Elton, peering over his newspaper in welcome.

"Do I, father?" Madeline stooped to rub her cheek softly against his and laughed to herself. "Why, I believe I have. That shows what a whirligig I am. I went out thinking life was a tragedy, and I come back thinking it--"

"What, little girl?"

"A divine comedy," said Madeline and laughed again. "Just see what a walk in the open air will do for a body."

CHAPTER XVIII

EASTER

Easter came late in April, when, to match man's mood, it should come; for the world was alive with new vitality. The south winds were infusing their wonder-working heats, and the bluebirds flashing their streaks of color through branches that felt the stir of sap, amid buds that strained to burst. There was the smell of growth where bits of "secret greenness" hid behind the dead leaves of last fall.

On Sat.u.r.day evening Mrs. Lenox welcomed the same circle that had met at her home the November before, and Lena's little heart glowed with the soul-satisfying sense of the difference to her. Then she had been a social waif, received on sufferance. Now she was one of them. She could even afford to have her own opinions. The very memory of past discomforts doubled the present blessedness, and Mr. Lenox looked only half the size that he had six months before. It was a long stride to have taken in half a year, and with reason she congratulated herself on her cleverness. In Mr. Lenox's gravity of manner as he took her in to dinner, she perceived only respect for Mrs. Percival, not knowing that he had in mind the small episode of the _Chatterer_, which his wife and Miss Elton had agreed to ignore.

"What very sensible people we are!" exclaimed Mrs. Lenox as she surveyed her small table party. "We shall spend to-morrow in hunting for anemones instead of looking at our neighbors' spring fineries; we shall catch the first robin at his love song, instead of listening to the cut and dried, much-practised church music; and we shall find rest to our souls. d.i.c.k, I am sure you need it. You look worn out. I'm afraid politics is proving a hard mistress."

"I wonder if it is possible to do too much," said d.i.c.k, rousing himself, with manifest languor. "It's only the way he does it that plays a man out. Here's Ellery, now, who works like a galley slave and looks as fresh as the proverbial daisy."

"Well, come, you are criticizing yourself even more severely," Mr. Lenox said. "You'll have to learn the secret, d.i.c.k, of letting your arms and legs and brain work for you, while your inner man remains at peace.

That's the only way an American man can live in these hustling days; and if you don't master it, the young men will come in and carry you out by the time that you are fifty."

"And there are worse things than that," rejoined d.i.c.k. "I suppose it is the universal experience that when one gets out of the freedom of extreme youth and settles down to the jog-trot, harnessed life, the way looks rather long and monotonous. A fellow can't help feeling tired to think how tired he'll be before he gets to the end. To-night I feel as old and dry as a mummy. If you touch me, I'll crumble."

"Mrs. Lenox and I have been longer in the game than you, d.i.c.k," answered his host whimsically. "We are getting dangerously near the equator; and we do not find ourselves exhausted. On the contrary, I rather think the scenery improves, in some respects, as we go along."

"You are hardly capable of measuring the common fate. You have had the touchstone of success, and the world has opened up before you. But what depress me and impress me are the sodden people whom I meet by the hundred; and I can't help reading my fate in the light of theirs. There are such millions of us, obscure and uncounted except on the census."

"If you will persist in talking serious things," said Ellery, "isn't obscurity, after all, an internal and not an external quality? You've got to believe that you are a creature that is worth while. There is no bitterness in belonging to the myriads if the myriads are themselves dignified by nature."

"But are they?" cried d.i.c.k, now rousing himself. "I look at every face I pa.s.s on the street. I'm always on the search for some ideal quality; and what do I see? Egotism and greed answer me from all their eyes. The ninety and nine have gone astray."

"Then it belongs to you to be the hundredth who does not go astray; and who gives a satisfactory answer to the same eternal questioning that meets you in the eyes of other men. It's not given to any man to play a neutral part in the world conflict. In all the magnificent interplay of forces, I doubt if there is any force strong enough to keep one standing still."

"Yes, my dear Ellery. And it is just that eternal motion that I am complaining about. It is burdensome to the flesh and wearisome to the imagination to look forward to a future of eternal rushing and striving.

I have a mult.i.tude of experiences every year, and I straightway forget them; and that deepens the impression that all these little affairs of ours, about which we make such an infernal racket at the time, are matters of very small importance in the march of the centuries. The march of the centuries may be majestic, but the waddle of this little ant of a man is not. It's insignificant."

