The famous Secretary sat at her desk in the well-kept sitting-room. She sat in the midst of documents and letters; large white sheets of her Education League writing-paper lay before her, the topmost sheet nearly filled with her neat chirography. Oblivious to small happenings in the world without, the Secretary was deep in her distinguished correspondence. But her desk, as it happened, stood in the window, and the Secretary, after all, was not so immersed in her affairs but that she looked out into the Park now and then, sometimes for whole minutes together. She looked, too, into the quiet street before the house. And so it was that her eyes, in time, fell upon the familiar figure of Charles Garrott; striding all at once into her range, turning swiftly in at her door, vanishing again into her vestibule, scarcely five feet from where she sat.

Though thus aware that she was about to have a caller, Mary did not at once spring up to go and welcome him. She sat, entirely motionless, her permanently questioning gaze fixed on the spot where the caller had passed from view. The ringing of the bell scarcely seemed to penetrate her consciousness. But then, in a moment, she dropped her pen quickly, and rose. Standing, she locked her two hands together before her, very tight, released them again, passed out into the hall, and opened her front door.

"Good-afternoon! This is an unexpected pleasure," said she, in her natural voice, or very near it. "Come in!—or can you?"

Her visitor looked full at her from the vestibule, unsmiling.

"Oh, certainly—if you're not too busy! It's what I am here for. How do you do to-day?"

"That's nice! You don't often honor us, and—I feared you had merely stopped to leave that package."

"Ah, yes!—the package! Some things Donald got for you—I suppose you know? He asked me—"

"Oh! I'm afraid that was very much of an imposition—and I was really in no hurry for them at all."

She thanked him, relieved him of the pretextual box, laid it on the hall table, and, with inevitable but extreme infelicity, continued:—

"You saw Donald to-day, then?"

A small silence preceded his controlled reply "Oh, yes!—I saw him."

"I've just packed him off to a house-party at the Kingsleys'—to make love to Helen Carson. But perhaps he told you?"

In the large mirror overhanging the table, the eyes of the once excellent friends briefly encountered. She was puzzled by the quality of his grave gaze.

"He did mention a house-party, I believe. But—"

Turning away toward the sitting-room, Mary filled the pause with a little laugh: "But you think he won't make love to Helen, perhaps?"

The grave young man, following her, did not burst forth, even then. His restraint seemed curious, even to himself. Crossing Washington Street just now, he had been full enough of plain speech, for this young woman's good. "I've had quite enough of this!" he would say to her. "I can't and won't give up my afternoons, my life, to playing nurse to Donald. If you are satisfied to have him marry Miss Angela, well and good. If not—" and then a last warning, far sharper, far more direct, than the other. But then as he waited upon her steps, and then as he looked at her in the door, the springs of this trivial anger had seemed mysteriously to subside and dry up. No doubt the Career-Maker's own look had something to do with that. Her face in the afternoon light was seen to be thin and tired; he thought he detected faint circles under her eyes, a slightly pinched look about her nostrils. But beyond all that, beyond any question of "sympathy," or cheering-up, it seemed that the affair itself had suddenly shrunk in importance. Donald's folly, Angela's little foibles, seemed to matter less to Charles as he found himself looking again at the departing heroine of his write-ups.

So he discharged his bolt with restrained formality: "It isn't that. I was only wondering whether or not you had packed him off, as yet."

"Oh!—but haven't I?... I don't understand."

"I happened to see him a minute ago, driving on Washington Street with your cousin—Miss Angela."

It was clear that the topic had lost no interest for Mary, at any rate. She stopped short in the middle of the floor, utterly taken aback.

"Donald!—as you came here?"

And, instantly recovering from mere astonishment, her capable gaze flew to the little watch on her wrist.

Charles reassured her, as dryly as possible: "However, they were headed toward the station, and going as fast as they could. I think he will make his train."

"But—it's not possible, I'm afraid! His train goes at five twenty-two—it's just that now!... Ah, how could he!"

Producing his own valued chronometer, the young man compared it with the educator's small trinket.

