THE play in which Sylvia was to appear in New York was called “A Honeymoon in Europe,” and if it might be judged from the first few rehearsals, at which the performers had read their parts like half-witted board-school children, it was thin stuff. Still, it was not fair to pass a final opinion without the two American stars who were awaiting the English company in their native land.

The author, Mr. Marchmont Hearne, was a timid little man who between the business manager and producer looked and behaved very much like the Dormouse at the Mad Tea-party. The manager did not resemble the Hatter except in the broad brim of his top-hat, which in mid-Atlantic he reluctantly exchanged for a cloth cap. The company declared he was famous for his tact; certainly he managed to suppress the Dormouse at every point by shouting, “One minute, Mr. Stern, please,” or, “Please, Mr. Burns, one minute,” and apologizing at once so effusively for not calling him by his right name that the poor little Dormouse had no courage to contest the real point at issue, which had nothing to do with his name. When the manager had to exercise a finer tactfulness, as with obdurate actresses, he was wont to soften his remarks by adding that nothing “derogatory” had been intended; this seemed to mollify everybody, probably, Sylvia thought, because it was such a long word. The Hatter’s name was Charles Fitzherbert. The producer, Mr. Wade Fortescue, by the length of his ears, by the way in which his electrical hair propelled itself into a peak on either side of his head, and by his wild, artistic eye, was really rather like the March Hare outwardly; his behavior was not less like. Mr. Fortescue’s attitude toward “A Honeymoon in Europe” was one that Beethoven might have taken up on being invited to orchestrate “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.” The author did not go so far as to resent this attitude, but on many occasions he was evidently pained by it, notwithstanding Mr. Fitzherbert’s assurances that Mr. Fortescue had intended nothing “derogatory.”

Sylvia’s part was that of a French chambermaid. The author had drawn it faithfully to his experience of Paris in the course of several week-ends. As his conception coincided with that of the general public in supposing a French chambermaid to be a cross between a street-walker and a tight-rope walker, it seemed probable that the part would be a success; although Mr. Fortescue wanted to mix the strain still further by introducing the blood of a comic ventriloquist.

“You must roll your ‘r’s’ more, Miss Scarlett,” he assured her. “That line will go for nothing as you said it.”

“I said it as a French chambermaid would say it,” Sylvia insisted.

“If I might venture—” the Dormouse began.

“One minute, please, Mr. Treherne,” interrupted the Mad Hatter. “What Mr. Fortescue wants, Miss Scarlett, is exaggeration—a leetle exaggeration. I believe that is what you want, Mr. Fortescue?”

“I don’t want a caricature,” snapped the March Hare. “The play is farcical enough as it is. What I want to impart is realism. I want Miss Scarlett to say the line as a French girl would say it.”

“Precisely,” said the Hatter. “That’s precisely what I was trying to explain to Miss Scarlett. You’re a bit hasty, old chap, you know, and I think you frightened her a little. That’s all right, Miss Scarlett, there’s nothing to be frightened about. Mr. Fortescue intended nothing derogatory.”

“I’m not in the least frightened,” said Sylvia, indignantly.

“If I might make a suggestion, I think that—” the Dormouse began.

“One minute please, please, Mr. Burns, one minute—Ah, dear me, Mr. Hearne, I was confusing you with the poet. Nothing derogatory in that, eh?” he laughed jovially.

“May I ask a question?” said Sylvia, and asked it before Mr. Fitzherbert could interrupt again. “Why do all English authors draw all Frenchwomen as cocottes and all French authors draw all English women as governesses? The answer’s obvious.”

The Mad Hatter and the March Hare were so much taken aback by this attack from Alice that the Dormouse was able to emit an entire sentence.

“I should like to say that Miss Scarlett’s rendering of the accent gives me great satisfaction. I have no fault to find. I shall be much obliged, Miss Scarlett, if you will correct my French whenever necessary. I am fully sensible of its deficiencies.”

Mr. Marchmont Hearne blinked after this challenge and breathed rather heavily.

“I’ve had a good deal of experience,” said Mr. Fortescue, grimly, “but I never yet found that it improved a play to allow the performers of minor rÔles, essentially minor rÔles, to write their parts in at rehearsal.”

Mr. Fitzherbert was in a quandary for a moment whether he should smoothe the rufflings of the author or of the actress or of the producer, but deciding that the author could be more profitable to his career in the end, he took him up-stage and tried to whisper away Mr. Fortescue’s bad temper. In the end Sylvia was allowed to roll her “r’s” at her own pace.

“I’m glad you stood up to him, dear,” said an elderly actress like a pink cabbage rose fading at the tips of the petals, who had been sitting throughout the rehearsal so nearly on the scene that she was continually being addressed in mistake by people who really were “on.” The author, who had once or twice smiled at her pleasantly, was evidently under the delusion that she was interested in his play.

“Yes, I was delighted with the way you stood up to them,” continued Miss Nancy Tremayne. “My part’s wretched, dear. All feeding! Still, if I’m allowed to slam the door when I go off in the third act, I may get a hand. Have you ever been to New York before? I like it myself, and you can live quite cheaply if you know the ropes. Of course, I’m drawing a very good salary, because they wanted me. I said I couldn’t come for a penny under one hundred dollars, and I really didn’t want to come at all. However, he would have me, and between you and me, I’m really rather glad to have the chance of saving a little money. The managers are getting very stingy in England. Don’t tell anybody what I’m getting, will you, dear? One doesn’t like to create jealousy at the commencement of a tour. It seems to be quite a nice crowd, though the girls look a little old, don’t you think? Amy Melhuish, who’s playing the ingÉnue, must be at least thirty. It’s wonderful how some women have the nerve to go on. I gave up playing ingÉnues as soon as I was over twenty-eight, and that’s four years ago now, or very nearly. Oh dear, how time flies!”

Sylvia thought that, if Miss Tremayne was only twenty-eight four years ago, time must have crawled.

“They’re sending us out in the Minneworra. The usual economy, but really in a way it’s nicer, because it’s all one class. Yes, I’m glad you stood up to them, dear. Fortescue’s been impossible ever since he produced one of those filthy Strindberg plays last summer for the Unknown Plays Committee. I hate this continental muck. Degenerate, I say it is. In my opinion Ibsen has spoiled the drama in England. What do you think of Charlie Fitzherbert? He’s such a nice man. Always ready to smooth over any little difficulties. When Mr. Vernon said to me that Charlie would be coming with us, I felt quite safe.”

“Morally?” Sylvia asked.

“Oh, go on! You know what I mean. Comfortable, and not likely to be stranded. Well, I’m always a little doubtful about American productions. I suppose I’m conservative. I like old-fashioned ways.”

Which was not surprising, Sylvia thought.

“Miss Tremayne, I can’t hear myself speak. Are you on in this scene?” demanded the producer.

“I really don’t know. My next cue is—”

“I don’t think Miss Tremayne comes on till Act Three,” said the author.

“We sha’n’t get there for another two hours,” the producer growled.

Miss Tremayne moved her chair back three feet, and turned to finish her conversation with Sylvia.

“What I was going to say when I was interrupted, dear, was that, if you’re a bad sailor, you ought to make a point of making friends with the purser. Unfortunately I don’t know the purser on the Minneworra, but the purser on the Minnetoota was quite a friend of mine, and gave me a beautiful deck-cabin. The other girls were very jealous.”

“Damn it, Miss Tremayne, didn’t I ask you not to go on talking?” the producer shouted.

“Nice gentlemanly way of asking anybody not to whisper a few words of advice, isn’t it?” said Miss Tremayne, with a scathing glance at Mr. Fortescue as she moved her chair quite six feet farther away from the scene.

