The House of a Merchant Prince

XXI.

BY FAR LESS FAVORABLE TO THE PLATONIC THEORY.

WHEN Bainbridge had not appeared for some time, Ottilie grew vaguely restless. After the events last narrated she indulged in an unusual amount of daydreaming about him. How warmly he had bent over her that evening at Mrs. Hastings’; how agitated he had seemed! How the charming domesticity of that occasion had appeared to take hold upon him also ! What had he been intending to say to her ? What had he had in mind to say to her, too, that other evening when she had read the book for him, and he had stammered so over her hand, in thanking her for it? She was almost afraid of the next meeting. The idea of it made her heart throb faster.

Ah, if he might care for her! If it might come about, in some improbable way, she knew not how, that they could always remain together! In the gravity of her twenty-one years, she endeavored to lift the veil of the future. Without Bainbridge in the foreground it all wore a very chilly look. She had before her a useful career, duties to many and to herself; she had not the slightest right to count upon him, and there are so many other matters than those of sentiment for a well-regulated person, such as she desired to be, to think of. Still, a natural bias towards romance was strong within her, and yet unsubdued. She dreamed the sweet dream of young girls, and at some time of all good women, of having a strong protecting arm to shield her from the hardships of the wide, unsympathetic world ; a person to whom she could look up with esteem and even a certain awe, and yet whom she felt that on occasion she could twist about the smallest of her little fingers, He should be so foolishly misguided as to think her an adorable person, even though few others did. He should go in and out about his affairs every day from a home and fireside which she could regulate at her own sweet will, as she had her doll’s house in childhood. All this moved in a fluttering way through her fancy. She could conceive no other figure that fitted so well into her pictures of domestic happiness as Bainbridge.

He did not come, however. She missed him greatly. It could not be that he was engrossed with more important affairs, for she heard of him elsewhere. She knew of his going to Miss Rawson’s, from the information of that lady herself, who came to call on her. Miss Rawson spoke of the Hasbrouck girls, and renewed in Ottilie something like a pang of self-reproach, as if it had been owing to treachery on her part that she had not been able to do anything for them.

Then the visitor chattered about Bainbridge. She dwelt upon his charming qualities. “ I see him now constantly,” she said, watching the effect upon Ottilie, “ though at one time he had almost abandoned me.” She took out some programmes of an entertainment in private theatricals, in which his name was prominently set down for a comic part. It was to be given at her house, and she begged that Ottilie would come.

“ Girls love to have the man in whom they invest their vanities admired,” says the tranquil Coventry Patmore, and probably nothing is truer, but not in this way, with these dangerous airs of proprietorship. Ottilie tortured herself with the idea that it might be Emily Rawson who was the cause of her troubles. She cried over it after the visitor had gone, but then resolutely tried to put the feeling down : “ I will not be so silly,” she declared to herself. Recollecting what had happened before, she wrote to Bainbridge, offering some pretexts for him to come ; but he declined them. Still, his reasons for doing so were plausible, and had not the air of being trumped up, and she did not know what to think.

Then, one day, Bainbridge left a mere formal card at the door without inquiring for her. She had really been at home, and he had not tried to find her. It seemed terribly significant, and she thought herself definitely abandoned.

Shortly after, they met at one of Mrs. Clef’s musicales, to which Ottilie had gone for the first time. It was an evening of the Harmonia Club of amateurs, and Miss Emily Rawson was there and played selections, as on a former occasion. Bainbridge paid her much attention. It was done with a purpose, though, we may confess for him, it almost broke his heart. He was in the very midst of his manful effort to put the incommoding passion down, deal with himself on the philosophic principles and leave Ottilie untrammeled to a better lot than any he could ever provide for her.

He conducted himself towards her, since he could not avoid her, with an elaborate courtesy. “ This New York of ours is such an enormous place,” he said, by way of explaining why it was that he had not been to see her for so long, “ that it defeats itself. One deprives himself of very great pleasures, and is in danger of losing most valued acquaintances, through the sheer impossibility of getting about.”

“ I thought perhaps it might be another — misconception,” said Ottilie bravely, — “ something might need to be explained.”

She made this essay from a sense of duty, with a timid little air of uttering a pleasantry. Bearing in mind the needlessness of their former misunderstanding, she did not think it right that an opportunity by which it might be avoided a second time — though a second time it would have been so much more unreasonable — should be allowed to pass, even if the overture came from herself. She saw an agitated expression overspread the countenance of the young man, and felt that he but left her the quicker for the attempted explanation.

Presently Miss Rawson came, and said to her, “ Do you know that this is the very place where I first heard of you ? Mr. Bainbridge gave me such an entertaining account of you here, the evening after having met you at your uncle’s store. We sympathized together over your peculiar situation.”

They had sympathized together over her! She had afforded them entertainment ! They had had this good understanding, then, long before she was ever heard of! Ah, what a poor, inconsequential person she was, Ottilie thought.

With bitter pangs of jealousy on her side now, she persuaded herself that this was the key to the enigma, this the fatal rivalry in which the destruction of her own happiness was involved. “ In Emily Rawson are united,” she said, “ most of the traits of which he has declared himself in search. Her accomplishments, her fortune, her knowledge of the world, her interest in purely mundane things, her sprightliness and intelligence, would all attract him. As likely as not there was some understanding between them before I came, and it is now resumed. Perhaps I was but a stopgap, a light distraction for him during some interval, some lover’s quarrel.”

She made herself miserable with this notion, though trying all the while to repudiate it. “ If he has used me as a pastime, oh, it was cruel, it was unworthy,” she said, bristling with a certain fierceness, “ and I ought to hate him !”

Then she recalled, to do him justice, that he had addressed her no word or assumption of love further than had been contained in his slight pretense of jealousy of Kingbolt. Upon the contrary, their platonic relation had been expressly defined. Bainbridge had advised and enjoined her to marry on the same mercenary basis that he openly professed himself.

The days passed, and still he did not come. The young girl grew paler and thinner. Her aunt ascribed the deterioration to the languor of opening spring, which was now again at hand. Mrs. Rodman Harvey had little time, however, for close observation of persons of minor importance. Her hands were full of engagements, as usual, and particularly of the wedding of her daughter Angelica, for which the date had been set and the preparations were actively in progress.

Ottilie had fits of weeping bitterly. At times the sense of loss gave her intolerable pain. She thought that it must endure always. She could not conceive it as a possibility that any other person should fill the place of Bainbridge, or that her feeling towards him could ever abate. She had a wild impulse to write to him and pour out her affection in unmeasured terms. Could women never rise to that? Was there nothing better than cold conventionalism and usage ? Perhaps if he only knew how much, how much, she loved him, it might awaken in him — it might palliate a little the unheard-of effrontery of the disclosure. She was almost ready to welcome the penalty of humiliation in his eyes. Was there no sacrifice, no heroic evidence of her affection, she could devise ? Only to let him know of its depth and unselfishness, then to remove herself forever from his sight,— there seemed a certain ideal, desperate hope of satisfaction even in this. Could a woman never rise or fall—if fall it were — to those things ? Must her heart break in silence ? She recalled the case of one Clara La Salle at Lone Tree, whose indelicate defiance of public opinion and infatuation for a lover against the opposition of her parents had been the talk of the place. She felt a tenderness now for this misguided girl, and almost counted herself in the same category.

She did not, however, write to Bainbridge that she could not live without him, being aided to resist, no doubt, by the strength of the popular prejudice against such conduct. Nor did she take any other step overpassing the strictest bounds of maidenly propriety. These little dramas are played out in silence, the anguish lived down. They have their few incoherent moments of manifestation in solitude, in fevers, and in dreams. Ottilie wept, and, rising sometimes to look at her flushed face and swollen eyes in the mirror, said, “ I am a disgraceful, shameless girl.”

The invitations to Mrs. Stoneglass’s literary receptions had been sent (upon a hint given by Bainbridge to that hospitable lady) and declined a number of times. Ottilie felt no longer in a mood for this diversion. One evening Mr. Stoneglass called upon her to offer an invitation in person.

“ We have feared,” he said, “ that you have not cared to come on account of the time being Sunday evening. We have a number of church-going friends who are inclined to feel the same way. Still, it is the most convenient evening on several accounts, and with our way of thinking we cannot bring ourselves to perceive any harm in it. We are to have a special evening, however, on Thursday of this week, for the wellknown authoress, Mrs. Jane Claxton Shaftsbury, of Boston, who will be here. We hope very much that you will come. You will be sure to see there a few, at least, whom you know, and Mrs. Stoneglass and myself will look after you to the best of our ability.”

