"Is she wicked?"

"I don't know; she keeps it to herself if she is; and, by the way, she is very quiet, I can never get her to talk much about herself. She appears so good that mother is beginning to quote her as an example, and that, you know, always makes one detest a person. I think there is some mystery about her. I'm sorry you will go, for I've lots of questions I'd like to ask you now we are acquainted."

"Pardon me; I'm not strong, and must have a rest. Silas Jones will answer just as well."

"Not quite," she said softly, with a smile designed to be bewitching.

As I pa.s.sed up the hall I heard her say, "Silas Jones, I'm pleased to see thee."

I threw myself on the lounge in my room in angry disgust.

"O Nature!" I exclaimed, "what excuse have you for such perverseness?

By every law of probability--by the ordinary sequence of cause and effect--this girl should have been what I fancied her to be. This, then, forsooth, is the day of my fate! It would be the day of doom did some malicious power chain me to this brainless, soulless, heartless creature. What possessed Nature to make such a blunder, to begin so fairly and yet reach such a lame and impotent conclusion? To the eye the girl is the fair and proper outcome of this home and beautiful country life. In reality she is a flat contradiction to it all, reversing in her own character the native traits and acquired graces of her father and mother.

"As if controlled and carried forward by a hidden and malign power, she goes steadily against her surrounding influences that, like the winds of heaven, might have wafted her toward all that is good and true. Is not sweet, quaint Mrs. Yocomb her mother? Is not the genial, hearty old gentleman her father? Has she not developed among scenes that should enn.o.ble her nature, and enrich her mind with ideality? There is Oriental simplicity and largeness in her parents' faith. Abraham sitting at the door of his tent, could scarcely have done better. Hers is the simplicity of silliness, which reveals what a woman of sense, though no better than herself, would not speak of. It is exasperating to think that her eyes and fingers are endowed with a sense of harmony and beauty, so that she can cut a gown and adorn her lovely person to perfection, and yet be so idiotic as to make a spectacle of herself in her real womanhood. As far as I can make out, Nature is more to blame than the girl. There is not a bat blinking in the sunlight more blind than she to every natural beauty of this June day; and yet her eyes are microscopic, and she sees a host of little things not worth seeing. A true womanly moral nature seems never to have been infused into her being. She detests children, her little sister shrinks from her; she speaks and surmises evil of the absent; to strut down Fifth Avenue in finery, to which she has given her whole soul, is her ideal of happiness--there, stop! She is the daughter of my kind host and hostess. The mystery of this world's evil is sadly exemplified in her defective character, from which sweet, true womanliness was left out. I should pity her, and treat her as if she were deformed. Poor Mrs.

Yocomb! Even mother-love cannot blind her to the truth that her fair daughter is a misshapen creature." After a little, I added wearily, "I wish I had never seen her; I am the worse for this day's mirage," and I closed my eyes in dull apathy.

CHAPTER V

MUTUAL DISCOVERIES

I must have slept for an hour or more, for when I awoke I saw through the window-lattice that the sun was declining in the west. Sleep had again proved better than all philosophy or medicine, for it had refreshed me and given something of the morning's elasticity.

I naturally indulged in a brief retrospect, conscious that while nothing had happened, since the croaking printer's remark, that I would care to print in the paper, experiences had occurred that touched me closer than would the news that all the Malays of Asia were running amuck. I felt as if thrown back on to my old life and work in precisely their old form. My expedition into the country and romance had been disappointing. It is true I had found rest and sleep, and for these I was grateful, and with these stanch allies I can go on with my work, which I now believe is the best thing the world has for me. I shall go back to it to-morrow, well content, after this day's experience, to make it my mistress. The bare possibility of being yoked to such a woman as in fancy I have wooed and won to-day makes me shiver with inexpressible dread. Her obtuseness, combined with her microscopic surveillance, would drive me to the nearest madhouse I could find. The whole business of love-making and marriage involves too much risk to a man who, like myself, must use his wits as a sword to carve his fortunes. I've fought my way up alone so far, and may as well remain a free lance. The wealthy, and those who are content to plod, can go through life with a woman hanging on their arm. Rich I shall never be, and I'll die before I'll plod. My place is in the midst of the world's arena, where the forces that shall make the future are contending, and I propose to be an appreciable part of those forces. I shall go back the wiser and stronger for this day's folly, and infinitely better for its rest, and I marched down the moody stairway, feeling that I was not yet a crushed and broken man, and cherishing also a secret complacency that I had at last outgrown my leanings toward sentimentality.