“Now, of course, we’re in a draught,” she grumbled to Sylvia. “But I always say that producers never have any consideration for anybody but themselves.”

By the time the S.S. Minneworra reached New York Sylvia had come to the conclusion that the representatives of the legitimate drama differed only from the chorus of a musical comedy in taking their temperaments and exits more seriously. Sylvia’s earlier experience had led her to suppose that the quantity of make-up and proximity to the footlights were the most important things in art.

Whatever hopes of individual ability to shine the company might have cherished before it reached New York were quickly dispelled by the two American stars, up to whom and not with whom they were expected to twinkle. Mr. Diomed Olver and Miss Marcia Neville regarded the rest of the company as Jupiter and Venus might regard the Milky Way. Miss Tremayne’s exit upon a slammed door was forbidden the first time she tried it, because it would distract the attention of the audience from Miss Neville, who at that moment would be sustaining a dimple, which she called holding a situation. This dimple, which was famous from Boston to San Francisco, from Buffalo to New Orleans, had, when Miss Neville first swam into the ken of a manager’s telescope, been easy enough to sustain. Of late years a slight tendency toward stoutness had made it necessary to assist the dimple with the forefinger and internal suction; the slamming of a door might disturb so nice an operation, and an appeal, which came oddly from Miss Neville, was made to Miss Tremayne’s sense of natural acting.

Mr. Olver did not bother to conceal his intention of never moving from the center of the stage, where he maintained himself with the noisy skill of a gyroscope.

“See here,” he explained to members of the company who tried to compete with his stellar supremacy. “The public pays to see Diomed Olver and Marcia Neville; they don’t care a damned cent for anything else in creation. Got me? That’s good. Now we’ll go along together fine.”

Mr. Charles Fitzherbert assisted no more at rehearsals, but occupied himself entirely with the box-office. Mr. Wade Fortescue was very fierce about 2 A.M. in the bar of his hotel, but very mild at rehearsals. Mr. Marchmont Hearne hibernated during this period, and when he appeared very shyly at the opening performance in Brooklyn the company greeted him with the surprised cordiality that is displayed to some one who has broken his leg and emerges weeks later from hospital without a limp.

New York made a deep and instant impression on Sylvia. No city that she had seen was so uncompromising; so sure of its flamboyant personality; so completely an ingenious, spoiled, and precocious child; so lovable for its extravagance and mischief. To her the impression was of some Gargantuan boy in his nursery building up tall towers to knock them down, running his clockwork-engines for fun through the streets of his toy city, scattering in corners quantities of toy bricks in readiness for a new fit of destructive construction, scooping up his tin inhabitants at the end of a day’s play to put them helter-skelter into their box, eking out the most novel electrical toys of that Christmas with the battered old trams of the Christmas before, cherishing old houses with a child’s queer conservatism, devoting a large stretch of bright carpet to a park, and robbing his grandmother’s mantelpiece of her treasures to put inside his more permanent structures. After seeing New York she sympathized very much with the remark she had heard made by a young New-Yorker on board the Minneworra, which at the time she had thought a mere callow piece of rudeness.

A grave doctor from Toledo, Ohio, almost as grave as if he were from the original Toledo, had expressed a hope to Sylvia that she would not accept New York as representative of the United States. She must travel to the West. New York had no family life. If Miss Scarlett wished to see family life, he should be glad to show it to her in Toledo. For confirmation of his criticism he had appealed to a young man standing at his elbow.

“Well,” the young man had replied, “I’ve never been fifty miles west of New York in my life, and I hope I never shall. When I want to travel I cross over to Europe for a month.”

The Toledo doctor had afterward spoken severely to Sylvia on the subject of this young New-Yorker, citing him as a dangerous element in the national welfare. Now, after seeing the Gargantuan boy’s nursery, she understood the spirit that wanted to enjoy his nursery and not be bothered to go for polite walks with maiden aunts in the country; equally, no doubt, in Toledo she should appreciate the point of view of the doctor and recognize the need for the bone that would support the vast bulk of the growing child.

Sylvia had noticed that as she grew older impressions became less vivid; her later and wider experience of London was already dim beside those first years with her father and Monkley. It had been the same during her travels. Already even the Alhambra was no longer quite clearly imprinted upon her mind, and each year it had been growing less and less easy to be astonished. But this arrival in New York had been like an arrival in childhood, as surprising, as exciting, as terrifying, as stimulating. New York was like a rejuvenating potion in the magic influence of which the memories of past years dissolved. Partly, no doubt, this effect might be ascribed to the invigorating air, and partly, Sylvia thought, to the anxiously receptive condition of herself now within sight of thirty; but neither of these explanations was wide enough to include all that New York gave of regenerative emotion, of willingness to be alive and unwillingness to go to bed, and of zest in being amused. Sylvia had supposed that she had long ago outgrown the pleasure of wandering about streets for no other reason than to be wandering about streets, of staring into shops, of staring after people, of staring at advertisements, of staring in company with a crowd of starers as well entertained as herself at a bat that was flying about in daylight outside the Plaza Hotel; but here in New York all that old youthful attitude of assuming that the world existed for one’s diversion, mixed with a sharp, though always essentially contemptuous, curiosity about the method it was taking to amuse one, was hers again. Sylvia had always regarded England as the frivolous nation that thought of nothing but amusement, England that took its pleasure so earnestly and its business so lightly. In New York there was no question of qualifying adverbs; everything was a game. It was a game, and apparently, by the enthusiasm with which it was played, a novel game, to control the traffic in Fifth Avenue—a rather dangerous game like American football, in which at first the casualties to the policemen who played it were considerable. Street-mending was another game, rather an elementary game that contained a large admixture of practical joking. Getting a carriage after the theater was a game played with counters. Eating, even, could be made into a game either mechanical like the automatic dime lunch, or intellectual like the free lunch, or imaginative like the quick lunch.

Sylvia had already made acquaintance with the crude material of America in Carlos Morera. New York was Carlos Morera much more refined and more matured, sweetened by its own civilization, which, having severed itself from other civilizations like the Anglo-Saxon or Latin, was already most convincingly a civilization of its own, bearing the veritable stamp of greatness. Sometimes Sylvia would be faced even in New York by a childishness that scarcely differed from the childishness of Carlos Morera. One evening, for instance, two of the men in the company who knew her tastes invited her to come with them to Murden’s all-night saloon off Sixth Avenue. They had been told it was a sight worth seeing. Sylvia, with visions of something like the dancing-saloon in Buenos Aires, was anxious to make the experiment. It sounded exciting when she heard that the place was kept going by “graft.” After the performance she and her companions went to Jack’s for supper; thence they walked along Sixth Avenue to Murden’s. It was only about two o’clock when they entered by a side door into a room exactly like the bar parlor of an English public house, where they sat rather drearily drinking some inferior beer, until one of Sylvia’s companions suggested that they had arrived too near the hours of legal closing. They left Murden’s and visited a Chinese restaurant in Broadway with a cabaret attached. The prices, the entertainment, the food, and the company were in a descending scale; the prices were much the highest. Two hours later they went back to Murden’s; the parlor was not less dreary; the beer was still abominable. However, just as they had decided that this could not be the right place, an enormous man slightly drunk entered under the escort of two ladies of the town. Perceiving that Sylvia and her companions had risen, the new-comer waved them back into their chairs and called for drinks all round.

“British?” he asked.

They nodded.

“Yes, I thought you were Britishers. I’m Under-Sheriff McMorris.” With this he seated himself, hugging the two nymphs on either side of him like a Dionysius in his chariot.

“Actor folk?” he asked.

They nodded.

“Yes, I thought you were actor folk. Ever read Shakespeare? Some boy, eh? Gee! I used to be able to spout Parsha without taking breath.”