“ I used to read the books of Mrs. Jane Claxton Shaftsbury in my childhood with pleasure,” replied Ottilie. “ I shall consider it an honor to meet her. I shall be very glad to go, I am sure.”

It would have been almost rudeness, she thought, any longer to decline. At one time she would have hailed such an opportunity with delight. As the guest went down the steps, she stood a moment, pensively, by the window. She leaned her forehead against the sash. It was a warm, damp evening of opening spring, and the window had been raised to cool the room, which was still kept at winter heat by the inexorable self-acting furnace in the cellar. Ottilie saw a dilapidated figure slouch out of the dark spot under a lamp-post, and accost Mr. Stoneglass, apparently asking him for alms. Being repulsed, as it appeared, — for vagrants of the kind were a common annoyance on the Avenue at the time, — it went back into the darkness again.

Presently, as she was turning away, there came by another form, the outlines of which made her heart momentarily stand still, then throb the faster. It was Bainbridge. The vagrant again came forth, and addressed himself to Bainbridge. It could be seen that he had a fine and venerable head. He put his hand on the arm of Bainbridge, and as the young man would have shaken him off in disgust besought, in a voice made part whistle and part croak through the paralysis of drink,—

“ Do something for me, Mr. Bainbridge, for Heaven’s sake! The price of a night’s lodgin’! You was the only one that kep’ me up. You was the one. You ” —

“Gammage! You here?” exclaimed the young man. with a start, showing vivid surprise and concern.

“ They av— avertised for me,” said the respectable wreck, whimpering. “ I had money, — plenty o’ money. I don’t know where I ’ve been. I must ha’ got astray. Do something for me, for Gor A’mighty’s sake! ”

“ What can I do for you, Gammage ? What can anybody do for you in this lost condition ? Do you know where to go, if I give you the price of a night’s lodging ? ”

“ No, I do not, — I do not. Come ! ” cried the man with a desperate air of revolt and loathing at his own lost condition.

“Then what can I do with you, except to get you locked up ? Say yourself, Gammage ! Now, is there anything else possible ? ”

“ Don’t do, it Mr. Bainbridge, — don’t do that! You was the only one — Your mother was the noblest— Your father used to ” —

“ Yes, yes, I kuow ; but that was when you had a house of your own to be taken to, and an affectionate family, and a position in the world. But now what are you ? Had they business for you, — the persons who advertised ? ” he inquired, changing suddenly under the stimulus of a new thought. “ What did they want you to do ? ” He lowered his voice, and turned his head solicitously, for it was in front of the house of Rodman Harvey himself that they had paused.

“ Mr. Onderdonk and Mr. St. Hill ? yes, they wanted me. I signed an affidavit for them. It was on an old matter, — a matter that took place many years ago,” said Gammage.

“ Great heavens ! Not that — that bank story involving Rodman Harvey, — the one you told me at my office one day ? ” cried Bainbridge, with a gesture of repulsion and dismay.

“ I never signed nothing but what was the truth,” answered the ex-bank teller, partially sobered, and resenting with a sulky air the apparent attaching of blame to him.

A public carriage came by at this momem. Bainbridge summoned the driver, who was already waving his whip arm in the air in an inviting way, entered the carriage with his protégé, and drove off.

Ottilie had heard all. She had dwelt dreamily, at first, upon the figure of Bainbridge, acquired half inadvertently this new evidence of his natural goodness of heart in his treatment of the poor wreck, then awakened with a start of affright to the important subject matter of their discourse.

“ It is this ! ” she exclaimed, adding a new and powerful reason to her jealousy of Emily Rawson to explain to herself the defection of Bainbridge. " Oh, I fear it is this ! He knows of something terrible to our detriment, and withdraws in time, before the blow has fallen.” He will not connect himself with disgrace and downfall. Oh, if I could but warn my uncle of what is plotting against him ! ”

With her imperfect information, nevertheless, it was not a subject on which she could write to her uncle. Nor, when he returned on one of his brief visits from Washington, did she find that she dared speak to him with the more freedom. This was his last visit, too, preceding that when he was to come back to attend his daughter’s wedding. Ottilie had found her uncle just and considerate beyond her expectations. If misfortune were in store for him, it seemed her duty to offer the possible solace of her presence and sympathy. If any unlawful act could be dragged up from the remote past, and laid at his door, it could only have been done in one of those moments of overwhelming pressure of which he had sometimes spoken in his comments on the fall of one and another of his contemporaries. She would not believe that he had ever been a corrupt or hardened character.

There was no alleviation for her varied forms of wretchedness. She could only wait. Cold tremors of apprehension for Rodman Harvey and the family name mingled with her tears of despondency on her own account, as snow-flakes are whirled down amid the rain.

The succession of events may now be somewhat rapidly advanced. The Sprowle faction, still unconciliated, had come upon the track of an old story against Rodman Harvey, and begun to follow it up. It developed in importance as the investigation proceeded. It was St. Hill who first brought it in. He had heard it in a vague way from some one who had adduced the builder Jocelyn as authority. St. Hill had thought it worth while to visit Jocelyn; then to hunt up McFadd, in his squalid tenement house in the vicinity of Harvey’s Terrace; and then to take steps for finding Gammage, who he was chagrined to learn, had once been a clerk in his own employ. St. Hill was quite out with his patron Kingbolt now. His company had moved its offices several stories higher up in the Magoon Building, and its transactions were going on in an extremely decreasing ratio. There were numerous persons, including some who had been its employees, who looked at and spoke of the company in the most indignant manner, on account of the loss of money by it. The once brisk Mr. Cutter, who had made such haste to embrace the “ desirable opening ” offered him, still hung on in a disconsolate way in its service, with but small hopes now of recovering either his arrears of salary or the money of the unfortunate Miss Speller, which he had deposited as a consideration for his position. Once, through the mediation of Ottilie, Cutter called on Rodman Harvey, during one of his later visits from Washington, and laid his case before him. Affidavits of some sort were drawn up between them, but these at present resulted in no open manifestation. The merchant prince was still in quest of his post as secretary of the treasury. He considered that he could not yet afford to attack personally, or even to allow to be overthrown at once, an enemy who, in his downfall, could retaliate with disclosures which might still be dangerous.

St. Hill, on the other hand, fearing to use the letters of Harvey in his possession, was willing to devote himself to an investigation along the whole line of his career, in the hope of finding more available material. The date of the threatened bankruptcy, years before, the memory of which appeared to so gall and enrage the merchant prince, seemed a promising point of attack. As the inquiry demanded time and trouble, St. Hill, as has been said, made it a pretext for drawing money from Sprowle Onderdonk.

It was Sprowle Onderdonk who naturally took the leadership of the cabal, and figured, instead of his more timorous cousin, as the champion of the wounded honor of his family. He was a bold and resolute person, and endowed with abundant administrative capacity. Though chiefly sportsman and man of leisure, he was attorney too, and a judge of the quality of evidence. He scoffed at the story in question when it was first brought in by St. Hill, who presented it with an air of elation.

“ A very timely discovery indeed ! ” he said. Why did n't you get something from Herodotus or Pliny the Elder ? And a choice Falstaff’s brigade of witnesses you have to sustain it! If that is the best you can do, man, you had better turn your attention to some more profitable field of labor.”

Finding that St. Hill was accomplishing so little, Sprowle Onderdonk began to show him the cold shoulder, as a good many people were now doing. Still, this idea, for want of a better, was persevered in. Gammage was discovered and his affidavit secured. The advertisement published in the newspapers at last reached him in his remote seclusion, He ventured to town, was well paid for his trouble, and came to the condition of which we have had a glimpse. It was not till a vastly more important accession was gained, in the person of Rodman Harvey’s once devoted henchman, Hackley, that the case looked really promising. The theory of Bainbridge that revenge is not a modern luxury, and that it finds few opportunities for exercise in this tame, civilized life of ours, then bade fair to be overthrown.

Rodman Harvey meanwhile, at Washington, was devoting himself to his new duties with his accustomed energy. His opening speech, on the Currency Question, was highly commended. He took the best apartments at the Arlington Hotel. His dignified attitude much improved his prospects for the succession to the secretaryship of the treasury, the present incumbent of which was still in very uncertain health. Harvey himself declined somewhat in physical vigor. He was a hard-worked man. There were long night sessions at the Capitol, where the ventilation was very bad ; and following these he had some severe attacks of vertigo.

