I

EARLY in her straitened youth, Ellen Stearns had determined to secure three things: an education, a home, and congenial companionship. Before she had worked her way through school and college, her slender hands and her indomitable will had grappled with many phases of self-help. Tutoring in term-time, waiting on table at summer hotels, and two years of teaching, carried her through her college course in six years. During the last year she was able to give her entire time to the college work and life; that year decided the president to recommend her for a position that had been above her most ambitious dream. “In force, in ability to use her scholarship, and in contagious idealism, she is unique,” the president wrote; “and this year has given her leisure to develop a latent good-comradeship that will insure her an important influence over growing girls.”

She was surprised by an appreciation which extravagantly repaid efforts that had been their own recompense. She could not understand how the work of a teacher could ever have been called drudgery. Once the principal cautioned her. “Save yourself a little,” she suggested. “You need not give yourself so absolutely to the girls. Be a little selfish, — if you can.”

Ellen wondered. It was easier to give than to withhold; it was only in the act of giving that she seemed to feel her grasp upon her own. The girls came to her with their confidences, their perplexities and enthusiasms. The youth she had never known was restored to her through her interest in them. As she caught the contagion of their buoyancy, she hoped that they might learn from her the lessons of her pilgrimage, without needing to tread the way that now, in the retrospect, seemed heartrendingly solitary.

The summer found her unaccountably weary; it was fortunate that it was no longer necessary to work. She discovered a nook on the Maine coast, a meetingplace of woods and sea, where she luxuriated in the summer and in the opening chapters of a novel that had flashed its outline into her mind in the early weeks of her school work; writing it was not a task, but recreation. During the following year, though the school life lost something of its ideal homelikeness, the work something of its first exhilaration, her opportunity retained its dream-like aspect. The girls and their development were still her first interest; her novel was an occasional private indulgence. The offer of an instructorship in her college surprised only herself. “I knew it was inevitable,” her principal told her. “I should like to keep you always, but there are inherent reasons why it is impossible. Keep your expenditure of energy within your income, and you may reach almost any height.”

She could not account for her good fortune. To deal with subjects of fascinating interest, and to transform her enthusiasm into service, in a setting of well-ordered beauty, seemed an ideal happiness. She gradually learned that ideal conditions do not exist in mundane institutions, but her contentment was not disturbed. Despite her age and experience, she was still young and ignorant when she met Lawrence Percival Shaw.

Reverend Lawrence Percival Shaw was the descendant of eight generations of clergymen, and the parallelism of his case and Emerson’s had not escaped his notice. From his boyhood he had written poems and kept journals, recording the growth of his mind. No culture had been spared to insure the efflorescence of genius upon the gray old branches of the family tree. He believed in himself in spite of contemporary skepticism, and in time many of his contemporaries admitted their mistake. His instructors in college had advised him not to devote himself entirely to literature, so he had studied for the ministry. At a flatteringly early age, he had found himself the pastor of the Bloomfield church, where his distinction of appearance, his clear-cut enunciation, his literary taste, and his originality of expression, made him the pride of his people and of the town. After a time his long literary labors were rewarded; at one bound he leaped into fame; for a season no select table of contents was properly arranged without a poem or an essay by Lawrence Percival Shaw. He was also in demand as a lecturer; his lecture on “The Joy of Living” won him many disciples. Early in his success, his name attracted Ellen. His enthusiasm for literature and for life supplied a voice for her own inarticulate spirit. When she met him, his face seemed even more eloquent than his words. He found in her what had not hitherto been combined in a satisfying measure,—enthusiasm, appreciation, and intelligence. He felt in her also a capacity for loyalty, for self-abnegation, that held for him the promise of new life. He told her that he loved her and needed her; and he had never spoken more sincerely.

By that time she had finished the novel, to which she had given four summers, the spare time of four teaching seasons, and the results of twenty-nine years of life. She sent it to a publisher without showing it to her lover, for she wanted to feel that she had rounded out something tangible, however humble, before her separate existence ceased. It must stand or fall by its own merits, her first and last novel, for she divined that marriage with Lawrence Percival Shaw would be an allabsorbing career.

