. Frankly, I have lost my position. I do not believe that would have come about except for other pressure with which she had nothing to do, but her charges and complaints, coming on top of opposition here on the part of someone else, has done what she couldn't have done alone. Flower Face, do you know what that means? I told you once that I had tied up all my spare cash in Blue Sea, which I hoped would come to so much. It may, but the cutting off my salary here means great changes for me there, unless I can make some other business engagement immediately. I shall probably have to give up my apartment in Riverside Drive and my automobile, and in other ways trim my sails to meet the bad weather. It means that if you come to me, we should have to live on what I can earn as an artist unless I should decide and be able to find something else. When I came to Canada for you, I had some such idea in mind, but since this thing has actually happened, you may think differently. If nothing happens to my Blue Sea investment, there may be an independent fortune some day in that. I can't tell, but that is a long way off, and meanwhile, there is only this, and I don't know what else your mother may do to my reputation. She appears to be in a very savage frame of mind. You heard what she said at While-a-Way. She has evidently gone back on that completely.

"Flower Face, I lay this all before you so that you may see how things are. If you come to me it may be in the face of a faded reputation. You must realize that there is a great difference between Eugene Witla, Managing Publisher of the United Magazines Corporation, and Eugene Witla, Artist. I have been very reckless and defiant in my love for you. Because you are so lovely--the most perfect thing that I have ever known, I have laid all on the altar of my affection. I would do it again, gladly--a thousand times. Before you came, my life was a gloomy thing. I thought I was living, but I knew in my heart that it was all a dusty shell--a lie. Then you came, and oh, how I have lived! The nights, the days of beautiful fancy. Shall I ever forget White Wood, or Blue Sea, or Briarcliff, or that wonderful first day at South Beach? Little girl, our ways have been the ways of perfectness and peace. This has been an intensely desperate thing to do, but for my sake, I am not sorry. I have been dreaming a wonderfully sweet and perfect dream. It may be when you know all and see how things stand, and stop and think, as I now ask you to do, you may be sorry and want to change your mind. Don't hesitate to do so if you feel that way. You know I told you to think calmly long ago before you told your mother. This is a bold, original thing we have been planning. It is not to be expected that the world would see it as we have. It is quite to be expected that trouble would follow in the wake of it, but it seemed possible to me, and still seems so. If you want to come to me, say so. If you want me to come to you, speak the word. We will go to England or Italy, and I will try my hand at painting again. I can do that I am sure. Or, we can stay here, and I can see if some engagement cannot be had.

"You want to remember, though, that your mother may not have finished fighting. She may go to much greater lengths than she has gone. You thought you might control her, but it seems not. I thought we had won in Canada, but it appears not. If she attempts to restrain you from using your share of your father's estate, she may be able to cause you trouble there. If she attempts to incarcerate you, she might be successful. I wish I could talk to you. Can't I see you at Lenox? Are you coming home next week? We ought to think and plan and act now if at all. Don't let any consideration for me stand in your way, though, if you are doubtful. Remember that conditions are different now. Your whole future hangs on your decision. I should have talked this way long ago, perhaps, but I did not think your mother could do what she has succeeded in doing. I did not think my financial standing would play any part in it.

"Flower Face, this is the day of real trial for me. I am unhappy, but only at the possible prospect of losing you. Nothing of all these other things really matters. With you, everything would be perfect, whatever my condition might be. Without you, it will be as dark as night. The decision is in your hands and you must act. Whatever you decide, that I will do. Don't, as I say, let consideration for me stand in the way. You are young. You have a social career before you. After all, I am twice your age. I talk thus sanely because if you come to me now, I want you to understand clearly how you come.

"Oh, I wonder sometimes if you really understand. I wonder if I have been dreaming a dream. You are so beautiful. You have been such an inspiration to me. Has this been a lure--a will-o'-the wisp? I wonder. I wonder. And yet I love you, love you, love you. A thousand kisses, Divine Fire, and I wait for your word.

"Eugene."

Suzanne read this letter at Lenox, and for the first time in her life she began to think and ponder seriously. What had she been doing? What was Eugene doing? This dénouement frightened her. Her mother was more purposeful than she imagined. To think of her going to Colfax--of her lying and turning so in her moods. She had not thought this possible of her mother. Had not thought it possible that Eugene could lose his position. He had always seemed so powerful to her; so much a law unto himself. Once when they were out in an automobile together, he had asked her why she loved him, and she said, "because you are a genius and can do anything you please."

"Oh, no," he answered, "nothing like that. I can't really do very much of anything. You just have an exaggerated notion of me."

"Oh, no, I haven't," she replied. "You can paint, and you can write"--she was judging by some of the booklets about Blue Sea and verses about herself and clippings of articles done in his old Chicago newspaper days, which he showed her once in a scrapbook in his apartment--"and you can run that office, and you were an advertising manager and an art director."

She lifted up her face and looked into his eyes admiringly.

"My, what a list of accomplishments!" he replied. "Well whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." He kissed her.

"And you love so beautifully," she added by way of climax.

Since then, she had thought of this often, but now, somehow, it received a severe setback. He was not quite so powerful. He could not prevent her mother from doing this, and could she really conquer her mother? Whatever Suzanne might think of her deceit, she was moving Heaven and earth to prevent this. Was she wholly wrong? After that climacteric night at St. Jacques, when somehow the expected did not happen, Suzanne had been thinking. Did she really want to leave home, and go with Eugene? Did she want to fight her mother in regard to her estate? She might have to do that. Her original idea had been that she and Eugene would meet in some lovely studio, and that she would keep her own home, and he would have his. It was something very different, this talk of poverty, and not having an automobile, and being far away from home. Still she loved him. Maybe she could force her mother to terms yet.

There were more struggles in the two or three succeeding days, in which the guardian of the estate--Mr. Herbert Pitcairn, of the Marquardt Trust Company, and, once more, Dr. Woolley, were called in to argue with her. Suzanne, unable to make up her mind, listened to her mother's insidious plea, that if she would wait a year, and then say she really wanted him, she could have him; listened to Mr. Pitcairn tell her mother that he believed any court would on application adjudge her incompetent and tie up her estate; heard Dr. Woolley say in her presence to her mother that he did not deem a commission in lunacy advisable, but if her mother insisted, no doubt a judge would adjudge her insane, if no more than to prevent this unhallowed consummation. Suzanne became frightened. Her iron nerve, after Eugene's letter, was weakening. She was terribly incensed against her mother, but she began now for the first time to think what her friends would think. Supposing her mother did lock her up. Where would they think she was? All these days and weeks of strain, which had worn her mother threadbare had told something on her own strength, or rather nerve. It was too intense, and she began to wonder whether they had not better do as Eugene suggested, and wait a little while. He had agreed up at St. Jacques to wait, if she were willing. Only the provision was that they were to see each other. Now her mother had changed front again, pleading danger, undue influence, that she ought to have at least a year of her old kind of life undisturbed to see whether she really cared.

"How can you tell?" she insisted to Suzanne, in spite of the girl's desire not to talk. "You have been swept into this, and you haven't given yourself time to think. A year won't hurt. What harm will it do you or him?"

"But, mama," asked Suzanne over and over at different times, and in different places, "why did you go and tell Mr. Colfax? What a mean, cruel thing that was to do!"

"Because I think he needs something like that to make him pause and think. He isn't going to starve. He is a man of talent. He needs something like that to bring him to his senses. Mr. Colfax hasn't discharged him. He told me he wouldn't. He said he would make him take a year off and think about it, and that's just what he has done. It won't hurt him. I don't care if it does. Look at the way he has made me suffer."

She felt exceedingly bitter toward Eugene, and was rejoicing that at last she was beginning to have her innings.

"Mama," said Suzanne, "I am never going to forgive you for this. You are acting horribly--I will wait, but it will come to the same thing in the end. I am going to have him."

"I don't care what you do after a year," said Mrs. Dale cheerfully and subtly. "If you will just wait that long and give yourself time to think and still want to marry him, you can do so. He can probably get a divorce in that time, anyhow." She did not mean what she was saying, but any argument was good for the situation, if it delayed matters.

"But I don't know that I want to marry him," insisted Suzanne, doggedly, harking back to her original idea. "That isn't my theory of it."

"Oh, well," replied Mrs. Dale complaisantly, "you will know better what to think of that after a year. I don't want to coerce you, but I'm not going to have our home and happiness broken up in this way without turning a hand, and without your stopping to think about it. You owe it to me--to all these years I have cared for you, to show me some consideration. A year won't hurt you. It won't hurt him. You will find out then whether he really loves you or not. This may just be a passing fancy. He has had other women before you. He may have others after you. He may go back to Mrs. Witla. It doesn't make any difference what he tells you. You ought to test him before you break up his home and mine. If he really loves you, he will agree readily enough. Do this for me, Suzanne, and I will never cross your path any more. If you will wait a year you can do anything you choose. I can only hope you won't go to him without going as his wife, but if you insist, I will hush the matter up as best I can. Write to him and tell him that you have decided that you both ought to wait a year. You don't need to see him any more. It will just stir things all up afresh. If you don't see him, but just write, it will be better for him, too. He won't feel so badly as he will if you see him again and go all over the ground once more."

Mrs. Dale was terribly afraid of Eugene's influence, but she could not accomplish this.

"I won't do that," said Suzanne, "I won't do it. I'm going back to New York, that's all there is about it!" Mrs. Dale finally yielded that much. She had to.

There was a letter from Suzanne after three days, saying that she couldn't answer his letter in full, but that she was coming back to New York and would see him, and subsequently a meeting between Suzanne and Eugene at Daleview in her mother's presence--Dr. Woolley and Mr. Pitcairn were in another part of the house at the time--in which the proposals were gone over anew.

Eugene had motored down after Mrs. Dale's demands had been put before him in the gloomiest and yet more feverish frame of mind in which he had ever been,--gloomy because of heavy forebodings of evil and his own dark financial condition--while inspirited at other moments by thoughts of some splendid, eager revolt on the part of Suzanne, of her rushing to him, defying all, declaring herself violently and convincingly, and so coming off a victor with him. His faith in her love was still so great.

The night was one of those cold October ones with a steely sky and a sickle moon, harbinger of frost, newly seen in the west, and pointed stars thickening overhead. As he sat in his car on the Staten Island ferry boat, he could see a long line of southward bound ducks, homing to those reedy marshes which Bryant had in mind when he wrote "To a Waterfowl." They were honking as they went, their faint "quacks" coming back on the thin air and making him feel desperately lonely and bereft. When he reached Daleview, speeding past October trees, and entered the great drawing-room where a fire was blazing and where once in spring he had danced with Suzanne, his heart leaped up, for he was to see her, and the mere sight of her was as a tonic to his fevered body--a cool drink to a thirsting man.

Mrs. Dale stared at Eugene defiantly when he came, but Suzanne welcomed him to her embrace. "Oh!" she exclaimed, holding him close for a few moments and breathing feverishly. There was complete silence for a time.

"Mama insists, Eugene," she said after a time, "that we ought to wait a year, and I think since there is such a fuss about it, that perhaps it might be just as well. We may have been just a little hasty, don't you think? I have told mama what I think about her action in going to Mr. Colfax, but she doesn't seem to care. She is threatening now to have me adjudged insane. A year won't make any real difference since I am coming to you, anyhow, will it? But I thought I ought to tell you this in person, to ask you about it"--she paused, looking into his eyes.

"I thought we settled all this up in St. Jacques?" said Eugene, turning to Mrs. Dale, but experiencing a sinking sensation of fear.

"We did, all except the matter of not seeing her. I think it is highly inadvisable that you two should be together. It isn't possible the way things stand. People will talk. Your wife's condition has to be adjusted. You can't be running around with her and a child coming to you. I want Suzanne to go away for a year where she can be calm and think it all out, and I want you to let her. If she still insists that she wants you after that, and will not listen to the logic of the situation in regard to marriage, then I propose to wash my hands of the whole thing. She may have her inheritance. She may have you if she wants you. If you have come to your senses by that time, as I hope you will have, you will get a divorce, or go back to Mrs. Witla, or do whatever you do in a sensible way."

She did not want to incense Eugene here, but she was very bitter.

Eugene merely frowned.

"Is this your decision, Suzanne, too?" he asked wearily.

"I think mama is terrible, Eugene," replied Suzanne evasively, or perhaps as a reply to her mother. "You and I have planned our lives, and we will work them out. We have been a little selfish, now that I think of it. I think a year won't do any harm, perhaps, if it will stop all this fussing. I can wait, if you can."

An inexpressible sense of despair fell upon Eugene at the sound of this, a sadness so deep that he could scarcely speak. He could not believe that it was really Suzanne who was saying that to him. Willing to wait a year! She who had declared so defiantly that she would not. It would do no harm? To think that life, fate, her mother were triumphing over him in this fashion, after all. What then was the significance of the black-bearded men he had seen so often of late? Why had he been finding horseshoes? Was fate such a liar? Did life in its dark, subtle chambers lay lures and traps for men? His position gone, his Blue Sea venture involved in an indefinite delay out of which might come nothing, Suzanne going for a whole year, perhaps for ever, most likely so, for what could not her mother do with her in a whole year, having her alone? Angela alienated--a child approaching. What a climax!

"Is this really your decision, Suzanne?" he asked, sadly, a mist of woe clouding his whole being.

"I think it ought to be, perhaps, Eugene," she replied, still evasively. "It's very trying. I will be faithful to you, though. I promise you that I will not change. Don't you think we can wait a year? We can, can't we?"

"A whole year without seeing you, Suzanne?"

"Yes, it will pass, Eugene."

"A whole year?"

"Yes, Eugene."

"I have nothing more to say, Mrs. Dale," he said, turning to her mother solemnly, a sombre, gloomy light in his eye, his heart hardening towards Suzanne for the moment. To think she should treat him so--throw him down, as he phrased it. Well, such was life. "You win," he added. "It has been a terrible experience for me. A terrible passion. I love this girl. I love her with my whole heart. Sometimes I have vaguely suspected that she might not know."

He turned to Suzanne, and for the first time he thought that he did not see there that true understanding which he had fancied had been there all the time. Could fate have been lying to him also in this? Was he mistaken in this, and had he been following a phantom lure of beauty? Was Suzanne but another trap to drag him down to his old nothingness? God! The prediction of the Astrologer of a second period of defeat after seven or eight years came back.

"Oh, Suzanne!" he said, simply and unconsciously dramatic. "Do you really love me?"

"Yes, Eugene," she replied.

"Really?"

"Yes."

He held out his arms and she came, but for the life of him he could not dispel this terrible doubt. It took the joy out of his kiss--as if he had been dreaming a dream of something perfect in his arms and had awaked to find it nothing--as if life had sent him a Judas in the shape of a girl to betray him.

"Do let us end this, Mr. Witla," said Mrs. Dale coldly, "there is nothing to be gained by delaying. Let us end it for a year, and then talk."

"Oh, Suzanne," he continued, as mournful as a passing bell, "come to the door with me."

"No, the servants are there," put in Mrs. Dale. "Please make your farewells here."

"Mama," said Suzanne angrily and defiantly, moved by the pity of it, "I won't have you talk this way. Leave the room, or I shall go to the door with him and further. Leave us, please."

Mrs. Dale went out.

"Oh, Flower Face," said Eugene pathetically, "I can't believe it. I can't. I can't! This has been managed wrong. I should have taken you long ago. So it is to end this way. A year, a whole year, and how much longer?"

"Only a year," she insisted. "Only a year, believe me, can't you? I won't change, I won't!"

He shook his head, and Suzanne as before took his face in her hands. She kissed his cheeks, his lips, his hair.

"Believe me, Eugene. I seem cold. You don't know what I have gone through. It is nothing but trouble everywhere. Let us wait a year. I promise you I will come to you. I swear. One year. Can't we wait one year?"

