"I am very glad to see you," Pauline was telling her aunt, a little later. She felt, while she spoke them, that her words were the merest polite falsehood. "I did not suppose you would care to honor me this evening—I mean all three of you," she added, with a rather mechanical smile in the direction of Miss Sallie and Courtlandt.

Mrs. Poughkeepsie promptly spoke. She was looking about her through a pair of gold-rimmed glasses while she did so. Her portliness was not without a modish majesty; folds of a black, close-clinging, lace-like fabric fell about her large person with much grace of effect; her severe nose appeared to describe an even more definite arc than usual.

"Sallie and I had nothing for to-night," said Mrs. Poughkeepsie. "Lent began to-day, you know, and there wasn't even a dinner to go to."

"I am pleased to afford you a refuge in your social distress," returned Pauline. It flashed through her mind that circumstance was drawing upon her, to-night, for a good deal of bitter feeling. What subtle thunder was in the air, ready to sour the milk of human kindness to its last drop?

"My dear," murmured her aunt, temporarily discontinuing her stares, and speaking more in reproach than conciliation, "you must not be so very quick to take offence when none is intended."

Pauline gave a laugh which she tried to make amiable. "It pleases me to think that no offence was intended," she declared.

"Your little party was by no means a pis-aller with me, dear Pauline," here stated Sallie, "whatever it may have been in mamma's case. I really wanted so much, don't you know, to see these—a—persons." The peculiar pause which Sallie managed to make before she pronounced the word "persons," and the gentle yet assertive accent which she managed to place upon the word itself, were both, in their way, beyond description. Not that either was of the import which would render description requisite, except from the point of view which considers all weightless trifles valuable.

Pauline bit her lip. She had long ago thought Sallie disqualified for contest by her native silliness. The girl had not a tithe of her mother's brains; she possessed all the servitude of an echo and all the imitativeness of a reflection. But like most weak things she had the power to wound, though her little sting was no doubt quite unintentional at present.

Courtlandt here spoke. He was perfectly his ordinary sober self as he said,—

"I happened to drop in upon Aunt Cynthia to-night, and she brought me here. I believe that I come without an invitation. Don't I? I've forgotten."

"You haven't forgotten," contradicted Pauline, though not at all unpleasantly. "You know I didn't invite you, because I didn't think you would care to come. You gave me every reason to think so."

"That was very rude," commented Sallie, with a rebuking look at Courtlandt. She had a great idea of manners, but her reverence was quite theoretical, as more than one ineligible and undesirable young gentleman knew, when she had chosen to freeze him at parties with the blank, indifferent regard of a sphinx. "It is so odd, really, Pauline," she went on, with her supercilious drawl, which produced a more irritating effect upon her cousin because apparently so spontaneous and unaffected—"it is so odd to meet people whom one does not know. I have always been accustomed to go to places where I knew everybody, and bowed, and had them come up and speak."

Pauline busied herself for an instant in smoothing the creases of her long gloves between wrist and elbow. "Don't you find it rather pleasant, Sallie," she said, "to procure an occasional change?"

"It ought to be refreshing," struck in Courtlandt, neutrally.

"You can have people to talk to you this evening, if you wish," pursued Pauline, while a certain sense that she was being persecuted by her relatives waged war with a decorous recognition of who and where she was.

Before Sallie could answer, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, who had ceased her determined survey, said in her naturally high, cool, suave tones,—

"Oh, of course we want you to present some of them to us, Pauline, dear. We came for that, Sallie and I. We want to see what has made you so fond of them. They are all immensely clever, of course. But one can listen and be instructed, if one does not talk. Do they expect you to talk, by the way? Will they not be quite willing to do all the talking themselves? I have heard—I don't just remember when or how—that they usually are willing."

"My dear Aunt Cynthia," said Pauline, in a low but not wholly composed voice, "you speak of my guests as if they were the inmates of a menagerie."

Mrs. Poughkeepsie threw back her head a very little. The motion made a jewel of great price and fine lustre shoot sparks of pale fire from the black lace shrouding her ample bosom. She laughed at the same moment, and by no means ill-naturedly. "I am sure they wouldn't like to have you suggest anything so dreadful," she said, "you, their protectress and patroness."

"I am neither," affirmed Pauline stoutly.

Mrs. Poughkeepsie lifted her brow in surprise. She almost lifted her august shoulders as well. "Then pray what are you, my dear?" she asked.

"Their hostess—and their equal," asserted Pauline. She spoke with momentary seriousness, but immediately afterward she chose to assume an air of careless raillery.

"Ah, Aunt Cynthia," she went on, "you don't know how you make me envy you!"

"Envy me, Pauline?"

"Oh, yes; you have settled matters so absolutely. You have no misgivings, no distrusts. You are so magnificently secure."

"I don't understand," politely faltered Mrs. Poughkeepsie. She looked inquiringly at Courtlandt.

