It was the year of the assassination of Sadi Carnot in France, of the trial of Emma Goldman in New York, of much "Hellish Anarchist Activity." It was a year of growth in the American Federation of Labour. It was a year of Socialist growth. It was a year of strikes—mine strikes, railway strikes, other strikes, Lehigh and Pullman and Cripple Creek. It was the year of the Army of Coxey. It was the year of the Unemployed and of Relief Agencies. It was the year when the phrase "A living wage" received currency.

In the winter of 1894 the Spanish War had not been, the Boer War had not been, the Russo-Japanese War had not been. The war between Japan and China was on the eve of being; people talked of Matabeleland, and Cecil Rhodes was chief in South Africa. Hawaii was in process of being annexed. In the winter of 1894 it was the Wilson Tariff Bill, and Bimetallism, and Mr. Gladstone and Home Rule, and the Mafia in Sicily, and the A.P.A., and the Bicycle, and Queen Liliuokalani, and the Causes of Strikes and of Panics, and Electric Traction, and the romances of Sienkiewicz and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "The Heavenly Twins." Mr. Howells was writing "Letters of an Altrurian Traveller"; George Meredith had published "Lord Ormont and his Aminta." Stevenson, at Vailima, was considering "Weir of Hermiston."

In 1894 occurred the first voting of women in New Zealand. It saw the opening of a Woman's Congress in Berlin. In New York a Woman Suffrage Amendment was strongly advocated before a Constitutional Convention. There was more talk than usual of the Unrest among Women, more editorials than usual upon the phenomenon, more magazine articles. But the bulk of the talk and the editorials and the magazine articles had to do with the business failures and the Unemployed and the Strikes.

The beating of the waves of the year was not loudly heard in the Maines' long, high-ceilinged parlour. The law droned on, bad years with good. Powhatan had speculated and made his little losses. His philosophy this winter was pessimistic, and the household "economized." But the table was still good and plentiful, and the coloured servants, who were fond of him and he of them, smiled and bobbed, and he had not felt it necessary to change his brand of cigars, and the same old people came in the evening. Mrs. Maine never read the newspapers. She rarely read anything, though once in a while she took up an old favourite of her youth, and placidly dipped now into it and now into her box of chocolates. Powhatan kept her supplied with the chocolates. Twice a week, when he came in at five o'clock, he produced out of his overcoat pocket a glazed, white, two-pound box:—"Chocolates, Bessie! Catch!"

Rachel Bolt was more alert to the world surge, but to her, too, it must come a little muted through the family atmosphere. Her swiftest vibrations were upon other lines, curious inner, personal revolts and rebellions, sometimes consumed below the crust, sometimes breaking forth with a flare and rain of words as of lava. The family and the people who habitually came to the house were used to Rachel's way of talking; as long as she did nothing outrÉ,—and she did not,—it was no more to them than a painted volcano. As for Sylvie—Sylvie was as sweet and likeable as sugar, but not interested in anything outside of the porcelain world-dish that held her. She liked her clothes this winter, and the young men who came to the house, and she dutifully practised her voice, and enjoyed the shops and the plays, and wondered a good deal if she was or was not in love with Jack Carter, who was an interne in one of the hospitals, and who sent her every week six of the new roses called American Beauties. She had other, more distant relatives in New York, people of wealth who presently took her up. She was with them and away from the Maines a good deal, and, on the whole, Hagar saw not much of Sylvie this winter. She and Rachel were more together.

Almost every evening, at the Maines', people came in—old Southern friends, living in New York, or here on business or other occasions, young men and women, fond of Rachel, acceptable fellow-sheep from the fold of St. Timothy, now and then the rector himself, now and then some young man, Southern, with a letter of introduction. Sometimes there were but one or two besides the family, sometimes seven or eight. There was little or no formal entertainment, but this kind of thing always. Each day at dusk Hagar put on one of the two half-festive gowns which, at the last moment, Miss Serena had insisted she must have. Both were simplicity itself, both of some soft, crÊpy stuff, one dark bronze and one dark green. They were made with the large puffed sleeves of the period, and the throat slightly low and square. "Country-made, but somehow just right," Rachel judged. "You aren't any more adorned than the leaf of a tree, and yet you might walk, just as you are, into CÆsar's palace."

