The Rise Of Silas Lapham

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SILAS LAPHAM

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
GEORGE ARMS

NEW YORK

Thirteenth Printing, September, 1961

20514-0119

Introduction copyright, 1949, by George Arms

Typography by Stefan Salter
Printed in the United States of America

INTRODUCTION

B

EFORE publication The Rise of Silas Lapham appeared
serially in the Century Magazine, where, in keeping with the
leisurely reading habits of the time, it came out in ten monthly
installments (November, 1884, to August, 1885). It was suc-
cessful from the start. But perhaps because of its favorable
reception and because of the headway that its author seemed
to be making in his program for realism, many reviewers did
not take kindly to the novel when it was published as a book
in the late summer of 1885.

At first glance we may smile at some of the early antipathies
expressed by reviewers. Special points of attack were the choice
of vulgar characters and the cynical tone. The Catholic World
went a little further than other reviews when it remarked that
one scene "for hopeless depravity both in author and subject,
out-Zolas Zola," but it only overstated what was elsewhere
being said. In the Andover Review there was essential agree-
ment, with attention directed more to manner than matter. Its
reviewer was troubled by "the subtle skepticism which per-
vades [Howells's] work, unconsciously to himself, and like a
slight frost takes the bloom off all fine emotions and actions."

Though these quotations are from Catholic and Protestant
journals, their counterparts occurred in many reviews of the
lay press. But more significantly we also find counterparts of

INTRODUCTION

this type of attack today, though with certain twists appropriate
to our modern temper. Lapham has, for instance, been ob-
jected to as a businessman not at all representative of the period
after the Civil War, as lacking the ruthless energy and money-
mad amoralism of a Vanderbilt, a Drew, or a Fisk. He is com-
monplace (to use a favorite word of Howells's), but common-
place because he is superficially bourgeois and not, as the first
readers had it, because he is vulgar. Again, though no one now
advances skepticism against Howells, his contemporaries in
using that word were making a judgment which not only in
class but in degree comes close to what is today's most damning
indictment of Howells. Our critics charge that he lacks emo-
tional density, that he does not impart the vital quality to his
novels which is the sine qua non of permanent literature.

Thus the terms of disparagement have shifted, but the
grounds remain much the same: Howells falls short in his
choice of people and in his handling of them. Since The Bos-
tonians and parts of Huckleberry Finn were serialized in the
Century at the same time as The Rise of Silas Lapham, it is
worth comparing the reputations of the three authors for a
moment. In 1885 criticisms were being made of Henry James
and Mark Twain that were much like those being made of
Howells, a natural result of these two authors largely sub-
scribing to the same tenets that their friend and former editor
held. But the bad people in James and Twain have become
interesting people, and their realistic handling has proved to
have depth. Since no such metamorphosis has blessed Howells,
are we to conclude that a critical tradition of more than a half
century has indisputably fixed his place as a novelist whose
modest merit is only a certain importance in literary history?

The question is of course asked in such a way that it would
be hard to reply with a positive "yes." Admittedly, a book that
after sixty years of familiarity has not at least drawn to itself
an elite of enthusiasts stands little chance of ever achieving the

vi

INTRODUCTION

status of a major classic. But The Rise of Silas Lap/jam has
always had, if not the enthusiastic backing of a few, a wide-
spread group of well-wishers. Because it continues to be read
in this fashion, it is right to reconsider the two main objec-
tions that have been made against it, and to go over some other
matters as well.

i

Tone and character are not entirely separable; in so far as
they can be distinguished, Howells's tone may surely be the
more justly impeached. But though the tone of The Rise of
Silas Lapham constitutes its greatest weakness, the fault is less
deplorable than it has sometimes appeared to those who ap-
proach Howells with expectations other than they ought to
hold.

Without attempting to urge that Howells conveys emotional
feeling of the deepest sort, we can suggest that he docs not
wholly lack vitality. His art is a restricted art. Instead of violent
explosions he provides a scries of minor tremors, from which
he hopes that his reader may derive an image of life that is
more true because it is more restrained. Unfortunately he some-
times seems to insist that the explosions do not exist, but to a
large extent he expects his readers to become aware of some-
thing greater than the tremors themselves. His description
within this novel of the passengers to Nantasket hints at both
his potential superficiality and depth: "In face they were com-
monplace, with nothing but the American poetry of vivid pur-
pose to light them up, where they did not wholly lack fire."
His interest in men is rational and polite, but it does not follow
that it is belittling or false. It is incomplete; but by restriction
Howells makes gains, even though he suffers losses.

In nearly every one of his novels, Howells was writing a

vii

INTRODUCTION

comedy of manners. Since he deals with men and their actions
in a social rather than in a deeply ethical fashion, we must not
try to read him as an author with a tragic sense partially real-
ized. To do so will cause us to turn from him with as great
disappointment as we might turn from Jane Austen or An-
thony Trollope if we had gone to them with such expectation.
Simply stated, comedy trusts in the triumph of common sense
over false emotion, whereas tragedy deals with the conflict of
emotions that are good and of sense that is false. With both
Lapham's conduct and with his daughter's, this novel follows
the comic mood. Howells accepts the goodness of life, as indeed
most of us do in our everyday living. But in so doing, he is
neither passive nor blind, for he joys in the proper and mocks
the false. This he does largely within his medium.

Largely, but not consistently. As almost invariably happens,
the comedy of manners makes a natural expansion of its bound-
aries into morals. The Rise of Silas Lapham does this too.
Howells is aware of his problem when he says, ". . . Our man-
ners and customs go for more in life than our qualities. The
price that we pay for civilisation is the fine yet impassable dif-
ferentiation of these." Yet at the same time Howells's control
of his medium seems to slip. The joyous acceptance and mis-
chievous mockery that we find in the Hubbard-Lapham inter-
view or at the Coreys' dinner are largely lost toward the end
of the novel. The author becomes more sober than he can
afford to be without offering us something that will more
seriously occupy us. Nearly everyone who reads the novel
feels that the story lags in the latter third. There are various
reasons, but perhaps the principal one is that Howells becomes
too preoccupied with his characters as potentially tragic figures.

Howells's discussion of Daisy Miller in his 1882 essay on
Henry James is pertinent to the handling of the novel. He
noted that James's treatment of his heroine had caused most
readers to misunderstand her. Yet he favored this ambiguity of

viii

INTRODUCTION

effect; James's method, which was one of impartiality rather
than confidential treatment, made it inevitable. Howells fur-
ther asserted that impartiality was one of the most valuable
qualities of art, and he hinted that it resulted in a richer sym-
pathy than was otherwise possible. Applying this same ap-
proach to The Rise of Silas Lapham, we see that when Howells
keeps his impartiality, we feel a profound and understanding
sympathy. But when, as too frequently happens, Howells be-
comes confidential, the sympathy blurs off into silliness. Again,
it is in the latter third of the novel that these faults are most
evident.

The mistaken identity of the love affair is also apt to annoy
the reader who insists upon regarding it as serious stuff rather
than as what it is, the situation of a farce. As a love affair it
marks a concession to audience, a concession which Howells
continued to make throughout his career, in spite of his doubt
at one point that he should "ever write another story in which
mating and marrying plays an important part." But as farce
the mix-up is good farce, and its solution proposes a useful rule
of conduct, the "economy of pain." All members of a lovers'
triangle should not suffer when circumstances require the suf-
fering of only one. As with most rules, this one is too simple,
but by hinting such other concepts as complicity, atonement,
and fate, the author recognizes that it merely shares in the truth
and is not the whole truth.

The surprise plot is pleasant enough, and by careful prepara-
tion in the characters' talk about literature Howells effects a
neat satirization of morbid self-sacrifice in the popular novel of
the period. Yet there is some doubt that the author always
limits the mood to farce and satire. He seems to want to make
somewhat more of it, and is yet unable to observe the irony
that could evolve from his attempt. He does not achieve a
richly satisfying relationship between the daughter's conduct
in love and the father's in business. If Lapham had used so

ix

INTRODUCTION

worldly a standard as "economy of pain" in his business deal-
ings, he might easily have argued himself out of the self-
sacrifice that his honesty demanded. Here perhaps we come to
the heart of the trouble in the novel. Howells does not fully
comprehend the function of the comic writer; when he expands
into essentially moral situations he cannot continue his comedy
on every level. The inability is not complete nor entirely dis-
abling, for in great part Howells does show aesthetic control;
but it is marked enough to keep the work short of achieving
an ideal perfection and to provide basis for the main stricture
against the novel.

Though the novel has a major shortcoming in tone, it has
none in characterization. We no longer condemn Silas Lapham
as vulgar, and we should not condemn him as commonplace,
nor as faultily incomplete. We can properly wish that Howells
could have seen his way to making Lapham still more complex.
For instance, the author might at least have canvassed the pos-
sibility that Lapham's righteous conduct was caused by desire
to fail (from his inability to cope with the social demands of
his financial position) as well as by rational moral code. Such
a wish is certainly more justifiable than to demand, as so many
have, that Lapham should have been made more representative
of his time. In the novel there is recognition of Lapham as an
ante-bellum type when his meeting with the English agents is
described. Theirs was a "deeper game than Lapham was used
to." Given his method, Howells could not treat a Vandcrbilt
as he does Lapham; and it is enough to see him aware that a
robber baron type of financier exists.

Though Lapham is not as complex as he might be, he is
sufficiently complex if we judge him upon his own terms and
those of the novel. The book shows understanding of the intri-
cacy of Lapham's sensibility and grossness, for it not merely
attaches sensibility to his morals and grossness to his manners,
but presents both these qualities as mutually involved in all

INTRODUCTION

aspects of his being. Howells plays constantly upon these con-
trasts from the opening interview with its reference to Lap-
ham's great hairy fist, its allusions to the virtues of the Old
Testament and Poor Richard's Almanac, and its use of Hub-
bard as a foil. Summing up this episode, Hubhard calls Lapham
"the old fool," but his wife Marcia exclaims, "Oh, what a good
man!" At the end of the novel Lapham is presented as a rustic
Vermonter, shaggy, slovenly, and unkempt, still bragging, yet
realizing finally a social and moral repose. Elsewhere Howells
condemns him for his "thick imagination," fills his mouth with
cliches, and ridicules his bourgeois nature (" 'It's the best paint
in God's universe,' he said, with the solemnity of prayer.").
Yet Lapham, anticipating Sewell, comes out with the right
answer on what to do about Tom's proposal to Penelope, as he
does in his own affairs. A fine epitomization of his character
is given through the Coreys' dinner, where he develops from
the shy blunderer of the first courses into a rough but dignified
conversationalist over the coffee cups and at the end of the
evening is led away a drunken ranter.

Our feeling for Lapham's moral character is achieved mostly
through its comparison with his wife's. The first scene of the
novel, when the author drops in a comment about wives, starts
an extremely interesting line of development, which ends with
Mrs. Lapham's paint the Persis brand effecting her husband's
modest recovery from failure. In much of this, particularly in
her concern for Rogers and in her opposition to Lapham's
social ambitions, she is a good influence. Indeed, Howells first
uses the word "rise" in writing of Lapham's marriage. Yet the
social rise and the building of the house do not leave her stain-
less; she is only smarter than her husband, and pays her way
with checks of one hundred dollars instead of five hundred.
The extent of her own contamination is made plain by her
inward cringing when Mrs. Corey calls the second time. With
all her urging of justice to Rogers, and even because of it, she

xi

INTRODUCTION

forsakes her husband when he most needs her moral backing
and makes his trial greater by foolishly suspecting him of
having a mistress. The very virtue upon which she prides her-
self plays her false. Hers is a legalistic morality, made morbid
by her longing "to have someone specifically suffer for the evil
in the world." But her husband recognizes the essence of moral
law, both in acting on it and in refusing to be proud of his
action.

As the moral side of Lapham is developed largely through
his wife, the social side comes to us through Brornfield Corey.
Through an ambivalent attitude toward Corey, Howells gains
our sympathy and makes one of the most moving portraits in
the book. Howells is fair to the elder Corey; he underlines the
propriety of his relations with Lapham and at one place gives
him a speech sympathetic to the Boston poor that had come
from one of Howells's own letters to his father. Yet always the
doubt of decadence intrudes. In his acceptance of Lapham does
Corey show a spirit safe in humility or one triply armed in
pride? "This is a thing that can't be done by halves!" says
Corey when he resolves to call on Penelope with his wife. To
this generous protest Howells then adds the stage direction:
"He cut his orange in the Neapolitan manner, and ate it in
quarters."

If Howells is ambivalent toward Corey, Lapham is simply
nonplused by his aristocratic acquaintance. Corey personifies
the great social world that Lapham longs to enter, and in Corey
he sees all graces that he lacks. Yet always there is "the struggle
of stalwart achievement not to feel flattered at the notice of
sterile elegance." Lapham is too much a part of the situation
to comprehend it; he can never realize, as does Mrs. Corey, the
real repugnance that exists in her husband's self-satire. But in
the scene when Lapham apologizes for his drunkenness young
Tom Corey recognizes the quality that raises his employer
above blind conflict. There the young man perceives Lapham

xii

INTRODUCTION

in all his stupid arrogance, yet with a saving humility that
comes from a sense of wrong.

II

One of the rewards of the novel is that the reader will retain
his impression of these people, and of several lesser characters.
But equally memorable should be the style and form. Here
certainly is a book that is written, a book that bears the mark
of heightened pleasure in words that one finds in all Howells.
When Mark Twain wrote an essay about his friend, he con-
fined himself altogether to the subject of diction; and though
the exclusiveness of that concern reflects a shortcoming in
Twain's critical outlook, it properly recognizes the importance
of Howells's urbane colloquialism. Howells had the new
American tone, which may well be the most generous con-
tribution of this early realist to his national literature. It works
from the ground up, beginning in Lapham's rustic directness
("What's the matter?" "Trouble's the matter") and in his
more ponderous middle-class locutions ("But what I say is, a
thing has got to be born in a man. . . ."). It flowers in How-
ells's easy geniality, with sentence after sentence striking one
as the almost perfect realization of stylistic grace.

It is hard to separate Howells's scenes from language because
scene after scene is speech, depending little upon action or
setting. There are of .course the big scenes, such as the interview
or the dinner party, which have become almost synonymous
with the novel. But an even greater delicacy enlivens the
slighter scenes the parasol-and-pine-shaving game played by
Irene and Tom, with its undertone of sexual symbolism so
perfectly though unconsciously rendered; the domestic con-
ference between Mrs. Corey and her husband that ends in her
despairing permission for him to read and smoke. Or there are

xiii

INTRODUCTION

passages like that of the prayerful meditation on paint between
Lapham and young Corey or of Mrs. Lapham's unexpected
discovery of a pretty secretary in her husband's office. In such
passages and scenes and in the occasional settings which the
author sketches, we get a sense of the story as a part of its
people and environment, and as always a sense of the author's
discriminating portrayal of them.

Another of the important, though slighter, techniques of the
novel that should not go unnoticed is cross reference. Details
are seldom given for their sake alone, but in anticipation and
retrospect. The technique is common enough in any well-
written novel, but here it is practiced with a greater pervasive-
ness than is ordinary. Every critic has had something to say
about the introduction of anticipatory detail in the first episode,
and perhaps in those beginning chapters cross reference is a
little too much done. But when this technique occurs more
subtly and easily throughout the whole novel, it creates a
desirable tension in effect.

This effect is the more needed because the novel breaks un-
happily at its closing chapters. As Firkins, one of the best of
Howells's critics, has written, there is "an ataxia or paralysis
of the limbs, which arrests motion and slackens enterprise."
If Howells were an inexperienced or frugal artist, one might
conclude that he had simply become tired. But rather, as has
been earlier argued, the real difficulty lies in Howells's inability
to maintain his comic tone. The suggestion may also be made
that Howells intended to spread out his sequence of actions in
the later pages (for this is what he frequently did in other
novels), but with too much story left to tell the amount of
summary narrative is relatively too great for the book to hold.

In spite of this defect, one does get a sense of form in The
Rise of Silas Lapham that is notably fine and in last analysis
renders the novel a work of art. The form is not simple, but
allows a number of variations which, as in a painting, play

xiv

INTRODUCTION

about the central design. The essential movement of the novel
divides into three parts: growth toward success (Chapters i-
10), the failure of social ambitions (Chapters 11-19), and the
failure in business (Chapters 20-27). In the first part are four
main sequences, with a slight loosening of chronological limits
in the last of these. The second part consists of one highly
concentrated sequence, the dinner party and the events antici-
pating and following it. In the third part (with time picking
up a week later and extending through winter and spring to
several years), the business failure occurs not the quick catas-
trophe that is expected but a series of hopes and disappoint-
ments.

The love affair, the relation of the Coreys in general, and
the dealings with Rogers follow this movement. Most of all
do Lapham's rises, in which his business failure is only a means
to the end. The real rise is the moral one: but this is preceded
by other rises, from which the final rise receives its dramatic
force. Recurring to the essential movement, we have in the first
part the rise in fortune with the promise (particularly after
the easy payment of the debt to Rogers) of the happiness and
honor it will bring. But in the next rise, into Boston aristocracy,
Lapham suffers defeat. When in the third part he is struck
down again, this time in business, he begins to climb toward
final triumph.

The moral rise that follows is in two steps: Lapham does
not gain the real, the ultimate rise by his resistance to the sev-
eral temptations with which he is confronted. Rather, that rise
comes in the testing of his sensibility by Sewell an episode
that stands in pleasing symmetry with the Hubbard interview
of the first pages. Now at last he refuses to indulge in over-
weening righteousness, a type of which had been suggested by
the earlier conduct of his wife. "I don't know as I should always
say it paid; but if I done it, and the thing was to do over again,
right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it."

XV

INTRODUCTION

It remains to be said that the house on Beacon Street func-
tions as the major symbol. The house rises with Lapham's
hopes, it seems to survive his social failure (though Irene real-
izes it has not), and in its ashes lies one of the last hopes of
salvaging his business. But since Lapham's rise is not social but
moral, the house is always a false image for him, "his pride
and glory, his success, his triumphant life's work which was
fading into failure in his helpless hands." Early in the novel,
Mrs. Lapham recognized the place as accursed: "I shan't live
in it. There's blood on it." As the trysting spot of Tom and
Irene, it furnished what was to become the true measure of his
love for her, a wood shaving. Much as Lapham had come to
feel that the house was his own creation, Howells again and
again holds up that feeling as delusion. It may represent Lap-
ham's aesthetic potential, but nothing more, for he knew the
house only as the unlearned might know an exquisite bit of
harmony. But the Vermont farmhouse belonged to Lapham
in a way that the Beacon Street house never could; and regard-
less of his earlier association with an architect, when he re-
turned to Vermont his plans for improvement were limited
to steam heat and naptha gas. "There were certainly all the
necessaries, but no luxuries, unless the statues of Prayer and
Faith might be so considered." Only with a house like that
might Lapham have his triumph.

We cannot call The Rise of Silas Lapham a great novel. It
is not that for our generation and probably not for any genera-
tion to come. But the total effect in spite of its several faults,
even in spite of the lapse in tone which does so much harm is
touched by greatness. We can properly consider the novel a
work of competence and illumination. It offers refreshment
and insight, which may be renewed and deepened each time
one returns to it.

Albuquerque, New Mexico G. A.

March, 7949

xvi

BIOGRAPHICAL AND
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

:i

ILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1837-1920) lived in Ohio
during his youth and early manhood. Work in his father's
newspaper offices took the place of formal schooling, and he
early acquired a reputation as a promising journalist and poet.
After serving four years as United States consul in Venice, he
returned to this country in 1865. In 1866 he became assistant
editor of the Atlantic Monthly in Boston, and from 1871 to
1 88 1 he served as its editor. In 1886 he began to contribute regu-
larly to Harpers Magazine. This association, which brought
him to New York City, continued until his death.

Beginning with Their Wedding Journey (1872), Ho wells
published thirty-five novels. Representative of the best are The
Lady of the Aroostoo\ (1879) for his apprentice period, and
A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885),
Indian Summer (1886), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890),
and A Traveler from Altruria (1894) for his achievement in
maturity. Howells's criticism has also proved important in the
growth of American realism. His other literary work includes
plays, poems, travel books, and essays.

There is as yet no book-length biography. The most useful
work is Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, edited by
Mildred Howells (1928). See also the autobiographical Years

xvii

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

of My Youth (1916) ; introductory chapters in D. G. Cooke,
William Dean Howells (1922) and O. W. Firkins, William
Dean Howells (1924) ; and chapters on Howells in Van Wyck
Brooks, New England: Indian Summer (1940).

For recent criticism of The Rise of Silas Lapham, see D. G.
Cooke, William Dean Howells (1922), pp. 243-249; Alexander
Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (1948), pp. 669-671;
O. W. Firkins, William Dean Howells (1924), pp. 111-119;
William M. Gibson and George Arms, in New England Quar-
terly, XVI (March, 1943), 118-122; Gordon Haight, in Literary
History of the United States (1948), II, 892; Granville Hicks,
The Great Tradition (1933), pp. 75-78; Howard Mumford
Jones, ed., The Rise of Silas Lapham (1948), pp. v-xi; A. H.
Quinn, American Fiction (1936), pp. 263-265; W. F. Taylor,
A History of American Letters (1936), pp. 299-300; Carl Van
Doren, The American Novel (rev. ed., 1940), pp. 126-127.

Contemporary reviews include Andover Review, IV (Nov.,
1885), 417-429; Atlantic Monthly, LVI (Oct., 1885), 554-556;
Catholic World, XLII (Nov., 1885), 274-280; Critic, n.s. IV
(Sept. 12, 1885), 122 (see also n.s. IV, 202, 224-225 for reviews
from Athenaeum and Saturday Review} ; Harvard Monthly,
I (Jan., 1886), 164-168; Literary World, XVI (Sept. 5, 1885),
299; Nation, XLI (Oct. 22, 1885), 347-348.

The text is that of the standard edition, copyright 1884 and
1912, first published in 1885 by Ticknor & Company, Boston.

xviu

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

w

T T H

HEN Bartley Hubbard went to interview Silas Lapham
for the "Solid Men of Boston'* series, which he undertook to
finish up in The Events, after he replaced their original pro-
jector on that newspaper, Lapham received him in his private
office by previous appointment.

"Walk right in!" he called out to the journalist, whom he
caught sight of through the door of the counting-room.

He did not rise from the desk at which he was writing, but
he gave Bartley his left hand for welcome, and he rolled his
large head in the direction of a vacant chair. "Sit down! I'll be
with you in just half a minute."

"Take your time," said Bartley, with the ease he instantly
felt. "I'm in no hurry." He took a note-book from his pocket,
laid it on his knee, and began to sharpen a pencil.

"There!" Lapham pounded with his great hairy fist on the
envelope he had been addressing. "William!" he called out, and
he handed the letter to a boy who came to get it. "I want that
to go right away. Well, sir," he continued, wheeling round in
his leather-cushioned swivel-chair, and facing Bartley, seated
so near that their knees almost touched, "so you want my life,
death, and Christian sufferings, do you, young man?"

"That's what I'm after," said Bartley. "Your money or your
life."

"I guess you wouldn't want my life without the money,"
said Lapham, as if he were willing to prolong these moments
of preparation.

"Take 'em both," Bartley suggested. "Don't want your

THE RISE OF

money without your life, if you come to that. But you're just
one million times more interesting to the public than if you
hadn't a dollar; and you know that as well as I do, Mr. Lap-
ham. There's no use beating about the bush."

"No," said Lapham, somewhat absently. He put out his huge
foot and pushed the ground-glass door shut between his little
den and the book-keepers, in their larger den outside.

"In personal appearance," wrote Hartley in the sketch for
which he now studied his subject, while he waited patiently
for him to continue, "Silas Lapham is a fine type of the suc-
cessful American. He has a square, bold chin, only partially
concealed by the short reddish-grey beard, growing to the edges
of his firmly closing lips. His nose is short and straight; his
forehead good, but broad rather than high; his eyes blue, and
with a light in them that is kindly or sharp according to his
mood. He is of medium height, and fills an average arm-chair
with a solid bulk, which on the day of our interview was un-
pretentiously clad in a business suit of blue serge. His head
droops somewhat from a short neck, which does not trouble
itself to rise far from a pair of massive shoulders."

"I don't know as I know just where you want me to begin,"
said Lapham.

"Might begin with your birth; that's where most of us be-
gin," replied Hartley.

A gleam of humorous appreciation shot into Lapham's blue
eyes.

"I didn't know whether you wanted me to go quite so far
back as that," he said. "But there's no disgrace in having been
born, and I was born in the State of Vermont, pretty well up
under the Canada line so well up, in fact, that I came very
near being an adoptive citizen; for I was bound to be an
American of some sort, from the word Go! That was about
well, let me see! pretty near sixty years ago: this is '75, and
that was '20. Well, say I'm fifty-five years old; and I've lived

SILAS LAPHAM

'em, too; not an hour of waste time about me, anywheres! I
was born on a farm, and "

"Worked in the fields summers and went to school winters:
regulation thing?" Bartley cut in.

"Regulation thing," said Lapham, accepting this irreverent
version of his history somewhat dryly.

"Parents poor, of course," suggested the journalist. "Any
barefoot business? Early deprivations of any kind, that would
encourage the youthful reader to go and do likewise? Orphan
myself, you know," said Bartley, with a smile of cynical good-
comradery.

Lapham looked at him silently, and then said with quiet self-
respect, "I guess if you see these things as a joke, my life won't
interest you."

"Oh yes, it will," returned Bartley, unabashed. "You'll see;
it'll come out all right." And in fact it did so, in the interview
which Bartley printed.

"Mr. Lapham," he wrote, "passed rapidly over the story of
his early life, its poverty and its hardships, sweetened, however,
by the recollections of a devoted mother, and a father who, if
somewhat her inferior in education, was no less ambitious for
the advancement of his children. They were quiet, unpreten-
tious people, religious, after the fashion of that time, and of
sterling morality, and they taught their children the simple
virtues of the Old Testament and Poor Richard's Almanac."

Bartley could not deny himself this gibe; but he trusted to
Lapham's unliterary habit of mind for his security in making
it, and most other people would consider it sincere reporter's
rhetoric.

"You know," he explained to Lapham, "that we have to look
at all these facts as material, and we get the habit of classifying
them. Sometimes a leading question will draw out a whole line
of facts that a man himself would never think of." He went on
to put several queries, and it was from Lapham's answers that

THE RISE OF

he generalised the history of his childhood. "Mr. Lapham, al-
though he did not dwell on his boyish trials and struggles,
spoke of them with deep feeling and an abiding sense of their
reality." This was what he added in the interview, and by the
time he had got Lapham past the period where risen Americans
are all pathetically alike in their narrow circumstances, their
sufferings, and their aspirations, he had beguiled him into for-
getfulness of the check he had received, and had him talking
again in perfect enjoyment of his autobiography.

"Yes, sir," said Lapham, in a strain which Bartley was care-
ful not to interrupt again, "a man never sees all that his mother
has been to him till it's too late to let her know that he sees it.

Why, my mother " he stopped. "It gives me a lump in the

throat," he said apologetically, with an attempt at a laugh.
Then he went on : "She was a little, frail thing, not bigger than
a good-sized intermediate school-girl; but she did the whole
work of a family of boys, and boarded the hired men besides.
She cooked, swept, washed, ironed, made and mended from
daylight till dark and from dark till daylight, I v/as going to
say; for I don't know how she got any time for sleep. But I sup-
pose she did. She got time to go to church, and to teach us to
read the Bible, and to misunderstand it in the old way. She was
good. But it ain't her on her knees in church that comes back
to me so much like the sight of an angel as her on her knees
before me at night, washing my poor, dirty little feet, that I'd
run bare in all day, and making me decent for bed. There were
six of us boys; it seems to me we were all of a size; and she was
just so careful with all of us. I can feel her hands on my feet
yet!" Bartley looked at Lapham's No. 10 boots, and softly whis-
tled through his teeth. "We were patched all over; but we
wa'n't ragged. I don't know how she got through it. She
didn't seem to think it was anything; and I guess it was no
more than my father expected of her. He worked like a horse

SILAS LAPHAM

in doors and out up at daylight, feeding the stock, and groan-
ing round all day with his rheumatism, but not stopping."

Bartley hid a yawn over his note-book, and probably, if he
could have spoken his mind, he would have suggested to Lap-
ham that he was not there for the purpose of interviewing his
ancestry. But Bartley had learned to practise a patience with his
victims which he did not always feel, and to feign an interest in
their digressions till he could bring them up with a round
turn.

"I tell you," said Lapham, jabbing the point of his penknife
into the writing-pad on the desk before him, "when I hear
women complaining nowadays that their lives are stunted and
empty, I want to tell 'em about my mother's life. 7 could paint
it out for 'em."

Bartley saw his opportunity at the word paint, and cut in.
"And you say, Mr. Lapham, that you discovered this mineral
paint on the old farm yourself?"

Lapham acquiesced in the return to business. "I didn't dis-
cover it," he said scrupulously. "My father found it one day, in
a hole made by a tree blowing down. There it was, lying loose
in the pit, and sticking to the roots that had pulled up a big
cake of dirt with 'em. / don't know what give him the idea that
there was money in it, but he did think so from the start. I
guess, if they'd had the word in those days, they'd considered
him pretty much of a crank about it. He was trying as long as
he lived to get that paint introduced; but he couldn't make it
go. The country was so poor they couldn't paint their houses
with anything; and father hadn't any facilities. It got to be a
kind of joke with us; and I guess that paint-mine did as much
as any one thing to make us boys clear out as soon as we got
old enough. All my brothers went West, and took up land; but
I hung on to New England, and I hung on to the old farm, not
because the paint-mine was on it, but because the old house was

THE RISE OF

and the graves. Well," said Lapham, as if unwilling to give
himself too much credit, "there wouldn't been any market for
it, anyway. You can go through that part of the State and buy
more farms than you can shake a stick at for less money than
it cost to build the barns on 'em. Of course, it's turned out a
good thing. I keep the old house up in good shape, and we
spend a month or so there every summer. M'wife kind of likes
it, and the girls. Pretty place; sightly all round it. I've got a
force of men at work there the whole time, and I've got a man
and his wife in the house. Had a family meeting there last
year; the whole connection from out West. There!" Lapham
rose from his seat and took down a large warped, unframed
photograph from the top of his desk, passing his hand over it,
and then blowing vigorously upon it, to clear it of the dust.
"There we are, all of us."

"I don't need to look twice at you," said Hartley, putting his
finger on one of the heads.

"Well, that's Bill," said Lapham, with a gratified laugh. "He's
about as brainy as any of us, I guess. He's one of their leading
lawyers, out Dubuque way; been judge of the Common Pleas
once or twice. That's his son just graduated at Yale along-
side of my youngest girl. Good-looking chap, ain't he?"

"She's a good-looking chap," said Hartley, with prompt ir-
reverence. He hastened to add, at the frown which gathered
between Lapham's eyes, "What a beautiful creature she is!
What a lovely, refined, sensitive face! And she looks good.
too."

"She is good," said the father, relenting.

"And, after all, that's about the best thing in a woman," said
the potential reprobate. "If my wife wasn't good enough to
keep both of us straight, I don't know what would become of
me."

"My other daughter," said Lapham, indicating a girl with
eyes that showed large, and a face of singular gravity. "Mis'

6

SILAS LAPHAM

Lapham," he continued, touching his wife's effigy with his
little finger. "My brother Willard and his family farm at Kan-
kakee. Hazard Lapham and his wife Baptist preacher in Kan-
sas. Jim and his three girls milling business at Minneapolis.
Ben and his family practising medicine in Fort Wayne."

The figures were clustered in an irregular group in front of
an old farm-house, whose original ugliness had been smartened
up with a coat of Lapham's own paint, and heightened with
an incongruous piazza. The photographer had not been able to
conceal the fact that they were all decent, honest-looking, sen-
sible people, with a very fair share of beauty among the young
girls; some of these were extremely pretty, in fact. He had put
them into awkward and constrained attitudes, of course; and
they all looked as if they had the instrument of torture which
photographers call a head-rest under their occiputs. Here and
there an elderly lady's face was a mere blur; and some of the
younger children had twitched themselves into wavering shad-
ows, and might have passed for spirit-photographs of their
own little ghosts. It was the standard family-group photograph,
in which most Americans have figured at some time or other;
and Lapham exhibited a just satisfaction in it. "I presume," he
mused aloud, as he put it back on top of his desk, "that we
sha'n't soon get together again, all of us."

"And you say," suggested Bartley, "that you stayed right
along on the old place, when the rest cleared out West?"

"No-o-o-o," said Lapham, with a long, loud drawl; "I cleared
out West too, first off. Went to Texas. Texas was all the cry in
those days. But I got enough of the Lone Star in about three
months, and I come back with the idea that Vermont was good
enough for me."

"Fatted calf business?" queried Bartley, with his pencil
poised above his note-book.

"I presume they were glad to see me," said Lapham, with
dignity. "Mother," he added gently, "died that winter, and I

THE RISE OF

stayed on with father. I buried him in the spring; and then I
came down to a little place called Lumberville, and picked up
what jobs I could get. I worked round at the saw-mills, and I
was ostler a while at the hotel I always did like a good horse.
Well, I wa'nt exactly a college graduate, and I went to school
odd times. I got to driving the stage after while, and by and by
I bought the stage and run the business myself. Then I hired
the tavern-stand, and well to make a long story short, then I
got married. Yes," said Lapham, with pride, "I married the
school-teacher. We did pretty well with the hotel, and my wife
she was always at me to paint up. Well, I put it off, and put it
off, as a man will, till one day I give in, and says I, 'Well, let's
paint up. Why, Pert,' m' wife's name's Persis, Tve got a
whole paint-mine out on the farm. Let's go out and look at it.'
So we drove out. I'd let the place for seventy-five dollars a year
to a shif less kind of a Kanuck that had come down that way;
and I'd hated to see the house with him in it; but we drove out
one Saturday afternoon, and we brought back about a bushel
of the stuff in the buggy-seat, and I tried it crude, and I tried it
burnt; and I liked it. M'wife she liked it too. There wa'n't any
painter by trade in the village, and I mixed it myself. Well,
sir, that tavern's got that coat of paint on it yet, and it hain't
ever had any other, and I don't know's it ever will. Well, you
know, I felt as if it was a kind of harumscarum experiment, all
the while; and I presume I shouldn't have tried it, but I kind of
liked to do it because father'd always set so much store by his
paint-mine. And when I'd got the first coat on," Lapham
called it cut, "I presume I must have set as much as half an
hour, looking at it and thinking how he would have enjoyed
it. I've had my share of luck in this world, and I ain't a-going
to complain on my own account, but I've noticed that most
things get along too late for most people. It made me feel bad,
and it took all the pride out of my success with the paint,

8

SILAS LAPHAM

thinking of father. Seemed to me I might 'a taken more interest
in it when he was by to see; but we've got to live and learn.
Well, I called my wife out, I'd tried it on the back of the
house, you know, and she left her dishes, I can remember
she came out with her sleeves rolled up and set down alongside
of me on the trestle, and says I, 'What do you think, Persis?'
And says she, 'well, you hain't got a paint-mine, Silas Lapham;
you've got a gold-mint. 9 She always was just so enthusiastic
about things. Well, it was just after two or three boats had
burnt up out West, and a lot of lives lost, and there was a great
cry about non-inflammable paint, and I guess that was what
was in her mind. 'Well, I guess it ain't any gold-mine, Persis,'
says I; 'but I guess it is a paint-mine. I'm going to have it an-
alysed, and if it turns out what I think it is, I'm going to work
it. And if father hadn't had such a long name, I should call it
the Nehemiah Lapham Mineral Paint. But, any rate, every
barrel of it, and every keg, and every bottle, and every package,
big or little, has got to have the initials and figures N. L. f.
1835, S. L. t. 1855, on it. Father found it in 1835, and I tried it
in 1855.' "

" 'S. T. 1860 X.' business," said Hartley.

"Yes," said Lapham, "but I hadn't heard of Plantation Bit-
ters then, and I hadn't seen any of the fellow's labels. I set to
work and I got a man down from Boston; and I carried him
out to the farm, and he analysed it made a regular job of it.
Well, sir, we built a kiln, and we kept a lot of that paint-ore
red-hot for forty-eight hours; kept the Kanuck and his family
up, firing. The presence of iron in the ore showed with the
magnet from the start; and when he came to test it, he found
out that it contained about seventy-five per cent, of the perox-
ide of iron."

Lapham pronounced the scientific phrases with a sort of
reverent satisfaction, as if awed through his pride by a little

THE RISE OF

lingering uncertainty as to what peroxide was. He accented it
as if it were purr-ox-eyed; and Bartley had to get him to spell
it.

"Well, and what then?" he asked, when he had made a note
of the percentage.

"What then?" echoed Lapham. "Well, then, the fellow set
down and told me, 'You've got a paint here/ says he, 'that's
going to drive every other mineral paint out of the market.
Why,' says he, 'it'll drive 'em right into the Back Bay!' Of
course, / didn't know what the Back Bay was then; but I begun
to open my eyes; thought I'd had *em open before, but I guess
I hadn't. Says he, 'That paint has got hydraulic cement in it,
and it can stand fire and water and acids;' he named over a lot
of things. Says he, 'It'll mix easily with linseed oil, whether you
want to use it boiled or raw; and it ain't a-going to crack nor
fade any; and it ain't a-going to scale. When you've got your
arrangements for burning it properly, you're going to have a
paint that will stand like the everlasting hills, in every climate
under the sun.' Then he went into a lot of particulars, and 1
begun to think he was drawing a long-bow, and meant to
make his bill accordingly. So I kept pretty cool; but the fellow's
bill didn't amount to anything hardly said I might pay him
after I got going; young chap, and pretty easy; but every word
he said was gospel. Well, I ain't a-going to brag up my paint;
I don't suppose you came here to hear me blow "

"Oh yes, I did," said Bartley. "That's what I want. Tell all
there is to tell, and I can boil it down afterward. A man can't
make a greater mistake with a reporter than to hold back any-
thing out of modesty. It may be the very thing we want to
know. What we want is the whole truth; and more; we've got
so much modesty of our own that we can temper almost any
statement."

Lapham looked as if he did not quite like this tone, and he
resumed a little more quietly. "Oh, there isn't really very much

10

SILAS LAPHAM

more to say about the paint itself. But you can use it for almost
anything where a paint is wanted, inside or out. It'll prevent
decay, and it'll stop it, after it's begun, in tin or iron. You can
paint the inside of a cistern or a bath-tub with it, and water
won't hurt it; and you can paint a steam-boiler with it, and heat
won't. You can cover a brick wall with it, or a railroad car, or
the deck of a steamboat, and you can't do a better thing for
either."

"Never tried it on the human conscience, I suppose," sug-
gested Bartley.

"No, sir," replied Lapham gravely. "I guess you want to keep
that as free from paint as you can, if you want much use of it.
I never cared to try any of it on mine." Lapham suddenly lifted
his bulk up out of his swivel-chair, and led the way out into the
wareroom beyond the office partitions, where rows and ranks
of casks, barrels, and kegs stretched dimly back to the rear of
the building, and diffused an honest, clean, wholesome smell
of oil and paint. They were labelled and branded as containing
each so many pounds of Lapham's Mineral Paint, and each
bore the mystic devices, N. L. f. 1835 S. L. /. 1855. "There!"
said Lapham, kicking one of the largest casks with the toe of
his boot, "that's about our biggest package; and here," he
added, laying his hand affectionately on the head of a very
small keg, as if it were the head of a child, which it resem-
bled in size, "this is the smallest. We used to put the paint on
the market dry, but now we grind every ounce of it in oil
very best quality of linseed oil and warrant it. We find it gives
more satisfaction. Now, come back to the office, and I'll show
you our fancy brands."

It was very cool and pleasant in that dim wareroom, with
the rafters showing overhead in a cloudy perspective, and dark-
ening away into the perpetual twilight at the rear of the build-
ing; and Bartley had found an agreeable seat on the head of a
half -barrel of the paint, which he was reluctant to leave. But he

II

THE RISE OF

rose and followed the vigorous lead of Lapham back to the
office, where the sun of a long summer afternoon was just be-
ginning to glare in at the window. On shelves opposite Lap-
ham's desk were tin cans of various sizes, arranged in taper-
ing cylinders, and showing, in a pattern diminishing toward
the top, the same label borne by the casks and barrels in the
wareroom. Lapham merely waved his hand toward these; but
when Hartley, after a comprehensive glance at them, gave his
whole attention to a row of clean, smooth jars, where differ-
ent tints of the paint showed through flawless glass, Lapham
smiled, and waited in pleased expectation.

"Hello!" said Bartley. "That's pretty!"

"Yes," assented Lapham, "it is rather nice. It's our latest
thing, and we find it takes with customers first-rate. Look
here!" he said, taking down one of the jars, and pointing to
the first line of the label.

Bartley read, "THE PERSIS BRAND," and then he looked
at Lapham and smiled.

"After her, of course," said Lapham. "Got it up and put the
first of it on the market her last birthday. She was pleased."

"I should think she might have been," said Bartley, while he
made a note of the appearance of the jars.

"I don't know about your mentioning it in your interview,"
said Lapham dubiously.

"That's going into the interview, Mr. Lapham, if nothing
else does. Got a wife myself, and I know just how you feel."
It was in the dawn of Bartley's prosperity on the Boston
Events, before his troubles with Marcia had seriously begun.

"Is that so?" said Lapham, recognising with a smile another
of the vast majority of married Americans; a few underrate
their wives, but the rest think them supernal in intelligence
and capability. "Well," he added, "we must see about that.
Where 'd you say you lived?"

"We don't live; we board. Mrs. Nash, 13 Canary Place."

12

SILAS LAPHAM

"Well, we've all got to commence that way," suggested Lap-
ham consolingly.

"Yes; but we've about got to the end of our string. I expect
to be under a roof of my own on Clover Street before long.
I suppose," said Bartley, returning to business, "that you didn't
let the grass grow under your feet much after you found out
what was in your paint-mine?"

"No, sir," answered Lapham, withdrawing his eyes from a
long stare at Bartley, in which he had been seeing himself a
young man again, in the first days of his married life. "I went
right back to Lumberville and sold out everything, and put all
I could rake and scrape together into paint. And Mis' Lapham
was with me every time. No hang back about her. I tell you
she was a woman!"

Bartley laughed. "That's the sort most of us marry."

"No, we don't," said Lapham. "Most of us marry silly little
girls grown up to loof( like women."

"Well, I guess that's about so," assented Bartley, as if upon
second thought.

"If it hadn't been for her," resumed Lapham, "the paint
wouldn't have come to anything. I used to tell her it wa'n't the
seventy-five per cent, of purr-ox-eyed of iron in the ore that
made that paint go; it was the seventy-five per cent, of purr-ox-
eyed of iron in her/'

"Good!" cried Bartley. Til tell Marcia that."

"In less'n six months there wa'n't a board-fence, nor a
bridge-girder, nor a dead wall, nor a barn, nor a face of rock in
that whole region that didn't have 'Lapham's Mineral Paint
Specimen' on it in the three colours we begun by making."
Bartley had taken his seat on the window-sill, and Lapham,
standing before him, now put up his huge foot close to Bart-
ley's thigh; neither of them minded that.

"I've heard a good deal of talk about that S. T 1860 X.
man, and the stove-blacking man, and the kidney-cure man,

THE RISE OF

because they advertised in that way; and I've read articles
about it in the papers; but I don't see where the joke comes in,
exactly. So long as the people that own the barns and fences
don't object, I don't see what the public has got to do with it.
And I never saw anything so very sacred about a big rock,
along a river or in a pasture, that it wouldn't do to put mineral
paint on it in three colours. I wish some of the people that talk
about the landscape, and write about it, had to bu'st one of
them rocks out of the landscape with powder, or dig a hole to
bury it in, as we used to have to do up on the farm; I guess
they'd sing a little different tune about the profanation of
scenery. There ain't any man enjoys a sightly bit of nature a
smooth piece of interval with half a dozen good-sized wine-
glass elms in it more than / do. But I ain't a-going to stand
up for every big ugly rock I come across, as if we were all a set
of dumn Druids. I say the landscape was made for man, and
not man for the landscape."

"Yes," said Bartley carelessly; "it was made for the stove-
polish man and the kidney-cure man."

"It was made for any man that knows how to use it," Lap-
ham returned, insensible to Bartley 's irony. "Let 'em go and
live with nature in the winter, up there along the Canada
line, and I guess they'll get enough of her for one while. Well
where was I?"

"Decorating the landscape," said Bartley.

"Yes, sir; I started right there at Lumber ville, and it give the
place a start too. You won't find it on the map now; and you
won't find it in the gazetteer. I give a pretty good lump of
money to build a town-hall, about five years back, and the first
meeting they held in it they voted to change the name, Lum-
berville want a name, and it's Lapham now."

"Isn't it somewhere up in that region that they get the old
Brandon red?" asked Bartley.

"We're about ninety miles from Brandon. The Brandon's a

SILAS LAPHAM

good paint," said Lapham conscientiously. "Like to show you
round up at our place some odd time, if you get off."

"Thanks. I should like it first-rate. Works there?"

"Yes; works there. Well, sir, just about the time I got
started, the war broke out; and it knocked my paint higher
than a kite. The thing dropped perfectly dead. I presume that
if Fd had any sort of influence, I might have got it into Gov-
ernment hands, for gun-carriages and army wagons, and may
be on board Government vessels. But I hadn't, and we had to
face the music. I was about broken-hearted, but m'wife she
looked at it another way. 7 guess it's a providence,* says she.
'Silas, I guess you've got a country that's worth fighting for.
Any rate, you better go out and give it a chance.' Well, sir, I
went. I knew she meant business. It might kill her to have me
go, but it would kill her sure if I stayed. She was one of that
kind. I went. Her last words was, Til look after the paint, Si/
We hadn't but just one little girl then, boy'd died, and Mis'
Lapham's mother was livin' with us; and I knew if times did
anyways come up again, m'wife 'd know just what to do. So
I went. I got through; and you can call me Colonel, if you want
to. Feel there!" Lapham took Bartley's thumb and forefinger
and put them on a bunch in his leg, just above the knee. "Any-
thing hard?"

"Ball?"

Lapham nodded. "Gettysburg. That's my thermometer. If
it wa'n't for that, I shouldn't know enough to come in when it
rains."

Bartley laughed at a joke which betrayed some evidences of
wear. "And when you came back, you took hold of the paint
and rushed it."

"I took hold of the paint and rushed it all I could," said
Lapham, with less satisfaction than he had hitherto shown in
his autobiography. "But I found that I had got back to an-
other world. The day of small things was past, and I don't

15

THE RISE OF

suppose it will ever come again in this country. My wife was
at me all the time to take a partner somebody with capital;
but I couldn't seem to bear the idea. That paint was like my
own blood to me. To have anybody else concerned in it was
like well, I don't know what. I saw it was the thing to do;
but I tried to fight it off, and I tried to joke it off. I used to say,
'Why didn't you take a partner yourself, Persis, while I was
away?' And she'd say, 'Well, if you hadn't come back, I
should, Si.' Always did like a joke about as well as any woman
7 ever saw. Well, I had to come to it. I took a partner." Lapham
dropped the bold blue eyes with which he had been till now
staring into Hartley's face, and the reporter knew that here was
a place for asterisks in his interview, if interviews were faithful.
"He had money enough," continued Lapham, with a sup-
pressed sigh; "but he didn't know anything about paint. We
hung on together for a year or two. And then we quit."

"And he had the experience," suggested Hartley, with com-
panionable ease.

"I had some of the experience too," said Lapham, with a
scowl; and Hartley divined, through the freemasonry of all
who have sore places in their memories, that this was a point
which he must not touch again.

"And since that, I suppose, you've played it alone."

"I've played it alone."

"You must ship some of this paint of yours to foreign coun-
tries, Colonel?" suggested Hartley, putting on a professional
air.

"We ship it to all parts of the world. It goes to South Amer-
ica, lots of it. It goes to Australia, and it goes to India, and it
goes to China, and it goes to the Cape of Good Hope. It'll
stand any climate. Of course, we don't export these fancy
brands much. They're for home use. But we're introducing
them elsewhere. Here." Lapham pulled open a drawer, and
showed Hartley a lot of labels in different languages Spanish,

16

SILAS LAPHAM

French, German, and Italian. "We expect to do a good business
in all those countries. We've got our agencies in Cadiz now,
and in Paris, and in Hamburg, and in Leghorn. It's a thing
that's bound to make its way. Yes, sir. Wherever a man has
got a ship, or a bridge, or a dock, or a house, or a car, or a
fence, or a pig-pen anywhere in God's universe to paint,
that's the paint for him, and he's bound to find it out sooner or
later. You pass a ton of that paint dry through a blast-furnace,
and you'll get a quarter of a ton of pig-iron. I believe in my
paint. I believe it's a blessing to the world. When folks come in,
and kind of smell round, and ask me what I mix it with, I al-
ways say, 'Well, in the first place, I mix it with Faith, and after
that I grind it up with the best quality of boiled linseed oil that
money will buy.' "

Lapham took out his watch and looked at it, and Bartley per-
ceived that his audience was drawing to a close. " 'F you ever
want to run down and take a look at our works, pass you over
the road," he called it rud, "and it sha'n't cost you a cent."

"Well, may be I shall, sometime," said Bartley. "Good after-
noon, Colonel."

"Good afternoon. Or hold on! My horse down there yet,
William?" he called to the young man in the counting-room
who had taken his letter at the beginning of the interview.
"Oh! All right!" he added, in response to something the young
man said. "Can't I set you down somewhere, Mr. Hubbard?
I've got my horse at the door, and I can drop you on my way
home. I'm going to take Mis' Lapham to look at a house I'm
driving piles for, down on the New Land."

"Don't care if I do," said Bartley.

Lapham put on a straw hat, gathered up some papers lying
on his desk, pulled down its rolling cover, turned the key in it,
and gave the papers to an extremely handsome young woman
at one of the desks in the outer office. She was stylishly
dressed, as Bartley saw, and her smooth, yellow hair was sculp-

17

1HE RISE OF

turesquely waved over a low, white forehead. "Here," said Lap-
ham, with the same prompt gruff kindness that he had used in
addressing the young man, "I want you should put these in
shape, and give me a type-writer copy to-morrow."

"What an uncommonly pretty girl!" said Bartley, as they
descended the rough stairway and found their way out to the
street, past the dangling rope of a block and tackle wander-
ing up into the cavernous darkness overhead.
"She does her work," said Lapham shortly.

Bartley mounted to the left side of the open buggy standing
at the curb-stone, and Lapham, gathering up the hitching-
weight, slid it under the buggy-seat and mounted beside him.

"No chance to speed a horse here, of course," said Lapham,
while the horse with a spirited gentleness picked her way, with
a high, long action, over the pavement of the street. The streets
were all narrow, and most of them crooked, in that quarter of
the town; but at the end of one the spars of a vessel pencilled
themselves delicately against the cool blue of the afternoon sky.
The air was full of a smell pleasantly compounded of oakum,
of leather, and of oil. It was not the busy season, and they met
only two or three trucks heavily straggling toward the wharf
with their long string teams; but the cobblestones of the pave-
ment were worn with the dint of ponderous wheels, and dis-
coloured with iron-rust from them; here and there, in wander-
ing streaks over its surface, was the grey stain of the salt water
with which the street had been sprinkled.

After an interval of some minutes, which both men spent in
looking round the dash-board from opposite sides to watch the
stride of the horse, Bartley said, with a light sigh, "I had a colt
once down in Maine that stepped just like that mare."

"Well!" said Lapham, sympathetically recognising the bond
that this fact created between them. "Well, now, I tell you what
you do. You let me come for you 'most any afternoon, now,

18

SILAS LAPHAM

and take you out over the Milldam, and speed this mare a little.
I'd like to show you what this mare can do. Yes, I would."

"All right," answered Bartley; "I'll let you know my first day
off."

"Good," cried Lapham.

"Kentucky?" queried Bartley.

"No, sir. I don't ride behind anything but Vermont; never
did. Touch of Morgan, of course; but you can't have much
Morgan in a horse if you want speed. Hambletonian mostly.
Where 'd you say you wanted to get out?"

"I guess you may put me down at the Events Office, just
round the corner here. I've got to write up this interview while
it's fresh."

"All right," said Lapham, impersonally assenting to Bart-
ley's use of him as material.

He had not much to complain of in Bartley 's treatment,
unless it was the strain of extravagant compliment which it
involved. But the flattery was mainly for the paint, whose vir-
tues Lapham did not believe could be overstated, and himself
and his history had been treated with as much respect as Bart-
ley was capable of showing any one. He made a very pictur-
esque thing of the discovery of the paint-mine. "Deep in the
heart of the virgin forests of Vermont, far up toward the line
of the Canadian snows, on a desolate mountain-side, where
an autumnal storm had done its wild work, and the great trees,
strewn hither and thither, bore witness to its violence, Nehe-
miah Lapham discovered, just forty years ago, the mineral
which the alchemy of his son's enterprise and energy has
transmuted into solid ingots of the most precious of metals.
The colossal fortune of Colonel Silas Lapham lay at the bot-
tom of a hole which an uprooted tree had dug for him, and
which for many years remained a paint-mine of no more ap-
preciable value than a soap-mine."

19

THE RISE OF

Here Hartley had not been able to forego another grin; but he
compensated for it by the high reverence with which he spoke
of Colonel Lapham's record during the war of the rebellion,
and of the motives which impelled him to turn aside from an
enterprise in which his whole heart was engaged, and take part
in the struggle. "The Colonel bears embedded in the muscle of
his right leg a little memento of the period in the shape of a
minie-ball, which he jocularly referred to as his thermometer,
and which relieves him from the necessity of reading 'The
Probabilities' in his morning paper. This saves him just so
much time; and for a man who, as he said, has not a moment
of waste time on him anywhere, five minutes a day are some-
thing in the course of a year. Simple, clear, bold, and straight-
forward, in mind and action, Colonel Silas Lapham, with a
prompt comprehensiveness and a never-failing business sagac-
ity, is, in the best sense of that much-abused term, one of na-
ture's noblemen, to the last inch of his five eleven and a half.
His life affords an example of single-minded application and
unwavering perseverance which our young business men
would do well to emulate. There is nothing showy or meretri-
cious about the man. He believes in mineral paint, and he puts
his heart and soul into it. He makes it a religion; though we
would not imply that it is his religion. Colonel Lapham is a
regular attendant at the Rev. Dr. Langworthy's church. He
subscribes liberally to the Associated Charities, and no good
object or worthy public enterprise fails to receive his support.
He is not now actively in politics, and his paint is not partisan;
but it is an open secret that he is, and always has been, a
staunch Republican. Without violating the sanctities of pri-
vate life, we cannot speak fully of various details which came
out in the free and unembarrassed interview which Colonel
Lapham accorded our representative. But we may say that the
success of which he is justly proud he is also proud to attribute
in great measure to the sympathy and energy of his wife one

20

SILAS LAPHAM

of those women who, in whatever walk of life, seem born to
honour the name of American Woman, and to redeem it from
the national reproach of Daisy Millerism. Of Colonel Lap-
ham's family, we will simply add that it consists of two young
lady daughters.

"The subject of this very inadequate sketch is building a
house on the water side of Beacon Street, after designs by one
of our leading architectural firms, which, when complete, will
be one of the finest ornaments of that exclusive avenue. It
will, we believe, be ready for the occupancy of the family some-
time in the spring."

When Bartley had finished his article, which he did with a
good deal of inward derision, he went home to Marcia, still
smiling over the thought of Lapham, whose burly simplicity
had peculiarly amused him.

"He regularly turned himself inside out to me," he said, as
he sat describing his interview to Marcia.

"Then I know you could make something nice out of it,"
said his wife; "and that will please Mr. Witherby."

"Oh yes, I've done pretty well; but I couldn't let myself loose
on him the way I wanted to. Confound the limitations of de-
cency, anyway! I should like to have told just what Colonel
Lapham thought of landscape advertising in Colonel Lapham's
own words. I'll tell you one thing, Marsh: he had a girl there
at one of the desks that you wouldn't let me have within gun-
shot of my office. Pretty? It ain't any name for it!" Marcia's
eyes began to blaze, and Bartley broke out into a laugh, in
which he arrested himself at sight of a formidable parcel in the
corner of the room.

"Hello! What's that?"

"Why, I don't know what it is," replied Marcia tremulously.
"A man brought it just before you came in, and I didn't like to
open it."

"Think it was some kind of infernal machine?" asked Bart-

21

THE RISE OF

ley, getting down on his knees to examine the package. "Mrs.
B. Hubbard, heigh?" He cut the heavy hemp string with his
penknife. "We must look into this thing. I should like to know
who's sending packages to Mrs. Hubbard in my absence." He
unfolded the wrappings of paper, growing softer and finer in-
ward, and presently pulled out a handsome square glass jar,
through which a crimson mass showed richly. "The Persis
Brand!" he yelled. "I knew it!"

"Oh, what is it, Bartley?" quavered Marcia. Then, coura-
geously drawing a little nearer: "Is it some kind of jam?" she
implored.

"Jam? No!" roared Bartley. "It's paint! It's mineral paint
Lapham's paint!"

"Paint?" echoed Marcia, as she stood over him while he
stripped their wrappings from the jars which showed the dark
blue, dark green, light brown, dark brown, and black, with the
dark crimson, forming the gamut of colour of the Lapham
paint. "Don't tell me it's paint that / can use, Bartley!"

"Well, I shouldn't advise you to use much of it all at once,"
replied her husband. "But it's paint that you can use in moder-
ation."

Marcia cast her arms round his neck and kissed him.
"O Bartley, I think I'm the happiest girl in the world! I was
just wondering what I should do. There are places in that
Clover Street house that need touching up so dreadfully. I
shall be very careful. You needn't be afraid I shall overdo.
But, this just saves my life. Did you buy it, Bartley? You know
we couldn't afford it, and you oughtn't to have done it! And
what does the Persis Brand mean?"

"Buy it?" cried Bartley. "No! The old fool's sent it to you as
a present. You'd better wait for the facts before you pitch into
me for extravagance, Marcia. Persis is the name of his wife;
and he named it after her because it's his finest brand. You'll

22

SILAS LAPHAM

see it in my interview. Put it on the market her last birthday
for a surprise to her."

"What old fool?" faltered Marcia.

"Why, Lapham the mineral paint man."

"Oh, what a good man!" sighed Marcia from the bottom of
her soul. "Hartley! you won't make fun of him as you do of
some of those people ? Will you ?"

"Nothing that he'll ever find out," said Bartley, getting up
and brushing off the carpet-lint from his knees.

II

A

FTER dropping Hartley Hubbard at the Events building,
Lapham drove on down Washington Street to Nankeen
Square at the South End, where he had lived ever since the
mistaken movement of society in that direction ceased. He
had not built, but had bought very cheap of a terrified gentle-
man of good extraction who discovered too late that the South
End was not the thing, and who in the eagerness of his flight
to the Back Bay threw in his carpets and shades for almost
nothing. Mrs. Lapham was even better satisfied with their bar-
gain than the Colonel himself, and they had lived in Nankeen
Square for twelve years. They had seen the saplings planted
in the pretty oval round which the houses were built flourish
up into sturdy young trees, and their two little girls in the same
period had grown into young ladies; the Colonel's tough
frame had expanded into the bulk which Bartley's interview
indicated; and Mrs. Lapham, while keeping a more youthful
outline, showed the sharp print of the crow's-foot at the cor-
ners of her motherly eyes, and certain slight creases in her
wholesome cheeks. The fact that they lived in an unfashionable
neighbourhood was something that they had never been made
to feel to their personal disadvantage, and they had hardly
known it till the summer before this story opens, when Mrs.
Lapham and her daughter Irene had met some other Bosto-
nians far from Boston, who made it memorable. They were
people whom chance had brought for the time under a singular
obligation to the Lapham ladies, and they were gratefully re-
cognisant of it. They had ventured a mother and two daugh-
ters as far as a rather wild little Canadian watering-place on

34

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

the St. Lawrence, below Quebec, and had arrived some days
before their son and brother was expected to join them. Two of
their trunks had gone astray, and on the night of their arrival
the mother was taken violently ill. Mrs. Lapham came to their
help, with her skill as nurse, and with the abundance of her
own and her daughter's wardrobe, and a profuse, single-
hearted kindness. When a doctor could be got at, he said that
but for Mrs. Lapham's timely care, the lady would hardly have
lived. He was a very effusive little Frenchman, and fancied he
was saying something very pleasant to everybody.

A certain intimacy inevitably followed, and when the son
came he was even more grateful than the others. Mrs. Lapham
could not quite understand why he should be as attentive to
her as to Irene; but she compared him with other young men
about the place, and thought him nicer than any of them. She
had not the means of a wider comparison; for in Boston, with
all her husband's prosperity, they had not had a social life,
Their first years there were given to careful getting on Lap-
ham's part, and careful saving on his wife's. Suddenly the
money began to come so abundantly that she need not save;
and then they did not know what to do with it. A certain
amount could be spent on horses, and Lapham spent it; his
wife spent on rich and rather ugly clothes and a luxury of
household appointments. Lapham had not yet reached the pic-
ture-buying stage of the rich man's development, but they dec-
orated their house with the costliest and most abominable fres-
coes; they went upon journeys, and lavished upon cars and
hotels; they gave with both hands to their church and to all the
charities it brought them acquainted with; but they did not
know how to spend on society. Up to a certain period Mrs.
Lapham had the ladies of her neighbourhood in to tea, as her
mother had done in the country in her younger days. Lap-
ham's idea of hospitality was still to bring a heavy-buying cus-
tomer home to pot-luck; neither of them imagined dinners.

25

THE RISE OF

Their two girls had gone to the public schools, where they
had not got on as fast as some of the other girls; so that they
were a year behind in graduating from the grammar-school,
where Lapham thought that they had got education enough.
His wife was of a different mind; she would have liked them
to go to some private school for their finishing. But Irene did not
care for study; she preferred house-keeping, and both the sis-
ters were afraid of being snubbed by the other girls, who were
of a diffrent sort from the girls of the grammar-school; these
were mostly from the parks and squares, like themselves. It
ended in their going part of a year. But the elder had an odd
taste of her own for reading, and she took some private lessons,
and read books out of the circulating library; the whole fam-
ijy were amazed at the number she read, and rather proud of it.

They were not girls who embroidered or abandoned them-
selves to needle-work. Irene spent her abundant leisure in shop-
ping for herself and her mother, of whom both daughters
made a kind of idol, buying her caps and laces out of their
pin-money, and getting her dresses far beyond her capacity to
wear. Irene dressed herself very stylishly, and spent hours on
her toilet every day. Her sister had a simpler taste, and, if she
had done altogether as she liked, might even have slighted
dress. They all three took long naps every day, and sat hours
together minutely discussing what they saw out of the window.
In her self-guided search for self-improvement, the elder sister
went to many church lectures on a vast variety of secular sub-
jects, and usually came home with a comic account of them,
and that made more matter of talk for the whole family. She
could make fun of nearly everything; Irene complained that
she scared away the young men whom they got acquainted
with at the dancing-school sociables. They were, perhaps, not
the wisest young men.

The girls had learned to dance at Papanti's; but they had not
belonged to the private classes. They did not even know of

26

SILAS LAPHAM

them, and a great gulf divided them from those who did. Their
father did not like company, except such as came informally
in their way; and their mother had remained too rustic to
know how to attract it in the sophisticated city fashion. None
of them had grasped the idea of European travel ; but they had
gone about to mountain and sea-side resorts, the mother and
the two girls, where they witnessed the spectacle which such
resorts present throughout New England, of multitudes of
girls, lovely, accomplished, exquisitely dressed, humbly glad of
the presence of any sort of young man; but the Laphams had
no skill or courage to make themselves noticed, far less courted
by the solitary invalid, or clergyman, or artist. They lurked
helplessly about in the hotel parlours, looking on and not
knowing how to put themselves forward. Perhaps they did
not care a great deal to do so. They had not a conceit o them-
selves, but a sort of content in their own ways that one may
notice in certain families. The very strength of their mutual
affection was a barrier to worldly knowledge; they dressed for
one another; they equipped their house for their own satis-
faction; they lived richly to themselves, not because they were
selfish, but because they did not know how to do otherwise.
The elder daughter did not care for society, apparently. The
younger, who was but three years younger, was not yet quite
old enough to be ambitious of it. With all her wonderful
beauty, she had an innocence almost vegetable. When her
beauty, which in its immaturity was crude and harsh, sud-
denly ripened, she bloomed and glowed with the uncon-
sciousness of a flower; she not merely did not feel herself
admired, but hardly knew herself discovered. If she dressed
well, perhaps too well, it was because she had the instinct of
dress; but till she met this young man who was so nice to her
at Baie St. Paul, she had scarcely lived a detached, individual
life, so wholly had she depended on her mother and her sUter
for her opinions, almost her sensations. She took account of

THE RISE OF

everything he did and said, pondering it, and trying to make
<>ut exactly what he meant, to the inflection of a syllable, the
slightest movement or gesture. In this way she began for the
first time to form ideas which she had not derived from her
family, and they were none the less her own because they were
\often mistaken.

Some of the things that he partly said, partly looked, she re-
ported to her mother, and they talked them over, as they did
everything relating to these new acquaintances, and wrought
them into the novel point of view which they were acquiring.
When Mrs. Lapham returned home, she submitted all the ac-
cumulated facts of the case, and all her own conjectures, to her
husband, and canvassed them anew.

At first he was disposed to regard the whole affair as of
small importance, and she had to insist a little beyond her own
convictions in order to counteract his indifference.

"Well, I can tell you," she said, "that if you think they were
not the nicest people you ever saw, you're mightily mistaken.
They had about the best manners; and they had been every-
where, and knew everything. I declare it made me feel as if
we had always lived in the backwoods. I don't know but the
mother and the daughters would have let you feel so a little, if
they'd showed out all they thought; but they never did; and
the son well, I can't express it, Silas! But that young man had
about perfect ways."

"Seem struck up on Irene?" asked the Colonel.

"How can / tell? He seemed just about as much struck up
on me. Anyway, he paid me as much attention as he did her.
Perhaps it's more the way, now, to notice the mother than it
used to be."

Lapham ventured no conjecture, but asked, as he had asked
already, who the people were.

Mrs. Lapham repeated their name. Lapham nodded his
head. "Do you know them ? What business is he in ?"

28

SILAS LAPHAM

"I guess he ain't in anything," said Lapham.

"They were very nice," said Mrs. Lapham impartially.

"Well, they'd ought to be," returned the Colonel. "Never
done anything else."

"They didn't seem stuck up," urged his wife.

"They'd no. need to with you. I could buy him and sell him,
twice over."

This answer satisfied Mrs. Lapham rather with the fact than
with her husband. "Well, I guess I wouldn't brag, Silas," she
said.

In the winter the ladies of this family, who returned to town
very late, came to call on Mrs. Lapham. They were again very
polite. But the mother let drop, in apology for their calling al-
most at nightfall, that the coachman had not known the way
exactly.

"Nearly all our friends are on the New Land or on the Hill."

There was a barb in this that rankled after the ladies had
gone; and on comparing notes with her daughter, Mrs. Lap-
ham found that a barb had been left to rankle in her mind also.

"They said they had never been in this part of the town be-
fore."

Upon a strict search of her memory, Irene could not report
that the fact had been stated with anything like insinuation,
but it was that which gave it a more penetrating effect.

"Oh, well, of course," said Lapham, to whom these facts
were referred. "Those sort of people haven't got much business
up our way, and they don't come. It's a fair thing all round.
We don't trouble the Hill or the New Land much."

"We know where they are," suggested his wife thoughtfully.

"Yes," assented the Colonel. "/ know where they are. I've
got a lot of land over on the Back Bay."

"You have?" eagerly demanded his wife.

"Want me to build on it?" he asked in reply, with a quiz-
zical smile.

29

THE RISE OB

"I guess we can get along here for a while."

This was at night. In the morning Mrs. Lapham said

"I suppose we ought to do the best we can for the children,,
in every way."

"I supposed we always had," replied her husband.

"Yes, we have, according to our light."

"Have you got some new light?"

"I don't know as it's light. But if the girls are going to keep
on living in Boston and marry here, I presume we ought to
try to get them into society, some way; or ought ro do some-
thing."

"Well, who's ever done more for their children than we
have?" demanded Lapham, with a pang at the thought that
he could possibly have been outdone. "Don't they have every-
thing they want? Don't they dress just as you say? Don't you
go everywhere with 'em ? Is there ever anything going on that's
worth while that they don't see it or hear it? / don't know what
you mean. Why don't you get them into society? There's
money enough!"

"There's got to be something besides money, I guess," said
Mrs. Lapham, with a hopeless sigh. "I presume we didn't go to
work just the right way about their schooling. We ought to
have got them into some school where they'd have got ac-
quainted with city girls girls who could help them along.
Nearly everybody at Miss Smillie's was from some where else."

"Well, it's pretty late to think about that now," grumbled
Lapham.

"And we've always gone our own way, and not looked out
for the future. We ought to have gone out more, and had peo-
ple come to the house. Nobody comes."

"Well, is that my fault? I guess nobody ever makes people
welcomer."

"We ought to have invited company more."

30

SILAS LAPHAM

"Why don't you do it now? If it's for the girls, I don't care if
you have the house full all the while."

Mrs. Lapham was forced to a confession full of humiliation.
"I don't know who to ask."

"Well, you can't expect me to tell you."

"No; we're both country people, and we've kept our coun-
try ways, and we don't, either of us, know what to do. You've
had to work so hard, and your luck was so long coming, and
then it came with such a rush, that we haven't had any chance
to learn what to do with it. It's just the same with Irene's looks;
I didn't expect she was ever going to have any, she was such a
plain child, and, all at once, she's blazed out this way. As long
as it was Penn that didn't seem to care for society, I didn't give
much mind to it. But I can see it's going to be different with
Irene. I don't believe but what we're in the wrong neighbour-
hood."

"Well," said the Colonel, "there ain't a prettier lot on the
Back Bay than mine. It's on the water side of Beacon, and it's
twenty-eight feet wide and a hundred and fifty deep. Let's
build on it."

Mrs. Lapham was silent a while. "No," she said finally;
"we've always got along well enough here, and I guess we
better stay."

At breakfast she said casually: "Girls, how would you like to
have your father build on the New Land?"

The girls said they did not know. It was more convenient
to the horse-cars where they were.

Mrs. Lapham stole a look of relief at her husband, and noth-
ing more was said of the matter.

The mother of the family who had called upon Mrs. Lapham
brought her husband's cards, and when Mrs. Lapham returned
the visit she was in some trouble about the proper form of ac-
knowledging the civility. The Colonel had no card but a busi-

THE RISE OF

ness card, which advertised the principal depot and the several
agencies of the mineral paint; and Mrs. Lapham doubted, till
she wished to goodness that she had never seen nor heard of
those people, whether to ignore her husband in the transaction
altogether, or to write his name on her own card. She decided
finally upon this measure, and she had the relief of not finding
the family at home. As far as she could judge, Irene seemed to
suffer a little disappointment from the fact.

For several months there was no communication between
the families. Then there came to Nankeen Square a litho-
graphed circular from the people on the Hill, signed in ink by
the mother, and affording Mrs. Lapham an opportunity to sub-
scribe for a charity of undeniable merit and acceptability. She
submitted it to her husband, who promptly drew a cheque for
five hundred dollars.

She tore it in two. "I will take a cheque for a hundred, Silas,"
she said.

"Why?" he asked, looking up guiltily at her.

"Because a hundred is enough; and I don't want to show off
before them."

"Oh, I thought may be you did. Well, Pert," he added, having
satisfied human nature by the preliminary thrust, "I guess
you're about right. When do you want I should begin to build
on Beacon Street?" He handed her the new cheque, where
slie stood over him, and then leaned back in his chair and
looked up at her.

"I don't want you should begin at all. What do you mean,
Silas?" She rested against the side of his desk.

"Well, I don't know as I mean anything. But shouldn't you
like to build ? Everybody builds, at least once in a lifetime."

"Where is your lot? They say it's unhealthy, over there."

Up to a certain point in their prosperity Mrs. Lapham had
kept strict account of all her husband's affairs; but as they
expanded, and ceased to be of the retail nature with which

32

SILAS LAPHAM

women successfully grapple, the intimate knowledge of them
made her nervous. There was a period in which she felt that
they were being ruined, but the crash had not come; and, since
his great success, she had abandoned herself to a blind con-
fidence in her husband's judgment, which she had hitherto felt
needed her revision. He came and went, day by day, unques-
tioned. He bought and sold and got gain. She knew that he
would tell her if ever things went wrong, and he knew that she
would ask him whenever she was anxious.

"It ain't unhealthy where I've bought," said Lapham, rather
enjoying her insinuation. "I looked after that when I was trad-
ing; and I guess it's about as healthy on the Back Bay as it is
here, anyway. I got that lot for you, Pert; I thought you'd want
to build on the Back Bay some day."

"Pshaw!" said Mrs. Lapham, deeply pleased inwardly, but
not going to show it, as she would have said. "I guess you want
to build there yourself." She insensibly got a little nearer to
her husband. They liked to talk to each other in that blunt
way; it is the New England way of expressing perfect confi-
dence and tenderness.

"Well, I guess I do," said Lapham, not insisting upon the un-
selfish view of the matter. "I always did like the water side of
Beacon. There ain't a sightlier place in the world for a house.
And some day there's bound to be a drive-way all along behind
them houses, between them and the water, and then a lot there
is going to be worth the gold that will cover it coin. I've had
offers for that lot, Pert, twice over what I give for it. Yes, I
have. Don't you want to ride over there some afternoon with
me and see it?"

"I'm satisfied where we be, Si," said Mrs. Lapham, recur-
ring to the parlance of her youth in her pathos at her husband's
kindness. She sighed anxiously, for she felt the trouble a
woman knows in view of any great change. They had often
talked of altering over the house in which they lived, but they

THE RISE OF

had never come to it; and they had often talked of building,
but it had always been a house in the country that they had
thought of. "I wish you had sold that lot."

"I hain't," said the Colonel briefly.

"I don't know as I feel much like changing our way of liv-
ing."

"Guess we could live there pretty much as we live here.
There's all kinds of people on Beacon Street; you mustn't
think they're all big-bugs. I know one party that lives in a
house he built to sell, and his wife don't keep any girl. You
can have just as much style there as you want, or just as little.
I guess we live as well as most of 'em now, and set as good a
table. And if you come to style, I don't know as anybody has
got more of a right to put it on than what we have."

"Well, I don't want to build on Beacon Street, Si," said Mrs.
Lapham gently.

"Just as you please, Persis. I ain't in any hurry to leave."

Mrs. Lapham stood flapping the cheque which she held in
her right hand against the edge of her left.

The Colonel still sat looking up at her face, and watching the
effect of the poison of ambition which he had artfully instilled
into her mind.

She sighed again a yielding sigh. "What are you going to do
this afternoon?"

"I'm going to take a turn on the Brighton road," said the
Colonel.

"I don't believe but what I should like to go along," said his
wife.

"All right. You hain't ever rode behind that mare yet, Pert,
and I want you should see me let her out once. They say the
snow's all packed down already, and the going is A i."

At four o'clock in the afternoon, with a cold, red winter
sunset before them, the Colonel and his wife were driving
slowly down Beacon Street in the light, high-seated cutter,

34

SILAS LAPHAM

where, as he said, they were a pretty tight fit. He was holding
the mare in till the time came to speed her, and the mare was
springily jolting over the snow, looking intelligently from side
to side, and cocking this ear and that, while from her nostrils,
her head tossing easily, she blew quick, irregular whiffs of
steam.

"Gay, ain't she?" proudly suggested the Colonel.

"She is gay," assented his wife.

They met swiftly dashing sleighs, and let them pass on
either hand, down the beautiful avenue narrowing with an
admirably even sky-line in the perspective. They were not in
a hurry. The mare jounced easily along, and they talked of the
different houses on either side of the way. They had a crude
taste in architecture, and they admired the worst. There were
women's faces at many of the handsome windows, and once
in a while a young man on the pavement caught his hat sud-
denly from his head, and bowed in response to some salutation
from within.

"I don't think our girls would look very bad behind one of
those big panes," said the Colonel.

"No," said his wife dreamily.

"Where's the young man? Did he come with them?"

"No; he was to spend the winter with a friend of his that
has a ranch in Texas. I guess he's got to do something."

"Yes; gentlemaning as a profession has got to play out in a
generation or two."

Neither of them spoke of the lot, though Lapham knew
perfectly well what his wife had come with him for, and she
was aware that he knew it. The time came when he brought
the mare down to a walk, and then slowed up almost to a
stop, while they both turned their heads to the right and
looked at the vacant lot, through which showed the frozen
stretch of the Back Bay, a section of the Long Bridge, and the
roofs and smoke-stacks of Charlestown.

35

THE RISE OF

"Yes, it's sightly," said Mrs. Lapham, lifting her hand from
the reins, on which she had unconsciously laid it.

Lapham said nothing, but he let the mare out a little.