"A year," he said. "A year. I can't believe it. Where will we all be in a year? Oh, Flower Face, Myrtle Bloom, Divine Fire. I can't stand this. I can't. It's too much. I'm the one who is paying now. Yes, I pay."

He took her face and looked at it, all its soft, enticing features, her eyes, her lips, her cheeks, her hair.

"I thought, I thought," he murmured.

Suzanne only stroked the back of his head with her hands.

"Well, if I must, I must," he said.

He turned away, turned back to embrace her, turned again and then, without looking back, walked out into the hall. Mrs. Dale was there waiting.

"Good night, Mrs. Dale," he said gloomily.

"Good night, Mr. Witla," she replied frigidly, but with a sense of something tragic in her victory at that.

He took his hat and walked out.

Outside the bright October stars were in evidence by millions. The Bay and Harbor of New York were as wonderfully lit as on that night when Suzanne came to him after the evening at Fort Wadsworth on her own porch. He recalled the spring odours, the wonderful feel of youth and love--the hope that was springing then. Now, it was five or six months later, and all that romance was gone. Suzanne, sweet voice, accomplished shape, light whisper, delicate touch. Gone. All gone--

"Faded the flower and all its budded charms, Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes, Faded the shape of beauty from my arms, Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise."

Gone were those bright days in which they had ridden together, dined together, walked in sylvan places beside their car. A little way from here he first played tennis with her. A little way from here he had come so often to meet her clandestinely. Now she was gone--gone.

He had come in his car, but he really did not want it. Life was accursed. His own was a failure. To think that all his fine dreams should crumble this way. Shortly he would have no car, no home on Riverside Drive, no position, no anything.

"God, I can't stand this!" he exclaimed, and a little later--"By God, I can't! I can't!"

He dismissed his car at the Battery, telling his chauffeur to take it to the garage, and walking gloomily through all the tall dark streets of lower New York. Here was Broadway where he had often been with Colfax and Winfield. Here was this great world of finance around Wall Street in which he had vaguely hoped to shine. Now these buildings were high and silent--receding from him in a way. Overhead were the clear bright stars, cool and refreshing, but without meaning to him now. How was he to settle it? How adjust it? A year! She would never come back--never! It was all gone. A bright cloud faded. A mirage dissolved into its native nothingness. Position, distinction, love, home--where were they? Yet a little while and all these things would be as though they had never been. Hell! Damn! Curse the brooding fates that could thus plot to destroy him!

Back in her room in Daleview Suzanne had locked herself in. She was not without a growing sense of the tragedy of it. She stared at the floor, recalled his face.

"Oh, oh," she said, and for the first time in her life felt as though she could cry from a great heartache--but she could not.

And in Riverside Drive was another woman brooding, lonely, despondently, desperately, over the nature of the tragedy that was upon her. How were things to be adjusted? How was she to be saved? Oh! oh! her life, her child! If Eugene could be made to understand! If he could only be made to see!

Chapter XXIII

During the weeks which followed Colfax's talk with him, and Suzanne's decision, which amounted practically to a dismissal, Eugene tried to wind up his affairs at the United Magazines Corporation, as well as straighten out his relationship with Angela. It was no easy task. Colfax helped him considerably by suggesting that he should say he was going abroad for the company, for the time being, and should make it appear imperative that he go at once. Eugene called in his department heads, and told them what Colfax suggested, but added that his own interests elsewhere, of which they knew, or suspected, were now so involved that he might possibly not return, or only for a little while at best. He put forward an air of great sufficiency and self-satisfaction, considering the difficulties he was encountering, and the thing passed off as a great wonder, but with no suspicion of any immediate misfortune attaching to him. As a matter of fact, it was assumed that he was destined to a much higher estate--the control of his private interests.

In his talk with Angela he made it perfectly plain that he was going to leave her. He would not make any pretence about this. She ought to know. He had lost his position; he was not going to Suzanne soon; he wanted her to leave him, or he would leave her. She should go to Wisconsin or Europe or anywhere, for the time being, and leave him to fight this thing out alone. He was not indispensable to her in her condition. There were nurses she could hire--maternity hospitals where she could stay. He would be willing to pay for that. He would never live with her any more, if he could help it--he did not want to. The sight of her in the face of his longing for Suzanne would be a wretched commentary--a reproach and a sore shame. No, he would leave her and perhaps, possibly, sometime when she obtained more real fighting courage, Suzanne might come to him. She ought to. Angela might die. Yes, brutal as it may seem, he thought this. She might die, and then--and then---- No thought of the child that might possibly live, even if she died, held him. He could not understand that, could not grasp it as yet. It was a mere abstraction.

Eugene took a room in an apartment house in Kingsbridge, where he was not known for the time being, and where he was not likely to be seen. Then there was witnessed that dreary spectacle of a man whose life has apparently come down in a heap, whose notions, emotions, tendencies and feelings are confused and disappointed by some untoward result. If Eugene had been ten or fifteen years older, the result might have been suicide. A shade of difference in temperament might have resulted in death, murder, anything. As it was, he sat blankly at times among the ruins of his dreams speculating on what Suzanne was doing, on what Angela was doing, on what people were saying and thinking, on how he could gather up the broken pieces of his life and make anything out of them at all.

The one saving element in it all was his natural desire to work, which, although it did not manifest itself at first, by degrees later on began to come back. He must do something, if it was not anything more than to try to paint again. He could not be running around looking for a position. There was nothing for him in connection with Blue Sea. He had to work to support Angela, of whom he was now free, if he did not want to be mean; and as he viewed it all in the light of what had happened, he realized that he had been bad enough. She had not been temperamentally suited to him, but she had tried to be. Fundamentally it was not her fault. How was he to work and live and be anything at all from now on?

There were long arguments over this situation between him and Angela--pleas, tears, a crashing downward of everything which was worth while in life to Angela, and then, in spite of her pathetic situation, separation. Because it was November and the landlord had heard of Eugene's financial straits, or rather reverse of fortune, it was possible to relinquish the lease, which had several years to run, and the apartment was given up. Angela, distraught, scarcely knew which way to turn. It was one of those pitiless, scandalous situations in life which sicken us of humanity. She ran helplessly to Eugene's sister, Myrtle, who first tried to conceal the scandal and tragedy from her husband, but afterward confessed and deliberated as to what should be done. Frank Bangs, who was a practical man, as well as firm believer in Christian Science because of his wife's to him miraculous healing from a tumor several years before, endeavored to apply his understanding of the divine science--the omnipresence of good to this situation.

"There is no use worrying about it, Myrtle," he said to his wife, who, in spite of her faith, was temporarily shaken and frightened by the calamities which seemingly had overtaken her brother. "It's another evidence of the workings of mortal mind. It is real enough in its idea of itself, but nothing in God's grace. It will come out all right, if we think right. Angela can go to a maternity hospital for the time being, or whenever she's ready. We may be able to persuade Eugene to do the right thing."

Angela was persuaded to consult a Christian Science practitioner, and Myrtle went to the woman who had cured her and begged her to use her influence, or rather her knowledge of science to effect a rehabilitation for her brother. She was told that this could not be done without his wish, but that she would pray for him. If he could be persuaded to come of his own accord, seeking spiritual guidance or divine aid, it would be a different matter. In spite of his errors, and to her they seemed palpable and terrible enough at present, her faith would not allow her to reproach him, and besides she loved him. He was a strong man, she said, always strange. He and Angela might not have been well mated. But all could be righted in Science. There was a dreary period of packing and storing for Angela, in which she stood about amid the ruins of her previous comfort and distinction and cried over the things that had seemed so lovely to her. Here were all Eugene's things, his paintings, his canes, his pipes, his clothes. She cried over a handsome silk dressing gown in which he had been wont to lounge about--it smacked so much, curiously, of older and happier days. There were hard, cold and determined conferences also in which some of Angela's old fighting, ruling spirit would come back, but not for long. She was beaten now, and she knew it--wrecked. The roar of a cold and threatening sea was in her ears.

It should be said here that at one time Suzanne truly imagined she loved Eugene. It must be remembered, however, that she was moved to affection for him by the wonder of a personality that was hypnotic to her. There was something about the personality of Eugene that was subversive of conventionality. He approached, apparently a lamb of conventional feelings and appearances; whereas, inwardly, he was a ravening wolf of indifference to convention. All the organized modes and methods of life were a joke to him. He saw through to something that was not material life at all, but spiritual, or say immaterial, of which all material things were a shadow. What did the great forces of life care whether this system which was maintained here with so much show and fuss was really maintained at all or not? How could they care? He once stood in a morgue and saw human bodies apparently dissolving into a kind of chemical mush and he had said to himself then how ridiculous it was to assume that life meant anything much to the forces which were doing these things. Great chemical and physical forces were at work, which permitted, accidentally, perhaps, some little shadow-play, which would soon pass. But, oh, its presence--how sweet it was!

Naturally Suzanne was cast down for the time being, for she was capable of suffering just as Eugene was. But having given her word to wait, she decided to stick to that, although she had not stuck to her other. She was between nineteen and twenty now--Eugene was nearing forty. Life could still soothe her in spite of herself. In Eugene's case it could only hurt the more. Mrs. Dale went abroad with Suzanne and the other children, visiting with people who could not possibly have heard, or ever would except in a vague, uncertain way for that matter. If it became evident, as she thought it might, that there was to be a scandal, Mrs. Dale proposed to say that Eugene had attempted to establish an insidious hold on her child in defiance of reason and honor, and that she had promptly broken it up, shielding Suzanne, almost without the latter's knowledge. It was plausible enough.

What was he to do now? how live? was his constant thought. Go into a wee, small apartment in some back street with Angela, where he and she, if he decided to stay with her, could find a pretty outlook for a little money and live? Never. Admit that he had lost Suzanne for a year at least, if not permanently, in this suddenly brusque way? Impossible. Go and confess that he had made a mistake, which he still did not feel to be true? or that he was sorry and would like to patch things up as before? Never. He was not sorry. He did not propose to live with Angela in the old way any more. He was sick of her, or rather of that atmosphere of repression and convention in which he had spent so many years. He was sick of the idea of having a child thrust on him against his will. He would not do it. She had no business to put herself in this position. He would die first. His insurance was paid up to date. He had carried during the last five years a policy for something over eighteen thousand in her favor, and if he died she would get that. He wished he might. It would be some atonement for the hard knocks which fate had recently given her, but he did not wish to live with her any more. Never, never, child or no child. Go back to the apartment after this night--how could he? If he did, he must pretend that nothing had happened--at least, nothing untoward between him and Suzanne. She might come back. Might! Might! Ah, the mockery of it--to leave him in this way when she really could have come to him--should have--oh, the bitterness of this thrust of fate!

There was a day when the furniture was sent away and Angela went to live with Myrtle for the time being. There was another tearful hour when she left New York to visit her sister Marietta at Racine, where they now were, intending to tell her before she came away, as a profound secret, the terrible tragedy which had overtaken her. Eugene went to the train with her, but with no desire to be there. Angela's one thought, in all this, was that somehow time would effect a reconciliation. If she could just wait long enough; if she could keep her peace and live and not die, and not give him a divorce, he might eventually recover his sanity and come to think of her as at least worth living with. The child might do it, its coming would be something that would affect him surely. He was bound to see her through it. She told herself she was willing and delighted to go through this ordeal, if only it brought him back to her. This child--what a reception it was to receive, unwanted, dishonored before its arrival, ignored; if by any chance she should die, what would he do about it? Surely he would not desert it. Already in her nervous, melancholy way, she was yearning toward it.

"Tell me," she said to Eugene one day, when they were alternately quarreling and planning, "if the baby comes, and I--and I--die, you won't absolutely desert it? You'll take it, won't you?"

"I'll take it," he replied. "Don't worry. I'm not an absolute dog. I didn't want it. It's a trick on your part, but I'll take it. I don't want you to die. You know that."

Angela thought if she lived that she would be willing to go through a period of poverty and depression with him again, if only she could live to see him sane and moral and even semi-successful. The baby might do it. He had never had a child. And much as he disliked the idea now, still, when it was here, he might change his mind. If only she could get through that ordeal. She was so old--her muscles so set. Meanwhile she consulted a lawyer, a doctor, a fortune teller, an astrologer and the Christian Science practitioner to whom Myrtle had recommended her. It was an aimless, ridiculous combination, but she was badly torn up, and any port seemed worth while in this storm.

The doctor told her that her muscles were rather set, but with the regimen he prescribed, he was satisfied she would be all right. The astrologer told her that she and Eugene were fated for this storm by the stars--Eugene, particularly, and that he might recover, in which case, he would be successful again in a measure. As for herself, he shook his head. Yes, she would be all right. He was lying. The fortune teller laid the cards to see if Eugene would ever marry Suzanne, and Angela was momentarily gratified to learn that she would never enter his life--this from a semi-cadaverous, but richly dressed and bejeweled lady whose ante-room was filled with women whose troubles were of the heart, the loss of money, the enmity of rivals, or the dangers of childbirth. The Christian Science practitioner declared all to be divine mind--omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient good, and that evil could not exist in it--only the illusion of it. "It is real enough to those who give it their faith and believe," said the counselor, "but without substance or meaning to those who know themselves to be a perfect, indestructible reflection of an idea in God. God is a principle. When the nature of that principle is realized and yourself as a part of it, evil falls away as the troublesome dream that it is. It has no reality." She assured her that no evil could befall her in the true understanding of Science. God is love.

The lawyer told her, after listening to a heated story of Eugene's misconduct, that under the laws of the State of New York, in which these misdeeds were committed, she was not entitled to anything more than a very small fraction of her husband's estate, if he had any. Two years was the shortest time in which a divorce could be secured. He would advise her to sue if she could establish a suitable condition of affluence on Eugene's part, not otherwise. Then he charged her twenty-five dollars for this advice.

Chapter XXIV

To those who have followed a routine or system of living in this world--who have, by slow degrees and persistent effort, built up a series of habits, tastes, refinements, emotions and methods of conduct, and have, in addition, achieved a certain distinction and position, so that they have said to one "Go!" and he goes, and to another "Come!" and he comes, who have enjoyed without stint or reserve, let or hindrance, those joys of perfect freedom of action, and that ease and deliberation which comes with the presence of comparative wealth, social position, and comforts, the narrowing that comes with the lack of means, the fear of public opinion, or the shame of public disclosure, is one of the most pathetic, discouraging and terrifying things that can be imagined. These are the hours that try men's souls. The man who sits in a seat of the mighty and observes a world that is ruled by a superior power, a superior force of which he by some miraculous generosity of fate has been chosen apparently as a glittering instrument, has no conception of the feelings of the man who, cast out of his dignities and emoluments, sits in the dark places of the world among the ashes of his splendor and meditates upon the glory of his bygone days. There is a pathos here which passes the conception of the average man. The prophets of the Old Testament discerned it clearly enough, for they were forever pronouncing the fate of those whose follies were in opposition to the course of righteousness and who were made examples of by a beneficent and yet awful power. "Thus saith the Lord: Because thou hast lifted thyself up against the God of Heaven, and they have brought the vessels of His house before thee, and thou and thy Lords, thy wives and concubines, have drank wine in them, and thou hast praised the gods of silver and gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone ... God hath numbered thy Kingdom and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting; thy Kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians."

Eugene was in a minor way an exemplification of this seeming course of righteousness. His Kingdom, small as it was, was truly at an end. Our social life is so organized, so closely knit upon a warp of instinct, that we almost always instinctively flee that which does not accord with custom, usage, preconceived notions and tendencies--those various things which we in our littleness of vision conceive to be dominant. Who does not run from the man who may because of his deeds be condemned of that portion of the public which we chance to respect? Walk he ever so proudly, carry himself with what circumspectness he may, at the first breath of suspicion all are off--friends, relations, business acquaintances, the whole social fabric in toto. "Unclean!" is the cry. "Unclean! Unclean!" And it does not matter how inwardly shabby we may be, what whited sepulchres shining to the sun, we run quickly. It seems a tribute to that providence which shapes our ends, which continues perfect in tendency however vilely we may overlay its brightness with the rust of our mortal corruption, however imitative we may be.

