§ 1

This is the story of Sylvia Castleman, of her love and her marriage. The story goes back to the days of her golden youth; but it has to be told by an old woman who had no youth at all, and who never dreamed of having a story to tell. It begins with scenes of luxury among the proudest aristocracy of the South; it is told by one who for the first thirty years of her life was a farmer’s wife in a lonely pioneer homestead in Manitoba, and who, but for the pictures and stories in magazines, would never have known that such a world as Sylvia Castleman’s existed.

Yet I believe that I can tell her story. Eight years of it I lived with her, so intensely that it became as my own existence to me. And the rest I gathered from her lips, even to the tiniest details. For years I went about my daily tasks with Sylvia’s memories as a kind of radiance about me, like a rainbow that shimmers over the head of a plodding traveler. In the time that I knew her, I never came to the end of her picturesque adventures, nor did I ever know what it was to be bored by them. The incident might be commonplace—a bit of a flirtation, the ordering of a costume, the blunder of a negro servant; but it was always Sylvia who was telling it—there was always the sparkle of her eyes, the mischievous smile, the swift glow of her countenance. And as the story progressed, suddenly would come some incident so wild that it would make you catch your breath; some fantastic, incredible extravagance; some strange, quixotic trait of character. You would find yourself face to face with an attitude to life out of the Middle Ages, with some fierce, vivid passion that carried you back even farther.

What a world it is! I know that it exists—for Sylvia took me home with her twice. I saw the Major wearing his faded gray uniform (it was “Reunion Day”) and discoursing upon the therapeutic qualities of “hot toddies.” I watched the negro boy folding and unfolding the newspaper, because Mrs. Castleman was obeying her physician and avoiding unnecessary exertion. I shook hands with Master Castleman Lysle, whose names were reversed by special decree of the state legislature, so that the memory of his distinguished ancestress might be preserved to posterity. And yet it will always seem like a fairy-story world to me. I can no more believe in the courtly Bishop, praying over my unrepentant head, than I can believe in Don Quixote. As for “Uncle Mandeville”—I could more easily persuade myself that I once talked with Pan Zagloba in the flesh.

I have Sylvia’s picture on my desk—the youthful picture that means so much to me, with its strange mixture of coquetry and wistfulness, of mischief and tenderness. Downstairs in the dining-room is the portrait of Lady Lysle, which is so much like her that strangers always mistook it. And if that be not enough, now and then Elaine steals into my room, and, silent as a shadow, takes her seat upon the little stool beside me, watching me with her sightless eyes. Her fingers fly swiftly at her knitting, and for hours, if need be, she moves nothing else. She knows by the sound of my pen that I am busy; with the wonderful acuteness of the blind she knows whether I am successful or not, whether what I write be joyous or painful.

How much she knows—much more than I dream, perhaps! I wonder about it, but I never ask her. Both Frank and I have tried to talk to her, but we cannot; it is cowardly, pitiful, perhaps—but we cannot! She used to ask questions in the beginning, but she must have felt our pain, for she asks no more; she simply haunts our home, the incarnation of the tragedy. So much of her mother she has—the wonderful red-brown eyes, the golden hair, the mobile, delicate features. But the sparkle of the eyes and the glow in the cheeks, the gaiety, the rapture—where are they? When I think of this, I clutch my hands in a sort of spasm, and go to my work again.

Or perhaps I go into Frank’s den and see him sitting there, with his haggard, brooding face, his hair that turned gray in one week. He never asks the question, but I see it in his eyes: “How much have you done to-day?” A cruel taskmaster is that face of Frank’s! He is haunted by the thought that I may not live to finish the story.

The hardest thing of all will be to make you see Sylvia as she was in that wild, wonderful youth of hers, when she was the belle of her state, when the suitors crowded about her like moths about a candle-flame. How shall one who is old and full of bitter memories bring back the magic spirit of youth, the glamor and the glow of it, the terrifying blindness, the torrent-like rush, the sheer, quivering ecstasy of it?

What words shall I choose to bring before you the joyfulness of Sylvia? When I first met her she was twenty-six, and had known the kind of sorrow that eats into a woman’s soul as acid might eat into her eyes; and yet you would think she had never been touched by pain—she moved through life, serene, unflinching, a lamp of cheerfulness to every soul who knew her. I met her and proceeded to fall in love with her like the veriest schoolgirl; I would go away and think of her, and clasp my hands together in delight. There was one word that kept coming to me; I would repeat it over and over again—“Happy! Happy! Happy!” She was the happiest soul that I have ever known upon the earth; a veritable fountain of joy.

I say that much; and then I hasten to correct it. It seems to be easy for some people to smile. There comes to me another word that I used to find myself repeating about Sylvia. She was wise! She was wise! She was wise with a strange, uncanny wisdom, the wisdom of ages upon ages of womanhood—women who have been mothers and counselors and homekeepers, but above all, women who have been managers of men! Oh, what a manager of men was Sylvia! For the most part, she told me, she managed them for their own good; but now and then the irresistible imp of mischievousness broke loose in her, and then she managed them any way at all, so long as she managed them!

Yet that, too, does her less than justice, I think. For you might search all over the states of the South, where she lived and visited, and where now they mention her name only in whispers; and nowhere, I wager, could you find a man who had ceased to love her. You might find hundreds who would wish to God that she were alive again, so that they might run away with her. For that is the third thing to be noted about Sylvia Castleman—that she was good. She was so good that when you knew her you went down upon your knees before her, and never got up again. How many times I have seen the tears start into her eyes over the memory of what the imp of mischievousness and the genius of management had made her do to men! How many times have I heard her laughter, as she told how she broke their hearts, and then used her tears for cement to patch them up again!

I realize that I must make some effort to tell you how she looked. But when I think of words—how futile, stale and shopworn seem all the words that come to me. In my early days my one recreation was cheap paper-covered novels and historical romances, from which I got my idea of the grand monde. Now, when I try to think of words with which to describe Sylvia, it is their words that come to me. I know that a heroine must be slender and exquisite, must be sensitive and haughty and aristocratic. Sylvia was all this, in truth; but how shall I bring to you the thrill of wonder that came to me when I encountered her—that living joy she was to me forever after, so different from anything the books had ever brought me!

She was tall and very straight, free in her carriage; her look, her whole aspect was quick and eager. I sit and try to analyze her charm, and I think the first quality was the sense she gave you of cleanness. I lived with her much; I saw her, not merely made up for parties, but as she opened her eyes in the morning; and I cannot recall that I ever saw about her any of those things that offend us in the body. Her eyes were always clear, her skin always fair; I never saw her with a cold, or heard her speak of a headache. If she were tired, she would not tell you so—at least, not if she thought you needed her. If there was anything the matter with her, there was only one way you found it out—that she stopped eating.

She would do that at home, when someone was ill and she was under a strain. She would literally fade away before your eyes—but still just as cheerful and brave, laughing at the protests of the doctors, the outcries of her aunts and her colored “aunties.” At such times she had a quite new kind of beauty, that seemed to strike men dumb; she used to make merry over it, saying that she could go out when other women had to shut themselves behind curtains. For thinness brought out every line of her exquisitely chiseled features; every quiver of her soul seemed to show—her tense, swift being was as if cut there in living marble, and she was some unearthly creature, wraith-like, wonderful, thrilling. There were poets in Castleman County; they would meet her in this depleted state, and behave after the fashion of poets in semi-tropical climates—stand with their knees knocking and the perspiration oozing out upon their foreheads; they would wander off by moonlight-haunted streams and compose enraptured verses, and come back and fall upon their knees and implore her to accept the poor, feeble tribute of their adoration.

I have seen her, too, when she was strong and happy, and then she would be well-made and shapely, with a charm of a more earthly sort. Then her color would be like the roses she always carried; and in each of her cheeks would appear the most adorable of dimples, and under her chin another. She had a nose that was very straight and finely carved; and right in the center, under the tip, the sculptor had put a tiny little groove. She had also a chin that was very straight, and right in the center of this was a corresponding little groove. You will laugh perhaps; but those touches added marvelously to the expressiveness of her countenance. How they would shift and change when, for instance, her nostrils quivered with anger, or when the imp of mischievousness took possession of her, and the network of quaint wrinkles gathered round her eyes!

Dimples, I know, are an ultra-feminine property; but Sylvia’s face was not what is ordinarily called feminine—it was a kind of face that painters would give to a young boy singing in a church. I used to tell her that it was the kind they gave to angels of the higher orders; whereupon she would put her arms about me and whisper, “You old goose!” She had a pair of the strangest red-brown eyes, soft and tender; and then suddenly lighting up—shining, shining!

I don’t know if I make you see her. I can add only one detail more, the one that people talked of most—her hair. You may see her hair, very beautifully done, in the portrait of Lady Lysle. The artist was shrewd and put the great lady in a morning robe, standing by the open window, the sunlight falling upon a cascade of golden tresses. The color of Sylvia’s hair was toned down when I knew her, but they told me that in her prime it had been vivid to outrageousness. I sit before the painting, and the present slips away and I see her as she was in the glow of her youth—eager, impetuous, swept with gusts of merriment and tenderness, like a mountain lake in April.

So the old chroniclers report her, nine generations back, when she came over to marry the Governor of Massachusetts! They have her wedding gown preserved in a Boston Museum, and the Lysles have a copy of it, so that each generation can be married in one like it. But Sylvia was the first it became, being the first blonde since her great progenitor. How strange seems such a whim of heredity—not merely the color of the hair and eyes, the cut of the features, but a whole character, a personality hidden away somewhere in the germ-plasm, and suddenly breaking out, without warning, after a couple of hundred years!

§ 3

When I think of Sylvia’s childhood and all the hairbreadth escapes of which she told me, I marvel that she ever came to womanhood. It would seem to be a perilous part of the world to raise children in, with horses and dogs and guns, and so many half-tamed negroes—to say nothing of all the half-tamed white people. Sylvia had three younger sisters and whole troops of cousins—the Bishop’s eleven children, and the children of Barry Chilton, his brother. I picture their existence as one long series of perilous escapes, with runaway horses, kicking mules and biting dogs, and negroes who shot and stabbed one another in sudden, ferocious brawls, or set fire to Castleman Hall in order that some other negro might be suspected and lynched.

Also there were the more subtle perils of the pantry and the green-apple orchard. I did not see any accident during my brief stay at the place, but I saw the dietetic ferocities of the family and marveled at them. It seemed to me that the life of that most precious of infants, Castleman Lysle, was one endless succession of adventures with mustard and ipecac and castor oil. I want somehow to make you realize this world of Sylvia’s, and I don’t know how I can do it better than by telling of my first vision of that future heir of all the might, majesty and dominion of the Lysles. It was one of the rare occasions when the Major was taking him on a journey. The old family horses were hitched to the old family carriage, and with a negro on the box, another walking at the horses’ heads, a third riding on a mule behind, and a fourth sent ahead to notify the police, the procession set forth to the station. I know quite well that I shall be called a liar; yet I can only give my solemn word that I saw it with my own eyes—the chief of police, duly notified, had informed all the officers on duty, and the population of a bustling town of forty thousand inhabitants, in the United States of America in the twentieth century, were politely requested not to drive automobiles along the principal avenue during the half hour that it took to convey Master Lysle to the train! And of course such a “request” was a command to all the inhabitants who were genteel enough to own automobiles. Was not this the grandson of the late General Castleman, the grand-nephew of a former territorial governor? Was he not the heir of the largest, the oldest and the most famous plantation in the county, the future dispenser of favors and arbiter of social fates? Was he not, incidentally, the brother of the loveliest girl in the state, to whom most of the automobile owners in the town had made violent love?

I would like to tell more about that world and Sylvia’s experiences in it—some of those amazing tales! Of the negro boy who bit a piece out of the baby’s leg, because he had heard someone say that the baby looked sweet enough to eat; of the negro girl who heard a war-story about “a train of gun-powder,” and proceeded with Sylvia’s aid to lay such a train from the cellar to the attic of the house. I would like to tell the whole story of her girlhood, and the strange ideas they taught her; but I have to pick and choose, saving my space for the things that are necessary to the understanding of her character.

Sylvia’s education was a decidedly miscellaneous one at first. “I think it is time the child had some regular training,” her great-aunt, Lady Dee, would say to the child’s mother. “Yes, I suppose you are right,” would be the answer. But then Lady Dee would go, and Major Castleman would come in, observing, “It’s marvelous the way that child picks things up, Miss Margaret.” (A habit from his courtship days, you understand.) “We must be careful not to overstimulate her mind.” To which his wife would respond, agreeably, “I’m sure you know best, Mr. Castleman.”

Every morning Sylvia would go with her father on his rounds to interview the managers of the three plantations; the Major in his black broadcloth frock-coat, a wide black hat and a white “bosom” shirt, riding horseback with an umbrella over his head, and followed at a respectful distance by his “boy” upon a mule. On these excursions Sylvia would recite the multiplication table, and receive lessons in the history of her country, from the point of view of its unreconstructed minority. Also she had lessons on this subject from her great-aunt, who never paid one of her numerous servants their small quarterly stipend that she did not exclaim: “Oh, how I hate the Yankees!”

I must not delay to introduce this great-aunt, who was Sylvia’s monitress in the arts and graces of life, and left her on her death-bed such a curious heritage of worldliness. Lady Dee was the last surviving member of a younger branch of the line of the Lysles. She was not a real countess, like her great ancestress; the name “Lady” had been given her in baptism. Early in the last century she had come over the mountains in a lumbering coach, with an escort of mounted riders, to marry the Surveyor General of the Territory. She still had a picture of this coach, along with innumerable other treasures in cedar chests in her attic: fan-sticks of carved ivory, inlaid with gold; gold garter buckles with wonderful enameling; old seals and silver snuff-boxes; rare jewels, such as white topazes and red amethysts; and a whole trunkful of the curious tiny silk parasols with which great ladies used to protect their creamy complexions—no more than ten inches across, and with handles of inlaid and carven ivory. When Sylvia was a little girl with two pigtails hanging down her back, it was one of the joys of her life to explore these treasures, and deck herself in faded ball costumes and chains of jewels and gold.

Also, from Lady Dee she received contributions to her moral training; not in set discourses, but incidentally and by allusions. Rummaging in the cedar chests she once came upon a miniature which she had never seen before; a lady in whom she recognized the eyes of the Lysles, and the arrogance which all their portraits show. “Who is this, Aunt Lady?” she asked; and the old gentlewoman frowned and answered, “We never speak of her, my dear. She is the one woman who ever disgraced our name.”

Sylvia hesitated a long time before she spoke again. She had heard much of family skeletons in the table-talk—but always other families. “What did she do?” she asked, at last.

“She was married to three men,” was the reply.

Again Sylvia hesitated. “You mean,” she ventured—“you mean—at the same time?”

Lady Dee stared. “No, my dear,” she said, gravely. “Her husbands died.”

“But—but—” began the other, timidly, groping to find her way in a strange field of thought.

“If she had been a woman of delicacy,” pronounced Lady Dee, “she would have been true to one love.” Then, after a pause, she added, solemnly, “Remember this, my child. Think before you choose, for the women of our family are like Sterne’s starling—when they have once entered their cage, they never come out.”

It was Lady Dee who objected to the desultory nature of Sylvia’s education, and began a campaign, as a result of which the Major sent her off to a “college” at the age of thirteen. You must not be frightened by this imposing statement, for it is easy to call yourself a “college” in the South. Sylvia was away for three years, during which she really studied, and acquired much more than the usual accomplishments of a young lady.

She had an extraordinarily capable mind; serene and efficient, like everything else about her. When I met her I was a woman of forty-five, who a few years before had broken with my whole past, having discovered the universe of knowledge. I had been like a starving person breaking into a well-filled larder, and stuffing myself greedily and promiscuously. I had taken upon myself the task of contending with other people’s prejudices, and my rapture over Sylvia Castleman was partly the realization that here was a woman—actually a woman—who had no prejudices whatever. She wanted me to tell her all I knew; and it was a great delight to expound to her a new set of ideas, and see her mind go from point to point, leaping swiftly, laying hold of details, ordering, comparing—above all, applying. That you may have a picture of this mind in action, let me tell you what she did in her girlhood, all unassisted—how she broke with the religion of her forefathers.

§ 4

That brings me to the Bishop, Basil Chilton, who had come into the family by marriage to one of Sylvia’s aunts. At the time of his marriage he had been a young Louisiana planter, handsome and fascinating. He had met Nannie Castleman at a ball, and at four o’clock in the morning had secured her promise to marry him before sunset. People said that he was half drunk at the time, and this was probably a moderate estimate, for he had been wholly drunk for a year or two afterwards. Then he had shot a man in a brawl and, despite the fact that he was a gentleman, had almost been punished for it. The peril had sobered him; a month or two later, at a Methodist revival, he was converted, made a sensational confession of his sins, and then, to the horror of his friends, became a preacher of Methodism.

To the Castlemans this was a calamity—to Lady Dee a personal affront. “Whoever heard of a gentleman who was a Methodist?” she demanded; and as the convert had no precedents to cite, she quarreled with him and for many years never spoke his name. Also it was hard upon Nannie Castleman—who had entered her cage and had to stay! They had compromised on the bargain that the children were to be brought up in her own faith, which was Very High Church. So now the unhappy preacher, later Bishop, sat in his study and wrote his sermons, while one by one his eleven children came of age, and danced and gambled and drank themselves to perdition in the very best form imaginable. When I met the family, the last of the daughters, Caroline, was just making her dÉbut, and her mother, nearly sixty, was the gayest dancer on the floor. It was the joke of the county, how the family automobile would first take the Bishop to prayer meeting, and then return to take the mother and the children to a ball.

Basil Chilton looked like an old-world diplomat, as I had come to conceive that personage from reading novels. He had the most charming manners—the kind of manners which cannot be cultivated, but come from nobility of soul. He was gentle and gracious even to servants; and yet imposing, with his stately figure and smooth, ascetic face, lined by care. He lived just a pony-ride from Castleman Hall, and almost every morning during vacations Sylvia would stop and spend a little while with him. People said that he loved her more than any of his own children.

So you can imagine what it meant when one day the girl said to him, “Uncle Basil, I have something to tell you. I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve made up my mind that I don’t believe in either heaven or hell.”