The sleighs and cutters were thickening round them. On the
Milldam it became difficult to restrict the mare to the long,
slow trot into which he let her break. The beautiful landscape
widened to right and left of them, with the sunset redder and
redder, over the low, irregular hills before them. They crossed
the Milldam into Longwood; and here, from the crest of the
first upland, stretched two endless lines, in which thousands
of cutters went and came. Some of the drivers were already
speeding their horses, and these shot to and fro on inner lines,
between the slowly moving vehicles on either side of the road.
Here and there a burly mounted policeman, bulging over the
pommel of his M'Clellan saddle, jolted by, silently gesturing
and directing the course, and keeping it all under the eye of the
law. It was what Hartley Hubbard called "a carnival of fash-
ion and gaiety on the Brighton road," in his account of it. But
most of the people in those elegant sleighs and cutters had so
little the air of the great world that one knowing it at all must
have wondered were they and their money came from; and
the gaiety of the men, at least, was expressed, like that of Colo-
nel Lapham, in a grim almost fierce, alertness; the women
wore an air of courageous apprehension. At a certain point the
Colonel said, "I'm going to let her out, Pert," and he lifted and
then dropped the reins lightly on the mare's back.

She understood the signal, and, as an admirer said, "she laid
down to her work." Nothing in the immutable iron of Lap-
ham's face betrayed his sense of triumph as the mare left every-
thing behind her on the road. Mrs. Lapham, if she felt fear, was
too busy holding her flying wraps about her, and shielding her
face from the scud of ice flung from the mare's heels, to betray
it; except for the rush of her feet, the mare was as silent as the
people behind her; the muscles of her back and thighs worked

36

SILAS LAPHAM

more and more swiftly, like some mechanism responding to MI
alien force, and she shot to the end of the course, grazing a
hundred encountered and rival sledges in her passage, but un-
molested by the policemen, who probably saw that the mare
and the Colonel knew what they were about, and, at any rate,
were not the sort of men to interfere with trotting like that. At
the end of the heat Lapham drew her in, and turned off on a
side street into Brookline.

"Tell you what, Pert," he said, as if they had been quietly
jogging along, with time for uninterrupted thought since he
last spoke, "I've about made up my mind to build on that lot.'*

"All right, Silas," said Mrs. Lapham; "I suppose you know
what you're about. Don't build on it for me, that's all."

When she stood in the hall at home, taking off her things,
she said to the girls, who were helping her, "Some day your
father will get killed with that mare."

"Did he speed her?" asked Penelope, the elder. She was
named after her grandmother, who had in her turn inherited
from another ancestress the name of the Homeric matron
whose peculiar merits won her a place even among the Puri-
tan Faiths, Hopes, Temperances, and Prudences. Penelope
was the girl whose odd serious face had struck Hartley Hub-
bard in the photograph of the family group Lapham showed
him on the day of the interview. Her large eyes, like her hair,
were brown; they had the peculiar look of near-sighted eyes
which is called mooning; her complexion was of a dark pallor.

Her mother did not reply to a question which might be con-
sidered already answered. "He says he's going to build on that
lot of his," she next remarked, unwinding the long veil which
she had tied round her neck to hold her bonnet on. She put her
hat and cloak on the hall table, to be carried upstairs later, and
they all went in to tea : creamed oysters, birds, hot biscuit, two
kinds of cake, and dishes of stewed and canned fruit and honey.
The women dined alone at one, and the Colonel at the same

37

THE RISE OF

hour down-town. But he liked a good hot meal when he got
home in the evening. The house flared with gas; and the Colo-
nel, before he sat down, went about shutting the registers,
through which a welding heat came voluming up from the
furnace.

"I'll be the death of that darkey yet" he said, "if he don't stop
making on such a fire. The only way to get any comfort out of
your furnace is to take care of it yourself."

"Well," answered his wife from behind the teapot, as he sat
down at table with this threat, "there's nothing to prevent you,
Si. And you can shovel the snow too, if you want to till you
get over to Beacon Street, anyway."

"I guess I can keep my own sidewalk on Beacon Street clean,
if I take the notion."

"I should like to see you at it," retorted his wife.

"Well, you keep a sharp lookout, and may be you will."

Their taunts were really expressions of affectionate pride in
each other. They liked to have it, give and take, that way, as
they would have said, right along.

"A man can be a man on Beacon Street as well as anywhere,
I guess."

"Well, I'll do the wash, as I used to in Lumberville," said
Mrs. Lapham. "I presume you'll let me have set tubs, Si. You
know I ain't so young any more." She passed Irene a cup of
Oolong tea, none of them had a sufficiently cultivated palate
for Souchong, and the girl handed it to her father.

"Papa," she asked, "you don't really mean that you're going
to build over there?"

"Don't I? You wait and see," said the Colonel, stirring his
tea.

"I don't believe you do," pursued the girl.

"Is that so? I presume you'd hate to have me. Your mother
does." He said doos, of course.

Penelope took the word. "I go in for it. I don't see any use in

38

SILAS LAPHAM

not enjoying money, if you've got it to enjoy. That's what it's
for, I suppose; though you mightn't always think so." She had
a slow, quaint way of talking, that seemed a pleasant personal
modification of some ancestral Yankee drawl, and her voice
was low and cozy, and so far from being nasal that it was a lit-
tle hoarse.

"I guess the ayes has it, Pen," said her father. "How would it
do to let Irene and your mother stick in the old place here, and
us go into the new house?" At times the Colonel's grammar
failed him.

The matter dropped, and the Laphams lived on as before,
with joking recurrences to the house on the water side of Bea-
con. The Colonel seemed less in earnest than any of them about
it; but that was his way, his girls said; you never could tell
when he really meant a thing.

39

Ill

JL OWARD the end of the winter there came a newspaper, ad-
dressed to Miss Irene Lapham; it proved to be a Texas news-
paper, with a complimentary account of the ranch of the Hon.
Loring G. Stanton, which the representative of the journal
had visited.

"It must be his friend," said Mrs. Lapham, to whom her
daughter brought the paper; "the one he's staying with."

The girl did not say anything, but she carried the paper to
her room, where she scanned every line of it for another name.
She did not find it, but she cut the notice out and stuck it into
the side of her mirror, where she could read it every morning
when she brushed her hair, and the last thing at night when
she looked at herself in the glass just before turning off the gas.
Her sister often read it aloud, standing behind her and render-
ing it with elocutionary effects.

"The first time I ever heard of a love-letter in the form of a
puff to a cattle-ranch. But perhaps that's the style on the Hill."

Mrs. Lapham told her husband of the arrival of the paper,
treating the fact with an importance that he refused to see in
it.

"How do you know the fellow sent it, anyway?" he de-
manded.

"Oh, I know he did."

"I don't see why he couldn't write to 'Rene, if he really
meant anything."

"Well, I guess that wouldn't be their way," said Mrs. Lap-
ham; she did not at all know what their way would be.

When the spring opened Colonel Lapham showed that he

40

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

had been in earnest about building on the New Land. His idea
of a house was a brown-stone front, four stories high, and a
French roof with an air-chamber above. Inside, there was to be
a reception-room on the street and a dining-room back. The
parlours were to be on the second floor, and finished in black
walnut or party-coloured paint. The chambers were to be on
the three floors above, front and rear, with side-rooms over the
front door. Black walnut was to be used everywhere except in
the attic, which was to be painted and grained to look like
black walnut. The whole was to be very high-studded, and
there were to be handsome cornices and elaborate centre-pieces
throughout, except, again, in the attic.

These ideas he had formed from the inspection of many new
buildings which he had seen going up, and which he had a pas-
sion for looking into. He was confirmed in his ideas by a mas-
ter builder who had put up a great many houses on the Back
Bay as a speculation, and who told him that if he wanted to
have a house in the style, that was the way to have it.

The beginnings of the process by which Lapham escaped
from the master builder and ended in the hands of an architect
are so obscure that it would be almost impossible to trace them.
But it all happened, and Lapham promptly developed his ideas
of black walnut finish, high studding, and cornices. The archi-
tect was able to conceal the shudder which they must have sent
through him. He was skilful, as nearly all architects are, in
playing upon that simple instrument Man. He began to touch
Colonel Lapham's stops.

"Oh, certainly, have the parlours high-studded. But you've
seen some of those pretty old-fashioned country-houses, haven't
you, where the entrance-story is very low-studded?"

"Yes," Lapham assented.

"Well, don't you think something of that kind would have
a very nice effect? Have the entrance-story low-studded, and
your parlours on the next floor as high as you please. Put your

41

THE RISE OF

little reception-room here beside the door, and get the whole
width of your house frontage for a square hall, and an easy low-
tread staircase running up three sides of it. I'm sure Mrs. Lap-
ham would find it much pleasanter." The architect caught
toward him a scrap of paper lying on the table at which they
were sitting and sketched his idea. "Then have your dining-
room behind the hall, looking on the water."

He glanced at Mrs. Lapham, who said, "Of course," and the
architect went on

"That gets you rid of one of those long, straight, ugly stair-
cases," until that moment Lapham had thought a long,
straight staircase the chief ornament of a house, "and gives
you an effect of amplitude and space."

"That's so!" said Mrs. Lapham. Her husband merely made a
noise in his throat.

"Then, were you thinking of having your parlours together,
connected by folding doors?" asked the architect deferentially.

"Yes, of course," said Lapham. "They're always so, ain't
they?"

"Well, nearly," said the architect. "I was wondering how
would it do to make one large square room at the front, taking
the whole breadth of the house, and, with this hall-space be-
tween, have a music-room back for the young ladies?"

Lapham looked helplessly at his wife, whose quicker appre-
hension had followed the architect's pencil with instant sym-
pathy. "First-rate!" she cried.

The Colonel gave way. "I guess that would do. It'll be kind
of odd, won't it?"

"Well, I don't know," said the architect. "Not so odd, I hope,
as the other thing will be a few years from now." He went on
to plan the rest of the house, and he showed himself such a
master in regard to all the practical details that Mrs. Lapham
began to feel a motherly affection for the young man, and her
husband could not deny in his heart that the fellow seemed to

42

SILAS LAPHAM

understand his business. He stopped walking about the room,
as he had begun to do when the architect and Mrs. Lapham en-
tered into the particulars of closets, drainage, kitchen arrange-
ments, and all that, and came back to the table. "I presume," he
said, "you'll have the drawing-room finished in black walnut?"

"Well, yes," replied the architect, "if you like. But some less
expensive wood can be made just as effective with paint. Of
course you can paint black walnut too."

"Paint it?" gasped the Colonel.

"Yes," said the architect quietly. "White, or a little off white."

Lapham dropped the plan he had picked up from the table.
His wife made a little move toward him of consolation or sup-
port.

"Of course," resumed the architect, "I know there has been
a great craze for black walnut. But it's an ugly wood; and for
a drawing-room there is really nothing like white paint. We
should want to introduce a little gold here and there. Perhaps
we might run a painted frieze round under the cornice gar-
lands of roses on a gold ground; it would tell wonderfully in a
white room."

The Colonel returned less courageously to the charge. "I
presume you'll want Eastlake mantel-shelves and tiles?" He
meant this for a sarcastic thrust at a prevailing foible of the
profession.

"Well, no," gently answered the architect. "I was thinking
perhaps a white marble chimney-piece, treated in the refined
Empire style, would be the thing for that room."

"White marble!" exclaimed the Colonel. "I thought that had
gone out long ago."

"Really beautiful things can't go out. They may disappear
for a little while, but they must come back. It's only the ugly
things that stay out after they've had their day."

Lapham could only venture very modestly, "Hard-wood
floors?"

43

THE RISE OF

"In the music-room, of course," consented the architect.

"And in the drawing-room?"

"Carpet. Some sort of moquette, I should say. But I should
prefer to consult Mrs. Lapham's taste in that matter."

"And in the other rooms ?"

"Oh, carpets, of course."

"And what about the stairs?"

"Carpet. And I should have the rail and banisters white -
banisters turned or twisted."

The Colonel said under his breath, "Well, I'm dumned!" but
he gave no utterance to his astonishment in the architect's pres-
ence. When he went at last, the session did not end till eleven
o'clock, Lapham said, "Well, Pert, I guess that fellow's fifty
years behind, or ten years ahead. I wonder what the Ongpeer
style is?"

"I don't know. I hated to ask. But he seemed to under-
stand what he was talking about. I declare, he knows what a
woman wants in a house better than she does herself."

"And a man's simply nowhere in comparison," said Lapham.
But he respected a fellow who could beat him at every point,
and have a reason ready, as this architect had; and when he
recovered from the daze into which the complete upheaval of
all his preconceived notions had left him, he was in a fit state
to swear by the architect. It seemed to him that he had dis-
covered the fellow (as he always called him) and owned him
now, and the fellow did nothing to disturb this impression. He
entered into that brief but intense intimacy with the Laphams
which the sympathetic architect holds with his clients. He was
privy to all their differences of opinion and all their disputes
about the house. He knew just where to insist upon his own
ideas, and where to yield. He was really building several other
houses, but he gave the Laphams the impression that he was
doing none but theirs.

The work was not begun till the frost was- thoroughly out of

44

SILAS LAPHAM

the ground, which that year was not before the end of April.
Even then it did not proceed very rapidly. Lapham said they
might as well take their time to it; if they got the walls up and
the thing closed in before the snow flew, they could be work-
ing at it all winter. It was found necessary to dig for the kit-
chen; at that point the original salt-marsh lay near the surface,
and before they began to put in the piles for the foundation
they had to pump. The neighbourhood smelt like the hold of a
ship after a three years' voyage. People who had cast their for-
tunes with the New Land went by professing not to notice it;
people who still "hung on to the Hill" put their handkerchiefs
to their noses, and told each other the old terrible stories of the
material used in filling up the Back Bay.

Nothing gave Lapham so much satisfaction in the whole
construction of his house as the pile-driving. When this began,
early in the summer, he took Mrs. Lapham every day in his
buggy and drove round to look at it; stopping the mare in
front of the lot, and watching the operation with even keener
interest than the little loafing Irish boys who superintended
it in force. It pleased him to hear the portable engine chuckle
out a hundred thin whiffs of steam in carrying the big iron
weight to the top of the framework above the pile, then seem
to hesitate, and cough once or twice in pressing the weight
against the detaching apparatus. There was a moment in which
the weight had the effect of poising before it fell; then it
dropped with a mighty whack on the iron-bound head of the
pile, and drove it a foot into the earth.

"By gracious!" he would say, "there ain't anything like that
in this world for business, Persis!"

Mrs. Lapham suffered him to enjoy the sight twenty or thirty
times before she said, "Well, now drive on, Si."

By the time the foundation was in and the brick walls had
begun to go up, there were so few people left in the neighbour-
hood that she might indulge with impunity her husband's

45

THE RISE OF

passion for having her clamber over the floor-timbers and the
skeleton staircases with him. Many of the householders had
boarded up their front doors before the buds had begun to swell
and the assessor to appear in early May; others had followed
soon; and Mrs. Lapham was as safe from remark as if she had
been in the depth of the country. Ordinarily she and her girls
left town early in July, going to one of the hotels at Nantasket,
where it was convenient for the colonel to get to and from his
business by the boat. But this summer they were all lingering
a few weeks later, under the novel fascination of the new house,
as they called it, as if there were no other in the world.

Lapham drove there with his wife after he had set Hartley
Hubbard down at the Events office, but on this day something
happened that interfered with the solid pleasure they usually
took in going over the house. As the Colonel turned from cast-
ing anchor at the mare's head with the hitching-weight, after
helping his wife to alight, he encountered a man to whom he
could not help speaking, though the man seemed to share his
hesitation if not his reluctance at the necessity. He was a tallish,
thin man, with a dust-coloured face, and a dead, clerical air,
which somehow suggested at once feebleness and tenacity.

Mrs. Lapham held out her hand to him.

"Why, Mr. Rogers!" she exclaimed; and then, turning to-
ward her husband, seemed to refer the two men to each other.
They shook hands, but Lapham did not speak. "I didn't know
you were in Boston," pursued Mrs. Lapham. "Is Mrs. Rogers
with you?"

"No," said Mr. Rogers, with a voice which had the flat, suc-
cinct sound of two pieces of wood clapped together. "Mrs.
Rogers is still in Chicago."

A little silence followed, and then Mrs. Lapham said

"I presume you are quite settled out there."

"No; we have left Chicago. Mrs. Rogers has merely remained
to finish up a little packing."

SILAS LAPHAM

"Oh, indeed! Are you coming back to Boston?"

"I cannot say as yet. We some think of so doing."

Lapham turned away and looked up at the building. His
wife pulled a little at her glove, as if embarrassed, or even
pained. She tried to make a diversion.

"We are building a house," she said, with a meaningless
laugh.

"Oh, indeed," said Mr. Rogers, looking up at it.

Then no one spoke again, and she said helplessly

"If you come to Boston, I hope I shall see Mrs. Rogers."

"She will be happy to have you call," said Mr. Rogers.

He touched his hat-brim, and made a bow forward rather
than in Mrs. Lapham's direction.

She mounted the planking that led into the shelter of the
bare brick walls, and her husband slowly followed. When she
turned her face toward him her cheeks were burning, and tears
that looked hot stood in her eyes.

"You left it all to me!" she cried. "Why couldn't you speak
a word?"

"I hadn't anything to say to him," replied Lapham sul-
lenly.

They stood a while, without looking at the work which they
had come to enjoy, and without speaking to each other.

"I suppose we might as well go on," said Mrs. Lapham at
last, as they returned to the buggy. The Colonel drove reck-
lessly toward the Milldam. His wife kept her veil down and
her face turned from him. After a time she put her handker-
chief up under her veil and wiped her eyes, and he set his teeth
and squared his jaw.

"I don't see how he always manages to appear just at the mo-
ment when he seems to have gone fairly out of our lives, and
blight everything," she whimpered.

"I supposed he was dead," said Lapham.

"Oh, don't say such a thing! It sounds as if you wished it."

47

THE RISE OF

"Why do you mind it? What do you let him blight every-
thing for?"

"I can't help it, and I don't believe I ever shall. I don't know
as his being dead would help it any. I can't ever see him with-
out feeling just as I did at first."

"I tell you," said Lapham, "it was a perfectly square thing.
And I wish, once for all, you would quit bothering about it.
My conscience is easy as far as he's concerned, and it always
was."

"And I can't look at him without feeling as if you'd ruined
him, Silas."

"Don't look at him, then," said her husband, with a scowl.
"I want you should recollect in the first place, Persis, that I
never wanted a partner."

"If he hadn't put his money in when he did, you'd 'a' broken
down."

"Well, he got his money out again, and more, too," said the
Colonel, with a sulky weariness.

"He didn't want to take it out."

"I gave him his choice : buy out or go out."

"You know he couldn't buy out then. It was no choice at
all."

"It was a business chance."

"No; you had better face the truth, Silas. It was no chance
at all. You crowded him out. A man that had saved you! No,
you had got greedy, Silas. You had made your paint your god,
and you couldn't bear to let anybody else share in its blessings."

"I tell you he was a drag and a brake on me from the word
go. You say he saved me. Well, if I hadn't got him out he'd 'a'
ruined me sooner or later. So it's an even thing, as far forth as
that goes."

"No, it ain't an even thing, and you know it, Silas. Oh, if I
could only get you once to acknowledge that you did wrong
about it, then I should have some hope. I don't say you meant

SILAS LAPHAM

wrong exactly, but you took an advantage. Yes, you took an
advantage! You had him where he couldn't help himself, aad
then you wouldn't show him any mercy."

"I'm sick of this," said Lapham. "If you'll 'tend to the house,
I'll manage my business without your help."

"You were very glad of my help once."

"Well, I'm tired of it now. Don't meddle."

"I will meddle. When I see you hardening yourself in a
wrong thing, it's time for me to meddle, as you call it, and I
will. I can't ever get you to own up the least bit about Rogers,
and I feel as if it was hurting you all the while."

"What do you want I should own up about a thing for when
I don't feel wrong? I tell you Rogers hain't got anything to
complain of, and that's what I told you from the start. It's a
thing that's done every day. I was loaded up with a partner that
didn't know anything, and couldn't do anything, and I un-
loaded; that's all."

"You unloaded just at the time when you knew that your
paint was going to be worth about twice what it ever had been;
and you wanted all the advantage for yourself."

"I had a right to it. I made the success."

"Yes, you made it with Rogers's money; and when you'd
made it you took his share of it. I guess you thought of that
when you saw him, and that's why you couldn't look him in
the face."

At these words Lapham lost his temper.

"I guess you don't want to ride with me any more to-day,"
he said, turning the mare abruptly round.

"I'm as ready to go back as what you are," replied his wife.
"And don't you ask me to go to that house with you any more.
You can sell it, for all me. I sha'n't live in it. There's blood

on it."

49

4
IV

JL HE silken texture of the marriage tie bears a daily strain of
wrong and insult to which no other human relation can be sub-
jected without lesion; and sometimes the strength that knits
society together might appear to the eye of faltering faith the
curse of those immediately bound by it. Two people by no
means reckless of each other's rights and feelings, but even
tender of them for the most part, may tear at each other's heart-
strings in this sacred bond with perfect impunity; though if
they were any other two they would not speak or look at each
other again after the outrages they exchange. It is certainly a
curious spectacle, and doubtless it ought to convince an ob-
server of the divinity of the institution. If the husband and wife
are blunt, outspoken people like the Laphams, they do not
weigh their words; if they are more refined, they weigh them
very carefully, and know accurately just how far they will carry,
and in what most sensitive spot they may be planted with
most effect.

Lapham was proud of his wife, and when he married her it
had been a rise in life for him. For a while he stood in awe of
his good fortune, but this could not last, and he simply re-
mained supremely satisfied with it. The girl who had taught
school with a clear head and a strong hand was not afraid of
work; she encouraged and helped him from the first, and bore
her full share of the common burden. She had health, and she
did not worry his life out with peevish complaints and vaga-
ries; she had sense and principle, and in their simple lot she
did what was wise and right. Their marriage was hallowed by
an early sorrow: they lost their boy, and it was years before

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

they could look each other in the face and speak of him. No
one gave up more than they when they gave up each other and
Lapham went to the war. When he came back and began to
work, her zeal and courage formed the spring of his enterprise.
In that affair of the partnership she had tried to be his con-
science, but perhaps she would have defended him if he had
accused himself; it was one of those things in this life which
seem destined to await justice, or at least judgment, in the next.
As he said, Lapham had dealt fairly by his partner in money;
he had let Rogers take more money out of the business than he
put into it; he had, as he said, simply forced out of it a timid
and inefficient participant in advantages which he had created.
But Lapham had not created them all. He had been dependent
at one time on his partner's capital. It was a moment of terrible
trial. Happy is the man for ever after who can choose the ideal,
the unselfish part in such an exigency! Lapham could not rise
to it. He did what he could maintain to be perfectly fair. The
wrong, if any, seemed to be condoned to him, except when
from time to time his wife brought it up. Then all the question
stung and burned anew, and had to be reasoned out and put
away once more. It seemed to have an inextinguishable vitality.
It slept, but it did not die.

His course did not shake Mrs. Lapham's faith in him. It as-
tonished her at first, and it always grieved her that he could
not see that he was acting solely in his own interest. But she
found excuses for him, which at times she made reproaches.
She vaguely perceived that his paint was something more than
business to him; it was a sentiment, almost a passion. He could
not share its management and its profit with another without
a measure of self-sacrifice far beyond that which he must make
with something less personal to him. It was the poetry of that
nature, otherwise so intensely prosaic; and she understood
this, and for the most part forbore. She knew him good and
true and blameless in all his life, except for this wrong, if it

5 1

THE RISE OF

were a wrong; and it was only when her nerves tingled intoler-
ably with some chance renewal of the pain she had suffered,
that she shared her anguish with him in true wifely fashion.

With those two there was never anything like an explicit
reconciliation. They simply ignored a quarrel; and Mrs. Lap-
ham had only to say a few days after at breakfast, "I guess the
girls would like to go round with you this afternoon, and look
at the new house," in order to make her husband grumble out
as he looked down into his coffee-cup, "I guess we better all go,
hadn't we?"

"Well, 111 see," she said.

There was not really a great deal to look at when Lapham
arrived on the ground in his four-seated beach-wagon. But the
walls were up, and the studding had already given skeleton
shape to the interior. The floors were roughly boarded over,
and the stairways were in place, with provisional treads rudely
laid. They had not begun to lath and plaster yet, but the clean,
fresh smell of the mortar in the walls mingling with the pun-
gent fragrance of the pine shavings neutralised the Venetian
odour that drew in over the water. It was pleasantly shady
there, though for the matter of that the heat of the morning
had all been washed out of the atmosphere by a tide of east
wind setting in at noon, and the thrilling, delicious cool of a
Boston summer afternoon bathed every nerve.

The foreman went about with Mrs. Lapham, showing her
where the doors were to be; but Lapham soon tired of this, and
having found a pine stick of perfect grain, he abandoned him-
self to the pleasure of whittling it in what was to be the recep-
tion-room, where he sat looking out on the street from what
was to be the bay-window. Here he was presently joined by his
girls, who, after locating their own room on the water side
above the music-room, had no more wish to enter into details
than their father.

"Come and take a seat in the bay-window, ladies," he called
out to them, as they looked in at him through the ribs of the

52

SILAS LAPHAM

wall. He jocosely made room for them on the trestle on which
he sat.

They came gingerly and vaguely forward, as young ladies do
when they wish not to seem to be going to do a thing they have
made up their minds to do. When they had taken their places
on their trestle, they could not help laughing with scorn,
open and acceptable to their father; and Irene curled her chin
up, in a little way she had, and said, "How ridiculous!" to
her sister.

"Well, I can tell you what," said the Colonel, in fond enjoy-
ment of their young ladyishness, "your mother wa'n't ashamed
to sit with me on a trestle when I called her out to look at the
first coat of my paint that I ever tried on a house."

"Yes; we've heard that story," said Penelope, with easy secu-
rity of her father's liking what she said. "We were brought up
on that story."

"Well, it's a good story," said her father.

At that moment a young man came suddenly in range, who
began to look up at the signs of building as he approached. He
dropped his eyes in coming abreast of the bay-window, where
Lapham sat with his girls, and then his face lightened, and he
took off his hat and bowed to Irene. She rose mechanically
from the trestle, and her face lightened too. She was a very
pretty figure of a girl, after our fashion of girls, round and slim
and flexible, and her face was admirably regular. But her great
beauty and it was very great was in her colouring. This was
of an effect for which there is no word but delicious, as we use
it of fruit or flowers. She had red hair, like her father in his
earlier days, and the tints of her cheeks and temples were such
as suggested May-flowers and apple-blossoms and peaches. In-
stead of the grey that often dulls this complexion, her eyes were
of a blue at once intense and tender, and they seemed to burn
on what they looked at with a soft, lambent flame. It was well
understood by her sister and mother that her eyes always ex-
pressed a great deal more than Irene ever thought or felt; but

53

THE RISE OF

this is not saying that she was not a very sensible girl and very
honest.

The young man faltered perceptibly, and Irene came a little
forward, and then there gushed from them both a smiling ex-
change of greeting, of which the sum was that he supposed she
was out of town, and that she had not known that he had got
back. A pause ensued, and flushing again in her uncertainty as
to whether she ought or ought not to do it, she said, "My fa-
ther, Mr. Corey; and my sister."

The young man took off his hat again, showing his shapely
head, with a line of wholesome sunburn ceasing where the re-
cently and closely clipped hair began. He was dressed in a fine
summer check, with a blue white-dotted neckerchief, and he
had a white hat, in which he looked very well when he put it
back on his head. His whole dress seemed very fresh and new,
and in fact he had cast aside his Texan habiliments only the
day before.

"How do you do, sir?" said the Colonel, stepping to the win-
dow, and reaching out of it the hand which the young man
advanced to take. "Won't you come in ? We're at home here.
House I'm building."

"Oh, indeed?" returned the young man; and he came
promptly up the steps, and through its ribs into the recep-
tion-room.

"Have a trestle?" asked the Colonel, while the girls ex-
changed little shocks of terror and amusement at the eyes.

"Thank you," said the young man simply, and sat down.

"Mrs. Lapham is upstairs interviewing the carpenter, but
she'll be down in a minute."

"I hope she's quite well," said Corey. "I supposed I was
afraid she might be out of town."

"Well, we are off to Nantasket next week. The house kept
us in town pretty late."

54

SILAS LAPHAM

"It must be very exciting, building a house," said Corey to
the elder sister.

"Yes, it is/' she assented, loyally refusing in Irene's interest
the opportunity of saying anything more.

Corey turned to the latter. "I suppose you've all helped to
plan it?"

"Oh no; the architect and mamma did that."

"But they allowed the rest of us to agree, when we were
good," said Penelope.

Corey looked at.her, and saw that she was shorter than her
sister, and had a dark complexion.

"k's very exciting," said Irene.

"Come up," said the Colonel, rising, "and look round if you'd
like to."

"I should like to, very much," said the young man.

He helped the young ladies over crevasses of carpentry and
along narrow paths of planking, on which they had made their
way unassisted before. The elder sister left the younger to
profit solely by these offices as much as possible. She walked be-
tween them and her father, who went before, lecturing on each
apartment, and taking the credit of the whole affair more and
more as he talked on.

"There!" he said, "we're going to throw out a bay-window
here, so as get the water all the way up and down. This is my
girls' room," he added, looking proudly at them both.

It seemed terribly intimate. Irene blushed deeply and turned
her head away.

But the young man took it all, apparently, as simply as their
father. "What a lovely lookout!" he said. The Back Bay spread
its glassy sheet before them, empty but for a few small boats
and a large schooner, with her sails close-furled and dripping
like snow from her spars, which a tug was rapidly towing to-
ward Cambridge. The carpentry of that city, embanked and

.55

THE RISE OF

embowered in foliage, shared the picturesqueness of Charles-
town in the distance.

"Yes," said Lapham, "I go in for using the best rooms in
your house yourself. If people come to stay with you, they can
put up with the second best. Though we don't intend to have
any second best. There ain't going to be an unpleasant room in
the whole house, from top to bottom."

"Oh, I wish papa wouldn't brag so!" breathed Irene to her
sister, where they stood, a little apart, looking away together.

The Colonel went on. "No, sir," he swelled out, "I have gone
in for making a regular job of it. I've got the best architect in
Boston, and I'm building a house to suit myself. And if money
can do it, I guess I'm going to be suited."

"It seems very delightful," said Corey, "and very original."

"Yes, sir. That fellow hadn't talked five minutes before I
saw that he knew what he was about every time."

a l wish mamma would come!" breathed Irene again. "I shall
certainly go through the floor if papa says anything more."

"They are making a great many very pretty houses nowa-
days," said the young man. "It's very different from the old-
fashioned building."

"Well," said the Colonel, with a large toleration of tone and
a deep breath that expanded his ample chest, "we spend more
on our houses nowadays. I started out to build a forty-thou-
sand-dollar house. Well, sir! that fellow has got me in for more
than sixty thousand already, and I doubt if I get out of it much
under a hundred. You can't have a nice house for nothing. It's
just like ordering a picture of a painter. You pay him enough,
and he can afford to paint you a first-class picture; and if you
don't, he can't. That's all there is of it. Why, they tell me that
A. T. Stewart gave one of those French fellows sixty thou-
sand dollars for a little seven-by-nine picture the other day. Yes,
sir, give an architect money enough, and he'll give you a nice
house every time."

56

SILAS LAPHAM

"I've heard that they're sharp at getting money to realise
their ideas," assented the young man, with a laugh.

"Well, I should say so!" exclaimed the Colonel. "They come
to you with an improvement that you can't resist. It has good
looks and common-sense and everything in its favour, and it's
like throwing money away to refuse. And they always manage
to get you when your wife is around, and then you're helpless."

The Colonel himself set the example of laughing at this joke,
and the young man joined him less obstreperously. The girls
turned, and he said, "I don't think I ever saw this view to bet-
ter advantage. It's surprising how well the Memorial Hall and
the Cambridge spires work up, over there. And the sunsets
must be magnificent."

Lapham did not wait for them to reply.

"Yes, sir, it's about the sightliest view I know of. I always
did like the water side of Beacon. Long before I owned prop-
erty here, or ever expected to, m'wife and I used to ride down
this way, and stop the buggy to get this view, over the water.
When people talk to me about the Hill, I can understand 'em.
It's snug, and it's old-fashioned, and it's where they've always
lived. But when they talk about Commonwealth Avenue, I
don't know what they mean. It don't hold a candle to the water
side of Beacon. You've got just as much wind over there, and
you've got just as much dust, and all the view you've got is the
view across the street. No, sir! when you come to the Back
Bay at all, give me the water side of Beacon."

"Oh, I think you're quite right," said the young man. "The
view here is everything."

Irene looked "I wonder what papa is going to say next!" at
her sister, when their mother's voice was heard overhead, ap-
proaching the opening in the floor where the stairs were to be;
and she presently appeared, with one substantial foot a long
way ahead. She was followed by the carpenter, with his rule
sticking out of his overalls pocket, and she was still talking to

57

THE RISE OF

him about some measurements they had been taking, when
they reached the bottom, so that Irene had to say, "Mamma,
Mr. Corey," before Mrs. Lapham was aware of him.

He came forward with as much grace and speed as the un-
certain footing would allow, and Mrs. Lapham gave him a
stout squeeze of her comfortable hand.

"Why, Mr. Corey! When did you get back?"

"Yesterday. It hardly seems as if I had got back. I didn't ex-
pect to find you in a new house."

"Well, you are our first caller. T presume you won't expect I
should make excuses for the state you find it in. Has the Colo-
nel been doing the honours?"

"Oh yes. And I've seen more of your house than I ever shall
again, I suppose."

"Well, I hope not," said Lapham. "There'll be several chances
to see us in the old one yet, before we leave."

He probably thought this a neat, off-hand way of making
the invitation, for he looked at his womankind as if he might
expect their admiration.

"Oh yes, indeed!" said his wife. "We shall be very glad to see
Mr. Corey, any time."

"Thank you; I shall be glad to come."

He and the Colonel went before, and helped the ladies down
the difficult descent. Irene seemed less sure-footed than the
others; she clung to the young man's hand an imperceptible
moment longer than need be, or else he detained her. He found
opportunity of saying, "It's so pleasant seeing you again," add-
ing, "all of you."

"Thank you," said the girl. "They must all be glad to have
you at home again."

Corey laughed.

"Well, I suppose they would be, if they were at home to have
me. But the fact is, there's nobody in the house but my father
and myself, and I'm only on my way to Bar Harbour."

58

SILAS LAPHAM

"Oh! Are they there?"

"Yes; it seems to be the only place where my mother can
get just the combination of sea and mountain air that she
wants."

"We go to Nantasket it's convenient for papa; and I don't
believe we shall go anywhere else this summer, mamma's so
taken up with building. We do nothing but talk house; and
Pen says we eat and sleep house. She says it would be a sort of
relief to go and live in tents for a while."

"She seems to have a good deal of humour," the young man
ventured, upon the slender evidence.

The others had gone to the back of the house a moment, to
look at some suggested change. Irene and Corey were left stand-
ing in the doorway. A lovely light of happiness played over her
face and etherealised its delicious beauty. She had some ado to
keep herself from smiling outright, and the effort deepened the
dimples in her cheeks; she trembled a little, and the pendants
shook in the tips of her pretty ears.

The others came back directly, and they all descended the
front steps together. The Colonel was about to renew his in-
vitation, but he caught his wife's eye, and, without being able
to interpret its warning exactly, was able to arrest himself, and
went about gathering up the hitching-weight, while the young
man handed the ladies into the phaeton. Then he lifted his hat,
and the ladies all bowed, and the Laphams drove off, Irene's
blue ribbons fluttering backward from her hat, as if they were
her clinging thoughts.

"So that's young Corey, is it?" said the Colonel, letting the
stately stepping, tall coupe horse make his way homeward at
will with the beach-wagon. "Well, he ain't a bad-looking fellow,
and he's got a good, fair and square, honest eye. But I don't see
how a fellow like that, that's had every advantage in this world,
can hang round home and let his father support him. Seems to
me, if I had his health and his education, I should want to

59

THE RISE OF

strike out and do something for myself."

The girls on the back seat had hold of each other's hands,
and they exchanged electrical pressures at the different points
their father made.

"I presume/' said Mrs. Lapham, "that he was down in Texas
looking after something."

"He's come back without finding it, I guess."

"Well, if his father has the money to support him, and don't
complain of the burden, I don't see why we should."

"Oh, I know it's none of my business; but I don't like the
principle. I like to see a man act like a man. I don't like to see
him taken care of like a young lady. Now, I suppose that fel-
low belongs to two or three clubs, and hangs around 'em all
day, lookin' out the window, I've seen 'em, instead of tryin'
to hunt up something to do for an honest livin'."

"If I was a young man," Penelope struck in, "I would belong
to twenty clubs, if I could find them, and I would hang around
them all, and look out the window till I dropped."

"Oh, you would, would you?" demanded her father, de-
lighted with her defiance, and twisting his fat head around
over his shoulder to look at her. "Well, you wouldn't do it on
my money, if you were a son of mine, young lady."

"Oh, you wait and see," retorted the girl.

This made them all laugh. But the Colonel recurred seriously
to the subject that night, as he was winding up his watch pre-
paratory to putting it under his pillow.

"I could make a man of that fellow, if I had him in the busi-
ness with me. There's stuff in him. But I spoke up the way I
did because I didn't choose Irene should think I would stand
any kind of a loafer 'round I don't care who he is, or how well
educated or brought up. And I guess, from the way Pen spoke
up, that 'Rene saw what I was driving at."

The girl, apparently, was less anxious about her father's ideas

60

SILAS LAPHAM

and principles than about the impression which he had made
upon the young man. She had talked it over and over with her
sister before they went to bed, and she asked in despair, as she
stood looking at Penelope brushing out her hair before the
glass

"Do you suppose hell think papa always talks in that brag-
ging way?"

"He'll be right if he does," answered her sister. "It's the way
father always does talk. You never noticed it so much, that's
all. And I guess if he can't make allowance for father's brag-
ging, he'll be a little too good. / enjoyed hearing the Colonel
go on."

"I know you did," returned Irene in distress. Then she
sighed. "Didn't you think he looked very nice?"

"Who? The Colonel?" Penelope had caught up the habit of
calling her father so from her mother, and she used his title
in all her jocose and perverse moods.

"You know very well I don't mean papa," pouted Irene.

"Oh! Mr. Corey! Why didn't you say Mr. Corey if you
meant Mr. Corey? If I meant Mr. Corey, I should say Mr.
Corey. It isn't swearing! Corey, Corey, Co "

Her sister clapped her hand over her mouth. "Will you hush,
you wretched thing?" she whimpered. "The whole house can
hear you."

"Oh yes, they can hear me all over the square. Well, I think
he looked well enough for a plain youth, who hadn't taken his
hair out of curl-papers for some time."

"It was clipped pretty close," Irene admitted; and they both
laughed at the drab effect of Mr. Corey's skull, as they remem-
bered it. "Did you like his nose?" asked Irene timorously.

"Ah, now you're coming to something," said Penelope. "I
don't know whether, if I had so much of a nose, I should want
it all Roman/*

61

THE RISE OF

"I don't see how you can expect to have a nose part one kind
and part another," argued Irene.

"Oh, 7 do. Look at mine!" She turned aside her face, so as to
get a three-quarters view of her nose in the glass, and crossing
her hands, with the brush in one of them, before her, regarded
it judicially. "Now, my nose started Grecian, but changed its
mind before it got over the bridge, and concluded to be snub
the rest of the way."

"You've got a very pretty nose, Pen," said Irene, joining in
the contemplation of its reflex in the glass.

"Don't say that in hopes of getting me to compliment his,
Mrs." she stopped, and then added deliberately "C!"

Irene also had her hair-brush in her hand, and now she
sprang at her sister and beat her very softly on the shoulder
with the flat of it. "You mean thing!" she cried, between her
shut teeth, blushing hotly.

"Well, D., then," said Penelope. "You've nothing to say
against D.? Though I think C. is just as nice an initial."

"Oh!" cried the younger, for all expression of unspeakable
things.

"I think he has very good eyes," admitted Penelope.

"Oh, he has! And didn't you like the way his sack-coat set ?
So close to him, and yet free kind of peeling away at the la-
pels?"

"Yes, I should say he was a young man of great judgment.
He knows how to choose his tailor."

Irene sat down on the edge of a chair. "It was so nice of you,
Pen, to come in, that way, about clubs."

"Oh, I didn't mean anything by it except opposition," said
Penelope. "I couldn't have father swelling on so, without say-
ing something."

"How he did swell!" sighed Irene. "Wasn't it a relief to have
mamma come down, even if she did seem to be all stocking at
first?"

62

SILAS LAPHAM

The girls broke into a wild giggle, and hid their faces in each
other's necks. "I thought I should die," said Irene.

" 'It's just like ordering a painting,' " said Penelope, recalling
her father's talk, with an effect of dreamy absent-mindedness.
" 'You give the painter money enough, and he can afford to
paint you a first-class picture. Give an architect money enough,
and he'll give you a first-class house, every time.' "

"Oh, wasn't it awful!" moaned her sister. "No one would
ever have supposed that he had fought the very idea of an archi-
tect for weeks, before he gave in."

Penelope went on. " 'I always did like the water side of Bea-
con, long before I owned property there. When you come to
the Back Bay at all, give me the water side of Beacon.' "

"Ow-w-w-w!" shrieked Irene. "Do stop!"

The door of their mother's chamber opened below, and the
voice of the real Colonel called, "What are you doing up there,
girls? Why don't you go to bed?"

This extorted nervous shrieks from both of them. The Colo-
nel heard a sound of scurrying feet, whisking drapery, and
slamming doors. Then he heard one of the doors opened again,
and Penelope said, "I was only repeating something you said
when you talked to Mr. Corey."

"Very well, now," answered the Colonel. "You postpone the
rest of it till to-morrow at breakfast, and see that you're up in
time to let me hear it."

A

THE same moment young Corey let himself in at his own
door with his latch-key, and went to the library, where he
found his father turning the last leaves of a story in the Revue
de$ Deux Mondes. He was a white-moustached old gentleman,
who had never been able to abandon his pince-nez for the su-
perior comfort of spectacles, even in the privacy of his own
library. He knocked the glasses off as his son came in and
looked up at him with lazy fondness, rubbing the two red
marks that they always leave on the side of the nose.

"Tom," he said, "where did you get such good clothes?"

"I stopped over a day in New York," replied the son, finding
himself a chair. "I'm glad you like them."

"Yes, I always do like your clothes, Tom," returned the fa-
ther thoughtfully, swinging his glasses. "But I don't see how
you can afford 'em, / can't."

"Well, sir," said the son, who dropped the "sir" into his
speech with his father, now and then, in an old-fashioned way
that was rather charming, "you see, I have an indulgent par-
ent."

"Smoke?" suggested the father, pushing toward his son a
box of cigarettes, from which he had taken one.

"No, thank you," said the son. "I've dropped that."

"Ah, is that so?" The father began to feel about on the table
for matches, in the purblind fashion of elderly men. His son
rose, lighted one, and handed it to him. "Well, oh, thank you,
Tom! I believe some statisticians prove that if you will give
up smoking you can dress very well on the money your to-
bacco costs, even if you haven't got an indulgent parent. But

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

I'm too old to try. Though, I confess, I should rather like the
clothes. Whom did you find at the club?"

"There were a lot of fellows there," said young Corey, watch-
ing the accomplished fumigation of his father in an absent
way.

"It's astonishing what a hardy breed the young club-men
are," observed his father. "All summer through, in weather
that sends the sturdiest female flying to the sea-shore, you find
the clubs filled with young men, who don't seem to mind the
heat in the least."

"Boston isn't a bad place, at the worst, in summer," said the
son, declining to take up the matter in its ironical shape.

"I dare say it isn't, compared with Texas," returned the
father, smoking tranquilly on. "But I don't suppose you find
many of your friends in town outside of the club."

"No; you're requested to ring at the rear door, all the way
down Beacon Street and up Commonwealth Avenue. It's rather
a blank reception for the returning prodigal."

"Ah, the prodigal must take his chance if he comes back out
of season. But I'm glad to have you back, Tom, even as it is,
and I hope you're not going to hurry away. You must give
your energies a rest."

"I'm sure you never had to reproach me with abnormal activ-
ity," suggested the son, taking his father's jokes in good part.

"No, I don't know that I have," admitted the elder. "You've
always shown a fair degree of moderation, after all. What do
you think of taking up next ? I mean after you have embraced
your mother and sisters at Mount Desert. Real estate ? It seems
to me that it is about time for you to open out as a real-estate
broker. Or did you ever think of matrimony?"

"Well, not just in that way, sir," said the young man. "I
shouldn't quite like to regard it as a career, you know."

"No, no. I understand that. And I quite agree with you. But
you know I've always contended that the affections could be

65

THE RISE OF

made to combine pleasure and profit. I wouldn't have a man
marry for money, that would be rather bad, but I don't see
why, when it comes to falling in love, a man shouldn't fall in
love with a rich girl as easily as a poor one. Some of the rich
girls are very nice, and I should say that the chances of a quiet
life with them were rather greater. They've always had every-
thing, and they wouldn't be so ambitious and uneasy. Don't
you think so?"

"It would depend," said the son, "upon whether a girl's peo-
ple had been rich long enough to have given her position before
she married. If they hadn't, I don't see how she would be any
better than a poor girl in that respect."

"Yes, there's sense in that. But the suddenly rich are on a
level with any of us nowadays. Money buys position at once.
I don't say that it isn't all right. The world generally knows
what it's about, and knows how to drive a bargain. I dare say
it makes the new rich pay too much. But there's no doubt
but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of
our age. It's the thing that chiefly strikes the imagination. The
Englishmen who come here are more curious about the great
new millionaires than about any one else, and they respect
them more. It's all very well. I don't complain of it."

"And you would like a rich daughter-in-law, quite regard-
less, then?"

"Oh, not quite so bad as that, Tom," said his father. "A little
youth, a little beauty, a little good sense and pretty behaviour
one mustn't object to those things; and they go just as often
with money as without it. And I suppose I should like her peo-
ple to be rather grammatical."

"It seems to me that you're exacting, sir," said the son. "How
can you expect people who have been strictly devoted to busi-
ness to be grammatical? Isn't that rather too much?"

"Perhaps it is. Perhaps you're right. But I understood your

66

SILAS LAPHAM

mother to say that those benefactors of hers, whom you met
last summer, were very passably grammatical."

"The father isn't."

The elder, who had been smoking with his profile toward his
son, now turned his face full upon him. "I didn't know you had
seen him?"

"I hadn't until to-day," said young Corey, with a little height-
ening of his colour. "But I was walking down street this after-
noon, and happened to look round at a new house some one
was putting up, and I saw the whole family in the window. It
appears that Mr. Lapham is building the house."

The elder Corey knocked the ash of his cigarette into the
holder at his elbow. "I am more and more convinced, the
longer I know you, Tom, that we are descended from Giles
Corey. The gift of holding one's tongue seems to have skipped
me, but you have it in full force. I can't say just how you would
behave under peine forte et dure, but under ordinary pressure
you are certainly able to keep your own counsel. Why didn't
you mention this encounter at dinner? You weren't asked to
plead to an accusation of witchcraft."

"No, not exactly," said the young man. "But I didn't quite
see my way to speaking of it. We had a good many other
things before us."

"Yes, that's true. I suppose you wouldn't have mentioned it
now if I hadn't led up to it, would you?"

"I don't know, sir. It was rather on my mind to do so. Per-
haps it was I who led up to it."

His father laughed. "Perhaps you did, Tom; perhaps you
did. Your mother would have known you were leading up to
something, but I'll confess that I didn't. What is it?"

"Nothing very definite. But do you know that in spite of his
syntax I rather liked him?"

The father looked keenly at the son; but unless the boy's full

THE RISE OF

confidence was offered, Corey was not the man to ask it.
"Well?" was all that he said.

"I suppose that in a new country one gets to looking at peo-
ple a little out of our tradition; and I dare say that if I hadn't
passed a winter in Texas I might have found Colonel Lapham
rather too much."

"You mean that there are worse things in Texas?"

"Not that exactly. I mean that I saw it wouldn't be quite
fair to test him by our standards."

"This comes of the error which I have often deprecated,"
said the elder Corey. "In fact I am always saying that the Bos-
tonian ought never to leave Boston. Then he knows and
then only that there can be no standard but ours. But we are
constantly going away, and coming back with our convictions
shaken to their foundations. One man goes to England, and re-
turns with the conception of a grander social life; another
comes home from Germany with the notion of a more search-
ing intellectual activity; a fellow just back from Paris has the
absurdest ideas of art and literature; and you revert to us from
the cowboys of Texas, and tell us to our faces that we ought to
try Papa Lapham by a jury of his peers. It ought to be stopped
it ought, really. The Bostonian who leaves Boston ought to
be condemned to perpetual exile."

The son suffered the father to reach his climax with smiling
patience. When he asked finally, "What are the characteristics
of Papa Lapham that place him beyond our jurisdiction?" the
younger Corey crossed his long legs, and leaned forward to
take one of his knees between his hands.

"Well, sir, he bragged, rather."

"Oh, I don't know that bragging should exempt him from
the ordinary processes. I've heard other people brag in Bos-
ton."

"Ah, not just in that personal way not about money."

"No, that was certainly different."

68

SILAS LAPHAM

"I don't mean/' said the young fellow, with the scrupulosity
which people could not help observing and liking in him,
"that it was more than an indirect expression of satisfaction in
the ability to spend."

"No. I should be glad to express something of the kind my-
self, if the facts would justify me."

The son smiled tolerantly again. "But if he was enjoying his
money in that way, I didn't see why he shouldn't show his
pleasure in it. It might have been vulgar, but it wasn't sordid.
And I don't know that it was vulgar. Perhaps his successful
strokes of business were the romance of his life "

The father interrupted with a laugh. "The girl must be un-
commonly pretty. What did she seem to think of her father's
brag?"

"There were two of them," answered the son evasively.

"Oh, two! And is the sister pretty too?"

"Not pretty, but rather interesting. She is like her mother."

"Then the pretty one isn't the father's pet?"

"I can't say, sir. I don't believe," added the young fellow,
"that I can make you see Colonel Lapham just as I did. He
struck me as very simple-hearted and rather wholesome. Of
course he could be tiresome; we all can; and I suppose his
range of ideas is limited. But he is a force, and not a bad one.
If he hasn't got over being surprised at the effect of rubbing his
lamp

"Oh, one could make out a case. I suppose you know what
you are about, Tom. But remember that we are Essex County
people, and that in savour we are just a little beyond the salt of
the earth. I will tell you plainly that I don't like the notion of a
man who has rivalled the hues of nature in her wildest haunts
with the tints of his mineral paint; but I don't say there are not
worse men. He isn't to my taste, though he might be ever so
much to my conscience."

"I suppose," said the son, "that there is nothing really to

THE RISE OF

be ashamed of in mineral paint. People go into all sorts of
things."

His father took his cigarette from his mouth and once more
looked his son full in the face. "Oh, is that it?"

"It has crossed my mind," admitted the son. "I must do
something. I've wasted time and money enough. I've seen
much younger men all through the West and South-west tak-
ing care of themselves. I don't think I was particularly fit for
anything out there, but I am ashamed to come back and live
upon you, sir."

His father shook his head with an ironical sigh. "Ah, we
shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluc-
tance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating
spirit of our youth. It strikes at the root of the whole feudal
system. I really think you owe me an apology, Tom. I supposed
you wished to marry the girl's money, and here you are, basely
seeking to go into business with her father."

Young Corey laughed again like a son who perceives that
his father is a little antiquated, but keeps a filial faith in his
\vit. "I don't know that it's quite so bad as that; but the thing
had certainly crossed my mind. I don't know how it's to be ap-
proached, and I don't know that it's at all possible. But I con-
fess that I 'took to' Colonel Lapham from the moment I saw
him. He looked as if he 'meant business,' and I mean business
too."

The father smoked thoughtfully. "Of course people do go
into all sorts of things, as you say, and I don't know that one
thing is more ignoble than another, if it's decent and large
enough. In my time you would have gone into the China trade
or the India trade though 7 didn't; and a little later cotton
would have been your manifest destiny though it wasn't
mine; but now a man may do almost anything. The real-estate
business is pretty full. Yes, if you have a deep inward vocation
for it, I don't see why mineral paint shouldn't do. I fancy it's

70

SILAS LAPHAM

easy enough approaching the matter. We will invite Papa Lap-
ham to dinner, and talk it over with him."

"Oh, I don't think that would be exactly the way, sir," said
the son, smiling at his father's patrician unworldliness.

"No? Why not?"

"I'm afraid it would be a bad start. I don't think it would
strike him as business-like."

"I don't see why he should be punctilious, if we're not."

"Ah, we might say that if he were making the advances."

"Well, perhaps you are right, Tom. What is your idea?"

"I haven't a very clear one. It seems to me I ought to get
some business friend of ours, whose judgment he would re-
spect, to speak a good word for me."

"Give you a character?"

"Yes. And of course I must go to Colonel Lapham. My no-
tion would be to inquire pretty thoroughly about him, and
then, if I liked the look of things, to go right down to Republic
Street and let him see what he could do with me, if anything."

"That sounds tremendously practical to me, Tom, though it
may be just the wrong way. When are you going down to
Mount Desert?"

"To-morrow, I think, sir," said the young man. "I shall turn
it over in my mind while I'm off."

The father rose, showing something more than his son's
height, with a very slight stoop, which the son's figure had not.
"Well," he said, whimsically, "I admire your spirit, and I don't
deny that it is justified by necessity. It's a consolation to think
that while I've been spending and enjoying, I have been pre-
paring the noblest future for you a future of industry and
self-reliance. You never could draw, but this scheme of going
into the mineral-paint business shows that you have inherited
something of my feeling for colour."

The son laughed once more, and waiting till his father was
well on his way upstairs, turned out the gas and then hurried

7 1

THE RISE OF

after him and preceded him into his chamber. He glanced over
it to see that everything was there, to his father's hand. Then
he said, "Good night, sir," and the elder responded, "Good
night, my son," and the son went to his own room.

Over the mantel in the elder Corey's room hung a portrait
which he had painted of his own father, and now he stood a
moment and looked at this as if struck by something novel in
it. The resemblance between his son and the old India mer-
chant, who had followed the trade from Salem to Boston when
the larger city drew it away from the smaller, must have been
what struck him. Grandfather and grandson had both the Ro-
man nose which appears to have flourished chiefly at the for-
mative period of the republic, and which occurs more rarely in
the descendants of the conscript fathers, though it still char-
acterises the profiles of a good many Boston ladies. Bromfield
Corey had not inherited it, and he had made his straight nose
his defence when the old merchant accused him of a want of
energy. He said, "What could a man do whose unnatural
father had left his own nose away from him?" This amused
but did not satisfy the merchant. "You must do something/'
he said; "and it's for you to choose. If you don't like the India
trade, go into something else. Or, take up law or medicine. No
Corey yet ever proposed to do nothing." "Ah, then, it's quite
time one of us made a beginning," urged the man who was
then young, and who was now old, looking into the somewhat
fierce eyes of his father's portrait. He had inherited as little of
the fierceness as of the nose, and there was nothing predatory
in his son either, though the aquiline beak had come down to
him in such force. Bromfield Corey liked his son Tom for the
gentleness which tempered his energy.

"Well let us compromise," he seemed to be saying to his fa-
ther's portrait. "I will travel." "Travel? How long?" the keen
eyes demanded. "Oh, indefinitely. I won't be hard with you,
father." He could see the eyes soften, and the smile of yielding

72

SILAS LAPHAM

come over his father's face; the merchant could not resist a
son who was so much like his dead mother. There was some
vague understanding between them that Bromfield Corey
was to come back and go into business after a time, but he
never did so. He travelled about over Europe, and travelled
handsomely, frequenting good society everywhere, and getting
himself presented at several courts, at a period when it was a
distinction to do so. He had always sketched, and with his
father's leave he fixed himself at Rome, where he remained
studying art and rounding the being inherited from his Yan-
kee progenitors, till there was very little left of the ancestral
angularities. After ten years he came home and painted that
portrait of his father. It was very good, if a little amateurish,
and he might have made himself a name as a painter of por-
traits if he had not had so much money. But he had plenty of
money, though by this time he was married and beginning to
have a family. It was absurd for him to paint portraits for pay,
and ridiculous to paint them for nothing; so he did not paint
them at all. He continued a dilettante, never quite abandoning
his art, but working at it fitfully, and talking more about it
than working at it. He had his theory of Titian's method; and
now and then a Bostonian insisted upon buying a picture of
him. After a while he hung it more and more inconspicuously,
and said apologetically, "Oh yes! that's one of Bromfield
Corey's things. It has nice qualities, but it's amateurish."

In process of time the money seemed less abundant. There
were shrinkages of one kind and another, and living had
grown much more expensive and luxurious. For many years
he talked about going back to Rome, but he never went,
and his children grew up in the usual way. Before he knew it
his son had him out to his class-day spread at Harvard, and
then he had his son on his hands. The son made various un-
successful provisions for himself, and still continued upon his
father's hands, to their common dissatisfaction, though it was

73

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

chiefly the younger who repined. He had the Roman nose and
the energy without the opportunity, and at one of the re-
versions his father said to him, "You ought not to have that
nose, Tom; then you would do very well. You would go and
travel, as I did."

LAPHAM and his wife continued talking after he had quelled
the disturbance in his daughters' room overhead; and their
talk was not altogether of the new house.

"I tell you," he said, "if I had that fellow in the business with
me I would make a man of him."

"Well, Silas Lapham," returned his wife, "I do believe
you've got mineral paint on the brain. Do you suppose a fellow
like young Corey, brought up the way he's been, would touch
mineral paint with a ten-foot pole?"

"Why not?" haughtily asked the Colonel.

"Well, if you don't know already, there's no use trying to tell
you."

74

VI

JL HE Corey s had always had a house at Nahant, but after let-
ting it for a season or two they found they could get on with-
out it, and sold it at the son's instance, who foresaw that if
things went on as they were going, the family would be strait-
ened to the point of changing their mode of life altogether.
They began to be of the people of whom it was said that they
stayed in town very late; and when the ladies did go away, it
was for a brief summering in this place and that. The father
remained at home altogether; and the son joined them in the
intervals of his enterprises, which occurred only too often.

At Bar Harbour, where he now went to find them, after his
winter in Texas, he confessed to his mother that there seemed
no very good opening there for him. He might do as well as
Loring Stanton, but he doubted if Stanton was doing very well.
Then he mentioned the new project which he had been think-
ing over. She did not deny that there was something in it, but
she could not think of any young man who had gone into such
a business as that, and it appeared to her that he might as well
go into a patent medicine or a stove-polish.

"There was one of his hideous advertisements," she said,
"painted on a reef that we saw as we came down."

Corey smiled. "Well, I suppose, if it was in a good state of
preservation, that is proof positive of the efficacy of the paint
on the hulls of vessels."

"It's very distasteful to me, Tom," said his mother; and if
there was something else in her mind, she did not speak more
plainly of it than to add: "It's not only the kind of business,
but the kind of people you would be mixed up with."

75

THE RISE OF

'I thought you didn't find them so very bad," suggested
Corey.

"I hadn't seen them in Nankeen Square then."

"You can see them on the water side of Beacon Street when
you go back."

Then he told of his encounter with the Lapham family in
their new house. At the end his mother merely said, "It is get-
ting very common down there," and she did not try to oppose
anything further to his scheme.

The young man went to see Colonel Lapham shortly after
his return to Boston. He paid his visit at Lapham's office, and
if he had studied simplicity in his summer dress he could not
have presented himself in a figure more to the mind of a
practical man. His hands and neck still kept the brown of the
Texan suns and winds, and he looked as business-like as Lap-
ham himself.

He spoke up promptly and briskly in the outer office, and
caused the pretty girl to look away from her copying at him.
"Is Mr. Lapham in?" he asked; and after that moment for re-
flection which an array of book-keepers so addressed likes to
give the inquirer, a head was lifted from a ledger and nodded
toward the inner office.

Lapham had recognised the voice, and he was standing, in
considerable perplexity, to receive Corey, when the young
man opened his painted glass door. It was a hot afternoon, and
Lapham was in his shirt-sleeves. Scarcely a trace of the boast-
ful hospitality with which he had welcomed Corey to his housL
a few days before lingered in his present address. He looked at
the young man's face, as if he e-pected him to despatch what-
ever unimaginable affair he had come upon.

"Won't you sit down ? How are you ? You'll excuse me," he
added, in brief allusion to the shirt-sleeves. "I'm about roasted."

Corey laughed. "I wish you'd let me take off my coat."

"Why, tal(e it off!" cried the Colonel, with instant pleasure.

76

SILAS LAPHAM

There is something in human nature which causes the man in
his shirt-sleeves to wish all other men to appear in the same
deshabille.

"I will, if you ask me after I've talked with you two minutes,"
said the young fellow, companionably pulling up the chair of-
fered him toward the desk where Lapham had again seated
himself. "But perhaps you haven't got two minutes to give
me?"

"Oh yes, I have," said the Colonel. "I was just going to
knock off. I can give you twenty, and then I shall have fifteen
minutes to catch the boat."

"All right," said Corey. "I want you to take me into the min-
eral paint business."

The Colonel sat dumb. He twisted his thick neck, and
looked round at the door to see if it was shut. He would not
have liked to have any of those fellows outside hear him, but
there is no saying what sum of money he would not have given
if his wife had been there to hear what Corey had just said.

"I suppose,'" continued the young man, 'I could have got
several people whose names you know to back my industry
and sobriety, and say a word for my business capacity. But I
thought I wouldn't trouble anybody for certificates till I found
whether there was a chance, or the ghost of one, of your want-
ing me. So I came straight to you."

Lapham gathered himself together as well as he could. He
had not yet forgiven Corey for Mrs. Lapham's insinuation that
ne would feel himself too good for the mineral paint business;
and though he was dispersed by that astounding shot at first,
he was not going to let any one even hypothetically despise
his paint with impunity. "How do you think I am going to take
you on?" They took on hands at the works; and Lapham put
it as if Corey were a hand coming to him for employment.
Whether he satisfied himself by this or not, he reddened a little
after he had said it.

77

THE RISE OF

Corey answered, ignorant of the offence: "I haven't a very
clear idea, I'm afraid; but I've been looking a little into the
matter from the outside "

"I hope you hain't been paying any attention to that fellow's
stuff in the Events? 9 ' Lapham interrupted. Since Bartley's in-
terview had appeared, Lapham had regarded it with very
mixed feelings. At first it gave him a glow of secret pleasure,
blended with doubt as to how his wife would like the use
Bartley had made of her in it. But she had not seemed to notice
it much, and Lapham had experienced the gratitude of the
man who escapes. Then his girls had begun to make fun of it;
and though he did not mind Penelope's jokes much, he did
not like to see that Irene's gentility was wounded. Business
friends met him with the kind of knowing smile about it that
implied their sense of the fraudulent character of its praise
the smile of men who had been there and who knew how it
was themselves. Lapham had his misgivings as to how his
clerks and underlings looked at it; he treated them with stately
severity for a while after it came out, and he ended by feeling
rather sore about it. He took it for granted that everybody had
read it.

"I don't know what you mean," replied Corey, "I don't see
the Events regularly."

"Oh, it was nothing. They sent a fellow down here to inter-
view me, and he got everything about as twisted as he could."

"I believe they always do," said Corey. "I hadn't seen it. Per-
haps it came out before I got home."

"Perhaps it did."

"My notion of making myself useful to you was based on
a hint I got from one of your own circulars."

Lapham was proud of those circulars; he thought they read
very well. "What was that?"

"I could put a little capital into the business," said Corey,
with the tentative accent of a man who chances a thing. "I've

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SILAS LAPHAM

got a little money, but I didn't imagine you cared for anything
of chat kind."

"No, sir, I don't/' returned the Colonel bluntly. "I've had
one partner, and one's enough."

"Yes," assented the young man, who doubtless had his own
ideas as to eventualities or perhaps rather had the vague hopes
of youth. "I didn't come to propose a partnership. But I see
that you are introducing your paint into the foreign markets,
and there I really thought I might be of use to you, and to my-
self too."

"How?" asked the Colonel scantly.

"Well, I know two or three languages pretty well. I know
French, and I know German, and I've got a pretty fair sprin-
kling of Spanish."

"You mean that you can talk them?" asked the Colonel,
with the mingled awe and slight that such a man feels for such
accomplishments.

"Yes; and I can write an intelligible letter in either of
them."

Lapham rubbed his nose. "It's easy enough to get all the
letters we want translated."

"Well," pursued Corey, not showing his discouragement if
he felt any, "I know the countries where you want to introduce
this paint of yours. I've been there. I've been in Germany and
France, and I've been in South America and Mexico; I've been
in Italy, of course. I believe I could go to any of those countries
and place it to advantage."

Lapham had listened with a trace of persuasion in his face,
but now he shook his head.

"It's placing itself as fast as there's any call for it. It wouldn't
pay us to send anybody out to look after it. Your salary and
expenses would eat up about all we should make on it."

"Yes," returned the young man intrepidly, "if you had to
pay me any salary and expenses."

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THE RISK OF

"You don't propose to work for nothing?"

"I propose to work for a commission." The Colonel was
beginning to shake his head again, but Corey hurried on. "I
haven't come to you without making some inquiries about the
paint, and I know how it stands with those who know best. I
believe in it."

Lapham lifted his head and looked at the young man,
deeply moved.

"It's the best paint in God's universe," he said, with the so-
lemnity of prayer.

"It's the best in the market," said Corey; and he repeated, "I
believe in it."

"You believe in it," began the Colonel, and then he stopped.
If there had really been any purchasing power in money, a
year's income would have bought Mrs. Lapham's instant pres-
ence. He warmed and softened to the young man in every way,
not only because he must do so to any one who believed in
his paint, but because he had done this innocent person the
wrong of listening to a defamation of his instinct and good
sense, and had been willing to see him suffer for a purely sup-
posititious offence.

Corey rose.

"You mustn't let me outstay my twenty minutes," he said,
taking out his watch. "I don't expect you to give a decided
answer on the spot. All that I ask is that you'll consider my
proposition."

"Don't hurry," said Lapham. "Sit still! I want to tell you
about this paint," he added, in a voice husky with the feeling
that his hearer could not divine. "I want to tell you all about
it."

"I could walk with you to the boat," suggested the young
man.

"Never mind the boat! I can take the next one. Look here!"
The Colonel pulled open a drawer, as Corey sat down again,

80

SILAS LAPHAM

and took out a photograph of the locality of the mine. "Here's
where we get it. This photograph don't half do the place
justice," he said, as if the imperfect art had slighted the features
of a beloved face. "It's one of the sightliest places in the coun-
try, and here's the very spot" he covered it with his huge fore-
finger "where my father found that paint, more than forty
years ago. Yes, sir!"

He went on, and told the story in unsparing detail, while
his chance for the boat passed unheeded, and the clerks in the
outer office hung up their linen office coats and put on their
seersucker or flannel street coats. The young lady went too,
and nobody was left but the porter, who made from time to
time a noisy demonstration of fastening a distant blind, or
putting something in place. At last the Colonel roused him-
self from the autobiographical delight of the history of his
paint. "Well, sir, that's the story."

"It's an interesting story," said Corey, with a long breath, as
they rose together, and Lapham put on his coat.

"That's what it is," said the Colonel. "Well!" he added, "I
don't see but what we've got to have another talk about this
thing. It's a surprise to me, and I don't see exactly how you're
going to make it pay."

"I'm willing to take the chances," answered Corey. "As I
said, I believe in it. I should try South America first. I should
try Chili."

"Look here!" said Lapham, with his watch in his hand. "I
like to get things over. We've just got time for the six o'clock
boat. Why don't you come down with me to Nantasket? I
can give you a bed as well as not. And then we can finish up."

The impatience of youth in Corey responded to the im-
patience of temperament in his elder.

"Why, I don't see why I shouldn't," he allowed himself to
say. "I confess I should like to have it finished up myself, if it
could be finished up in the right way."

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THE RISE OF

"Well, we'll see. Dennis!" Lapham called to the remote por-
ter, and the man came. "Want to send any word home?" he
asked Corey.

"No; my father and I go and come as we like, without keep-
ing account of each other. If I don't come home, he knows
that I'm not there. That's all."

"Well, that's convenient. You'll find you can't do that when
you're married. Never mind, Dennis," said the Colonel.

He had time to buy two newspapers on the wharf before he
jumped on board the steam-boat with Corey. "Just made it,"
he said; "and that's what I like to do. I can't stand it to be
aboard much more than a minute before she shoves out." He
gave one of the newspapers to Corey as he spoke, and set
him the example of catching up a camp-stool on their way to
that point on the boat which his experience had taught him
was the best. He opened his paper at once and began to run
over its news, while the young man watched the spectacular
recession of the city, and was vaguely conscious of the people
about him, and of the gay life of the water round the boat. The
air freshened; the craft thinned in number; they met larger
sail, lagging slowly inward in the afternoon light; the islands
of the bay waxed and waned as the steamer approached and
left them behind.

"I hate to see them stirring up those Southern fellows again,'*
said the Colonel, speaking into the paper on his lap. "Seems to
me it's time to let those old issues go."

"Yes," said the young man. "What are they doing now?"

"Oh, stirring up the Confederate brigadiers in Congress. I
don't like it. Seems to me, if our party hain't got any other
stock-in-trade, we better shut up shop altogether." Lapham
went on, as he scanned his newspaper, to give his ideas of
public questions, in a fragmentary way, while Corey listened
patiently, and waited for him to come back to business. He
folded up his paper at last, and stuffed it into his coat pocket.

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SILAS LAPHAM

"There's one thing I always make it a rule to do/' he said, "and
that is to give my mind a complete rest from business while
I'm going down on the boat. I like to get the fresh air all
through me, soul and body. I believe a man can give his mind a
rest, just the same as he can give his legs a rest, or his back. All
he's got to do is to use his will-power. Why, I suppose, if I
hadn't adopted some such rule, with the strain I've had on me
for the last ten years, I should 'a' been a dead man long ago.
That's the reason I like a horse. You've got to give your mind
to the horse; you can't help it, unless you want to break your
neck; but a boat's different, and there you got to use your will-
power. You got to take your mind right up and put it where

you want it. I make it a rule to read the paper on the boat

Hold on!" he interrupted himself to prevent Corey from pay-
ing his fare to the man who had come round for it. "I've got
tickets. And when I get through the paper, I try to get some-
body to talk to, or I watch the people. It's an astonishing thing
to me where they all come from. I've been riding up and down
on these boats for six or seven years, and I don't know but very
few of the faces I see on board. Seems to be a perfectly fresh lot
every time. Well, of course! Town's full of strangers in the
summer season, anyway, and folks keep coming down from
the country. They think it's a great thing to get down to the
beach, and they've all heard of the electric light on the water,
and they want to see it. But you take faces now! The astonish-
ing thing to me is not what a face tells, but what it don't tell.
When you think of what a man is, or a woman is, and what
most of 'em have been through before they get to be thirty, it
seems as if their experience would burn right through. But it
don't. I like to watch the couples, and try to make out which
are engaged, or going to be, and which are married, or better
be. But half the time I can't make any sort of guess. Of course,
where they're young and kittenish, you can tell; but where
they're anyways on, you can't. Heigh?"

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THE RISE OF

"Yes, I think you're right," said Corey, not perfectly recon-
ciled to philosophy in the place of business, but accepting it as
he must.

"Well," said the Colonel, "I don't suppose it was meant we
should know what was in each other's minds. It would take
a man out of his own hands. As long as he's in his own hands,
there's some hopes of his doing something with himself; but if
a fellow has been found out even if he hasn't been found out
to be so very bad it's pretty much all up with him. No, sir. I
don't want to know people through and through."

The greater part of the crowd on board and, of course, the
boat was crowded looked as if they might not only be easily
but safely known. There was little style and no distinction
among them; they were people who were going down to the
beach for the fun or the relief of it, and were able to afford it.
In face they were commonplace, with nothing but the Ameri-
can poetry of vivid purpose to light them up, where they did
not wholly lack fire. But they were nearly all shrewd and
friendly-looking, with an apparent readiness for the humorous
intimacy native to us all. The women were dandified in dress,
according to their means and taste, and the men differed from
each other in degrees of indifference to it. To a straw-hatted
population, such as ours is in summer, no sort of personal dig-
nity is possible. We have not even the power over observers
which comes from the fantasticality of an Englishman when
he discards the conventional dress. In our straw hats and our
serge or flannel sacks we are no more imposing than a crowd
of boys.

"Some day," said Lapham, rising as the boat drew near the
wharf of the final landing, "there's going to be an awful ac-
cident on these boats. Just look at that jam."

He meant the people thickly packed on the pier, and under
strong restraint of locks and gates, to prevent them from rush-

SILAS LAPHAM

ing on board the boat and possessing her for the return trip be-
fore she had landed her Nantasket passengers.

"Overload 'em every time/ 1 he continued, with a sort of dry,
impersonal concern at the impending calamity, as if it could
not possibly include him. "They take about twice as many as
they ought to carry, and about ten times as many as they could
save if anything happened. Yes, sir, it's bound to come. Hello!
There's my girl!" He took out his folded newspaper and waved
it toward a group of phaetons and barouches drawn up on the
pier a little apart from the pack of people, and a lady in one of
them answered with a flourish of her parasol.

When he had made his way with his guest through the
crowd, she began to speak to her father before she noticed
Corey. "Well, Colonel, you've improved your last chance. We've
been coming to every boat since four o'clock, or Jerry has,
and I told mother that I would come myself once, and see if /
couldn't fetch you; and if I failed, you could walk next time.
You're getting perfectly spoiled."

The Colonel enjoyed letting her scold him to the end before
he said, with a twinkle of pride in his guest and satisfaction in
her probably being able to hold her own against any discom-
fiture, "I've brought Mr. Corey down for the night with me,
and I was showing him things all the way, and it took time."

The young fellow was at the side of the open beach-wagon,
making a quick bow, and Penelope Lapham was cozily drawl-
ing, "Oh, how do you do, Mr. Corey?" before the Colonel had
finished his explanation.

"Get right in there, alongside of Miss Lapham, Mr. Corey,**
he said, pulling himself up into the place beside the driver.
"No, no," he had added quickly, at some signs of polite protest
in the young man, "I don't give up the best place to anybody.
Jerry, suppose you let me have hold of the leathers a minute."

This was his way of taking the reins from the driver; and in

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THE RISE OF

half the time he specified, he had skilfully turned the vehicle
on the pier, among the crooked lines and groups of foot-pas-
sengers, and was spinning up the road toward the stretch of
verandaed hotels and restaurants in the sand along the shore.
"Pretty gay down here," he said, indicating all this with a turn
of his whip, as he left it behind him. "But I've got about sick of
hotels; and this summer I made up my mind that I'd take a
cottage. Well, Pen, how are the folks?" He looked half-way
round for her answer, and with the eye thus brought to bear
upon her he was able to give her a wink of supreme content.
The Colonel, with no sort of ulterior design, and nothing but
his triumph over Mrs. Lapham definitely in his mind, was feel-
ing, as he would have said, about right.

The girl smiled a daughter's amusement at her father's boy-
ishness. "I don't think there's much change since morning. Did
Irene have a headache when you left?"

"No," said the Colonel.

"Well, then, there's that to report."

"Pshaw!" said the colonel with vexation in his tone.

"I'm sorry Miss Irene isn't well," said Corey politely.

*'I think she must have got it from walking too long on the
beach. The air is so cool here that you forget how hot the sun

is."

"Yes, that's true," assented Corey.

<4 A good night's rest will make it all right," suggested the
Colonel, without looking round. "But you girls have got to
look out."

"If you're fond of walking," said Corey, "I suppose you find
the beach a temptation."

"Oh, it isn't so much that," returned the girl. "You keep
walking on and on because it's so smooth and straight before
you. We've been here so often that we know it all by heart-
just how it looks at high tide, and how it looks at low tide,
and how it looks after a storm. We're as well acquainted with

86

SILAS LAPHAM

the crabs and stranded jelly-fish as we are with the children
digging in the sand and the people sitting under umbrellas. I
think they're always the same, all of them."

The Colonel left the talk to the young people. When he spoke
next it was to say, "Well, here we are!" and he turned from the
highway and drove up in front of a brown cottage with a ver-
milion roof, and a group of geraniums clutching the rock
that cropped up in the loop formed by the road. It was treeless
and bare all round, and the ocean, unnecessarily vast, weltered
away a little more than a stone's-cast from the cottage. A
hospitable smell of supper filled the air, and Mrs. Lapham was
on the veranda, with that demand in her eyes for her belated
husband's excuses, which she was obliged to check on her
tongue at sight of Corey.

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VII

1 HE exultant Colonel swung himself lightly down from his
seat. "I've brought Mr. Corey with me/' he nonchalantly ex-
plained.

Mrs. Lapham made their guest welcome, and the Colonel
showed him to his room, briefly assuring himself that there was
nothing wanting there. Then he went to wash his own hands,
carelessly ignoring the eagerness with which his wife pursued
him to their chamber.

"What gave Irene a headache?" he asked, making himself
a fine lather for his hairy paws.

"Never you mind Irene," promptly retorted his wife. "How
came he to come? Did you press him? If you did, I'll never
forgive you, Silas!"