Forthwith he delivered the speech about the quality of mercy.

“Wal?” he demanded at the end.

The English actors congratulated him and called for another round. Mr. McMorris turned to one of the nymphs:

“Wal, honey?”

“Cut it out, you fat old slob; you’re tanked!” said honey.

Mr. McMorris recited several other speeches, including the vision of the dagger from “Macbeth.” From Shakespeare he passed to Longfellow, and from Longfellow to Byron. After an hour of recitations he was persuaded by the bartender to give some of his reminiscences of criminals in New York, which he did so vividly that Sylvia began to suppose that at one time or another he really had been connected with the law. Finally about six o’clock he became pathetic and wept away most of what he had drunk.

“I’m feeling bad this morning. I gart to go and arrest a man for whom I have a considerable admiration. I gart to go down-town to Washington Square and arrest a prominent citizen at eight o’clock sharp. I guess they’re waiting right now for me to come along and make that arrest. Where’s my black-jack?”

He fumbled in his pocket for a leather-covered life-preserver, which he flourished truculently. Leaning upon the shoulders of the nymphs, he waved a farewell and staggered out.

Sylvia asked the bartender what he really was.

“He’s Under-Sheriff McMorris. At eight o’clock he’s going to arrest a prominent New York citizen for misappropriation of some fund.”

That evening in the papers Sylvia read that Under-Sheriff McMorris had burst into tears when ex-Governor Somebody or other had walked down the steps of his house in Washington Square and offered himself to the custody of the law.

“I don’t like to have to do this, Mr. Governor,” Under-Sheriff McMorris had protested.

“You must do your duty, Mr. Under-Sheriff.”

The crowd had thereupon cheered loudly, and the wife of the ex-Governor, dissolved in tears, had waved the Stars and Stripes from an upper window.

“Jug for the ex-Governor and a jag for the under-sheriff,” said Sylvia. “If only the same spirit could be applied to minor arrests. That may come. It’s wonderful, really, how in this mighty republic they manage to preserve any vestige of personality, but they do.”

The play ran through the autumn and went on tour in January. Sylvia did not add much to her appreciation of America in the course of it, because, as was inevitable in the short visits they paid to various towns, she had to depend for intercourse upon the members of the company. She reached New York again shortly before her twenty-eighth birthday. When nearly all her fellow-players returned to England, she decided to stay behind. The first impression she had received of entering upon a new phase of life when she landed in New York had not yet deserted her, and having received an offer from the owner of what sounded, from his description, like a kind of hydropathic establishment to entertain the visitors there during the late summer and fall, she accepted. In August, therefore, she left New York and went to Sulphurville, Indiana.

Sylvia had had glimpses of rural America in Vermont and New Hampshire during the tour; in such a cursory view it had not seemed to differ much from rural England. Now she was going to see rustic America, if a distinction between the two adjectives might be made. At Indianapolis she changed from the great express into a smaller train that deposited her at a railway station consisting of a tumble-down shed. Nobody came out to welcome the train, but the colored porter insisted that this was the junction from which she would ultimately reach Sulphurville and denied firmly Sylvia’s suggestion that the engine-driver had stopped here for breath. She was the only passenger who alighted, and she saw the train continue on its way with something near despair. The sun was blazing down. All around was a grasshopper-haunted wilderness of Indian corn. It was the hottest, greenest, flattest, most God-forsaken spot she had ever seen. The heat was so tremendous that she ventured inside the hut for shade. The only sign of life was a bug proceeding slowly across a greasy table. Sylvia went out and wandered round to the other side. Here, fast asleep, was a man dressed in a pair of blue trousers, a neckerchief, and an enormous straw hat. As the trousers reached to his armpits, he was really fully dressed, and Sylvia was able to recognize him as a human being from an illustrated edition she possessed of Huckleberry Finn; at the same time, she thought it wiser to let him sleep and returned to the front of the shed. To her surprise, for it seemed scarcely possible that anybody could inhabit the second floor, she perceived a woman with curl-papers, in a spotted green-and-yellow bed-wrapper, looking out of what until now she had supposed to be a gap in the roof caused by decay. Sylvia asked the woman if this was the junction for Sulphurville. She nodded, but vanished from the window before there was time to ask her when the train would arrive.

Sylvia waited for an hour in the heat, and had almost given up hope of ever reaching Sulphurville when suddenly a train arrived, even smaller than the one into which she had changed at Indianapolis, but still considerably larger than any European train. The hot afternoon wore away while this new train puffed slowly deeper and deeper into rustic America until it reached Bagdad. Hitherto Sylvia had traveled in what was called a parlor-car, but at Bagdad she had to enter a fourth train that did not possess a parlor-car and that really resembled a local train in England, with oil-lamps and semi-detached compartments. At every station between Bagdad and Sulphurville crowds of country folk got in, all of whom were wearing flags and flowers in their buttonholes and were in a state of perspiring festivity. At the last station before Sulphurville the train was invaded by the members of a local band, whose instruments fought for a place as hard as their masters. Sylvia was nearly elbowed out of her seat by an aggressive ophicleide, but an old gentleman opposite with a saxhorn behind him and a euphonium on his knees told her by way of encouragement that the soldiers didn’t pass through Indiana every day.

“The last time I saw soldiers like that was during the war,” he said, “and I don’t allow any of us here will ever see so many soldiers again.” He looked round the company defiantly, but nobody seemed inclined to contradict him, and he grunted with disappointment. It seemed hard that the old gentleman’s day should end so tamely, but fortunately a young man in the far corner proclaimed it not merely as his opinion, but supported it from inside information, that the regiment was being marched through Indiana like this in order to get it nearer to the Mexican border.

“Shucks!” said the old gentleman, and blew his nose so violently that every one looked involuntarily at one of the brass instruments. “Shucks!” he repeated. Then he smiled at Sylvia, who, sympathizing with the happy close of his day, smiled back just as the train entered the station of Sulphurville.

The Plutonian Hotel, Sulphurville, had presumably been built to appease the same kind of human credulity that created the pump-rooms at Bath or Wiesbaden or Aix-les-Bains. Sylvia had observed that one of the great elemental beliefs of the human race, a belief lost in primeval fog, was that if water with an odd taste bubbled out of the earth, it must necessarily possess curative qualities; if it bubbled forth without a nasty enough taste to justify the foundation of a spa, it was analyzed by prominent chemists, bottled, and sold as a panacea to the great encouragement of lonely dyspeptics with nothing else to read at dinner. In the Middle Ages, and possibly in the classic times of Æsculapius, these natural springs had fortified the spiritual side of man; in late days they served to dilute his spirits. The natural springs at Sulphurville fully justified the erection of the Plutonian Hotel and the lowest depths of mortal credulity, for they had a revolting smell, an exceptionally unpleasant taste, and a high temperature. Everything that balneal ingenuity could suggest had been done, and in case the internal cure was not nasty enough as it was, the first glass of water was prescribed for six o’clock in the morning. Though it was necessary to test human faith by the most arduous and vexatious ordinances for human conduct, lest it might grow contemptuous of the cure, it was equally necessary to prevent boredom, if not of the devotees themselves, at any rate of their families. Accordingly, there was an annex of the ascetic hotel where everybody was driven to bed at eleven by the uncomfortable behavior of the servants, and where breakfast was served not later than seven; this annex possessed a concert-hall, a small theater, a gaming-saloon with not merely roulette, but many apparently childish games of chance that nevertheless richly rewarded the management. Sylvia wondered if there was any moral intention on the part of the proprietors in the way they encouraged gambling, if they wished to accentuate the chances and changes of human life and thereby secure for their clients a religious attitude toward their bodily safety. Certainly at the Plutonian Hotel it was impossible to obtain anything except meals without gambling. In order to buy a cigar or a box of chocolates it was necessary to play dice with the young woman who sold them, with more or less profit to the hotel, according to one’s luck. Every morning some new object was on view in the lobby to be raffled that evening. Thus on the fourth night of her stay Sylvia became the owner of a large trunk, the emptiness of which was continuous temptation.