Where had she got such an idea? She had certainly not learned it at the “college,” for the institution was “denominational” and had no text-books of later date than 1850. Somewhere she had found a volume of Huxley’s “Lay Sermons,” but she had got nothing out of that, for the Major had discovered her reading page three, and had solemnly consigned the book to the flames. No, it was simply that she had been thinking for herself.

The Bishop took it well. He did not try to frighten her, he did not even show her his distress of mind. He told her that she was an angel, the very soul of purity and goodness, and that God would surely lead her to truth if only she kept herself humble. As Sylvia put it to me: “He knew that I would come back, and I knew that I would never come back.”

And that was the situation between them to the very end—the bitter end. He always believed that she would learn to see things as he saw them. He died a year or so ago, the courtly old gentleman—consoled by the thought that he was now to meet his God and Sylvia face to face, and hear the former explain to the latter the difference between Divine Law and mere human ideas of Justice.

The rest of the family were not so patient as the Bishop. To have a heretic in the household was even worse than having a Methodist! Mrs. Castleman, who agreed with the Bible as she agreed with everything, was dumb with bewilderment; while the Major set to work to hunt out dusty volumes from the attic. He read every word of Paley’s “Evidences” aloud to his daughter, and some of Gladstone’s essays, and several other books, the very names of which she forgot. You may smile at this picture, but it was a serious matter to the Castlemans, who had based their morality upon the fear of fire and brimstone and the weeping and gnashing of teeth, and who kept Sylvia three months from school to impress such images upon her imagination.

There were several religious sects represented in the county. These were generally at war with one another, but they all made common cause in this emergency, and committees of old ladies from the “Christians,” the “hard-shell Baptists,” the “predestination Presbyterians,” would come to condole with “Miss Margaret,” and would kneel down in the parlor with Sylvia and pray for her salvation, shedding tears over the cream velour upholstery of the hand-carved mahogany sofas. A distant cousin who was “in orders,” a young gentleman of charming presence and special training in dialectics, was called in to answer the arguments of this wayward young lady, and stayed for three days, probing deeply into his patient’s mind—not merely her theological beliefs, but the attitude to life which underlay them. When he had finished he said to her, “My dear Sylvia, it is my opinion that you are the most dangerous person in this county.” She told me the story, and added, “I hadn’t the remotest idea what the man meant!” But I answered her that he had been perfectly right. In truth, he was a seer, that young clergyman!

§ 5

There was a general feeling that Sylvia had learned more than was good for her; and so the family made inquiries, and selected the most exclusive and expensive “finishing school” in New York, for the purpose of putting a stop to her intellectual development. And so we come to the beginning of Sylvia’s wordly career, and to the visit she paid to Lady Dee—who now, at the age of ninety, felt herself failing rapidly, and wished to leave to her great-niece her treasures of worldly counsel.

Lady Dee was one of those quaint figures you meet in the South, who go to balls and parties when they are old enough to be sewing the layettes of their great-grandchildren. I have seen a picture of her at the age of eighty-five, in a cerise-colored silk ball-gown with a lace “bertha,” her white hair curled in front and done in a pile with a coronet of diamonds. You must imagine her now, in an invalid’s chair upon the gallery, but still with her hair dressed as of old; telling to Sylvia tales of her own young ladyhood—and incidentally, with such deftness that the girl never guessed her purpose, introducing instruction in the strategy and tactics of the sex war.

Life was short, according to Lady Dee, and the future was uncertain. A woman bloomed but once, and must make the most of that. To be the center of events during her hour, that was life’s purpose; and to achieve it, it was necessary to know how to hold men. Men were sometimes said to be strange and difficult creatures, but in reality they were simple and easily handled. The trouble was that most women went blindly at the task, instead of availing themselves of the wisdom which their sex had been storing up for ages, in the minds of such authorities as Lady Dee.

The old lady went on to expound the science of coquetry. I had read of the sex game, as it is played in the grand monde, but I had never supposed that the players were as conscious and deliberate as this veteran expert. She even used the language of battle: “A woman’s shield, my child, is her innocence; her sharpest weapon is her naÏvetÉ. The way to disarm a man’s suspicions is to tell him what you’re doing to him—then you’re sure he won’t believe it!”

She would go into minute details of these Amazonian arts: how to beguile a man, how to promise to marry him without really promising, how to keep him at the proper temperature by judicious applications of jealousy. Nor was this sex war to stop after the wedding ceremony—when most women foolishly laid down their weapons. A woman must sleep in her armor, according to Lady Dee. She must never let her husband know how much she loved him, she must make him think of her as something rare and unattainable, she must keep him in a state where her smile was the greatest thing in life to him. Said the old lady, gravely: “The women of our family are famous for henpecking their husbands—they don’t even take the trouble to hide it. I’ve heard your grandfather, the General, say that it was all right for a man to be henpecked, if only it was by the right hen.”

A training, you perceive, of a decidedly worldly character; and yet there was nothing upon which Sylvia’s relatives laid more stress than the preserving of what they called her “innocence.” There were wild people in this part of the world—high-spirited and hot-tempered, hard drinkers and fast livers; there were deeds of violence, and strange and terrible tales that you might hear. But when these tales had anything to do with sex, they were carefully kept from Sylvia’s ears. Only once had this rule been broken—an occasion which made a great impression upon the child. The daughter of one of the neighboring families had eloped, and the dreadful rumor was whispered that she had traveled in a sleeping-car with the man, and been married at the end of the journey, instead of at the beginning.

And there was Uncle Mandeville, the youngest of the Major’s brothers—half drunk, though Sylvia did not know it—pacing the veranda and discussing the offending bridegroom. “He should have been shot!” cried Mandeville. “The damned scoundrel, he should have been shot like a dog!” And suddenly he paused before the startled child. He was a giant of a man, and his voice had the power of a church-organ. He placed his hands upon Sylvia’s shoulders, pronouncing in solemn tones, “Little girl, I want you to know that I will protect the honor of the women of our family with my life! Do you understand me, little girl?”

And Sylvia, awe-stricken, answered, “Yes, Uncle Mandeville.” The worthy gentleman was so much moved by his own nobility and courage that the tears stood in his eyes; he went on, melodramatically, “With my life! With my life! And remember the boast of the Castlemans—that there was never a man in our family who broke his word, nor a woman with a stain upon her name!”

That had been in Sylvia’s childhood. But now she was a young lady, about to start for the metropolis, and the family judged that the time had come for her to be instructed in some of these delicate matters. There had been consultations between her mother and aunts, in which the former had been prodded on to the performing of one of the most difficult of all maternal duties. Sylvia remembered the occasion vividly, for her mother’s agitation was painful to witness; she led the girl solemnly into a darkened room, and casting down her eyes, as if she were confessing a crime, she said:

“My child, you will probably hear evil-minded girls talking of things of which my little daughter has never heard. When these things are discussed, I want you to withdraw quietly from the company. You should remain away until vulgar topics have been dismissed from the conversation. I want your promise to do this, my daughter.”

Her mother’s sense of shame had communicated itself to Sylvia. At first she had been staring wonderingly, but now she cast down her own eyes. She gave the desired promise; and that was all the education concerning sex that she had during her girlhood. This experience determined her attitude for many years—a mingling of shame and fear. The time had come for her to face the facts of her own physical development, and she did so with agony of soul, and in her ignorance came near to injuring her bodily health.

Also, the talk had another consequence, over which Mrs. Castleman would have been sorely distressed had she known it. Though the girl tried her best, it was impossible for her to avoid hearing some of the “vulgar” conversation of the very sophisticated young ladies at the “finishing school.” In spite of herself, she learned something of what sex and marriage meant—enough to make her flesh creep and her cheeks burn with horror and disgust. It seemed to her that she could no longer bear to meet and talk to men. When she came home for the Christmas holidays and discovered that her mother was expecting a child, the thought of what this meant filled her with shame for both her parents; she wondered how they could expect a pure-minded girl to love them, when they had so degraded themselves. So intense was this impression that it continued over the Easter vacation, when she returned to find the house in possession of the new heir of all the might, majesty and dominion of the Lysles.

§ 6

Miss Abercrombie’s “finishing school” was located on Fifth Avenue, immediately opposite—so the catalogue informed you—to the mansions of the oldest Knickerbocker families. It was Miss Abercrombie’s boast that she had married more than half her young ladies to millionaires, and she took occasion to drop allusions to the subject to all whom it might interest. She ran her establishment upon an ingenious plan, about half her pupils being the daughters of Western buccaneers, who paid high prices, and the other half being the daughters of Southern aristocrats, accepted at reduced rates. So the young ladies from the West got the “real thing” in refinement, and the young ladies from the South made acquaintances whose brothers were “eligible.”

Sylvia had always had everything that she wanted, and was under the impression that immense sums of money had been spent upon her upbringing. But among these new associates she found herself in the class of the poorest. She had never owned a dress which they would consider expensive, whereas the dresses of these girls were trimmed with real lace, and cost several hundreds of dollars each. It was a startling experience to many of them to discover that a girl who had so few jewels as Sylvia could be so haughty and self-possessed; which was, of course, just what they had come for—to acquire that superiority to their wealth which is the apex of culture in millionairedom.

So Sylvia became an uncrowned queen, and all the lumber princesses and copper duchesses and railroad countesses vied in entertaining her. They treated her to box-parties, where, duly chaperoned, they listened to possibly indecent musical comedies; and to midnight feasts where they imperiled their complexions with peanut butter and almond paste and chocolate creams and stuffed olives and anchovies and crackers and mustard pickles and fruit cake and sardines and plum pudding and sliced ham and salted almonds—and what other delicacies might come along in anybody’s boxes from home. To aid in the digestion of these “goodies” Sylvia was taken out twice daily, and marched in a little private parade up Fifth Avenue, wearing a hat so large that all her attention was required to keep it on in windy weather, and so heavy that it made her head ache if the air were still; a collar so high that she could not bend her head to balance the hat; high-heeled shoes upon which she toddled with her feet crowded down upon the toes; and a corset laced so tight that her lower ribs were bent out of shape and her liver endangered. About the highest testimony that I can give to the altogether superhuman wonderfulness of Sylvia is that she stayed for two years at Miss Abercrombie’s, and came home a picture of radiant health, eager, joyous—and lovely as the pearly tints of dawn.

She came home to prepare for her dÉbut; and what an outfit she brought! You may picture her unfolding the treasures in her big bedroom, which had been freshly done over in pink silk; her mother and aunts and cousins bending over the trays, and the negro servants hovering in the doorway, breathless with excitement, while the “yard-man” came panting up the stairs with new trunks. Such an array of hats and gowns and lingerie, gloves and fans, ribbons and laces, silk hose and satin slippers, beads and buckles! The “yard-man,” a negro freshly promoted from the corn-fields, went down into the kitchen with shining eyes, exclaiming, “I allus said dis house was heaven, and now I knows it, ’cause I seen dem ‘golden slippers’!”

It was not a time for a girl to do much philosophizing; but Sylvia knew that these “creations” of Paris dressmakers had cost frightful sums of money, and she wondered vaguely why the family had insisted upon them. She had heard rumors of a poor crop last year, and of worries about some notes. Glad as the Major was to see her, she thought that he looked careworn and tired.

“Papa,” she said, “I’ve been spending an awful lot of money.”

“Yes, honey,” he answered.

“I hope you don’t think I have been extravagant, Papa.”

“No, no, honey.”

“I tried to economize, but you’ve no idea how things cost in New York, and how those girls spend money. My clothes—Mamma and Aunt Nannie would have me buy them——”

“It’s all right, my child—you have only one springtime, you know.”

Sylvia paused a moment. “I feel as if I ought to marry a very rich man, after all the money you’ve spent upon me.”

Whereat the Major looked grave. “Sylvia,” he said, “I don’t want any daughter of mine to feel that she has to marry. I shall always be able to support my children, I hope.”

This was noble, and Sylvia was grateful for it; but with that serene, observing mind of hers she could not help noting that if her father by any chance called her attention to some man of her acquaintance, it was invariably a “marriageable” man; and always there was added some detail as to the man’s possessions. “Billy Harding’s a fellow with a future before him,” he would remark. “He’s one of the cleverest business men I know.”

Sylvia was also impressed with a comical phrase of her mother’s, which seemed to indicate that that good lady classified poverty with smallpox and diphtheria. The Major had suggested inviting to supper a young medical student who was honest but penniless; and “Miss Margaret” replied, “I really cannot see what we have to gain by exposing our daughters to an undesirable marriage.” Sylvia concluded that her family pinned its faith to the maxim of Tennyson’s “Northern Farmer”—

“DoÄn’t thou marry for munny, but goÄ wheer munny is!”

§ 7

You must have a glimpse of Castleman Hall as it was at the time of the dÉbut. The old house stands upon a hill, terraced on one side, and overlooking the river from a high bluff on the other. It is of red brick, originally square, with a two-storied portico and hanging balcony in front; later on there had been added two wings of white painted wood, for the library and conservatory—now nearly covered with red roses and Virginia creepers. On the afternoon of the great day there was a reception to all the married friends of the family. They came in conveyances of every kind, from family coaches to modern high-power limousines; they came in costumes varying from the latest Paris modes to the antebellum splendor of old Mrs. Tagliaferro, who hobbled cautiously over the polished hardwood floors, with the help of her gold-headed cane on one side, and her husband, the General, on the other. Once arrived, she laid her hands upon Sylvia’s, and told her how pretty she was, and how she must contribute a new stone to the archway through which the Castlemans had marched to fame for so many generations. There had been many famous Castleman beauties, quavered the old gentleman, in his turn, but none more beautiful than the present one—save only, perhaps, her mother. (This last as “Miss Margaret” appeared at his elbow, clad in ample folds of gray satin and tulle.) So one by one ladies and gentlemen came up and delivered gallant speeches and grave exhortations, until Sylvia was overwhelmed with the sense of responsibility involved in being a daughter of the Castlemans.

And then came the evening, with the dÉbut dance for the young people. Ten years later I saw Sylvia in the gown she wore: white chiffon over white messaline, with roses and a string of pearls. Wonderful she must have been that night, at the age of eighteen, the climax of her beauty; eager, glowing, a-quiver with excitement. I picture her standing before the mirror, childishly ravished by her own loveliness, her mother and aunts, scarcely less excited, putting the final touches to her toilette. I picture her girl friends in the dressing-room and the hall, gossiping, chattering, laughing; the buzz of excitement, then the hush when she appeared, the cries of congratulation and applause. I picture the downstairs rooms, decorated with lilies, magnolias and white ribbons, the furniture covered with white brocade, the chandeliers turned into great bells of lilies, the soft light from white-shaded candles flooding everything. I picture the swains, waiting eagerly at the foot of the staircase, each with a bouquet for his chosen one in his hand. I can hear the strains of the violins floating up the staircase, and see the shimmering form of Sylvia floating down, crowned with her dazzling glory of golden hair. There was no one in Castleman County who failed to realize that a belle was born that night!

§ 8

It was just a week after these festivities that there occurred the death of Sylvia’s great-aunt. Nothing could have been more characteristic than the method of her departure. She left home and betook herself to an aristocratic boarding-house, kept by a “decayed gentlewoman” in New Orleans; she might be a long time a-dying, she said, and did not want anybody making a fuss over her. Also she did not care to have her nieces and nephews calling in to drop hints as to the disposition of her rosewood bedroom set, her miniature piano and her Queen Anne baby’s crib. She left a will in which she bequeathed her property to her grand-niece, Sylvia Castleman, to be held in trust for her until she was forty years of age. “Some man will take care of her while she is beautiful,” she wrote, “but later on she may find use for my pittance.” And finally the old lady put in a clause to the effect that the bequest was conditional upon her grand-niece’s obeying her injunction to wear no mourning for her. “It is impossible to make a woman with brown eyes look presentable in black,” she wrote. And this, you understand, in a document which had to be filed for probate! Most fortunate it was that all the editors of newspapers in the South are gentlemen, who can be relied upon not to print the news.

Sylvia obeyed the instructions of this extraordinary document, and felt it a solemn duty to go to entertainments, even with tears in her eyes. So now began a bewildering succession of dinners, dances and receptions, balls and suppers, house parties, hunting parties, auto parties, theatre parties. It speaks marvels for her constitution that she was able to stand the strain. When the last light had been extinguished she would drag herself upstairs to bed, a limp train hung over her limp arm, her feet aching in the tiny slippers and her back aching in the cruel stays. The Governor saw fit to appoint her as his “sponsor” at the state militia encampment; and so for ten days she would rise every morning at daybreak, ride out with an “escort” to witness guard-mount, and remain in the midst of a rush of gaieties until three or four o’clock the next morning, when the nightly dance came to an end.

Sylvia always refused to give photographs of herself to men. It was part of her feeling about them that she could not endure the thought of her image being in their rooms. But her enterprising Aunt Nannie, the Bishop’s wife, presented one to the editor of a metropolitan magazine, where it appeared under the heading of “A Reigning Beauty of the New South.” It was taken up and reproduced in Southern papers, and after that Sylvia found that her fame had preceded her—everywhere she went new worshippers joined her train, and came to her hometown to lay siege to her.

You may perhaps know something about these Southern men. I had never dreamed of such, and I would listen spellbound for hours to Sylvia’s tales of them. Men who, as Lady Dee had phrased it, had nothing to do but make love to their women! There were times when the realization of this brought me a shudder. I would see, in a sudden vision, the torment of a race of creatures who were doomed to spend their whole existence in the chase of their females; and the females devoting their energies to stinging them to fresh frenzies!

The men liked it; they liked nothing else in the world so much. “You may make me as unhappy as you please,” they would tell Sylvia—“if only you will let me love you!” And Sylvia, in the course of time, became reconciled to letting them love her. She learned to play the game—to play it with constantly increasing excitement, with a love of mischief and a thirst for triumph.

She would show her latest victim twenty moods in one evening, alluring him, repelling him, stimulating him, scorning him, pitying him, bewildering him. When they met again, she would be completely absorbed in the conversation of another man. He would be reduced at last to begging for a chance to talk seriously with her; and she, pretending to be touched, might let him call, and show him her loveliest and most sympathetic self. So, before he realized it, he would be caught fast. If he happened to be especially conspicuous, or especially rich, or especially otherwise worth while, she might take the trouble to goad him to desperation. Then he would be ready to give proofs of his devotion—to go through West Point, or to be made a judge, if only she would promise to marry him. Each of these tasks she set to an unfortunate wretch, who went off and performed it—and came back and found her married!