He was obliged to run often to the City, a journey of many hours, which also fatigued him. He was harassed at this time by news of escapades on the part of his younger son. Rodman, Jr., now entered into possession of the desired latch-key, and become a Freshman at Columbia College, was discovered figuring, with some of his mates, by way of a lark, as a “ supe ” in a spectacular drama at Niblo’s Garden. He revolted against the severe discipline with which this act was visited by his father, left the parental roof, and remained absent for several days, being lured home finally by promise of forgiveness.

The elder son, Selkirk, also showed disappointing traits. On the very eve of succeeding to the principal place in the contemplated new partnership, and becoming an important figure in the commercial world on his own account, he begged to be released from commercial life altogether. He made the degenerate proposal that he should he allowed to occupy his time with his books and bricabrac, and perhaps take up some one of the arts or sciences as a pursuit, just as had been done by his friend Blankenhorn. Blankenhorn was a rich young fellow who had gone into painting, not having begun till he was twenty-eight, studied abroad, and really bade fair to achieve results quite worth mentioning. Rodman Harvey would by no means listen to any such idea.

It depressed him very much, however, and was the cause of delaying the formation of the new partnership. Since his son, who should have been its principal promoter, took but so languid an interest, a different order of consideration was required for its proper arrangement, and things were allowed to remain for a while as they were. This state of mind was very Unfortunate, as it turned out, since it resulted in a disagreement with his warm adherent and eulogist, Hackley, and in his final loss and desertion to the enemy.

Hackley was incommoded by the postponements and demurrers when he had been all ready to begin. His factory had been burned behind him, and he was left “standing in the gap,” as he phrased it. This, however, was a comparatively small matter. The main disagreement was about the capital he was to put in. He had lost, he said, by the conflagration of his factory, and made this a pretext for failure to contribute the amount first agreed upon. He confided in the good offices of Rodman Harvey to establish him in his proper place in the new firm all the same; but to this the merchant prince did not agree. He quoted the faithful and experienced Mr. Minn as opposed to a distribution of rank not based upon proportionate capital. Nor would he consent that Hackley should be credited with a part of his own, Harvey’s, capital which was to be left in the concern. He said impatiently, being in a testy mood, that business and sentiment were to be rigidly divorced. He did not understand that the having conferred favors in the past constituted an obligation to go on conferring them indefinitely.

A correspondence on this subject extended over a considerable time, with growing bitterness. Finally, Hackley, in an injudicious huff, not at all expecting to be taken at his word, repudiated the partnership and the acquaintance of Rodman Harvey altogether. Being really taken at his word, however (a new testimony, it would seem, to the freedom of the merchant prince from any sense of guilt that could be within the knowledge of those whom he thus cavalierly treated), he sulked, complained, and spoke of himself as a very ill-used person. It was now that he fell in with the chieftain of the hostile cabal in the person of Sprowle Onderdonk.

The meeting was brought about by the contrivance of the latter, who at an opportune moment sounded Hackley on the remote transaction with which his name, as well as Rodman Harvey’s, was connected. Hackley at first pooh-poohed the idea.

“ Oh, my dear sir, really! ” he protested, as if the notion were wholly preposterous. " He is too strong in the community, you know,” he continued, “ and the matter is so very old. He is at the President’s table continually, and everybody knows that he is the favorite for the successor-ship to the portfolio of the treasury when the secretary drops off, which may happen now at any moment.”

“ So much the better reason,” declared Sprowle Onderdonk, greatly encouraged to find his information not only not dissipated into thin air by Hackley, but confirmed and sustained even in this demurring way. “ He is going down, I tell you. He is going to be smashed. You had better be with us than against us.”

The pair sat on one of the settees along the sides of the marble-paved lobby of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which is filled in the evening with a bustling crowd of men. Sprowle Onderdonk had pushed his hat back upon his head, and gesticulated as he talked with an earnest and resolute air. They spoke of General Burlington, formerly the president of the Antarctic Bank, who they thought must have even a fuller knowledge of the affair in question than Hackley’s own.

“ It is strange,” said Hackley, “ that he has never cared to use it openly, as often as he has been opposed to Harvey, politically and otherwise.”

“ It is intelligible enough,” said the other, seeking a plausible explanation. “ Probably he did not wish to draw attention to the affair, on his own account. The manager of a financial institution never likes to admit that there has been any irregularity in it under his régime. He may have something to clear up himself ; not criminality, of course, but perhaps culpable carelessness. I have taken occasion to sound him a little in a discreet way, but have drawn nothing from him.”

“ He is discretion itself, — Burlington is,” commented Mr. Hackley.

“At the same time,” said the other, “ if he is put on the stand, he will tell what he knows. He is straight and reliable, I think. When the other testimony is all in, he will have to get up and either confirm or deny it ; and it does not look as though there were going to be very much denying.”

“ Oh, there would be no use in going into court with it, and putting anybody in a formal witness box,” protested Hackley ; “ that would hardly do. The matter is too ancient, and must be outlawed and doubly outlawed by this time.”

“ My idea exactly,” said Sprowle Onderdonk. “ Of course not. What we want is the moral effect of it. We must play it against him politically. His present situation makes him excellent game. All we want now is a fitting opportunity, and I have one in mind. The disclosure should be à propos of something. Harvey will come on from Washington in about a fortnight to attend his daughter’s wedding. He has promised to attend at the same time the annual meeting of the Civic Reform Association, which is to be held — probably in one of the private parlors of this hotel — two days before. He is both treasurer and first director, and has to make his report. I am sure he will come. If he should not, of course we can explode the thing in the newspapers.”

“ He is a very methodical person. I dare say he will come,” said Hackley, with a ruminating, anxious air.

“ He will hardly be made secretary of the treasury before that, and if he is afterwards I shall be much mistaken. I also am a member of the Civic Reform Association. I shall make a little speech. I shall give the Harveys a souvenir by way of a wedding present that they will be likely to remember.”

XXII.

AN EVENING IN EITERARY SOCIETY.

The Stoneglass family lived up town, in a comfortable house of the English basement pattern, at a certain remove to the Westward from that first meridian of respectability, the Avenue.

Ottilie Harvey presented herself there, on the Thursday evening of the reception to Mrs. Jane Claxton Shaftsbury, accompanied by her aunt’s maid, who was to return for her in the carriage. The lower floor of the house was devoted to the purpose of dressingrooms for either sex. The guests had deposited their outer clothing in neat bundles along the banks, as it were, before plunging into the stream of social gayety. Stoneglass perceived Ottilie as she was coming up the stair-case, went part way down to meet her, and brought her to his wife, who received her most affably. In a moment more she was presented to the guest of the evening, who stood close by.

It had been said of Mrs. Shaftsbury that she was one of the few literary persons who knew how to dress. The remark was that of the poetess, Mrs. Anne Arundel Clum, who by no means possessed the accomplishment referred to, although she no doubt prided herself upon it; but this did not prevent its being strictly true. Mrs. Shaftsbury really did dress very well indeed, and was a person, besides, of gracious and amiable manners. Ottilie, in a rather dazed way, found herself paying the authoress compliments on her writings, which she had read in girlhood.

“ You must hear this so often,” she said, “ but pray have patience just this once ! It is such an unusual opportunity for me. How could you ever consent to make Miriam’s Memoirs so short ? And oh, why, in Hands and Hearts, did you not let Ernestine marry Eckford ? ” “ Did you really care, child ? ” said the kindly celebrity. “ These are our flatteries. These are our payments. It pleases me so much to think I could have interested you.”

It would have been a great occasion indeed for Ottilie could she have succeeded in controlling the mournful feelings by which she was possessed. What material, had she but been in the mood, for a letter to her early friends of the Lone Tree High School, who had been accustomed, like herself, to put Mrs. Shaftsbury’s books under their pillows at night! She was escorted about the rooms by Mr. Stoneglass and other persons whom he presented to her. She heard fragments of a great variety of conversations. The names of the people she met were very often mentioned in full. These were persons who could not afford to be confounded with anybody else. The names bad a certain important air, even when you did not recognize them. You seemed always on the point of remembering something notable they had done which had for the moment escaped you.

