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XXII
THE COOING OF TURTLE-DOVES

There is nothing like the possibility of loss to bring a man to his bearings in regard to a woman. Dick Fairfield had told Jack that of course he was not a marrying man, that he could not afford to marry a poor woman, and that nothing would induce him to marry a rich one; he had even set down in his diary on the announcement of Jack's engagement that he could never have offered his hand to a girl with so much money; what his secret thought may have been no sage may say, but he had all the outward signs of a man who has convinced himself that he has no idea of trying to secure the girl he loves. Now that the affair had shaped itself so that May was again free, he hurried to her with a precipitation which had in it a choice flavor of comedy.

May always told him afterward that he did not even do her the honor to ask her for her hand, but that he coolly walked in and took up the engagement of Jack Neligage where it had been dropped. It was at least true that by nine o'clock that very evening they were sitting side by side as cosy and as idiotically blissful as a young couple newly betrothed should be. However informally the preliminaries had been conducted, the conclusion seemed to be eminently satisfactory.

"To think that this is the result of that little letter that I found on my table one rainy night last February," Dick observed rapturously. "I remember just how it looked."

"It was horrid of me to write it," May returned, with a demure look which almost as plainly as words added: "Contradict me!"

"It was heavenly of you," Dick declared, rising to the occasion most nobly. "It was the nicest valentine that ever was."

Some moments of endearments interesting to the participants but not edifying in narration followed upon this assertion, and then the little stream of lover-talk purled on again.

"Oh, Mr. Fairfield," May began with utter irrelevancy, "I – "

"You promised not to call me that," he interrupted.

"But it's so strange to say Dick. Well, Dick, then – "

The slight interruption of a caress having been got over, she went on with her shattered observation.

"What was I going to say? You put me all out, with your 'Dick' – I do think it's the dearest name! – Stop! I know what I was going to say. I was frightened almost to death when Mrs. Neligage said the Count wrote 'Love in a Cloud.' Oh, I wanted to get under the tea-table!"

"But you didn't really think he wrote my letters?"

"I couldn't believe it; but I didn't know what to think. Then when he wore a red carnation the next day, I thought I should die. I thought anyway he'd read the letter; and that's what made me so meek when Mrs. Neligage took hold of me."

"But you never suspected that I wrote the book?" Fairfield asked.

"Oh, I don't know. Sometimes it seems to me as if I really did know all the time. Don't you remember how we talked about the book at Mrs. Harbinger's tea?"

"That's just your intuition," Dick returned. "I know I didn't suspect you, for it troubled me tremendously that I cared so much for you when I thought I was in love with my unknown correspondent. It didn't seem loyal."

"But of course it was, you know, because there was only one of us."

Dick laughed, and bestowed upon her an ecstatic little hug.

"You dear little Paddy! That's a perfect bull!"

She drew herself away, and pretended to frown with great dignity.

"I don't care if it is a bull!" protested she. "I won't be called a Paddy!"

Dick's face expressed a consternation and a penitence so marked that she burst into a trill of laughter and flung herself back into his arms.

"I was just teasing," she said. "The truth is that Jack Neligage has teased me so awfully that I've caught it like the measles."

The tender follies which make up the talk of lovers are not very edifying reading when set down in the unsympathetic blackness of print. They are to be interpreted, moreover, with the help of many signs, trifling in themselves but essential to a correct understanding. Looks, caresses, sighs, chuckles, giggles, pressures and claspings, intonations which alter or deny the word spoken, a thousand silly becks, and nods, and wreathèd smiles, all go to make up the conversation between the pair, so that what may be put into print is but a small portion of the ecstatic whole. May Calthorpe and Dick Fairfield were not behind in all the enchanting idiocy which belongs to a wooing, where each lover, secure in being regarded as perfection, ventures for once in a lifetime to be frankly childish, to show self without any mask of convention.

"Oh, I knew you were a man of genius the very first time I saw you," May cried, in an entirely honest defiance of all facts and all evidence.

"I wish I were for your sake," Dick replied, with an adoring glance, and a kiss on the hand which he held. "And to think that this absurdly small hand wrote those beautiful letters."

"You didn't suppose I had an amanuensis, did you?" laughed May.

Then Dick laughed, and together they both laughed, overpowered by the exquisite wit of this fine jest.

"Really, though," Dick said, "they came to me like a revelation. I never had such letters before!"

May drew away her hand, and sat upright with an air of offended surprise.

"Well, I should hope you never did!" she cried. "The idea of any other woman's daring to write to you!"