Such were the customs of young ladies in Sylvia’s world; but I must not fail to mention that she had sometimes the courage to set her face against this “world.” For instance, she had a prejudice against drunkenness. She stood fast by the bold precedent that she would never permit an intoxicated person to dance with her; and terrible humiliations she put upon two or three who outraged her dignity. They hid in their rooms in an agony of remorse, and sent deputations of their friends to plead for pardon, and went away from home and stayed for months, until Sylvia consented to take them into her favor again.

She took her place upon the icy heights of her maidenhood, and was not to be drawn therefrom. There were only two men in the world, outside of fathers and uncles and cousins, who could boast that they had ever kissed her. About both of these I shall tell you in the course of time. She was famous among other men for her reserve—they would make wagers and lay siege to her for months, but no one ever dared to claim that he had secured his kiss.

With boyish frankness they would tell her of these things; they told her all they thought about her. I have never heard of men who dealt so frankly in personalities, who would discuss a woman and her various “points” so openly to her face. “Miss Sylvia, you look like all your roses to-night.”—“Miss Sylvia, I swear you’ve got the loveliest eyes in the world!”—“You’ll be fading soon now; you’d better marry while you’ve got a chance!”—“I came to see if you were as pretty as they say, Miss Castleman!”

She would laugh merrily. “Are you disappointed? Don’t you find me ado’able?”

So far I have made no attempt to give you an idea of Sylvia’s way of speaking English. It was a drawl so charming that Miss Abercrombie had given instructions not to mar it by rash corrections. I can only mention a few of her words—which is as if I gave you single hairs out of her golden glory. She always spoke of “cannles.” She could, of course, make nothing of the letter r, and said “funnichuh” and “que-ah” and “befo-ah mawnin’.” There had been an English heiress at Miss Abercrombie’s who had won the whole school over to “gel,” but when Sylvia arrived, she swept the floor with “go-il.” The most irresistible word of all I thought was “bug;” there is no way to indicate this by spelling—you must simply take three times as long to say it, lingering over the vowel sound, caressing it as if you thought that “bu-u-u-gs” were the most “ado’able” things in all the “wo’il.”

Sylvia learned to apply with deadly effect the maxim of Lady Dee—that a woman’s sharpest weapon is her naÏvetÉ. “Beware of me!” she would warn her helpless victims. “Haven’t you heard that I’m a coquette? No, I’m not joking. It’s something I’m bitterly ashamed of, but I can’t help it; I’m a cold-hearted, selfish creature, a deliberate breaker of hearts.” And then, of course, the victim would thrill with excitement and exclaim, “See what you can do to me, Miss Sylvia! I’ll send you armfuls of roses if you can break my heart!” You may judge how these competitions ended from a chance remark which Sylvia made to me—“When I look back upon my life, it seems to me that I waded in a river of roses.”

The only protection which nature has vouchsafed against these terrors is the fact that sooner or later such cold and cruel huntresses themselves get snared. In the simile of “Sterne’s starling,” they are lured up to a certain cage, and after much hopping about and hesitating, much advancing and retreating, much chattering and chirping, they adorn themselves in satin robes and lace veils and lilies-of-the-valley, and to the sound of sweet strains from “Lohengrin” they enter the golden cage. And then, snap! the door is shut and locked fast, and the proprietor of the cage mounts guard over it—in Sylvia’s part of the world with a shotgun in his hands.

§ 10

So I come to the time when this haughty lady was humbled; that is to say, the time of her meeting with Frank Shirley. Because it was through Harriet Atkinson that she came to know him, I must first tell you in a few words about that active and pushing young lady.

Harriet Atkinson was the one weak spot in the fortifications of respectability which Sylvia’s parents had built up about her. Harriet’s ancestors were Yankees, of the very most odious “carpet-bag” type. Her grandfather had been a pawnbroker in Boston, so fierce rumor declared; and her father was a street-railroad president, who purchased “red-neck” legislators for use in his business. Harriet herself was a brunette beauty, so highly colored that she looked artificial, no matter how hard she tried to look natural.

But in spite of these appalling facts, Harriet Atkinson was the most intelligent girl whom Sylvia had met during her three years at the “college.” She had a wit that was irresistible, and also she understood people. You might spend weeks in her company and never be bored; whereas there were persons who could prove possession of the “very best blood in the South,” but who were capable of boring you most frightfully when they got you alone for half an hour.

Sylvia was never allowed to go to Harriet’s home, nor was Harriet ever asked to Castleman Hall. But Sylvia refused to give up her friend, and for a year she intrigued incessantly to force Harriet upon her hostesses, and to persuade her own suitors to call at the Atkinson home. In the end she married her off to the scion of a great family—with consequences which are to be told at a later stage of my story. The point for the present is that things happened exactly as Sylvia’s aunts had predicted; through her intimacy with the undesirable Harriet Atkinson she was “exposed” to the acquaintance of several undesirable men, among them Frank Shirley.

Sylvia had known about the Shirleys from earliest childhood. She had heard the topic talked about at the family dinner-table, and had seen tears in her father’s eyes when the final tragedy came. For the Shirleys were among the “best people,” and this was not the kind of thing which was allowed to happen to such.

About twelve years previously the legislature had appropriated money for the building of a veterans’ home, and the funds had been entrusted to a committee, of which Robert Shirley was treasurer. The project had lapsed for a couple of years, and when the money was called for, Robert Shirley was unable to produce it. Rumors leaked out, and there came a demand in the legislature for an accounting.

The Major was one of a committee of friends who were asked by the Governor to make a private investigation. They found that Shirley had deposited the money to his private bank account, after the unbusinesslike methods of a Southern gentleman. Checks had been drawn upon it; but there was evidence at the bank tending to show that the checks might not have been signed by Shirley himself. He had a younger brother, a spendthrift and gambler, whom he had indulged and protected all his life. Such were the hints which Sylvia had heard at home—when suddenly Robert Shirley proceeded to the state Capitol and requested the Governor to stop the investigation, declaring that he alone was to blame.

It was a terrible thing. Shirley was besought to fly, he was told by the Governor’s own authority that he might live anywhere outside the state, and the search for him would be nominal. But he stood fast; the money was gone, and some one must pay the penalty. So the world saw the unprecedented spectacle of a man of “good family” standing trial, and receiving a sentence of five years in the penitentiary.

He left a broken-hearted wife and four children. Sylvia remembered the horror with which her mother and her aunts had contemplated the fate of these latter. Two girls, soon to become young ladies, and cut off from all hope of a future! “But, Mamma,” Sylvia cried, “it isn’t their fault!” She recollected the very tone of her mother’s voice, the dying away to a horrified whisper at the end: “My child, their father wore stripes!”

The Shirleys made no attempt to hold up their heads against the storm, but withdrew into strict seclusion on their plantation. Now, ten years later, Robert Shirley having died in prison, his widow was a pitiful shadow, his daughters were hopeless old maids, and his two sons were farmers, staying at home and acting as their own managers.

Of these, Frank Shirley was the elder. I am handicapped in setting out to tell you about him by the fact that he sits in the next room, and will have to read what I write; he is not a man to stand for any nonsense about himself—nor yet one whose ridicule an amateur author would wish to face. I will content myself with stating simple facts, which he cannot deny; for example, that he is a man a trifle below the average height, but sturdily built and exceedingly powerful. He had in those days dark hair and eyes, and he would not claim to have been especially bad-looking. He is the most reserved man I have ever known, but his feelings are intense when they are roused, and on these rare occasions he is capable of being eloquent. He is, in general, a very solid and dependable kind of man; he does not ask anything of anybody, but he is willing to give, cautiously, after he has made sure that his motive will be understood. As I read that over, it seems to me a judicious and entirely unsentimental statement about him, which he will have to pass.

He was, he tells me, a lively boy; but after the age of eleven he always had, as the most prominent fact in his consciousness, the knowledge that men set him apart as something different from themselves. And this, of course, made intercourse with them difficult; if they were indifferent to him, that was insult, and if they were cordial, then they were taking pity upon him. He always knew that the people who met him, however politely they greeted him, were repeating behind his back the inevitable whisper, “His father wore stripes!” So naturally he found it pleasanter not to meet people.

Then, too, there were his mother and sisters; it was hard not to be bitter about them. He knew that the girls were gentle and lovely; and it rather made men seem cowardly, that it should be certain that no one in their own social world would ever ask them in marriage. There is so much asking in marriage in the South—it is really difficult for a gentlewoman to be passed over altogether. The Shirley girls could not discuss this, even in the bosom of their family; but Frank came to understand, and to brood over the thing in secret.

§ 11

So you see Frank Shirley was a difficult man to get at—as much so as if he had been an emperor or an anchorite. I have been interested in the psychology of sex, and I wondered how much this aloofness had to do with what happened to Sylvia. There were so many men, and they were all so much alike, and they were all so easy! But here was a man who was different; a man whom one could not get at without humiliating efforts; a man of mystery, about whom one could imagine things! I asked Sylvia, who thought there might be something in this; but much more in a deeper fact, which is known to poets and tellers of love-tales, but has not been sufficiently heeded by scientists—that intuitive, commanding and sometimes terrifying revelation of sexual affinity, which we smile at and discredit under the name of “love at first sight.” The first time Sylvia met Frank she did not know who he was; she saw at first only his back; and yet she began at once to experience a thrill which she had never known in her life before. Absurd as they may sound, I will repeat her words: “There was something about the back of his neck that took my breath!”

It had been some years since she had heard the Shirleys mentioned. They had quietly declined all invitations, and this made it easy for everybody to do with decency what everybody wanted to do—to cease sending invitations. The Shirley plantation was remotely located, some twenty miles away from Castleman Hall; and so little by little the family had been forgotten.

But there was a certain Mrs. Venable, a young widow who owned a hunting-lodge near the Shirley place; and as fate would have it, she was one of the people whom Sylvia had persuaded to take up Harriet Atkinson. One day, as the latter was driving to the lodge in her automobile, she was “mired” in the midst of a terrific thunderstorm, when along came a gentleman on horseback, who politely insisted upon her taking his waterproof, and then mounting behind him and riding to his home up on the hill; by which romantic method the delighted Harriet found herself conveyed to an old and evidently aristocratic homestead, and welcomed by some altogether lovely people.

Being younger than Sylvia, and not so much on the “inside” as to local history, Harriet had been obliged to get the story from Mrs. Venable. It had heightened her interest in the Shirleys—for Harriet’s great merit was that she was human and spontaneous where she should have been respectable. She went to call again on the family, and when she got home she made haste to tell Sylvia about it. “Sunny,” she said—that was her way of taking liberties with Sylvia’s complexion—“you ought to meet that man Frank Shirley.” She went on to tell how good-looking he was, how silent and mysterious, and what a fine voice he had. “And the sweetest, lazy smile!” she declared. “I’m sure he could be a lady-killer if he did not take life so seriously!” So, you see, Sylvia had something to start her imagination going, and a reason for accepting Mrs. Venable’s invitation to a hunting party.

One sunshiny morning in the late fall she was taking part in a deer-hunt, carrying a rifle and looking as picturesque as possible. They put her on a “stand” with Charlie Peyton, who ought to have been at college, but was hanging round making a nuisance of himself by sighing and gazing. After waiting a half hour or so, off in the woods they heard a dog yelping. Charlie went off to investigate, thinking it might be a bear; and so Sylvia was left to her fate.

She heard a sound in the bushes at one side, and thought it was a deer. The creature moved past her, hidden by a dense thicket, and passed a little way ahead, with a heavy trampling sound. She had half raised her gun, when suddenly the bushes parted, and with a leap over a fallen log there came into view—not a deer, but a horse with a rider upon his back.

The girl lowered her gun. The dog yelped again and the man reined up his horse and stood listening. The horse was restive; as he drew rein upon it, it turned slightly, exhibiting the rider’s face. To the outward eye he was a not unusual figure, wearing the khaki shirt and knickerbockers affected by the younger generation of planters when on duty. The shirt was open, with a red bandana handkerchief tucked round at the throat.

But Sylvia was not looking with the outward eye. Sylvia had been reading romances, and had a vague idea of a lover who would some day appear, being distinguished from the ordinary admirers of salons and ball-rooms by something knightly in his aspect. And this man seemed to have that something. His face was a face of power, yet not harsh, rather with a touch of melancholy.

As a rule Sylvia was immediately observant of her own emotional states, especially where men were concerned; but this once she was too much interested to think what she was thinking. She was noting the man’s deeply-shadowed eyes and shiny black hair, his statue-like figure and his mastery of the horse. She wondered if he would look in her direction, and she waited, fascinated, for the moment when his glance would rest upon her.

The moment came. He started slightly, and then quickly his hand went up to his hat. “I beg your pardon,” he said, politely.

Sylvia noted his deep, full-toned voice; and with a sudden thrill she recollected Harriet’s adventure. “Can this be Frank Shirley?” she thought. She caught herself together and smiled. “It is for me to beg pardon,” she said. “I came near shooting at you.”

“I deserved it,” he answered, smiling in turn. “I was trespassing on my neighbor’s land.”

Sylvia had by now been “out” a full year, and it must be admitted that she was a sophisticated young lady. When she met a man, her thought was: “Could I love him? And how would it be if I married him?” Her imagination would leap ahead through a long series of scenes: the man’s home, his relatives and her own, his occupations, his amusements, his ideas. She would see herself traveling with him, driving with him, presiding at dinner-parties for him—perhaps helping to get him sober the next morning. As a drowning man is said to live over his whole past in a few seconds, so Sylvia might live her whole future during a figure at a “german.”

But with this man it was different. She could not imagine him in any position in her world. He was an elemental creature, belonging in some wild place, where there was danger to be faced and deeds to be done. Sylvia had read “Paul and Virginia,” and “Robinson Crusoe,” and “Typee,” and in her mind was a vague idea of a primitive, close-to-nature life, which one yearned for when one was tightly laced, or was sent into the parlor to entertain an old friend of the family. She imagined this strange knight springing forward and lifting her upon his saddle-bow, to bear her away to such a world. She could feel his powerful arms about her, his whispered words in her ear; she could hear the clatter of his horse’s hoofs—away, away!

She had to make another effort, and remember who she was. “You are not lost, I suppose?” he was asking.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I am on a ‘stand.’”

“Of course,” he replied; again there was a pause, and again Sylvia’s brain went whirling. It was absurd how the beating of her heart kept translating itself into the clatter of horse’s hoofs.

The man turned for a moment to listen to the dog; and she stole another look at him. His eyes came back and caught her glance. She absolutely had to say something—instantly, to save the situation. “I—I am not alone,” she stammered. Oh, how dreadful—that she, Sylvia Castleman, should stumble over words!

“My escort has gone to look for the dog,” she added. “He will be back in a moment.”

“Oh,” he said; and Sylvia noted a sudden change in his expression—a set, repressed look. She saw the blood mounting slowly, until it colored his cheeks to a crimson.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, coldly. “Good-morning.” He turned his horse and started on his way.

He had taken her words as a dismissal. But that was the least part of the mistake. Sylvia read his mind in a flash—he was Frank Shirley, and he thought that she had recognized him, and was thinking of his father who had worn stripes! Yes, surely it must be that—for what right had he to be hurt otherwise—that she did not care to stand conversing with a strange man in a forest?

The thought sent her into a panic. She thought of nothing but the cruelty of that idea. “No, no!” she cried, the tears almost starting into her eyes. “I did not mean to send you away at all!”

He turned, startled by her vehemence. For a moment or two they stood staring at each other. The girl had this one swift thought: “How dreadful it must be to have such a thing in your mind, to have to be waiting for insults from people—or at best, for pity!”

Then, in his quiet voice, he said, “I really think I had better go.” Again he turned his horse, and without another glance rode away, leaving Sylvia staring at his vanishing figure, with her hands tightly clutching her gun.

After that Sylvia felt that she had in common decency to meet Frank Shirley. She asked nothing more about her motives—she simply had to meet him, to remove one thought from his mind. But for two days she was at her wit’s end, and went round bored to death by everything and everybody. She had a sudden whim to be let alone; and how difficult it is to be let alone at a house party! There was the everlasting Charlie Peyton, looking at her out of sickly blue eyes, and forever trying to get hold of her hand; there was Billy Aldrich, with his sybaritic silk socks, his shiny finger nails and talcum-powdered face; there was Malcolm McCallum, a dandy from Louisville, with his endless stream of impeccable suits and his caravan of trunks; there was Harvey Richards, a “steel-man” from Birmingham, who had thrown his business to the winds and settled down to the task of boring Sylvia. He was big and burly, and had become the special favorite of her family; he dandled the baby brother and made fudge with the sisters—but Sylvia declared viciously that his idea of love-making was to poke at her with his finger.

She took to getting up very early in the morning, so that she could go riding alone. As there was but one road, it was not her fault if she passed near the Shirley place. And if by any remote chance he were to be out riding too——

It was the third morning that she met him. He came round a turn, and it all happened in a flash, before she had time to think. He gave her the stiffest greeting that was consistent with good breeding; and then he was past. Of course she could not look back. It was ten chances to one that he would not do the same, but still he might, and that would be dreadful.

She went on. She was angry with herself for her stupidity. That she should have met him thus, and had no better wit than to let him get by! Theoretically, of course, ladies cannot stop gentlemen to whom they have not been introduced; but there are always things that can happen, in cases of emergency like this. She thought of plans, and then she fell into a rage with herself for thus pursuing a man.

The next morning when she went riding, she forced herself to turn the horse’s head in the other direction from the Shirley place. But her thoughts would come back to Frank, and presently she was making excuses for herself. This man was not as other men; if he avoided her, it was not because he did not want to know her, but because of his misfortune. It was wicked that a man should be tied up in such a net of misapprehension; to get him out of it would be, not unmaidenly, but heroic. When she had met him yesterday morning, she ought to have stopped her horse, and made him stay and talk with her. She was to leave in two days more!

She turned her horse and went back; and when she was near the Shirley house—here he came!