Ottilie encountered within a brief space of time a member of a great publishing house, the name of whose firm is known like a household word throughout the country; Colonel Bowsfield, the South American traveller, who had lectured in the Star course at Lone Tree ; Ringrose, the poet, whose verses she had pasted into her scrap-books ; Professor Brown, whose specialty was the popularization of science; and Professor McMurdock, the Shakespearean reciter, whom she had heard at Chickering Hall. There were Temple, the historian; Camden, an elderly journalist, known somewhat for comic contributions to the magazines, and leading social spirit at the Lotos Club ; Flitchbrush, the painter; a leading tragic actress, and a younger one, equally prominent in “ society ” parts. The actress of tragedy reclined languidly in an easychair, and in the course of the evening recited, in the same position, Mrs. Browning’s Italy. The society actress took pains to shift from one to another of various carefully studied poses, that the lines of her slender figure and excellent profile might be seen to advantage. There was Jane Scrim, who wrote a great deal of matter of small importance with a spiteful tang, and had a termagant air corresponding with her literary style. She was continually flying about from one profession to another, representing each as an extraordinary new departure from all that had ever been done heretofore, and calling upon gods and men to take notice of her and her doings. There was Mrs. Sevenleague, who had published an account of he rexperiences as a traveler, wholly unaccompanied, across Southeastern Bungaleeboo. Count Altamont, a person whose title was somehow shady, though apparently genuine, who posed for traveler, poet, and amateur in all the fine arts, and was more popular with the female sex than with men, was present, and had brought with him a protégé in the shape of an Indian boy, in full feathers and costume of deer-skin. The Count had procured this protégé in the remote wilds of the West, and represented that he proposed to take charge of his musical education.

Mrs. Anne Arundel Clum shook hands with Ottilie. Dr. Wyburd also came forward, and greeted her demonstratively.

“ Yes,” he said, “ you find me here. I should have been very good at this literary sort of thing if I had been allowed to follow it. As it is, I only woo the muse a little, in a fragmentary way, in such poor intervals as I can snatch from my many engrossing occupations. I come here but seldom, yet it is not for want of inclination and desire. The genial companionship of people of letters is tonic and reviving to the mind, which is apt to rust out in our purely fashionable life. It is here, in fact, that I feel myself most at home.”

There were present other journalists with Mr. Camden, as young Mr. Skate, lately become attached to that able review the Slate, the editors in chief of the Musical Tablet, the Art Vignette, — recently started in opposition to the Art Kaleidoscope, — and the Hebrew Exodus. The assembly had a very cosmopolitan air. Mr. Skate, on being presented to Ottilie, said that he rarely came to these places, but his reason was quite different from that given by Dr. Wyburd. It was contempt instead of lack of leisure. He said it was refreshing to find some one to whom he could express a few frank opinions.—some one out of the regular gang. He went on to express his views of the policy in criticism which he endeavored, so far as he was concerned, to carry out in the Slate.

“ I have two short principles.” he said. “ Nothing good can be produced in America. Our civilization is too new and raw. It may appear to be good, but that is an error. On the other hand, nothing very bad can be produced in Europe, which is saved by its centuries of culture, its storied monuments, its naturally profounder way of looking at things. Having thus simplified matters, one merely points out the degrees of badness and goodness, and concentrates upon a neat way of saying things. I would hardly wish this to go outside as coming from me, but I have devoted much thought to the position, and am satisfied of its correctness.”

The Indian boy confided to Ottilie — in response to some little attempt to draw him out, for he was the most notable of the curiosities — that he wore no such clothes at home, and that he had no musical tastes whatever for cultivation. His Reservation was a civilized place, with farms and schools, and his people wore the regular European dress. This theatrical outfit had been prepared for him at a costumer’s in the Bowery. Count Altamont, it appeared, was toting about this extraordinary figure from one reception to another to add to his own importance.

Ottilie wondered that the poet Ringrose should appear so young. He was just beginning to show the first approaches of middle age. She had somehow thought of him as older. He was a nervous, quick-speaking person ; not gloomy, but with a trace as of a permanent trouble on his countenance. He brightened at the compliment she paid him in quoting lines of his which had impressed her in a peculiar way, some years before, and treated her very affably. Perhaps they got none too much praise, after all, these sensitively organized oracles; or was their capacity for it enormous ? Ringrose had letters in his pockets from brother celebrities. He showed Ottilie some of these.

“ Ringrose conducts a correspondence with all the learned of his time,” said Mr. Stoneglass, coming up. “ It is like the age of Erasmus. They condole with each other after their peculiar freemasonry, and despise the profane vulgar as it deserves,”

Ringrose received this sally with a deprecating smile.

“ I have just had a letter from Canto,” he said. “ He incloses me a poem. He wishes me to tell him exactly what I think of it. I think it is the best bad poem I ever saw. It has his usual knack, his deftness; but when you come to look for ideas there is nothing in it. Form alone may do very well for a picture, but not in poetry. For my part, I confess that I like a subject, a story, in my picture, also. It is not the thing to say in these Impressionist days. We had the whole discussion last night at Flitchbrush’s studio. They call ‘story’ in a picture ‘ literary,’ — that is the disparaging epithet they apply to it; but if they can find nothing worse to say of it than that, I remain quite unmoved.” “ An interesting place, Flitchbrush’s,” suggested Mr. Stoneglass.

“ Yes,” said Ringrose. “You should go around to one of his evenings,” to Ottilie; “that is to say, if you are at all of Bohemian tastes, — as I fear you are not. His studio is a remarkable place, decorated with rugs and miscellaneous traps, and full of portfolios of things to look over. People drop in informally of Wednesday evenings, and talk ; and tea is passed about. Mrs. Flitchbrush sits and sews at some bright-colored costume for a lay figure, as a good mother of a family elsewhere might mend the apparel of her children.”

Flitchbrush joined them. “ I was telling them of our discussion of last night,” said Ringrose. Upon this reference, as is so apt to be the case, the self-same discussion was presently renewed with heat.

“ A picture should be decorative before anything else,” said Flitchbrush. “ If it can get a subject that lends itself to decorative purposes, so much the better ; but decorative it must be, at all costs.”

“ Art has a higher mission,” asserted Ringrose.

“ It has its own mission,” rejoined Flitchbrush, “ and no other.”

In an adjacent group it was being disputed whether newspaper criticism should or should not be signed.

“ It should be signed,” declared the historian, Temple.

“It should not be signed,” declared the journalist, Camden.

“ I say it should be signed,” said Temple. He was a small man, with an almost boyish briskness of speech and manner, though he must have reached the age of fifty. He was not a very great historian, but he had made a good position for himself, and he had some excellent ideas. “ It is an insufferable outrage,” he said, “ that some work of mine, over which I have spent months, perhaps years, carefully constructing the plan, elaborating every detail, giving to the whole my best energy and thought, — it is an outrage, I say, that the public estimate of this work should be so largely made by the haphazard dictum of some anonymous penny-a-liner, who has nothing to lose by printing the first rubbish that comes into his head, and with the weight of a great newspaper behind him. He may even be a competent person, and only tired, cross, or hurried at the time of writing; or he may be incapable of forming any opinion entitled to respect. All the same, in it goes, whatever it be, and a bias is created in the minds of fifty thousand people, which is not recovered from, perhaps, in a generation or two. Suppose the subject be a new play. The critic hurries away from it, yawning, somewhat before midnight. He wants to go to bed. Discriminating writing is by no means easy, at the best. His article must go in in the morning. lie is responsible to no one. Why should he earn his salary in a difficult way when an easy way will do ? He damns or praises at his own sweet will. His only rule is to be quick about it. No, let the opinions be signed. If they amount to anything, they will stand upon their own merits; if not, they will be estimated, like the traditional kick from the mule, according to the source whence they come.”

“ A newspaper man’s life would not be worth the having, under those conditions,” protested Mr. Camden. “ He could not show himself, for scowling looks, when generally he had done no more than his duty.”

“I sign everything I write,” said the belligerent Miss Scrim. “ I put my town, county, and street address to it. They always know where to find me, if they want to.”

“It would create a school of criticism, and give such criticism its part in literature,” continued Temple. “ Reputations would be made in it. Look at the school of critical writers that has arisen in France under this system.”

Mr. Stoneglass talked to Ottilie of the fine qualities, as a man and a citizen, of her uncle. He certainly hoped to see him soon in the treasury department.

Colonel Bowsfield made some mention to her of his experiences while in the service of the Khedive of Egypt. Mrs. Sevenleague, who had lately returned from a career in London society, gave her an account of Browning, Swinburne, and others, and of a new American writer lately gone there, who was said to be making a great stir.

“ Is he as bright as the conversations in his books ? ” asked Ottilie.

“ We met him at Lady Ludgate Hill’s,” her informant said. “He talked exclusively about the weather.”

Mrs. Sevenleague also said of a leading English novelist of the younger school, “We saw a great deal of him when in lodgings in London. He was quite devoted to a young lady of our party. At one time it looked almost like an engagement.”