"It is metaphysics," Courtlandt at once said. "They are a branch of study in which Pauline has made great progress." His face remained so completely placid and controlled that he might have been giving the number of a residence or recording the last quotation in stocks.

Sallie had become absorbed in staring here and there, just as her mother had been a brief while ago; Mrs. Poughkeepsie was at a little distance from her niece; Courtlandt stood close at Pauline's side, so that the latter could ask him, in an undertone full of curt, covert imperiousness,—

"Did you come here to say and do rude things?"

"I never say nor do rude things if I can help it," he answered, with a leaden stolidity in his own undertone.

"Why did they come?" continued Pauline, lowering her voice still more.

"You invited them, I believe. That is, at least, my impression."

"I mentioned the affair. I never imagined they would wish to come."

"You see that you were mistaken. If I had been you I wouldn't have given them the awful opportunity."

"What awful opportunity?" queried Pauline, furtively bristling.

"Of coming," said Courtlandt.

"My dear Pauline," here broke in Mrs. Poughkeepsie, "shall you not present anybody to us?"

"Anyone whom you please to meet, Aunt," responded Pauline.

"But, my dear, we please to meet anyone. We have no preferences. How can we have?"

"This is torment," thought poor Pauline. She glanced toward Courtlandt, but she might as well have appealed to one of her chairs. "What shall I do?" her thoughts sped fleetly on. "This woman and this girl would shock and repel whomever I should bring to them. It would be like introducing the North Pole and the South."

But her face revealed no sign of her perplexity. She quietly put her hand within Courtlandt's arm. "Come, Court," she said, with a very creditable counterfeit of gay sociality, "let us find a few devotees for Aunt Cynthia and Sallie."

"We shall find a good many," said Courtlandt, as they moved away. "Have no fear of that."

"I am by no means sure that we shall find any," protested Pauline, both with dismay and antagonism.

"Pshaw," retorted Courtlandt. "Mention the name. It will work like magic."

"The name? What name?"

"Poughkeepsie. Do you suppose these haphazard Bohemians wouldn't like to better themselves if they could?"

Pauline took her hand from his arm, though he made a slight muscular movement of detention.

"They are not haphazard Bohemians," she said. "You know, too, that they are not. They are mostly people of intellect, of culture, of high and large views. I don't know what you mean by saying that they would 'like to better themselves.' Where have they ever heard of Aunt Cynthia? Her name would be simply a dead letter to them."

Courtlandt gave a low laugh, that was almost gruff, and was certainly harsh. "Where have they ever heard of Aunt Cynthia?" he repeated. "Why, she never dines out that the society column of half-a-dozen newspapers does not record it, and her name would be very far from a dead letter. It would be a decidedly living letter."

"But you don't understand," insisted Pauline, exasperatedly. "These people have no aims to know the so-called higher classes."

"Excuse me," said Courtlandt, with superb calm. "Everybody has aims to know the so-called higher classes—if he or she possibly can. Especially 'she'," he added in his colorless monotone.

Just then Pauline found herself confronted by Miss Upton. The moon-like face of this diminutive lady wore a flushed eagerness as she began to speak.

"Oh, Mrs. Varick," she said, "I've a great, great favor to ask of you! I want you to introduce me to your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie."

"With pleasure," answered Pauline, feeling as if the request had been a sort of jeer. "You know my aunt by sight, then, Miss Upton?"

"Oh, yes, I've known her for some time by sight, Mrs. Varick. Miss Cragge pointed her out to me one night at Wallack's. She had a box, with her daughter and several other people. One of them was an English lord—or so Miss Cragge said.... But excuse my mentioning my friend's name, as you don't like her."

"Who told you that I did not like Miss Cragge?" asked Pauline, with abrupt crispness.

"Oh, nobody, nobody," hurried Miss Upton. "But you haven't invited her here to-night—you left her out, you know. That was all. And I thought...."

"Are you a friend of Miss Cragge's?" asked Pauline.

"Oh, yes ... that is, I know her quite well. She writes dramatic criticisms, you know, and she has seen me in amateur theatricals. She's kind enough to tell me that she doesn't think that I have a tragic soul in a comic body." Here Miss Upton gave a formidably resonant laugh. "But I'm convinced that I have, and so I've never gone on the stage. But if I could get a few of the very aristocratic people, Mrs. Varick,—like yourself, and your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie—to hear me give a private reading or two, from 'Romeo and Juliet' or 'The Hunchback' or 'Parthenia', why, I should be prepared to receive a new opinion, don't you understand, with regard to my abilities. There is nothing like being endorsed at the start by people who belong to the real upper circles of society."

"Of course there isn't," said Courtlandt, speaking too low for Miss Upton to catch his words, and almost in the ear of Pauline. "Introduce me," he went swiftly on. "I will save you the bore of further introductions. You will soon see how they will all flock about the great nabob, though she may be ignorant of Æsthetics, philosophy, Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Carlyle, and anybody you please."

