# Disintegration.

## Book 1.

Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, gethan?

### 1.

"There she goes!" Val whispered, twitching her nurse's sleeve.

Shining亮光 attracted attention. In the springtime, she was a beautiful girl, and this caused many to gather around her. However, she was also seen by some as auspicious omes, or omes to death. The panels of her harness were often seen to come off, and she was seen by some to be a dangerous object. But what was most notable was the way in which she moved. She would often be seen to walk along Fifth Avenue, the slender lady, erect under theParkway procession. Her sunshade, passed so close that Valeria could see the pearls about her neck and the bracelets slipping back from her wrist.

"Don't, lovey, don't," Mary Noonan entreated, averting her head from the forbidden enchantment of the sight, and her ears from the child's inevitable question: "Why mayn't I look at my own mamma?"

"The Lord in His mercy knows, darling — and your own papa asking you not to!"

"That's what you always say, Noony; but why does papa ask me not to? Did you see the big blue stone in her bracelet? I never saw her wear that hat before. Noony, isn't she the beautifullest

2.

mother in the world?

"That she is, darling, and used to nurse you in her arms
as innocent-like — and don't you ever speak of her again, lovey,
or Noon'll have to leave you."

This threat always reduced Valeria to silence, not from
any fear of its fulfillment — Noony being obliviously one of the
fundamental facts of life — but because it was the accepted signal
of the nurse's surrender, and Valeria scorned the tame diversion of
arguing with a routed opponent. If Noony had a fault, it was her
dialectical weakness, and her haste to take sanctuary in the threat
of leaving Valeria. For this defect, however, she atoned by quali-
ties unmatched within the range of Val's experience: such as her
power of sustained attention while pages of "story-book" were poured
into her ear in the monotonous shout of infancy; her familiarity
with the wants and habits of puppies, rabbits, squirrels, and other
small mammals; her tolerance of messy live things in basins, and her
unfailing readiness to "tidy up" the nursery after those holiday
afternoons which, to most children, are dimmed by the impending ob-
ligation of having to put things away. Noony was as full of moral
axioms as a copy-book; but there was a genial discrepancy between
her principles and conduct, and most of her rules were no more meant
for use than the "Sunday silk" which she kept in the bottom of an
old brindled trunk in the attic. On essential points she was in-
exorable; but Valeria knew that the malum prohibitum of dabbling in
the ink~~ and~~ or wading in a clean frock was divided by the whole
width of her nurse's cheerful tolerance from the malum in se of
meanness or falsehood. Noony had the Irish gift

3.

of evading a moral, and her ingenuity in finding reasons for
overlooking Valeria's infraction of nursery laws kept pace with her
charge's versatility in breaking them.

"If it 'ud bring her mother back I'd do it!" Val once
heard her say to a Presbyterian housemaid zealous for the child's
chastisement; and this hint of the unavailingness of any peril to
evoke the protecting arms of motherhood gave Val her first clear
sense of loneliness. She knew, of course — had known, since the
cataclysmic day when the nursery fire remained unlit, and there were
no lessons, and her supper was forgotten — that some change had
come over that part of her universe known as Mamma. The change was
mainly geographical, consisting in a closing of doors once inter-
mittently open to infantile peepings, and in a vast disgorgement of
closets and upheaval of trunks that resulted in the submergence of
the French maid who had ruled these chaotic elements. Other, less
tangible losses, there were too — the faint scent which had led one
as straight to Mamma's threshold as though her wardrobes were violet
beds in spring; the afternoon door-bell that heralded thrilling
glimpses of smoothly-brushed or speedily bald heads on their way up
to the drawing-room, punctually followed by a tea-tray laden with
seductions in pastry (so that Val pictured society as a glorified
nursery-party, with holiday privileges in the matter of cake and
jam); and, intensest of all, the bedtime vision of a glittering
lady sweeping down to the nightly brougham. Of more personal
changes the child remained unconscious, and after the first day she
hardly noticed an absence which affected none of the fundamental
laws of nursery life. Noony, at that time, was the ocean bounding

4.

her world; the continent "Mamma" forming an outer region of wonder
and fable, ~~to be~~ dreamed ever rather than lived in.

