A long, rainy Sunday inaugurated Christiansen's visit. A cold, damp fog blew in off the Sound, and an open fire proved a comfort. Jerry went off to paint, Bobs disappeared, and Jane found herself alone with Christiansen, in the first intimacy they had known for months.

"How goes the adventure?" he asked.

"Merrily."

"You are glad you started on it?"

"Oh, yes."

"You would be," he granted.

"Why would I be?"

"You belong to the 'Friends of Fate,' as some poet called them. Some of us struggle against Fate, some of us make it an ally. You would do that."

"But Fate, so far, has been my friend."

"Those long lonely years of work by yourself?"

"But I needed them. I learned everything of value that I know, during those years."

"You see, I spoke truly," he smiled, nodding at her.

"You meet life that way, too," she said.

"I've met it all ways, my friend, fighting, acquiescent, not always with valour. Now I have come to a time when I depend upon an armour, which fends off outside troubles, but also keeps in those I already have."

"No one could understand human beings so well, could possess your fierceness and your mercy toward them, without holding the key to suffering."

"Wise Jane Judd," he smiled. "I have had a long journey with Fate. For twenty years I have been paying for youthful folly. Do you know about me, Jane?"

"Jerry told me that you are married, that your wife lives."

"She has moved from one sanatorium to another for twenty years, Jane."

"How dreadful, my friend."

"I go to see her when I can. I have been with her this summer. It is like visiting some little girl I knew when I was a lad.... I wanted you to know."

"Does she suffer?"

"Apparently not. She just is, that's all. No past, no future."

"But your past, your future, Martin?"

"I can have none," he said steadily.

"Did you love her very much?"

"I suppose so, as a boy. What does a child of twenty know of love? She was eighteen when we ran away. After about five years this malady developed, a sort of melancholia at first, then a kind of mental vacuity for all these many years."

"It's unfair; it's cruel!" she cried.

"So it is. There have been times when I have cursed God in fury, but after all it is not left us to choose our own tests. If Fate were only kind, we would not need to woo her. Perhaps I needed my hard years as you needed yours."

"I can't believe that, but I know what they have made of you—what I have reaped from them."

He laid his hand on hers for a second.

"Thank you, Jane. You've been a little flowering place for me, of repose and peace. Tell me about the work."

"It grows in plan, but not in execution. I lie abed until noon, these days, and I spend the time thinking about the book. I make notes; sometimes I write a chapter. But I feel that when my baby comes I shall suddenly enter a new world, I shall know such wonderful things to put in my book."

"Assuredly. You could not plumb the one greatest spiritual and physical experience without your eyes being unsealed to all the fundamental verities."

Jane rose, and turned a canvas, which leaned against the wall, into the light, where Martin could see it.

"Do you like this?" she asked.

He looked at it silently for several moments.

"Jerry has sensed it, too," he said. "This is a fine thing—his best."

"He can paint, if I can get him away from those portraits."

"It's a cursed thing for an artist to be clever. He would better be mediocre. It's your husband's curse. He may have a big gift, but if his cleverness is the thing the rabble want to buy, and he sells it to them, his gift is doomed."

"Who's doomed?" said Jerry, coming in, glowing from his long tramp in the rain.

"You are, if you paint Mrs. Abercrombie Brendon, when you can do this," Christiansen answered.

"You like that?"

"This has feeling and excellent painting. It is real, vital, fine."

"I felt I had something there."

"You've got a pretty knack with pretty ladies, but don't let it ruin you."

"Pretty ladies pay, it might be added, and we need the money just now."

"Face the truth, then. Swear to yourself this is a temporary aberration, and be true to yourself, Paxton."

"Well, if I don't turn out to be my own best self with Jane, and Bobs, and now you after me, I haven't any best self! My own opinion is that I'm probably a rotten second-rater."

"Not even the greatest artists are first-rate all the time, Jerry," Jane urged.

"That lets me out, then," he laughed. "I got some nice effects out there in the fog; it's a soaking white blanket down on the beach."

"You didn't see Bobs?"

"No; is she out? You two been gabbling all morning?"