"I believe you're a little fast, aren't you? I'm five-eighteen. And it was just quarter past when I saw them, for I looked to see. That gave him seven minutes—"

"Yes—well!—but Angela's little car is so slow—"

"Oh!—it can go fast enough for practical purposes—I've observed. Besides, Donald may have telephoned and found that the train was late."

"Yes—that's true."

Mary Wing looked toward the window, characteristically composed again, but evidently concerned enough.

"Well, I hope so. It would be too stupid of him to miss it, after all ... I can't think how he happened to be with Angela—at the last minute this way."

"How, indeed? But sit down, do, and I'll tell you why it seems particularly—mystifying to me. I hope," the formal caller added, with a glance toward the busy-looking desk, "I'm not interrupting?"

The General Secretary said no, with some brevity.

In sentences less copious and biting than he had sketched out on the corner, Charles recited the history of his futile afternoon. He could not, indeed, believe it possible that Donald, having donned the solemn bridegroom look for Helen Carson, would deliberately throw it off again for the sake of a short drive in the Fordette: which, to say the least of it, could be had at any time at his desire. Nor was Donald really a born fool, who would miss a train through sheer childish carelessness. The inference was that, encountering Angela, accidentally (more or less), just after his second start, the youth had calculated that he still had time to spare; and so had consented to exchange the speedy limousine for the Fordette: quite probably in no spirit more serious than that of a venturesome lark. Charles's remarks, at least, took these generous grounds, reassuring as to the moment. And still a tinge of exasperation crept into his account of his wasted labors. And still something in him seemed to require that he should bring these small responsibilities home where they belonged, for once: leaving them on her doorstep, as it were, for her to jump over when she went away.

But his story, inevitably, was one of ungallant efforts to evade impending pursuit. And when, to point up his lesson, he guardedly suggested a connection between the natural ambitions of Miss Angela, and the two complete transplantations of her family, Mary Wing seemed to gather more of his purely private thought than he had intended. One of her intent interrogative stares brought him to an unintended pause. And she commented quietly, but rebukingly, he considered:—

"You seem to have changed your opinion of Angela since last week."

There, of course, he hardly cared to justify himself. He could not well explain what Angela's resemblance to her mother had signified to him, and why he considered poor Dr. Flower the most magnificent romanticist in the world.

"I merely suggest," he said, with stiffening dignity, "that she does seem to be much interested in Donald—and he in her—now. I happen to know that he called on her twice the day he left for New York, and talked with her over the telephone this morning. But you mistake me, if you think I mean to criticize your cousin—personally. I hope I understand better than that how—all this—is as logical and mathematical as a natural law. How far in the other direction the education of women ought to take them ... that, of course, is not for me to guess.... My point is only that these—these perfectly logical ambitions—are strong enough to be taken seriously by those who mean to oppose them."

"Do you doubt that I take this seriously?"

"I have doubted it, I must admit.... Suppose this house-party comes to nothing, what do you mean to do?"

The former heroine of the write-ups did not answer him at once. She sat in a straight chair, half-sidewise, a considerable distance away; her arm was laid along the chair-back, her cheek sunk upon her hand. Something in the pose made the caller think of Donald's exaggerated statement, that he had never seen Mary so blue in his life.

When she spoke, it was not again to suggest, offhand, that he should save Donald by stepping in.

"You are right, of course," she said with a certain dignity herself. "I haven't been thinking of it as seriously as I should—evidently. Now—if this doesn't come to anything—I'll need some time to plan about it."

"It's going to be rather troublesome, I'm afraid. And you—I—"

"I'll make it my chief interest, you may be sure."

Then the stiff caller, examining his shirt-cuff as if he had never seen such an object before, released his logical comment:

"But I'm afraid you haven't left yourself a great deal of time, have you? Two weeks may prove rather a small allowance—for a difficult matter like this."

"Oh, I—hope there will be time enough. Meantime, I—"

"I hadn't realized you were going so soon, you see. That will add to the difficulties, I'm afraid. Donald says you expect to leave on the 20th."