The child's clearest realization of her mother's absence
came through her father's presence. Val's father had always been
more remote than her mother, more conjectural, perhaps because less
vividly embodied. The child, on Noony's estimate, accepted him as
a great man; but her personal observation of him, restricted by
opportunity, was further hampered by fear. It was not that he was
unkind: he was gentler than her mother; but he had a *sudden*
al times almost as desolate as the doctor's command
expected way with him, Unluckily suggestive of a
to show one's tongue. Val, accustomed to lord it over Noony's men-
slower mind
oral processes, hung back bewildered from her father's abrupt transi-
tions. Even as a child she was too much concerned with her own
part in any transaction to resign herself to an admissible receptivi-
ty; and her father's wonderfulness, which was food for pride in his
absence, became an obstacle when they were together.

It was on the day of her mother's departure that, for the
first time, she lost this sense of constraint. Supperless and cold,
she was sitting in the nursery, wondering what mysterious catastrophe
had swept nurse and fire and bread-and-milk out of her *suddenly*
depopulated life, when the door opened and Clephane walked in.

"Hello," he said, "what are you doing here all alone?"

"I don't know," said Valeria, though it was an admission
she always hated to make.

The answer seemed to find an echo in her father's mood,
for he shrugged his shoulders and smiled, not unkindly.

"Haven't you had your supper?"

5.

"No, she answered with a swelling throat.

"Why, what a shame! And your little nose is blue. I'll
tell you what — you'll come down and dine with me."

She clapped her hands joyfully. "Oh, father — shall
I? May I? And have méringues, too?"

Still smiling, he lifted her against his shoulder. "I shouldn't wonder. If the house furnishes such things nowadays, But why méringues, especially?"

Valeria stretched her arms to the infantile limit of the
superlative. "Because I love them better than anything else in the
world."

"Upon my soul! Why, I didn't suppose you'd ever been
allowed to taste one."

She looked at him expressively. "I never have — that's
why!"

His hold loosened and he let her slip to his feet with an
odd murmur. "They're all alike!" she heard him say, in supposed
allusion to méringues; then his hand clasped hers, and he added,
with the sudden listlessness that often followed his fitful con-
descensions: "Well, come on then; we'll see what we can find."

That dinner — with her feet dangling for the first time
under the pink-shaded table where a reminiscence of Mamma still
lingered in the flowers and bonbons, and the little baskets of salt-
ed almonds — remained one of the most vivid landmarks of Valeria's
childhood. It must have been that very evening, amid the glorious
license of almonds, caramels, and méringues fetched hastily from the
confectionery shop, that she had her first intuition of her father's need

6.

of her: a need expressing itself, pathetically enough to maturer
observation, in his sudden sense of the responsibility she represent-
ed. Even to her undeveloped perceptions there was a trace of de-
pendence in his groping questions about her lessons, her exercise,
and all the details of Noony's administration. She felt that she
was "entertaining" him, as mamma entertained the gentlemen who came
to tea; a feeling increased discovery
to do so was somehow distinctly connected with her mother's being
away. Mamma had been away before; but this absence was different:
it was at once an end and a beginning. In a dim effort to account
for the difference, Val, after dinner, in the security of her father's
arms, ventured a question which she was sure would be guessed that Noony
would have forbidden: — "Will mamma be a long time away, father?"

Clephane seemed not to have heard. He continued to gaze
at the fire, a brooding hand in her hair.

"A long time," he said at length.

His daughter made a movement that brought her face close
to his.

"Then I'll take care of you, father, shan't I? And see
that everything's all right?"

"Of course you will." He met her movement with a kiss.
She flung her arms about him. "And you'll tell Noony — make
Noony understand?"

"Understand what?"

"That I'm to take care of you while mother's away."

"Of course. We'll tell her together."

8.

11.

Had Valeria been of an age to formulate her impressions, she might
have defined her mother's departure as the first in a series of
eliminations, of subtractions from the total of existence, so
that Mrs. Clephane's going seemed in the end to carry away more than
her brilliant presence had ever bestowed.