"But you were writing to a stranger; some other woman – "

"Now, Richard," declared May resolutely, "this has got to be settled right here. If you are going to twit me all my life with having written to you – "

He effectually stopped her speech.

"I'll never speak of it again," he said; "or at least only just often enough so that it shan't be entirely forgotten."

"You are horrid!" declared she with a pout. "You mean to tease me with – "

"Tease you, May? Heavens, how you mistake! I only want all my life to be kept your slave by remembering – "

The reader is at liberty from experience to supply as many hours of this sort of talk as his taste calls for. There were, however, some points of real interest touched upon in the course of the evening. Dick confided to May the fact that Jack Neligage had sold his ponies, was paying his debts, and had accepted a place in a bank. Mr. Frostwinch, a college friend of Jack's father, had offered the situation, and although the salary was of course not large it gave Neligage something to live on.

"Oh, I'll tell that to Alice to-morrow," May said. "She will be delighted to know that Jack is going to do something. Alice is awfully fond of him."

The conversation had to be interrupted by speculations upon the relative force of the attachment between Alice and Jack and the love which May and Dick were at that moment confirming; and from this the talk drifted away to considerations of the proper manner of disclosing the engagement. May's guardian, Mr. Frostwinch, Dick knew well, and there was no reason to expect opposition from him unless on the possible ground of a difference of fortune. It was decided that Dick should see him on the morrow, and that there should be no delay in announcing the important news.

"It will take us two or three days to write our notes, of course," May said, with a pretty air of being very practical in the midst of her sentiment. "We'll say next Wednesday."

Dick professed great ignorance of the social demands of the situation, and of course the explanation had to be given with many ornamental flourishes in the way of oscular demonstrations. May insisted that everything should be done duly and in order; told him upon whom of her relatives he would have to call, to whom write, and so many other details that Dick accused her of having been engaged before.

"You horrid thing!" she pouted. "I've a great mind to break the engagement now. I have been engaged, though," she added, bursting into a laugh of pure glee. "You forget that I woke up this morning engaged to one man and shall go to sleep engaged to another."

"Dear old Jack!" Fairfield said fervently. "Well, I must go home and find him. I want to tell him the news. Heavens! I had no idea it was so late!"

"It isn't late," May protested, after the fashion of all girls in her situation, both before and since; but when Dick would go, she laughingly said: "You tell Jack if he were here I'd kiss him. He said I'd want to some time."

And after half an hour of adieus and a brisk walk home, Dick delivered the message.

XXIII
THE BUSINESS OF A MUSE

The decadence of literature began insensibly with the invention of printing, and has been proceeding ever since. How far it has proceeded and whether literature yet exists at all are questions difficult if not impossible to answer at the present time, because of the multitude of books. No living man can have more than a most superficial knowledge of what is being done in what was formerly the royalty and is now the communism of letters. A symphony played in the midst of a battle would stand much the same chance of being properly appreciated as would to-day a work of fine literary worth sent forth in the midst of the innumerous publications of the age.

Men write, however, more than ever. There is perhaps a difference, in that where men of the elder day deluded themselves or hoped to delude others with impressive talk about art and fame and other now obsolete antiquities, the modern author sets before him definite and desirable prizes in the shape of money and of notoriety which has money's worth. The muse of these days is confronted on the door of the author with a stern "No admittance except on business," and she is not allowed to enter unless she bring her check-book with her. The ideal of art is to-day set down in figures and posted by bankers' clerks. Men once foolishly tried to live to write; now they write to live. If men seek for Pegasus it is with a view to getting a patent on him as a flying-machine; and the really progressive modern author has much the same view of life as the rag-picker, that of collecting any sort of scraps that may be sold in the market.

Dick Fairfield had much the attitude of other writers of his day and generation. He had set out to make a living by writing, because he liked it, and because, in provincial Boston at least, there is still a certain sense of distinction attached to the profession of letters, a legacy from the time when the public still respected art. Fairfield had been for years struggling to get a foothold of reputation sufficiently secure to enable him to stretch more vigorously after the prizes of modern literary life, where notoriety commands a price higher than genius could hope for. He had done a good deal of hack work, of which that which he liked least, yet which had perhaps as a matter of training been best for him, had been the rewriting of manuscripts for ambitious authors. A bureau which undertakes for a compensation to mend crude work, to infuse into the products of undisciplined imagination or incompetency that popular element which shall make a work sell, had employed Fairfield to reconstruct novels which dealt with society. In this capacity he had made over a couple of flimsy stories of which Mrs. Croydon claimed the credit, on the strength of having set down the first draught from events which had happened within her own knowledge. So little of the original remained in the published version, it may be noted in passing, that she might have been puzzled to recognize her own bantlings. The success of these books had given Dick courage to attempt a society novel for himself; and by one of those lucky and inexplicable flukes of fortune, "Love in a Cloud" had gained at least the success of immediate popularity.

