In August—the Ashendynes being back at Gilead Balm—the "Young People's Home Magazine" published Hagar's fairy story. Gilead Balm was impressed, but not greatly impressed. It had the aristocratic tradition as to writers; no Ashendyne had ever needed to be one. There had been editor Ashendynes, in the old fiery, early, and mid-century times, but editorship came out naturally from the political stream, and the political, with law, planting, and soldiery, had been the Ashendyne stream. The Ashendyne mind harked back to Early Georgian, even to Stuart times; when you said "writer" it saw something Grub Streetish. In addition, Hagar's was, of course, only a child's story.

The two hundred dollars shrank in impressiveness from being known of after and not before Medway Ashendyne's letter. But to the eyes of her grandmother and her Aunt Serena the two hundred dollars was the impressive, the only really impressive, thing. Her grandmother advised that it be put in bank. Miss Serena said that, when she was Hagar's age, she had had a watch and chain for more than two years. "What would you like to do with it, Gipsy?" asked Captain Bob.

The colour came into Hagar's cheeks. "With one half I want to get my two winter dresses and my coat and hat, and with the other half I want to get books."

"Books!" exclaimed the Ashendynes—the Colonel was not present. "Why, aren't there books enough here?"

"They are not the kind of books I need."

"Nonsense!" said Old Miss. "Get your winter clothes if you wish,—though I am sure that Medway means now to send the Colonel money for you,—but save the rest. It will come in useful some day. Some day, child, you'll be thinking about your marriage clothes."

"Luna and I came over the hill just now with Ralph Coltsworth," remarked Captain Bob cheerfully, apropos of nothing. "He says he's studying hard—means to catch up at the University and be a credit to the family."

Miss Serena was talented in taking offence at small things. She had evolved the watch-and-chain idea and she thought it should have received more consideration. In addition she had the kind of memory that always holds the wrong things. "Books! I suppose you mean a kind of books that we certainly don't have many of here!—French novels and Darwin and the kind of books those two Northern women were reading this summer! Even when you were a child—don't you remember, mother?—you had a perfect talent for getting your hands on debasing literature! I supposed you had outgrown it. I'm sure Mrs. LeGrand never encouraged it. A hundred dollars worth of books!—and I suppose you are to choose them! Well, if I were father, I'd look over the list first."

"Aunt Serena," said Hagar, with a Spanish gravity and courtesy, "there are times when I understand the most violent crimes.... Yes; I know you don't know what I mean."

That was in August. September passed and part of October, and then, late in that month, Hagar went to New York.

Medway Ashendyne and his wife were travelling in the East. Next year or the year after, they might, Medway wrote, be in America. In the meantime, Hagar must have advantages. He had not the least idea, he wrote his father, what kind of a person she was. Her letters were formal, toneless and colourless to a degree. He hoped she had not inherited—But whatever she had inherited, she was, of course, his daughter, and he must take care of her, being now in a position properly to do so. His wife suggested, for the moment, a winter in New York, properly chaperoned. The money would be forthcoming (there followed a memorandum of a handsome sum placed in bank to the Colonel's credit). He could, he knew, leave it to his father and mother to see that she was properly chaperoned. His wife had thought of making certain suggestions, but upon talking it over together, they had come to the conclusion that, at the moment, at least, it would be wisest not to interfere with the Gilead Balm order and way of life. It was admirably suited, he judged, for a young girl's bringing up—much better than the modern American way of doing things. Only in France—or the Orient—was the jeune fille really preserved.