The Colonel laughed, and his wife shook him by the shoul-
der to make him laugh lower. " 'Sh!" she whispered. "Do you
want him to hear every thing? Did you urge him?"

The Colonel laughed the more. He was going to get all the
good out of this. "No, I didn't urge him. Seemed to want to

come."

"I don't believe it. Where did you meet him ?"
"At the office."
"What office?"
"Mine."

"Nonsense! What was he doing there?"
"Oh, nothing much."
"What did he come for?"

"Come for? Oh! he scud he wanted to go into the mineral
paint business."

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

Mrs. Lapham dropped into a chair, and watched his bulk
shaken with smothered laughter. "Silas Lapham," she gasped,
"if you try to get off any more of those things on me "

The Colonel applied himself to the towel. "Had a notion he
could work it in South America. 7 don't know what he's up
to."

"Never mind!" cried his wife. "I'll get even with you yet."

"So I told him he had better come down and talk it over,"
continued the Colonel, in well-affected simplicity. "I knew he
wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole."

"Go on!" threatened Mrs. Lapham.

"Right thing to do, wa'n't it?"

A tap was heard at the door, and Mrs. Lapham answered it.
A maid announced supper. "Very well," she said, "come to tea
now. But I'll make you pay for this, Silas."

Penelope had gone to her sister's room as soon as she en-
tered the house.

"Is your head any better, 'Rene?" she asked.

"Yes, a little," came a voice from the pillows. "But I shall
not come to tea. I don't want anything. If I keep still, I shall be
all right by morning."

"Well, I'm sorry," said the elder sister. "He's come down
with father."

"He hasn't! Who?" cried Irene, starting up in simultaneous
denial and demand.

"Oh, well, if you say he hasn't, what's the use of my telling
you who?"

"Oh, how can you treat me so!" moaned the sufferer. "What
do you mean, Pen?"

"I guess I'd better not tell you," said Penelope, v/atching her
like a cat playing with a mouse. "If you're not coming to tea,
it would just excite you for nothing."

The mouse moaned and writhed upon the bed.

"Oh, I wouldn't treat you so!"

THE RISE OF

The cat seated herself across the room, and asked quietly

"Well, what could you do if it was Mr. Corey ? You couldn't
come to tea, you say. But he'll excuse you. 7've told him you
had a headache. Why, of course you can't come! It would be
too barefaced. But you needn't be troubled, Irene; I'll do my
best to make the time pass pleasantly for him." Here the cat
gave a low titter, and the mouse girded itself up with a mo-
mentary courage and self-respect.

"I should think you would be ashamed to come here and
tease me so."

"I don't see why you shouldn't believe me," argued Penelope.
"Why shouldn't he come down with father, if father asked
him? and he'd be sure to if he thought of it. I don't see any
p'ints about that frog that's any better than any other frog."

The sense of her sister's helplessness was too much for the
tease; she broke down in a fit of smothered laughter, which
convinced her victim that it was nothing but an ill-timed joke.

"Well, Pen, I wouldn't use you so," she whimpered.

Penelope threw herself on the bed beside her.

"Oh, poor Irene! He is here. It's a solemn fact." And she
caressed and soothed her sister, while she choked with laugh-
ter. "You must get up and come out. I don't know what
brought him here, but here he is."

"It's too late now," said Irene desolately. Then she added,
with a wilder despair: "What a fool I was to take that walk!"

"Well," coaxed her sister, "come out and get some tea. The
tea will do you good."

"No, no; I can't come. But send me a cup here."

"Yes, and then perhaps you can see him later in the eve-
ning."

"I shall not see him at all."

An hour after Penelope came back to her sister's room and
found her before her glass. "You might as well have kept still,
and been well by morning, 'Rene," she said. "As soon as we

90

SILAS LAPHAM

were done father said, 'Well, Mr. Corey and I have got to talk
over a little matter of business, and we'll excuse you, ladies/
He looked at mother in a way that I guess was pretty hard to
bear. 'Rene, you ought to have heard the Colonel swelling at
supper. It would have made you feel that all he said the other
day was nothing."

Mrs. Lapham suddenly opened the door.

"Now, see here, Pen," she said, as she closed it behind her,
"I've had just as much as I can stand from your father, and if
you don't tell me this instant what it all means '"

She left the consequences to imagination, and Penelope re-
plied with her mock soberness

"Well, the Colonel does seem to be on his high horse, ma'am..
But you mustn't ask me what his business with Mr. Corey i%
for I don't know. All that I know is that i net them at the
landing, and that they conversed all the way dow^ on literary
topics."

"Nonsense! What do you think it is?'*

"Well, if you want my candid opinion, I think this talk about
business is nothing but a blind. It seems a pity Irene shouldn't
have been up to receive him," she added.

Irene cast a mute look of imploring at her mother, who was
too much preoccupied to afford her the protection it asked.

"Your father said he wanted to go into the business with
him,"

Irene's look changed to a stare of astonishment and mystifi-
cation, but Penelope preserved her imperturbability.

"Well, it's a lucrative business, I believe."

"Well, I don't believe a word of it!" cried Mrs. Lapham.
"And so I told your father."

"Did it seem to convince him?" inquired Penelope.

Her mother did not reply. "I know one thing," she said.
"He's got to tell me every word, or there'll be no sleep for him
this night."

91

THE RISE OF

"Well, ma'am," said Penelope, breaking down in one of
'her queer laughs, "I shouldn't be a bit surprised if you were
right."

"Go on and dress, Irene," ordered her mother, "and then you
and Pen come out into the parlour. They can have just two
hours for business, and then we must all be there to receive
him. You haven't got headache enough to hurt you."

"Oh, it's all gone now," said the girl.

At the end of the limit she had given the Colonel, Mrs. Lap-
ham looked into the dining-room, which she found blue with
!his smoke.

U 'I think you gentlemen will find the parlour pleasanter now,
-and we can give it up to you."

"Oh no, you needn't," said her husband. "We've got about
through." Corey was already standing, and Lapham rose too.
"I guess we can join the ladies now. We can leave that little
point till to-morrow."

Both of the young ladies were in the parlour when Corey
entered with their father, and both were frankly indifferent to
the few books and the many newspapers scattered about on the
table where the large lamp was placed. But after Corey had
greeted Irene he glanced at the novel under his eye, and said, in
the dearth that sometimes befalls people at such times: "I sec
you're reading Middlemarch. Do you like George Eliot?"

"Who?" asked the girl.

Penelope interposed. "I don't believe Irene's read it yet. I've
just got it out of the library; I heard so much talk about it. I
wish she would let you find out a little about the people for
yourself," she added. But here her father struck in

"I can't get the time for books. It's as much as I can do to
keep up with the newspapers; and when night comes, I'm
tired, and I'd rather go out to the theatre, or a lecture, if they've
got a good stereopticon to give you views of the places. But I
guess we all like a play better than 'most anything else. I want

92

SILAS LAPHAM

something that'll make me laugh. I don't believe in tragedy. I
think there's enough of that in real life without putting it on
the stage. Seen 'Joshua Whitcomb'?"

The whole family joined in the discussion, and it appeared
that they all had their opinions of the plays and actors. Mrs.
Lapham brought the talk back to literature. "I guess Penelope
does most of our reading."

"Now, mother, you're not going to put it all on me!" said the
girl, in comic protest.

Her mother laughed, and then added, with a sigh: "I used
to like to get hold of a good book when I was a girl; but we
weren't allowed to read many novels in those days. My mother
called them all lies. And I guess she wasn't so very far wrong
about some of them."

"They're certainly fictions," said Corey, smiling.

"Well, we do buy a good many books, first and last," said the
Colonel, who probably had in mind the costly volumes which
they presented to one another on birthdays and holidays. "But
I get about all the reading I want in the newspapers. And when
the girls want a novel, I tell 'em to get it out of the library.
That's what the library's for. Phew!" he panted, blowing away
the whole unprofitable subject. "How close you women-folks
like to keep a room! You go down to the sea-side or up to the
mountains for a change of air, and then you cork yourselves
into a room so tight you don't have any air at all. Here! You
girls get on your bonnets, and go and show Mr. Corey the view
of the hotels from the rocks."

Corey said that he should be delighted. The girls exchanged
looks with each other, and then with their mother. Irene curved
her pretty chin in comment upon her father's incorrigibility,
and Penelope made a droll mouth, but the Colonel remained
serenely content with his finesse. "I got 'em out of the way,"
he said, as soon as they were gone, and before his wife had
time to fall upon him, "because I've got through my talk with

93

THE RISE OF

him, and now I want to talk with you. It's just as I said, Pcrsis;
he wants to go into the business with me."

"It's lucky for you," said his wife, meaning that now he
would not be made to suffer for attempting to hoax her. But
she was too intensely interested to pursue that matter further.
"What in the world do you suppose he means by it?"

"Well, I should judge by his talk that he had been trying a
good many different things since he left college, and he hain't
found just the thing he likes or the thing that likes him. It
ain't so easy. And now he's got an idea that he can take hold of
the paint and push it in other countries push it in Mexico and
push it in South America. He's a splendid Spanish scholar,"
this was Lapham's version of Corey's modest claim to a smat-
tering of the language, "and he's been among the natives
enough to know their ways. And he believes in the paint,"
added the Colonel.

"I guess he believes in something else besides the paint," said
Mrs. Lapham.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, Silas Lapham, if you can't see now that he's after
Irene, I don't know what ever can open your eyes. That's all." 1

The Colonel pretended to give the idea silent consideration,,
as if it had not occurred to him before. "Well, then, all I've got
to say is, that he's going a good way round. I don't say you're
wrong, but if it's Irene, I don't see why he should want to go-
off to South America to get her. And that's what he proposes
to do. I guess there's some paint about it too, Persis. He says he
believes in it," the Colonel devoutly lowered his voice, "and
he's willing to take the agency on his own account down there,
and run it for a commission on what he can sell."

"Of course! He isn't going to take hold of it any way so as
to feel beholden to you. He's got too much pride for that."

<% Hc ain't going to take hold of it at all, if he don't mean
paint in the first place and Irene afterward. I don't object to

94

SILAS LAPHAM

him, as I know, either way, but the two things won't mix; and
I don't propose he shall pull the wool over my eyes or any-
body else. But, as far as heard from, up to date, he means paint
first, last, and all the time. At any rate, I'm going to take him
on that basis. He's got some pretty good ideas about it, and
he's been stirred up by this talk, just now, about getting our
manufactures into the foreign markets. There's an overstock
in everything, and we've got to get rid of it, or we've got to
shut down till the home demand begins again. We've had
two or three such flurries before now, and they didn't amount
to much. They say we can't extend our commerce under the
high tariff system we've got now, because there ain't any sort of
reciprocity on our side, we want to have the other fellows
show all the reciprocity, and the English have got the advan-
tage of us every time. I don't know whether it's so or not; but
I don't see why it should apply to my paint. Anyway, he wants
to try it, and I've about made up my mind to let him. Of course
I ain't going to let him take all the risk. I believe in the paint
too, and I shall pay his expenses anyway."

"So you want another partner after all?" Mrs. Lapham
could not forbear saying.

"Yes, if that's your idea of a partner. It isn't mine," returned
her husband dryly.

"Well, if you've made up your mind, Si, I suppose you're
ready for advice," said Mrs. Lapham.

The Colonel enjoyed this. "Yes, I am. What have you got to
say against it?"

"I don't know as I've got anything. I'm satisfied if you are."

"Well?"

"When is he going to start for South America?"

"I shall take him into the office a while. He'll get off some
time in the winter. But he's got to know the business first."

"Oh, indeed! Are you going to take him to board in the
family?"

95

THE RISE OF

"What are you after, Persis?"

"Oh, nothing! I presume he will feel free to visit in the fam-
ily, even if he don't board with us."

"I presume he will."

"And if he don't use his privileges, do you think he'll be a fit
person to manage your paint in South America?"

The Colonel reddened consciously. "I'm not taking him on
that basis."

"Oh yes, you are! You may pretend you ain't to yourself, but
you mustn't pretend so to me. Because I know you."

The Colonel laughed. "Pshaw!" he said.

Mrs. Lapham continued: "I don't see any harm in hoping
that he'll take a fancy to her. But if you really think it won't do
to mix the two things, I advise you not to take Mr. Corey into
the business. It will do all very well if he does take a fancy to
her; but if he don't, you know how you'll feel about it. And I
know you well enough, Silas, to know that you can't do him
justice if that happens. And I don't think it's right you should
take this step unless you're pretty sure. I can see that you've set
your heart on this thing "

"I haven't set my heart on it at all," protested Lapham.

"And if you can't bring it about, you're going to feel un-
happy over it," pursued his wife, regardless of his protest.

"Oh, very well," he said. "If you know more about what's in
my mind than I do, there's no use arguing, as I can see."

He got up, to carry off his consciousness, and sauntered out
of the door on to his piazza. He could see the young people
down on the rocks, and his heart swelled in his breast. He
had always said that he did not care what a man's family was,
but the presence of young Corey as an applicant to him for
employment, as his guest, as the possible suitor of his daughter,
was one of the sweetest flavours that he had yet tasted in his
success. He knew who the Coreys were very well, and, in his
simple, brutal way, he had long hated their name as a symbol

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SILAS LAPHAM

of splendour which, unless he should live to see at least three
generations of his descendants gilded with mineral paint, he
could not hope to realise in his own. He was acquainted in a
business way with the tradition of old Phillips Corey, and he
had heard a great many things about the Corey who had spent
his youth abroad and his father's money everywhere, and done
nothing but say smart things. Lapham could not see the smart-
ness of some of them which had been repeated to him. Once
he had encountered the fellow, and it seemed to Lapham that
the tall, slim, white-moustached man, with the slight stoop,
was everything that was offensively aristocratic. He had
bristled up aggressively at the name when his wife told how she
had made the acquaintance of the fellow's family the summer
before, and he had treated the notion of young Corey's caring
for Irene with the contempt which such a ridiculous supersti-
tion deserved. He had made up his mind about young Corey
beforehand; yet when he met him he felt an instant liking for
him, which he frankly acknowledged, and he had begun to as-
sume the burden of his wife's superstition, of which she seemed
now ready to accuse him of being the inventor.

Nothing had moved his thick imagination like this day's
events since the girl who taught him spelling and grammar in
the school at Lumberville had said she would have him for her
husband.

The dark figures, stationary on the rocks, began to move,
and he could see that they were coming toward the house. He
went indoors, so as not to appear to have been watching them.

97

VIII

WEEK after she had parted with her son at Bar Harbour,
Mrs. Corey suddenly walked in upon her husband in their
house in Boston. He was at breakfast, and he gave her the pa-
tronising welcome with which the husband who has been stay-
ing in town all summer receives his wife when she drops down
upon him from the mountains or the sea-side. For a little mo-
ment she feels herself strange in the house, and suffers herself
to be treated like a guest, before envy of his comfort vexes her
back into possession and authority. Mrs. Corey was a lady, and
she did not let her envy take the form of open reproach.

"Well, Anna, you find me here in the luxury you left me to.
How did you leave the girls?"

"The girls were well," said Mrs. Corey, looking absently at
her husband's brown velvet coat, in which he was so hand-
some. No man .had ever grown grey more beautifully. His
hair, while not remaining dark enough to form a theatrical
contrast with his moustache, was yet some shades darker, and,
in becoming a little thinner, it had become a little more grace-
fully wavy. His skin had the pearly tint which that of elderly
men sometimes assumes, and the lines which time had traced
upon it were too delicate for the name of wrinkles. He had
never had any personal vanity, and there was no consciousness
in his good looks now.

"I am glad of that. The boy I have with me," he returned;
"that is, when he is with me."

"Why, where is he?" demanded the mother.

"Probably carousing with the boon Lapham somewhere. He

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

left me yesterday afternoon to go and offer his allegiance to the
Mineral Paint King, and I haven't seen him since."

"Bromfield!" cried Mrs. Corey. "Why didn't you stop him?"

"Well, my dear, I'm not sure that it isn't a very good thing.' 1

"A good thing Pit's horrid!"

"No, I don't think so. It's decent. Tom had found out with-
out consulting the landscape, which I believe proclaims it every-
where "

"Hideous!"

"That it's really a good thing; and he thinks that he has
some ideas in regard to its dissemination in the parts beyond
seas."

"Why shouldn't he go into something else?" lamented the
mother.

"I believe he has gone into nearly everything else and come
out of it. So there is a chance of his coming out of this. But as I
had nothing to suggest in place of it, I thought it best not to
interfere. In fact, what good would my telling him that min-
eral paint was nasty have done? I dare say you told him it was
nasty."

"Yes! I did."

"And you see with what effect, though he values your opin-
ion three times as much as he values mine. Perhaps you came
up to tell him again that it was nasty?"

"I feel very unhappy about it. He is throwing himself away.
Yes, I should like to prevent it if I could!"

The father shook his head.

"If Lapham hasn't prevented it, I fancy it's too late. But there
may be some hopes of Lapham. As for Tom's throwing him-
self away, I don't know. There's no question but he is one of
the best fellows under the sun. He's tremendously energetic,
and he has plenty of the kind of sense which we call horse; but
he isn't brilliant. No, Tom is not brilliant. I don't think he

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would get on in a profession, and he's instinctively kept out of
everything of the kind. But he has got to do something. What
shall he do ? He says mineral paint, and really I don't see why
he shouldn't. If money is fairly and honestly earned, why
should we pretend to care what it comes out of, when we don't
really care ? That superstition is exploded everywhere."

"Oh, it isn't the paint alone," said Mrs. Corey; and then she
perceptibly arrested herself, and made a diversion in continu-
ing: "I wish he had married some one."

"With money?" suggested her husband. "From time to time
I have attempted Tom's corruption from that side, but I sus-
pect Tom has a conscience against it, and I rather like him for
it. I married for love myself," said Corey, looking across the
table at his wife.

She returned his look tolerantly, though she felt it right to
say, "What nonsense!"

"Besides," continued her husband, "if you come to money,
there is the paint princess. She will have plenty."

"Ah, that's the worst of it," sighed the mother. "I suppose I
could get on with the paint "

"But not with the princess? I thought you said she was a
very pretty, well-behaved girl?"

"She is very pretty, and she is well-behaved; but there is
nothing of her. She is insipid; she is very insipid."

"But Tom seemed to like her flavour, such as it was?"

"How can I tell? We were under a terrible obligation to
them, and I naturally wished him to be polite to them. In fact,
I asked him to be so."

"And he was too polite."

"I can't say that he was. But there is no doubt that the child
is extremely pretty."

"Tom says there are two of them. Perhaps they will neutral-
ize each other."

"Yes, there is another daughter," assented Mrs. Corey. "I

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don't see how you can joke about such things, Bromfield," she
added.

"Well, I don't either, my dear, to tell you the truth. My hardi-
hood surprises me. Here is a son of mine whom I see reduced to
making his living by a shrinkage in values. It's very odd," in-
terjected Corey, "that some values should have this peculiarity
of shrinking. You never hear of values in a picture shrinking;
but rents, stocks, real estate all those values shrink abomi-
nably. Perhaps it might be argued that one should put all his
values into pictures; I've got a good many of mine there."

"Tom needn't earn his living," said Mrs. Corey, refusing her
husband's jest. "There's still enough for all of us."

"That is what I have sometimes urged upon Tom. I have
proved to him that with economy, and strict attention to busi-
ness, he need do nothing as long as he lives. Of course he would
be somewhat restricted, and it would cramp the rest of us; but
it is a world of sacrifices and compromises. He couldn't agree
with me, and he was not in the least moved by the example of
persons of quality in Europe, which I alleged in support of the
life of idleness. It appears that he wishes to do something to
do something for himself. I am afraid that Tom is selfish."

Mrs. Corey smiled wanly. Thirty years before, she had mar-
ried the rich young painter in Rome, who said so much better
things than he painted charming things, just the things to
please the fancy of a girl who was disposed to take life a little
too seriously and practically. She saw him in a different light
when she got him home to Boston; but he had kept on saying
the charming things, and he had not done much else. In fact,
he had fulfilled the promise of his youth. It was a good trait in
him that he was not actively but only passively extravagant. He
was not adventurous with his money; his tastes were as simple
as an Italian's; he had no expensive habits. In the process of
time he had grown to lead a more and more secluded life. It
was hard to get him out anywhere, even to dinner. His patience

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with their narrowing circumstances had a pathos which she
felt the more the more she came into charge of their joint life.
At times it seemed too bad that the children and their educa-
tion and pleasures should cost so much. She knew, besides,
that if it had not been for them she would have gone back to
Rome with him, and lived princely there for less than it took
to live respectably in Boston.

"Tom hasn't consulted me," continued his father, "but he has
consulted other people. And he has arrived at the conclusion
that mineral paint is a good thing to go into. He has found
out all about it, and about its founder or inventor. It's quite
impressive to hear him talk. And if he must do something for
himself, I don't see why his egotism shouldn't as well take that
form as another. Combined with the paint princess, it isn't so
agreeable; but that's only a remote possibility, for which your
principal ground is your motherly solicitude. But even if it
were probable and imminent, what could you do? The chief
consolation that we American parents have in these matters
is that we can do nothing. If we were Europeans, even English,
we should take some cognisance of our children's love affairs,
and in some measure teach their young affections how to shoot.
But it is our custom to ignore them until they have shot, and
then they ignore us. We are altogether too delicate to arrange
the marriages of our children; and when they have arranged
them we don't like to say anything, for fear we should only
make bad worse. The right way is for us to school ourselves to
indifference. That is what the young people have to do else-
where, and that is the only logical result of our position here.
It is absurd for us to have any feeling about what we don't in-
terfere with."

"Oh, people do interfere with their children's marriages very
often," said Mrs. Corey.

"Yes, but only in a half-hearted way, so as not to make it
disagreeable for themselves if the marriages go on in spite of

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them, as they're pretty apt to do. Now, my idea is that I ought
to cut Tom off with a shilling. That would be very simple, and
it would be economical. But you would never consent, and
Tom wouldn't mind it."

"I think our whole conduct in regard to such things is
wrong," said Mrs. Corey.

"Oh, very likely. But our whole civilisation is based upon it.
And who is going to make a beginning? To which father in
our acquaintance shall I go and propose an alliance for Tom
with his daughter ? I should feel like an ass. And will you go to
some mother, and ask her sons in marriage for our daughters?
You would feel like a goose. No; the only motto for us is,
Hands off altogether."

"I shall certainly speak to Tom when the time comes," said
Mrs. Corey.

"And I shall ask leave to be absent from your discomfiture^
my dear," answered her husband.

The son returned that afternoon, and confessed his surprise
at finding his mother in Boston. He was so frank that she had
not quite the courage to confess in turn why she had come, but
trumped up an excuse.

"Well, mother," he said promptly, "I have made an engage-
ment with Mr. Lapham."

"Have you, Tom?" she asked faintly.

"Yes. For the present I am going to have charge of his for-
eign correspondence, and if I see my way to the advantage I ex-
pect to find in it, I am going out to manage that side of his
business in South America and Mexico. He's behaved very
handsomely about it. He says that if it appears for our common
interest, he shall pay me a salary as well as a commission. I've
talked with Uncle Jim, and he thinks it's a good opening."

"Your Uncle Jim does?" queried Mrs. Corey in amaze.

"Yes; I consulted him the whole way through, and I've acted
on his advice."

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This seemed an incomprehensible treachery on her brother's
part.

"Yes; I thought you would like to have me. And besides, I
couldn't possibly have gone to any one so well fitted to advise
me."

His mother said nothing. In fact, the mineral paint business^
however painful its interest, was, for the moment, superseded
by a more poignant anxiety. She began to feel her way cau-
tiously toward this.

"Have you been talking about your business with Mr. Lap-
ham all night?"

"Well, pretty much," said her son, with a guiltless laugh. "I
went to see him yesterday afternoon, after I had gone over the
whole ground with Uncle Jim, and Mr. Lapham asked me to
go down with him and finish up."

"Down ?" repeated Mrs. Corey.

"Yes, to Nantasket. He has a cottage down there."

"At Nantasket?" Mrs. Corey knitted her brows a little.
"What in the world can a cottage at Nantasket be like?"

"Oh, very much like a 'cottage' anywhere. It has the usual
allowance of red roof and veranda. There are the regulation
rocks by the sea; and the big hotels on the beach about a mile
off, flaring away with electric lights and roman-candles at
night. We didn't have them at Nahant."

"No," said his mother. "Is Mrs. Lapham well? And her
daughter?"

"Yes, I think so," said the young man. "The young ladies
walked me down to the rocks in the usual way after dinner,
and then I came back and talked paint with Mr. Lapham till
midnight. We didn't settle anything till this morning coming
up on the boat."

"What sort of people do they seem to be at home?"

"What sort? Well, I don't know that I noticed." Mrs. Corey

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permitted herself the first part of a sigh of relief; and her son
laughed, but apparently not at her. "They're just reading Mid-
dleware h. They say there's so much talk about it. Oh, I sup-
pose they're very good people. They seemed to be on very good
terms with each other."

"I suppose it's the plain sister who's reading Middlemarch"

"Plain? Is she plain?" asked the young man, as if searching
his consciousness. "Yes, it's the older one who does the reading,
apparently. But I don't believe that even she overdoes it. They
like to talk better. They reminded me of Southern people in
that." The young man smiled, as if amused by some of his im-
pressions of the Lapham family. "The living, as the country
people call it, is tremendously good. The Colonel he's a colo-
nel talked of the coffee as his wife's coffee, as if she had per-
sonally made it in the kitchen, though I believe it was merely
inspired by her. And there was everything in the house that
money could buy. But money has its limitations."

This was a fact which Mrs. Corey was beginning to realise
more and more unpleasantly in her own life; but it seemed to
bring her a certain comfort in its application to the Laphams.
"Yes, there is a point where taste has to begin," she said.

"They seemed to want to apologise to me for not having
more books," said Corey. "I don't know why they should. The
Colonel said they bought a good many books, first and last;
but apparently they don't take them to the sea-side."

"I dare say they never buy a new book. I've met some of these
moneyed people lately, and they lavish on every conceivable
luxury, and then borrow books, and get them in the cheap pa-
per editions."

"I fancy that's the way with the Lapham family," said the
young man, smilingly. "But they are very good people. The
other daughter is humorous."

"Humorous?" Mrs. Corey knitted her brows in some per-

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plexity. "Do you mean like Mrs. Sayre?" she asked, naming
the lady whose name must come into every Boston mind when
humour is mentioned.

"Oh no; nothing like that. She never says anything that you
can remember; nothing in flashes or ripples; nothing the least
literary. But it's a sort of droll way of looking at things; or a
droll medium through which things present themselves. I don't
know. She tells what she's seen, and mimics a little."

"Oh," said Mrs. Corey coldly. After a moment she asked:
"And is Miss Irene as pretty as ever?"

"She's a wonderful complexion," said the son unsatisfactorily.
"I shall want to be by when father and Colonel Lapham meet,"
he added, with a smile.

"Ah, yes, your father!" said the mother, in that way in which
a wife at once compassionates and censures her husband to
their children.

"Do you think it's really going to be a trial to him?" asked
the young man quickly.

"No, no, I can't say it is. But I confess I wish it was some
other business, Tom."

"Well, mother, I don't see why. The principal thing looked
at now is the amount of money; and while I would rather
starve than touch a dollar that was dirty with any sort of dis-
honesty "

"Of course you would, my son!" interposed his mother
proudly.

"I shouldn't at all mind its having a little mineral paint on it.
I'll use my influence with Colonel Lapham if I ever have any
to have his paint scraped off the landscape."

"I suppose you won't begin till the autumn."

"Oh yes, I shall," said the son, laughing at his mother's sim-
ple ignorance of business. "I shall begin to-morrow morning."

"To-morrow morning!"

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"Yes. I've had my desk appointed already, and I shall be
down there at nine in the morning to take possession."

"Tom," cried his mother, "why do you think Mr. Lapham
has taken you into business so readily ? I've always heard that
it was so hard for young men to get in."

"And do you think I found it easy with him ? We had about
twelve hours' solid talk."

"And you don't suppose it was any sort of personal con-
sideration?"

"Why, I don't know exactly what you mean, mother. I sup-
pose he likes me."

Mrs. Corey could not say just what she meant. She answered,
ineffectually enough

"Yes. You wouldn't like it to be a favour, would you?"

"I think he's a man who may be trusted to look after his own
interest. But I don't mind his beginning by liking me. It'll be
my own fault if I don't make myself essential to him."

"Yes," said Mrs. Corey.

"Well, demanded her husband, at their first meeting after her
interview with their son, "what did you say to Tom?"

"Very little, if anything. I found him with his mind made
up, and it would only have distressed him if I had tried to
change it."

"That is precisely what I said, my dear."

"Besides, he had talked the matter over fully with James, and
seems to have been advised by him. I can't understand James."

"Oh! it's in regard to the paint, and not the princess, that he's
made up his mind. Well, I think you were wise to let him alone,
Anna. We represent a faded tradition. We don't really care
what business a man is in, so it is large enough, and he doesn't
advertise offensively; but we think it fine to affect reluctance."

"Do you really feel so, Bromfield?" asked his wife seriously.

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"Certainly I do. There was a long time in my misguided
youth when I supposed myself some sort of porcelain; but it's
a relief to be of the common clay, after all, and to know it. If
I get broken, I can be easily replaced."

"If Tom must go into such a business," said Mrs. Corey, "I'm
glad James approves of it."

"I'm afraid it wouldn't matter to Tom if he didn't; and I
don't know that I should care," said Corey, betraying the fact
that he had perhaps had a good deal of his brother-in-law's
judgment in the course of his life. "You had better consult him
in regard to Tom's marrying the princess."

"There is no necessity at present for that," said Mrs. Corey,
with dignity. After a moment, she asked, "Should you feel
quite so easy if it were a question of that, Bromfield?"

"It would be a little more personal."

"You feel about it as I do. Of course, we have both lived too
long, and seen too much of the world, to suppose we can con-
trol such things. The child is good, I haven't the least doubt,
and all those things can be managed so that they wouldn't dis-
grace us. But she has had a certain sort of bringing up. I should
prefer Tom to marry a girl with another sort, and this business
venture of his increases the chances that he won't. That's all."
'Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door,
but 'twill serve.' "

"I shouldn't like it."

"Well, it hasn't happened yet."

"Ah, you never can realise anything beforehand."

"Perhaps that has saved me some suffering. But you have at
least the consolation of two anxieties at once. I always find that
a great advantage. You can play one off against the other."

Mrs. Corey drew a long breath as if she did not experience
the suggested consolation; and she arranged to quit, the fol-
lowing afternoon, the scene of her defeat, which she had not
had the courage to make a battlefield. Her son went down to

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see her off on the boat, after spending his first day at his desk
in Lapham's office. He was in a gay humour, and she departed
in a reflected gleam of his good spirits. He told her all about it,
as he sat talking with her at the stern of the boat, lingering till
the last moment, and then stepping ashore, with as little waste
of time as Lapham himself, on the gang-plank which the deck-
hands had laid hold of. He touched his hat to her from the
wharf to reassure her of his escape from being carried away
with her, and the next moment his smiling face hid itself in
the crowd.

He walked on smiling up the long wharf, encumbered with
trucks and hacks and piles of freight, and, taking his way
through the deserted business streets beyond this bustle, made
a point of passing the door of Lapham's warehouse, on the
jambs of which his name and paint were lettered in black on a
square ground of white. The door was still open, and Corey
loitered a moment before it, tempted to go upstairs and fetch
away some foreign letters which he had left on his desk, and
which he thought he might finish up at home. He was in love
with his work, and he felt the enthusiasm for it which noth-
ing but the work we can do well inspires in us. He believed
that he had found his place in the world, after a good deal of
looking, and he had the relief, the repose, of fitting into it.
Every little incident of the momentous, uneventful day was a
pleasure in his mind, from his sitting down at his desk, to which
Lapham's boy brought him the foreign letters, till his rising
from it an hour ago. Lapham had been in view within his own
office, but he had given Corey no formal reception, and had, in
fact, not spoken to him till toward the end of the forenoon,
when he suddenly came out of his den with some more letters
in his hand, and after a brief "How d' ye do ?" had spoken a few
words about them, and left them with him. He was in his shirt-
sleeves again, and his sanguine person seemed to radiate the
heat with which he suffered. He did not go out to lunch, but

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had it brought to him in his office, where Corey saw him eating
it before he left his own desk to go out and perch on a swing-
ing seat before the long counter of a down-town restaurant.
He observed that all the others lunched at twelve, and he re-
solved to anticipate his usual hour. When he returned, the
pretty girl who had been clicking away at a type-writer all the
morning was neatly putting out of sight the evidences of pie
from the table where her machine stood, and was preparing to
go on with her copying. In his office Lapham lay asleep in his
arm-chair, with a newspaper over his face.

Now, while Corey lingered at the entrance to the stairway,
these two came down the stairs together, and he heard Lapham
saying, "Well, then, you better get a divorce."

He looked red and excited, and the girl's face, which she
veiled at sight of Corey, showed traces of tears. She slipped
round him into the street.

But Lapham stopped, and said, with the show of no feeling
but surprise: "Hello, Corey! Did you want to go up?"

"Yes; there were some letters I hadn't quite got through with."

"You'll find Dennis up there. But I guess you better let
them go till to-morrow. I always make it a rule to stop work
when I'm done."

"Perhaps you're right," said Corey, yielding.

"Come along down as far as the boat with me. There's a little
matter I want to talk over with you."

It was a business matter, and related to Corey's proposed
connection with the house.

The next day the head book-keeper, who lunched at the long
counter of the same restaurant with Corey, began to talk with
him about Lapham. Walker had not apparently got his place
by seniority; though with his forehead, bald far up toward the
crown, and his round smooth face, one might have taken him
for a plump elder, if he had not looked equally like a robust in-

HO

SILAS LAPHAM

fant. The thick drabbish-yellow moustache was what arrested
decision in either direction, and the prompt vigour of all his
movements was that of a young man of thirty, which was
really Walker's age. He knew, of course, who Corey was, and
he had waited for a man who might look down on him socially
to make the overtures toward something more than business
acquaintance; but, these made, he was readily responsive, and
drew freely on his philosophy of Lapham and his affairs.

"I think about the only difference between people in this
world is that some know what they want, and some don't. Well,
now," said Walker, beating the bottom of his salt-box to make
the salt come out, "the old man knows what he wants every
time. And generally he gets it. Yes, sir, he generally gets it. He
knows what he's about, but I'll be blessed if the rest of us do
half the time. Anyway, we don't till he's ready to let us. You
take my position in most business houses. It's confidential. The
head book-keeper knows right along pretty much everything
the house has got in hand. I'll give you my word 7 don't. He
may open up to you a little more in your department, but, as
far as the rest of us go, he don't open up any more than an oys-
ter on a hot brick. They say he had a partner once; I guess he's
dead. / wouldn't like to be the old man's partner. Well, you see,
this paint of his is like his heart's blood. Better not try to joke
him about it. I've seen people come in occasionally and try it.
They didn't get much fun out of it."

While he talked, Walker was plucking up morsels from his
plate, tearing off pieces of French bread from the long loaf, and
feeding them into his mouth in an impersonal way, as if he
were firing up an engine.

"I suppose he thinks," suggested Corey, "that if he doesn't
tell, nobody else will."

Walker took a draught of beer from his glass, and wiped the
foam from his moustache.

Ill

THE RISE OF

"Oh, but he carries it too far! It's a weakness with him. He's
just so about everything. Look at the way he keeps it up about
that type-writer girl of his. You'd think she was some princess
travelling incognito. There isn't one of us knows who she is, or
where she came from, or who she belongs to. He brought her
and her machine into the office one morning, and set 'em down
at a table, and that's all there is about it, as far as we're con-
cerned. It's pretty hard on the girl, for I guess she'd like to

talk; and to any one that didn't know the old man " Walker

broke off and drained his glass of what was left in it.

Corey thought of the words he had overheard from Lapham
to the girl. But he said, "She seems to be kept pretty busy."

"Oh yes," said Walker; "there ain't much loafing round the
place, in any of the departments, from the old man's down.
That's just what I say. He's got to work just twice as hard, if
he wants to keep everything in his own mind. But he ain't
afraid of work. That's one good thing about him. And Miss
Dewey has to keep step with the rest of us. But she don't look
like one that would take to it naturally. Such a pretty girl as
that generally thinks she does enough when she looks her pret-
tiest."

"She's a pretty girl," said Corey, non-committally. "But I
suppose a great many pretty girls have to earn their living."

"Don't any of 'em like to do it," returned the book-keeper.
"They think it's a hardship, and I don't blame 'em. They have
got a right to get married, and they ought to have the chance.
And Miss Dewey's smart, too. She's as bright as a biscuit. I
guess she's had trouble. I shouldn't be much more than half
surprised if Miss Dewey wasn't Miss Dewey, or hadn't always
been. Yes, sir," continued the book-keeper, who prolonged
the talk as they walked back to Lapham's warehouse together,
"I don't know exactly what it is, it isn't any one thing in par-
ticular, but I should say that girl had been married. I wouldn't

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speak so freely to any of the rest, Mr. Corey, I want you to
understand that, and it isn't any of my business, anyway; but
that's my opinion."

Corey made no reply, as he walked beside the book-keeper,
who continued

"It's curious what a difference marriage makes in people.
Now, I know that I don't look any more like a bachelor of
my age than I do like the man in the moon, and yet I couldn't
say where the difference came in, to save me. And it's just so
with a woman. The minute you catch sight of her face, there's
something in it that tells you whether she's married or not.
What do you suppose it is?"

"I'm sure I don't know," said Corey, willing to laugh away
the topic. "And from what I read occasionally of some people
who go about repeating their happiness, I shouldn't say that
the intangible evidences were always unmistakable."

"Oh, of course," admitted Walker, easily surrendering his
position. "All signs fail in dry weather. Hello! What's that?"
He caught Corey by the arm, and they both stopped.

At a corner, half a block ahead of them, the summer noon
solitude of the place was broken by a bit of drama. A man and
woman issued from the intersecting street, and at the moment
of coming into sight the man, who looked like a sailor, caught
the woman by the arm, as if to detain her. A brief struggle en-
sued, the woman trying to free herself, and the man half coax-
ing, half scolding. The spectators could now see that he was
drunk; but before they could decide whether it was a case for
their interference or not, the woman suddenly set both hands
against the man's breast and gave him a quick push. He lost
his footing and tumbled into a heap in the gutter. The woman
faltered an instant, as if to see whether he was seriously hurt,
and then turned and ran.

When Corey and the book-keeper re-entered the office, Miss

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Dewey had finished her lunch, and was putting a sheet of pa-
per into her type-writer. She looked up at them with her eyes
of turquoise blue, under her low white forehead, with the hair
neatly rippled over it, and then began to beat the keys of her
machine.

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IX

LAP HAM had the pride which comes of self -making, and he
would not openly lower his crest to the young fellow he had
taken into his business. He was going to be obviously master
in his own place to every one; and during the hours of busi-
ness he did nothing to distinguish Corey from the half-dozen
other clerks and book-keepers in the outer office, but he was not
silent about the fact that Bromfield Corey's son had taken a
fancy to come to him. "Did you notice that fellow at the desk
facing my type-writer girl? Well, sir, that's the son of Brom-
field Corey old Phillips Corey's grandson. And I'll say this for
him, that there isn't a man in the office that looks after his
work better. There isn't anything he's too good for. He's right
here at nine every morning, before the clock gets in the word.
I guess it's his grandfather coming out in him. He's got charge
of the foreign correspondence. We're pushing the paint every-
where." He flattered himself that he did not lug the matter in.
He had been warned against that by his wife, but he had the
right to do Corey justice, and his brag took the form of illus-
tration. "Talk about training for business I tell you it's all in
the man himself! I used to believe in what old Horace Greeley
said about college graduates being the poorest kind of horned
cattle; but I've changed my mind a little. You take that fellow
Corey. He's been through Harvard, and he's had about every
advantage that a fellow could have. Been everywhere, and talks
half a dozen languages like English. I suppose he's got money
enough to live without lifting a hand, any more than his fa-
ther does; son of Bromfield Corey, you know. But the thing
was in him. He's a natural-born business man; and I've had

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many a fellow with me that had come up out of the street, and
worked hard all his life, without ever losing his original op-
position to the thing. But Corey likes it. I believe the fellow
would like to stick at that desk of his night and day. I don't
know where he got it. I guess it must be his grandfather, old
Phillips Corey; it often skips a generation, you know. But
what I say is, a thing has got to be born in a man; and if it
ain't born in him, all the privations in the world won't put it
there, and if it is, all the college training won't take it out."

Sometimes Lapham advanced these ideas at his own table,
to a guest whom he had brought to Nantasket for the night.
Then he suffered exposure and ridicule at the hands of his
wife, when opportunity offered. She would not let him bring
Corey down to Nantasket at all.

"No, indeed!" she said. "I am not going to have them think
we're running after him. If he wants to see Irene, he can find
out ways of doing it for himself."

"Who wants him to see Irene?" retorted the Colonel angrily.

"I do," said Mrs. Lapham. "And I want him to see her with-
out any of your connivance, Silas. I'm not going to have it said
that I put my girls at anybody. Why don't you invite some of
your other clerks ?"'

"He ain't just like the other clerks. He's going to take charge
of a part of the business. It's quite another thing."

"Oh, indeed!" said Mrs. Lapham vexatiously. "Then you arc
going to take a partner."

"I shall ask him down if I choose!" returned the Colonel,
disdaining her insinuation.

His wife laughed with the fearlessness of a woman who
knows her husband.

"But you won't choose when you've thought it over, Si."
Then she applied an emollient to his chafed surface. "Don't
you suppose I feel as you do about it? I know just how proud
you are, and I'm not going to have you do anything that will

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SILAS LAPHAM

make you feel meeching afterward. You just let things take
their course. If he wants Irene, he's going to find out some way
of seeing her; and if he don't, all the plotting and planning in
the world isn't going to make him."

"Who's plotting?" again retorted the Colonel, shuddering
at the utterance of hopes and ambitions which a man hides
with shame, but a woman talks over as freely and coolly as if
they were items of a milliner's bill.

"Oh, not you!" exulted his wife. "I understand what you
want. You want to get this fellow, who is neither partner nor
clerk, down here to talk business with him. Well, now, you
just talk business with him at the office."

The only social attention which Lapham succeeded in offer-
ing Corey was to take him in his buggy, now and then, for a
spin out over the Milldam. He kept the mare in town, and on
a pleasant afternoon he liked to knock off early, as he phrased
it, and let the mare out a little. Corey understood something
about horses, though in a passionless way, and he would have
preferred to talk business when obliged to talk horse. But he
deferred to his business superior with the sense of discipline
which is innate in the apparently insubordinate American
nature. If Corey could hardly have helped feeling the social
difference between Lapham and himself, in his presence he
silenced his traditions, and showed him all the respect that
he could have exacted from any of his clerks. He talked horse
with him, and when the Colonel wished he talked house. Be-
sides himself and his paint Lapham had not many other topics;
and if he had a choice between the mare and the edifice on the
water side of Beacon Street, it was just now the latter. Some-
times, in driving in or out, he stopped at the house, and made
Corey his guest there, if he might not at Nantasket; and one
day it happened that the young man met Irene there again. She
had come up with her mother alone, and they were in the
house, interviewing the carpenter as before, when the Colonel

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jumped out of his buggy and cast anchor at the pavement.
More exactly, Mrs. Lapham was interviewing the carpenter,
and Irene was sitting in the bow-window on a trestle, and
looking out at the driving. She saw him come up with her
father, and bowed and blushed. Her father went on upstairs to
find her mother, and Corey pulled up another trestle which he
found in the back part of the room. The first floorings had
been laid throughout the house, and the partitions had been
lathed so that one could realise the shape of the interior.

"I suppose you will sit at this window a good deal," said the
young man.

"Yes, I think it will be very nice. There's so much more go-
ing on than there is in the Square."

"It must be very interesting to you to see the house grow."

"It is. Only it doesn't seem to grow so fast as I expected."

"Why, I'm amazed at the progress your carpenter has made
every time I come."

The girl looked down, and then lifting her eyes she said,
with a sort of timorous appeal

"I've been reading that book since you were down at Nan-
tasket."

"Book?" repeated Corey, while she reddened with disap-
pointment. "Oh yes. Middlemarch. Did you like it?"

"I haven't got through with it yet. Pen has finished it."

"What does she think of it?"

"Oh, I think she likes it very well. I haven't heard her talk
about it much. Do you like it?"

"Yes; I liked it immensely. But it's several years since I read
it."

"I didn't know it was so old. It's just got into the Sea-
side Library," she urged, with a little sense of injury in her
tone.

"Oh, it hasn't been out such a very great while," said Corey
politely. "It came a little before Daniel Deronda"

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SILAS LAPHAM

The girl was again silent. She followed the curl of a shaving
on the floor with the point of her parasol.

"Do you like that Rosamond Vincy?" she asked, without
looking up.

Corey smiled in his kind way.

"I didn't suppose she was expected to have any friends. I
can't say I liked her. But I don't think I disliked her so much as
the author does. She's pretty hard on her good-looking" he
was going to say girls, but as if that might have been rather per-
sonal, he said "people."

"Yes, that's what Pen says. She says she doesn't give her any
chance to be good. She says she should have been just as bad
as Rosamond if she had been in her place."

The young man laughed. "Your sister is very satirical, isn't
she?"

"I don't know," said Irene, still intent upon the convolutions
of the shaving. "She keeps us laughing. Papa thinks there's
nobody that can talk like her." She gave the shaving a little
toss from her, and took the parasol up across her lap. The un-
worldliness of the Lapham girls did not extend to their dress;
Irene's costume was very stylish, and she governed her head
and shoulders stylishly. "We are going to have the back room
upstairs for a music-room and library," she said abruptly.

"Yes?" returned Corey. "I should think that would be
charming."

"We expected to have book-cases, but the architect wants to
build the shelves in."

The fact seemed to be referred to Corey for his comment.

"It seems to me that would be the best way. They'll look
like part of the room then. You can make them low, and hang
your pictures above them."

"Yes, that's what he said." The girl looked out of the win-
dow in adding, "I presume with nice bindings it will look very
well."

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"Oh, nothing furnishes a room like books."

"No. There will have to be a good many of them."

"That depends upon the size of your room and the number
of your shelves."

"Oh, of course! I presume," said Irene, thoughtfully, "we
shall have to have Gibbon."

"If you want to read him," said Corey, with a laugh of sym-
pathy for an imaginable joke.

"We had a great deal about him at school. I believe we had
one of his books. Mine's lost, but Pen will remember."

The young man looked at her, and then said, seriously,
"You'll want Greene, of course, and Motley, and Parkman."

"Yes. What kind of writers are they?"

"They're historians too."

"Oh yes; I remember now. That's what Gibbon was. Is it
Gibbon or Gibbons?"

The young man decided the point with apparently superflu-
ous delicacy. "Gibbon, I think."

"There used to be so many of them," said Irene gaily. "I used
to get them mixed up with each other, and I couldn't tell them
from the poets. Should you want to have poetry?"

"Yes; I suppose some edition of the English poets."

"We don't any of us like poetry. Do you like it?"

"I'm afraid I don't very much," Corey owned. "But, of
course, there was a time when Tennyson was a great deal more
to me than he is now."

"We had something about him at school too. I think I re-
member the name. I think we ought to have all the American
poets."

"Well, not all. Five or six of the best: you want Longfellow
and Bryant and Whittier and Holmes and Emerson and
Lowell."

The girl listened attentively, as if making mental note of the
names.

I2O

SILAS LAPHAM

"And Shakespeare," she added. "Don't you like Shakespeare's
plays?"

"Oh yes, very much."

"I used to be perfectly crazy about his plays. Don't you think
'Hamlet' is splendid ? We had ever so much about Shakespeare.
Weren't you perfectly astonished when you found out how
many other plays of his there were ? I always thought there was
nothing but 'Hamlet' and 'Romeo and Juliet' and 'Macbeth'
and 'Richard in.' and 'King Lear,' and that one that Robeson
and Crane have oh yes! 'Comedy of Errors.' "

"Those are the ones they usually play," said Corey.

"I presume we shall have to have Scott's works," said Irene,
returning to the question of books.

"Oh yes."

"One of the girls used to think he was great. She was always
talking about Scott." Irene made a pretty little amiably con-
temptuous mouth. "He isn't American, though?" she sug-
gested.

"No," said Corey; "he's Scotch, I believe."

Irene passed her glove over her forehead. "I always get him'
mixed up with Cooper. Well, papa has got to get them. If we
have a library, we have got to have books in it. Pen says it's per-
fectly ridiculous having one. But papa thinks whatever the
architect says is right. He fought him hard enough at first. I
don't see how any one can keep the poets and the historians
and novelists separate in their mind. Of course papa will buy
them if we say so. But I don't see how I'm ever going to tell
him which ones." The joyous light faded out of her face and
left it pensive.

"Why, if you like," said the young man, taking out his pencil,
"I'll put down the names we've been talking about."

He clapped himself on his breast pockets to detect some lurk-
ing scrap of paper.

"Will you?" she cried delightedly. "Here! take one of my

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cards," and she pulled out her card-case. "The carpenter writes
on a three-cornered block and puts it into his pocket, and it's
so uncomfortable he can't help remembering it. Pen says she's
going to adopt the three-cornered-block plan with papa."

"Thank you," said Corey. "I believe I'll use your card." He
crossed over to her, and after a moment sat down on the trestle
beside her. She looked over the card as he wrote. "Those are
the ones we mentioned, but perhaps I'd better add a few
others."

"Oh, thank you," she said, when he had written the card full
on both sides. "He has got to get them in the nicest binding,
too. I shall tell him about their helping to furnish the room,
and then he can't object." She remained with the card, look-
ing at it rather wistfully.

Perhaps Corey divined her trouble of mind. "If he will take
that to any bookseller, and tell him what bindings he wants,
he will fill the order for him."

"Oh, thank you very much," she said, and put the card back
into her card-case with great apparent relief. Then she turned
her lovely face toward the young man, beaming with the tri-
umph a woman feels in any bit of successful manoeuvring, and
began to talk with recovered gaiety of other things, as if, hav-
ing got rid of a matter annoying out of all proportion to its
importance, she was now going to indemnify herself.

Corey did not return to his own trestle. She found another
shaving within reach of her parasol, and began poking that
with it, and trying to follow it through its folds. Corey watched
her a while.

"You seem to have a great passion for playing with shav-
ings," he said. "Is it a new one?"

"New what?"

"Passion."

"I don't know," she said, dropping her eyelids, and keeping

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SILAS LAPHAM

on with her effort. She looked shyly aslant at him. "Perhaps
you don't approve of playing with shavings?"

"Oh yes, I do. I admire it very much. But it seems rather diffi-
cult. I've a great ambition to put my foot on the shaving's tail
and hold it for you."

"Well," said the girl.

"Thank you," said the young man. He did so, and now she
ran her parasol point easily through it. They looked at each
other and laughed. "That was wonderful. Would you like tQ
try another?" he asked.

"No, I thank you," she replied. "I think one will do."

They both laughed again, for whatever reason or no reason,,
and then the young girl became sober. To a girl everything a
young man does is of significance; and if he holds a shaving
down with his foot while she pokes through it with her parasol,
she must ask herself what he means by it.

"They seem to be having rather a long interview with the
carpenter to-day," said Irene, looking vaguely toward the ceil-
ing. She turned with polite ceremony to Corey. "I'm afraid
you're letting them keep you. You mustn't."

"Oh no. You're letting me stay," he returned.

She bridled and bit her lip for pleasure. "I presume they will
be down before a great while. Don't you like the smell of the
wood and the mortar ? It's so fresh."

"Yes, it's delicious." He bent forward and picked up from
the floor the shaving with which they had been playing, and
put it to his nose. "It's like a flower. May I offer it to you?" he
asked, as if it had been one.

"Oh, thank you, thank you!" She took it from him and put
it into her belt, and then they both laughed once more.

Steps were heard descending. When the elder people reached
the floor where they were sitting, Corey rose and presently took
his kave.

THE RISE OF

"What makes you so solemn, 'Rene?" asked Mrs. Lapham.

"'Solemn?" echoed the girl. "I'm not a bit solemn. What can
you mean?"

Corey dined at home that evening, and as he sat looking
across the table at his father, he said, "I wonder what the aver-
age literature of non-cultivated people is."

"Ah," said the elder, "I suspect the average is pretty low even
with cultivated people. You don't read a great many books
yourself, Tom."

"No, I don't," the young man confessed. "I read more books
when I was with Stanton, last winter, than I had since I was
a boy. But I read them because I must there was nothing else
to do. It wasn't because I was fond of reading. Still I think I
read with some sense of literature and the difference between
authors. I don't suppose that people generally do that; I have
met people who had read books without troubling themselves
to find out even the author's name, much less trying to decide
upon his quality. I suppose that's the way the vast majority of
people read."

"Yes. If authors were not almost necessarily recluses, and
ignorant of the ignorance about them, I don't see how they
could endure it. Of course they are fated to be overwhelmed
by oblivion at last, poor fellows; but to see it weltering all
round them while they are in the very act of achieving im-
mortality must be tremendously discouraging. I don't suppose
that we who have the habit of reading, and at least a nodding
acquaintance with literature, can imagine the bestial darkness
of the great mass of people even people whose houses are rich
and whose linen is purple and fine. But occasionally we get
glimpses of it. I suppose you found the latest publications lying
all about in Lapham cottage when you were down there?"

Young Corey laughed. "It wasn't exactly cumbered with
them."

"No?"

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SILAS LAPHAM

"To tell the truth, I don't suppose they ever buy books. The
young ladies get novels that they hear talked of out of the cir-
culating library."

"Had they knowledge enough to be ashamed of their igno-
rance?"

"Yes, in certain ways to a certain degree."

"It's a curious thing, this thing we call civilisation," said the
elder musingly. "We think it is an affair of epochs and of na-
tions. It's really an affair of individuals. One brother will be
civilised and the other a barbarian. I've occasionally met young
girls who were so brutally, insolently, wilfully indifferent to
the arts which make civilisation that they ought to have been
clothed in the skins of wild beasts and gone about barefoot with
clubs over their shoulders. Yet they were of polite origin, and
their parents were at least respectful of the things that these
young animals despised."

"I don't think that is exactly the case with the Lapham fam-
ily," said the son, smiling. "The father and mother rather apolo-
gised about not getting time to read, and the young ladies by
no means scorned it."

"They are quite advanced!"

"They are going to have a library in their Beacon Street
house."

"Oh, poor things! How are they ever going to get the books
together?"

"Well, sir," said the son, colouring a little, "/ have been indi-
rectly applied to for help."

''You, Tom!" His father dropped back in his chair and
laughed.

"I recommended the standard authors," said the son.

"Oh, I never supposed your prudence would be at fault,
Tom!"

"But seriously," said the young man, generously smiling in
sympathy with his father's enjoyment, "they're not unintelli-

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THE RISE OF

gent people. They are very quick, and they are shrewd and
sensible."

"I have no doubt that some of the Sioux are so. But that
is not saying that they are civilised. All civilisation comes
through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got
his civilisation by talking and looking, and in some measure a
Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history
and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise. Once we
were softened, if not polished, by religion; but I suspect that
the pulpit counts for much less now in civilising."

"They're enormous devourers of newspapers, and theatre-
goers; and they go a great deal to lectures. The Colonel prefers
them with the stereopticon."

"They might get a something in that way," said the elder
thoughtfully. "Yes, I suppose one must take those things into
account especially the newspapers and the lectures. I doubt if
the theatre is a factor in civilisation among us. I dare say it
doesn't deprave a great deal, but from what I've seen of it I
should say that it was intellectually degrading. Perhaps they
might get some sort of lift from it; I don't know. Tom!" he
added, after a moment's reflection. "I really think I ought to
see this patron of yours. Don't you think it would be rather
decent in me to make his acquaintance?"

"Well, if you have the fancy, sir," said the young man. "But
there's no sort of obligation. Colonel Lapham would be the last
man in the world to want to give our relation any sort of social
character. The meeting will come about in the natural course
of things."

"Ah, I didn't intend to propose anything immediate," said
the father. "One can't do anything in the summer, and I should
prefer your mother's superintendence. Still, I can't rid myself
of the idea of a dinner. It appears to me that there ought to be
a dinner."

"Oh, pray don't feel that there's any necessity."

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SILAS LAPHAM

"Well," said the elder, with easy resignation, "there's at
least no hurry."

"There is one thing I don't like," said Lapham, in the course
of one of those talks which came up between his wife and him-
self concerning Corey, "or at least I don't understand it; and
that's the way his father behaves. I don't want to force myself
on any man; but it seems to me pretty queer the way he holds
off. I should think he would take enough interest in his son to
want to know something about his business. What is he afraid
of?" demanded Lapham angrily. "Does he think I'm going to
jump at a chance to get in with him, if he gives me one? He's
mightily mistaken if he does. / don't want to know him."

"Silas," said his wife, making a wife's free version of her hus-
band's words, and replying to their spirit rather than their let-
ter, "I hope you never said a word to Mr. Corey to let him
know the way you feel."

"I never mentioned his father to him!" roared the Colonel.
"That's the way I feel about it!"

"Because it would spoil everything. I wouldn't have them
think we cared the least thing in the world for their acquaint-
ance. We shouldn't be a bit better off. We don't know the same
people they do, and we don't care for the same kind of things."

Lapham was breathless with resentment of his wife's im-
plication. "Don't I tell you," he gasped, "that I don't want to
know them? Who began it? They're friends of yours if they're
anybody's."

"They're distant acquaintances of mine," returned Mrs.
Lapham quietly; "and this young Corey is a clerk of yours.
And I want we should hold ourselves so that when they get
ready to make the advances we can meet them half-way or not,
just as we choose."

"That's what grinds me," cried her husband. "Why should
we wait for them to make the advances? Why shouldn't we

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make 'em ? Are they any better than we are ? My note of hand
would be worth ten times what Bromfield Corey's is on the
street to-day. And I made my money. I haven't loafed my life
away."

"Oh, it isn't what you've got, and it isn't what you've done
exactly. It's what you are."

"Well, then, what's the difference?"

"None that really amounts to anything, or that need give
you any trouble, if you don't think of it. But he's been all his
life in society, and he knows just what to say and what to do,
and he can talk about the things that society people like to talk
about, and you can't."

Lapham gave a furious snort. "And does that make him any
better?"

"No. But it puts him where he can make the advances with-
out demeaning himself, and it puts you where you can't. Now,
look here, Silas Lapham! You understand this thing as well as
I do. You know that I appreciate you, and that I'd sooner die
than have you humble yourself to a living soul. But I'm not
going to have you coming to me, and pretending that you can
meet Bromfield Corey as an equal on his own ground. You
can't. He's got a better education than you, and if he hasn't
got more brains than you, he's got different. And he and his
wife, and their fathers and grandfathers before 'em, have al-
ways had a high position, and you can't help it. If you want to
know them, you've got to let them make the advances. If you
don't, all well and good."

"I guess," said the chafed and vanquished Colonel, after a
moment for swallowing the pill, "that they'd have been in a
pretty fix if you'd waited to let them make the advances last
summer."

"That was a different thing altogether. I didn't know who
they were, or may be I should have waited. But all I say now is
that if you've got young Corey into business with you, in

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hopes of our getting into society with his father, you better ship
him at once. For I ain't going to have it on that basis."

"Who wants to have it on that basis?" retorted her husband.

"Nobody, if you don't," said Mrs. Lapham tranquilly.

Irene had come home with the shaving in her belt, unnoticed
by her father, and unquestioned by her mother. But her sister
saw it at once, and asked her what she was doing with it.

"Oh, nothing," said Irene, with a joyful smile of self -betrayal,
taking the shaving carefully out, and laying it among the laces
and ribbons in her drawer.

"Hadn't you better put it in water, 'Rene? It'll be all wilted
by morning," said Pen.

"You mean thing!" cried the happy girl. "It isn't a flower!"

"Oh, I thought it was a whole bouquet. Who gave it to
you?"

"I shan't tell you," said Irene saucily.

"Oh, well, never mind. Did you know Mr. Corey had been
down here this afternoon, walking on the beach with me?"

:< He wasn't he wasn't at all! He was at the house with me.
There! I've caught you fairly."

"Is that so?" drawled Penelope. "Then I never could guess
who gave you that precious shaving."

"No, you couldn't!" said Irene, flushing beautifully. "And
you may guess, and you may guess, and you may guess!" With
her lovely eyes she coaxed her sister to keep on teasing her, and
Penelope continued the comedy with the patience that women
have for such things.

"Well, I'm not going to try, if it's no use. But I didn't know
it had got to be the fashion to give shavings instead of flowers.
But there's some sense in it. They can be used for kindlings
when they get old, and you can't do anything with old flowers.
Perhaps he'll get to sending 'em by the barrel."

Irene laughed for pleasure in this tormenting. "O Pen, I want
to tell you how it all happened."

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"Oh, he did give it to you, then? Well, I guess I don't care to
hear."

"You shall, and you've got to!" Irene ran and caught her
sister, who feigned to be going out of the room, and pushed her
into a chair. "There, now!" She pulled up another chair, and
hemmed her in with it. "He came over, and sat down on the
trestle alongside of me "

"What? As close as you are to me now?"

"You wretch! I will give it to you! No, at a proper distance.
And here was this shaving on the floor, that I'd been poking
with my parasol "

"To hide your embarrassment."

"Pshaw! I wasn't a bit embarrassed. I was just as much at
my ease! And then he asked me to let him hold the shaving
down with his foot, while I went on with my poking. And I
said yes he might "

"What a bold girl! You said he might hold a shaving down
for you?"

"And then and then " continued Irene, lifting her eyes

absently, and losing herself in the beatific recollection, "and

then Oh yes! Then I asked him if he didn't like the smell

of pine shavings. And then he picked it up, and said it smelt
like a flower. And then he asked if he might offer it to me
just for a joke, you know. And I took it, and stuck it in my
belt. And we had such a laugh! We got into a regular gale.
And O Pen, what do you suppose he meant by it?" She sud-
denly caught herself to her sister's breast, and hid her burning
face on her shoulder.

"Well, there used to be a book about the language of flowers.
But I never knew much about the language of shavings, and
I can't say exactly "

"Oh, don't don't, Pen!" and here Irene gave over laughing,
and began to sob in her sister's arms.

"Why, 'Rene!" cried the elder girl.

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"You J(now he didn't mean anything. He doesn't care a bit
about me. He hates me! He despises me! Oh, what shall I do?"

A trouble passed over the face of the sister as she silently com-
forted the child in her arms; then the drolling light came back
into her eyes. "Well, 'Rene, you haven't got to do anything.
That's one advantage girls have got if it is an advantage. I'm
not always sure."

Irene's tears turned to laughing again. When she lifted her
head it was to look into the mirror confronting them, where
her beauty showed all the more brilliant for the shower that
had passed over it. She seemed to gather courage from the
sight.

"It must be awful to have to do/' she said, smiling into her
own face. "I don't see how they ever can."

"Some of 'em can't especially when there's such a tearing
beauty around."

"Oh, pshaw, Pen! you know that isn't so. You've got a real
pretty mouth, Pen," she added thoughtfully, surveying the
feature in the glass, and then pouting her own lips for the sake
of that effect on them.

"It's a useful mouth," Penelope admitted; "I don't believe I
could get along without it now, I've had it so long."

"It's got such a funny expression just the mate of the look
in your eyes; as if you were just going to say something ridicu-
lous. He said, the very first time he saw you, that he knew you
were humorous."

"Is it possible? It must be so, if the Grand Mogul said it.
Why didn't you tell me so before, and not let me keep on go-
ing round just like a common person?"

Irene laughed as if she liked to have her sister take his praises
in that way rather than another. "I've got such a stiff, prim
kind of mouth," she said, drawing it down, and then looking
anxiously at it.

"I hope you didn't put on that expression when he offered

THE RISE OF

you the shaving. If you did, I don't believe he'll ever give you
another splinter."

The severe mouth broke into a lovely laugh, and then pressed
itself in a kiss against Penelope's cheek.

"There! Be done, you silly thing! I'm not going to have you
accepting me before I've offered myself, anyway'' She freed
herself from her sister's embrace, and ran from her round the
room.

Irene pursued her, in the need of hiding her face against her
shoulder again. "O Pen! O Pen!" she cried.

The next day, at the first moment of finding herself alone
with her eldest daughter, Mrs. Lapham asked, as if knowing
that Penelope must have already made it subject of inquiry:
"what was Irene doing with that shaving in her belt yester-
day?"

"Oh, just some nonsense of hers with Mr. Corey. He gave it
to her at the new house." Penelope did not choose to look up
and meet her mother's grave glance.

"What do you think he meant by it ?"

Penelope repeated Irene's account of the affair, and her
mother listened without seeming to derive much encourage-
ment from it.

"He doesn't seem like one to flirt with her," she said at last.
Then, after a thoughtful pause : "Irene is as good a girl as ever
breathed, and she's a perfect beauty. But I should hate the day
when a daughter of mine was married for her beauty."

"You're safe as far as I'm concerned, mother."

Mrs. Lapham smiled ruefully. "She isn't really equal to him,
Pen. I misdoubted that from the first, and it's been borne in
upon me more and more ever since. She hasn't mind enough."

"I didn't know that a man fell in love with a girl's intellect,'*
said Penelope quietly.

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SILAS LAPHAM

"Oh no. He hasn't fallen in love with Irene at all. If he had,
it wouldn't matter about the intellect."

Penelope let the self-contradiction pass.

"Perhaps he has, after all."

"No," said Mrs. Lapham. "She pleases him when he sees
her. But he doesn't try to see her."

"He has no chance. You won't let father bring him here."

"He would find excuses to come without being brought, if
he wished to come," said the mother. "But she isn't in his mind
enough to make him. He goes away and doesn't think any-
thing more about her. She's a child. She's a good child, and I
shall always say it; but she's nothing but a child. No, she's got
to forget him."

"Perhaps that won't be so easy."

"No, I presume not. And now your father has got the notion
in his head, and he will move heaven and earth to bring it to
pass. I can see that he's always thinking about it."

"The Colonel has a will of his own," observed the girl, rock-
ing to and fro where she sat looking at her mother.

"I wish we had never met them!" cried Mrs. Lapham. "I
wish we had never thought of building! I wish he had kept
away from your father's business!"

"Well, it's too late now, mother," said the girl. "Perhaps it
isn't so bad as you think."

"Well, we must stand it, anyway," said Mrs. Lapham, with
the grim antique Yankee submission.

"Oh yes, we've got to stand it," said Penelope, with the
quaint modern American fatalism.

133

I

T WAS late June, almost July, when Corey took up his life in
Boston again, where the summer slips away so easily. If you
go out of town early, it seems a very long summer when you
come back in October; but if you stay, it passes swiftly, and,
seen foreshortened in its flight, seems scarcely a month's length.
It has its days of heat, when it is very hot, but for the most
part it is cool, with baths of the east wind that seem to saturate
the soul with delicious freshness. Then there are stretches of
grey, westerly weather, when the air is full of the sentiment of
early autumn, and the frying of the grasshopper in the blos-
somed weed of the vacant lots on the Back Bay is intershot
with the carol of crickets; and the yellowing leaf on the long
slope of Mt. Vernon Street smites the sauntering observer with
tender melancholy. The caterpillar, gorged with the spoil of the
lindens on Chestnut, and weaving his own shroud about him
in his lodgment on the brick-work, records the passing of sum-
mer by mid-July; and if after that comes August, its breath is
thick and short, and September is upon the sojourner before
he has fairly had time to philosophise the character of the
town out of season.

But it must have appeared that its most characteristic feature
was the absence of everybody he knew. This was one of the
things that commended Boston to Bromfield Corey during
the summer; and if his son had any qualms about the life he
had entered upon with such vigour, it must have been a relief
to him that there was scarcely a soul left to wonder or pity. By
the time people got back to town the fact of his connection
with the mineral paint man would be an old story, heard afar

134

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

off with different degrees of surprise, and considered with dif-
ferent degrees of indifference. A man has not reached the age
of twenty-six in any community where he was born and
reared without having had his capacity pretty well ascertained;
and in Boston the analysis is conducted with an unsparing thor-
oughness which may fitly impress the un-Bostonian mind,
darkened by the popular superstition that the Bostonians
blindly admire one another. A man's qualities are sifted as
closely in Boston as they doubtless were in Florence or Athens;
and, if final mercy was shown in those cities because a man
was, with all his limitations, an Athenian or Florentine, some
abatement might as justly be made in Boston for like reason.
Corey's powers had been gauged in college, and he had not
given his world reason to think very differently of him since
he came out of college. He was rated as an energetic fellow, a
little indefinite in aim, with the smallest amount of inspiration
that can save a man from being commonplace. If he was not
commonplace, it was through nothing remarkable in his mind,
which was simply clear and practical, but through some com-
bination of qualities of the heart that made men trust him, and
women call him sweet a word of theirs which conveys other-
wise indefinable excellences. Some of the more nervous and
excitable said that Tom Corey was as sweet as he could live;
but this perhaps meant no more than the word alone. No man
ever had a son less like him than Bromfield Corey. If Tom
Corey had ever said a witty thing, no one could remember it;
and yet the father had never said a witty thing to a more sym-
pathetic listener than his own son. The clear mind which pro-
duced nothing but practical results reflected everything with
charming lucidity; and it must have been this which en-
deared Tom Corey to every one who spoke ten words with
him. In a city where people have good reason for liking to
shine, a man who did not care to shine must be little short of
universally acceptable without any other effort for popularity;

135

THE RISE OF

and those who admired and enjoyed Bromfield Corey loved
his son. Yet, when it came to accounting for Tom Corey, as it
often did in a community where every one's generation is
known to the remotest degrees of cousinship, they could not
trace his sweetness to his mother, for neither Anna Bellingham
nor any of her family, though they were so many blocks of
Wenham ice for purity and rectangularity, had ever had any
such savour; and, in fact, it was to his father, whose habit of
talk wronged it in himself, that they had to turn for this quality
of the son's. They traced to the mother the traits of practical-
ity and common-sense in which he bordered upon the com-
monplace, and which, when they had dwelt upon them, made
him seem hardly worth the close inquiry they had given him.

While the summer wore away he came and went methodi-
cally about his business, as if it had been the business of his
life, sharing his father's bachelor liberty and solitude, and ex-
pecting with equal patience the return of his mother and sis-
ters in the autumn. Once or twice he found time to run down
to Mt. Desert and see them; and then he heard how the Phila-
delphia and New York people were getting in everywhere,
and was given reason to regret the house at Nahant which he
had urged to be sold. He came back and applied himself to his
desk with a devotion that was exemplary rather than neces-
sary; for Lapham made no difficulty about the brief absences
which he asked, and set no term to the apprenticeship that
Corey was serving in the office before setting off upon that
mission to South America in the early winter, for which no
date had yet been fixed.

The summer was a dull season for the paint as well as for
everything else. Till things should brisk up, as Lapham said,
in the fall, he was letting the new house take a great deal of his
time. ^Esthetic ideas had never been intelligibly presented to
him before, and he found a delight in apprehending them that
was very grateful to his imaginative architect. At the begin-

SILAS LAPHAM

ning, the architect had foreboded a series of mortifying defeats
and disastrous victories in his encounters with his client; but
he had never had a client who could be more reasonably led on
from one outlay to another. It appeared that Lapham required
but to understand or feel the beautiful effect intended, and he
was ready to pay for it. His bull-headed pride was concerned
in a thing which the architect made him see, and then he be-
lieved that he had seen it himself, perhaps conceived it. In some
measure the architect seemed to share his delusion, and freely
said that Lapham was very suggestive. Together they blocked
out windows here, and bricked them up there; they changed
doors and passages; pulled down cornices and replaced them
with others of different design; experimented with costly de-
vices of decoration, and went to extravagant lengths in novel-
ties of finish. Mrs. Lapham, beginning with a woman's adven-
turousness in the unknown region, took fright at the reckless
outlay at last, and refused to let her husband pass a certain
limit. He tried to make her believe that a far-seeing economy
dictated the expense; and that if he put the money into the
house, he could get it out any time by selling it. She would not
be persuaded.

"I don't want you should sell it. And you've put more money
into it now than you'll ever get out again, unless you can find
as big a goose to buy it, and that isn't likely. No, sir! You just
stop at a hundred thousand, and don't you let him get you a
cent beyond. Why, you're perfectly bewitched with that fellow!
You've lost your head, Silas Lapham, and if you don't look
out you'll lose your money too."

The Colonel laughed; he liked her to talk that way, and
promised he would hold up a while.

"But there's no call to feel anxious, Pert. It's only a question
what to do with the money. I can reinvest it; but I never had
so much of it to spend before."

"Spend it, then," said his wife; "don't throw it away! And

137

THE RISE OF

how came you to have so much more money than you know
what to do with, Silas Lapham ?" she added.
"Oh, I've made a very good thing in stocks lately."
"In stocks? When did you take up gambling for a living?"
"Gambling? Stuff! What gambling? Who said it was gam-
bling?"

"You have; many a time."

"Oh yes, buying and selling on a margin. But this was a
bona fide transaction. I bought at forty-three for an investment,
and I sold at a hundred and seven; and the money passed both

times."

"Well, you better let stocks alone," said his wife, with the
conservatism of her sex. "Next time you'll buy at a hundred
and seven and sell at forty-three. Then where '11 you be?"

"Left," admitted the Colonel.

"You better stick to paint a while yet."

The Colonel enjoyed this too, and laughed again with the
ease of a man who knows what he is about. A few days after
that he came down to Nantasket with the radiant air which
he wore when he had done a good thing in business and
wanted his wife's sympathy. He did not say anything of what
had happened till he was alone with her in their own room;
but he was very gay the whole evening, and made several jokes
which Penelope said nothing but very great prosperity could
excuse : they all understood these moods of his.

"Well, what is it, Silas?" asked his wife when the time came.
"Any more big-bugs wanting to go into the mineral paint
business with you?"

"Something better than that."

"I could think of a good many better things," said his wife,
with a sigh of latent bitterness. "What's this one?"

"I've had a visitor."

"Who?"

"Can't you guess?"

138

SILAS LAPHAM

"I don't want to try. Who was it?"

"Rogers."

Mrs. Lapham sat down with her hands in her lap, and stared
at the smile on her husband's face, where he sat facing her.

"I guess you wouldn't want to joke on that subject, Si," she
said, a little hoarsely, "and you wouldn't grin about it unless
you had some good news. I don't know what the miracle is,
but if you could tell quick "

She stopped like one who can say no more.

"I will, Persis," said her husband, and with that awed tone
in which he rarely spoke of anything but the virtues of his
paint. "He came to borrow money of me, and I lent him it.
That's the short of it. The long "

"Go on," said his wife, with gentle patience.

"Well, Pert, I was never so much astonished in my life as I
was to see that man come into my office. You might have
knocked me down with I don't know what."

"I don't wonder. Go on!"

"And he was as much embarrassed as I was. There we stood,
gaping at each other, and I hadn't hardly sense enough to ask
him to take a chair. I don't know just how we got at it. And I
don't remember just how it was that he said he came to come
to me. But he had got hold of a patent right that he wanted to
go into on a large scale, and there he was wanting me to sup-
ply him the funds."

"Go on!" said Mrs. Lapham, with her voice further in her
throat.

"I never felt the way you did about Rogers, but I know how
you always did feel, and I guess I surprised him with my an-
swer. He had brought along a lot of stock as security "

"You didn't take it, Silas!" his wife flashed out.

"Yes, I did, though," said Lapham. "You wait. We settled
our business, and then we went into the old thing, from the
very start. And we talked it all over. And when we got through

139

THE RISE OF

we shook hands. Well, I don't know when it's done me so
much good to shake hands with anybody."

"And you told him you owned up to him that you were in
the wrong, Silas?"

"No, I didn't," returned the Colonel promptly; "for I wasn't.
And before we got through, I guess he saw it the same as I
did."

"Oh, no matter! so you had the chance to show how you
felt."

"But I never felt that way," persisted the Colonel. "I've lent
him the money, and I've kept his stocks. And he got what he
wanted out of me."

"Give him back his stocks!"

"No, I shan't. Rogers came to borrow. He didn't come to
beg. You needn't be troubled about his stocks. They're going
<>o come up in time; but just now they're so low down that
no bank would take them as security, and I've got to hold them
till they do rise. I hope you're satisfied now, Persis," said her
husband; and he looked at her with the willingness to receive
the reward of a good action which we all feel when we have
performed one. "I lent him the money you kept me from
spending on the house."

"Truly, Si? Well, I'm satisfied," said Mrs. Lapham, with
a deep tremulous breath. "The Lord has been good to you,
Silas," she continued solemnly. "You may laugh if you choose,
and I don't know as 7 believe in his interfering a great deal;
but I believe he's interfered this time; and I tell you, Silas, it
ain't always he gives people a chance to make it up to others in
this life. I've been afraid you'd die, Silas, before you got the
chance; but he's let you live to make it up to Rogers."

"I'm glad to be let live," said Lapham stubbornly, "but I
hadn't anything to make up to Milton K. Rogers. And if God
has let me live for that "

i; Oh, say what you please, Si! Say what you please, now

140

SILAS LAPHAM

you've done it! I shan't stop you. You've taken the one spot
the one spccf^ off you that was ever there, and I'm satisfied."