Angela had gone home by now to see her father, who was now quite old and feeble, and also down to Alexandria to see Eugene's mother, who was also badly deteriorated in health.

"I keep hoping against hope that your attitude will change toward me," wrote Angela. "Let me hear from you if you will from time to time. It can't make any difference in your course. A word won't hurt, and I am so lonely. Oh, Eugene, if I could only die--if I only could!" No word as to the true state of things was given at either place. Angela pretended that Eugene had long been sick of his commercial career and was, owing to untoward conditions in the Colfax Company, glad to return to his art for a period. He might come home, but he was very busy. So she lied. But she wrote Myrtle fully of her hopes and, more particularly, her fears.

There were a number of conferences between Eugene and Myrtle, for the latter, because of their early companionship, was very fond of him. His traits, the innocent ones, were as sweet to her as when they were boy and girl together. She sought him out in his lovely room at Kingsbridge.

"Why don't you come and stay with us, Eugene?" she pleaded. "We have a comfortable apartment. You can have that big room next to ours. It has a nice view. Frank likes you. We have listened to Angela, and I think you are wrong, but you are my brother, and I want you to come. Everything is coming out right. God will straighten it out. Frank and I are praying for you. There is no evil, you know, according to the way we think. Now"--and she smiled her old-time girlish smile--"don't stay up here alone. Wouldn't you rather be with me?"

"Oh, I'd like to be there well enough, Myrtle, but I can't do it now. I don't want to. I have to think. I want to be alone. I haven't settled what I want to do. I think I will try my hand at some pictures. I have a little money and all the time I want now. I see there are some nice houses over there on the hill that might have a room with a north window that would serve as a studio. I want to think this thing out first. I don't know what I'll do."

He had now that new pain in his groin, which had come to him first when her mother first carried Suzanne off to Canada and he was afraid that he should never see her any more. It was a real pain, sharp, physical, like a cut with a knife. He wondered how it was that it could be physical and down there. His eyes hurt him and his finger tips. Wasn't that queer, too?

"Why don't you go and see a Christian Science practitioner?" asked Myrtle. "It won't do you any harm. You don't need to believe. Let me get you the book and you can read it. See if you don't think there is something in it. There you go smiling sarcastically, but, Eugene, I can't tell you what it hasn't done for us. It's done everything--that's just all. I'm a different person from what I was five years ago, and so is Frank. You know how sick I was?"

"Yes, I know."

"Why don't you go and see Mrs. Johns? You needn't tell her anything unless you want to. She has performed some perfectly wonderful cures."

"What can Mrs. Johns do for me?" asked Eugene bitterly, his lip set in an ironic mould. "Cure me of gloom? Make my heart cease to ache? What's the use of talking? I ought to quit the whole thing." He stared at the floor.

"She can't, but God can. Oh, Eugene, I know how you feel! Please go. It can't do you any harm. I'll bring you the book tomorrow. Will you read it if I bring it to you?"

"No."

"Oh, Eugene, please for my sake."

"What good will it do? I don't believe in it. I can't. I'm too intelligent to take any stock in that rot."

"Eugene, how you talk! You'll change your mind some time. I know how you think. But read it anyhow. Will you please? Promise me you will. I shouldn't ask. It isn't the way, but I want you to look into it. Go and see Mrs. Johns."

Eugene refused. Of asinine things this seemed the silliest. Christian Science! Christian rot! He knew what to do. His conscience was dictating that he give up Suzanne and return to Angela in her hour of need--to his coming child, for the time being anyhow, but this awful lure of beauty, of personality, of love--how it tugged at his soul! Oh, those days with Suzanne in the pretty watering and dining places about New York, those hours of bliss when she looked so beautiful! How could he get over that? How give up the memory? She was so sweet. Her beauty so rare. Every thought of her hurt. It hurt so badly that most of the time he dared not think--must, perforce, walk or work or stir restlessly about agonized for fear he should think too much. Oh, life; oh, hell!

The intrusion of Christian Science into his purview just now was due, of course, to the belief in and enthusiasm for that religious idea on the part of Myrtle and her husband. As at Lourdes and St. Anne de Beau Pré and other miracle-working centres, where hope and desire and religious enthusiasm for the efficacious intervention of a superior and non-malicious force intervenes, there had occurred in her case an actual cure from a very difficult and complicated physical ailment. She had been suffering from a tumor, nervous insomnia, indigestion, constipation and a host of allied ills, which had apparently refused to yield to ordinary medical treatment. She was in a very bad way mentally and physically at the time the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures," by Mrs. Eddy, was put into her hands. While attempting to read it in a hopeless, helpless spirit, she was instantly cured--that is, the idea that she was well took possession of her, and not long after she really was so. She threw all her medicines, of which there was quite a store, into the garbage pail, eschewed doctors, began to read the Christian Science literature, and attend the Christian Science church nearest her apartment, and was soon involved in its subtle metaphysical interpretation of mortal life. Into this faith, her husband, who loved her very much, had followed, for what was good enough for her and would cure her was good enough for him. He soon seized on its spiritual significance with great vigor and became, if anything, a better exponent and interpreter of the significant thought than was she herself.

Those who know anything of Christian Science know that its main tenet is that God is a principle, not a personality understandable or conceivable from the mortal or sensory side of life (which latter is an illusion), and that man (spiritually speaking) in His image and likeness. Man is not God or any part of Him. He is an idea in God, and, as such, as perfect and indestructible and undisturbably harmonious as an idea in God or principle must be. To those not metaphysically inclined, this is usually dark and without significance, but to those spiritually or metaphysically minded it comes as a great light. Matter becomes a built-up set or combination of illusions, which may have evolved or not as one chooses, but which unquestionably have been built up from nothing or an invisible, intangible idea, and have no significance beyond the faith or credence, which those who are at base spiritual give them. Deny them--know them to be what they are--and they are gone.

To Eugene, who at this time was in a great state of mental doldrums--blue, dispirited, disheartened, inclined to see only evil and destructive forces--this might well come with peculiar significance, if it came at all. He was one of those men who from their birth are metaphysically inclined. All his life he had been speculating on the subtleties of mortal existence, reading Spencer, Kant, Spinoza, at odd moments, and particularly such men as Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Lord Avebury, Alfred Russel Wallace, and latterly Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Crookes, trying to find out by the inductive, naturalistic method just what life was. He had secured inklings at times, he thought, by reading such things as Emerson's "Oversoul," "The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius," and Plato. God was a spirit, he thought, as Christ had said to the woman at the well in Samaria, but whether this spirit concerned itself with mortal affairs, where was so much suffering and contention, was another matter. Personally he had never believed so--or been at all sure. He had always been moved by the Sermon on the Mount; the beauty of Christ's attitude toward the troubles of the world, the wonder of the faith of the old prophets in insisting that God is God, that there are no other Gods before him, and that he would repay iniquity with disfavor. Whether he did or not was an open question with him. This question of sin had always puzzled him--original sin. Were there laws which ante-dated human experience, which were in God--The Word--before it was made flesh? If so, what were these laws? Did they concern matrimony--some spiritual union which was older than life itself? Did they concern stealing? What was stealing outside of life? Where was it before man began? Or did it only begin with man? Ridiculous! It must relate to something in chemistry and physics, which had worked out in life. A sociologist--a great professor in one of the colleges had once told him that he did not believe in success or failure, sin, or a sense of self-righteousness except as they were related to built-up instincts in the race--instincts related solely to the self-preservation and the evolution of the race. Beyond that was nothing. Spiritual morality? Bah! He knew nothing about it.

Such rank agnosticism could not but have had its weight with Eugene. He was a doubter ever. All life, as I have said before, went to pieces under his scalpel, and he could not put it together again logically, once he had it cut up. People talked about the sanctity of marriage, but, heavens, marriage was an evolution! He knew that. Someone had written a two-volume treatise on it--"The History of Human Marriage," or something like that and in it animals were shown to have mated only for so long as it took to rear the young, to get them to the point at which they could take care of themselves. And wasn't this really what was at the basis of modern marriage? He had read in this history, if he recalled aright, that the only reason marriage had come to be looked upon as sacred, and for life, was the length of time it took to rear the human young. It took so long that the parents were old, safely so, before the children were launched into the world. Then why separate?

But it was the duty of everybody to raise children.

Ah! there had been the trouble. He had been bothered by that. The home centered around that. Children! Race reproduction! Pulling this wagon of evolution! Was every man who did not inevitably damned? Was the race spirit against him? Look at the men and women who didn't--who couldn't. Thousands and thousands. And those who did always thought those who didn't were wrong. The whole American spirit he had always felt to be intensely set in this direction--the idea of having children and rearing them, a conservative work-a-day spirit. Look at his father. And yet other men were so shrewd that they preyed on this spirit, moving factories to where this race spirit was the most active, so that they could hire the children cheaply, and nothing happened to them, or did something happen?

However, Myrtle continued to plead with him to look into this new interpretation of the Scriptures, claiming that it was true, that it would bring him into an understanding of spirit which would drive away all these mortal ills, that it was above all mortal conception--spiritual over all, and so he thought about that. She told him that if it was right that he should cease to live with Angela, it would come to pass, and that if it was not, it would not; but anyhow and in any event in this truth there would be peace and happiness to him. He should do what was right ("seek ye first the Kingdom of God"), and then all these things would be added unto him.

And it seemed terribly silly at first to Eugene for him to be listening at all to any such talk, but later it was not so much so. There were long arguments and appeals, breakfast and dinner, or Sunday dinners at Myrtle's apartment, arguments with Bangs and Myrtle concerning every phase of the Science teaching, some visits to the Wednesday experience and testimony meetings of their church, at which Eugene heard statements concerning marvelous cures which he could scarcely believe, and so on. So long as the testimonies confined themselves to complaints which might be due to nervous imagination, he was satisfied that their cures were possibly due to religious enthusiasm, which dispelled their belief in something which they did not have, but when they were cured of cancer, consumption, locomotor-ataxia, goitres, shortened limbs, hernia--he did not wish to say they were liars, they seemed too sincere to do that, but he fancied they were simply mistaken. How could they, or this belief, or whatever it was, cure cancer? Good Lord! He went on disbelieving in this way, and refusing also to read the book until one Wednesday evening when he happened to be at the Fourth Church of Christ Scientist in New York that a man stood up beside him in his own pew and said:

"I wish to testify to the love and mercy of God in my case, for I was hopelessly afflicted not so very long ago and one of the vilest men I think it is possible to be. I was raised in a family where the Bible was read night and morning--my father was a hidebound Presbyterian--and I was so sickened by the manner in which it was forced down my throat and the inconsistencies which I thought I saw existing between Christian principle and practice, even in my own home, that I said to myself I would conform as long as I was in my father's house and eating his bread, but when I got out I would do as I pleased. I was in my father's house after that a number of years, until I was seventeen, and then I went to a large city, Cincinnati, but the moment I was away and free I threw aside all my so-called religious training and set out to do what I thought was the most pleasant and gratifying thing for me to do. I wanted to drink, and I did, though I was really never a very successful drinker." Eugene smiled. "I wanted to gamble, and I did, but I was never a very clever gambler. Still I did gamble a bit. My great weakness was women, and here I hope none will be offended, I know they will not be, for there may be others who need my testimony badly. I pursued women as I would any other lure. They were really all that I desired--their bodies. My lust was terrible. It was such a dominant thought with me that I could not look at any good-looking woman except, as the Bible says, to lust after her. I was vile. I became diseased. I was carried into the First Church of Christ Scientist in Chicago, after I had spent all my money and five years of my time on physicians and specialists, suffering from locomotor ataxia, dropsy and kidney disease. I had previously been healed of some other things by ordinary medicine.

"If there is anyone within the sound of my voice who is afflicted as I was, I want him to listen to me.

"I want to say to you tonight that I am a well man--not well physically only, but well mentally, and, what is better yet, in so far as I can see the truth, spiritually. I was healed after six months' treatment by a Christian Science practitioner in Chicago, who took my case on my appealing to her, and I stand before you absolutely sound and whole. God is good."

He sat down.

While he had been talking Eugene had been studying him closely, observing every line of his features. He was tall, lean, sandy-haired and sandy-bearded. He was not bad-looking, with long straight nose, clear blue eyes, a light pinkish color to his complexion, and a sense of vigor and health about him. The thing that Eugene noted most was that he was calm, cool, serene, vital. He said exactly what he wanted to say, and he said it vigorously. His voice was clear and with good carrying power. His clothes were shapely, new, well made. He was no beggar or tramp, but a man of some profession--an engineer, very likely. Eugene wished that he might talk to him, and yet he felt ashamed. Somehow this man's case paralleled his own; not exactly, but closely. He personally was never diseased, but how often he had looked after a perfectly charming woman to lust after her! Was the thing that this man was saying really true? Could he be lying? How ridiculous! Could he be mistaken? This man? Impossible! He was too strong, too keen, too sincere, too earnest, to be either of these things. Still--But this testimony might have been given for his benefit, some strange helpful power--that kindly fate that had always pursued him might be trying to reach him here. Could it be? He felt a little strange about it, as he had when he saw the black-bearded man entering the train that took him to Three Rivers, the time he went at the call of Suzanne, as he did when horseshoes were laid before him by supernatural forces to warn him of coming prosperity. He went home thinking, and that night he seriously tried to read "Science and Health" for the first time.

Chapter XXV

Those who have ever tried to read that very peculiar and, to many, very significant document know what an apparent jumble of contradictions and metaphysical balderdash it appears to be. The statement concerning the rapid multiplication and increased violence of diseases since the flood, which appears in the introduction is enough to shock any believer in definite, material, established natural science, and when Eugene came upon this in the outset, it irritated him, of course, greatly. Why should anybody make such a silly statement as this? Everybody knew that there had never been a flood. Why quote a myth as a fact? It irritated and from a critical point of view amused him. Then he came upon what he deemed to be a jumble of confusion in regard to matter and spirit. The author talked of the evidences of the five physical senses as being worthless, and yet was constantly referring to and using similes based upon those evidences to illustrate her spiritual meanings. He threw the book down a number of times, for the Biblical references irritated him. He did not believe in the Bible. The very word Christianity was a sickening jest, as sickening as it had been to the man in the church. To say that the miracles of Christ could be repeated today could not be serious. Still the man had testified. Wasn't that so? A certain vein of sincerity running through it all--that profound evidence of faith and sympathy which are the characteristics of all sincere reformers--appealed to him. Some little thoughts here and there--a profound acceptance of the spiritual understanding of Jesus, which he himself accepted, stayed with him. One sentence or paragraph somehow stuck in his mind, because he himself was of a metaphysical turn----

"Become conscious for a single moment that life and intelligence are purely spiritual, neither in nor of matter, and the body will then utter no complaints. If suffering from a belief in sickness, you will find yourself suddenly well. Sorrow is turned into joy when the body is controlled by spiritual life and love."

"God is a spirit," he recalled Jesus as saying. "They that worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth."

"You will find yourself suddenly well," thought Eugene. "Sorrow is turned into joy."

"Sorrow. What kind of sorrow? Love sorrow? This probably meant the end of earthly love; that that too was mortal."

He read on, discovering that Scientists believed in the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, which struck him as silly; also that they believed in the ultimate abolition of marriage as representing a mortal illusion of self-creation and perpetuation, and of course the having of children through the agency of the sexes, also the dematerialization of the body--its chemicalization into its native spirituality, wherein there can be neither sin, sickness, disease, decay nor death, were a part of their belief or understanding. It seemed to him to be a wild claim, and yet at the time, because of his natural metaphysical turn, it accorded with his sense of the mystery of life.