The Colonel wrote to Mrs. LeGrand. Mrs. LeGrand returned one of her long, fluent letters. First of all, congratulations that Hagar had come to her senses about Mr. Laydon, then—"Now as to New York—"

Sylvie was going to New York too,—going to have singing lessons, for she had a very sweet voice, and every one agreed that it would be a mistake not to give it the best training. The problem of how to manage for Sylvie had received the following solution, and Mrs. LeGrand proffered it as a possible way to manage for Hagar also. There was Powhatan Maine's family in New York—Powhatan himself and Bessie and their widowed daughter, Mrs. Bolt, with her two children. They lived well, "in our quiet, homelike, Southern fashion, of course." Powhatan was a solid lawyer in a solid firm. Sylvie had paid them a visit once before, but of course this year it was a question of her being in New York for months and months. Now, ordinarily, the Maines would not have heard of such a thing, but this disastrous year, with everybody failing, Powhatan had lost heavily in stocks and apparently they were having to economize. At any rate, Bessie was willing, just for this year, to take Sylvie under her wing and to let her pay for her room and board. The Maines' house was a good, big one, and Mrs. LeGrand had very little doubt that, just as a family favour, Bessie would be willing to receive Hagar on similar terms. Bessie would certainly stipulate that the arrangement should be a quiet one, just between themselves, and that Hagar, no less than Sylvie, should be regarded merely as a young friend and connection, visiting her that winter. This understood, Bessie would look after the two as if they were her own. It was fortunate that neither Sylvie nor Hagar was "out," for the Maines were in mourning. But Powhatan and Bessie knew a great many people, and the two girls would probably see company enough. "You remember Bessie, don't you? Good-nature itself! Nothing pleases her so much as having people happy about her." Then, too, there would be Rachel Bolt. She could take Hagar to the theatre and to concerts and the picture galleries and where not. "The Maines are all members of St. Timothy's—the Bishop's nephew's church, you know."—In fine, Mrs. LeGrand advised that the Ashendynes write at once to Mrs. Maine. It was done and Hagar's winter soon arranged for.

New York!... She had dreamed of great cities, but she had never seen one. The night on the sleeping-car—her first night on any sleeping-car—she stayed awake and watched through the window the flying clouds and the moon and stars between, and, underneath, the fugitive landscape. There was a sense of exaltation, of rushing on with the rushing world. Now and again, as the train creaked and swung, and once, as another roared past, there came moments of fascinated terror. Rushing train and rushing world, all galloping wildly through the night, and in front, surely some bottomless precipice!... She and Sylvie had a section, and though Hagar had offered to take the upper berth, it had ended in their having it put back and sleeping together. Now Hagar sat up in bed, and looked at the sleeping Sylvie. There was a dim, blended light, coming from the lamp above and the moonlight night without. Sylvie lay, half-uncovered, fast asleep, her hair in glossy braids, her pretty face, shell-tinted, sunk in the pillow, her breast quietly rising and falling. Hagar had an intense, impersonal, abstract passion for beauty wherever and in whatever form it resided. Now, limbs beneath her, her arms nursing each other, she sat and regarded the sleeping Sylvie with a pure, detached admiration. The train roared into a station; she drew the window curtain until it roared out again, then bared the window, and sat and watched the flying dark woods and the silver surface of some wide water. New York—New York—New York....

Sylvie was a travelled lady. Sylvie had been to New York before. She had been to Florida and New Orleans and Niagara and Saratoga. She could play sweetly, not arrogantly,—Sylvie was not arrogant, except, perhaps, a little when it came to good looks,—the part of guide and mentor to Hagar. In the Jersey City station she kept a reassuring touch upon Hagar's arm down the long platform to the gate. "The New York Ferry has a sign over it. Even if they don't meet us, I know how to manage—Oh, there's Cousin Powhatan!"

It was a pearl-grey morning, going over, with a mist that was almost a fog hanging upon the water and making unearthly and like a mirage the strange sky-line before them. There were not so many huge, tall buildings as there would be in after years, but they were beginning. The mist drifted, opening and closing, and to the mist was added the fairy garlands and pennants of white steam. Out of the luminous haze grew white ferryboats and low barges, and here passed an opalescent shape like a vast moth wing. "A sailboat," said Hagar under her breath. The air was chill and clinging. Sylvie and Captain Powhatan Maine preferred to sit and talk within the cabin, but Hagar remained outside. She stood with her hands lightly touching the rail, her eyes wide. Another sailboat slipped past. She turned and looked along the widening water, oceanward, and in a rift of the grey pearl clouds she seemed to see, at a great distance, a looming woman shape. A salt odour filled her nostrils. "Oh, the sea! I smell the sea!"