"There wan't ever any speck there," Lapham held out, laps-
ing more and more into his vernacular; "and what I done I
done for you, Persis."

"And I thank you for your own soul's sake, Silas."

"I guess my soul's all right," said Lapham.

"And I want you should promise me one thing more."

"Thought you said you were satisfied?"

"I am. But I want you should promise me this: that you
won't let anything tempt you anything! to ever trouble
Rogers for that money you lent him. No matter what happens
no matter if you lose it all. Do you promise?"

"Why, I don't ever expect to press him for it. That's what I
said to myself when I lent it. And of course I'm glad to have
that old trouble healed up. I don't thin\ I ever did Rogers
any wrong, and I never did think so; but if I did do it if
I did I'm willing to call it square, if I never see a cent of my
money back again."

"Well, that's all," said his wife.

They did not celebrate his reconciliation with his old enemy
for such they had always felt him to be since he ceased to be
an ally by any show of joy or affection. It was not in their
tradition, as stoical for the woman as for the man, that they
should kiss or embrace each ether at such a moment. She was
content to have told him that he had done his duty, and he was
content with her saying that. But before she slept she found
words to add that she always feared the selfish part he had
acted toward Rogers had weakened him, and left him less able
to overcome any temptation that might beset him; and that
was one reason why she could never be easy about it. Now she
should never fear for him again.

This time he did not explicitly deny her forgiving impeach-
ment.

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THE RISE OF

''Well, it's all past and gone now, anyway; and I don't want
you should think anything more about it."

He was man enough to take advantage of the high favour
in which he stood when he went up to town, and to abuse it by
bringing Corey down to supper. His wife could not help con-
doning the sin of disobedience in him at such a time. Penelope
said that between the admiration she felt for the Colonel's bold-
ness and her mother's forbearance, she was hardly in a state to
entertain company that evening; but she did what she could.

Irene liked being talked to better than talking, and when
her sister was by she was always, tacitly or explicitly, referring
to her for confirmation of what she said. She was content to
sit and look pretty as she looked at the young man and listened
to her sister's drolling. She laughed and kept glancing at Corey
to make sure that he was understanding her. When they went
out on the veranda to see the moon on the water, Penelope
led the way and Irene followed.

They did not look at the moonlight long. The young man
perched on the rail of the veranda, and Irene took one of the
red-painted rocking-chairs where she could conveniently look
at him and at her sister, who sat leaning forward lazily and
running on, as the phrase is. That low, crooning note of hers
was delicious; her face, glimpsed now and then in the moon-
light as she turned it or lifted it a little, had a fascination which
kept his eye. Her talk was very unliterary, and its effect seemed
hardly conscious. She was far from epigram in her funning.
She told of this trifle and that; she sketched the characters
and looks of people who had interested her, and nothing
seemed to have escaped her notice; she mimicked a little, but
not much; she suggested, and then the affair represented itself
as if without her agency. She did not laugh; when Corey
stopped she made a soft cluck in her throat, as if she liked his
being amused, and went on again.

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SILAS LAPHAM

The Colonel, left alone with his wife for the first time since
he had come from town, made haste to take the word. "Well,
Pert, I've arranged the whole thing with Rogers, and I hope
you'll be satisfied to know that he owes me twenty thousand
dollars, and that I've got security from him to the amount of
a fourth of that, if I was to force his stocks to a sale."

"How came he to come down with you?" asked Mrs. Lap-
ham.

"Who? Rogers?"

"Mr. Corey."

"Corey? Oh!" said Lapham, affecting not to have thought
she could mean Corey. "He proposed it."

"Likely!" jeered his wife, but with perfect amiability.

"It's so," protested the Colonel. "We got talking about a mat-
ter just before I left, and he walked down to the boat with me;
and then he said if I didn't mind he guessed he'd come along
down and go back on the return boat. Of course I couldn't let
him do that."

"It's well for you you couldn't."

"And I couldn't do less than bring him here to tea."

"Oh, certainly not."

"But he ain't going to stay the night unless," faltered Lap-
ham, "you want him to."

"Oh, of course, 7 want him to! I guess he'll stay, probably."

"Well, you know how crowded that last boat always is, and
he can't get any other now."

Mrs. Lapham laughed at the simple wile. "I hope you'll be
just as well satisfied, Si, if it turns out he doesn't want Irene
after all."

"Pshaw, Persist What are you always bringing that up for?"
pleaded the Colonel. Then he fell silent, and presently his rude,
strong face was clouded with an unconscious frown.

"There!" cried his wife, startling him from his abstraction,

143

THE RISE OF

"I see how you'd feel; and I hope that you'll remember who
you've got to blame."

"I'll risk it," said Lapham, with the confidence of a man used
to success.

From the veranda the sound of Penelope's lazy tone came
through the closed windows, with joyous laughter from Irene
and peals from Corey.

"Listen to that!" said her father within, swelling up with
inexpressible satisfaction. "That girl can talk for twenty, right
straight along. She's better than a circus any day. I wonder
what she's up to now."

"Oh, she's probably getting off some of those yarns of hers,
or telling about some people. She can't step out of the house
without coming back with more things to talk about than most
folks would bring back from Japan. There ain't a ridiculous
person she's ever seen but what she's got something from them
to make you laugh at; and I don't believe we've ever had any-
body in the house since the girl could talk that she hain't got
some saying from, or some trick that'll paint 'em out so 't you
can see 'em and hear 'em. Sometimes I want to stop her; but
when she gets into one of her gales there ain't any standing
up against her. I guess it's lucky for Irene that she's got Pen
there to help entertain her company. I can't ever feel down
where Pen is."

"That's so," said the Colonel. "And I guess she's got about as
much culture as any of them. Don't you?"

"She reads a great deal," admitted her mother. "She seems to
be at it the whole while. I don't want she should injure her
health, and sometimes I feel like snatchin' the books away
from her. I don't know as it's good for a girl to read so much,
anyway, especially novels. I don't want she should get no-
tions."

"Oh, I guess Pen '11 know how to take care of herself," said
Lapham.

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SILAS LAPHAM

"She's got sense enough. But she ain't so practical as Irene.
She's more up in the clouds more of what you may call a
dreamer. Irene's wide-awake every minute; and I declare, any
one to see these two together when there's anything to be
done, or any lead to be taken, would say Irene was the oldest,
nine times out of ten. It's only when they get to talking that
you can see Pen's got twice as much brains."

"Well," said Lapham, tacitly granting this point, and leaning
back in his chair in supreme content. "Did you ever see much
nicer girls anywhere?"

His wife laughed at his pride. "I presume they're as much
swans as anybody's geese."

"No; but honestly, now!"

"Oh, they'll do; but don't you be silly, if you can help it, Si."

The young people came in, and Corey said it was time for his
boat. Mrs. Lapham pressed him to stay, but he persisted, and
he would not let the Colonel send him to the boat; he said he
would rather walk. Outside, he pushed along toward the boat,
which presently he could see lying at her landing in the bay,
across the sandy tract to the left of the hotels. From time to
time he almost stopped in his rapid walk, as a man does whose
mind is in a pleasant tumult; and then he went forward at a
swifter pace.

"She's charming!" he said, and he thought he had spoken
aloud. He found himself floundering about in the deep sand,
wide of the path; he got back to it, and reached the boat just
before she started. The clerk came to take his fare, and Corey
looked radiantly up at him in his lantern-light, with a smile
that he must have been wearing a long time; his cheek was
stiff with it. Once some people who stood near him edged sud-
denly and fearfully away, and then he suspected himself of
having laughed outright.

XI

c

OREY put off his set smile with the help of a frown, of
which he first became aware after reaching home, when his
father asked

"Anything gone wrong with your department of the fine
arts to-day, Tom?"

"Oh no no, sir," said the son, instantly relieving his brows
from the strain upon them, and beaming again. "But I was
thinking whether you were not perhaps right in your impres-
sion that it might be well for you to make Colonel Lapham's
acquaintance before a great while."

"Has he been suggesting it in any way?" asked Bromfield
Corey, laying aside his book and taking his lean knee be-
tween his clasped hands.

"Oh, not at all!" the young man hastened to reply. "I was
merely thinking whether it might not begin to seem inten-
tional, your not doing it."

"Well, Tom, you know I have been leaving it altogether to
you "

"Oh, I understand, of course, and I didn't mean to urge any-
thing of the kind "

"You are so very much more of a Bostonian than I am, you
know, that I've been waiting your motion in entire confidence
that you would know just what to do, and when to do it. If
I had been left quite to my own lawless impulses, I think I
should have called upon your padrone at once. It seems to me
that my father would have found some way of showing that he
expected as much as that from people placed in the relation to
him that we hold to Colonel Lapham."

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THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

"Do you think so?" asked the young man.

"Yes. But you know I don't pretend to be an authority in
such matters. As far as they go, I am always in the hands of
your mother and you children."

"I'm very sorry, sir. I had no idea I was over-ruling your
judgment. I only wanted to spare you a formality that didn't
seem quite a necessity yet. I'm very sorry," he said again, and
this time with more comprehensive regret. "I shouldn't like to
have seemed remiss with a man who has been so considerate
of me. They are all very good-natured."

"I dare say," said Bromfield Corey, with the satisfaction
which no elder can help feeling in disabling the judgment of a
younger man, "that it won't be too late if I go down to your
office with you to-morrow."

"No, no. I didn't imagine your doing it at once, sir."

"Ah, but nothing can prevent me from doing a thing when
once I take the bit in my teeth," said the father, with the pleas-
ure which men of weak will sometimes take in recognising
their weakness. "How does their new house get on?"

"I believe they expect to be in it before New Year."

"Will they be a great addition to society?" asked Bromfield
Corey, with unimpeachable seriousness.

"I don't quite know what you mean," returned the son, a
little uneasily.

"Ah, I see that you do, Tom."

"No one can help feeling that they are all people of good
sense and right ideas."

"Oh, that won't do. If society took in all the people of right
ideas and good sense, it would expand beyond the calling
capacity of its most active members. Even your mother's social
conscientiousness could not compass it. Society is a very dif-
ferent sort of thing from good sense and right ideas. It is base
upon them, of course, but the airy, graceful, winning super-
structure which we all know demands different qualities. Have

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your friends got these qualities, which may be felt, but not
defined?"

The son laughed. "To tell you the truth, sir, I don't think
they have the most elemental ideas of society, as we under-
stand it. I don't believe Mrs. Lapham ever gave a dinner."

"And with all that money!" sighed the father.

"I don't believe they have the habit of wine at table. I sus-
pect that when they don't drink tea and coffee with their
dinner, they drink ice-water."

"Horrible!" said Bromfield Corey.

"It appears to me that this defines them."

"Oh yes. There are people who give dinners, and who are
not cognoscible. But people who have never yet given a dinner,
how is society to assimilate them?"

"It digests a great many people," suggested the young man.

"Yes; but they have always brought some sort of sauce pi-
quante with them. Now, as I understand you, these friends of
yours have no such sauce."

"Oh, I don't know about that!" cried the son.

"Oh, rude, native flavours, I dare say. But that isn't what I
mean. Well, then, they must spend. There is no other way for
them to win their way to general regard. We must have the
Colonel elected to the Ten O'clock Club, and he must put
himself down in the list of those willing to entertain. Any
one can manage a large supper. Yes, I see a gleam of hope for
him in that direction."

In the morning Bromfield Corey asked his son whether he
should find Lapham at his place as early as eleven.

"I think you might find him even earlier. I've never been
there before him. I doubt if the porter is there much sooner."

"Well, suppose I go with you, then?"

"Why, if you like, sir," said the son, with some deprecation.

"Oh, the question is, will he like ?"

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SILAS LAPHAM

"I think he will, sir"; and the father could see that his son
was very much pleased.

Lapham was rending an impatient course through the morn-
ing's news when they appeared at the door of his inner room.
He looked up from the newspaper spread on the desk before
him, and then he stood up, making an indifferent feint of not
knowing that he knew Bromfield Corey by sight.

"Good morning, Colonel Lapham," said the son, and Lap-
ham waited for him to say further, "I wish to introduce my
father."

Then he answered, "Good morning," and added rather
sternly for the elder Corey, "How do you do, sir ? Will you take
a chair?" and he pushed him one.

They shook hands and sat down, and Lapham said to his
subordinate, "Have a seat"; but young Corey remained stand-
ing, watching them in their observance of each other with an
amusement which was a little uneasy. Lapham made his visitor
speak first by waiting for him to do so.

"I'm glad to make your acquaintance, Colonel Lapham, and
I ought to have come sooner to do so. My father in your place
would have expected it of a man in my place at once, I believe.
But I can't feel myself altogether a stranger as it is. I hope Mrs.
Lapham is well? And your daughter?"

"Thank you," said Lapham, "they're quite well."

"They were very kind to my wife "

"Oh, that was nothing!" cried Lapham. "There's nothing
Mrs. Lapham likes better than a chance of that sort. Mrs. Corey
and the young ladies well?"

"Very well, when I heard from them. They're out of town."

"Yes, so I understood," said Lapham, with a nod toward the
son. "I believe Mr. Corey, here, told Mrs. Lapham." He leaned
back in his chair, stiffly resolute to show that he was not
incommoded by the exchange of these civilities.

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"Yes," said Bromfield Corey. "Tom has had the pleasure
which I hope for of seeing you all. I hope you're able to make
him useful to you here?" Corey looked round Lapham's room
vaguely, and then out at the clerks in their railed enclosure,
where his eye finally rested on an extremely pretty girl, who
was operating a type-writer.

"Well, sir," replied Lapham, softening for the first time with
this approach to business, "I guess it will be our own fault if we
don't. By the way, Corey," he added, to the younger man, as he
gathered up some letters from his desk, "here's something in
your line. Spanish or French, I guess."

"I'll run them over," said Corey, taking them to his desk.

His father made an offer to rise.

"Don't go," said Lapham, gesturing him down again. "I
just wanted to get him away a minute. I don't care to say it to
his face, I don't like the principle, but since you ask me
about it, FH just as lief say that Fve never had any young man
take hold here equal to your son. I don't know as you care "

"You make me very happy," said Bromfield Corey. "Very
happy indeed. Fve always had the idea that there was some-
thing in my son, if he could only find the way to work it out.
And he seems to have gone into your business for the love
of it."

"He went to work in the right way, sir! He told me about
it. He looked into it. And that paint is a thing that will bear
looking into."

"Oh yes. You might think he had invented it, if you heard
him celebrating it."

"Is that so?" demanded Lapham, pleased through and
through. "Well, there ain't any other way. You've got to believe
in a thing before you can put any heart in it. Why, I had a part-
ner in this thing once, along back just after the war, and he
used to be always wanting to tinker with something else.
'Why,' says I, 'you've got the best thing in God's universe now.

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Why ain't you satisfied?' I had to get rid of him at last. I stuck
to my paint, and that fellow's drifted round pretty much all
over the whole country, whittling his capital down all the
while, till here the other day I had to lend him some money to
start him new. No, sir, you've got to believe in a thing. And
I believe in your son. And I don't mind telling you that, so far
as he's gone, he's a success."

"That's very kind of you."

"No kindness about it. As I was saying the other day to a
friend of mine, I've had many a fellow right out of the street
that had to work hard all his life, and didn't begin to take hold
like this son of yours."

Lapham expanded with profound self-satisfaction. As he
probably conceived it, he had succeeded in praising, in a per-
fectly casual way, the supreme excellence of his paint, and his
own sagacity and benevolence; and here he was sitting face to
face with Bromfield Corey, praising his son to him, and re-
ceiving his grateful acknowledgments as if he were the father
of some office-boy whom Lapham had given a place half out of
charity.

"Yes, sir, when your son proposed to take hold here, I didn't
have much faith in his ideas, that's the truth. But I had faith in
him, and I saw that he meant business from the start. I could
see it was born in him. Any one could."

"I'm afraid he didn't inherit it directly from me," said Brom-
field Corey; "but it's in the blood, on both sides."

"Well, sir, we can't help those things," said Lapham compas-
sionately. "Some of us have got it, and some of us haven't.
The idea is to make the most of what we have got."

"Oh yes; that is the idea. By all means."

"And you can't ever tell what's in you till you try. Why,
when I started this thing, I didn't more than half understand
my own strength. I wouldn't have said, looking back, that I
could have stood the wear and tear of what I've been through.

THE RISE OF

But I developed as I went along. It's just like exercising your
muscles in a gymnasium. You can lift twice or three times as
much after you've been in training a month as you could be-
fore. And I can see that it's going to be just so with your son.
His going through college won't hurt him, he'll soon slough
all that off, and his bringing up won't; don't be anxious about
it. I noticed in the army that some of the fellows that had
the most go-ahead were fellows that hadn't ever had much
more to do than girls before the war broke out. Your son will
get along."

"Thank you," said Bromfield Corey, and smiled whether
because his spirit was safe in the humility he sometimes
boasted, or because it was triply armed in pride against any-
thing the Colonel's kindness could do.

"He'll get along. He's a good business man, and he's a fine
fellow. Must you go?" asked Lapham, as Bromfield Corey
now rose more resolutely. "Well, glad to see you. It was natural
you should want to come and see what he was about, and I'm
glad you did. I should have felt just so about it. Here is some
of our stuff," he said, pointing out the various packages in his
office, including the Persis Brand.

"Ah, that's very nice, very nice indeed," said his visitor.
"That colour through the jar very rich delicious. Is Persis
Brand a name?"

Lapham blushed.

"Well, Persis is. I don't know as you saw an interview that
fellow published in the Events a while back?"

"What is the Events?"

"Well, it's that new paper Witherby's started."

"No," said Bromfield Corey, "I haven't seen it. I read The
Daily," he explained; by which he meant The Daily Advertiser,
the only daily there is in the old-fashioned Bostonian sense.

"He put a lot of stuff in my mouth that I never said," re-
sumed Lapham; "but that's neither here nor there, so long as

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you haven't seen it. Here's the department your son's in," and
he showed him the foreign labels. Then he took him out into
the warehouse to see the large packages. At the head of the
stairs, where his guest stopped to nod to his son and say
"Good-bye, Tom," Lapham insisted upon going down to the
lower door with him. "Well, call again," he said in hospitable
dismissal. "I shall always be glad to see you. There ain't a great
deal doing at this season." Bromfield Corey thanked him, and
let his hand remain perforce in Lapham's lingering grasp. "If
you ever like to ride after a good horse " the Colonel be-
gan.

"Oh, no, no, no; thank you! The better the horse, the more
I should be scared. Tom has told me of your driving!"

"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed the Colonel. "Well! every one to his
taste. Well, good morning, sir!" and he suffered him to go.

"Who is the old man blowing to this morning?" asked
Walker, the book-keeper, making an errand to Corey's desk.

"My father."

"Oh! That your father? I thought he must be one of your
Italian correspondents that you'd been showing round, or
Spanish."

In fact, as Bromfield Corey found his way at his leisurely
pace up through the streets on which the prosperity of his
native city was founded, hardly any figure could have looked
more alien to its life. He glanced up and down the facades and
through the crooked vistas like a stranger, and the swarthy
fruiterer of whom he bought an apple, apparently for the
pleasure of holding it in his hand, was not surprised that the
purchase should be transacted in his own tongue.

Lapham walked back through the outer office to his own
room without looking at Corey, and during the day he spoke
to him only of business matters. That must have been his way
of letting Corey see that he was not overcome by the honour of
his father's visit. But he presented himself at Nantasket with

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the events so perceptibly on his mind that his wife asked:
"Well, Silas, has Rogers been borrowing any more money of
you? I don't want you should let that thing go too far. You've
done enough."

"You needn't be afraid. I've seen the last of Rogers for one
while." He hesitated, to give the fact an effect of no impor-
tance. "Corey's father called this morning."

"Did he?" said Mrs. Lapham, willing to humour his feint of
indifference. "Did he want to borrow some money too?"

"Not as I understood." Lapham was smoking at great ease,
and his wife had some crocheting on the other side of the
lamp from him.

The girls were on the piazza looking at the moon on the
water again. "There's no man in it to-night," Penelope said,
and Irene laughed forlornly.

"What did he want, then?" asked Mrs. Lapham.

"Oh, I don't know. Seemed to be just a friendly call. Said he
ought to have come before."

Mrs. Lapham was silent a while. Then she said: "Well, I
hope you're satisfied now."

Lapham rejected the sympathy too openly offered. "I don't
know about being satisfied. I wan't in any hurry to see him."

His wife permitted him this pretence also. "What sort of a
person is he, anyway?"

"Well, not much like his son. There's no sort of business
about him. I don't know just how you'd describe him. He's
tall; and he's got white hair and a moustache; and his fingers
are very long and limber. I couldn't help noticing them as he
sat there with his hands on the top of his cane. Didn't seem to
be dressed very much, and acted just like anybody. Didn't talk
much. Guess I did most of the talking. Said he was glad I
seemed to be getting along so well with his son. He asked
after you and Irene; and he said he couldn't feel just like a
stranger. Said you had been very kind to his wife. Of course

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SILAS LAPHAM

I turned it off. Yes," said Lapham thoughtfully, with his hands
resting on his knees, and his cigar between the fingers of his
left hand, "I guess he meant to do the right thing, every way.
Don't know as I ever saw a much pleasanter man. Dunno but
what he's about the pleasantest man I ever did see." He was not
letting his wife see in his averted face the struggle that revealed
itself there the struggle of stalwart achievement not to feel
flattered at the notice of sterile elegance, not to be sneakingly
glad of its amiability, but to stand up and look at it with eyes
on the same level. God, who made us so much like himself, but
out of the dust, alone knows when that struggle will end. The
time had been when Lapham could not have imagined any
worldly splendour which his dollars could not buy if he chose
to spend them for it; but his wife's half discoveries, taking
form again in his ignorance of the world, filled him with help-
less misgiving. A cloudy vision of something unpurchasable,
where he had supposed there was nothing, had cowed him in
spite of the burly resistance of his pride.

"I don't see why he shouldn't be pleasant," said Mrs. Lap-
ham. "He's never done anything else."

Lapham looked up consciously, with an uneasy laugh.
"Pshaw, Persis! you never forget anything?"

"Oh, I've got more than that to remember. I suppose you
asked him to ride after the mare?"

"Well," said Lapham, reddening guiltily, "he said he was
afraid of a good horse."

"Then, of course, you hadn't asked him." Mrs. Lapham
crocheted in silence, and her husband leaned back in his chair
and smoked.

At last he said, "I'm going to push that house forward.
They're loafing on it. There's no reason why we shouldn't be
in it by Thanksgiving. I don't believe in moving in the dead of
winter."

"We can wait till spring. We're very comfortable in the old

THE RISE OF

place," answered his wife. Then she broke out on him : "What
are you in such a hurry to get into that house for? Do you
want to invite the Corey s to a house-warming?"

Lapham looked at her without speaking.

"Don't you suppose I can see through you ? I declare, Silas
Lapham, if I didn't know different, I should say you were about
the biggest fool! Don't you know any thing? Don't you know
that it wouldn't do to ask those people to our house before
they've asked us to theirs? They'd laugh in our faces!"

"I don't believe they'd laugh in our faces. What's the differ-
ence between our asking them and their asking us?" de-
manded the Colonel sulkily.

"Oh, well! If you don't see!"

"Well, I don't see. But I don't want to ask them to the house.
I suppose, if I want to, I can invite him down to a fish dinner
at Taft's."

Mrs. Lapham fell back in her chair, and let her work drop
in her lap with that "Tckk!" in which her sex knows how to
express utter contempt and despair.

"What's the matter?"

"Well, if you do such a thing, Silas, I'll never speak to you
again! It's no use! It's no use! I did think, after you'd behaved
so well about Rogers, I might trust you a little. But I see I can't.
I presume as long as you live you'll have to be nosed about like
a perfect 7 don't know what!"

"What are you making such a fuss about?" demanded Lap-
ham, terribly crest-fallen, but trying to pluck up a spirit. "I
haven't done anything yet. I can't ask your advice about any-
thing any more without having you fly out. Confound it! I
shall do as I please after this."

But as if he could not endure that contemptuous atmosphere,
he got up, and his wife heard him in the dining-room pouring
himself out a glass of ice-water, and then heard him mount the
stairs to their room, and slam its door after him.

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SILAS LAPHAM

"Do you know what your father's wanting to do now?" Mrs
Lapham asked her eldest daughter, who lounged into the par
lour a moment with her wrap stringing from her arm, while
the younger went straight to bed. "He wants to invite Mr.
Corey's father to a fish dinner at Taft's!"

Penelope was yawning with her hand on her mouth; she
Gtopped, and, with a laugh of amused expectance, sank into a
chair, her shoulders shrugged forward.

"Why! what in the world has put the Colonel up to that?"

"Put him up to it! There's that fellow, who ought have
come to see him long ago, drops into his office this morning,
and talks five minutes with him, and your father is flattered out
of his five senses. He's crazy to get in with those people, and
I shall have a perfect battle to keep him within bounds."

"Well, Persis, ma'am, you can't say but what you began it,"
said Penelope.

"Oh yes, I began it," confessed Mrs. Lapham. "Pen," she
broke out, "what do you suppose he means by it?"

"Who? Mr. Corey's father? What does the Colonel think?"

"Oh, the Colonel!" cried Mrs. Lapham. She added tremu-
lously : "Perhaps he is right. He did seem to take a fancy to her

last summer, and now if he's called in that way " She left

her daughter to distribute the pronouns aright, and resumed:
"Of course, I should have said once that there wasn't any ques-
tion about it. I should have said so last year; and I don't know
what it is keeps me from saying so now. I suppose I know a
little more about things than I did; and your father's being so
bent on it sets me all in a twitter. He thinks his money can do
everything. Well, I don't say but what it can, a good many.
And 'Rene is as good a child as ever there was; and I don't see
but what she's pretty-appearing enough to suit anyone. She's
pretty-behaved, too; and she is the most capable girl. I presume
young men don't care very much for such things nowadays;
but there ain't a great many girls can go right into the kitchen.

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and make such a custard as she did yesterday. And look at the
way she does, through the whole house! She can't seem to go
into a room without the things fly right into their places. And
if she had to do it to-morrow, she could make all her own
dresses a great deal better than them we pay to do it. I don't
say but what he's about as nice a fellow as ever stepped. But
there! I'm ashamed of going on so."

"Well, mother," said the girl after a pause, in which she
looked as if a little weary of the subject, "why do you worry
about it? If it's to be it'll be, and if it isn't "

"Yes, that's what I tell your father. But when it comes to
myself, I see how hard it is for him to rest quiet. I'm afraid we
shall all do smething we'll repent of afterwards."

"Well, ma'am," said Penelope, '7 don't intend to do anything
wrong; but if I do, I promise not to be sorry for it. I'll go that
far. And I think I wouldn't be sorry for it beforehand, if I
were in your place, mother. Let the Colonel go on! He likes to
manoeuvre, and he isn't going to hurt any one. The Corey fam-
ily can take care of themselves, I guess."

She laughed in her throat, drawing down the corners of her
mouth, and enjoying the resolution with which her mother
tried to fling off the burden of her anxieties. "Pen! I believe
you're right. You always do see things in such a light! There!
I don't care if he brings him down every day."

"Well, ma'am," said Pen, "I don't believe 'Rene would, either.
She's just so indifferent!"

The Colonel slept badly that night, and in the morning Mrs.
Lapham came to breakfast without him.

"Your father ain't well," she reported. "He's had one of his
turns."

'7 should have thought he had two or three of them," said
Penelope, "by the stamping round I heard. Isn't he coming to
breakfast?"

"Not just yet," said her mother. "He's asleep, and he'll be

SILAS LAPHAM

all right if he gets his nap out. I don't want you girls should
make any great noise."

"Oh, we'll be quiet enough," returned Penelope. "Well, I'm
glad the Colonel isn't sojering. At first I thought he might be
sojering." She broke into a laugh, and, struggling indolently
with it, looked at her sister. "You don't think it'll be necessary
for anybody to come down from the office and take orders
from him while he's laid up, do you, mother?" she inquired.

"Pen!" cried Irene.

"He'll be well enough to go up on the ten o'clock boat," said
the mother sharply.

"I think papa works too hard all through the summer. Why
don't you make him take a rest, mamma?" asked Irene.

"Oh, take a rest! The man slaves harder every year. It used
to be so that he'd take a little time off now and then; but I
declare, he hardly ever seems to breathe now away from his
office. And this year he says he doesn't intend to go down to
Lapham, except to see after the works for a few days. / don't
know what to do with the man any more! Seems as if the more
money he got, the more he wanted to get. It scares me to think
what would happen to him if he lost it. I know one thing," con-
cluded Mrs. Lapham. "He shall not go back to the office to-
day."

"Then he won't go up on the ten o'clock boat," Pen re-
minded her.

"No, he won't. You can just drive over to the hotel as soon
as you're through, girls, and telegraph that he's not well, and
won't be at the office till to-morrow. I'm not going to have
them send anybody down here to bother him."

"That's a blow," said Pen. "I didn't know but they might
send " she looked demurely at her sister "Dennis!"

"Mamma!" cried Irene.

"Well, I declare, there's no living with this family any more,"
said Penelope.

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"There, Pen, be done!" commanded her mother. But perhaps
she did not intend to forbid her teasing. It gave a pleasant sort
of reality to the affair that was in her mind, and made what
she wished appear not only possible but probable.

Laphatn got up and lounged about, fretting and rebelling as
each boat departed without him, through the day; before night
he became very cross, in spite of the efforts of the family to
soothe him, and grumbled that he had been kept from going
up to town. "I might as well have gone as not," he repeated,
till his wife lost her patience.

"Well, you shall go to-morrow, Silas, if you have to be car-
ried to the boat."

"I declare," said Penelope, "the Colonel don't pet worth a
cent."

The six o'clock boat brought Corey. The girls were sitting
on the piazza, and Irene saw him first.

"O Pen!" she whispered, with her heart in her face; and Pe-
nelope had no time for mockery before he was at the steps.

"I hope Colonel Lapham isn't ill," he said, and they could
hear their mother engaged in a moral contest with their father
indoors.

"Go and put on your coat! I say you shall! It don't matter
how he sees you at the office, shirt-sleeves or not. You're in a
gentleman's house now or you ought to be and you shan't
see company in your dressing-gown."

Penelope hurried in to subdue her mother's anger.

"Oh, he's very much better, thank you!" said Irene, speaking
up loudly to drown the noise of the controversy.

"I'm glad of that," said Corey, and whca she led him indoors
the vanquished Colonel met his visitor in a double-breasted
frock-coat, which he was still buttoning up. He could not per-
suade himself at once that Corey had not come upon some ur-
gent business matter, and when he was clear that he had come
out of civility, surprise mingled with his gratification that

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he should be the object of solicitude to the young man. In
Lapham 's circle of acquaintance they complained when they
were sick, but they made no womanish inquiries after one an-
other's health, and certainly paid no visits of sympathy till
matters were serious. He would have enlarged upon the par-
ticulars of his indisposition if he had been allowed to do so;
and after tea, which Corey took with them, he would have re-
mained to entertain him if his wife had not sent him to bed.
She followed him to see that he took some medicine she had
prescribed for him, but she went first to Penelope's room,
where she found the girl with a book in her hand, which she
was not reading.

"You better go down," said the mother. 'Tve got to go to
your father, and Irene is all alone with Mr. Corey; and I
know she'll be on pins and needles without you're there to help
make it go off."

"She'd better try to get along without me, mother," said
Penelope soberly. "I can't always be with them."

"Well," replied Mrs. Lapham, "then 7 must. There'll be a
perfect Quaker meeting down there."

"Oh, I guess 'Rene will find something to say if you leave her
to herself. Or if she don't, he must. It'll be all right for you to go
down when you get ready; but I shan't go till toward the last.
If he's coming here to see Irene and I don't believe he's come
on father's account he wants to see her and not me. If she
can't interest him alone, perhaps he'd as well find it out now
as any time. At any rate, I guess you'd better make the experi-
ment. You'll know whether it's a success if he comes again."

"Well," said the mother, "may be you're right. I'll go down
directly. It does seem as if he did mean something, after all."

Mrs. Lapham did not hasten to return to her guest. In her
own girlhood it was supposed that if a young man seemed to
be coming to see a girl, it was only common-sense to suppose
that he wished to see her alone; and her life in town had left

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Mrs. Lapham's simple traditions in this respect unchanged.
She did with her daughter as her mother would have done
with her.

Where Penelope sat with her book, she heard the continu-
ous murmur of voices below, and after a long interval she
heard her mother descend. She did not read the open book that
lay in her lap, though she kept her eyes fast on the print. Once
she rose and almost shut the door, so that she could scarcely
hear; then she opened it wide again with a self -disdainful air,
and resolutely went batk to her book, which again she did not
read. But she remained in her room till it was nearly time for
Corey to return to his boat.

When they were alone again, Irene made a feint of scolding
her for leaving her to entertain Mr. Corey.

"Why! didn't you have a pleasant call?" asked Penelope.

Irene threw her arms round her. "Oh, it was a splendid call!
I didn't suppose I could make it go off so well. We talked
nearly the whole time about you!"

"I don't think that was a very interesting subject."

"He kept asking about you. He asked everything. You
don't know how much he thinks of you, Pen. O Pen! what do
you think made him come? Do you think he really did come
to see how papa was?" Irene buried her face in her sister's neck.

Penelope stood with her arms at her side, submitting.
"Well," she said, "I don't think he did, altogether."

Irene, all glowing, released her. "Don't you don't you
really? O Pen! don't you think he is nice? Don't you think
he's handsome? Don't you think I behaved horridly when we
first met him this evening, not thanking him for coming? I
know he thinks I've no manners. But it seemed as if it would be
thanking him for coming to see me. Ought I to have asked
him to come again, when he said good-night? I didn't; I
couldn't. Do you believe he'll think I don't want him to ? You
don't believe he would keep coming if he didn't want to "

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SILAS LAPHAM

"He hasn't kept coming a great deal, yet," suggested Pe-
nelope.

"No; I know he hasn't. But if he if he should?"

"Then I should think he wanted to."

"Oh, would you would you ? Oh, how good you always are,
Pen! And you always say what you think. I wish there was
some one coming to see you too. That's all that I don't like

about it. Perhaps He was telling about his friend there in

Texas "

"Well," said Penelope, "his friend couldn't call often from
Texas. You needn't ask Mr. Corey to trouble about me, 'Rene.
I think I can manage to worry along, if you're satisfied."

"Oh, I am, Pen. When do you suppose he'll come again?"
Irene pushed some of Penelope's things aside on the dressing-
case, to rest her elbow and talk at ease. Penelope came up and
put them back.

"Well, not to-night," she said; "and if that's what you're
sitting up for "

Irene caught her round the neck again, and ran out of the
room.

The Colonel was packed off on the eight o'clock boat the
next morning; but his recovery did not prevent Corey from
repeating his visit in a week. This time Irene came radiantly
up to Penelope's room, where she had again withdrawn herself.
"You must come down, Pen," she said. "He's asked if you're
not well, and mamma says you've got to come."

After that Penelope helped Irene through with her calls,
and talked them over with her far into the night after Corey
was gone. But when the impatient curiosity of her mother
pressed her for some opinion of the affair, she said, "You know
as much as I do, mother."

"Don't he ever say anything to you about her praise her
up, any?"

"He's never mentioned Irene to me."

163

THE RISE OB

"He hasn't to me, either," said Mrs. Lapham, with a sigh of
trouble. "Then what makes him keep coming?"

"I can't tell you. One thing, he says there isn't a house open
in Boston where he's acquainted. Wait till some of his friends
get back, and then if he keeps coming, it'll be time to inquire."

"Well!" said the mother; but as the weeks passed she was
less and less able to attribute Corey's visits to his loneliness
in town, and turned to her husband for comfort.

"Silas, I don't know as we ought to let young Corey keep
coming so. I don't quite like it, with all his family away."

"He's of age," said the Colonel. "He can go where he pleases.
It don't matter whether his family's here or not."

"Yes, but if they don't want he should come? Should you
feel just right about letting him?"

"How're you going to stop him? I swear, Persis, I don't
know what's got over you! What is it? You didn't use to be so.
But to hear you talk, you'd think those Coreys were too good
for this world, and we wan't fit for 'em to walk on."

"I'm not going to have 'em say we took an advantage of
their being away and tolled him on."

"I should like to hear 'em say it!" cried Lapham. "Or any-
body!"

"Well," said his wife, relinquishing this point of anxiety, "I
can't make out whether he cares anything for her or not. And
Pen can't tell either; or else she won't."

"Oh, I guess he cares for her, fast enough," said the Colonel.

"I can't make out that he's said or done the first thing to
show it."

"Well, I was better than a year getting my courage up."

"Oh, that was different," said Mrs. Lapham, in contemptu-
ous dismissal of the comparison, and yet with a certain fond-
ness. "I guess, if he cared for her, a fellow in his position
wouldn't be long getting up his courage to speak to Irene."

Lapham brought his fist down on the table between them.

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SILAS LAPHAM

"Look here, Persis! Once for all, now, don't you ever let me
hear you say anything like that again! I'm worth nigh on to a
million, and I've made it every cent myself; and my girls are
the equals of anybody, I don't care who it is. He ain't the fellow
to take on any airs; but if he ever tries it with me, I'll send him
to the right about mighty quick. I'll have a talk with him,
if "

"No, no; don't do that!" implored his wife. "I didn't mean
anything. I don't know as I meant anything. He's just as un-
assuming as he can be, and I think Irene's a* match for any-
body. You just let things go on. It'll be all right. You never
can tell how it is with young people. Perhaps she's offish. Now
you ain't you ain't going to say anything?"

Lapham suffered himself to be persuaded, the more easily,
no doubt, because after his explosion he must have perceived
that his pride itself stood in the way of what his pride had
threatened. He contented himself with his wife's promise that
she would never again present that offensive view of the case,
and she did not remain without a certain support in his sturdy
self-assertion.

XII

M,

. COREY returned with her daughters in the early days
of October, having passed three or four weeks at Intervale after
leaving Bar Harbour. They were somewhat browner than
they were when they left town in June, but they were not
otherwise changed. Lily, the elder of the girls, had brought
back a number of studies of kelp and toadstools, with accessory
rocks and rotten logs, which she would never finish up and
never show any one, knowing the slightness of their merit.
Nanny, the younger, had read a great many novels with a keen
sense of their inaccuracy as representations of life, and had
seen a great deal of life with a sad regret for its difference from
fiction. They were both nice girls, accomplished, well-dressed
of course, and well enough looking; but they had met no one
at the seaside or the mountains whom their taste would allow
to influence their fate, and they had come home to the occupa-
tions they had left, with no hopes and no fears to distract them.

In the absence of these they were fitted to take the more vivid
interest in their brother's affairs, which they could see weighed
upon their mother's mind after the first hours of greeting.

"Oh, it seems to have been going on, and your father has
never written a word about it," she said, shaking her head.

"What good would it have done?" asked Nanny, who was
little and fair, with rings of light hair that filled a bonnet-front
very prettily; she looked best in a bonnet. "It would only have
worried you. He could not have stopped Tom; you couldn't,
when you came home to do it."

"I dare say papa didn't know much about it," suggested Lily.
She was a tall, lean, dark girl, who looked as if she were not

166

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

quite warm enough, and whom you always associated with
wraps of different aesthetic effect after you had once seen her.

It is a serious matter always to the women of his family
when a young man gives them cause to suspect that he is inter-
ested in some other woman. A son-in-law or brother-in-law
does not enter the family; he need not be caressed or made
anything of; but the son's or brother's wife has a claim upon
his mother and sisters which they cannot deny. Some conven-
tion of their sex obliges them to show her affection, to like or
to seem to like her, to take her to their intimacy, however
odious she may be to them. With the Coreys it was something
more than an affair of sentiment. They were by no means
poor, and they were not dependent money-wise upon Tom
Corey; but the mother had come, without knowing it, to rely
upon his sense, his advice in everything, and the sisters, seeing
him hitherto so indifferent to girls, had insensibly grown to
regard him as altogether their own till he should be released,
not by his marriage, but by theirs, an event which had not
approached with the lapse of time. Some kinds of girls they
believed that they could readily have chosen a kind might
have taken him without taking him from them; but this gen-
erosity could not be hoped for in such a girl as Miss Lapham.

"Perhaps/' urged their mother, "it would not be so bad.
She seemed an affectionate little thing with her mother, with-
out a great deal of character, though she was so capable about
some things."

"Oh, she'll be an affectionate little thing with Tom too, you
may be sure," said Nanny. "And that characterless capability
becomes the most intense narrow-mindedness. She'll think we
were against her from the beginning."

"She has no cause for that," Lily interposed, "and we shall
not give her any."

"Yes, we shall," retorted Nanny. "We can't help it; and if we
can't, her own ignorance would be cause enough."

THE RISE OF

"I can't feel that she's altogether ignorant," said Mrs. Corey
justly.

"Of course she can read and write," admitted Nanny.

"I can't imagine what he finds to talk about with her," said
Lily.

"Oh, that's very simple," returned her sister. "They talk
about themselves, with occasional references to each other, I
have heard people 'going on' on the hotel piazzas. She's em-
broidering, or knitting, or tatting, or something of that kind;
and he says she seems quite devoted to needlework, and she
says, yes, she has a perfect passion for it, and everybody laughs
at her for it; but she can't help it, she always was so from a
child, and supposes she always shall be, with remote and
minute particulars. And she ends by saying that perhaps he
does not like people to tat, or knit, or embroider, or whatever.
And he says, oh, yes, he does; what could make her think such
a thing? but for his part he likes boating rather better, or if
you're in the woods camping. Then she lets him take up one
corner of her work, and perhaps touch her fingers; and that
encourages him to say that he supposes nothing could induce
her to drop her work long enough to go down on the rocks,
or out among the huckleberry bushes; and she puts her head
on one side, and says she doesn't know really. And then they
go, and he lies at her feet on the rocks, or picks huckleberries
and drops them in her lap, and they go on talking about them-
selves, and comparing notes to see how they differ from each
other. And "

"That will do, Nanny," said her mother.

Lily smiled autumnally. "Oh, disgusting!"

"Disgusting? Not at all!" protested her sister. "It's ver
amusing when you see it, and when you do it "

"It's always a mystery what people see in each other," ob-
served Mrs. Corey severely.

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SILAS LAPHAM

"Yes," Nanny admitted, "but I don't know that there is
much comfort for us in the application."

"No, there isn't," said her mother.

"The most that we can do is to hope for the best till we know
the worst. Of course we shall make the best of the worst when

it comes."

"Yes, and perhaps it would not be so very bad. I was saying
to your father when I was here in July that those things can
always be managed. You must face them as if they were noth-
ing out of the way, and try not to give any cause for bitterness
among ourselves."

"That's true. But I don't believe in too much resignation
beforehand. It amounts to concession," said Nanny.

"Of course we should oppose it in all proper ways," returned
her mother.

Lily had ceased to discuss the matter. In virtue of her artistic
temperament, she was expected not to be very practical. It
was her mother and her sister who managed, submitting to
the advice and consent of Corey what they intended to do.

"Your father wrote me that he had called on Colonel Lap-
ham at his place of business," said Mrs. Corey, seizing her first
chance of approaching the subject with her son.

"Yes," said Corey. "A dinner was father's idea, but he came
down to a call, at my suggestion."

"Oh," said Mrs. Corey, in a tone of relief, as if the statement
threw a new light on the fact that Corey had suggested the
visit. "He said so little about it in his letter that I didn't know
just how it came about."

"I thought it was right they should meet," explained the son,
"and so did father. I was glad that I suggested it, afterward;
it was extremely gratifying to Colonel Lapham."

"Oh, it was quite right in every way. I suppose you have
seen something of the family during the summer."

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THE RISE OF

"Yes, a good deal. I've been down at Nantasket rather
often."

Mrs. Corey let her eyes droop. Then she asked: "Are they
well?"

"Yes, except Lapham himself, now and then. I went down
once or twice to see him. He hasn't given himself any vacation
this summer; he has such a passion for his business that I fancy
he finds it hard being away from it at any time, and he's made
his new house an excuse for staying "

"Oh yes, his house! Is it to be something fine?"

"Yes; it's a beautiful house. Seymour is doing it."

"Then, of course, it will be very handsome. I suppose the
young ladies are very much taken up with it; and Mrs. Lap-
ham."

"Mrs. Lapham, yes. I don't think the young ladies care so
much about it."

"It must be for them. Aren't they ambitious?" asked Mrs,
Corey, delicately feeling her way.

Her son thought a while. Then he answered with a smile

"No, I don't really think they are. They are unambitious, I
should say." Mrs. Corey permitted herself a long breath. But
her son added, "It's the parents who are ambitious for them,"
and her respiration became shorter again.

"Yes," she said.

"They're very simple, nice girls," pursued Corey. "I think
you'll like the elder, when you come to know her."

When you come to know her. The words implied an ex-
pectation that the two families were to be better acquainted.

"Then she is more intellectual than her sister?" Mrs. Corey
ventured.

"Intellectual?" repeated her son. "No; that isn't the word,
quite. Though she certainly has more mind."

"The younger seemed very sensible."

"Oh, sensible, yes. And as practical as she's pretty. She can do

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SILAS LAPHAM

all sorts of things, and likes to be doing them. Don't you think
she's an extraordinary beauty?"

"Yes yes, she is," said Mrs. Corey, at some cost.

"She's good, too," said Corey, "and perfectly innocent and
transparent. I think you will like her the better the more you
know her."

"I thought her very nice from the beginning," said the
mother heroically; and then nature asserted itself in her. "But
I should be afraid that she might perhaps be a little bit tire-
some at last; her range of ideas seemed so extremely limited."

"Yes, that's what I was afraid of. But, as a matter of fact, she
isn't. She interests you by her very limitations. You can see
the working of her mind, like that of a child. She isn't at all
conscious even of her beauty."

"I don't believe young men can tell whether girls are con-
scious or not," said Mrs. Corey. "But I am not saying the Miss

Laphams are not " Her son sat musing, with an inattentive

smile on his face. "What is it?"

"Oh! nothing. I was thinking of Miss Lapham and some-
thing she was saying. She's very droll, you know."

"The elder sister? Yes, you told me that. Can you see the
workings of her mind too?"

"No; she's everything that's unexpected." Corey fell into an-
other reverie, and smiled again; but he did not offer to explain
what amused him, and his mother would not ask.

"I don't know what to make of his admiring the girl so
frankly," she said afterward to her husband. "That couldn't
come naturally till after he had spoken to her, and I feel sure
that he hasn't yet."

"You women haven't risen yet it's an evidence of the back-
wardness of your sex to a conception of the Bismarck idea in
diplomacy. If a man praises one woman, you still think he's
in love with another. Do you mean that because Tom didn't
praise the elder sister so much, he has spoken to her?"

171

THE RISE OF

Mrs. Corey refused the consequence, saying that it did not
follow. "Besides, he did praise her."

"You ought to be glad that matters are in such good shape,
then. At any rate, you can do absolutely nothing."

"Oh! I know it," sighed Mrs. Corey. "I wish Tom would be
a little opener with me."

"He's as open as it's in the nature of an American-born son
to be with his parents. I dare say if you'd asked him plumply
what he meant in regard to the young lady, he would have told
you if he knew."

"Why, don't you think he does know, Bromfield?"

"I'm not at all sure he does. You women think that because
a young man dangles after a girl, or girls, he's attached to them.
It doesn't at all follow. He dangles because he must, and
doesn't know what to do with his time, and because they seem
to like it. I dare say that Tom has dangled a good deal in this
instance because there was nobody else in town."

"Do you really think so?"

"I throw out the suggestion. And it strikes me that a young
lady couldn't do better than stay in or near Boston during the
summer. Most of the young men are here, kept by business
through the week, with evenings available only on the spot, or
a few miles off. What was the proportion of the sexes at the
seashore and the mountains?"

"Oh, twenty girls at least for even an excuse of a man. It's
shameful."

"You see, I am right in one part of my theory. Why shouldn't
I be right in the rest?"

"I wish you were. And yet I can't say that I do. Those things
are very serious with girls. I shouldn't like Tom to have been
going to see those people if he meant nothing by it."

"And you wouldn't like it if he did. You are difficult, my
dear." Her husband pulled an open newspaper toward him
from the table.

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SILAS LAPHAM

"I feel that it wouldn't be at all like him to do so," said Mrs.
Corey, going on to entangle herself in her words, as women
often do when their ideas are perfectly clear. "Don't go to read-
ing, please, Bromfield! I am really worried about this matter. I
must know how much it means. I can't let it go on so. I don't
see how you can rest easy without knowing."

"I don't in the least know what's going to become of me
when I die; and yet I sleep well," replied Bromfield Corey, put-
ting his newspaper aside.

"Ah! but this is a very different thing."

"So much more serious? Well, what can you do? We had
this out when you were here in the summer, and you agreed
with me then that we could do nothing. The situation hasn't
changed at all."

"Yes, it has; it has continued the same," said Mrs. Corey,
again expressing the fact by a contradiction in terms. "I think
I must ask Tom outright."

"You know you can't do that, my dear."

"Then why doesn't he tell us?"

"Ah, that's what he can't do, if he's making love to Miss
Irene that's her name, I believe on the American plan. He
will tell us after he has told her. That was the way I did. Don't
ignore our own youth, Anna. It was a long while ago, I'll
admit."

"It was very different," said Mrs. Corey, a little shaken.

"I don't see how. I dare say Mamma Lapham knows whether
Tom is in love with her daughter or not; and no doubt Papa
Lapham knows it at second hand. But we shall not know it
until the girl herself does. Depend upon that. Your mother
knew, and she told your father; but my poor father knew noth-
ing about it till we were engaged; and I had been hanging
about dangling, as you call it "

"No, no; you called it that."

"Was it I ? for a year or more."

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THE RISE OF

The wife could not refuse to be a little consoled by the image
of her young love which the words conjured up, however
little she liked its relation to her son's interest in Irene Lap-
ham. She smiled pensively. "Then you think it hasn't come to
an understanding with them yet?"

"An understanding? Oh, probably."

"An explanation, then?"

"The only logical inference from what we've been saying is
that it hasn't. But I don't ask you to accept it on that account.
May I read now, my dear?"

"Yes, you may read now/' said Mrs. Corey, with one of
those sighs which perhaps express a feminine sense of the un-
satisfactoriness of husbands in general, rather than a personal
discontent with her own.

"Thank you, my dear; then I think I'll smoke too," said
Bromfield Corey, lighting a cigar.

She left him in peace, and she made no further attempt upon
her son's confidence. But she was not inactive for that reason.
She did not, of course, admit to herself, and far less to others,
the motive with which she went to pay an early visit to the
Laphams, who had new come up from Nantasket to Nankeen
Square. She said to her daughters that she had always been a
little ashamed of using her acquaintance with them to get
money for her charity, and then seeming to drop it. Besides, it
seemed to her that she ought somehow to recognise the busi-
ness relation that Tom had formed with the father; they must
not think that his family disapproved of what he had done.

"Yes, business is business," said Nanny, with a laugh. "Do
you wish us to go with you again?"

"No; I will go alone this time," replied the mother with
dignity.

Her coupe now found its way to Nankeen Square without
difficulty, and she sent up a card, which Mrs. Lapham received
in the presence of her daughter Penelope.

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SILAS LAPHAM

"I presume I've got to see her," she gasped.

"Well, don't look so guilty, mother," joked the girl; "you
haven't been doing anything so very wrong."

"It seems as if I had. I don't know what's come over me. I
wasn't afraid of the woman before, but now I don't seem to feel
as if I could look her in the face. He's been coming here of his
own accord, and I fought against his coming long enough,
goodness knows. I didn't want him to come. And as far forth
as that goes, we're as respectable as they are; and your father's
got twice their money, any day. We've no need to go begging
for their favour. I guess they were glad enough to get him in
with your father."

"Yes, those are all good points, mother," said the girl; "and
if you keep saying them over, and count a hundred every time
before you speak, I guess you'll worry through."

Mrs. Lapham had been fussing distractedly with her hair
and ribbons, in preparation for her encounter with Mrs. Cotfey.
She now drew in a long quivering breath, stared at her daugh-
ter without seeing her, and hurried downstairs. It was true
that when she met Mrs. Corey before she had not been awed
by her; but since then she had learned at least her own igno-
rance of the world, and she had talked over the things she had
misconceived and the things she had shrewdly guessed so much
that she could not meet her on the former footing of equality.
In spite of as brave a spirit and as good a conscience as woman
need have, Mrs. Lapham cringed inwardly, and tremulously
wondered what her visitor had come for. She turned from pale
to red, and was hardly coherent in her greetings; she did not
know how they got to where Mrs. Corey was saying exactly
the right things about her son's interest and satisfaction in his
new business, and keeping her eyes fixed on Mrs. Lapham's,
reading her uneasiness there, and making her feel, in spite of
her indignant innocence, that she had taken a base advantage
of her in her absence to get her son away from her and marry

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THE RISE OF

him to Irene. Then, presently, while this was painfully revolv-
ing itself in Mrs. Lapham's mind, she was aware of Mrs. Corey
asking if she was not to have the pleasure of seeing Miss Irene.

"No; she's out, just now," said Mrs. Lapham. "I don't know
just when she'll be in. She went to get a book." And here she
turned red again, knowing that Irene had gone to get the book
because it was one that Corey had spoken of.

"Oh! I'm sorry," said Mrs. Corey. "I had hoped to see her.
And your other daughter, whom I never met?"

"Penelope?" asked Mrs. Lapham, eased a little. "She is at
home. I will go and call her." The Laphams had not yet
thought of spending their superfluity on servants who could
be rung for; they kept two girls and a man to look after the
furnace, as they had for the last ten years. If Mrs. Lapham had
rung in the parlour, her second girl would have gone to the
street door to see who was there. She went upstairs for Pe-
nelope herself, and the girl, after some rebellious derision,
returned with her.

Mrs. Corey took account of her, as Penelope withdrew to
the other side of the room after their introduction, and sat
down, indolently submissive on the surface to the tests to be
applied, and following Mrs. Corey's lead of the conversation in
her odd drawl.

"You young ladies will be glad to be getting into your new
house," she said politely.

"I don't know," said Penelope. "We're so used to this one."

Mrs. Corey looked a little baffled, but she said sympatheti-
cally, "Of course, you will be sorry to leave your old home."

Mrs. Lapham could not help putting in on behalf of her
daughters : "I guess if it was left to the girls to say, we shouldn't
leave it at all."

"Oh, indeed!" said Mrs. Corey; "are they so much attached?
But I can quite understand it. My children would be heart-
broken too if we were to leave the old place." She turned to

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SILAS LAPHAM

Penelope. "But you must think of the lovely new house, and
the beautiful position."

"Yes, I suppose we shall get used to them too," said Penelope,
in response to this didactic consolation.

"Oh, I could even imagine your getting very fond of them,"
pursued Mrs. Corey patronisingly. "My son has told me of the
lovely outlook you're to have over the water. He thinks you
have such a beautiful house. I believe he had the pleasure of
meeting you all there when he first came home."

"Yes, I think he was our first visitor."

"He is a great admirer of your house," said Mrs. Corey, keep-
ing her eyes very sharply, however politely, on Penelope's face,
as if to surprise there the secret of any other great admiration
of her son's that might helplessly show itself.

"Yes," said the girl, "he's been there several times with fa-
ther; and he wouldn't be allowed to overlook any of its good
points."

Her mother took a little more courage from her daughter's
tranquillity.

"The girls make such fun of their father's excitement about
his building, and the way he talks it into everybody."

"Oh, indeed!" said Mrs. Corey, with civil misunderstanding
and inquiry.

Penelope flushed, and her mother went on: "I tell him he's
more of a child about it than any of them."

"Young people are very philosophical nowadays," remarked
Mrs. Corey.

"Yes, indeed,*' said Mrs. Lapham. "I tell them they've always
had everything, so that nothing's a surprise to them. It was
different with us in our young days."

"Yes," said Mrs. Corey, without assenting.

"I mean the Colonel and myself," explained Mrs. Lapham.

"Oh yes ycsl" said Mrs. Corey.

"I'm sure," the former went on, rather helplessly, "we had to

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THE RISE OF

work hard enough for everything we got. And so we appre-
ciated it,"

"So many things were not done for young people then," said
Mrs. Corey, not recognising the early-hardships stand-point of
Mrs. Lapham. "But I don't know that they are always the better
for it now," she added vaguely, but with the satisfaction we all
feel in uttering a just commonplace.

"It's rather hard living up to blessings that you've always
had," said Penelope.

"Yes," replied Mrs. Corey distractedly; and coming back to
her slowly from the virtuous distance to which she had ab-
sented herself. She looked at the girl searchingly again, as if
to determine whether this were a touch of the drolling her son
had spoken of. But she only added: "You will enjoy the sun-
sets on the Back Bay so much."

"Well, not unless they're new ones," said Penelope. "I don't
believe I could promise to enjoy any sunsets that I was used to,
a great deal."

Mrs. Corey looked at her with misgiving, hardening into
dislike. "No," she breathed vaguely. "My son spoke of the fine
effect of the lights about the hotel from your cottage at Nan-
tasket," she said to Mrs. Lapham.

"Yes, they're splendid!" exclaimed that lady. "I guess the
girls went down every night with him to see them from the
rocks."

"Yes," said Mrs. Corey, a little dryly; and she permitted her-
self to add : "He spoke of those rocks. I suppose both you young
ladies spend a great deal of your time on them when you're
there. At Nahant my children were constantly on them."

"Irene likes the rocks," said Penelope. "I don't care much
about them, especially at night."

"Oh, indeed! I suppose you find it quite as well looking at
the lights comfortably from the veranda."

"No; you can't see them from the house."

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SILAS LAPHAM

"Oh," said Mrs. Corey. After a perceptible pause, she turned
to Mrs. Lapham. "I don't know what my son would have done
for a breath of sea air this summer, if you had not allowed him
to come to Nantasket. He wasn't willing to leave his business
long enough to go anywhere else."

"Yes, he's a born business man," responded Mrs. Lapham
enthusiastically. "If it's born in you, it's bound to come out.
That's what the Colonel is always saying about Mr. Corey. He
says it's born in him to be a business man, and he can't help it."
She recurred to Corey gladly because she felt that she had not
said enough of him when his mother first spoke of his connec-
tion with the business. "I don't believe," she went on excitedly,
"that Colonel Lapham has ever had anybody with him that he
thought more of."

"You have all been very kind to my son," said Mrs. Corey in
acknowledgment, and stiffly bowing a little, "and we feel
greatly indebted to you. Very much so."

At these grateful expressions Mrs. Lapham reddened once
more, and murmured that it had been very pleasant to them,
she was sure. She glanced at her daughter for support, but Pe-
nelope was looking at Mrs. Corey, who doubtless saw her from
the corner of her eyes, though she went on speaking to her
mother.

"I was sorry to hear from him that Mr. Colonel? Lapham
had not been quite well this summer. I hope he's better now?"

"Oh yes, indeed," replied Mrs. Lapham ; "he's all right now.
He's hardly ever been sick, and he don't know how to take care
of himself. That's all. We don't any of us; we're all so well."

"Health is a great blessing," sighed Mrs. Corey.

"Yes, so it is. How is your oldest daughter?" inquired Mrs.
Lapham. "Is she as delicate as ever?"

"She seems to be rather better since we returned." And now
Mrs. Corey, as if forced to the point, said bunglingly that the
young ladies had wished to come with her, but had been de-

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THE RISE OF

tained. She based her statement upon Nanny's sarcastic de-
mand; and, perhaps seeing it topple a little, she rose hastily, to
get away from its fall. "But we shall hope for some some other
occasion," she said vaguely, and she put on a parting smile,
and shook hands with Mrs. Lapham and Penelope, and then,
after some lingering commonplaces, got herself out of the
house.

Penelope and her mother were still looking at each other,
and trying to grapple with the effect or purport of the visit,
when Irene burst in upon them from the outside.

"O mamma! wasn't that Mrs. Corey's carriage just drove
away?"

Penelope answered with her laugh. "Yes! You've just missed
the most delightful call, 'Rene. So easy and pleasant every way.
Not a bit stiff! Mrs. Corey was so friendly! She didn't make me
feel at all as if she'd bought me, and thought she'd given too
much; and mother held up her head as if she were all wool and
a yard wide, and she would just like to have anybody deny it."

In a few touches of mimicry she dashed off a sketch of the
scene: her mother's trepidation, and Mrs. Corey's well-bred
repose and polite scrutiny of them both. She ended by show-
ing how she herself had sat huddled up in a dark corner, mute
with fear.

"If she came to make us say and do the wrong thing, she must
have gone away happy; and it's a pity you weren't here to help,
Irene. I don't know that I aimed to make a bad impression,
but I guess I succeeded even beyond my deserts." She laughed;
then suddenly she flashed out in fierce earnest. "If I missed
doing anything that could make me as hateful to her as she

made herself to me " She checked herself, and began to

laugh. Her laugh broke, and the tears started into her eyes; she
ran out of the room, and up the stairs.

"What what does it mean?" asked Irene in a daze.

Mrs. Lapham was still in the chilly torpor to which Mrs.

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SILAS LAPHAM

Corey's call had reduced her. Penelope's vehemence did not
rouse her. She only shook her head absently, and said, "I don't
know."

"Why should Pen care what impression she made? I didn't
suppose it would make any difference to her whether Mrs.
Corey liked her or not."

"I didn't, either. But I could see that she was just as nervous
as she could be, every minute of the time. I guess she didn't
like Mrs. Corey any too well from the start, and she couldn't
seem to act like herself."

"Tell me about it, mamma," said Irene, dropping into a
chair.

Mrs. Corey described the interview to her husband on her
return home. "Well, and what are your inferences?" he asked.

"They were extremely embarrassed and excited that is, the
mother. I don't wish to do her injustice, but she certainly be-
haved consciously."

"You made her feel so, I dare say, Anna. I can imagine how
terrible you must have been in the character of an accusing
spirit, too lady-like to say anything. What did you hint?"

"I hinted nothing," said Mrs. Corey, descending to the weak-
ness of defending herself. "But I saw quite enough to convince
me that the girl is in love with Tom, and the mother knows it."

"That was very unsatisfactory. I supposed you went to find
out whether Tom was in love with the girl. Was she as pretty as
ever?"

"I didn't see her; she was not at home; I saw her sister."

"I don't know that I follow you quite, Anna. But no matter.
What was the sister like?"

"A thoroughly disagreeable young woman."

"What did she do?"

"Nothing. She's far too sly for that. But that was the impres-
sion."

181

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"Then you didn't find her so amusing as Tom does ?"

"I found her pert. There's no other word for it. She says
things to puzzle you and put you out."

"Ah, that was worse than pert, Anna; that was criminal.
Well, let us thank heaven the younger one is so pretty."

Mrs. Corey did not reply directly. "Bromfield," she said, after
a moment of troubled silence, "I have been thinking over your
plan, and I don't see why it isn't the right thing."

"What is my plan?" inquired Bromfield Corey.

"A dinner."

Her husband began to laugh. "Ah, you overdid the accusing-
spirit business, and this is reparation." But Mrs. Corey hurried
on, with combined dignity and anxiety

"We can't ignore Tom's intimacy with them it amounts
to that; it will probably continue even if it's merely a fancy,
and we must seem to know it; whatever comes of it, we can't
disown it. They are very simple, unfashionable people, and un-
worldly; but I can't say that they are offensive, unless unless,"
she added, in propitiation of her husband's smile, "unless the
father how did you find the father ?" she implored.

"He will be very entertaining," said Corey, "if you start him
on his paint. What was the disagreeable daughter like? Shall
you have her?"

"She's little and dark. We must have them all," Mrs. Corey
sighed. "Then you don't think a dinner would do?"

"Oh yes, I do. As you say, we can't disown Tom's relation
to them, whatever it is. We had much better recognise it, and
make the best of the inevitable. I think a Lapham dinner would
be delightful." He looked at her with delicate irony in his voice
and smile, and she fetched another sigh, so deep and sore now
that he laughed outright. "Perhaps," he suggested, "it would be
the best way of curing Tom of his fancy, if he has one. He has
been seeing her with the dangerous advantages which a mother
knows how to give her daughter in the family circle, and with

182

SILAS LAPHAM

no means of comparing her with other girls. You must invite
several other very pretty girls."

"Do you really think so, Bromfield?" asked Mrs. Corey, tak-
ing courage a little. "That might do." But her spirits visibly
sank again. "I don't know any other girl half so pretty."

"Well, then, better bred."

"She is very lady-like, very modest, and pleasing."

"Well, more cultivated."

"Tom doesn't get on with such people."

"Oh, you wish him to marry her, I see."

No, no "

"Then you'd better give the dinner to bring them together,
to promote the affair."

"You know I don't want to do that, Bromfield. But I feel
that we must do something. If we don't, it has a clandestine ap-
pearance. It isn't just to them. A dinner won't leave us in any
worse position, and may leave us in a better. Yes," said Mrs.
Corey, after another thoughtful interval, "we must have them
have them all. It could be very simple."

"Ah, you can't give a dinner under a bushel, if I take your
meaning, my dear. If we do this at all, we mustn't do it as if we
were ashamed of it. We must ask people to meet them."

"Yes," sighed Mrs. Corey. "There are not many people in
town yet," she added, with relief that caused her husband an-
other smile. "There really seems a sort of fatality about it," she
concluded religiously.

"Then you had better not struggle against it. Go and recon-
cile Lily and Nanny to it as soon as possible."

Mrs. Corey blanched a little. "But don't you think it will be
the best thing, Bromfield?"

"I do indeed, my dear. The only thing that shakes my faith
in the scheme is the fact that I first suggested it. But if you have
adopted it, it must be all right, Anna. I can't say that I expected
it."

"No," said his wife, "it wouldn't do."

183

XIII

H

AVING distinctly given up the project of asking the Lap-
hams to dinner, Mrs. Corey was able to carry it out with the
courage of sinners who have sacrificed to virtue by frankly ac-
knowledging its superiority to their intended transgression. She
did not question but the Laphams would come; and she only
doubted as to the people whom she should invite to meet them.
She opened the matter with some trepidation to her daughters,
but neither of them opposed her; they rather looked at the
scheme from her own point of view, and agreed with her that
nothing had really yet been done to wipe out the obligation to
the Laphams helplessly contracted the summer before, and
strengthened by that ill-advised application to Mrs. Lapham for
charity. Not only the principal of their debt of gratitude re-
mained, but the accruing interest. They said, What harm could
giving the dinner possibly do them ? They might ask any or all
of their acquaintance without disadvantage to themselves; but it
would be perfectly easy to give the dinner just the character they
chose, and still flatter the ignorance of the Laphams. The trou-
ble would be with Tom, if he were really interested in the girl;
but he could not say anything if they made it a family dinner;
he could not feel anything. They had each turned in her own
mind, as it appeared from a comparison of ideas, to one of the
most comprehensive of those cousinships which form the ad-
miration and terror of the adventurer in Boston society. He
finds himself hemmed in and left out at every turn by rami-
fications that forbid him all hope of safe personality in his com-
ments on people; he is never less secure than when he hears

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

some given Bostonian denouncing or ridiculing another. If he
will be advised, he will guard himself from concurring in these
criticisms, however just they appear, for the probability is that
their object is a cousin of not more than one remove from the
censor. When the alien hears a group of Boston ladies calling
one another, and speaking of all their gentlemen friends, by the
familiar abbreviations of their Christian names, he must feel
keenly the exile to which he was born; but he is then, at least,
in comparatively little danger; while these latent and tacit
cousinships open pitfalls at every step around him, in a society
where Middlesexes have married Essexes and produced Suf-
folks for two hundred and fifty years.

These conditions, however, so perilous to the foreigner, are
a source of strength and security to those native to them. An
uncertain acquaintance may be so effectually involved in the
meshes of such a cousinship, as never to be heard of outside of
it and tremendous stories are told of people who have spent a
whole winter in Boston, in a whirl of gaiety, and who, the
original guests of the Suffolks, discover upon reflection that
they have met no one but Essexes and Middlesexes.

Mrs. Corey's brother James came first into her mind, and
she thought with uncommon toleration of the easy-going, un-
critical, good-nature of his wife. James Bellingham had been
the adviser of her son throughout, and might be said to have
actively promoted his connection with Lapham. She thought
next of the widow of her cousin, Henry Bellingham, who had
let her daughter marry that Western steamboat man, and was
fond of her son-in-law; she might be expected at least to en-
dure the paint-king and his family. The daughters insisted so
strongly upon Mrs. Bellingham's son Charles, that Mrs. Corey
put him down if he were in town; he might be in Central
America; he got on with all sorts of people. It seemed to her
that she might stop at this: four Laphams, five Coreys, and
four Bellinghams were enough.

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THE RISE OF

"That makes thirteen," said Nanny. "You can have Mr. and
Mrs. Scwell."

"Yes, that is a good idea," assented Mrs. Corey. "He is our
minister, and it is very proper."

"I don't see why you don't have Robert Chase. It is a pity he
shouldn't see her for the colour."

"I don't quite like the idea of that," said Mrs. Corey; "but we
can have him too, if it won't make too many." The painter had
married into a poorer branch of the Coreys, and his wife was
dead. "Is there any one else?"

"There is Miss Kingsbury."

"We have had her so much. She will begin to think we are
using her."

"She won't mind; she's so good-natured."

"Well, then," the mother summed up, "there are four Lap-
hams, five Coreys, four Bellinghams, one Chase, and one Kings-
bury fifteen. Oh! and two Se wells. Seventeen. Ten ladies and
seven gentlemen. It doesn't balance very well, and it's too
large."

"Perhaps some of the ladies won't come," suggested Lily.

"Oh, the ladies always come," said Nanny.

Their mother reflected. "Well, I will ask them. The ladies
will refuse in time to let us pick up some gentlemen some-
where; some more artists. Why! we must have Mr. Seymour,
the architect; he's a bachelor, and he's building their house,
Tom says."

Her voice fell a little when she mentioned her son's name,
and she told him of her plan, when he came home in the eve-
ning, with evident misgiving.

"What are you doing it for, mother?" he asked, looking at
her with his honest eyes.

She dropped her own in a little confusion. "I won't do it at
all, my dear," she said, "if you don't approve. But I thought
You know we have never made any proper acknowledg-

186

SILAS LAPHAM

ment of their kindness to us at Bale St. Paul. Then in the win-
ter, I'm ashamed to say, I got money from her for a charity I
was interested in; and I hate the idea of merely using people in
that way. And now your having been at their house this sum-
mer we can't seem to disapprove of that; and your business
relations to him "

"Yes, I see," said Corey. "Do you think it amounts to a din-
ner?"

"Why, I don't know," returned his mother. "We shall have
hardly any one out of our family connection."

"Well," Corey assented, "it might do. I suppose what you
wish is to give them a pleasure."

"Why, certainly. Don't you think they'd like to come?"

"Oh, they'd like to come; but whether it would be a pleasure
after they were here is another thing. I should have said that if
you wanted to have them, they would enjoy better being sim-
ply asked to meet our own immediate family."

"That's what I thought of in the first place, but your father
seemed to think it implied a social distrust of them; and we
couldn't afford to have that appearance, even to ourselves."

"Perhaps he was right."

"And besides, it might seem a little significant."

Corey seemed inattentive to this consideration. "Whom did
you think of asking?" His mother repeated the names. "Yes,
that would do," he said, with a vague dissatisfaction.

"I won't have it at all, if you don't wish, Tom."

"Oh yes, have it; perhaps you ought. Yes, I dare say it's right.
What did you mean by a family dinner seeming significant?"

His mother hesitated. When it came to that, she did not like
to recognise in his presence the anxieties that had troubled her.
But "I don't know," she said, since she must. "I shouldn't want
to give that young girl, or her mother, the idea that we wished
to make more of the acquaintance than than you did, Tom."

He looked at her absent-mindedly, as if he did not take her

187

THE RISE OF

meaning. But he said, "Oh yes, of course," and Mrs. Corey, in
the uncertainty in which she seemed destined to remain con-
cerning this affair, went off and wrote her invitation to Mrs.
Lapham. Later in the evening, when they again found them-
selves alone, her son said, "I don't think I understood you,
mother, in regard to the Laphams. I think I do now. I certainly
don't wish you to make more of the acquaintance than I have
done. It wouldn't be right; it might be very unfortunate. Don't
give the dinner!"

"It's too late now, my son," said Mrs. Corey. "I sent my note
to Mrs. Lapham an hour ago." Her courage rose at the trouble
which showed in Corey's face. "But don't be annoyed by it,
Tom. It isn't a family dinner, you know, and everything can be
managed without embarrassment. If we take up the aflfair at
this point, you will seem to have been merely acting for us; and
they can't possibly understand anything more."

"Well, well! Let it go! I dare say it's all right. At any rate, it
can't be helped now."

"I don't wish to help it, Tom," said Mrs. Corey, with a cheer-
fulness which the thought of the Laphams had never brought
her before. "I am sure it is quite fit and proper, and we can
make them have a very pleasant time. They are good, inoffen-
sive people, and we owe it to ourselves not to be afraid to show
that we have felt their kindness to us, and his appreciation of
you."

"Well," consented Corey. The trouble that his mother had
suddenly cast off was in his tone; but she was not sorry. It was
quite time that he should think seriously of his attitude toward
these people if he had not thought of it before, but, according
to his father's theory, had been merely dangling.

It was a view of her son's character that could hardly have
pleased her in different circumstances, yet it was now unques-
tionably a consolation if not wholly a pleasure. If she consid-

188

SILAS LAPHAM

ered the Laphams at all, it was with the resignation which we
feel at the evils of others, even when they have not brought
them on themselves.

Mrs. Lapham, for her part, had spent the hours between Mrs.
Corey's visit and her husband's coming home from business
in reaching the same conclusion with regard to Corey; and
her spirits were at the lowest when they sat down to supper.
Irene was downcast with her; Penelope was purposely gay;
and the Colonel was beginning, after his first plate of the boiled
ham, which, bristling with cloves, rounded its bulk on a wide
platter before him, to take note of the surrounding mood
when the door-bell jingled peremptorily, and the girl left wait-
ing on the table to go and answer it. She returned at once with
a note for Mrs. Lapham, which she read, and then, after a help-
less survey of her family, read again.

"Why, what is it, mamma?" asked Irene, while the Colonel,
who had taken up his carving-knife for another attack on the
ham, held it drawn half across it.

"Why, / don't know what it does mean," answered Mrs. Lap-
ham tremulously, and she let the girl take the note from her.

Irene ran it over, and then turned to the name at the end
with a joyful cry and a flush that burned to the top of her fore-
head. Then she began to read it once more.

The Colonel dropped his knife and frowned impatiently,
and Mrs. Lapham said, "You read it out loud, if you know
what to make of it, Irene." But Irene, with a nervous scream of
protest, handed it to her father, who performed the office.

"DEAR MRS. LAPHAM:
"Will you and General Lapham "

"I didn't know I was a general," grumbled Lapham. "I guess
I shall have to be looking up my back pay. Who is it writes this,
anyway?" he asked, turning the letter over for the signature.

"Oh, never mind. Read it through!" cried his wife, with

THE RISE OF

a kindling glance of triumph at Penelope, and he resumed
" and your daughters give us the pleasure of your company
at dinner on Thursday, the 28th, at half-past six.

"Yours sincerely,

"ANNA B. COREY."

The brief invitation had been spread over two pages, and the
Colonel had difficulties with the signature which he did not in-
stantly surmount. When he had made out the name and pro-
nounced it, he looked across at his wife for an explanation.

"1 don't know what it all means," she said, shaking her head
and speaking with a pleased flutter. "She was here this after-
noon, and I should have said she had come to see how bad she
could make us feel. I declare I never felt so put down in my
life by anybody."

"Why, what did she do? What did she say?" Lapham was
ready, in his dense pride, to resent any affront to his blood, but
doubtful, with the evidence of this invitation to the contrary,
if any affront had been offered. Mrs. Lapham tried to tell him,
but there was really nothing tangible; and when she came to
put it into words, she could not make out a case. Her husband
listened to her excited attempt, and then he said, with judicial
superiority, "/ guess nobody's been trying to make you feel
bad, Persis. What would she go right home and invite you to
dinner for, if she'd acted the way you say?"

In this view it did seem improbable, and Mrs. Lapham was
shaken. She could only say, "Penelope felt just the way I did
about it."

Lapham looked at the girl, who said, "Oh, / can't prove it!
I begin to think it never happened. I guess it didn't."

"Humph!" said her father, and he sat frowning thought-
fully a while ignoring her mocking irony, or choosing to take
her seriously. "You can't really put your finger on anything,'*
he said to his wife, "and it ain't likely there is anything. Any-
way, she's done the proper thing by you now."

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SILAS LAPHAM

Mrs. Lapham faltered between her lingering resentment and
the appeals of her flattered vanity. She looked from Penelope's
impassive face to the eager eyes of Irene. "Well just as you
say, Silas. I don't know as she was so very bad. I guess may be
she was embarrassed some "

"That's what I told you, mamma, from the start," inter-
rupted Irene. "Didn't I tell you she didn't mean anything by it ?
It's just the way she acted at Baie St. Paul, when she got well
enough to realise what you'd done for her!"

Penelope broke into a laugh. "Is that her way of showing
her gratitude? I'm sorry I didn't understand that before."