"That's a dangerous state of mind to be in, d.i.c.k," said Lenox.

"And after all, you can't help being a very important thing to yourself," said Madeline. "And it must be of eternal significance to you whether your soul is walking with the centuries or against them."

"My dear Madeline," answered d.i.c.k, "when I am with you and such as you who live on a little remote mountain, eternity seems a very important matter; but when I am with most people, next Wednesday, when taxes are due, looms up and shuts out eternity. And you will permit me to think that you women who are sheltered and who sit with the good things of life heaped about you, don't know very much about practical conditions."

"But why isn't my conscience as practical as my clothes?" persisted Madeline. "And why is the fortune made to-day in Montana mines and lost to-morrow in Wall Street any more practical than this same majestic march of the centuries and the great thoughts that circle about it?

'Practical' is such a foolish word, d.i.c.k."

"Undoubtedly, to you," said d.i.c.k with a little sneer. "But to most of the race to which we have the honor to belong it is the word that makes the dictionary heavy. It is because you do not know its meaning that you women, or perhaps I ought to use the despised term, 'ladies,' become the very beautiful and useless articles that you are--works of art, which may thrill and charm a man for a moment, when he has time to look at them, but which bear little relation to the stress of life which you can not comprehend."

"d.i.c.k!" Madeline spoke almost with tears in her eyes. "It is not like you to have a fling at women."

"You see I'm gathering wisdom as I go along."

"Gathering idiocy, you mean," interposed Mr. Lenox. "d.i.c.k, you young fool, the ideal woman is the goal toward which the rest of humanity must run; and the sooner you bend all your practical faculties in that direction, and there abase the knee, the better for you."

He nodded down the table toward his wife, and she pursed up her lips and said, "You nice goose! That's the way to keep us sweet-tempered."

"I hope you're not going to turn cynic, d.i.c.k," said Ellery. "The role does not fit you."

"A cynic," interposed Mrs. Lenox, "always thinks that he has discovered the sourness of the world. In reality all he has found is his own bad digestion. I should hate to think there was anything on my table to cause acute indigestion, d.i.c.k."

"Perhaps there is a cog loose in his brain so that his wheels do not work together," added Ellery.

"At any rate, cynicism is self-confessed failure; so don't give way to it," Mr. Lenox concluded.

"Oh, I give up. Spare me," cried d.i.c.k.

Mrs. Lenox rose with a little nod, and as Madeline swept past him towards the door, d.i.c.k turned for an instant and stopped her laughingly.

"Forgive me," he said. "I did not mean it. I felt like saying something obnoxious."

"But you always used to want to be nice, d.i.c.k," she answered.

"Miss Elton," Mrs. Percival spoke severely, as a matron to a heedless girl, "perhaps the gentlemen would prefer to have their smoke alone. Are you coming to the drawing-room with us?"

Later, much later, Lena, in the privacy of her own room, awaited the coming of her husband who seemed to her to prolong outrageously the game of billiards which made his excuse for sitting up a little longer than herself. She shook out her fluff of hair, and arrayed herself in a bewildering pink dressing-gown from beneath which she toasted some very pink toes before the fire. She knew what arguments told on the masculine intellect. And at last d.i.c.k came.

"Sit down over there," she commanded. "No, you shan't come near me, d.i.c.k, until I've said my say. I'm really much displeased, and you need not act as though you thought it was a trifling matter."

d.i.c.k sat humbly in the spot appointed.

"d.i.c.k, I don't want you to say any more horrid little things about women. You've done it several times lately. The other day you said something to Mr. Early about his 'glorious freedom'; and you made a sneering remark to Mr. Preston about women's small dishonesties."

"Only jokes, I a.s.sure you."

"Everybody knows that women are a great deal better than men."

"They must be," said d.i.c.k. "Literature is full of statements to that effect."

"And marriage is far more desirable than 'glorious freedom'."

"It is," answered d.i.c.k. "So long as there are things to disagree about, marriage will not lose its savor."

"You say that in a perfectly mean way, as though you did not really believe anything nice. But whether you believe it or not, I am going to ask you not to talk so any more," Mrs. Percival went on with dignity, "because it sounds exactly like a criticism of me, and I think you owe it to me to treat me with respect. What must people think of me when you fling in--what do you call them--innuendoes like that around?"

Mr. Percival looked at his wife in silence; then he picked her up, chair and all, and whirled her around in front of a long pier gla.s.s.