It should be remembered as a factor in this reading that Eugene was particularly fitted by temperament--introspective, imaginative, psychical--and by a momentarily despairing attitude, in which any straw was worth grasping at which promised relief from sorrow, despair and defeat, to make a study of this apparently radical theory of human existence. He had heard a great deal of Christian Science, seeing its churches built, its adherents multiplying, particularly in New York, and enthusiastically claiming freedom from every human ill. Idle, without entertainment or diversion and intensely introspective, it was natural that these curious statements should arrest him.

He was not unaware, also, from past reading and scientific speculation, that Carlyle had once said that "matter itself--the outer world of matter, was either nothing, or else a product due to man's mind" (Carlyle's Journal, from Froude's Life of Carlyle), and that Kant had held the whole universe to be something in the eye or mind--neither more nor less than a thought. Marcus Aurelius, he recalled, had said somewhere in his meditations that the soul of the universe was kind and merciful; that it had no evil in it, and was not harmed by evil. This latter thought stuck in his mind as peculiar because it was so diametrically opposed to his own feelings that the universe, the spirit of it that is, was subtle, cruel, crafty, and malicious. He wondered how a man who could come to be Emperor of Rome could have thought otherwise. Christ's Sermon on the Mount had always appealed to him as the lovely speculations of an idealist who had no real knowledge of life. Yet he had always wondered why "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal" had thrilled him as something so beautiful that it must be true "For where your treasure is there will your heart be also." Keats had said "beauty is truth--truth beauty," and still another "truth is what is."

"And what is?" he had asked himself in answer to that.

"Beauty," was his reply to himself, for life at bottom, in spite of all its teeming terrors, was beautiful.

Only those of a metaphysical or natural religious turn of mind would care to follow the slow process of attempted alteration, which took place during the series of months which followed Angela's departure for Racine, her return to New York at Myrtle's solicitation, the time she spent in the maternity hospital, whither she was escorted on her arrival by Eugene and after. These are the deeps of being which only the more able intellectually essay, but Eugene wandered in them far and wide. There were long talks with Myrtle and Bangs--arguments upon all phases of mortal thought, real and unreal, with which Angela's situation had nothing to do. Eugene frankly confessed that he did not love her--that he did not want to live with her. He insisted that he could scarcely live without Suzanne. There was the taking up and reading or re-reading of odd philosophic and religious volumes, for he had nothing else to do. He did not care at first to go and sit with Angela, sorry as he was for her. He read or re-read Kent's "History of the Hebrews"; Weiniger's "Sex and Character"; Carl Snyder's "The World Machine"; Muzzey's "Spiritual Heroes"; Johnston's translation of "Bhagavad Ghita"; Emerson's essay on the Oversoul, and Huxley's "Science and Hebrew Tradition" and "Science and Christian Tradition." He learned from these things some curious facts which relate to religion, which he had either not known before or forgotten, i.e., that the Jews were almost the only race or nation which developed a consecutive line of religious thinkers or prophets; that their ideal was first and last a single God or Divinity, tribal at first, but later on universal, whose scope and significance were widened until He embraced the whole universe--was, in fact, the Universe--a governing principle--one God, however, belief in whom, His power to heal, to build up and overthrow had never been relinquished.

The Old Testament was full of that. Was that. The old prophets, he learned to his astonishment, were little more than whirling dervishes when they are first encountered historically, working themselves up into wild transports and frenzies, lying on the ground and writhing, cutting themselves as the Persian zealots do to this day in their feast of the tenth month and resorting to the most curious devices for nurturing their fanatic spirit, but always setting forth something that was astonishingly spiritual and great. They usually frequented the holy places and were to be distinguished by their wild looks and queer clothing. Isaiah eschewed clothing for three years (Is. 22, 21); Jeremiah appeared in the streets of the capital (according to Muzzey) with a wooden yoke on his neck, saying, "Thus shalt Juda's neck be bent under bondage to the Babylonian" (Jer. 27; 2 ff); Zedekiah came to King Ahab, wearing horns of iron like a steer, and saying, "Thus shalt thou push the Syrians" (1 Kings 22, 11). The prophet was called mad because he acted like a madman. Elisha dashed in on the gruff captain, Jehu, in his camp and broke a vial of oil on his head, saying, "Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, I have made thee king over the people of the Lord"; then he opened the door and fled. Somehow, though these things seemed wild, yet they accorded with Eugene's sense of prophecy. They were not cheap but great--wildly dramatic, like the word of a Lord God might be. Another thing that fascinated him was to find that the evolutionary hypothesis did not after all shut out a conception of a ruling, ordaining Divinity, as he had supposed, for he came across several things in the papers which, now that he was thinking about this so keenly, held him spellbound. One was quoted from a biological work by a man named George M. Gould, and read:

"Life reaches control of physical forces by the cell-mechanism, and, so far as we know, by it solely." From reading Mrs. Eddy and arguing with Bangs, Eugene was not prepared to admit this, but he was fascinated to see how it led ultimately to an acknowledgment of an active Divinity which shapes our ends. "No organic molecule shows any evidence of intellect, design or purpose. It is the product solely of mathematically determinate and invariable physical forces. Life becomes conscious of itself through specialized cellular activity, and human personality, therefore, can only be a unity of greater differentiations of function, a higher and fuller incarnation than the single cell incarnation. Life, or God, is in the cell.... (And everywhere outside of it, quite as active and more so, perhaps, Eugene reserved mentally.) The cell's intelligence is His. (From reading Mrs. Eddy, Eugene could not quite agree with this. According to her, it was an illusion.) The human personality is also at last Himself and only Himself.... If you wish to say 'Biologos' or God instead of Life, I heartily agree, and we are face to face with the sublime fact of biology. The cell is God's instrument and mediator in materiality; it is the mechanism of incarnation, the word made flesh and dwelling among us."

The other was a quotation in a Sunday newspaper from some man who appeared to be a working physicist of the time--Edgar Lucien Larkin:

"With the discovery and recent perfection of the new ultra-violet light microscope and the companion apparatus, the microphotographic camera, with rapidly moving, sensitive films, it seems that the extreme limit of vision of the human eye has been reached. Inorganic and organic particles have been seen, and these so minute that (the smallest) objects visible in the most powerful old-style instruments are as huge chunks in comparison. An active microscopic universe as wonderful as the sidereal universe, the stellar structure, has been revealed. This complexity actually exists; but exploration has scarcely commenced. Within a hundred years, devoted to this research, the micro-universe may be partially understood. Laws of micro-movements may be detected and published in textbooks like those of the gigantic universe suns and their concentric planets and moons. I cannot look into these minute moving and living deeps without instantly believing that they are mental--every motion is controlled by mind. The longer I look at the amazing things, the deeper is this conviction. This micro-universe is rooted and grounded in a mental base. Positively and without hope of overthrow, this assertion is made--the flying particles know where to go. Coarse particles, those visible in old-time microscopes, when suspended in liquids, were observed to be in rapid motion, darting to all geometrical directions with high speed. But the ultra-violet microscope reveals moving trillions of far smaller bodies, and these rush on geometric lines and cutout angles with the most incredible speed, specific for each kind and type."

What were the angles? Eugene asked himself. Who made them? Who or what arranged the geometric lines? The "Divine Mind" of Mrs. Eddy? Had this woman really found the truth? He pondered this, reading on, and then one day in a paper he came upon this reflection in regard to the universe and its government by Alfred Russel Wallace, which interested him as a proof that there might be, as Jesus said and as Mrs. Eddy contended, a Divine Mind or central thought in which there was no evil intent, but only good. The quotation was: "Life is that power which, from air and water and the substances dissolved therein, builds up organized and highly complex structures possessing definite forms and functions; these are presented in a continuous state of decay and repair by internal circulation of fluids and gases; they reproduce their like, go through various phases of youth, maturity and age, die and quickly decompose into their constituent elements. They thus form continuous series of similar individuals and so long as external conditions render their existence possible seem to possess a potential immortality.

"It is very necessary to presuppose some vast intelligence, some pervading spirit, to explain the guidance of the lower forces in accordance with the preordained system of evolution we see prevailing. Nothing less will do....

"If, however, we go as far as this, we must go further.... We have a perfect right, on logical and scientific grounds, to see in all the infinitely varied products of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, which we alone can make use of, a preparation for ourselves, to assist in our mental development, and to fit us for a progressively higher state of existence as spiritual beings.

" ... It seems only logical to assume that the vast, the infinite chasm between ourselves and the Deity, is to some extent occupied by an almost infinite series of grades of beings, each successive grade having higher and higher powers in regard to the origination, the development and the control of the universe.

" ... There may have been a vast system of co-operation of such grades of beings, from a very high grade of power and intelligence down to those unconscious or almost unconscious cell souls posited by Haeckel....

"I can imagine the ... Infinite Being, foreseeing and determining the broad outlines of a universe....

"He might, for instance, impress a sufficient number of his highest angels to create by their will power the primal universe of ether, with all those inherent properties and forces necessary for what was to follow. Using this as a vehicle, the next subordinate association of angels would so act upon the ether as to develop from it, in suitable masses and at suitable distances, the various elements of matter, which, under the influence of such laws and forces as gravitation, heat, and electricity, would thenceforth begin to form those vast systems of nebulæ and suns which constitute our stellar universe.

"Then we may imagine these hosts of angels, to whom a thousand years are as one day, watching the development of this vast system of suns and planets until some one or more of them combined in itself all those conditions of size, of elementary constitution, of atmosphere, of mass of water and requisite distance from its source of heat as to insure a stability of constitution and uniformity of temperature for a given minimum of millions of years, or of ages, as would be required for the full development of a life world from amoeba to man, with a surplus of a few hundreds of millions for his adequate development.

"We are led, therefore, to postulate a body of what we may term organizing spirits, who would be charged with the duty of so influencing the myriads of cell souls as to carry out their part of the work with accuracy and certainty....

"At successive stages of the development of the life world, more and perhaps higher intelligences might be required to direct the main lines of variation in definite directions, in accordance with the general design to be worked out, and to guard against a break in the particular line, which alone could lead ultimately to the production of the human form.

"This speculative suggestion, I venture to hope, will appeal to some of my readers as the very best approximation we are now able to formulate as to the deeper, the most fundamental causes of matter and force of life and consciousness, and of man himself, at his best, already a little lower than the angels, and, like them, destined to a permanent progressive existence in a world of spirit."

This very peculiar and apparently progressive statement in regard to the conclusion which naturalistic science had revealed in regard to the universe struck Eugene as pretty fair confirmation of Mrs. Eddy's contention that all was mind and its infinite variety and that the only difference between her and the British scientific naturalists was that they contended for an ordered hierarchy which could only rule and manifest itself according to its own ordered or self-imposed laws, which they could perceive or detect, whereas, she contended for a governing spirit which was everywhere and would act through ordered laws and powers of its own arrangement. God was a principle like a rule in mathematics--two times two is four, for instance--and was as manifest daily and hourly and momentarily in a hall bedroom as in the circling motions of suns and systems. God was a principle. He grasped that now. A principle could be and was of course anywhere and everywhere at one and the same time. One could not imagine a place for instance where two times two would not be four, or where that rule would not be. So, likewise with the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent mind of God.

Chapter XXVI

The most dangerous thing to possess a man to the extent of dominating him is an idea. It can and does ride him to destruction. Eugene's idea of the perfection of eighteen was one of the most dangerous things in his nature. In a way, combined with the inability of Angela to command his interest and loyalty, it had been his undoing up to this date. A religious idea followed in a narrow sense would have diverted this other, but it also might have destroyed him, if he had been able to follow it. Fortunately the theory he was now interesting himself in was not a narrow dogmatic one in any sense, but religion in its large aspects, a comprehensive resumé and spiritual co-ordination of the metaphysical speculation of the time, which was worthy of anyone's intelligent inquiry. Christian Science as a cult or religion was shunned by current religions and religionists as something outré, impossible, uncanny--as necromancy, imagination, hypnotism, mesmerism, spiritism--everything, in short, that it was not, and little, if anything, that it really was. Mrs. Eddy had formulated or rather restated a fact that was to be found in the sacred writings of India; in the Hebrew testaments, old and new; in Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Emerson, and Carlyle. The one variation notable between her and the moderns was that her ruling unity was not malicious, as Eugene and many others fancied, but helpful. Her unity was a unity of love. God was everything but the father of evil, which according to her was an illusion--neither fact nor substance--sound and fury, signifying nothing.

It must be remembered that during all the time Eugene was doing this painful and religious speculation he was living in the extreme northern portion of the city, working desultorily at some paintings which he thought he might sell, visiting Angela occasionally, safely hidden away in the maternity hospital at One Hundred and Tenth Street, thinking hourly and momentarily of Suzanne, and wondering if, by any chance, he should ever see her any more. His mind had been so inflamed by the beauty and the disposition of this girl that he was really not normal any longer. He needed some shock, some catastrophe greater than any he had previously experienced to bring him to his senses. The loss of his position had done something. The loss of Suzanne had only heightened his affection for her. The condition of Angela had given him pause, for it was an interesting question what would become of her. "If she would only die!" he said to himself, for we have the happy faculty of hating most joyously on this earth the thing we have wronged the most. He could scarcely go and see her, so obsessed was he with the idea that she was a handicap to his career. The idea of her introducing a child into his life only made him savage. Now, if she should die, he would have the child to care for and Suzanne, because of it, might never come to him.

His one idea at this time was not to be observed too much, or rather not at all, for he considered himself to be in great disfavor, and only likely to do himself injury by a public appearance--a fact which was more in his own mind than anywhere else. If he had not believed it, it would not have been true. For this reason he had selected this quiet neighborhood where the line of current city traffic was as nothing, for here he could brood in peace. The family that he lived with knew nothing about him. Winter was setting in. Because of the cold and snow and high winds, he was not likely to see many people hereabouts--particularly those celebrities who had known him in the past. There was a great deal of correspondence that followed him from his old address, for his name had been used on many committees, he was in "Who's Who," and he had many friends less distinguished than those whose companionship would have required the expenditure of much money who would have been glad to look him up. He ignored all invitations, however; refused to indicate by return mail where he was for the present; walked largely at night; read, painted, or sat and brooded during the day. He was thinking all the time of Suzanne and how disastrously fate had trapped him apparently through her. He was thinking that she might come back, that she ought. Lovely, hurtful pictures came to him of re-encounters with her in which she would rush into his arms, never to part, from him any more. Angela, in her room at the hospital, received little thought from him. She was there. She was receiving expert medical attention. He was paying all the bills. Her serious time had not yet really come. Myrtle was seeing her. He caught glimpses of himself at times as a cruel, hard intellect driving the most serviceable thing his life had known from him with blows, but somehow it seemed justifiable. Angela was not suited to him. Why could she not live away from him? Christian Science set aside marriage entirely as a human illusion, conflicting with the indestructible unity of the individual with God. Why shouldn't she let him go?

He wrote poems to Suzanne, and read much poetry that he found in an old trunkful of books in the house where he was living. He would read again and again the sonnet beginning, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes"--that cry out of a darkness that seemed to be like his own. He bought a book of verse by Yeats, and seemed to hear his own voice saying of Suzanne,

"Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery ...

He was not quite as bad as he was when he had broken down eight years before, but he was very bad. His mind was once more riveted upon the uncertainty of life, its changes, its follies. He was studying those things only which deal with the abstrusities of nature, and this began to breed again a morbid fear of life itself. Myrtle was greatly distressed about him. She worried lest he might lose his mind.

"Why don't you go to see a practitioner, Eugene?" she begged of him one day. "You will get help--really you will. You think you won't, but you will. There is something about them--I don't know what. They are spiritually at rest. You will feel better. Do go."