Irene made no effort to reply. She merely looked from her
mother to her father with a grieved face for their protection,
and Lapham said, "When we've done supper, you answer her,
Persis. Say we'll come."

"With one exception," said Penelope.

"What do you mean?" demanded her father, with a mouth
full of ham.

"Oh, nothing of importance. Merely that I'm not going."

Lapham gave himself time to swallow his morsel, and his
rising wrath went down with it. "I guess you'll change your
mind when the time comes," he said. "Anyway, Persis, you say
we'll all come, and then, if Penelope don't want to go, you can
excuse her after we get there. That's the best way."

None of them, apparently, saw any reason why the affair
should not be left in this way, or had a sense of the awful and
binding nature of a dinner engagement. If she believed that
Penelope would not finally change her mind and go, no doubt
Mrs. Lapham thought that Mrs. Corey would easily excuse her
absence. She did not find it so simple a matter to accept the
invitation. Mrs. Corey had said "Dear Mrs. Lapham," but Mrs.
Lapham had her doubts whether it would not be a servile imi-
tation to say "Dear Mrs. Corey" in return; and she was tor-
mented as to the proper phrasing throughout and the precise

191

THE RISE OF

temperature which she should impart to her politeness. She
wrote an unpractised, uncharacteristic round hand, the same
in which she used to set the children's copies at school, and she
subscribed herself, after some hesitation between her husband's
given name and her own, "Yours truly, Mrs. S. Lapham."

Penelope had gone to her room, without waiting to be asked
to advise or criticise; but Irene had decided upon the paper,
and on the whole, Mrs. Lapham's note made a very decent ap-
pearance on the page.

When the furnace-man came, the Colonel sent him out to
post it in the box at the corner of the square. He had deter-
mined not to say anything more about the matter before the
girls, not choosing to let them see that he was elated; he tried
to give the effect of its being an everyday sort of thing, abruptly
closing the discussion with his order to Mrs. Lapham to accept;
but he had remained swelling behind his newspaper during
her prolonged struggle with her note, and he could no longer
hide his elation when Irene followed her sister upstairs.

"Well, Pers," he demanded, "what do you say now?"

Mrs. Lapham had been sobered into something of her former
misgiving by her difficulties with her note. "Well, I don't know
what to say. I declare, I'm all mixed up about it, and I don't
know as we've begun as we can carry out in promising to go.
I presume," she sighed, "that we can all send some excuse at
the last moment, if we don't want to go."

"I guess we can carry out, and I guess we shan't want to send
any excuse," bragged the Colonel. "If we're ever going to be
anybody at all, we've got to go and see how it's done. I presume
we've got to give some sort of party when we get into the new
house, and this gives the chance to ask 'em back again. You
can't complain now but what they've made the advances, Per-
sis?"

"No," said Mrs. Lapham lifelessly; "I wonder why they
wanted to do it. Oh, I suppose it's all right," she added in dep-

192

SILAS LAPHAM

recation of the anger with her humility which she saw rising
in her husband's face; "but if it's all going to be as much trou-
ble as that letter, I'd rather be whipped. / don't know what I'm
going to wear; or the girls either. I do wonder I've heard that
people go to dinner in low-necks. Do you suppose it's the cus-
tom?"

"How should / know?" demanded the Colonel. "I guess
you've got clothes enough. Any rate, you needn't fret about
it. You just go round to White's or Jordan & Marsh's, and ask
for a dinner dress. I guess that'll settle it; they'll know. Get
some of them imported dresses. I see 'em in the window every
time I pass; lots of 'em."

"Oh, it ain't the dress!" said Mrs. Lapham. "I don't suppose
but what we could get along with that; and I want to do the
best we can for the children; but / don't know what we're go-
ing to talk about to those people when we get there. We haven't
got anything in common with them. Oh, I don't say they're
any better," she again made haste to say in arrest of her hus-
band's resentment. "I don't believe they are; and I don't see
why they should be. And there ain't anybody has got a better
right to hold up their head than you have, Silas. You've got
plenty of money, and you've made every cent of it."

"I guess I shouldn't amounted to much without you, Persis,"
interposed Lapham, moved to this justice by her praise.

"Oh, don't talk about me!" protested the wife. "Now that
you've made it all right about Rogers, there ain't a thing in
this world against you. But still, for all that, I can see and I
can feel it when I can't see it that we're different from those
people. They're well-meaning enough, and they'd excuse it, I
presume, but we're too old to learn to be like them."

"The children ain't," said Lapham shrewdly.

"No, the children ain't," admitted his wife, "and that's the
only thing that reconciles me to it."

"You see how pleased Irene looked when I read it?"

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THE RISE O

"Yes, she was pleased/'

"And I guess Penelope'U think better of it before the time

comes."

"Oh yes, we do it for them. But whether we're doing the
best thing for 'em, goodness knows. I'm not saying anything
against him. Irene 11 be a lucky girl to get him, if she wants
him. But there! I'd ten times rather she was going to marry
such a fellow as you were, Si, that had to make every inch of
his own way, and she had to help him. It's in her!"

Lapham laughed aloud for pleasure in his wife's fondness;
but neither of them wished that he should respond directly to
it. "I guess, if it wan't for me, he wouldn't have a much easier
time. But don't you fret! It's all coming out right. That dinner
ain't a thing for you to be uneasy about. It'll pass off perfectly
easy and natural."

Lapham did not keep his courageous mind quite to the end
of the week that followed. It was his theory not to let Corey see
that he was set up about the invitation, and when the young
man said politely that his mother was glad they were able to
come, Lapham was very short with him. He said yes, he be-
lieved that Mrs. Lapham and the girls were going. Afterward
he was afraid Corey might not understand that he was coming
too; but he did not know how to approach the subject again,
and Corey did not, so he let it pass. It worried him to see all the
preparation that his wife and Irene were making, and he tried
to laugh at them for it; and it worried him to find that Penel-
ope was making no preparation at all for herself, but only help-
ing the others. He asked her what should she do if she changed
her mind at the last moment and concluded to go, and she said
she guessed she should not change her mind, but if she did,
she would go to White's with him and get him to choose her an
imported dress, he seemed to like them so much. He was too
proud to mention the subject again to her.

Finally, all that dress-making in the house began to scare

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SILAS LAPHAM

him with vague apprehensions in regard to his own dress. As
soon as he had determined to go, an ideal of the figure in which
he should go presented itself to his mind. He should not wear
any dress-coat, because, for one thing, he considered that a man
looked like a fool in a dress-coat, and, for another thing, he had
none had none on principle. He would go in a frock-coat and
black pantaloons, and perhaps a white waistcoat, but a black
cravat anyway. But as soon as he developed this ideal to his
family, which he did in pompous disdain of their anxieties
about their own dress, they said he should not go so. Irene re-
minded him that he was the only person without a dress-coat
at a corps reunion dinner which he had taken her to some
years before, and she remembered feeling awfully about it at
the time. Mrs. Lapham, who would perhaps have agreed of her-
self, shook her head with misgiving. "I don't see but what
you'll have to get you one, Si," she said. "I don't believe they
ever go without 'em to a private house."

He held out openly, but on his way home the next day, in a
sudden panic, he cast anchor before his tailor's door and got
measured for a dress-coat. After that he began to be afflicted
about his waistcoat, concerning which he had hitherto been
airily indifferent. He tried to get opinion out of his family, but
they were not so clear about it as they were about the frock.
It ended in their buying a book of etiquette, which settled the
question adversely to a white waistcoat. The author, however,
after being very explicit in telling them not to eat with their
knives, and above all not to pick their teeth with their forks, a
thing which he said no lady or gentleman ever did, was still
far from decided as to the kind of cravat Colonel Lapham
ought to wear: shaken on other points, Lapham had begun
to waver also concerning the black cravat. As to the question
of gloves for the Colonel, which suddenly flashed upon him
one evening, it appeared never to have entered the thoughts of
the etiquette man, as Lapham called him. Other authors on the

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THE RISE OP

same subject were equally silent, and Irene could only remem-
ber having heard, in some vague sort of way, that gentlemen
did not wear gloves so much any more.

Drops of perspiration gathered on Lapham's forehead in
the anxiety of the debate; he groaned, and he swore a little in
the compromise profanity which he used.

"I declare," said Penelope, where she sat purblindly sewing
on a bit of dress for Irene, "the Colonel's clothes are as much
trouble as anybody's. Why don't you go to Jordan & Marsh's
and order one of the imported dresses for yourself, father?"
That gave them all the relief of a laugh over it, the Colonel
joining in piteously.

He had an awful longing to find out from Corey how he
ought to go. He formulated and repeated over to himself an
apparently careless question, such as, "Oh, by the way, Corey,
where do you get your gloves?" This would naturally lead to
some talk on the subject, which would, if properly managed,
clear up the whole trouble. But Lapham found that he would
rather die than ask this question, or any question that would
bring up the dinner again. Corey did not recur to it, and Lap-
ham avoided the matter with positive fierceness. He shunned
talking with Corey at all, and suffered in grim silence.

One night, before they fell asleep, his wife said to him, "I
was reading in one of those books to-day, and I don't believe
but what we've made a mistake if Pen holds out that she won't

go"

"Why?" demanded Lapham, in the dismay which beset him
at every fresh recurrence to the subject.

"The book says that it's very impolite not to answer a dinner
invitation promptly. Well, we've done that all right, at first I
didn't know but what we had been a little loo quick, may be,
but then it says if you're not going, that it's the height of rude-
ness not to let them know at once, so that they can fill your
place at the table."

iq6

SILAS LAPHAM

The Colonel was silent for a while. "Well, I'm dumned," he
said finally, "if there seems to be any end to this thing. If it was
to do over again, I'd say no for all of us."

"I've wished a hundred times they hadn't asked us; but it's
too late to think about that now. The question is, what are we
going to do about Penelope?"

"Oh, I guess she'll go, at the last moment."

"She says she won't. She took a prejudice against Mrs. Corey
that day, and she can't seem to get over it."

"Well, then, hadn't you better write in the morning, as soon
as you're up, that she ain't coming?"

Mrs. Lapham sighed helplessly. "I shouldn't know how to get
it in. It's so late now; I don't see how I could have the face."

"Well, then, she's got to go, that's all."

"She's set she won't."

"And Fm set she shall," said Lapham with the loud obstinacy
of a man whose women always have their way.

Mrs. Lapham was not supported by the sturdiness of his
proclamation.

But she did not know how to do what she knew she ought to
do about Penelope, and she let matters drift. After all, the child
had a right to stay at home if she did not wish to go. That was
what Mrs. Lapham felt, and what she said to her husband next
morning, bidding him let Penelope alone, unless she chose her-
self to go. She said it was too late now to do anything, and
she must make the best excuse she could when she saw Mrs.
Corey. She began to wish that Irene and her father would go
and excuse her too. She could not help saying this, and then
she and Lapham had some unpleasant words.

"Look here!" he cried. "Who wanted to go in for these peo-
ple in the first place? Didn't you come home full of 'em last
year, and want me to sell out here and move somewheres else
because it didn't seem to suit 'em ? And now you want to put it
all on me! I ain't going to stand it."

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THE RISE OF

"Hush!" said his wife. "Do you want to raise the house? I
didn't put it on you, as you say. You took it on yourself. Ever
since that fellow happened to come into the new house that
day, you've been perfectly crazy to get in with them. And now
you're so afraid you shall do something wrong before 'ein, you
don't hardly dare to say your life's your own. I declare, if you
pester me any more about those gloves, Silas Lapham, I won't

go-"

"Do you suppose I want to go on my own account?" he de-
manded furiously.

"No," she admitted. "Of course I don't. I know very well
that you're doing it for Irene; but, for goodness gracious' sake,
don't worry our lives out, and make yourself a perfect laugh-
ing-stock before the children."

With this modified concession from her, the quarrel closed
in sullen silence on Lapham's part. The night before the dinner
came, and the question of his gloves was still unsettled, and
in a fair way to remain so. He had bought a pair, so as to be on
the safe side, perspiring in company with the young lady who
sold them, and who helped him try them on at the shop; his
nails were still full of the powder which she had plentifully
peppered into them in order to overcome the resistance of his
blunt fingers. But he wa? uncertain whether he should wear
them. They had found a book at last that said the ladies re-
moved their gloves on sitting down at table, but it said noth-
ing about gentlemen's gloves. He left his wife where she stood
half hook-and-eyed at her glass in her new dress, and went
down to his own den beyond the parlour. Before he shut his
door he caught a glimpse of Irene trailing up and down before
the long mirror in her new dress, followed by the seamstress
on her knees; the woman had her mouth full of pins, and from
time to time she made Irene stop till she could put one of the
pins into her train; Penelope sat in a corner criticising and
counselling. It made Lapham sick, and he despised himself and

SILAS LAPHAM

all his brood for the trouble they were taking. But another
glance gave him a sight of the young girl's face in the mirror,
beautiful and radiant with happiness, and his heart melted
again with paternal tenderness and pride. It was going to be a
great pleasure to Irene, and Lapham felt that she was bound to
cut out anything there. He was vexed with Penelope that she
was not going too; he would have liked to have those people
hear her talk. He held his door a little open, and listened to the
things she was "getting off" there to Irene. He showed that
he felt really hurt and disappointed about Penelope, and the
girl's mother made her console him the next evening before
they all drove away without her. "You try to look on the
bright side of it, father. I guess you'll see that it's best I didn't
go when you get there. Irene needn't open her lips, and they
can all see how pretty she is; but they wouldn't know how
smart I was unless I talked, and maybe then they wouldn't."
This thrust at her father's simple vanity in her made him
laugh; and then they drove away, and Penelope shut the door,
and went upstairs >/ith her lips firmly shutting in a sob.

199

>&&&M><M><$^^

XIV

J- HE Coreys were one of the few old families who lingered
in Bellingham Place, the handsome, quiet old street which the
sympathetic observer must grieve to see abandoned to board-
ing-houses. The dwellings are stately and tall, and the whole
place wears an air of aristocratic seclusion, which Mrs. Corey's
father might well have thought assured when he left her his
house there at his death. It is one of two evidently designed by
the same architect who built some houses in a characteristic
taste on Beacon Street opposite the Common. It has a wooden
portico, with slender fluted columns, which have always been
painted white, and which, with the delicate mouldings of the
cornice, form the sole and sufficient decoration of the street
front; nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be better.
Within, the architect has again indulged his preference for the
classic; the roof of the vestibule, wide and low, rests on marble
columns, slim and fluted like the wooden columns with-
out, and an ample staircase climbs in a graceful, easy curve
from the tesselated pavement. Some carved Venetian scrigni
stretched along the wall; a rug lay at the foot of the stairs; but
otherwise the simple adequacy of the architectural intention
had been respected, and the place looked bare to the eyes of the
Laphams when they entered. The Coreys had once kept a
man, but when young Corey began his retrenchments the man
had yielded to the neat maid who showed the Colonel into the
reception-room and asked the ladies to walk up two flights.

He had his charges from Irene not to enter the drawing-
room without her mother, and he spent five minutes in getting
on his gloves, for he had desperately resolved to wear them

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THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

at last. When he had them on, and let his large fists hang down
on either side, they looked, in the saffron tint which the shop-
girl said his gloves should be of, like canvased hams. He per-
spired with doubt as he climbed the stairs, and while he waited
on the landing for Mrs. Lapham and Irene to come down from
above before going into the drawing-room, he stood staring at
his hands, now open and now shut, and breathing hard. He
heard quiet talking beyond the portiere within, and presently
Tom Corey came out.

"Ah, Colonel Lapham! Very glad to see you."

Lapham shook hands with him and gasped, "Waiting for
Mis' Lapham," to account for his presence. He had not been
able to button his right glove, and he now began, with as much
indifference as he could assume, to pull them both off, for he
saw that Corey wore none. By the time he had stuffed them
into the pocket of his coat-skirt his wife and daughter de-
scended.

Corey welcomed them very cordially too, but looked a little
mystified. Mrs. Lapham knew that he was silently inquiring
for Penelope, and she did not know whether she ought to ex-
cuse her to him first or not. She said nothing, and after a glance
toward the regions where Penelope might conjecturably be
lingering, he held aside the portiere for the Laphams to pass,
and entered the room with them.

Mrs. Lapham had decided against low-necks on her own
responsibility, and had entrenched herself in the safety of a
black silk, in which she looked very handsome. Irene wore a
dress of one of those shades which only a woman or an artist
can decide to be green or blue, and which to other eyes looks
both or neither, according to their degrees of ignorance. If it
was more like a ball dress than a dinner dress, that might be
excused to the exquisite effect. She trailed, a delicate splendour,
across the carpet in her mother's sombre wake, and the con-
sciousness of success brought a vivid smile to her face. Lapham,

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THE RISE OF

pallid with anxiety lest he should somehow disgrace himself,
giving thanks to God that he should have been spared the
shame of wearing gloves where no one else did, but at the same
time despairing that Corey should have seen him in them, had
an unwonted aspect of almost pathetic refinement.

Mrs. Corey exchanged a quick glance of surprise and relief
with her husband as she started across the room to meet her
guests, and in her gratitude to them for being so irreproachable,
she threw into her manner a warmth that people did not al-
ways find there. "General Lapham?" she said, shaking hands
in quick succession with Mrs. Lapham and Irene, and now ad-
dressing herself to him.

"No, ma'am, only Colonel," said the honest man, but the
lady did not hear him. She was introducing her husband to
Lapham's wife and daughter, and Bromfield Corey was al-
ready shaking his hand and saying he was very glad to see him
again, while he kept his artistic eye on Irene, and apparently
could not take it off. Lily Corey gave the Lapham ladies a
greeting which was physically rather than socially cold, and
Nanny stood holding Irene's hand in both of hers a moment,
and taking in her beauty and her style with a generous admira-
tion which she could afford, for she was herself faultlessly
dressed in the quiet taste of her city, and looking very pretty.
The interval was long enough to let every man present con-
fide his sense of Irene's beauty to every other; and then, as the
party was small, Mrs. Corey made everybody acquainted.
When Lapham had not quite understood, he held the person's
hand, and, leaning urbanely forward, inquired, "What name?"
He did that because a great man to whom he had been pre-
sented on the platform at a public meeting had done so to him,
and he knew it must be right.

A little lull ensued upon the introductions, and Mrs. Corey
said quietly to Mrs. Lapham, "Can I send any one to be of use
to Miss Lapham?" as if Penelope must be in the dressing-room.

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SILAS LAPHAM

Mrs. Lapham turned fire-red, and the graceful forms in
which she had been intending to excuse her daughter's absence
went out of her head. "She isn't upstairs," she said, at her blunt-
est, as country people are when embarrassed. "She didn't feel
just like coming to-night. I don't know as she's feeling very
well."

Mrs. Corey emitted a very small "O!" very small, very cold,
which began to grow larger and hotter and to burn into Mrs.
Lapham's soul before Mrs. Corey could add, "I'm very sorry.
It's nothing serious, I hope?"

Robert Chase, the painter, had not come, and Mrs. James
Bellingham was not there, so that the table really balanced bet-
ter without Penelope; but Mrs. Lapham could not know this,
and did not deserve to know it. Mrs. Corey glanced round the
room, as if to take account of her guests, and said to her hus-
band, "I think we are all here, then," and he came forward and
gave his arm to Mrs. Lapham. She perceived then that in their
determination not to be the first to come they had been the
last, and must have kept the others waiting for them.

Lapham had never seen people go down to dinner arm-in-
arm before, but he knew that his wife was distinguished in
being taken out by the host, and he waited in jealous impa-
tience to see if Tom Corey would offer his arm to Irene. He
gave it to that big girl they called Miss Kingsbury, and the
handsome old fellow whom Mrs. Corey had introduced as her
cousin took Irene out. Lapham was startled from the mis-
giving in which this left him by Mrs. Corey's passing her hand
through his arm, and he made a sudden movement forward,
but felt himself gently restrained. They went out the last of all;
he did not know why, but he submitted, and when they
sat down he saw that Irene, although she had come in with
that Mr. Bellingham, was seated beside young Corey, after
all.

He fetched a long sigh of relief when he sank into his chair

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THE RISE OF

and felt himself safe from error if he kept a sharp lookout and
did only what the others did. Bellingham had certain habits
which he permitted himself, and one of these was tucking the
corner of his napkin into his collar; he confessed himself an
uncertain shot with a spoon, and defended his practice on the
ground of neatness and common-sense. Lapham put his napkin
into his collar too, and then, seeing that no one but Belling-
ham did it, became alarmed and took it out again slyly. He
never had wine on his table at home, and on principle he was a
prohibitionist; but now he did not know just what to do about
the glasses at the right of his plate. He had a notion to turn
them all down, as he had read of a well-known politician's do-
ing at a public dinner, to show that he did not take wine; but,
after twiddling with one of them a moment, he let them be, for
it seemed to him that would be a little too conspicuous, and he
felt that every one was looking. He let the servant fill them all,
and he drank out of each, not to appear odd. Later, he observed
that the young ladies were not taking wine, and he was glad to
see that Irene had refused it, and that Mrs. Lapham was letting
it stand untasted. He did not know but he ought to decline
some of the dishes, or at least leave most of some on his plate,
but he was not able to decide; he took everything and ate every-
thing.

He noticed that Mrs. Corey seemed to take no more trouble
about the dinner than anybody, and Mr. Corey rather less; he
was talking busily to Mrs. Lapham, and Lapham caught a
word here and there that convinced him she was holding her
own. He was getting on famously himself with Mrs. Corey,
who had begun with him about his new house; he was telling
her all about it, and giving her his ideas. Their conversation
naturally included his architect across the table; Lapham had
been delighted and secretly surprised to find the fellow there;
and at something Seymour said the talk spread suddenly, and
the pretty house he was building for Colonel Lapham became

204

SILAS LAPHAM

the general theme. Young Corey testified to its loveliness,
and the architect said laughingly that if he had been able to
make a nice thing of it, he owed it to the practical sympathy
of his client.

"Practical sympathy is good," said Bromfield Corey; and,
slanting his head confidentially to Mrs. Lapham, he added,
"Does he bleed your husband, Mrs. Lapham? He's a terrible
fellow for appropriations!"

Mrs. Lapham laughed, reddening consciously, and said she
guessed the Colonel knew how to take care of himself. This
struck Lapham, then draining his glass of sauterne, as wonder-
fully discreet in his wife.

Bromfield Corey leaned back in his chair a moment. "Well,
after all, you can't say, with all your modern fuss about it, that
you do much better now than the old fellows who built such
houses as this."

"Ah," said the architect, "nobody can do better than well.
Your house is in perfect taste; you know I've always admired
it; and I don't think it's at all the worse for being old-fashioned.
What we've done is largely to go back of the hideous style that
raged after they forgot how to make this sort of house. But I
think we may claim a better feeling for structure. We use better
material, and more wisely; and by and by we shall work out
something more characteristic and original."

"With your chocolates and olives, and your clutter of bric-
a-brac?"

"All that's bad, of course, but I don't mean that. I don't wish
to make you envious of Colonel Lapham, and modesty prevents
my saying that his house is prettier, though I may have my
convictions, but it's better built. All the new houses are better
built. Now, your house "

"Mrs. Corey's house," interrupted the host, with a burlesque
haste in disclaiming responsibility for it that made them all
laugh. "My ancestral halls are in Salem, and I'm told you

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THE RISE OF

couldn't drive a nail into their timbers; in fact, I don't know
that you would want to do it."

"I should consider it a species of sacrilege," answered Sey-
mour, "and I shall be far from pressing the point I was going
to make against a house of Mrs. Corey's."

This won Seymour the easy laugh, and Lapham silently won-
dered that the fellow never got off any of those things to him.

"Well," said Corey, "you architects and the musicians are the
true and only artistic creators. All the rest of us, sculptors,
painters, novelists, and tailors, deal with forms that we have
before us; we try to imitate, we try to represent. But you two
sorts of artists create form. If you represent, you fail. Somehow
or other you do evolve the camel out of your inner conscious-
ness."

"I will not deny the soft impeachment," said the architect,
with a modest air.

"I dare say. And you'll own that it's very handsome of me to
say this, after your unjustifiable attack on Mrs. Corey's prop-
erty."

Bromfield Corey addressed himself again to Mrs. Lapham.
and the talk subdivided itself as before. It lapsed so entirely
away from the subject just in hand, that Lapham was left with
rather a good idea, as he thought it, to perish in his mind, for
want of a chance to express it. The only thing like a recurrence
to what they had been saying was Bromfield Corey's warning
Mrs. Lapham, in some connection that Lapham lost, against
Miss Kingsbury. "She's worse," he was saying, "when it comes
to appropriations than Seymour himself. Depend upon it, Mrs.
Lapham, she will give you no peace of your mind, now she's
met you, from this out. Her tender mercies are cruel; and I
leave you to supply the context from your own scriptural
knowledge. Beware of her, and all her works. She calls them
works of charity; but heaven knows whether they are. It don't
stand to reason that she gives the poor all the money she gets

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SILAS LAPHAM

out of people. I have my own belief" he gave it in a whisper
for the whole table to hear "that she spends it for champagne
and cigars."

Lapham did not know about that kind of talking; but Mist
Kingsbury seemed to enjoy the fun as much as anybody, anrt
he laughed with the rest.

"You shall be asked to the very next debauch of the com-
mittee, Mr. Corey; then you won't dare expose us/' said Miss
Kingsbury.

"I wonder you haven't been down upon Corey to go to the
Chardon Street home and talk with your indigent Italians in
their native tongue," said Charles Bellingham. "I saw in the
Transcript the other night that you wanted some one for the
work."

"We did think of Mr. Corey," replied Miss Kingsbury; "but
we reflected that he probably wouldn't talk with them at all;
he would make them keep still to be sketched, and forget all
about their wants."

Upon the theory that this was a fair return for Corey's pleas-
antry, the others laughed again.

"There is one charity," said Corey, pretending superiority to
Miss Kingsbury's point, "that is so difficult, I wonder it hasn't
occurred to a lady of your courageous invention."

"Yes?" said Miss Kingsbury. "What is that?"

"The occupation, by deserving poor of neat habits, of all the
beautiful, airy, wholesome houses that stand empty the whole
summer long, while their owners are away in their lowly cots
beside the sea."

"Yes, that is terrible," replied Miss Kingsbury, with quick
earnestness, while her eyes grew moist. "I have often thought
of our great, cool houses standing useless here, and the thou-
sands of poor creatures stifling in their holes and dens, and the
little children dying for wholesome shelter. How cruelly selfish
we are!"

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THE RISE OF

"That is a very comfortable sentiment, Miss Kingsbury,"
said Corey, "and must make you feel almost as if you had
thrown open No. 31 to the whole North End. But I am serious
about this matter. I spend my summers in town, and I occupy
my own house, so that I can speak impartially and intelligently;
and I tell you that in some of my walks on the Hill and down
on the Back Bay, nothing but the surveillance of the local po-
liceman prevents my offering personal violence to those long
rows of close-shuttered, handsome, brutally insensible houses.
If I were a poor man, with a sick child pining in some garret
or cellar at the North End, I should break into one of them,
and camp out on the grand piano."

"Surely, Bromfield," said his wife, "you don't consider what
havoc such people would make with the furniture of a nice
house!"

"That is true," answered Corey, with meek conviction. "I
never thought of that."

"And if you were a poor man with a sick child, I doubt if
you'd have so much heart for burglary as you have now," said
James Bellingham.

"It's wonderful how patient they are," said the minister.
"The spectacle of the hopeless comfort the hard-working poor
man sees must be hard to bear."

Lapham wanted to speak up and say that he had been there
himself, and knew how such a man felt. He wanted to tell
them that generally a poor man was satisfied if he could make
both ends meet; that he didn't envy any one his good luck, if
he had earned it, so long as he wasn't running under himself.
But before he could get the courage to address the whole ta-
ble, Sewell added, "I suppose he don't always think of it."

"But some day he will think about it," said Corey. "In fact,
we rather invite him to think about it, in this country."

"My brother-in-law," said Charles Bellingham, with the
pride a man feels in a mentionably remarkable brother-in-law,

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SILAS LAPHAM

"has no end of fellows at work under him out there at Omaha,
and he says it's the fellows from countries where they've been
kept from thinking about it that are discontented. The Ameri-
cans never make any trouble. They seem to understand that
so long as we give unlimited opportunity, nobody has a right
to complain."

"What do you hear from Leslie?" asked Mrs. Corey, turning
from these profitless abstractions to Mrs. Bellingham.

"You know," said that lady in a lower tone, "that there is
another baby?"

"No! I hadn't heard of it!"

"Yes; a boy. They have named him after his uncle."

"Yes," said Charles Bellingham, joining in. "He is said to be
a noble boy, and to resemble me."

"All boys of that tender age are noble," said Corey, "and
look like anybody you wish them to resemble. Is Leslie still
home-sick for the bean-pots of her native Boston?"

"She is getting over it, I fancy," replied Mrs. Bellingham.
"She's very much taken up with Mr. Blake's enterprises, and
leads a very exciting life. She says she's like people who have
been home from Europe three years; she's past the most
poignant stage of regret, and hasn't reached the second, when
they feel that they must go again."

Lapham leaned a little toward Mrs. Corey, and said of a pic-
ture which he saw on the wall opposite, "Picture of your
daughter, I presume?"

"No; my daugher's grandmother. It's a Stewart Newton; he
painted a great many Salem beauties. She was a Miss Polly Bur-
roughs. My daughter is like her, don't you think?" They both
looked at Nanny Corey and then at the protrait. "Those pretty
old-fashioned dresses are coming in again. I'm not surprised
you took it for her. The others" she referred to the other
portraits more or less darkling on the walls "are my people;
mostly Copleys."

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THE RISE OF

These names, unknown to Lapham, went to his head like
the wine he was drinking; they seemed to carry light for the
moment, but a film of deeper darkness followed. He heard
Charles Bellingham telling funny stories to Irene and trying
to amuse the girl; she was laughing, and seemed very happy.
From time to time Bellingham took part in the general talk
between the host and James Bellingham and Miss Kingsbury
and that minister, Mr. Sewell. They talked of people mostly;
it astonished Lapham to hear with what freedom they talked.
They discussed these persons unsparingly; James Bellingham
spoke of a man known to Lapham for his business success and
great wealth as not a gentleman; his cousin Charles said he
was surprised that the fellow had kept from being governor so
long.

When the latter turned from Irene to make one of these ex-
cursions into the general talk, young Corey talked to her ; and
Lapham caught some words from which it seemed that they
were speaking of Penelope. It vexed him to think she had not
come; she could have talked as well as any of them; she was
just as bright; and Lapham was aware that Irene was not as
bright, though when he looked at her face, triumphant in its
young beauty and fondness, he said to himself that it did not
make any difference. He felt that he was not holding up his
end of the line, however. When some one spoke to him he
could only summon a few words of reply, that seemed to lead
to nothing; things often came into his mind appropriate to
what they were saying, but before he could get them out they
were off on something else; they jumped about so, he could
not keep up; but he felt, all the same, that he was not doing
himself justice.

At one time the talk ran off upon a subject that Lapham
had never heard talked of before; but again he was vexed that
Penelope was not there, to have her say; he believed that her
say would have been worth hearing.

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Miss Kingsbury leaned forward and asked Charles Belling-
ham if he had read Tears, Idle Tears, the novel that was mak-
ing such a sensation; and when he said no, she said she won-
dered at him.

"It's perfectly heart-breaking, as you'll imagine from the
pame; but there's such a dear old-fashioned hero and heroine
in it, who keep dying for each other all the way through,
and making the most wildly satisfactory and unnecessary
sacrifices for each other. You feel as if you'd done them your-
self."

"Ah, that's the secret of its success," said Bromfield Corey.
"It flatters the reader by painting the characters colossal, but
with his limp and stoop, so that he feels himself of their super-
natural proportions. You've read it, Nanny?"

"Yes," said his daughter. "It ought to have been called Slop,
Silly Slop."

"Oh, not quite slop, Nanny," pleaded Miss Kingsbury.

"It's astonishing," said Charles Bellingham, "how we do like
the books that go for our heart-strings. And I really suppose
that you can't put a more popular thing than self-sacrifice into
a novel. We do like to see people suffering sublimely."

"There was talk some years ago," said James Bellingham,
"about novels going out."

"They're just coming in!" cried Miss Kingsbury.

"Yes," said Mr. Sewell, the minister. "And I don't think
there ever was a time when they formed the whole intellectual
experience of more people. They do greater mischief than
ever."

"Don't be envious, parson," said the host.

"No," answered Sewell. "I should be glad of their help. But
those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them
excuse me, Miss Kingsbury are ruinous!"

"Don't you feel like a moral wreck, Miss Kingsbury?" asked
the host.

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But Sewell went on: "The novelists might be the greatest
possible help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feel-
ings in their true proportion and relation, but for the most
part they have been and are altogether noxious."

This seemed sense to Lapham; but Bromfield Corey asked:
"But what if life as it is isn't amusing? Aren't we to be
amused?"

"Not to our hurt," sturdily answered the minister. "And
the self-sacrifice painted in most novels like this "

"Slop, Silly Slop?" suggested the proud father of the in-
ventor of the phrase.

"Yes is nothing but psychical suicide, and is as wholly im-
moral as the spectacle of a man falling upon his sword."

"Well, I don't know but you're right, parson," said the host;
and the minister, who had apparently got upon a battle-horse
of his, careered onward in spite of some tacit attempts of his
wife to seize the bridle.

"Right ? To be sure I am right. The whole business of love,
and love-making and marrying, is painted by the novelists in a
monstrous disproportion to the other relations of life. Love is
very sweet, very pretty "

"Oh, than\ you, Mr. Sewell," said Nanny Corey, in a way
that set them all laughing.

"But it's the affair, commonly, of very young people, who
have not yet character and experience enough to make them
interesting. In novels it's treated, not only as if it were the chief
interest of life, but the sole interest of the lives of two ridicu-
lous young persons; and it is taught that love is perpetual, that
the glow of a true passion lasts for ever; and that it is sacrilege
to think or act otherwise."

"Well, but isn't that true, Mr. Sewell?" pleaded Miss Kings-
bury.

"I have known some most estimable people who had mar-
ried a second time," said the minister, and then he had the

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SILAS LAPHAM

applause with him. Lapham wanted to make some open recog*
nition of his good sense, but could not.

"I suppose the passion itself has been a good deal changed,"
said Bromfield Corey, "since the poets began to idealise it in
^he days of chivalry."

"Yes; and it ought to be changed again," said Mr. Sewell.

"What! Back?"

"I don't say that. But it ought to be recognised as something
natural and mortal, and divine honours, which belong to right-
eousness alone, ought not to be paid it."

"Oh, you ask too much, parson," laughed his host, and tho
talk wandered away to something else.

It was not an elaborate dinner; but Lapham was used to
having everything on the table at once, and this succession o(
dishes bewildered him; he was afraid perhaps he was eating too
much. He now no longer made any pretence of not drinking
his wine, for he was thirsty, and there was no more water, and
he hated to ask for any. The ice-cream came, and then the fruit.
Suddenly Mrs. Corey rose, and said across the table to her hus-
band, "I suppose you will want your coffee here." And he re
plied, "Yes; we'll join you at tea."

The ladies all rose, and the gentlemen go' up with them,
Lapham started to follow Mrs. Corey, but the other men
merely stood in their places, except young Corey, who ran and
opened the door for his mother. Lapham thought with sham^
that it was he who ought to have done that; but no one seemed
to notice, and he sat down again gladly, after kicking out one
of his legs which had gone to sleep.

They brought in cigars with coffee, and Bromfield Corey
advised Lapham to take one that he chose for him. Lapham
confessed that he liked a good cigar about as well as anybody,,
and Corey said: "These are new. I had an Englishman here the
other day who was smoking old cigars in the superstition that
tobacco improved with age, like wine."

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THE RISE OF

"Ah," said Lapham, "anybody who had ever lived off a to-
bacco country could tell him better than that." With the fum-
ing cigar between his lips he felt more at home than he had be-
fore. He turned sidewise in his chair and, resting one arm on
the back, intertwined the fingers of both hands, and smoked at
large ease.

James Bellingham came and sat down by him. "Colonel Lap-
ham, weren't you with the g6th Vermont when they charged
across the river in front of Pickensburg, and the rebel battery
opened fire on them in the water?"

Lapham slowly shut his eyes and slowly dropped his head
for assent, letting out a white volume of smoke from the corner
of his mouth.

"I thought so," said Bellingham. "I was with the 85th Mas-
sachusetts, and I sha'n't forget that slaughter. We were all new
to it still. Perhaps that's why it made such an impression."

"I don't know," suggested Charles Bellingham. "Was there
anything much more impressive afterward ? I read of it out in
Missouri, where I was stationed at the time, and I recollect the
talk of some old army men about it. They said that death-rate
couldn't be beaten. I don't know that it ever was."

"About one in five of us got out safe," said Lapham, breaking
his cigar-ash off on the edge of a plate. James Bellingham
reached him a bottle of Apollinaris. He drank a glass, and then
went on smoking.

They all waited, as if expecting him to speak, and then Corey
said: "How incredible those things seem already! You gentle-
men faow that they happened; but are you still able to believe
it?"

"Ah, nobody feels that anything happened," said Charles
Bellingham. "The past of one's experience doesn't differ a
great deal from the past of one's knowledge. It isn't much more
probable; it's really a great deal less vivid than some scenes in
a novel that one read when a boy."

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SILAS LAPHAM

"I'm not sure of that," said James Bellingham.

"Well, James, neither am I," consented his cousin, helping
himself from Lapham's Apollinaris bottle. "There would be
very little talking at dinner if one only said the things that one
was sure of."

The others laughed, and Bromfield Corey remarked
thoughtfully, "What astonishes the craven civilian in all these
things is the abundance the superabundance of heroism.
The cowards were the exception; the men that were ready to
die, the rule."

"The woods were full of them," said Lapham, without tak-
ing his cigar from his mouth.

"That's a nice little touch in School," interposed Charles
Bellingham, "where the girl says to the fellow who was at In-
kerman, 'I should think you would be so proud of it,' and he
reflects a while, and says, 'Well, the fact is, you know, there
were so many of us.' "

"Yes, I remember that," said James Bellingham, smiling
for pleasure in it. "But I don't see why you claim the credit of
being a craven civilian, Bromfield," he added, with a friendly
glance at his brother-in-law, and with the willingness Boston
men often show to turn one another's good points to the light
in company; bred so intimately together at school and college
and in society, they all know these points. "A man who was
out with Garibaldi in '48," continued James Bellingham.

"Oh, a little amateur red-shirting," Corey interrupted in
deprecation. "But even if you choose to dispute my claim, what
has become of all the heroism ? Tom, how many club men do
you know who would think it sweet and fitting to die for their
country?"

"I can't think of a great many at the moment, sir," replied
the son, with the modesty of his generation.

"And I couldn't in '61," said his uncle. "Nevertheless they
were there."

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THE RISE OF

"Then your theory is that it's the occasion that is wanting,"
said Bromfield Corey. "But why shouldn't civil service reform,
and the resumption of specie payment, and a tariff for revenue
only, inspire heroes ? They are all good causes."

"It's the occasion that's wanting," said James Bellingham,
ignoring the persiflage. "And I'm very glad of it."

"So am I," said Lapham, with a depth of feeling that ex-
pressed itself in spite of the haze in which his brain seemed to
float. There was a great deal of the talk that he could not fol-
low; it was too quick for him; but here was something he was
clear of. "I don't want to see any more men killed in my time."
Something serious, something sombre must lurk behind these
words, and they waited for Lapham to say more; but the haze
closed round him again, and he remained silent, drinking Apol-
linaris.

"We non-combatants were notoriously reluctant to give up
fighting," said Mr. Sewell, the minister; "but I incline to think
Colonel Lapham and Mr. Bellingham may be right. I dare say
we shall have the heroism again if we have the occasion. Till
it comes, we must content ourselves with the everyday generosi-
ties and sacrifices. They make up in quantity what they lack
in quality, perhaps."

"They're not so picturesque," said Bromfield Corey. "You
can paint a man dying for his country, but you can't express
on canvas a man fulfilling the duties of a good citizen."

"Perhaps the novelists. will get at him by and by," suggested
Charles Bellingham. "If I were one of these fellows, I shouldn't
propose to myself anything short of that."

"What? the commonplace?" asked his cousin.

"Commonplace? The commonplace is just that light, im-
palpable, aerial essence which they've never got into their con-
founded books yet. The novelist who could interpret the com-
mon feelings of commonplace people would have the answer
to 'the riddle of the painful earth' on his tongue."

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SILAS LAPHAM

"Oh, not so bad as that, I hope," said the host; and Lapham
looked from one to the other, trying to make out what they
were at. He had never been so up a tree before.

"I suppose it isn't well for us to see human nature at white
heat habitually," continued Bromfield Corey, after a while. "It
would make us vain of our species. Many a poor fellow in that
war and in many another has gone into battle simply and
purely for his country's sake, not knowing whether, if he laid
down his life, he should ever find it again, or whether, if he
took it up hereafter, he should take it up in heaven or hell.
Come, parson!" he said, turning to the minister, "what has
ever been conceived of omnipotence, of omniscience, so sub-
lime, so divine as that?"

"Nothing," answered the minister quietly. "God has never
been imagined at all. But if you suppose such a man as that
was Authorised, I think it will help you to imagine what God
must be."

"There's sense in that," said Lapham. He took his cigar out
of his mouth, and pulled his chair a little toward the table, on
which he placed his ponderous fore-arms. "I want to tell you
about a fellow I had in my own company when we first went
out. We were all privates to begin with; after a while they
elected me captain I'd had the tavern stand, and most of 'em
knew me. But Jim Millon never got to be anything more than
corporal; corporal when he was killed." The others arrested
themselves in various attitudes of attention, and remained
listening to Lapham with an interest that profoundly flattered
him. Now, at last, he felt that he was holding up his end of the
rope. "I can't say he went into the thing from the highest mo-
tives, altogether; our motives are always pretty badly mixed,
and when there's such a hurrah-boys as there was then, you
can't tell which is which. I suppose Jim Millon's wife was
enough to account for his going, herself. She was a pretty bad
assortment," said Lapham, lowering his voice and glancing

217

THE RISE OF

round at the door to make sure that it was shut, "and she used
to lead Jim one kind of life. Well, sir," continued Lapham,
synthetising his auditors in that form of address, "that fellow
used to save every cent of his pay and send it to that woman.
Used to get me to do it for him. I tried to stop him. 'Why, Jim,'
said I, *y u know what she'll do with it.' 'That's so, Cap,' says
he, 'but I don't know what she'll do without it.' And it did
keep her straight straight as a string as long as Jim lasted.
Seemed as if there was something mysterious about it. They
had a little girl, about as old as my oldest girl, and Jim
used to talk to me about her. Guess he done it as much for
her as for the mother; and he said to me before the last action
we went into, 'I should like to turn tail and run, Cap. I ain't
comin' out o' this one. But I don't suppose it would do.' 'Well
not for you, Jim,' said I. 'I want to live,' he says; and he bust
out crying right there in my tent. 'I want to live for poor Molly
and Zerrilla' that's what they called the little one; I dunno
where they got the name. 'I ain't ever had half a chance; and
now she's doing better, and I believe we should get along after
this.' He set there cryin' like a baby. But he wan't no baby
when he went into action. I hated to look at him after it was
over, not so much because he'd got a ball that was meant for
me by a sharpshooter he saw the devil takin' aim, and he
jumped to warn me as because he didn't look like Jim; he
looked like fun; all desperate and savage. I guess he died
hard."

The story made its impression, and Lapham saw it. "Now
I say," he resumed, as if he felt that he was going to do himself
justice, and say something to heighten the effect his story had
produced. At the same time he was aware of a certain want
of clearness. He had the idea, but it floated vague, elusive, in
his brain. He looked about as if for something to precipitate it
in tangible shape.

"Apollinaris?" asked Charles Bellingham, handing the bottle

218

SILAS LAPHAM

from the other side. He had drawn his chair closer than the rest
to Lapham's, and was listening with great interest. When
Mrs. Corey asked him to meet Lapham, he accepted gladly.
"You know I go in for that sort of thing, Anna. Since Leslie's
affair we're rather bound to do it. And I think we meet these
practical fellows too little. There's always something original
about them." He might naturally have believed that the re-
ward of his faith was coming.

"Thanks, I will take some of this wine," said Lapham, pour-
ing himself a glass of Madeira from a black and dusty bottle
caressed by a label bearing the date of the vintage. He tossed
off the wine, unconscious of its preciousness, and waited for
the result. That cloudiness in his brain disappeared before it,
but a mere blank remained. He not only could not remember
what he was going to say, but he could not recall what they
had been talking about. They waited, looking at him, and he
stared at them in return. After a while he heard the host
saying, "Shall we join the ladies?"

Lapham went, trying to think what had happened. It
seemed to him a long time since he had drunk that wine.

Miss Corey gave him a cup of tea, where he stood aloof from
his wife, who was talking with Miss Kingsbury and Mrs.
Sewell; Irene was with Miss Nanny Corey. He could not hear
what they were talking about; but if Penelope had come, he
knew that she would have done them all credit. He meant to
let her know how he felt about her behaviour when he got
home. It was a shame for her to miss such a chance. Irene was
looking beautiful, as pretty as all the rest of them put together,
but she was not talking, and Lapham perceived that at a din-
ner-party you ought to talk. He was himself conscious of hav-
ing talked very well. He now wore an air of great dignity, and,
in conversing with the other gentlemen, he used a grave and
weighty deliberation. Some of them wanted him to go into the
library. There he gave his ideas of books. He said he had not

2I 9

THE RISE OF

much time for anything but the papers; but he was going to
have a complete library in his new place. He made an elabo-
rate acknowledgment to Bromfield Corey o his son's kindness
in suggesting books for his library; he said that he had ordered
them all, and that he meant to have pictures. He asked Mr.
Corey who was about the best American painter going now.
"I don't set up to be a judge of pictures, but I know what I
like," he said. He lost the reserve which he had maintained
earlier, and began to boast. He himself introduced the subject
of his paint, in a natural transition from pictures; he said Mr.
Corey must take a run up to Lapham with him some day, and
see the Works; they would interest him, and he would drive
him round the country; he kept most of his horses up there,
and he could show Mr. Corey some of the finest Jersey grades
in the country. He told about his brother William, the judge at
Dubuque; and a farm he had out there that paid for itself
every year in wheat. As he cast off all fear, his voice rose, and
he hammered his arm-chair with the thick of his hand for
emphasis. Mr. Corey seemed impressed; he sat perfectly quiet,
listening, and Lapham saw the other gentlemen stop in their
talk every now and then to listen. After this proof of his
ability to interest them, he would have liked to have Mrs. Lap-
ham suggest again that he was unequal to their society, or to
the society of anybody else. He surprised himself by his ease
among men whose names had hitherto overawed him. He
got to calling Bromfield Corey by his surname alone. He did
not understand why young Corey seemed so preoccupied, and
he took occasion to tell the company how he had said to his
wife the first time he saw that fellow that he could make a
man of him if he had him in the business; and he guessed he
was not mistaken. He began to tell stories of the different
young men he had had in his employ. At last he had the talk
altogether to himself; no one else talked, and he talked un-
ceasingly. It was a great time; it was a triumph.

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SILAS LAPHAM

He was in this successful mood when word came to him
that Mrs. Lapham was going; Tom Corey seemed to have
brought it, but he was not sure. Anyway, he was not going to
hurry. He made cordial invitations to each of the gentlemen
to drop in and see him at his office, and would not be satisfied
till he had exacted a promise from each. He told Charles Bel-
lingham that he liked him, and assured James Bellingham that
it had always been his ambition to know him, and that if any
one had said when he first came to Boston that in less than ten
years he should be hobnobbing with Jim Bellingham, he
should have told that person he lied. He would have told any-
body he lied that had told him ten years ago that a son of Bronv
field Corey would have come and asked him to take him into
the business. Ten years ago he, Silas Lapham, had come to Bos-
ton a little worse off than nothing at all, for he was in debt for
half the money that he had bought out his partner with, and
here he was now worth a million, and meeting you gentlemen
like one of you. And every cent of that was honest money, no
speculation, every copper of it for value received. And here,
only the other day, his old partner, who had been going to the
dogs ever since he went out of the business, came and borrowed
twenty thousand dollars of him! Lapham lent it because his
wife wanted him to: she had always felt bad about the fellow's
having to go out of the business.

He took leave of Mr. Scwell with patronising affection, and
bade him come to him if he ever got into a tight place with his
parish work; he would let him have all the money he wanted;
he had more money than he knew what to do with. "Why,
when your wife sent to mine last fall," he said, turning to Mr.
Corey, "I drew my cheque for five hundred dollars, but my
wife wouldn't take more than one hundred; said she wasn't
going to show off before Mrs. Corey. I call that a pretty good
joke on Mrs. Corey. I must tell her how Mrs. Lapham done
h^r out of a cool four hundred dollars."

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THE RISE OF

He started toward the door of the drawing-room to take
leave of the ladies; but Tom Corey was at his elbow, saying,
"I think Mrs. Lapham is waiting for you below, sir," and in
obeying the direction Corey gave him toward another door
he forgot all about his purpose, and came away without saying
good-night to his hostess.

Mrs. Lapham had not known how soon she ought to go, and
had no idea that in her quality of chief guest she was keeping
the others. She stayed till eleven o'clock, and was a little fright-
ened when she found what time it was; but Mrs. Corey,
without pressing her to stay longer, had said it was not at all
late. She and Irene had had a perfect time. Everybody had
been very polite; on the way home they celebrated the amiabil-
ity of both the Miss Coreys and of Miss Kingsbury. Mrs. Lap-
ham thought that Mrs. Bellingham was about the pleasantest
person she ever saw; she had told her all about her married
daughter who had married an inventor and gone to live in
Omaha a Mrs. Blake.

"If it's that car-wheel Blake," said Lapham proudly, "I know
all about him. I've sold him tons of the paint."

"Pooh, papa! How you do smell of smoking!" cried Irene.

"Pretty strong, eh?" laughed Lapham, letting down a win-
dow of the carriage. His heart was throbbing wildly in the
close air, and he was glad of the rush of cold that came in,
though it stopped his tongue, and he listened more and more
drowsily to the rejoicings that his wife and daughter ex-
changed. He meant to have them wake Penelope up and tell
her what she had lost; but when he reached home he was too
sleepy to suggest it. He fell asleep as soon as his head touched
the pillow, full of supreme triumph.

But in the morning his skull was sore with the unconscious,
night-long ache; and he rose cross and taciturn. They had a
silent breakfast. In the cold grey light of the morning the
glories of the night before showed poorer. Here and there a

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SILAS LAPHAM

painful doubt obtruded itself and marred them with its awk-
ward shadow. Penelope sent down word that she was not well,
and was not coming to breakfast, and Lapham was glad to go
to his office without seeing her.

He was severe and silent all day with his clerks, and per-
emptory with customers. Of Corey he was slyly observant,
and as the day wore away he grew more restively conscious.
He sent out word by his office-boy that he would like to see Mr.
Corey for a few minutes after closing. The type-writer girl
had lingered too, as if she wished to speak with him, and Corey
stood in abeyance as she went toward Lapham's door.

"Can't see you to-night, Zerrilla," he said bluffly, but not
unkindly. "Perhaps I'll call at the house, if it's important."

"It is," said the girl, with a spoiled air of insistence.

"Well," said Lapham, and, nodding to Corey to enter, he
closed the door upon her. Then he turned to the young man
and demanded: "Was I drunk last night?"

223

XV

J-JAPHAM'S strenuous face was broken up with the emotions
that had forced him to this question : shame, fear of the things
that must have been thought of him, mixed with a faint
hope that he might be mistaken, which died out at the shocked
and pitying look in Corey's eyes.

"Was I drunk?" he repeated. "I ask you, because I was never
touched by drink in my life before, and I don't know." He
stood with his huge hands trembling on the back of his chair,
and his dry lips apart, as he stared at Corey.

"That is what every one understood, Colonel Lapham," said
the young man. "Every one saw how it was. Don't "

"Did they talk it over after I left?" asked Lapham vulgarly.

"Excuse me," said Corey, blushing, "my father doesn't talk
his guests over with one another." He added, with youthful
superfluity, "You were among gentlemen."

"I was the only one that wasn't a gentleman there!" la-
mented Lapham. "I disgraced you! I disgraced my family! I
mortified your father before his friends!" His head dropped. "I
showed that I wasn't fit to go with you. I'm not fit for any de-
cent place. What did I say? What did I do?" he asked, sud-
denly lifting his head and confronting Corey. "Out with it!
If you could bear to see it and hear it, I had ought to bear to
know it!"

"There was nothing really nothing," said Corey. "Beyond
the fact that you were not quite yourself, there was nothing
whatever. My father did speak of it to me," he confessed,
"when we were alone. He said that he was afraid we had not
been thoughtful of you, if you were in the habit of taking only

224

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

water; I told him I had not seen wine at your table. The others
said nothing about you."

"Ah, but what did they think?"

"Probably what we did: that it was purely a misfortune
an accident."

"I wasn't fit to be there," persisted Lapham. "Do you want
to leave?" he asked, with savage abruptness.

"Leave?" faltered the young man.

"Yes; quit the business? Cut the whole connection?"

"I haven't the remotest idea of it!" cried Corey in amaze-
ment. "Why in the world should I?"

"Because you're a gentleman, and I'm not, and it ain't right
I should be over you. If you want to go, I know some parties
that would be glad to get you. I will give you up if you want to
go before anything worse happens, and I shan't blame you. I
can help you to something better than I can offer you here, and
I will."

"There's no question of my going, unless you wish it," said
Corey. "If you do "

"Will you tell your father," interrupted Lapham, "that I
had a notion all the time that I was acting the drunken black-
guard, and that I've suffered for it all day ? Will you tell him I
don't want him to notice me if we ever meet, and that I know
I'm not fit to associate with gentlemen in anything but a busi-
ness way, if I am that?"

"Certainly I shall do nothing of the kind," retorted Corey.
"I can't listen to you any longer. What you say is shocking to
me shocking in a way you can't think."

"Why, man!" exclaimed Lapham, with astonishment; "if 7
can stand it, you can!"

"No," said Corey, with a sick look, "that doesn't follow. You
may denouitee yourself, if you will; but I have my reasons for
refusing to hear you my reasons why I can't hear you. If you
say another word I must go away."

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"/ don't understand you," faltered Lapham, in bewilderment,
which absorbed even his shame.

"You exaggerate the effect of what has happened," said the
young man. "It's enough, more than enough, for you to have
mentioned the matter to me, and I think it's unbecoming in
me to hear you."

He made a movement toward the door, but Lapham
stopped him with a tragic humility of his appeal. "Don't go
yet! I can't let you. I've disgusted you, I see that; but I didn't
mean to. I I take it back."

"Oh, there's nothing to take back," said Corey, with a re-
pressed shudder for the abasement which he had seen. "But let
us say no more about it think no more. There wasn't one of
the gentlemen present last night who didn't understand the
matter precisely as my father and I did, and that fact must end
it between us two."

He went out into the larger office beyond, leaving Lapham
helpless to prevent his going. It had become a vital necessity
with him to think the best of Lapham, but his mind was in a
whirl of whatever thoughts were most injurious. He thought
of him the night before in the company of those ladies and
gentlemen, and he quivered in resentment of his vulgar, brag-
gart, uncouth nature. He recognised his own allegiance to the
exclusiveness to which he was born and bred, as a man per-
ceives his duty to his country when her rights are invaded. His
eye fell on the porter going about in his shirt-sleeves to make
the place fast for the night, and he said to himself that Dennis
was not more plebeian than his master; that the gross appe-
tites, the blunt sense, the purblind ambition, the stupid ar-
rogance were the same in both, and the difference was in a
brute will that probably left the porter the gentler man of the
two. The very innocence of Lapham's life in the direction in
which he had erred wrought against him in the young man's
mood: it contained the insult of clownish inexperience. Amidst
the stings and flashes of his wounded pride, all the social tradi-

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tions, all the habits of feeling, which he had silenced more and
more by force of will during the past months, asserted their
natural sway, and he rioted in his contempt of the offensive
boor, who was even more offensive in his shame than in his
trespass. He said to himself that he was a Corey, as if that were
somewhat; yet he knew that at the bottom of his heart all the
time was that which must control him at last, and which
seemed sweetly to be suffering his rebellion, secure of his sub-
mission in the end. It was almost with the girl's voice that it
seemed to plead with him, to undo in him, effect by effect, the
work of his indignant resentment, to set all things in another
and fairer light, to give him hopes, to suggest palliations, to
protest against injustices. It was in Lapham's favour that he
was so guiltless in the past, and now Corey asked himself if it
were the first time he could have wished a guest at his father's
table to have taken less wine; whether Lapham was not rather
to be honoured for not knowing how to contain his folly where
a veteran transgressor might have held his tongue. He asked
himself, with a thrill of sudden remorse, whether, when Lap-
ham humbled himself in the dust so shockingly, he had shown
him the sympathy to which such abandon had the right; and
he had to own that he had met him on the gentlemanly
ground, sparing himself and asserting the superiority of his
sort, and not recognising that Lapham's humiliation came
from the sense of wrong, which he had helped to accumulate
upon him by superfinely standing aloof and refusing to touch
him.

He shut his desk and hurried out into the early night, not to
go anywhere, but to walk up and down, to try to find his way
out of the chaos, which now seemed ruin, and now the ma-
terials out of which fine actions and a happy life might be
shaped. Three hours later he stood at Lapham's door.

At times what he now wished to do had seemed for ever im-
possible, and again it had seemed as if he could not wait a mo-
ment longer. He had not been careless, but very mindful of

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THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

what he knew must be the feelings of his own family in regard
to the Laphams, and he had not concealed from himself that
his family had great reason and justice on their side in not
wishing him to alienate himself from their common life and
associations. The most that he could urge to himself was that
they had not all the reason and justice; but he had hesitated
and delayed because they had so much. Often he could not
make it appear right that he should merely please himself in
what chiefly concerned himself. He perceived how far apart
in all their experiences and ideals the Lapham girls and his
sisters were; how different Mrs. Lapham was from his mother;
how grotesquely unlike were his father and Lapham; and the
disparity had not always amused him.

He had often taken it very seriously, and sometimes he said
that he must forego the hope on which his heart was set. There
had been many times in the past months when he had said
that he must go no further, and as often as he had taken this
stand he had yielded it, upon this or that excuse, which he was
aware of trumping up. It was part of the complication that he
should be unconscious of the injury he might be doing to some
one besides his family and himself; this was the defect of his
diffidence; and it had come to him in a pang for the first time
when his mother said that she would not have the Laphams
think she wished to make more of the acquaintance than he
did; and then it had come too late. Since that he had suffered
quite as much from the fear that it might not be as that it
might be so; and now, in the mood, romantic and exalted, in
which he found himself concerning Lapham, he was as far as
might be from vain confidence. He ended the question in his
own mind by affirming to himself that he was there, first of
all, to see Lapham and give him an ultimate proof of his own
perfect faith and unabated respect, and to offer him what rep-
aration this involved for that want of sympathy of human-
ity which he had shown.

228

XVI

JL HE Nova Scotia second-girl who answered Corey's ring
said that Lapham had not come home yet.

"Oh," said the young man, hesitating on the outer step.

"I guess you better come in," said the girl, "I'll go and see-
when they're expecting him."

Corey was in the mood to be swayed by any chance. He
obeyed the suggestion of the second-girl's patronising friend-
liness, and let her shut him into the drawing-room, while she
went upstairs to announce him to Penelope.

"Did you tell him father wasn't at home?"

"Yes. He seemed so kind of disappointed, I told him to come
in, and I'd see when he would be in," said the girl, with the
human interest which sometimes replaces in the American
domestic the servile deference of other countries.

A gleam of amusement passed over Penelope's face, as she
glanced at herself in the glass. "Well," she cried finally, drop-
ping from her shoulders the light shawl in which she had been
huddled over a book when Corey rang, "I will go down."

"All right," said the girl, and Penelope began hastily to
amend the disarray of her hair, which she tumbled into a mass
on the top of her little head, setting off the pale dark of her
complexion with a flash of crimson ribbon at her throat. She
moved across the carpet once or twice with the quaint grace
that belonged to her small figure, made a dissatisfied grimace
at it in the glass, caught a handkerchief out of a drawer and
slid it into her pocket, and then descended to Corey.

The Lapham drawing-room in Nankeen Square was in
the parti-coloured paint which the Colonel had hoped to repeat

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in his new house: the trim of the doors and windows was in
light green and the panels in salmon; the walls were a plain
tint of French grey paper, divided by gilt mouldings into broad
panels with a wide stripe of red velvet paper running up the
corners; the chandelier was of massive imitation bronze; the
mirror over the mantel rested on a fringed mantel-cover of
green reps, and heavy curtains of that stuff hung from gilt
lambrequin frames at the window; the carpet was of a small
pattern in crude green, which, at the time Mrs. Lapham
bought it, covered half the new floors in Boston. In the pan-
elled spaces on the walls were some stone-coloured landscapes,
representing the mountains and canons of the West, which
the Colonel and his wife had visited on one of the early official
railroad excursions. In front of the long windows looking into
the Square were statues, kneeling figures which turned their
backs upon the company within-doors, and represented al-
legories of Faith and Prayer to people without. A white marble
group of several figures, expressing an Italian conception of
Lincoln Freeing the Slaves, a Latin negro and his wife,
with our Eagle flapping his wings in approval, at Lincoln's
feet, occupied one corner, and balanced the what-not of an
earlier period in another. These phantasms added their chill to
that imparted by the tone of the walls, the landscapes, and the
carpets, and contributed to the violence of the contrast when
the chandelier was lighted up full glare, and the heat of the
whole furnace welled up from the registers into the quivering
atmosphere on one of the rare occasions when the Laphams in-
vited company.

Corey had not been in this room before; the family had al-
ways received him in what they called the sitting-room. Penel-
ope looked into this first, and then she looked into the parlour,
with a smile that broke into a laugh as she discovered him
standing under the single burner which the second-girl had
lighted for him in the chandelier.

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"I don't understand how you came to be put in there," she
said, as she led the way to the cozier place, "unless it was be-
cause Alice thought you were only here on probation, anyway.
Father hasn't got home yet, but I'm expecting him every mo-
ment; I don't know what's keeping him. Did the girl tell you
that mother and Irene were out?"

"No, she didn't say. It's very good of you to see me." She
had not seen the exaltation which he had been feeling, he
perceived with half a sigh; it must all be upon this lower level;
perhaps it was best so. "There was something I wished to say
to your father I hope," he broke off, "you're better to-
night."

"Oh yes, thank you," said Penelope, remembering that she
had not been well enough to go to dinner the night before.

"We all missed you very much."

"Oh, thank you! I'm afraid you wouldn't have missed me
if I had been there."

"Oh yes, we should," said Corey, "I assure you."

They looked at each other.

"I really think I believed I was saying something," said the
girl.

"And so did I," replied the young man. They laughed rather
wildly, and then they both became rather grave.

He took the chair she gave him, and looked across at her,
where she sat on the other side of the hearth, in a chair lower
than his, with her hands dropped in her lap, and the back of
her head on her shoulders as she looked up at him. The soft-
coal fire in the grate purred and flickered; the drop-light cast
a mellow radiance on her face. She let her eyes fall, and then
lifted them for an irrelevant glance at the clock on the mantel.

"Mother and Irene had gone to the Spanish Students* con-
cert."

"Oh, have they?" asked Corey; and he put his hat, which
he had been holding in his hand, on the floor beside his chair.

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She looked down at it tor no reason, and then looked up at
his face for no other, and turned a little red. Corey turned a
little red himself. She who had always been so easy with him
now became a little constrained.

"Do you know how warm it is out-of-doors?" he asked.

"No; is it warm? I haven't been out all day."

"It's like a summer night."

She turned her face towards the fire, and then started ab-
ruptly. "Perhaps it's too warm for you here?"

"Oh no, it's very comfortable."

"I suppose it's the cold of the last few days that's still in the
house. I was reading with a shawl on when you came."

"I interrupted you."

"Oh no. I had finished the book. I was just looking over it
again."

"Do you like to read books over?"

"Yes; books that I like at all."

"What was it?" asked Corey.

The girl hesitated. "It has rather a sentimental name. Did
you ever read it? Tears, Idle Tears."

"Oh yes; they were talking of that last night; it's a famous
book with ladies. They break their hearts over it. Did it make
you cry?"

"Oh, it's pretty easy to cry over a book," said Penelope,
laughing; "and that one is very natural till you come to the
main point. Then the naturalness of all the rest makes that
seem natural too; but I guess it's rather forced."

"Her giving him up to the other one?"

"Yes; simply because she happened to know that the other
one had cared for him first. Why should she have done it?
What right had she?"

"I don't know. I suppose that the self-sacrifice "

"But it wasn't self-sacrifice or not self-sacrifice alone. She
was sacrificing him too; and for some one who couldn't ap-

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SILAS LAPHAM

predate him half as much as she could. I'm provoked with
myself when I think how I cried over that book for I did cry.
It's silly it's wicked for any one to do what that girl did.
Why can't they let people have a chance to behave reasonably
in stories?"

"Perhaps they couldn't make it so attractive," suggested
Corey, with a smile.

"It would be novel, at any rate," said the girl. "But so it
would in real life, I suppose," she added.

"I don't know. Why shouldn't people in love behave sen-
sibly?"

"That's a very serious question," said Penelope gravely. "I
couldn't answer it," and she left him the embarrassment of
supporting an inquiry which she had certainly instigated her-
self. She seemed to have finally recovered her own ease in do-
ing this. "Do you admire our autumnal display, Mr. Corey?"

"Your display?"

"The trees in the Square. We think it's quite equal to an
opening at Jordan & Marsh's."

"Ah, I'm afraid you wouldn't let me be serious even about
your maples."

"Oh yes, I should if you like to be serious."

"Don't you?"

"Well not about serious matters. That's the reason that book
made me cry."

"You make fun of everything. Miss Irene was telling me last
night about you."

"Then it's no use for me to deny it so soon. I must give Irene
a talking to."

"I hope you won't forbid her to talk about you!"

She had taken up a fan from the table, and held it, now be-
tween her face and the fire, and now between her face and
him. Her little visage, with that arch, lazy look in it, topped by
its mass of dusky hair, and dwindling from the full cheeks to

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the small chin, had a Japanese effect in the subdued light, and
it had the charm which comes to any woman with happiness.
It would be hard to say how much of this she perceived that he
felt. They talked about other things a while, and then she
came back to what he had said. She glanced at him obliquely
round her fan, and stopped moving it. "Does Irene talk about
me?" she asked.

"I think so yes. Perhaps it's only I who talk about you. You
must blame me if it's wrong," he returned.

"Oh, I didn't say it was wrong," she replied. "But I hope if
you said anything very bad of me you'll let me know what it
was, so that I can reform "

"No, don't change, please!" cried the young man.

Penelope caught her breath, but went on resolutely, "or re-
buke you for speaking evil of dignities." She looked down at
the fan, now flat in her lap, and tried to govern her head, but
it trembled, and she remained looking down. Again they let
the talk stray, and then it was he who brought it back to them-
selves, as if it had not left them.

"I have to talk of you," said Corey, "because I get to talk to
you so seldom."

"You mean that I do all the talking when we're together?"
She glanced sidewise at him; but she reddened after speaking
the last word.

"We're so seldom together," he pursued.

"I don't know what you mean "

"Sometimes I've thought I've been afraid that you avoided
me."

"A voided you?"

"Yes! Tried not to be alone with me."

She might have told him that there was no reason why she
should be alone with him, and that it was very strange he
should make this complaint of her. But she did not. She kept

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SILAS LAPHAM

looking down at the fan, and then she lifted her burning face
and looked at the clock again. "Mother and Irene will be sorry
to miss you," she gasped.

He instantly rose and came towards her. She rose too, and
mechanically put out her hand. He took it as if to say good-
night. "I didn't mean to send you away," she besought him.

"Oh, I'm not going," he answered simply. "I wanted to say-
to say that it's I who make her talk about you. To say I

There is something I want to say to you; I've said it so often to
myself that I feel as if you must know it." She stood quite still,
letting him keep her hand, and questioning his face with a be-
wildered gaze. "You must know she must have told you
she must have guessed " Penelope turned white, but out-
wardly quelled the panic that sent the blood to her heart. "I
I didn't expect I hoped to have seen your father but I must
speak now, whatever I love you!"

She freed her hand from both of those he had closed upon
it, and went back from him across the room with a sinuous
spring. "Me!" Whatever potential complicity had lurked in
her heart, his words brought her only immeasurable dismay,

He came towards her again. "Yes, you. Who else?"

She fended him off with an imploring gesture. "I thought-^
I_i t was

She shut her lips tight, and stood looking at him where he
remained in silent amaze. Then her words came again, shud-
deringly. "Oh, what have you done?"

"Upon my soul," he said, with a vague smile, "I don't know,
I hope no harm?"

"Oh, don't laugh!" she cried, laughing hysterically herself.
"Unless you want me to think you the greatest wretch in the
world!"

"I?" he responded. "For heaven's sake tell me what you
mean!"

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"You know I can't tell you. Can you say can you put your
hand on your heart and say that you say you never meant
that you meant me all along?"

"Yes! yes! Who else? I came here to see your father, and to

tell him that I wished to tell you this to ask him But

what does it matter? You must have known it you must
have seen and it's for you to answer me. I've been abrupt, I
know, and I've startled you; but if you love me, you can forgive
that to my loving you so long before I spoke."

She gazed at him with parted lips.

"Oh, mercy! What shall I do? If it's true what you say
you must go!" she said. "And you must never come any more.
Do you promise that?"

"Certainly not," said the young man. "Why should I prom-
ise such a thing so abominably wrong? I could obey if you
didn't love me "

"Oh, I don't! Indeed I don't! Now will you obey."

"No. I don't believe you."

"Oh!"

He possessed himself of her hand again.

"My love my dearest! What is this trouble, that you can't
tell it? It can't be anything about yourself. If it is anything
about any one else, it wouldn't make the least difference in the
world, no matter what it was. I would be only too glad to
show by any act or deed I could that nothing could change me
towards you."

"Oh, you don't understand!"

"No, I don't. You must tell me."

"I will never do that."

"Then I will stay here till your mother comes, and ask her
what it is."

"Ask her?"

"Yes! Do you think I will give you up till I know why I
must?"

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SILAS LAPHAM

"You force me to it! Will you go if I tell you, and never let
any human creature know what you have said to me?"

"Not unless you give me leave."

"That will be never. Well, then " She stopped, and made

two or three ineffectual efforts to begin again. "No, no! I can't.
You must go!"

"I will not go!"

"You said you loved me. If you do, you will go."

He dropped the hands he had stretched towards her, and she
hid her face in her own.

"There!" she said, turning it suddenly upon him. "Sit down
there. And will you promise me on your honour not to
speak not to try to persuade me not to touch me? You
won't touch me?"

"I will obey you, Penelope."

"As if you were never to see me again? As if I were dying?"

"I will do what you say. But I shall see you again; and don't
talk of dying. This is the beginning of life "

"No. It's the end," said the girl, resuming at last something
of the hoarse drawl which the tumult of her feeling had
broken into those half-articulate appeals. She sat down too,
and lifted her face towards him. "It's the end of life for me, be-
cause I know now that I must have been playing false from the
beginning. You don't know what I mean, and I can never tell
you. It isn't my secret it's some one else's. You you must
never come here again. I can't tell you why, and you must
never try to know. Do you promise?"

"You can forbid me. I must do what you say."

"I do forbid you, then. And you shall not think I am
cruel "

"How could I think that?"

"Oh, how hard you make it!"

Corey laughed for very despair. "Can I make it easier by
disobeying you?"

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THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

"I know I am talking crazily. But I'm not crazy."

"No, no," he said, with some wild notion of comforting her;
"but try to tell me this trouble! There is nothing under heaven
no calamity, no sorrow that I wouldn't gladly share with
you, or take all upon myself if I could!"

"I know! But this you can't. Oh, my "

"Dearest! Wait! Think! Let me ask your mother your
father "

She gave a cry.

"No! If you do that, you will make me hate you! Will
you "

The rattling of a latch-key was heard in the outer door.

"Promise!" cried Penelope.

"Oh, I promise!"

"Good-bye!" She suddenly flung her arms round his neck,
and, pressing her cheek tight against his, flashed out of the
room by one door as her father entered it by another.

Corey turned to him in a daze. "I I called to speak with

you about a matter But it's so late now. I'll 111 see you

to-morrow."

"No time like the present," said Lapham, with a fierce-
ness that did not seem referable to Corey. He had his hat still
on, and he glared at the young man out of his blue eyes with a
fire that something else must have kindled there.

"I really can't now," said Corey weakly. "It will do quite as
well to-morrow. Good night, sir."

"Good night," answered Lapham abruptly, following him
to the door, and shutting it after him. "I think the devil must
have got into pretty much everybody to-night," he muttered,
coming back to the room, where he put down his hat. Then he
went to the kitchen-stairs and called down, "Hello, Alice! I
want something to eat!"

XVII

"W,

HAT'S the reason the girls never get down to breakfast
any more?" asked Lapham, when he met his wife at the table
in the morning. He had been up an hour and a half, and he
spoke with the severity of a hungry man. "It seems to me
they don't amount to anything. Here I am, at my time of life,
up the first one in the house. I ring the bell for the cook at
quarter-past six every morning, and the breakfast is on the
table at half -past seven right along, like clockwork, but I never
see anybody but you till I go to the office."

"Oh yes, you do, Si," said his wife soothingly. "The girls are
nearly always down. But they're young, and it tires them more
than it does us to get up early."

"They can rest afterwards. They don't do anything after they
are up," grumbled Lapham.

"Well, that's your fault, ain't it? You oughtn't to have
made so much money, and then they'd have had to work." She
laughed at Lapham's Spartan mood, and went on to excuse
the young people. "Irene's been up two nights hand running,
and Penelope says she ain't well. What makes you so cross
about the girls? Been doing something you're ashamed of?"

"I'll tell you when I've been doing anything to be ashamed
of," growled Lapham.

"Oh no, you won't!" said his wife jollily. "You'll only be
hard on the rest of us. Come now, Si; what is it?"

Lapham frowned into his coffee with sulky dignity, and
said, without looking up, "I wonder what that fellow wanted
here last night?"

"What fellow?"

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THE RISE OF

"Corey. I found him here when I came home, and he said
he wanted to see me; but he wouldn't stop."

"Where was he?"

"In the sitting-room."

"Was Pen there?"

"/ didn't see her."

Mrs. Lapham paused, with her hand on the cream-jug.
*' Why, what in the land did he want ? Did he say he wanted
you?"

"That's what he said."

"And then he wouldn't stay?"

"No."

"Well, then, I'll tell you just what it is, Silas Lapham. He
came here" she looked about the room and lowered her
voice "to see you about Irene, and then he hadn't the cour-
age."

"I guess he's got courage enough to do pretty much what he
wants to," said Lapham glumly. "All I know is, he was here.
You better ask Pen about it, if she ever gets down."

"I guess I shan't wait for her," said Mrs. Lapham; and, as
her husband closed the front door after him, she opened that
of her daughter's room and entered abruptly.

The girl sat at the window, fully dressed, and as if she had
been sitting there a long time. Without rising, she turned her
face towards her mother. It merely showed black against the
light, and revealed nothing till her mother came close to her
with successive questions. "Why, how long have you been up,
Pen ? Why don't you come to your breakfast ? Did you see Mr.
Corey when he called last night ? Why, what's the matter with
you ? What have you been crying about ?"

"Have I been crying?"

"Yes! Your cheeks are all wet!"

"I thought they were on fire. Well, I'll tell you what's hap-
pened." She rose, and then fell back in her chair. "Lock the

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SILAS LAPHAM

door!" she ordered, and her mother mechanically obeyed. "I
don't want Irene in here. There's nothing the matter. Only,
Mr. Corey offered himself to me last night."

Her mother remained looking at her, helpless, not so much
with amaze, perhaps, as dismay.

"Oh, Tin not a ghost! I wish I was! You had better sit down,
mother. You have got to know all about it."

Mrs. Lapham dropped nervelessly into the chair at the
other window, and while the girl went slowly but briefly on,
touching only the vital points of the story, and breaking at
times into a bitter drollery, she sat as if without the power to
speak or stir.

"Well, that's all, mother. I should say I had dreamt it, if I
had slept any last night; but I guess it really happened."

The mother glanced round at the bed, and said, glad to
occupy herself delayingly with the minor care : "Why, you have
been sitting up all night! You will kill yourself."

"I don't know about killing myself, but I've been sitting up
all night," answered the girl. Then, seeing that her mother
remained blankly silent again, she demanded, "Why don't you
blame me, mother ? Why don't you say that I led him on, and
tried to get him away from her? Don't you believe I did?"

Her mother made her no answer, as if these ravings of self-
accusal needed none. "Do you think," she asked simply, "that
he got the idea you cared for him ?"

"He knew it! How could I keep it from him? I said I didn't
at first!"

"It was no use," sighed the mother. "You might as well said
you did. It couldn't help Irene any, if you didn't."