Through the six months of their engagement she worked with renewed energy. Her novel was published in May, and they were married in June. Shaw’s first collection of poems also appeared in May; a slender volume with wide margins and many fly-leaves. His wedding present to her was a beautifully bound presentation copy, which she unwrapped with a thrill of rapturous self-reproach. It had never occurred to her to have her novel bound for him; she had given him a pearl scarf-pin, as if they had been ordinary lovers. She exulted in his superior thoughtfulness, as in all his other superiorities ; she would learn to be like him in fine considerateness; with all her disadvantages, she had always been quick at learning.

His spare time that summer was given to revising a volume of essays that had been announced for publication in November; he was scrupulously painstaking. Ellen’s novel had succeeded; it had been crowned with the commendation of those who know, and with popular approval; the financial returns were surprisingly out of proportion to her expectations. She felt like an Aladdin as she wrote, in November, the check that transformed her savings and the returns from her book into the ownership of an ideally complete little house, which stood in a generous yard, surrounded by trees and a stretch of lawn, with a strip of garden in the rear. How had it happened ? she asked herself wonderingly. Everything that she had longed for had come to her through the sheer force of her desire; and more that she had not dreamed of; no poet’s pen could reproduce the color, the music, the promise, of life. Her publishers were urging upon her the writing of a new novel; the idea was ready, but the substance must be curiously wrought in the depths of her spirit while her everyday work went on; before the actual labor of brain and pen could begin, there were many things that demanded her energies.

They were settled in their new home in time for a worthy keeping of Christmas, and in the twilight of that day a new note sounded in the silence of their dual content. “I have decided,” Shaw said, “to send in my resignation.”

“Oh, Lawrence! Why?” Ellen softened the intensity of a surprise that might have sounded almost impertinent in its free expression.

“My sermons and my pastoral work have been sapping energies that I need for production. I have got out of the experience all there is in it, and a habit of didacticism has been growing on me. I am primarily an artist, not a preacher, and I have been warping my nature. The constant necessity of meeting engagements hinders the free play of my mind. These last six months, for instance, have been wasted. I have prepared my essays for publication, but I have produced nothing. And I had expected so much. My marriage, my happiness, an experience that has gone down to the deepest roots of life, has left no record. I must secure proper conditions before it is too late.”

Ellen had listened in painful bewilderment. “Dear,” she said, “I don’t understand. Perhaps it is because I am not literary, — whatever I have written has been as spontaneous as breathing, so I cannot judge, — but it has seemed to me that the way to write is to go on doing one’s work, and then to write what presses for utterance.”

“But my writing is my work,” he insisted. “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world. Have you never felt that for yourself ? ”

“Never! I am here to live and to love and to work and to help, and to thank God for the good measure, pressed down and shaken together and running over, that flows into words.”

“Ah,” he said, “you are a woman, not an artist. Art requires absolute devotion; the nourishing of the soul on the highest ideals, the truest beauty; a perennial fountain of joy within the heart; and the long, laborious practice by which a fitting form is moulded for the idea. The only trammels the artist should feel are those which he prescribes for himself in the working out of his inspiration. Bondage enough he will find through the intractability of his material. In every other respect he should be a free spirit.”

“Your preaching,” she suggested; “is n’t that an art ? Is n’t there the constant contact with the deepest need, the deepest inspiration ? The opportunity to give the joy of your heart a form that shall cure men’s diseases, and soothe their sorrows, and satisfy their longings, and strengthen their wills, and inspire their lives?”

“You see only one side. As long as the water comes men are satisfied; who considers the well ? But when the well is dry ? It is not mere self-regard, but altruism that demands consideration for one’s self. And in the scale of benefactors the poet, the prophet, stand far above the preacher. The preacher’s message is limited; the message of the poet is universal.”

“And the salary?” Ellen said helplessly. The tide of words and the undertow of apprehension had swept her from her moorings.

“It is only eighteen hundred dollars,” he replied. “My time is certainly worth more than that. If I were one of those snapshot fellows who snatch at ideas as they elbow their way through the crowd, and rattle them off on typewriters in the pauses of their meaningless activity, I might do my best work with my eye on the clock, my engagement book in my hand, and the doorbell ringing in my ears, in the intervals between weddings, funerals, pastoral calls,and meetings. As it is now, my energies are being frittered away in routine, while with large leisure, there is no telling what I might accomplish. Think of the men whose work will live! how jealously they have been guarded from distraction!”