"Oh, why do you bother me, Myrtle? Please don't. I don't want to go. I think there is something in the idea metaphysically speaking, but why should I go to a practitioner? God is as near me as He is anyone, if there is a God."

Myrtle wrung her hands, and because she felt so badly more than anything else, he finally decided to go. There might be something hypnotic or physically contagious about these people--some old alchemy of the mortal body, which could reach and soothe him. He believed in hypnotism, hypnotic suggestion, etc. He finally called up one practitioner, an old lady highly recommended by Myrtle and others, who lived farther south on Broadway, somewhere in the neighborhood of Myrtle's home. Mrs. Althea Johns was her name--a woman who had performed wonderful cures. Why should he, Eugene Witla, he asked himself as he took up the receiver, why should he, Eugene Witla, ex-managing publisher of the United Magazines Corporation, ex-artist (in a way, he felt that he was no longer an artist in the best sense) be going to a woman in Christian Science to be healed of what? Gloom? Yes. Failure? Yes. Heartache? Yes. His evil tendencies in regard to women, such as the stranger who had sat beside him had testified to? Yes. How strange! And yet he was curious. It interested him a little to speculate as to whether this could really be done. Could he be healed of failure? Could this pain of longing be made to cease? Did he want it to cease? No; certainly not! He wanted Suzanne. Myrtle's idea, he knew, was that somehow this treatment would reunite him and Angela and make him forget Suzanne, but he knew that could not be. He was going, but he was going because he was unhappy and idle and aimless. He was going because he really did not know what else to do.

The apartment of Mrs. Johns--Mrs. Althea Johns--was in an apartment house of conventional design, of which there were in New York hundreds upon hundreds at the time. There was a spacious areaway between two wings of cream-colored pressed brick leading back to an entrance way which was protected by a handsome wrought-iron door on either side of which was placed an electric lamp support of handsome design, holding lovely cream-colored globes, shedding a soft lustre. Inside was the usual lobby, elevator, uniformed negro elevator man, indifferent and impertinent, and the telephone switchboard. The building was seven storeys high. Eugene went one snowy, blustery January night. The great wet flakes were spinning in huge whirls and the streets were covered with a soft, slushy carpet of snow. He was interested, as usual, in spite of his gloom, in the picture of beauty the world presented--the city wrapped in a handsome mantle of white. Here were cars rumbling, people hunched in great coats facing the driving wind. He liked the snow, the flakes, this wonder of material living. It eased his mind of his misery and made him think of painting again. Mrs. Johns was on the seventh floor. Eugene knocked and was admitted by a maid. He was shown to a waiting room, for he was a little ahead of his time, and there were others--healthy-looking men and women, who did not appear to have an ache or pain--ahead of him. Was not this a sign, he thought as he sat down, that this was something which dealt with imaginary ills? Then why had the man he had heard in the church beside him testified so forcibly and sincerely to his healing? Well, he would wait and see. He did not see what it could do for him now. He had to work. He sat there in one corner, his hands folded and braced under his chin, thinking. The room was not artistic but rather nondescript, the furniture cheap or rather tasteless in design. Didn't Divine Mind know any better than to present its representatives in such a guise as this? Could a person called to assist in representing the majesty of God on earth be left so unintelligent artistically as to live in a house like this? Surely this was a poor manifestation of Divinity, but----

Mrs. Johns came--a short, stout, homely woman, gray, wrinkled, dowdy in her clothing, a small wen on one side of her mouth, a nose slightly too big to be pleasing--all mortal deficiencies as to appearance highly emphasized, and looking like an old print of Mrs. Micawber that he had seen somewhere. She had on a black skirt good as to material, but shapeless, commonplace, and a dark blue-gray waist. Her eye was clear and gray though, he noticed, and she had a pleasing smile.

"This is Mr. Witla, I believe," she said, coming across the room to him, for he had got into a corner near the window, and speaking with an accent which sounded a little Scotch. "I'm so glad to see you. Won't you come in?" she said, giving him precedence over some others because of his appointment, and re-crossed the room preceding him down the hall to her practice room. She stood to one side to take his hand as he passed.

He touched it gingerly.

So this was Mrs. Johns, he thought, as he entered, looking about him. Bangs and Myrtle had insisted that she had performed wonderful cures--or rather that Divine Mind had, through her. Her hands were wrinkled, her face old. Why didn't she make herself young if she could perform these wonderful cures? Why was this room so mussy? It was actually stuffy with chromos and etchings of the Christ and Bible scenes on the walls, a cheap red carpet or rug on the floor, inartistic leather-covered chairs, a table or desk too full of books, a pale picture of Mrs. Eddy and silly mottoes of which he was sick and tired hung here and there. People were such hacks when it came to the art of living. How could they pretend to a sense of Divinity who knew nothing of life? He was weary and the room here offended him. Mrs. Johns did. Besides, her voice was slightly falsetto. Could she cure cancer? and consumption? and all other horrible human ills, as Myrtle insisted she had? He didn't believe it.

He sat down wearily and yet contentiously in the chair she pointed out to him and stared at her while she quietly seated herself opposite him looking at him with kindly, smiling eyes.

"And now," she said easily, "what does God's child think is the matter with him?"

Eugene stirred irritably.

"God's child," he thought; "what cant!" What right had he to claim to be a child of God? What was the use of beginning that way? It was silly, so asinine. Why not ask plainly what was the matter with him? Still he answered:

"Oh, a number of things. So many that I am pretty sure they can never be remedied."

"As bad as that? Surely not. It is good to know, anyhow, that nothing is impossible to God. We can believe that, anyhow, can't we?" she replied, smiling. "You believe in God, or a ruling power, don't you?"

"I don't know whether I do or not. In the main, I guess I do. I'm sure I ought to. Yes, I guess I do."

"Is He a malicious God to you?"

"I have always thought so," he replied, thinking of Angela.

"Mortal mind! Mortal mind!" she asseverated to herself. "What delusions will it not harbor!"

And then to him:

"One has to be cured almost against one's will to know that God is a God of love. So you believe you are sinful, do you, and that He is malicious? It is not necessary that you should tell me how. We are all alike in the mortal state. I would like to call your attention to Isaiah's words, 'Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.'"

Eugene had not heard this quotation for years. It was only a dim thing in his memory. It flashed out simply now and appealed, as had all these Hebraic bursts of prophetic imagery in the past. Mrs. Johns, for all her wen and her big nose and dowdy clothes, was a little better for having been able to quote this so aptly. It raised her in his estimation. It showed a vigorous mind, at least a tactful mind.

"Can you cure sorrow?" he asked grimly and with a touch of sarcasm in his voice. "Can you cure heartache or fear?"

"I can do nothing of myself," she said, perceiving his mood. "All things are possible to God, however. If you believe in a Supreme Intelligence, He will cure you. St. Paul says 'I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.' Have you read Mrs. Eddy's book?"

"Most of it. I'm still reading it."

"Do you understand it?"

"No, not quite. It seems a bundle of contradictions to me."

"To those who are first coming into Science it nearly always seems so. But don't let that worry you. You would like to be cured of your troubles. St. Paul says, 'For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.' 'The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise--that they are vain.' Do not think of me as a woman, or as having had anything to do with this. I would rather have you think of me as St. Paul describes anyone who works for truth--'Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God.'"

"You know your Bible, don't you?" said Eugene.

"It is the only knowledge I have," she replied.

There followed one of those peculiar religious demonstrations so common in Christian Science--so peculiar to the uninitiated--in which she asked Eugene to fix his mind in meditation on the Lord's prayer. "Never mind if it seems pointless to you now. You have come here seeking aid. You are God's perfect image and likeness. He will not send you away empty-handed. Let me read you first, though, this one psalm, which I think is always so helpful to the beginner." She opened her Bible, which was on the table near her, and began:

"He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most high shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

"I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress; my God; in him will I trust.

"Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.

"He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and thy buckler.

"Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day. Nor for the pestilence that walketh in the darkness; nor for destruction that wasteth at noonday.

"A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

"Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.

"Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.

"For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.

"They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.

"Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder, the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under foot.

"Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him. I will set him on high, because he hath known my name.

"He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble. I will deliver him and honor him.

"With long life will I satisfy him, and show him my salvation."

During this most exquisite pronunciamento of Divine favor Eugene was sitting with his eyes closed, his thoughts wandering over all his recent ills. For the first time in years, he was trying to fix his mind upon an all-wise, omnipresent, omnipotent generosity. It was hard and he could not reconcile the beauty of this expression of Divine favor with the nature of the world as he knew it. What was the use of saying, "They shall bear thee up in their hands lest thou dash thy foot against a stone," when he had seen Angela and himself suffering so much recently? Wasn't he dwelling in the secret place of the Most High when he was alive? How could one get out of it? Still---- "Because he hath set his love on me--therefore will I deliver him." Was that the answer? Was Angela's love set on him? Was his own? Might not all their woes have sprung from that?

"He shall call upon me and I shall answer. I will deliver him in trouble. I will deliver him and honor him."

Had he ever really called on Him? Had Angela? Hadn't they been left in the slough of their own despond? Still Angela was not suited to him. Why did not God straighten that out? He didn't want to live with her.

He wandered through this philosophically, critically, until Mrs. Johns stopped. What, he asked himself, if, in spite of all his doubts, this seeming clamor and reality and pain and care were an illusion? Angela was suffering. So were many other people. How could this thing be true? Did not these facts exclude the possibility of illusion? Could they possibly be a part of it?

"Now we are going to try to realize that we are God's perfect children," she said, stopping and looking at him. "We think we are so big and strong and real. We are real enough, but only as a thought in God--that is all. No harm can happen to us there--no evil can come nigh us. For God is infinite, all power, all life. Truth, Love, over all, and all."

She closed her eyes and began, as she said, to try to realize for him the perfectness of his spirit in God. Eugene sat there trying to think of the Lord's prayer, but in reality thinking of the room, the cheap prints, the homely furniture, her ugliness, the curiousness of his being there. He, Eugene Witla, being prayed for! What would Angela think? Why was this woman old, if spirit could do all these other things? Why didn't she make herself beautiful? What was it she was doing now? Was this hypnotism, mesmerism, she was practicing? He remembered where Mrs. Eddy had especially said that these were not to be practiced--could not be in Science. No, she was no doubt sincere. She looked it--talked it. She believed in this beneficent spirit. Would it aid as the psalm said? Would it heal this ache? Would it make him not want Suzanne ever any more? Perhaps that was evil? Yes, no doubt it was. Still---- Perhaps he had better fix his mind on the Lord's Prayer. Divinity could aid him if it would. Certainly it could. No doubt of it. There was nothing impossible to this vast force ruling the universe. Look at the telephone, wireless telegraphy. How about the stars and sun? "He shall give his angels charge over thee."

"Now," said Mrs. Johns, after some fifteen minutes of silent meditation had passed and she opened her eyes smilingly--"we are going to see whether we are not going to be better. We are going to feel better, because we are going to do better, and because we are going to realize that nothing can hurt an idea in God. All the rest is illusions. It cannot hold us, for it is not real. Think good--God--and you are good. Think evil and you are evil, but it has no reality outside your own thought. Remember that." She talked to him as though he was a little child.

He went out into the snowy night where the wind was whirling the snow in picturesque whirls, buttoning his coat about him. The cars were running up Broadway as usual. Taxicabs were scuttling by. There were people forging their way through the snow, that ever-present company of a great city. There were arc lights burning clearly blue through the flying flakes. He wondered as he walked whether this would do him any good. Mrs. Eddy insisted that all these were unreal, he thought--that mortal mind had evolved something which was not in accord with spirit--mortal mind "a liar and the father of it," he recalled that quotation. Could it be so? Was evil unreal? Was misery only a belief? Could he come out of his sense of fear and shame and once more face the world? He boarded a car to go north. At Kingsbridge he made his way thoughtfully to his room. How could life ever be restored to him as it had been? He was really forty years of age. He sat down in his chair near his lamp and took up his book, "Science and Health," and opened it aimlessly. Then he thought for curiosity's sake he would see where he had opened it--what the particular page or paragraph his eye fell on had to say to him. He was still intensely superstitious. He looked, and here was this paragraph growing under his eyes:

"When mortal man blends his thoughts of existence with the spiritual, and works only as God works, he will no longer grope in the dark and cling to earth because he has not tasted heaven. Carnal beliefs defraud us. They make man an involuntary hypocrite--producing evil when he would create good, forming deformity when he would outline grace and beauty, injuring those whom he would bless. He becomes a general mis-creator, who believes he is a semi-God. His touch turns hope to dust, the dust we all have trod. He might say in Bible language, 'The good that I would, I do not, but evil, which I would not, I do.'"

He closed the book and meditated. He wished he might realize this thing if this were so. Still he did not want to become a religionist--a religious enthusiast. How silly they were. He picked up his daily paper--the Evening Post--and there on an inside page quoted in an obscure corner was a passage from a poem by the late Francis Thompson, entitled "The Hound of Heaven." It began:

"I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years ...

The ending moved him strangely:

Still with unhurrying chase, And unperturbèd face Deliberate speed, majestic instancy Came on the following Feet, And a voice above their beat-- "Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."

Did this man really believe this? Was it so?

He turned back to his book and read on, and by degrees he came half to believe that sin and evil and sickness might possibly be illusions--that they could be cured by aligning one's self intellectually and spiritually with this Divine Principle. He wasn't sure. This terrible sense of wrong. Could he give up Suzanne? Did he want to? No!

He got up and went to the window and looked out. The snow was still blowing.

"Give her up! Give her up!" And Angela in such a precarious condition. What a devil of a hole he was in, anyway! Well, he would go and see her in the morning. He would at least be kind. He would see her through this thing. He lay down and tried to sleep, but somehow sleep never came to him right any more. He was too wearied, too distressed, too wrought up. [S]till he slept a little, and that was all he could hope for in these days.

Chapter XXVII

It was while he was in this state, some two months later, that the great event, so far as Angela was concerned, came about, and in it, of necessity, he was compelled to take part. Angela was in her room, cosily and hygienically furnished, overlooking the cathedral grounds at Morningside Heights, and speculating hourly what her fate was to be. She had never wholly recovered from the severe attack of rheumatism which she had endured the preceding summer and, because of her worries since, in her present condition was pale and weak though she was not ill. The head visiting obstetrical surgeon, Dr. Lambert, a lean, gray man of sixty-five years of age, with grizzled cheeks, whose curly gray hair, wide, humped nose and keen gray eyes told of the energy and insight and ability that had placed him where he was, took a slight passing fancy to her, for she seemed to him one of those plain, patient little women whose lives are laid in sacrificial lines. He liked her brisk, practical, cheery disposition in the face of her condition, which was serious, and which was so noticeable to strangers. Angela had naturally a bright, cheery face, when she was not depressed or quarrelsome. It was the outward sign of her ability to say witty and clever things, and she had never lost the desire to have things done efficiently and intelligently about her wherever she was. The nurse, Miss De Sale, a solid, phlegmatic person of thirty-five, admired her spunk and courage and took a great fancy to her also because she was lightsome, buoyant and hopeful in the face of what was really a very serious situation. The general impression of the head operating surgeon, the house surgeon and the nurse was that her heart was weak and that her kidneys might be affected by her condition. Angela had somehow concluded after talks with Myrtle that Christian Science, as demonstrated by its practitioners, might help her through this crisis, though she had no real faith in it. Eugene would come round, she thought, also, for Myrtle was having him treated absently, and he was trying to read the book, she said. There would be a reconciliation between them when the baby came--because--because---- Well, because children were so winning! Eugene was really not hard-hearted--he was just infatuated. He had been ensnared by a siren. He would get over it.