There was hardly a corner of the house from which she had
been so perennially absent that did not testify to this effect of
departure
her final removal. The flowers vanished first, unrenewed in the
drawing-room vases; the orris-scented cushions followed; the drawing-
room fire went out, and a tearful housemaid closed the door upon a
hearth restored to midsummer bareness. No afternoon door-bell
announced the approach of glossy-headed gentlemen; no passing tea-
tray left its wake upon the stairs; no ladies called in dazzling
glow-worm light
no messengers waiting for notes languished on the hall-
bench; no dressmakers' boxes bumped the angles of the narrow stair-
case; no cabs were suddenly called and as abruptly countermanded;
the pink candle-shades faded from the dining-table, and the cook
sank into a penitential routine of rice-pudding and mutton.
Hard on these lesser exclusions a greater followed, and Val, dis-

9.

mayed, beheld the closing of her father's door. He had come home one evening too tired to do more than smile at her across the table over which she was still permitted to preside; and sending away his food untasted, had finally dismissed her also with a imp patient kiss that drove her to the nursery in tears. The next morning she woke to the doctor's voice on the stairs; Noony checked her flight from her crib; and the servants hovered outside in groups that scattered at her approach.

The long days that followed were marked only by the doctor's visits and the gliding presence of her father's cousin, Mrs. Neafe. Mrs. Neafe was one of the women who scented illness from afar, and are on the spot at once with a bag and the assurance that they can "sleep anywhere." It was Val's bitterest grievance that this lady was admitted to the sick-room from which she was herself shut out. To the eager queries with which the child awaited her, on the threshold, Mrs. Neafe accorded only the incipient cry — "That woman, oh, that woman!" Val's soul was tremulous with the sense that this might mean her mother, in some mysterious way, she dared not ask. In some connected her father's illness with her mother's departure. When she asked Noony if Mamma would now come back, the nurse's corrugated face grew red, and turning away with excessively bright blue eyes, she muttered vaguely, "Where's my spectacles now, I wonder?"

Between Mrs. Neafe and Noony there reigned a veiled antagonism, shown on the nurse's side by an apparent inability to understand or transmit the other's depreciating orders, on Mrs. Neafe's by the extravagance of pity with which she enveloped Valeria

10.

in her nurse's presence. Mrs. Neafe's compassionate inuendoes
slowly widened the rift of perception through which it was borne in
Valeria that Mrs. Clephane's absence was permanent. To the
child's fancy, her mother had gone as summer goes, taking with her
warmth and light and flowers, but as certain to return in the punctu-
al rotation of the year; now Mrs. Neafe's allusions hinted at perman-
less, and one desolate night Val whispered the terrified question —
was her mother dead?

From Mrs. Neafe's damp endearments she extricated a cheer-
less "No."

"She'll come back then, by and bye?" Val persisted; and
Mrs. Neafe inconclusively answered that she did hope Mary Noonan
was particular about making her say her prayers.

to be held for
Valeria was too shrewd not to understand the meaning of
such evasive deflections. They all slammed the same door in
her face, and such unanimity of opposition kept her curiosity glued
to the crack.

It was one of Mrs. Neafe's ideas — an idea especially
offensive to Noony — that Valeria was too much alone; in pursuance
of which theory the child was frequently sent to Mrs. Neafe's own
house to play with that lady's little girl. Betty Neafe was a
small adroit person no older than Val but infinitely beyond her in the
exercise of those intuitions which are supposed to distinguish her
sex. The children had little in common, though Val's admiration of
her cousin's superior experience in a resigned acceptance of the games
that Betty preferred. These were chiefly connected with the social
life of dolls, and involved a minute reproduction of the conversa-

11.

tions overheard in Mrs. Neafe's drawing-room. Valeria had no great
taste for such diversions; and her subservience to her cousin was not
&mdash; but unmarked by intermittent flashes of rebellion.

"Oh, I'm so tired of playing visits," she protested one
day.

Betty stared with soft blue eyes. "Why, it's what you'll
have to do when you grow up."

