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seen three or four of them, but only one had consented to let him even leave his play with him; the others said that it would be useless for them to look at it.

She could not forbear showing him the advertisement she had answered as they sat at lunch; but he glanced at it with disdain, and said there must be some sort of fake in it; if it was some irresponsible fellow getting up a combination he would not scruple to use the ideas of any manuscript submitted to him and work them over to suit himself. Louise could not speak. All heart went out of her; she wanted to cry, and she did not tell what she had done.

Neither of them ate much. He asked her if she was ready to begin on the story with him; she said, Oh, yes; and she hobbled off into the other room. Then he seemed to remember her hurt for the first time; he had been so full of his failure with the play before. He asked her how she was, and she said, much better; and then he stretched himself on the lounge and tried to dictate, and she took her place at his desk and tried to write. But she either ran ahead of him, and prompted him, which vexed him, or she lagged so far behind that he lost the thread of what he was saying and became angry. At last she put her head down on the paper and blotted it with her tears.

At that he said, "Oh, you'd better go back to bed," and then though he spoke harshly, he lifted her tenderly and half carried her to her room.

XVII

THEY did not try working the play into a story again together. Maxwell kept doggedly at it, though he said it was of no use; the thing had taken the dramatic form with inexorable fixity as it first came from his mind; it could be changed, of course, but it could only be changed for the worse, artistically. If he could sell it as a story, the work would not be lost; he would gain the skill that came from doing, in any event, and it would keep him alive under the ill-luck that now seemed to have set in.

None of the managers wanted his play. Some of them seemed to want it less than others; some wanted it less immediately

than others; some did not want it after reading; some refused it without reading it; some had their arrangements made for an indefinite time, others in the present uncertain state of affairs could not make any arrangements; some said it was an American play; others that it was un-American in its pessimistic spirit; some found it too literary; others, lacking in imagination. They were nearly all so kind that at first Maxwell was guilty of the folly of trying to persuade them against the reasons they gave; when he realized that these reasons were also excuses, he set his teeth and accepted them in silence.

For a number of days Louise suffered in momentary expectation of a reply from L. Sterne. She thought it would come by district messenger the day she wrote; and for several days afterwards she had the letters brought to her first, so that she could read them, and not disturb Maxwell with them at his work, if it were not necessary. He willingly agreed to that; he saw that it helped to pass the irksome time for her. She did not mean to conceal any answer she should have from L. Sterne, but she meant when the answer came to prepare her husband for it in such sort, that he would understand her motive, and though he condemned it, would easily forgive her. But the days went and no letter from L. Sterne came, and after a season of lively indignation at his rudeness, Louise began to forget him a little, though she still kept her surveillance of the mails.

It was always on her conscience, in the meantime, to give some of the first moments of her recovery to going with Maxwell and thanking Mrs. Harley for the kindness she had shown her in her accident. She was the more strenuous in this intention, because the duty was so distasteful, and she insisted upon Maxwell's com pany, though he argued that he had already done enough himself in thanking her preserver, because she wished to punish a certain reluctance of her own in having him go. She promised herself that she would do everything that was right by that creature; and perhaps she repaired to her presence in rather overwhelming virtue. If this was so, Mrs. Harley showed herself equal to the demand upon her, and was overwhelming in her kind. She not only made nothing of what she had done

for Louise, but she made nothing of Louise, and contrived with a few well directed strokes to give her distinctly the sense of being a chit, a thing Louise was not at all used to. She was apparently one of those women who have no use for persons of their own sex ; but few women, even of that sort, could have so promptly relegated Louise to the outside of their interest, or so frankly devoted themselves to Maxwell. The impartial spectator might easily have imagined that it was his ankle which had been strained, and that Louise was at best an intrusive sympathizer. Sometimes Mrs. Harley did not hear what she said; at other times, if she began a response to her, she ended it in a question to him; even when she talked to Louise, her eyes were smouldering upon Maxwell. If this had all or any of it been helpless or ignorant rudeness, it could have been borne and forgiven; but Louise was aware of intention, of perfect intelligence in it; she was sensible of being even more disliked than disliking, and of finally being put to flight with a patronizing benevolence for her complete recovery which was intolerable. What was worse was that, while the woman had been so offensive, she could not wholly rid herself of the feeling that her punishment was in a measure merited, though it was not justice that had dealt with her.

frowsy, for the Maxwells breakfasted late, and the housemaid had not had time to put it in order. Louise saw it through her father's and mother's eyes with the glance they gave it, and found the rooms ridiculously little, and furnished with cheap Fourteenth Street things; but she bragged all the more noisily of it on that account, and made her mother look out of the windows, for the pretty view they had from their corner-room. Mrs. Hilary pulled her head back from the prospect of the railroad-ridden avenue with silent horror, and Louise burst into a wild laugh. Well, it isn't Commonwealth Avenue, mamma; I don't pretend that, you know."

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Where's Maxwell?" asked Hilary, still puffing from the lounge he had sunk upon as soon as he got into the room.