Miss De Sale let her hair down in braids, Gretchen style, and fastened great pink bows of ribbon in them. As her condition became more involved, only the lightest morning gowns were given her--soft, comfortable things in which she sat about speculating practically about the future. She had changed from a lean shapeliness to a swollen, somewhat uncomely object, but she made the best of a bad situation. Eugene saw her and felt sorry. It was the end of winter now, with snow blowing gaily or fiercely about the windows, and the park grounds opposite were snow-white. She could see the leafless line of sentinel poplars that bordered the upper edges of Morningside. She was calm, patient, hopeful, while the old obstetrician shook his head gravely to the house surgeon.

"We shall have to be very careful. I shall take charge of the actual birth myself. See if you can't build up her strength. We can only hope that the head is small."

Angela's littleness and courage appealed to him. For once in a great many cases he really felt sorry.

The house surgeon did as directed. Angela was given specially prepared food and drink. She was fed frequently. She was made to keep perfectly quiet.

"Her heart," the house surgeon reported to his superior, "I don't like that. It's weak and irregular. I think there's a slight lesion."

"We can only hope for the best," said the other solemnly. "We'll try and do without ether."

Eugene in his peculiar mental state was not capable of realizing the pathos of all this. He was alienated temperamentally and emotionally. Thinking that he cared for his wife dearly, the nurse and the house surgeon were for not warning him. They did not want to frighten him. He asked several times whether he could be present during the delivery, but they stated that it would be dangerous and trying. The nurse asked Angela if she had not better advise him to stay away. Angela did, but Eugene felt that in spite of his alienation, she needed him. Besides, he was curious. He thought Angela would stand it better if he were near, and now that the ordeal was drawing nigh, he was beginning to understand how desperate it might be and to think it was only fair that he should assist her. Some of the old pathetic charm of her littleness was coming back to him. She might not live. She would have to suffer much. She had meant no real evil to him--only to hold him. Oh, the bitterness and the pathos of this welter of earthly emotions. Why should they be so tangled?

The time drew very near, and Angela was beginning to suffer severe pains. Those wonderful processes of the all-mother, which bind the coming life in a cradle of muscles and ligaments were practically completed and were now relaxing their tendencies in one direction to enforce them in another. Angela suffered at times severely from straining ligaments. Her hands were clenched desperately, her face would become deathly pale. She would cry. Eugene was with her on a number of these occasions and it drove home to his consciousness the subtlety and terror of this great scheme of reproduction, which took all women to the door of the grave, in order that this mortal scheme of things might be continued. He began to think that there might be something in the assertion of the Christian Science leaders that it was a lie and an illusion, a terrible fitful fever outside the rational consciousness of God. He went to the library one day and got down a book on obstetrics, which covered the principles and practice of surgical delivery. He saw there scores of pictures drawn very carefully of the child in various positions in the womb--all the strange, peculiar, flower-like positions it could take, folded in upon itself like a little half-formed petal. The pictures were attractive, some of them beautiful, practical as they were. They appealed to his fancy. They showed the coming baby perfect, but so small, its head now in one position, now in another, its little arms twisted about in odd places, but always delightfully, suggestively appealing. From reading here and there in the volume, he learned that the great difficulty was the head--the delivery of that. It appeared that no other difficulty really confronted the obstetrician. How was that to be got out? If the head were large, the mother old, the walls of the peritoneal cavity tight or hard, a natural delivery might be impossible. There were whole chapters on Craniotomy, Cephalotripsy, which in plain English means crushing the head with an instrument....

One chapter was devoted to the Cæsarian operation, with a description of its tremendous difficulties and a long disquisition on the ethics of killing the child to save the mother, or the mother to save the child with their relative values to society indicated. Think of it--a surgeon sitting in the seat of judge and executioner at the critical moment! Ah, life with its petty laws did not extend here. Here we came back to the conscience of man which Mrs. Eddy maintained was a reflection of immanent mind. If God were good, He would speak through that--He was speaking through it. This surgeon referred to that inmost consciousness of supreme moral law, which alone could guide the practitioner in this dreadful hour.

Then he told of what implements were necessary, how many assistants (two), how many nurses (four), the kinds of bandages, needles, silk and catgut thread, knives, clamp dilators, rubber gloves. He showed how the cut was to be made--when, where. Eugene closed the book, frightened. He got up and walked out in the air, a desire to hurry up to Angela impelling him. She was weak, he knew that. She had complained of her heart. Her muscles were probably set. Supposing these problems, any one of them, should come in connection with her. He did not wish her to die.

He had said he had--yes, but he did not want to be a murderer. No, no! Angela had been good to him. She had worked for him. Why, God damn it, she had actually suffered for him in times past. He had treated her badly, very badly, and now in her pathetic little way she had put herself in this terrific position. It was her fault, to be sure it was. She had been trying as she always had to hold him against his will, but then could he really blame her? It wasn't a crime for her to want him to love her. They were just mis-mated. He had tried to be kind in marrying her, and he hadn't been kind at all. It had merely produced unrest, dissatisfaction, unhappiness for him and for her, and now this--this danger of death through pain, a weak heart, defective kidneys, a Cæsarian operation. Why, she couldn't stand anything like that. There was no use talking about it. She wasn't strong enough--she was too old.

He thought of Christian Science practitioners, of how they might save her--of some eminent surgeon who would know how without the knife. How? How? If these Christian Scientists could only think her through a thing like this--he wouldn't be sorry. He would be glad, for her sake, if not his own. He might give up Suzanne--he might--he might. Oh, why should that thought intrude on him now?

When he reached the hospital it was three o'clock in the afternoon, and he had been there for a little while in the morning when she was comparatively all right. She was much worse. The straining pains in her side which she had complained of were worse and her face was alternately flushed and pale, sometimes convulsed a little. Myrtle was there talking with her, and Eugene stood about nervously, wondering what he should do--what he could do. Angela saw his worry. In spite of her own condition she was sorry for him. She knew that this would cause him pain, for he was not hard-hearted, and it was his first sign of relenting. She smiled at him, thinking that maybe he would come round and change his attitude entirely. Myrtle kept reassuring her that all would be well with her. The nurse said to her and to the house doctor who came in, a young man of twenty-eight, with keen, quizzical eyes, whose sandy hair and ruddy complexion bespoke a fighting disposition, that she was doing nicely.

"No bearing down pains?" he asked, smiling at Angela, his even white teeth showing in two gleaming rows.

"I don't know what kind they are, doctor," she replied. "I've had all kinds."

"You'll know them fast enough," he replied, mock cheerfully. "They're not like any other kind."

He went away and Eugene followed him.

"How is she doing?" he asked, when they were out in the hall.

"Well enough, considering. She's not very strong, you know. I have an idea she is going to be all right. Dr. Lambert will be here in a little while. You had better talk to him."

The house surgeon did not want to lie. He thought Eugene ought to be told. Dr. Lambert was of the same opinion, but he wanted to wait until the last, until he could judge approximately correctly.

He came at five, when it was already dark outside, and looked at Angela with his grave, kindly eyes. He felt her pulse, listened to her heart with his stethoscope.

"Do you think I shall be all right, doctor?" asked Angela faintly.

"To be sure, to be sure," he replied softly. "Little woman, big courage." He smoothed her hand.

He walked out and Eugene followed him.

"Well, doctor," he said. For the first time for months Eugene was thinking of something besides his lost fortune and Suzanne.

"I think it advisable to tell you, Mr. Witla," said the old surgeon, "that your wife is in a serious condition. I don't want to alarm you unnecessarily--it may all come out very satisfactorily. I have no positive reason to be sure that it will not. She is pretty old to have a child. Her muscles are set. The principal thing we have to fear in her case is some untoward complication with her kidneys. There is always difficulty in the delivery of the head in women of her age. It may be necessary to sacrifice the child. I can't be sure. The Cæsarian operation is something I never care to think about. It is rarely used, and it isn't always successful. Every care that can be taken will be taken. I should like to have you understand the conditions. Your consent will be asked before any serious steps are taken. Your decision will have to be quick, however, when the time comes."

"I can tell you now, doctor, what my decision will be," said Eugene realizing fully the gravity of the situation. For the time being, his old force and dignity were restored. "Save her life if you can by any means that you can. I have no other wish."

"Thanks," said the surgeon. "We will do the best we can."

There were hours after that when Eugene, sitting by Angela, saw her endure pain which he never dreamed it was possible for any human being to endure. He saw her draw herself up rigid time and again, the color leaving her face, the perspiration breaking out on her forehead only to relax and flush and groan without really crying out. He saw, strange to relate, that she was no baby like himself, whimpering over every little ill, but a representative of some great creative force which gave her power at once to suffer greatly and to endure greatly. She could not smile any more. That was not possible. She was in a welter of suffering, unbroken, astonishing. Myrtle had gone home to her dinner, but promised to return later. Miss De Sale came, bringing another nurse, and while Eugene was out of the room, Angela was prepared for the final ordeal. She was arrayed in the usual open back hospital slip and white linen leggings. Under Doctor Lambert's orders an operating table was got ready in the operating room on the top floor and a wheel table stationed outside the door, ready to remove her if necessary. He had left word that at the first evidence of the genuine childbearing pain, which the nurse understood so well, he was to be called. The house surgeon was to be in immediate charge of the case.

Eugene wondered in this final hour at the mechanical, practical, business-like manner in which all these tragedies--the hospital was full of women--were taken. Miss De Sale went about her duties calm, smiling, changing the pillows occasionally for Angela, straightening the disordered bedclothes, adjusting the window curtains, fixing her own lace cap or apron before the mirror which was attached to the dresser, or before the one that was set in the closet door, and doing other little things without number. She took no interest in Eugene's tense attitude, or Myrtle's when she was there, but went in and out, talking, jesting with other nurses, doing whatever she had to do quite undisturbed.

"Isn't there anything that can be done to relieve her of this pain?" Eugene asked wearily at one point. His own nerves were torn. "She can't stand anything like that. She hasn't the strength."

She shook her head placidly. "There isn't a thing that anyone can do. We can't give her an opiate. It stops the process. She just has to bear it. All women do."

"All women," thought Eugene. Good God! Did all women go through a siege like this every time a child was born? There were two billion people on the earth now. Had there been two billion such scenes? Had he come this way?--Angela? every child? What a terrible mistake she had made--so unnecessary, so foolish. It was too late now, though, to speculate concerning this. She was suffering. She was agonizing.

The house surgeon came back after a time to look at her condition, but was not at all alarmed apparently. He nodded his head rather reassuringly to Miss De Sale, who stood beside him. "I think she's doing all right," he said.

"I think so, too," she replied.

Eugene wondered how they could say this. She was suffering horribly.

"I'm going into Ward A for an hour," said the doctor. "If any change comes you can get me there."

"What change could come," asked Eugene of himself, "any worse than had already appeared?" He was thinking of the drawings, though, he had seen in the book--wondering if Angela would have to be assisted in some of the grim, mechanical ways indicated there. They illustrated to him the deadly possibilities of what might follow.

About midnight the expected change, which Eugene in agonized sympathy was awaiting, arrived. Myrtle had not returned. She had been waiting to hear from Eugene. Although Angela had been groaning before, pulling herself tense at times, twisting in an aimless, unhappy fashion, now she seemed to spring up and fall as though she had fainted. A shriek accompanied the movement, and then another and another. He rushed to the door, but the nurse was there to meet him.

"It's here," she said quietly. She went to a phone outside and called for Dr. Willets. A second nurse from some other room came in and stood beside her. In spite of the knotted cords on Angela's face, the swollen veins, the purple hue, they were calm. Eugene could scarcely believe it, but he made an intense effort to appear calm himself. So this was childbirth!

In a few moments Dr. Willets came in. He also was calm, business like, energetic. He was dressed in a black suit and white linen jacket, but took that off, leaving the room as he did so, and returned with his sleeves rolled up and his body incased in a long white apron, such as Eugene had seen butchers wear. He went over to Angela and began working with her, saying something to the nurse beside him which Eugene did not hear. He could not look--he dared not at first.

At the fourth or fifth convulsive shriek, a second doctor came in, a young man of Willets' age, and dressed as he was, who also took his place beside him. Eugene had never seen him before. "Is it a case of forceps?" he asked.

"I can't tell," said the other. "Dr. Lambert is handling this personally. He ought to be here by now."

There was a step in the hall and the senior physician or obstetrician had entered. In the lower hall he had removed his great coat and fur gloves. He was dressed in his street clothes, but after looking at Angela, feeling her heart and temples, he went out and changed his coat for an apron, like the others. His sleeves were rolled up, but he did not immediately do anything but watch the house surgeon, whose hands were bloody.

"Can't they give her chloroform?" asked Eugene, to whom no one was paying any attention, of Miss De Sale.

She scarcely heard, but shook her head. She was busy dancing attendance on her very far removed superiors, the physicians.

"I would advise you to leave the room," said Dr. Lambert to Eugene, coming over near him. "You can do nothing here. You will be of no assistance whatsoever. You may be in the way."

Eugene left, but it was only to pace agonizedly up and down the hall. He thought of all the things that had passed between him and Angela--the years--the struggles. All at once he thought of Myrtle, and decided to call her up--she wanted to be there. Then he decided for the moment he would not. She could do nothing. Then he thought of the Christian Science practitioner. Myrtle could get her to give Angela absent treatment. Anything, anything--it was a shame that she should suffer so.

"Myrtle," he said nervously over the phone, when he reached her, "this is Eugene. Angela is suffering terribly. The birth is on. Can't you get Mrs. Johns to help her? It's terrible!"

"Certainly, Eugene. I'll come right down. Don't worry."

He hung up the receiver and walked up and down the hall again. He could hear mumbled voices--he could hear muffled screams. A nurse, not Miss De Sale, came out and wheeled in the operating table.

"Are they going to operate?" he asked feverishly. "I'm Mr. Witla."

"I don't think so. I don't know. Dr. Lambert wants her to be taken to the operating room in case it is necessary."

They wheeled her out after a few moments and on to the elevator which led to the floor above. Her face was slightly covered while she was being so transferred, and those who were around prevented him from seeing just how it was with her, but because of her stillness, he wondered, and the nurse said that a very slight temporary opiate had been administered--not enough to affect the operation, if it were found necessary. Eugene stood by dumbly, terrified. He stood in the hall, outside the operating room, half afraid to enter. The head surgeon's warning came back to him, and, anyhow, what good could he do? He walked far down the dim-lit length of the hall before him, wondering, and looked out on a space where was nothing but snow. In the distance a long lighted train was winding about a high trestle like a golden serpent. There were automobiles honking and pedestrians laboring along in the snow. What a tangle life was, he thought. What a pity. Here a little while ago, he wanted Angela to die, and now,--God Almighty, that was her voice groaning! He would be punished for his evil thoughts--yes, he would. His sins, all these terrible deeds would be coming home to him. They were coming home to him now. What a tragedy his career was! What a failure! Hot tears welled up into his eyes, his lower lip trembled, not for himself, but for Angela. He was so sorry all at once. He shut it all back. No, by God, he wouldn't cry! What good were tears? It was for Angela his pain was, and tears would not help her now.

Thoughts of Suzanne came to him--Mrs. Dale, Colfax, but he shut them out. If they could see him now! Then another muffled scream and he walked quickly back. He couldn't stand this.

He didn't go in, however. Instead he listened intently, hearing something which sounded like gurgling, choking breathing. Was that Angela?

"The low forceps"--it was Dr. Lambert's voice.

"The high forceps." It was his voice again. Something clinked like metal in a bowl.

"It can't be done this way, I'm afraid," it was Dr. Lambert's voice again. "We'll have to operate. I hate to do it, too."

A nurse came out to see if Eugene were near. "You had better go down into the waiting room, Mr. Witla," she cautioned. "They'll be bringing her out pretty soon. It won't be long now."