The ferryboat glided into its slip, the bell rang, the chains rattled; out resonantly, from the lower deck, passed the great dray horses and heavy wagons; the passengers disembarked; a crowd hurried, in column, toward the Elevated. Half-bewildered, Hagar found herself mounting long flights of steps, passing through a gateway, entering a train, which at once, with a shriek, began to run upon a level with second-story windows. She saw dingy red-brick factory and tenement buildings close, close to her face; fire-escapes and staring windows with squalid or horribly tawdry rooms beyond; on the window-sills spindling, starved plants in ancient, battered tin cans, children's faces, women leaning out, children, children, children—"We have to go quite far uptown," said Captain Maine. "Well, and what do you girls want to see first?"

He was a short, stout, gallant gentleman with a fierce grey mustache. Sylvie talked for both. Hagar nodded her head or commanded a smile when manners seemed to indicate it, but her mind was dealing with a nightmare. "Was this—was this New York?" Once she turned her head toward their escort, but something told her that if, indeed, she asked the absurd question, he would say, "Why, yes! Don't you like it?"

Where were the domes and colonnades? Where the cleanness and fairness—where the order and beauty? Where was the noble, great city? Where were the happy people? She tried to tell herself, first, that all these were there, that this was but a chance ugly street the train was going through ... but they went through it for miles, and she caught glimpses of so many other streets that seemed no better! And then she tried to tell herself, that, after all, she must have known it would be something like this. She had seen before, on a small scale, in a small city, decrepit buildings and decrepit people of all ages. Poverty, dirt, and disease.... One city would be like another, only larger.... She must have known. But knowing did not seem to have helped—or perhaps she had never really seen, nor thought it out. She was tired and overstrained; a horror came upon her. She looked through a window into a room hung with a ghastly green, torn, and soiled paper. Men and women were working in it, bent over a long table, working haggardly and fast, the shirts of the men, the bodices of the women, open at the throat. Another window—a wretched, blowsy woman and a young man with a bloated, unwholesome face;—another, and an old, old woman with a crying child, whom she struck;—then mere blank windows or windows with starveling geraniums in broken pots; and beneath and around and everywhere voices and heavy wheels, and the train rushing on upon its trestle high in the air. Something black and cold and hopeless rolled over Hagar's soul. It was as though the train were droning, droning, a melancholy text.

"Hagar! What is the matter? You looked as though you were going to faint!"

But Hagar wasn't going to faint. She pulled herself together. "No, no! It isn't anything! I was tired, I suppose—"

"Mustn't faint in New York," said Captain Maine genially. "You'll get run over if you do."

On went the Elevated, and the walls of windows grew vaguely better—or the shock of surprise was over—or the armoured being within shouldered away a hampering unhappiness. New York—New York—New York! Hope and vision sprang afresh. The windows and the houses in which they were set decidedly bettered. There were distant glimpses of fine buildings, spires of churches, trees that must be in a park. The sun, which had been all morning hidden by clouds, came suddenly forth and flooded the world with October gold. The gulf between what she had dreamed and what she saw perceptibly narrowed, though it was still there and though it still ached. "Here we are!" said Captain Maine, and folded his newspaper. Out of the train upon a platform—then more stairs, this time running downward—then a block or two of walking, in the crisp air, then a very different street from those the train had rushed through and very different houses. "Here we are!" said their host again, and they mounted a brownstone stoop. A coloured maid opened the door—they passed into a narrow reception hall with the Maines' ancestral tall clock standing by the stair and on the opposing walls engravings of Southern generals; thence, through folding doors, into a cool, deep parlour and the embrace of Mrs. Maine.