Pauline turned and looked at him. There was the shadow of a sparkle in the familiar brown eyes—the eyes that she never regarded closely without being reminded of her girlhood, even of her childhood as well.

"It is a challenge then?" she asked softly.

For a second he seemed not to understand her. Then he nodded his head. "Yes—a challenge," he answered.

She gave an inward sigh.... A little later she had made the desired introduction.... Presently, as Miss Upton moved away on Courtlandt's arm in the direction of her aunt and Sallie, she burst into a laugh, of whose loudness and acerbity she was equally unconscious.

Martha Dares, appearing at her side, arrested the laugh. Pauline grew promptly serious as she looked into Martha's homely face, with its little black eyes beaming above the fat cheeks and the unclassic nose, but not beaming by any means so merrily as when she had last given all its features her full heed.

"You don't laugh a bit as if you were pleased," said Martha, in her short, alert way. "I hope nothing has gone wrong."

"It seems to me as if everything were going wrong," returned Pauline, with a momentary burst of frankness which she at once regretted.

"Good gracious!" said Martha. "I'm astonished to hear you tell me so."

"Forget that I have told you so," said Pauline, throwing a little delicate repulsion into voice and mien. "By the way, your sister is not here to-night, Miss Dares."

Martha's plump figure receded a step or two.

"No," she replied, in the tone of one somewhat puzzled for a reply. "I came with my mother."

"And your sister had a headache."

"A headache," repeated Martha, showing what strongly resembled involuntary surprise.

"Yes. So your mother told me."

"Well, it's true," said Martha. Pauline was watching her more closely than she perhaps detected. "Cora's been working very hard, of late. She works altogether too hard. I often tell her so—Here comes Mr. Kindelon," Martha pursued, very abruptly changing the subject, while her gaze seemed to fix itself on some point behind her companion. "He wants to speak with you, I suppose. I'll move along—you see, I go about just as I choose. What's the use of my waiting for an escort? I'm not accustomed to attentions from the other sex, so I just behave as if it didn't exist. That's the wisest plan."

"But you surely need not be afraid of Mr. Kindelon," said Pauline.

"Oh, we're not the best of friends just now," returned Martha.... She had passed quite fleetly away in another instant. And while Pauline was wondering at the oddity of her departure, Kindelon presented himself.

"You and Martha Dares are not good friends?" she quickly asked. She did not stop to consider whether or no her curiosity was unwarrantable, but she felt it to be a very distinct and cogent curiosity.

Kindelon frowned. "I don't want to talk of Martha Dares," he said, "and I hope that you do not, either. She is a very unattractive topic."

"Isn't that a rather recent discovery?"

"Oh, no—Shall we speak of something else? Your aunt's arrival, for instance. I see that she is quite surrounded."

"Surrounded?" replied Pauline falteringly. Her eyes turned in the direction of Mrs. Poughkeepsie and Sallie.

It was true. Seven or eight ladies and gentlemen were gathered about the stately lady and her daughter. Both appeared to be holding a little separate and exclusive reception of their own.

"Courtlandt was right!" exclaimed Pauline ruefully, and with a stab of mortification. She turned to meet the inquiring look of Kindelon. "I thought Aunt Cynthia would be unpopular here," she continued. "I supposed that no one in my rooms to-night would care to seek her acquaintance."

"This is a grandee," said Kindelon, "and so they are glad enough to know her. If your cousin, Mr. Beekman, prophesied anything of that sort, he was indeed perfectly right."

Pauline shook her head musingly. "Good heavens!" she murmured, "are there any people in the world who can stand tests? I begin to think not." Her speech grew more animated, her eyes began to brighten indignantly and with an almost tearful light. "Here am I," she went on, "determined to encourage certain individuals in what I believed was their contempt of social frivolity and the void delusion which has been misnamed position and birth. With a sort of polite irony Aunt Cynthia appears and shows me that I am egregiously wrong—that she can hold her court here as well as at the most giddily fashionable assemblage.... Look; my cousin has just presented Mr. Whitcomb, the 'coming historian' with the pensive face, and Mr. Paiseley, the great American dramatist with the abnormal head. How pleased they both seem! They appear to tingle with deference. Aunt Cynthia is patronizing them, I am sure, as she now addresses them. She thinks them entirely her inferiors; she considers them out of her world, which is the correct world to be in, and there's an end of it. You can lay the Atlantic cable, you can build the Brooklyn Bridge, but you can't budge the granitic prejudices of Aunt Cynthia.... Yet why do they consent to be patronized by her? Do they not know and feel that she represents a mere sham? Do they value her for what she is, or misvalue her for something that she is not?"

Kindelon laughed a little gravely as he answered: "I am afraid they do the former. And in being what she is, she is a great deal."

"Surely not in the estimate of those who are at all serious on the subject of living—those whom superficialities in all conduct or thought weary and even disgust."