"No," he said all at once, "I want to see for myself." He walked into the room where Angela was now lying on the operating table in the centre of the room. A six-globed electrolier blazed close overhead. At her head was Dr. Willets, administering the anæsthetic. On the right side was Dr. Lambert, his hands encased in rubber gloves, bloody, totally unconscious of Eugene, holding a scalpel. One of the two nurses was near Angela's feet, officiating at a little table of knives, bowls, water, sponges, bandages. On the left of the table was Miss De Sale. Her hands were arranging some cloths at the side of Angela's body. At her side, opposite Dr. Lambert, was another surgeon whom Eugene did not know. Angela was breathing stertorously. She appeared to be unconscious. Her face was covered with cloths and a rubber mouth piece or cone. Eugene cut his palms with his nails.

So they have to operate, after all, he thought. She is as bad as that. The Cæsarian operation. Then they couldn't even get the child from her by killing it. Seventy-five per cent. of the cases recorded were successful, so the book said, but how many cases were not recorded. Was Dr. Lambert a great surgeon? Could Angela stand ether--with her weak heart?

He stood there looking at this wonderful picture while Dr. Lambert quickly washed his hands. He saw him take a small gleaming steel knife--bright as polished silver. The old man's hands were encased in rubber gloves, which looked bluish white under the light. Angela's exposed flesh was the color of a candle. He bent over her.

"Keep her breathing normal if you can," he said to the young doctor. "If she wakes give her ether. Doctor, you'd better look after the arteries."

He cut softly a little cut just below the centre of the abdomen apparently, and Eugene saw little trickling streams of blood spring where his blade touched. It did not seem a great cut. A nurse was sponging away the blood as fast as it flowed. As he cut again, the membrane that underlies the muscles of the abdomen and protects the intestines seemed to spring into view.

"I don't want to cut too much," said the surgeon calmly--almost as though he were talking to himself. "These intestines are apt to become unmanageable. If you just lift up the ends, doctor. That's right. The sponge, Miss Wood. Now, if we can just cut here enough"--he was cutting again like an honest carpenter or cabinet worker.

He dropped the knife he held into Miss Wood's bowl of water. He reached into the bleeding, wound, constantly sponged by the nurse, exposing something. What was that? Eugene's heart jerked. He was reaching down now in there with his middle finger--his fore and middle fingers afterwards, and saying, "I don't find the leg. Let's see. Ah, yes. Here we have it!"

"Can I move the head a little for you, doctor?" It was the young doctor at his left talking.

"Careful! Careful! It's bent under in the region of the coccyx. I have it now, though. Slowly, doctor, look out for the placenta."

Something was coming up out of this horrible cavity, which was trickling with blood from the cut. It was queer a little foot, a leg, a body, a head.

"As God is my judge," said Eugene to himself, his eyes brimming again.

"The placenta, doctor. Look after the peritoneum, Miss Wood. It's alive, all right. How is her pulse, Miss De Sale?"

"A little weak, doctor."

"Use less ether. There, now we have it! We'll put that back. Sponge. We'll have to sew this afterwards, Willets. I won't trust this to heal alone. Some surgeons think it will, but I mistrust her recuperative power. Three or four stitches, anyhow."

They were working like carpenters, cabinet workers, electricians. Angela might have been a lay figure for all they seemed to care. And yet there was a tenseness here, a great hurry through slow sure motion. "The less haste, the more speed," popped into Eugene's mind--the old saw. He stared as if this were all a dream--a nightmare. It might have been a great picture like Rembrandt's "The Night Watch." One young doctor, the one he did not know, was holding aloft a purple object by the foot. It might have been a skinned rabbit, but Eugene's horrified eyes realized that it was his child--Angela's child--the thing all this horrible struggle and suffering was about. It was discolored, impossible, a myth, a monster. He could scarcely believe his eyes, and yet the doctor was striking it on the back with his hand, looking at it curiously. At the same moment came a faint cry--not a cry, either--only a faint, queer sound.

"She's awfully little, but I guess she'll make out." It was Dr. Willets talking of the baby. Angela's baby. Now the nurse had it. That was Angela's flesh they had been cutting. That was Angela's wound they were sewing. This wasn't life. It was a nightmare. He was insane and being bedeviled by spirits.

"Now, doctor, I guess that will keep. The blankets, Miss De Sale. You can take her away."

They were doing lots of things to Angela, fastening bandages about her, removing the cone from her mouth, changing her position back to one of lying flat, preparing to bathe her, moving her to the rolling table, wheeling her out while she moaned unconscious under ether.

Eugene could scarcely stand the sickening, stertorous breathing. It was such a strange sound to come from her--as if her unconscious soul were crying. And the child was crying, too, healthily.

"Oh, God, what a life, what a life!" he thought. To think that things should have to come this way. Death, incisions! unconsciousness! pain! Could she live? Would she? And now he was a father.

He turned and there was the nurse holding this littlest girl on a white gauze blanket or cushion. She was doing something to it--rubbing oil on it. It was a pink child now, like any other baby.

"That isn't so bad, is it?" she asked consolingly. She wanted to restore Eugene to a sense of the commonplace. He was so distracted looking.

Eugene stared at it. A strange feeling came over him. Something went up and down his body from head to toe, doing something to him. It was a nervous, titillating, pinching feeling. He touched the child. He looked at its hands, its face. It looked like Angela. Yes, it did. It was his child. It was hers. Would she live? Would he do better? Oh, God, to have this thrust at him now, and yet it was his child. How could he? Poor little thing. If Angela died--if Angela died, he would have this and nothing else, this little girl out of all her long, dramatic struggle. If she died, came this. To do what to him? To guide? To strengthen? To change? He could not say. Only, somehow, in spite of himself, it was beginning to appeal to him. It was the child of a storm. And Angela, so near him now--would she ever live to see it? There she was unconscious, numb, horribly cut. Dr. Lambert was taking a last look at her before leaving.

"Do you think she will live, doctor?" he asked the great surgeon feverishly. The latter looked grave.

"I can't say. I can't say. Her strength isn't all that it ought to be. Her heart and kidneys make a bad combination. However, it was a last chance. We had to take it. I'm sorry. I'm glad we were able to save the child. The nurse will give her the best of care."

He went out into his practical world as a laborer leaves his work. So may we all. Eugene went over and stood by Angela. He was tremendously sorry for the long years of mistrust that had brought this about. He was ashamed of himself, of life--of its strange tangles. She was so little, so pale, so worn. Yes, he had done this. He had brought her here by his lying, his instability, his uncertain temperament. It was fairly murder from one point of view, and up to this last hour he had scarcely relented. But life had done things to him, too. Now, now---- Oh, hell, Oh, God damn! If she would only recover, he would try and do better. Yes, he would. It sounded so silly coming from him, but he would try. Love wasn't worth the agony it cost. Let it go. Let it go. He could live. Truly there were hierarchies and powers, as Alfred Russel Wallace pointed out. There was a God somewhere. He was on His throne. These large, dark, immutable forces, they were not for nothing. If she would only not die, he would try--he would behave. He would! he would!

He gazed at her, but she looked so weak, so pale now he did not think she could come round.

"Don't you want to come home with me, Eugene?" said Myrtle, who had come back some time before, at his elbow. "We can't do anything here now! The nurse says she may not become conscious for several hours. The baby is all right in their care."

The baby! the baby! He had forgotten it, forgotten Myrtle. He was thinking of the long dark tragedy of his life--the miasma of it.

"Yes," he said wearily. It was nearly morning. He went out and got into a taxi and went to his sister's home, but in spite of his weariness, he could scarcely sleep. He rolled feverishly.

In the morning he was up again, early, anxious to go back and see how Angela was--and the child.

Chapter XXVIII

The trouble with Angela's system, in addition to a weak heart, was that it was complicated at the time of her delivery by that peculiar manifestation of nervous distortion or convulsions known as eclampsia. Once in every five hundred cases (or at least such was the statistical calculation at the time), some such malady occurred to reduce the number of the newborn. In every two such terminations one mother also died, no matter what the anticipatory preparations were on the part of the most skilled surgeons. Though not caused by, it was diagnosed by, certain kidney changes. What Eugene had been spared while he was out in the hall was the sight of Angela staring, her mouth pulled to one side in a horrible grimace, her body bent back, canoe shape, the arms flexed, the fingers and thumbs bending over each other to and fro, in and out, slowly, not unlike a mechanical figure that is running down. Stupor and unconsciousness had immediately followed, and unless the child had been immediately brought into the world and the womb emptied, she and it would have died a horrible death. As it was she had no real strength to fight her way back to life and health. A Christian Science practitioner was trying to "realize her identity with good" for her, but she had no faith before and no consciousness now. She came to long enough to vomit terribly, and then sank into a fever. In it she talked of Eugene. She was in Blackwood, evidently, and wanted him to come back to her. He held her hand and cried, for he knew that there was never any recompense for that pain. What a dog he had been! He bit his lip and stared out of the window.

Once he said: "Oh, I'm no damned good! I should have died!"

That whole day passed without consciousness, and most of the night. At two in the morning Angela woke and asked to see the baby. The nurse brought it. Eugene held her hand. It was put down beside her, and she cried for joy, but it was a weak, soundless cry. Eugene cried also.

"It's a girl, isn't it?" she asked.

"Yes," said Eugene, and then, after a pause, "Angela, I want to tell you something. I'm so sorry, I'm ashamed. I want you to get well. I'll do better. Really I will." At the same time he was wondering, almost subconsciously, whether he would or no. Wouldn't it be all the same if she were really well--or worse?

She caressed his hand. "Don't cry," she said, "I'll be all right. I'm going to get well. We'll both do better. It's as much my fault as yours. I've been too hard." She worked at his fingers, but he only choked. His vocal cords hurt him.

"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry," he finally managed to say.

The child was taken away after a little while and Angela was feverish again. She grew very weak, so weak that although she was conscious later, she could not speak. She tried to make some signs. Eugene, the nurse, Myrtle, understood. The baby. It was brought and held up before her. She smiled a weak, yearning smile and looked at Eugene. "I'll take care of her," he said, bending over her. He swore a great oath to himself. He would be decent--he would be clean henceforth and for ever. The child was put beside her for a little while, but she could not move. She sank steadily and died.

Eugene sat by the bed holding his head in his hands. So, he had his wish. She was really dead. Now he had been taught what it was to fly in the face of conscience, instinct, immutable law. He sat there an hour while Myrtle begged him to come away.

"Please, Eugene!" she said. "Please!"

"No, no," he replied. "Where shall I go? I am well enough here."

After a time he did go, however, wondering how he would adjust his life from now on. Who would take care of of----

"Angela" came the name to his mind. Yes, he would call her "Angela." He had heard someone say she was going to have pale yellow hair.

******

The rest of this story is a record of philosophic doubt and speculation and a gradual return to normality, his kind of normality--the artistic normality of which he was capable. He would--he thought--never again be the maundering sentimentalist and enthusiast, imagining perfection in every beautiful woman that he saw. Yet there was a period when, had Suzanne returned suddenly, all would have been as before between them, and even more so, despite his tremulousness of spirit, his speculative interest in Christian Science as a way out possibly, his sense of brutality, almost murder, in the case of Angela--for, the old attraction still gnawed at his vitals. Although he had Angela, junior, now to look after, and in a way to divert him,--a child whom he came speedily to delight in--his fortune to restore, and a sense of responsibility to that abstract thing, society or public opinion as represented by those he knew or who knew him, still there was this ache and this non-controllable sense of adventure which freedom to contract a new matrimonial alliance or build his life on the plan he schemed with Suzanne gave him. Suzanne! Suzanne!--how her face, her gestures, her voice, haunted him. Not Angela, for all the pathos of her tragic ending, but Suzanne. He thought of Angela often--those last hours in the hospital, her last commanding look which meant "please look after our child," and whenever he did so his vocal cords tightened as under the grip of a hand and his eyes threatened to overflow, but even so, and even then, that undertow, that mystic cord that seemed to pull from his solar plexus outward, was to Suzanne and to her only. Suzanne! Suzanne! Around her hair, the thought of her smile, her indescribable presence, was built all that substance of romance which he had hoped to enjoy and which now, in absence and probably final separation, glowed with a radiance which no doubt the reality could never have had.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep." We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and only of dreams are our keen, stinging realities compounded. Nothing else is so moving, so vital, so painful as a dream.

For a time that first spring and summer, while Myrtle looked after little Angela and Eugene went to live with her and her husband, he visited his old Christian Science practitioner, Mrs. Johns. He had not been much impressed with the result in Angela's case, but Myrtle explained the difficulty of the situation in a plausible way. He was in a terrific state of depression, and it was while he was so that Myrtle persuaded him to go again. She insisted that Mrs. Johns would overcome his morbid gloom, anyhow, and make him feel better. "You want to come out of this, Eugene," she pleaded. "You will never do anything until you do. You are a big man. Life isn't over. It's just begun. You're going to get well and strong again. Don't worry. Everything that is is for the best."

He went once, quarreling with himself for doing so, for in spite of his great shocks, or rather because of them, he had no faith in religious conclusions of any kind. Angela had not been saved. Why should he?

Still the metaphysical urge was something--it was so hard to suffer spiritually and not believe there was some way out. At times he hated Suzanne for her indifference. If ever she came back he would show her. There would be no feeble urgings and pleadings the next time. She had led him into this trap, knowing well what she was doing--for she was wise enough--and then had lightly deserted him. Was that the action of a large spirit? he asked himself. Would the wonderful something he thought he saw there be capable of that? Ah, those hours at Daleview--that one stinging encounter in Canada!--the night she danced with him so wonderfully!

During a period of nearly three years all the vagaries and alterations which can possibly afflict a groping and morbid mind were his. He went from what might be described as almost a belief in Christian Science to almost a belief that a devil ruled the world, a Gargantuan Brobdingnagian Mountebank, who plotted tragedy for all ideals and rejoiced in swine and dullards and a grunting, sweating, beefy immorality. By degrees his God, if he could have been said to have had one in his consciousness, sank back into a dual personality or a compound of good and evil--the most ideal and ascetic good, as well as the most fantastic and swinish evil. His God, for a time at least, was a God of storms and horrors as well as of serenities and perfections. He then reached a state not of abnegation, but of philosophic open-mindedness or agnosticism. He came to know that he did not know what to believe. All apparently was permitted, nothing fixed. Perhaps life loved only change, equation, drama, laughter. When in moments of private speculation or social argument he was prone to condemn it loudest, he realized that at worst and at best it was beautiful, artistic, gay, that, however, he might age, groan, complain, withdraw, wither, still, in spite of him, this large thing which he at once loved and detested was sparkling on. He might quarrel, but it did not care; he might fail or die, but it could not. He was negligible--but, oh, the sting and delight of its inner shrines and favorable illusions.

And curiously, for a time, even while he was changing in this way, he went back to see Mrs. Johns, principally because he liked her. She seemed to be a motherly soul to him, contributing some of the old atmosphere he had enjoyed in his own home in Alexandria. This woman, from working constantly in the esoteric depths, which Mrs. Eddy's book suggests, demonstrating for herself, as she thought, through her belief in or understanding of, the oneness of the universe (its non-malicious, affectionate control, the non-existence of fear, pain, disease, and death itself), had become so grounded in her faith that evil positively did not exist save in the belief of mortals, that at times she almost convinced Eugene that it was so. He speculated long and deeply along these lines with her. He had come to lean on her in his misery quite as a boy might on his mother.

The universe to her was, as Mrs. Eddy said, spiritual, not material, and no wretched condition, however seemingly powerful, could hold against the truth--could gainsay divine harmony. God was good. All that is, is God. Hence all that is, is good or it is an illusion. It could not be otherwise. She looked at Eugene's case, as she had at many a similar one, being sure, in her earnest way, that she, by realizing his ultimate fundamental spirituality, could bring him out of his illusions, and make him see the real spirituality of things, in which the world of flesh and desire had no part.

"Beloved," she loved to quote to him, "now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he shall appear"--(and she explained that he was this universal spirit of perfection of which we are a part)--"we shall be like him; for we shall see him as He is."