"Oh, he's down town interviewing a manager about his play."

"I thought that fellow out West had his play. Or is this a new one?"

"No," said Louise, very slowly and thoughtfully, "Brice has taken back his play from Mr. Godolphin.” This was true; he had taken it back in a sense. She added, as much to herself as to her father. "But he has got a new playthat he's working at."

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I hope he hasn't been rash with Godolphin; though I always had an idea that it would have been better for him to deal

"Well, that is over," said Maxwell, when with a manager. It seems more businessthey were again by themselves.

"Yes, forever," sighed Louise, and for once she was not let have the last word. "I hope you'll remember that I didn't want to go."

At least they had not misunderstood each other about Mrs. Harley.

Toward the end of the month, Louise's father and mother came on from Boston. They professed that they had been taken with that wish to see the autumn exhibition at the National Academy, which sometimes affects Bostonians, and that their visit had nothing to do with the little hurt that Louise wrote them of after she was quite well of it. They drove over from their hotel the morning they arrived, and she did not know anything of their coming till she heard their voices at the door; her father's voice was rather husky from the climb to her apart

ment.

like."

Oh, much," said Louise.

After a little while, they were more at home with each other; she began to feel herself more their child, and less Maxwell's wife; the barriers of reluctance against him, which she always knew were up with them, fell away from between them and herself. But her father said they had come to get her and Maxwell to lunch with them at their hotel, and then Louise felt herself on her husband's side of the fence again. She said, no, they must stay with her; that she was sure Brice would be back for lunch; and she wanted to show them her house-keeping. Mrs. Hilary cast her eye about the room, at the word, as if she had seen quite enough of it already, and this made Louise laugh again. She was no better in person than the room was, and she felt her mother's tacit censure apply to

The apartment was looking somewhat her slatternly dressing-gown.

"I know what you're thinking, mamma. But I got the habit of it when I had my strained ankle."

"Oh, I'm sure it must be very comfortable," Mrs. Hilary said, of the dressinggown. "Is it entirely well, now?" she added, of the ankle; and she and Hilary both looked at Louise in a way that would have convinced her that their final anxiety concerning it had brought them to New York, if she had not guessed it already. "The doctor," and by this she meant their old family doctor, as if he were the only one, "said you couldn't be too careful."

"Well, I haven't been careful," said Louise, gayly, "but I'm quite well, and you can go back at once, if that's all, mam

ma.

stay and have her go on with her nonsense, but his wife took him away.

When Maxwell came in, she was so full of their visit, that she did not ask him what luck he had with his play, but told him at once they were going to dine with her father and mother. "And I want you to brace up, my dear, and not let them imagine anything."

"How, anything?" he asked, listlessly.

"Oh, nothing. About your play not going perfectly. I didn't think it neces

sary to go into particulars with them, and you needn't. Just pass it over lightly if they ask you anything about it. But they won't."

Maxwell did not look so happy as he

Hilary laughed with her. "You haven't might at the prospect of dining with his changed much, Louise."

Her mother said, in another sense, I think you look a little pulled down," and that made her and her father laugh again. She got to playing with him, and poking him, and kissing him, in the way she had with him when she was a girl; it was not so very long ago.

Her mother bore with this for awhile, and then she rose to go. "You're not going to stay! Louise protested.

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Not to-day, my dear. I've got some shopping to do before lunch.”

"Well," said Louise, "I didn't suppose you would stay the first time, such swells as you and papa. But I shall insist upon your coming to-morrow when you've recovered a little from the blow this home of virtuous poverty has given you, and I've had a chance to dust and prepare for you. And I'll tell you what, mamma; Brice and I will come to dinner with you, to-night, and we won't take any refusal. We'll be with you at seven. How will that do, papa ?"

"That will do," said Hilary, with his arm round her waist, and they kissed each other to clinch the bargain.

"And don't you two old things go away and put your frosty pows together and say Brice and I are not happy. We do quarrel like cats and dogs every now and then, but the rest of the time we're the happiest couple in the universe; and an example to parents."

Hilary would have manifestly liked to

wife's father and mother, but he did not say anything disagreeable, and after an instant of silent resentment, Louise did not say anything disagreeable either. In fact, she devoted herself to avoiding any displeasures with him, and she arrived with him at the Hilarys' hotel on perfectly good terms, and as far as he was concerned, in rather good spirits.

Upon the whole, they had a very good time. Hilary made occasion to speak to Maxwell of his letters to the Abstract, and told him they were considered by far the best letters of the kind published anywhere, which meant, anywhere in Boston.

"You do that sort of thing so well, newspaper writing," he continued, with a slyness that was not lost upon Louise, though Maxwell was ignorant of his drift, "that I wonder you don't sometimes want to take it up again."

"It's well enough," said Maxwell, who was gratified by his praise.

"By the way," said Hilary, "I met your friend, Mr. Ricker, the other day, and he spoke most cordially about you. I fancy he would be very glad to have you back.'