It distressed her that he should seem to defend himself against her. “ I only wanted to understand,” she said. “Of course, you must have the conditions you need for your best work. I have been so proud of my preacher that I never knew he was living at the expense of my poet, — my bringer of good tidings. We must all work in our own way, and none of us can learn the secret for another.”

The first of February his new life began, with leisure to search the woods for their secret, the hills for their inspiration, and the snow-clad meadows for their sweep of freedom; with leisure to linger with the masters of words who have moved men’s souls; with leisure to brood over life and its manifold meanings, to write with joyous abandon to the mood of the hour, to cut down and file and polish with the scrupulousness that distinguished him. Success rewarded his efforts; the break with the past had proved his wisdom; the joy of his heart blossomed in remunerative words.

The multiplicity of his duties had never interfered with his regular visits to Boston. With all his enthusiasm for art, Lawrence Percival Shaw was a thoroughbred aristocrat, superior to show, but insistent on fineness in the arts of life; and he had learned in his student days that only one barber in America was master of a haircut that combined the distinction of genius with the indescribable something that marks the man of the world. These necessary visits to Boston gave an opportunity to hear good music, to meet cultured men, to see pictures, to feel the stimulus of fine accomplishment. Ellen was unable to accompany him, but the spoils he brought back were better than any she could have found for herself. An opportunity had come to her to write book reviews, and there were many other interests to fill her weeks of waiting.

II

The sudden burst of success had been followed by an unaccountable absence of editorial appreciation. Essay after essay, poem after poem, came back with courteous circumlocutions. Ellen managed to keep the ring of apprehension out of her words of cheer, and added another series of “pot-boilers” to the list of her occupations. In June all occupation ceased for a few weeks, while she learned a new language.

Shaw hung over his namesake, strangely moved. “My heir!” he said, in an awestruck voice that carried his meaning straight to Ellen’s heart.

“He is better than a poem,” she suggested, with a light on her face that idealized the man without depreciating the artist; and for a moment the poet forgot himself.

In the strength of that self-forgetfulness, he made a visit to New York, and put a straightforward question to the editor who had, in the past, given him the most encouragement: “Will you tell me frankly what fault you find with my work, — why I have altogether lost your favor ? ”

The editor hesitated. “We must have variety.”

“Yes; but allowing for that. You have had nothing of mine for eighteen months. I am asking now for an honest criticism.”

“If you want an honest criticism, I should say that for the last two years you have done nothing but repeat yourself. The writer who strives for marked originality of expression has a double danger, — from himself and from the public; in his concentration upon form he is tempted to neglect substance, and the public, though at first attracted, quickly wearies of what it calls mannerisms and pose.”

“The public! ” Shaw ejaculated scornfully.

“Yes,” the editor replied; “but however we may determine to lead, we must look to the public for our following. We may have manuscript clubs, and pass around things that seem too good for publication, — but personally I have never put my hand on anything that I thought was too good, though many things are too limited. With all the craving for the sensational by the reading masses, there has never been a more eager demand for life in literature. Whatever difficulties other editors may find, it is not our readers, but our writers that hinder our making a better magazine.”

Both courtesy and policy checked Shaw’s suggestion that editorial fallibility might be another hindrance.

“I don’t mean,” the editor answered his unspoken criticism, “that we don’t make mistakes. I merely mean that I have never consciously rejected a manuscript because it was too good for our readers; it might be very good in some respects, but poor in others. An excellent sermon, for instance, would fail of acceptance, because most sermons need the personality of the preacher to give them effectiveness.”

Shaw flushed uncomfortably. “You think I am too didactic?”

“My dear fellow!” the editor apologized ; “I dislike personalities,and I avoid criticism; but you want frankness, and I have been interested in your work. I have tried to analyze my disappointment, and it seems to me that, from some cause which lies beyond my knowledge, you have simply stagnated.”