"Yes, we've had a fine gabble," laughed Christiansen. "I'll put on a mackintosh and go in search of your Miss Bobs."

Jerry went to the door with him, and Jane stole off to her room. She did not want to talk to Jerry just then; she wanted to think over all the things she and Martin had said to each other during those friendly hours.

Out on the muddy road, Christiansen strode along at a great pace. He wanted to be alone, to think out his chaotic thoughts. He had come to the Paxtons' with no idea at all that Jane was to have a child, and the knowledge had come to him with a shock. He had long since admitted to himself that he was more interested in Jane's development, in her search for expression, than he had been in anything for years. He liked the quality of her mind; he thought her possessed of that rare gift, a sense of style. She had absorbed the masters, yet was no pupil of any of them. He was convinced that she had a future, and it was of this he was thinking when he exclaimed at the announcement of her marriage, "Child, child, what have you done?" The baby would be another fetter, and she must be free to work out her artistic salvation. It might be years before that freedom came. Would her gift grow richer, or die for want of use?

"How can we expect to manage it?" he growled into the fog.

"What?" said Bobs, at his elbow.

"Wraith, where did you drop from?" he demanded.

"Out of the fog to answer your question. What was it?"

"How can a woman be an artist and a human being at the same time?"

She peered at him before she replied.

"She can't. She can only be them in relays. Artist awhile, human awhile. Living takes too much from her. Loving, wiving, mothering are too devouring. Men manage their part of it, but women cannot; that is my decision."

"You think she must choose between them?"

"No, that is too big a price to pay for either."

"How, then?"

"She must have both some of the time, neither all the time."

"But isn't that increasingly difficult with a man to consider, possibly a child or two?"

"Difficult? Do you think there is anything more difficult than being a woman to-day? I don't," she answered bitterly.

"The most difficult thing I know is being a man."

"Why do we bother with it at all, when just a little plop out there in the fog would end it?"

"Would it, though?"

"Don't you think souls are ever allowed to rest? Do they plunge us into some new form the minute we leave the old?"

"It's the doubt about it that is salutary."

"If you go out, you're a coward. If you stay on, it's because you're afraid to go out," she cried.

"Even so. Therefore you come to grips with life, and prove yourself a good soldier."

"Like Jane," Bobs said. "Isn't she fine?"

"She is a very rare human."

"She's the best friend I ever had."

"I think I can say that, too," he said.

"Does she understand your problems just as she does mine?"

"Yes."

"You remember the hymn that talks about 'being at rest in God?' That's the way I feel about Jane."

"You should do a study of her. You owe us Jane's broad, God-like beneficence to offset your 'Woman.'"

"I am going to do her, as soon as I grow up to her."

"That's a tribute to our friend."

"Aren't those fog shapes startling?" she said, pointing with her stick. "No wonder the soldiers saw miracles on the field of Mons."

"But the real miracle that happened there, they did not see," he answered.

"What was that?"

"The Christmas truce in the trenches was the miracle of our times—the great hope of our future. If men can respect one another as enemies, instead of hating one another, some day we may have an end of war."

"I cannot dream nor philosophize war out of life, Mr. Christiansen. If it is not between nations, it will be between classes. If it is not for booty, it will be for survival. How can we hope to do away with it?"

"By another miracle, already begun—a sense of brotherhood in the world of men. If, even in the trenches, men clasped hands on Christmas Day, and gave the enemy Christmas greeting; if only a few employers lead off with a coÖperative ownership; if only a few workmen in the unions meet the employers in fairness, it means that the day of universal amnesty is not a dream."

"You dear, big believer in miracles!" she scoffed.

"Poor little cynic, snarling at the heels of truth," he retorted.

The heavens opened at that moment, and the rain descended with midsummer violence.

"Shall we run for the woods?" he asked.

"No, I like it," answered she, lifting her face to the torrent.

So they ploughed through the mud puddles, and arrived home, wet through, but tingling with racing blood and clear brains. As Bobs ran through the hall on her way to her room, she called to her hostess:

"Jane, let there be tons of food!"