She saw him far down the road, and so had plenty of time to get her wits together. Had he, by any chance, come out in the hope of meeting her? Or would he be annoyed by her getting in his way? Suppose he were to snub her—how could she ever get over it?

She took a diamond ring from her finger, and reached back and shoved it under the saddle-cloth. It was a “marquise” ring, with sharp points, and when she threw her weight upon it, the horse gave a jump. She repeated the action, and it began to prance. “Now then!” whispered Sylvia to herself.

§ 13

He came near; and she reined up her chafing steed. “I beg pardon,” she said.

He raised his hat, and holding it, looked at her inquiringly.

“I think my horse must have a stone in his foot.”

“Oh!” he said, and was off in a moment, throwing the reins of his mount over its head and handing them to her.

“Which foot?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

He bent down and examined one hoof, then another, and so on for all four, without a word. Then, straightening up, he said, “I don’t see anything.”

He looked very serious and concerned. How “easy” he would be! “There really must be something,” she said. “He’s all in a lather.”

“There might be something deep in,” he answered, making his investigation all over again. “But I don’t see any blood.” (What a fine back he has! thought Sylvia.)

He stood up. “Let me see his mouth,” he said. “Are you sure you’ve not held him too tight?”

“I am used to horses,” was her reply.

“Some of them have peculiarities,” he remarked. “Possibly the saddle has rubbed——”

“No, no,” answered Sylvia, in haste, as he made a move to lift the cloth.

It was always hard for her to keep from laughing for long; and there was something so comical in his gravity. Then too, something desperate must be done, for presently he would mount and ride away. “There’s surely no stone in his foot,” he declared.

Whereat Sylvia broke into one of her radiant smiles. “Perhaps,” she said, “it’s in your horse’s foot!”

He looked puzzled.

“Don’t you see?” she laughed. “Something must be wrong—or you couldn’t be here talking to me!”

But he still looked bewildered. “Dear me, what a man!” thought she.

A color was beginning to mount in his cheeks. Perhaps he was going to be offended! Clearly, with such a man one’s cue was frankness. So her tone changed suddenly. “Are you Mr. Shirley?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“And do you know who I am?”

“Yes, Miss Castleman.”

“Our families are old friends, you know.”

“Yes, I know it.”

“And then, tell me—” She paused. “Honestly!”

“Why—yes.”

“I’ve been honest and told you—I’m not really worried about my horse. Now you be honest and say why you rode out this morning.”

He waited before replying, studying her face—not boldly, but gravely. “I think, Miss Castleman, that it would be better if I did not.”

Then it was Sylvia’s turn to study. Was it a rebuke? Had he not come out on her account at all? Or was it still the ghost of his father’s prison-suit?

He did not help her with another word. (I can hear Frank’s laugh as he told me about this episode. “We silent fellows have such an advantage! We just wait and let people imagine things!”)

Sylvia’s voice fell low. “Mr. Shirley, you have me at a great disadvantage.” And as she said this she gazed at him with the wonderful red-brown eyes, wide open, childlike. So far there had never been a man who could resist the spell of those eyes. Would this man be able? The busy little brain behind them was watching every sign.

“I don’t understand,” he replied; and she took up the words:

“It is I who don’t understand. And I dare not ask you to explain!”

She was terrified at this temerity; and yet she must press on—there was no other way. She saw gates opening before her—gates into wonderland!

She leaned forward with a little gesture of abandonment. “Listen, Frank Shirley!” she said. (What a masterstroke was that!) “I have known about you since I was a little girl. And I understand the way things are now, because I am a friend of Miss Atkinson’s. She asked you to come over and meet me, and you didn’t. Now if the reason was that you have no interest in me—why then I’m annoying you, and I’m behaving outrageously, and I’m preparing humiliation for myself. But if the reason is that you think I wouldn’t meet you fairly—that I wouldn’t judge you as I would any other man—why, don’t you see, that would be cruel, that would be wicked! If you were afraid that I wanted to—to patronize you—to do good to you——”

She stopped. Surely she had said enough!

There was a long silence, while he gazed at her—reading her very soul, she feared. “Suppose, Miss Castleman,” he said, at last, “that I was afraid that you wanted to do harm to me?”

That was getting near to what she wanted! “Are you afraid?” she asked.

“Possibly I am,” he replied. “It is easy for those who have never suffered to preach to those who have never done anything else.”

Sylvia did not know quite how to meet that. It was so much more serious than she had been looking for, when she had slipped that ring under the saddle-cloth! “Oh,” she cried, “what shall I say to you?”

“I will tell you exactly,” he said, “and then neither of us will be taking advantage of the other. You are offering me your friendship, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, can you say to me that if I were to accept it, the shame of my family would never make any difference to you?”

She cried instantly, “That is what I’ve been trying to tell you! Of course it would not.”

“You can say that?” he persisted. “It would make no difference whatever?”

She was about to answer again; but he stopped her. “Wait and think. You must know just what I mean. It is not a thing about which I could endure a mistake. Think of your family—your friends—your whole world! And think of everything that might arise between us!”

She stared at him, startled. He was asking if he might make love to her! She had not meant it to go so far as that—but there it was. Her own recklessness, and his forthrightness, had brought it to that point. And what could she say?

“Think!” he was saying. “And don’t try to evade—don’t lie to me. Answer me the truth!”

His eyes held hers. She waited—thinking, as he forced her to. At last, when she spoke, it was with a slightly trembling voice. “It would make no difference,” she said.

And then she tried to continue looking at him, but she could not. She was blushing; it was a dreadful habit she had!

It was an absolutely intolerable situation, and she must do something—instantly. He never would—the dreadful sphinx of a man! She looked up. “Now we’re friends?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Then,” she said, laughing, “reach under the saddle-cloth and get out my ring. I might lose it.”

Bewildered, he got the ring, and understanding at last, laughed with her. “And now,” cried Sylvia, in her friendliest tone of voice, “get on your horse again and behave like a man of enterprise! Come!” She touched her mount and went galloping; she heard him pounding away behind her, and she began to sing:

They were good comrades now; all their problems solved, and a stirrup-cup of happiness to quaff between them. Sylvia was amazed at herself—the surge of exultation which arose in her and swept her along upon its crest. Never in all her life had she been as full of verve and animation as she was throughout that ride. She laughed, she sang, she poured out a stream of fantasy; and all the while the clatter of the horses hoofs—romance blending itself with reality!

But also she was studying the man. There was something in her which must always be studying people. Thank Heaven, he was a man who could forget himself, and laugh and be good fun! It was something to have got him out of his melancholy, and set him to galloping here—admiring her, marveling at her! She felt his admiration like a storm of wind pushing her along.

At last she drew up, breathless. “Dear me,” she exclaimed, “what a lot of chattering I have done! And we must be—how many miles from home?”

“Ten, I should say,” he replied.

“And I’ve had no breakfast!” she said. “We really must go back.”

He made no objection, and they turned. “You must come and see me at the lodge,” she said. “I am going home to-morrow afternoon.”

But he shook his head. “Don’t ask me,” he replied. “You know I don’t belong among smart people.”

She started to protest; but then she thought of Billy Aldrich with his tight collars and fancy stick-pins—of Malcolm McCallum with his Japanese valet; no, there was no use pretending about such things. And besides, she did not want these people to know her secret.

“But where can we meet?” she said. (How perfectly appalling was that—without any hint from him!)

“Can’t we ride again to-morrow morning?” he asked, quite simply.

And so they settled it. He left her at the place where the road turned in to the lodge. He tried to thank her for what she had taken the trouble to do; but she was frightened now—she dared not stay and listen any longer to his voice. She waved him a bright farewell, and rode off, feeling suddenly faint and bewildered.

She had half a mile or so to ride alone, and in that ride it was exactly as if he were by her side. She still heard his horse’s hoofs, and felt how he would look if she were to turn. Once she thought of Lady Dee, and then she could not help laughing. What would Lady Dee have said! How many of the rules of coquetry had she not broken in the space of two brief hours! But after a little more thought, she consoled herself. Possibly there were moves in this game which even Lady Dee had never heard of! “I don’t think I managed it so badly,” she was saying to herself, as she dismounted from her horse.

And that was the view she took when she told Harriet about it. She had not meant to tell Harriet at all, but the secret would out—she had to have some one to talk to. “Oh, my dear,” she exclaimed, “he’s perfectly wonderful!”

“Who? What do you mean?” asked Harriet.

“Frank Shirley.”

“What? You’ve met him?”

“Met him? I’ve been riding with him the whole morning, and I’ve almost let him propose to me!”

“Sylvia!” cried Harriet, aghast.

The other stood looking before her, grown suddenly thoughtful. “Yes, I did. And what’s more, I believe that to-morrow morning I’m going to let him propose to me.”

“Sunny,” exclaimed her friend, “are you a woman, or one of Satan’s imps?”

For answer Sylvia took her seat at the piano and began to sing—a song by which all her lovers set much store:

§ 15

Sylvia did very little thinking that first day—she was too much possessed by feelings. Besides this she had to go through all the routine of a house party; to go to breakfast and make apologies for her singular desire to ride alone; to go quail-shooting and remind Charlie Peyton to fire off his gun now and then; to curl her hair and select a gown for dinner—and all the while in a glow of happiness so intense as to come close to the borderland of pain.

It was not a definite emotion, but a vague, suffused ecstasy. She was like one who goes about hearing exquisite music; angels singing in the sky above her, little golden bells ringing in every part of her body. And then always, penetrating the mist of her feelings, was the memory of Frank Shirley. She could see his eyes, as they had looked up at her; she could hear the tones of his voice—its low intensity as he had said, “Think of everything that might happen between us!” She would find herself blushing crimson at the dinner-table, and would have to chatter to hide her confusion.

When night came she went into a sleep that was a half swoon of happiness; and awoke in the early dawn, first bewildered, then horrified, because of what she had done—her boldness, her lack of dignity and reserve. She had thrown herself at a man’s head! And of course he would be disgusted and would flee from her. She drank her coffee and dressed a full half hour too early; and meanwhile she was planning how she would treat him that morning. But then, suppose he did not come that morning?

She rode out in the light of a sunrise she did not see, amid the song of birds she did not hear. Suppose he did not come! When she saw him, far up the road, she wanted to turn and flee. Her heart pounded, her cheeks burned, there was a clashing as of cymbals in her ears. She reined up her horse and sat motionless, telling herself that she must be calm. She clenched her hands and bit a little hole in her tongue; and so, when he arrived, he found a young woman of the world awaiting him.

She saw at once that something was wrong with him. He too had been having moods and agonies, and had come full of resolutions and reservations! He greeted her politely, and had almost nothing to say as they rode away together. Sylvia’s heart sank. He had come because he had promised; but he was regretting his indiscretions. Very well, she would show him that she, too, could be polite! Under the spur of her fierce pride, she could be a light-hearted child, utterly unaware of the existence of any sulking male.

So they rode on. It was such a beautiful morning, the odor of the pine-forests was so refreshing and the song of the birds so free, that Sylvia was soon all that she had set out to pretend. She forgot her cavalier for several minutes, laughing and humming. When she realized him again, she had the boldness to tease him about himself—

And when he had no poetry ready to reply, she grew tired of him altogether, and touched her horse and cantered quickly on. Let him follow her if he chose—what mattered it! Moreover, she rode well, and men always noticed it; she was bare-headed, and no man ever saw the golden glory of her hair in bright sunlight that his heart did not begin to quiver within him!

After a while he spurred his horse and rode at her side, and without looking, she saw that he was watching her. She gave him just a little smile, absent-minded and barely polite. Resolving to punish him still more, she asked him the time. He gravely drew out his watch and replied to her question. “I will ride as far as the spring,” she said. “Then I must be going back.”

But he did not make the expected protest. He was going to lose her, and he did not care! Oh, what a man!

As they drew near the spring, Sylvia began to be uneasy again. She did not want him to lose her; she wanted him to care. She stopped to breathe her horse, and to look at the moss-ringed pool of water, and at the field of golden-rod beyond. “How lovely!” she said; and repeated, “How lovely!” He never said a word—and when he might so easily have said, “Let us stay a while!”

She was growing desperate. Her horse had got its breath and had had some water—what else? “I must have some of that golden-rod!” she exclaimed, suddenly. What was the matter with him, staring into space in that fashion? Had he no manners at all? “I must have some golden-rod,” she repeated; and when he still made no move, she said, “Hold my horse, please,” and started to dismount.

He sprang off, and took the reins of her horse, and those of his own in the same hand, giving his other hand to her. It was the first time he had touched her, and it sent a shock through her that sent her flying in a panic—out into the field of flowers, where she could hide her cheeks and her trembling!

§ 16

He made the horses fast to the fence, carefully and deliberately; and meantime she was gathering golden-rod. She knew that she made a picture in the midst of flowers. She was very much occupied as he came to her side.

A moment later she heard his voice: “Miss Castleman.”

Panic seized her again, but she looked up, with her last flicker of courage. “Well?” she asked.

“There is something I want to tell you,” he began. “I can’t play this game with you—I am no match for you at all.”

“Why—what do you mean?” she managed to say.

As usual, she knew just what he meant. “I am not a man who can play with his emotions,” he said. “You must understand this at the very outset—the thing is real to me, and I’ve got to know quickly whether or not it is real to you.”

There he was! Like a storm of wind that threatened to sweep away her pretenses, the whole pitiful little structure of her coquetry. But she could not let the structure go; it was her only shelter, and she strove desperately to hold it in place. “Why should you assume that I play with my emotions?” she demanded.

“You play, not with your own, but with other peoples’ emotions,” he replied. “I know; I’ve heard about you—long ago.”

She drew herself up haughtily. “You do not approve of me, Mr. Shirley? I’m very sorry.”

“You must know—” he began.

But she went on, in a rush of defensive recklessness: “You think I’m hollow—a coquette—a trifler with hearts. Well, I am. It’s all I know.” She flung her head up, looking at him defiantly.

“No, Miss Castleman,” he said, “it’s not all you know!”

But her recklessness was driving her—that spirit of the gambler that was in the blood of all her race. “It is all I know.” She bent over and began strenuously to pluck sprays of golden-rod.

“To break men’s hearts?” he asked.

She laughed scornfully. “I had a great-aunt, Lady Dee—perhaps you’ve heard of her. She taught me—and I’ve found out through much experience that she was right.” She gazed at him boldly, over the armful of flowers. “‘Sylvia, never let yourself be sorry for men. Let them take care of themselves. They have all the advantage in the game. They are free to come and go, they pick us up and look us over and drop us when they feel like it. So we have to learn to manage them. And, believe me, my child, they like it—it’s what they’re made for!’”

“And you believe such things as that?”

She laughed, a superbly cynical laugh, and began to gather more flowers. “I used to think they were cruel—when I was young. But now I know that Aunt Lady was right. What else have men to do but to make love to us? Isn’t it better for them than getting drunk, or gambling, or breaking their necks hunting foxes? ‘It’s the thing that lifts them above the brute,’ she used to say. ‘Naturally, the more of them you lift, the better.’”

“Did she teach you to deceive men deliberately?”

“She told me that when she was ordering her wedding trousseau, she was engaged to a dozen; a cousin of hers was engaged to another dozen, and couldn’t make up her mind which to choose, so she sent notes to them all to say that she’d marry the man who got to her first.”

He smiled—his slow, quiet smile. Sylvia did not know how he was taking these things; nor did his next remark enlighten her. “Did it not surprise you to be taught that men were the centre of creation?”

“No. They taught me that God was a man.”

He laughed, then became grave. “Why do you need so many men? You can’t marry but one.”

“Not in the South. But when I am ready to marry that one, I want it to be the one I want; and the only way to be sure is to have a great many wanting you. When a man sees a girl so surrounded with suitors that he can’t get near her, he knows it’s the one girl in the world for him. Aunt Lady had a saying about it, full of wisdom.” And Sylvia looked very wise herself. “‘Men are sheep!’”

“I see,” he said, somewhat grimly. “I fear, Miss Castleman, I cannot enter such a competition.”

“Is it cowardice?”

“Perhaps. It has been said that discretion is the better part of valor. You see, to me love is not a game, but a reality. It could never be that to you, I fear.”

Poor Sylvia! She was trying desperately hard to remember and make use of her training. But the rules she had learned were, so to speak, for fresh-water sailing; no one had ever thought that her frail craft might be blown out upon a stormy ocean like this. Picture her as a terrified navigator, striving to steer with a broken rudder, and gazing up into a mountain-wave that comes roaring down upon her!

He was a man who meant what he said. She had tried her foolish arts upon him and had only disgusted him. He was going away; and once he had left her, she would be powerless to get hold of him again!

Love could never be a reality to her, he had said. With sudden tears in her voice she exclaimed, “It could! It could!”

His whole aspect changed in a moment. A fire seemed to leap into his eyes. “You mean that?” he asked. And that was enough for her. As he moved towards her, she backed away a step or two. She thrust out the great bunch of golden-rod, filling his arms with that, and retreated farther into the yellow field.

He stood for a moment, nonplussed, looking rather comical with his unexpected load. Then he turned away without a word, and went to where his horse was fastened, and began to tie the flowers to his saddle.

She joined him before he had finished and mounted her own horse, saying casually, “It is late. We must return.” He mounted and rode beside her in silence.

At last he remarked, “You are going away this afternoon?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then where can I see you?”

“You will have to come to my home.”

There was a pause. “It will be a difficult experience,” he observed. “You will have to help me through it.”

She answered, promptly, “You must come as any other man would come. You must learn to do that—you must simply not know what other people are thinking.”

At which he smiled sadly. “There is nothing in that. When everybody in the world is thinking one thing about you, you find there’s no use pretending not to know what it is.”

There he was again—simple and direct. He had a vision of the hostility of her relatives, the horror of her friends; he went on to speak his thoughts quite baldly. Was she prepared to face these difficulties? She might have the courage, she might not; but at least she must be forewarned, and not encounter them blindly. She said, “My own people will be kind, I assure you.” And when he smiled dubiously, she added, “Leave it to me. I promise you I’ll manage them.”

§ 17

Sylvia, as you know, had been taught to discuss the affairs of her heart in the language of military science. Continuing the custom, the fortress of her coquetry had withstood an onslaught which had brought dismay to the garrison, who had never before known what it was to be in real danger. In the hope of restoring confidence to the troops there was now undertaken a raid into the territory of perfectly innocent and defenseless neighbors.