Ottilie could hardly believe that this was real; that it was indeed she who was listening to such talk and having such experiences. She was hearing at first hand of the very greatest personages, the figures to whom her imagination had always gone out with admiring reverence, from others who actually knew them. But she was accepting it all in a dazed way. She was forcing a forlorn interest, instead of kindling with enthusiasm. A little while ago it would not have been possible for anything to be more to her liking, but now the virtue had somehow gone out of it.

“ These wretched little human affections of ours, how engrossing they are ! ” she sighed. “ Of what possible consequence is this feeling of mine in the universe, and yet it rises up and eclipses the whole of it.”

The one person in all the world with whom she could best have enjoyed the new experience, the one who would have best caught its quaint humors, its contrasts, its fresh and typical aspects, was ruthlessly torn from her by fate. A sense of this grew so keen as to be at moments almost intolerable. It seemed that the hour of departure would never come. She looked often to see if Rosine were not in waiting with her cloak below.

Temple, planting himself squarely before her, said, “What do you do? I think I have read your poems. It is always fair to ask that question at Mrs. Stoneglass’s. Everybody here is supposed to have done something of note.”

Ottilie felt her fraudulent position, in trying to pass on equal terms in a circle of such distinction, to be at length justly exposed.

“I — I only appreciate, a little,” she stammered.

But the apparent severity of the brisk little historian proved only a part of his manner, and not intended for offense. Finding that he had an excellent listener, he talked to her diffusely a long time. It was entertaining talk for the time, though exclusively relating to himself. Presently he accosted the member of the great publishing house on the subject of a proposed new volume, for which he, Temple, desired peculiarly advantageous terms. This led to a wrangle in a half-humorous way upon the mooted question of the disproportion between the profits of the publisher and the author.

“ You grind the faces of the poor,” said Temple. “ You seize the lion’s share, and put off the author, the real producer, without whom you could not exist, with a beggarly pittance.”

“ I can demonstrate to you,” said the publisher, “ that the ten per cent. received by the author really comprises the larger share of profits.” And he began in an elaborate way to demonstrate.

“ That is all very well, all very well,” cut in Temple, who had often argued the case before, both on one side and the other; “ but meanwhile the author starves in his garret, and you roll hither in your carriage.”

“ I would have you to know that I came in a horse-car,” said the publisher testily.

“ And I on foot,” said the brisk historian, with a triumphant air, both of having established his position and had the last word.

From time to time the hostess, Mrs. Stoneglass, implored silence, either by a gesture of her own or the aid of some polite masculine volunteer, and introduced a performer, for the more general entertainment of the company. During the pauses, a very dark young woman, who sat beside Ottilie, favored her with some particulars as to her early education, taste in books, and the like. She seemed rather young to have attained distinction on her own account, and Ottilie set her down as allied to it by some family tie.

“ From my earliest years,” she said, “my family took pains to gather about me only the most intellectual and refined minds. I have never known what it is to associate with anybody not intellectual. My taste in literature has been formed in the same way. I care for no characters in books who would not be suitable companions for me in real life. My father was a man of the greatest talent. You must have heard of him, — Chester A. Skadge. He wrote poems, plays, essays, everything. But he esteemed more than all his old family name.”

“ Here too ? ” thought Ottilie. And she said sweetly, “ Oh, I am sure he must have been quite right,” which caused the young woman of such exceptional advantages to dart at her a look of suspicion.

A small, gentle-speaking lady on the other side — who did not prove as gentle as she seemed — confided to Ottilie her opinion of the American fiction of the time.

“ It is very little, very pretty, very nice, very dainty,” she said, joining a thumb and finger to aid in expressing the idea. “ But when you look for breadth, for scope, fire, magnificence of conception, what a disappointment! Why do they give us no great, noble, typical women ? And what do they do, these insignificant characters ? Nothing in the world but sit around and talk. Or, if they do not talk, they think. Not an incident, not a circumstance, of any extraordinary sort! ”

“ Is it not pleasant to see life as it is, — I mean the best part of it, — to have the writers try to find the poetry and romance around us in every-day things ? ” ventured Ottilie. “ I am sure it is as genuine as if it existed in a remote age, or under some very exceptional circumstances. And I sometimes think that there is nothing more charming, either in books or out of them, than just the right kind of conversations.”

Having got thus far, she stopped in trepidation. Had she actually the temerity to think of contradicting such people as this ?

Some of the performers brought forward by Mrs. Stoneglass were musical. Among others appeared Wilhelmina Klauser, daughter of the confidential agent through whose stratagem Ottilie had been first introduced to her uncle’s notice. The German girl had developed, it seemed, a talent quite out of the common, which caused her to be in much demand. Her blonde hair was bound up in fillets, like that of a classic nymph. She was retiring by nature, but her music inspired her. Seated at the piano, she dashed off her selection with an almost masculine vigor.

The most, however, were of the histrionic order. Recitations seemed an amusement much in vogue. The distinguished tragic actress kindly gave something, as has been said. Professor McMurdock, the Shakespearean expositor, followed. Count Altamont placed himself crosswise on a chair for a steed and pretended to be a cavalier engaged in some remarkable exploit. The poem in which this was set forth was, he said, his own. When he had finished Mrs. Stoneglass gave a little ecstatic cry. “ How lovely ! How perfect! ” she said, and clapped her hands.

She liked to encourage her performers, and keep them in an obliging vein. She congratulated the Count also on his poem, saying, —

“ Authors, we know, like pretty women, must he flattered.”

“But when one is both author and pretty woman, then what is to be done ? ” returned the Count, with a languishing glance. It was such speeches as these, perhaps, that gave him his popularity with the fair sex.

In a corner apart by themselves stood a little group of rising poets, who, with talent and ardor, were not without some of the eccentricities of youth and of their profession. It was whispered to the hostess that young Mr. Edson Judson, of this group, had a poem in his pocket, which he had delivered with great acceptance to the circle at a dinner at a restaurant, just before their coming hither. Mrs. Stoneglass thereupon insisted that Mr. Judson should repeat the performance, and he allowed himself to be persuaded. He announced to the company in a few dignified words of preamble that science was his chosen source of inspiration. He would make no secret of his belief that modern science afforded a deeper and truer inspiration than any that effete systems of the past could boast of. His poem was an ode entitled Vortex Atoms. It had a sufficiently learned air, but was not quite as lucid as poems very often are.

A Mr. Okenberg, described to her as a promising writer of short stories for the magazines, was introduced to Ottilie. He had a lively, rather caustic way of talking. He appeared to enter into her situation, and to find that she might be interested in some explanations of curious phases of things about her.

“ That is James Edson Judson,” he said of the young poet who had just finished. “ He is a broker. He turns those things off instead of attending to business. He has been dubbed, by some friendly hand, a ‘ poet of the future,’ and delights in the title. His best things, however, are not done in pursuance of any theory.”

Mr. Edson Judson meanwhile retired to his circle, and was received by them with beaming countenances. He had taken occasion, before retiring, to mention to Mrs. Stoneglass that in his opinion the poem of Mr. George Gladwin Ludlow, delivered at the same dinner, was, in its way, even better than his own. Mr. George Gladwin Ludlow was, upon this, invited forward in his turn. His effusion was of a gloomy, suicidal cast.

“ If the other two members of the group are asked to recite,” Mr. Okenberg went on, “ Wixon will give comic squibs; the other—but no, Hurlpool will never be allowed to recite. They are all connected with the press, in one way and another, or pursue the journey to Parnassus in the intervals of arduous occupations. They rarely come here. I don’t know what brings them out tonight. As a rule they look down upon such [daces. They take their pleasure in less trammeled, Bohemian fashion. Each has his specialty. Just as that of Judson is science, of Ludlow suicide, of Wixon comic squibs, the grand specialty of Hurlpool is to fly in the face of all the received proprieties of civilization. He is a literary Ajax defying the lightning. He seems determined to be original, at any price. He is great on orientalisms, and on renditions of Scripture in an easy fashion of his own. His Verbiage blazes with light and color. He says that the bane of American letters is the preposterous deference shown to the conventional ‘ young person.’ He would have all departments of life thrown open as material for literature. He declares that he would have literature made for adults, and not for babes in arms, and sighs that he was not born a Frenchman. Perhaps he is not as bad as he seems. He has an excellent warm heart for his friends, they say, and he looks at himself with a kind of innocence. In the clique his effusions are received without especial objection. The theory most in vogue among them is that of art for art’s sake. One subject is looked upon as about as good as another. The members have their little eccentricities of appearance, as you see. The literary Ajax cultivates a smile of calculated brightness ; the poet of the future, the raven locks and slouch hat of a murderer in a melodrama ; the suicidal poet, the blonde beard and spectacles of a socialist philosopher of Montmartre. The humorist alone is dapper and clean-cut. It is a saving grace, after all, this humor ; it keeps one out of a multitude of scrapes.”