"But these," said Kindelon, with one of his hand-sweeps, "are not that sort of people."

"I supposed a great many of them were."

"You supposed wrongly."

Pauline gave a momentary frown, whose gloom meant pain. And before her face had re-brightened she had begun to speak. "But they cannot care to do as Aunt Cynthia does—to trifle, to idle."

"I fancy that a good many of them would trifle and idle if they had your aunt's facilities for that employment—or lack of it."

"But they paint, they read, they write, they think; they make poems, novels, dramas. They are people with an occupation, an ideal. How can they be interested in a fellow-creature who does nothing with her time except waste it?"

"She wastes it very picturesquely," replied Kindelon. "She is Mrs. Poughkeepsie; she represents great prosperity, aristocratic ease, lofty security above need. They read about her; they should not do so, but that they do is more the fault of modern journalism than theirs. Theoretically they may consider that she deserves their hardest feelings; but this has no concern whatever with their curiosity, their interest, their hope of advancement."

"Their hope of advancement!" echoed Pauline, forlornly, almost aghast. "What possible hope of advancement could they have from such a source?"

Her querulous question had scarcely ended when she perceived that Arthur Trevor had presented himself at her side. The young poet was exceedingly smart to-night. His tawny hair was rolled off his wide brow with a sort of precise negligence; it looked as if a deliberative brush and not a careless hand had so rolled it. He fixed his dreamy blue eyes with steadfastness upon Pauline's face before speaking.

"I am so sorry, Mrs. Varick," he began, giving a distinct sigh and slowly shaking his head from side to side. "I wonder if you know what I am sorry about."

"Oh, yes," returned Pauline, with a nervous trill of laughter. "You have come to me with a complaint on the subject of Mr. Rufus Corson. You see, Mr. Trevor, rumor has forestalled you. I heard that you were furious because I omitted to ask your intimate enemy."

Arthur Trevor gave an exaggerated start; it was a very French start; he lifted his blond eyebrows as much as his shoulders. And he looked at Kindelon while he responded:

"Ah! I see! Kindelon has been telling you horrid things. Kindelon hates us poets. These men of the newspapers always do. But there is a wide gulf between the poetry of to-day and the newspapers of to-day."

"Of course there is," quickly struck in Kindelon. "That is why the modern newspaper is read so much and the modern poetry so little."

Arthur Trevor chose to ignore this barbed rejoinder. His dreamy eyes and general air of placid reverie made such an attitude singularly easy of assumption.

"Poor Rufus feels your slight," he said, addressing Pauline solely. "Why do you call him my intimate enemy? We are the dearest of friends. He adores decay, and sings of it. I do not sing of it, but I adore it for its color. There is always color in decay."

"Discolor," said Kindelon, with better wit than grammar.

"Decay," pursued Arthur Trevor, "is the untried realm of the future poet. Scarcely anything else is left him. He is driven to find a beauty in ugliness, and there is an immense beauty in ugliness, if one can only perceive it. The province of the future poet shall be to make one perceive it."

"That is like saying," declared Kindelon, "that the province of the future gentleman shall be to make one perceive the courtesy in discourtesy or the refinement in vulgarity."

Again Mr. Trevor ignored Kindelon. "Poor Rufus was so much less to blame than Leander Prawle," he continued. "And yet you invited Leander Prawle. Prawle is so absurdly optimistic. Prawle has absolutely no color. Prawle is irretrievably statuesque and sculpturesque. It is so nonsensical to be that in poetry. Sculpture is the only art that gives an imperious rien ne va plus to the imagination. Prawle should have been a sculptor. He would have made a very bad one, because his ideas are too cold even for marble. But his poetry would not have been such an icy failure if it had been carved instead of written."

"You need not put up with this kind of thing any longer than you want," whispered Kindelon to Pauline. "Hostship, like Mr. Prawle's poetry, remember, has its limitations."

Pauline pretended not to hear this audacious aside. "Mr. Trevor," she said, making her voice very even and collected, "I regret that I could not quite bring myself to ask your friend. The Egyptians, you recollect, used to have a death's-head at their banquets. But that was a good many years ago, and New York isn't Thebes.... Please pardon me if I tell you that I must leave you for a little while."

As Pauline was passing him, Trevor lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. He did so without a hint of rhapsody, but in a sort of solemn exaltation. "New York is surely not Thebes!" he exclaimed. "Ah, if it only were! To have lived in Thebes for one day, to have got its real and actual color, would be worth ten years of dull existence here!"

"How I wish fate had treated him more to his taste!" said Kindelon, when Pauline and himself were a little distance off. "He meant to make an appeal for that mortuary Corson. He might better have tried to perpetuate his own welcome at your next salon."

"My next salon!" echoed Pauline, with a laugh full of fatigue and derision.

"What do you mean?" he asked shortly.