Mrs. Maine was large and sleepy and quiet and dark, with a nebulous personality. Everybody who knew her said that she was extremely good-natured, while a few added that she was too indolent to be irascible, and a fair number called it native kindliness and adduced a range of respectable incidents. No one ever hinted at intellectuality, and she certainly did not shine in conversation; she was not, apparently, socially ambitious, and nobody could be said to take less trouble—and yet a number of people—chiefly Southerners dwelling in New York, the more decorative and prosperous of St. Timothy's congregation, and Powhatan Maine's legal associates and acquaintances—exhibited a certain partiality for the Maine house. Powhatan told good war stories and darky stories; almost always there appeared something good to eat, with a Southern name and flavour; and Mrs. Maine was as unobtrusive and comfortable to get on with as the all-pervasive ether. There was nothing riotous nor especially buoyant in the house; it was rather dim and dull and staid; but people who had begun to visit the Maines twenty years before visited still. Perhaps most of them were dim and dull and staid themselves. Others, perhaps, liked the occasional salt of an environment which was not habitually theirs. The house itself was deep and for a New York dwelling wide, cool, high-ceilinged, and dark, with a gleam of white marble mantel-pieces and antiquated crystal chandeliers, with some ancient Virginia furniture and some ebony and walnut abominations of the 'seventies. Everything was a little worn, tending toward shabbiness; but a shabbiness not extreme, as yet only comfortable, though with a glance toward a more helpless old age. There were a fair number of books, some portraits and good, time-yellowed engravings. There were four coloured servants beside the nurse for Mrs. Bolt's children. The children, Charley and Betty, were pudgy, quaint elves of three and five. Charley, the younger, had been blind from birth.

That evening, Rachel Bolt came before bedtime into Hagar's room. "May I sit and talk a little while? Sylvie and mother and father and Dick Dabney, who came in a little while ago, are playing duplicate whist."

"Of course you may. It's such a pleasant room you've given me."

Rachel turned in her chair and regarded it from wall to wall somewhat cynically. "Well, I suppose at the first blush it may seem so. It is, however, rather shabby. We meant to do it over again this year, but times are so tremendously hard that we gave it up with a lot of other things.—What I really came in for was to ask what kind of things and places and people you'd like to see this winter. It's agreed with your grandfather that I'm to take you around."

"It is good of you to be willing to do it—"

"Oh, I'm to be paid for doing it! I'll be spinning my spring outfit and Betty's and Charley's while we gallivant. But I do not mean"—she laughed—"that it is going to be hard or disagreeable work, unless"—she ended coolly—"you want to go to places where I don't want to go."

"To those places," said Hagar seriously, "I will go alone."

"Then," said Rachel, "we will get along very well.... What do you want to do anyhow?"

"I want to feel around for a while. And I'd like to be shown how to go and how to manage, just at first. But after that I hope you won't mind if I just wander about by myself." She lifted her long arms above her head in a gesture, harassed and restless. "I think there are people to whom solitude means as much as food or sleep."

"Do you want me to get up and say good-night?" asked Rachel promptly.

Hagar gave a warm little laugh. "Not yet awhile. I'm not that greedy and sleepy. I strive to be temperate.... What I want to see first are pictures. I have never seen any—barring those at home and at Eglantine."

"Well, we can go to the Metropolitan to-morrow."

"I should like that. Then I want to hear music. I have never heard any to count."

"There'll be concerts and the opera later. The opera is, of course, very expensive, but I understand that your father wants you to do pretty well what you wish. If you don't mind being high up, we can do a good deal of it reasonably."

"Then let us go high up."

"At the moment there aren't even concerts. We might find an organ recital, and on Sundays there is music in the park."

"Day after to-morrow is Sunday. I'll go and hear that. Then I want to go to the theatre."

"Most of that will come later, too. Are you fond of the theatre?"

"I don't know. That is why I want to go—to find out. I have never seen but three plays."

"What an awfully lucky person! What were they?"