Usually by half-past ten visitors were gone, lights downstairs were out. Powhatan and Bessie believed in early to bed and late to rise. Upstairs, in her bedroom on the third floor, Hagar shook out and hung in the closet the bronze or green dress, as the case might be, put on her gown and her red wrapper, braided her hair, pushed the couch well beneath the light, curled herself up on it under the eider-down quilt, and, tablet against knee, began to write.... The Short Story—it was that she dreamed and wrote and polished. Two currents of thought and aspiration ran side by side. "To earn money—to make my own living—to be able to help"; and "To make this Idea, that I think is beautiful, come forth and grow.—To get this thing right—to make this dream show clear—to do it, to do it!—To create!" The latter current was the most powerful. The former would sooner or later accomplish its end; it would turn the mill-wheel and be content. But the latter—never, never would it be satisfied; never would it say, "It is accomplished." Always there would be the further dream, always the necessity to make that, too, come clear. There were other currents, more or less strong, Desire of Fame, Desire to be Known, Desire to Excel, and others; but the first two were the great currents.

Since March and the fairy story she had written other stories, four or five in all. She had sent them to magazines, and all but one had come back. That one she had sent immediately after her search for Thomasine. In a month she had word that it was taken, and that, on publication, she would be paid fifty dollars. The letter was like manna, she went about all day with a rapt face. To write—to write—to write stories like Hawthorne, like Poe....

She had been six weeks in New York. That night, when she had worked for an hour over one half-page, and then, the light out, had sat for a long while in the window looking at the winter stars above the city roofs, she could not sleep when she went to bed, but lay, straight and still, half-thinking, half-dreaming. A pageant of impressions, waves of repeated, altered, rearranged contacts drove through her mind. The pictures and marbles of the Metropolitan, the sculptures and casts of sculptures which she cared for more than for the paintings, those of the latter which she loved—the music that she had heard, the plays she had seen, the Park and the slow, interminable afternoon parade of carriages watched from a bench beneath the trees, Fifth Avenue, Broadway, the hurrying crowds, the rush and roar, tramp and clangour, the colour and bravura—Omega Street, the Settlement, a Sunday afternoon there, discussions to which she had listened, a mass meeting of strikers which, Powhatan having taken her downtown to show her the Stock Exchange and Trinity, they had inadvertently fringed, and from which, with epithets of disapproval, he had hurried her away;—uptown once more and the florists' windows and the wheels on the asphalt, a Sunday morning at St. Timothy's with the stained glass and the Bishop's nephew intoning;—again the theatres, a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, the "Merchant of Venice," a play of Pinero's; again the pictures and the statues, the cast of the great Venus, the cast of Niobe, of the Diana with the hound, of Apollo and Hermes; the pictures, Rembrandts and Vandykes, and certain landscapes, and a form that she liked, firelit and vague, blind Nydia moving through ruining Pompeii, and Bastien LePage's Joan of Arc; then the Park again, and the great trees above the mall, and people, people, people!—all made a vibrating whirl, vast, many-hued, and with strange harmonies. She lay until it passed and sank like the multi-coloured sand of the desert.