He meant his rejoinders to be unanswerable, and she seemed to find them so. Glancing up from his cuff in the silence, Charles found his famous friend's eyes fixed upon him in a strange gaze, which her lids and lashes veiled at once. Had that look struck him from any other eyes in the world, he would have labeled it reproachful, without the smallest hesitation. But Mary was never reproachful: she scarcely thought enough of him for that; and, besides, the shoe was on the other foot, as she should know very well.

"I did say something of the sort last week, I believe—though no day was really settled on. But it was very nice of you," she went on naturally enough, but with too evident a wish to shift the conversation, "to take so much trouble about it to-day. I do appreciate all your interest in it—and I do believe it's going to turn out right, too. Donald certainly left me with that feeling, this afternoon. So don't let's bother about it any more now," said Mary. "I'd much rather hear—some more about your writing. I hope you've gotten the book well started now?"

But Charles, unique among the writers of the world, did not want to talk about himself to-day. No, he had found the topic for him now.

"No!—I haven't, I'm sorry to say. Your arrangements are all made, aren't they? Judge Blenso tells me you're going to live with Sophy Stein, who used to run the Pure Food laboratories here?"

Again her brief look seemed to thrust upon him like a hand, and again her reply glanced off:—

"Yes—I was planning to live with her. You knew her, didn't you, when—"

"I was going to say—if everything is arranged, perhaps you wouldn't need to start so early.... Of course, the idea of your friends here would be that you should wait till the last day."

As she neither approved nor rejected this amiable suggestion, Charles said: "How does that idea appeal to you?"

To his surprise, instead of answering his question, Mary rose abruptly and went over to her desk. He then assumed that she wished to show him some letter bearing on her arrangements for her new life. But it seemed that her movement had no such object. She merely stood there a moment, fingering her papers in an irresolute sort of way; and then, without a word, she moved a little farther, and stood, looking out of the window.

He said, at once with bewilderment and with increasing constraint: "Or possibly you don't wish me to know when you are going?"

Then Mary Wing turned in the dying light, and said, not dramatically at all, but in her quietest everyday voice:—

"No, I don't mind your knowing. I'm not going."

And still the authority on women did not understand.

"Not going—when?"

"I've decided not to accept the appointment."

And, sitting down, suddenly and purposelessly at her desk, the young woman of the Career added in a rather let-down voice: "I haven't told anybody at all yet. I just decided—last night."

Then came silence into the twilight sitting-room, surely a silence like none here before it. In the Wings' best chair, the caller sat still as a marble man, while the little noises from the street grew loud and louder. And then, quite abruptly and mechanically, he began to rise, exactly as if an unseen spirit were lifting him bodily by the hair. And he could feel all the blood drawing out of his face.

"Not going to accept the appointment," he echoed suddenly, in a queer voice.

And then, as if so reminded that his tongue possessed this accomplishment, he all at once burst out: "Why—but—why! You have accepted it! It was settled!—long ago! Not going!—what do you mean? Why, what's happened?"

The young woman seated so inappropriately at the desk, gazing so meaninglessly into pigeon-holes, made no reply. And now Charles Garrott was walking toward her, walking as the entranced walk, fascinated, staring with fixed eyes that had forgotten how to wink.

"What're you talking about? I don't know what you mean! Why, what's happened—what's gone wrong?"

Mary Wing grew restless under his questionings; she spoke with obvious effort: "Nothing's happened—nothing's gone wrong. I say, I simply decided that I wouldn't—take the position, after all. I decided I would refuse it. So I was writing to Dr. Ames—to explain ... That's all I can say."

But the man standing over her looked more spellbound than ever.

"Explain!—explain what?... Why—you can't put me off like this—can you?" said he, all his stiffness so shattered by her thunderbolt, all his struggle but for some effect of poise. "You must know—I'm tremendously interested. And—I'm obliged to feel that something pretty serious has happened to make you—"

"No!—nothing has happened at all, I've said. I assure you—nothing."