"I always tried to help her with him, even when I "

"Yes, I know. But she never was equal to him. I saw that
from the start; but I tried to blind myself to it. And when he
kept coming "

"You never thought of me!" cried the girl, with a bitterness

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that reached her mother's heart. "I was nobody! I couldn't feel!
No one could care for me!" The turmoil of despair, of tri-
umph, of remorse and resentment, which filled her soul, tried
to express itself in the words.

"No,'' said the mother humbly. "I didn't think of you. Or I
didn't think of you enough. It did come across me sometimes

that may be But it didn't seem as if And your going on

so for Irene "

"You let me go on. You made me always go and talk with
him for her, and you didn't think I would talk to him for my-
self. Well, I didn't!"

"I'm punished for it. When did you begin to care for
him?"

"How do I know? What difference does it make? It's all
over now, no matter when it began. He won't come here any
more, unless I let him." She could not help betraying her pride
in this authority of hers, but she went on anxiously enough,
"What will you say to Irene? She's safe as far as I'm con-
cerned; but if he don't care for her, what will you do?"

"I don't know what to do," said Mrs. Lapham. She sat in an
apathy from which she apparently could not rouse herself.
"I don't see as anything can be done."

Penelope laughed in a pitying derision.

"Well, let things go on then. But they won't go on."

"No, they won't go on," echoed her mother. "She's pretty
enough, and she's capable; and your father's got the money
I don't know what I'm saying! She ain't equal to him, and she
never was. I kept feeling it all the time, and yet I kept blind-
ing myself."

"If he had ever cared for her," said Penelope, "it wouldn't
have mattered whether she was equal to him or not. I'm not
equal to him either."

Her mother went on: "I might have thought it was you;

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SILAS LAPHAM

but I had got set Well! I can see it all clear enough, now it's

too late. 7 don't know what to do."

"And what do you expect me to do?" demanded the girl.
"Do you want me to go to Irene and tell her that I've got
him away from her?"

"O good Lord!" cried Mrs. Lapham. "What shall I do?
What do you want I should do, Pen?"

"Nothing for me," said Penelope. "I've had it out with my-
self. Now do the best you can for Irene."

"I couldn't say you had done wrong, if you was to marry him
to-day."

"Mother!"

"No, I couldn't. I couldn't say but what you had been good
and faithful all through, and you had a perfect right to do it.
There ain't any one to blame. He's behaved like a gentleman,
and I can see now that he never thought of her, and that it
was you all the while. Well, marry him, then! He's got the
right, and so have you."

"What about Irene? I don't want you to talk about me. I
can take care of myself."

"She's nothing but a child. It's only a fancy with her. She'll
get over it. She hain't really got her heart set on him."

"She's got her heart set on him, mother. She's got her whole
life set on him. You know that."

"Yes, that's so," said the mother, as promptly as if she had
been arguing to that rather than the contrary effect.

"If I could give him to her, I would. But he isn't mine to
give." She added in a burst of despair, "He isn't mine to keep!"

"Well," said Mrs. Lapham, "she has got to bear it. I don't
know what's to come of it all. But she's got to bear her share
of it." She rose and went toward the door.

Penelope ran after her in a sort of terror. "You're not going to
tell Irene?" she gasped, seizing her mother by either shoulder.

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THE RISE OF

"Yes, I am," said Mrs. Lapham. "If she's a woman grown,
she can bear a woman's burden."

"I can't let you tell Irene," said the girl, letting fall her face
on her mother's neck. "Not Irene," she moaned. "I'm afraid to
let you. How can I ever look at her again?"

"Why, you haven't done anything, Pen," said her mother
soothingly.

"I wanted to! Yes, I must have done something. How could
I help it? I did care for him from the first, and I must have
tried to make him like me. Do you think I did? No, no! You
mustn't tell Irene! Not not yet! Mother! Yes! I did try to
get him from her!" she cried, lifting her head, and suddenly
looking her mother in the face with those large dim eyes of
hers. "What do you think? Even last night! It was the first time
I ever had him all to myself, for myself, and I know now that I
tried to make him think that I was pretty and funny. And I
didn't try to make him think of her. I knew that I pleased
him, and I tried to please him more. Perhaps I could have kept
him from saying that he cared for me; but when I saw he did
I must have seen it I couldn't. I had never had him to myself,
and for myself before. I needn't have seen him at all, but I
wanted to see him; and when I was sitting there alone with
him, how do I know what I did to let him feel that I cared for
him ? Now, will you tell Irene ? I never thought he did care for
me, and never expected him to. But I liked him. Yes I did like
him! Tell her that! Or else / will."

"If it was to tell her he was dead," began Mrs. Lapham ab-
sently.

"How easy it would be!" cried the girl in self -mockery. "But
he's worse than dead to her; and so am I. I've turned it over a
million ways, mother; I've looked at it in every light you can
put it in, and I can't make anything but misery out of it. You
can see the misery at the first glance, and you can't see more or
less if you spend your life looking at it." She laughed again, as

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SILAS LAPHAM

if the hopelessness of the thing amused her. Then she flew to
the extreme of self-assertion. "Well, I have a right to him, and
he has a right to me. If he's never done anything to make her
think he cared for her, and I know he hasn't; it's all been
our doing, then he's free and I'm free. We can't make her

happy whatever we do; and why shouldn't I No, that

won't do! I reached that point before!" She broke again into
her desperate laugh. "You may try now, mother!"

"I'd best speak to your father first "

Penelope smiled a little more forlornly than she had laughed.

"Well, yes; the Colonel will have to know. It isn't a trouble
that I can keep to myself exactly. It seems to belong to too
many other people."

Her mother took a crazy encouragement from her return to
her old way of saying things. "Perhaps he can think of some-
thing."

"Oh, I don't doubt but the Colonel will know just what to
do!"

"You mustn't be too down-hearted about it. It it'll all
come right "

"You tell Irene that, mother."

Mrs. Lapham had put her hand on the door-key; she
dropped it, and looked at the girl with a sort of beseeching
appeal for the comfort she could not imagine herself. "Don't
look at me, mother," said Penelope, shaking her head. "You
know that if Irene were to die without knowing it, it wouldn't
come right for me."

"Pen!"

"I've read of cases where a girl gives up the man that loves
her so as to make some other girl happy that the man doesn't
love. That might be done."

"Your father would think you were a fool," said Mrs. Lap-
ham, finding a sort of refuge in her strong disgust for the
pseudo heroism. "No! If there's to be any giving up, let it be

THE RISE OF

by the one that shan't make anybody but herself suffer. There's
trouble and sorrow enough in the world, without making it
on purpose!"

She unlocked the door, but Penelope slipped round and set
herself against it. "Irene shall not give up!"

"I will see your father about it," said the mother. "Let me
out now "

"Don't let Irene come here!"

"No. I will tell her that you haven't slept. Go to bed now,
and try to get some rest. She isn't up herself yet. You must
have some breakfast."

"No; let me sleep if I can. I can get something when I wake
up. I'll come down if I can't sleep. Life has got to go on. It
does when there's a death in the house, and this is only a
little worse."

"Don't you talk nonsense!" cried Mrs. Lapham, with angry
authority.

"Well, a little better, then," said Penelope, with meek con-
cession.

Mrs. Lapham attempted to say something, and could not.
She went out and opened Irene's door. The girl lifted her
head drowsily from her pillow. "Don't disturb your sister
when you get up, Irene. She hasn't slept well "

"Please don't talk! I'm almost dead with sleep!" returned
Irene. "Do go, mamma! I shan't disturb her." She turned her
face down in the pillow, and pulled the covering up over her
ears.

The mother slowly closed the door and went downstairs,
feeling bewildered and baffled almost beyond the power to
move. The time had been when she would have tried to find
out why this judgment had been sent upon her. But now she
could not feel that the innocent suffering of others was in-
flicted for her fault; she shrank instinctively from that cruel
and egotistic misinterpretation of the mystery of pain ard loss.

246

SILAS LAPHAM

She saw her two children, equally if differently dear to hei,
destined to trouble that nothing could avert, and she could
not blame either of them; she could not blame the means of
this misery to them; he was as innocent as they, and though
her heart was sore against him in this first moment, she could
still be just to him in it. She was a woman who had been used to
seek the light by striving; she had hitherto literally worked to
it. But it is the curse of prosperity that it takes work away from
us, and shuts that door to hope and health of spirit. In this
house, where everything had come to be done for her, she had
no tasks to interpose between her and her despair. She sat down
in her own room and let her hands fall in her lap, the hands
that had once been so helpful and busy, and tried to think it
all out. She had never heard of the fate that was once supposed
to appoint the sorrows of men irrespective of their blameless-
ness or blame, before the time when it came to be believed
that sorrows were penalties; but in her simple way she recog-
nised something like that mythic power when she rose from
her struggle with the problem, and said aloud to herself, "Well,
the witch is in it." Turn which way she would, she saw no ex-
cape from the misery to come the misery which had come
already to Penelope and herself, and that must come to Irene
and her father. She started when she definitely thought of her
husband, and thought with what violence it would work in
every fibre of his rude strength. She feared that, and she feared
something worse the effect which his pride and ambition
might seek to give it; and it was with terror of this, as well as
the natural trust with which a woman must turn to her hus-
band in any anxiety at last, that she felt she could not wait for
evening to take counsel with him. When she considered how
wrongly he might take it all, it seemed as if it were already
known to him, and she was impatient to prevent his error.

She sent out for a messenger, whom she despatched with a
note to his place of business: "Silas, I should like to ride with

247

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

you this afternoon. Can't you come home early? Persis." And
she was at dinner with Irene, evading her questions about Pe-
nelope, when answer came that he would be at the house with
the buggy at half-past two. It is easy to put off a girl who has
but one thing in her head; but though Mrs. Lapham could es-
cape without telling anything of Penelope, she could not escape
seeing how wholly Irene was engrossed with hopes now turned
so vain and impossible. She was still talking of that dinner, of
nothing but that dinner, and begging for flattery of herself
and praise of him, which her mother had till now been so ready
to give.

"Seems to me you don't take very much interest, mamma!"
she said, laughing and blushing at one point.

"Yes, yes, I do," protested Mrs. Lapham, and then the girl
prattled on.

"I guess I shall get one of those pins that Nanny Corey had
in her hair. I think it would become me, don't you?"

"Yes; but Irene I don't like to have you go on so, till un-
less he's said something to show You oughtn't to give your-
self up to thinking " But at this the girl turned so white,

and looked such reproach at her, that she added frantically:
"Yes, get the pin. It is just the thing for you! But don't dis-
turb Penelope. Let her alone till I get back. I'm going out to
ride with your father. He'll be here in half an hour. Are you
through? Ring, then. Get yourself that fan you saw the other
day. Your father won't say anything; he likes to have you look
well. I could see his eyes on you half the time the other night."

"I should have liked to have Pen go with me," said Irene,
restored to her normal state of innocent selfishness by these
flatteries. "Don't you suppose she'll be up in time ? What's the
matter with her that she didn't sleep?"

"I don't know. Better let her alone."

"Well," submitted Irene.

248

XVIII

M,

LRS. LAPHAM went away to put on her bonnet and cloak,
and she was waiting at the window when her husband drove
up. She opened the door and ran down the steps. "Don't get
out; I can help myself in," and she clambered to his side, while
he kept the fidgeting mare still with voice and touch.

"Where do you want I should go?" he asked, turning the
buggy.

"Oh, I don't care. Out Brookline way, I guess. I wish you
hadn't brought this fool of a horse," she gave way petulantly.
"I wanted to have a talk."

"When I can't drive this mare and talk too, I'll sell out al-
together," said Lapham. "She'll be quiet enough when she's
had her spin."

"Well," said his wife; and while they were making their way
across the city to the Milldam she answered certain questions
he asked about some points in the new house.

"I should have liked to have you stop there," he began; but she
answered so quickly, "Not today," that he gave it up and turned
his horse's head westward when they struck Beacon Street.

He let the mare out, and he did not pull her in till he left the
Brighton road and struck off under the low boughs that met
above one of the quiet streets of Brookline, where the stone
cottages, with here and there a patch of determined ivy on their
northern walls, did what they could to look English amid the
glare of the autumnal foliage. The smooth earthen track under
the mare's hoofs was scattered with flakes of the red and yel-
low gold that made the air luminous around them, and the
perspective was gay with innumerable tints and tones.

249

THE RISE OF

"Pretty sightly," said Lapham, with a long sigh, letting the
reins lie loose in his vigilant hand, to which he seemed to rele-
gate the whole charge of the mare. "I want to talk with you
about Rogers, Persis. He's been getting in deeper and deeper
with me; and last night he pestered me half to death to go in
with him in one of his schemes. I ain't going to blame anybody,
but I hain't got very much confidence in Rogers. And I told
him so last night."

"Oh, don't talk to me about Rogers!" his wife broke in.
"There's something a good deal more important than Rog-
ers in the world, and more important than your business. It
seems as if you couldn't think of anything else that and the
new house. Did you suppose I wanted to ride so as to talk Rog-
ers with you?" she demanded, yielding to the necessity a wife
feels of making her husband pay for her suffering, even if he
has not inflicted it. "I declare "

"Well, hold on, now!" said Lapham. "What do you want to
talk about ? I'm listening."

His wife began, "Why, it's just this, Silas Lapham!" and
then she broke off to say, "Well, you may wait, now starting
me wrong, when it's hard enough anyway."

Lapham silently turned his whip over and over in his hand
and waited.

"Did you suppose," she asked at last, "that that young Corey
had been coming to see Irene?"

"I don't know what I supposed," replied Lapham sullenly.
"You always said so." He looked sharply at her under his
lowering brows.

"Well, he hasn't," said Mrs. Lapham; and she replied to the
frown that blackened on her husband's face. "And I can tell
you what, if you take it in that way I shan't speak another
word."

"Who's takin' it what way?" retorted Lapham savagely.
"What are you drivin' at?"

250

SILAS LAPHAM

"I want you should promise that you'll hear me out quietly."

"I'll hear you out if you'll give me a chance. I haven't said a
word yet."

"Well, I'm not going to have you flying into forty furies, and
looking like a perfect thundercloud at the very start. I've had
to bear it, and you've got to bear it too."

"Well, let me have a chance at it, then."

"It's nothing to blame anybody about, as I can see, and the
only question is, what's the best thing to do about it. There's
only one thing we can do; for if he don't care for the child,
nobody wants to make him. If he hasn't been coming to se$
her, he hasn't, and that's all there is to it,"

"No, it ain't!" exclaimed Lapham.

"There!" protested his wife.

"If he hasn't been coming to see her, what has he been com-
ing for?"

"He's been coming to see Pen!" cried the wife. "Now are
you satisfied?" Her tone implied that he had brought it all
upon them; but at the sight of the swift passions working in
his face to a perfect comprehension of the whole trouble, she
fell to trembling, and her broken voice lost all the spurious
indignation she had put into it. "O Silas! what are we going to
clo about it ? I'm afraid it'll kill Irene."

Lapham pulled off the loose driving-glove from his right
hand with the fingers of his left, in which the reins lay. He
passed it over his forehead, and then flicked from it the mois-
ture it had gathered there. He caught his breath once or twice,
like a man who meditates a struggle with superior force and
then remains passive in its grasp.

His wife felt the need of comforting him, as she had felt the
need of afflicting him. "I don't say but what it can be made to
come out all right in the end. All I say is, I don't see my way
clear yet."

"What makes you think he likes Pen?" he asked quietly.

251

THE RISE OF

"He told her so last night, and she told me this morning.
Was he at the office to-day?"

'"Yes, he was there. I haven't been there much myself. He
didn't say anything to me. Does Irene know?"

"No; I left her getting ready to go out shopping. She wants
to get a pin like the one Nanny Corey had on."

"O my Lord!" groaned Lapham.

*'It's been Pen from the start, I guess, or almost from the
start. I don't say but what he was attracted some by Irene at the
very first; but I guess it's been Pen ever since he saw her; and
we've taken up with a notion, and blinded ourselves with it.
Time and again I've had my doubts whether he cared for Irene
any; but I declare to goodness, when he kept coming, I never
hardly thought of Pen, and I couldn't help believing at last he
did care for Irene. Did it ever strike you he might be after
Pen?"

"No. I took what you said. I supposed you knew."

"Do you blame me, Silas?" she asked timidly.

"No. What's the use of blaming? We don't either of us want
anything but the children's good. What's it all of it for, if it
ain't for that? That's what we've both slaved for all our lives."

"Yes, I know. Plenty of people lose their children," she sug-
gested.

"Yes, but that don't comfort me any. I never was one to feel
good because another man felt bad. How would you have liked
it if some one had taken comfort because his boy lived when
ours died? No, I can't do it. And this is worse than death, some-
ways. That comes and it goes; but this looks as if it was one
of those things that had come to stay. The way I look at it,
there ain't any hope for anybody. Suppose we don't want Pen
to have him; will that help Irene any, if he don't want her?
Suppose we don't want to let him have either; does that help
either!"

"You talk," exclaimed Mrs. Lapham, "as if our say was go-

SILAS LAPHAM

ing to settle it. Do you suppose that Penelope Lapham is a girl
to take up with a fellow that her sister is in love with, and
that she always thought was in love with her sister, and go off
and be happy with him ? Don't you believe but what it would
come back to her, as long as she breathed the breath of life,
how she'd teased her about him, as I've heard Pen tease Irene,
and helped to make her think he was in love with her, by show-
ing that she thought so herself? It's ridiculous!"

Lapham seemed quite beaten down by this argument. His
huge head hung forward over his breast; the reins lay loose in
his moveless hand; the mare took her own way. At last he lifted
his face and shut his heavy jaws.

"Well?" quavered his wife.

"Well," he answered, "if he wants her, and she wants him,
I don't see what that's got to do with it." He looked straight
forward, and not at his wife.

She laid her hands on the reins. "Now, you stop right here,
Silas Lapham! If I thought that if I really believed you could
be willing to break that poor child's heart, and let Pen disgrace
herself by marrying a man that had as good as killed her sister,
just because you wanted Bromfield Corey's son for a son-in-
law

Lapham turned his face now, and gave her a look. "You
had better not believe that, Persis! Get up!" he called to the
mare, without glancing at her, and she sprang forward. "I see
you've got past being any use to yourself on this subject."

"Hello!" shouted a voice in front of him. "Where the devil
yougoin' to?"

"Do you want to fyll somebody?" shrieked his wife.

There was a light crash, and the mare recoiled her length,
and separated their wheels from those of the open buggy in
front which Lapham had driven into. He made his excuses to
the occupant; and the accident relieved the tension of their
feelings, and left them far from the point of mutual injury

253

THE RISE OF

which they had reached in their common trouble and their
unselfish will for their children's good.

It was Lapham who resumed the talk. "I'm afraid we can't
either of us see this thing in the right light. We're too near to
it. I wish to the Lord there was somebody to talk to about it."

"Yes," said his wife; "but there ain't anybody."

"Well, I dunno," suggested Lapham, after a moment; "why
not talk to the minister of your church ? May be he could see
some way out of it."

Mrs. Lapham shook her head hopelessly. "It wouldn't do.
I've never taken up my connection with the church, and I don't
feel as if I'd got any claim on him."

"If he's anything of a man, or anything of a preacher, you
have got a claim on him," urged Lapham; and he spoiled his
argument by adding, "I've contributed enough money to his
church."

"Oh, that's nothing," said Mrs. Lapham. "I ain't well
enough acquainted with Dr. Langworthy, or else I'm too welL
No; if I was to ask any one, I should want to ask a total stran-
ger. But what's the use, Si ? Nobody could make us see it any
different from what it is, and I don't know as I should want
they should."

It blotted out the tender beauty of the day, and weighed
down their hearts ever more heavily within them. They ceased
to talk of it a hundred times, and still came back to it. They
drove on and on. It began to be late. "I guess we better go back,
Si," said his wife; and as he turned without speaking, she
pulled her veil down and began to cry softly behind it, with
low little broken sobs.

Lapham started the mare up and drove swiftly homeward.
At last his wife stopped crying and began trying to find her
pocket. "Here, take mine, Persis," he said kindly, offering her
his handkerchief, and she took it and dried her eyes with it.
"There was one of those fellows there the other night," he

254

SILAS LAPHAM

spoke again, when his wife leaned back against the cushions in
peaceful despair, "that I liked the looks of about as well as any
man I ever saw. I guess he was a pretty good man. It was that
Mr. Sewell." He looked at his wife, but she did not say any-
thing. "Persis," he resumed, "I can't bear to go back with noth-
ing settled in our minds. I can't bear to let you."

"We must, Si," returned his wife, with gentle gratitude. Lap-
ham groaned. "Where does he live?" she asked.

"On Bolingbroke Street. He gave me his number."

"Well, it wouldn't do any good. What could he say to us?"

"Oh, I don't know as he could say anything," said Lapham
hopelessly; and neither of them said anything more till they
crossed the Milldam and found themselves between the rows
of city houses.

"Don't drive past the new house, Si," pleaded his wife. "I
couldn't bear to see it. Drive drive up Bolingbroke Street.
We might as well see where he does live."

"Well," said Lapham. He drove along slowly. "That's the
place," he said finally, stopping the mare and pointing with
his whip.

"It wouldn't do any good," said his wife, in a tone which he
understood as well as he understood her words. He turned the
mare up to the curbstone.

"You take the reins a minute," he said, handing them to
his wife.

He got down and rang the bell, and waited till the door
opened; then he came back and lifted his wife out. "He's in,"
he said.

He got the hitching- weight from under the buggy-seat and
made it fast to the mare's bit.

"Do you think she'll stand with that?" asked Mrs. Lapham.

"I guess so. If she don't, no matter."

"Ain't you afraid she'll take cold," she persisted, trying to
make delay.

2 55

THE RISE OF

"Let her!" said Lapham. He took his wife's trembling hand
under his arm, and drew her to the door.

"He'll think we're crazy," she murmured in her broken
pride.

"Well, we are," said Lapham. "Tell him we'd like to see him
alone a while," he said to the girl who was holding the door
ajar for him, and she showed him into the reception-room,
which had been the Protestant confessional for many burdened
souls before their time, coming, as they did, with the belief that
they were bowed down with the only misery like theirs in the
universe; for each one of us must suffer long to himself before
he can learn that he is but one in a great community of
wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from
the foundation of the world.

They were as loath to touch their trouble when the minister
came in as if it were their disgrace; but Lapham did so at last.
and, with a simple dignity which he had wanted in his bun-
gling and apologetic approaches, he laid the affair clearly before
the minister's compassionate and reverent eye. He spared
Corey's name, but he did not pretend that it was not himself
and his wife and their daughters who were concerned.

"I don't know as I've got any right to trouble you with this
thing," he said, in the moment while Sewell sat pondering the
case, "and I don't know as I've got any warrant for doing it.
But, as I told my wife here, there was something about you
I don't know whether it was anything you said exactly that
made me feel as if you could help us. I guess I didn't say so
much as that to her; but that's the way I felt. And here we are.
And if it ain't all right "

"Surely," said Sewell, "it's all right. I thank you for coming
for trusting your trouble to me. A time comes to every one of
MS when we can't help ourselves, and then we must get others
to help us. If people turn to me at such a time, I feel sure that

256

SILAS LAPHAM

1 was put into the world for something it nothing more than
to give my pity, my sympathy."

The brotherly words, so plain, so sincere, had a welcome in
them that these poor outcasts of sorrow could not doubt.

"Yes," said Lapham huskily, and his wife began to wipe the
tears again under her veil.

Sewell remained silent, and they waited till he should speak*
"We can be of use to one another here, because we can always
be wiser for some one else than we can for ourselves. We can
see another's sins and errors in a more merciful light and that
is always a fairer light than we can our own; and we can look
more sanely at others' afflictions." He had addressed these
words to Lapham; now he turned to his wife. "If some one had
come to you, Mrs. Lapham, in just this perplexity, what would
you have thought?"

"I don't know as I understand you," faltered Mrs. Lapham.

Sewell repeated his words, and added, "I mean, what do you
think some one else ought to do in your place?"

"Was there ever any poor creatures in such a strait before?"
she asked, with pathetic incredulity.

"There's no new trouble under the sun," said the minister.

"Oh, if it was any one else, I should say I should say Why,

of course! I should say that their duty was to let " She

paused.

"One suffer instead of three, if none is to blame?" suggested
Sewell. "That's sense, and that's justice. It's the economy of
pain which naturally suggests itself, and which would insist
upon itself, if we were not all perverted by traditions which
are the figment of the shallowest sentimentality. Tell me, Mrs.
Lapham, didn't this come into your mind when you first
learned how matters stood?"

"Why, yes, it flashed across me. But I didn't think it could
be right."

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THE RISE OF

"And how was it with you, Mr. Lapham?"

"Why, that's what / thought, o course. But I didn't see my
way "

"No," cried the minister, "we are all blinded, we are all
weakened by a false ideal of self-sacrifice. It wraps us round
with its meshes, and we can't fight our way out of it. Mrs. Lap-
ham, what made you feel that it might be better for three to
suffer than one?"

"Why, she did herself. I know she would die sooner than
take him away from her."

"I supposed so!" cried the minister bitterly. "And yet she is
a sensible girl, your daughter?"

"She has more common-sense "

"Of course! But in such a case we somehow think it must be
wrong to use our common-sense. I don't know where this false
ideal comes from, unless it comes from the novels that befool
and debauch almost every intelligence in some degree. It cer-
tainly doesn't come from Christianity, which instantly repudi-
ates it when confronted with it. Your daughter believes, in
spite of her common-sense, that she ought to make herself and
the man who loves her unhappy, in order to assure the life-long
wretchedness of her sister, whom he doesn't love, simply be-
cause her sister saw him and fancied him first! And I'm sorry
to say that ninety-nine young people out of a hundred oh,
nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand! would con-
sider that noble and beautiful and heroic; whereas you know
at the bottom of your hearts that it would be foolish and cruel
and revolting. You know what marriage is! And what it must
be without love on both sides."

The minister had grown quite heated and red in the face.

"I lose all patience!" he went on vehemently. "This poor
child of yours has somehow been brought to believe that it will
kill her sister if her sister does not have what does not belong
to her, and what it is not in the power of all the world, or any

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soul in the world, to give her. Her sister will suffer yes,
keenly! in heart and in pride; but she will not die. You will
suffer too, in your tenderness for her; but you must do your
duty. You must help her to give up. You would be guilty if
you did less. Keep clearly in mind that you are doing right,
and the only possible good. And God be with you!"

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XIX

TALKED sense, Persis," said Lapham gently, as he
mounted to his wife's side in the buggy and drove slowly home-
ward through the dusk.

"Yes, he talked sense," she admitted. But she added bitterly,
"I guess, if he had it to do! Oh, he's right, and it's got to be
done. There ain't any other way for it. It's sense; and, yes, it's
justice." They walked to their door after they left the horse at
the livery stable around the corner, where Lapham kept it. "I
want you should send Irene up to our room as soon as we get
in, Silas."

"Why, ain't you going to have any supper first?" faltered
Lapham with his latch-key in the lock.

"No. I can't lose a minute. If I do, I shan't do it at all."

"Look here, Persis," said her husband tenderly, "let me do
this thing."

"Oh, you!" said his wife, with a woman's compassionate
scorn for a man's helplessness in such a case. "Send her right
up. And I shall feel " She stopped to spare him.

Then she opened the door, and ran up to her room without
waiting to speak to Irene, who had come into the hall at the
sound of her father's key in the door.

"I guess your mother wants to see you upstairs," said Lap-
ham, looking away.

Her mother turned round and faced the girl's wondering
look as Irene entered the chamber, so close upon her that she
had not yet had time to lay off her bonnet; she stood with her
wraps still on her arm.

"Irene!" she said harshly, "there is something you have got

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THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

to bear. It's a mistake we've all made. He don't care anything
for you. He never did. He told Pen so last night. He cares for
her."

The sentences had fallen like blows. But the girl had taken
them without flinching. She stood up immovable, but the deli-
cate rose-light of her complexion went out and left her colour-
less. She did not offer to speak.

"Why don't you say something?" cried her mother. "Do you
want to kill me, Irene?"

"Why should I want to hurt you, mamma?" the girl replied
steadily, but in an alien voice. "There's nothing to say. I want
to see Pen a minute."

She turned and left the room. As she mounted the stairs that
led to her own and her sister's rooms on the floor above, her
mother helplessly followed. Irene went first to her own room
at the front of the house, and then came out leaving the door
open and the gas flaring behind her. The mother could see
that she had tumbled many things out of the drawers of her
bureau upon the marble top.

She passed her mother, where she stood in the entry. "You
can come too, if you want to, mamma," she said.

She opened Penelope's door without knocking, and went in.
Penelope sat at the window, as in the morning. Irene did not
go to her; but she went and laid a gold hair-pin on her bureau,
and said, without looking at her, "There's a pin that I got to-
day, because it was like his sister's. It won't become a dark per-
son so well, but you can have it."

She stuck a scrap of paper in the side of Penelope's mirror.
"There's that account of Mr. Stanton's ranch. You'll want to
read it, I presume."

She laid a withered boutonniere on the bureau beside the pin.
"There's his button-hole bouquet. He left it by his plate, and
I stole it."

She had a pine-shaving fantastically tied up with a knot of

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THE RISE OF

ribbon, in her hand. She held it a moment; then, looking de-
liberately at Penelope, she went up to her, and dropped it in
her lap without a word. She turned, and, advancing a few steps,
tottered and seemed about to fall.

Her mother sprang forward with an imploring cry, "O
'Rene, 'Rene, 'Rene!"

Irene recovered herself before her mother could reach her.
"Don't touch me," she said icily. "Mamma, I'm going to put on
my things. I want papa to walk with me. I'm choking here."

"I I can't let you go out, Irene, child," began her mother.

"You've got to," replied the girl. "Tell papa to hurry his
supper."

"O poor soul! He doesn't want any supper. He knows it
too."

"I don't want to talk about that. Tell him to get ready."

She left them once more.

Mrs. Lapham turned a hapless glance upon Penelope.

"Go and tell him, mother," said the girl. "I would, if I could.
If she can walk, let her. It's the only thing for her." She sat
still; she did not even brush to the floor the fantastic thing
that lay in her lap, and that sent up faintly the odour of the
sachet powder with which Irene liked to perfume her boxes.

Lapham went out with the unhappy child, and began to talk
with her, crazily, incoherently, enough.

She mercifully stopped him. "Don't talk, papa. I don't want
any one should talk with me."

He obeyed, and they walked silently on and on. In their aim-
less course they reached the new house on the water side of
Beacon, and she made him stop, and stood looking up at it.
The scaffolding which had so long defaced the front was gone,
and in the light of the gas-lamp before it all the architectural
beauty of the facade was suggested, and much of the finely felt
detail was revealed. Seymour had pretty nearly satisfied him-

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SILAS LAPHAM

self in that rich facade; certainly Lapham had not stinted him
of the means.

"Well," said the girl, "I shall never live in it," and she began
to walk on.

Lapham's sore heart went down, as he lumbered heavily
after her. "Oh yes, you will, Irene. You'll have lots of good
times there yet."

"No," she answered, and said nothing more about it. They
had not talked of their trouble at all, and they did not speak
of it now. Lapham understood that she was trying to walk
herself weary, and he was glad to hold his peace and let her
have her way. She halted him once more before the red and
yellow lights of an apothecary's window.

"Isn't there something they give you to make you sleep?"
she asked vaguely. "I've got to sleep to-night!"

Lapham trembled. "I guess you don't want anything, Irene."

"Yes, I do! Get me something!" she retorted wilfully. "If
you don't, I shall die. I must sleep."

They went in, and Lapham asked for something to make a
nervous person sleep. Irene stood poring over the show-case
full of brushes and trinkets, while the apothecary put up the
bromide, which he guessed would be about the best thing. She
did not show any emotion; her face was like a stone, while her
father's expressed the anguish of his sympathy. He looked as if
he had not slept for a week; his fat eyelids drooped over his
glassy eyes, and his cheeks and throat hung flaccid. He started
as the apothecary's cat stole smoothly up and rubbed itself
against his leg; and it was to him that the man said, "You
want to take a table-spoonful of that as long as you're awake.
I guess it won't take a great many to fetch you."

"All right," said Lapham, and paid and went out. "I don't
know but I shall want some of it," he said, with a joyless
laugh.

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Irene came closer up to him and took his arm. He laid his
heavy paw on her gloved fingers. After a while she said, "I want
you should let me go up to Lapham to-morrow."

"To Lapham? Why, to-morrow's Sunday, Irene! You can't
go to-morrow."

"Well, Monday, then. I can live through one day here."

"Well," said the father passively. He made no pretence of ask-
ing her why she wished to go, nor any attempt to dissuade
her.

"Give me that bottle," she said, when he opened the door at
home for her, and she ran up to her own room.

The next morning Irene came to breakfast with her mother;
the Colonel and Penelope did not appear, and Mrs. Lapham
looked sleep-broken and careworn.

The girl glanced at her. "Don't you fret about me, mamma,"
she said. "I shall get along." She seemed herself as steady and
strong as rock.

"I don't like to see you keeping up so, Irene," replied her
mother. "It'll be all the worse for you when you do break. Bet-
ter give way a little at the start."

"I shan't break, and I've given way all I'm going to. I'm go-
ing to Lapham to-morrow, I want you should go with me,
mamma, and I guess I can keep up one day here. All about
it is, I don't want you should say anything, or loo\ anything.
And, whatever I do, I don't want you should try to stop me.
And, the first thing, I'm going to take her breakfast up to her.
Don't!" she cried, intercepting the protest on her mother's lips.
"I shall not let it hurt Pen, if I can help it. She's never done
a thing nor thought a thing to wrong me. I had to fly out at her
last night; but that's all over now, and I know just what I've
got to bear."

She had her way unmolested. She carried Penelope's break-
fast to her, and omitted no care or attention that could make
the sacrifice complete, with an heroic pretence that she was

264

SILAS LAPHAM

performing no unusual service. They did not speak, beyond
her saying, in a clear dry note, "Here's your breakfast, Pen,"
and her sister's answering, hoarsely and tremulously, "Oh,
thank you, Irene." And, though two or three times they turned
their faces toward each other while Irene remained in the room,
mechanically putting its confusion to rights, their eyes did not
meet. Then Irene descended upon the other rooms, which she
set in order, and some of which she fiercely swept and dusted.
She made the beds; and she sent the two servants away to
church as soon as they had eaten their breakfast, telling them
that she would wash their dishes. Throughout the morning
her father and mother heard her about the work of getting
dinner, with certain silences which represented the moments
when she stopped and stood stock-still, and then, readjusting
her burden, forced herself forward under it again.

They sat alone in the family room, out of which their two
girls seemed to have died. Lapham could not read his Sunday
papers, and she had no heart to go to church, as she would
have done earlier in life when in trouble. Just then she was ob-
scurely feeling that the church was somehow to blame for that
counsel of Mr. SewelPs on which they had acted.

"I should like to know," she said, having brought the matter
up, "whether he would have thought it was such a light matter
if it had been his own children. Do you suppose he'd have been
so ready to act on his own advice if it had been ?"

"He told us the right thing to do, Persis, the only thing.
We couldn't let it go on," urged her husband gently.

"Well, it makes me despise Pen! Irene's showing twice the
character that she is, this very minute."

The mother said this so that the father might defend her
daughter to her. He did not fail. "Irene's got the easiest part,
the way I look at it. And you'll see that Pen'll know how to
behave when the time comes."

"What do you want she should do?"

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"I haven't got so far as that yet. What are we going to do
about Irene?"

"What do you want Pen should do," repeated Mrs. Lapham,
"when it comes to it?"

"Well, I don't want she should take him, for one thing," said
Lapham.

This seemed to satisfy Mrs. Lapham as to her husband, and
she said in defence of Corey, "Why, I don't see what he's done.
It's all been our doing."

"Never mind that now. What about Irene?"

"She says she's going to Lapham to-morrow. She feels that
she's got to get away somewhere. It's natural she should."

"Yes, and I presume it will be about the best thing for her.
Shall you go with her?"

"Yes."

"Well." He comfortlessly took up a newspaper again, and
she rose with a sigh, and went to her room to pack some things
for the morrow's journey.

After dinner, when Irene had cleared away the last trace of
it in kitchen and dining-room with unsparing punctilio, she
came downstairs, dressed to go out, and bade her father come
to walk with her again. It was a repetition of the aimlessness
of the last night's wanderings. They came back, and she got
tea for them, and after that they heard her stirring about in
her own room, as if she were busy about many things; but
they did not dare to look in upon her, even after all the noises
had ceased, and they knew she had gone to bed.

"Yes; it's a thing she's got to fight out by herself," said Mrs.
Lapham.

"I guess she'll get along," said Lapham. "But I don't want
you should misjudge Pen either. She's all right too. She ain't
to blame."

"Yes, I know. But I can't work round to it all at once.

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SILAS LAPHAM

I shan't misjudge her, but you can't expect me to get over it
right away."

"Mamma," said Irene, when she was hurrying their depar-
ture the next morning, "what did she tell him when he asked
her?"

"Tell him?" echoed the mother; and after a while she added,
"She didn't tell him anything."

"Did she say anything about me?"

"She said he mustn't come here any more."

Irene turned and went into her sister's room. "Good-bye,
Pen," she said, kissing her with an effect of not seeing or touch-
ing her. "I want you should tell him all about it. If he's half a
man, he won't give up till he knows why you won't have him;
and he has a right to know."

"It wouldn't make any difference. I couldn't have him
after "

"That's for you to say. But if you don't tell him about me, I
will."

"'Rene!"

"Yes! You needn't say I cared for him. But you can say that
you all thought he cared for me."

O Irene "

"Don't!" Irene escaped from the arms that tried to cast them-
selves about her. "You are all right, Pen. You haven't done
anything. You've helped me all you could. But I can't yet."

She went out of the room and summoned Mrs. Lapham with
a sharp "Now, mamma!" and went on putting the last things
into her trunks.

The Colonel went to the station with them, and put them
on the train. He got them a little compartment to themselves
in the Pullman car; and as he stood leaning with his lifted
hands against the sides of the doorway, he tried to say some-
thing consoling and hopeful : "I guess you'll have an easy ride,

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THE RISE OF

Irene. I don't believe it'll be dusty, any, after the rain last night."

"Don't you stay till the train starts, papa," returned the girl,
in rigid rejection of his futilities. "Get off, now."

"Well, if you want I should," he said, glad to be able to
please her in anything. He remained on the platform till the
cars started. He saw Irene bustling about in the compartment,
making her mother comfortable for the journey; but Mrs.
Lapham did not lift her head. The train moved off, and he
went heavily back to his business.

From time to time during the day, when he caught a glimpse
of him, Corey tried to make out from his face whether he knew
what had taken place between him and Penelope. When Rogers
came in about time of closing, and shut himself up with Lap-
ham in his room, the young man remained till the two came
out together and parted in their salutationless fashion.

Lapham showed no surprise at seeing Corey still there, and
merely answered, "Well!" when the young man said that
he wished to speak with him, and led the way back to his
room.

Corey shut the door behind them. "I only wish to speak to
you in case you know of the matter already; for otherwise I'm
bound by a promise."

"I guess I know what you mean. It's about Penelope."

"Yes, it's about Miss Lapham. I am greatly attached to her
you'll excuse my saying it; I couldn't excuse myself if I were
not."

"Perfectly excusable," said Lapham. "It's all right."

"Oh, I'm glad to hear you say that!" cried the young fellow
joyfully. "I want you to believe that this isn't a new thing or
an unconsidered thing with me though it seemed so unex-
pected to her."

Lapham fetched a deep sigh. "It's all right as far as I'm con-
cerned or her mother. We've both liked you first-rate."

"Yes?"

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SILAS LAPHAM

"But there seems to be something in Penelope's mind I
don't know " The Colonel consciously dropped his eyes.

"She referred to something I couldn't make out what but
I hoped I hoped that with your leave I might overcome it
the barrier whatever it was. Miss Lapham Penelope gave
me the hope that I was wasn't indifferent to her "

"Yes, I guess that's so," said Lapham. He suddenly lifted his
head, and confronted the young fellow's honest face with his
own face, so different in its honesty. "Sure you never made up
to any one else at the same time?"

"Never! Who could imagine such a thing? If that's all, I can
easily "

"I don't say that's all, nor that that's it. I don't want you
should go upon that idea. I just thought, may be you hadn't
thought of it."

"No, I certainly hadn't thought of it! Such a thing would
have been so impossible to me that I couldn't have thought of
it; and it's so shocking to me now that I don't know what to
say to it."

"Well, don't take it too much to heart," said Lapham,
alarmed at the feeling he had excited; "I don't say she thought
so. I was trying to guess trying to "

"If there is anything I can say or do to convince you "

"Oh, it ain't necessary to say anything. I'm all right."

"But Miss Lapham! I may see her again? I may try to con-
vince her that "

He stopped in distress, and Lapham afterwards told his wife
that he kept seeing the face of Irene as it looked when he
parted with her in the car; and whenever he was going to say
yes, he could not open his lips. At the same time he could not
help feeling that Penelope had a right to what was her own,
and Sewell's words came back to him. Besides, they had already
put Irene to the worst suffering. Lapham compromised, as he
imagined.

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"You can come round to-night and see me, if you want to,"
he said; and he bore grimly the gratitude that the young man
poured out upon him.

Penelope came down to supper and took her mother's place
at the head of the table.

Lapham sat silent in her presence as long as he could bear it.
Then he asked, "How do you feel to-night, Pen?"

"Oh, like a thief," said the girl. "A thief that hasn't been ar-
rested yet."

Lapham waited a while before he said, "Well, now, your
mother and I want you should hold up on that a while."

"It isn't for you to say. It's something I can't hold up on."

"Yes, I guess you can. If I know what's happened, then
what's happened is a thing that nobody is to blame for. And
we want you should make the best of it and not the worst.
Heigh? It ain't going to help Irene any for you to hurt your-
self or anybody else; and I don't want you should take up
with any such crazy notion. As far as heard from, you haven't
stolen anything, and whatever you've got belongs to you."

"Has he been speaking to you, father?"

"Your mother's been speaking to me."

"Has he been speaking to you?"

"That's neither here nor there."

"Then he's broken his word, and I will never speak to him
again!"

"If he was any such fool as to promise that he wouldn't talk
to me on a subject" Lapham drew a deep breath, and then
made the plunge "that I brought up "

"Did you bring it up?"

"The same as brought up the quicker he broke his word
the better; and I want you should act upon that idea. Recollect
that it's my business, and your mother's business, as well as
yours, and we're going to have our say. He hain't done any-
thing wrong, Pen, nor anything that he's going to be punished

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SILAS LAPHAM

for. Understand that. He's got to have a reason, if you're not
going to have him. I don't say you've got to have him; I want
you should feel perfectly free about that; but I do say you've
got to give him a reason."

"Is he coming here?"

"I don't know as you'd call it coming "

"Yes, you do, father!" said the girl, in forlorn amusement
at his shuffling.

"He's coming here to see me "

"When's he coming?"

"I don't know but he's coming to-night."

"And you want I should see him?"

"I don't know but you'd better."

"All right. I'll see him."

Lapham drew a long deep breath of suspicion inspired by
this acquiescence. "What you going to do?" he asked presently.

"I don't know yet," answered the girl sadly. "It depends a
good deal upon what he does."

"Well," said Lapham, with the hungriness of unsatisfied
anxiety in his tone. When Corey's card was brought into the
family-room where he and Penelope were sitting, he went into
the parlour to find him. "I guess Penelope wants to see you,"
he said; and, indicating the family-room, he added, "She's in
there," and did not go back himself.

Corey made his way to the girl's presence with open trepi-
dation, which was not allayed by her silence and languor. She
sat in the chair where she had sat the other night, but she was
not playing with a fan now.

He came toward her, and then stood faltering. A faint smile
quivered over her face at the spectacle of his subjection. "Sit
down, Mr. Corey," she said. "There's no reason why we
shouldn't talk it over quietly; for I know you will think I'm
right."

"I'm sure of that," he answered hopefully. "When I saw tha>

THE RISE OF

your father knew of it to-day, I asked him to let me see you

again. I'm afraid that I broke my promise to you techni-
cally

"It had to be broken."

He took more courage at her words. "But I've only come to
do whatever you say, and not to be an annoyance to you "

"Yes, you have to know; but I couldn't tell you before. Now
they all think I should."

A tremor of anxiety passed over the young man's face, on
which she kept her eyes steadily fixed.

"We supposed it it was Irene "

He remained blank a moment, and then he said with a smile
of relief, of deprecation, of protest, of amazement, of compas-
sion

"Oh! Never! Never for an instant! How could you think
such a thing? It was impossible! I never thought of her. But I
see I see! I can explain no, there's nothing to explain! I
have never knowingly done or said a thing from first to last to
make you think that. I see how terrible it is!" he said; but he
still smiled, as if he could not take it seriously. "I admired her
beauty who could help doing that? and I thought her very
good and sensible. Why, last winter in Texas, I told Stanton
about our meeting in Canada, and we agreed I only tell you
to show you how far I always was from what you thought
that he must come North and try to see her, and and of
course, it all sounds very silly! and he sent her a newspaper
with an account of his ranch in it "

"She thought it came from you."

"Oh, good heavens! He didn't tell me till after he'd done
it. But he did it for a part of our foolish joke. And when I met
your sister again, I only admired her as before. I can see, now,
how I must have seemed to be seeking her out; but it was to
talk of you with her I never talked of anything else if I could
help it, except when I changed the subject because I was

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SILAS LAPHAM

ashamed to be always talking of you. I see how distressing it
is for all of you. But tell me that you believe me!"

"Yes, I must. It's all been our mistake "

"It has indeed! But there's no mistake about my loving you,
Penelope," he said; and the old-fashioned name, at which she
had often mocked, was sweet to her from his lips.

"That only makes it worse!" she answered.

"Oh no!" he gently protested. "It makes it better. It makes
it right. How is it worse? How is it wrong?"

"Can't you see? You must understand all now! Don't you

see that if she believed so too, and if she " She could not go

on.

"Did she did your sister think that too?" gasped Corey.

"She used to talk with me about you; and when you say you
cared for me now, it makes me feel like the vilest hypocrite in
the world. That day you gave her the list of books, and she
came down to Nantasket, and went on about you, I helped her
to flatter herself oh! I don't see how she can forgive me. But
she knows I can never forgive myself! That's the reason she
can do it. I can see now," she went on, "how I must have been
trying to get you from her. I can't endure it! The only way is
for me never to see you or speak to you again!" She laughed
forlornly. "That would be pretty hard on you, if you cared."

"I do care all the world!"

"Well, then, it would if you were going to keep on caring.
You won't long, if you stop coming now."

"Is this all, then? Is it the end?"

"It's whatever it is. I can't get over the thought of her. Once
I thought I could, but now I see that I can't. It seems to grow
worse. Sometimes I feel as if it would drive me crazy."

He sat looking at her with lack-lustre eyes. The light sud-
denly came back into them. "Do you think I could love you if
you had been false to her ? I know you have been true to her,
and truer still to yourself. I never tried to see her, except with

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THE RISE OF

the hope of seeing you too. I supposed she must know that I
was in love with you. From the first time I saw you there that
afternoon, you filled my fancy. Do you think I was flirting
with the child, or no, you don't think that! We have not done
wrong. We have not harmed any one knowingly. We have a
right to each other "

"No! no! you must never speak to me of this again. If you
do, I shall know that you despise me."

"But how will that help her? I don't love her"

"Don't say that to me! I have said that to myself too much."

"If you forbid me to love you, it won't make me love her,"
he persisted.

She was about to speak, but she caught her breath without
doing so, and merely stared at him.

"I must do what you say," he continued. "But what good will
it do her? You can't make her happy by making yourself un-
happy."

"Do you ask me to profit by a wrong?"

"Not for the world. But there is no wrong!"

"There is something I don't know what. There's a wall
between us. I shall dash myself against it as long as I live; but
that won't break it."

"Oh!" he groaned. "We have done no wrong. Why should
we suffer from another's mistake as if it were our sin?"

"I don't know. But we must suffer."

"Well, then, I will not, for my part, and I will not let you. If
you care for me "

"You had no right to know it."

"You make it my privilege to keep you from aoing wrong
for the right's sake. I'm sorry, with all my heart and soul, for
this error; but I can't blame myself, and I won't deny myself
the happiness I haven't done anything to forfeit. I will never
give you up. I will wait as long as you please for the time when
you shall feel free from this mistake; but you shall be mine

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at last. Remember that. I might go away for months a year,
even; but that seems a cowardly and guilty thing, and I'm not
afraid, and I'm not guilty, and I'm going to stay here and try to
see you."

She shook her head. "It won't change anything. Don't you
see that there's no hope for us?"

"When is she coming back?" he asked.

"I don't know. Mother wants father to come and take her
out West for a while."

"She's up there in the country with your mother yet?"

"Yes."

He was silent; then he said desperately

"Penelope, she is very young; and perhaps perhaps she
might meet "

"It would make no difference. It wouldn't change it for me.'*

"You are cruel cruel to yourself, if you love me, and cruel
to me. Don't you remember that night before I spoke you
were talking of that book; and you said it was foolish and
wicked to do as that girl did. Why is it different with you,
except that you give me nothing, and can never give me any-
thing when you take yourself away ? If it were anybody else, I
am sure you would say "

"But it isn't anybody else, and that makes it impossible.
Sometimes I think it might be if I would only say so to my-
self, and then all that I said to her about you comes up "

"I will wait. It can't always come up. I won't urge you any
longer now. But you will see it differently more clearly. Good-
bye no! Good night! I shall come again to-morrow. It will
surely come right, and, whatever happens, you have done no
wrong. Try to keep that in mind. I am so happy, in spite of all!"

He tried to take her hand, but she put it behind her. "No,
no! I can't let you yet!"

275

XX

A

FTER a week Mrs. Lapham returned, leaving Irene alone at
the old homestead in Vermont. "She's comfortable there as
comfortable as she can be anywheres, I guess," she said to her
husband as they drove together from the station, where he had
met her in obedience to her telegraphic summons. "She keeps
herself busy helping about the house; and she goes round
amongst the hands in their houses. There's sickness, and you
know how helpful she is where there's sickness. She don't com-
plain any. I don't know as I've heard a word out of her mouth
since we left home; but I'm afraid it'll wear on her, Silas."

"You don't look over and above well yourself, Persis," said
her husband kindly.

"Oh, don't talk about me. What I want to know is whether
you can't get the time to run off with her somewhere. I wrote
to you about Dubuque. She'll work herself down, I'm afraid;
and then I don't know as she'll be over it. But if she could go
off, and be amused see new people "

"I could maJ{e the time," said Lapham, "if I had to. But, as
it happens, I've got to go out West on business, I'll tell you
about it, and I'll take Irene along."

"Good!" said his wife. "That's about the best thing I've
heard yet. Where you going?"

"Out Dubuque way."

"Anything the matter with Bill's folks?"

"No. It's business."

"How's Pen?"

"I guess she ain't much better than Irene."

"He been about any?"

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THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

"Yes. But I can't see as it helps matters much."

"Tchk!" Mrs. Lapham fell back against the carriage cush-
ions. "I declare, to see her willing to take the man that we all
thought wanted her sister! I can't make it seem right."

"It's right," said Lapham stoutly; "but I guess she ain't will-
ing; I wish she was. But there don't seem to be any way out of
the thing, anywhere. It's a perfect snarl. But I don't want you
should be anyways ha'sh with Pen."

Mrs. Lapham answered nothing; but when she met Penel-
ope she gave the girl's wan face a sharp look, and began to
whimper on her neck.

Penelope's tears were all spent. "Well, mother," she said,
"you come back almost as cheerful as you went away. I needn't
ask if 'Rene's in good spirits. We all seem to be overflowing
with them. I suppose this is one way of congratulating me.
Mrs. Corey hasn't been round to do it yet."

"Are you are you engaged to him, Pen?" gasped her
mother.

"Judging by my feelings, I should say not. I feel as if it was
a last will and testament. But you'd better ask him when he
comes."

"I can't bear to look at him."

"I guess he's used to that. He don't seem to expect to be
looked at. Well! we're all just where we started. I wonder how
long it will keep up."

Mrs. Lapham reported to her husband when he came home
at night he had left his business to go and meet her, and then,
after a desolate dinner at the house, had returned to the office
again that Penelope was fully as bad as Irene. "And she don't
know how to work it off. Irene keeps doing; but Pen just sits
in her room and mopes. She don't even read. I went up this
afternoon to scold her about the state the house was in you
can see that Irene's away by the perfect mess; but when I saw
her through the crack of the door I hadn't the heart. She sat

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THE RISE OF

there with her hands in her lap, just staring. And, my good-
ness! she jumped so when she saw me; and then she fell back,
and began to laugh, and said she, 'I thought it was my ghost,
mother!' I felt as if I should give way."

Lapham listened jadedly, and answered far from the point.
"I guess I've got to start out there pretty soon, Persis."

"How soon?"

"Well, to-morrow morning."

Mrs. Lapham sat silent. Then, "All right," she said. "I'll get
you ready."

"I shall run up to Lapham for Irene, and then I'll push on
through Canada. I can get there about as quick."

"Is it anything you can tell me about, Silas?"

"Yes," said Lapham. "But it's a long story, and I guess you've
got your hands pretty full as it is. I've been throwing good
money after bad, the usual way, and now I've got to see if
I can save the pieces."

After a moment Mrs. Lapham asked, "Is it Rogers?"

"It's Rogers."

"I didn't want you should get in any deeper with him."

"No. You didn't want I should press him either; and I had
to do one or the other. And so I got in deeper."

"Silas," said his wife, "I'm afraid I made you!"

"It's all right, Persis, as far forth as that goes. I was glad to
make it up with him I jumped at the chance. I guess Rogers
saw that he had a soft thing in me, and he's worked it for all
it was worth. But it'll all come out right in the end."

Lapham said this as if he did not care to talk any more about
it. He added casually, "Pretty near everybody but the fellows
that owe me seem to expect me to do a cash business, all of a
sudden."

"Do you mean that you've got payments to make, and that
people are not paying you?"

Lapham winced a little. "Something like that," he said, and

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SILAS LAPHAM

he lighted a cigar. "But when I tell you it's all right, I mean
it, Persis. I ain't going to let the grass grow under my feet,
though, especially while Rogers digs the ground away from
the roots."

"What are you going to do ?"

"If it has to come to that, I'm going to squeeze him." Lap-
ham's countenance lighted up with greater joy than had yet
visited it since the day they had driven out to Brookline. "Mil-
ton K. Rogers is a rascal, if you want to know; or else all the
signs fail. But I guess he'll find he's got his come-uppance."
Lapham shut his lips so that the short, reddish-grey beard
stuck straight out on them.

"What's he done?"

"What's he done? Well, now, I'll tell you what he's done,
Persis, since you think Rogers is such a saint, and that I used
him so badly in getting him out of the business. He's been dab-
bling in every sort of fool thing you can lay your tongue to,
wild-cat stocks, patent-rights, land speculations, oil claims,
till he's run through about everything. But he did have a big
milling property out on the line of the P. Y. & X., saw-mills
and grist-mills and lands, and for the last eight years he's
been doing a land-office business with 'em business that
would have made anybody else rich. But you can't make Mil-
ton K. Rogers rich, any more than you can fat a hide-bound
colt. It ain't in him. He'd run through Vanderbilt, Jay Gould,
and Tom Scott rolled into one in less than six months, give
him a chance, and come out and want to borrow money of you.
Well, he won't borrow any more money of me; and if he thinks
I don't know as much about that milling property as he does
he's mistaken. I've taken his mills, but I guess I've got the in-
side track; Bill's kept me posted; and now I'm going out there
to see how I can unload; and I shan't mind a great deal if Rog-
ers is under the load when it's off once."

"I don't understand you, Silas."

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"Why, it's just this. The Great Lacustrine & Polar Railroad
has leased the P. Y. & X. for ninety-nine years, bought it, prac-
tically, and it's going to build car-works right by those mills,
and it may want them. And Milton K. Rogers knew it when
he turned 'em in on me."

"Well, if the road wants them, don't that make the mills
valuable? You can get what you ask for them!"

"Can I? The P. Y. & X. is the only road that runs within
fifty miles of the mills, and you can't get a foot of lumber nor
a pound of flour to market any other way. As long as he had a
little local road like the P. Y. & X. to deal with, Rogers could
manage; but when it come to a big through line like the G. L.
& P., he couldn't stand any chance at all. If such a road as that
took a fancy to his mills, do you think it would pay what he
asked? No, sir! He would take what the road offered, or else
the road would tell him to carry his flour and lumber to market
himself."

"And do you suppose he knew the G. L. & P. wanted the
mills when he turned them in on you?" asked Mrs. Lapham
aghast, and falling helplessly into his alphabetical parlance.

The Colonel laughed scoffingly. "Well, when Milton K.
Rogers don't know which side his bread's buttered on! I don't
understand," he added thoughtfully, "how he's always letting
it fall on the buttered side. But such a man as that is sure to
have a screw loose in him somewhere."

Mrs. Lapham sat discomfited. All that she could say was,
"Well, I want you should ask yourself whether Rogers would
ever have gone wrong, or got into these ways of his, if it hadn't
been for your forcing him out of the business when you did.
I want you should think whether you're not responsible for
everything he's done since."

"You go and get that bag of mine ready," said Lapham sul-
lenly. "I guess I can take care of myself. And Milton K. Rogers
too," he added.

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SILAS LAPHAM

That evening Corey spent the time after dinner in his own
room, with restless excursions to the library, where his mother
sat with his father and sisters, and showed no signs of leaving
them. At last, in coming down, he encountered her on the
stairs, going up. They both stopped consciously.

"I would like to speak with you, mother. I have been waiting
to see you alone."

"Come to my room," she said.

"I have a feeling that you know what I want to say," he be-
gan there.

She looked up at him where he stood by the chimney-
piece, and tried to put a cheerful note into her questioning
"Yes?"

"Yes; and I have a feeling that you won't like it that you
won't approve of it. I wish you did I wish you could!"

"I'm used to liking and approving everything you do, Tom.
If I don't like this at once, I shall try to like it you know that
for your sake, whatever it is."

"I'd better be short," he said, with a quick sigh. "It's about
Miss Lapham." He hastened to add, "I hope it isn't surprising
to you. I'd have told you before, if I could."

"No, it isn't surprising. I was afraid I suspected some-
thing of the kind."

They were both silent in a painful silence.

"Well, mother?" he asked at last.

"If it's something you've quite made up your mind to "

"It is!"

"And if you've already spoken to her "

"I had to do that first, of course."

"There would be no use of my saying anything, even if I
disliked it."

"You do dislike it!"

"No no! I can't say that. Of course I should have preferred
it if you had chosen some nice girl among those that you had

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THE RISE OF

been brought up with some friend or associate of your sisters,
whose people we had known "

"Yes, I understand that, and I can assure you that I haven't
been indifferent to your feelings. I have tried to consider them
from the first, and it kept me hesitating in a way that I'm
ashamed to think of; for it wasn't quite right towards others.
But your feelings and my sisters' have been in my mind, and
if I couldn't yield to what I supposed they must be, en-
tirely "

Even so good a son and brother as this, when it came to his
love affair, appeared to think that he had yielded much in con-
sidering the feelings of his family at all.

His mother hastened to comfort him. "I know I know. I've
seen for some time that this might happen, Tom, and I have
prepared myself for it. I have talked it over with your father,
and we both agreed from the beginning that you were not to
be hampered by our feeling. Still it is a surprise. It must be."

"I know it. I can understand your feeling. But I'm sure that
it's one that will last only while you don't know her well."

"Oh, I'm sure of that, Tom. I'm sure that we shall all be fond
of her, for your sake at first, even and I hope she'll like us."

"I am quite certain of that," said Corey, with that confidence
which experience does not always confirm in such cases. "And
your taking it as you do lifts a tremendous load off me."

But he sighed so heavily, and looked so troubled, that his
mother said, "Well, now, you mustn't think of that any more.
We wish what is for your happiness, my son, and we will
gladly reconcile ourselves to anything that might have been
disagreeable. I suppose we needn't speak of the family. We must
both think alike about them. They have their drawbacks,
but they are thoroughly good people, and I satisfied myself
the other night that they were not to be dreaded." She rose,
and put her arm round his neck. "And I wish you joy, Tom! If

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SILAS LAPHAM

she's half as good as you are, you will both be very happy." She
was going to kiss him, but something in his looks stopped her
an absence, a trouble, which broke out in his words.

"I must tell you, mother! There's been a complication a
mistake that's a blight on me yet, and that it sometimes
seems as if we couldn't escape from. I wonder if you can help
us! They all thought I meant the other sister."

"O Tom! But how could they?"

"I don't know. It seemed so glaringly plain I was ashamed
of making it so outright from the beginning. But they did.
Even she did, herself!"

"But where could they have thought your eyes were your
taste? It wouldn't be surprising if any one were taken with
that wonderful beauty; and I'm sure she's good too. But I'm
astonished at them! To think you could prefer that little, black,
odd creature, with her joking and "

"Mother!" cried the young man, turning a ghastly face of
warning upon her.

"What do you mean, Tom?"

"Did you did did you think so too that it was Irene I
meant?"

"Why, of course!"

He stared at her hopelessly.

"O my son!" she said, for all comment on the situation.

"Don't reproach me, mother! I couldn't stand it."

"No. I didn't mean to do that. But how how could it hap-
pen?"

"I don't know. When she first told me that they had under-
stood it so, I laughed almost it was so far from me. But now
when you seem to have had the same idea Did you all think
so?"

"Yes."

They remained looking at each other. Then Mrs. Corey be-

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THE RISE OF

gan: "It did pass through my mind once that day I went to
call upon them that it might not be as we thought; but I
knew so little of of "

"Penelope/' Corey mechanically supplied.

"Is that her name ? I forgot that I only thought of you in
relation to her long enough to reject the idea; and it was natu-
ral after our seeing something of the other one last year, that I
might suppose you had formed some attachment "

"Yes; that's what they thought too. But I never thought of
her as anything but a pretty child. I was civil to her because
you wished it; and when I met her here again, I only tried to
see her so that I could talk with her about her sister."

"You needn't defend yourself to me, Tom," said his mother,
proud to say it to him in his trouble. "It's a terrible business
for them, poor things," she added. "I don't know how they
could get over it. But, of course, sensible people must see "

"They haven't got over it. At least she hasn't. Since it's hap-
pened, there's been nothing that hasn't made me prouder and
fonder of her! At first I was charmed with her my fancy was
taken; she delighted me I don't know how; but she was sim-
ply the most fascinating person I ever saw. Now I never think
of that. I only think how good she is how patient she is with
me, and how unsparing she is of herself. If she were concerned
alone if I were not concerned too it would soon end. She's
never had a thought for anything but her sister's feeling and
mine from the beginning. I go there, I know that I oughtn't,
but I can't help it, and she suffers it, and tries not to let me
see that she is suffering it. There never was any one like her
so brave, so true, so noble. I won't give her up I can't. But it
breaks my heart when she accuses herself of what was all my
doing. We spend our time trying to reason out of it, but we al-
ways come back to it at last, and I have to hear her morbidly
blaming herself. Oh!"

Doubtless Mrs. Corey imagined some reliefs to this suffering,

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SILAS LAPHAM

some qualifications of this sublimity in a girl she had disliked
so distinctly; but she saw none in her son's behaviour, and she
gave him her further sympathy. She tried to praise Penelope,
and said that it was not to be expected that she could reconcile
herself at once to everything. "I shouldn't have liked it in her
if she had. But time will bring it all right. And if she really
cares for you "

"I extorted that from her."

"Well, then, you must look at it in the best light you can.
There is no blame anywhere, and the mortification and pain
is something that must be lived down. That's all. And don't let
what I said grieve you, Tom. You know I scarcely knew her,
and I I shall be sure to like any one you like, after all."

"Yes, I know," said the young man drearily. "Will you tell
father?"

"If you wish."

"He must know. And I couldn't stand any more of this, just
yet any more mistake."

"I will tell him," said Mrs. Corey; and it was naturally the
next thing for a woman who dwelt so much on decencies to
propose: "We must go to call on her your sisters and I. They
have never seen her even; and she mustn't be allowed to think
we're indifferent to her, especially under the circumstances."

"Oh no! Don't go not yet," cried Corey, with an instinctive
perception that nothing could be worse for him. "We must
wait we must be patient. I'm afraid it would be painful to her
now."

He turned away without speaking further; and his mother's
eyes followed him wistfully to the door. There were some ques-
tions that she would have liked to ask him; but she had to con-
tent herself with trying to answer them when her husband
put them to her.

There was this comfort for her always in Bromfield Corey,
that he never was much surprised at anything, however shock-

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THE RISE OF

ing or painful. His standpoint in regard to most matters was
that of the sympathetic humorist who would be glad to have
the victim of circumstance laugh with him, but was not too
much vexed when the victim could not. He laughed now
when his wife, with careful preparation, got the facts of his
son's predicament fully under his eye.

"Really, Bromfield," she said, "I don't see how you can laugh.
Do you see any way out of it?"

"It seems to me that the way has been found already. Tom
has told his love to the right one, and the wrong one knows
it. Time will do the rest."

"If I had so low an opinion of them all as that, it would
make me very unhappy. It's shocking to think of it."

"It is upon the theory of ladies and all young people," said
her husband, with a shrug, feeling his way to the matches on
the mantel, and then dropping them with a sigh, as if recollect-
ing that he must not smoke there. "I've no doubt Tom feels
himself an awful sinner. But apparently he's resigned to his
sin; he isn't going to give her up."

"I'm glad to say, for the sake of human nature, that she isn't
resigned little as I like her," cried Mrs. Corey.

Her husband shrugged again. "Oh, there mustn't be any in-
decent haste. She will instinctively observe the proprieties. But
come, now, Anna! you mustn't pretend to me here, in the sanc-
tuary of home, that practically the human affections don't rec-
oncile themselves to any situation that the human sentiments
condemn. Suppose the wrong sister had died : would the right
one have had any scruple in marrying Tom, after they had
both 'waited a proper time,' as the phrase is?"

"Bromfield, you're shocking!"

"Not more shocking than reality. You may regard this as a
second marriage." He looked at her with twinkling eyes, full
of the triumph the spectator of his species feels in signal ex-
hibitions of human nature. "Depend upon it, the right sister

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SILAS LAPHAM

will be reconciled; the wrong one will be consoled; and all will
go merry as a marriage bell a second marriage bell. Why, it's
quite like a romance!" Here he laughed outright again.

"Well," sighed the wife, "I could almost wish the right one.
as you call her, would reject Tom, I dislike her so much."

"Ah, now you're talking business, Anna," said her husband,
with his hands spread behind the back he turned comfortably
to the fire. "The whole Lapham tribe is distasteful to me. As I
don't happen to have seen our daughter-in-law elect, I have
still the hope which you're disposed to forbid me that she
may not be quite so unacceptable as the others."

"Do you really feel so, Bromfield?" anxiously inquired his
wife.

"Yes I think I do;" and he sat down, and stretched out his
long legs toward the fire.

"But it's very inconsistent of you to oppose the matter now,
when you've shown so much indifference up to this time.
You've told me, all along, that it was of no use to oppose it."

"So I have. I was convinced of that at the beginning, or my
reason was. You know very well that I am equal to any trial,
any sacrifice, day after to-morrow; but when it comes to-day
it's another thing. As long as this crisis decently kept its dis-
tance, I could look at it with an impartial eye; but now that it
seems at hand, I find that, while my reason is still acquiescent,
my nerves are disposed to excuse the phrase kick. I ask my-
self, what have I done nothing for, all my life, and lived as a
gentleman should, upon the earnings of somebody else, in the
possession of every polite taste and feeling that adorns leisure,
if I'm to come to this at last? And I find no satisfactory an-
swer. I say to myself that I might as well have yielded to the
pressure all round me, and gone to work, as Tom has."

Mrs. Corey looked at him forlornly, divining the core of real
repugnance that existed in his self -satire.

"I assure you, my dear," he continued, "that the recoJlec-

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THE RISE OF

tion of what I suffered from the Laphams at that dinner of
yours is an anguish still. It wasn't their behaviour, they be-
haved well enough or ill enough; but their conversation was
terrible. Mrs. Lapham's range was strictly domestic; and when
the Colonel got me in the library, he poured mineral paint
all over me, till I could have been safely warranted not to crack
or scale in any climate. I suppose we shall have to see a good
deal of them. They will probably come here every Sunday
night to tea. It's a perspective without a vanishing-point."

"It may not be so bad, after all," said his wife; and she sug-
gested for his consolation that he knew very little about the
Laphams yet.

He assented to the fact. "I know very little about them, and
about my other fellow-beings. I dare say that I should like the
Laphams better if I knew them better. But in any case, I resign
myself. And we must keep in view the fact that this is mainly
Tom's affair, and if his affections have regulated it to his satis-
faction, we must be content."

"Oh yes," sighed Mrs. Corey. "And perhaps it won't turn out
so badly. It's a great comfort to know that you feel just as I
do about it."

"I do," said her husband, "and more too."

It was she and her daughters who would be chiefly annoyed
by the Lapham connection; she knew that. But she had to be-
gin to bear the burden by helping her husband to bear his light
share of it. To see him so depressed dismayed her, and she
might well have reproached him more sharply than she did
for showing so much indifference, when she was so anxious,
at first. But that would not have served any good end now.
She even answered him patiently when he asked her,
"What did you say to Tom when he told you it was the other
one?"

"What could I say ? I could do nothing, but try to take back
what I had said against her."

"Yes, you had quite enough to do, I suppose. It's an awk-

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SILAS LAPHAM

ward business. If it had been the pretty one, her beauty would
have been our excuse. But the plain one what do you suppose
attracted him in her?"

Mrs. Corey sighed at the futility of the question. "Per-
haps I did her injustice. I only saw her a few moments. Perhaps
I got a false impression. I don't think she's lacking in sense,
and that's a great thing. She'll be quick to see that we don't
mean unkindness, and can't, by anything we say or do, when
she's Tom's wife." She pronounced the distasteful word with
courage, and went on: "The pretty one might not have been
able to see that. She might have got it into her head that we
were looking down on her; and those insipid people are ter-
ribly stubborn. We can come to some understanding with this
one; I'm sure of that." She ended by declaring that it was now
their duty to help Tom out of his terrible predicament.

"Oh, even the Lapham cloud has a silver lining," said Corey.
"In fact, it seems really to have all turned out for the best,
Anna; though it's rather curious to find you the champion of
the Lapham side, at last. Confess, now, that the right girl has
secretly been your choice all along, and that while you sym-
pathise with the wrong one, you rejoice in the tenacity with
which the right one is clinging to her own!" He added with
final seriousness, "It's just that she should, and, so far as I un-
derstand the case, I respect her for it."

"Oh yes," sighed Mrs. Corey. "It's natural, and it's right."
But she added, "I suppose they're glad of him on any terms."

"That is what I have been taught to believe," said her hus-
band. "When shall we see our daughter-in-law elect ? I find my-
self rather impatient to have that part of it over."

Mrs. Corey hesitated. "Tom thinks we had better not call,
just yet."

"She has told him of your terrible behaviour when you
called before?"

"No, Bromfield! She couldn't be so vulgar as that?"

"But anything short of it?"

XXI

LAP HAM was gone a fortnight. He was in a sullen humour
when he came back, and kept himself shut close within his
own den at the office the first day. He entered it in the morn-
ing without a word to his clerks as he passed through the outer
room, and he made no sign throughout the forenoon, except to
strike savagely on his desk-bell from time to time, and send out
to Walker for some book of accounts or a letter-file. His boy
confidentially reported to Walker that the old man seemed to
have got a lot of papers round; and at lunch the book-keeper
said to Corey, at the little table which they had taken in a cor-
ner together, in default of seats at the counter, "Well, sir, I
guess there's a cold wave coming."

Corey looked up innocently, and said, "I haven't read the
weather report."

"Yes, sir," Walker continued, "it's coming. Areas of rain
along the whole coast, and increased pressure in the region of
the private office. Storm-signals up at the old man's door now."

Corey perceived that he was speaking figuratively, and that
his meteorology was entirely personal to Lapham. "What do
you mean?" he asked, without vivid interest in the allegory,
his mind being full of his own tragi-comedy.

"Why, just this: I guess the old man's takin' in sail. And I
guess he's got to. As I told you the first time we talked about
him, there don't any one know one-quarter as much about the
old man's business as the old man does himself; and I ain't be-
traying any confidence when I say that I guess that old partner
of his has got pretty deep into his books. I guess he's over head
and ears in 'em, and the old man's gone in after him, and he's

290

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

got a drownin' man's grip round his neck. There seems to be a
kind of a lull kind of a dead calm, / call it in the paint
market just now; and then again a ten-hundred-thousand-
dollar man don't build a hundred-thousand-dollar house
without feeling the drain, unless there's a regular boom. And
just now there ain't any boom at all. Oil, I don't say but what
the old man's got anchor . to windward; guess he has; but if
he's goin to leave me his money, I wish he'd left it six weeks
ago. Yes, sir, I guess there's a cold wave comin'; but you can't
generally 'moat always t^ 1 ', as a usual thing, where the old
man's concerned, and it's only a guess." Walker began to feed
in his breaded chop with the same nervous excitement with
which he abandoned himself to the slangy and figurative ex-
cesses of his talks. Corey had listened with a miserable curi-
osity and compassion up to a certain moment, when a broad
light of hope flashed upon him. It came from Lapham's poten-
tial ruin; and the way out of the labyrinth that had hitherto
seemed so hopeless was clear enough, if another's disaster
would befriend him, and give him the opportunity to prove the
unselfishness of his constancy. He thought of the sum of
money that was his own, and that he might offer to lend, or
practically give, if the time came; and with his crude hopes
and purposes formlessly exulting in his heart, he kept on lis-
tening with an unchanged countenance.

Walker could not rest till he had developed the whole situa-
tion, so far as he knew it. "Look at the stock we've got on
hand. There's going to be an awful shrinkage on that, now!
And when everybody is shutting down, or running half-time,
the works up at Lapham are going full chip, just the same as
ever. Well, it's his pride. I don't say but what it's a good sort of
pride, but he likes to make his brags that the fire's never been
out in the works since they started, and that no man's work or
wages has ever been cut down yet at Lapham, it don't matter
what the times are. Of course," explained Walker, "I shouldn't

291

THE RISE OF

talk so to everybody; don't know as I should talk so to any-
body but you, Mr. Corey."

"Of course," assented Corey.

"Little off your feed to-day," said Walker, glancing at Corey's
plate.

"I got up with a headache."

"Well, sir, if you're like me you'll carry it round all day,
then. I don't know a much meaner thing than a headache
unless it's earache, or toothache, or some other kind of ache.
I'm pretty hard to suit, when it comes to diseases. Notice how
yellow the old man looked when he came in this morning? I
don't like to see a man of his build look yellow much."

About the middle of the afternoon the dust-coloured face of
Rogers, now familiar to Lapham's clerks, showed itself among
them. "Has Colonel Lapham returned yet?" he asked, in his
dry, wooden tones, of Lapham's boy.

"Yes, he's in his office," said the boy; and as Rogers ad-
vanced, he rose and added, "I don't know as you can see him
to-day. His orders are not to let anybody in."

"Oh, indeed!" said Rogers; "I think he will see me!" and he
pressed forward.

"Well, I'll have to ask," returned the boy; and hastily pre-
ceding Rogers, he put his head in at Lapham's door, and then
withdrew it. "Please to sit down," he said; "he'll see you
pretty soon;" and, with an air of some surprise, Rogers obeyed.
His sere, dull-brown whiskers and the moustache closing over
both lips were incongruously and illogically clerical in effect,
and the effect was heightened for no reason by the parchment
texture of his skin; the baldness extending to the crown of his
head was like a baldness made up for the stage. What his face
expressed chiefly was a bland and beneficent caution. Here, you
must have said to yourself, is a man of just, sober, and prudent
views, fixed purposes, and the good citizenship that avoids
debt and hazard of every kind.

292

SILAS LAPHAM

"What do you want?" asked Lapham, wheeling round in
his swivel-chair as Rogers entered his room, and pushing the
door shut with his foot, without rising.

Rogers took the chair that was not offered him, and sat with
his hat-brim on his knees, and its crown pointed towards Lap-
ham. "I want to know what you are going to do," he answered
with sufficient self-possession.

"I'll tell you, first, what I've done'' said Lapham. "I've been
to Dubuque, and I've found out all about that milling property
you turned in on me. Did you know that the G. L. & P. had
leased the P. Y. & X.?"

"I some suspected that it might."

"Did you know it when you turned the property in on me?
Did you know that the G. L. & P. wanted to buy the mills?"

"I presumed the road would give a fair price for them," said
Rogers, winking his eyes in outward expression of inwardly
blinking the point.

"You lie," said Lapham, as quietly as if correcting him in a
slight error; and Rogers took the word with equal sang jroid.
"You knew the road wouldn't give a fair price for the mills.
You knew it would give what it chose, and that I couldn't help
myself, when you let me take them. You're a thief, Milton K.
Rogers, and you stole money I lent you." Rogers sat listening,
as if respectfully considering the statements. "You knew how
I felt about that old matter or my wife did; and that I wanted
to make it up to you, if you felt anyway badly used. And you
took advantage of it. You've got money out of me, in the first
place, on securities that wan't worth thirty-five cents on the
dollar, and you've let me in for this thing, and that thing, and
you've bled me every time. And all I've got to show for it is a
milling property on a line of road that can squeeze me, when-
ever it wants to, as dry as it pleases. And you want to know
what I'm going to do ? I'm going to squeeze you. I'm going to
sell these collaterals of yours," he touched a bundle of papers

293

THE RISE OF

among others that littered his desk, "and I'm going to let the
mills go for what they'll fetch. 7 ain't going to fight the G. L.
&P."