The Plutonian was not merely a resort for gouty Easterners; it catered equally for the uric acid of the West. Sylvia liked the families from the West, particularly the girls with their flowing hair and big felt hats who rode on Kentucky ponies to see smugglers’ caves in the hills, conforming invariably to the traditional aspect of the Western belle in the cinema. The boys were not so picturesque; in fact, they scarcely differed from European boys of the same age. The East supplied the exotic note among the children; candy-fed, shrill, and precocious with a queer gnomelike charm, they resembled expensive toys. These visitors to Sulphurville were much more affable with one another than their fellows in Europe would have been in similar circumstances. Sylvia had already noticed that in America stomachic subjects could inspire the dullest conversation; here at the Plutonian the stomach had taken the place of the soul, and it was scarcely an exaggeration to say that in the lounges people rose up to testify in public about their insides.

The morning after Sylvia’s arrival the guests were much excited by the visit of the soldiers, who were to camp for a week on the hotel grounds and perform various maneuvers. Sylvia observed that everybody talked as if a troupe of acrobats was going to visit the hotel; nobody seemed to have any idea that the American army served any purpose but the entertainment of the public with gymnastic displays. That afternoon the regiment marched past the hotel to its camping-ground; the band played the “Star-spangled Banner”; all the visitors grouped upon the steps in front clapped their hands; the colonel took off his hat, waved it at the audience, and bowed like a successful author. At first Sylvia considered his behavior undignified and absurd; afterward she rather approved of its friendliness, its absence of pomp and arrogance, its essentially democratic inspiration—in a word, its familiarity.

The proprietor of the Plutonian, a leading political “boss,” was so much moved by the strains of the music, the martial bearing of the men, and the opportunity of self-advertisement, that he invited the officers of the regiment to mess free in the hotel during their visit. Everybody praised Mr. O’Halloran’s generosity and patriotism, the more warmly because it gave everybody an occasion to commiserate with the officers upon their absurdly small pay. Such commiseration gratified the individual’s sense of superiority and made it easy for him to brag about his own success in life. Sylvia resented the business man’s point of view about his national army; it was almost as patronizing as an Englishman’s attitude to an artist or a German’s to a woman or a Frenchman’s to anybody but a Frenchman. Snobbishness was only tolerable about the past. Perhaps that was the reason why the Italians were the only really democratic nation she had met so far. The Italians were aristocrats trying to become tradesmen; the rest of mankind were tradesmen striving to appear aristocrats.

Sylvia had sung her songs and was watching the roulette, when a young lieutenant who had been playing with great seriousness turned to her and asked if she was not British.

“We got to know some British officers out in China,” he told her. “We couldn’t seem to understand them at first, but afterward we found out they were good boys, really. Only the trouble was we were never properly introduced at first, and that worried them some. Say, there’s a fellow-countryman of yours sick in Sulphurville. I kind of found out by accident this morning, because I went into a drug-store and the storekeeper was handing out some medicine to a colored girl who was arguing with him whether she should pay for it. Seems this young Britisher’s expecting his remittance. That’s a God-awful place to be stranded, Sulphurville.”

They chatted for a while together. Sylvia liked the simple good-fellowship of the young American, his inquisitiveness about her reasons for coming to sing at the Plutonian Hotel, and his frank anticipation of any curiosity on her side by telling her all about himself and his career since he left West Point. He was amused by her account of the excitement over the passage of the troops through the villages, and seized the occasion to moralize on the vastness of a country through one state of which a regiment could march and surprise half the inhabitants with their first view of an American soldier.

“Seems kind of queer,” he said.

“But very Arcadian,” Sylvia added.

When Sylvia went to bed her mind reverted to the young Englishman; at the time she had scarcely taken in the significance of what the officer had told her. Now suddenly the sense of his loneliness and suffering overwhelmed her fancy. She thought of the desolation of that railway junction where she had waited for the train to Sulphurville, of the heat and the grasshoppers and the flat, endless greenery. Even that brief experience of being alone in the heart of America had frightened her. She had not taken heed of the vastness of it while she was traveling with the company, and here at the hotel definitely placed as an entertainer she had a certain security. But to be alone and penniless in Sulphurville, to be ill, moreover, and dependent on the charity of foreigners, so much the more foreign because, though they spoke the same language, they spoke it with strange differences like the people in a dream. The words were the same, but they expressed foreign ideas. Sylvia began to speculate upon the causes that had led to this young Englishman’s being stranded in Sulphurville. There seemed no explanation, unless he were perhaps an actor who had been abandoned because he was too ill to travel with the company. At this idea she almost got out of bed to walk through the warm frog-haunted night to his rescue. She became sentimental about him in the dark. It seemed to her that nothing in the world was so pitiable as a sick artist; always the servant of the public’s curiosity, he was now the helpless prey of it. He would be treated with the contempt that is accorded to sick animals whose utility is at an end. She visualized him in the care of a woman like the one who had leaned out of that railway shed in a spotted green-and-yellow wrapper. Yet, after all, he might not be a mountebank; there was really no reason to suppose he was anything but poor and lonely, though that was enough indeed.

“I must be getting very old,” Sylvia said to herself. “Only approaching senility could excuse this prodigal effusion of what is really almost maternal lust. I’ve grown out of any inclination to ask myself why I think things or why I do things. I’ve nothing now but an immense desire to do—do—do. I was beginning to think this desperate determination to be impressed, like a child whose father is hiding conspicuously behind the door, was due to America. It’s nothing to do with America; it’s myself. It’s a kind of moral and mental drunkenness. I know what I’m doing. I’m entirely responsible for my actions. That’s the way a drunken man argues. Nobody is so utterly convinced of his rightness and reasonableness and judgment as a drunken man. I might argue with myself till morning that it’s ridiculous to excite myself over the prospect of helping an Englishman stranded in Sulphurville, but when, worn out with self-conviction, I fall asleep, I shall wake on tiptoe, as it were. I shall be quite violently awake at once. The fact is I’m absolutely tired of observing human nature. I just want to tumble right into the middle of its confusion and forget how to criticize anybody or anything. What’s the good of meeting a drunken man with generalizations about human conduct or direction or progression? He won’t listen to generalizations, because drunkenness is the apotheosis of the individual. That’s why drunken people are always so earnestly persuasive, so anxious to convince the unintoxicated observer that it is better to walk on all-fours than upright. Eccentricity becomes a moral passion; every drunken man is a missionary of the peculiar. At the present moment I’m in the mental state that, did I possess an honest taste for liquor, would make me get up and uncork the brandy-bottle. It’s a kind of defiant self-expression. Oh, that poor young Englishman lying alone in Sulphurville! To-morrow, to-morrow! Who knows? Perhaps I really shall find that I am necessary to somebody. Even as a child I conceived the notion of being indispensable. I want somebody to say to me: ‘You! You! What should I have done without you?’ I suppose every woman feels that; I suppose that is the maternal instinct. But I don’t believe many women can feel it so sharply as I do, because very few women have ever been compelled by circumstances to develop their personalities so early and so fully, and then find that nobody wants that personality. I could cry just at the mere notion of being wanted, and surely this young Englishman, whoever he is, will want me. Oh, Sylvia, Sylvia, you’re deliberately working yourself up to an adventure! And who has a better right? Tell me that. That’s exactly why I praised the drunkard; he knows how to dodge self-consciousness. Why shouldn’t you set out to have an adventure? You shall, my dear. And if you’re disappointed? You’ve been disappointed before. Damn those tree-frogs! Like all croakers, they disturb oblivion. I wonder if he’d like my new trunk. And I wonder how old he is. I’m assuming that he’s young, but he may be a matted old tramp.”