"Well, I shan't, then!"

"If you don't, nobody'll visit you."

"I don't want them to," declared Valeria, &mdash; undifferently to this threat.

Betty's eyes widened. "But it's perfectly dreadful not
to be visited," she insisted.

"How do you know?"

"Because I do. It's like your Mamma."

"Like my Mamma?"

Betty nodded. "She isn't visited."

Valeria flared up. "She is, too! Crowds of people come every day. More than ever come here to see our mother."

Betty dimpled derisively. "Used to, you silly, before
she went away. Nobody visits her now."

There was a long, portentous silence. Valeria was tremb-
ling with inarticulate rage, but no retort came to her aid. At
last she said: "How do you know?"

Betty was affecting to dress one of her dolls with an air
of extreme preoccupation. Her small definite face was as impassive
as the doll's, but in reality she was afraid of Valeria.

12.

"I hear all the ladies say it," she returned with an as-
sumption of carelessness — "every one who comes to see mamma.
They're so sorry for mamma, because your mamma is her cousin — but
then, as mamma says, she's only a cousin by marriage."
Valeria's anger was mingled with perplexity. "Why are they sorry
for your mamma?" she faltered.

"Because it's so dreadful to be related to anybody im-
proper."

"Improper?" Val dropped her doll with a crash: the word
was the more dreadful for its lack of precise meaning. She flung
herself <u>suddenly</u> on Betty, blindly, wildly, with the fury of a <u>young</u>
savage. Betty's screams resounded, and Mrs. Neafe rushed in, fol-
lowed by a breathless nurse-maid.

"Children — Elizabeth — Valeria — what's the mat-

Betty stood sobbing, her frock disordered, her fair rump-
led hair looking like the halo of a rebel cherub.

"Elizabeth, what have you been doing?"

"I didn't do anything. She hit me and tore my new frock.

"Why did you do it, Valeria?"

Valeria raised her head defiantly. "Because she said my
mother was improper."

"Betty!" Mrs. Neafe heaved a despairing sigh. "I'm sure
I don't know where you learn such words. Haven't I told you never
to mention Valeria's mother?"

Val seized on this in a flash. "Why mayn't she mention
my mother?"

13.

Mrs. Neafe saw her mistake, and prudently took refuge in
anger.

"You're both very naughty children," she said, assuming a judicial tone. "I'm afraid I shall not be able to let you come here any longer, Valeria, if you are so rough with Betty. And, Betty, you are to ask Valeria not to be so naughty for having been rude. I can't imagine why you are both so unlikable. Valeria, Noonan will be coming for you soon, and you will be better put on your hat and make yourself tidy."

After that, for a long time, Val did not speak of her
mother. She knew it was useless to question Mary Noonan, who could
be as secret as a priest under her tender Irish garrulity; and
though Clephane was now better, and able to see his daughter for a
few moments daily, his pale face looked out at her so strangely from
the pillows that she was too shy to do more than lay her cheek
against the thin hand she held out to her.

When he was able to be up again spring had come, and they
left town and went down to Long Island. The return to the country
was always the climax of Valeria's year, and in the first confusing
sweetness of recovered acquaintance with lop-cared rabbits and
guinea-hens, she threw off the problem of her mother's fate. As
custom staled these delights the perplexity returned, and at night
in her little bed, or at dusk when she stole upstairs past the de-
serted drawing-room, her heart swelled with its unshared mystery.
But she had waited too long: a secretion of dread had formed about
her mother's name, and she dared not speak it, even to herself.

The next winter a strange thing happened. They went back
to town at the usual season, and Val sank into her narrower winter

14.

existence, with its horizon bounded by lesson-books, and its monotonous daily walk at Noony's side. On one of these walks, on a brilliant December day, a carriage flashed by them in Fifth Avenue, and in the carriage sat her mother, more radiant and wonderful than ever. Val gave a cry and tugged at her nurse's hand.

"Noony — Noony; there's mother! Look! Look! Don't you see her? Noony — do you think she's coming home?"

The nurse, queerly pale, dragged her on without answering.