Lapham wheeled about in his chair and turned his burly
back on his visitor, who sat wholly unmoved.

"There are some parties," he began, with a dry tranquillity
ignoring Lapham's words, as if they had been an outburst
against some third person, who probably merited them, but
in whom he was so little interested that he had been obliged
to use patience in listening to his condemnation, "there are
some English parties who have been making inquiries in re-
gard to those mills."

"I guess you're lying, Rogers," said Lapham, without look-
ing round.

"Well, all that I have to ask is that you will not act hastily."

"I see you don't think I'm in earnest!" cried Lapham, facing
fiercely about. "You think I'm fooling, do you?" He struck his
bell, and "William," he ordered the boy who answered it, and
who stood waiting while he dashed off a note to the brokers
and enclosed it with the bundle of securities in a large enve-
lope, "take these down to Gallop & Paddock's, in State Street,
right away. Now go!" he said to Rogers, when the boy had
closed the door after him; and he turned once more to his desk.

Rogers rose from his chair, and stood with his hat in his
hand. He was not merely dispassionate in his attitude and
expression, he was impartial. He wore the air of a man who
was ready to return to business whenever the wayward mood
of his interlocutor permitted. "Then I understand," he said,
"that you will take no action in regard to the mills till I have
seen the parties I speak of."

Lapham faced about once more, and sat looking up into
the visage of Rogers in silence. "I wonder what you're up to,"
ne said at last; "I should like to know." But as Rogers made
no sign of gratifying his curiosity, and treated this last remark

294

SILAS LAPHAM

of Lapham's as of the irrelevance of all the rest, he said, frown-
ing, "You bring me a party that will give me enough for those
mills to clear me of you, and I'll talk to you. But don't you
come here with any man of straw. And I'll give you just
twenty-four hours to prove yourself a swindler again."

Once more Lapham turned his back, and Rogers, after look-
ing thoughtfully into his hat a moment, cleared his throat, and
quietly withdrew, maintaining to the last his unprejudiced de-
meanour.

Lapham was not again heard from, as Walker phrased it,
during the afternoon, except when the last mail was taken in
to him; then the sound of rending envelopes, mixed with that
of what seemed suppressed swearing, penetrated to the outer
office. Somewhat earlier than the usual hour for closing, he ap-
peared there with his hat on and his overcoat buttoned about
him. He said briefly to his boy, "William, I shan't be back again
this afternoon," and then went to Miss Dewey and left a num-
ber of letters on her table to be copied, and went out. Nothing
had been said, but a sense of trouble subtly diffused itself
through those who saw him go out.

That evening as he sat down with his wife alone at tea, he
asked, "Ain't Pen coming to supper?"

"No, she ain't," said his wife. "I don't know as I like the way
she's going on, any too well. I'm afraid, if she keeps on, she'll
be down sick. She's got deeper feelings than Irene."

Lapham said nothing, but having helped himself to the
abundance of his table in his usual fashion, he sat and looked
at his plate with an indifference that did not escape the notice
of his wife. "What's the matter with you?" she asked.

"Nothing. I haven't got any appetite."

"What's the matter?" she persisted.

"Trouble's the matter; bad luck and lots of it's the matter,"
said Lapham. "I haven't ever hid anything from you, Persis,
when you asked me, and it's too late to begin now. I'm in a fix.

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THE RISE OF

I'll tell you what kind of a fix, if you think it'll do you
any good; but I guess you'll be satisfied to know that it's a
fix."

"How much of a one?" she asked with a look of grave,,
steady courage in her eyes.

"Well, I don't know as I can tell, just yet," said Lapham,,
avoiding this look. "Things have been dull all the fall, but I
thought they'd brisk up come winter. They haven't. There
have been a lot of failures, and some of 'em owed me, and
some of 'em had me on their paper; and " Lapham stopped.

"And what?" prompted his wife.

He hesitated before he added, "And then Rogers."

"I'm to blame for that," said Mrs. Lapham. "I forced you to

it."

"No; I was as willing to go into it as what you were," an-
swered Lapham. "I don't want to blame anybody."

Mrs. Lapham had a woman's passion for fixing responsibil-
ity; she could not help saying, as soon as acquitted, "I warned
you against him, Silas. I told you not to let him get in any
deeper with you."

"Oh yes. I had to help him to try to get my money back. I
might as well poured water into a sieve. And now " Lap-
ham stopped.

"Don't be afraid to speak out to me, Silas Lapham. If it
comes to the worst, I want to know it I've got to know it.
What did I ever care for the money? I've had a happy home
with you ever since we were married, and I guess I shall have
as long as you live, whether we go on to the Back Bay, or go
back to the old house at Lapham. I know who's to blame, and
I blame myself. It was my forcing Rogers on to you." She
came back to this, with her helpless longing, inbred in all
Puritan souls, to have some one specifically suffer for the evil
in the world, even if it must be herself.

"It hasn't come to the worst yet, Persis," said her husband.

rflLAS LAPHAM

"But I shall have to hold up on the new house a little while,
till I can see where I am."

"I shouldn't care if we had to sell it," cried his wife, in pas-
sionate self-condemnation. "I should be glad if we had to, as far
as I'm concerned."

"I shouldn't," said Lapham.

"I know I" said his wife; and she remembered ruefully how
his heart was set on it.

He sat musing. "Well, I guess it's going to come out all right
in the end. Or, if it ain't," he sighed, "we can't help it. May be
Pen needn't worry so much about Corey, after all," he con-
tinued, with a bitter irony new to him. "It's an ill wind that
blows nobody good. And there's a chance," he ended, with a
still bitterer laugh, "that Rogers will come to time, after all."

"I don't believe it!" exclaimed Mrs. Lapham, with a gleam
of hope in her eyes. "What chance ?"

"One in ten million," said Lapham; and her face fell again.
"He says there are some English parties after him to buy these
mills."

"Well?"

"Well, I gave him twenty-four hours to prove himself a liar."

"You don't believe there are any such parties?"

"Not in this world."

"But if there were?"

"Well, if there were, Persis But pshaw!"

"No, no!" she pleaded eagerly. "It don't seem as if he could
be such a villain. What would be the use of his pretending?
If he brought the parties to you "

"Well," said Lapham scornfully, "I'd let them have the mills
at the price Rogers turned 'em in on me at. / don't want to
make anything on 'em. But guess I shall hear from the G. L.
& P. first. And when they make their offer, I guess I'll have
to accept it, whatever it is. I don't think they'll have a great
many competitors."

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Mrs. Lapham could not give up her hope. "If you could get
your price from those English parties before they knew that
the G. L. & P. wanted to buy the mills, would it let you out
with Rogers?"

"Just about," said Lapham.

"Then I know he'll move heaven and earth to bring it about.
I tyiow you won't be allowed to suffer for doing him a kind-
ness, Silas. He can't be so ungrateful! Why, why should he
pretend to have any such parties in view when he hasn't?
Don't you be down-hearted, Si. You'll see that he'll be round
with them to-morrow."

Lapham laughed, but she urged so many reasons for her be-
lief in Rogers that Lapham began to rekindle his own faith a
little. He ended by asking for a hot cup of tea; and Mrs. Lap-
ham sent the pot out and had a fresh one steeped for him.
After that he made a hearty supper in the revulsion from his
entire despair; and they fell asleep that night talking hopefully
of his affairs, which he laid before her fully, as he used to do
when he first started in business. That brought the old times
back, and he said : "If this had happened then, I shouldn't have
cared much. I was young then, and I wasn't afraid of anything.
But I noticed that after I passed fifty I began to get scared
easier. I don't believe I could pick up, now, from a regular
knockdown."

"Pshaw! You scared, Silas Lapham?" cried his wife proudly.
"I should like to see the thing that ever scared you; or the
knockdown that you couldn't pick up from!"

"Is that so, Persis?" he asked, with the joy her courage gave
him.

In the middle of the night she called to him, in a voice which
the darkness rendered still more deeply troubled: "Are you
awake, Silas?"

"Yes; I'm awake."

"I've been thinking about those English parties, Si "

SILAS LAPHAM

"So've I."

"And I can't make it out but what you'd be just as bad as
Rogers, every bit and grain, if you were to let them have the
mills "

"And not tell 'em what the chances were with the G. L. & P.?
I thought of that, and you needn't be afraid."

She began to bewail herself, and to sob convulsively: "O
Silas! O Silas!" Heaven knows in what measure the passion of
her soul was mixed with pride in her husband's honesty, relief
from an apprehended struggle, and pity for him.

"Hush, hush, Persis!" he besought her. "You'll wake Pen if
you keep on that way. Don't cry any more! You mustn't."

"Oh, let me cry, Silas! It'll help me. I shall be all right in a
minute. Don't you mind." She sobbed herself quiet. "It does
seem too hard," she said, when she could speak again, "that
you have to give up this chance when Providence had fairly
raised it up for you."

"I guess it wan't Providence raised it up," said Lapham.
"Any rate, it's got to go. Most likely Rogers was lyin', and
there ain't any such parties; but if there were, they couldn't
have the mills from me without the whole story. Don't you be
troubled, Persis. I'm going to pull through all right."

"Oh, I ain't afraid. I don't suppose but what there's plenty
would help you, if they knew you needed it, Si."

"They would if they knew I didn't need it," said Lapham
sardonically.

"Did you tell Bill how you stood?"

"No, I couldn't bear to. I've been the rich one so long, that I
couldn't bring myself to own up that I was in danger."

"Yes."

"Besides, it didn't look so ugly till to-day. But I guess we
shan't let ugly looks scare us."

"No."

299

XXII

1 HE morning postman brought Mrs. Lapham a letter from
Irene, which was chiefly significant because it made no refer-
ence whatever to the writer or her state of mind. It gave the
news of her uncle's family; it told of their kindness to her; her
cousin Will was going to take her and his sisters ice-boating
on the river, when it froze.

By the time this letter came, Lapham had gone to his busi-
ness, and the mother carried it to Penelope to talk over. "What
do you make out of it?" she asked; and without waiting to be
answered she said, "I don't know as I believe in cousins marry-
ing, a great deal; but if Irene and Will were to fix it up be-
tween 'em " She looked vaguely at Penelope.

"It wouldn't make any difference as far as I was concerned,"
replied the girl listlessly.

Mrs. Lapham lost her patience.

"Well, then, I'll tell you what, Penelope!" she exclaimed,
"Perhaps it'll make a difference to you if you know that your
father's in real trouble. He's harassed to death, and he was
awake half the night, talking about it. That abominable old
Rogers has got a lot of money away from him; and he's lost by
others that he's helped," Mrs. Lapham put it in this way be-
cause she had no time to be explicit, "and I want you should
come out of your room now, and try to be of some help and
comfort to him when he comes home to-night. I guess Irene
wouldn't mope round much, if she was here," she could not
help adding.

The girl lifted herself on her elbow. "What's that you say
about father?" she demanded eagerly. "Is he in trouble? Is he

300

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

going to lose his money? Shall we have to stay in this house?"

"We may be very glad to stay in this house," said Mrs. Lap-
ham, half angry with herself for having given cause for the
girl's conjectures, and half with the habit of prosperity in her
child, which could conceive no better of what adversity was.
"And I want you should get up and show that you've got some
feeling for somebody in the world besides yourself."

"Oh, I'll get upl" said the girl promptly, almost cheerfully.

"I don't say it's as bad now as it looked a little while ago,"
said her mother, conscientiously hedging a little from the
statement which she had based rather upon her feelings than
her facts. "Your father thinks he'll pull through all right, and
I don't know but what he will. But I want you should see if you
can't do something to cheer him up and keep him from getting
so perfectly down-hearted as he seems to get, under the load
he's got to carry. And stop thinking about yourself a while,
and behave yourself like a sensible girl."

"Yes, yes," said the girl; "I will. You needn't be troubled
about me any more."

Before she left her room she wrote a note, and when she
came down she was dressed to go out-of-doors and post it
herself. The note was to Corey:

"Do not come to see me any more till you hear from me. I
have a reason which I cannot give you now; and you must
not ask what it is."

All day she went about in a buoyant desperation, and she
came down to meet her father at supper.

"Well, Persis," he said scornfully, as he sat down, "we might
as well saved our good resolutions till they were wanted. I
guess those English parties have gone back on Rogers."

"Do you mean he didn't come?"

"He hadn't come up to half-past five," said Lapham.

"Tchk!" uttered his wife.

"But I guess I shall pull through without Mr. Rogers," con-

301

THE RISE OF

tinued Lapham. "A firm that I didn't think could weather it is
still afloat, and so far forth as the danger goes of being dragged
under with it, I'm all right." Penelope came in. "Hello, Pen!"
cried her father. "It ain't often I meet you nowadays." He put
up his hand as she passed his chair, and pulled her down and
kissed her.

"No," she said; "but I thought I'd come down to-night and
cheer you up a little. I shall not talk; the sight of me will be
enough."

Her father laughed out. "Mother been telling you? Well, I
was pretty blue last night; but I guess I was more scared than
hurt. How'd you like to go to the theatre to-night? Sellers at
the Park. Heigh?"

"Well, I don't know. Don't you think they could get along
without me there?"

"No; couldn't work it at all," cried the Colonel. "Let's all
go. Unless," he added inquiringly, "there's somebody coming
here?"

"There's nobody coming," said Penelope.

"Good! Then we'll go. Mother, don't you be late now."

"Oh, 7 shan't keep you waiting," said Mrs. Lapham. She
had thought of telling what a cheerful letter she had got from
Irene; but upon the whole it seemed better not to speak of
Irene at all just then. After they returned from the theatre,
where the Colonel roared through the comedy, with continual
reference of his pleasure to Penelope, to make sure that she
was enjoying it too, his wife said, as if the whole affair had
been for the girl's distraction rather than his, "I don't believe
but what it's going to come out all right about the children;"
and then she told him of the letter, and the hopes she had
founded upon it.

"Well, perhaps you're right, Persis," he consented.

"I haven't seen Pen so much like herself since it happened.
I declare, when I see the way she came out to-night, just to

302

SILAS LAPHAM

please you, I don't know as I want you should get over all your
troubles right away."

"I guess there'll be enough to keep Pen going for a while
yet," said the Colonel, winding up his watch.

But for a time there was a relief, which Walker noted, in the
atmosphere at the office, and then came another cold wave,
slighter than the first, but distinctly felt there, and succeeded
by another relief. It was like the winter which was wearing on
to the end of the year, with alternations of freezing weather,
and mild days stretching to weeks, in which the snow and ice
wholly disappeared. It was none the less winter, and none the
less harassing for these fluctuations, and Lapham showed in
his face and temper the effect of like fluctuations in his affairs.
He grew thin and old, and both at home and at his office he
was irascible to the point of offence. In these days Penelope
shared with her mother the burden of their troubled home,
and united with her in supporting the silence or the petulance
of the gloomy, secret man who replaced the presence of jolly
prosperity there. Lapham had now ceased to talk of his
troubles, and savagely resented his wife's interference. "You
mind your own business, Persis," he said one day, "if you've
got any;" and after that she left him mainly to Penelope, who
did not think of asking him questions.

"It's pretty hard on you, Pen," she said.

"That makes it easier for me," returned the girl, who did not
otherwise refer to her own trouble. In her heart she had won-
dered a little at the absolute obedience of Corey, who had
made no sign since receiving her note. She would have liked
to ask her father if Corey was sick; she would have liked
him to ask her why Corey did not come any more. Her mother
went on

"I don't believe your father knows where he stands. He
works away at those papers he brings home here at night, as
if he didn't half know what he was about. He always did have

303

THE RISE OF

that close streak in him, and I don't suppose but what he's
been going into things he don't want anybody else to know
about, and he's kept these accounts of his own."

Sometimes he gave Penelope figures to work at, which he
would not submit to his wife's nimbler arithmetic. Then she
went to bed and left them sitting up till midnight, struggling*
with problems in which they were both weak. But she could
see that the girl was a comfort to her father, and that his trou-
bles were a defence and shelter to her. Some nights she could
hear them going out together, and then she lay awake for their
return from their long walk. When the hour or day of respite
came again, the home felt it first. Lapham wanted to know
what the news from Irene was; he joined his wife in all her
cheerful speculations, and tried to make her amends for his
sullen reticence and irritability. Irene was staying on at Du-
buque. There came a letter from her, saying that her uncle's
people wanted her to spend the winter there. "Well, let her,"
said Lapham. "It'll be the best thing for her." Lapham himself
had letters from his brother at frequent intervals. His brother
was watching the G. L. & P., which as yet had made no offer
for the mills. Once, when one of these letters came, he sub-
mitted to his wife whether, in the absence of any positive infor-
mation that the road wanted the property, he might not, with
a good conscience, dispose of it to the best advantage to any-
body who came along.

She looked wistfully at him; it was on the rise from a sea-
son of deep depression with him. "No, Si," she said; "I don't
see how you could do that."

He did not assent and submit, as he had done at first, but
began to rail at the unpracticality of women; and then he shut
some papers he had been looking over into his desk, and flung
out of the room.

One of the papers had slipped through the crevice of the
lid, and lay upon the floor. Mrs. Lapham kept on at her sewing,

34

SILAS LAPHAM

but after a while she picked the paper up to lay it on the desk.
Then she glanced at it, and saw that it was a long column
of dates and figures, recording successive sums, never large
ones, paid regularly to "Wm. M." The dates covered a year,
and the sum amounted at least to several hundreds.

Mrs. Lapham laid the paper down on the desk, and then she
took it up again and put it into her work-basket, meaning to
give it to him. When he came in she saw him looking absent-
mindedly about for something, and then going to work upon
his papers, apparently without it. She thought she would wait
till he missed it definitely, and then give him the scrap she had
picked up. It lay in her basket, and after some days it found
its way under the work in it, and she forgot it.

305

XXIII

New Year's there had scarcely been a mild day, and
he streets were full of snow, growing foul under the city feet
and hoofs, and renewing its purity from the skies with re-
peated falls, which in turn lost their whiteness, beaten down,
md beaten black and hard into a solid bed like iron. The
deighing was incomparable, and the air was full of the din of
Dells; but Lapham's turnout was not of those that thronged
he Brighton road every afternoon; the man at the livery-stable
>ent him word that the mare's legs were swelling.

He and Corey had little to do with each other. He did not
know how Penelope had arranged it with Corey; his wife said
>he knew no more than he did, and he did not like to ask the
^irl herself, especially as Corey no longer came to the house.
He saw that she was cheerfuller than she had been, and help-
Euller with him and her mother. Now and then Lapham
opened his troubled soul to her a little, letting his thought
3reak into speech without preamble or conclusion. Once he
said

"Pen, I presume you know I'm in trouble."

"We all seem to be there," said the girl.

"Yes, but there's a difference between being there by your
3wn fault and being there by somebody else's."

"I don't call it his fault," she said.

"I call it mine," said the Colonel.

The girl laughed. Her thought was of her own care, and her
Father's wholly of his. She must come to his ground. "What
have you been doing wrong?"

"I don't know as you'd call it wrong. It's what people do

306

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

all the time. But I wish I'd let stocks alone. It's what I always
promised your mother I would do. But there's no use cryin*
over spilt milk; or watered stock, either."

"I don't think there's much use crying about anything. If
it could have been cried straight, it would have been all right
from the start," said the girl, going back to her own affair;
and if Lapham had not been so deeply engrossed in his, he
might have seen how little she cared for all that money could
do or undo. He did not observe her enough to see how vari-
able her moods were in those days, and how often she sank
from some wild gaiety into abject melancholy; how at times
she was fiercely defiant of nothing at all, and at others inex-
plicably humble and patient. But no doubt none of these signs
had passed unnoticed by his wife, to whom Lapham said one
day, when he came home, "Persis, what's the reason Pen don't
marry Corey?"

"You know as well as I do, Silas," said Mrs. Lapham, with
an inquiring look at him for what lay behind his words.

"Well, I think it's all tomfoolery, the way she's going on.
There ain't any rhyme nor reason to it." He stopped, and his
wife waited. "If she said the word, I could have some help
from them." He hung his head, and would not meet his
wife's eye.

"I guess you're in a pretty bad way, Si," she said pityingly,
"or you wouldn't have come to that."

"I'm in a hole," said Lapham, "and I don't know where to
turn. You won't let me do anything about those mills "

"Yes, I'll let you," said his wife sadly.

He gave a miserable cry. "You know I can't do anything, if
you do. O my Lord!"

She had not seen him so low as that before. She did not know
what to say. She was frightened, and could only ask, "Has
it come to the worst?"

"The new house has got to go," he answered evasively.

307

THE RISE OF

She did not say anything. She knew that the work on the
house had been stopped since the beginning of the year. Lap-
ham had told the architect had he preferred to leave it un-
finished till the spring, as there was no prospect of their being
able to get into it that winter; and the architect had agreed
with him that it would not hurt it to stand. Her heart was
heavy for him, though she could not say so. They sat to-
gether at the table, where she had come to be with him at his
belated meal. She saw that he did not eat, and she waited for
him to speak again, without urging him to take anything.
They were past that.

"And I've sent orders to shut down at the Works," he added.

"Shut down at the Works!" she echoed with dismay. She
could not take it in. The fire at the Works had never been out
before since it was first kindled. She knew how he had prided
himself upon that; how he had bragged of it to every listener,
and had always lugged the fact in as the last expression of his
sense of success. "O Silas!"

"What's the use?" he retorted. "I saw it was coming a
month ago. There are some fellows out in West Virginia that
have been running the paint as hard as they could. They
couldn't do much; they used to put it on the market raw. But
lately they got to baking it, and now they've struck a vein of
natural gas right by their works, and they pay ten cents for
fuel, where I pay a dollar, and they make as good a paint. Any-
body can see where it's going to end. Besides, the market's
over-stocked. It's glutted. There wan't anything to do but to
shut down, and I've shut down."

"I don't know what's going to become of the hands in the
middle of the winter, this way," said Mrs. Lapham, laying hold
of one definite thought which she could grasp in the turmoil
of ruin that whirled before her eyes.

"I don't care what becomes of the hands," cried Lapham.
"They've shared my luck; now let 'em share the other thing.

308

SILAS LAPHAM

And if you're so very sorry for the hands, I wish you'd keep a
little of your pity for me. Don't you know what shutting down
the Works means?"

"Yes, indeed I do, Silas," said his wife tenderly.

"Well, then!" He rose, leaving his supper untasted, and went
into the sitting-room, where she presently found him, with
that everlasting confusion of papers before him on the desk.
That made her think of the paper in her work-basket, and
she decided not to make the careworn, distracted man ask her
for it, after all. She brought it to him.

He glanced blankly at it and then caught it from her, turn-
ing red and looking foolish. "Where'd you get that?"

"You dropped it on the floor the other night, and I picked it
up.Whois'Wm.M.'?"

"*Wm. M.'?" he repeated, looking confusedly at her, and
then at the paper. "Oh, it's nothing." He tore the paper into
small pieces, and went and dropped them into the fire. When
Mrs. Lapham came into the room in the morning, before he
was down, she found a scrap of the paper, which must have
fluttered to the hearth; and glancing at it she saw that the
words were "Mrs. M." She wondered what dealings with a
woman her husband could have, and she remembered the con-
fusion he had shown about the paper, and which she had
thought was because she had surprised one of his business
secrets. She was still thinking of it when he came down to
breakfast, heavy-eyed, tremulous, with deep seams and
wrinkles in his face.

After a silence which he did not seem inclined to break,
"Silas," she asked, "who is 'Mrs. M.'?"

He stared at her. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't you?" she returned mockingly. "When you do, you
tell me. Do you want any more coffee?"

"No."

"Well, then, you can ring for Alice when you've finished. I've

309

THE RISE OF

got some things to attend to." She rose abruptly, and left the
room. Lapham looked after her in a dull way, and then went
on with his breakfast. While he still sat at his coffee, she flung
into the room again, and dashed some papers down beside his
plate. "Here are some more things of yours, and I'll thank you
to lock them up in your desk and not litter my room with
them, if you please." Now he saw that she was angry, and it
must be with him. It enraged him that in such a time of trou-
ble she should fly out at him in that way. He left the house
without trying to speak to her.

That day Corey came just before closing, and, knocking at
Lapham's door, asked if he could speak with him a few mo-
ments.

"Yes," said Lapham, wheeling round in his swivel-chair and
kicking another towards Corey. "Sit down. I want to talk to
you. I'd ought to tell you you're wasting your time here. I
spoke the other day about your placin' yourself better, and I
can help you to do it, yet. There ain't going to be the outcome
for the paint in the foreign markets that we expected, and I
guess you better give it up."

"I don't wish to give it up," said the young fellow, setting
his lips. "I've as much faith in it as ever; and I want to propose
now what I hinted at in the first place. I want to put some
money into the business."

"Some money!" Lapham leaned towards him, and frowned
as if he had not quite understood, while he clutched the arms
of his chair.

"I've got about thirty thousand dollars that I could put in,
and if you don't want to consider me a partner I remember
that you objected to a partner you can let me regard it as an
investment. But I think I see the way to doing something at
once in Mexico, and I should like to feel that I had something
more than a drummer's interest in the venture."

The men sat looking into each other's eyes. Then Lapham

310

SILAS LAPHAM

leaned back in his chair, and rubbed his hand hard and slowly
over his face. His features were still twisted with some strong
emotion when he took it away. "Your family know about
this?"

"My Uncle James knows."

"He thinks it would be a good plan tor you?"

"He thought that by this time I ought to be able to trust
my own judgment."

"Do you suppose I could see your uncle at his office?"

"I imagine he's fhere."

"Well, I want to have a talk with him, one of these days." He
sat pondering a while, and then rose, and went with Corey
to his door. "I guess I shan't change my mind about taking
you into the business in that way," he said coldly. "If there
was any reason why I shouldn't at first, there's more now."

"Very well, sir," answered the young man, and went to close
his desk. The outer office was empty; but while Corey was put-
ting his papers in order it was suddenly invaded by two
women, who pushed by the protesting porter on the stairs and
made their way towards Lapham's room. One of them was
Miss Dewey, the type-writer girl, and the other was a woman
whom she would resemble in face and figure twenty years
hence, if she led a life of hard work varied by paroxysms of
hard drinking.

"That his room, Z'rilla?" asked this woman, pointing to-
wards Lapham's door with a hand that had not freed itself
from the fringe of dirty shawl under which it had hung. She
went forward without waiting for the answer, but before she
could reach it the door opened, and Lapham stood filling its
space.

"Look here, Colonel Lapham!" began the woman, in a high
key of challenge. "I want to know if this is the way you're
goin' back on me and Z'rilla ?"

"What do you want?" asked Lapham.

THE RISE OF

"What do I want? What do you s'pose I want? I want the
money to pay my month's rent; there ain't a bite to eat in
the house; and I want some money to market."

Lapham bent a frown on the woman, under which she
shrank back a step. "You've taken the wrong way to get it.
Clear out!"

"I won't clear out!" said the woman, beginning to whimper.

"Corey!" said Lapham, in the peremptory voice of a master,
he had seemed so indifferent to Corey's presence that the
young man thought he must have forgotten he was there,
"Is Dennis anywhere round?"

"Yissor," said Dennis, answering for himself from the head
of the stairs, and appearing in the ware-room.

Lapham spoke to the woman again. "Do you want I should
call a hack, or do you want I should call an officer?"

The woman began to cry into an end of her shawl. "7 don't
know what we're goin' to do."

"You're going to clear out," said Lapham. "Call a hack,
Dennis. If you ever come here again, I'll have you arrested.
Mind that! Zerrilla, I shall want you early to-morrow morn-
ing."

"Yes, sir," said the girl meekly; she and her mother shrank
out after the porter.

Lapham shut his door without a word.

At lunch the next day Walker made himself amends for
Corey's reticence by talking a great deal. He talked about Lap-
ham, who seemed to have, more than ever since his apparent
difficulties began, the fascination of an enigma for his book-
keeper, and he ended by asking, "Did you see that little circus
last night?"

"What little circus?" asked Corey in his turn.

"Those two women and the old man. Dennis told me about
it. I told him if he liked his place he'd better keep his mouth
shut."

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SILAS LAPHAM

"That was very good advice," said Corey.

"Oh, all right, if you don't want to talk. Don't know as I
should in your place," returned Walker, in the easy security
he had long felt that Corey had no intention of putting on
airs with him. "But I'll tell you what : the old man can't expect
it of everybody. If he keeps this thing up much longer, it's go-
ing to be talked about. You can't have a woman walking into
your place of business, and trying to bulldoze you before your
porter, without setting your porter to thinking. And the last
thing you want a porter to do is to think; for when a porter
thinks, he thinks wrong."

"I don't see why even a porter couldn't think right about
that affair," replied Corey. "I don't know who the woman was,
though I believe she was Miss Dewey's mother; but I couldn't
see that Colonel Lapham showed anything but a natural re-
sentment of her coming to him in that way. I should have
said she was some rather worthless person whom he'd been be-
friending, and that she had presumed upbn his kindness."

"Is that so? What do you think of his never letting Miss
Dewey's name go on the books?"

"That it's another proof it's a sort of charity of his. That's
the only way to look at it."

"Oh, I'm all right." Walker lighted a cigar and began to
smoke, with his eyes closed to a fine straight line. "It won't
do for a book-keeper to think wrong, any more than a porter,
I suppose. But I guess you and I don't think very different
about this thing."

"Not if you think as I do/* replied Corey steadily; "and I
know you would do that if you had seen the 'circus' yourself.
A man doesn't treat people who have a disgraceful hold upon
him as he treated them."

"It depends upon who he is," said Walker, taking his cigar
from his mouth. "I never said the old man was afraid of any-
thing."

3*3

THE RISE OF

"And character," continued Corey, disdaining to touch the
matter further, except in generalities, "must go for something.
If it's to be the prey of mere accident and appearance, then it
goes for nothing."

"Accidents will happen in the best regulated families," said
Walker, with vulgar, good-humoured obtuseness that filled
Corey with indignation. Nothing, perhaps, removed his mat-
ter-of-fact nature further from the commonplace than a certain
generosity of instinct, which I should not be ready to say was
always infallible.

That evening it was Miss Dewey's turn to wait for speech
with Lapham after the others were gone. He opened his door
at her knock, and stood looking at her with a worried air.
"Well, what do you want, Zerrilla?" he asked, with a sort of
rough kindness.

"I want to know what I'm going to do about Hen. He's
back again; and he and mother have made it up, and they both
got to drinking last night after I went home, and carried on so
that the neighbours came in."

Lapham passed his hand over his red and heated face. "I
don't know what I'm going to do. You're twice the trouble
that my own family is, now. But I know what I'd do, mighty
quick, if it wasn't for you, Zerrilla," he went on relentingly.
"I'd shut your mother up somewheres, and if I could get that
fellow off for a three years' voyage "

"I declare," said Miss Dewey, beginning to whimper, "it
seems as if he came back just so often to spite me. He's never
gone more than a year at the furthest, and you can't make it
out habitual drunkenness, either, when it's just sprees. I'm at
my wit's end."

"Oh, well, you mustn't cry around here," said Lapham
soothingly.

"I know it," said Miss Dewey. "If I could get rid of Hen, I

SILAS LAPHAM

could manage well enough with mother. Mr. Wemmel would
marry me if I could get the divorce. He's said so over and
over again."

"I don't know as I like that very well," said Lapham, frown-
ing. "I don't know as I want you should get married in any
hurry again. I don't know as I like your going with anybody
else just yet."

"Oh, you needn't be afraid but what it'll be all right. It'll be
the best thing all round, if I can marry him."

"Well!" said Lapham impatiently; "I can't think about it
now. I suppose they've cleaned everything out again?"

"Yes, they have," said Zerrilla; "there isn't a cent left."

"You're a pretty expensive lot," said Lapham. "Well, here!"
He took out his pocket-book and gave her a note. "I'll be
round to-night and see what can be done."

He shut himself into his room again, and Zerrilla dried her
tears, put the note into her bosom, and went her way.

Lapham kept the porter nearly an hour later. It was then
six o'clock, the hour at which the Laphams usually had tea; but
all custom had been broken up with him during the past
months, and he did not go home now. He determined, perhaps
in the extremity in which a man finds relief in combating one
care with another, to keep his promise to Miss Dewey, and at
the moment when he might otherwise have been sitting down
at his own table he was climbing the stairs to her lodging in
the old-fashioned dwelling which had been portioned off into
flats. It was in a region of depots, and of the cheap hotels, and
"ladies' and gents' " dining-rooms, and restaurants with bars,
which abound near depots; and Lapham followed to Miss
Dewey 's door a waiter from one of these, who bore on a salver
before him a supper covered with a napkin. Zerrilla had ad-
mitted them, and at her greeting a young fellow in the shabby
shore-suit of a sailor, buttoning imperfectly over the nautical

315

THE RISE OF

blue flannel of his shirt, got up from where he had been sitting,
on one side of the stove, and stood infirmly on his feet, in
token of receiving the visitor. The woman who sat on the other
side did not rise, but began a shrill, defiant apology.

"Well, I don't suppose but what you'll think we're livin* on
the fat c' the land, right straight along, all the while. But it's
just like this. When that child came in from her work, she
didn't seem to have the spirit to go to cookin' anything, and
I had such a bad night last night I was feelin' all broke up, and
s'd I, what's the use, anyway ? By the time the butcher's heaved
in a lot o' bone, and made you pay for the suet he cuts away, it
comes to the same thing, and why not git it from the restVant
first off, and save the cost o' your fire ? s'd I."

"What have you got there under your apron? A bottle?"
demanded Lapham, who stood with his hat on and his hands
in his pockets, indifferent alike to the ineffective reception of
the sailor and the chair Zerrilla had set him.

"Well, yes, it's a bottle," said the woman, with an assump-
tion of virtuous frankness. "It's whisky; I got to have some-
thing to rub my rheumatism with."

"Humph!" grumbled Lapham. "You've been rubbing his
rheumatism too, I see."

He twisted his head in the direction of the sailor, now softly
and rhythmically waving to and fro on his feet.

"He hain't had a drop to-day in this house!" cried the
woman.

"What are you doing around here?" said Lapham, turning
fiercely upon him. "You've got no business ashore. Where's
your ship ? Do you think I'm going to let you come here and
eat your wife out of house and home, and then give money to
keep the concern going?"

"just the very words I said when he first showed his face
here, yist'day. Didn't I, Z'rilla?" said the woman, eagerly join-

SILAS LAPHAM

ing in the rebuke of her late boon companion. "You got no
business here, Hen, s'd I. You can't come here to live on me
and Z'rilla, s'd I. You want to go back to your ship, s'd I. That's
what I said."

The sailor mumbled, with a smile of tipsy amiability for
Lapham, something about the crew being discharged.

"Yes," the woman broke in, "that's always the way with
these coasters. Why don't you go off on some them long
v'y'ges ? s'd I. It's pretty hard when Mr. Wemmel stands ready
to marry Z'rilla and provide a comfortable home for us both
I hain't got a great many years more to live, and I should like
to get some satisfaction out of 'em, and not be beholden and
dependent all my days, to have Hen, here, blockin' the way.
I tell him there'd be more money for him in the end; but he
can't seem to make up his mind to it."

"Well, now, look here," said Lapham. "I don't care anything
about all that. It's your own business, and I'm not going to
meddle with it. But it's my business who lives off me; and so
I tell you all three, I'm willing to take care of Zerrilla, and I'm
willing to take care of her mother "

"I guess if it hadn't been for that child's father," the mother
interpolated, "you wouldn't been here to tell the tale, Colonel
Lapham."

"I know all about that," said Lapham. "But I'll tell you
what, Mr. Dewey, I'm not going to support you."

"I don't see what Hen's done," said the old woman impar-
tially.

"He hasn't done anything, and I'm going to stop it. He's got
to get a ship, and he's got to get out of this. And Zerrilla
needn't come back to work till he does. I'm done with you all."

"Well, I vow," said the mother, "if I ever heard anything
like it! Didn't that child's father lay down his life for you?
Hain't you said it yourself a hundred times? And don't she

317

THE RISE OF

work for her money, and slave for it mornin', noon, and
night? You talk as if we was beholden to you for the very
bread in our mouths. I guess if it hadn't been for Jim, you
wouldn't been here crowin' over us."

"You mind what I say. I mean business this time/' said Lap-
ham, turning to the door.

The woman rose and followed him, with her bottle in her
hand. "Say, Colonel! what should you advise Z'rilla to do about
Mr. Wemmel ? I tell her there ain't any use goin' to the trouble
to git a divorce without she's sure about him. Don't you
think we'd ought to git him to sign a paper, or something,
that he'll marry her if she gits it? I don't like to have things
going at loose ends the way they are. It ain't sense. It ain't
right."

Lapham made no answer to the mother anxious for her
child's future, and concerned for the moral questions involved.
He went out and down the stairs, and on the pavement at the
lower door he almost struck against Rogers, who had a bag in
his hand, and seemed to be hurrying towards one of the de-
pots. He halted a little, as if to speak to Lapham; but Lapham
turned his back abruptly upon him, and took the other direc-
tion.

The days were going by in a monotony of adversity to him,
from which he could no longer escape, even at home. He at-
tempted once or twice to talk of his troubles to his wife, but
she repulsed him sharply; she seemed to despise and hate him;
but he set himself doggedly to make a confession to her, and
he stopped her one night, as she came into the room where he
sat hastily upon some errand that was to take her directly
away again.

"Persis, there's something I've got to tell you."

She stood still, as if fixed against her will, to listen.

"I guess you know something about it already, and I guess
it set you against me."

SILAS LAPHAM

"Oh, I guess not, Colonel Lapham. You go your way, and
I go mine. That's all."

She waited for him to speak, listening with a cold, hard
smile on her face.

"I don't say it to make favour with you, because I don't want
you to spare me, and I don't ask you; hut I got into it through
Milton K. Rogers."

"Oh!" said Mrs. Lapham contemptuously.

"I always felt the way I said about it that it wan't any better
than gambling, and I say so now. It's like betting on the turn
of a card; and I give you my word of honour, Persis, that I
never was in it at all till that scoundrel began to load me up
with those wild-cat securities of his. Then it seemed to me as if
I ought to try to do something to get somewhere even. I know
it's no excuse; but watching the market to see what the in-
fernal things were worth from day to day, and seeing it go up,
and seeing it go down, was too much for me; and, to make a
long story short, I began to buy and sell on a margin just
what I told you I never would do. I seemed to make some-
thing I did make something; and I'd have stopped, I do be-
lieve, if I could have reached the figure I'd set in my own mind
to start with; but I couldn't fetch it. I began to lose, and then I
began to throw good money after bad, just as I always did with
everything that Rogers ever came within a mile of. Well, what's
the use? I lost the money that would have carried me out of
this, and I shouldn't have had to shut down the Works, or sell
the house, or "

Lapham stopped. His wife, who at first had listened with
mystification, and then dawning incredulity, changing into a
look of relief that was almost triumph, lapsed again into sever-
ity. "Silas Lapham, if you was to die the next minute, is this
what you started to tell me?"

"Why, of course it is. What did you suppose I started to tell

you?"

319

THE RISE OF

"And look me in the eyes! you haven't got anything else
on your mind now?"

"No! There's trouble enough, the Lord knows; but there's
nothing else to tell you. I suppose Pen gave you a hint about
it. I dropped something to her. I've been feeling bad about it,
Persis, a good while, but I hain't had the heart to speak of it.
I can't expect you to say you like it. I've been a fool, I'll allow,
and I've been something worse, if you choose to say so; but
that's all. I haven't hurt anybody but myself and you and the
children."

Mrs. Lapham rose and said, with her face from him, as she
turned towards the door, "It's all right, Silas. I shan't ever
bring it up against you."

She fled out of the room, but all that evening she was very
sweet with him, and seemed to wish in all tacit ways to atone
for her past unkindness.

She made him talk of his business, and he told her of Co-
rey's offer, and what he had done about it. She did not seem to
care for his part in it, however; at which Lapham was silently
disappointed a little, for he would have liked her to praise him.

"He did it on account of Pen!"

"Well, he didn't insist upon it, anyway," said Lapham, who
must have obscurely expected that Corey would recognise his
own magnanimity by repeating his offer. If the doubt that fol-
lows a self-devoted action the question whether it was not
after all a needless folly is mixed, as it was in Lapham's case,
with the vague belief that we might have done ourselves a
good turn without great risk of hurting any one else by being
a little less unselfish, it becomes a regret that is hard to bear.
Since Corey spoke to him, some things had happened that gave
Lapham hope again.

"I'm going to tell her about it," said his wife, and she showed
herself impatient to make up for the time she had lost. "Why
didn't you tell me before, Silas?"

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SILAS LAPHAM

"I didn't know we were on speaking terms before," said
Lapham sadly.

"Yes, that's true," she admitted, with a conscious flush. "I
hope he won't think Pen's known about it all this while."

321

XXIV

A HAT evening James Bellingham came to see Corey after din-
ner, and went to find him in his own room.

"I've come at the instance of Colonel Lapham," said the
uncle. "He was at my office to-day, and I had a long talk with
him. Did you know that he was in difficulties?"

"I fancied that he was in some sort of trouble. And I had the
book-keeper's conjectures he doesn't really know much about
it."

"Well, he thinks it time on all accounts that you should
know how he stands, and why he declined that proposition of
yours. I must say he has behaved very well like a gentleman."

"I'm not surprised."

"I am. It's hard to behave like a gentleman where your in-
terest is vitally concerned. And Lapham doesn't strike me as a
man who's in the habit of acting from the best in him always."

"Do any of us?" asked Corey.

"Not all of us, at any rate," said Bellingham. "It must have
cost him something to say no to you, for he's just in that state
when he believes that this or that chance, however small,
would save him."

Corey was silent. "Is he really in such a bad way ?"

"It's hard to tell just where he stands. I suspect that a hope-
ful temperament and fondness for round numbers have always
caused him to set his figures beyond his actual worth. I don't
say that he's been dishonest about it, but he's had a loose way
of estimating his assets; he's reckoned his wealth on the basis
of his capital, and some of his capital is borrowed. He's lost

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heavily by some of the recent failures, and there's been a ter-
rible shrinkage in his values. I don't mean merely in the stock
of paint on hand, but in a kind of competition which has be-
come very threatening. You know about that West Virginian
paint?"

Corey nodded.

"Well, he tells me that they've struck a vein of natural gas out
there which will enable them to make as good a paint as his
own at a cost of manufacturing so low that they can under-
sell him everywhere. If this proves to be the case, it will not
only drive his paint out of the market, but will reduce the value
of his Works the whole plant at Lapham to a merely nomi-
nal figure."

"I see," said Corey dejectedly. "I've understood that he had
put a great deal of money into his Works."

"Yes, and he estimated his mine there at a high figure. Of
course it will be worth little or nothing if the West Virginia
paint drives his out. Then, besides, Lapham has been into sev-
eral things outside of his own business, and, like a good many
other men who try outside things, he's kept account of them
himself; and he's all mixed up about them. He's asked me
to look into his affairs with him, and I've promised to do so.
Whether he can be tided over his difficulties remains to be
seen. I'm afraid it will take a good deal of money to do it a
great deal more than he thinks, at least. He believes compara-
tively little would do it. I think differently. I think that anything
less than a great deal would be thrown away on him. If it were
merely a question of a certain sum even a large sum to keep
him going, it might be managed; but it's much more compli-
cated. And, as I say, it must have been a trial to him to refuse
your offer."

This did not seem to be the way in which Bellingliam had
meant to conclude. But he said no more; and Corey made him
no response.

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He remained pondering the case, now hopefully, now doubt-
fully, and wondering, whatever his mood was, whether Penel-
ope knew anything of the fact with which her mother went
nearly at the same moment to acquaint her.

"Of course, he's done it on your account," Mrs. Lapham
could not help saying.

"Then he was very silly. Does he think I would let him give
father money ? And if father lost it for him, does he suppose it
would make it any easier for me ? I think father acted twice as
well. It was very silly."

In repeating the censure, her look was not so severe as hei
tone; she even smiled a little, and her mother reported to her
father that she acted more like herself than she had yet since
Corey's offer.

"I think, if he was to repeat his offer, she would have him
now," said Mrs. Lapham.

"Well, 111 let her know if he does," said the Colonel.

"I guess he won't do it to you!" she cried.

"Who else will he do it to?" he demanded.

They perceived that they had each been talking of a different
offer.

After Lapham went to his business in the morning the post-
man brought another letter from Irene, which was full of
pleasant things that were happening to her; there was a great
deal about her cousin Will, as she called him. At the end she
had written, "Tell Pen I don't want she should be foolish."

"There!" said Mrs. Lapham. "I guess it's going to come out
right, all round;" and it seemed as if even the Colonel's diffi-
culties were past. "When your father gets through this, Pen,"
she asked impulsively, "what shall you do?"

"What have you been telling Irene about me?"

"Nothing much. What should you do?"

"It would be a good deal easier to say what I should do if
father didn't," said the girl.

3 2 4

SILAS LAPHAM

"I know you think it was nice in him to make your father
that offer," urged the mother.

"It was nice, yes; but it was silly," said the girl. "Most nice
things are silly, I suppose," she added.

She went to her room and wrote a letter. It was very long,
and very carefully written; and when she read it over, she tore
it into small pieces. She wrote another one, short and hurried,
and tore that up too. Then she went back to her mother, in the
family room, and asked to see Irene's letter, and read it over to
herself. "Yes, she seems to be having a good time," she sighed.
"Mother, do you think I ought to let Mr. Corey know that I
know about it?"

"Well, I should think it would be a pleasure to him," said
Mrs. Lapham judicially.

"I'm not so sure of that the way I should have to tell him.
I should begin by giving him a scolding. Of course, he meant
well by it, but can't you see that it wasn't very flattering? How
did he expect it would change me?"

"I don't believe he ever thought of that."

"Don't you? Why?"

"Because you can see that he isn't one of that kind. He
might want to please you without wanting to change you by
what he did."

"Yes. He must have known that nothing would change me,
at least, nothing that he could do. I thought of that. I
shouldn't like him to feel that I couldn't appreciate it, even if
I did think it was silly. Should you write to him?"

"I don't see why not."

"It would be too pointed. No, I shall just let it go. I wish he
hadn't done it."

"Well, he has done it."

"And I've tried to write to him about it two letters: one so
humble and grateful that it couldn't stand up on its edge, and
the other so pert and flippant. Mother, I wish you could have

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seen those two letters! I wish I had kept them to look at if I
ever got to thinking I had any sense again. They would take
the conceit out of me."

"What's the reason he don't come here any more?"

"Doesn't he come?" asked Penelope in turn, as if it were
something she had not noticed particularly.

"You'd ought to know."

"Yes." She sat silent a while. "If he doesn't come, I suppose
it's because he's offended at something I did."

"What did you do?"

"Nothing. I wrote to him a little while ago. I suppose it
was very blunt, but I didn't believe he would be angry at it.
But this this that he's done shows he was angry, and that he
wasn't just seizing the first chance to get out of it."

"What have you done, Pen?" demanded her mother sharply.

"Oh, I don't know. All the mischief in the world, I suppose.
I'll tell you. When you first told me that father was in trouble
with his business, I wrote to him not to come any more till I
let him. I said I couldn't tell him why, and he hasn't been here
since. I'm sure I don't know what it means."

Her mother looked at her with angry severity. "Well, Penel-
ope Lapham! For a sensible child, you are the greatest goose
I ever saw. Did you think he would come here and sec if you
wouldn't let him come?"

"He might have written," urged the girl.

Her mother made that despairing "Tchk!" with her tongue,
and fell back in her chair. "I should have despised him if he had
written. He's acted just exactly right, and you you've acted
I don't know how you've acted. I'm ashamed of you. A girl
that could be so sensible for her sister, and always say and do
just the right thing, and then when it comes to herself to be
such a disgusting simpleton!"

"I thought I ought to break with him at once, and not let
him suppose that there was any hope for him or me if father

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SILAS LAPHAM

was poor. It was my one chance, in this whole business, to do
anything heroic, and I jumped at it. You mustn't think, be-
cause I can laugh at it now, that I wasn't in earnest, mother!
I was dead! But the Colonel has gone to ruin so gradually,
that he's spoilt everything. I expected that he would be bank-
rupt the next day, and that then he would understand what I
meant. But to have it drag along for a fortnight seems to take
all the heroism out of it, and leave it as flat!" She looked at her
mother with a smile that shone through her tears, and a
pathos that quivered round her jesting lips. "It's easy enough
to be sensible for other people. But when it comes to myself,
there I am! Especially, when I want to do what I oughtn't so
much that it seems as if doing what I didn't want to do must
be doing what I ought! But it's been a great success one way,
mother. It's helped me to keep up before the Colonel. If it
hadn't been for Mr. Corey's staying away, and my feeling so
indignant with him for having been badly treated by me, I
shouldn't have been worth anything at all."

The tears started down her cheeks, but her mother said,
"Well, now, go along, and write to him. It don't matter what
you say, much; and don't be so very particular."

Her third attempt at a letter pleased her scarcely better than
the rest, but she sent it, though it seemed so blunt and awk-
ward. She wrote :

DEAR FRIEND, I expected when I sent you that note, that
you would understand, almost the next day, why I could not
see you any more. You must know now, and you must not
think that if anything happened to my father, I should wish
you to help him. But that is no reason why I should not thank
you, and I do thank you, for offering. It was like you, I will
say that.

Yours sincerely,

PENELOPE LAPHAM.
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She posted her letter, and he sent his reply in the evening,
by hand:

DEAREST, What I did was nothing, till you praised it. Every-
thing I have and am is yours. Won't you send a line by the
bearer, to say that I may come to see you ? I know how you
feel; but I am sure that I can make you think differently. You
must consider that I loved you without a thought of your fa-
ther's circumstances, and always shall.

T.C.

The generous words were blurred to her eyes by the tears
that sprang into them. But she could only write in answer:

"Please do not come; I have made up my mind. As long as
this trouble is hanging over us, I cannot see you. And if father
is unfortunate, all is over between us."

She brought his letter to her mother, and told her what she
had written in reply. Her mother was thoughtful a while be-
fore she said, with a sigh, "Well, I hope you've begun as you
can carry out, Pen."

"Oh, I shall not have to carry out at all. I shall not have to do
anything. That's one comfort the only comfort." She went
away to her own room, and when Mrs. Lapham told her hus-
band of the affair, he was silent at first, as she had been. Then
he said, "I don't know as I should have wanted her to done dif-
ferently; I don't know as she could. If I ever come right again,
she won't have anything to feel meeching about; and if I don't,
I don't want she should be beholden to anybody. And I guess
that's the way she feels."

The Coreys in their turn sat in judgment on the fact which
their son felt bound to bring to their knowledge.

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"She has behaved very well/' said Mrs. Corey, to whom her
son had spoken.

"My dear," said her husband, with his laugh, "she has be-
haved too well. If she had studied the whole situation with the
most artful eye to its mastery, she could not possibly have be-
haved better."

The process of Lapham's financial disintegration was like
the course of some chronic disorder, which has fastened itself
upon the constitution, but advances with continual reliefs,
with apparent amelioration, and at times seems not to advance
at all, when it gives hope of final recovery not only to the suf-
ferer, but to the eye of science itself. There were moments
when James Bellingham, seeing Lapham pass this crisis and
that, began to fancy that he might pull through altogether;
and at these moments, when his adviser could not oppose any-
thing but experience and probability to the evidence of the
fact, Lapham was buoyant with courage, and imparted his
hopefulness to his household. Our theory of disaster, of sor-
row, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and novelists, is
that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives and in
the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches
us that this is false. The house of mourning is decorously dark-
ened to the world, but within itself it is also the house of laugh-
ing. Bursts of gaiety, as heartfelt as its grief, relieve the gloom,
and the stricken survivors have their jests together, in which
the thought of the dead is tenderly involved, and a fond sense,
not crazier than many others, of sympathy and enjoyment be-
yond the silence, justifies the sunnier mood before sorrow
rushes back, deploring and despairing, and making it all up
again with the conventional fitness of things. Lapham's adver-
sity had this quality in common with bereavement. It was not
always like the adversity we figure in allegory; it had its mo-
ments of being like prosperity, and if upon the whole it wa?

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continual, it was not incessant. Sometimes there was a week of
repeated reverses, when he had to keep his teeth set and to hold
on hard to all his hopefulness; and then days came of negative
result or slight success, when he was full of his jokes at the tea-
table, and wanted to go to the theatre, or to do something to
cheer Penelope up. In some miraculous way, by some enor-
mous stroke of success which should eclipse the brightest of
his past prosperity, he expected to do what would reconcile all
difficulties, not only in his own affairs, but in hers too. "You'll
see," he said to his wife; "it's going to come out all right.
Irene'll fix it up with Bill's boy, and then she'll be off Pen's
mind; and if things go on as they've been going for the last
two days, I'm going to be in a position to do the favours my-
self, and Pen can feel that she's makin' a sacrifice, and then I
guess may be she'll do it. If things turn out as I expect now,
and times ever do get any better generally, I can show Corey
that I appreciate his offer. I can offer him the partnership my-
self then."

Even in the other moods, which came when everything had
been going wrong, and there seemed no way out of the net,
there were points of consolation to Lapham and his wife.
They rejoiced that Irene was safe beyond the range of their
anxieties, and they had a proud satisfaction that there had been
no engagement between Corey and Penelope, and that it was
she who had forbidden it. In the closeness of interest and sym-
pathy in which their troubles had reunited them, they con-
fessed to each other that nothing would have been more gall-
ing to their pride than the idea that Lapham should not have
been able to do everything for his daughter that the Coreys
might have expected. Whatever happened now, the Coreys
could not have it to say that the Laphams had tried to bring
any such thing about.

Bellingham had lately suggested an assignment to Lapham,
as the best way out of his difficulties. It was evident that he

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had not the money to meet his liabilities at present, and that
he could not raise it without ruinous sacrifices, that might still
end in ruin after all. If he made the assignment, Bellingham
argued, he could gain time and make terms; the state of things
generally would probably improve, since it could not be worse,
and the market, which he had glutted with his paint, might re-
cover and he could start again. Lapham had not agreed with
him. When his reverses first began it had seemed easy for him
to give up everything, to let the people he owed take all, so
only they would let him go out with clean hands; and he had
dramatised this feeling in his talk with his wife, when they
spoke together of the mills on the G. L. & P. But ever since then
it had been growing harder, and he could not consent even to
seem to do it now in the proposed assignment. He had not
found other men so very liberal or faithful with him; a good
many of them appeared to have combined to hunt him down;
a sense of enmity towards all his creditors asserted itself in
him; he asked himself why they should not suffer a little too.
Above all, he shrank from the publicity of the assignment. It
was open confession that he had been a fool in some way; he
:ould not bear to have his family his brother the judge, es-
pecially, to whom he had always appeared the soul of business
wisdom think him imprudent or stupid. He would make any
sacrifice before it came to that. He determined in parting with
Bellingham to make the sacrifice which he had oftenest in his
^ind, because it was the hardest, and to sell his new house.
That would cause the least comment. Most people would sim-
ply think that he had got a splendid offer, and with his usual
luck had made a very good thing of it; others who knew a little
more about him would say that he was hauling in his horns,
but they could not blame him; a great many other men were
doing the same in those hard times the shrewdest and safest
men : it might even have a good effect. He went straight from
Bellingham's office to the real-estate broker in whose hands he

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meant to put his house, for he was not the sort of man to shilly-
shally when he had once made up his mind. But he found it
hard to get his voice up out of his throat, when he said he
guessed he would get the broker to sell that new house of his
on the Wjiter side of Beacon. The broker answered cheerfully,
yes; he supposed Colonel Lapham knew it was a pretty dull
time in real estate ? and Lapham said yes, he knew that, but he
should not sell at a sacrifice, and he did not care to have the
broker name him or describe the house definitely unless parties
meant business. Again the broker said yes; and he added, as
a joke Lapham would appreciate, that he had half a dozen
houses on the water side of Beacon, on the same terms; that
nobody wanted to be named or to have his property described.

It did, in fact, comfort Lapham a little to find himself in the
same boat with so many others; he smiled grimly, and said in
his turn, yes, he guessed that was about the size of it with a
good many people. But he had not the heart to tell his wife
what he had done, and he sat taciturn that whole evening,
without even going over his accounts, and went early to bed,
where he lay tossing half the night before he fell asleep. He
slept at last only upon the promise he made himself that he
would withdraw the house from the broker's hands; but he
went heavily to his own business in the morning without do-
ing so. There was no such rush, anyhow, he reflected bitterly;
there would be time to do that a month later, probably.

It struck him with a sort of dismay when a boy came with a
note from a broker, saying that a party who had been over the
house in the fall had come to him to know whether it could be
bought, and was willing to pay the cost of the house up to the
time he had seen it. Lapham took refuge in trying to think who
the party could be; he concluded that it must have been some-
body who had gone over it with the architect, and he did not
like that; but he was aware that this was not an answer to the

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SILAS LAPHAM

broker, and he wrote that he would give him an answer in
the morning.

Now that it had come to the point, it did not seem to him
that he could part with the house. So much of his hope for him-
self and his children had gone into it that the thought of sell-
ing it made him tremulous and sick. He could not keep about
his work steadily, and with his nerves shaken by want of sleep,
and the shock of this sudden and unexpected question, he left
his office early, and went over to look at the house and try to
bring himself to some conclusion here. The long procession
of lamps on the beautiful street was flaring in the clear red of
the sunset towards which it marched, and Lapham, with a
lump in his throat, stopped in front of his house and looked at
their multitude. They were not merely a part of the landscape;
they were a part of his pride and glory, his sucess, his trium-
phant life's work which was fading into failure in his helpless
hands. He ground his teeth to keep down that lump, but the
moisture in his eyes blurred the lamps, and the keen pale crim-
son against which it made them flicker. He turned and looked
up, as he had so often done, at the window-spaces, neatly
glazed for the winter with white linen, and recalled the night
when he had stopped with Irene before the house, and she had
said that she should never live there, and he had tried to coax
her into courage about it. There was no such facade as that on
the whole street, to his thinking. Through his long talks with
the architect, he had come to feel almost as intimately and
fondly as the architect himself the satisfying simplicity of the
whole design and the delicacy of its detail. It appealed to him
as an exquisite bit of harmony appeals to the unlearned ear,
and he recognised the difference between this fine work and
the obstreperous pretentiousness of the many overloaded house-
fronts which Seymour had made him notice for his instruction
elsewhere on the Back Bay. Now, in the depths of his gloom,

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he tried to think what Italian city it was where Seymour
said he had first got the notion of treating brick-work in that
way.

He unlocked the temporary door with the key he always
carried, so that he could let himself in and out whenever he
liked, and entered the house, dim and very cold with the ac-
cumulated frigidity of the whole winter in it, and looking as if
the arrest of work upon it had taken place a thousand years
before. It smelt of the unpainted woods and the clean, hard
surfaces of the plaster, where the experiments in decoration
had left it untouched; and mingled with these odours was that
of some rank pigments and metallic compositions which Sey-
mour had used in trying to realise a certain daring novelty of
finish, which had not proved successful. Above all, Lapham
detected the peculiar odour of his own paint, with which the
architect had been greatly interested one day, when Lapham
showed it to him at the office. He had asked Lapham to let him
try the Persis Brand in realising a little idea he had for the fin-
ish of Mrs. Lapham's room. If it succeeded they could tell her
what it was, for a surprise.

Lapham glanced at the bay-window in the reception-room,
where he sat with his girls on the trestles when Corey first
came by; and then he explored the whole house to the attic, in
the light faintly admitted through the linen sashes. The floors
were strewn with shavings and chips which the carpenters
had left, and in the music-room these had been blown into
long irregular windrows by the draughts through a wide rent
in the linen sash. Lapham tried to pin it up, but failed, and
stood looking out of it over the water. The ice had left the river,
and the low tide lay smooth and red in the light of the sunset.
The Cambridge flats showed the sad, sodden yellow of mead-
ows stripped bare after a long sleep under snow; the hills, the
naked trees, the spires and roofs had a black outline, as if they
were objects in a landscape of the French school.

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SILAS LAPHAM

The whim seized Lapham to test the chimney in the music-
room; it had been tried in the dining-room below, and in his
girls' fireplaces above, but here the hearth was still clean. He
gathered some shavings and blocks together, and kindled them,
and as the flame mounted gaily from them, he pulled up a nail-
keg which he found there and sat down to watch it. Nothing
could have been better; the chimney was a perfect success; and
as Lapham glanced out of the torn linen sash he said to himself
that that party, whoever he was, who had offered to buy his
house might go to the devil; he would never sell it as long as
he had a dollar. He said that he should pull through yet; and
it suddenly came into his mind that, if he could raise the
money to buy out those West Virginia fellows, he should be
all right, and would have the whole game in his own hand. He
slapped himself on the thigh, and wondered that he had never
thought of that before; and then, lighting a cigar with a splin-
ter from the fire, he sat down again to work the scheme out
in his own mind.

He did not hear the feet heavily stamping up the stairs>
and coming towards the room where he sat; and the policeman
to whom the feet belonged had to call out to him, smoking at
his chimney-corner, with his back turned to the door, "Hello!
what are you doing here?"

"What's that to you?" retorted Lapham, wheeling half round
on his nail-keg.

"I'll show you," said the officer, advancing upon him, and
then stopping short as he recognised him. "Why, Colonel Lap-
ham! I thought it was some tramp got in here!"

"Have a cigar?" said Lapham hospitably. "Sorry there ain't
another nail-keg."

The officer took the cigar. "I'll smoke it outside. I've just
come on, and I can't stop. Tryin' your chimney?"

"Yes, I thought I'd see how it would draw, in here. It seems
to go first-rate."

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THE RISE OF

The policeman looked about him with an eye of inspection.
"You want to get that linen window, there, mended up."

"Yes, I'll speak to the builder about that. It can go for one
night."

The policeman went to the window and failed to pin the
linen together where Lapham had failed before. "I can't fix it."
He looked round once more, and saying, "Well, good night,"
went out and down the stairs.

Lapham remained by the fire till he had smoked his cigar;
then he rose and stamped upon the embers that still burned
with his heavy boots, and went home. He was very cheerful at
supper. He told his wife that he guessed he had a sure thing
of it now, and in another twenty-four hours he should tell her
just how. He made Penelope go to the theatre with him, and
when they came out, after the play, the night was so fine that
he said they must walk round by the new house and take a
look at it in the starlight. He said he had been there before he
came home, and tried Seymour's chimney in the music-room,
and it worked like a charm.

As they drew near Beacon Street they were aware of un-
wonted stir and tumult, and presently the still air transmitted
a turmoil of sound, through which a powerful and incessant
throbbing made itself felt. The sky had reddened above them,
and turning the corner at the Public Garden, they saw a black
mass of people obstructing the perspective of the brightly-
lighted street, and out of this mass a half-dozen engines, whose
strong heart-beats had already reached them, sent up volumes
of fire-tinged smoke and steam from their funnels. Ladders
were planted against the facade of a building, from the roof of
which a mass of flame burnt smoothly upward, except where
here and there it seemed to pull contemptuously away from
the heavy streams of water which the firemen, clinging like
great beetles to their ladders, poured in upon it.

Lapham had no need to walk down through the crowd, gaz-

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SILAS LAPHAM

ing and gossiping, with shouts and cries and hysterical laugh-
ter, before the burning house, to make sure that it was his.

"I guess I done it, Pen," was all he said.

Among the people who were looking at it were a party who
seemed to have run out from dinner in some neighbouring
house; the ladies were fantastically wrapped up, as if they had
flung on the first things they could seize.

"Isn't it perfectly magnificent!" cried a pretty girl. "I
wouldn't have missed it on any account. Thank you so much,
Mr. Symington, for bringing us out!"

"Ah, I thought you'd like it," said this Mr. Symington, who
must have been the host; "and you can enjoy it without the
least compunction, Miss Delano, for I happen to know that
the house belongs to a man who could afford to burn one up
for you once a year."

"Oh, do you think he would, if I came again?"

"I haven't the least doubt of it. We don't do things by halves
in Boston."

"He ought to have had a coat of his noncombustible paint
on it," said another gentleman of the party.

Penelope pulled her father away toward the first carriage
she could reach of a number that had driven up. "Here, fa-
ther! get into this."

"No, no; I couldn't ride," he answered heavily, and he
walked home in silence. He greeted his wife with, "Well, Per-
sis, our house is gone! And I guess I set it on fire myself;" and
while he rummaged among the papers in his desk, still with
his coat and hat on, his wife got the facts as she could from
Penelope. She did not reproach him. Here was a case in which
his self-reproach must be sufficiently sharp without any edge
from her. Besides, her mind was full of a terrible thought.

"O Silas," she faltered, "they'll think you set it on fire to get
the insurance!"

Lapham was staring at a paper which he held in his hand.

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"I had a builder's risk on it, but it expired last week. It's a dead
loss."

"Oh, thank the merciful Lord!" cried his wife.

"Merciful!" said Lapham. "Well, it's a queer way of showing
it."

He went to bed, and fell into the deep sleep which sometimes
follows a great moral shock. It was perhaps rather a torpor
than a sleep.

338

XXV

JLjAPHAM awoke confused, and in a kind of remoteness from
the loss of the night before, through which it loomed mistily.
But before he lifted his head from the pillow, it gathered sub-
stance and weight against which it needed all his will to bear
up and live. In that moment he wished that he had not wak-
ened, that he might never have wakened; but he rose, and
faced the day and its cares.

The morning papers brought the report of the fire, and the
conjectured loss. The reporters somehow had found out the fact
that the loss fell entirely upon Lapham; they lighted up the
hackneyed character of their statements with the picturesque
interest of the coincidence that the policy had expired only
the week before; heaven knows how they knew it. They said
that nothing remained of the building but the walls; and Lap-
ham, on his way to business, walked up past the smoke-stained
shell. The windows looked like the eye-sockets of a skull down
upon the blackened and trampled snow of the street; the pave-
ment was a sheet of ice, and the water from the engines had
frozen, like streams of tears, down the face of the house, and
hung in icy tags from the window-sills and copings.

He gathered himself up as well as he could, and went on to
his office. The chance of retrieval that had flashed upon him,
as he sat smoking by that ruined hearth the evening before,
stood him in such stead now as a sole hope may; and he said to
himself that, having resolved not to sell his house, he was no
more crippled by its loss than he would have been by letting
his money lie idle in it; what he might have raised by mortgage
on it could be made up in some other way; and if they would

339

THE RISE OF

sell he could still buy out the whole business of that West Vir-
ginia company, mines, plant, stock on hand, goodwill, and
everything, and unite it with his own. He went early in the
afternoon to see Bellingham, whose expressions of condolence
for his loss he cut short with as much politeness as he knew
how to throw into his impatience. Bellingham seemed at first
a little dazzled with the splendid courage of his scheme; it was
certainly fine in its way; but then he began to have his misgiv-
ings.

"I happen to know that they haven't got much money be-
hind them," urged Lapham. "They'll jump at an offer."

Bellingham shook his head. "If they can show profit on the
old manufacture, and prove they can make their paint still
cheaper and better hereafter, they can have all the money they
want. And it will be very difficult for you to raise it if you're
threatened by them. With that competition, you know what
your plant at Lapham would be worth, and what the shrinkage
on your manufactured stock would be. Better sell out to them,"
he concluded, "if they will buy."

"There ain't money enough in this country to buy out my
paint," said Lapham, buttoning up his coat in a quiver of re-
sentment. "Good afternoon, sir." Men are but grown-up boys
after all. Bellingham watched this perversely proud and ob-
stinate child fling petulantly out of his door, and felt a sym-
pathy for him which was as truly kind as it was helpless.

But Lapham was beginning to see through Bellingham, as
he believed. Bellingham was, in his way, part of that conspir-
acy by which Lapham's creditors were trying to drive him to
the wall. More than ever now he was glad that he had nothing
to do with that cold-hearted, self-conceited race, and that the
favours so far were all from his side. He was more than ever
determined to show them, every one of them, high and low,
that he and his children could get along without them, and
prosper and triumph without them. He said to himself that if

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SILAS LAPHAM

Penelope were engaged to Corey that very minute, he would
make her break with him.

He knew what he should do now, and he was going to do it
without loss of time. He was going on to New York to see
those West Virginia people; they had their principal office
there, and he intended to get at their ideas, and then he in-
tended to make them an offer. He managed this business better
than could possibly have been expected of a man in his impas-
sioned mood. But when it came really to business, his practical
instincts, alert and wary, came to his aid against the passions
that lay in wait to betray after they ceased to dominate him.
He found the West Virginians full of zeal and hope, but in ten
minutes he knew that they had not yet tested their strength in
the money market, and had not ascertained how much or how
little capital they could command. Lapham himself, if he had
had so much, would not have hesitated to put a million dollars
into their business. He saw, as they did not see, that they
had the game in their own hands, and that if they could raise
the money to extend their business, they could ruin him. It was
only a question of time, and he was on the ground first. He
frankly proposed a union of their interests. He admitted that
they had a good thing, and that he should have to fight them
hard; but he meant to fight them to the death unless they
could come to some sort of terms. Now, the question was
whether they had better go on and make a heavy loss for both
sides by competition, or whether they had better form a part-
nership to run both paints and command the whole market.
Lapham made them three propositions, each of which was fair
and open: to sell out to them altogether; to buy them out alto-
gether; to join facilities and forces with them, and go on in
an invulnerable alliance. Let them name a figure at which they
would buy, a figure at which they would sell, a figure at which
they would combine, or, in other words, the amount of capi-
tal they needed.

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They talked all day, going out to lunch together at the Astor
House, and sitting with their knees against the counter on a
row of stools before it for fifteen minutes of reflection and de-
glutition, with their hats on, and then returning to the base-
ment from which they emerged. The West Virginia company's
name was lettered in gilt on the wide low window, and its
paint, in the form of ore, burnt, and mixed, formed a display
on the window shelf. Lapham examined it and praised it; from
time to time they all recurred to it together; they sent out for
some of Lapham's paint and compared it, the West Virginians
admitting its former superiority. They were young fellows,
and country persons, like Lapham, by origin, and they looked
out with the same amused, undaunted provincial eyes at the
myriad metropolitan legs passing on the pavement above the
level of their window. He got on well with them. At last, they
said what they would do. They said it was nonsense to talk of
buying Lapham out, for they had not the money; and as for
selling out, they would not do it, for they knew they had a big
thing. But they would as soon use his capital to develop it as
anybody else's, and if he could put in a certain sum for this
purpose, they would go in with him. He should run the works
at Lapham and manage the business in Boston, and they would
run the works at Kanawha Falls and manage the business in
New York. The two brothers with whom Lapham talked
named their figure, subject to the approval of another brother
at Kanawha Falls, to whom they would write, and who would
telegraph his answer, so that Lapham could have it inside of
three days. But they felt perfectly sure that he would approve;
and Lapham started back on the eleven o'clock train with an
elation that gradually left him as he drew near Boston, where
the difficulties of raising this sum were to be overcome. It
seemed to him, then, that those fellows had put it up on him
pretty steep, but he owned to himself that they had a sure
thing, and that they were right in believing they could raise

342

SILAS LAPHAM

the same sum elsewhere; it would take all of it, he admitted,
to make their paint pay on the scale they had the right to ex-
pect. At their age, he would not have done differently; but
when he emerged, old, sore, and sleep-broken, from the sleep-
ing-car in the Albany depot at Boston, he wished with a pa-
thetic self-pity that they knew how a man felt at his age. A year
ago, six months ago, he would have laughed at the notion that
it would be hard to raise the money. But he thought ruefully
of that immense stock of paint on hand, which was now a drug
in the market, of his losses by Rogers and by the failures of
other men, of the fire that had licked up so many thousands in
a few hours; he thought with bitterness of the tens of thou-
sands that he had gambled away in stocks, and of the com-
missions that the brokers had pocketed whether he won or
lost; and he could not think of any securities on which he
could borrow, except his house in Nankeen Square, or the
mine and works at Lapham. He set his teeth in helpless rage
when he thought of that property out on the G. L. & P., that
ought to be worth so much, and was worth so little if the Road
chose to say so.

He did not go home, but spent most of the day shining
round, as he would have expressed it, and trying to see if he
could raise the money. But he found that people of whom he
hoped to get it were in the conspiracy which had been formed
to drive him to the wall. Somehow, there seemed a sense of his
embarrassments abroad. Nobody wanted to lend money on
the plant at Lapham without taking time to look into the state
of the business; but Lapham had no time to give, and he knew
that the state of the business would not bear looking into. He
could raise fifteen thousand on his Nankeen Square house,
and another fifteen on his Beacon Street lot, and this was all
that a man who was worth a million by rights could do! He
said a million, and he said it in defiance of Bellingham, who
had subjected his figures to an analysis which wounded Lap-

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ham more than he chose to show at the time, for it proved that
he was not so rich and not so wise as he had seemed. His hurt
vanity forbade him to go to Bellingham now for help or ad-
vice; and if he could have brought himself to ask his brothers
for money, it would have been useless; they were simply well-
to-do Western people, but not capitalists on the scale he re-
quired.

Lapham stood in the isolation to which adversity so often
seems to bring men. When its test was applied, practically or
theoretically, to all those who had seemed his friends, there
was none who bore it; and he thought with bitter self -con-
tempt of the people whom he had befriended in their time of
need. He said to himself that he had been a fool for that; and
he scorned himself for certain acts of scrupulosity by which
he had lost money in the past. Seeing the moral forces all ar-
rayed against him, Lapham said that he would like to have the
chance offered him to get even with them again; he thought
he should know how to look out for himself. As he understood
it, he had several days to turn about in, and he did not let one
day's failure dishearten him. The morning after his return
he had, in fact, a gleam of luck that gave him the greatest en-
couragement for the moment. A man came in to inquire about
one of Rogers's wild-cat patents, as Lapham called them, and
ended by buying it. He got it, of course, for less than Lapham
took it for, but Lapham was glad to be rid of it for something,
when he had thought it worth nothing; and when the trans-
action was closed, he asked the purchaser rather eagerly if he
knew where Rogers was; it was Lapham 's secret belief that
Rogers had found there was money in the thing, and had sent
the man to buy it. But it appeared that this was a mistake;
the man had not come from Rogers, but had heard of the pat-
ent in another way; and Lapham was astonished in the after-
noon, when his boy came to tell him that Rogers was in the
outer office, and wished to speak with him.

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SILAS LAPHAM

"All right," said Lapham, and he could not command at
once the severity for the reception of Rogers which he would
have liked to use. He found himself, in fact, so much relaxed
towards him by the morning's touch of prosperity that he
asked him to sit down, gruffly, of course, but distinctly; and
when Rogers said in his lifeless way, and with the effect of
keeping his appointment of a month before, "Those English
parties are in town, and would like to talk with you in refer-
ence to the mills," Lapham did not turn him out-of-doors.

He sat looking at him, and trying to make out what Rogers
was after; for he did not believe that the English parties, if they
existed, had any notion of buying his mills.

"What if they are not for sale?" he asked. "You know that
I've been expecting an offer from the G. L. & P."

"I've kept watch of that. They haven't made you any offer,"
said Rogers quietly.

"And did you think," demanded Lapham, firing up, "that I
would turn them in on somebody else as you turned them in
on me, when the chances are that they won't be worth ten cents
on the dollar six months from now?"

"I didn't know what you would do," said Rogers non-com*
mittally. "I've come here to tell you that these parties stand
ready to take the mills off your hands at a fair valuation at the
value I put upon them when I turned them in."

"I don't believe you!" cried Lapham brutally, but a wild
predatory hope made his heart leap so that it seemed to turn
over in his breast. "I don't believe there are any such parties to
begin with; and in the next place, I don't believe they would
buy at any such figure; unless unless you've lied to them, as
you've lied to me. Did you tell them about the G. L. & P.?"

Rogers looked compassionately at him, but he answered,
with unvaried dryness, "I did not think that necessary."

Lapham had expected this answer, and he had expected or
intended to break out in furious denunciation of Rogers when

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he got it; but he only found himself saying, in a sort of baffled
gasp, "I wonder what your game is!"

Rogers did not reply categorically, but he answered, with
his impartial calm, and as if Lapham had said nothing to in-
dicate that he differed at all with him as to disposing of the
property in the way he had suggested: "If we should succeed
in selling, I should be able to repay you your loans, and should
have a little capital for a scheme that I think of going into."

"And do you think that I am going to steal these men's
money to help you plunder somebody in a new scheme?" an-
swered Lapham. The sneer was on behalf of virtue, but it was
still a sneer.

"I suppose the money would be useful to you too, just now."

"Because I know that you have been trying to borrow."

At this proof of wicked omniscience in Rogers, the question
whether he had better not regard the affair as a fatality, and
yield to his destiny, flashed upon Lapham; but he answered, "I
shall want money a great deal worse than I've ever wanted it
yet, before I go into such rascally business with you. Don't you
know that we might as well knock these parties down on the
street, and take the money out of their pockets?"