"I mean that I had best give no other salon," she replied. "I mean that this is a failure and a mockery."

She looked full up into his eyes as she spoke. They both paused. "So soon?" questioned Kindelon, as if in soft amazement.

"Yes—so soon," she answered, with a quiver in her voice and a slight upward movement of both hands. "What is it all amounting to?"

"What did I tell you?" he said.

"Oh, confirm your prophecy?" she broke forth, somewhat excitedly. "I know you warned me against disappointment. Enjoy your satisfaction—Look at Aunt Cynthia now. She is holding a perfect court. How they do flock round Sallie and herself, just as Courtlandt said that they would! I feel that this is the beginning and the end. I have misjudged, miscalculated, misinterpreted. And I am miserably dejected!"

Just then Martha Dares approached Pauline. "Will you please introduce me to your aunt?" said Martha.

"With the greatest pleasure, Miss Dares," returned Pauline.

"Et tu Brute?" said Kindelon, under his breath. Pauline heard him, but Martha did not....

A little later Courtlandt had joined her, and Kindelon had glided away.

"Are you convinced?" said Courtlandt.

"Convinced of what?" she retorted, with an almost fierce defiance.

"Oh, of nothing, since you take it so ferociously." She saw that his calm brown eyes were coolly watching her face.

"When is your next salon?" he asked. "Is it to be a week from to-night?"

"It is never to be again," she answered.

She meant the words, precisely as she spoke them. She longed for the entertainment to end, and when it had ended she felt relieved, as if from a painful tension and strain. Musing a little later in her bed-chamber, before retiring, she began to feel a slight change of mood. Had she not, after all, expected, demanded, exacted, too much? Was she justified in giving way to this depression and disappointment? Was she not more blamable in deceiving herself than these people were in surprising her? She had been warned by Kindelon; she had, in a certain way, been warned by Mrs. Dares. But these were not her desired band of plain livers and high thinkers. They were very far below any such elevated standard. They had seemed to make a sort of selfish rush into her drawing-rooms for the purpose of getting there, and afterward boasting that they had got there. She was by no means sure if the very quality and liberality of her refreshments had not made for them the prospect of another Thursday evening offer increased allurements. Many of them were full of the most distressing trivialities. The conduct of Mr. Barrowe had seemed to her atrociously unpleasant. His action with regard to the excluded Miss Cragge struck her as a superlative bit of impudence. If she went on giving more receptions she would doubtless only accumulate more annoyances of a similar sort.

No; the intellectual life of the country was young, like the country itself. It was not only young; it was raw and crude. To continue in her task would be to fail hopelessly. She had best not continue in it. She might be wrong in abandoning it so soon; there might be hope yet. But, after all, she was undertaking no holy crusade; conscience made no demands upon her for the perpetuation and triumph of her project. Let it pass into the limbo of abortive efforts. Let it go to make another stone in that infernal pathway proverbially paved by good intentions....

She slept ill that night, and breakfasted later than usual. And she had scarcely finished breakfasting when a card was handed her, which it heightened her color a little to peruse.

The card bore Miss Cragge's name, and one portion of its rather imposing square was filled with the names of many Eastern and Western journals besides, of which the owner evidently desired to record that she was a special correspondent. It seemed to Pauline, while she gazed at the scrap of pasteboard, that this was exactly the sort of card which a person like Miss Cragge would be apt to use for presentation. She was at a loss to understand why Miss Cragge could have visited her at all, and perhaps the acquiescing answer which she presently gave her servant was given because curiosity surpassed and conquered repulsion.

But after the servant had departed, Pauline regretted that she had agreed to see Miss Cragge. "What can the woman want of me?" she now reflected, "except to abuse and possibly insult me?"

Still, the word had been sent. She must hold to it.

Pauline gave Miss Cragge a cool yet perfectly courteous bow, as they met a little later.

"You are Miss Cragge, I believe," she said, very quietly and amiably.

"Oh, I didn't suppose you'd forgotten me so soon!" came the reproachful and rather unsteady answer. Miss Cragge had risen some time before Pauline entered the room, and her gaunt shape, clad in scant gear, looked notably awkward. Her street costume was untidy, shabby, and even bedraggled. She held a bundle of newspapers, which she shifted nervously from hand to hand.

"You wish to speak with me, then?" said Pauline, still courteously.

"Yes," returned Miss Cragge. It was evident that she underwent a certain distinct agitation. "I have called upon you, Mrs. Varick, because I felt that I ought to do so."

"It is, then, a matter of duty, Miss Cragge?"

"Yes—a matter of duty. A matter of duty toward myself. Toward myself as a woman, you know—I think that I have been wronged—greatly wronged."

"Not wronged by me, I hope."

"Through you, by someone else."

"I do not understand you."

"I—I shall try to make myself plain."

"I trust you will succeed."