"Noony — Noony — don't you see her?"

Noony, standing still, caught the child to her breast in the crowded street. Val felt the pressure of a wet cheek against her own, and the contact silenced her, she knew not why. Noony set her down, and the two walked on without speaking.

After that they met Val's mother almost daily, and the little girl lived on the sight. Mrs. Clephane always flashed past them in the same way, dazzling, sumptuous, remote, enclosed in an aurea of light and fragrance. Almost at once, Val had understood that she was not coming home — could never again be coming home; and, after the first shock of disappointment, the child was glad that it was so. She knew how her mother would have hated the new house they had moved into — the narrow mean house, with its blotchy wall-papers and the dreary oil-cloth in the hall. The other house had been small too, but clear and sunny as a globe of gold-fish. In this one there were no fresh muslin curtains, no flowers or cushions or rosy candle-shades: everything was as dull and dog-eared as a lesson-book. Val, who had inherited Mrs. Clephane's taste for the external finish of life, had from the first

15.

felt the change in an unformulated childish way; and at sight of her
mother the feeling took shape in a distinct repudiation of her new
surroundings. She was ashamed of the house, and hoped her mother
would never come there. She began to be ashamed of her own ap-
pearance, too, of her old-fashioned frocks, made at home under
Noony's supervision, of her shabby shoes and ugly woollen gloves.
Now, when her mother passed, in that circumambient brightness which
seemed her native element, Val would shrink behind Noony's skirts,
like a votary veiling his face as his divinity is carried by. In
Val's mind the maternal image was slowly entering on its apotheosis.

If the apparition of Mrs. Clephane had the effect of lift-
ing her daughter for a moment above the dull level of reality, the
fall back seemed to take place daily from a greater height, to be a
sharper plunge to a lower depth of disillusionment. Val's intimacy
with her father had ended with his return to health. During the
summer he had been much away, and once in town he resumed his daily
disappearances, that morning plunge into the unpredicable known in
New York households as "going down town". From this submersion he
returned at night-fall, fagged and listless, to drop an absent-mind-
ed kiss on the brown head she was bending above her supper, and ask
a few questions which he did not expect her to answer. Val was no
longer his companion: she had gone back to being his little girl.
To a child of her susceptibilities the change was humiliating: it
robbed her of the one advantage her mother's going had seemed to
give, and in this depressing relapse to the half-light of the usual,
that mother's personality acquired a supernatural brightness.

Two years had passed thus, and on the afternoon on which

16.

Val had celebrated the wonders of her mother's new bonnet and of the
blue stone in her bracelet, a young man to whom such phenomena had
once been hardly less engrossing, stood for the first time in that
interval on the Clephanes' doorstep. Val, on turning the corner,
saw him at once, and releasing her hand from Noony's, ran toward him
with a cry.

"Sevvy! Sevvy!" she sang, and found herself instantly
swung up to the commanding height of his shoulder.

"Is this giantess Val?" he asked; and she cried back
joyfully — "We thought you'd forgotten all about us."

"I've been to the ends of the earth — back of beyond,"
he answered. "But you _are_ big, Val! Why, you've quite outgrown
me — you're a head and shoulders taller than I am."

The joke struck a familiar chord, and Val answered with an ecstatic:
"Sevvy, oh, Sevvy," while the young man continued to gaze up at her
with grey eyes capable of a complexity of emotions. Presently he
let her slip to the ground, and she dragged him into the hall, and
stood in rapt contemplation while he laid aside his hat and stick.
It was long since the house had had a visitor like Severance, and
the parlour-maid was almost as much impressed as Valeria.

"I _am_ taller, really," the latter said, with a proud shake
which challenged verification. "Father doesn't notice — but my

17.

chin is up to his watch-chain now."

"Dear me!" said Severance, with amiable exaggeration, "he must wear his watch around his neck like a lady's locket."

A gust of merriment shook Valeria. "Father — father wear his watch around his neck!" For richness and subtlety of humour no one, in her estimation, had ever equalled Severance. But the name laid a sudden constraint upon them.