When at last she slept, she had a curious dream. She and her mother were alone on an island with palm trees. She was used to being with her mother in dreams. She had for the memory of her mother so passionate a loyalty; the figure of Maria, young, it always seemed to her, as herself, so kept abreast with her inner life that it was but a naturalness that she should be there in the dream mind, too. She was there now, on the island with the palm trees, and the two sat and looked at the sea, which was very blue. Then, right out of the lonely sea, there grew a crowded wharf, with a white steamship and people going to it and coming from it. Her father came from it, dressed in white with a white hat like a helmet, and then suddenly there was no wharf nor ship, but they were in a curious street of low, pale-coloured houses—her father and her mother and herself and the palm trees. "Now we are all going to be happy together," she said; but "No," said her mother, "wait until the procession passes." Then there was a procession, and they were all women, and at first they all had the face and eyes of Bastien LePage's Joan of Arc, but then that faded, and they were simply many women, but each of them carried a blossoming bough. She saw faces that she knew among them, and she saw women that she thought belonged to the Middle Ages, and Greek women, and Egyptians, and savages. They went by for a long time, and then, with a turn of the hand, the dream changed, and they were all in a courtyard with a well and more palm trees, and people coming and going, and they were eating and drinking, and there was a third woman with them whom her father called Anna. She had a string of jewels, and she tried them, first on Hagar and then on Maria; but Maria had a knife and suddenly she struck at her father with it. She cut him across both wrists and the blood flowed.—Hagar wakened and sat up in bed, shivering. Her father's face was still plain against her eyeballs—bearded and handsome, with red in his cheeks and the hat like a helmet.

During Christmas week Ralph Coltsworth appeared. He had to spend his holidays somewhere, he said. Hawk Nest was dull and he didn't like Gilead Balm without Hagar.

"Ralph, why don't you study?"

"I do study. I'm a star student. Only I don't like the law. I'm going to do a little more convincing myself and the family, and then I'm going to chuck it! I've got a little money to start things with. I want to go in with a broker I know."

"What do you want to do that for?"

"Oh, because!... There are chances, if you've got the feeling in your finger tips!... Don't you know, Gipsy, that something like that is the career for a man like me? If I had been my father, I could have waved my sword and gone charging down history—and if I'd been my grandfather, I could have poured out Whig eloquence from every stump in the country and looked Olympian and been carried in procession (I don't like politics now; it's an entirely different thing);—and if I'd been my great-grandfather, I could have filibustered or settled the Southwest; and back of that I could have done almost any old thing—come over with the Adventurers, seized a continent, shared England with the Normans, marauded with the Vikings, whiled through Europe with Attila, done almost anything and come out with a name and my arms full! Now you can't conquer things like that, but, by George, you can corner things!"

"What do you mean?—That you want to become a rich man?"

"That's what most of those others wanted. Yes, riches and power."

"I was reading the other day a magazine article. It said that the day when any American, if he had energy and ambition, might hope to make a great fortune was past. It said that the Capets and Plantagenets and Hapsburgs were all here; that the dynasties were established and the entente cordiale in operation; that young and adventurous Americans might hope to become captains of mercenaries, or they might go in for being court chaplains, and troubadours."

"Oh, that article had dyspepsia!" said Ralph. "It isn't as easy as it was, that's certain! but it's possible yet, in 1894—if you've got an opening."

"Have you got one?"

"Elder and Marten would take me in. Marten was an old flame of my mother's, and I got his son Dick out of a scrape last year.—In ten years, you'll see, Gipsy! I'll send you orchids and pearls!"

"I don't want them, thank you, Ralph."

Ralph took the flower from his buttonhole and began to pluck away its petals. "Gipsy, I was awfully glad, last summer, when you sent that Eglantine fellow about his business."

"Mr. Laydon and I sent each other."

"Well, the road's clear—that's all I want to know! Gipsy—"

"Ralph, it's no use. I'm not going to listen."

"The family has planned this ever since we were infants. When you used to come to Hawk Nest with your big eyes and your blue gingham dress and your white stockings—I knew it somehow even then, even when I teased you so—"

"You certainly teased me. Do you remember the rain barrel?"

"No, I don't. The family has set its heart—"

"Oh, Ralph, family can be such a tyrant! At any rate, ours will have to take its heart off this."

Ralph turned sullen. "Well, the family used to settle it for women."

"Yes, it did—when you came over with William the Conqueror! Do you want to take me, regardless—just as you'd take those millions? Well, you may take those millions, but you can't take me!"

"Your father wants it, too. The Colonel showed me a letter—"

Hagar stopped short—they were walking in the Park. "My father!... Do you think I owe my father so great a love and obedience?" She looked before her, steadily, down the vista of vast, leafless trees. "The strongest feeling," she said, "that I have about my father is one of strong curiosity."