The first victim was Charlie Peyton. He had implored one last opportunity to prove his devotion—being unable to imagine how his devotion could be of no interest to Sylvia. So the guests of the house party were treated to the amazing spectacle of this dignified and self-conscious youth standing for two hours in the crotch of an apple-tree. Meanwhile Sylvia went off for a walk with Malcolm McCallum; and when at last Charlie’s time was up, and he set out in search of her, he found his rival occupied in crawling on his knees the length of a splintery dock which ran out into the lake. Sylvia sat by, absorbed in a book, and when Charlie questioned her as to the meaning of this strange phenomenon, she replied that Mr. McCallum (known to us previously as “the Louisville dandy”) was probably experimenting with the creases in his trousers.

Dressing for luncheon and the trip home, Sylvia had a consultation with her friend Harriet. “Do you suppose I’m really in love?” was her question.

“With whom?” asked Harriet.

But Sylvia paid no heed to this feeble wit. “I don’t think he approves of me, Harriet. He thinks I’m shallow and vain—a trifler with hearts.”

“What would you have him think?” persisted the other.

“He isn’t like other men, Harriet. He makes me ashamed of myself. I think I ought to treat him differently.”

Whereat her friend became suddenly serious. “Look here, Sunny, don’t you lose your nerve! You stick to your game!”

“But suppose he won’t stand it?”

“Make him stand it! Take my advice, now, and don’t go trying experiments. You’ve learned one way, and you’re a wonder at it—don’t get yourself mixed up at the critical moment.”

Sylvia was gazing at herself in the mirror, wondering at the look on her own face. “I don’t know what to do next!” she cried.

“The Lord takes care of children and fools,” said Harriet. “I hope He’s on His job!” Then the luncheon gong sounded, and they went downstairs.

There was a new man, who had arrived the night before. He was named Pendleton, and Sylvia found herself placed next to him. She suspected that he had arranged this, and was bored by the prospect, and purposely talked with Charlie Peyton on her other side. Towards the end of the meal a servant came in and whispered to the hostess, who rose suddenly with the exclamation, “Frank Shirley is here!” Amid the general silence that fell Sylvia began suddenly to eat with assiduity.

The hostess went out, and returned after a minute or so with Frank at her heels. “Do sit down,” she was saying. “At least have some of this sherbet.”

“I’ve had my luncheon,” he replied; “I supposed you’d have finished.” But he seated himself at the table, as requested. There was a general pause, everybody expecting some explanation; but he volunteered none.

Opposite to Sylvia was Belle Johnston, an insipid young person who had a reputation for wit, for which she made other people pay. “Did you think it looked like rain, Mr. Shirley?” she inquired. Sylvia could have destroyed her.

“The weather is very pleasant,” said Frank. No one could be sure whether he was imperturbable, or had missed the jest altogether.

Harriet, seeing her friend’s alarming appetite and discomfort, stepped in now to save the situation. “I hope you brought me a message from your sister,” she remarked. “I am expecting one.”

But Frank would have none of any such devices. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I haven’t brought it.”

Sylvia was furious. Had he no tact, no social sense at all—not even any common gratitude? He ought to have waited outside, where he would have been less conspicuous; instead of sitting there, dumb as an oyster, looking at her and obviously waiting for her! Sooner or later everyone must notice.

With a sudden impulse she turned to the man at her side. “I am sorry you came so late,” she said.

“I am more than sorry,” he replied, brightening instantly.

“I really must go home this afternoon,” she said.

He was encouraged by her tone of regret. “I think I will tell you something,” he said.

“Well?”

“I came here on purpose to meet you. I was visiting my friends, the Allens, at Thanksgiving, and all the men there were talking of you.”

This, of course, was ancient history to Sylvia. “What were they saying?” she asked—and stole a glance at Frank.

“They said you’d never let a man go without hurting him. At least, not if you thought him worth while.”

“Dear me!” she exclaimed, astonished and flattered. “I wonder that you weren’t afraid to meet me!”

“I was amused,” answered the other. “I thought to myself, I’d like to see her hurt me.”

Sylvia lifted her delicate eyebrows and gave him a slow, quiet stare, four-fifths scorn and one-fifth challenge.

“Gad!” he exclaimed. “You are interesting for a fact! When you look like that!”

“Not otherwise?” she inquired, now wholly scornful.

“Oh, you’re not the most beautiful woman I ever saw! Nor the cleverest!”

“Do not challenge me like that.”

“Why not?” he laughed.

“You might regret it.”

“It would be a good adventure—I’d be willing to pay the price to see the game. I admire a woman who knows her business.”

So the banter continued; the man displaying his cleverness and Sylvia casting upon him glances of mockery, of contempt, half veiling curiosity and interest. He, of course, being secretly convinced of his own irresistibility, was noting these glances and speculating about them, thrilled by them without realizing it, persuading himself that the girl was really coming to admire him. This was a kind of encounter which had occurred, not once, but a hundred times in Sylvia’s career, and usually it meant nothing in particular to her. But now it brought a reckless joy, because of the shock it was giving to that other man—the terrible man who sat across the way, his eyes boring into her very soul!

§ 18

When the luncheon was over, Sylvia made her way to Harriet Atkinson and caught her by the arm. “Harriet!” she exclaimed. “You must help me!”

“What?” whispered the other.

“I can’t see him!”

“But why not?”

“He wants to lecture me, and I won’t stand it! I’m going into the garden—take him somewhere else—you must!” Then, seeing Frank making toward her, she gave Harriet a vicious pinch, and fled from the room. There was a summer-house in the garden at the far end, and thither she went upon flying feet.

I was never sure how it happened—whether, as Harriet always vowed, she tried to hold Frank and could not, or whether she turned traitor to her friend. At any rate Sylvia had been there not more than a minute, and had scarcely begun to get control of herself, when she heard a step, and looking up, saw Frank Shirley coming down the path.

There was but one door to the summer-house—and he soon occupied that. “Go away!” she cried. “Go away!” (That was all that was left of her savoir faire!)

He stopped. “Miss Castleman,” he said—and his voice was hard, “I came here to see you. But now I’m sorry I came.”

The garrison rallied as to a trumpet-call. “That is too bad, Mr. Shirley,” she said, with appalling hauteur. “But you know you do not have to stay an instant.”

He gazed at her in doubt for a moment. Her heart was pounding and the color flooding her face. “I don’t believe you know what you are doing!” he exclaimed.

“Really!” she replied, witheringly. “Do you?”

“No,” he went on, “I don’t understand you at all. But I simply will find out!”

He strode towards her. She shrank into the seat, but he caught her hands. For a moment she resisted; but he held fast, and from his hands she felt a current as of fire, flowing through all her veins.

Slowly he drew her to her feet. “Sylvia!” he whispered. “Sylvia! Look at me!”

She obeyed him instinctively, and their eyes met. “You love me!” he exclaimed. She could hear his quick breathing. She felt herself sinking towards him. She felt his arms about her, his breath upon her cheek.

“I love you!” he murmured. And she closed her eyes, and he kissed her again and again. In his kisses it seemed to her that she would melt away.

She was exultant and happy. The testimony of his love was rapture to her. But then suddenly came a fear which they had inculcated in her. All the women who had ever talked to her on the problem of the male-creature—all agreed that nothing was so fatal as to allow the taking of “liberties.” Also there came sudden shame. She began to struggle. “You must not kiss me! It is not right!”

“But, Sylvia!” he protested. “I love you!”

“Oh, stop!” she pleaded. “Stop!”

“You love me!” he whispered.

“Please, please stop!”

A gentle pressure would have held her, but she felt that he was releasing her—all but one hand. She sank down upon the seat, trembling. “Oh, you ought not to have done it!” she cried.

He asked, “Why not?”

“No man has ever done that to me before!” The thought of what he had done, the memory of his lips upon her cheek, sent the blood flying there in hot waves; she began to sob: “No, no! You should not have done it!”

“Sylvia!” he pleaded, surprised by her vehemence. “Don’t you realize that you love me?”

“I don’t know! I’m afraid! I must have time!” She was weeping convulsively now. “You will never respect me again!”

“You must not say such a thing as that! It is not true!”

“You will go away and remember it, and you will despise me!”

His voice was calm and very soothing. “Sylvia,” he said, “I have told you that I love you. And I believe that you love me. If that is so, I had a perfect right to kiss you, and you had a perfect right to let me kiss you.”

There he was, sensible as ever; Sylvia found the storm of her emotion dying away. She had time to recall one of the maxims of Lady Dee: “A woman should never let a man see her weeping. It makes her cheeks pale and her nose red.” She resolved that she would stay in the protecting shadows of the summer-house until after he had departed.

§ 19

She went home; and at the dinner-table she was telling some of the adventures of the house party. “Oh, by the way,” she said, carelessly, “I met Frank Shirley.”

“Really?” exclaimed Mrs. Castleman. “Those poor, unfortunate people!”

“He must be quite a man now,” said Aunt Varina. “How old is he?”

“About twenty-one,” said the mother. Sylvia was amazed; she had not thought definitely of his age, but he had seemed a mature man to her.

“I see him now and then,” put in the Major. “He comes to town. Not a bad-looking chap.”

“He asked if he might call,” said Sylvia. “I told him, Yes. Was that right, Papa?”

“Why, certainly,” was the reply.

“He seems a very shy, silent kind of man,” she added. “He wasn’t sure that he’d be welcome.”

“Why, my dear,” exclaimed Mrs. Castleman. “I’m sure we’ve never made any difference in our treatment of the Shirleys!”

“Bob Shirley’s children will always be welcome to my home, so long as they behave themselves,” declared the father.

And so Sylvia left the matter, content with their attitude. Frank was wrong in his estimate of her family.

Two days later there came a negro man, riding a mule and carrying a bag, with a note from Frank. He begged her to accept this present of quail, because she had lost so much of her hunting time, and Charlie Peyton’s aim had been so bad. Sylvia read the note, and got from it a painful shock. The handwriting was boyish and the manner of expression crude. She was used to leisure-class stationery, with her monogram in gold at the top, and this was written upon a piece of cheap paper. Somehow it made the whole matter seem unreal and incredible to her. She found herself trying to recall how he looked.

So she went to sleep; and awakening early the next morning, waiting for the agreeable tinkle of the approaching coffee-cup—there suddenly he came to her! Just as real as he had been in the summer-house, with his breath upon her cheek! The delicious, blinding ecstasy possessed her again—and then fresh humiliation at the memory of his kisses! Oh, why did he not come to see her—instead of leaving her the prey of her fancy? She could not escape from the idea that she had lost his respect by flinging herself at his head—by permitting him to kiss her.

The next morning came the negro again, this time with a great bunch of golden-rod. “What a present!” exclaimed the whole family; but Sylvia understood and was happy. “It’s because of my hair,” she told the others, laughing. It must be that he loved her, despite her indiscretions!

He wrote that he was coming to see her that evening; and that because of the length of the ride, he would accept her invitation and come to dinner. So Sylvia braced herself for the ordeal.

She dressed very simply, so as not to attract attention. Uncle Mandeville was there, and two girl cousins from Louisville, visiting the family, and two of the Bishop’s boys and one of Barry Chilton’s, who dropped in at the last moment to see them. That was the way at Castleman Hall—there were never less than a dozen people at any meal, and the cook allowed for twenty. To all this crowd Sylvia had to introduce her strange new conquest, ignoring their glances of inquiry and parrying their mischievous shafts.

I must let you see this family at dinner. At the head of the table sits the Major, with gray hair and a gray imperial, wearing his black vest cut so low that he can plead it is evening dress; still adhering valiantly to the custom of his fathers, and carving the roast for his growing family, while the littlest girls, who come last, follow each portion with hungry eyes and count the number intervening. At the foot sits Mrs. Castleman, serving the salad and dessert, her ample figure robed in satin. “Miss Margaret” is just at that stage of her life, after the birth of the son and heir, when she has definitely abandoned the struggle with an expanding waistline. When I met her, some years later, she weighed two hundred and eighty pounds, and was the best-natured and most comically inefficient human soul I have ever encountered in my life.

There is Aunt Varina Tuis, humble and inconspicuous, weary after a day of trotting up and down stairs after the housekeeper, to see that the embroidered napkins were counted before they went to the laundry, that the drawing-room furniture was dusted, the dead flowers taken out of the dining-room, the fleas in the servants’ quarters kept in subjection. Mrs. Tuis’ queer little voice is seldom heard at the dinner-table, unless she is appealed to in some matter of family history: whom this one married, whom that one had been engaged to, whether or not it was true that some neighbor’s grandfather had kept a grocery store, as rumored.

Then there is Uncle Mandeville, home to recuperate from a spree in New Orleans; enormous in every direction, rosy-faced and prosperous, with a resounding laugh and an endless flow of fun. Beside him sits Celeste, the next daughter, presenting a curious contrast to Sylvia, with her restless black eyes, her positive manner and worldly viewpoint. There are the two cousins from Louisville, healthy and radiant, and the two Chilton boys, Clive and Harley, and Barry’s boy, who is a giant like Uncle Mandeville, and whenever he laughs, makes the cut glass to rattle on the buffet.

All this family hunts in one pack. They know all each other’s affairs, and take an interest in them, and stand together against the rest of the world. They are a noisy crew, good-humored, careless, but with hot tempers and little control of them—so that when their interests clash and they get on one another’s toes, they quarrel as violently as before they loved. Their conversation is apt to be bewildering to a stranger, for they seldom talk about general questions, having a whole arcanum of family allusions not easily understood. At this meal, for example, they are merry for half an hour over the latest tales of the doings of an older brother of Clive and Harley, who has married a girl with rich parents, but is too proud to take a dollar from them, and is forcing his bride to play at decent poverty. When the provisions run out they visit the Bishop, or the Major, or Uncle Barry, as may be most convenient, and go off with an automobile-load of hams and sausage-puddings and pickles and preserves. How many jokes there are, and what gales of merriment go round the table! The Bishop’s son the first kleptomaniac in the family! Barry’s young giant declaring that a single smile from the bride cost his father a cow and calf! The little girls, Peggy and Maria, chiming in with their tale of how the predatory couple found a lone chicken foraging in the rose-garden, confiscated it, carried it off under Basil’s coat, tied it by the leg under the piazza at the back of their house in town—and then forgot it and let it starve to death!

Sylvia sat watching this tableful of care-free, rollicking people—the men handsome, finely built, well-fed and well-groomed, the women delicate, soft-skinned and exquisitely gowned—representing the best type their civilization could produce. A pleasant scene it was, with snowy damask cloth and bouquets of roses, precious old silver and quaint hand-painted china, with a background of mahogany furniture and paneled walls. She watched Frank in the midst of it, thinking of his home as Harriet had pictured it—the people subdued and sombre, the stamp of poverty upon everything. She was glad to see that he was able to fit himself into the mood of this company, enjoying the sallies of fun and pleasing those he talked to.

The house being full of young couples who wanted to be alone, Sylvia took Frank into the library. She liked this room, with its red leather furniture and cozy fireplace, and queer old book-cases with diamond-shaped panes of glass. She liked it because the lights were on the table, and no woman looks beautiful when lighted from over her head. This may seem a small matter to you, but Sylvia had learned how much depends upon detail. She remembered one of the maxims of Lady Dee: “Get a man on your home-ground, where you can have things as you want them; and then place your chair to show the best side of your face.”

These things I set down as Sylvia told them to me—a long time afterwards, when we could laugh over them. It was a fact about her all the way through, that whatever she did, good or bad, she knew why she was doing it. In this she differed from a good many other women, who are not honest, even with themselves, and who feel that things become vulgar only when they are mentioned. The study of her own person and its charms was of course the very essence of her rÔle as a “belle.” At every stage of her life she had been drilled and coached—how to dance, how to enter a drawing-room, how to receive a compliment, how to toy with a suitor. At Miss Abercrombie’s, the young ladies had an etiquette teacher who gave them instructions in the most minute details of their deportment; not to bend your body too much, but mainly your knees, when you sat down; not to let your hands lie flat at your sides, but to turn your little fingers gracefully out; never to hesitate or think of yourself when entering a room, but to fix your thoughts upon some person, and move towards that person with decision. Sylvia had needed this last instruction especially, for in the beginning she had had a terrible time entering rooms. It should be a comfort to some would-be belles to know that Sylvia Castleman, who attained in the end to such eminence in her profession, was at the outset a terrified child with shaking knees and chattering teeth, who never would have gone anywhere of her own choice!

§ 20

Now she was ready to try out all these instructions upon Frank. The scene was set and lighted, the curtain rose—but somehow there was a hitch in the performance. Frank was moody again. He sat staring before him, frowning somberly; and she looked at him in a confusion of anxieties. He did not love her after all—she had simply seized upon him and compelled his attention, and now he was longing to extricate himself! Even if this were not true, it would soon come to that, for she could think of nothing interesting to say, and he would be bored.

She racked her wits. What could she talk about to a man who knew none of her “set,” who never went to balls or dinners, who could not conceivably care about polite gossip? Why didn’t he say something—the silent man! What manners to take into company!

“I must make him look at me,” she resolved. So without saying a word, she began taking a rose from her corsage and adjusting it in her hair. The motion distracted him, and she saw that he was watching. She had him!

“Is that in right?” she asked. Of course a la France rose in perfectly arranged hair is always “in right,” and Sylvia knew it. Her little device failed abjectly, for Frank answered simply “Yes,” and began staring into space again.

She tried once more, contenting herself with the barest necessities of conversation. “Did you shoot those quail yourself?”

Then he turned. “Miss Sylvia, I have something I must say to you. I’ve had time to think things over.” He paused.

Ah, now it was coming! He had had time to think things over—and he called her “Miss Sylvia!” Something cried out in her to make haste and release him before he asked it. But she could not speak—she was as if pinned by a lance.

He went on. “Miss Sylvia, I had made up my mind that love was not for me. I knew that to women of my own class I was a man with a tainted name—a convict’s son; and I would rather die than marry beneath me. So I shut up my heart, and when I met a woman, I turned and went away—as I tried to do with you. But you would not have it, and I could not resist you. I’ve been amazed at the intensity of my own feelings; it’s something I could not have dreamed of—and unless I’m mistaken, it’s been the same with you.”