Sylvia woke next morning, as she had prefigured herself, on tiptoe; at breakfast she was sorry for all the noisy people round her, so important to her was life seeming. She set out immediately afterward to walk along the hot, dusty road to the town, elated by the notion of leaving behind her the restlessness and stark cleanliness of the big hotel. The main street of Sulphurville smelled of straw and dry grain; and if it had not been for the flies she would have found the air sweet enough after the damp exhalations of brimstone that permeated the atmosphere of the Plutonian and its surroundings. The flies, however, tainted everything; not even the drug-store was free from them. Sylvia inquired for the address of the Englishman, and the druggist looked at her sharply. She wondered if he was hoping for the settlement of his account.

“Madden’s the name, ain’t it?” the druggist asked.

“Madden,” she repeated, mechanically. A wave of emotion flooded her mind, receded, and left it strewn with the jetsam of the past. The druggist and the drug-store faded out of her consciousness; she was in Colonial Terrace again, insisting upon Arthur’s immediate departure.

“What a little beast I was!” she thought, and a desire came over her to atone for former heartlessness by her present behavior. Then abruptly she realized that the Madden of Sulphurville was not necessarily, or even probably, the Arthur Madden of Hampstead. Yet behind this half-disappointment lay the conviction that it was he. “Which accounts for my unusual excitement,” Sylvia murmured. She heard herself calmly asking the storekeeper for his address.

“The Auburn Hotel,” she repeated. “Thank you.”

The storekeeper seemed inclined to question her further; no doubt he wished to be able to count upon his bill’s being paid; but Sylvia hurried from the shop before he could speak.

The Auburn Hotel, Sulphurville, was perhaps not worse than a hotel of the same class would have been in England, but the colored servant added just enough to the prevailing squalor to make it seem worse. When Sylvia asked to see Mr. Madden the colored servant stared at her, wiped her mouth with her apron, and called:

“Mrs. Lebus!”

“Oh, Julie, is that you? What is it you want?” twanged a voice from within that sounded like a cat caught in a guitar.

“You’re wanted right now, Mrs. Lebus,” the servant called back.

The duet was like a parody of a ’coon song, and Sylvia found herself humming to ragtime:

Mrs. Lebus was one of those women whose tongues are always hunting, like eager terriers. With evident reluctance she postponed the chase of an artful morsel that had taken refuge in some difficult country at the back of her mouth, and faced the problem of admitting Sylvia to the sick man’s room.

“You a relative?” she asked.

Sylvia shook her head.

“Perhaps you’ve come about his remittance. He told me he was expecting a hundred dollars any time. You staying in Sulphurville?”

Sylvia understood that the apparent disinclination to admit her was only due to unsatisfied curiosity and that there was not necessarily any suspicion of her motives. At this moment something particularly delicious ran across the path of Mrs. Lebus’s tongue, and Sylvia took advantage of the brief pause during which it was devoured, to penetrate into the lobby, where a melancholy citizen in a frock-coat and a straw hat was testing the point of a nib upon his thumb, whether with the intention of offering it to Mrs. Lebus to pick her teeth or of writing a letter was uncertain.

“Oh, Scipio!” said Mrs. Lebus. She pronounced it “Skipio.”

“Wal?”

“She wants to see Mr. Madden.”

“Sure.”

The landlady turned to Sylvia.

“Mr. Lebus don’t have no objections. Julie, take Miss—What did you say your name was?”

Sylvia saw no reason against falling into what Mrs. Lebus evidently considered was a skilfully laid trap, and told her.

“Scarlett,” Mr. Lebus repeated. “We don’t possess that name in Sulphurville. Yes, ma’am, that name’s noo to Sulphurville.”

“Sakes alive, Scipio, are you going to keep Miss Scarlett hanging around all day whiles you gossip about Sulphurville?” his wife asked. Aware of her husband’s enthusiasm for his native place, she may have foreseen a dissertation upon its wonders unless she were ruthless.

“Julie’ll take you up to his apartment. And don’t you forget to knock before you open the door, Julie.”

On the way up-stairs in the wake of the servant, Sylvia wondered how she should explain her intrusion to a stranger, even though he were an Englishman. She had so firmly decided to herself it was Arthur that she could not make any plans for meeting anybody else. Julie was quite ready to open the door of the bedroom and let Sylvia enter unannounced; she was surprised by being requested to go in first and ask the gentleman if he could receive Miss Scarlett. However, she yielded to foreign eccentricity, and a moment later ushered Sylvia in.

It was Arthur Madden; and Sylvia, from a mixture of penitence for the way she treated him at Colonial Terrace, of self-congratulation for being so sure beforehand that it was he, and from swift compassion for his illness and loneliness, ran across the room and greeted him with a kiss.

“How on earth did you get into this horrible hole?” Arthur asked.

“My dear, I knew it was you when I heard your name.” Breathlessly she poured out the story of how she had found him.

“But you’d made up your mind to play the Good Samaritan to whoever it was—you never guessed for a moment at first that it was me.”

She forgave him the faint petulance because he was ill, and also because it brought back to her with a new vividness long bygone jealousies, restoring a little more of herself as she once was, nearly thirteen years ago. How little he had changed outwardly, and much of what change there was might be put down to his illness.

“Arthur, do you remember Maria?” she asked.

He smiled. “He died only about two years ago. He lived with my mother after I went on the stage.”

Sylvia wondered to him why they had never met all these years. She had known so many people on the stage, but then, of course, she had been a good deal out of England. What had made Arthur go on the stage first? He had never talked of it in the old days.

“I used always to be keen on music.”

Sylvia whistled the melody that introduced them to each other, and he smiled again.

“My mother still plays that sometimes, and I’ve often thought of you when she does. She lives at Dulwich now.”

They talked for a while of Hampstead and laughed over the escape.

“You were a most extraordinary kid,” he told her. “Because, after all, I was seventeen at the time—older than you. Good Lord! I’m thirty now, and you must be twenty-eight!”

To Sylvia it was much more incredible that he should be thirty; he seemed so much younger than she, lying here in this frowsy room, or was it that she felt so much older than he?

“But how on earth did you get stranded in this place?” she asked.

“I was touring with a concert party. The last few years I’ve practically given up the stage proper. I don’t know why, really, for I was doing quite decently, but concert-work was more amusing, somehow. One wasn’t so much at the beck and call of managers.”

Sylvia knew, by the careful way in which he was giving his reasons for abandoning the stage, that he had not yet produced the real reason. It might have been baffled ambition or it might have been a woman.

“Well, we came to Sulphurville,” said Arthur. He hesitated for a moment. Obviously there had been a woman. “We came to Sulphurville,” he went on, “and played at the hotel you’re playing at now—a rotten hole,” he added, with retrospective bitterness. “I don’t know how it was, but I suppose I got keen on the gambling—anyway, I had a row with the other people in the show, and when they left I refused to go with them. I stayed behind and got keen on the gambling.”

“It was after the row that you took to roulette?” Sylvia asked.

“Well, as a matter if fact, I had a row with a girl. She treated me rather badly, and I stayed on. I lost a good deal of money. Well, it wasn’t a very large sum, as a matter of fact, but it was all I had, and then I fell ill. I caught cold and I was worried over things. I cabled to my mother for some money, but there’s been no reply. I’m afraid she’s had difficulty in raising it. She quarreled with my father’s people when I went on the stage. Damned narrow-minded set of yokels. Furious because I wouldn’t take up farming. How I hate narrow-minded people!” And with an invalid’s fretful intolerance he went on grumbling at the ineradicable characteristics of an English family four thousand miles away.