"One—I was a little girl and I went to Richmond for two days—was 'Maria Stuart.' Janauschek played it. The next was in the small town near where I live. It was rather terribly done, I believe, and it kept me awake for a week afterward. I was fifteen. It was 'The Corsican Brothers.' Then"—said Hagar, "last winter I saw 'Romeo and Juliet.'... They didn't seem like plays. They seemed like life,—sometimes terrible and sometimes beautiful. I want to go to find out if it is always so."

"It isn't," said Rachel. "You are inexperienced."

"There is a natural history museum here, isn't there?"

"Yes, a large one."

"I want to go there. I want to see malachite and chrysoprase and jade, and the large blue butterflies and the apes up to man and the models of the pterodactyl and dinosaur and a hundred other things."

"Until now," said Rachel, "I have thought that Charley and Betty had the largest possible appetites. What else?"

"Am I tiring you?"

"Not a bit. Besides, it is business. I came in here to get a catalogue raisonnÉ.—It's rather curious that you should have such a passion for minerals and species and prehistoric things."

"Is it? Well, I have it," said Hagar. She put her arms again behind and above her head. "If you want to know All, you must live All—though in honour preferring one to the other."

Beside her, on the little table by the hearth, was a paper and pencil. Suddenly she unlocked her hands, bent over and drew a sheet of paper from under the book with which she had covered it on Rachel's entrance. "I was trying to write something when you came in. It is rough and crude,—just the skeleton,—but it's something like what I mean and what I want." She held it out; then, with a deprecating gesture and a shy flush, "If it doesn't bore you—"

Rachel took it and read.

Rachel put it down. "I'll think that out a little. We've never had any one in the house just like you."

"I thought," said Hagar, "that Sunday morning I would go to the Catholic Cathedral. If you tell me the way I can find it—"

"You are not a Catholic?"

"No. But I have always wanted so to smell incense.—

"You are rich in differences," said Rachel. "I hope we'll get along well together. I think we will. Is there anything else you can think of at the moment?"

"I want to see the Salvation Army."

"That may be managed, if you are willing to take it in detachments."

"And I want—oh, I want to go somewhere where I can really see the ocean!"

"I'll get father to take us down to Brighton Beach. It isn't too late, this mild weather."

"This morning," said Hagar, "we came through—miles, I think—of places where poor people live. I want to see all that again."

"It isn't very edifying. But we can get under the wing of some association and do a little mild slumming."

"I want to go down there alone and often—"

"That," said Rachel, "is impossible."

"Why?"

"It is not done. Besides, it would be dangerous."

"Dangerous?"

"You might take any disease—or get into any kind of trouble. There are all sorts of traps."

"Why should they set traps?"

"Oh, all kinds of horrors happen.—Just look at the newspapers! A girl—alone—you'd be subjected to insult."

Hagar sighed. "I've always been alone. And I don't see that we are not subjected to insult everywhere. I could never feel more insulted than, sometimes, I have been at home."

Rachel, turning in her chair, darted at her a lightning-like glance of comprehension. "Well, that's true enough, though I never heard it put into words before! It's true.... But it remains that with our present conventions, you must have company when you go to see how the other half lives."

"The other half?"

"It's a term: One half of us doesn't know how the other half lives."

"I see," said Hagar. "Well, I'll be glad when I get out of fractions."

Both laughed. A kind of soft, friendly brightness prevailed in the third-floor back bedroom. There was no open fire, but they sat on either side of the little squat table, and the reading-lamp with a yellowy globe did the job of a common luminary. The light reached out to each and linked them together. Rachel Bolt was small and dark and slender. Much of the time she passed for a cynical and rather melancholy young woman; then, occasionally, sheaths parted like opening wings and something showed that was vivid and deep and duskily luminous. The next moment the rift might close, but there had been received an impression of the inward depths. She had been married at eighteen, her first child born a year later. She was now twenty-five, and had been a widow for two years. In worldly wisdom and savoir faire, and in several emotional experiences she was well ahead of Hagar, but in other respects the brain ways of the younger in years were deeper and older. Whatever differences, their planes were near enough for a comprehension that, continually deepening, passed before long into the country of lasting friendship.