"But ... You can't imagine how absolutely in the dark ... Do you mean you've found something else you'd rather do—here?"

"I suppose that's one way of putting it—yes.... Why, I simply say that when the time came—I wasn't able to do it, that's all.... No, I didn't want to do it—that must have been it. Of course, people always do what they really want most."

"You didn't want to do what?... You know, that's just what I don't quite understand."

"But I've just told you," she protested; and there stopped short.

She had overcome the brief weakness which had seemed to seize her when, for the first time, she heard her intention declared aloud, the spoken word, it may be, imparting to it the last irrevocable stroke. She, the competent, would not be incompetent with her own great affair. And now, as if she reluctantly acknowledged some right he had to understand, she seemed to force herself to speak again, in a voice from which her self-control had pressed all tone.

"I mean that, when the time came, I couldn't pick up and go away—for good—no matter what was at the other end. I mean I wasn't willing to. I'd rather not."

She took a breath; and then tone came into her sentences, but it was only a sort of light hardness.

"I suppose it all came down to this—that I wasn't willing to leave mother—in the way I should have to leave her. I didn't want to. It was not possible ... And I'm afraid that's all I can say."

"But of course I understand you now," said the young man instantly, in the strangest mild voice.

"Then, if you will—please me—let's say no more about it."

To that stanch speech he made no reply: perhaps he did not hear it. Winter dusk had crept quickly into the pretty sitting-room. The tall figure motionless by the little desk grew perceptibly dimmer.

That understanding Charles spoke of had come upon him by successive shocks, each violent in its way. His had been the mere mad sense of a world too suddenly swung upside down, of the individual himself left standing brilliantly on his head. That had been just at first; and then perception had slid into him like a lance, and his feet had struck the solid ground with a staggering jolt. It was as if, at a word, all the supporting fabrications of his mind had turned to thin air, and out he fell headlong, at last, upon the real and the true. And this real and this true was Mary Wing, nothing else, standing where she had always stood; Mary, his best old friend, whom he had given his back to, belabored with harsh words, while she struggled at the crossroads of her life—to this. Now contrition, now humbleness had shaken the young authority, a poignant conviction of his failure, in understanding and in friendship. And then she spoke again, making it all quite perfect with simple words that he himself, in a dream, might have shaped and put into her mouth. I wasn't willing to leave mother. And after that, it seemed that nothing about himself could possibly matter in the least.

"You know," he said, quite naturally, out of the small silence, "I think it's beautiful that a girl like you can feel this way—a girl with your abilities—your usefulness and splendid success—and now this magnificent oppor—"

"Don't!—please don't! I hadn't meant to speak of it at all. I—we won't discuss it, please."

She spoke hastily, pushing back the papers she had been pretending to arrange, starting to rise. But that word or that movement seemed to galvanize the still Charles into the suddenest life.

"Discuss it!" he cried, in a new voice. "Why, we're going to have the greatest discussion you ever heard!"

For perhaps the strangest part of this destructive upheaval was that it seemed to leave every idea he had ever had about this Career completely reversed. One word from Mary Wing about not leaving her mother, and nothing seemed to matter but that she, in her fine recklessness, should not be allowed to sacrifice her triumph and her life.

"No!—please! It's settled now. And it only makes—"

But her friend, the authority, had flung himself into the chair beside her, like an excited boy, and he seized her wrist on the desk-leaf in an arresting grip.

"No, it isn't settled till it's settled right!—don't you know that? Is this your letter to Ames here? Let me tear it up for you now! Refuse the appointment! Why, Miss Mary! You can't think of such a thing! You!—a worker with a mission—and this your great call!—your big opportunity—your duty! Yes, your—"

She interrupted his flowing modernisms to say, quite patiently: "You're hurting my wrist."