Fairfield had published the novel anonymously partly from modesty, partly from a business sense that it was better to have his name clear than associated with a failure. He had been deterred from acknowledging the book after its success by the eagerness with which the public had set upon his characters and identified each with some well known person. If the scene of a novel be laid in a provincial city its characters must all be identified. That is the first intellectual duty of the readers of fiction. To look at a novel from a critical point of view is no longer in the least a thing about which any reader need concern himself; but it would be an omission unpardonably stupid were he to remain unacquainted with some original under the disguise of every character. A single detail is sufficient for identification. If a man in a tale have a wart on his nose, the intelligent reader should not rest until he think of a dweller in the town whose countenance is thus adorned. That single particular must thenceforth be held to decide the matter. If the man in the novel and the man in the flesh differ in every other particular, physical and mental, that is to be held as the cunning effort of the writer to disguise his real model. The wart decides it, and the more widely the copy departs in other characteristics from the chosen person the more evident is it that the novelist did not wish his original to be known. The more striking therefore is the shrewdness which has penetrated the mystery. The reader soddens in the consciousness of his own penetration as the sardine, equally headless, soaks in oil. Fairfield was now waiting for this folly of identification to pass before he gave his name to the novel, and in the mean time he was tasting the delight of a first literary success where the pecuniary returns allowed his vanity to glow without rebuke from his conscience.

Fairfield was surprised, one morning not long after the polo game, by receiving a call from Mrs. Croydon. He knew her slightly, having met her now and then in society, and his belief that she was entirely ignorant of his share in her books might naturally invest her with a peculiar interest. She was a Western woman who had lived in the East but a few years, and her blunders in regard to Eastern society as they appeared in her original manuscripts had given him a good deal of quiet amusement. Why she should now have taken it upon herself to come to his chambers could only become evident by her own explanation.

"You are probably surprised to see me here, Mr. Fairfield," she began, settling herself in a chair with the usual ruffling of rag-tag-and-bobbery without which she never seemed able to move.

"I naturally should not have been vain enough to foresee that I should have such an honor," he responded, with his most elaborate society manner.

She smirked, and nodded.

"That is very pretty," she said. "Well, I'll tell you at once, not to keep you in suspense. I came on business."

"Business?" repeated he.

"Yes, business. You see, I have just come from the Cosmopolitan Literary Bureau."

Fairfield did not look pleased. He had kept his connection with that factory of hack-work a secret, and no man likes to be reminded of unpleasant necessities.

"They have told me," she went on, "that you revised the manuscript of my novels. I must say that you have done it very satisfactorily. We women of society are so occupied that it is impossible for us to attend to all that mere detail work, and it is a great relief to have it so well done."

Fairfield bowed stiffly.

"I am glad that you were satisfied," he replied; "but it is a violation of confidence on the part of the bureau."

"Oh, you are one of us now," Mrs. Croydon observed with gracious condescension. "It isn't as if they had told anybody else. They told me, you see, that you wrote 'Love in a Cloud.'"

"That is a greater violation of confidence still," Fairfield responded. "Indeed, it was a most un-gentlemanly thing of Mr. Cutliff. He only knew it because a stupid errand boy carried him the manuscript by mistake. He had no right to tell that. I shall give him my opinion of his conduct."

Mrs. Croydon accomplished a small whirlwind of ribbon ends, and waved her plump hand in remonstrance.

"Oh, I beg you won't," she protested. "It will get me into trouble if you do. He especially told me not to let you know."

Fairfield smiled rather sardonically.

"The man who betrays a confidence is always foolish enough to suppose his confidence will be sacred. I think this is an outrageous breach of good faith on Mr. Cutliff's part."

Mrs. Croydon gave a hitch forward as if she were trying to bring her chair closer to that of Fairfield.

"As I was saying," she remarked, "we society women have really so little time to give to literature, and literature needs just our touch so much, that it has been especially gratifying to find one that could carry out my ideas so well."