A long-haired, elderly man, much more eccentric in aspect than any of the clique described, now approached. “ Here comes Chalker,” said Okenberg. “ He says that ‘the genius is half d—d fool,’ and you may be sure that he counts himself a genius. He is running at his own expense a weekly called the Scroll. He maintains that it is needed to keep in order, and eventually supplant, the Slate. He is extremely sanguine about it. It is crammed with vagaries. If the Slate has its vagaries also, they are at least based upon a keen, worldly wisdom. Chalker is engaged upon a great work of what he calls hypothetiical characterizations. He tells me that he will examine what kind of a figure various personages of history would have made in other professions than those which they actually adopted. Thus he will show what sort of a novelist or playwright Napoleon would have made ; how Turner would have led armies, and Beethoven managed a paint-pot.

“ I think I know of a couple of new subscribers for you, Chalker,” he said to the object of this description.

“ Don’t bring me subscribers, my dear young friend,” returned Mr. Chalker. “ But if you have a couple of new ideas, bring them in. That is what we want.”

The recitations were resumed. The professional elocutionists of the masculine sex were distinguished by having their faces clean-shaven, to secure the greatest play of expression. One of them imitated musical instruments and the sounds of animals ; then mimicked leading actors and personages in public life. It appeared that the young lady who had described to Ottilie her fastidious bringing up by the late Chester A. Skadge also possessed the elocutionary talent. She went forward to the middle of the room, stood a few moments with a portentous fixity, and suddenly burst forth : “ Oh ! young Lochinvar is come out of the west.”

Her eyes were opened to their widest and fiercest at the preliminary “ Oh-o-o,” but this was followed, with the “ young Lochinva-ar,” by a capacious smile. Her words were accompanied by gesticulation, after the Delsarte system. The selection seemed almost like a herald’s flourish of trumpets to usher in an important new arrival.

Lanes, or rifts, occasionally opened through the crowd. All at once, down such a lane Ottilie, discovered Bainbridge. He had apparently just come up the stairs, and was shaking hands with the hostess. The lane closed again. He had not discovered Ottilie. She turned pale, and leaned for a moment against the wall. She had opportunity to recover herself, however, before he came up, some little time afterwards. Mr. Okenberg was once more talking to her, and she was standing up. Camden the journalist, Ringrose the poet, and others were close by. Bainbridge wore a preoccupied air, as if looking for somebody.

“ Ah,” he said, touching Camden’s arm, “ have I found you ? I have been at your lodgings. They said that you would probably be here.”

He did not observe at once the presence in which he stood. He awoke to it, with a start. He endeavored to cloak this, as the custom is, against the suspicions of the others by an assumption of indifference. He finished in a word or two the business he had with Camden, and then spoke with Ottilie. As a new-comer, the rest gave him the young lady a moment to himself, though still maintaining their places. He politely inquired for her impressions. There were topics enough for conversation in the novel scene. Ottilie had schooled herself to reply impassively. Nothing is more chilling to the expansions of illregulated affection than dread of the disdain of its object. In the presence of Bainbridge she was phenomenally calm. But she kept her glance averted.

“ They are not all as friendly in speaking about one another as I had supposed,” suggested Ottilie. “ Several of them have abused Mrs. Shaftsbury, the guest of the evening, to me, though I think very highly of her. Two of these in turn have afterwards abused each other.”

“ The axiom might be laid down that people who are equal to disliking the same thing are not necessarily equal to admiring each other,” said Bainbridge.

They spoke of some of the more pronounced individualities. “ They have ideals of their own in personal appearance, you see,” said Bainbridge, hardly caring how his words ran. “ They desire to establish a correspondence between their looks and their exceptional positions. They take their profession with a profound seriousness,— wish us to think they make a sort of priesthood of it.” “ It is a rank charlatanism, and makes me sick,” said Okenberg, overhearing. “ If I were a poet, I should model myself upon a butcher-boy in appearance. The technical poet, the technical thinker, the technical anything, is my aversion. Poetry is the singing voice of the soul as opposed to its common speech. Most all of us have our little touch of it somewhere. Whether a man have in him more or less of it, it is not a reason why he should make a guy of himself. Poetry, thought of any kind, is not conjured out from under a particular kind of hat, as if it were a trick in legerdemain. I tell you there are reputations that consist entirely of an uncouth name, a cloak, and a slouch hat, and nothing else.”

“ Charlatanism or not, it is probably What the public prefer,” said Bainbridge. “ We do not like to think that our ideas are furnished us by exactly the same order of beings as ourselves. Given a sufficient difference in appearance and manner of doing things, and we half delude ourselves into the belief that we are dealing with a race of a foreign and mysterious sort.”

“ I saw you talking with Mrs. Plumfield,” said Ringrose to Ottilie, — “ the gentle-looking little lady, of positive opinions, who has just turned this way. She gave you her opinion of American fiction, I dare say ? ”

“Yes,” assented Ottilie, in surprise.

“ She asks why there are no great, noble, typical women in it,” interrupted Okenberg. “ I am sure I can't tell her, considering how very common they are in real life. You ladies are great extremists. You want in a novel one of two things. Either there must be a heroine of portentous seriousness, who performs none but the most magnanimous deeds, or else she must be continually tearing her clothes climbing fences, and seen in this condition, with unkempt hair and face stained with blackberries, by the discriminating young man who is to be come the arbiter of her fate. Now that I have ascertained what you need, however, I propose to conform to it and turn it to pecuniary account. I conceive a compromise or union which shall capture all suffrages at once. My next heroine shall be a Joan of Arc who is first discovered sliding down the banisters.”

“ I detest compromises,” said Miss Jane Scrim, catching only this word.

Mr. Okenberg looked as if he moderately detested Jane Scrim.

“ I hope that you will take more kindly, then, to my second great original idea,” he said. “ It is purely philanthropic. It is a plan to ameliorate the condition of elderly spinsters, a hardlyused race both in fiction and out of it. I consider it worth oceans of platform agitation.”

“ Yes ? ” inquired Miss Jane Scrim fiercely.

“ Let us combine to slowly but surely advance the ages of our heroines. Thus my last heroine was nineteen. My next shall be twenty-two, the next twentyseven, the next thirty, and so on. The charming time of maidenhood, the ideal period for first love and matrimonial sentiment, may thus be made to extend, say, to fifty.”

Ottilie did not quite like this. “ Mrs. Plumfield thought that our fiction was deficient in incidents,” she said, by way of diversion.

“ Nobody will make that complaint about her story,” said Mr. Okenberg. “ She has written a novel, too. — per haps you may not know it. She hawked it around to all the publishers, and then printed it at her own expense. Not that that is anything against it, for about the last man in the world to know a good thing when he sees it is a publisher. It is crammed with murders, abductions, and explosions of nitro-glycerine. The hero has ‘a throat like a marble column,’and lives in a bandbox, and his name is Cyril Gurle.

“ The ' incident ’ school has gone out,” pursued Okenberg. “ We have come to understand, with Schopenhauer, that ‘ the rank of a novel is according as it depicts more the inner and less the outer life.’ Mental and moral incidents, as read in their effect upon character, are vastly more worthy objects of contemplation than runaway horses and exploding locomotives.”

“ And are the other kind to be ruled out altogether ? ” asked Ottilie.

“ Nothing is to be ruled out; but writers will naturally be graded according as they cater to a childish taste for marvels or to something more enlightened. There is a rank of physical incidents, too. There are plenty of happenings which are strange, poetic, stimulating to the imagination, and worthy of interest in themselves, just as are lovely people, places, and aspects of nature. The other day two ocean steamers passed each other in a fog so thick that neither could be seen from the other’s deck, yet so near that voices could be heard from one to the other. I call that a good incident. Put the heroine on board one, the hero on the other; see ? He hears her voice as if out of the air. It is some critical turn in their affairs ; see ? That would be equal to a proportionate space of any but the best of my or Blank’s conversations. No, on the whole, nothing, or almost nothing, should be ruled out. ‘ Hitch your wagon to a star ! ’ Hitch it to the great passions, the forces of nature, the feelings of weirdness and mystery that stir dimly in every human breast. The work must be done with the broad Homeric touches, too, as well as the fine ones, if it expects to live. It must not be too civilized, too sophisticated. Over-sophistication is possibly going to be the next vice of our literature.”