"Oh, I shall succeed," declared Miss Cragge, gasping a little for breath as she now continued. "I have an enemy, Mrs. Varick, and that enemy is your friend. Yes, I mean Mr. Kindelon, of course. He has set you against me. He has made you shut your doors upon me. Oh, you need not deny that this is true. I am perfectly certain of its truth. I am always received by Hagar Williamson Dares. She is a noble, true woman, and she lets me come to her house because she knows I have my battle to fight, just as she has always had her own, and that I deserve her sympathy and her friendship. I don't maintain that I've been always blameless. A newspaper woman can't always be that. She gives wounds, just as she gets wounds. But I never did Ralph Kindelon any harm in my life. He hates me, but he has no business to hate me. I never cared much about his hatred till now. But now he has shown me that he is an active and dangerous enemy. I mean, of course, about this affair of yours. I wanted to be invited to your house last evening; I expected to be invited. I was on the Dareses' list. I'm going to be perfectly candid. It would have been a feather in my cap to have come here. I know exactly what your position in society is, and I appreciate the value of your acquaintance. If you had snubbed me of your own accord, I would have pocketed the snub without a murmur. I'm used to snubbings; I have to be, for I get a good many. Nobody can go abroad picking up society-items as I do, and not receive the cold shoulder. But in this case it was no spontaneous rebuff on your part; it was the malicious interference of a third party; it was Kindelon's mean-spirited persuasion used against me behind my back. And it has been an injury to me. It's going to hurt me more than you think. It has been found out and talked over that I was dropped by you.... Now, I don't want to be dropped. I want to claim my rights—to ask if you will not do me justice—if you will not waive any personal concern with a private quarrel and allow me to have the same chance that you have given so many others. To put it plainly and frankly, Mrs. Varick, I have come here this morning for the purpose of asking you if you will not give me an invitation to your next entertainment."

All the time she had thus spoken, Miss Cragge had remained standing. Pauline, who also stood, had shown no desire that her visitor should sit. She was biting her lip as Miss Cragge ended, and her tones were full of a haughty repulsion as she now said,—

"Really, I am unprepared to give you any answer whatever. But you seem to demand an answer, and therefore I shall give you one. You are very straightforward with me, and so I do not see why I should not be equally straightforward with you."

Miss Cragge gave a bitter, crisp little laugh. "I see what is coming," she said. "You think me abominable, and you are going to tell me so."

"I should not tell you if I thought it," replied Pauline. "But I must tell you that I think you unwarrantably bold."

"And you refuse me any other explanation?" now almost panted Miss Cragge. "You will not give me even the satisfaction of knowing why you have dropped me?"

Pauline shook her head. "I do not recognize your right to question me on that point," she returned. "You assume to know my reason for not having asked you here. I object to the form and the quality of your question. I deny that I have dropped you, as you choose to term it. I think your present course a presumptuous one, and I am ignorant of having violated any rights of your own by not having sent you a card to my reception. There are a great many other people in New York besides yourself to whom I did not send a card. Any quarrel between you and Mr. Kindelon is a matter of no concern to me. And as for my having dealt you an injury, that assertion is quite preposterous. I do not for an instant admit it, and since your attitude toward me is painfully unpleasant, I beg that this conversation may be terminated at once."

"Oh, you show me the door, do you?" exclaimed Miss Cragge. She looked very angry as she now spoke, and her anger was almost repulsively unbecoming. Her next words had the effect of a harsh snarl. "I might have expected just this sort of treatment," she proceeded, with both her dingy-gloved hands manipulating the bundle of newspapers at still brisker speed. "But I'm a very good hater, Mrs. Varick, and I'm not stamped on quite so easily as you may suppose. I usually die pretty hard in such cases, and perhaps you'll find that your outrageous behavior will get the punishment it merits. Oh, you needn't throw back your proud head like that, as if I were the dirt under your feet! I guess you'll be sorry before very long. I intend to make you so if I can!"

Pauline felt herself turn pale. "You are insolent," she said, "and I desire you to leave my house immediately."

Miss Cragge walked to the door, but paused as she reached its threshold, looking back across one of her square shoulders with a most malevolent scowl.

"You've got no more heart than a block of wood," she broke forth. "You never had any. I know all about you. You married an old man for his money a few years ago. He was old enough to be your grandfather, and a wretched libertine at that. You knew it, too, when you married him. So now that you've got his money you're going to play the literary patron with it. And like the cold-blooded coquette that you are, you've made Ralph Kindelon leave poor Cora Dares, who's madly in love with him, and dance attendance on yourself. I suppose you think Kindelon really cares for you. Well, you're mightily mistaken if you do think so, and if he ever marries you I guess it won't be long before he makes you find it out!"

Miss Cragge disappeared after the delivery of this tirade, and as she closed the outer hall-door with a loud slam Pauline had sank into a chair. She sat thus for a longer time than she knew, with hands knotted in her lap, and with breast and lips quivering.