As I approached the door of the wide, low-browed parlor, I saw Miss Warren reading a paper; a second later and my heart gave a bound: it was the journal of which I was the night editor, and I greeted its familiar aspect as the face of an old friend in a foreign land. It was undoubtedly the number that had gone to press the night I had broken down, and I almost hoped to see some marks of the catastrophe in its columns. How could I beguile the coveted sheet from Miss Warren's hands and steal away to a half-hour's seclusion?

"What! Miss Warren," I exclaimed, "reading a newspaper on Sunday?"

She looked at me a moment before replying, and then asked:

"Do you believe in a Providence?"

Thrown off my guard by the unexpected question, I answered:

"a.s.suredly; I am not quite ready to admit that I am a fool, even after all that has happened."

There was laughter in her eyes at once, but she asked innocently:

"What has happened?"

I suppose my color rose a little, but I replied carelessly, "I have made some heavy blunders of late. You are adroit in stealing away from a weak position under a fire of questions, but your stratagem shall not succeed," I continued severely. "How can you explain the fact, too patent to be concealed, that here in good Mrs. Yocomb's house, and on a Sunday afternoon, you are reading a secular newspaper?"

"You have explained my conduct yourself," she said, a.s.suming a fine surprise.

"I?"

"You, and most satisfactorily. You said you believed in a Providence. I have merely been reading what he has done, or what he has permitted, within the last twenty-four hours."

I looked around for a chair, and sat down "struck all of a heap," as the rural vernacular has it.

"Is that your definition of news?" I ventured at last.

"I'm not a dictionary. That's the definition of what I've been reading this afternoon."

"Miss Warren, you may score one against me."

The mischievous light was in her eyes, but she said suavely:

"Oh, no, you shall have another chance. I shall begin by showing mercy, for I may need it, and I see that you can be severe."

"Well, please, let me take breath and rally my shattered wits before I make another advance. I understand you, then, that you regard newspapers as good Sunday reading?"

"You prove your ability, Mr. Morton, by drawing a vast conclusion from a small and ill-defined premise. I don't recall making any such statement."

"Pardon me, you are at disadvantage now. I ask for no better premise than your own action; for you are one, I think, who would do only what you thought right."

"A palpable hit. I'm glad I showed you mercy. Still it does not follow that because I read a newspaper, all newspapers are good Sunday reading. Indeed, there is much in this paper that is not good reading for Monday or any other day."

"Ah!" I exclaimed, looking grave, "then why do you read it?"

"I have not. A newspaper is like the world of which it is a brief record--full of good and evil. In either case, if one does not like the evil, it can be left alone."

"Which do you think predominates in that paper?"

"Oh, the good, in the main. There is an abundance of evil, too, but it is rather in the frank and undisguised record of the evil in the world.

It does not seem to have got into the paper's blood and poisoned its whole life. It is easily skipped if one is so inclined. There are some journals in which the evil cannot be skipped. From the leading editorial to the obscurest advertis.e.m.e.nt, one stumbles on it everywhere. They are like certain regions in the South, in which there is no escape from the snakes and malaria. Now there are low places in this paper, but there is high ground also, where the air is good and wholesome, and where the outlook on the world is wide. That is the reason I take it."

"I was not aware that many young ladies looked, in journals of this character, beyond the record of deaths and marriages."

"We studied ancient history. Is it odd that we should have a faint desire to know what Americans are doing, as well as what the Babylonians did?"

"Oh, I do not decry your course as irrational. It seems rather--rather--"

"Rather too rational for a young lady."

"I did not say that; but here is my excuse," and I took from a table near a periodical ent.i.tled "The Young Lady's Own Weekly," addressed to Miss Adah Yocomb.

"Have not young men their own weeklies also--which of the two cla.s.ses is the more weakly?"

"Ahem! I decline to pursue this phase of the subject any further. To return to our premise, this journal," and I laid my hand on the old paper caressingly. "It so happens that I read it also, and thus learn that we have had many thoughts in common; though, no doubt, we would differ on some of the questions discussed in it. What do you think of its politics?"

"I think they are often very bad."

"That's delightfully frank," I said, sitting back in my chair a little stiffly. "I think they are very good--at any rate they are mine."