It was a bold man who could use words such as those to Sylvia. To what merciless teasing he laid himself open! But she only drew a deep sigh of relief. He still loved her!

“I forced myself to stay away,” he continued, without waiting for her to answer. “I said, ‘I must not go near her again. I must run away somewhere and get over it.’ And then again I said, ‘I can make her happy—I will marry her.’ I said that, but I’m not going to do it.”

He paused. Oh, what a voice he had! Sylvia felt the blood ebbing and flowing in her cheeks, pounding in her ears. She could not hear his words very well—but he loved her!

“Sylvia,” he was saying, earnestly—as if half to convince himself—“we must both of us wait. You must have time to consider what loving me would mean. You have all these people—happy people; and I have nothing like that in my life. You have this beautiful home, expensive clothes—every luxury. But I am a poor man. I have only a mortgaged plantation, with a mother and a brother and two sisters to share it. I have no career—I have not even an education. All your uncles, your cousins, your suitors, are college men, and I am a plain farmer. So I face what seems to me the worst temptation a man could have. I see you, and you are everything in the world that is desirable; and I believe that I could win you and carry you away from here. My whole being cries out, ‘Go and take her! She loves you! She wants you to!’ But instead, I have to come here and say, ‘Think it over. Make sure of your feelings; that it’s not simply a flush of excitement.’ You being the kind of tenderhearted thing you are, it might so easily be a romantic imagining about a man who’s apart from other men—one you feel sorry for and would like to help! You see what I mean? It isn’t easy for me to say it, but I’d be a coward if I didn’t say it—and mean it—and stand by it.”

There was a long pause. Sylvia was thinking. How different it was from other men’s love-making! There was Malcolm McCallum, who had taken her driving yesterday, and had said what they all said: “Never mind if you don’t love me—marry me, and let me teach you to love me.” In other words, “Stake your life’s happiness upon a blind chance, at the command of my desire.” Of course they would surround her with all the external things of life, build her a great house and furnish it richly, deck her with silks and jewels and supply her with servants. All the world would come to admire her, and then she would be so grateful to her generous lord that she could not but love him.

Her voice was low as she answered, “A woman does not really care about the outside things. She wants love most. She wants to be sure of her heart—but of the man’s heart too.”

“As to that,” he said, “I will not trust myself to speak. You are the loveliest vision that has ever come to me. You are——”

“I know,” she interrupted. “But that, too, is mostly surface. I am luxurious, I am artificial and shallow—a kind of butterfly.” This was what she said to men when she wished to be most deadly. But now she really meant it; there was a mist of tears in her eyes.

“That is nothing,” he answered. “I am not such a fool that I can’t see all that. There are two people in you, as in all of us. The question is, which do you want to be?”

“How can I say?” she murmured. “It would be a question of whether you loved me——”

“Ah, Sylvia!” he cried, in a voice of pain that startled her. And suddenly he rose and began to pace the room. “I cannot talk about my feeling for you,” he said. “I made up my mind before I came here that I would not woo you—not if I had to bite off my tongue to prevent it. I said, ‘I will explain to her, and then I will go away and give her time.’ I want to play fair. I want to know that I have played fair.”

As he stood there, she could see the knotted tendons in his hands, she could see the agitation of his whole being. And suddenly a great current took her and bore her to him. She put her hands upon his shoulders, whispering, “Frank!”

He stood stiff and silent.

“I love you!” she said. “I love you!” She gave a little sob of happiness; and he caught her in his arms and pressed her to his bosom, crushing all her roses, and stifling her words with his kisses. And so, a few minutes later, Sylvia was lying back in her favorite chair, with the satisfaction of knowing at last that he was looking at her. A couple of hours later, when he went away, it was as her plighted lover.

§ 21

Frank came again two days later; and then Mrs. Castleman made her first remark. “Sylvia,” she said, “you mustn’t flirt with that man.”

“Why not, Mother?”

“Because he’d probably take it seriously. And he’s had a hard time, you know. We can’t treat the Shirleys quite as we do other people.”

“All right,” said Sylvia. “I’ll be careful.”

Frank wanted the engagement made known at once—at least to the family. Such was his direct way. But Sylvia had an instinct against telling; she wanted a little time to watch and study and plan.

It was hard, however; she was absolutely shining with happiness—there seemed to be a kind of soul-electricity that came from her and affected everyone she met. It gathered the men about her thicker than ever—and at the very time that she wanted to be alone with Frank and the thought of Frank!

One evening when the Young Matrons’ Club gave its monthly cotillion, Frank, knowing nothing about this event, called unexpectedly. A visit meant to him forty miles on horseback; and so, to the general consternation, Sylvia refused to attend the dance. All evening the telephone rang and the protests poured in. “We won’t stand for it!” the men declared; and the women asked, “Who is it?” She had been to a bridge-party that afternoon, and everyone knew she was not sick. But what man could it be, when all the men were at the cotillion?

So the gossip began; and a week later another incident gave it wings. It was a great occasion, the semi-annual ball of the Country Club, and Frank had been warned that Sylvia would not be at home. But he wanted to see her in her glory, and he galloped his twenty miles in darkness and rain, and turned up at the club-house at midnight, and stood in the doorway to watch. Sylvia, seeing him and realizing what his presence meant, was seized with a sudden impulse to acknowledge him. She stopped dancing, and sent her partner away, and stood talking to Frank. Oh, what a staring, what a wagging of tongues! Frank Shirley! Of all people in the world, Frank Shirley!

Of course, the news came to the Hall. Early in the morning, Aunt Nannie called up, announcing a visit, and there followed a family conclave with Mrs. Castleman, Aunt Varina and Sylvia.

“Sylvia,” said Mrs. Chilton, trying her best to look casual, “I understand that Frank Shirley was at the ball.”

“Yes, Aunt Nannie.”

There was a pause. “What was he doing there?” asked “Miss Margaret,” evidently having been coached.

“Why, I’m sure, Mother, I don’t know.”

“Did you invite him?”

“Indeed, I did not.”

“He isn’t a member of the Club, is he?”

“No; but he knows lots of other people who are.”

“Everybody is saying he came to see you,” broke in Aunt Nannie. “They say you stopped dancing to talk with him.”

“I can’t help what they say, Aunt Nannie.”

“Do you think,” inquired the Bishop’s wife, “that it was altogether wise to get your name associated with his?”

“Isn’t he a gentleman?” asked Sylvia.

“That’s all right, my dear, but you’ve got to remember that you live in the world, and must consider other people’s point of view.”

“Do you mean, Aunt Nannie, that Frank Shirley’s to be excluded from society because of his father’s misfortune?”

“Not excluded, Sylvia. There are shades to such things. The point is that a young girl—a girl conspicuous, like you——”

“But, Aunt Nannie, I asked mother and father, and they were willing to receive him. Isn’t that true, Mother?”

“Why, yes, Sylvia,” said “Miss Margaret,” weakly, “but I didn’t mean——”

“It was all right for him to come here, once or twice,” interrupted Aunt Nannie. “But at a Club ball——”

“The point is, Sylvia dear,” quavered Mrs. Tuis, “you will get yourself a reputation for singularity.”

And the mother added, “You surely don’t have to do that to attract attention!”

So there it was. All that fine sentiment about the unhappy Shirleys went like a film of mist before a single breath of the world’s opinion! They would not say it brutally—“He’s a convict’s son, and you can’t afford to know him too well.” It was not the Southern fashion—at least among the older generation—to be outspoken in worldliness. They had generous ideals, and made their boast of “chivalry;” but here, when it came to a test, they were all in accord with Aunt Nannie, who was said to “talk like a cold-blooded Northern woman.”

Sylvia decided at once that some one must be told; so she went back to lunch with her aunt, and afterwards sought out the Bishop in his study. The walls of this room were lined with ancient theological treatises and sermons in faded greenish-black bindings: an array which never failed to appal the soul of Sylvia, who realized that she had consigned to the scrap-heap all this mass of learning—and had not yet apologized for her temerity.

“Uncle Basil,” she began, “I have something very, very important to tell you.” The Bishop turned from his desk and gazed at her. “I am engaged to be married,” she said.

“Why, Sylvia!” he exclaimed.

“And I—I’m very much in love.”

“Who is the man, my dear?”

“It is Frank Shirley.”

Sylvia was used to watching people and reading their thoughts quickly. She saw that her uncle’s first emotion was one of dismay. “Frank Shirley!”

“Yes, Uncle Basil.”

Then she saw him gather himself together. He was going to try to be fair—the dear soul! But she could not forget that his first emotion had been dismay. “Tell me about it, my child,” he said.

“I met him at the Venable’s,” she replied, “only a couple of weeks ago. He’s an unusual sort of man, lonely and unhappy, very reserved and hard to get at. He fell in love with me—very much in love; but he didn’t want me to know it. He did tell me at last.”

The Bishop was silent. “I love him,” she added.

“Are you sure?”

“As I’ve never loved anybody—as I never dreamed I could love.”

There was a pause. “Uncle Basil—he’s a good man,” she said. “That is why I love him.”

Again there was a pause. “Have you told your father and mother?” asked the Bishop.

“Not yet.”

“You must tell them at once, Sylvia.”

“I know they will make objections, and I want you to meet Frank and talk with him. You see, Uncle Basil, I’m going to marry him—and I want your help.”

The Bishop was silent again, weighing his next words. “Of course, my dear,” he said, “from a worldly point of view it is not a good match, and I fear your parents will regard it as a calamity. But, as you know, I think of nothing but the happiness of my darling Sylvia. I won’t say anything at all until I have met the man. Send him to see me, little girl, and then I will give you the best counsel I can.”

§ 22

Frank went to pay his call the next day, and then came back to Sylvia. “He’s a dear old man,” he said. “And he wants what is best for you.”

“What does he want?” demanded Sylvia.

“He says we should not marry now—that I ought to be better able to take care of you. And of course he’s right.”

There was a pause; then suddenly Frank exclaimed, “Sylvia, I can’t be just a farmer if I’m going to marry you.”

“What can you be, Frank?”

“I’m going to go to college.”

“But that would take four years!”

“No, it needn’t. I could dig in and get into the Sophomore class this winter. I’ve been through a military academy, and I was going to Harvard, where my father and my grandfather went, but I thought it was my duty to come home and see to the place. But now my brother has grown up, and he has a good head for business.”

“What would you do ultimately?”

“I’ve always wanted to study law, and I think now I ought to. Nobody is going to be willing for us to marry at once; and they’re much less apt to object to me if I’m seriously going to make something of myself.”

Sylvia went over the next morning to get her uncle’s blessing. The good Bishop gave it to her—together with some exhortations which he judged she needed. They were summed up in one sentence which he pronounced: “There is nothing more unhappy in this world than a serious-minded man with a worldly-minded wife.” Poor old Uncle Basil, with his snow-white hair and his patient, saintly face, worn with care—how much of his own soul he put into that utterance! Sylvia laid her head upon his shoulder, and let the tears run down upon his coat.

After a while, he remarked, “Sylvia, your aunt saw Frank come here.”

“What!” exclaimed Sylvia. “You don’t mean that she’ll guess!”

“She’s very clever at guessing, my child.” So Sylvia, as she rode home, realized that she had no more time to lose. When she got to the Hall, she set to work at once to carry out her plans.

She found her Aunt Varina in her room with a headache. On her dressing-table was a picture of the late-lamented Mr. Tuis, which Sylvia picked up. By manifesting a little interest in it, she quickly got her aunt to talking on the subject of matrimony.

Mrs. Tuis was the youngest of the Major’s sisters. In the face of the protests of her relatives she had married a comparatively “common” man, who was poor and had turned out to be a drunkard, and after leading Aunt Varina a dog’s life, had taken chloral. So Mrs. Tuis had come back to eat the bread of charity—which, though it was liberally sweetened with affection, had also a slightly bitter taste of compassion.

Her ill-fated romance was a poor thing, perhaps—but her own. As she told it her bosom fluttered and the tears trickled down her cheeks; and when she had got to a state of complete deliquescence, her niece whispered: “Oh, Aunt Varina, I’m so glad you believe in love! Aunt Varina, will you keep a solemn secret if I tell it to you?”

And so came the story of the amazing engagement. Mrs. Tuis listened with wide-open, startled eyes, every now and then whispering, “Sylvia! Sylvia!” Of course she was thrilled to the deeps of her soul by it; and of course, in the mood that she had been caught, she could not possibly refuse her sympathy. “You must help me with the others,” said the girl. “I’m going to tell mother next.”

§ 23

The first thing that struck you about “Miss Margaret” was her appalling incompetence. But underneath it lay the most exclusively maternal soul imaginable. She had nursed her children when they were almost two years old, great healthy calves running about the place and standing up to suck; she had rocked them to sleep in her arms when they were big enough to be reading Virgil; she had shed as many tears over a broken finger as most mothers shed over a funeral. She wanted her daughters to be happy, and to this end she would give them anything that civilization provided; she would even be willing that one of them should marry a man whose father “wore stripes”—so far as she was concerned, and so long as she remained alone with the daughter. You must picture her, clasping Sylvia in her arms and weeping from general agitation; moved to pity by the tale of Frank’s loneliness, moved to awe by the tale of his goodness—but then suddenly smitten as by a thunderbolt with the thought: “What will people say! What will your Aunt Nannie say!”

While Sylvia was bent upon having her way, you must not imagine that she did not feel any of these emotions. Although she was mostly Lady Lysle, her far-off ancestress, she was also a little of “Miss Margaret,” and was almost capsized in these gales of emotion. She remembered a hundred scenes of tenderness and devotion; she clasped the great girl-mother in her arms, and mingled their tears and vowed that she would never do anything to make her unhappy. It was a lachrymal lane—this pathway of Sylvia’s engagement!

With her father she took a different line. She got the Major alone in his office and talked to him solemnly, not about love and romance, but about Frank Shirley’s character. She knew that the Major was disturbed by the wildness of the young men of the world about him; she had heard him discuss the pace at which Aunt Nannie’s boys were traveling. And here was a man who had sowed no wild oats, and had learned the lesson of self-control.

She was surprised at the way the Major took it. He clutched the arms of his chair and went white when he caught the import of her discourse; but he heard her to the end, and then sat for a long while in silence. Finally, he inquired, “Sylvia, did anybody ever tell you why your Uncle Laurence killed himself?”

“No,” she replied.

“He was engaged to a girl, and her parents made her break off the match. I never knew why; but it ruined the girl’s life, as well as his, and it made a terrible impression on me. So I made a vow—and now, I suppose, is the time I have to keep it. I said I would never interfere in a love-affair of one of my children!”

Sylvia was deeply affected, not only by his words, but by the intense agitation which she saw he was repressing. “Papa, does it seem so very dreadful to you?” she asked.

Again there was a long wait before he answered. “It is something quite different from what I had expected,” he said. “It will make a difference in your whole life—to an extent which I fear you cannot realize.”

“But if I really love him, Papa?”

“If you really love him, my dear, then I will not try to oppose you. But oh, Sylvia, be sure that you love him! You must promise me to wait until I can be sure you are not mistaken about that.”

“I expect to wait, Papa,” she said. “There will be no mistake.”

They talked for half an hour or so, and then Sylvia went to her room. Half an hour later “Aunt Sarah,” the cook, came flying to her in great agitation. “Miss Sylvia, what’s de matter wid yo’ papa?”

“What?” cried Sylvia, springing up.

“He’s sittin’ on a log out beyan’ de garden, cryin’ fo’ to break his heart!”

Sylvia fled to the spot, and fell upon her knees by him and flung her arms about him, crying, “Papa, Papa!” He was still sobbing; she had never seen him exhibit such emotion in her life before, and she was terrified. “Papa, what is it?”

She felt him shudder and control himself. “Nothing, Sylvia. I can’t tell you.”

“Papa,” she whispered, “do you object to Frank Shirley as much as that?”

“No, my dear—it isn’t that. It’s that the whole thing has knocked me off my feet. My little girl is going away from me—and I didn’t know she was grown up yet. It made me feel so old!”

He looked at her, trying to smile and feeling a little ashamed of his tears. She looked into the dear face, and it seemed withered and wrinkled all of a sudden. She realized with a pang how much he really had aged. He was working so hard—she would see him at his accounts late at night, when she was leaving for a ball, and would feel ashamed for her joys that he had to pay for. “Oh, Papa, Papa!” she cried, “I ought to marry a rich man!”

“My child,” he exclaimed, “don’t let me hear you say a thing like that!”

Poor, poor Major! He said it and he meant it; he was, I think, the most naÏve of all the members of his family. He was a “Southern gentleman,” not a business man; he hated money with his whole soul—hated it, even while he spent it and enjoyed what it brought him. He was like a chip of wood caught in a powerful current; swept through rapids and over cataracts, to his own boundless bewilderment and dismay.

§ 24

“He is without any pride of family.” That had been the verdict upon the Major pronounced by his mother, who had been a grand lady in her own day. She would turn to her eldest daughter and say, “Look after him, Nannie! Make him keep his shoes shined!” And so now, towards the end of their conference, Sylvia and her father found themselves looking at each other and saying, “What will Aunt Nannie say?” Sylvia was laughing, but all the same she had not the nerve to face her aunt, and ’phoned the Bishop to ask him to break the news.

Half an hour later the energetic lady’s automobile was heard at the door. And now behold, a grand council, with the Major and his wife, Mrs. Chilton, Mrs. Tuis, Mr. Mandeville Castleman, Sylvia and Celeste—the last having learned that something startling had happened, and being determined to find out about it.

“Now,” began Aunt Nannie, “what is this that Basil has been trying to tell me?”

There was no reply.

“Mandeville,” she demanded, “have you heard this news?”

“No,” said Uncle Mandeville.

“That Sylvia has engaged herself to Frank Shirley!”

“Good God!” said Uncle Mandeville.

“Sylvia!” exclaimed Celeste, in horror.

“Is it true?” demanded Aunt Nannie—in a tone which said that she declined to comment until official confirmation had been received.

“It is true,” said Sylvia.

“And what have you to say about it?” inquired Aunt Nannie. She looked first at the Major, then at his wife, and then at Mrs. Tuis; but no one had anything to say.