"How is your father?" Severance asked; and Val, replying that he was very well, lapsed immediately into the little girl who is polite to visitors. George Severance was silent, glancing about the narrow hall. To each of the two, the other's presence recalled a past which seemed hardly less remote and fantastic to the man than to the child; for Severance's had been among the most assiduous of the glossy heads which Val had seen, day after day, devotionally ascending the stairs to her mother's drawing-room.

"This house is not as nice as the other," she said, with a vague instinct of apology.

"Isn't it?" he returned absently; and at that moment the rattle of Clephane's latch-key relieved them from farther effort.

III

18.

Clephane took the meeting with less surprise than his daughter, but with hardly less satisfaction.

"My dear fellow," he exclaimed, "this is uncommonly pleasant! I'd no notion you were in these parts."

Their strong hand-clasp bridged over the awkwardness of farther speech, and they stood looking at each other in the unconstrained silence which simplifies masculine friendship.

In the library, however, with the door closed on them, the silence prolonged itself to the verge of embarrassment. It was Clephane who spoke first.

"It's good to see you, old man," he said, pushing a cigar-box toward Severance. "When did you get back?"

"Only yesterday."

"And where have you been all this time?"

"Oh, in the wilds — South America chiefly."

"Looking after those mines of your uncle's?"

Severance nodded. He had prolonged the rite of cutting and lighting his cigar, perhaps as a means of evading consecutive speech.

Clephane, who had thrown himself into an armchair near the fire, stirred uneasily, like a sick man turning on his pillow. "I wish I could get away into the wilds!" he muttered. "There are times when New York is like a giant microscope, and one's self the lone atom wriggling under the lens." Severance made no answer, and the other went on nervously: "You've been gone over two years, haven't you? You must have left just before I got my knock on the head."

"Yes," said the younger man slowly.

Clephane raised himself on one elbow and turned to look at him. "You'd heard about it, I suppose?"

Severance weighed his words. "I heard that you and Mrs. Clephane had separated."

"Is that all?"

"Practically. I haven't many New York correspondents, and for much of the time I was out of range of the papers."

19.

"But you heard there was another man?"

"Something of the sort; but no name was mentioned."

Clephane threw back his head with a laugh. "Ah, then you've missed the culmination — the *bouquet* of the whole business. The other man was Tillotson Wing."

Severance stared. "Wing? Tillotson Wing?"

"There's a co-respondent to flatter a man's vanity, eh?"

"Good God!" said Severance.

There was a pause, punctuated by Clephane's rasping laugh.

"And since then — what has become of her?" Severance asked at length.

"What has become of her? Oh, she's done the straight thing — made an honest man of him. They're married."

"She married Wing?"

"Within a week after she got the divorce."

"After *she* got it — ? But I thought — "

Clephane leaned back, knocking the ashes from his cigar.

"You thought I'd shown her the door? Well — I did, of course; but for the child's sake we came to an understanding — a — a kind of compromise, you see — "

Severance continued to gaze at him. "No, I don't see," he said bluntly.

"Why, I let Alice get the divorce — on the ground of desertion — but of course with the understanding that Val was to stay with me."

"But Val would have stayed with you in any case."

"Yes — but there would have been the scandal."

20.

Severance stood up and tossed aside his cigar. "Oh, damn the scandal," he said energetically.

Clephane followed him with a reflective eye. "You think it a mis-
take to dodge facts in that way?"

"On general principles I think an open scandal less un-
wholesome than one that's covered up."

"Most people wouldn't agree with you — at least not where there's a child concerned," Clephane rejoined, in his calm judicial tone, as though the question were purely hypothetical. "With a boy it wouldn't have mattered, but a girl is different."

"Do you expect to keep the facts from Valeria after she is grown up?"

"Oh, I don't know; by that time I may have resigned my paternal
responsibilities." He stretched himself with a sigh. "Lord knows
I wasn't made for them."

Severance glanced at him with a shade of impatience.
"You were always devoted to the child."

"My dear fellow, it's one thing to be devoted to a child
and another to know how to take care of it. Nature apparently
designed me to be Valeria's father, but it presumably didn't intend
me to be her mother too."