The vulgarity, the brutality of those parting words had literally stunned her. It is no exaggeration to state that Miss Cragge's reference to her marriage had inflicted a positive agony of shame. But the allusion to Cora Dares's love for Kindelon, and to Kindelon's merely mercenary regard for herself, had also stabbed with depth and suffering. Was it then true that this man's feelings toward her were only the hypocritical sham of an aim at worldly advancement? "How shall I act to him when we again meet?" Pauline asked herself. "If I really thought this charge true, I should treat him with entire contempt. And have I the right to believe it true? This Cragge creature has a viperish nature. Should I credit such information from such a source?"

That was a day of days with poor Pauline. She seemed to look upon Ralph Kindelon in a totally new light. She realized that the man's brilliant personality had made his society very dear to her. She told herself that she cared for him as she had cared for none other in her life. But the thought that personal ambition was solely at the root of his devotion affected her with something not far from horror.

By degrees the memory of Miss Cragge's final outburst stung her less and less. The whole speech had been so despicable, the intention to wantonly insult had been so evident. After a few hours had passed, Pauline found that she had regained nearly all her customary composure. She felt that if Kindelon should come that evening she could discuss with him calmly and rationally the almost hideous occurrence of the morning.

He did come, and she told him a great deal, but she did not tell him all. No mention of Cora Dares left her lips, nor of the acrid slur at his own relations toward herself. He listened to the recital with a face that wrath paled, while it lit a keener spark in his eyes. But he at length answered in tones thoroughly controlled, if a little husky and roughened:

"I can scarcely express to you my disgust for that woman's conduct. I did not think her capable of it. She represents one of the most baleful forces of modern times—the nearly unbridled license of the newspaper. She has dipped her pen for years into poisonous ink; she is one of our American monstrosities and abominations. Her threat of punishment to you would be ridiculous if it were not so serious."

"You think that she will carry it out?" asked Pauline.

"I should not be at all surprised if she did so."

"Do you mean that she may write some slanderous article about me?"

"It is quite possible."

Pauline gave a plaintive sigh. "Oh, have I no means of preventing her?" she exclaimed.

Kindelon shook his head negatively. "She attacks from an ambuscade, nearly always," he answered. "There is no such thing as spiking her guns, for they are kept so hidden. Still, let us hope for the best."

Pauline burst into tears. "What a wretched failure I have made of it all!" she cried. "Ah, if I had only known sooner that my project would bring such disaster upon me!"

"It has brought no disaster as yet," said Kindelon, with a voice full of the most earnest sympathy.

"It has brought distress, regret, torment!" asseverated Pauline, still struggling with her tears.

"Have you told me all?" he suddenly asked, with an acute, anxious look.

"All?" murmured Pauline.

"Yes. Did that woman say anything more?"

"Yes," Pauline answered, after a little silence, with lowered eyes.

"Ah!" sounded Kindelon's exasperated sigh. "I can almost guess what it was," he went on. "She was not content, then, with saying atrocious things of your marriage; she must couple our names together—yours and mine."

"She mentioned another name still," said Pauline, who continued to gaze at the floor. "It was the name of Cora Dares." Pauline lifted her eyes, now; they wore a determined, glittering look. "She said that Cora Dares was madly in love with you. 'Madly' struck me as an odd enough word to apply to that gentle, dignified girl."

"It might well do so!" burst from Kindelon, in a smothered voice. He rose and began to pace the floor. She had never seen him show such an excited manner; all his past volatility was as nothing to it. And yet he was plainly endeavoring to repress his excitement. "However," he proceeded, in a swift undertone, "this absurd slander need not concern you."

"You call it slander, as if you did not really think it so," she said.

He paused, facing her. "Are you going to let the venomous spite of an inferior win your respectful credence?" he questioned.

"We can't help believing certain things," said Pauline, measuredly, "no matter who utters them. I believed that Cora Dares was in love with you before I heard Miss Cragge say it. Or, at least, I seriously suspected as much. But of course this could not be a matter of the least concern to myself, until"—And here she paused very suddenly.

"Well?" he queried. "Until?"—

She appeared to reflect, for an instant, on the advisability of saying more. Then she lifted both hands, with a tossing, reckless motion. "Oh," she declared, "not until that woman had the audacity to accuse me of heartlessly standing in the path of Cora Dares's happiness—of alienating your regard from her—of using, moreover, a hatefully treacherous means toward this end—a means which I should despise myself if I ever dreamed of using!..." Pauline's voice had begun to tremble while she pronounced the latter word.

"I understand," he said. His own voice was unsteady, though the anger had in great measure left it. To her surprise, he drew quite near her, and then seated himself close at her side. "If you did truly care for me," came his next sentence, "how little I should care what false witness that woman bore against the attachment! But since that day down at the Battery, when I wore my heart on my sleeve so daringly, I have made a resolve. It will be your fault, too, if I fail to keep it. And if I do fail, I shall fail most wretchedly. I—I shall make a sort of desperate leap at the barrier which now separates you and me."