“ The bane of our literature is the caprice of magazine editors,” broke in Bowsfield, the traveler. “ There ought to be a point where one should be beyond their veto and control. Does anybody suppose for one moment that I would send an article to one of them that I thought unworthy of my reputation ? The current dictation should be resisted to the utmost. Let the writer be true to himself; that is all that is needed. Let him judge himself. Look at Wordsworth. Immediate recognition is no test of merit. Wordsworth was the best judge of Wordsworth ; Camden is the best judge of Camden; you, Okenberg, of Okenberg; and I, of myself.” Colonel Bowsfield struck himself proudly on the breast.

“ One bane of American letters, probably, as of American art,” said Okenberg, “is the abject reverence for everything European. We are not seeing enough with our own eyes. A curious thing, because we have been accustomed in so many books and pictures to scenes laid abroad, we have fallen into the way of thinking that almost the only proper place for them. We do not sufficiently reflect that the foreign writers and picture-makers use the people, the streets, the scenes, of every-day life about them. Supposing they too thought it necessary to go abroad for their material: whither would they repair? Perhaps to us. The London of Dickens, the Paris of Victor Hugo, are their own most familiar stamping-grounds. I profess myself the implacable foe of Europe. Let it have a care ! The best literature and the best art are always home-inspired.”

Thus the talk went on. Ottilie had but a small part to take in it, being appealed to occasionally by the speakers ; but with what an intelligence she answered! Perhaps the others saw in her a trace of the sadness she could not wholly conceal, and purposely tried to divert her from it. Bainbridge had conquered his flushings and paleness. His eyes wandered yearningly over her face. He thought he had never known her so thin before. Could it be that she had suffered on his account? To what advantage she appeared in every company ! He had been well along on the road towards freedom, as he deemed, He relapsed now into slavery with a headlong impetus. He must have speech with her. He began to devour her with his eyes. He would have liked to seize her in his arms, there in the midst of them all, and bear her away from out their senseless babble, as is said to be the custom, as part of the matrimonial preliminaries, among some barbarous tribes.

“ You must not judge us too hastily, you know,” said Mr. Okenberg, choosing to represent Ottilie as an investigating person, whose mission it was to severely formulate literary society. “Perhaps you have n't seen the best of us. You must come again, and often. A new-comer is apt to see the odd features first, and judge all the rest accordingly. Our entertainers are the nicest people in the world, but all sorts of persons turn up here. One sometimes has to think, too, that the literary faculty, instead of being a form of strength, is weakness. If we really understood life, we should command it, reap its principal rewards, comfortably live it, instead of passing our time in wisely dissertating about it. You have seen the preposterous egotism and conceit of some of us. There are persons here who would talk you to death about their own superlative genius with a gusto. There are people with every apparent advantage in the world, who know no more of Chesterfield than if they had been brought up in the heart of Africa, — and some of them call themselves thinkers, the more ’s the pity.”

“ I think I would draw it a little milder,” suggested Mr. Camden. “ It will not do to unfold the dark secrets of our prison-house all at once. You will frighten our visitor away, and that would be a serious calamity,” he added, with a gallant bow. “ I am not the ill-natured critic you affect to think,” Ottilie thought it necessary to disclaim. “It all pleases me very much. I am only too flattered to be allowed to be here.”

“ Well, there are ideas,” said Okenberg, taking the back track, “ plenty of them, bubbling and seething. It is better than stagnation, after all. The people have something to them more than what mere money will buy. I don’t know but I have patience with most of them, except Bolster. Bolster is literary, as the Irishman played the violin, ‘ by main strength.’ He has money, and publishes a volume every year at his own expense. He has never known what it is to have a single unaffected human impulse or turn of expression. In manner and matter alike he sets your teeth on edge. And yet he passes, in a certain way, for a literary man. Publishers ought to be held to pains and penalties for such things.”

Bainbridge drifted away from the group, proposing to seek a favorable opportunity to return to it and secure Ottilie to himself. The group dissolved presently, in the shifting way in which things pass in such assemblies. Ottilie exchanged some words with Wilhelmina Klauser. The later news of the FinleyCutter case from Harvey’s Terrace was told her.

“ Miss Finley is worse,” said Wilhelmina. “ She goes about crying and saying that she is losing her mind. Mrs. Cutter, her former friend, has shown her but little sympathy. She pretends to be indignant that anybody could suppose that her husband could do anything wrong. Perhaps it really was not so much his fault that he lost the money; that is, perhaps it was not intentional. He may have been taken in.

I have heard that he has been to see prominent persons to find out if there is not some way of getting redress.”

“ He has seen my uncle,” said Ottilie. “ I think that something will be done.”

The knot of minor poets were now discussing with heat the problem whether the genius is in advance of his time, or only in the very midst of it, and serving as its mouth-piece and essential expression. There was no uncertain implication that this was a question in which they all had a personal interest. This was mingled with talk as to the characters of editors, the rates of payment in various quarters, and the rise of journals.

Elsewhere, a group of young playwrights considered the decline, or rather the failure to arise, of the American drama. It was laid to the hopeless incompetency, and fiendish arts in suppressing native merit, of the managers. A member of the group, whose claim to authority was founded upon the dramatization of a poor French novel, which ran two nights in the country, described his method of writing.

“ I have a miniature theatre of pasteboard,” he said, “ on which I arrange everything in advance. I see then just how it is going to look. I fix even my exits and entrances. When I have once established a certain exit or entrance, no manager under heaven shall change it.”

“ He has read me some of his things,” remarked Camden to a neighbor. “ I recollect one in particular ; a comedy, he called it. He laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks, and positively there was not a touch in it to provoke the faintest smile.”

Ottilie heard both this remark and that of the boastful aspirant by which it was called out. She was standing by the piano. The case of pathetic hardship of which she had heard from Wilhelmina had increased her own sadness, and at the same time appeared to show it as selfish.

“ I make my own griefs,” she sighed;

“ those of others are made for them.”

Bainbridge came up to her once again. At length they were alone. " How well Mr. Okenberg talks ! ” Ottilie threw out, by way of a suggestion of converse to break an impending awkwardness.

“ He is somewhat of the order of that potentate who ' never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one.’ He does not always carry out his good ideas in his writing. Still, he has time before him,” responded Bainbridge.

He fidgeted, looked to the right and left, then suddenly said, in a changed, almost husky tone, “ I wish you would come and sit down with me a little while. There is something I want to say to you. I can find places.”

“ I do not think I ought to,” Ottilie murmured ; but opposition died on her lips, and she followed him. He led the way through the crowd to some chairs by the wall, in a corner. The people standing up and moving about in front of them insured a sort of privacy for their interview.

“ I did not know that you were here,” began Bainbridge. “ I had not the slightest idea of it. I thought you would have accepted an invitation earlier in the season. It is only by the merest accident that I am here myself. I had to find Mr. Camden, in connection with a piece of work I am doing for his paper, and I was directed to this place. It is going to make the greatest difference to me that I have come. I have something I must say to you.”

“ If it be to account for your extraordinary keeping away from me, of late,” said Ottilie faintly, “ perhaps it is quite in order.”

“ I did not expect to see you,” the young man went on, repeating himself in his agitation. “ I had made up my mind not to see you.” Ah, he had made up his mind not to see her. “ Do you know why I stayed away ? ”

“No,” answered Ottilie. “I thought perhaps — It was said — The report went around—that you were engaged to Miss Emily Rawson.”

“ What nonsense ! ” he cried indignantly, half starting up. And yet, perhaps indignation was not greatly called for. His own conduct had given excellent color to such a report. He was somewhat cooler upon this, and acted with greater self-possession.

“Well,” he said, “ I have been trying the severest experiment of my life.

I have been trying to see what sort of a martyr I should make, But I am not the stulf for martyrdom. I recant, I retract my errors, or am perhaps ready for worse ones. The rack and thumb-screw frighten me. Had it ever occurred to you that I might be in love with you ? ”

“ No,” said Ottilie with a violent start, opening her fan to aid in concealing her emotion.

“You had not thought that all that pretty intercourse, that charming friendship of ours, was, on my side, love, — that it was bound to result in it ? You made me so unspeakably fond of you that”—

“ How ? I made you so fond of me ! ” she interrupted to ask. These were the dearest words she ever had heard, in all her life, and they gave her a feeling almost of faintness, but she had answered as if refuting some kind of aspersion upon her character.

“ Simply by being what you are, — the loveliest character, the most beautiful and adorable being, in the world. Simply by giving me your companionship, by letting me be with you.”