"Yes, and I'm going on hurting it till I see that letter torn up! Now, Miss Mary!—listen to me—for once—I beg! You won't suppose I don't understand—now—what made you sit down to do this, and I—I needn't say I admire you immensely for feeling so. But—don't you see—if life's hard, it's not your doing, and if it's hardest on mothers, you can't change the conditions by a hair's-breadth, no matter what you do.... Why, if you were going to marry Donald, and go off to Wyoming, the break here would be just as bad, but you'd never think it wasn't right—you'd know that these were the terms and conditions of life. Oh, you know all that as well as I! You know the duty isn't from children to parents—no, I swear, it's from parents to children, every time. And your mother'll be the first to say so—you know that, too! You know, when you tell her you're thinking of doing this, she'll go down on her knees to beg you to take your youth—and your life—and be free—"

He was deflected by one of Mary's normal level gazes, turned upon him. She said steadily:—

"How long have you been feeling this way?"

"Ten years! And then—for about five minutes."

"I had understood somehow—I don't know how exactly—that you always thought I should stay here."

The young man felt a flush spreading upward toward his hair, but would not lower his eyes.

"Perhaps I did have some such feeling—in a sort of—personal, illogical way. But if it's the last word I ever speak—you've destroyed the last shred of it."

He rose abruptly, without intention. Nothing in the world was clearer to him than that he and his reactions mattered little to her now; yet the desire mounted in him to explain how it was never the thing itself, but always the feeling about it, that had seemed so important to him. However, the school-teacher, with a little definitive gesture of the arm he had released, spoke first:—

"Well, never mind! Don't argue with me, please. It's as over and done with as something last year—"

But Charles, upon his unimagined task of persuading Mary to act as the Egoettes act, cried out: "No!—no! Argue! Why, d'you think I'll stand by and hold my tongue, while you sacrifice the great chance of your life, your particular dream—for a mere notion of duty! I say, and I've always said, that freedom—and the right to do your work—belong to you, if to anybody in the world! You've—"

"Do you really suppose I've lain awake all these nights without learning what my own mind is?"

Having stopped him effectually with this dry thrust, she went on in another manner, not controversial at all, rather like one speaking to herself.

"And as for my freedom—that's not involved at all.... I was thinking just now that maybe this is just what freedom—responsible freedom—really is—means. It's having the ability and the desire and the fair chance to do a thing—and then not do it."

And then Charles Garrott knew, quite suddenly and finally, that this, indeed, was no talk in a book, but the realest thing in the world; that this incredible had really happened: that Mary Wing, the "hard" Career-Maker, was tossing her Career away....

He stood quite silenced, while she spoke her last decisive word.

"So you see you have a wrong idea of—what I'm doing, altogether. I appreciate your—being so interested—I value it, you know that," said Mary Wing in a controlled voice, hard even. "But I can't leave you thinking that I'm simply sacrificing myself—to my mother, for instance. It isn't that way at all. Of course, I'm no more to mother than mother is to me. It's not a sacrifice.... Or, rather—I'm in the position that people are always in—more or less. Either way, I've got to sacrifice—and this is the way I choose. But it's getting very dark. I must light the lamps."

She rose as she spoke, and having risen, bent again, to snap on, superfluously, her little desk-light. And as she so stood and bent, the large hand of Charles Garrott reached out suddenly, and began to pat her shoulder.

She seemed but a slip of a girl, no more, that he, Charles, could have tossed upon his shoulder, and so walked out upon a journey. But here, in a wink, she had shot up so tall upon his horizon that he himself, beside her, seemed to possess no significance at all. She might be right, she might be wrong: but, to him, the authority, this crashing negation of the Ego was the flung banner of a splendid trustworthiness, a fitness to lead her own life, indeed, such as should not be questioned henceforward. Never had this woman's independence of him spoken out to him with so clarion a voice as now. And still, over and through her unemotional firmness, the sense of what a giving-up was here swelled in him almost overwhelmingly. It was the brilliant prize of ten years' checkered struggle that his old friend to-day so stoically threw away. Here was a refusal which would touch every corner of her life to its farthest reaches....

So Charles Garrott's warring sensations, his humility and his pride in her, had instinctively expressed themselves in the awkward mute gesture of his sympathies.