The young man began to regard her with a new expression in his face. As a literary woman she should have recognized the look, the expression which tells of the author on the scent of material. Whether Fairfield ever tried his hand at painting Mrs. Croydon or not, that look would have made it plain to any well-trained fellow worker that her peculiarities tempted his literary sense. Any professional writer who listens with that gleam in his eyes is inevitably examining what is said, the manner of its saying, the person who is speaking, in the hope that here he has a subject for his pen; he is asking himself if the reality is too absurd to be credible; how much short of the extravagance of the original he must come to keep within the bounds of seeming probability. Fairfield was confronted with a subject which could not be handled frankly and truthfully. Nobody would believe the tone of the woman or her remarks to be anything but a foolish exaggeration; if she had had the genuine creative instinct, the power of analysis, the recognition of human peculiarities, Mrs. Croydon must have seen in his evident preoccupation the indication that he was deliberating how far toward the truth it would in fiction be possible to go.

"It is very kind of you," he murmured vaguely.

"Oh, don't mention it," responded she, more graciously than ever. "You are really one of us now, as I said; and I always feel strongly the ties of the literary guild."

"The guild owes you a great deal," Fairfield observed blandly.

Mrs. Croydon waved her hand engagingly in return for this compliment, incidentally with a waving of various adornments of her raiment which gave her the appearance in little of an army with banners.

"I didn't come just for compliments," she observed with much sweetness. "I am a business woman, and I know how to come to the point. My father left me to manage my own property, and so I've had a good deal of experience. When I see how women wander round a thing without being able to get at it, it makes me ashamed of them all. I don't wonder that men make fun of them."

"You are hard on your sex."

"Oh, no harder than they deserve. Why, in Chicago there are a lot of women that do business in one way or another, and I never could abide 'em. I never could get on with them, it was so hard to pin them down."

"I readily understand how annoying it must have been," Fairfield observed with entire gravity. "Did you say that you had business with me?"

"Yes," she answered. "I suppose that I might have written, but there are some things that are so much better arranged by word of mouth. Don't you think so?"

"Oh, there's no doubt of it."

"Besides," she went on, "I wanted to tell you how much I like your work, and it isn't easy to express those things on paper."

It would be interesting to know whether to Fairfield at that moment occurred the almost inevitable reflection that for Mrs. Croydon it was hard, if her manuscripts were the test, to express anything on paper.

"You are entirely right," he said politely. "It is easy enough to put facts into words, but when it comes to feelings such as you express, it is different, of course."

He confided to Jack Neligage later that he wondered if this were not too bold a flout, but Mrs. Croydon received it as graciously as possible.

"There is so complete a difference," she observed with an irrelevance rather startling, "between the mental atmosphere in Boston and that I was accustomed to in Chicago. Here there is a sort of – I don't know that I can express it exactly; it's part of an older civilization, I suppose; but I don't think it pays so well as what we have in Chicago."

"Pays so well?" he repeated. "I don't think I understand."

"It doesn't sell so well in a book," she explained. "I thought that it would be better business to write stories of the East for the West to buy; but I've about made up my mind that it'll be money in my pocket to write of the West for the eastern market."

Fairfield smiled under his big mustache, playing with a paper-knife.

"Pardon my mentioning it," he said, "but I thought you wrote for fame, and not for money."

"Oh, I don't write for money, I assure you; but I was brought up to be a business woman, and if I'm going to write books somebody ought to pay for them. Now I wanted to ask you what you will sell me your part in 'Love in a Cloud' for."

Whether this sudden introduction of her business or the nature of it when introduced were the more startling it might have been hard to determine. Certain it is that Fairfield started, and stared at his visitor as if he doubted his ears.

"My part of it?" he exclaimed. "Why, I wrote it."

"Yes," she returned easily, "but so many persons have supposed it to be mine, that it is extremely awkward to deny it; and you have become my collaborateur, of course, by writing on the other novels."

"I hadn't realized that," Dick returned with a smile.

"You've put so much of your style into my other books," she pursued, "that it's made people attribute 'Love in a Cloud' to me, and I think you are bound now not to go back on me. I don't know as you see it as I do, but it seems to me that since you took the liberty of changing so much in my other stories you ought to be willing to bear the consequences of it, especially as I'm willing to pay you well."

"But as long as you didn't write the book," Dick observed, "I should think you'd feel rather queer to have it said you did."

"I've thought of that," Mrs. Croydon said, nodding, with a flutter of silken tags, "but I reason that the ideas are so much my own, and the book is so exactly what I would have written if social duties hadn't prevented, that that ought not to count. The fact that so many folks think I wrote it shows that I might have written it."