“Of course something may have happened to my mother,” he added. “You may be sure that if anything had those beasts would never take the trouble to write and tell me. It would be a pleasure to them if they could annoy me in any way.”

A swift criticism of Arthur’s attitude toward the possibility of his mother’s death rose to Sylvia’s mind, but she repressed it, pleading with herself to excuse him because he was ill and overstrained. She was positively determined to see henceforth nothing but good in people, and in her anxiety to confirm herself in this resolve she was ready not merely to exaggerate everything in Arthur’s favor, but even to twist any failure on his side into actual merit. Thus when she hastened to put her own resources at his disposal, and found him quite ready to accept without protest her help, she choked back the comparison with Jack Airdale’s attitude in similar circumstances, and was quite angry with herself, saying how much more naturally Arthur had received her good-will and how splendid it was to find such simplicity and sincerity.

“I’ll nurse you till you’re quite well, and then why shouldn’t we take an engagement together somewhere?”

Arthur became enthusiastic over this suggestion.

“You’ve not heard me sing yet. My throat’s still too weak, but you’ll be surprised, Sylvia.”

“I haven’t got anything but a very deep voice,” she told him. “But I can usually make an impression.”

“Can you? Of course, where I’ve always been held back is by lack of money. I’ve never been able to afford to buy good songs.”

Arthur began to sketch out for himself a most radiant future, and as he talked Sylvia thought again how incredible it was that he should be older than herself. Yet was not this youthful enthusiasm exactly what she required? It was just the capacity of Arthur’s for thinking he had a future that was going to make life tremendously worth while for her, tremendously interesting—oh, it was impossible not to believe in the decrees of fate, when at the very moment of her greatest longing to be needed by somebody she had met Arthur again. She could be everything to him, tend him through his illness, provide him with money to rid himself of the charity of Mrs. Lebus and the druggist, help him in his career, and watch over his fidelity to his ambition. She remembered how, years ago at Hampstead, his mother had watched over him; she could recall every detail of the room and see Mrs. Madden interrupt one of her long sonatas to be sure Arthur was not sitting in a draught. And it had been she who had heedlessly lured him away from that tender mother. There was poetic justice in this opportunity of reparation now accorded to her. To be sure, it had been nothing but a childish escapade—reparation was too strong a word; but there was something so neat about this encounter years afterward in a place like Sulphurville. How pale he was, which, nevertheless, made him more romantic to look at; how thin and white his hands were! She took one of them in her own boy’s hands, as so many people had called them, and clasped it with the affection that one gives to small helpless things, to children and kittens, an affection that is half gratitude because one feels good-will rising like a sweet fountain from the depth of one’s being, the freshness of which playing upon the spirit is so dear, that no words are enough to bless the wand that made the stream gush forth.

“I shall come and see you all day,” said Sylvia. “But I think I ought not to break my contract at the Plutonian.”

“Oh, you’ll come and live here,” Arthur begged. “You’ve no idea how horrible it is. There was a cockroach in the soup last night, and of course there are bugs. For goodness’ sake, Sylvia, don’t give me hope and then dash it away from me. I tell you I’ve had a hell of a time in this cursed hole. Listen to the bed; it sounds as if it would collapse at any moment. And the bugs have got on my nerves to such a pitch that I spend the whole time looking at spots on the ceiling and fancying they’ve moved. It’s so hot, too; everything’s rotted with heat. You mustn’t desert me. You must come and stay here with me.”

“Why shouldn’t you move up to the Plutonian?” Sylvia suggested. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll get one of the doctors to come and look at you, and if he thinks it’s possible you shall move up there at once. Poor boy, it really is too ghastly here.”

Arthur was nearly weeping with self-pity.

“But, my dear girl, it’s much worse than you think. You know those horrible birds’ bath-tubs in which they bring your food at third-rate American hotels, loathsome saucers with squash and bits of grit in watery milk that they call cereals, and bony bits of chicken, well, imagine being fed like that when you’re ill; imagine your bed covered with those infernal saucers. One of them always used to get left behind when Julie cleared away, and it always used to fall with a crash on the floor, and I used to wonder if the mess would tempt the cockroaches into my room. And then Lebus used to come up and make noises in his throat and brag about Sulphurville, and I used to know by his wandering eye that he was looking for what he called the cuspidor, which I’d put out of sight. And Mrs. Lebus used to come up and suck her teeth at me until I felt inclined to strangle her.”

“The sooner you’re moved away the better,” Sylvia said, decidedly.

“Oh yes, if you think it can be managed. But if not, Sylvia, for God’s sake don’t leave me alone.”

“Are you really glad to see me?” she asked.

“Oh, my dear, it was like heaven opening before one’s eyes!”

“Tell me about the girl you were fond of,” she said, abruptly.

“What do you want to talk about her for? There’s nothing to tell you, really. She had red hair.”

Sylvia was glad that Arthur spoke of her with so little interest; it certainly was definitely comforting to feel the utter dispossession of that red-haired girl.

“Look here,” said Sylvia. “I’m going to let these people suppose that I’m your long-lost relative. I shall pay their bill and bring the doctor down to see you. Arthur, I’m glad I’ve found you. Do you remember the cab-horse? Oh, and do you remember the cats in the area and the jug of water that splashed you? You were so unhappy, almost as unhappy as you were when I found you here. Have you always been treated unkindly?”

“I have had a pretty hard time,” Arthur said.

“Oh, but you mustn’t be sorry for yourself,” she laughed.

“No, seriously, Sylvia, I’ve always had a lot of people against me.”

“Yes, but that’s such fun. You simply must be amused by life when you’re with me. I’m not hard-hearted a bit, really, but you mustn’t be offended with me when I tell you that really there’s something a tiny bit funny in your being stranded in the Auburn Hotel, Sulphurville.”

“I’m glad you think so,” said Arthur, in rather a hurt tone of voice.

“Don’t be cross, you foolish creature.”

“I’m not a bit cross. Only I would like you to understand that my illness isn’t a joke. You don’t suppose I should let you pay my bills and do all this for me unless it were really something serious.”

Sylvia put her hand on his mouth. “I forgive you,” she murmured, “because you really are ill. Oh, Arthur, do you remember Hube? What fun everything is!”

Sylvia left him and went down-stairs to arrange matters with Mrs. Lebus.

“It was a relation, after all,” she told her. “The Maddens have been related to us for hundreds of years.”

“My! My! Now ain’t that real queer? Oh, Scipio!”

Mr. Lebus came into view cleaning his nails with the same pen, and was duly impressed with the coincidence.

“Darned if I don’t tell Pastor Gollick after next Sunday meeting. He’s got a kind of hankering after the ways of Providence. Gee! Why, it’s a sermonizing cinch.”

There was general satisfaction in the Auburn Hotel over the payment of Arthur’s bill.

“Not that I wouldn’t have trusted him for another month and more,” Mrs. Lebus affirmed. “But it’s a satisfaction to be able to turn round and say to the neighbors, ‘What did I tell you?’ Folks in Sulphurville was quite sure I’d never be paid back a cent. This’ll learn them!”

Mr. Lebus, in whose throat the doubts of the neighbors had gathered to offend his faith, cleared them out forever in one sonorous rauque.

The druggist’s account was settled, and though, when Sylvia first heard him, he had been doubtful if his medicine was doing the patient any good, he was now most anxious that he should continue with the prescription. That afternoon one of the doctors in residence at the Plutonian visited Arthur and at once advised his removal thither.