By chance, it was Mary's more distant shoulder that his novel impulse had prompted him to pat and go on patting: so, from the accident of their positions, an eye-witness might have been with difficulty convinced that this man's arm was not actually about the slim figure of his friend. But a jury, without doubt, would have accepted the friend's attitude, her entire indifference to what was going on, as fair proof that this was purely a modern proceeding, and no caress. To ask why he did this clearly did not enter Mary's head. Had she been a man, indeed, or he her father, she could hardly have seemed more unaffected by Charles Garrott's unexampled ministrations.

With what speech he meant to accompany and justify his pattings, Charles had not stopped to think. He had, in fact, himself just become conscious of them, when Mary, straightening up, said suddenly in her normal voice:—

"There's the telephone ringing. Excuse me a minute."

She gave him a brief look in passing, which may have been intended as some sort of courteous acknowledgment of the pattings after all. And then she disappeared into the hall, putting an end to talk: inopportunely he felt; leaving him with, a vague sense of inartistic incompletion....

The young man stood still in the silent sitting-room, in a duskiness just punctuated by the small green glow of the desk-lamp.

One of those many minds of his, which are at once a writer's genius and his curse,—that completely detached, cool overmind which never sleeps, never ceases to scrutinize and appraise,—was quite conscious that Mary had held him off with a hand firmer than his own. There was a tremendous lot that he really needed to say, it seemed, in sheer admiration, sheer feeling; and, the truth was, she didn't wish to have him say it. No; her strength, though so far finer and more sensitive than the strength of the Egoette, was, indeed, not "soft." She would not sentimentalize even her own suicidal renouncing. As for weeping—he himself had seemed rather nearer tears than his iron-hearted friend....

But the intense thought of the central mind, of the net Charles, had never wavered from its great stark fact, that Mary Wing was going to stay at home—and be a school-teacher.... And why had he, who thought himself as observant as another authority, been staggered so by the revelation? Had not he himself divined just this subtler quality in her long ago, when he found and named her as the best type of modern woman?... But no, even in "Bondwomen," he had had reservations, it seemed; open doubts in the write-ups.

And now, Charles the author, in his turn, abruptly collided with a strange discovery. He stood rigid, startled.... This strength and this surrender, this power to act, this power to feel, this freedom fine enough to accept the responsibilities of freedom, and to have no part with that hollow Self-Assertion which traded round the world in freedom's name: what was all this but the rounded half of that true Line which, in the Studio, had so long eluded him? What had he wished to say about freedom so much as just this? And why need he search in his fancy now for his wholly Admirable Heroine?...

Mary Wing appeared suddenly in the door. Unmoving, the young man stood and gazed at her; and so vivid had his imaginings become that his stare was touched with no greeting, no recognition even. And then, even in the dusk, he seemed to see that she, his Heroine in the flesh, brought back a face more troubled than she had taken out, eyes colored with a fresh anxiety.

He spoke rather confusedly: "What was it? Is anything the matter?"

"Dr. Flower's very ill," she answered hurriedly. "He's had a stroke, or something. I'm afraid it's very serious. I must go there at once."

All the small fret of the earlier afternoon, every thought and association with which he had walked into this room just now had receded so fast and far that re-connection, all in a moment, was not easy. Charles, staring, seemed to say: "And who, if you please, is Dr. Flower?" And then his mind replied with a flashing picture of Angela's father, as he had last seen him, sitting forlorn among his cigar-stubs: and at once he touched reality again.

"Ah! I'm sorry!" said he; and then: "You must let me go with you."

"Well—thank you—if you like."

And Mary, already moving away toward the bedrooms, added then, in a colorless sort of way:—

"Who do you suppose telephoned me from there?"

"Who telephoned?—I don't know—"

She paused, half turned, looked back at him, hesitated, and then spoke but a single word:—

"Donald."

Brief though the reply was, it was sufficient to plant Charles Garrott's feet permanently upon the earth.

After an interval, with movements purely mechanical, he sought for his watch. It was quarter past six. And he understood everything then.

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