"But after all you didn't write it," Fairfield objected. "That seems to make it awkward."

"Why, of course it would have been better if I had given you a sketch of it," Mrs. Croydon returned, apparently entirely unmoved; "but then of course you got so much of the spirit of 'Love in a Cloud' out of my other books – "

This was perhaps more than any author could be expected to endure, and least of all a young author in the discussion of his first novel.

"Why, how can you say that?" he demanded indignantly.

"Do you suppose," she questioned with a benign and patronizing smile, "that so many persons would have taken your book for mine in the first place if you hadn't imitated me or taken ideas from my other books?"

Dick sprang to his feet, and then sat down, controlling himself.

"Well," he said coldly, "it makes no difference. It is too late to do anything about it now. An edition of 'Love in a Cloud' with my name on the title-page comes out next Wednesday. If folks say too much about the resemblance to your books, I can confess, I suppose, my part in the others."

She turned upon him with a burst of surprise and indignation which set all her ribbon-ends waving in protest.

"That," she said, "is a professional secret. No man of honor would tell it."

She rose as she spoke, her face full of indignation.

"You have not treated me fairly," she said bitterly. "You must have seen that the book was attributed to me, and you knew the connection between 'Love in a Cloud' and my other books – "

"Other books!" exclaimed Dick.

Mrs. Croydon waved him into silence with a magnificent gesture, but beyond that took no notice of his words.

"You saw how everybody looked at me that day at Mrs. Harbinger's," she went on. "If you were going to give your name to the book why didn't you do it then?"

"I didn't think of you at all," was his answer. "I was too much amused in seeing that absurd Barnstable make a fool of himself with Count Shimbowski. Did you know that the Count actually challenged him?"

Wrath of celestial goddesses darkened the face of Mrs. Croydon as a white squall blackens the face of the sky. Her eyes glared with an expression as fierce if not as bright as the lightning.

"What do you say?" she screamed. "Challenge my husband?"

"Your husband!" ejaculated Dick, a staring statue of surprise.

"Yes, my husband," she repeated vehemently. "He didn't make a fool of himself that day! A man can't come to the defense of a woman but you men sneer at him. Do you mean that that beastly foreign ape dared to challenge him for that? I'd like to give him my opinion of him!"

When a man finds himself entertaining a wildcat unawares he should either expel the beast or himself take safety in flight. Dick could apparently do neither. He stood speechless, gazing at the woman before him, who seemed to be waxing in fury with every moment and every word. She swept across the short space between them in a perfect hurricane of streamers, and almost shook her fists in his face.

"I understand it all now," she said. "You were in it from the beginning! I suppose that when you worked on my books you took the trouble to find out about me, and that's where your material came from for your precious 'Love in a Cloud.' Oh, my husband will deal with you!"

Fairfield looked disconcerted enough, as well he might, confronted with a woman who was apparently so carried away by anger as to have lost all control of herself.

"Mrs. Croydon," he said, with a coldness and a dignity which could not but impress her, "I give you my word that I never knew anything about your history. That was none of my business."

"Of course it was none of your business!" she cried. "That's just what makes it so impertinent of you to be meddling with my affairs!"

Fairfield regarded her rather wildly.

"Sit down, please," he said beseechingly. "You mustn't talk so, Mrs. Croydon. Of course I haven't been meddling with your affairs, and – "

"And not to have the courage to say a word to prevent my husband's being dragged into a duel with that foreigner! Oh, it does seem as if I couldn't express my opinion of you, Mr. Fairfield!"

"My dear Mrs. Croydon – "

"And as for Erastus Barnstable," she rushed on to say, "he's quick-tempered, and eccentric, and obstinate, and as dull as a post; he never understood me, but he always meant well; and I won't have him abused."

"I hadn't any idea of abusing him," Dick pleaded humbly. "Really, you are talking in an extraordinary fashion."

She stopped and glared at him as if with some gleam of returning reason. Her face was crimson, and her breath came quickly. Women of society outside of their own homes so seldom indulge in the luxury of an unbecoming rage that Dick had perhaps never before seen such a display. Any well-bred lady knows how to restrain herself within the bounds of personal decorum, and to be the more effective by preserving some appearance of calmness. Mrs. Croydon had evidently lacked in her youth the elevating influence of society where good manners are morals. It was interesting for Dick, but too extravagantly out of the common to be of use to him professionally.

"I hope you are proud of your politeness this morning," Mrs. Croydon ended by saying; and without more adieu she fluttered tumultuously to the door.