Arthur made rapid progress when he was once out of the hospitable squalor of the Auburn Hotel, and the story of Sylvia’s discovery of her unfortunate cousin became a romantic episode for all the guests of the Plutonian, a never-failing aid to conversation between wives waiting for their husbands to emerge from their daily torture at the hands of the masseurs, who lived like imps in the sulphurous glooms of the bath below; maybe it even provided the victims themselves with a sufficiently absorbing topic to mitigate the penalties of their cure.

Arthur himself expanded wonderfully as the subject of so much discussion. It gave Sylvia the greatest pleasure to see the way in which his complexion was recovering its old ruddiness and his steps their former vigor; but she did not approve of the way in which the story kept pace with Arthur’s expansion. She confided to him how very personally the news of the sick Englishman had affected her and how she had made up her mind from the beginning that it was a stranded actor, and afterward, when she heard in the drug-store the name Madden, that it actually was Arthur himself. He, however, was unable to stay content with such an incomplete telepathy; indulging human nature’s preference for what is not true, both in his own capacity as a liar and in his listeners’ avid and wanton credulity, he transferred a woman’s intimate hopes into a quack’s tale.

“Then you didn’t see your cousin’s spirit go up in the elevator when you were standing in the lobby? Now isn’t that perfectly discouraging?” complained a lady with an astral reputation in Illinois.

“I’m afraid the story’s been added to a good deal,” Sylvia said. “I’m sorry to disappoint the faithful.”

“She’s shy about giving us her experiences,” said another lady from Iowa. “I know I was just thrilled when I heard it. It seemed to me the most wonderful story I’d ever imagined. I guess you felt kind of queer when you saw him lying on a bed in your room.”

“He was in his own room,” Sylvia corrected, “and I didn’t feel at all queer. It was he who felt queer.”

“Isn’t she secretive?” exclaimed the lady from Illinois. “Why, I was going to ask you to write it up in our society’s magazine, The Flash. We don’t print any stories that aren’t established as true. Well, your experience has given me real courage, Miss Scarlett. Thank you.”

The astral enthusiast clasped Sylvia’s hand and gazed at her as earnestly as if she had noticed a smut on her nose.

“Yes, I’m sure we ought to be grateful,” said the lady from Iowa. “My! Our footsteps are treading in the unseen every day of our lives! You certainly are privileged,” she added, wrapping Sylvia in a damp mist of benign fatuity.

“I wish you wouldn’t elaborate everything so,” Sylvia begged of Arthur when she had escaped from the deification of the two psychical ladies. “It makes me feel so dreadfully old to see myself assuming a legendary shape before my own eyes. It’s as painful as being stuffed alive—stuffed alive with nonsense,” she added, with a laugh.

Arthur’s expansion, however, was not merely grafted on Sylvia’s presentiment of his discovery in Sulphurville; he blossomed upon his own stock, a little exotically, perhaps, like the clumps of fiery cannas in the grounds of the hotel, but with a quite conspicuous effectiveness. Like the cannas, he required protection from frost, for there was a very real sensitiveness beneath all that flamboyance, and it was the knowledge of this that kept Sylvia from criticizing him at all severely. Besides, even if he did bask a little too complacently in expressions of interest and sympathy, it was a very natural reaction from his wretched solitude at the Auburn Hotel, for which he could scarcely be held culpable, least of all by herself. Moreover, was not this so visible recovery the best tribute he could have paid to her care? If he appeared to strut—for, indeed, there was a hint of strutting in his demeanor—he only did so from a sense of well-being. Finally, if any further defense was necessary, he was an Englishman among a crowd of Americans; the conditions demanded a good deal of competitive self-assertion.

Meanwhile summer was gone; the trees glowed with every shade of crimson. Sylvia could not help feeling that there was something characteristic in the demonstrative richness of the American fall; though she was far from wishing to underrate its beauty, the display was oppressive. She sighed for the melancholy of the European autumn, a conventional emotion, no doubt, but so closely bound up with old associations that she could not wish to lose it. This cremation of summer, these leafy pyrotechnics, this holocaust of color, seemed a too barbaric celebration of the year’s death. It was significant that autumn with its long-drawn-out suggestion of decline should here have failed to displace fall; for there was something essentially catastrophic in this ruthless bonfire of foliage. It was not surprising that the aboriginal inhabitants should have been redskins, nor that the gorgeousness of nature should have demanded from the humanity it overwhelmed a readjustment of decorative values which superficial observers were apt to mistake for gaudy ostentation. Sylvia could readily imagine that if she had been accustomed from childhood to these crimson woods, these beefy robins, and these saucer-eyed daisies, she might have found her own more familiar landscapes merely tame and pretty; but as it was she felt dazzled and ill at ease. It’s a little more and how much it is, she told herself, pondering the tantalizing similarity that was really as profoundly different as an Amazonian forest from Kensington Gardens.

Arthur’s first flamboyance was much toned down by all that natural splendor; in fact, it no longer existed, and Sylvia found a freshening charm in his company amid these crimson trees and unfamiliar birds, and in this staring white hotel with its sulphurous exhalations. His complete restoration to health, moreover, was a pleasure and a pride that nothing could mar, and she found herself planning his happiness and prosperity as if she had already transferred to him all she herself hoped from life.

At the end of September the long-expected remittance arrived from Mrs. Madden, and Sylvia gathered from the letter that the poor lady had been much puzzled to send the money.

“We must cable it back to her at once,” Sylvia said.

“Oh, well, now it’s come, is that wise?” Arthur objected. “She may have had some difficulty in getting it, but that’s over now.”

“No, no. It must be cabled back to her. I’ve got plenty of money to carry us on till we begin to work together.”

“But I can’t go on accepting charity like this,” Arthur protested. “It’s undignified, really. I’ve never done such a thing before.”

“You accepted it from your mother.”

“Oh, but my mother’s different.”

“Only because she’s less able to afford it than I am,” Sylvia pointed out. “Look, she’s sent you fifty pounds. Think how jolly it would be for her suddenly to receive fifty pounds for herself.”

Arthur warmed to the idea; he could not resist the picture of his mother’s pleasure, nor the kind of inverted generosity with which it seemed to endow himself. He talked away about the arrival of the money in England till it almost seemed as if he were sending his mother the accumulation of hard-earned savings to buy herself a new piano; that was the final purpose to which, in Arthur’s expanding fancy, the fifty pounds was to be put. Sylvia found his attitude rather boyish and charming, and they had an argument, on the way to cable the money back, whether it would be better for Mrs. Madden to buy a Bechstein or a BlÜthner.

Sylvia’s contract with the Plutonian expired with the first fortnight of October, and they decided to see what likelihood there was of work in New York before they thought of returning to Europe. They left Sulphurville with everybody’s good wishes, because everybody owed to their romantic meeting an opportunity of telling a really good ghost story at first hand, with the liberty of individual elaboration.

New York was very welcome after Sulphurville. They passed the wooded heights of the Hudson at dusk in a glow of somber magnificence softened by the vapors of the river. It seemed to Sylvia that scarcely ever had she contemplated a landscape of such restrained splendor, and she thought of that young New-Yorker who had preferred not to travel more than fifty miles west of his native city, though the motive of his loyalty had most improbably been the beauty of the Hudson. She wondered if Arthur appreciated New York, but he responded to her enthusiasm with the superficial complaints of the Englishman, complaints that when tested resolved themselves into conventional formulas of disapproval.

“I suppose trite opinions are a comfortable possession,” Sylvia said. “But a good player does not like a piano that is too easy. You complain of the morning papers’ appearing shortly after midnight, but confess that in your heart you prefer reading them in bed to reading a London evening paper, limp from being carried about in the pocket and with whatever is important in it illegible.”