He threw his head back, gazing up at Severance with his smile of
ironical self-depreciation, and as the two thus confronted each
other the contrast in their attitude and expression suddenly re-
vealed a fundamental difference of nature. Severance, lean, com-
pact, with an almost dry precision of feature softened by musing
eyes, had straightened himself instinctively against the first hint

21.

of compromise; while Clephane, relaxed in his chair, betrayed in
every line of his lounging figure and evasive face the temperament
which avenges itself on its weaknesses by satirizing them.

It was a side if his nature of which Severance had never
before been conscious. Through their long years of intimacy, he
had classified Clephane as a clever chap, who thought out things
which he himself acted on without much thought; but it had not
occurred to him that this habit of scrutiny might have slowly weak-
ened the springs of action. Now he saw that Clephane had ap-
peared to act because he had, as it were, the headway of habit upon
him. On the current of an organized happiness he had kept up a
fair semblance of progression; but, left to himself, he had soon
drifted into a backwater of inertia. It was characteristic of
Clephane that his first word implied a recognition of his weakness.

"Who was the Johnny who said that animals were automata?
I don't know whether it's true of animals, but it is of men — some
men. I'm an automaton, for instance. It didn't show as long as I
could run along in my groove — I didn't suspect it myself; but as
soon as I was jolted out I found myself whizzing about aimlessly in
the air, and then I fell over on my back and have been lying there
ever since." He leaned forward and stirred the languishing fire.
"People grumble about living in a rut — good God, it's the normal
way of living. A rut of habit, a rut of self-sacrifice, a rut of
illusion — it' all one, as long as the bounds are fixed. We're
like travellers crossing a ravine on a single plank — if the plank
gives way, we find ourselves with a broken back in the bottom of the
ravine. I'd like to strip some of the strong characters that are

22.

held up to us for admiration, and find out how much of their
strength is genuine backbone, and how much the iron brace of habit
that they wear under their clothes. The strongest man on earth may
be kept going by the knowledge that there's a woman waiting for him
at home, in a certain chair by the fire — just let him come back
some night and find that chair empty!"

He took a turn through the room and flung himself down
again. He had never been a communicative man, and this sudden
letting-down of the barriers of reticence struck Severance more pain-
fully than his actual words.

"And that isn't all — that isn't the worst of it," he broke out.
"There are depths below depths in such a hole as I've dropped into.
Suppose, when you come back and find the woman gone, you sit down
and tot up what she's taken with her; not in mere happiness, bien
être, the kind of domestic comfort that is the moral equivalent of
good housekeeping, but in your fundamental stock of beliefs, the
actual capital you were living on. Suppose you find yourself
stripped bare — drugged, robbed and chucked out — what on earth
is there left to set up living with?" He rose again and laid a ner-
vous hand on Severance's arm. "I tell you what it is, if a woman
throws you over for a man, you're a man yourself and can face it;
but if she throws you over for an income you're no more than an
empty purse in the gutter."

Severance, as he listened, had penetrated in a flash to
the heart of the disaster. It mattered nothing that Clephane had
sacrificed himself, had narrowed his life, deflected his ambitions:
the bitterness of the loss lay in the perception of its futility.
Though the two men had been friends since the younger's college
days, Severance, never given to analysis, had left whole tracts of
Clephane's nature unexplored. Now they were suddenly laid bare to

23.

him. Severance, like all Clephane's friends, had been aware of
his complete subjection to his wife, though it may not have occurred
to any of them to think of love as the power that bound him. Cle-
phane was not the man to formulate his emotions, or Mrs. Clephane
the woman to encourage their expression, and the tradition of taste
in
amid which they had grown up forbade any outward signs of conjugality;
but it was precisely this enforced reserve which emphasized the man's
cautious subserviency of will and intellect — that immersion of the
larger in the smaller nature that is one of the mysteries of the
moral life.

