A Hazard of New Fortunes, Part Fifth

eason; but they did not find Mrs. Horn at home, and neither she nor Miss Vance came to see them after people returned to town in the fall. They tried to believe for a time that Mrs. Horn had

ven; and she had planned the words and the behavior with which she would have punished them if they had appeared then. Neither sister imagined herself in anywise inferior to them; but Christine was suspicious, at lea

id Christine, "

to have no definite aim, she was willing to rest in the pleasure they gave her van

Mrs. Dryfoos, in answer to such a burst of desperat

any place for young men, either." She found this so good when s

there had never be

oke," said Mrs. Dryfoos.

r. Beaton ha'r't been round for a couple o' weeks. If you don't watch out

to give you the slip, Mel

y little, and so he passed out of her life without having left any trace in her heart, though Mela had a heart that she would have put at the disposition of almost any young man that wanted it. Kendricks himself, Manhattan cockney as he was, with scarcely more out look into the average American nature than if he had been kept a prisoner in New York society all his days, perceived a property in her which forbade him as a man of conscience to trifle with her; something earthly good and kind, if it was simple and vulgar. In revising his impressions of her, it seemed to him that she would come even to better literary effect if this were recognized in her; and it made her sacred, in spite of her willingness to fool and to be fooled, in her merely human quality. After all, he saw that she wished honestly to love and to be loved, and the lures she threw out to that end seemed to him pathetic rather than ridiculous; he could not join Beaton in laughing at her; and he did not lik

inct understanding with Alma Leighton, and experienced the relief it really gave him, he thought for a while that if it had fallen out otherwise, and she had put him in charge of her destiny, he might have been better able to manage his own. But as it was, he could only drift, and let all other things take their course. It was necessary that he should go to see her afterward, to show her that he was equal to the event; but he did not go so often, and he went rather oftener to the Dryfooses; it was not easy to see Margaret Vance, except on the society terms. With much sneering and scorning, he fulfilled the duties to Mrs. Horn without which he knew he should be dropped from her list; but one might go to many of her Thursdays without getting many words with her niece. Beaton hardly knew whether he wanted many; the girl kept the charm of her innocent stylishness; but latterly she wanted to talk more about social questions than about the psychical problems that young people usually debate so personally. Son of the working-people as he was, Beaton had never cared anything about such matters; h

y different,"

s a hint for the cloistral life; he's a cloistered nature-the nature that atones and suffer

y much in

the tyro natures. When Fulkerson gets to joking Dryfoos-he likes to put his joke in the form of a pretence that Dryfoos is actuated by a se

id Miss Vance, with suc

uded in it for having me

g, in natural rebellion

ys a little

she demanded. "A right i

held it was. He's flat; he h

coming a little too exacting for comfort in her idealism. He put down the cup of tea he had been tasting, and said, in his solemn stac

luenced by them. During the past summer she had been unhappy at her separation from the cares that had engrossed her more and more as their stay in the city drew to an end in the spring, and she had hurried her aunt back to town earlier in the fall than she would have chosen to come. Margaret had her correspondents among the working-women whom she befriended. Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaret was actually promoting a strike of the button-hole workers. This, of course, had its ludicrous side, in connection with a young lady in good society, and a person of even so little humor as Mrs. Horn could not help seeing it. At the same time, she could not help foreboding the worst from it; she was afraid that Margaret's health would give way under the strain, and that if she did not go into a sisterhood she would at least go into a decline. She began the winter with all such counteractive measures as she could employ. At an age when such things weary, she threw her

in reviving Margaret's former interest in art. She asked him if Mr. Wetmore had his classes that winter as usual; and she said she wished Margaret could be induced to go again: Mr. Wetmore always said that she did not draw very well, but that she had a great deal of feeling for it, and her work was interesting. She asked, were the Leig

n, and she said, with a sigh, she wished he still had a class; she always fanc

ld not let her have any illusions about the outcome of what she was doing; and did not Mr. Beaton think that some illusion was necessary with young people? Of course, it was very nice of Mr. Wetmore to be so honest, but it did not always s

ore talent than she really had? The more Beaton thought of this, the more furious he became, and the more he was convinced that something like it had been unconsciously if not consciously in her mind. He framed some keen retorts, to the general effect that with the atmosphere of illusion preserved so completely a

woman who was to Beaton the embodiment of artificiality should intimate, however innocently-the innocence made it all the worse-that he was less honest than Wetmore, whom he knew to be so much more honest, was something that must be ret

ut I am very glad of the opportunity of seeing you alon

with her pleasure in seeing him alone. "I believe so?" He

ask so strange. Mr. Beaton, why do you come so much to this house?" Mr

d. "Why do I

es

Mandel, but will you all

derstand. I have nothing to say about them, but I should not be speaking to you now if they were not all rather helpless people. They do not know the world they have come to live in here, and they cannot help themselves or one another. But you do know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure yo

g among such people as the Dryfooses, but not without a humorous contempt; he had thought of her as Mandel, and sometimes as Old Mandel, though she was not half a score of year

suggested, they would hardly know how to help themselves at all in such a matter. I have no objection to saying that I ask it from the father of the young ladies. Of course, in and for mysel

sadness in his own. He lifted his eyes and looked into hers. "If I

ladies the other meant. A good many thoughts went through Beaton's mind, and none of them were flattering. He had not been unconscious that the part he had played toward this girl was ignoble, and that it had grown meaner as the fancy which her beauty had at first kindled in him had grown cooler. He was aware that of late

, "Of course, it's only your a

n enemy who had humiliated him at a moment when he particularly needed exalting. It was really very simple for him to stop going to see Christine Dryfoos, but it was not at all simple for Mrs. Mandel to deal with the conseque

; he could not keep that, under the circumstances, even if some pretence were not made to get rid of him; he must hurry and anticipate any such pretence; he must see Fulkerson at once; he wondered where he should find h

e renounced his employment on 'Every Other Week;' and what should he do when he had renounced it? Take pupils, perhaps; open a class? A lurid conception of a class conducted on those principles of shameless flattery at which Mrs. Horn had hinted-he believed now she had meant to insult him-presented itself. Why should not he act upon the suggestion? He thought with loathing for the whole race of women-dabblers in art. How easy the thing would be: as easy as to turn back now and

and blown; that idiotic fur overcoat was stifling. He could not possibly walk down to Eleventh; he did not want to walk even to the Elevated station at Thirty-fourth; he stopped at the corner to wait for a surface-car, a

her in a general sarcasm of the absence of the cars than

s tobacco-juice into the gutter. "In

sked Beaton, wondering

Third Avenue and one or two cross-town lines." He spat again and kept his bulk at its incline over the gutter to glance at a group of men on the c

strikers?"

iceman

rouble

e till we begin to move th

cks and mount the stairs of the Elevated station. "If you'd take out eight or ten of those fellows," h

nt begin it. If it comes to a fight, though," he said, with a look at the men under the scooping rim of

six thous

bo

fernal fools ex

ction in his irony. "It's got to run its course. Then they'll come back with their

the strike, and obscurely connecting it as one of the series with the wrongs he had suffered at the ha

iends with a good many drivers and conductors in the course of his free riding, "I guess that's what the roads would

severely. "They can bring

at fast enough," s

an left Beaton, and sauntered slowly down toward the group as if in the natural course of an afternoon ramble. On the other side of the street Beaton could see another o