It had been a bitter experience, for Shaw was a proud man, with no place for the word “failure” in his personal vocabulary. He had delayed his resignation too long; he should have given up everything for literature in the first glow of his success. Propositions had been made to him then that he had not been able to accept; the Ladies’ Counselor, for instance, had offered flattering remuneration for a series of papers; but he had had no time then to prepare them, nor inclination to sell his honored name in the popular marketplace. If he had had only himself to think of,he would not have hesitated to risk everything for the opportunity to devote himself to his art; but just then he had met Ellen, and his allegiance had been divided. The bitterness deepened in his eyes as he stared blindly from the car-window at the flying landscape. Love, marriage, fatherhood, had come to him, and no new life had flowed into his work. His imagination had revealed in his earlier years more vital conceptions than had followed contact with reality, if he could trust the verdict of his friend the editor. “Perhaps I have been working too hard,” he thought wearily. “I must put myself to school to simple life, and forget the exactions of literature.”

He haunted his wife’s room, watching the baby as if its aimless hands held the clue to a mystery, watching his wife as if she were the priestess of an oracle. Life! life! The word rang through his brain. “An eager demand for life in literature.” He would supply it if he could find it; the selfish claims of an exacting age had starved his own life.

In the sunshine of his devotion, Ellen’s strength returned rapidly. Her heart bounded with hope; the vague apprehensions that had lurked in the shadows of her consciousness disappeared, with the other symptoms of illness. In this atmosphere of happiness, Lawrence would come into his own; her poet, whose sensitiveness to distraction and unpleasant contacts was necessarily in an exact proportion to his feeling for beauty, for life in its finest and truest manifestations. She rejoiced that she was not an artist, but only an appreciator of art, so that she could feel the value of another’s work, while making it her own work to furnish conditions in which the finest life might be lived, the truest literature written. In the spring a conditional arrangement had been made with the principal of a school for girls in Bloomfield, by which, if all went well, Ellen was engaged to teach literature and history the following year. Her reputation as a teacher had compensated for a temporary uncertainty. “Pot-boiling” had become unendurable: enforced writing racked her nerves, offended her taste, and irritated her conscience. Some time her novel would find its way into being, but it could not be hurried.

July and August had passed before Lawrence confided in her; his hope had flickered out in darkness. “I should not mind what Stanford said so much,” he explained; “he’s fallible like the rest of us. But it corroborated my own judgment. I have stagnated. I feel it through every fibre. I need a change. I need atmosphere, stimulus, inspiration. I ought to go abroad. . . . Do you think it could be arranged?”

“I have seven hundred dollars in the savings-bank,” she said.

“I should not need it all,” he answered gratefully. “Of course, you know I would not take it if I did not think it would be a profitable investment. I am sure it will make me more productive.” She turned her eyes away from the look on his face, but he bent over and kissed her without noticing. “It is as much for you as for myself,” he said.

“Of course!” she answered quickly. “Your success could n’t mean to you what it means to me.” But when he had left the room, she turned her face away from her own thoughts.

His three months abroad did for him all that he had hoped. He came back with sun-browned face, clear eyes, fresh enthusiasm, and renewed self-confidence. In the fight with untoward circumstances he had won; he would win in the battle for recognition. What was known by flippant young journalists as “the Lawrence Percival Shaw renaissance ” speedily followed; his name again adorned tables of contents, — not as select, perhaps, as in his earlier triumph, but still respectable, — and humorous writers imitated his style. But Ellen kept her position in the Bloomfield school for girls, and even relapsed into her old habit of writing “pot-boilers.” There was still a slowly diminishing return from her book, and her publishers still urged upon her the expediency of bringing out another novel before the impetus of her first success was lost. Under the stimulus of Shaw’s “renaissance,” she had written a few chapters; but later she laid them aside with an unacknowledged dread of what might be found written between the lines. Besides, she could not write truly unless her mind had time to play, and playtime now was scarce.

The year of her daughter’s arrival was abstracted from school work; she made up for the loss by an increased activity in literary journalism, a trade at which she had become surprisingly proficient. She knew now why teaching is sometimes called drudgery, but only in prospect and retrospect; she was still able to furnish on demand the interest in her work that made her a successful teacher.

Shaw paid for his own cigars, his own clothes, his own literary hair-cuts, —occasionally, when the sun shone, for his own trips. Careful attention was needed to make her home what it should be for her family; but the industry and thrift in which Ellen had trained herself enabled her to perform miracles. There was much to stimulate her energy and strengthen her courage as her boy and girl grew in sturdy self-reliance; and she had not entirely lost hope that some genuine accomplishment would reward her faith in her husband, and his confidence in himself.