“But the flaring head-lines,” Arthur protested. “You surely don’t like them?”

“Oh, but I do!” she avowed. “They’re as much more amusing than the dreary column beneath as tinned tongue is nicer than the dry undulation for which you pay twice as much. Head-lines are the poetry of journalism, and, after all, what would the Parthenon be without its frieze?”

“Of course you’d argue black was white,” Arthur said.

“Well, that’s a better standpoint than accepting everything as gray.”

“Most things are gray.”

“Oh no, they’re not! Some things are. Old men’s beards and dirty linen and Tschaikowsky’s music and oysters and Wesleyans.”

“There you go,” he jeered.

“Where do I go?”

“Right off the point,” said Arthur, triumphantly. “No woman can argue.”

“Oh, but I’m not a woman,” Sylvia contradicted. “I’m a mythical female monster, don’t you know—one of those queer beasts with claws like hay-rakes and breasts like peg-tops and a tail like a fish.”

“Do you mean a Sphinx?” Arthur asked, in his literal way. He was always rather hostile toward her extravagant fancies, because he thought it dangerous to encourage a woman in much the same way as he would have objected to encouraging a beggar.

“No, I really meant a grinx, which is rather like a Sphinx, but the father was a griffin—the mother in both cases was a minx, of course.”

“What was the father of the Sphinx?” he asked, rather ungraciously.

Sylvia clapped her hands.

“I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist the question. A sphere—a woman’s sphere, of course, which is nearly as objectionable a beast as a lady’s man.”

“You do talk rot sometimes,” said Arthur.

“Don’t you ever have fancies?” she demanded, mockingly.

“Yes, of course, but practical fancies.”

“Practical fancies,” Sylvia echoed. “Oh, my dear, it sounds like a fairy in Jaeger combinations! You don’t know what fun it is talking rot to you, Arthur. It’s like hoaxing a chicken with marbles. You walk away from my conversation with just the same disgusted dignity.”

“You haven’t changed a bit,” Arthur proclaimed. “You’re just the same as you were at fifteen.”

Sylvia, who had been teasing him with a breath of malice, was penitent at once; after all, he had once run away with her, and it would be difficult for any woman of twenty-eight not to rejoice a little at the implication of thirteen undestructive years.

“That last remark was like a cocoanut thrown by a monkey from the top of the cocoanut-palm,” she said. “You meant it to be crushing, but it was crushed instead, and quite deliciously sweet inside.”

All the time that Sylvia had been talking so lightly, while the train was getting nearer and nearer to New York, there had lain at the back of her mind the insistent problem of her relationship to Arthur. The impossibility of their going on together as friends and nothing more had been firmly fixed upon her consciousness for a long time now, and the reason of this was to be sought for less in Arthur than in herself. So far they had preserved all the outward semblances of friendship, but she knew that one look from her eyes deep into his would transform him into her lover. She gave Arthur credit for telling himself quite sincerely that it would be “caddish” to make love to her while he remained under what he would consider a grave obligation; and because with his temperament it would be as much in the ordinary routine of the day to make love to a woman as to dress himself in the morning. She praised his decorum and was really half grateful to him for managing to keep his balance on the very small pedestal that she had provided. She might fairly presume, too, that if she let Arthur fall in love with her he would wish to marry her. Why should she not marry him? It was impossible to answer without accusing herself of a cynicism that she was far from feeling, yet without which she could not explain even to herself her quite definite repulsion from the idea of marrying him. The future, really, now, the very immediate future, must be flung to chance; it was hopeless to arrogate to her forethought the determination of it; besides, here was New York already.

“We’d better go to my old hotel,” Sylvia suggested. Was it the reflection of her own perplexity, or did she detect in Arthur’s accents a note of relief, as if he too had been watching the Palisades of the Hudson and speculating upon the far horizon they concealed?

They dined at Rector’s, and after dinner they walked down Broadway into Madison Square, where upon this mild October night the Metropolitan Tower, that best of all the Gargantuan baby’s toys, seemed to challenge the indifferent moon. They wandered up Madison Avenue, which was dark after the winking sky-signs of Broadway and with its not very tall houses held a thought of London in the darkness. But when Sylvia turned to look back it was no longer London, for she could see the great, illuminated hands and numerals of the clock in the Metropolitan flashing from white to red for the hour. This clock without a dial-plate was the quietest of the Gargantuan baby’s toys, for it did not strike; one was conscious of the almost pathetic protest against all those other damnably noisy toys: one felt he might become so enamoured of its pretty silence that to provide himself with a new diversion he might take to doubling the hours to keep pace with the rapidity of the life with which he played.

“It’s almost as if we were walking up Haverstock Hill again,” said Arthur.

“And we’re grown up now,” Sylvia murmured. “Oh, dreadfully grown up, really!”

They walked on for a while in silence. It was impossible to keep back the temptation to cheat time by leaping over the gulf of years and being what they were when last they walked along together like this. Sylvia kept looking over her shoulder at the bland clock hanging in the sky behind them; at this distance the fabric of the tower had melted into the night and was no longer visible, which gave to the clock a strange significance and made it a simulacrum of time itself.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” she said.

“Do you remember when you told me I looked like a cow? It was after”—he breathed perceptibly faster—“after I kissed you.”

She would not ascribe his remembering what she had called him to an imperfectly healed scar of vanity, but with kindlier thoughts turned it to a memento of his affection for her. After all, she had loved him then; it had been a girl’s love, but did there ever come with age a better love than that first flushed gathering of youth’s opening flowers?

“Sylvia, I’ve thought about you ever since. When you drove me away from Colonial Terrace I felt like killing myself. Surely we haven’t met again for nothing.”

“Is it nothing unless I love you?” she asked, fiercely, striving to turn the words into weapons to pierce the recesses of his thoughts and blunt themselves against a true heart.

“Ah no, I won’t say that,” he cried. “Besides, I haven’t the right to talk about love. You’ve been—Sylvia, I can’t tell you what you’ve been to me since I met you again.”

“If I could only believe—oh, but believe with all of me that was and is and ever will be—that I could have been so much.”

“You have, you have.”

“Don’t take my love as a light thing,” she warned him. “It’s not that I’m wanting so very much for myself, but I want to be so much to you.”

“Sylvia, won’t you marry me? I couldn’t ever take your love lightly. Indeed. Really.”

“Ah, it’s not asking me to marry you that means you’re serious. I’m not asking you what your intentions are. I’m asking if you want me.”

“Sylvia, I want you dreadfully.”

“Now, now?” she pressed.

“Now and always.”

They had stopped without being aware of it. A trolley-car jangled by, casting transitory lights that wavered across Arthur’s face, and Sylvia could see how his eyes were shining. She dreaded lest by adding a few conventional words he should spoil what he had said so well, but he waited for her, as in the old days he had always waited.

“You’re not cultivating this love, like a convalescent patient does for his nurse?” Sylvia demanded.

She stopped herself abruptly, conscious that every question she put to him was ultimately being put to herself.

“Did I ever not love you?” he asked. “It was you that grew tired of me. It was you that sent me away.”

“Don’t pretend that all these years you’ve been waiting for me to come back,” she scoffed.

“Of course not. What I’m trying to explain is that we can start now where we left off; that is, if you will.”

He held out his hand half timidly.

“And if I won’t?”

The hand dropped again to his side, and there was so much wounded sensitiveness in the slight gesture that Sylvia caught him to her as if he were a child who had fallen and needed comforting.

“When I first put my head on your shoulder,” she murmured. “Oh, how well I can remember the day—such a sparkling day, with London spread out like life at our feet. Now we’re in the middle of New York, but it seems just as far away from us two as London was that day—and life,” she added, with a sigh.