And all this had to go on with bated breath, and no other demonstrations than such as would have been proper to conversation on the most ordinary topics. Bainbridge bore with difficulty the enforced restraint. He would have liked to sink literary and all other society, for the time being, to the bottom of the sea.

“ I am not at all adorable,” returned Ottilie, “ nor of an amiable character,— if you only knew me. Nor am I beautiful ; I have never been told so. My mirror informs me too truly on that point. And there are excellent reasons why I ought not to let you talk to me in this way. I must not listen to you.”

“ I knew that I should never be able to see you again without telling you all. Now you have heard it. To pass your house, even to walk in the direction of it, to call you to mind, has given me thrills and pains of the heart. I must show what I have been through. I am completely unstrung. I am good for nothing.”

“ Then why did you keep away ? ”

“Because I was magnanimous. Now that I have relapsed into my selfishness again I have come back. I tried to sacrifice you to your own best good. I have never made a secret of my worldly circumstances to you. At the last period of our intimacy they had become notably worse than ever, and so I took myself off. I wanted to do nothing to interfere with your prospects, the brilliant match you might well enough make. You recollect how we talked of these subjects in the summer. When I thought Kingbolt was making up to you, I tried in the same way to give him a clear field, though I was tortured with a jealousy I cannot describe.”

“ And you were really jealous of Kingbolt ? ”

The insensate, delightful idea! The blood again coursed warmly through all her chilled members.

“Madly. And since then I have been jealous of all the world. The advice I gave, the principles we laid down, are as good as ever ; but oh, I love you so dearly that I have not been able to prevent myself from coming to you with a foolish proposition. I have come to ask you to be mine, in spite of all that we have said; to try and conceive an existence from the romantic point of view, without all of those things that we may both have thought so necessary. It is better that I should have made you this offer, at any rate. Now you have but to refuse me. I shall have the comfort, at least, of knowing that I have done all I could.

“ There is just one ray of light,” he went on, before Ottilie, gasping for breath in her agitation, could begin ber answer. He spoke now with a nervous haste, as if to postpone as long as possible the adverse decision he dreaded, though the instant before he had professed himself resigned to it. “ A letter has reached me to day, which may prove of significance. It informs me that my absconding debtor and quondam friend of former years, of whom I once told you, has turned up in Denver, with the appearance of being quite a prosperous person. He is thought to have met with success in mining and to be a wealthy man. In that case I shall be able to recover what is due me, — a comfortable sum to begin the world on. I am going to take a journey thither; who knows what may come of it? And besides,” he continued, as if not willing to have the decision rest wholly upon so problematic a resource, and with a boastful air new to him, “ I shall presently get a large practice. I must. Fortune cannot always run in the same groove; and when it turns it can turn in but one way.”

It touched Ottilie deeply to see him almost humiliate himself before her, like this. But she too was revolving certain ideas in her head.

“ No,” she said ; “ this is a sudden impulse. It is against the sober judgment you had formed. Let us renew our former friendship. That will do, will it not ? ”

“ It is too late for friendship. It never was friendship. I have analyzed it thoroughly.”

“ You exaggerate what you are pleased to call my brilliant prospects; and you greatly disparage yourself,” returned Ottilie. “ You are good enough for anybody. You must not think that it is reasons of a mercenary kind that influence me. I esteem it a very, very great honor you do me, — I say it most truly, — but I am obliged to decline. I cannot marry you.”

“ Oh, do not say that! Oh, why ? ” he pleaded in a wretched way. “ Then you have never cared for me ? ”

“ On the contrary, I have cared for you, and I do like you, very, very much. There, I am glad to have you know that, though it must not alter what I have said.”

For the first time the people in the vicinity may have had a slight suspicion that these two were not talking exclusively about the weather.

“ Drop your hand by your side a moment, by your skirt. Let me take it in token of gratitude for even so much,” Bainbridge begged. “ They will not see. Just an instant! ”

“ They will see. I am very foolish,” she said, as if to herself, in consenting. “ There ! there ! ” and she drew the hand away from his ardent pressure with some difficulty.

She continued firm, nevertheless, in the refusal she had returned. She also had secretly her ideals of duty and selfsacrifice, and they were perhaps higher than his. She recalled perfectly well what his theory of a comfortable, even a tolerable, existence was. She had no right to take advantage of an injudicious enthusiasm to hamper him, and possibly prevent its realization forever.

Bainbridge asked for whys and wherefores, putting himself forward as a person excellently adapted to the comprehension of good reasons. She incautiously relented so far as to furnish him with some suggestion of those above named. He demolished them with a fierce energy. Ottilie was driven into her intrenchments. Unless the garrison had resources not yet drawn upon, it seemed in imminent danger of being forced to haul down its colors.

The hostess came bustling along at this moment, and, before she could be hindered, begged to present another candidate for the honor of her acquaintance. Usage demanded that Bainbridge should yield to the new-comer. He did so with an ill grace, but kept near, trusting to Ottilie to recall him.

Fragments of discourse from adjoining circles were heard. Mr. Okenberg said, “ I shall put such and such a character through about ten thousand words.” “ I shall write on that subject six thousand words,” and used other similar jargon of his craft. He was throwing out hints and suggestions of plots which he proposed to use in his stories.

“ I should have been very good at story-writing,” said Dr. Wyburd, with much complacency. “ I should have drawn a great deal upon real life. I have had the fortune to fall in with such a variety of experiences.”

He began to give specimens by way of establishing the character of his material. “ You alter, of course, and magnify any given incident to suit your own purposes ? ” he said.

“Yes,” assented Okenberg. “We could not get along without that.”

“ Well, there was my friend and patient, old Colonel Kingbolt, for instance, who was killed by the wind of a shot, you may say. Nothing ever actually hurt him. He was notified of a forgery of his name in a New York bank. The bank telegraphed him, ' Have you issued such and such acceptances, now in our hands ? ’ — date and amount given, but no name. He telegraphed back a negative, and demanded details, but these were refused. Renewed applications met with no better success. He then got it into his head that there was some infamous plot against his credit, and so allowed himself to be worried to death. It was rather curious they should have refused the particulars to a person of the colonel’s importance. They passed it off as an error of some kind in the bank. This might be represented as one of those cases you read about, where the facts are suppressed in the interest of influential parties.”

“ Yes, that might be worked up ; most anything can be worked up, you know,” said Okenberg. “ You could have the son of the deceased, say, come to New York, and fall into relations with the persons who committed some crime which was the immediate cause of his father’s death. One of them might be, say, his prospective father-in-law. The whole matter might be exploded on the wedding-day. Nothing lends itself to all sorts of sensational possibilities better than a wedding-day.”

“ But, unfortunately, or fortunately, you cannot construct your little romance in that way,” broke in Stoneglass; “ that is to say, if it is going to be founded on real life. Old Colonel Kingbolt’s son is about to marry the daughter of Rodman Harvey, — as sound, solid, and upright a merchant as ever lived. Mr. Harvey’s niece is with us here to-night,” he added, by way of making some little parade of the guest. “ It is very soon, I believe, Miss Harvey, that your cousin is to marry Mr. Kingbolt ? ”

“ Yes,” replied Ottilie, a flush passing over her face, which was deeply clouded with anxiety ; “within a fortnight.”

When Bainbridge was able to resume his interrupted suit, there were no longer to be discovered in her any traces of yielding.

“ No,” she said ; “ go your journey to the West, and forget me. That will aid you to begin.”

“ I can never forget you ; it is not possible.”

“ Do you not know of excellent reasons why you should ? ” she asked, examining him searchingly.

“ I know of nothing that does or can in any way conflict with my ardent devotion to you.” He would not concede that he took her meaning, if he really did so. Any admission and conference could but strengthen her fears.

“ There is something — I cannot speak more clearly,” pursued Ottilie.

“ I have an impression, a dread. It is necessary to wait,”

“ But let it be an engagement! Then we can wait as long as we like. What folly! What cobweb fantasy is this! Come, we understand each other. You are not afraid of me. We are engaged.

I shall call it so.”

“ No,” she persisted. “ Obstinacy is said to be a Harvey trait. You will find that it is mine. You must go your journey. I am not to be persuaded.” “ Nothing shall induce me,” she was saying, to strengthen herself inwardly, “ to cast upon him, in addition to all the rest, the possibility of a disgrace which I feel to be impending.”

Her carriage was now announced. Bainbridge insisted upon going down with her to put her into it, “ I am coming to see you to-morrow to talk it over again,” he declared, at the last moment.

“It will not be of any use,” she returned. “ And perhaps I shall not be at home.”

William Henry Bishop.