III

One Saturday afternoon in May she settled herself for a half hour’s breathing space in a blossoming lilac arbor that occupied a corner of the yard. The elmshaded street behind her was hidden from sight, and almost as quiet as the country. Before her stretched the smooth lawn that was one of her extravagances, and the house, with its broad, vine-shaded veranda was eloquent of peace and home. The children were playing happily under the trees. The scent of the lilacs brought back her own childhood, with its hopes, its bewildered loyalty, its bitter disappointments, its passion for a dim, faraway good. A wave of thankfulness swept through her; her children had all that her childhood had been denied.

Her husband passed the gate, returning from a country stroll, and going on to the post office for his mail. A college student, home to spend Sunday, tramped by with his chum. Her husband returned his salutation with his habitual serene courtesy. “Who’s your distinguished friend ? ” the visitor asked, as the two young men passed her arbor.

“Lawrence Percival Pshaw!” came the mocking answer.

What she had refused to see started into insistent life before her, an inevasible presence, raised by the spell of a ringing voice, — the echo of public opinion. That was what he was to those who had not willfully blinded their eyes. What was the use of unremitting toil to keep up this mockery called life?

The boy and girl came running toward her, straight and slim, with flower-like faces; the heirs of their father’s distinction. She forgot her weariness. Her soul flung itself armed into the arena. “No! ” she said fiercely. “Not for them, — that name! ”

They threw themselves upon her. “Tell us a story!” they cried in unison.

“Not now,” she said. “After supper. Come now.” She rose and turned the torrent of their eagerness in another direction. “ We have n’t finished our weeding. There will be just time before supper.” It was not a suitable time for such work, but her sense of fitness had been overwhelmed by the surge of desperate motherhood. The children went with her willingly enough; everything they did with her companionship was fascinating; their fingers flew as they chattered and laughed.

“Work is the best kind of play there is,” Ellen said cheerily, “because you not only have the fun of doing it, but you have something to show for it. Think of the radishes and lettnce and peas and beans that will taste so good to us all! ” It was heretically utilitarian doctrine for young children, but she felt instinctively that the best safeguard against making work of what should be play is making play of what is ordinarily considered work.

“Papa does n’t like to work,” Lawrence said sagely.

Ellen’s heart contracted. The adjustment of loyalty to her children and loyalty to their father would be increasingly difficult.

“Of course not!” Ruth’s confident voice returned. “Papa is a gentleman.”

“I’m glad we’re not gentlemen,” Lawrence said. “I’m glad we’re just a boy and a girl, and — a mother!”

“Your father’s training has been different,” Ellen explained gravely. “His — work is of a different kind. But — we were born to use our hands; to do things and make things, and — be glad we can.”

When she had put the children in the way of removing the traces of their toil, she went out on the veranda. Her husband was resting after his long walk. Her heart was full of bitterness, but as he turned toward her, her mood changed. The faint lines about his eyes and mouth, his look of fatigue, touched her indefinably; after all, he was only the oldest and most helpless of her children. “My story has come back,” he said simply. She knew all that the words implied. Poetry and essays were not in demand, and were unremunerative; he had been advised to try fiction; he had spent himself on a short story, which he had elaborated with infinite pains.

“Dear!” she broke out passionately, “can’t, you see what the trouble is ? You have lost your grip on reality. You wear yourself out in modeling mist, when what people want and need is life. If you would get some regular definite employment, it would be your salvation.”

He looked at her in an astonishment that took away breath and power of speech. Slowly his equanimity returned; he even smiled faintly. “What would you suggest?” he asked. “A book-agency ?”

“Yes! a book-agency! Or teaching. Any thing that would bring you into touch with real life. Why should your manhood be wasted?”

His eyes filled with slow, painful tears that wrung her heart. “Then you have altogether lost faith in me?” he asked.

“No!” she cried. “It is because I have not altogether lost faith in you that I speak. Your success would be the crown of my life, but I care infinitely more for you. And I seem to know now just what your success depends on. Dearest, if not for me, if not for the children, if not for yourself, then for the sake of your art, be a man first, an artist afterward.”

Shaw’s habitual dignity reasserted itself. He spoke with a courteous aloofness. “My dear,” he said with unconscious irony, “you ask what is impossible, — I was born an artist.”