"And every man that has this hope in him purifieth himself even as He is pure."

She once explained to him that this did not mean that the man must purify himself by some hopeless moral struggle, or emaciating abstinance, but rather that the fact that he had this hope of something better in him, would fortify him in spite of himself.

"You laugh at me," she said to him one day, "but I tell you you are a child of God. There is a divine spark in you. It must come out. I know it will. All this other thing will fall away as a bad dream. It has no reality."

She even went so far in a sweet motherly way as to sing hymns to him, and now, strange to relate, her thin voice was no longer irritating to him, and her spirit made her seemingly beautiful in his eyes. He did not try to adjust the curiosities and anomalies of material defects in so far as she was concerned. The fact that her rooms were anything but artistically perfect; that her body was shapeless, or comparatively so, when contrasted with that standard of which he had always been so conscious; the fact that whales were accounted by her in some weird way as spiritual, and bugs and torturesome insects of all kinds as emanations of mortal mind, did not trouble him at all. There was something in this thought of a spiritual universe--of a kindly universe, if you sought to make it so, which pleased him. The five senses certainly could not indicate the totality of things; beyond them must lie depths upon depths of wonder and power. Why might not this act? Why might it not be good? That book that he had once read--"The World Machine"--had indicated this planetary life as being infinitesimally small; that from the point of view of infinity it was not even thinkable--and yet here it appeared to be so large. Why might it not be, as Carlyle had said, a state of mind, and as such, so easily dissolvable. These thoughts grew by degrees, in force, in power.

At the same time he was beginning to go out again a little. A chance meeting with M. Charles, who grasped his hand warmly and wanted to know where he was and what he was doing, revived his old art fever. M. Charles suggested, with an air of extreme interest, that he should get up another exhibition along whatever line he chose.

"You!" he said, with a touch of heartening sympathy, and yet with a glow of fine corrective scorn, for he considered Eugene as an artist only, and a very great one at that. "You,--Eugene Witla--an editor--a publisher! Pah! You--who could have all the art lovers of the world at your feet in a few years if you chose--you who could do more for American art in your life time than anyone I know, wasting your time art directing, art editing--publishing! Pouf! Aren't you really ashamed of yourself? But it isn't too late. Come now--a fine exhibition! What do you say to an exhibition of some kind next January or February, in the full swing of the season? Everybody's interested then. I will give you our largest gallery. How is that? What do you say?" he glowed in a peculiarly Frenchy way,--half commanding, half inspiring or exhorting.

"If I can," said Eugene quietly, with a deprecating wave of the hand, and a faint line of self-scorn about the corners of his mouth. "It may be too late."

"'Too late! Too late!' What nonsense! Do you say that to me? If you can! If you can! Well, I give you up! You with your velvet textures and sure lines. It is too much. It is unbelievable!"

He raised his hands, eyes, and eye-brows in Gallic despair. He shrugged his shoulders, waiting to see a change of expression in Eugene.

"Very good!" said Eugene, when he heard this. "Only I can't promise anything. We will see." And he wrote out his address.

This started him once more. The Frenchman, who had often heard him spoken of and had sold all his earlier pictures, was convinced that there was money in him--if not here then abroad--money and some repute for himself as his sponsor. Some American artists must be encouraged--some must rise. Why not Eugene? Here was one who really deserved it.

So Eugene worked, painting swiftly, feverishly, brilliantly--with a feeling half the time that his old art force had deserted him for ever--everything that came into his mind. Taking a north lighted room near Myrtle he essayed portraits of her and her husband, of her and baby Angela, making arrangements which were classically simple. Then he chose models from the streets,--laborers, washerwomen, drunkards--characters all, destroying canvases frequently, but, on the whole, making steady progress. He had a strange fever for painting life as he saw it, for indicating it with exact portraits of itself, strange, grim presentations of its vagaries, futilities, commonplaces, drolleries, brutalities. The mental, fuzzy-wuzzy maunderings and meanderings of the mob fascinated him. The paradox of a decaying drunkard placed against the vivid persistence of life gripped his fancy. Somehow it suggested himself hanging on, fighting on, accusing nature, and it gave him great courage to do it. This picture eventually sold for eighteen thousand dollars, a record price.

In the meantime his lost dream in the shape of Suzanne was traveling abroad with her mother--in England, Scotland, France, Egypt, Italy, Greece. Aroused by the astonishing storm which her sudden and uncertain fascination had brought on, she was now so shaken and troubled by the disasters which had seemed to flow to Eugene in her wake, that she really did not know what to do or think. She was still too young, too nebulous. She was strong enough in body and mind, but very uncertain philosophically and morally--a dreamer and opportunist. Her mother, fearful of some headstrong, destructive outburst in which her shrewdest calculations would prove of no avail, was most anxious to be civil, loving, courteous, politic anything to avoid a disturbing re-encounter with the facts of the past, or a sudden departure on the part of Suzanne, which she hourly feared. What was she to do? Anything Suzanne wanted--her least whim, her moods in dress, pleasure, travel, friendship, were most assiduously catered to. Would she like to go here? would she like to see that? would this amuse her? would that be pleasant? And Suzanne, seeing always what her mother's motives were, and troubled by the pain and disgrace she had brought on Eugene, was uncertain now as to whether her conduct had been right or not. She puzzled over it continually.

More terrifying, however, was the thought which came to her occasionally as to whether she had really loved Eugene at all or not. Was this not a passing fancy? Had there not been some chemistry of the blood, causing her to make a fool of herself, without having any real basis in intellectual rapprochement. Was Eugene truly the one man with whom she could have been happy? Was he not too adoring, too headstrong, too foolish and mistaken in his calculations? Was he the able person she had really fancied him to be? Would she not have come to dislike him--to hate him even--in a short space of time? Could they have been truly, permanently happy? Would she not be more interested in one who was sharp, defiant, indifferent--one whom she could be compelled to adore and fight for rather than one who was constantly adoring her and needing her sympathy? A strong, solid, courageous man--was not such a one her ideal, after all? And could Eugene be said to be that? These and other questions tormented her constantly.

It is strange, but life is constantly presenting these pathetic paradoxes--these astounding blunders which temperament and blood moods bring about and reason and circumstance and convention condemn. The dreams of man are one thing--his capacity to realize them another. At either pole are the accidents of supreme failure and supreme success--the supreme failure of an Abélard for instance, the supreme success of a Napoleon, enthroned at Paris. But, oh, the endless failures for one success.

But in this instance it cannot be said that Suzanne had definitely concluded that she did not love him. Far from it. Although the cleverest devices were resorted to by Mrs. Dale to bring her into contact with younger and to her--now--more interesting personalities, Suzanne--very much of an introspective dreamer and quiet spectator herself, was not to be swiftly deluded by love again--if she had been deluded. She had half decided to study men from now on, and use them, if need be, waiting for the time when some act, of Eugene's, perhaps, or some other personality, might decide for her. The strange, destructive spell of her beauty began to interest her, for now she knew that she really was beautiful. She looked in her mirror very frequently now--at the artistry of a curl, the curve of her chin, her cheek, her arm. If ever she went back to Eugene how well she would repay him for his agony. But would she? Could she? Would he have not recovered his sanity and be able to snap his fingers in her face and smile superciliously? For, after all, no doubt he was a wonderful man and would shine as something somewhere soon again. And when he did--what would he think of her--her silence, her desertion, her moral cowardice?

"After all, I am not of much account," she said to herself. "But what he thought of me!--that wild fever--that was wonderful! Really he was wonderful!"

Chapter XXIX

The dénouement of all this, as much as ever could be, was still two years off. By that time Suzanne was considerably more sobered, somewhat more intellectually cultivated, a little cooler--not colder exactly--and somewhat more critical. Men, when it came to her type of beauty, were a little too suggestive of their amorousness. After Eugene their proffers of passion, adoration, undying love, were not so significant.

But one day in New York on Fifth Avenue, there was a re-encounter. She was shopping with her mother, but their ways, for a moment, were divided. By now Eugene was once more in complete possession of his faculties. The old ache had subsided to a dim but colorful mirage of beauty that was always in his eye. Often he had thought what he would do if he saw Suzanne again--what say, if anything. Would he smile, bow--and if there were an answering light in her eye, begin his old courtship all over, or would he find her changed, cold, indifferent? Would he be indifferent, sneering? It would be hard on him, perhaps, afterwards, but it would pay her out and serve her right. If she really cared, she ought to be made to suffer for being a waxy fool and tool in the hands of her mother. He did not know that she had heard of his wife's death--the birth of his child--and that she had composed and destroyed five different letters, being afraid of reprisal, indifference, scorn.

She had heard of his rise to fame as an artist once more, for the exhibition had finally come about, and with it great praise, generous acknowledgments of his ability--artists admired him most of all. They thought him strange, eccentric, but great. M. Charles had suggested to a great bank director that his new bank in the financial district be decorated by Eugene alone, which was eventually done--nine great panels in which he expressed deeply some of his feeling for life. At Washington, in two of the great public buildings and in three state capitols were tall, glowing panels also of his energetic dreaming,--a brooding suggestion of beauty that never was on land or sea. Here and there in them you might have been struck by a face--an arm, a cheek, an eye. If you had ever known Suzanne as she was you would have known the basis--the fugitive spirit at the bottom of all these things.

But in spite of that he now hated her--or told himself that he did. Under the heel of his intellectuality was the face, the beauty that he adored. He despised and yet loved it. Life had played him a vile trick--love--thus to frenzy his reason and then to turn him out as mad. Now, never again, should love affect him, and yet the beauty of woman was still his great lure--only he was the master.

And then one day Suzanne appeared.

He scarcely recognized her, so sudden it was and so quickly ended. She was crossing Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street. He was coming out of a jeweler's, with a birthday ring for little Angela. Then the eyes of this girl, a pale look--a flash of something wonderful that he remembered and then----

He stared curiously--not quite sure.

"He does not even recognize me," thought Suzanne, "or he hates me now. Oh!--all in five years!"

"It is she, I believe," he said to himself, "though I am not quite sure. Well, if it is she can go to the devil!" His mouth hardened. "I will cut her as she deserves to be cut," he thought. "She shall never know that I care."

And so they passed,--never to meet in this world--each always wishing, each defying, each folding a wraith of beauty to the heart.

L'ENVOI

There appears to be in metaphysics a basis, or no basis, according as the temperament and the experience of each shall incline him, for ethical or spiritual ease or peace. Life sinks into the unknowable at every turn and only the temporary or historical scene remains as a guide,--and that passes also. It may seem rather beside the mark that Eugene in his moral and physical depression should have inclined to various religious abstrusities for a time, but life does such things in a storm. They constituted a refuge from himself, from his doubts and despairs as religious thought always does.

If I were personally to define religion I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance; an envelope to pocket him from the unescapable and unstable illimitable. We seek to think of things as permanent and see them so. Religion gives life a habitation and a name apparently--though it is an illusion. So we are brought back to time and space and illimitable mind--as what? And we shall always stand before them attributing to them all those things which we cannot know.

Yet the need for religion is impermanent, like all else in life. As the soul regains its health, it becomes prone to the old illusions. Again women entered his life--never believe otherwise--drawn, perhaps, by a certain wistfulness and loneliness in Eugene, who though quieted by tragedy for a little while was once more moving in the world. He saw their approach with more skepticism, and yet not unmoved--women who came through the drawing rooms to which he was invited, wives and daughters who sought to interest him in themselves and would scarcely take no for an answer; women of the stage--women artists, poetasters, "varietists," critics, dreamers. From the many approaches, letters and meetings, some few relationships resulted, ending as others had ended. Was he not changed, then? Not much--no. Only hardened intellectually and emotionally--tempered for life and work. There were scenes, too, violent ones, tears, separations, renouncements, cold meetings--with little Angela always to one side in Myrtle's care as a stay and consolation.

In Eugene one saw an artist who, pagan to the core, enjoyed reading the Bible for its artistry of expression, and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spinoza and James for the mystery of things which they suggested. In his child he found a charming personality and a study as well--one whom he could brood over with affectionate interest at times, seeing already something of himself and something of Angela, and wondering at the outcome. What would she be like? Would art have any interest for her? She was so daring, gay, self-willed, he thought.

"You've a Tartar on your hands," Myrtle once said to him, and he smiled as he replied:

"Just the same I'll see if I can't keep up with her."

One of his occasional thoughts was that if he and Angela, junior, came to understand each other thoroughly, and she did not marry too soon, he could build a charming home around her. Perhaps her husband might not object to living with them.

The last scene of all may be taken from his studio in Montclair, where with Myrtle and her husband as resident housekeepers and Angela as his diversion he was living and working. He was sitting in front of his fireplace one night reading, when a thought in some history recalled to his mind a paragraph somewhere in Spencer's astonishing chapters on "the unknowable" in his "Facts and Comments," and he arose to see if he could find it. Rummaging around in his books he extracted the volume and reread it, with a kind of smack of intellectual agreement, for it suited his mood in regard to life and his own mental state in particular. Because it was so peculiarly related to his own viewpoint I quote it:

"Beyond the reach of our intelligence as are the mysteries of the objects known by our senses, those presented in this universal matrix are, if we may say so, still further beyond the reach of our intelligence, for whereas, those of the one kind may be, and are, thought of by many as explicable on the hypothesis of creation, and by the rest on the hypothesis of evolution, those of the other kind cannot by either be regarded as thus explicable. Theist and Agnostic must agree in recognizing the properties of Space as inherent, eternal, uncreated--as anteceding all creation, if creation has taken place. Hence, could we penetrate the mysteries of existence, there would still remain more transcendent mysteries. That which can be thought of as neither made nor evolved presents us with facts the origin of which is even more remote from conceivability than is the origin of the facts presented by visible and tangible things.... The thought of this blank form of existence which, explored in all directions as far as eye can reach, has, beyond that, an unexplored region compared with which the part imagination has traversed is but infinitesimal--the thought of a space, compared with which our immeasurable sidereal system dwindles to a point, is a thought too overwhelming to be dwelt upon. Of late years the consciousness that without origin or cause, infinite space has ever existed and must ever exist produces in me a feeling from which I shrink."

"Well," said Eugene, turning as he thought he heard a slight noise, "that is certainly the sanest interpretation of the limitations of human thought I have ever read"--and then seeing the tiny Angela enter, clad in a baggy little sleeping suit which was not unrelated to a Harlequin costume, he smiled, for he knew her wheedling, shifty moods and tricks.

"Now what are you coming in here for?" he asked, with mock severity. "You know you oughn't to be up so late. If Auntie Myrtle catches you!"

"But I can't sleep, Daddy," she replied trickily, anxious to be with him a little while longer before the fire, and tripping coaxingly across the floor. "Won't you take me?"

"Yes, I know all about your not being able to sleep, you scamp. You're coming in here to be cuddled. You beat it!"

"Oh, no, Daddy!"

"All right, then, come here." And he gathered her up in his arms and reseated himself by the fire. "Now you go to sleep or back you go to bed."

She snuggled down, her yellow head in his crook'd elbow while he looked at her cheek, recalling the storm in which she had arrived.

"Little flower girl," he said. "Sweet little kiddie."

His offspring made no reply. Presently he carried her asleep to her couch, tucked her in, and, coming back, went out on the brown lawn, where a late November wind rustled in the still clinging brown leaves. Overhead were the star--Orion's majestic belt and those mystic constellations that make Dippers, Bears, and that remote cloudy formation known as the Milky Way.

"Where in all this--in substance," he thought, rubbing his hand through his hair, "is Angela? Where in substance will be that which is me? What a sweet welter life is--how rich, how tender, how grim, how like a colorful symphony."

Great art dreams welled up into his soul as he viewed the sparkling deeps of space.

"The sound of the wind--how fine it is tonight," he thought.

Then he went quietly in and closed the door.

THE END