“I can’t quite believe that you’re in your right senses,” continued the speaker. “Or that I have heard you say the words. What can have got into you?”

“Nannie,” said the Major, clearing his throat, “Sylvia doesn’t want to marry him for a long time.”

“But she proposes to be engaged to him, I understand!”

“Yes,” admitted the other.

“And this engagement is to be announced?”

“Why—er—I suppose——”

“Certainly,” put in Sylvia.

“And when, may I ask?”

“At once.”

“And is there nobody here who has thought of the consequences? Possibly you have overlooked the fact that one of my daughters has planned to marry Ridgely Peyton next month. That is to be called off?”

“What do you mean, Aunt Nannie?”

“Can you be childish enough to imagine that the Peytons will consent to marry into a family with a convict’s son in it?”

“Nannie!” protested the Major.

“I know!” replied Mrs. Chilton. “Sylvia doesn’t like the words. But if she proposes to marry a convict’s son, she may as well get used to them now as later. It’s the thing that people will be saying about her for the balance of her days; the thing they’ll be saying about all of us everywhere. Look at Celeste there—just ready to come out! How much chance she’ll have—with such a start! Her sister engaged to Frank Shirley!”

Sylvia turned to Celeste, and the eyes of these two met. Celeste turned pale, and her look was eloquent of dismay.

“Nannie,” put in the Major, protestingly, “Frank Shirley is a fine, straight fellow——”

“I’ve nothing to say against Frank Shirley,” exclaimed the other. “I know nothing about him, and never expect to know anything about him. But I know the story of his family, and I know that he’s no right in ours. And what’s more, he knows it too—if he were a man with any conscience or self-respect, he’d not consent to ruin Sylvia’s life!”

“Aunt Nannie,” broke in the girl, “is one to think of nothing in marriage but worldly pride?”

“Worldly pride!” ejaculated the other. “You call it worldly pride—because you, who have been the favorite child of the Castlemans, who have been given every luxury, every privilege, are asked not to trample your sisters and cousins! To give way to a blind passion, and put a stain upon our name that will last for generations! Where do you suppose you’d have been to-day if your forefathers had acted in such fashion? Do you imagine that you’d have been the belle of Castleman Hall, the most sought-after girl in the state?”

That was the argument. For some minutes Mrs. Chilton went on to pour it forth. And angry as she was, Sylvia could not but feel the force of it, and realize the effect it was producing on the other members of the council. It was not the voice of a woman speaking; it was the voice of something greater than any of them, or than all of them together—a thing that had come from dim-distant ages, and would continue into an impenetrable future. It was the voice of the Family! No light thing it was, in truth, to be the favorite daughter of the Castlemans! Not a responsibility one could evade, an honor one could decline!

“You are where you are to-day,” proclaimed the speaker, “because other women thought of you when they chose their husbands. And I have never observed in you any unwillingness to accept the advantages they have handed on to you, any contempt for admiration and success. You are only a girl, of course; you can’t be expected to realize all the meaning of your marriage to your family; but your mother and father know, and they ought to have impressed it on you, instead of leaving you to run wild and be trapped by the first unprincipled man that came along!”

There was a pause. The Major and his wife sat in silence, with a guilty look upon their faces. “Worldly pride!” exclaimed Aunt Nannie, turning upon them. “Have you told her about your own marriage?”

“What do you mean?” asked the Major.

“You know very well,” was the reply, “that Margaret, when she married you, was head over heels in love with a nice, respectable, poor young preacher. And that she married you, not because she was in love with you, but because she knew that you were a noble-minded gentleman, the head of the oldest and best family in the county.” And then Aunt Nannie turned upon Sylvia. “Suppose,” she demanded, “that your mother had been sentimental and silly, and had run away with the preacher—have you any idea where you’d be now?”

Sylvia was hardly to be blamed for having no answer to this question, which might have been too much for the most learned scientist. There was silence in the council.

“Or take Mandeville,” pursued the Voice of the Family.

“Nannie!” protested Mandeville.

“You don’t want it talked about, I know,” said the other, “but this is a time for truth-telling. Your Uncle Mandeville was madly in love with a girl—a girl who had position, and money too; but he would not marry her because she had a sister who was ‘fast,’ and he would not bring such blood into the family.”

There was a pause. Uncle Mandeville’s head was bowed.

“And do you remember,” persisted Aunt Nannie, “that when the question was being discussed, your brother here asked that his growing daughters be spared having to hear about a scandal? Do you remember that?”

“Yes,” said Mandeville, “I remember that.”

“And how much nobler was such conduct than that of your Uncle Tom. Think——”

One could feel a sudden thrill go through the assembly. “Oh!” cried Miss Margaret, protestingly; and Mrs. Tuis exclaimed, “Nannie!”

“Think of what happened to Tom’s wife!” the other was proceeding; but here she was stopped by a firm word from the Major. “We will not discuss that, sister!”

There was a solemn pause, during which Sylvia and Celeste stared at each other. They knew that Uncle Tom Harley, their mother’s brother, was an army officer stationed in the far West; but they had never heard before that he had a wife, and were amazed and a little frightened by the revelation. It is in moments such as these, when the tempers of men and women strike sparks, that one gets glimpses of the skeletons that are hidden far back in the corners of family closets!

§ 25

There was a phrase which Sylvia had heard a thousand times in the discussions of her relatives; it was “bad blood.” “Bad blood” was a thing which possessed and terrified the Castleman imagination. Sylvia had but the vaguest ideas of heredity. She had heard it stated that tuberculosis and insanity were transmissible, and that one must never marry into a family where these disorders appeared; but apparently, also, the family considered that poverty and obscurity were transmissible—besides the general tendency to do things of which your neighbors disapproved. And you were warned that these evils often skipped a generation and reappeared. You might pick out a most excellent young man for a husband, and then see your children return to the criminal ways of his ancestors.

That was Aunt Nannie’s argument now. When Sylvia cried, “What has Frank Shirley done?” the reply was, “It’s not what he did, but what his father did.”

“But,” cried the girl, “his father was innocent! I’ve heard Papa say it a hundred times!”

“Then his uncle was guilty,” was Aunt Nannie’s response. “Somebody took the money and gambled it away.”

“But is gambling such a terrible offence? It seems to me I’ve heard of some Castlemans gambling.”

“If they do,” was the reply, “they gamble with their own money.”

At which Sylvia cried, “Nothing of the kind! They have gambled, and then come to Uncle Mandeville to get him to pay their debts!”

Now that was a body-blow; for it was Aunt Nannie’s own boys who had adopted this custom, which Sylvia had heard sternly reprehended in the family councils. Aunt Nannie flushed, and Uncle Mandeville made haste to interpose—“Sylvia, you should not speak so to your aunt.”

“I don’t see why not,” declared the girl. “I am saying nothing but what is true; and I have been attacked in the thing that is most precious in life to me.”

Here the Major felt it his duty to enter the debate. “Sylvia,” he said, “I don’t think you quite realize your aunt’s feelings. It is no selfish motive that leads her to make these objections.”

“Not selfish?” asked the girl. “She’s admitted it’s her fear for her own daughters, Papa——”

“It’s just exactly as much for your own sister, Sylvia.” It was the voice of Celeste, entering the discussion for the first time. Sylvia stared at her, astonished, and saw her eyes alight, her face as set and hard as Aunt Nannie’s. Sylvia realized all at once that she had an enemy in her own house.

She was trembling violently as she made reply. “Then, Celeste, I have to give up everything that means happiness in life to me, because I might frighten away rich suitors from my sister?”

“Sylvia,” put in the Major, gravely, before Celeste could speak, “you must not say things like that. It is not because Frank Shirley is poor that we are objecting. The pride of the Castlemans is not simply a pride of worldly power.”

“She degrades us and degrades herself when she implies it!” exclaimed Aunt Nannie.

“It is a high and great pride,” continued the Major. “The pride of a race of men and women who have scorned ignoble conduct and held themselves above all dishonor. That is no weak or shallow thing, Sylvia. It is a thing which sustains and upholds us at every moment of our lives: that we are living, not merely for our individual selves, but for all the generations that are to be. It may seem a cruel thing that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children, but it is a law of God. It was something that Bob Shirley himself said to me, with tears in his eyes—that his children and his children’s children would have to pay for what had been done.”

“But, Papa!” cried Sylvia. “They don’t have to pay it, except that we make them pay it!”

“You are mistaken, my child,” said the Major, quietly. “It’s not we alone. It was the whole of society that condemned him. We cannot possibly wipe out the blot on the Shirley escutcheon.”

“We can only drag ourselves down with them!” exclaimed Aunt Nannie.

“Why, it’s just as if we said that going to prison was nothing!” cried Celeste.

“You must remember how many people there are looking up to us, Sylvia,” put in Uncle Mandeville, solemnly.

There they were, all in chorus; Sylvia gazed in anguish from one to another. She gazed at her mother, just at the moment that that good lady was preparing to express her opinion. For the particular thing which held the imagination of “Miss Margaret” in thrall was this vision of the Castlemans living their life as it were upon a stage, with the lower orders in the pit looking on, imbibing instruction and inspiration from the action of the lofty drama.

Sylvia had heard it all before, and she could not bear to listen to it now. The tears, which had long been in her eyes, suddenly began to roll down her cheeks; she sprang up, exclaiming passionately, “You are all against me! Everyone of you!”

“Sylvia,” said her father, in distress, “that is not true!”

“We would wade through blood for you!” exclaimed Uncle Mandeville—who was always looking for a chance to shoot somebody for the honor of the Castleman name.

“We are thinking of nothing but your own future,” said the Major. “You are only a child, Sylvia——”

But Sylvia cried, “I can’t bear any more! You promised to stand by me, Papa—and now you let Aunt Nannie come here and persuade you—Mamma too—all of you! You will break my heart!” And so saying she fled from the room, leaving the family council to proceed as best it could without her.

§ 26

Sylvia shut herself in her room and had a good, exhaustive cry. Then, with her soul atmosphere cleared, she set to work to think out her problem.

She had to admit that the family had presented a strong case. There was the matter of heredity, for example. Just how much likelihood might there be, in the event of her marrying Frank, of her finding herself with children of evil tendencies? Just what truth might there be in Aunt Nannie’s point of view, that he was a selfish man, seeking to redeem his family fortunes by allying himself with the Castlemans? The question sounded cold-blooded, but then Sylvia always had to face the truth.

Also there was the problem, to what extent a girl ought to sacrifice herself to her family. There was no denying that they had done much for her. She had been as their right eye to them; and what did she owe them in return? There was no one of them whom she did not love, sincerely, intensely; there was no one over whose sorrows she had not wept, whose burdens she had not borne. And now she faced the fact that if she married Frank Shirley, she would cause them unhappiness. She might argue that they had no right to be unhappy; but that did not alter the fact—they would be unhappy. Sylvia’s life so far had been a process of bringing other people joy; and now, suddenly, she found herself in a dilemma where it was necessary for her to cause pain. Upon whom ought it to fall—upon her mother and father, her uncles and aunts—or upon Frank Shirley and herself?

Of all the arguments which produced an effect upon her, the most powerful was that embodied in Aunt Nannie’s phrase, “a blind passion.” Sylvia had been taught to think of “passion” as something low and shameful; she did not like the vision of herself as a weak, infatuated creature, throwing away all that other people had striven to give her. Many were the phrases whereby all her life she had heard such conduct scorned; there was a phrase from the Bible that was often cited—something about “inordinate affection.” Just what was the difference between ordinate and inordinate affection? And how was she to decide in which category to place her love for Frank Shirley?

For the greater part of two days and two nights Sylvia debated these problems; and then she went to her father. The color was gone from her cheeks, and she was visibly thinner; but her mind was made up.

She told the Major all the doubts that had beset her and all the arguments she had considered. She set forth his contention that the pride of the Castlemans was not a “worldly pride;” and then she announced her conclusion, which was that he was permitting himself to be carried along, against his own better judgment, by the vanity of the women of his family.

Needless to say, the Major was startled by this pronouncement, delivered with all the solemnity of a pontiff ex cathedra. But Sylvia was ready with her proofs. There was Aunt Nannie, scheming and plotting day and night to make great marriages for her children. Spending her husband’s money in ways he disapproved, and getting—what? Was there a single one of her children that was happy? Was there a single couple—for all the rich marriages—that wasn’t living beyond its income, and jealous of other people who were able to spend more? Harley, grumbling because he couldn’t have a motor of his own—Clive, because he couldn’t afford to marry the girl he loved! And both of them drinking and gambling, and forcing Uncle Mandeville to pay their debts.

“Sylvia, you know I have protested to your Aunt Nannie.”

“Yes, Papa—but meantime you’re ruining your own health and fortune to enable your daughters to run the same race. Here’s Celeste, like a hound in the leash, eager to have her chance—just Aunt Nannie all over again! I know, Papa—it’s terrible, and I can’t bear to hurt you with it, but I have to tell you what my own decision is. I love Frank Shirley; I think my love for him is a true love, and I can’t for a moment think of giving it up. I’m sorry to have to break faith with the Family; I can only plead that I didn’t understand the bargain when I made it, and that I shall take care not to make my debt any greater.”

“What do you mean, Sylvia?”

“I mean that I want to give up the social game. I want to stop spending fortunes on clothes and travel and luxuries; I want to stop being paraded round and exhibited to men I’m not interested in. I want you to give me a little money—just what I need to live—and let me go to New York to study music for a year or two more, until I am able to teach and earn my own living.”

“Earn your own living! Sylvia!”

“Precisely, Papa. And meantime, Frank can go through college and law school, and when we can take care of ourselves, we’ll marry. That’s my plan, and I’m serious about it—I want you to let me do it this year.”

And there sat the poor Major, staring at her, his face a study of unutterable emotions, whispering to himself, “My God! My God!”

When Sylvia told me about this scene I reminded her of her experience with the young clergyman who had come to convert her from heresy. “Don’t you see now,” I asked, “why he called you the most dangerous woman in Castleman County?”

§ 27

This procedure of Sylvia’s was a beautiful illustration of what the military strategists call an “offensive defence.” By the simple suggestion of earning her own living, she got everything else in the world that she wanted. It was agreed that she might make known her engagement to Frank Shirley. It was agreed that she need have no more money spent upon clothes and parties. Most important of all, it was agreed that Aunt Nannie was to be informed that Sylvia’s course was approved by her parents, and that Frank Shirley was to be welcomed to Castleman Hall.

But of course she was not to be allowed to earn money. Her father made it clear that the bare suggestion of this caused him more unhappiness than she could endure to inflict. When she protested, “I want to learn something useful!” the dear old Major was ready with the proposition that they learn something useful together; and forthwith unlocked the diamond-paned doors of the old mahogany book-cases, and dragged forth dust-covered sets of Grote’s “History of Greece,” and Hume’s “History of England,” and Jefferson Davis’ “Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government”—out of which ponderous volumes Sylvia read aloud to him for several hours each day thereafter.

So from now on this is to be the story of a wholly reformed and chastened huntress of hearts. No more for her the tournaments of coquetry, no more the trumpets of the ball-room peal. No longer shall we behold her, clad in armor of chiffon and real lace, with breastplate of American beauty roses and helmet of gold and pearls. No longer shall we see the arrows of her red-brown eyes flying over the stricken field, deep-dyed with the heart’s blood of Masculinity. Instead of this the dusty tome and the midnight oil and the green eye-shade confront us; we behold the uncanny spectacle of the loveliest of created mortals clad in blue stockings and black-rimmed spectacles.—All this scintillating wit, I make haste to explain, is not mine, but something which Avery Crittenden, the town wag, dashed off in a moment of illumination, and which appeared in the Castleman County Register (no names, if you please!) a couple of weeks after the news of Sylvia’s reformation had stunned the world.

I wish that space were less limited, so that I could tell you how Castleman County received the tidings, and some few of the comical episodes in the long war which it waged to break down her resolution of withdrawal. It was the light of their eyes going out, and they could not and would not be reconciled to it. They wrote letters, they sent telegrams; they would come and literally besiege the house—sit in the parlor and condole with “Miss Margaret,” no longer because Sylvia refused to marry them, but merely because she refused to lead the german with them! They would come with bands of music, with negro singers to serenade her. One spring night a whole fancy-dress ball adjourned by unanimous consent, and stormed the terraces of Castleman Hall and held its revels under the windows; and so of course Sylvia had to stop trying to read about Walpole’s ministry and invite them in and give them wine and cake. On the evening of one of the club dances there was an organized conspiracy; seventeen of her old sweethearts sent her roses, and when in spite of this she did not come, the next day came seventeen messengers, bearing seventeen packages, each containing a little cupid wrapped in cotton-wool—but with his wings broken!

Such was the pressure from outside; and within—there would be a new gown sent by Uncle Mandeville, who was on another spree in New Orleans; a gown that was really a dream of beauty and a crime not to wear. Or there would be talk at the table about Dolly Witherspoon, Sylvia’s chief rival, and the triumph she had won at the cotillion last night; how Stanley Pendleton was “rushing” her, and how Cousin Harley had been snubbed by her. And then some one gave a ball, and Charlie Peyton rang up to say that he was getting drunk and going to the devil unless Sylvia would come and dance with him! And when this device succeeded, and the rumor of it spread—how many of the nicest boys in the county took to getting drunk and going to the devil, because Sylvia would not come and dance with them!

I mention these things in order that you may understand that, sincere as Sylvia was in her effort to withdraw from “society,” she was not entirely successful. She still met “eligible” men, and she was still an object of family concern. A few days after the council, she had been surprised by a visit from Aunt Nannie, who came to apologize and make peace. “I want you to know, Sylvia dear,” she declared, “that what I said to you was said with no thought of anything but your own good.” There was a reconciliation, with tears in the eyes of both of them—and a renewal of the activities of Aunt Nannie. How often it happened to Sylvia, when at some dance she fell into the clutches of an undesirable man, that Aunt Nannie found a pretext for joining them—and presently, without quite realizing how, Sylvia found that the man was gone, and that she was settled for a tÊte-À-tÊte with a more suitable companion! Once she stopped to luncheon with the Bishop, and found herself being shown a new album of photographs. There among English cathedrals and Rhenish castles she stumbled upon a picture of the “Mansion House,” the home of the wealthy Peytons. “What a lovely old place!” she exclaimed; and her aunt remarked, “Charlie will inherit that, lucky boy!”