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"I wonder he doesn't buy in. I hear it though in two or three cases of people can be done."

whom she liked, she coaxed him a little to go with her. Meeting her mother, and talking over the life she used to lead in Boston, and the life so many people were leading there still, made her a little hungry for society; she would have liked well enough to find herself at a dinner again, and she would have felt a little dancing after the

"Not by Ricker, for the best of all possible reasons," said Maxwell, with a laugh. Louise could hardly wait till she had parted from her father and mother before she began on her husband: You goose! Didn't you see that papa was hinting at buying you a share in the Abstract?" "He was very modest about it, then; I dinner no hardship; but she remembered didn't see anything of the kind."

"Oh, do you think you are the only modest man? Papa is very modest, and he wouldn't make you an offer outright, unless he saw that you would like it. But I know that was what he was coming to, and if you'll let me"

A sentiment of a reluctance rather than refusal was what made itself perceptible from his arm to hers, as they hurried along the street together, and Louise would not press the question till he spoke again.

He did not speak till they were in the train on their way home. Then he said, "I shouldn't care to have a money interest in a newspaper. It would tie me up to it, and load me down with cares I should hate. It wouldn't be my real life."

"Yes," said his wife, but when they got into their little apartment, she cast an eye opened to its meanness and narrowness over the common belongings, and wondered if he would ever ask himself whether this was her real life. But she did not speak, though she was apt to speak out most things that she thought.

XVIII

SOME people began to call, old friends of her mother's, whose visit to New York seemed to have betrayed to them the fact of Louise's presence for the first time, and some friends of her own, who had married, and come to New York to live, and who said they had just got back to town long enough to learn that she was there. These all reproached her for not having let them know sooner where she was, and they all more or less followed up their reproaches with the invitations which she dreaded because of Maxwell's aversion for them. But she submitted them to him, and submitted to his refusal to go with her, and declined them. In her heart she thought he was rather ungracious, but she did not say so,

the promise she had made herself not to tease Maxwell about such things. So she merely coaxed him, and he so far relented as to ask her why she could not go without him, and that hurt her, and she said she never would go without him. All the same, when there came an invitation for lunch, from a particularly nice friend of her girlhood, she hesitated and was lost. She had expected, somehow, that it was going to be a very little lunch, but she found it a very large one, in the number of people, and after the stress of accounting for her husband's failure to come with her, she was not sorry to have it so. She inhaled with joy the atmosphere of the flower-scented rooms; her eye dwelt with delight on their luxurious and tasteful appointments, the belongings of her former life, which seemed to emerge in them from the past, and claim her again; the women in their chic New York costumes and their miracles of early winter hats, hailed her a long-lost sister by every graceful movement and cultivated tone; the correctly tailored and agreeably mannered men had polite intelligence of a world that Maxwell never would and never could be part of; the talk of the little amusing, unvital things that began at once, was more precious to her than the problems which the austere imagination of her husband dealt with; it suddenly fatigued her to think how hard she had tried to sympathize with his interest in them. Her heart leapt at sight of the long, rose-heaped table, with its glitter of glass and silver, and the solemn perfection of the serving-men; a spectacle not important in itself was dear to her from association with gayeties, which now, for a wicked moment, seemed to her better than love.

There were all sorts of people: artists and actors, as well as people of fashion. Her friend had given her some society notable to go out with, but she had appointed for the chair next her on the other hand, a

young man in a pretty pointed beard, whom she introduced across from the head of the table, as soon as she could civilly take the notable to herself. Louise did not catch his name, and it seemed presently that he had not heard hers, but their acquaintance prospered without this knowledge. He made some little jokes, which she promptly responded to, and they talked awhile as if they were both New Yorkers, till she said, at some remark of his, But I am not a New Yorker," and then he said, "Well, neither am I," and offered to tell her what he was if she would tell him what she was. "Oh, I'm from Boston, of course," she answered, but then, instead of saying where he was from, he broke out :

"Now I will fulfil my vow!" "Your vow? What is your vow?" "To ask the first Boston person I met if that Boston person knew anything about another Boston person, who wrote a most remarkable play I saw in the fall out at home."

"A play," said Louise, with total loss of interest in the gentleman's city or country. 'Yes, by a Boston man named Maxwell

Louise stared at him, and if their acquaintance had been a little older, she might have asked him to come off. As it was she could not speak, and she let him go on.

"I don't know when I've ever had a stronger impression in the theatre than I had from that play. Perfectly modern, and perfectly American." He briefly sketched it.

"It was like a terrible experience on the tragic side, and on the other side, it was a rapture. I never saw love-making on the stage before that made me wish to be a lover

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Oh, of anything you want to be acquitted of! What crime would you prefer? There are whole deluges of mercy for you. But now, go on, and tell me everything you thought about the play." "I'd rather you'd tell me what you know about the playwright."

"Everything, of course, and nothing." She added the last words from a sudden, poignant conviction. "Isn't that the way with the wives of you men of genius?" "Am I a man of genius? "You're literary." "Oh, literary, yes. But I'm not married."

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