"You say it will be my fault," was Pauline's response. The color had stolen into her cheeks before she framed her next sentence, and with a most clear glow. "How will it be my fault?"

"You must have given me encouragement," he said, "or at least something that I shall take for encouragement."

A silence followed. She was looking straight at the opposite wall; her cheeks were almost roseate now; a tearful light shone in her eyes as his sidelong look watched them. "Perhaps," she faltered, "you might take for encouragement what I did not mean as such."

"Ah, that is cruel!" he retorted.

She turned quickly; she put one hand on his arm. "I did not wish to be cruel!" she affirmed, gently and very feelingly.

It seemed to her, then, that the strong arm on which her hand rested underwent a faint tremor.

"It is easy for you to be cruel, where I am concerned."

"Easy!" she repeated, rapidly withdrawing her hand, and using a hurt intonation.

He leaned closer to her, then. "Yes," he said. "And you know why. I have told you of the difference between us. I have told you, because I am incessantly feeling it."

"There is a great difference," she answered, with a brisk little nod, as though of relief and gratification. "You have more intellect than I—far more. You are exceptional, capable, important. I am simply usual, strenuous, and quite of the general herd. That is the only difference which I will admit, although you have reproached me for practising a certain kind of masquerade—for secretly respecting the shadow and vanity called caste, birth, place. Yes," she went on, with a soft fervor that partook of exultation, while she turned her eyes upon his face and thought how extraordinary a face it was in its look of power and manliness, "I will accede to no other difference than this. You are above me, and I will not let you place yourself on my level!"

She felt his breath touch her cheek, then, as he replied: "You are so fine and high and pure that I think you could love only one whom you set above yourself—however mistakenly."

"My love must go with respect—always," she said.

"I am not worthy of your respect."

"Do you want me to credit Miss Cragge?"

"Did she say that I was unworthy of it?"

"I—I cannot tell you what she said on that point. I would not tell you, though you begged me to do so."

She saw a bitter smile cross his face, but it lingered there merely an instant. "I can guess," he avowed, "that she tried to make you believe I do not really love you! It is so like her to do that."

"I—I will say nothing," stammered Pauline, once more averting her eyes.

Immediately afterward he had taken her hand in his own. She resisted neither its clasp nor its pressure.

"You know that I love you," she now heard him say, though the leap of her heart made his words sound far off, confused, unreal. "You must have known it days ago! There—my resolve is broken! But what can I do? You have stooped downward from your high state by telling me that I am better than you. I am not better than you, Pauline! I am below you—all the world would say so except yourself. But you don't care for the world. Well, then I will despise it, too, because you bid me. I never respected what you represent until you made me respect it by making me love you. Now I respect and love it, both, because you are a part of it. This is what your project, your ambition, has come to. Ah! how pitiful a failure! you're disgusted with your salon—you have been ill-treated, rebuffed, deceived! The little comedy is played to the end—and what remains? Only a poor newspaper-fellow, a sort of Irish adventuring journalist, who offers you his worthless heart to do what you choose with it! What will you choose to do with it? I don't presume to advise, to demand—not even to ask! If you said you would marry Ralph Kindelon you would be making a horrible match! Don't let us forget that. Don't let us forget how Mrs. Poughkeepsie would storm and scold!"

He had both her hands in both his own, now. She looked at him with eyes that sparkled and swam in tears. But though she did not withdraw her hands, she receded from him while brokenly saying:

"I—I don't care anything about Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie. But there—there is something else that I do care about. It—it seems to steal almost like a ghost between us—I can't tell why—I have no real reason to be troubled as I am—it is like a last and most severe distress wrought by this failure of mine with all those new people.... It is the thought that you have made Cora Dares believe that you meant to marry her."

Pauline's voice died away wretchedly, and she drooped her head as the final faint word was spoken. But she still let Kindelon hold her hands. And his grasp tightened about them as she heard him answer:

"I suppose Cora Dares may have believed that.... But, good God! am I so much to blame? I had never met you, Pauline. It was before I went to Ireland the last time—I never asked her to marry me—It was what they call a flirtation. Am I to be held to account for it? Hundreds of men have been foolish in this way before myself—Have you raised me so high only to dash me down?—Won't you speak? Won't you tell me that you forgive a dead fancy for the sake of a living love? Are you so cruel?—so exacting?"

"I am not cruel," she denied, lifting her eyes....

It was a good many minutes later that she said to him, with the tears standing on her flushed cheeks, and her fluttered voice in truly sad case,

"I—I am going to accept the Irish adventuring journalist (as—as he calls himself) for my husband, though he—he has never really asked me yet."

"He could not ask you," affirmed Kindelon, with by no means his first kiss. "Like every subject who wishes to marry a princess, he was forced to recognize a new matrimonial code!"