She remembered also the case of Ned Scott, the young West Pointer who came home on furlough, setting all the girls’ hearts aflutter with his gray and gold gorgeousness. “My, what a handsome fellow!” exclaimed Aunt Nannie. “It makes me happy just to watch him walk!”

“An army man always has a good social position,” remarked “Miss Margaret,” casually.

“And an assured income,” added Aunt Varina, timidly.

“He has a mole on his nose,” observed Sylvia.

§ 28

Frank Shirley had passed the midwinter examinations at Harvard, and was settled in the dormitory of his fathers; and so for a while the acute agitation subsided. It began again in the summer, however—when Sylvia proposed staying at the Hall, instead of going with the family to the summer-place in the mountains of North Carolina. It was obvious that this was in order to be near her lover; and so the whole battle had to be fought over again. Aunt Nannie was unable to understand how Sylvia could be willing to “publish her infatuation to the world.”

“But I have only the summer when I can see him,” the girl argued.

“But even so, my dear—to give up everything else, to change all your plans, the plans of your whole family!”

“Nobody need change, Aunt Nannie. Aunt Varina will stay with me gladly.”

“Others have to stay, if it’s only to hide what you are doing. It’s not decent, Sylvia! Believe me, you will lose the man’s own respect if you behave so. No man can permanently respect a woman who betrays her feelings so openly.”

“My dear Aunt Nannie,” said Sylvia, quietly, “I am quite sure that I know Frank Shirley better than you do.”

“Poor, deluded child,” was Mrs. Chilton’s comment. “You’ll find to your sorrow some day that men are all alike!”

But the girl was obdurate. The family had to proceed to desperate measures. First her mother declared that she would stay also—she must remain to protect her unfortunate child. And then, of course, the Major decided that it was his duty to remain. There came the question of Celeste, who had planned a house party, and foresaw the spoiling of her fun by the selfishness of her sister. There was also the baby—the precious, ineffable baby, the heir of all the might, majesty and dominion of the Lysles. The family physician intervened—the child must positively have the mountain air. Also the Major’s liver trouble was serious, he was sleeping badly and working too hard, and was in desperate need of a change. Prompted by Aunt Nannie, the doctor said this in Sylvia’s hearing—and settled the matter.

It had been Frank’s idea to remain at Cambridge and study during the summer, so as to make up some “conditions;” but when he learned that Sylvia intended to remain at the Hall, he decided to stand the expense of coming home. He arrived there to find that she had suddenly changed her mind and was going—and offering but slight explanation of her change. Sylvia was intensely humiliated because of the attitude of her family, and was trying to spare Frank the pain of knowing about it.

So came the beginning of unhappiness between them. Frank was acutely conscious of his inferiority to her in all worldly ways. And he knew that her relatives were trying to break down her resolution. He could not believe that they would succeed; and yet, there was a bitter and disillusioned man within him who could not believe that they would fail. In his soul there were always thorns of doubt, which festered, and now and then would cause him pangs of agony. But he was as proud as any savage, and would have died before he would ask for mercy. When he learned that she was going away from him, for no better reason than her relatives’ objections, he felt that she did not care enough for him. And then, when he did not protest, it was Sylvia’s turn to worry. So it really did not matter to him whether she stayed or not! It might be that Aunt Nannie was right after all, that a man ceased to love a woman who gave herself too freely.

The matter was complicated by the episode of Beauregard Dabney, about which I have to tell.

You have heard, perhaps, of the Dabneys of Charleston; the names of three of them—Beauregard’s grandfather and two great-uncles—may be read upon the memorial tablets in the stately old church which is the city’s pride. In Charleston they have a real aristocracy—gentlemen so poor that they wear their cuffs all ragged, yet are received with homage in the proudest homes in the South. The Dabneys had a city mansion with front steps crumbling away, and a country house which would not keep out the rain; and yet when Beauregard, the young scion of the house, fell prey to the charm and animation of Harriet Atkinson, whose father’s street railroad was equal to a mint, the family regarded it as the greatest calamity since Appomattox.

He had followed Harriet to Castleman County; and when the news got out, a detachment of uncles and aunts came flying, and captured the poor boy, and were on the point of shipping him home, when Harriet called Sylvia to the rescue. Sylvia could impress even the Dabneys; and if only she would have Beauregard and one of the aunts invited to Castleman Hall, it might yet be possible to save the situation.

Sylvia had met young Dabney once, when visiting in Charleston. She remembered him as an effeminate-mannered youth, with what would have been a doll-baby face but for the fact that the nose caved in in the middle in a disturbing way. “Tell me, Harriet,” she asked, when she met her friend—“are you in love with him?”

“I don’t know,” said Harriet. “I’m afraid I’m not—at least, not very much.”

“But why do you want to marry a man you don’t love?”

Harriet was driving, and she grasped the reins tightly and gave the horse a flick with the whip. “Sunny,” she said, “you might as well face the fact—I could never fall in love as you have. I don’t believe in it. I wouldn’t want to. I’d never let myself trust a man that much.”

“But then, why marry?”

“I have to marry. What can I do? I’m tired of being chaperoned, and I don’t want to be an old maid.”

Sylvia pondered for a moment. “Suppose,” she said, “that you should marry him, and then meet a man you loved?”

“I’ve already answered that—it won’t happen. I’m too selfish.” She paused, and then added, “It’s all right, Sunny. I’ve figured over it, and I’m not making any mistake. He’s a good fellow, and I like him. He’s a gentleman—he does not offend me. Also, he’s very much in love with me, which is the best way; I’ll always be the boss in my own home. He’s respected, and I’ll help out my poor struggling family if I marry him. You know how it is, Sunny—I vowed I’d never be a climber, but it’s hard to pull back when your people are eager for the heights. And then, too, it’s always a temptation to want to go where you’re told you can’t go.”

“Yes, I know that,” said Sylvia. “But that’s a joke, and marrying’s a serious matter.”

“It’s only that because we make it so,” retorted the other. “I find myself bored to death, and here’s something that rouses my fighting blood. They say I sha’n’t have him—and so I want him. I’m going to break into that family, and then I’m going to shake the rats out of the hair of some of those old maid aunts of his!”

She laughed savagely and drove on for a while. “Sunny,” she resumed at last, “you’re all right. You know it, but I tell you so anyway. You never were a snob that I know—but I’m cynical enough to say that it’s only because you are too proud. Can you imagine how you’d feel if anybody tried to patronize you? Can you imagine how you’d feel if everybody did it? I’m tired of it—don’t you see? And Beauregard is my way of escape. I’m going to marry him if I possibly can; my mind is made up to it. I’ve got the whole plan of campaign laid out—your part included.”

“What’s my part, Harriet?”

“It’s very simple. I want you to let Beauregard fall in love with you.”

“With me!”

“Yes. I want you to give him the worst punishment you ever gave a man in your life.”

“But what’s that for?”

“He’s in love with me—he wants me—and he’s too much of a coward to marry me. And I want to see him suffer for it—as only you can make him. I want you to take him and maul him, I want you to bray him and pound him in your mortar, I want you to roll him and toss him about, to walk on him and stamp on him, to beat him to a jelly and grind him to a powder! I want you to keep it up till he’s thoroughly reduced—and then you can turn him over to me.”

“And then you will heal him?” inquired Sylvia—who had not been alarmed by this bloodthirsty discourse.

“Perhaps I will and perhaps I won’t,” said the other. “What is there in the maxims of Lady Dee about a broken heart?”

“The best way to catch a man,” quoted Sylvia, “is on the rebound!”

§ 30

I don’t know how this adventure will seem to you. To me it was atrocious; but Sylvia undertook it with a child’s delight.

“I had on a white hat with pink roses,” she said, when she told me about it; “and I could always do anything to a man when I had pink roses on. Beauregard was waiting for Harriet to go driving when I first saw him; she was upstairs, late on purpose. He said something about my looking like a rose myself—he was the most obvious of human creatures. And when he asked me to get in and sit by him, I said, ‘Harriet will be jealous.’ Of course he was charmed at the idea of Harriet’s being jealous. So he asked me to take a little drive with him, and we stayed out an hour—and by the time we got back, I had him!”

Two days later he was on his knees begging Sylvia to marry him. At which, of course, she was horrified. “Why, you’re supposed to be in love with my best friend!”

He was frank about it, poor soul. “Of course, Miss Sylvia,” he explained, “I was in love with Harriet; and Harriet’s a fine girl, all right. It’s bad about her family, but I thought we could go away where nobody knew her, and people would accept her as my wife, and they’d soon forget. She’s jolly and interesting, and all that. But you understand, surely, Miss Sylvia—no man would marry Harriet Atkinson if he could get you. You—you’re quite different, Miss Sylvia. You’re one of us!”

He made Sylvia furious by his matter-of-fact snobbery; and so she was lovely to him. She told him that she, too, had been in love, but her family was opposed to the man, and now she was very unhappy. She told him that she was not worthy of the love of such a man as he. Poor Beauregard tried his best to reassure her, and followed her about day and night for ten days, and was a most dreadful nuisance.

Each day she would report to Harriet the stage of infatuation to which he had come; until at last Harriet’s thirst for blood was satisfied. Then, dressed all in snow-white muslin and lace, Sylvia took her devoted suitor off to a seat in a distant grape-arbor, and there administered the dose she had prepared for him. “Mr. Dabney,” she said, “this joke has got to be such a bore that I can’t stand it.”

“What joke?” asked Beauregard, innocently.

“You know that I have called myself a friend of Harriet Atkinson’s. When you came to me and told me that you loved her, but wanted to marry me because my family was better than hers—did it never occur to you how it would strike her friend? Evidently not. Well, let me tell you then—I could think that it was the stupidest joke I had ever heard, or else that you were the most arrogant jack that ever walked on two legs. I said that I would punish you—and I’ve been doing it. You must understand that I never felt the least particle of interest in you; I never met a man who’d be less apt to attract me, and I can’t see how you managed to interest Harriet. I assure you you’ve no reason for holding the extravagant opinion of yourself which you do.”

The poor youth sat staring at her, unable to believe his ears. And so, of course, Sylvia began to feel sorry for him. “I can see,” she said, “that there might be something in you to like—if only you had the courage to be yourself. But you’re so terrorized by your aunts and uncles, you’ve let them make you into such a dreadful snob——”

She paused. “You really think I am a snob?” he cried.

“The worst I ever met. I couldn’t bring myself to discuss it with you. Let me give you this one piece of advice, though; if you think you’re too good to marry a girl, pray find it out before you tell her that you love her. Of course, I’m not sorry that it happened this time, for you won’t break Harriet’s heart, and she’s a thousand times too good for you. So I’m not sorry that you’ve lost her.”

“You—you think that I’ve lost her, Miss Sylvia?” gasped the other.

“Lost her?” echoed Sylvia. “Why, you don’t mean—” But then she stopped. She must not make it impossible for him to think of Harriet again. “You’ve lost her, unless she’s a great deal more generous than I’d ever be.”

Beauregard took his drubbing very well. He persuaded Sylvia to discuss his snobbery with him, and confessed the offence, and got up quite a fire of indignation against his banded relatives. Also he admitted that Harriet was too good for him, and that he had treated her like a cad. His speeches grew shorter and his manner more anxious, and Sylvia could see that his main thought was to get back and find out if he’d really lost Harriet.

So she called her friend up on the ’phone and announced, “He’s coming. Get on your prettiest dress without delay!” And then Sylvia went away and had a cry—first, because she had said such cruel things, and second, because her mother and father would be unhappy when they learned that Beauregard had escaped her.

An hour later Harriet called up to say that it was all over. “Did you accept him?” asked Sylvia.

To which the other answered, “You may trust me now, Sunny! You have made him into a soft dough, and I’ll knead him.” And sure enough, the new Beauregard Dabney sent his aunts and uncles flying, and followed Harriet to her summer home on the Gulf, and was hardly to be induced to wait for a conventional wedding—so eager was he to prove to himself and to Sylvia Castleman that he was really not a coward and a snob!

§ 31

It was in the midst of these adventures that Frank Shirley made his unexpected return from the North. On the day when he came to see her first, she naturally forgot about the existence of Beauregard Dabney—until Beauregard suddenly appeared and flew into a fit of jealousy. Then the imp of mischievousness got hold of Sylvia; she found herself wondering, “Would it be possible for Frank to be jealous of Beauregard? And if he was, how would he behave?”

“I knew it was dreadful then,” she told me, “but I couldn’t have helped it if I’d been risking my life. I had to see what Frank would do when he was jealous. I simply had to! It was a kind of insanity!”

So she tried it, and did not get much fun out of the experience. Frank was like an Indian in captivity; he could not be made to cry out under torture. He saw Beauregard’s position, and the unconcealed delight of the family; but he set his lips together and never gave a sign. Sylvia was going away for the summer, and Beauregard was talking about following her. There would be other suitors following her, no doubt—and new ones on the ground. Frank went home, and Sylvia did not hear from him for several days.

The Beauregard episode came to its appointed end, and then, in a letter to Frank, Sylvia mentioned that she had accomplished her purpose—the youth was engaged to Harriet. She thought this was explaining things. But how could Frank imagine the complications of the art of man-catching? Was Sylvia jesting with him, or trying to blind him, or apologizing to him, or what?

Sylvia kept putting off her start to the mountains—she could not bear to go while things were in such a state between them. But, while she was still hesitating, to her consternation she received a note from him saying that he was starting for Colorado. He had received a telegram that an aunt was dead; there were business matters to be attended to—some property which for his sisters’ sake could not be neglected. It was a cold, business-like note, with not a word of sorrow at parting; and Sylvia shed tears over it. Such is the irrationality of those in love, she had forgotten all about young Dabney or any other cause for doubt and unhappiness she might have given Frank. She thought that he, and he alone, had been unkind. And meantime, Frank had made up his mind that she was repenting of her engagement, and that it was his duty to make it easy for her to withdraw.

So the two spent an unhappy summer. Sylvia let herself be taken about to parties, but she grew more weary every hour of the social game. “I’ve smiled until I’ve got the lockjaw,” she would say. She was losing weight and growing pale, in spite of the mountain air.

September came, and Harriet’s wedding was set for the next month, and likewise Frank’s return to Harvard. He came back from the West, and Sylvia wrote asking him to come and visit her for a week. But to her consternation there came in reply a polite refusal from Frank. There was so much that needed his attention on the plantation, and some studying that must be done if he was to make good. For three days Sylvia struggled with herself, the last stand of that barbarian pride of hers; then she gave way completely and sent him a telegram: “Please come at once.”

She would have recalled it an hour afterwards, but it was too late; and that evening she received an answer, to the effect that he would arrive in the morning. She spent a sleepless night imagining his coming, and a score of different ways in which she would meet him. She would throw herself at his feet and beg him not to torture her; she would array herself in her newest gown and fascinate him in the good old way; she would climb once more upon the pinnacle of her pride and compel him to humble himself before her.

In the morning she drove to meet him, together with a cousin who had come on the same train. She never stood a worse social ordeal than that drive and the luncheon with the family. But at last they were alone together, and sat gazing at each other with eyes full of bewilderment and pain.

“Sylvia,” said Frank, finally, “you do not look happy.”

“Why should I be happy?” she asked.

There was a pause. “Listen,” he said. “Can we not deal honestly with each other—openly and sincerely, for once. Surely that is the best way, Sylvia—no matter how much it hurts.”

“I am ready to do it,” she replied.

“You don’t have to spare my feelings,” he went on. “I know all you have to contend with, and I sha’n’t blame you. The one thing I can’t bear is to be played with, to be lured by false hopes, to drag on and on, tormented by uncertainty.”

She was gazing at him, bewildered. “Why do you say all that, Frank?” she cried.

“Why should I not say it?” he asked; and again they stared at each other.

Suddenly she broke out, in a voice full of anguish, “Frank, this is what I want to know—answer me this! Do you love me?”

“Do I love you?” he echoed.

“Yes,”—and with greater intensity, “I want you to be honest about it!”

“Honey!” he said, his voice trembling, “it’s the question of whether I’m allowed to love you. It’s so terrible to me—I can’t stand the uncertainty.”

She cried again, “But do you want to love me?”

She heard his voice break, she saw the emotion that was shaking him, and with a sudden sob she was in his arms. “Oh, Frank, Frank!” she exclaimed. “What have we been doing to each other?”

And so at last the fog of misunderstanding was lifted. “Sweetheart,” he exclaimed, “what could you have been thinking?”

“I thought you had stopped loving me because I had been too bold, because I had been unwomanly.”

“Why, Sylvia, you must be mad! Have I not been hungry for your love?”

“Oh, tell me that I can love you!” she wailed. “Tell me that you won’t grow tired of me if I love you!”

He clasped her in his arms and covered her lips with kisses; he soothed her like a frightened child. She was free now to sob out her grief, to tell him what she had felt throughout all these months of misery. “Oh, why didn’t you come to me like this before?” she asked.

“But, Sylvia,” he answered, “how could I know? I saw you letting another man make love to you——”

“But, Frank, that was only a joke!”

“But how could I know that?”

“How could you imagine anything else? That I could prefer Beauregard Dabney to you!”

“That’s easy to say,” he replied. “But there was your family—I knew what they’d prefer, and I saw how they were struggling to keep us apart. And what was I to think—why should you be giving him your time, unless you wanted to let me know——”

“Ah, don’t say that! Don’t say that!” she cried, quickly. “It’s wicked that such a thing should have happened.”

“We must learn to talk things out frankly,” he said. “For one thing you must not let your family come between us again. You must free me from this dreadful fear that they are going to take you from me.”

And suddenly Sylvia blazed up. All the misunderstanding had come from the opposition of her family, and her unwillingness to talk to Frank about it. “I never saw it so clearly before,” she exclaimed. “Frank, I can never make them see things my way. And they’ll always have this dreadful power over me—because I love them so!”

“What can you do then?” he asked.

“I’m going to betray them to you!” she cried. And as he looked puzzled, she went on, “I’m going to tell you about them! I’m going to tell you everything they’ve said and done, and everything they may say and do in the future!”

“And that,” said Frank to me, “was the most loving thing she ever said!” Such was the power, in Sylvia’s world, of the ideal of the Family!