"They have come on," answered Rogers, "from Portland to
see you. I expected them some weeks ago, but they disappointed
me. They arrived on the Circassian last night; they expected
to have got in five days ago, but the passage was very stormy."

"Where are they?" asked Lapham, with helpless irrelevance,
and feeling himself somehow drifted from his moorings by
Rogers's shipping intelligence.

"They are at Young's. I told them we would call upon them
after dinner this evening; they dine late."

"Oh, you did, did you?" asked Lapham, trying to drop an-
other anchor for a fresh clutch on his underlying principles.
"Well, now, you go and tell them that I said I wouldn't come."

"Their stay is limited," remarked Rogers. "I mentioned

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SILAS LAPHAM

this evening because they were not certain they could remain
over another night. But if to-morrow would suit you bet-
ter "

"Tell 'em I shan't come at all," roared Lapham, as much in
terror as defiance, for he felt his anchor dragging. "Tell 'em I
shan't come at all! Do you understand that?"

"I don't see why you should stickle as to the matter of going
to them," said Rogers; "but if you think it will be better to
have them approach you, I suppose I can bring them to you."

"No, you can't! I shan't let you! I shan't see them! I shan't
have anything to do with them. Now do you understand?"

"I inferred from our last interview," persisted Rogers, un-
moved by all this violent demonstration of Lapham's, "that
you wished to meet these parties. You told me that you would
give me time to produce them; and I have promised them that
you would meet them ; I have committed myself."

It was true that Lapham had defied Rogers to bring on his
men, and had implied his willingness to negotiate with them.
That was before he had talked the matter over with his wife,
and perceived his moral responsibility in it; even she had not
seen this at once. He could not enter into this explanation with
Rogers; he could only say, "I said I'd give you twenty-four
hours to prove yourself a liar, and you did it. I didn't say
twenty-four days."

"I don't see the difference," returned Rogers. "The parties
are here now, and that proves that I was acting in good faith
at the time. There has been no change in the posture of affairs.
You don't know now any more than you knew then that
the G. L. & P. is going to want the property. If there's any dif-
ference, it's in favour of the Road's having changed its mind."

There was some sense in this, and Lapham felt it felt it
only too eagerly, as he recognised the next instant.

Rogers went on quietly : "You're not obliged to sell to these
parties when you meet them; but you've allowed me to commit

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myself to them by the promise that you would talk with them."

" 'Twan't a promise," said Lapham.

"It was the same thing; they have come out from England
on my guaranty that there was such and such an opening for
their capital; and now what am I to say to them? It places me
in a ridiculous position." Rogers urged his grievance calmly,
almost impersonally, making his appeal to Lapham's sense of
justice. "I cant go back to those parties and tell them you won't
see them. It's no answer to make. They've got a right to know
why you won't see them."

"Very well, then!" cried Lapham; "I'll come and tell them
why. Who shall I ask for? When shall I be there?"

"At eight o'clock, please," said Rogers, rising, without ap-
parent alarm at his threat, if it was a threat. "And ask for me;
I've taken a room at the hotel for the present."

"I won't keep you five minutes when I get there," said Lap-
ham; but he did not come away till ten o'clock.

It appeared to him as if the very devil was in it. The English-
men treated his downright refusal to sell as a piece of bluff,
and talked on as though it were merely the opening of the nego-
tiation. When he became plain with them in his anger, and
told them why he would not sell, they seemed to have been
prepared for this as a stroke of business, and were ready to meet
it.

"Has this fellow," he demanded, twisting his head in the
direction of Rogers, but disdaining to notice him otherwise,
"been telling you that it's part of my game to say this ? Well,
sir, I can tell you, on my side, that there isn't a slipperier rascal
unhung in America than Milton K. Rogers!"

The Englishmen treated this as a piece of genuine American
humour, and returned to the charge with unabated courage.
They owned now, that a person interested with them had
been out to look at the property, and that they were satisfied

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SILAS LAPHAM

with the appearance of things. They developed further the fact
that they were not acting solely, or even principally, in their
own behalf, but were the agents of people in England who had
projected the colonisation of a sort of community on the spot,
somewhat after the plan of other English dreamers, and that
they were satisfied, from a careful inspection, that the resources
and facilities were those best calculated to develop the energy
and enterprise of the proposed community. They were pre-
pared to meet Mr. Lapham Colonel, they begged his pardon,
at the instance of Rogers at any reasonable figure, and were
quite willing to assume the risks he had pointed out. Some-
thing in the eyes of these men, something that lurked at an in-
finite depth below their speech, and was not really in their
eyes when Lapham looked again, had flashed through him a
sense of treachery in them. He had thought them the dupes of
Rogers; but in that brief instant he had seen them or
thought he had seen them his accomplices, ready to betray
the interests of which they went on to speak with a certain
comfortable jocosity, and a certain incredulous slight of his
<how of integrity. It was a deeper game than Lapham was used
ro, and he sat looking with a sort of admiration from one Eng-
lishman to the other, and then to Rogers, who maintained an
exterior of modest neutrality, and whose air said, "I have
brought you gentlemen together as the friend of all parties,
and I now leave you to settle it among yourselves. I ask noth-
ing, and expect nothing, except the small sum which shall
accrue to me after the discharge of my obligations to Colonel
Lapham."

While Rogers's presence expressed this, one of the English-
men was saying, "And if you have any scruple in allowin' us to
assume this risk, Colonel Lapham, perhaps you can console
yourself with the fact that the loss, if there is to be any, will
fall upon people who are able to bear it upon an association

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of rich and charitable people. But we're quite satisfied there
will be no loss," he added savingly. "All you have to do is to
name your price, and we will do our best to meet it."

There was nothing in the Englishman's sophistry very
shocking to Lapham. It addressed itself in him to that easy-
going, not evilly intentioned, potential immorality which re-
gards common property as common prey, and gives us the
most corrupt municipal governments under the sun which
makes the poorest voter, when he has tricked into place, as
unscrupulous in regard to others' money as an hereditary
prince. Lapham met the Englishman's eye, and with difficulty
kept himself from winking. Then he looked away, and tried to
find out where he stood, or what he wanted to do. He could
hardly tell. He had expected to come into that room and un-
mask Rogers, and have it over. But he had unmasked Rogers
without any effect whatever, and the play had only begun. He
had a whimsical and sarcastic sense of its being very different
from the plays at the theatre. He could not get up and go away
in silent contempt; he could not tell the Englishmen that he
believed them a pair of scoundrels and should have nothing to
do with them; he could no longer treat them as innocent dupes.
He remained baffled and perplexed, and the one who had not
spoken hitherto remarked

"Of course we shan't 'aggie about a few pound, more or less.
If Colonel Lapham's figure should be a little larger than ours,
I've no doubt 'e'll not be too 'ard upon us in the end."

Lapham appreciated all the intent of this subtle suggestion,
and understood as plainly as if it had been said in so many
words, that if they paid him a larger price, it was to be expected
that a certain portion of the purchase-money was to return to
their own hands. Still he could not move; and it seemed to
him that he could not speak.

"Ring that bell, Mr. Rogers," said the Englishman who had
last spoken, glancing at the annunciator button in the wall

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SILAS LAPHAM

near Rogers's head, "and 'ave up something 'ot, can't you? I
should like to wet me w'istle, as you say 'ere, and Colonel Lap-
ham seems to find it rather dry work."

Lapham jumped to his feet, and buttoned his overcoat about
him. He remembered with terror the dinner at Corey's where
he had disgraced and betrayed himself, and if he went into
this thing at all, he was going into it sober. "I can't stop," he
said, "I must be going."

"But you haven't given us an answer yet, Mr. Lapham,"
said the first Englishman with a successful show of dignified
surprise.

"The only answer I can give you now is, No" said Lapham.
"If you want another, you must let me have time to think it
over."

"But 'ow much time?" said the other Englishman. "We're
pressed for time ourselves, and we hoped for an answer 'oped
for a hanswer," he corrected himself, "at once. That was our
understandin' with Mr. Rogers."

"I can't let you know till morning, anyway," said Lapham,
and he went out, as his custom often was, without any parting
salutation. He thought Rogers might try to detain him; but
Rogers had remained seated when the others got to their feet,
and paid no attention to his departure.

He walked out into the night air, every pulse throbbing
with the strong temptation. He knew very well those men
would wait, and gladly wait, till the morning, and that the
whole affair was in his hands. It made him groan in spirit to
think that it was. If he had hoped that some chance might take
the decision from him, there was no such chance, in the present
or future, that he could see. It was for him alone to commit
this rascality if it was a rascality or not.

He walked all the way home, letting one car after another
pass him on the street, now so empty of other passing, and it
was almost eleven o'clock when he reached home. A carriage

THE RISE OF

stood before his house, and when he let himself in with his
key, he heard talking in the family-room. It came into his head
that Irene had got back unexpectedly, and that the sight of her
was somehow going to make it harder for him; then he
thought it might be Corey, come upon some desperate pretext
to see Penelope; but when he opened the door he saw, with a
certain absence of surprise, that it was Rogers. He was stand-
ing with his back to the fireplace, talking to Mrs. Lapham,
and he had been shedding tears; dry tears they seemed, and
they had left a sort of sandy, glistening trace on his cheeks. Ap-
parently he was not ashamed of them, for the expression with
which he met Lapham was that of a man making a desperate
appeal in his own cause, which was identical with that of hu-
manity, if not that of justice.

"I some expected," began Rogers, "to find you here "

"No, you didn't," interrupted Lapham; "you wanted to come
here and make a poor mouth to Mrs. Lapham before I got
home."

"I knew that Mrs. Lapham would know what was going
on," said Rogers more candidly, but not more virtuously, for
that he could not, "and I wished her to understand a point
that I hadn't put to you at the hotel, and that I want you
should consider. And I want you should consider me a little in
this business too; you're not the only one that's concerned, I
tell you, and I've been telling Mrs. Lapham that it's my one
chance; that if you don't meet me on it, my wife and children
will be reduced to beggary."

"So will mine," said Lapham, "or the next thing to it."
"Well, then, I want you to give me this chance to get on my
feet again. You've no right to deprive me of it; it's unchris-
tian. In our dealings with each other we should be guided by
the Golden Rule, as I was saying to Mrs. Lapham before you
came in. I told her that if I knew myself, I should in your place
consider the circumstances of a man in mine, who had hon-

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SILAS LAPHAM

ourably endeavoured to discharge his obligations to me, and
had patiently borne my undeserved suspicions. I should con-
sider that man's family, I told Mrs. Lapham."

"Did you tell her that if I went in with you and those fel-
lows, I should be robbing the people who trusted them?"

"I don't see what you've got to do with the people that sent
them here. They are rich people, and could bear it if it came to
the worst. But there's no likelihood, now, that it will come to
the worst; you can see yourself that the Road has changed its
mind about buying. And here am I without a cent in the world;
and my wife is an invalid. She needs comforts, she needs little
luxuries, and she hasn't even the necessaries; and you want to
sacrifice her to a mere idea! You don't know in the first place
that the Road will ever want to buy; and if it does, the proba-
bility is that with a colony like that planted on its line, it would
make very different terms from what it would with you or me.
These agents are not afraid, and their principals are rich peo-
ple; and if there was any loss, it would be divided up amongst
them so that they wouldn't any of them feel it."

Lapham stole a troubled glance at his wife, and saw that
there was no help in her. Whether she was daunted and con-
fused in her own conscience by the outcome, so evil and disas-
trous, of the reparation to Rogers which she had forced her
husband to make, or whether her perceptions had been blunted
and darkened by the appeals which Rogers had now used, it
would be difficult to say. Probably there was a mixture of both
causes in the effect which her husband felt in her, and from
which he turned, girding himself anew, to Rogers.

"I have no wish to recur to the past," continued Rogers, with
growing superiority. "You have shown a proper spirit in re-
gard to that, and you have done what you could to wipe it out."

"I should think I had," said Lapham. "I've used up about a
hundred and fifty thousand dollars trying."

"Some of my enterprises," Rogers admitted, "have been un-

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fortunate, seemingly; but I have hopes that they will yet turn
out well in time. I can't understand why you should be so
mindful of others now, when you showed so little regard for
me then. I had come to your aid at a time when you needed
help, and when you got on your feet you kicked me out of the
business. I don't complain, but that is the fact; and I had to be-
gin again, after I had supposed myself settled in life, and es-
tablish myself elsewhere."

Lapham glanced again at his wife; her head had fallen; he
could see that she was so rooted in her old remorse for that
questionable act of his, amply and more than fully atoned for
since, that she was helpless, now in the crucial moment, when
he had the utmost need of her insight. He had counted upon
her; he perceived now that when he had thought it was for
him alone to decide, he had counted upon her just spirit to stay
his own in its struggle to be just. He had not forgotten how
she held out against him only a little while ago, when he asked
her whether he might not rightfully sell in some such contin-
gency as this; and it was not now that she said or even looked
anything in favour of Rogers, but that she was silent against
him, which dismayed Lapham. He swallowed the lump that
rose in his throat, the self-pity, the pity for her, the despair,
and said gently, "I guess you better go to bed, Persis. It's pretty
late."

She turned towards the door, when Rogers said, with the
obvious intention of detaining her through her curiosity

"But I let that pass. And I don't ask now that you should
sell to these men."

Mrs. Lapham paused, irresolute.

"What are you making this bother for, then?" demanded
Lapham. "What do you want?"

"What I've been telling your wife here. I want you should
sell to me. I don't say what I'm going to do with the property,

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SILAS LAPHAM

and you will not have an iota of responsibility, whatever hap-
pens."

Lapham was staggered, and he saw his wife's face light up
with eager question.

"I want that property," continued Rogers, "and I've got the
money to buy it. What will you take for it? If it's the price
you're standing out for : "

"Persis," said Lapham, "go to bed," and he gave her a look
that meant obedience for her. She went out of the door, and
left him with his tempter.

"If you think I'm going to help you whip the devil round
the stump, you're mistaken in your man, Milton Rogers," said
Lapham, lighting a cigar. "As soon as I sold to you, you would
sell to that other pair of rascals. / smelt 'em out in half a min-
ute."

"They are Christian gentlemen," said Rogers. "But I don't
purpose defending them; and I don't purpose telling you what
I shall or shall not do with the property when it is in my hands
again. The question is, Will you sell, and, if so, what is your
figure? You have got nothing whatever to do with it after
you've sold."

It was perfectly true. Any lawyer would have told him the
same. He could not help admiring Rogers for his ingenuity,
and every selfish interest of his nature joined with many ob-
vious duties to urge him to consent. He did not see why he
should refuse. There was no longer a reason. He was standing
out alone for nothing, any one else would say. He smoked on
as if Rogers were not there, and Rogers remained before the
fire as patient as the clock ticking behind his head on the man-
tel, and showing the gleam of its pendulum beyond his face
on either side. But at last he said, "Well?"

"Well," answered Lapham, "you can't expect me to give you
an answer to-night, any more than before. You know that

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what you've said now hasn't changed the thing a bit. I wish it
had. The Lord knows, I want to be rid of the property fast
enough."

"Then why don't you sell to me? Can't you see that you
will not be responsible for what happens after you have sold?"

"No, I can't see that; but if I can by morning, I'll sell."

"Why do you expect to know any better by morning? You're
wasting time for nothing!" cried Rogers, in his disappoint-
ment. "Why are you so particular? When you drove me out
of the business you were not so very particular."

Lapham winced. It was certainly ridiculous for a man who
had once so selfishly consulted his own interests to be stick-
ling now about the rights of others.

"I guess nothing's going to happen overnight," he answered
sullenly. "Anyway, I shan't say what I shall do till morning."

"What time can I see you in the morning?"

"Half-past nine."

Rogers buttoned his coat, and went out of the room without
another word. Lapham followed him to close the street-door
after him.

His wife called down to him from above as he approached
the room again, "Well?"

"I've told him I'd let him know in the morning."

"Want I should come down and talk with you?"

"No," answered Lapham, in the proud bitterness which his
isolation brought, "you couldn't do any good." He went in
and shut the door, and by and by his wife heard him begin
walking up and down; and then the rest of the night she lay
awake and listened to him walking up and down. But when
the first light whitened the window, the words of the Scripture
came into her mind : "And there wrestled a man with him un-
til the breaking of the day. . . . And he said, Let me go, for the
day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou
bless me."

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SILAS LAPHAM

She could not ask him anything when they met, but he raised
his dull eyes after the first silence, and said, "/ don't know what
I'm going to say to Rogers."

She could not speak; she did not know what to say, and she
saw her husband, when she followed him with her eyes from
the window, drag heavily down toward the corner, where he
was to take the horse-car.

He arrived rather later than usual at his office, and he found
his letters already on his table. There was one, long and official-
looking, with a printed letter-heading on the outside, and Lap-
ham had no need to open it in order to know that it was the
offer of the Great Lacustrine & Polar Railroad for his mills.
But he went mechanically through the verification of his pro-
phetic fear, which was also his sole hope, and then sat looking
blankly at it.

Rogers came promptly at the appointed time, and Lapham
handed him the letter. He must have taken it all in at a glance,
and seen the impossibility of negotiating any further now, even
with victims so pliant and willing as those Englishmen.

"You've ruined me!" Rogers broke out. "I haven't a cent
left in the world! God help my poor wife!"

He went out, and Lapham remained staring at the door
which closed upon him. This was his reward for standing
firm for right and justice to his own destruction: to feel like a
thief and a murderer.

357

XXVI

.LATER in the forenoon came the despatch from the West
Virginians in New York, saying their brother assented to their
agreement; and it now remained for Lapham to fulfil his part
of it. He was ludicrously far from able to do this; and unless he
could get some extension of time from them, he must lose this
chance, his only chance, to retrieve himself. He spent the time
in a desperate endeavour to raise the money, but he had not
raised the half of it when the banks closed. With shame in his
heart he went to Bellingham, from whom he had parted so
haughtily, and laid his plan before him. He could not bring
himself to ask Bellingham's help, but he told him what he pro-
posed to do. Bellingham pointed out that the whole thing was
an experiment, and that the price asked was enormous, unless
a great success were morally certain. He advised delay, he ad-
vised prudence; he insisted that Lapham ought at least to go
out to Kanawha Falls, and see the mines and works before he
put any such sum into the development of the enterprise.

"That's all well enough," cried Lapham; "but if I don't
clinch this offer within twenty-four hours, they'll withdraw
it, and go into the market; and then where am I?"

"Go on and see them again," said Bellingham. "They can't
be so peremptory as that with you. They must give you time
to look at what they want to sell. If it turns out what you
hope, then I'll see what can be done. But look into it
thoroughly."

"Well!" cried Lapham, helplessly submitting. He took out
his watch, and saw that he had forty minutes to catch the four
o'clock train. He hurried back to his office, and put together

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THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

some papers preparatory to going, and despatched a note by
his boy to Mrs. Lapham saying that he was starting for New
York, and did not know just when he should get back.

The early spring day was raw and cold. As he went out
through the office he saw the clerks at work with their street-
coats and hats on; Miss Dewey had her jacket dragged up on
her shoulders, and looked particularly comfortless as she oper-
ated her machine with her red fingers. "What's up?" asked
Lapham, stopping a moment.

"Seems to be something the matter with the steam," she
answered, with the air of unmerited wrong habitual with so
many pretty women who have to work for a living.

"Well, take your writer into my room. There's a fire in the
stove there," said Lapham, passing out.

Half an hour later his wife came into the outer office. She
had passed the day in a passion of self-reproach, gradually
mounting from the mental numbness in which he had left
her, and now she could wait no longer to tell him that she
saw how she had forsaken him in his hour of trial and left
him to bear it alone. She wondered at herself in shame and
dismay; she wondered that she could have been so confused as
to the real point by that old wretch of a Rogers, that she could
have let him hoodwink her so, even for a moment. It as-
tounded her that such a thing should have happened, for if
there was any virtue upon which this good woman prided her-
self, in which she thought herself superior to her husband, it
was her instant and steadfast perception of right and wrong,
and the ability to choose the right to her own hurt. But she
had now to confess, as each of us has had likewise to confess in
his own case, that the very virtue on which she had prided her-
self was the thing that had played her false; that she had kept
her mind so long upon that old wrong which she believed her
husband had done this man that she could not detach it, but
clung to the thought of reparation for it when she ought to

359

THE RISE OF

have seen that he was proposing a piece of roguery as the
means. The suffering which Lapham must inflict on him if he
decided against him had been more to her apprehension than
the harm he might do if he decided for him. But now she
owned her limitations to herself, and above everything in the
world she wished the man whom her conscience had roused
and driven on whither her intelligence had not followed, to
do right, to do what he felt to be right, and nothing else. She
admired and revered him for going beyond her, and she wished
to tell him that she did not know what he had determined to
do about Rogers, but that she knew it was right, and would
gladly abide the consequences with him, whatever they were.

She had not been near his place of business for nearly a year,
and her heart smote her tenderly as she looked about her
there, and thought of the early days when she knew as much
about the paint as he did; she wished that those days were back
again. She saw Corey at his desk, and she could not bear to
speak to him; she dropped her veil that she need not recognise
him, and pushed on to Lapham's room, and opening the door
without knocking, shut it behind her.

Then she became aware with intolerable disappointment
that her husband was not there. Instead, a very pretty girl sat
at his desk, operating a type-writer. She seemed quite at home,
and she paid Mrs. Lapham the scant attention which such
young women often bestow upon people not personally interest-
ing to them. It vexed the wife that any one else should seem to
be helping her husband about business that she had once been
so intimate with; and she did not at all like the girl's indif-
ference to her presence. Her hat and sack hung on a nail in one
corner, and Lapham's office coat, looking intensely like him
to his wife's familiar eye, hung on a nail in the other corner;
and Mrs. Lapham liked even less than the girl's good looks
this domestication of her garments in her husband's office. She
began to ask herself excitedly why he should be away from

360

SILAS LAPHAM

his office when she happened to come; and she had not the
strength at the moment to reason herself out of her unreason-
ableness.

"When will Colonel Lapham be in, do you suppose?" she
sharply asked of the girl.

"I couldn't say exactly," replied the girl, without looking
round.

"Has he been out long?"

"I don't know as I noticed," said the girl, looking up at the
clock, without looking at Mrs. Lapham. She went on working
her machine.

"Well, I can't wait any longer," said the wife abruptly.
"When Colonel Lapham comes in, you please tell him Mrs.
Lapham wants to see him."

The girl started to her feet and turned toward Mrs. Lapham
with a red and startled face, which she did not lift to confront
her. "Yes yes I will," she faltered.

The wife went home with a sense of defeat mixed with an
irritation about this girl which she could not quell or ac-
count for. She found her husband's message, and it seemed in-
tolerable that he should have gone to New York without
seeing her; she asked herself in vain what the mysterious busi-
ness could be that took him away so suddenly. She said to her-
self that he was neglecting her; he was leaving her out a little
too much; and in demanding of herself why he had never
mentioned that girl there in his office, she forgot how much
she had left herself out of his business life. That was another
curse of their prosperity. Well, she was glad the prosperity was
going; it had never been happiness. After this she was going to
know everything as she used.

She tried to dismiss the whole matter till Lapham returned;
and if there had been anything for her to do in that miserable
house, as she called it in her thought, she might have suc-
ceeded. But again the curse was on her; there was nothing to

361

THE RISE OF

do; and the looks of that girl kept coming back to her vacancy,
her disoccupation. She tried to make herself something to do,
but that beauty, which she had not liked, followed her amid
the work of overhauling the summer clothing, which Irene
had seen to putting away in the fall. Who was the thing, any-
way? It was very strange, her being there; why did she jump
up in that frightened way when Mrs. Lapham had named her-
self?

After dark, that evening, when the question had worn
away its poignancy from mere iteration, a note for Mrs. Lap-
ham was left at the door by a messenger who said there was
no answer. "A note for me?" she said, staring at the unknown,
and somehow artificial-looking, handwriting of the superscrip-
tion. Then she opened it and read: "Ask your husband about
his lady copying-clerk. A Friend and Well-wisher," who signed
the note, gave no other name.

Mrs. Lapham sat helpless with it in her hand. Her brain
reeled; she tried to fight the madness off; but before Lapham
came back the second morning, it had become, with lessening
intervals of sanity and release, a demoniacal possession. She
passed the night without sleep, without rest, in the frenzy of
the cruellest of the passions, which covers with shame the un-
happy soul it possesses, and murderously lusts for the misery
of its object. If she had known where to find her husband in
New York, she would have followed him; she waited his
return in an ecstasy of impatience. In the morning he came
back, looking spent and haggard. She saw him drive up to
the door, and she ran to let him in herself.

"Who is that girl you've got in your office, Silas Lapham?"
she demanded, when her husband entered.

"Girl in my office?"

"Yes! Who is she? What is she doing there?"

"Why, what have you heard about her?"

"Never you mind what I've heard. Who is she ? Is it Mrs. M.

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SILAS LAPHAM

that you gave that money to? I want to know who she is! I
want to know what a respectable man, with grown-up girls of
his own, is doing with such a looking thing as that in his office ?
I want to know how long she's been there? I want to know
what she's there at all for?"

He had mechanically pushed her before him into the long,
darkened parlour, and he shut himself in there with her now,
to keep the household from hearing her lifted voice. For a
while he stood bewildered, and could not have answered if he
would; and then he would not. He merely asked, "Have I ever
accused you of anything wrong, Persis?"

"You no need to!" she answered furiously, placing herself
against the closed door.

"Did you ever know me to do anything out of the way?"

"That isn't what I asked you.'*

"Well, I guess you may find out about that girl yourself. Get
away from the door."

"I won't get away from the door."

She felt herself set lightly aside, and her husband opened
the door and went out. "I will find out about her," she
screamed after him. "I'll find out, and I'll disgrace you. I'll
teach you how to treat me "

The air blackened round her : she reeled to the sofa, and then
she found herself waking from a faint. She did not know how
long she had lain there; she did not care. In a moment her
madness came whirling back upon her. She rushed up to his
room; it was empty; the closet-doors stood ajar and the draw-
ers were open; he must have packed a bag hastily and fled. She
went out and wandered crazily up and down till she found a
hack. She gave the driver her husband's business address, and
told him to drive there as fast as he could; and three times she
lowered the window to put her head out and ask him if he
could not hurry. A thousand things thronged into her mind to
support her in her evil will. She remembered how glad and

363

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proud that man had been to marry her, and how everybody
said she was marrying beneath her when she took him. She
remembered how good she had always been to him, how per-
fectly devoted, slaving early and late to advance him, and look-
ing out for his interests in all things, and sparing herself in
nothing. If it had not been for her, he might have been driving
stage yet; and since their troubles had begun, the troubles
which his own folly and imprudence had brought on them, her
conduct had been that of a true and faithful wife. Was he the
sort of man to be allowed to play her false with impunity?
She set her teeth and drew her breath sharply through them
when she thought how willingly she had let him befool her,
and delude her about that memorandum of payments to Mrs.
M., because she loved him so much, and pitied him for his cares
and anxieties. She recalled his confusion, his guilty looks.

She plunged out of the carriage so hastily when she reached
the office that she did not think of paying the driver; and he
had to call after her when she had got half-way up the stairs.
Then she went straight to Lapham's room, with outrage in
her heart. There was again no one there but that type-writer
girl; she jumped to her feet in a fright, as Mrs. Lapham dashed
the door to behind her and flung up her veil.

The two women confronted each other.

"Why, the good land!" cried Mrs. Lapham, "ain't you Zer-
rillaMillon?"

"I I'm married," faltered the girl. "My name's Dewey,,
now."

"You're Jim Millon's daughter, anyway. How long have you
been here?"

"I haven't been here regularly; I've been here off and on
ever since last May."

"Where's your mother?"

"She's here in Boston."

Mrs. Lapham kept her eyes on the girl, but she dropped,

364

SILAS LAPHAM

trembling, into her husband's chair, and a sort oi amaze and
curiosity were in her voice instead of the fury she had meant
to put there.

"The Colonel," continued Zerrilla, "he's been helping us,
and he's got me a type-writer, so that I can help myself a little.
Mother's doing pretty well now; and when Hen isn't around
we can get along."

"That your husband?"

"I never wanted to marry him; but he promised to try to get
something to do on shore; and mother was all for it, because
he had a little property then, and I thought may be I'd better.
But it's turned out just as I said, and if he don't stay away long
enough this time to let me get the divorce, he's agreed to it,
time and again, I don't know what we're going to do." Zer-
rilla's voice fell, and the trouble which she could keep out of
her face usually, when she was comfortably warmed and fed
and prettily dressed, clouded it in the presence of a sympathetic
listener. "I saw it was you, when you came in the other day/ 5
she went on; "but you didn't seem to know me. I suppose the
Colonel's told you that there's a gentleman going to marry
me Mr. Wemmel's his name as soon as I get the divorce; but
sometimes I'm completely discouraged; it don't seem as if I
ever could get it."

Mrs. Lapham would not let her know that she was ignorant
of the fact attributed to her knowledge. She remained listen-
ing to Zerrilla, and piecing out the whole history of her
presence there from the facts of the past, and the traits of her
husband's character. One of the things she had always had
to fight him about was that idea of his that he was bound to
take care of Jim Millon's worthless wife and her child because
Millon had got the bullet that was meant for him. It was a
perfect superstition of his; she could not beat it out of him; but
she had made him promise the last time he had done anything
for that woman that it should be the last time. He had then

365

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got her a little house in one of the fishing ports, where she
could take the sailors to board and wash for, and earn an hon-
est living if she would keep straight. That was five or six years
ago, and Mrs. Lapham had heard nothing of Mrs. Millon since;
she had heard quite enough of her before; and had known her
idle and baddish ever since she was the worst little girl at
school in Lumberville, and all through her shameful girlhood,
and the married days which she had made so miserable to the
poor fellow who had given her his decent name and a chance
to behave herself. Mrs. Lapham had no mercy on Moll Millon,
and she had quarrelled often enough with her husband for
befriending her. As for the child, if the mother would put
Zerrilla out with some respectable family, that would be one
thing; but as long as she kept Zerrilla with her, she was against
letting her husband do anything for either of them. He had
done ten times as much for them now as he had any need to,
and she had made him give her his solemn word that he would
do no more. She saw now that she was wrong to make him
give it, and that he must have broken it again and again for
the reason that he had given when she once scolded him for
throwing away his money on that hussy
"When I think of Jim Millon, I've got to; that's all."
She recalled now that whenever she had brought up the
subject of Mrs. Millon and her daughter, he had seemed shy
of it, and had dropped it with some guess that they were get-
ting along now. She wondered that she had not thought at
once of Mrs. Millon when she saw that memorandum about
Mrs. M.; but the woman had passed so entirely out of her life,
that she had never dreamt of her in connection with it. Her
husband had deceived her, yet her heart was no longer hot
against him, but rather tenderly grateful that his deceit was in
this sort, and not in that other. All cruel and shameful doubt of
him went out of it. She looked at this beautiful girl, who had
blossomed out of her knowledge since she saw her last, and

SILAS LAPHAM

she knew that she was only a blossomed weed, of the same
worthless root as her mother, and saved, if saved, from the
same evil destiny, by the good of her father in her; but so far
as the girl and her mother were concerned, Mrs. Lapham
knew that her husband was to blame for nothing but his wil-
ful, wrong-headed, kind-heartedness, which her own exactions
had turned into deceit. She remained a while, questioning the
girl quietly about herself and her mother, and then, with a
better mind towards Zerrilla, at least, than she had ever had be-
fore, she rose up and went out. There must have been some
outer hint of the exhaustion in which the subsidence of her
excitement had left her within, for before she had reached the
head of the stairs, Corey came towards her.

"Can I be of any use to you, Mrs. Lapham? The Colonel
was here just before you came in, on his way to the train."

"Yes, yes. I didn't know I thought perhaps I could catch
him here. But it don't matter. I wish you would let some one
go with me to get a carriage," she begged feebly.

"I'll go with you myself," said the young fellow, ignoring
the strangeness in her manner. He offered her his arm in the
twilight of the staircase, and she was glad to put her trembling
hand through it, and keep it there till he helped her into a
hack which he found for her. He gave the driver her direc-
tion, and stood looking a little anxiously at her.

"I thank you; I am all right now," she said, and he bade the
man drive on.

When she reached home she went to bed, spent with the
tumult of her emotions and sick with shame and self-reproach.
She understood now, as clearly as if he had told her in as
many words, that if he had befriended those worthless jades
the Millons characterised themselves so, even to Mrs. Lap-
ham's remorse secretly and in defiance of her, it was because
he dreaded her blame, which was so sharp and bitter, for
what he could not help doing. It consoled her that he had de-

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ficd her, deceived her; when he came back she should tell
him that; and then it flashed upon her that she did not know
where he was gone, or whether he would ever come again. If
he never came, it would be no more than she deserved; but
she sent for Penelope, and tried to give herself hopes of escape
from this just penalty.

Lapham had not told his daughter where he was going; she
had heard him packing his bag, and had offered to help him;
but he had said he could do it best, and had gone off, as he
usually did, without taking leave of any one.

"What were you talking about so loud, down in the parlour,"
she asked her mother, "just before he came up? Is there any
new trouble?"

"No; it was nothing."

"I couldn't tell. Once I thought you were laughing." She
went about, closing the curtains on account of her mother's
headache, and doing awkwardly and imperfectly the things
that Irene would have done so skilfully for her comfort.

The day wore away to nightfall, and then Mrs. Lapham said
she must know. Penelope said there was no one to ask; the
clerks would all be gone home, and her mother said yes, there
was Mr. Corey; they could send and ask him; he would know.

The girl hesitated. "Very well," she said, then, scarcely above
a whisper, and she presently laughed huskily. "Mr. Corey
seems fated to come in, somewhere. I guess it's a Providence,
mother."

She sent off a note, inquiring whether he could tell her just
where her father had expected to be that night; and the an-
swer came quickly back that Corey did not know, but would
look up the book-keeper and inquire. This office brought him
in person, an hour later, to tell Penelope that the Colonel
was to be at Lapham that night and next day.

"He came in from New York, in a great hurry, and rushed

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SILAS LAPHAM

off as soon as he could pack his bag," Penelope explained,
"and we hadn't a chance to ask him where he was to be to-
night. And mother wasn't very well, and "

"I thought she wasn't looking well when she was at the
office to-day. And so I thought I would come rather than
send," Corey explained in his turn.

"Oh, thank you!"

"If there is anything I can do telegraph Colonel Lapham,
or anything?"

"Oh no, thank you; mother's better now. She merely wanted
to be sure where he was."

He did not offer to go, upon this conclusion of his business,
but hoped he was not keeping her from her mother. She
thanked him once again, and said no, that her mother was
much better since she had had a cup of tea; and then they
looked at each other, and without any apparent exchange of
intelligence he remained, and at eleven o'clock he was still
there. He was honest in saying he did not know it was so late;
but he made no pretence of being sorry, and she took the blame
to herself.

"I oughtn't to have let you stay," she said. "But with father
gone, and all that trouble hanging over us "

She was allowing him to hold her hand a moment at the
door, to which she had followed him.

"I'm so glad you could let me!" he said, "and I want to ask
you now when I may come again. But if you need me,
you'll "

A sharp pull at the door-bell outside made them start asun-
der, and at a sign from Penelope, who knew that the maids
were abed by this time, he opened it.

"Why, Irene!" shrieked the girl.

Irene entered with the hackman, who had driven her un-
heard to the door, following with her small bags, and kissed

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her sister with resolute composure. "That's all," she said to
the hackman. "I gave my checks to the expressman," she ex-
plained to Penelope.

Corey stood helpless. Irene turned upon him, and gave him
her hand. "How do you do, Mr. Corey?" she said, with a
courage that sent a thrill of admiring gratitude through him.
"Where's mamma, Pen? Papa gone to bed?"

Penelope faltered out some reply embodying the facts, and
Irene ran up the stairs to her mother's room. Mrs. Lapham
started up in bed at her apparition.

"Irene Lapham."

"Uncle William thought he ought to tell me the trouble
papa was in; and did you think I was going to stay off there
junketing, while you were going through all this at home,
and Pen acting so silly, too ? You ought to have been ashamed
to let me stay so long! I started just as soon as I could pack.
Did you get my despatch ? I telegraphed from Springfield. But
it don't matter, now. Here I am. And I don't think I need have
hurried on Pen's account," she added, with an accent prophetic
of the sort of old maid she would become, if she happened not
to marry.

"Did you see him?" asked her mother. "It's the first time
he's been here since she told him he mustn't come."

"I guess it isn't the last time, by the looks," said Irene, and
before she took off her bonnet she began to undo some of
Penelope's mistaken arrangements of the room.

At breakfast, where Corey and his mother met the next
morning before his father and sisters came down, he told her,
with embarrassment which told much more, that he wished
now that she would go and call upon the Laphams.

Mrs. Corey turned a little pale, but shut her lips tight and
mourned in silence whatever hopes she had lately permitted
herself. She answered with Roman fortitude: "Of course, if

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SILAS LAPHAM

there's anything between you and Miss Lapham, your family
ought to recognise it."

"Yes," said Corey.

"You were reluctant to have me call at first, but now if the
affair is going on "

"It is! I hope yes, it is!"

"Then I ought to go and see her, with your sisters; and she
ought to come here and we ought all to see her and make the
matter public. We can't do so too soon. It will seem as if we
were ashamed if we don't."

"Yes, you are quite right, mother," said the young man
gratefully, "and I feel how kind and good you are. I have tried
to consider you in this matter, though I don't seem to have
done so; I know what your rights are, and I wish with all my
heart that I were meeting even your tastes perfectly. But I
know you will like her when you come to know her. It's been
very hard for her every way about her sister, and she's made
a great sacrifice for me. She's acted nobly."

Mrs. Corey, whose thoughts cannot always be reported>
said she was sure of it, and that all she desired was her son's
happiness.

"She's been very unwilling to consider it an engagement on
that account, and on account of Colonel Lapham's difficulties.
I should like to have you go, now, for that very reason. I don't
know just how serious the trouble is; but it isn't a time when
we can seem indifferent."

The logic of this was not perhaps so apparent to the glasses
of fifty as to the eyes of twenty-six; but Mrs. Corey, however
she viewed it, could not allow herself to blench before the son
whom she had taught that to want magnanimity was to
be less than gentlemanly. She answered, with what composure
she could, "I will take your sisters," and then she made some
natural inquiries about Lapham's affairs.

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THE RISE OF

"Oh, I hope it will come out all right," Corey said, with a
lover's vague smile, and left her. When his father came down,
rubbing his long hands together, and looking aloof from all
the cares of the practical world, in an artistic withdrawal, from
which his eye ranged over the breakfast-table before he sat
down, Mrs. Corey told him what she and their son had been
saying.

He laughed, with a delicate impersonal appreciation of the
predicament. "Well, Anna, you can't say but if you ever were
guilty of supposing yourself porcelain, this is a just punish-
ment of your arrogance. Here you are bound by the very qual-
ity on which you've prided yourself to behave well to a bit of
earthenware who is apparently in danger of losing the gilding
that rendered her tolerable."

"We never cared for the money," said Mrs. Corey. "You
know that."

"No; and now we can't seem to care for the loss of it. That
would be still worse. Either horn of the dilemma gores us.
Well, we still have the comfort we had in the beginning; we
can't help ourselves; and we should only make bad worse by
crying. Unless we can look to Tom's inamorata herself for
help."

Mrs. Corey shook her head so gloomily that her husband
broke off with another laugh. But at the continued trouble of
her face, he said, sympathetically. "My dear, I know it's a very
disagreeable affair; and I don't think either of us has failed to
see that it was so from the beginning. I have had my way of
expressing my sense of it, and you yours, but we have always
been of the same mind about it. We would both have preferred
to have Tom marry in his own set; the Laphams are about the
last set we could have wished him to marry into. They are un-
cultivated people, and so far as I have seen them, I'm not able
to believe that poverty will improve them. Still, it may. Let us
hope for the best, and let us behave as well as we know how.

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SILAS LAPHAM

I'm sure you will behave well, and I shall try. I'm going witli
you to call on Miss Lapham. This is a thing that can't be done
by halves!"

He cut his orange in the Neapolitan manner, and ate it in
quarters.

373

XXVII

I

RENE did not leave her mother in any illusion concerning her
cousin Will and herself. She said they had all been as nice to
her as they could be, and when Mrs. Lapham hinted at what
had been in her thoughts, or her hopes, rather, Irene severely
snubbed the notion. She said that he was as good as engaged
to a girl out there, and that he had never dreamt of her. Her
mother wondered at her severity; in these few months the girl
had toughened and hardened; she had lost all her babyish de-
pendence and pliability; she was like iron; and here and there
she was sharpened to a cutting edge. It had been a life and
death struggle with her; she had conquered, but she had also
necessarily lost much. Perhaps what she had lost was not worth
keeping; but at any rate she had lost it.

She required from her mother a strict and accurate account
of her father's affairs, so far as Mrs. Lapham knew them; and
she showed a business-like quickness in comprehending them
that Penelope had never pretended to. With her sister she ig-
nored the past as completely as it was possible to do; and she
treated both Corey and Penelope with the justice which
their innocence of voluntary offence deserved. It was a diffi-
cult part, and she kept away from them as much as she could.
She had been easily excused, on a plea of fatigue from her jour-
ney, when Mr. and Mrs. Corey had called the day after her ar-
rival, and Mrs. Lapham being still unwell, Penelope received
them alone.

The girl had instinctively judged best that they should know
the worst at once, and she let them have the full brunt of the
drawing-room, while she was screwing her courage up to come

374

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

down and see them. She was afterwards months afterwards
able to report to Corey that when she entered the room his
father was sitting with his hat on his knees, a little tilted away
from the Emancipation group, as if he expected the Lincoln to
hit him, with that lifted hand of benediction; and that Mrs.
Corey looked as if she were not sure but the Eagle pecked. But
for the time being Penelope was as nearly crazed as might be
by the complications of her position, and received her visitors
with a piteous distraction which could not fail of touching
Bromfield Corey's Italianised sympatheticism. He was very po-
lite and tender with her at first, and ended by making a joke
with her, to which Penelope responded, in her sort. He said he
hoped they parted friends, if not quite acquaintances; and she
said she hoped they would be able to recognise each other if
they ever met again.

"That is what I meant by her pertness," said Mrs. Corey,
when they were driving away.

"Was it very pert?" he queried. "The child had to answer
something."

"I would much rather she had answered nothing, under the
circumstances," said Mrs. Corey. "However!" she added hope-
lessly.

"Oh, she's a merry little grig, you can see that, and there's no
harm in her. I can understand a little why a formal fellow like
Tom should be taken with her. She hasn't the least reverence, I
suppose, and joked with the young man from the beginning.
You must remember, Anna, that there was a time when you
liked my joking."

"It was a very different thing!"

"But that drawing-room," pursued Corey; "really, I don't
see how Tom stands that. Anna, a terrible thought occurs to
me! Fancy Tom being married in front of that group, with a
floral horse-shoe in tuberoses coming down on either side of
it!"

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THE RISE OF

"Bromfield!" cried his wife, "you are unmerciful."

"No, no, my dear," he argued; "merely imaginative. And I
can even imagine that little thing finding Tom just the least
bit slow, at times, if it were not for his goodness. Tom is so
kind that I'm convinced he sometimes feels your joke in his
heart when his head isn't quite clear about it. Well, we will not
despond, my dear."

"Your father seemed actually to like her," Mrs. Corey
reported to her daughters, very much shaken in her own prej-
udices by the fact. If the girl were not so offensive to his fastidi-
ousness, there might be some hope that she was not so offen-
sive as Mrs. Corey had thought. "I wonder how she will strike
you" she concluded, looking from one daughter to another, as
if trying to decide which of them would like Penelope least.

Irene's return and the visit of the Coreys formed a distraction
for the Laphams in which their impending troubles seemed to
hang further aloof; but it was only one of those reliefs which
mark the course of adversity, and it was not one of the cheer-
ful reliefs. At any other time, either incident would have been
an anxiety and care for Mrs. Lapham which she would have
found hard to bear; but now she almost welcomed them. At
the end of three days Lapham returned, and his wife met him
as if nothing unusual had marked their parting; she reserved
her atonement for a fitter time; he would know now from the
way she acted that she felt all right towards him. He took very
little note of her manner, but met his family with an austere
quiet that puzzled her, and a sort of pensive dignity that re-
fined his rudeness to an effect that sometimes comes to such
natures after long sickness, when the animal strength has been
taxed and lowered. He sat silent with her at the table after their
girls had left them alone, and seeing that he did not mean to
speak, she began to explain why Irene had come home, and to
praise her.

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SILAS LAPHAM

"Yes, she done right," said Lapham. "It was time for her to
come," he added gently.

Then he was silent again, and his wife told him of Corey's
having been there, and of his father's and mother's calling. "I
guess Pen's concluded to make it up," she said.

"Well, we'll see about that," said Lapham; and now she
could no longer forbear to ask him about his affairs.

"I don't know as I've got any right to know anything about
it," she said humbly, with remote allusion to her treatment of
him. "But I can't help wanting to know. How are things go-
ing, Si?"

"Bad," he said, pushing his plate from him, and tilting him-
self back in his chair. "Or they ain't going at all. They've
stopped."

"What do you mean, Si ?" she persisted, tenderly.

"I've got to the end of my string. To-morrow I shall call a
meeting of my creditors, and put myself in their hands. If
there's enough left to satisfy them, I'm satisfied." His voice
dropped in his throat; he swallowed once or twice, and then
did not speak.

"Do you mean that it's all over with you?" she asked fear-
fully.

He bowed his big head, wrinkled and grizzled; and after a
while he said, "It's hard to realise it; but I guess there ain't any
doubt about it." He drew a long breath, and then he explained
to her about the West Virginia people, and how he had got
an extension of the first time they had given him, and had got
a man to go up to Lapham with him and look at the works,
a man that had turned up in New York, and wanted to put
money in the business. His money would have enabled Lap-
ham to close with the West Virginians. "The devil was in it,
right straight along," said Lapham. "All I had to do was to
keep quiet about that other company. It was Rogers and his

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THE RISE OF

property right over again. He liked the look of things, and he
wanted to go into the business, and he had the money plenty;
it would have saved me with those West Virginia folks. But I
had to tell him how I stood. I had to tell him all about it, and
what I wanted to do. He began to back water in a minute, and
the next morning I saw that it was up with him. He's gone
back to New York. I've lost my last chance. Now all I've got to
do is to save the pieces."

"Will will everything go?" she asked.

"I can't tell, yet. But they shall have a chance at everything
every dollar, every cent. I'm sorry for you, Persis and the
girls."

"Oh, don't talk of usl" She was trying to realise that the
simple, rude soul to which her heart clove in her youth, but
which she had put to such cruel proof, with her unsparing con-
science and her unsparing tongue, had been equal to its or-
deals, and had come out unscathed and unstained. He was able
in his talk to make so little of them; he hardly seemed to see
what they were; he was apparently not proud of them, and cer-
tainly not glad; if they were victories of any sort, he bore them
with the patience of defeat. His wife wished to praise him, but
she did not know how; so she offered him a little reproach, in
which alone she touched the cause of her behaviour at part-
ing. "Silas," she asked, after a long gaze at him, "why didn't
you tell me you had Jim Millon's girl there?"

"I didn't suppose you'd like it, Persis," he answered. "I did
intend to tell you at first, but then I put I put it off. I thought
you'd come round some day, and find it out for yourself."

"I'm punished," said his wife, "for not taking enough in-
terest in your business to even come near it. If we're brought
back to the day of small things, I guess it's a lesson for me,
Silas."

"Oh, I don't know about the lesson," he said wearily.

That night she showed him the anonymous scrawl which

378

SILAS LAPHAM

had kindled her fury against him. He turned it listlessly over
in his hand. "I guess I know who it's from," he said, giving it
back to her, "and I guess you do too, Persis."

"But how how could he "

"Mebbe he believed it," said Lapham, with patience that cut
her more keenly than any reproach. "You did."

Perhaps because the process of his ruin had been so gradual,
perhaps because the excitement of preceding events had ex-
hausted their capacity for emotion, the actual consummation
of his bankruptcy brought a relief, a repose to Lapham and his
family, rather than a fresh sensation of calamity. In the shadow
of his disaster they returned to something like their old, united
life; they were at least all together again; and it will be in-
telligible to those whom life has blessed with vicissitude, that
Lapham should come home the evening after he had given up
everything to his creditors, and should sit down to his supper
so cheerful that Penelope could joke him in the old way, and
tell him that she thought from his looks they had concluded to
pay him a hundred cents on every dollar he owed them.

As James Bellingham had taken so much interest in his trou-
bles from the first, Lapham thought he ought to tell him, be-
fore taking the final step, just how things stood with him, and
what he meant to do. Bellingham made some futile inquiries
about his negotiations with the West Virginians, and Lapham
told him they had come to nothing. He spoke of the New
York man, and the chance that he might have sold out half his
business to him. "But, of course, I had to let him know how it
was about those fellows."

"Of course," said Bellingham, not seeing till afterwards the
full significance of Lapham's action.

Lapham said nothing about Rogers and the Englishmen. He
believed that he had acted right in that matter, and he was sat-
isfied; but he did not care to have Bellingham, or anybody,
perhaps, think he had been a fool.

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THE RISE OF

All those who were concerned in his affairs said he behaved
well, and even more than well, when it came to the worst. The
prudence, the good sense, which he had shown in the first years
of his success, and of which his great prosperity seemed to have
bereft him, came back, and these qualities, used in his own be-
half, commended him as much to his creditors as the anxiety
he showed that no one should suffer by him; this even made
some of them doubtful of his sincerity. They gave him time,
and there would have been no trouble in his resuming on the
old basis, if the ground had not been cut from under him by
the competition of the West Virginia company. He saw him-
self that it was useless to try to go on in the old way, and he
preferred to go back and begin the world anew where he had
first begun it, in the hills at Lapham. He put the house at Nan-
keen Square, with everything else he had, into the payment of
his debts, and Mrs. Lapham found it easier to leave it for the
old farmstead in Vermont than it would have been to go from
that home of many years to the new house on the water side of
Beacon. This thing and that is embittered to us, so that we
may be willing to relinquish it; the world, life itself, is embit-
tered to most of us, so that we are glad to have done with them
at last; and this home was haunted with such memories to
each of those who abandoned it that to go was less exile than
escape. Mrs. Lapham could not look into Irene's room without
seeing the girl there before her glass, tearing the poor little
keepsakes of her hapless fancy from their hiding-places to
take them and fling them in passionate renunciation upon her
sister; she could not come into the sitting-room, where her
little ones had grown up, without starting at the thought of her
husband sitting so many weary nights at his desk there, trying
to fight his way back to hope out of the ruin into which he was
slipping. When she remembered that night when Rogers came,
she hated the place. Irene accepted her release from the house
eagerly, and was glad to go before and prepare for the family

SILAS LAPHAM

at Lapham. Penelope was always ashamed of her engagement
there; it must seem better somewhere else, and she was glad
to go too. No one but Lapham, in fact, felt the pang of parting
in all its keenness. Whatever regret the others had was softened
to them by the likeness of their flitting to many of those re-
movals for the summer which they made in the late spring
when they left Nankeen Square; they were going directly into
the country instead of to the seaside first; but Lapham, who
usually remained in town long after they had gone, knew all
the difference. For his nerves there was no mechanical sense of
coming back; this was as much the end of his proud, prosper-
ous life as death itself could have been. He was returning to
begin life anew, but he knew as well as he knew that he should
not find his vanished youth in his native hills, that it could
never again be the triumph that it had been. That was impos-
sible, not only in his stiffened and weakened forces, but in the
very nature of things. He was going back, by grace of the man
whom he owed money, to make what he could out of the one
chance which his successful rivals had left him.

In one phase his paint had held its own against bad times
and ruinous competition, and it was with the hope of doing
still more with the Persis Brand that he now set himself to
work. The West Virginia people confessed that they could
not produce those fine grades, and they willingly left the field
to him. A strange, not ignoble friendliness existed between
Lapham and the three brothers; they had used him fairly; it
was their facilities that had conquered him, not their ill-will;
and he recognised in them without enmity the necessity to
which he had yielded. If he succeeded in his efforts to develop
his paint in this direction, it must be for a long time on a small
scale compared with his former business, which it could never
equal, and he brought to them the flagging energies of an el-
derly man. He was more broken than he knew by his failure;
it did not kill, as it often does, but it weakened the spring once

THE RISE OF

so strong and elastic. He lapsed more and more into acquies-
cence with his changed condition, and that bragging note of
his was rarely sounded. He worked faithfully enough in his
enterprise, but sometimes he failed to seize occasions that in
his younger days he would have turned to golden account. His
wife saw in him a daunted look that made her heart ache for
him.

One result of his friendly relations with the West Virginia
people was that Corey went in with them, and the fact that he
did so solely upon Lapham's advice, and by means of his
recommendation, was perhaps the Colonel's proudest consola-
tion. Corey knew the business thoroughly, and after half a year
at Kanawha Falls and in the office at New York, he went out
to Mexico and Central America, to see what could be done for
them upon the ground which he had theoretically studied with
Lapham.

Before he went he came up to Vermont, and urged Penelope
to go with him. He was to be first in the city of Mexico, and if
his mission was successful he was to be kept there and in South
America several years, watching the new railroad enterprises
and the development of mechanical agriculture and whatever
other undertakings offered an opening for the introduction
of the paint. They were all young men together, and Corey,
who had put his money into the company, had a proprietary
interest in the success which they were eager to achieve.

"There's no more reason now and no less than ever there
was," mused Penelope, in counsel with her mother, "why I
should say Yes, or why I should say No. Everything else
changes, but this is just where it was a year ago. It don't go
backward, and it don't go forward. Mother, I believe I shall
take the bit in my teeth if anybody will put it there!"

"It isn't the same as it was," suggested her mother. "You can
see that Irene's all over it."

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SILAS LAPHAM

"That's no credit to me," said Penelope. "I ought to be
just as much ashamed as ever."

"You no need ever to be ashamed."

"That's true, too," said the girl. "And I can sneak off to Mex-
ico with a good conscience if I could make up my mind to it."
She laughed. "Well, if I could be sentenced to be married, or
somebody would up and forbid the banns! / don't know what
to do about it."

Her mother left her to carry her hesitation back to Corey,
and she said now, they had better go all over it and try to rea-
son it out. "And I hope that whatever I do, it won't be for my
own sake, but for others!"

Corey said he was sure of that, and looked at her with eyes of
patient tenderness.

"I don't say it is wrong," she proceeded, rather aimlessly,
"but I can't make it seem right. I don't know whether I can
make you understand, but the idea of being happy, when every-
body else is so miserable, is more than I can endure. It makes
me wretched."

"Then perhaps that's your share of the common suffering,"
suggested Corey, smiling.

"Oh, you know it isn't! You know it's nothing. Oh! One
of the reasons is what I told you once before, that as long as
father is in trouble I can't let you think of me. Now that he's
lost everything ?" She bent her eyes inquiringly upon him,
as if for the effect of this argument.

"I don't think that's a very good reason," he answered se-
riously, but smiling still. "Do you believe me when I tell you
that I love you?"

"Why, I suppose I must," she said, dropping her eyes.

"Then why shouldn't I think all the more of you on account
of your father's loss? You didn't suppose I cared for you be-
cause he was prosperous?" There was a shade of reproach,

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THE RISE OF

ever so delicate and gentle, in his smiling question, which she
felt.

"No, I couldn't think such a thing of you. I I don't know

what I meant. I meant that " She could not go on and say

that she had felt herself more worthy of him because of her
father's money; it would not have been true; yet there was no
other explanation. She stopped, and cast a helpless glance at
him.

He came to her aid. "I understand why you shouldn't wish
me to suffer by your father's misfortunes."

"Yes, that was it; and there is too great a difference ever)'
way. We ought to look at that again. You mustn't pretend that
you don't know it, for that wouldn't be true. Your mother
will never like me, and perhaps perhaps I shall not like her."

"Well," said Corey, a little daunted, "you won't have to marry
my family."

"Ah, that isn't the point!"

"I know it," he admitted. "I won't pretend that I don't see
what you mean; but I'm sure that all the differences would
disappear when you came to know my family better. I'm not
afraid but you and my mother will like each other she can't
help it!" he exclaimed, less judicially than he had hitherto
spoken, and he went on to urge some points of doubtful tena-
bility. "We have our ways, and you have yours; and while
I don't say but what you and my mother and sisters would
be a little strange together at first, it would soon wear off, on
both sides. There can't be anything hopelessly different in
you all, and if there were it wouldn't be any difference to me."

"Do you think it would be pleasant to have you on my side
against your mother?"

"There won't be any sides. Tell me just what it is you're
afraid of."

"Afraid?"

"Thinking of, then."

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SILAS LAPHAM

"I don't know. It isn't anything they say or do," she ex-
plained, with her eyes intent on his. "It's what they are. I
couldn't be natural with them, and if I can't be natural with
people, I'm disagreeable."

"Can you be natural with me?"

"Oh, I'm not afraid of you. I never was. That was the trou-
ble, from the beginning."

"Well, then, that's all that's necessary. And it never was the
least trouble to me!"

"It made me untrue to Irene."

"You mustn't say that! You were always true to her."

"She cared for you first."

"Well, but I never cared for her at all!" he besought her.

"She thought you did."

"That was nobody's fault, and I can't let you make it yours.
My dear "

"Wait. We must understand each other," said Penelope, ris-
ing from her seat to prevent an advance he was making from
his; "I want you to realise the whole affair. Should you want
a girl who hadn't a cent in the world, and felt different in your
mother's company, and had cheated and betrayed her own
sister?"

"I want you!"

"Very well, then, you can't have me. I should always despise
myself. I ought to give you up for all these reasons. Yes, I
must." She looked at him intently, and there was a tentative
quality in her affirmations.

"Is this your answer?" he said. "I must submit. If I asked
too much of you, I was wrong. And good-bye."

He held out his hand, and she put hers in it. "You think
Tm capricious and fickle!" she said. "I can't help it I don't
know myself. I can't keep to one thing for half a day at a time.
But it's right for us to part yes, it must be. It must be," she
repeated; "and I shall try to remember that. Good-bye! I will

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THE RISE OF

try to keep that in my mind, and you will too you won't care,
very soon! I didn't mean that no; I know how true you are;
but you will soon look at me differently; and see that even if
there hadn't been this about Irene, I was not the one for you.
You do think so, don't you?" she pleaded, clinging to his hand.
"I am not at all what they would like your family; I felt that.
I am little, and black, and homely, and they don't understand
my way of talking, and now that we've lost everything No,
I'm not fit. Good-bye. You're quite right, not to have patience
with me any longer. I've tried you enough. I ought to be will-
ing to marry you against their wishes if you want me to, but

I can't make the sacrifice I'm too selfish for that " All at

once she flung herself on his breast. "I can't even give you up!
I shall never dare look any one in the face again. Go, go! But
take me with you! I tried to do without you! I gave it a fair
trial, and it was a dead failure. O poor Irene! How could she
give you up?"

Corey went back 10 Boston immediately, and left Penelope,
as he must, to tell her sister that they were to be married. She
was spared from the first advance toward this by an accident
or a misunderstanding. Irene came straight to her after Corey
was gone, and demanded, "Penelope Lapham, have you been
such a ninny as to send that man away on my account?"

Penelope recoiled from this terrible courage; she did not
answer directly, and Irene went on, "Because if you did, I'll
thank you to bring him back again. I'm not going to have him
thinking that I'm dying for a man that never cared for me.
It's insulting, and I'm not going to stand it. Now, you just
send for him!"

"Oh, I will, 'Rene," gasped Penelope. And then she added,
shamed out of her prevarication by Irene's haughty magnanim-
ity, "I have. That is he's coming back "

Irene looked at her a moment, and then, whatever thought
was in her mind, said fiercely, "Well!" and left her to her dis-

586

SILAS LAPHAM

may her dismay and her relief for they both knew that this
was the last time they should ever speak of that again.

The marriage came after so much sorrow and trouble, and
the fact was received with so much misgiving for the past and
future, that it brought Lapham none of the triumph in which
he had once exulted at the thought of an alliance with the
Coreys. Adversity had so far been his friend that it had taken
from him all hope of the social success for which people crawl
and truckle, and restored him, through failure and doubt and
heartache, the manhood which his prosperity had so nearly
stolen from him. Neither he nor his wife thought now that
their daughter was marrying a Corey; they thought only that
she was giving herself to the man who loved her, and their
acquiescence was sobered still further by the presence of Irene.
Their hearts were far more with her.

Again and again Mrs. Lapham said she did not see how she
could go through it. "I can't make it seem right," she said.

"It is right," steadily answered the Colonel.

"Yes, I know. But it don't seem so."

It would be easy to point out traits in Penelope's character
which finally reconciled all her husband's family and endeared
her to them. These things continually happen in novels; and
the Coreys, as they had always promised themselves to do,
made the best, and not the worst of Tom's marriage.

They were people who could value Lapham's behaviour as
Tom reported it to them. They were proud of him, and Brom-
field Corey, who found a delicate, aesthetic pleasure in the
heroism with which Lapham had withstood Rogers and his
temptations something finely dramatic and unconsciously
effective, wrote him a letter which would once have flattered
the rough soul almost to ecstasy, though now he affected to
slight it in showing it. "It's all right if it makes it more com-
fortable for Pen," he said to his wife.

387

THE RISE OF

But the differences remained uneffaced, if not uneffaceable,
between the Coreys and Tom Corey's wife. "If he had only
married the Colonel!" subtly suggested Nanny Corey.

There was a brief season of civility and forbearance on both
sides, when he brought her home before starting for Mexico,
and her father-in-law made a sympathetic feint of liking Penel-
ope's way of talking, but it is questionable if even he found it
so delightful as her husband did. Lily Corey made a little, in-
effectual sketch of her, which she put by with other studies to
finish up, sometime, and found her rather picturesque in some
ways. Nanny got on with her better than the rest, and saw
possibilities for her in the country to which she was going. "As
she's quite unformed, socially," she explained to her mother,
"there is a chance that she will form herself on the Spanish
manner, if she stays there long enough, and that when she
comes back she will have the charm of, not olives, perhaps, but
tortillas, whatever they are: something strange and foreign,
even if it's borrowed. I'm glad she's going to Mexico. At that
distance we can correspond/

Her mother sighed, and said bravely that she was sure they
all got on very pleasantly as it was, and that shf was perfectly
satisfied if Tom was.

There was, in fact, much truth in what she said of their har-
mony with Penelope. Having resolved, from the beginning,
to make the best of the worst, it might almost be said that they
were supported and consoled in their good intentions by a
higher power. This marriage had not, thanks to an overruling
Providence, brought the succession of Lapham teas upon
Bromfield Corey which he had dreaded; the Laphams were far
off in their native fastnesses, and neither Lily nor Nanny Corey
was obliged to sacrifice herself to the conversation of Irene;
they were not even called upon to make a social demonstration
for Penelope at a time when, most people being still out of

SILAS LAPHAM

town, it would have been so easy; she and Tom had both
begged that there might be nothing of that kind; and though
none of the Coreys learned to know her very well in the week
she spent with them, they did not find it hard to get on with
her. There were even moments when Nanny Corey, like her
father, had glimpses of what Tom had called her humour, but
it was perhaps too unlike their own to be easily recognisable.

Whether Penelope, on her side, found it more difficult to
harmonise, I cannot say. She had much more of the harmonis-
ing to do, since they were four to one; but then she had gone
through so much greater trials before. When the door of their
carriage closed and it drove off with her and her husband to
the station, she fetched a long sigh.

"What is it?" asked Corey, who ought to have known better.

"Oh, nothing. I don't think I shall feel strange amongst the
Mexicans now."

He looked at her with a puzzled smile, which grew a little
graver, and then he put his arm round her and drew her closer
to him. This made her cry on his shoulder. "I only meant that
I should have you all to myself." There is no proof that she
meant more, but it is certain that our manners and customs
go for more in life than our qualities. The price that we pay
for civilisation is the fine yet impassable differentiation of these.
Perhaps we pay too much; but it will not be possible to per-
suade those who have the difference in their favour that this is
so. They may be right; and at any rate, the blank misgiving,
the recurring sense of disappointment to which the young
people's departure left the Coreys is to be considered. That was
the end of their son and brother for them; they felt that; and
they were not mean or unamiable people.

He remained three years away. Some changes took place in
that time. One of these was the purchase by the Kanawha Falls
Company of the mines and works at Lapham. The transfer

389

THE RISE OF

relieved Lapham of the load of debt which he was still labour-
ing under, and gave him an interest in the vaster enterprise of
the younger men, which he had once vainly hoped to grasp all
in his own hand. He began to tell of this coincidence as some-
thing very striking; and pushing on more actively the special
branch of the business left to him, he bragged, quite in his old
way, of its enormous extension. His son-in-law, he said, was
pushing it in Mexico and Central America: an idea that they
had originally had in common. Well, young blood was what
was wanted in a thing of that kind. Now, those fellows out in
West Virginia: all young, and a perfect team!

For himself, he owned that he had made mistakes; he could
see just where the mistakes were put his finger right on them.
But one thing he could say : he had been no man's enemy but
his own; every dollar, every cent had gone to pay his debts; he
had come out with clean hands. He said all this, and much
more, to Mr. Sewell the summer after he sold out, when the
minister and his wife stopped at Lapham on their way across
from the White Mountains to Lake Champlain; Lapham had
found them on the cars, and pressed them to stop off.

There were times when Mrs. Lapham had as great pride in
the clean-handedness with which Lapham had come out as he
had himself, but her satisfaction was not so constant. At those
times, knowing the temptations he had resisted, she thought
him the noblest and grandest of men; but no woman could
endure to live in the same house with a perfect hero, and there
were other times when she reminded him that if he had kept
his word to her about speculating in stocks, and had looked
after the insurance of his property half as carefully as he had
looked after a couple of worthless women who had no earthly
claim on him, they would not be where they were now. He
humbly admitted it all, and left her to think of Rogers herself.
She did not fail to do so, and the thought did not fail to restore
him to her tenderness again.

390

SILAS LAPHAM

I do not know how it is that clergymen and physicians keep
from telling their wives the secrets confided to them; perhaps
they can trust their wives to find them out for themselves
whenever they wish. Sewell had laid before his wife the case of
the Laphams after they came to consult with him about Corey's
proposal to Penelope, for he wished to be confirmed in his be-
lief that he had advised them soundly; but he had not given
her their names, and he had not known Corey's himself. Now
he had no compunctions in talking the affair over with her
without the veil of ignorance which she had hitherto assumed,
for she declared that as soon as she heard of Corey's engage-
ment to Penelope, the whole thing had flashed upon her. "And
that night at dinner I could have told the child that he was in
love with her sister by the way he talked about her; I heard
him; and if she had not been so blindly in love with him her-
self, she would have known it too. I must say, I can't help feel-
ing a sort of contempt for her sister."

"Oh, but you must not!" cried Sewell. "That is wrong,
cruelly wrong. I'm sure that's out of your novel-reading, my
dear, and not out of your heart. Come! It grieves me to hear
you say such a thing as that."

"Oh, I dare say this pretty thing has got over it how much
character she has got! and I suppose she'll see somebody
else."

Sewell had to content himself with this partial concession.
As a matter of fact, unless it was the young West Virginian
who had come on to arrange the purchase of the Works, Irene
had not yet seen any one, and whether there was ever anything
between them is a fact that would need a separate inquiry. It
is certain that at the end of five years after the disappointment
which she met so bravely, she was still unmarried. But she was
even then still very young, and her life at Lapham had been
varied by visits to the West. It had also been varied by an in-
vitation, made with the politest resolution by Mrs. Corey,

391

THE RISE OF

to visit in Boston, which the girl was equal to refusing in the
same spirit.

Sewell was intensely interested in the moral spectacle which
Lapham presented under his changed conditions. The Colonel,
who was more the Colonel in those hills than he could ever
have been on the Back Bay, kept him and Mrs. Sewell over
night at his house; and he showed the minister minutely round
the Works and drove him all over his farm. For this expedition
he employed a lively colt which had not yet come of age, and
an open buggy long past its prime, and was no more ashamed
of his turnout than of the finest he had ever driven on the Mill-
dam. He was rather shabby and slovenly in dress, and he had
fallen unkempt, after the country fashion, as to his hair and
beard and boots. The house was plain, and was furnished with
the simpler moveables out of the house in Nankeen Square.
There were certainly all the necessaries, but no luxuries, un-
less the statues of Prayer and Faith might be so considered.
The Laphams now burned kerosene, of course, and they had
no furnace in the winter; these were the only hardships the
Colonel complained of; but he said that as soon as the company
got to paying dividends again, he was evidently proud of the
outlays that for the present prevented this, he should put in
steam heat and naphtha-gas. He spoke freely of his failure,
and with a confidence that seemed inspired by his former trust
in Sewell, whom, indeed, he treated like an intimate friend,
rather than an acquaintance of two or three meetings. He went
back to his first connection with Rogers, and he put before
Sewell hypothetically his own conclusions in regard to the
matter.

"Sometimes/* he said, "I get to thinking it all over, and it
seems to me I done wrong about Rogers in the first place; that
the whole trouble came from that. It was just like starting a
row or bricks. I tried to catch up and stop 'em from going, but
tSey all tumbled, one after another. It wan't in the nature of

392

SILAS LAPHAM

things that they could be stopped till the last brick went. I
don't talk much with my wife, any more about it; but I should
like to know how it strikes you."

"We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world,"
replied the minister, "but I'm more and more puzzled about it
in the moral world. There its course is often so very obscure;
and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty
whatever. And in your own case, as I understand, you don't
admit you don't feel sure that you ever actually did wrong
this man "

"Well, no; I don't. That is to say "

He did not continue, and after a while Sewell said, with
that subtle kindness of his, "I should be inclined to think
nothing can be thrown quite away; and it can't be that our
sins only weaken us that your fear of having possibly behaved
selfishly toward this man kept you on your guard, and strength-
ened you when you were brought face to face with a greater"
he was going to say temptation, but he saved Lapham's pride,
and said "emergency."

"Do you think so?"

"I think that there may be truth in what I suggest."

"Well, I don't know what it was," said Lapham; "all I know
is that when it came to the point, although I could see that I'd
got to go under unless I did it that I couldn't sell out to those
Englishmen, and I couldn't let that man put his money into
my business without I told him just how things stood."

As Sewell afterwards told his wife, he could see that the loss
of his fortune had been a terrible trial to Lapham, just be-
cause his prosperity had been so gross and palpable; and he
had now a burning desire to know exactly how, at the bottom
of his heart, Lapham still felt. "And do you ever have any re-
grets?" he delicately inquired of him.

"About what I done ? Well, it don't always seem as if I done
it/' replied Lapham. "Seems sometimes as if it was a hole

393

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

opened for me, and I crept out of it. I dpn't know," he added
thoughtfully, biting the corner of his stiff moustache. "I don't
know as I should always say it paid; but if I done it, and the
thing was to do over again, right in the same way, I guess I
should have to do it."

THE END

394

\ddison and Steele, SEL. FROM THE
TATLER & THE SPECTATOR 87

AMERICAN THOUGHT: CIVIL WAR TO
WORLD WAR I 70

ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE
SHAKESPEARE 45

ANTHOLOGY OF GREEK DRAMA: FIRST

SERIES 29
ANTHOLOGY OF GREEK DRAMA: SECOND

SERIES 68

\NTHOLOGY OF ROMAN DRAMA 101
\rnold, SELECTED POETRY AND PROSE

62

\USten, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 22

Balzac, PERE GORIOT 18

Benet, S. V., SELECTED POETRY & PROSE
100

THE BIBLE: SEL. FROM OLD & NEW
TESTAMENTS 56

Bronte, Charlotte, JANE EYRE 24

Bronte, Emily, WUTHERING HEIGHTS
23

Browning Robert, SELECTED POETRY
71

Bunyan, THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS 27

Burke, REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLU-
TION IN FRANCE 84

Butler, THE WAY OF ALL FLESH 7

Byron, SELECTED POETRY AND LETTERS

54

Chaucer, THE CANTERBURY TALES 65
Coleridge, SELECTED POETRY AND

PROSE 55

COLONIAL AMERICAN WRITING 43
Conrad, LORD JIM 85
Conrad, NOSTROMO 111
Uooper, THE PIONEERS 99
Cooper, THE PRAIRIE 26
>ane, RED BADGE OF COURAGE, SEL'D

PROSE & POETRY 47

Dante, THE DIVINE COMEDY 72
Defoe, MOLL FLANDERS 25
De Forest, MISS RAVENEL'S CONVER-
SION 74

Dickens, GREAT EXPECTATIONS 20
Dickens, HARD TIMES 95
Dreiser, SISTER CARRIE 86
Dryden, SELECTED WORKS 60

Eliot. ADAM BEDE 32

ELIZABETHAN FICTION 64

Emerson, SELECTED PROSE AND POETRY
30

ENGLISH PROSE AND POETRY 1660-
1800: A SELECTION 110

Fielding, JOSEPH ANDREWS 15

FIFTEEN MODERN AMERICAN POETS 79

Flaubert, MADAM BOVARY 2

FOUR MODERN PLAYS: FIRST SERIES,

Ibsen, Shaw, O'Neill, Miller 90

FOUR MODERN PLAYS: SECOND SERIES,

Ibsen, Wilde, Rostand, Gorky 109
Franklin, AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND SE-
LECTED WRITINGS 12
Frederic, THE DAMNATION OF THERON

WARE 108

Garland, MAIN-TRAVELLED ROADS 66
Godwin, CALEB WILLIAMS 103
Goethe, FAUST: PART i 75
Goethe, SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHEH,

NEW MELUSINA, NOVELLE 13
Gogol, DEAD SOULS 5
GREAT ENGLISH AND AMERICAN ESSAYS

34

Hardy, FAH FROM THE MADDING CROWD

98

Hardy, THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE 9
Hardy, THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE 39
Hauptmann, THREE PLAYS: The Weav-
ers, Hannele, The Beaver Coat 52
Hawthorne, THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN

CABLES 89

Hawthorne, THE SCARLET LETTER 1
Hawthorne, SELECTED TALES AND
SKETCHES 33

Howells, THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM 19

Ibsen, THREE PLAYS: Ghosts, Enemy

of the People, Wild Duck 4
Irving, SELECTED PROSE 41
James, Henry, THE AMBASSADORS 104
James, Henry, THE AMERICAN 16
James, Henry, SELECTED SHORT STORIES

31

Johnson, RASSELAS, POEMS, & SELECTED
PROSE 57

KeatS, SELECTED POETRY AND LETTERS
50

Lincoln, SELECTED SPEECHES, MES-
SAGES. AND LETTERS 82

LITERATURE OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
44

London, MARTIN EDEN 80

MASTERPIECES OF THE SPANISH GOLDEN
AGE 93

Melville, MOBY DICK 6

Melville, SEL'D TALES AND POEMS 36

Milton, PARADISE LOST AND SELECTED

POETRY AND PROSE 35
MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE 53

Newman, THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY

102

Morris, Frank, MC TEAGUE 40
Parkman, THE DISCOVERY OF THE

GREAT WEST: LA SALLE 77
PLUTARCH EIGHT GREAT LIVES 105
Poe, SELECTED PROSE AND POETRY,

REV. 42

POETRY OF THE NEW ENGLAND REN-
AISSANCE, 1790-1890 38

Pope, SELECTED POETRY AND PROSE 46
RINEHART BOOK OF SHORT STORIES 59
RINEHART BOOK OF VERSE 58

Robinson, E. A., SEL. EARLY POEMS

AND LETTERS 107

Roosevelt, F. D., SPEECHES, MESSAGES,

PRESS CONFERENCES, & LETTERS 83
Scott, THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN 14
SELECTED AMERICAN PHOSE, 1841-1900

94

SELECTIONS FROM GREEK AND ROMAN
HISTORIANS 88

Shakespeare, FIVE PLAYS: Hamlet;
King Lear; Henry IV, Part I; Much

Ado about Nothing; The Tempest
51
Shakespeare, AS YOU LIKE IT, JULIUS

CAESAR, MACBETH 91

Shakespeare, TWELFTH NIGHT, OTHEL-
LO 92

Shaw, SELECTED PLAYS AND OTHER
WRITINGS 81

Shelley, SELECTED POETRY AND PROSE
49

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT 97
Smollett, HUMPHRY CLINKER 48
SOUTHERN STORIES 106

Spenser, SELECTED POETRY 73
Sterne, TRISTRAM SHANDY 37
Stevenson, MASTER OF BALLANTRAE 67
Swift, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS 10

Swift, SELECTED PROSE AND POETRY 78

Tennyson, SELECTED POETRY 69

Thackeray, VANITY FAIR 76

Thoreau, WALDEN, ON THE DUTY OF

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE 8

Trollope, DARCHESTER TOWERS 21

Turgenev, FATHERS AND CHILDREN 17

Twain, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLE-
BERRY FINN 11

Twain, ROUGHING IT 61

Vergil, THE AENEID 63

VICTORIAN POETRY: Clough to Kipling
96

Whitman, LEAVES OF GRASS AND

SELECTED PHOSE 28

Wordsworth, THE PRELUDE, SEL'D SON-
NETS & MINOR POEMS, Rev. & Enl. 3

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