It was characteristic of Mrs. Clephane that the diverg-
ences between her husband and herself seemed, to most of her after-
noon visitors, to[tell] pre</td>

24.

some day wish to marry; but this predestined being had not as yet
taken even transient shape in any of the women he had known. Men
of energetic temper and limited imagination are usually bored by
clever women, and Severance was no exception to the rule. Mere
beauty, once the wonder of it had passed, bored him almost as much
as mere brains, and coarseness simply repelled him. He was there-
fore reduced to seeking distraction in the type of woman who exists
simply for social purposes, who is inconceivable apart from a high-
ly organized society, and who is at once the cause and effect of
such a society: its culmination and its excuse for being. He did
not, indeed, formulate any such theory. He simply tended toward
certain women because they were "jolly" without being coarse and
easy without being vulgar; because they wore good clothes, and had
good cooks, and made things pleasant for a man who was naturally shy
and silent, and who liked to take out his share of social inter-
course in smoking cigarettes and listening. Mrs. Clephane was a
finished example of this class, and her prettiness, her grace, her
somewhat obvious feminine arts, had been to Severance but so many
undefined ingredients in the congenial atmosphere of her house. He
was like a man who enjoys travelling through fine scenery without
conscious appreciation of its details.

Severance combined with his mildly Mahometan conception of
woman's social function a naïve theory of the sanctity of marriage.
He had accepted long ago, at a gulp, all the current generalizations
about the hallowing influences of family life. The subject had
never come into his own experience, and he had kept it in that lum-
ber-room of platitudes where the man of action stores the impedi-

25.

menta of sentiment. In obedience to this habit, Severance had regarded the Clephanes as a model couple, and had cherished a sort of Christmas-lithograph idea of their family relations, with the child as a link between them, and their devotion to each other forming an immovable substructure to the frivolous surface of their lives.

Clephane's outburst brought this pretty theory to the ground. Severance, looking back over his friend's past, saw for the first time what his happiness had cost him. Clephane had started in life with an income sufficient for the maintenance of an intelligent leisure. He had fancied he could maintain a wife and child on it as well, and having a great sense of the value of leisure as a social factor in money-making communities, he had planned an existence which should be a sort of moral light-house to toilers on the foggy seas of commercialism. He meant to prove, by means of a charming wife and a simple but *enlightened* studied hospitality, the essential insignificance of mere wealth in the scale of social values. Incidentally, these theories were to be illustrated by occasional contributions to the literature of criticism; he had already published a volume on the "Aesthetics of Conduct", and a series of sociological essays called "Readjustments". But in the main he meant to let his life speak for him, and for two years he fancied *that* it had spoken with a certain eloquence. There was one person, however, to whom it had failed to carry conviction, and that person was Mrs. Clephane. Severance saw it all now. He understood, with retrospective pity, the poignancy of disillusionment that had lain under Clephane's decision to "go into business."

26.

At the time, people had taken it as a matter of course to see him suddenly tied to a desk in a broker's office. The office was an important one, and it was hinted, but not uncharitably, that Mrs. Clephane's "push" had probably made him a place in it. All this seemed natural enough to most of his associates. The logic of it was in fact quite obvious. In a community where idleness and leisure are still interchangeable terms no man is excused for being idle unless his wealth is so large that the care of it is as arduous as its acquisition might have been. The real idler, whose bank-account denies him this plea, is at most tolerated on sufferance, and the retributive sense of the community finds satisfaction in the thought that, sooner or later, he will probably have to turn to and work for his family. Severance, with the rest, accepted this view. He had the American's innate sense that a husband's first duty is to provide his wife with pin-money, and he had thought it rather manly of a dawdler like Clephane to pull himself together and set to work with that chivalrous object in view. Even now, he was prepared to admit that the exchange might have been worth making. The tragedy of course lay deeper: not in Mrs. Clephane's taste for pretty gowns and smart carriages, but in the fact that the man who had sold his birthright to provide her with these commodities had been no more to her than the soil from which she wrung her crops.

At this point it struck Severance that, in his survey of the situation, he had hardly given a thought to Mrs. Clephane. He smiled to think of the movement of pity which the idea of her punishment had provoked. Adrift on the world, face to face with destructive forces ignorantly set in motion, she had seemed, by